AlwaysAPrice

Anniversary, Architect creation (as in publishing and testing badges, not the ones for completing objectives in published arcs), and Bug Hunter should be account-wide, those are more for player actions, not things a character does in the course of being played in the game. Just about everything else that grants a badge represents a waypoint in a character's individual journey, places they've physically been, deeds they've personally accomplished, ordeals they've survived. Your badge collection is supposed to be different from character to character. If you want a character to collect 'em all, they have to go out and do that.

Pretty sure it's just the first 100 groups created and still in existence. I have basecode -20 on Everlasting and it's on there, and the handful of entries that have their code in their description are almost all 2 digits. 1 is in the 130s, which seems low enough that it might have just been bumped up to the top 100 as older groups have been deleted over time.

In your Homecoming install directory under /accounts/<loginname>, there's a file called playerslot.txt that tracks your sorting. Delete or rename that file and the game'll go back to ordering your characters by creation date.

Love the profile art feature, especially that art pins and worn titles are two separate features so I can, for example, equip 'The Beast Within' under my name without also plastering a Fifth Column logo on my bio. Tested with long character names & origin/archetype combos vs. wide art and narrow window size and it all looked great/layered readably (names reduce in font size when the window's narrowed enough to compress them and edge a little too upward when they do, but I had to name a character wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww to make it do that and figure that's behavior unrelated to this update anyway). Patch notes might want to mention that the art does not update automatically if you have your bio open when you change it, you need to reopen Personal Info to confirm the change for yourself. Sometime in the future it'd be nice to see the origin promotional art added to a set of badges so they can be pinned for aesthetic/roleplay reasons regardless of build origin - or maybe just made individually settable via /info_pin_badge?

I do wish events would go back to the two-week period they generally ran for on live. Yes, the full month makes it more likely everyone gets a crack at the goodies while the event is on, and I usually enjoy the easing off of pressure so I can keep doing other things I like in the game without feeling like I'm missing my one chance at the event, but every year it seems like after the first two weeks burn-out sets in for most and the numbers of people around PuG-ing the event in the later weeks dwindles anyway, so good luck if you're interested in banners or invasions or Winter Lord or what-have-you in the back half of month. While I've never actually bothered trying to compete with it in my groups to say for sure, it's also always struck me that month long events probably aren't great for RPSGs? Everyone being unavailable for group events for a couple weeks while they capitalize on a rare event with special rewards seems understandable and a good duration to plan a break from SG stuff around, but a whole month of it has always just seemed disheartening/disruptive to me. But then again I've just spun up a spooky-themed VG so I'm poised to capitalize on the entire month next year, so whichever way future events shake out I'm good.

Just putting in a request that old Power Surge get the mutually-exclusive treatment with its new version. Was enjoying a casual climb up on a recharge-heavy almost-only-Power-Surge scrapper build for funsies.

May have already been mentioned but I'll just point out that Tanks, Brutes, and Sentinels (also Blasters, MMs, and VEATs from my quick check through Mids, but those don't sound on the table) get access to a power called Static Discharge in the Mu Mastery patron pool, which is an electricity cone with a pretty nice range and width that deals respectable damage. I think outside of epics it's only available to /elec Dominators. I use it for Palpatine fingers on a Sith-inspired character but if you don't mind the animation not quite fitting (I'd say it's close enough when you're viewing your character from behind) it could make for a very nice lightning breath.

This is an option already actually, for epic pool Energy Torrent at least, I'd guess for Energy Blast as well but haven't looked. Would certainly like to see it available on more cones though.

Imagine OP's made their decision by now, but: I'd say go for the stalker even if you're already doing one just because DB's combo system sets its play apart enough from most other sets that it shouldn't feel like too much of a retread, and the stalker version of Dual Blades is very fun and pairs especially well with the Stalker ATOs. On a scrapper I will usually end up skipping combos altogether for a tight, Clawsy attack chain, but the stalker's combos fit into its playstyle a lot more naturally and feel like they contribute to your effectiveness instead of distracting from it. IIRC Stalker Empower & Sweep both begin with Build Up > Assassin's Blades, so proccing Assassin's Mark can refresh the cycle on those.

Ice/Street was my first Tank to 50 and is still a favorite. Became my first fire farmer by accident: I loaded up on Winter IOs for their procs purely on "ice character" principle before I noticed how much Fire Def/Res they added, and also found Spinning Strike with Force Feedback is hilarious. (also for a long time the Blistering Cold Hold could proc off Gauntlet so sometimes I would Crushing Uppercut someone so hard the guy next to him froze solid.) I've also got a Street/Dark Stalker that I like but haven't finished, rolled just cos I wanted to see how Spinning Strike paired with Cloak of Fear and AS's occasional extra AoE fears (probably will go Control Hybrid for even more when I get back to that one). So far the /SR Brute I've got hasn't thrilled me versus the SR/SS Tank version of the same character and mostly just exists at this point to maintain a side base, and I've binned a couple Street Justice scrappers that didn't hold me but not due to any complaint over that version of the set, more those characters just happened to not be keepers or got switched to a different combo. Stalker version is my least favorite but only because it doesn't get Rib Cracker, possibly the most satisfying attack in the game.

