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Robotech_Master

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Everything posted by Robotech_Master

  1. They've said they'll add a secure expedited login capability to the new launcher at some point.
  2. The only thing I can think to add is that, if Homecoming and NCSoft ever do reach an accord so that Homecoming can be considered officially official, the player population will probably explode with new players who might have been unwilling to try the game while its legal status was still iffy, or with brand new people who didn't know about it yet when Homecoming feels free to widely publicize it. Of course, I have no idea when or if that will even happen, but folks thinking for the long term might want to start stockpiling sellable stuff instead of selling it now, because prices might shoot through the roof later once there's so much more demand. But again, it could be months before such a thing even happens, if it happens.
  3. You mean it's October 1st, right? 🙂 And not that I can think of. If I see something has changed dramatically, or learn about some great new idea that I feel worthy of sharing, I will update the guides accordingly. Have done so here and there from time to time since I originally wrote them. But right now, I think they're all generally still valid—bearing in mind the disclaimer advisory to always check current market conditions before you make some big bet.
  4. Hey, thanks for the kind words. And what you said just there at the end inspired me to add a new section to my guide, toward the end, counselling folks to watch what comes out on the test servers for possible future opportunities when they hit the live ones. 🙂
  5. Unfortunately, that's the kind of thing they can't talk about. Corporations tend to insist on keeping that kind of stuff close to the chest—and for excellent reason. No matter what the terms are they're discussing, odds are good that they wouldn't be acceptable to everybody. (I mean, hell, just look at what happens every time they do something as trivial as rebalancing an AT or power set. The arguments rage for weeks!) That would cause controversies and uproars that would distract from the discussion itself. Those people I mentioned in an earlier post who will find any reason they can to hate Homecoming would have a field day. Reading between the lines (as of course I'm not privy to the discussions myself), it looks like NCSoft has asked for some administrative stuff relating to the use of trademarks, and Homecoming is cheerfully complying. Which seems to bode well for the discussions; NCSoft asked nicely rather than filing C&Ds and stuff, and Homecoming is showing its willingness to be reasonable by making the changes. Hopefully this will lead to more progress in the talks and better things down the line.
  6. I doubt that any "proof" HC could offer that it's "really" in talks with NCSoft would be sufficient for everyone. (Apart from things like the name change, which as someone already noted does smell just like the kind of deck-chair shuffling a corporation would insist upon.) In addition to its code base, Homecoming also inherited much of the general hostility and distrust toward the hidden private server that ran for six years without telling anyone. I don't doubt that there are plenty of people out there looking for any reason they can find to decry the Homecoming staff as a bunch of doodyheads. Trying to appease people who simply can't be appeased is a waste of time and effort on everyone's part. Perhaps the best "proof" is that we're still being permitted to continue playing and the servers haven't been C&D'd into oblivion. (Or into relocating to some hard-to-prosecute country, anyway.) The number of rogue private server projects for other games that have been permitted to continue for very long once the rights-holder knew about them is...not large. You honestly think they wouldn't know about us by now? As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. When they're finally ready to announce actual final results of the negotiations, I imagine everyone will believe them then.
  7. For what it's worth, "Karen the Destroyer" isn't a "brand new character"; they're a level 50, and they were in the Hamidon Raid with me at the time. This character wasn't created to poke fun at your daughter, it was created some long time ago to (I assume) poke fun at the Karen meme in general, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was true for some of the others, too. It's unfortunate that there are some people out there who will respond to being asked to stop by doubling down, but that kind of person is all over the Internet, not just in CoH. It would be more effective to use /ignore than to try to get them to stop.
  8. That said, if you can find a PVP recipe or Enhancement inexpensively, you can roll it to one of the PVP sets with lucrative procs that sell for 11 - 12 million. (And then roll it within that set to that proc.)
  9. Left is my TW/SR Brute's resist/defense stats at level 50. Right are my SR/TW Tanker's level 50 stats. And they're using Musculature and Incandescence, actually. Don't really need Ageless now, thanks to decent set slotting and Performance Shifter procs...also, Musculature does have an end mod effect, too.
  10. If you think that's expensive, I probably shouldn't mention how I tend to buy a few charges each of those 10 million Inf pet summons on every character... 🙂
  11. I keep running into people who express surprise that I was able to make Titan Weapons play nicely with Super Reflexes on both a Tanker and a Brute. But it's a very fun combo to play. Over-capped positional defense, and near 50% damage resist to smashing, lethal, fire, and cold. Never really had too many problems keeping momentum up either, since I was able to scoop recharge rate bonuses from five LotGs, ATOs and purple sets, Reactive Defense, and so on. End was a problem early on, but a little judicious Stamina proc slotting and use of that recovery serum temp power from the P2W helped out a lot.
  12. I've added several new guides to this post. Just sayin'.
  13. R_M'S AUCTION HOUSE GUIDE TO FIXED-PRICE ITEMS AND SPECIAL SALVAGE or WHY YOU DIDN'T KNOW HOW TO FIND WHAT YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOU NEEDED I've written guides about two stores where Homecoming players can find very useful items—the P2W Store and the Reward Merit Vendor—but it occurred to me there was one more place I hadn't gone over yet that not every player would know about. So I'm writing this guide to complete the trifecta. That missing place is, of course, the auction house. Known by different names (Wentworth's, the Black Market, the Trading Post, etc.) depending on which faction you're playing in, the auction house is accessible from anywhere outside of instanced maps, SG bases, or PVP zones just by typing /ah to bring up the interface. Most players are probably well aware this is a good place to get Enhancements, Recipes, Inspirations, and Invention Salvage. But there are some other things you can get here that you might just not know about. Or at least, you didn't until you read this guide. FIXED-PRICE ITEMS: AUCTION HOUSE TELEPORTERS Open the auction house, click the "reset" button at the top right to clear any settings you might have made if you were searching on things already, then in the index at the left side of the window, click the + next to "Fixed Price" to expand the Fixed Price section of the listing. Under this section, you will find four items: the Black Market Transporter, Underground Transporter, Consignment House Transporter, and Trading House Transporter. Costing 10,000 Inf each, these powers are effectively single-use teleports that will take you to the physical location of one of the auction houses of those particular faction—if you are currently a member of that faction. For example, if you're a Villain or Rogue, Black Market Transporter will transport you to one of the Black Markets in the Rogue Isles—but none of the other three powers will do anything for you. Heroes and Vigilantes can use the Consignment House teleporter to get to Wentworths in Paragon City. Members of the Praetorian Resistance can use Underground Transporter to get to one of the auction houses in the Praetorian Underground, and Praetorian Loyalists can use Trading Post to get to one of the Praetorian above-ground auction houses. Unless you plan to swap sides at some point, you might as well not bother buying one of the "wrong" hero/villain transporters—and if you're a Praetorian who's passed level 20 and chosen the red or blue side, the Underground and Trading Post porters won't work for you either. And there's no way to delete these powers out of your power window, so you're just stuck with them forever. And there's one more important point to mention: due to a glitch, you can buy up to 10 "charges" of each power—but using the power deletes the power, no matter how many charges are left in it. So you might as well not waste your money; just buy and use one charge at a time. This power used to be very handy when you had to travel to the auction house to use its services. However, it is no longer strictly necessary, given that everyone can now access the auction house from anywhere. Also, if you park your character at an auction house for a length of time, you start building up charges on an auction house teleporter day job power that doesn't cost you anything to use. Still, this auction house teleport could be useful in a few cases where it would be handy to get to a particular auction house very quickly. For example, if you're doing a Market Crash, you could use one of these to hop to the Wentworth's there just before the last mission, then get to the nearby transit line and teleport everyone else to you. The rest of the things I'll discuss in this guide are listed under the "Salvage" category. SPECIAL SALVAGE If you click the + next to "Salvage," you'll see four subcategories. "Event" is where you'll find the salvage pieces from the Halloween and Winter events, that you can take to the vendor NPCs and trade in for an extra costume slot, costumes, and other temp powers. (You will usually find some holiday salvage available all year 'round, because people stock up on more than they need during the events, and can put it on the auction house at any time. Also, candy canes can be found in the Lords of Winter Super Pack, which I'll discuss below. The NPCs who take the salvage in trade never stop taking it; it's just that it only drops during the events.) "Invention" is what you normally think of when you think of salvage, so no need to explore that further. "Legacy" is kind of a weird case. This is where you'll find salvage items that are no longer used in-game, such as salvage items that used to be required to craft things for supergroup bases. It might seem odd that these items are still trading on the auction house now, but that's because they're actually "bucketed" with another salvage item that people actually can use—Brainstorm Idea Salvage, which I'll cover a bit later. That is to say, the auction house considers these items to be the same thing as Brainstorm Idea Salvage. If you buy one, the auction house pulls a piece out of the "bucket" they all share, just as it would do if you bought a piece of Brainstorm Idea Salvage. Presumably, this is because back in I13, after base salvage was phased out, the game would let you convert leftover pieces of it into Brainstorm Ideas. In any case, while it's an interesting oddity, there's literally nothing in the game you can do with legacy salvage anymore, so don't bother buying any. But the last subcategory, "Special," is where you can find the most interesting things. ACCESS BYPASS and PROTOTYPE ELEMENT The Access Bypass and Prototype Element are basically the same thing, but for different uses. (They're even bucketed together.) These powers let you bypass one of the required elements for earning the PVP zone temp powers from Warburg and Bloody Bay, respectively. In Warburg, you have to collect three access codes by rescuing three scientists from the underground complex, which you can then use to launch a missile and earn a single-use buff-or-debuff nuke. The Access Bypass will fill in for one of the three access codes. In Bloody Bay, you have to scan five meteor fragments to get five sample elements to process at a bunker and trade in for a Shivan Shard that will let you summon an Elite Boss pet Shivan five times. The Prototype Element will fill in for one of the meteor elements. In both cases, these substitute powers can make it easier for you to do your thing and get out of there. Note that you are only able to carry one of these items at a time, and you can't access the auction house from within a PVP zone, so if you're doing nukes in Warburg and want to get all three, you'll have to zone out after each launch to grab a new Access Bypass and then go back in. The Prototype Element salvage just doesn't seem that useful to me, given that it's not much harder to scan five rocks than to scan four, and you only have to do it once per five-use shard anyway. But the Access Bypass is a godsend given how annoying it can be to lead those scientists out. It's a big time saver to cut that time and effort by a third, let me tell you. Easily worth 500,000 Inf each, which seems to be the common going rate for them. BRAINSTORM IDEA These are the things I mentioned earlier, that are bucketed with legacy salvage. At any Enhancement crafting table, under the "Special" tab, you'll find an option to trade these items in for random salvage rolls—1 for a Common, 5 for an Uncommon, 20 for a Rare. You can also get them as drops from enemies, or find them included in the Super Packs I'll discuss later on. If you do buy them, you should probably use them only on Rare rolls—at the 20,000 Inf going rate, for 20 of them, that's the only one where you might get something that's more valuable than the amount of Inf you spent to get enough Brainstorm Ideas for it. Even then, bear in mind that if you sell the Rare, you're losing 10% of the value of the sale in auction house fees, so buying bunches of them and rolling them to Rare Salvage for resale probably isn't a good way to make any amount of money. ENHANCEMENT BOOSTER, CATALYST, CONVERTER, and UNSLOTTER I've already discussed these at length in my other guides, such as How to Make Millions on the Market in Minutes or A Reward Merit Vendor Primer, so there's not really much point in rehashing those here. Suffice it to say that, if you're wanting to buy these and don't feel like typing the name in the search box, this is where you would go to find them. SUPER PACKS: HEROES AND VILLAINS, ROGUES AND VIGILANTES, and LORDS OF WINTER Finally, we come to the biggest thing that a lot of people don't even know about. Super Packs are basically loot crates, and back in live days, the Heroes and Villains Pack (the only one that was available before shutdown) cost the equivalent of $1 each through NCSoft's Paragon Market. Since everything in the game is free now, the versions of them available in Homecoming just cost Inf—the Heroes and Villains and Rogues and Vigilantes packs sell for 10 million each, and the Lords of Winter pack sells for 25 million (except during the Winter Event, when it falls to 10 million like the others). Unlike the other forms of salvage mentioned, the prices of these do not usually vary; they are not available outside the auction house, and they're seeded at the aforementioned rates. (Occasionally someone buys one and changes their mind, and lists it for less to try to get most of their money back, but this does not happen often.) The Heroes and Villains packs and Rogues and Vigilantes packs are similar to each other—they contain from zero to two random ATOs each, as well as a number of other handy temp powers, Inspirations, Salvage, or Merits. The Lords of Winter pack contains winter-related Enhancements and items, as well as some of the same filler from the other packs. It is possible to make a profit by buying up these packs, opening them, and selling the Enhancements and other sellable items—especially if you convert the ATO Enhancements until they become one of the Brute sets, which are in the highest demand due to Brutes' immense popularity in fire farming. It's not as fast as some other methods, and you have to buy a lot of them to be able to make a lot of Inf, but it's simple to do and doesn't take a whole lot of time. There are also some particular items and powers you can get from Super Packs that aren't available anywhere else in the game—the Experienced power that grants five bars of Patrol XP, the Windfall power that boosts Inf and drops for the next hour, or the Revival and Restore self- and ally-rez powers, for example. Stocking up on Super Packs is the only way you can also stock up on those. Another useful thing is, Super Packs are a great way to simplify the process of slotting your characters out on ATO or Winter Enhancement Sets. Rather than worry about placing bids for all the Enhancements you want, that may not even be on sale or may take ages to come in, you can simply buy enough Super Packs to have the quantity of Enhancements you want, then use Enhancement Converters to roll those Enhancements until they're exactly what you want. (This is especially feasible with the Lords of Winter packs, since there are so few Winter Enhancement Sets that it won't take many Converters to get you to the one you want.) Not only do you get exactly the Enhancements you want for about the same amount you'd have spent to buy them individually, but you also got all the other stuff in those packs for free. (See my "Making Millions" guide for an explanation of how to use Converters in this way.) I also like to use Super Packs as easy-to-hand-out prizes when playing hide and seek, or giving gifts to lowbies—they're handy 10 million Inf chunks of value you can just drag and drop onto someone without having to fuss with the trade interface. CONCLUSION If you didn't already know about all this nifty obscure stuff that's also available on the auction house, hopefully this guide has opened your eyes to some new possibilities. Please be sure to check out my other guides, linked below! And as always, if I made a mistake or left something out, please leave a follow-up comment and I may update the guide to take it into account. Thanks for reading!
