(Almost) Everyone's best friend?

[Riverdusk]

Use the wiki to help you not miss anyone.  I also use the "find contact" button a lot to help me not miss anyone.

 

And MM does work just fine.  When you want to stealth you just dismiss your pets and resummon when you need them.  The recharge on them is super low now so they are pretty much always ready.

[CountZero]

7 hours ago, Riverdusk said:

Use the wiki to help you not miss anyone.  I also use the "find contact" button a lot to help me not miss anyone.

 

I did a bit of prep work using the wiki, I put together a spreadsheet with all the contacts names and levels. Although the wiki isn't 100% accurate it's pretty close.

Hadn't though about the "find contact" button, thanks for that. Just hit level 10 and there's a block of 25 contacts to befriend, I can see how the "find contact" would be a good safety net.

[CountZero]

The large block of hero contacts hasn't worked out exactly as expected. right now I've only been able to get in touch with half of them. So a switch to the red side to get those lvl 10-ish contacts went pretty well, although something slightly odd happened as after going up a couple of levels all the blue side contacts were showing up giving missions, which feels off I was playing for the other team. Also Celerity: Stealth is absolute game changer for sneaking round, so everyone gets to be a stalker at lvl 12.

So the bestie count is now up to 42, and just a few more missions before it's time to switch back to the blue side.

[CountZero]

So after a little break dealing with other toons dramas, it's back to Ash Lee's adventures. At lvl 15 there was a huge block of potential hero contact but with far fewer villain ones, the upshot being that all villain contacts were maxed out but only about half the hero ones were contactable at all.  There was a long time staying at level 15 that eventually brought the bestie count up to 62. Now a little burst of levelling needed to get to 20 and unlock the next batch of contacts.

[catsi563]

On 9/2/2025 at 1:52 PM, CountZero said:

 

Well that's just not true. There are 5 starting contacts in Atlas, you can talk to all of them and max out all of their friendship ratings. Mercy gives you 3 starting contacts and again you can max all of those out. Kuzmin gives you a choice of one other contact but you never get a chance to meet the other unlike most other contacts.

And the whole point of this exercise in lunacy is to get as many maxed out contacts on the inactive contacts tab. Something that Ouro doesn't help with.

 

Strictly speaking and lore accurate there are TEN contacts in atlas 

 

the five listed above and their 5 counter parts from galaxy city who were shifted into altas after galaxy was wrecked

[CountZero]

A little trip into the First Ward, gives a nice chain of contacts to make friends with and all in close proximity making them easy to befriend. However things get a little more complicated with a return to the blue side and contacts scatter across IP, Talos and Faultline. The various Special Agents in Talos are easy to progress but having 8 contacts on the go at the same time makes it feel like there's a lot of effort for not much progress. Currently down to 3 active contacts, and I get the feel that many of the remaining potential blue side are just repeats of other contacts so won't be introduced.  Anyway the bestie count is now up to 84, and the question becomes who will be the 100th bestie?
 

On 9/27/2025 at 5:37 PM, catsi563 said:

Strictly speaking and lore accurate there are TEN contacts in atlas 

 

the five listed above and their 5 counter parts from galaxy city who were shifted into altas after galaxy was wrecked

Strictly speaking there are TWENTY EIGHT contacts in Atlas but as the Galaxy ones don't offer missions and don't have a friendship, they don't count for the purposes of this lunacy.

[CountZero]

So there was a pause while lots of ToTing was done on various alts. Including a little experiment of getting a toon from 1 to 50 by visiting the "murder motel" and only doing one huge level up session, won't doing that again as I've now got a toon I don't know how to play instead of learning about how to get the best out of them as they level.

Anyway back to the quest to get everyone on speed dial, there was a little bit of switching between blue and red to get through difficult hunting but generally from 20-25 the villain contacts\stories have a much better flow to them (the advantage of learning from the original CoH release). Also I'm wondering if the devs for CoH originally planned to have separate contacts\stories based on origin type which got cut down because of costs and time or was it just a cheap way to make it feel like there was more content than actually existed?

