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Abroham Lincoln posted:but also they lowered Sonic Blast's animation times and damage, and also toned down the -res debuffing by a whole lot. Currently it does a flat -20% res per attack that's only limited by the debuff timer so you can spam stack it. Now it's split by a nonstacking unique -12% from any attack, and a second -8% that's unique per attack so you have to juggle 5 of them for way less result. It's better on every archetype but defenders, who lost the most -res and gained the least damage, proportionally. I'd go as far as to say it's actually good for everyone else now, rather than being a gimmick set for defenders who *only* cared about the debuffs for their teammates.
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Jul 14, 2022 15:50
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is it atill viable for defenders? I thought that debuff was the main purpose of the sonic set aside from the shields?
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Jul 14, 2022 15:58
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Crasical posted:It's better on every archetype but defenders, who lost the most -res and gained the least damage, proportionally. I'd go as far as to say it's actually good for everyone else now, rather than being a gimmick set for defenders who *only* cared about the debuffs for their teammates. I'm not so sure that's true for Corruptors. Howl went from a 1.00 scale down to about 0.66 scale, so it's taken a bit of a hit even if the damage got redistributed to Siren's Song, which now needs to be slotted for damage (!?) rather than sleep. For me this is a bit of an annoyance since I had a chain of Shockwave -> Howl -> SS. Similarly, Screech becoming the heavy hitter is a little annoying since it sort of makes any hold one gets from their PPP/APP less desirable/redundant.
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Jul 14, 2022 16:38
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My one 50 defender is sonic blast 
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Jul 14, 2022 17:01
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So how much has changed for endgame IO builds? Are all the defense sets people have built less valuable now? Should we be reslotting for non-defense stuff because enough things are gonna punch through SLE that it's not reliable? Specifically for non-tanky ATs, like Blasters or Corruptors or stuff like that.
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Jul 14, 2022 17:12
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I use use ranged defense on non-melee ATs and it’s always been fine. Cheap, too, the only sets I can think of that are expensive are the accurate tohit debuff and Numina. I’ve never ever built a squishy for s/l defense or taken Scorpion Shield. It even works on my fire/fire blaster that mostly lives in melee. My dark/sonic defender thinks this page sucks rear end, though, with the -res nerf. I’m most worried about my s/l defense dark armor brutes and tanks, but I don’t really care that much that they might need support more now.
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Jul 14, 2022 17:52
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yeah I've always leaned towards positional defense except on armor powersets that are explicitly typed, and I never built around strictly s/l defense, I don't think this will have a big effect on any characters except those that are purely s/l defense. I don't go crazy with winter sets on every power or any poo poo like that either.
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Jul 14, 2022 18:10
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Crasical posted:It's better on every archetype but defenders, who lost the most -res and gained the least damage, proportionally. I'd go as far as to say it's actually good for everyone else now, rather than being a gimmick set for defenders who *only* cared about the debuffs for their teammates. For everyone it seems like the DPA changes have put it into a perfectly middling spot, like that forums spreadsheet guy putting it just behind Seismic in mission clear times. A defender probably doesn't care about the extra DPS when you view the Sonic attacks as debuff buttons, and a blaster probably doesn't care about the extremely minor -res. So you have a set that went from dogshit to "okay" for its damage, but to defenders it's kind of just a straight nerf. Was this worth it to homogenize it into yet another perfectly average blast set? Why, that is for you the reader to decide Abroham Lincoln fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Jul 14, 2022 |
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Jul 14, 2022 21:04
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Harrow posted:So how much has changed for endgame IO builds? Are all the defense sets people have built less valuable now? Should we be reslotting for non-defense stuff because enough things are gonna punch through SLE that it's not reliable? Specifically for non-tanky ATs, like Blasters or Corruptors or stuff like that. I think I'm not changing the builds I've already made for most of my roster, since I tend to prefer Hover/Ranged defense builds, but I think I'm going to rethink my new Titan/Stone scrapper. That said, I'm pretty sure I'm never going to try the super hard gently caress you versions of the ITF. If I wanted to spend 3 hours on a TF I'd solo Quarterfield or something.