  14. Any chance of incorporating the option to use a URL shortener on export links? People give me the side-eye when I post a huge long export link into Discord. Of course, I could simply put it into a URL shortener myself, but it would be nice to have the option to save that extra step.
  15. And I imagine that Envenomed Daggers and the pets from the P2W store could also help, for those who have that kind of money. I might just have to give that a shot when my level 48 Super Reflexes/Titan Weapons Tanker hits 50.
  16. Yeah, that's something I've been meaning to update into this guide, when I get around to it.
  17. One of the most annoying things to me is that, if I want to keep my character's selected face, face decals, hair, etc. when I swap the rest of her to a new body, I can't use the custom costume drop-down. I'll either need to go through and reselect each body part to match the new set and keep my face, or reselect each face option after I change to the new set. It would be nice if there were a way to save just the head, so I could reload it after I switch to a new custom set. Or, if there were some way to "lock" certain parts to prevent them from changing, while the custom costume drop-down changes everything that isn't locked. I don't know if it would be easy or even possible to do something like this, but it would really be nice if it could be done.
  18. RUNNING THE BEHAVIORAL ADJUSTMENT FACILITY INCARNATE TRIAL or ROCK 'EM SOCK 'EM PRAETORIAN ROBOTS! The Behavioral Adjustment Facility Trial, or BAF, is one of the dead simplest Incarnate Trials to do. For that reason, it's probably the single-most run Incarnate Trial in the game, simply because it's so easy. That being said, even the simplest Incarnate Trial can be hard to understand if nobody bothers explaining it to you. And the way many of these trials are run, most of the people doing them have long experience and know exactly where to be at any given time, so nobody really bothers to give clear orders—they just assume everyone already knows what to do. This can leave newcomers confused, with no idea at all about what is even going on. Reading the Homecoming Wiki article about it can help, but the wiki tends to be more informative than instructional. So, I'm writing this guide to let the newly-Incarnate know what to do, as well as go over my own advice for people running the trial for the first time. To note, this guide is informed by my own experience and opinions. Other experienced trial leaders will have their own way of doing things, so if you get on a trial with leaders who run it differently, don't assume they're doing it wrong. Learn from what they're doing, just as I learned from others before I got comfortable running the trial for myself. And if you're an experienced leader and disagree with any of my advice (or think I got something factually wrong), please comment below the guide. I hope you've already read my Comprehensive Guide to the Incarnate System, so you'll have a basic idea of how Incarnates work. If not, or if it's been a while, you might want to run through it to refresh your memory. MAP OF THE BEHAVIORAL ADJUSTMENT FACILITY In the rest of the guide, I'll be referring to this map, and the numbers I've marked on it. Keep it handy. PREPARATION STAGE FORMING UP THE BAF TRIAL If you're going to be leading the Trial, begin by deciding where you're going to meet up for it. There are two main spots people usually use: Pocket D and Ouroboros. Both of them are accessible to both heroes and villains; both can hold a lot of people. Ouroboros is a bit easier to get to, given that everyone almost certainly has an Ouroboros porter by the time they're an Incarnate, plus has Luna the Incarnate vendor to convert Astral Merits into Empyreans while people wait between Trials. Pocket D has a lot of nice amenities and can be reached by SG base porter or that teleport power from the P2W store. In the end, it's largely a matter of personal preference. Whichever zone you pick, once you're there you should broadcast periodically on the LFG channel and be ready to invite people to the League as they zone in. Note that you can't invite "enemies" into the league unless they're within the same zone as you. If you're a blue-sider (Hero or Vigilante), then any red-sider (Villain or Rogue) must be in the same zone with you before you can invite them on the league—and vice versa. So if you get the message that you can't add an enemy to the league, ask them to let you know when they're in the zone so you can add them. At this stage, don't worry too much about balancing out the composition of the teams—due to the way the LFG teleport works, your teams will probably look completely different when you zone into the trial, and you'll just have to do it all over again. For now, just worry about getting 24 people. (If you like. You can start with as few as 12, but the more, the merrier!) In Homecoming, all that is necessary to be eligible for the BAF Trial is to have trained up to level 50. You don't even need your Alpha Slot unlocked yet; it's enough that you be 50 and earning Incarnate XP. CHOOSE YOUR LEAGUE: OPEN OR CLOSED? When you're forming a league for this or any other Trial, you have the choice of leaving the league Open or setting it Closed. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. Open Leagues will allow anyone to join the league uninvited through the LFG panel if the league has room available. Running the Trial from an Open League will grant an additional Astral Merit on completing the Trial, as well as apply the "Warmth of Prometheus," a 7.5% buff to damage, healing, and recharge rate for all participants. It will also allow league members to vote to kick members, but will prevent you as league leader from kicking anyone from the Trial yourself. Also, if your league is not completely full with 24 members at the time you queue up, you may have to wait a few minutes before the game will allow it to start. To launch a Closed League, you would make sure that the "Lock the event for your group" option at the lower right of the LFG screen is checked before you queue. This will prevent outsiders from joining without an invitation from you, and will allow you to kick troublemakers yourself without need of a vote. Of course, you won't get the extra Astral Merit or the "Warmth of Prometheus" buff from running Closed. Also, there is a bug inherent in Closed Leagues that will make zoning into the Trial a bit of a trial itself, which I'll explain in a future section. PREPPING FOR LAUNCH: THE THREE REQUESTS Once you've filled to 24 people, issue the Three Requests. (I'd say "Three Commandments," but really, that sounds a bit too bossy, even for leading a Trial. And you don't have the power to comply obedience anyway, so might as well try to catch more flies with honey.) Once we zone into the trial, please stand perfectly still, so you don't move and trigger the cut scene. The very start of the trial can be a bit confusing, due to a nasty bug with Closed Leagues that I'll go over in the next section, and there's an obnoxiously long cut scene that triggers just from someone walking a few yards forward from where you zone in, right in the middle of it. If you can get people to hold off on triggering that cut scene, you'll have time to repair the teams from the issues caused by that bug. Once we zone into the trial, please check to see if you have the league star. If you do, please pass it back to me immediately. One of the more annoying things about the LFG teleporter is that it will invariably assign the league star to the first person who zones into the trial zone—which is nearly never the person actually running the trial. If you don't say anything about that now, when people zone in their minds will be on charging headlong into the trial, and they may not even pay any attention to their chat or messages if you ask them to give the star back. So prompt them now so they'll be thinking about it when they zone in. If you get dropped from the league, send me a /tell so I can invite you back in. Due to the bug I'll explain in the next section, a handful of people will probably be booted from the league if you launch Closed. However, you can invite them back in again just by issuing the command /li [name]. So ask that they tell you who they are, so you can get that taken care of. Once you've made those things clear to everyone go ahead and hit LFG, choose the BAF trial from the Incarnate Trials tab, lock the event to your group, and queue up. Note that if you're taking part in the trial and get disconnected at any time other than when you first zone in, you should always check your LFG window for a "rejoin" button that will let you hop right back into the trial. For whatever reason, getting a /li reinvitation when you have a "rejoin" button available will actually lock you out of the trial. PART ONE: RUNNING THE TRIAL For the first part of this guide, I'm going to go over the Trial the way it is usually run—just the basic tasks required to beat the Trial and get your Incarnate materials. Afterward, I'll discuss the badges and what you need to do differently if you want to get them. Then I'll discuss each badge in turn. Note that, as with all Incarnate Trials, the hospital is within the trial map—but the hospital's exit doors will only open for ten seconds out of every thirty. So, be quick about getting to the exit door; if you miss the 10-second window, you'll have to wait 20 more seconds for another one. ZONING IN You'll appear on a small platform with stairs to a door at one end (which you can barely see at the very southwest part of the map, above). Moving forward toward the stairs will trigger a two-minute cut scene as Mother Mayhem gets an update on the current situation from Siege and Nightstar. Hopefully, everyone is well-behaved and doesn't move for at least a minute or two. Now, that bug I was talking about. For whatever reason, when you zone into an Incarnate Trial on a Closed League, the game likes to fill two teams, then split the third team into four people scattered across the other four possible league teams, and drop the rest. So, those people will need to send you a /tell so you can invite them back in with /li [name], and you'll need to consolidate those scattered people onto just one team. Of course, a complicating factor is that you probably won't even have the league star until whoever has it now notices and gives it back to you, and you can't consolidate the team or reinvite the dropped players until that happens. And if someone doesn't heed your advice and goes ahead and charges forward, you'll be into that cut scene for two minutes before you can do anything further about fixing things. (Note that if you do happen to have the star as you're zoning in, you can try immediately moving people from teams 1 and 2 over to team 3 as they zone in one by one. This could prevent those people who are last to zone in from getting booted by this bug.) In any case, you should try not to keep the players waiting too long. It may take a couple of minutes before everyone is able to send you a /tell. Once you've merged the remains of team 3 back into one team, you should go ahead and move forward, through the cut scene, and get started on things. BALANCING THE TEAMS After the cut scene, and while peforming the first couple tasks of the Trial, you should check the composition of the teams and try to balance them as best you can by shuffling people from one team to another. Ideally, you should have at least one Tanker or Brute and at least one Controller or Dominator on every team. Try to split support and damage types evenly across the teams, because there may come times each team needs to act on its own. Ideally, you should have teams well balanced by the time Siege is defeated. PHASE ONE: DEFEAT FOES As soon as the cut scene ends, and you enter the door at the top of the stairs, you'll be inside the Behavioral Adjustment Facility—and so will a bunch of Warworks. You need to take out 40 of them in order to move on to the next phase. That shouldn't take you long. When you finish, the turret guns positioned around the walls will start firing, and they have nasty auto-hit attacks that will quickly clobber anyone still standing in the open. To get out of their line of fire, make for the point marked 1 on the map, above. Due to the way the north building is positioned, it's a blind spot from the nearest turrets, and out of the range of the turrets farther away. By the way, do not click on any of the glowy consoles by the outer wall beneath the turrets. I'll explain why later. PHASE TWO: DEFEAT NIGHTSTAR When the