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Soonmot posted:Yeah basically I was curious if 3 recharge IOs were going to be enough. I started a new plant/nature controller and having 4 minute recharge times blows. The grin face is the best and I don't understand why everyone doesn't use it all the time, especially with the Death Mask Eyes or Bug Eyes. 
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May 14, 2023 22:45
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It's been danced around but not explicitly stated, regarding end redux and recharge - FYI the formula for both produces heavy diminishing returns the more of them you stack in a power, even disregarding ED. The formula is (cost / 1+enh), so with one SO giving 33%, it reduces by 1/4 (cost / 1.33), but it takes two more SOs to reduce it by another 1/4 to 1/2 (cost / 2). Going beyond 100% gets worse and worse - another entire 100% of global enhancement only gets you from 1/2 to 1/3. What you want is a little end redux, in everything you use. Even just half an IO with frankenslotting is extremely effective. Also your toggles are probably the least end-hungry powers you have while in battle; it seems like you want them reduced because "well they're on all the time right?", but you do not care about end consumption when you're not actually fighting. Global endredux is nice but mostly ineffective if you actually have some slotted in everything; I expect if someone sees great returns on that it's because of the powers where that's the only end redux they have. I think it does effect unslottable temp powers and things though, if you've got some of those you're using. But that's why, while Hasten can be perma'd, it's usually a bad idea to bother with it. Those last 10 seconds require a huge amount of recharge bonus to get and probably isn't worth the sacrifice compared to "close enough", especially if you're not buying a bunch of purples and such. Global recharge is beneficial enough that it's still worth stacking some, especially with how it doesn't effect proc chances, but it's not worth losing defense or whatever else for more when you've already got a bunch. zzMisc fucked around with this message at 02:18 on May 15, 2023 |
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May 15, 2023 02:09
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Anyone got a link to baby's first AE farmer? I want to make one this time around instead of my 50th MM so I can actually slot them out properly. I think the one I tried last I played was Rad/Fire?
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May 15, 2023 11:27
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I don't have a link but I slapped one together in-game haphazardly today. Rad/Fire brute or Fire/Rad tank. You get 90% fire resist with just 1 or 2 +resist enhances in your defensive powers so focus on set bonuses with fire defense (sirroco's, aegis off the top of my head, the 2 resist uniques that give +3% defense, etc) You don't need sets at all as long as you don't mind converting and popping 2 small purples or 1 medium purple all the time, once you get sets you can switch to reds. Turn on all your toggles then pull enemies and press your aoes. Use the fire Build up -> fire AoE -> rad Buildup -> rad AoE -> rad punches (which all become AoEs on contaminated targets) -> repeat. e: Also a huge tip for pulling in a (solo) AE farm: Your goal is just to get enemy attention and move on, but don't move too far. Jump around and get some groups' attention, then just stand still and start killing. There's no need to break line of sight or anything like that. There's a maximum number of targets that can be engaging you in melee range, as you kill the enemies in melee, the ones throwing ranged attacks will run up to replace them. It took me a while to realize how easy it was and before that I was overexerting myself trying to LoS them and round them all up or whatever. I like the Shiva/Meteor map because it packs everything so close together that you only need like 3 killzones to clear the whole map. e2: My current setup at level 44 (can easily solo +4 fire farms) - this is absolutely not optimized or ideal, just something I slapped together cheaply that works well: Scirocco's Dervish (5pc) x4 Aegis (3pc) x2 Touch of the Nictus x1 (unnecessary, but the accuracy/health/end/healing is pretty nice) Mocking Beratement (5pc) x1 (this could easily be replaced with another Scirocco's but Contained Strike takes taunt enhances and this was a cheap large fire defense set bonus) +3% def enhances from Gladiator's Armor and Steadfast Protection 2x LotG 2piece (including global recharge) - not necessary That puts me at 36.97% Fire Defense which is enough to not need purples. Everything else is a plain crafted IO. Total price is approximately 50-70mil. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 17:54 on May 15, 2023 |
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May 15, 2023 11:43
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yeah I love controllers but they just seem so superfluous at high level play, groups move so fast and nuke things so fast that the control aspect is totally uneeded. And at lower levels, your powers have so much recharge that you're mainly using single target holds for entire fights depending on what sort of secondary you choose.
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May 15, 2023 18:57
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At high level I think it's reasonable to build controllers to not "overpay on not dying." Just get 1 AoE mez, slot your single target hold/immob/whatever else with damage procs, then leverage your pets and unique primary set stuff to better compete with corruptor/defender DPS while still doing your mez thing. Trying to build like "I'm a corruptor with a pet and a wormhole/arctic air/carrion creepers/whatever and a "spammable" AoE stun/fear/confuse is a lot more fun than throwing out lots of AoE mezzes on mobs that wouldn't have hurt anyone anyway IMO.