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Jul 15, 2022 05:14
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without actually looking into any of the changes myself because i play a gimmick build controller who dies instantly as soon as anybody looks at them funny anyway; i'll take anything that makes high end team play even slightly less of a mindless steamroll, whether it be defense changes or aggro caps or what have you. the rest of you can suffer like i already do.
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Jul 15, 2022 05:26
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Fearless_Decoy posted:That said, I'm pretty sure I'm never going to try the super hard gently caress you versions of the ITF. If I wanted to spend 3 hours on a TF I'd solo Quarterfield or something. I'm glad there's other ways to get the costume tokens because turning TFs into raid-style affairs sounds truly miserable, even if HC tends to have a pretty decent population of leaders who can drag people through the experience up to a point. (Probably less so the higher difficulties just due to needing high end Incarnate poo poo.) Granted, I only have very narrow interest in certain specific costume powers anyway. But of course the hyper expensive chibi costume is one of them, and they also had to go and attach badges to collecting a bunch... I'm still kinda leery at the whole thing. One of the reasons I downright hated the Incarnate system as it originally stood was due to it arbitrarily locking a bunch of costume poo poo behind endgame currencies, because Matt Miller. This is obviously a bit different, but there's credible reasons to want a number of those costume powers from level 1. Like the one time I went to an IRL event back when, I picked the Knives of Artemis power as my swag for the specific purpose of playing a KoA character and not just wacky fun time vanity or w/e. And sure, you can obtain all the tokens you need from a different character and transfer them over to a fresh level 1 and that's great, but it's the exact same hassle as back when you needed to craft the special invention boot costume pieces. 
John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Jul 15, 2022 |
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Jul 15, 2022 15:02
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I'm not sure why they feel the need to add in things that are meant as a player retention tool.
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Jul 15, 2022 16:34
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I'm glad to see they implemented that system to stop people from squatting on names, but after being away for at least a year, I'm going through my character list and noticed that my thugs mastermind Danny Trejo was gone. RIP
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Jul 15, 2022 16:51
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Soonmot posted:I'm glad to see they implemented that system to stop people from squatting on names, but after being away for at least a year, I'm going through my character list and noticed that my thugs mastermind Danny Trejo was gone. RIP How does the system work? I'm curious if any of my names are gone and/or if any names I wanted have freed up on Excel.
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Jul 15, 2022 18:40
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Harrow posted:How does the system work? I'm curious if any of my names are gone and/or if any names I wanted have freed up on Excel. IIRC, the broad strokes are that lower level characters get their names freed up sooner and I think after a certain point (level 50?) names just get locked in no matter what. The names are also dynamically freed up; you only lose them if somebody else tries to roll up a character with that name. Also all of this only applies if you haven't logged in to that character in a while.
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Jul 15, 2022 19:12
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Harrow posted:How does the system work? I'm curious if any of my names are gone and/or if any names I wanted have freed up on Excel. It's not implemented yet and won't be for a while
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Jul 15, 2022 19:44
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Also, this is just warnings. Actual freeing up to come later, it seems.
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Jul 15, 2022 19:45
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I swear there are characters I remember creating on homecoming that are not there anymore.
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Jul 15, 2022 19:51
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Check other servers, maybe you moved it
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Jul 15, 2022 20:01
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John Murdoch posted:IIRC, the broad strokes are that lower level characters get their names freed up sooner and I think after a certain point (level 50?) names just get locked in no matter what. The names are also dynamically freed up; you only lose them if somebody else tries to roll up a character with that name. Also all of this only applies if you haven't logged in to that character in a while. Flesh Forge posted:It's not implemented yet and won't be for a while Oh okay, cool. Sounds like a pretty reasonable system. I think I remember reading about the plans for it back when Homecoming launched and forgot about it. When it does get implemented there are a couple of names I hope I can snag on Excel, and the only names I really care about keeping are on level 50 characters anyway so that's no big deal.