Warworks are cleared out and the turrets open up, Nightstar will appear at the point marked 2, between the two smaller buildings to the east. Some Tanker or Brute needs to go taunt her back to point 1. (The best candidate would be a Resistance-based type, like Fire, Dark, or Stone, because the turrets are auto-hit so Defense won't do any good; someone Defense-based like Super Reflexes won't have the capped Resistances of a Resistance Tanker and will go down a lot quicker.) Try to get her as close to 1 as you possibly can—dead-center of the building. It may be necessary to ask the league to hold off on attacking her until the taunter has her properly positioned. Once she's there, take her down. She's generally easy to defeat, save for one special trick that both she and Siege have for this trial, which is sequestration. As you gain her attention, you will receive two warnings, and with each warning you'll have a glowing ring that appears around you. If you disregard the warnings, what happens next is that you get sequestered—irresistibly held for thirty seconds. What's more, it's an AoE hold—so anyone within those rings around you will be held as well. Pay close attention to these warnings. If you notice the second warning message, or see you have a second ring, back away from everyone else, and either attack the AV from range or fight their adds (that is, the additional enemies that spawn with them) until the rings fade away. If you lose track of Nightstar amid all her adds and the other players, you can instantly target her by clicking on her health bar in the pop-up trial window that displays it. Once Nightstar goes down, you'll have about a minute to prepare for the next part: the running of the prisoners. PHASE THREE: PRISONERS ESCAPING When the countdown timer hits 5:00, the doors on the four large buildings and the two smaller ones will open, and mindwashed Resistance prisoners will start running for freedom. For whatever reason, they will run up and down the walkways toward the exit doors at the opposite side of the complex from where they start. (You would think that if they really wanted to get loose, they'd head for the doors closest to them, but who can say what goes through the minds of the mindwashed?) To stop the Praetorians' evil plans, you have to stop the prisoners. Position your teams, and be sure to summon Lore Pets and set them to "Aggressive" when the timer reaches 5:05, so they'll be effective all the way through the prisoner run. There are two kinds of prisoners: Commandos and Fighters. Commandos are the tougher ones, and they're immune to pretty much every form of mez or taunt; the only way to stop them at all is to drop them. Fighters can be mezzed, however. Classes with high single-target damage should probably concentrate their fire on Commandos, since they're the toughest ones to stop. The macro /macro Cmdo targetcustomnear Commando could come in handy for quickly targeting them. Prisoners won't attack you, so you can generally drop defensive toggles for this phase if you could better use the End for other things. However, they can cast Confuse on characters and their pets. Kinetics should be careful when and how they cast Speed Boost, lest they accidentally grant a group of prisoners super speed and send them zipping quickly away. DOORS VS. CHOKES There are two possible ways to distribute your forces here. The way I saw most leaders run it for the first few months of Homecoming was that they'd assign two or three people to each set of doors, and clobber the prisoners from each door before they could get loose, with a couple people held in reserve to go after runners. There is some argument that this might still be the way to go if your league has a lot of AoE damage but not so many buffers. However, I feel the other method is a vast improvement in almost every possible circumstance. More recent teams have largely switched over to the "chokepoint" strategy, or "chokes" for short. In this strategy, you will position one of your teams at the point marked 1, and the other two teams at the point marked 3. Due to the way their pathing system works, all prisoners will pass through either point 1 (about 1/3 of the prisoners) or point 3 (about 2/3 of the prisoners) on their way to freedom. Setting up a pair of gauntlets at these chokepoints will let you clobber each of them with all your might as they pass. Group your teams up fairly closely together, with the center of the group about where the red number is; this lets AoE buffs hit more people, and allows you to concentrate AoE damage. It also doesn't leave room for prisoners to slip between buildings and escape, which is the most likely cause of leaks in this strategy. (Prisoners exiting the middle south building will try to head south between it and the building immediately to its left, to make for an exit at the lower left corner of the left building, which is why point 3 is positioned right there.) If anyone tries to spread out, or take up position at one of the doors, ask them to get back with the rest of the group. People at each end of the choke should be facing outward, because enemies will run in from both directions. Clobber the enemies coming toward you—but if you see any enemies running past you from behind, definitely clobber them before they get far, because if they get past you they'll be able to escape to freedom. Try not to let any prisoners at all get away. The chokepoint system is remarkably efficient; with a league that knows what they're doing, chances are good that not a single prisoner will get past you. Even if a few do, it's not likely that all 30 will. PHASE FOUR: DEFEAT SIEGE This phase is essentially a repeat of Phase Two. Gather everyone back at 1, where Nightstar is still lying. Siege will appear at point 4 on the map, and that tough taunter needs to grab him and bring him back. You should position him as close as possible to Nightstar, because it will be important for Phase Five that those two be as close together as possible. This is also why it's a good idea to get Nightstar to the middle of the building before dropping her during Phase Two, so you won't have as far to drag Siege. It may be necessary to ask the rest of the league to hold off attacking until Siege is where you want him. As with Nightstar, Siege will warn and then sequester people who attack him. Again, pay attention to the warnings, move away from other people when you get the second ring, and don't get your leaguemates mezzed. And as with Nightstar, you can instantly select him at any time by clicking on his health bar in the trial goal display. Once Siege drops, Phase Five will begin immediately. PHASE FIVE: DEFEAT SIEGE AND NIGHTSTAR (AGAIN) The instant Siege falls, both he and Nightstar will self-rez, and you have to clobber them both again—with the addition that the two archvillains must be defeated within 10 seconds of each other. You need to take them down at more or less exactly the same time. Positioning them close together during the earlier phases helps with this, since you'll be able to hit both of them with the same AoE attacks, making it easier to balance the damage. Everyone should keep a close eye on the health bars, and try to keep the two within 5% health of each other at all times. If one goes down faster than the other, switch your target over and pound on the other until they're more even. Again, you can quickly select either one by clicking on their health bar in the trial goal display. As with Phases Two and Four, mind your warnings and beware sequestration. And that's that. When the two go down, you win the trial, and will get a pop-up window offering your choice of Incarnate component. Make your pick, then exit the trial, and get ready to run another one! PART TWO: BAF BADGES There are four possible badges you can earn from the Behavioral Adjustment Facility Trial. Earning each badge brings with it a random Uncommon Incarnate Thread salvage material, which means that earning badges is a good way for beginning Incarnates to get some of the pieces they need to let them build up powers quickly. Earning all four badges confers the Master of the B.A.F. badge, and a random Rare salvage. If you already have a badge, qualifying for it again awards an extra Astral Merit. The first two of these badges are really simple, but the other two are considerably more complicated. ALARM RAISER This is the very easiest badge to get. All you have to do is not click on any of the glowing consoles around the wall beneath the turrets. Clicking the console deactivates the turret—but the way most trials are run, you're almost never going to be exposed to turret fire anyway, so why bother? That means you'll automatically get the badge the first time you do the BAF on a character, and get an extra Astral Merit each time you run the trial thereafter. NOT ON MY WATCH This is another very easy one to get, if you're any good at Phase Three. Simply don't let any prisoners escape, and you'll get that badge the first time and an extra Astral every time afterward. In my experience, a properly executed chokepoint strategy will do this nearly every time. GOTTA KEEP 'EM SEPARATED This one can be trickier. To earn this badge, you have to defeat Siege and Nightstar where they spawn, rather than pulling them away to point 1. To do this, follow these steps. For Phase Two, the entire league heads to point 2 and engages Nightstar where she spawns. If you move between the two small buildings, you can avoid most of the turret fire. During Phase Three, after the teams have arranged themselves at chokes, divide one of the teams of 8 into two teams of 4 each, so you now have four teams of 8, 8, 4, and 4 people each. In Phase Four, the whole league heads to defeat Siege at point 4. Moving under the awning behind where he spawns will shield you from fire from the turrets. When Siege is down to about 25% health, direct one of the teams of 8 and one of the teams of 4 to head over to point 2 and get ready. During Phase Five, keep a sharp eye on the AVs' relative healths. Remember that you can't switch targets from one AV to the other, so the only way to control defeat speed is to ask the people fighting one AV or the other to hold their attacks for a few moments. You may need to remind them ahead of time to watch the chat so they will see those instructions when you give them. When you defeat the AVs at the same time, you should get the badge. STRONG AND PRETTY For this badge, during Phase Five, you have to make sure that no reinforcement adds are alive when you defeat Nightstar and Siege. This can be a little tricky, and may take more than one try to get right. During Phase Five, assign from 4 to 8 people to an "Adds Team" to move to where the adds spawn during this phase—the set of doors at point 5 on the map. Meanwhile, work on getting the AVs' health down to about 5%. Make sure that everyone understands the importance of watching their health and stopping their attacks at that point, so as not to kill the AVs prematurely. Hold the AVs at 5% health until the next bunch of adds spawn. At that point, the adds team defeats them as quickly as possible with Judgement and other huge AoE attacks, and gives the go signal—at which point the AV teams clobber the AVs as fast as they can and hope they can do it before another wave of reinforcements comes out. Note that it is possible to try for both Gotta Keep 'em Separated and Strong and Pretty at the same time—simply arrange your teams so that you have a 4-to-6 person Adds Team in addition to four other teams to split evenly between the two AVs, send the Adds Team to do their job at the same time you send the Nightstar teams on their way, and follow the same hold-at-5% strategy. But my own preference is just to go for one badge at a time, because there are fewer things that could go wrong that way. And it's not as if you're not going to want to run this trial again. CONCLUSION I hope this guide has given new Incarnates a better idea of what goes on during the BAF trial, as well as given players thinking about leading it some insight into how the thing should be run. If I left anything out or made any mistakes, I'm open to suggestions and corrections, and will happily edit the guide to fix any errors. For other suggestions on how to run the Trial, you might also want to have a look at the several guides on offer linked from the BAF Trial Homecoming Wiki page. In particular, the Visual Guide has a very nice diagram of the facility with the prisoner pathing and all exits marked out, which demonstrates exactly why those two particular chokepoints are so effective (and where to watch for leaks).