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May 15, 2023 19:26
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For plant/nature the only cool thing I have up for every fight, is going to be spores of confusion, which is great, that's an awesome power. But carrion creepers is a 4-5 minute recharge. My good buffs are 4-6 minutes, and some of them are stationary beacons so the party runs out of range by the time I finish animating anyways.
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May 16, 2023 00:45
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That's unfortunately just kind of level 50 CoH in a nutshell. I've been playing a lot for the past couple weeks and I love the hell out of this game but level 50 stuff isn't as fun as it used to be back before incarnates and IOs and it's largely because any kind of support or utility feels mostly unnecessary. I have a Time/Rad defender that I love and enjoy playing. It's incredibly strong at what it does, and it has two things it does incredibly well: making sure that allies connect all of their attacks, and making sure that enemies do not connect any of their attacks. It's even great for carrying level 50s through level 54 content. The problem is once it starts teaming with level 50+1s with even a couple sets slotted who, for the most part, cap their own defenses and accuracy. Suddenly all of those buffs become useless and the only things I'm there for are (1)Chrono Shift which is a great recovery/recharge buff but a long cooldown pbaoe and (2)Stacking -regen or -res on AVs. Defenders were a whole lot more fun back in the day when Hamidon was top tier content, and it sounds like the same deal with controllers - power scales so high that everything dies before CCs can reasonably be cast and there are never any threatening enemies that need to be mezzed (outside of the one or two things that can only be damaged while held) It doesn't help that you can go from Fresh 50 to full tier 3+ Incarnates in one or two afternoons of running KM ITF and Tinpex and that you can fully slot yourself out in set IOs with ~10m seed money and a couple hours spent crafting, converting and selling enhances  it's nice that powering up at 50 is accessible, because I wouldn't want to spend weeks grinding on every 50, but it also means the median power level is "highly overpowered"
deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 16:25 on May 16, 2023 |
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May 16, 2023 01:03
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oh yeah when homecoming went public I started an empathy/pistol defender that was fun as hell to level, but I think I left her at level 47 after respecing to take all the pistol attacks and some more pool attacks since empathy heals are almost useless at those levels. I should probably go back to playing damage primary ATs
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May 16, 2023 01:29
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it's true that some powerset combos are going to feel a little useless at 50 but i wouldn't say it applies to any archetype as a whole. if you intend to take a controller or defender to 50 and play a lot of level 50 content with them as a controller or defender instead of a knockoff DPS, you really want to be debuff-focused. your team can cap their own numbers but damage/tank ATs can't meaningfully gently caress with enemy numbers in the same way you can. for example i play a dark/rad controller that's very heavy on control and debuff with damage as a distant last priority, and i don't feel useless (except on ITF because the designer of ITF hates controllers) because every button i press is increasing the team's DPS or reducing incoming damage on top of whatever OP stuff they have slotted. plus, controlling a pack may feel superfluous if the enemies only last a couple of seconds, but it really isn't. you're making the enemy positions completely predictable which lets melee move more efficiently and eliminates the hassle of runners, and you're preventing DPS spikes and other poo poo that can easily kill blasters, etc. no matter how well they're slotted. the difference between a team with control and debuff and a team without is pretty obvious to me even at 50.
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May 16, 2023 01:52
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Most support sets remain super powerful forever, e.g. Kinetics, Nature, Poison, Radiation, Time (not just because of Chrono Shift), Cold and a couple of others, because they have really good AOE buff/debuff powers that have a very appreciable impact on team effectiveness even when you're past that "nobody is getting hit, mostly nobody is running out of endurance" phase. Controller combos with these are great and while your 4 minute AOE hold is very skippable, tools like Earthquake, Bonfire, Ice Slick and of course Seeds of Confusion are still extremely helpful in a lot of scenarios like ITF or Market Crash where you have huge numbers of enemies in overlapping spawns. I wouldn't say there is any content that makes Controllers completely irrelevant, because you've always got your support set, but most control sets have some super useful bullshit power on top of that that's a reasonable trade for a damage set in most party combos. The control sets that have felt less useful to me in a reasonable team in the late game have been Gravity and Darkness and Mind Control, and looking at Sonic and Illusion as well, for various reasons.
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May 16, 2023 02:42
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I will never stop playing Masterminds, mostly because no other game has a class like it.