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Jul 15, 2022 20:03
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It's gonna suck for my altaholism, but it's not like I've played in the past year or two, so I guess if you really want to play as Benimaru from King of Fighters, go right ahead. Funny enough, it's one of my 50's I'd love to have a name change if the name I want gets released.
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Jul 15, 2022 20:39
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John Murdoch posted:I'm glad there's other ways to get the costume tokens because turning TFs into raid-style affairs sounds truly miserable, even if HC tends to have a pretty decent population of leaders who can drag people through the experience up to a point. (Probably less so the higher difficulties just due to needing high end Incarnate poo poo.) I kinda empathize with them on this front because anything you can put up for a reward I think is something someone will object to. New power rewards? Plenty of power creep as is. Convenience? In this dead game, get outta here. Costumes, badges, titles, etc.? My concept! I think having narrow scope full-costume-transforms based on lore stuff is probably fine. tbh, I think having stuff like unlockable weapons from beating up enemy groups was kinda cool too, but you can push back on either for the same reasons.
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Jul 15, 2022 21:06
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I'm probably speaking against the grain here but has someone who hasn't picked up the game more than an hour or two in the past couple years, it's actually kinda frustrating to know my 50's names *won't* be released. I tend to just PL new alts straight to 50 to play with builds and I honestly don't care about the names of most of them. If I had to log in once every few months on the couple characters whose names I care about it really wouldn't bother me much, and if I forget and lose 'em, oh well. Maybe I should just log in and rename everyone to random strings, but eh, effort
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Jul 16, 2022 13:35
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Abroham Lincoln posted:I kinda empathize with them on this front because anything you can put up for a reward I think is something someone will object to. New power rewards? Plenty of power creep as is. Convenience? In this dead game, get outta here. Costumes, badges, titles, etc.? My concept! My main reason for balking is that when the game was revived, they completely stripped out every last lovely and obnoxious unlock from the costume editor and just gave you everything by default. Obviously MTX were never coming back, but it was also a giant pain in the rear end if you wanted to say, roll up a Family goon with an AR because you were in for an hours long grind to unlock the tommy gun to complete the look. I guess there's maybe hypothetically people out there that treat those sorts of unlocks as trophies or character milestones or "upgrades" or whatever and freely swap them out, but nobody I know ever treated them that way. Like I said, NPC costumes are a bit of a different beast, but if you want to play as a certain NPC type that isn't otherwise replicatable in the costume editor, it's a return to the bad old days of needing to jump through hoops to get a character looking right at creation. In a sense they're a new form of unlockable costume part. Thankfully basically all of the most relevant ones for that use case are at the lowest tier so it's doubtful to be a big hassle to get ahold of things like the PPD mechsuit, but it still rubs me the wrong way is all.
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Jul 16, 2022 14:56
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It's been a while since I played, they added character-specific unlockable costume pieces?
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Jul 16, 2022 16:47
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Ironslave posted:It's been a while since I played, they added character-specific unlockable costume pieces? A few. Capes, once upon a time. A witch hat you got for defeating a short witch task force nine times. A bunch were for characters who had started incarnate stuff, so they could be beings of pure energy or whatever. The current version just leaves everything unlocked for everyone.