  19. THE COMPLETE NEWCOMER'S GUIDE TO CITY OF HEROES STARTING OUT WITH YOUR FIRST CHARACTER or I JUST FLEW INTO THE CITY, AND BOY ARE MY ARMS TIRED Welcome, at last, to the City of Heroes (or Villains)! In previous guides, I've gone over basic facts about the game, how to create your character, and some of the terminology you'll encounter as you play. If you're following along, you should have just completed the tutorial, and have emerged anew into the city with all its wonders. Let's get you started adventuring, shall we? First, a couple of caveats. This advice only covers starting out in the City of Heroes or City of Villains factions. Things work a little differently in Going Rogue, which is part of why I suggested you not create your first character over there. By the time you're ready for Going Rogue, you should have a better handle on how things work in general, and have an easier time starting in an environment that isn't as friendly to new players. Also, this advice is only meant for your first character. Once you get more experienced, with future characters you may want to skip over a lot of it. But to get a good jump on the learning curve, you should start with the basics. Learn to walk before you run, and other clichés like that. Also, I would recommend doing your first few missions solo, so you can move at your own pace and not have someone else dragging you along at their speed—although if a friend invited you to the game, it seems likely they might want to show you the ropes themselves, so you should certainly let them help you out. This advice isn't meant to be comprehensive, by the way; I'm not going to cover all of the different tabs in the options menu, or tell you how to do everything. A lot of that stuff, you'll learn better by doing it for yourself. The Homecoming Wiki, ParagonWiki, the in-game /help channel, and the Homecoming Discord server are all good sources of help to go to when you need to know something I'm not covering. I'm just going to give you the very basics, and you can have the joy of discovering other stuff as you go along. Let's begin. HELP ME! On arriving in Paragon City or the Rogue Isles, one of the first pop-up windows you get prompts you to set yourself as "Helper" or "Help Me!" Choosing one of those titles will cause a title to appear over your name when other people see it over your head, saying either "Helper" or "Help Me!" and will also color your character name a particular way so it's easier for such folks to recognize. I highly recommend that you set yourself as "Help Me!," at least at first. This tells everyone you meet that you're brand new to the game, and they may be more inclined to offer friendly advice and assistance. Likewise, if you see someone else who has "Helper" over their name, that means they consciously chose to mark themselves as someone newbies could approach with questions, so it won't bother them if you go up and ask them to help you with something. If you made a mistake, or should feel you don't need help anymore, you can change this setting at any time just by pressing "H" to bring up the help screen and picking another option from the drop-down. This title system is also how people can tag themselves as "roleplayers," meaning that they're more likely to be playing their characters in-character. If that sounds like fun to you, you may want to change to that setting later on. But for now, you should probably stick with "Help Me!" until you learn the ropes. YOUR GLOBAL CHAT HANDLE AND YOU The next thing you might want to do is change your global chat handle. Your global chat handle, or "global" for short, is a handle people can use to message or email you regardless of which character you're logged into. They can also add you to their global friends list, which will let them see where you're logged in and what character you're playing (if you haven't turned on "hide" to make yourself invisible). Global handles are also used for emailing items or Inf from one character to another. By default, your global chat handle will be set to the name of your first character, but that may not be what you want to keep it set to. You can change this handle once, by clicking Menu at the top right, then Global Chat Handle (X) about 2/3 of the way down the list of options. After you've changed it, you can come back to this menu option to be reminded of what it is, but if you need to change it again after that you'll need to ask a Game Master for help. So double-check what you typed before you click the submit button. TRAINING UP Now that you've got your help status and global chat handle set, it's time to train up. Go talk to the trainer. In Atlas Park, that will be Ms. Liberty. (There's another trainer, Back Alley Brawler, over near the west end of the zone, but Ms. Liberty is right up the steps from where new characters begin.) In Mercy Island, that will be Arbiter Richard. You can easily locate the trainer on your map (hit "M" to open it and use the slide on the right side to zoom in) by their icon, a white circle with a green silhouette of a person in it. The tutorial ends by giving you enough XP to reach level 2, so you'll be able to train up immediately and select a new power from the choices given. Every time you level up, you'll go to the nearest trainer and choose more powers, or more Enhancement slots for your existing powers, so you'll be doing this a lot. Don't worry that you might make the "wrong" choice and somehow "mess up" your character. The choices you make for skills and Enhancement slots aren't permanent. As you continue to play, you'll be given several opportunities per character to "respec"—that is, respecify your power and enhancement choices. If you use up all those chances, you can buy further additional chances pretty inexpensively on the auction house. You can't change your Origin, character archetype, or what primary and secondary power sets you chose, but you will be able to change what powers you picked from those sets when, and how the slots are distributed among them. In fact, you should probably just accept that you will want to respec your character sooner or later, just because you can't fully understand what all the powers do or how much enhancement you should put into them until you've tried them out. So for right now, just pick whatever power looks good to you and put whatever slots you want to into them. There's no wrong way to make your first character; it's all a learning experience. PLAY TO WIN WITH PAY 2 WIN The P2W Store has a number of free items that new players may find very helpful. Remember, even though it's called "P2W," that's just a developer in-joke; there are no real monetary costs involved. You can find the P2W by looking for dollar-sign icons on your map; it will be one of those. (In fact, there's also a P2W store in the Outbreak/Breakout tutorials; if you're reading through this guide before you play through the tutorial, you could also go ahead and grab all these things while you're in it.) I would recommend stopping by the store and picking these free powers up on every character as soon as you make them: The Origin-bonus Blackwand (if your character is Magic, Mutant, or Natural Origin) or the Origin-bonus Nemesis Staff (if your character is Science, Technology, or Natural; Natural Origin can choose which of the two they want to take the bonus on) Two powers out of: Sands of Mu, Ghost-Slaying Axe, or non-Origin-bonus Blackwand/Nemesis Staff Either Jump Pack or Steam Jump Either Beast Run or Ninja Run Whichever Buff Pet best fits your character's concept Inner Inspiration, Secondary Mutation, or Mystic Fortune (I'd recommend Inner Inspiration, as it provides three medium or large Inspirations per use, very handy when starting the game) The five free Prestige Enhancements, which you can slot into your first few attack powers to add a good chunk of damage, recharge rate, and some useful procs (chances for the power to cause some extra effect). You can come back and get other powers that cost Inf later on, when you actually have some Inf. I actually wouldn't recommend taking the XP boost options to start, because those options cut down on the amount of Inf you get, and you don't currently have any. Also, you're still learning the game, so perhaps you don't want to level too quickly just yet. ARRANGING YOUR POWER TRAYS You've just picked up a bunch of extra powers—so you may now be wondering where they are. When you buy a power in the P2W Store, it doesn't automatically add itself to your tray the way your powers do when you train. You're going to have to drag those powers down to your tray—and to do that, you'll want to make some room. When you start out, you just get one tray of ten power slots, numbered 1 through 0. But when you get more powers, you're going to need more places to put them. At the far right, just above your power tray, you should see a + sign and then a triangle. Click the triangle, and another power tray will appear above your first one. Click it one more time, and you'll get a third tray. (And the triangle reverses, meaning that you can click it again to drop back to one tray.) These trays will all start out with the number "1" on the left end and show the exact same powers, but click the triangle to the right of the "1" and it will change to the number "2". You'll probably want to make the middle tray "2" and the top tray "3". You can have up to 9 trays full of 10 icons each; the same power icon can be in more than one tray, but you can't put one power in the same tray twice. Next, click "Powers" at the left, just above your first tray slot. That will open your powers window, and along the right side you'll see all those powers you got from the P2W. Drag them one at a time into spaces where you want them on your tray. Note that you can hotkey the powers in your first tray by pressing numbers 1 through 0, and hotkey the powers in your second and third tray by pressing Alt+ or Ctrl+ the number, respectively. If that's still not enough trays for you, you can add even more. Click the + and you'll see a floating tray appear in the upper left of your screen. Change it to show power tray 4, then drag it to where you want it, and click + again if you want another. You can change the shape of floating trays by right-clicking on them, and choosing one of the options. If you choose Horizontal or Vertical, you can actually bend the tray into an "L" shape by dragging it against the edge of the screen. Play around with these extra trays and see how you want them. By the time you reach level 50, you'll probably have enough powers and macros to fill all 9 possible power trays. Powers in these floating trays can't be hotkeyed, so if you prefer using keys to clicking, you'll want to put your most-often-used powers in the three basic trays, while moving less-often-used ones to the floaters. SPEAKING TO YOUR FIRST CONTACT Next, it's time to get your first real mission! Go talk to the contact the tutorial assigned you, and take their first mission. (You can actually talk to any of the beginning contacts, even the ones the tutorial didn't give you, but it's probably best to keep things simple and go with that one.) They'll have a mission for you, which will send you to speak to someone else, defeat enemies, or enter a door elsewhere in the starting zone. If it's very far away, you can use the run and jump powers you got from the P2W store to help you get there more quickly. After you complete the mission, you'll need to come back to the contact and talk to them again to take another mission. At some point, probably after another mission or two, they should let you call them from your contact screen after future missions, so you don't have to run all the way back every time. The contact will offer you several missions as part of a single arc—a series of related missions that tell a story over the course of running them. When the arc finishes, you'll get an XP bonus and several Reward Merits, and you'll probably level up once or twice during that time as well. Most contacts offer one or two arcs, as well as a few stand-alone missions, all of which are good for earning some more XP. ARE THINGS TOO TOUGH? HERE'S HOW TO FIX THAT Not all beginning characters are created equal, and sometimes you can run up against enemies who are too challenging for you, even if they're just the same level as you. Fortunately, there's a way built into the game to fix that—though it's located in an odd place in the game's interface. On the left side of your screen, in the text entry field under the chat window, there's a round button with a speech balloon in it. Clicking that button brings up a menu. Most of the items in the menu are chat-related options, but at the very bottom is Set Notoriety. Choose that, and another menu opens up, letting you select what level of enemies you'll face, how many members the game should think are on your team, whether you want there to be Boss class enemies when you're soloing, and whether you want to face any Archvillains when soloing. The level indicator is probably set to +0, meaning that you will face mainly enemies of your own level or one higher. You can change it as low as -1, to make enemies one level lower than or the same level as you, so they'll be easier to hit and won't do as much damage to you. You can also set "Solo Bosses" to "No" and any enemy who would have been a tougher, more challenging Boss type will be a Lieutenant instead. ("Elite Bosses," a special kind of Boss, will still be Elite Bosses, though.) But note that reducing the difficulty also reduces the amount of XP you get from enemies. The chat options menu seems like a strange place to put mission difficulty settings, but it's a side-effect of some of the changes Homecoming's developers made to make things simpler for the players. In the live version of the game, the only way to change difficulty was by by talking to a Hero Corps analyst (one of the light-and-dark-blue-clad heroes, like the one standing just northeast of City Hall in Atlas) or Fortunata Fateweaver in person. (And you can still change the difficulty settings that way as well, if you like.) But to let players