Beam/invuln did it for me. Two sets I'm not particularly thrilled with on any other AT but the sentinel version of Invuln is great and Beam seemed to synergize well with the AT's gimmick. Quickly became a favorite build overall, not just favorite sentinel, and is a fun & functional ride all the way up.

Usually T3 Alpha, T1-2 Judgement and Interface, T3 Lore & Destiny, then T3 Hybrid. Determined more by the order they unlock in than their comparative utility, really. For characters I'm going to full T4s on, priority after that is usually Lore, Alpha, Hybrid, Destiny, Interface, Judgement, but it can vary when a power's super on-theme for either the concept or build.

Not every time, but I frequently nope out of Levantera's bombs around the PTS mission. I couldn't even articulate what I find so tedious about that one but my reaction is always "ugh this shit again" when I get to it.

Honestly, as a lover of Group Fly, I'd totally welcome this change even if it wouldn't be my ideal approach. The current implementation produces a lot of sometimes quite valid whining that I'm always worried will lead to changes to a power I like just fine the way it is. If it was off by default no new characters would ever have to experience that jarring moment of loss of agency that leads to said kvetching in the first place and these threads would quickly dry up. People who aren't frustrated by the mechanic could go turn it on to continue experiencing it in the wild, and people who would be bothered by it would just never realize it's there in the first place.

It's not that they couldn't make it a proper option, it was just the quickly deployable implementation they had the resources to complete at the time so players could immediately benefit from the additional options they'd figured out how to provide, according to some of the historical notes on the wiki. It still works just fine for its original purpose so sorting that probably remains a pretty low priority feature awaiting the interest of someone patient enough to deal with that particular area of the code. Do think it would be nice if HC made the current implementation less Easter Eggy, dropped a copy of Null somewhere close to the trainers in Atlas & Mercy (or gave its menu to the Field Analysts/Fateweavers to give them something to do), and maybe added a pop-up to the new character process pointing out where it is and what it does, maybe with contact text on the Group Fly/Speed Boost options explaining for new players who haven't encountered those powers yet why the option is provided. (leaving out alignment change on the non co-op zone versions of course or limiting it to just the half-step from that side).

It rarely needs to be, but I think the main purpose of planning a build is to seek consistency in that build's performance. If the recharges of the powers in whatever ideal attack chains I've figured out only line up sustainably while Hasten is toggled in the planner, then to be able to perform that efficiently as regularly as possible I want to be hastened as close to constantly as possible. There's also goals like perma-Dom where I think you don't always quite need perma-Hasten to keep it up but it sure helps, by giving you a larger window between recharge and expiration to refresh Domination in, as more precarious timing on that is easily thrown off by long power animations or recharge debuffing enemies.

This just got me curious so I jumped on a character of mine that I know gets a lot out of Force Feedback but doesn't have the extreme recharge slotting needed for perma-Hasten without it. She's an Ice/SJ tank with 65% global recharge and the Force Feedback proc in Spinning Strike. She's normally pretty close to perma-Hasten because she uses Spiritual, which gives Hasten itself recharge past the ED cap, but I unslotted the Alpha for this test. Without the Alpha, Hasten's recharge upon activation (2 50+5 IOs and 135% global recharge active) was 136 seconds. Jumped in a farm map for a target-rich environment for Spinning Strike and, activating Hasten just before I put Strike on auto, Hasten ended up recharging in a bit under 118 seconds. Before I remembered to unslot the Alpha I tested it against one of the dummies outside the RWZ base, and with just the single target so much less frequent FF procs, I only shaved off about 4 seconds. So if you have the circumstances for a high uptime on Force Feedback, through AoEs and/or longer-recharge powers (I get a lot out of putting it in epic Energy Torrent on other characters), a single one can potentially make up for a 40% shortfall in global recharge, but if it's only going to be in effect a couple times a minute it has much, much less of an impact.

If you have an immediate need to verify who's who on your roster, you can use /getglobalname followed by a character name to check one at a time.

If editing existing macros is the main circumstance you encounter this in, there's a behavior in the bio editor (AE too, I think) that might be related: whenever you enter two consecutive spaces, or while editing allow two existing spaces to touch, one of those spaces will automatically be made non-breaking, recorded as an &nbsp; while looking like just another space. For example, if I want to edit the sentence "I want to edit the sentence" to say "a" sentence instead, if I place the cursor right at the end of "the" and backspace, it will eventually say "edit sentence" with two spaces for an instant before I hit 'a'. In that instant, it's become "edit&nbsp; sentence", and will remain "edit&nbsp;a sentence" after I enter the new word. And if I typed multiple words, each time I hit space from that position with a space following, the same thing would happen, leading to invisible character-count-devouring chains like "edit&nbsp;some&nbsp;other sentence". If this is what's happening, it can be avoided by always starting any edits with the cursor at the start of the next word you intend to keep, and might be fixable by just backspacing the affected space so the words on either side touch then re-entering a single space.