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Jul 16, 2022 17:32
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Mystic Mongol posted:A few. Capes, once upon a time. A witch hat you got for defeating a short witch task force nine times. A bunch were for characters who had started incarnate stuff, so they could be beings of pure energy or whatever. - Capes and auras required special missions at level 20 and 30 respectively. - Getting the Ten Times the Victor badge unlocked the Cabal witch hat. - City of Villains came with its own pile of new parts which necessitated buying it (obv. account-wide). - The various seasonal events all had at least 1-2 unique items. - Veteran rewards granted a grab-bag of exclusive stuff, albeit account-wide. - You had to use the invention system to craft three specific types of boots, plus the grand majority of wing types. (The basic, core Angel and Demon wings were themselves veteran rewards.) - Task Force Commander unlocked the much-valued epaulets, which were nothing but a non-spiky version of an existing City of Villains piece and needed to be unlocked because ??? - Each Vanguard item needed to be unlocked separately via a relatively steep Vanguard merit cost. (You got the gloves for free for doing the introductory missions.) - Completing the ITF unlocked all of the Roman gear. - NPC weapon unlocks were tied to specific badges. - Various stripes of microtransactions ranging from reasonable to dogshit, account-wide. - Incarnate unlocks ranging from stupid to really loving stupid, the crown being the Ascension pieces which were only wearable on level 50 characters, period. - Across the entirety of the game's lifespan cosmetic rewards were attached to pre-order schemes and/or different versions of the game like Collector's editions though over time these got folded into veteran rewards. - One aura was used as an incentive for people to change game launchers. - Account-wide permanent NPC costume powers were used as convention swag, contest prizes, etc. Ironslave posted:It's been a while since I played, they added character-specific unlockable costume pieces? In beta right now is a system where you can earn a new currency that solely exists to be traded in for per-character permanent NPC costume transformation powers (the same kind that are part of the Halloween event, though there's an extra expensive prestige tier with more original stuff). With the primary goal being to incentivize people towards playing the mostly-new hard mode challenge difficulty levels seen in the Aeon Strike Force and, also in beta, for the ITF. Though there are also other ways to obtain them - WSTs, iTrials, a small random chance per mission completion, and the AH.
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Jul 16, 2022 18:50
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Yeah it's kind of weird this is what they're adding in ~prestige rewards~ that are character specific no less on a private server, but at least it's the most harmless thing they could possibly pick for it.
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Jul 16, 2022 21:20
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Meeko posted:Yeah it's kind of weird this is what they're adding in ~prestige rewards~ that are character specific no less on a private server, but at least it's the most harmless thing they could possibly pick for it. It's got a very 'this would be what a still-running-MMO-would do' vibe to it, yeah. But between that and a lot of the new/redesigned sets being overly complex, I've gotten the impression they're just making stuff to put on a resume. Sure, Sonic would be fine if they just sped up the animations, cut the -res a little bit, and called it a day. But I'm a designer so I've got to add 5 unique named debuffs effects to pad that word count. 
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Jul 17, 2022 01:51
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It feels like they're stuck wanting people to try the harder difficulty modes but not wanting to turn it into yet another avenue for getting the same endgame rewards of HOs/merits/incarnate stuff. Especially since by design the highest difficulties come with the expectation that you'll already have a build making use of all of those resources. Once you exclude all those flavors of mechanical rewards, and then for sake of argument cut out cosmetics as an option...there's admittedly not a whole hell of a lot left to give out. Barring some radical, dubiously feasible idea that nobody's thought of, I guess.Abroham Lincoln posted:Sure, Sonic would be fine if they just sped up the animations, cut the -res a little bit, and called it a day. But I'm a designer so I've got to add 5 unique named debuffs effects to pad that word count. I thought they just split the -Res into a stacking debuff and a non-stacking debuff and labeled them as distinct things for clarity? Doesn't really come off as overdesigned at all. Abroham Lincoln posted:I kinda empathize with them on this front because anything you can put up for a reward I think is something someone will object to. New power rewards? Plenty of power creep as is. Convenience? In this dead game, get outta here. Costumes, badges, titles, etc.? My concept! Oh also bringing this back because FWIW I am also irritated that the badge titles for the ones connected to the costume powers are all quite juicy and would naturally be a huge pain to get.
John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Jul 17, 2022 |
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Jul 17, 2022 15:31
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Well part of the issue is that the harder difficulty levels start locking you out of things. Some of these at least make sense (do the original LRSF back when it launched, with Statesman at level 54 and no one with IO set bonuses or incarnate powers!), some I feel are pretty lame (Master of (x) Task Forces from Live now lock out Incarnate powers), to 'this is now a slog' (Relentless Aeon Strike Force making all mobs +4/x8, increased stats across the board, and you can't use any non-rez inspirations). Getting an Emp Merit per AV kill is... not QUITE like stealing pocket change from them (that'd be getting an Astral Merit instead) but it doesn't feel rewarding.