change the difficulty immediately from wherever their characters are, the options had to be added to a menu, and there aren't a whole lot of options menus in the game that can be opened with just one click. The chat options menu was apparently the only one players could quickly open up if they needed to make changes on the spur of the moment. AUTOFIRE AND YOU Here's a useful little trick that the tutorials don't tell you about. City of Heroes will let you set one of your powers up to fire automatically as soon as it recharges. Players will often use it for their fastest-recharging attack, or stick it on healing auras to make sure they heal everyone around them as often as possible, or might put it on Hasten, a Super Speed pool power that makes most of a character's powers recharge faster while it's active. There are plenty of potential uses for it. To use it, just hold down the Control key and click the icon for the power. You'll see a green circle appear around it, meaning that it's been selected for autofire. To cancel autofire, just hit Z. Autofire can be very handy for making sure you're attacking or buffing as often as you're able. But just remember, any attack power you use it on will go off any time you have a target selected and within range. So if you're trying to sneak through somewhere without attacking any enemies, you might want to turn it off to avoid any unfortunate accidents. If you like autofire enough, perhaps you might be inspired to name your next character Otto Fire. (Or maybe not. It's probably taken anyway.) TWINSHOT AND DR. GRAVES When you reach level 5, you will be given one of these two contacts: Twinshot on the hero side, Dr. Graves on the villain side. These contracts will introduce you to a series of further tutorial arcs (at levels 5, 10, and 15) that will walk you through some additional explanation of the game, so you should definitely do their missions on your first character. You will already know some of the things they go over (how to train up or use transit lines, for example), but on the whole, the repetition doesn't hurt. You probably won't want to do these contacts' arcs on other characters, but they'll help you learn even more about the game by doing. And they're pretty amusingly written, as well. WHAT ABOUT "DEATH FROM BELOW"? As you adventure through Atlas Park or Mercy Island, you'll probably see Death from Below (DFB) advertised multiple times on the LFG or Broadcast chat channels. Death from Below is an entry-level trial, available separately for both heroes and villains, in which you face several archvillains and will undoubtedly gain a lot of XP (especially if you have the Double XP booster enabled). It's a pretty common way to jump characters past the very first few levels so they can move on to other zones and start doing higher-level content immediately. On your first character, I would not recommend jumping into one of these until after you've completed at least the first Twinshot or Dr. Graves arc. While Death From Below is a lot of fun, it can also cause you to outlevel the very entry-level content that will demonstrate to you how to play the game, while the enemies are still relatively weak and don't have many special abilities that make them harder for you to handle. Once you know more about how to play the game, that's not an issue, and you can court Death from Below to your heart's content. (In fact, after you complete the level 5 Twinshot/Dr. Graves arc, doing a DFB at that point would probably level you up enough that you can immediately start the level 10 arc next.) But I would strongly recommend playing out those introductory arcs first. VIGILANTE, ROGUE, AND YOU One other thing you might want to change right away is your character's alignment. There are four basic alignments in City of Heroes/Villains. Hero and Villain are the basic default alignments for starting on the Hero (blue) or Villain (red) side of the game. However, there are also two in-between alignments—Vigilante on the blue side, and Rogue on the red side. Each of these alignments is treated as Hero or Villain in terms of the main content they can do and the badges and Accolades they can get (as well as the sides they fight on in PVP zones), but they also get limited access to the other side's content. Both Vigilante and Rogue can travel anywhere in both Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. They can join teams doing missions or Task/Strike Forces/Trials on the opposite side (Vigilante can join Villain teams; Rogue can join Hero teams), and can participate in those missions, but they can't speak to most opposing contacts themselves. They can speak to Detective or Broker contacts to get a police radio or newspaper, and they can also start Task Forces, Strike Forces, or Trials from either side. If all this sounds too complicated to you, feel free to ignore it until later on. There's no reason you have to be anything other than the straight Hero or Villain you start out as. However, once you've learned your way around the game a little, you might want to go ahead and swap to one of those in-between alignments—especially if you start out as a Villain. The blue side has a lot more players than the red side, so if you're a Villain who wants to team up, you may have to go Rogue in order to find other people to team with. (The Rogue alignment has no connection to the Going Rogue expansion, by the way, and characters who start out in the Praetorian (gold) setting can't change alignment until they leave Praetoria at level 20.) It used to be that you had to wait until level 20 to change sides, and it was a slow, laborious process involving doing ten Tip missions followed by an alignment mission to change or confirm your alignment. However, Homecoming added a contact called Null the Gull—a seagull who sits on top of a truck on the villain side of the Pocket D dance club. If you can travel safely to Pocket D, you can change your alignment to any of the other three alignments at any time. Some players do this immediately on each new character they make so they have access to that much more content while leveling up. HELP, I'M STUCK! WHAT CAN I DO? In a previous guide, I already mentioned The Homecoming Wiki, ParagonWiki, the in-game /help channel, and the Homecoming Discord server as places you could look for more information or help from fellow players about things that aren't clear. (Or look for some player with "Helper" floating over their head.) But sometimes that kind of help isn't enough. City of Heroes isn't perfect; it does have its share of game-breaking bugs that crop up from time to time. Sometimes an enemy may get stuck in a wall or ceiling so you can't damage it, but you need to defeat it to complete the mission. Or sometimes you just can't find the last objective and are not sure if something's wrong with the mission. If you need actual help with the game, then you'll need to find a Game Master (GM). The easiest way to do that is to type "/petition (whatever your problem is)" from the chat window. (For example, "/petition Enemy stuck in wall, can't complete mission".) Then select the category and type a brief description of your problem. The petition will immediately be sent to the Game Masters' ticket queue, and if there's a GM currently on duty, they will be pinged to respond to it. (You can also file a ticket into the same system using Homecoming's support webpage, which also permits attaching screenshots and such if you have any that are relevant.) However, there won't always be a Game Master on duty to answer the petition. To see if there is, you can go to the Discord server I linked above and check the sidebar on the right side of the screen (in the desktop version). There will be categories of GM listed there, including possibly "On-Duty Game Master." If the category does not exist, there aren't any GMs currently on duty. Unfortunately, as a volunteer effort, Homecoming's GM coverage can be a bit spotty—especially late at night, or during business hours on weekdays. If there's no GM on duty, it could be a while before they can respond to your ticket. If your problem is urgent, you can try messaging or tagging one of the GMs who shows the green dot of being logged into Discord and see if they can help you, but bear in mind that they may not be in any position to help; they might be nowhere near their computer and just logged into Discord from their phone. If worst comes to worst, you have two choices: automatically completing the mission, or resetting the mission and doing it over. AUTOCOMPLETING OR RESETTING A MISSION Once every three days, City of Heroes will let you complete a mission automatically—that is, make the contact mark the mission completed without you actually meeting its goals. This can be useful if you're stuck and there's no GM around to help you get past it. All you need to do is call the contact, and choose "Complete the current mission from this contact." You should only use this as a last resort, however, because you won't be able to do it again for another three days. To reset a mission, so you can go through it again and hope it doesn't get stuck this time, first exit the mission. Then you need to select another mission from your list of missions, from some other contact, and set it as your active mission. (If you're high enough level to get these, a newspaper or radio mission or a tip mission would work, since those are easy to obtain.) When you set the new mission as your active mission, the game will warn you that you're about to abandon all progress on that other mission. Tell it to proceed, then after the new mission is selected, you can select the other mission again and begin it again. Alternately, you can just log out of the game and log back in, and all your progress on the mission will be reset. Also, if you call or visit the contact as if you were autocompleting the mission, there should also be a choice to abandon the mission. This will usually let you call and accept the same mission again. In addition to resetting stuck missions, this will also let you apply a different Difficulty (Notoriety) level to the mission, if you had the wrong one set before you started it. To reset a Task Force or Strike Force mission, all members of the team have to log out, wait for two minutes, then log back in. It can be necessary to do this if a Task Force mission begins repeating after a player quits the TF. There's no other real way to get the TF kicked back into gear when that happens. CONCLUSION AND FURTHER ADVICE Congratulations! You've taken your first few steps into a larger world. Though things start off pretty simple, as you continue to level up the game will get increasingly complex, with new systems becoming available to you. Fortunately, many of these new systems include tutorial or introductory missions, or else have guides available elsewhere on the forum—and by the time you need those guides, hopefully the rest of the game will have started making enough sense to you that they'll be easier to follow. As for where you go from here—why not join a Death from Below trial now that you've finished your first few missions? Or when you get to level 8, see if you can get on a Positron Task Force (if you're a Hero, Vigilante, or Rogue; Villains have to wait for level 15 to do Virgil Tarikoss's Strike Force). Join a team of people doing missions and see how the game works in a group. If you need extra Inf to build up your character, check out the techniques I suggest in my guide to making fast money through Enhancement conversion. It takes a bit of work, but it's still possible to make tens of millions of Inf in a relatively short time, even starting from nothing at all. Once you have more cash, you can go and check out those powers that cost big money in the P2W store. You might want to check out the rest of my guides, too. When you get to King's Row or Port Oakes, speak to the Detective or Broker contact there to get access to the police radio/newspaper random mission system. When it's safe to enter Steel Canyon or Cap au Diable, you should run by that university and speak to the contact who will walk you through a tutorial on how the in-game crafting system works. When you reach level 20, you can start doing Tip Missions for extra merits, or to change your alignment—or you can speak to Null the Gull in Pocket D (the seagull on top of a truck in the red side of the club) to change your alignment at any time. And when you reach level 50, there's the further complexity of the Incarnate system to explore… When it comes time to respec your character, don't forget to take a screenshot of the way your power trays are arranged. (You can use Windows Key + Shift + S to open the Windows snipping tool to capture the trays, then paste the image into a paint program.) The respec will reset the positions of all your power icons, so you'll want that reminder of how they were originally set up so you can drag them back into place. Whatever you do, have fun with it! If you get frustrated, it's okay to seek help from other players or GMs. You're doing this to have fun, so it should be fun for you. And if you have any questions these guides didn't answer, or you think I got something wrong, please leave a comment under the relevant guide. If there's a mistake or an omission, I'll be happy to fix it, and I'm sure the discussion will also be useful to future new players who read these threads. I'll see you in the City of Heroes (or Villains)!
  20. I tried it out, and it worked just fine. Thanks! Very useful.
  21. I've never had any problem soloing my Tankers, and they've gotten even better since the bumps Tankers got in the most recent Page. And I don't doubt that it's possible to build high-damage variations of any class, but people just starting out in the game wouldn't be able to do that. I'm trying to avoid giving them too much information and confusing them. They'll have time to learn about the exceptions to the rules later on.
  22. Well, I'm more concerned with people learning how to play the game. The backstory is something that they'll learn for themselves over the course of the various story arcs, after all.