Finally unlocked the sniper shot power, which I always enjoy on blasters because why make it a fair fight when you can one shot a red shirt?

 

One of the fun advantages of this idiocy is doing "Who WIll Die?" hero and villain mission close to each so you get to play the other half of the story at roughly the same time.

 

If I've got this right then I'm getting close to half way through. As the BFF count is now at 109, with 10 active contacts and 158 possible contacts 
And the 100th BFF Leonard - Unofficial Homecoming Wiki

[Snarky]

4 hours ago, CountZero said:

So there was a pause while lots of ToTing was done on various alts. Including a little experiment of getting a toon from 1 to 50 by visiting the "murder motel" and only doing one huge level up session, won't doing that again as I've now got a toon I don't know how to play instead of learning about how to get the best out of them as they level.

Anyway back to the quest to get everyone on speed dial, there was a little bit of switching between blue and red to get through difficult hunting but generally from 20-25 the villain contacts\stories have a much better flow to them (the advantage of learning from the original CoH release). Also I'm wondering if the devs for CoH originally planned to have separate contacts\stories based on origin type which got cut down because of costs and time or was it just a cheap way to make it feel like there was more content than actually existed?

Finally unlocked the sniper shot power, which I always enjoy on blasters because why make it a fair fight when you can one shot a red shirt?

 

One of the fun advantages of this idiocy is doing "Who WIll Die?" hero and villain mission close to each so you get to play the other half of the story at roughly the same time.

 

If I've got this right then I'm getting close to half way through. As the BFF count is now at 109, with 10 active contacts and 158 possible contacts 
And the 100th BFF Leonard - Unofficial Homecoming Wiki

What you are encountering blueside is the fact that a story arc can have 1-5 possible contacts. Then you are assigned 1.  The other possibilities are dead to you, they offer the exact same story arcs and side missions 

[Jacke]

21 minutes ago, Snarky said:

What you are encountering blueside is the fact that a story arc can have 1-5 possible contacts. Then you are assigned 1.  The other possibilities are dead to you, they offer the exact same story arcs and side missions 

 

Those are the traditional Blueside contacts.  There's 5 sets of them, one for each Origin: Magic, Mutant, Natural, Science, Technology.  They tend to give Missions involving the same Villain Groups.  Only the first set, for Levels 1 to 5, only have 1 contact per set.  Then they expand to about 3 per set.
https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Category:Contacts_By_Level

 

 

[CountZero]

4 hours ago, Snarky said:

What you are encountering blueside is the fact that a story arc can have 1-5 possible contacts. Then you are assigned 1.  The other possibilities are dead to you, they offer the exact same story arcs and side missions 

I understand all that. But if you compare red side and blue side, the red side has a better story\contact structure to it. That's fine because the devs will have learned from CoH when CoV was released.

However if you take a step back and look at the game, a toons origin makes absolutely no difference to the game play experience (with a couple of minor exceptions). So why include an origin at all? Now if you look at the lvl 1 missions for heroes they differ depending on the toons origin, which got me thinking. Was the original plan to limit enemy types by origin? So tech heroes would face clockwork and freakshow for most of their missions but magic heroes would get CoT and Tsoo. So different play through's would give a different experience and give players a reason to  keep paying the subscription. And if that was the plan, then was it cut back because of time and cost pressures? Or alternatively were the different origins and contacts just smoke and mirrors to make it look like there was more content than there actually was?

Honestly I'm leaning a little more towards the "smoke and mirrors".  The way I'd been doing the contacts was to have as many on the go at once as possible but I switched to  just focusing on a single contact at a time and noticed something. With red side contacts the missions are mostly limited to a single zone, so there's not much travel but with blue side the mission starts were always in "any zone but the one you are currently in", so lots of travel almost as if the devs were trying to create the illusion of the game being bigger than it was.