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May 16, 2023 16:05
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This is why I prefer smaller, mid-level teams because AT and powerset choices matter more and not everyone is the same cookie cutter Incarnate nuker. The writing was already on the wall back on live. I once actually had to have an awkward conversation with a fully kitted out Incarnate Night Widow because we were trying to run a casual mission team and meanwhile they were hardcore 200mph solo farming entire chunks of the map without any acknowledgement of the rest of the team and that didn't sit well. Sure enough, even now a lot of teams I end up on are more like packs of soloers all sharing the same map.
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May 16, 2023 16:11
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yeah the Destiny and Judgement and Hybrid incarnate stuff was a terrible idea, the others aren't too bad but Destiny in particular is just dumb as hell.
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May 16, 2023 16:16
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Oh my last post was specifically about empathy as a support set. They really need to let it over heal into absorb. Empathy was incredibly fun leveling because I was playing the have in reverse, keeping my allies HP up instead of taking enemy bars down.
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May 16, 2023 16:39
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that's a specific thing that really sucks about Destiny and Ageless, a blaster (or any other AT) can take Ageless, a power that completely obsoletes a signature Empathy power and has 100% uptime. Barrier and to a lesser extent, Rebirth and Clarion are hugely game-breaking as well.
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May 16, 2023 17:16
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Flesh Forge posted:yeah the Destiny and Judgement and Hybrid incarnate stuff was a terrible idea, the others aren't too bad but Destiny in particular is just dumb as hell. I remember finding a zombie invasion on my first HC brute, getting all excited about how I was going to smash some zombies, only there weren’t any because people kept judgementing them as soon as they’d spawn. I quit because it wasn’t any fun.
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May 16, 2023 18:00
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Flesh Forge posted:that's a specific thing that really sucks about Destiny and Ageless, a blaster (or any other AT) can take Ageless, a power that completely obsoletes a signature Empathy power and has 100% uptime. Barrier and to a lesser extent, Rebirth and Clarion are hugely game-breaking as well. Also, circling back to endurance management, if you ever ask for advice on the subject the #1 response is...well okay, the first response is going to be grab all 4 IO procs, but the second response immediately after is going to be "just take Ageless lol" which isn't much of an answer when your character is level 25. I've never believed in that "Force Field is obsolete because everyone at endgame is already softcapped" stuff, but Barrier spam sure as poo poo doesn't help.
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May 16, 2023 18:26
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the other thing about Barrier is 2x resurrection on a 2 minute cooldown e: big red flag is pretty much all teams doing the 4 star TFs that I have seen have required T4 Barrier for everyone on the team
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May 16, 2023 18:28
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The sheer power leap is also why I can't even conceive of what the other Incarnate powers were supposed to be. Hybrid already felt like they were running out of steam, everything else covers the bases so utterly and completely that where else is there to go?
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May 16, 2023 18:34
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Yeah I think Incarnate content is where they were really starting to rub up against the limits of the system. IO sets already started to break things and incarnate buffs just throw more gasoline on that fire. For most of CoH's development the design seemed to be heavily focused on the mid-level content and making the process of going through the levelling curve interesting, and that seems to be where the base mechanics are the strongest. Once you hit the top end you end up just layering more and more buffs on and starting to hit caps on everything and the basic combat mechanics just can't really keep up.
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May 16, 2023 18:55
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I almost wonder if it would have been better for them to focus entirely on story content and architect poo poo towards the end. There is a possible world where they could have made it sort of a mmo superhero version of Neverwinter Nights. Creator content allowed and approved, randomize the paper/radio missions a bit more, maybe have the occasional mission end up with an arc or something. I think widening the game instead of going tall would have been the right call. It was always a game with a bit more of a roleplay focus and leaning into that was the way to go. There was no need to give all classes every bonus in the end game only to just make things harder.
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May 16, 2023 19:51
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TGG posted:I almost wonder if it would have been better for them to focus entirely on story content and architect poo poo towards the end. There is a possible world where they could have made it sort of a mmo superhero version of Neverwinter Nights. Creator content allowed and approved, randomize the paper/radio missions a bit more, maybe have the occasional mission end up with an arc or something. I think widening the game instead of going tall would have been the right call. It was always a game with a bit more of a roleplay focus and leaning into that was the way to go. There was no need to give all classes every bonus in the end game only to just make things harder. Wide other than tall would've been the move but from one of the old post-shutdown Q&A's: quote:Q) What was going to be the plan for the final incarnate powers and trials? (@Sarrona) And then from some other assorted bits, it seemed like the power creep was going to be in full force: quote:Q) What were the next few incarnate slots going to be? From what Dark Astoria saw, it seemed like all future content was going in the incarnate direction, with enemies that level shifted and probably other ways of interacting with your abilities. Whether that just means raw dog higher difficulty or debuffs like removing your level shifts or locking out powers, who knows. In that sense I'm pretty glad Homecoming's stepped off the gas on that stuff, as much as new stuff sounds fun.