  23. THE COMPLETE NEWCOMER'S GUIDE TO CITY OF HEROES BASIC TERMINOLOGY AND CONCEPTS or HOW DO I SHOT WEB? Before I go over how to spend your new character's first day in City of Heroes, there are a few concepts I should introduce to make things go easier. These are things you'll encounter in your first hours playing the game, but will be dealing with all throughout the course of it, so getting an idea of what they mean now will help you start off on the right foot. I'll try to keep these explanations simple, because you really will learn a lot more from experience. EXPERIENCE POINTS Since you'll be learning from experience, we'll start your learning with…experience! Experience Points, that is; usually abbreviated to "XP." These points are how the game charts your progress as you defeat bad (or good) guys and complete missions. After you collect a certain amount of XP, you will "level up"—that is, graduate to the next character level, so you can go to a trainer and improve your powers. You'll also be greeted with a nifty chime and visual effect celebrating your ascendancy, and have a large set of Inspirations automatically applied to you. (Including an Awaken, so if you're currently face-down from having been defeated when it happens, you'll immediately be brought back to life.) If you're on a team, these things will call your level-up to your teammates' attention, and they may congratulate you. (Because of that chime, leveling up is also referred to as a "ding," and it's not uncommon for people who level up to shout "Ding!" or "Ding <level number>!" when it happens, or use the term as a verb. "When I ding 50...") The amount of XP required to level up scales up as you level up. At level 1 or 2, it just requires defeating an enemy or two, or just a few, to do it. By the time you're in your 40s, you'll have to defeat hundreds of them (as well as obtain XP from other sources). Also, the amount of XP you get from individual defeats scales up level by level. There are charts out there giving the exact details of how many enemy defeats it takes per level if you care to look for them, but most players don't really worry about that. They track their progress by the graphical representation in the upper right corner of the screen, in the same place as their Health and Endurance bars. To the right of the Health and Endurance bars is a dial with ten wedge-shaped segments (often referred to as "bubbles" or "bubs"). Below the Health and End bars is an XP bar. The bar starts out empty, but will fill with pink as you defeat enemies and earn XP. Each filled bar represents one filled bubble, and you must fill ten bubbles to advance to the next level. (Since filling one bar amounts to a bubble, sometimes players will talk about needing "two more bubs," or they may say "two more bars.") PATROL XP AND XP DEBT Did you know you can earn XP for not playing your character? In the picture above, you'll note that part of the XP bar is blue, and there are two blue bubbles after the filled pink ones. This blue segment is called Patrol XP. It's a sort of XP bonus you get for staying logged out over long periods of time—approximately one full bar per day. When you next adventure, that blue bar will add to the amount of regular XP you earn until it is used up. Each time you earn one experience point, one of the Patrol experience points will convert into a regular one, meaning that you'll earn XP twice as fast until you use it up. (Patrol XP only counts toward XP from enemy defeats, not from other sources such as end-of-mission XP bonuses.) You won't encounter the other kind of XP modifier until you reach level 10. That is XP debt. When you're defeated after level 10, you'll get a form of negative XP added onto your XP bar, called XP Debt—the brown segment in the picture above. This debt works just like patrol XP, but in reverse: out of every two XP you earn, one will be deducted from the XP debt until the debt is gone. There are ways to work off debt faster, but in actuality they hardly matter, because most of the time you'll hardly even notice your XP debt before it's worked off by defeating a few enemies on your way to the next level. You will earn half as much debt for being defeated within a mission as you would for being defeated within a regular map zone. Back when City of Heroes was first launched, the way of thinking in MMO design was that there should be some sort of extra punishment for being defeated in battle—be that making you have to go find your corpse to get your stuff back, or tacking an XP penalty onto you for it. In those days, you would get a half-bar of debt for being defeated inside a mission, or a whole bar for being defeated outside. Many players would groan about it—but some would intentionally get defeated multiple times to slow down their leveling progress so they could experience more content without outleveling it. Those days are long gone. Now you can simply choose to turn off XP gain with a switch in the options menu if you want to slow down your leveling—and there's a flashback system for going back to play content you missed, so you don't even have to do that. And the amount of XP Debt you get for defeats has been vastly reduced. (Also, "In my day, we had to earn XP uphill both ways, in the snow...") XP Debt and Patrol XP cancel each other out. If you have Patrol XP when you're defeated after level 10, the amount of debt will subtract from the Patrol XP instead of adding the brown segment. Also, if you log out with debt, the next time you log in that debt will be reduced by the amount of Patrol XP you would have earned in that time. INFLUENCE, INFAMY, AND INFORMATION Besides XP, the other thing you'll earn from defeating enemies is the game's main system of currency, Inf. Depending on which side your character starts out, Inf may stand for Influence (for heroes), Infamy (for villains), or Information (for Praetorians). The different names are just for thematic purposes, because it's actually the exact same currency—if your character switches sides from hero to villain, they will have the same amount of Infamy as they did Influence before the change. Inf is actually not meant to represent material wealth, but rather how well-regarded your character is in the overall heroing, villainous, or Praetorian community. At the time City of Heroes was launched, "reputation currency" was a nifty new idea in some science-fictional and philosophical circles (for example, it featured heavily in Cory Doctorow's 2003 novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). It's easy to see why the game developers went that route, since it offered a way to avoid the mercenary connotations that would arise out of heroes having to earn real money for their heroing work in order to upgrade their powers. Also, it gives players more control over their characters' backstories. If they want to say their character lives in a penthouse, or they want them to live just up the alley from where Skulls and Hellions mug people, that's entirely up to them. It doesn't make a difference to the game either way. In any case, as you defeat enemies, you will earn both XP and Inf. Inf can be used at vendors or auction houses to buy things including Enhancements and Inspirations (more on those shortly) to power up your characters. You can also use the game's email system to email Inf to other people, or to yourself if you want to be able to move it from character to character or simply keep it in storage. Your character can't have more than 2 billion Inf in its wallet at any one time; any amount you earn over that is simply lost. If you approach that 2 billion Inf cap, you'll probably want to email yourself a few hundred million to clear room for more. (It may seem unimaginable to you right now that you could ever have two billion Inf, but you'll get there.) There is a free XP booster you can get at the P2W store that will increase the amount of XP you earn. However, it will also cut the amount of Inf you earn by the same percentage—so if you double your XP, you won't earn any Inf from adventuring at all. As you're just starting out in the game, you might want to leave that alone for now. There are also other (and faster) ways to earn Inf than just adventuring. In fact, I cover a method that will let you earn your first million or so Inf within just an hour of gameplay in another of my guides. But that's one of those advanced guides that assumes a little more game knowledge than someone just starting out might have, so it might be best to save that one until you've played the game a little and understand a little more. ENHANCEMENTS It probably won't come as a surprise that Enhancements are one of the more complicated elements of City of Heroes. Enhancements are the way you upgrade and customize your powers—and there are a whole lot of different kinds of them. Fortunately, you won't encounter most of those kinds until you've had more experience in the game, so I won't cover those in any detail. But even going over the kinds you'll run into when you start out will be complicated enough. If you've already gone through the tutorial for that character you created in the previous guide, you'll have been introduced to Enhancements already. They fit into spaces on your powers, that you add to your powers as you level up. A power starts with just one slot, and you can add up to five, for a total of six. When City of Heroes launched, first there were just three fundamental categories of Enhancement. Training Enhancements (or Trainings) are low-level Enhancements, that dropped from defeated enemies at levels 1-14. Dual-Origin Enhancements (abbreviated as DOs) started dropping at level 15 (as well as being available for purchase in stores at that level). They are twice as effective as Trainings, and each one can be used by characters who have one of two particular Origins. For example, one variety of DO can be used by Mutant or Magic characters, another can be used by Magic or Natural characters, another by Natural or Technology, and so on. Single-Origin Enhancements (SOs) are twice as effective as DOs (hence, four times as effective as Trainings) and started dropping (and selling) at level 25, and can be used by characters of that one specific Origin that they're meant for. As you level up, these Enhancements will become less effective and eventually expire. You can slot them starting three levels below the level of the Enhancement. (For example, you can slot a level 15 DO when your character is level 12.) As long as the Enhancement is higher than your character's level, the number will be colored green. When it is exactly equal to your character's level, it will be colored white. When it is up to 3 levels lower than your character, it is colored yellow. If it is more than 3 levels higher or lower than your character's level, the Enhancement will be colored red, and you can't slot it (and if it's one you slotted already and outleveled, it just won't do anything for the power it's in until it's replaced with a higher-level Enhancement). To make the Enhancements last longer, you can combine Enhancements that are less than 3 levels higher than you are, to bump them up one more level in effectiveness. Even so, in days of old, it was not uncommon for a teammate to say, "Hold up, guys, all my Enhancements just went red," and for them have to spend five or ten minutes at a store hastily buying and slotting new ones. And they would have to do this every five levels. Fortunately, as time went on, the developers introduced new kinds of Enhancement to the game, including Invention Enhancements that don't expire. However, you probably won't be making much use of those until you get into your level 20s. Invention Enhancements can be kind of complicated, but you shouldn't worry about those when you're just getting into the game. By the time you've leveled up to the point where Invention Enhancements will be a good option for your character, you'll be better able to understand the other guides that discuss those in more detail. As a just-starting player, most of the Enhancements you'll be dealing with right now until you reach level 12 will be Trainings. These are the ones that will drop when you defeat some enemies. You should slot ones you can use and sell ones you can't—or just sell all of them to get a little extra money you can use for other things. I wouldn't really suggest buying more, though. To be honest, as little as Trainings do, it's almost not worth messing with them at all. At low levels, your character gets some automatic buffs that make the Enhancements a lot less important; these buffs dwindle and go away by level 20. Incidentally, this whole business may be just about to change. Since Invention Enhancements have effectively rendered Trainings and DOs obsolete, a patch currently testing on the open beta server will make SO Enhancements available starting at level 5. (And once it goes live, I'll have to update this section of my guide.) That will make your Enhancement drops much more effective. INSPIRATIONS As you adventure, you will also have Inspirations drop from defeated enemies, or be available to purchase in the same stores that sell Inspirations. Inspirations are temporary power-ups you can use at any time to boost your damage, accuracy, defense, and other statistics, or to recover health or Endurance. Inspirations are square tokens that show up in a tray above your power trays, where you can click one to use it up. The basic Inspirations you receive at first will be a solid color with a particular logo on them representing their effect, and they come in three sizes with different level of effectiveness. The small size is the only one you can purchase directly from vendors; you can get larger ones from higher-level enemies or the auction house, among other places. Players often refer to Inspirations as "candy," or by the color of the inspiration ("greens," "blues," etc.). When you start out, you'll only be able to hold three Inspirations in your tray, but as you level up you'll get more space. Inspirations can make the difference between failure and success. It's not uncommon for players to go by the vendor and pick up whole trays full of purple (Defense) Inspirations before going into particularly challenging missions. One type of Inspiration, Awakens, will let you resurrect ("rez") yourself after having been defeated, though they leave you vulnerable for a good amount of time so be sure you're in a safe place before you use them. There are a few other types of Inspiration beyond just the basic, that you will be able to get later on. Don't be afraid to use your Inspirations. You can only get more Inspirations from defeating enemies if you have empty space in your tray for them to drop into. It's tempting to save Inspirations, especially bigger ones, for later on when you think you might need them. However, if you use them as often as possible, you get the benefit of them right away and make room for more to come to you later—or for teammates to pass them to you if they see you need them. If you keep your Inspiration tray full all the time, you're passing up many chances to get more. INVENTION SALVAGE At some point, the game will notify you that you've just received your first piece of invention salvage from a defeated enemy. Invention salvage is used in City of Heroes's crafting system, where you can build Invention Enhancements out of pieces you pick up or buy at auction. For now, you should probably just hold onto it. You can learn more about crafting Inventions by taking the tutorial offered by an NPC at the universities in Steel Canyon or Cap au Diable. REWARD MERITS You will receive your first few reward merits early on, after you complete your first mission story arcs. (I'll discuss those in the next guide, about starting off your adventures in Paragon City.) Reward Merits are a system of tokens that are awarded for certain accomplishments in the game, such as completing story arcs or Task/Strike Forces, or visiting all the exploration badges in a zone. You can use them at Reward Merit Vendors to purchase various items such as Enhancements or Recipes. You will probably want to save these Merits up at first, as most of the things you could buy with them aren't that useful at lower levels. In a couple of my other guides, I do discuss things you can buy with them in more detail, as well as how to use them to make money. You may want to get a little more experience at playing the game before you dive too deeply into those, however. There are other types of Merits in the game (Hero/Villain, Vanguard, Empyrean, etc.) but you won't encounter those until considerably later on. CONCLUSION Hopefully, I haven't confused you too badly. In the next guide, I will offer advice for getting started on your first day in Paragon City or the Rogue Isles.