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Jul 17, 2022 16:01
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I think CoH is at its best not worrying about difficulty. It's all about letting your creativity run wild, be the hero you want to be, unhindered by any meta. It's why I'm so adamant about seeing more costume pieces, more proliferation among the options, filling in gaps in sets, and so on. Just making the creativity process as smooth and varied as possible. Bring who you want, the end bosses are all doable with everyone.
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Jul 17, 2022 23:43
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Freakazoid_ posted:I think CoH is at its best not worrying about difficulty. It's all about letting your creativity run wild, be the hero you want to be, unhindered by any meta. It's why I'm so adamant about seeing more costume pieces, more proliferation among the options, filling in gaps in sets, and so on. Just making the creativity process as smooth and varied as possible. Bring who you want, the end bosses are all doable with everyone. I tend to agree, though I do like the badges you can get for what are basically challenge modes. But it's also great that there's no content gated behind that and you can do the exact same stuff without worrying about the badges. I still love Incarnate Trials because they have some neat mechanics but generally aren't that hard
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Jul 17, 2022 23:44
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totally fine with all that ~challenge mode~ crap as long as they don't lock character advancement/mechanic stuff or content behind it.
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Jul 18, 2022 00:53
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John Murdoch posted:I thought they just split the -Res into a stacking debuff and a non-stacking debuff and labeled them as distinct things for clarity? Doesn't really come off as overdesigned at all. They have a flag to convey this and it's just "effects don't stack from the same caster" and it's been there forever. The only upside is that this design maintains a constant -12% res that's refreshed from every blast, but like... what if the blasts all just did a constant -12% and didn't stack with themselves? That's still a pretty sizeable nerf from the current -20%, and you didn't have to do this weird split debuff mechanic. It'd even be better since the current biggest downside of the beta design is that the tier 1/2 blasts don't stack at all with each other, which is just lovely in particular for Sents and Blasters who may want to take those for AT mechanics. Flesh Forge posted:totally fine with all that ~challenge mode~ crap as long as they don't lock character advancement/mechanic stuff or content behind it. The challenge modes I think are a lot of fun and lean into the powercreep fun of the game way better than trying to balance defense or whatever. Let people have their nostalgia and old builds and superhero fun and just concentrate on making new poo poo.
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Jul 18, 2022 03:16
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It's ITF Week! Love seeing everybody put together stunt runs for it. Mastermind ITF! Kheld ITF! Widow/Soldier ITF! ...huh, which means it's going to be a long time before it's the weekly strike target again, isn't it? I suppose it makes sense that they'd launch the revamp when it's at low ebb, but the ITF's always at least a little popular for its status as a speedable or grindable high-end TF for all sides.
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Jul 19, 2022 05:51
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all-knockback ITF all-purple ITF all-bumblebee ITF all-sword-axe-mace ITF
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Jul 19, 2022 06:07
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okay they absolutely are deleting characters because Peter Tape my water/pain corrupter was gone when I went to look for him today that's a gimmick that could not have existed pre-hc, so I'm not misremembering. Besides the point though, I'm having a blast playing again, global is @soonmot
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Jul 22, 2022 17:19
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Soonmot posted:okay they absolutely are deleting characters because Peter Tape my water/pain corrupter was gone when I went to look for him today that's a gimmick that could not have existed pre-hc, so I'm not misremembering. I'm pretty sure there's a time limit on level 1 characters just to free up names from people making dozens of characters and then logging off and never playing again
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Jul 22, 2022 21:32
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Relentless posted:I'm pretty sure there's a time limit on level 1 characters just to free up names from people making dozens of characters and then logging off and never playing again That hasn’t even gone live yet, and even once it goes live it’s not gonna be active for a while to give people time to keep names they’re actually using. unless we wanna get into some  poo poo there isn’t any reason a character should be straight up gone without you deleting them
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Jul 22, 2022 21:46
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