Sif

It was at this point reading through the thread that I remembered I was afk-farming. The only change I made for Page5 was switching to a new arc ID. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I spend >95% of my time on Homecoming farming, so I'm definitely a "farmer", and I enjoy it. I enjoy farming (afk and not), I like being able to zone out, I like being able to trivially multitask, I like being able to just walk away and not even think about pausing. The in-game rewards, I can't really say are a motivator for me (except the ding sound, it's somehow so satisfying). They're so much that I've gotten progressively lazier, like only listing items on the AH for 1 inf (ones that I don't just vendor because lazy). After reading this thread, I'm not sure if there has been any changes to farmers that aren't focused on maximizing rewards. For the ones that are, what is the impact? I might've missed it in this thread, but I've not seen numbers to get an idea of the impact to in-game rewards.

I've also been gone, and I believe the answer is not much, depending on exactly when you were last paying attention. With that said, Issue 27 (Page 1) just went up on the beta servers a few days ago, and it's pretty damn big.

I think you misunderstood what I said. To quote your guide: "Stalkers used to be good in PvP and bad on allmost everything else." Today, Stalkers are all around great, but, like you said, not so much in the past when it came to teaming. I'm not suggesting this because I think it will necessarily make them better either (if Stalkers were any better, they'd probably get nerfed), more so because it will give a bit more mechanical variety in Stalker primaries, which I find a bit lacking. I also wasn't intending to suggest existing sets should necessarily be changed (I meant to have that in the original post, but looks like I lost that bit while drafting it, my apologies for the confusion there), although programmatically Stalker Claws could have both Build Up and Follow Up, and only allow a character to take one of the two, but I more so had it in mind as a consideration for any new powersets. Without the BU ATO, Build Up doesn't do a ton for DPS without extreme +recharge (due to the uptime), and a power like Follow Up is significantly better over time. As a point of comparison, Claw's BU (which recharges faster than other BUs), with 100% recharge, is equivalent to about twice the +damage as a Stalker's Assault. Build Up is still superior if you're wanting a burst of damage (hence why Follow Up & co were converted, because the devs originally targeted Stalkers towards burst at the expense of DPS). With the BU ATO, Build Up certainly has a massively improved up time, but a hypothetical Stalker Follow Up could be made to receive a benefit from the BU ATO to help deliver a similar level of performance. I'm not interested in any additional performance out of Stalkers (I think we can both agree Stalkers aren't in need of a buff).

In the days of yore, the days of the lolstalker that was arguably only useful on a team for porting everyone to the boss or as Vengeance-bait, when porting powersets to Stalkers each one had Confront -> Placate, an attack -> AS, and the +damage power -> Build Up (if it wasn't already). With modern day Stalkers, I'm wondering... do they really need the +damage power converted to Build Up? The BU -> AS -> Placate -> Run playstyle that Stalkers seemed to originally be designed for is fully dead, and Stalkers will scrap with the best of them. Ignoring the BU-recharge ATO for a moment, I wouldn't be surprised if, say, a Claws Stalker with Follow Up instead of Build Up would be at least competitive. What do people think? Is this reasonable? Any way to deal with the BU-recharge proc (maybe instead it'll change Follow Up/etc to do double +damage?)?

Plot twist: OP never took damage because they'd already ghosted to the boss/glowie and were waiting for the team to show up 😄 While Stalkers used to be total crap (despite how much I wanted to enjoy them), they're a joy to play these days, and like their Scrapper brethren can occasionally survive against all odds.

Is that for every possible destination, or just what the old LRTP could do? Remember you don't need everything to get the accolade, so you'd only need the zones that LRTP provides to get equivalent functionality.

Looks like most of the images aren't working, I'm only seeing the Results without the IO in Claws image.

I had to try this... the results are quite interesting. It's a bit awkward, but the brief period of time where the power begins recharging before realizing it has more charges makes vertical travel painful. Now this works well with a button on my mouse, to just ping around. I don't think I'd replace using shift clicking with it, though, as it's not really precise enough for my tastes (although maybe paired with a TP-to-target bind it'd work better)

Redundancy is a form of error correction. But we're getting off topic here: we should be discussing how i27p1 100% sucks because regen hasn't been nerfed. Devs, pls nerf. kthxbai.

FYI, this wouldn't be an issue, as the hit rolls are calculated at the beginning of the casting*. If someone teleports them away, then you start casting, that'd obviously be an issue, and a possibility, but seems like a weird scenario. I don't imagine this being much of an issue in practice, certainly less than a drunk energy / stormy user, flinging knockbacks every which way (doubly so since it wouldn't result in any scatter). Any team with even the slightest coordination (even less than the typical PuG I'm on) should see Fold Space as a net win. * Ones that spawn a pseudo pet after a delay which then deals the damage would determine the targets after the delay, and would be impacted negatively. I can't recall if any nukes actually do this off the top of my head. On the other hand, to use it well all you really need to do is wait for the enemies to be rather scattered, get next to whoever would be holding aggro, and cast it. If the enemies are scattered about, it'll clump them up, making melee's life easier, as well as anyone wanting to fling AoEs. I don't really expect a ton of people to be taking Fold Space (more than LRTP, but that's a very low bar), much less to be spamming it every time it's up as if it's part of their attack rotation. Seeing as it doesn't scatter, I'd expect it to be much easier to use productively than Wormhole (a well-placed Wormhole would be superior to a FS, though, as it also does mez).