  24. THE COMPLETE NEWCOMER'S GUIDE TO CITY OF HEROES INTRODUCTION TO THE GAME or JUST WHAT IS THIS "CITY OF HEROES" THING, ANYWAY? City of Heroes can be a little confusing if you're just getting into it. Many of the guides on this forum (including most of my own) are aimed at people who already have some passing familiarity with the game. The wikis (Homecoming and Paragon) are great for looking up specific things, but they don't provide much in the way of an overview. That's why I'm writing these guides. If you're thinking of starting playing—maybe the recent one-year anniversary of Homecoming piqued your curiosity, or maybe a friend who already plays invited you—then this will hopefully give you a good place to start. WHAT IS CITY OF HEROES? City of Heroes is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, or MMORPG. This is an Internet-based game in which multiple players can get together and adventure, playing the roles of superheroes or villains fighting against criminals, villains, heroes, and other adversaries. Characters gain experience by defeating adversaries, or by completing missions that take place on instanced maps (which some might call "dungeons" in the old RPG parlance). As characters gain experience, they can "level up," increasing their ability to take and give damage and gaining additional powers that let them do it in new ways. WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CITY OF HEROES AND CITY OF VILLAINS? AND WHAT'S GOING ROGUE? City of Heroes was the original game in which characters played superheroes. City of Villains was an expansion added later on, in which characters could play villains in a different part of the world. (Although it was marketed as a separate game for a while, it was always just another part of the same game—as demonstrated by the way NCSoft eventually made both games free to anyone who owned one or the other.) Going Rogue was a new expansion added shortly before the original game shut down, in which players could take on the role of characters from the Praetorian "mirror universe" which features in a number of City of Heroes/Villains storylines. For simplicity, I'l refer to all three under the umbrella name City of Heroes in this guide. If you're just getting into City of Heroes, you should probably wait to play a Going Rogue character until you're more familiar with the original game. It was designed as an "advanced" setting offering greater challenges for experienced players. CAN I "WIN" CITY OF HEROES? As an MMORPG, City of Heroes does not have a single finite narrative the way single-player games do, with a defined beginning, progression, and conclusion. Instead, character progression is more open-ended. There are many narrative story arcs characters can take part in as they level up, but there's no "end" for a character to reach—no specific point where you can say you've "won." Players are free to set their own goals, of course; many players consider their character "finished" when they have leveled up all the way and have all their powers unlocked and enhanced for maximum effect, but they can still have plenty of fun playing those "finished" characters even after that. There are also plenty of achievements and badges to collect. DO I HAVE TO TEAM UP WITH OTHER PEOPLE? Like all MMOs, City of Heroes is made to promote teaming up. A good team-up, with characters who complement each others' abilities, can be a lot of fun. However, there are some times you just want to be by yourself. Fortunately, City of Heroes characters are balanced enough that it's possible to play nearly any well-built character solo through at least some content. The best soloing classes will be both tough and capable of dealing good damage: Brutes, Scrappers, Tankers, and Sentinels, for example. "Squishier" damage classes like Blasters, Corrupters, and Stalkers can solo nearly as well if they're careful; support classes like Defenders and Controllers won't do as much damage but can still adventure solo through most content, albeit a bit more slowly. Not all content can be soloed by all classes—archvillains and monsters need a lot of damage to put down. But almost every class can do at least some things by themselves, if the character is built well—that is, if their player chooses the right powers and upgrades them in the right ways. HOW DIFFICULT IS CITY OF HEROES? The game can seem fairly complex at first, and there's a bit of a learning curve. (That's why I'm writing these newcomer's guides, to try to provide a grounding in basic concepts that you can build on as you learn more.) But once you start to pick it up, you'll find it gets significantly easier. Some higher-level content can be especially challenging, but by the time you get there you should be able to play well enough to deal with it. As for how difficult individual missions are for your hero or villain character to complete, that's largely up to you. There is a system of difficulty control built into the game that will let you choose how tough or easy you want your missions to be, and whether you want just a few or a whole lot of enemies to appear in them. If you're having too much trouble, you can lower the difficulty (though you'll get less XP for defeating less difficult enemies). Or if you want more of a challenge (and more XP), you can ramp it up. In the game, this system is called "Notoriety." You'll sometimes also hear it referred to as "Reputation" by veteran players, as that's what it used to be called back in the old live days. DOES CITY OF HEROES HAVE "LOOT"? Veterans of other MMOs may be concerned about "loot"—valuable items that enemies may drop, or that you may have to do specific quests to obtain, that you may lose if your character dies and someone loots their corpse. When City of Heroes originally launched, one of the most appealing elements was the near-complete absence of this factor. And while more loot-like items or powers have been added to the game since, there is still nothing you could lose or have taken from you if you should be defeated, and the very rarest items in the game are still within pretty easy reach of any player who knows how to get them. There is a currency system in City of Heroes, called "Influence" on the hero side, "Infamy" for villains, and "Information" for Praetorians, abbreviated universally as "Inf". This currency actually doesn't have anything to do with financial money; heroes and villains are assumed to be just as rich or poor as they want to be. Instead, it's supposedly tied to how renowned the hero or villain is. It can be earned through adventuring, or by selling things on the in-game market. (It can also be earned by "farming" easily-repeated content, or by converting and reselling certain crafted items, but those are more advanced topics.) In the "live" version of the game, Inf prices of rare items on the in-game market could and often did go through the roof, but Homecoming's economy has price controls that keep everything within a more affordable range. Super-rare items do cost a lot more money than a new player would have, but they can still be obtained with sufficient time and effort put in. There are also a few secondary forms of reward currency, called "Merits," that are earned via completing certain types of content and can be used to buy certain rare items, but that's a more advanced topic to go into later. DOES CITY OF HEROES HAVE GUILDS? Yes! Although the City of Heroes version of them is called "supergroups." These are organizations that characters can join to play alongside friends and players of other like-minded characters. Being part of a supergroup means you can see which other players in the group are online and what they're doing right now. It also means you have access to the supergroup base, which includes amenities like teleporters, item storage, access to trainers or vendors, and so on. Supergroup bases used to have their own in-game currency called "Prestige" that characters would build up by playing, and could be spent to afford better bases. However, in Homecoming, all base items are now free, which means that it's possible to build some very impressive bases. There used to be two separate forms of supergroup—supergroups for heroes, villain groups for villains. However, in Homecoming, both heroic and villainous characters can belong to the same group, with access to the same base. DOES CITY OF HEROES HAVE PVP (PLAYER-VS-PLAYER) COMBAT? Yes and no. The vast majority of content in the game for both heroes and villains is PVE, player-vs-environment, in which human players cooperate or play singly against computer-controlled enemies. However, there are four "PvP Zones," which are areas of the game where players from both sides can enter and clash. Some of them have useful temporary powers offered as rewards to entice players into them. There is also an arena where players can set up PvP matches against other players. (There also used to be a specialized form of PvP called "base raids," where supergroups could raid other supergroups' bases, but that was taken out of the game when supergroup base construction was made free.) There are also several co-op zones, where players from both hero and villain factions can team up to fight common enemies in PvE. No player is ever forced to engage in PvP, apart from being required to enter those PVP zones if you want to obtain those useful temporary powers. In fact, it's pretty rare for much PvP combat to happen at all, outside of the "unofficial PvP server," Indomitable. DOES CITY OF HEROES HOMECOMING COST MONEY TO PLAY? No. The game is made available completely free to all players, and things in the game that used to cost real-world money are now either free or bought with the in-game currency Inf instead. (One of the in-game vendors is called the "P2W Store," a name that often confuses newcomers because "P2W" usually refers to paying real money for in-game advantages, but this is just a little inside joke; the store only deals in Inf.) In fact, anyone charging real money for anything within the game is against the Code of Conduct, and if you see someone making such an offer you should report it to the game masters right away. The Homecoming servers do cost money to host, and there are some other expenses involved, but these are paid for strictly through voluntary donations, and Homecoming is careful never to accept more donations than necessary to meet those costs. A donation window opens on the last Saturday of every month, and closes as soon as enough donations have come in from players—an hour or two at most, and often just a matter of minutes. IS PLAYING CITY OF HEROES LEGAL? If you're really concerned about the legality of something, you should ask a real lawyer, which I am not. I can't give you legal advice. That said, to this layperson it seems highly unlikely you would get in trouble for playing it. There are so many players that it would cost NCSoft a small fortune to sue them all, even if there was an incentive to. It's far likelier that the people operating the Homecoming server itself (and the various other independent server efforts like Rebirth, Thunderspy, etc.) would be the ones to get in trouble—and if they were going to get in trouble over it, they probably would have by now. In fact, Homecoming's administrators have been engaged in talks with NCSoft for several months to establish legitimacy for this new version of the game. Both sides are being very tight-lipped about the progress of the negotiations, but at least they do still seem to be going on. Homecoming passing its one-year anniversary without any significant trouble seems to be a pretty good sign. Whether you want to get started in the game before those negotiations conclude successfully is up to you. The most you're likely to lose if things don't work out is all the time and effort you put into your characters—the same thing the people who played the game originally lost when NCSoft first closed it down. The difference is, you're not also pouring monthly subscription fees into it! WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HOMECOMING, REBIRTH, AND THE OTHER NEW CITY OF HEROES SERVERS? All of these different servers forked the City of Heroes codebase that was originally leaked and took it in different directions. Some of them run servers as close as possible to the version that existed on the day the original ("live") version of the game closed down. Others (including Homecoming) developed new code on top of it, including their own new power sets or character classes. This MassivelyOP article discusses differences between different City of Heroes server projects that existed as of May, 2020. Otherwise, if you want to find out more about the non-Homecoming servers, Google is your friend. HOW DO I GET STARTED PLAYING CITY OF HEROES ON HOMECOMING? Glad you asked! Go to the "Getting Started" section of the Homecoming Forum and follow the instructions on installing the game and creating your accounts. And once you've got the game installed, go to my next guide and I'll walk you through the process of logging in and character creation.