Paragon City University, usually shorthanded PCU by NPCs, but it's also sometimes called just Paragon University so Paragon U is probably another common shortening.

I usually buy fresh enhancements for everything, but I've had a couple cases where I did bother to strip things from an old build. When my kat/fire brute reached the end of her empyrean generating lifespan I pulled out most of her gear because I planned to just start the build over, but never got around to playing the new one up, and recently I saved the ATOs and other bits from a sonic/rad corr in the 30s I deleted because the character had never really clicked for me while a more recent ice/rad had. The corr ATOs I ended up turning into scrapper sets for my latest project with converters, since I'd already kitted out the ice/rad before I realized I was never going to bother with the other and decided to scrap it, and the brute gear got claimed piece by piece over years by other characters who either needed them or that I wanted some quick cash on without alting around to e-mail funds, so when I've done this I've never actually ended up using the stripped pieces for the reason I bothered to strip them for. Generally speaking I don't find it to be worth the time and fiddliness of the process of unslotting and transferring enhancements, let alone losing a combo from my roster of options to play with. My normal play and intermittent marketeering keeps my account hovering comfortably around the 3 billion inf while every new full build that holds my interest runs me about 600 million at buy-it-now pricing, and each tends to make most of that back from drops during their incarnate grind.

It's the trade-off for the freedom of movement it provides versus faster modes of movement that have to contend more with the environment. Fly can pretty much always get from A to B in a straight line, everything else has to navigate. Though the new implementation of Afterburner offsets that considerably.

Nature doesn't have the level of debuff of a dark or rad but it's got enough to make a difference, along with healing and +Res to keep you up through the fight, and fire's high damage helps get AVs down to Scourge range pretty fast for a solo player. Early to mid-game AVs are generally not as threatening as the ones faced in say 45 and up content, as they're intended to be dangerous but winnable fights for a team of appropriate level with SOs at best, but they're still hard-hitting giant sacks of HP most non-melee builds can't autopilot through. I haven't tested my own /nature corr against AVs yet but given my experience soloing /Dark: the -ToHit & -Dam from Spore Cloud and -Dam from Enzymes is probably enough to bring the threat of any even-con AV down into that feels-like-an-EB range, then the -Regen and -Res from the same two powers along with Overgrowth's damage boost would help accelerate the melting. I'd say it isn't an over-reaction at all to be impressed if you haven't handled an AV that smoothly with a support build before, but it's also not a surprising outcome for fans of solo corruption, especially if you were exemplared or even just well built out for your level.

If it's very fun to play, I'm probably riding it to T4 in all slots and onward to the Genuine badge, at which point XP usually gets turned off because I'm very mature, though a handful of characters have gotten to keep going if the gag didn't suit their tone or I really wanted the rest of the vet badges on them. If it's good but not thrilling, I'm probably moving on after getting the Incarnate shifts out of the way, and if it's just so-so I probably get weary of it after only a couple vet levels and move on to the next concept that catches my fancy. Accolades and badges are usually super not a concern of mine but the keepers usually end up with a couple of the passives and I'll probably go out of my way for badges that are super appropriate for a character to wear if I notice they exist.

The Devouring Earth showed up after the Rikti War, and there's reference in an arc, The Terra Conspiracy, to a raid on the Paragon Technical Institute when Hamidon was still human made by a character described as a young woman at the time of the arc (which would be 2004-ish since I think it's one that's been in the game from the start) who says she knew him before he was transformed, which suggests to me the transformation is relatively recent. I'm not sure if the Paragon Tech raid is addressed further in any in-game sources (gave up quick on digging through arcs contact by contact on pwiki), but in the story bible PDF that's out there there is some more detail that could help in figuring this out, though nothing in that is canon that wasn't actually used somewhere. In there, that event occurs after the war (the PTI was chosen because other facilities around the world with the equipment he needed to create the Will of the Earth were destroyed by the Rikti) and it mentions that his academic standing with Oxford, where he completed a Ph.D., had "long expired after a decade of working with the radical environmentalist fringe". He's described as a prodigy but there isn't any specific mention that he got an unusually early start on his education, so could have finished at Oxford anywhere in his mid-20s to early 30s, then at least 10 years after that is the Paragon Tech raid where he exposed himself to the Will of the Earth and began his transformation, which was probably in 2003 (between the end of the war and the start of the game). Though he could still be a fair bit older than 35-40 in 2003 if more time transpired between the end of his schooling and that revocation of his credentials, I doubt Primal and Praetorian Hamidon can be hashed out to be the same age. More likely that either the same person was just born at different times on the two Earths, or maybe Praetoria's Hamidon Pasilima Sr. was the mad scientist of the family.