Doctor Brainbottle

I have fond memories of jumping into zone events from back in the old days. They were crazy, wild, and fun, in any zone at any level. The first time I heard a zone event was happening in Homecoming, I rushed over to the zone with my low-to-mid level character and.... it was a total dud. It sucked. Mobs weren't spawning, and the ONLY reactions I heard from other people was annoyance and disappointment. I've gone up level since, and I STILL haven't participated in any random zone events that didn't suck. If this is the mechanical cause of the problem, no amount of quibbling over the technical details can convince me it was an "improvement". Zone events used to not suck. I would like them to go back to not sucking, please.

Getting the assault bot will make the slog more bearable, but the REAL turning point is a few levels later, when you get the final upgrade for your robots, and particularly the insane AOE missiles for your assault bot. I can't tell you how satisfying it was when I got that upgrade, and once again heard the sound of my assault bot launching volley after volley of missiles into a crowded pack of helpless, doomed mobs. THAT was what I was missing.

minor correction: as long as you keep your minions in defensive mode, you can issue any imperative command EXCEPT ATTACK and you will get the bodyguard effect.

the auction house lets you buy the attuned version of any set IO at the same price as a normal version. Some of the "merely uncommon" IO sets with lackluster set bonuses can be snapped up for bargain basement prices. An attuned IO from even one of these unpopular sets scales up to be as good or better than a generic level 25 invention IO, and you can often slot them below level 22 as well. This is before you even account for set bonuses, which might not be the BEST set bonuses if the set was cheap but it's a little more icing on the cake compared to generic invention IOs.

Six slotting brawl is not actually that crazy an idea for a brute. It is a fast swinging, fast recharging, endurance-conserving attack power, which means it's great for building fury. Putting brawl on auto-fire is almost manditory for leveling a brute. It's second only to AOE attacks as a place to put special proc IOs, because it swings so fast and so often.

There is a configuration slider for increasing the overall scale of user interface elements, which helps, though it comes at the price of buttons and so forth also being larger. I wouldn't mind more specific control.

She's an agent of Longbow, and you're a Villain working your way up the ranks of Arachnos. I wouldn't mind an option to betray Harris BEFORE fighting Page, and make the point sooner and more clearly that fighting her is just Arachnos business and nothing personal, but the fight was going to happen in any case.

When does Harris ACTUALLY get an "emotional redemption"? Every time I play through this arc, I choose to laugh in Harris's face and murder the guy. That clearly isn't emotional redemption. I've never actually chosen the other option, but I always understood it as obvious in the context of the mission that it might as well have been labeled "Kick An Adorable Puppy": you get this option because you're playing a VILLAIN. The point is not to redeem Harris, far from it: the point is to give your character a MORE evil option than laughing in his face and killing him like a chump.

the writing should not refer to Lt. Harris as a "girlfriend". That is a valid objection. But as for the "fridged girlfriend" trope, I don't agree this fits at all, starting with the simple fact that Harris isn't a hero. He didn't "innocently" open a refrigerator to be utterly shocked to discover his girlfriend in it. We the audience are not supposed to feel a single drop of sympathy for him, or outrage on his behalf. Our CHARACTER has the option to assure Harris that he did the right thing, but that is merely to re-assert that our characters are puppy-kicking villains. Finally, Harris doesn't undergo redemption or character growth: you either avert it by smoothly reassuring him that he did exactly the right thing in your loathsomely diabolical opinion as a villain, or you laugh in his face about what a chump he is and promptly dispose of the idiot. TV Tropes calls the latter option the "Heel-Face Door Slam": https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HeelFaceDoorSlam If there was a second part of this quest arc where a heroic Longbow agent hunts you down to exact revenge on you for what you did to Lt. Page, THAT would be a lot closer to the "fridged girlfriend" trope. But even this would be an inversion of the standard trope, by having so much of the story focusing on HOW the girlfriend ended up in the fridge, while the part where the hero discovers the body and vows revenge is glossed over as a relatively unimportant background detail.

Definitely stop buying SOs. Scan the auction house for cheap attuned IOs that will scale up to 50, mostly ignoring the fact that they're "sets" and picking them for their basic enhancement values: three damage/accuracy ios from three different sets won't complete any set bonuses, but they were GOOD set bonuses the IOs wouldn't be this cheap, and they will give you more damage AND accuracy in 3 slots than SOs, without becoming obsolete in a few short levels.

Okay, how about this for a middle ground: you can skip one mission a day and get the rewards, exactly like it is now. Then, if you want to skip MORE missions in one day, you get a slightly different dialog option for "skip mission and rewards" instead of nothing. In either case, the skipped mission should get automatically recorded.

I like the basic idea, but maybe make it a temp power that uses charges. Make the charges inexpensive so even newbies can afford it, but have a very limited number of max charges so even inf billionaires have to use it judiciously, if they want to avoid the inconvenience of constantly going back to the Pay2Win vendor to refill it.

how about unlimited skips, but you also skip the xp and merits. Also, skipping a mission should automatically double as reporting the mission as problematic, and get recorded in a database table keyed by whatever internal mission name or number the devs would need to investigate the problem. Then if the devs have some spare time they can fix the top N most frequently skipped missions.