I have a Grav/Emp Controller named Sonnet. I then forgot about them (at ~29), and then decided I wanted to make a Grav Controller, decided to go with Emp as the secondary, and Pink Sonata was born. I only realized when she was ~30, and decided I liked the second incarnation more. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I have intentionally done the same build multiple times, and the same powerset combo but on a different AT (e.g. Scrapper and Stalker), but I think that was the only time I've remade the exact character, including much of the concept, months apart.

I have seen that issue in a few dom builds, which is a bit unfortunate. In general, while some ATOs are amazing (e.g. Stalkers), others are a bit more... meh. From a mechanics point of view, could always do another Dominator ATO set, with a new name ATO type name, that slots into different powers (e.g. attacks) that provide different benefits. Not sure if that's the best way forward, though (would have to do a round for all the other ATs as well).

So, you want to play some City of Heroes. But, you have a dozen+ or way more characters, and you can't decide which. Do other people ever find themselves in this situation? Found any good strategies for dealing with it?

I've been back for less than a day and now I want to respec all my characters back in to Teleportation and roll several Energy Melee characters...

Regen must be continually re-nerfed, otherwise it will regen and become OP again.

The devs really should have continued with how the leveling system worked up to then, and restricted "traditional" level 50 content to Alpha, with each level of incarnate content allowing the tier that came out with it (and earlier) + the next one, rather than screwing up the balance of the old lvl 50 content. This would make it more practical to keep content balanced, allow you to feel more powerful in the content as you've gone up. Restricting 2 of the level shifts wasn't enough. Probably far too late to even consider such a change now.

You can already build a character with 2 primary, 1 secondary, 20 pool powers, and 1 epic. I'm sure it'll be totally unfrustrating to play that when the powers are from 4 pools, but unplayable if spread over 5+ pools. /s Personally I don't really care much one way or the other about this suggestion, I'm just curious by the curt negative responses this immediately generated (and generated the previous time I've seen it suggested). The reasoning I've seen has seemed rather... weak, considering the reaction. Standard Code Rant violations and appeals to tradition, primarily.

Most likely you are entering the wrong credentials. If you'd be willing to calm down and provide more info, someone might be able to help you solve your problem. But if you just want to give up without trying, that's your call.

The code is available, fyi. I wasn't speaking hypotheticals. I'm not claiming it's easy (because I've not tried to make the change), but the assertions of why it'd be hard sound pretty bogus and, themselves, would fall into the Standard Code Rant territory.

So the argument is it won't benefit min/maxed end-game builds (where the game is already too easy), so it shouldn't be done? Not everyone is as dead-set on a specific combo of pools as you suggest. The beauty of this game has been the acceptance of concept over microoptimization, allowing a much wider range of possible viable builds than is common in other games.

Remember the history of City of Heroes: Archetypes weren't originally a thing. The game was originally going to be freeform, but found lots of people would end up in highly gimped builds. So, they changed to the Archetype system. Just because you can't prevent all poor choices doesn't mean you can't limit them (if only via removing the choice). The DB certainly doesn't care, from the PoV of the DB you've just got a list of powers associated with your character with various attributes (including the powerset name and power category). A character could have an arbitrary combination of powers, including every single Blaster primary power (SexyJay back on live, as an example). "Pool Powers" isn't some fundamental aspect of the game. In fact, from the PoV of the DB, your list of powers can look quite different than what you might assume. For a tame example, Dual Pistols doesn't have 9 powers, but 12! Another one: all your temp powers are just more powers. Additionally, there could actually be an archvillain with a power that grants anyone hit with it, say, Aid Self permanently from the medicine pool via one of its own powers (powers that grant powers are actually pretty common, it's just they typically grant ones that aren't persistent and expire after a short bit, and hidden from your Powers window). You don't know that, you're just making assumptions based upon... something else being said to be hard. It might be hard, but it might also be a single line of code change (because, quite frankly, nothing in the server/engine probably cares about the 4 power pool limit except the selection screen). I think there should be less jrangering based upon purely speculated difficulties of a suggestion.

I'm curious for arguments on both side of this, why it should/shouldn't change (beyond "dev time" and "because that's the way its been"). I've always been under the impression that the reason that the limit was put into place was to help prevent newbs from unintentionally gimping themselves by ignoring their primary & secondary. From spending a bunch of time going through the game's power info, I kind of doubt that the engine actually cares about that sort of thing. Powers are a lot more flexible than most people realize.

Pinned at the top is Mids' Reborn, which is the latest incarnation:

User Experience Clear Mind isn't a huge portion of Emp (or support sets), it's one power out of 9. The issue with Clear Mind, that a power like Fortitude doesn't have, is that there's bad feedback on when to recast, to be able to maintain it. It's fairly easy to maintain Fortitude on 4 (+- based upon recharge) people, since you just recast whenever it's recharged, and you can glance at the icon to know how long until you can recast it (previously but guestimating based upon the size, now with an actual countdown). On the other hand, a power like Mystic Fortune has a very long duration (20 minutes) which means even with a few minute gap, you're still maintaining very high up times. Clear Mind suffers due to having a short recharge, but moderate duration, without good way to keep track of your buffs on others. I think something like HeroStats buff tracker should be integrated into CoH proper, like has already been done for recharge timers. That would go a long way to resolving the UX issue.

It's not a chore, it's shit UX.