  25. THE COMPLETE NEWCOMER'S GUIDE TO CITY OF HEROES LOGGING IN AND CHARACTER CREATION or WELCOME TO PARAGON CITY, WE HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR STAY! I've become pretty well known around here for writing guides at the drop of a hat. But on looking over these guides lately, I realized that most of them tend to assume a certain level of knowledge from having played City of Heroes some already. Which means that they might not necessarily be all that useful to someone who only just started playing the game, because there's a lot to internalize. We veteran players sometimes forget just how overwhelming it can all be when starting out. So I'm going to use my amazing tech support empathy powers to try to put myself in the shoes of someone who just got City of Heroes installed for the very first time, and is looking at their screen in puzzlement over what to do. This guide will cover the early steps of logging in and creating a character; I plan to write later guides that will cover other aspects of the early stages of the game. WHERE ELSE TO FIND HELP Before I get into the nitty gritty, let me go over a couple of other great resources for new or puzzled players. For starters, a new wiki specifically dedicated to Homecoming only just launched. It is still in the process of being updated to reflect the changes Homecoming makes from the original "live" version, so it may not be entirely accurate just yet, but volunteers are working on it. If there's something you don't understand, just look it up there and see what it says. Homecoming Wiki's content is derived from ParagonWiki. Because it captures how the game was at the time it shut down, ParagonWiki is not completely accurate to the new changes Homecoming has incorporated (most notably, new Archetypes, power sets, and Enhancement sets Homecoming has added; the Incarnate system and other formerly premium or veteran reward items that have been made free; or some badges that have been moved to Echo zones), but it still does a great job covering basic concepts. (In Googling CoH, you may also run across a "City of Heroes Fandom Wiki." This was a predecessor to ParagonWiki and was no longer updated consistently once ParagonWiki launched, so is even less accurate than ParagonWiki. It may also have some still-accurate information, but it will also have a lot of extraneous detail that is no longer correct and was removed in ParagonWiki. In comparison to the other two sources just mentioned, I can't really recommend the Fandom Wiki.) Another great resource is these very forums, on which you're reading this guide right now. There are plenty of other guides you can read (including mine!), though you may need a little more experience under your belt before you can fully understand them. And then there's other players themselves. One of the best things about City of Heroes is that so many of its players are willing and eager to help. You can ask in the /help channel in-game, or go to the Homecoming Discord server and ask questions on #in-game-help or #new-players and plenty of people will be happy to help out. This is also where you can find on-duty GMs (which I'll talk more about later in a future guide). Now, let's move on to what to do after you've first launched the game. GETTING STARTED Assuming you were able to install and launch the game, and get the splash screen, you may be presented with your first major hurdle: you try to log into the game, and it doesn't take your ID and password. This is because the game actually needs its own separate account—it doesn't use the forum account login. If you haven't created one yet, go to the game account creation page and make one. Once you have that, you can go ahead and log into the game with it. Welcome to Paragon City (or the Rogue Isles)! CHOOSING YOUR SERVER Once you've successfully logged in, the first screen you'll see will ask you to select a server. Homecoming has five servers: Excelsior, Everlasting, Indomitable, Torchbearer, Reunion. If you were invited by a friend who already plays on one of those servers, then you already know which server you want to choose. If not, read on. Reunion is hosted on a server in Germany (rEUnion, get it?); the other four are hosted in Canada. If you're in the EU or a compatible time zone, you might be able to find more players awake and active on Reunion at the same time as you are. You probably won't see a difference in play performance regardless of which hosting locale you use; City of Heroes was originally designed to be playable over dial-up Internet, so a high ping won't really matter too much. Torchbearer was the first Homecoming server to come online; it and Excelsior are the two highest-population servers, if you want to be sure of finding a lot of people to play with. Everlasting is the "unofficial RP server" (like Virtue was back in the days of live). Indomitable is the "unofficial PVP server." Don't worry too much that you might pick the "wrong" server. You can transfer up to five characters from one server to another at any given time, and you get your five transfer tokens refreshed every three days. Server transfer is usually instantaneous. So if you decide you want to switch to some other server later on, it's really pretty easy. CHOOSING A SETTING AND ORIGIN After you pick a server, you'll be presented with a screen listing ten empty character slots full of exciting possibility! You can make a new character either by clicking on one of those slots, or by clicking the button with a silhouette and a + sign on it at the top left, right next to "Slots Used: 0/1000". Farther right along the top are buttons to let you move characters to a different server, change a character's name, or delete a character—all grayed out right now because you don't actually have any characters yet. You can't play the game without a character, so go ahead and make one! Note that if you should decide you made a mistake at any point during the character creation process, before you've finalized the character and entered the game, you can always click the "back" arrow to go back and change it. Once you've entered the game, however, all your choices for this character are locked in. After you click the button or slot to start the character creation process, the next screen will present two options for setting at the top, and five options for Origin along the bottom. I'll cover the setting options first. You have two settings in which you can make a character: "City of Heroes: Freedom" is the basic heroes-or-villains game, in which you create a noble hero or an evil villain. "Going Rogue" was a much later expansion, in which you create a character from the Praetorian "Mirror Universe" who gets their start fighting crime (or the dystopian government) in that setting before moving over to Paragon City at level 20. As a new player, you are strongly advised to choose the "City of Heroes: Freedom" option, not the "Going Rogue" option, for two reasons: First, "Going Rogue" assumes you've had a good deal of experience with the game already, and starts out with a lot tougher enemies and missions to handle. Second, the Praetorian setting is strongly steeped in the storylines and mythology of the basic City of Heroes setting, and the story arcs there won't mean as much to you without having encountered Praetorians from the hero/villain side first. Which one you actually do choose is, of course, strictly up to you. Apart from starting in different worlds, the only major difference in character creation is that the hero and villain "epic" Archetypes—Peacebringer, Warshade, Arachnos Soldier, and Arachnos Widow—are available in "Freedom," but not in "Going Rogue." Your character's Origin used to be a lot more important than it is now. In the live version of the game, Origin controlled where you could obtain Enhancements you could use, which stores you needed to unlock, and so on. However, in Homecoming's version of the game, since all types of Origin Enhancement are available at every store, all stores are unlocked, and few people even bother using Origin Enhancements anymore anyway, Origin has very little significance beyond a roleplaying hook. Choose whichever option makes the most sense to your character's backstory and move on. But do remember that you can't change your Origin after you finish character creation; you would have to make a new character to have a different Origin. And there's one more option down at the bottom of the screen, which you can do either now or in subsequent screens: type your character's name, and click the magnifying glass to see if that name is already taken. If it isn't taken yet, the game will reserve it for you. (Remember not to use the name of an existing character from somewhere else like a comic book or movie; that would violate Homecoming's terms of service. and will probably be reset to a generic name when a GM notices it.) Once you're finished here, click the "Next" arrow at the bottom right. CHOOSING A CHARACTER CLASS The next screen will invite you to choose a character class category. Do you want to tank (that is, be the tough, hard-to-damage one who draws fire away from squishier sorts), deal melee damage, deal ranged damage, handle crowd control, provide buff/debuff/heal support, or work with pets? Choosing one of these categories will narrow down the character class choices you get on the next screen. However, you do not have to pick one of these. If you just click "next" without choosing one, you'll see a list of all available character classes. The character classes are pretty self-explanatory, thanks to the description and charts that clicking on one brings up, so I won't cover them in any detail. However, I do want to touch on the epic archetypes—Peacebringer and Warshade on the hero side; Arachnos Widow and Arachnos Soldier on the villain side. These classes were originally gated so that only players who had already gotten a character to level 50 could choose them. Then that was dropped to level 20. Now anyone can make one—but I would strongly advise that they not be your first ever character pick. As with "Going Rogue," these classes assume a certain level of experience playing basic characters. Also, since they were originally meant for people who already knew full well how to play the game, they don't get offered the introductory tutorial at the end of the character creation process—and as a brand new player, you definitely do want the tutorial. (And they are also locked into starting as heroes or villains, respectively—though they can immediately change their alignment by visiting a contact in Pocket D afterward if they want.) Some character classes are more complicated to play than others. If you're just learning the game, you might want to start with one of the sturdier damage-dealing types, like Scrappers, Brutes, Sentinels, or Tankers—or possibly one of the "squishier" damage-dealers like Blasters or Stalkers. These characters are all pretty simple to play, because their powers are aimed mainly at putting enemies flat on the ground while keeping yourself relatively safe. They are also good for playing by yourself, since they don't have powers that rely on having teammates. I recommend soloing at least your first few missions, so you can take your time and learn how the game works without worrying you might be slowing someone else down. Support and control classes like Defenders, Corruptors, Controllers, Dominators, and Masterminds can be a little more complex, with more complicated powers, and you might want to be sure you have a good handle on how the rest of the game works before you try out one of them. Of course, which class you do choose is entirely up to you, in the end; if you prefer more esoteric playstyles than just hitting or shooting things, you might prefer a support and control class even with that complexity. But again, I'd suggest you make that your second character, after you've gotten the hang of City of Heroes itself from playing a simpler one. Once you've made your selection, click "Next" again. CHOOSING YOUR POWERS Now you come to a screen where you can choose your character's primary power set and your first power from it. For the primary set, you can choose to start with either the first or the second power from the list. You can add more powers as you level up. Clicking on a power set will let you mouse over the power names at right and see how they're described. After you make your selection, click "Next" and you'll get to pick your secondary power set. This screen works just the same way as the primary, but you will automatically start with the first power from this set, whatever it is. Note that once you've finished creating your character, you cannot change your primary or secondary power set if you respec (that is, respecify your power choices, which you'll be given chances to do later in the game)—those sets are locked in. A character respec can only change which powers you take, in what order, how you slot them up, and what power pools or epic pool you choose later on. But don't agonize too much over your choices—remember, you've got a thousand character slots available, so if this one doesn't work out, you can always just make another. THE COSTUME DESIGNER Once you've chosen your powers, you're introduced to the costume designer. I won't cover this in detail, because it's pretty self-explanatory—it's easy to see what things do just by clicking on them. First you choose your character's body type: male, female, or "huge" (male). (There's no huge female type, alas.) You can adjust sliders or use one of the presets to adjust your character's body shape. Then clicking "next" takes you into the costume designer itself, where you can play paper dolls with your character to your heart's content. It's not at all unusual to spend hours fiddling with the costume designer before you ever start playing the game. When the game was first launched, City of Heroes's costume designer was renowned for the amazing number of possibilities it offered, and it's still pretty darned impressive even now—especially since all the costume options that used to be locked or limited to the paid expansions are now unlocked and freely available. And after you design your costume and auras, you get to customize how your powers look. A few key points: first, no matter how tempting it is, don't make an exact carbon-copy of some existing superhero you're fond of. That would violate the game's terms of service. When a gamemaster sees it (or some player sees it and reports it to the gamemasters), it will probably be reset to a generic outfit. Second, you can save your costume and power customization choices at any time to files in your game installation directory, which can then be loaded into other characters or extra costume slots. Your character will start out with a number of costume slots unlocked, and costume changes are free until your character reaches level 10. So if you want to go ahead and design several different outfits for your character, you can talk to a trainer and load those files into your spare slots as soon as you enter the game. FILLING OUT YOUR CHARACTER CARD After you've finished designing your character's costume and powers (and how long did it take you?), clicking "Next" brings you to a screen where you enter some information about your character. There are two fields you can fill out: your character's battle cry, and the description. Don't worry about making a mistake here; you can always come back and change these at any time from within the game. The battle cry is some inspiring or evocative catchphrase your character is prone to shout out at odd moments, like "It's clobberin' time!" or "Spooooon!" from the comic books. You'll be able to hit the F10 key any time you feel like it to shout that phrase out in chat. The description is your character's backstory and biography, which other players will be able to view when they meet your character in-game. Alas, you only get 1023 characters in which to cover your character's life history, but that doesn't mean you can't make a go of it anyway. (This field is, of course, completely optional; the vast majority of characters you'll run into in the game don't have anything written here. However, it's a great chance for people who enjoy roleplaying to give a sketch of what their character is like and otherwise show off their creativity.) The text editor for the description field is kind of limited, and trying to go back and change or add to early parts of a long description can make it act oddly. I would recommend writing up your bio in text via Notepad or some other text editor, then copying and pasting it into the description field when you're done. CHOOSING A TUTORIAL After you're finished with this card, clicking "next" brings up a question box, asking if you would like to play the tutorial. As a new, first-time player, I highly recommend you click "Yes". If you do, you will be given a choice of three tutorials: "Outbreak" is the game's original tutorial for beginning heroes, and selecting it will set your character's alignment to "Hero." "Breakout" is the original tutorial for beginning villains, and will set your character to "Villain." "Galaxy City" is a new beginning tutorial implemented late in the game, which will ask your character to make the moral choice to become a hero or villain along the way. If you selected "no," the game will then ask if your character is a hero or villain. (If you chose one of the epic archetypes, then clicking "next" will just skip right to the "are you ready to complete the character creation process" question.) I would personally recommend selecting the Outbreak or Breakout tutorial for your first character, because those tutorials provide a better introduction to and grounding in the way the game works in general. You can try the "Galaxy City" tutorial with another character, if you want. But definitely pick one of them, regardless, because as a new player they will be very helpful in explaining the basic mechanics of the game. After you answer these questions, the game will ask if you want to complete the character creation process and enter the game. If you say "no," it will put you back on the character card screen, and you can click the "back" arrow to go back and revisit earlier choices. If you say "yes," then away into the tutorial you go. See you in Paragon City or the Rogue Isles! CONCLUSION I hope this guide has helped you get through the process of creating and designing your first City of Heroes or Villains character. Let's move on to some basic terminology and concepts before we kick off your first day in the big City.
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