Back in the day, masterminds could not summon minions while hovering: they had to land on the ground, summon the minions, and then re-activate hover. This was annoying and unpopular, and the devs eventually fixed it: masterminds can now summon minions while hovering. However, there are a number of other powers, mostly involving summoning something, that still work the old way. This includes summoning vanity pets, summoning the Ouroboros portal, summoning a portable invention workstation, and probably several others. I'm hardly an expert on how the code works internally, but from what I've heard the usual "biggest technical issue" with getting powers to work while hovering is that there needs a separate, distinct animation for every action that can be performed while hovering. But there is now an animation for summoning while hovering, so please proliferate it to all summoning powers. On a related note: please also allow me to summon pets that can fly in mid-air. For that matter, let me summon ANY pet in mid-air, if only to amuse myself by watching it fall. And would it break the game if I was allowed to summon the portable workbench or the Ouroboros portal in mid-air? Honestly, even if I was allowed to "exploit" summon foe to inflict some pitiful amount of fall damage on one foe every few seconds by summoning it in mid-air, I doubt a fire/kin farmer would be impressed.

someone else suggested Jodhpurs, and so along similar lines, I'd love a pith helmet. Preferably Wolseley style.

huh, just noticed "placable in supergroup bases" is in the original list. I'm not sure why it needs to be anywhere else. Anyone can create a supergroup base of any size, you no longer have to grind prestige for it.

I like this idea, but instead of "a variety of places", how about making it something you can add to a supergroup base? Then you can have as much control as you want over who's even allowed on the map at all.

I put Overwhelming Force in my assault bot, and never looked back. It doesn't just have a chance to proc "for every attack", it has a chance to proc for every TARGET hit by an AOE attack, and at level 32 the assault bot gets massive AOE missile attacks and isn't stingy with them. Once the Assault Bot gets those glorious missile launchers, the drones are more or less obsolete. I only still have them six-slotted to hold various special IOs that give pet-boosting effects in a radius. I'm seriously thinking of not even bothering to summon them anymore in remotely difficult content, because they're at a significant level shift disadvantage, get into trouble easily, and then the protector bots tend to waste heals on them before they die anyway.

This reminds me, I couldn't find a spectrum version of flat/bare feet for females. Unless I was missing something, my choices were limited to standard high heeled boots, or stilettos.

I just thought of something: if pets are added to standard fly and standard teleport, that would help distinguish them from "Mystic Flight" from the Sorcery power pool. People have raised the question, why bother with the fly and teleport pools, if Mystic Flight gives you flight AND teleport AND some other cool powers, all in one pool? Making standard fly and standard teleport apply to pets would help make them more competitive with Mystic Flight.

Hmm, I suppose that was the actual "use case" group fly and group teleport originally had in mind. Back in the day, when travel powers didn't unlock until the mid-teens and grinding up to level 15 took some time even if you knew what you were doing, there were lots of lowbies with nothing but sprint who would ACTUALLY appreciate the utility of having a team-mate who had group fly. But I think we can all agree, on reflection, that times have changed. A first level character on the Homecoming servers can go straight from the character creator to the Pay2Win vendor, grab Ninja Run, a jump pack, and other goodies, and then if they even WANT a full-fledged travel power from a power pool they can get it in about ten minutes on a slow day, before they're finished with their first rinse and repeat "Death From Below". So today, on the homecoming server, the actual "team utility" of group fly and team teleport is non-existent. If there's a tiny handful of newbies limping around with just sprint, their needs could be better served by just telling them about the Pay2Win vendor and "Death From Below". Thus, I don't think the toggle is even needed. Group Fly and team teleport should just apply to pets, period. Or alternately, pets should be added to STANDARD fly and teleport, and group fly and team teleport should be replaced with entirely new powers that might be useful for a wider variety of archetypes.

I mostly agree, except I'm not sure it even needs a toggle. Most people on a team already have whatever travel power they prefer: group fly is redundant at best, though not as bad as team teleport, which is effectively just griefing your own team. I love team teleport for soloing with my mastermind, but serious question: does anyone who is NOT a mastermind use it? And not for griefing?

Homecoming seems to have an "everything is unlocked from the start" policy, and I find it refreshing. I'd prefer to keep it this way.

"Stick together or it won't work" is logically predicated on the assumption that somebody WANTS it to work, and what I'm telling you is that nobody wants it to work. Literally nobody. I have the power on my bar, and I have NEVER been asked to use it in a team setting. It's an answer to a question nobody ASKED.

Team teleport is vastly different from group fly. When someone casts group fly, they give you the POWER to fly. How you use that power is up to you. Team teleport does quite the opposite: it TAKES AWAY your ability to decide where you're going.