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May 16, 2023 20:28
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The thing is I can understand why the devs were going in that direction, because players want endgame stuff. People get attached to their characters and for a lot of CoH's lifetime, there just wasn't really much reason to keep playing a character once they hit 50.
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May 16, 2023 20:31
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The Cheshire Cat posted:The thing is I can understand why the devs were going in that direction, because players want endgame stuff. People get attached to their characters and for a lot of CoH's lifetime, there just wasn't really much reason to keep playing a character once they hit 50. The game definitely needed more of an endgame, but the execution was a complete mess. Not at all helped by Matt "why would someone ever want to play more than one character?" Miller and his fetish for currency systems. Though the most obvious problem was that they didn't put the kibosh on Incarnate powers being available in non-Incarnate content. I think at one point, well after the fact, they considered locking them out but realized the genie was out of the bottle. I...just...why loving have the system go from Alpha to Omega but then just keep piling more poo poo on top after that??? They weren't even in a good position to pump out that many new Incarnate slots + associated content by the end, best I could tell. Just like I said, where do you go from those Omega ideas? What does the next tier of powers look like and what would the content that required them even be??
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May 16, 2023 20:56
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My assumption was that it was going to be CoH's version of a WoW gear treadmill or something. You're not really upping the quantity of powers or adding more to a baseline. Omega-Destiny is a stronger form of Alpha-Destiny, but just replaces or modifies it. The only problem being that their content pace wasn't tenable to make appropriately challenging Omega Incarnate content with the same quantity and variety that the base game has. It'd probably have bitten them in the rear end sooner or later.
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May 16, 2023 21:10
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black and white proof that a lot of the OG dev ideas were legitimately really bad lol Having seen that kind of ~~~ ENDGAME ~~~ progression system by Cryptic more fully fleshed out in Neverwinter, good loving god it sucks so hard. They literally sell players the right to skip each gear score/content plateau for $50 bucks per character. This translates to roughly two months of time-gated relentless grind per content plateau if you don't buy the skip. While the content is all reasonably OK by MMO standards (it's voiced competently, there's some variety in tasks etc) each of these plateaus has to be done in order. No incentive for anyone to team any of these activities either, in general the prospects for group play are pretty awful because players are spread out through these content/gear score tiers.
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May 16, 2023 21:35
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Yeah, I like the setup right now, where if you want group content there's the incarnate trials but there's also some nice prizes attached to the weekly strike target, a selection of usually pre-50 task forces where your incarnate powers are locked out by the lower level. I think it's just, like, the shadow shard TFs, Ms. Lib, Lady Grey, and Imperious? Ignoring the "incarnate task forces" like Tin Mage and Dr. Kahn. With just the incarnate powers we have now, they're honestly a help against the Rularuu and the Arachnos bigwigs, and for getting the big prizes if you want to crank the difficulty all the way up against rikti or romans. Also a fan of wide content for my ten thousand alts, but yeah, at the end that's not what they were looking at to monetize the game.
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May 16, 2023 22:36
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Glazius posted:I think it's just, like, the shadow shard TFs, Ms. Lib, Lady Grey, and Imperious? Ignoring the "incarnate task forces" like Tin Mage and Dr. Kahn. Eden and Sewer trials also got their level ranges bumped up so you can bring Incarnate stuff in. There's also the third respec trials on both sides (not that I've seen anyone actually do them in a long, long time) as well as Market Crash, which seems to have dropped off in popularity for some reason. Villains also have LRSF and Doc Aeon. Edit: Kahn/Barracuda, too. Really glad you don't have to put up with the shitshow of the original Barracuda SF anymore. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 23:13 on May 16, 2023 |
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May 16, 2023 23:07
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I do wish at 50 all your enhancements just automatically attuned and you got a slider to set your combat level to whatever, that way you could run contacts at any level with teams and have your nice IO set up but not be locked into an ouro arc.
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May 16, 2023 23:11
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I think CoH was way ahead of its time, it came out at a time when MMOs were trying to determine what "endgame" meant exactly and even though they clearly understand peoples' love for cosmetics in CoH, I don't think they really understood peoples love for cosmetics yet. If level 50 content was an endless treadmill to unlock new account-wide costume parts, alternate animation sets for powers, big fancy emotes, etc. people would eat it up. An endgame grind doesn't have to include any power scaling at all!
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May 17, 2023 00:40
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Idk, my least favorite part of the Incarnate system was the unlockable cosmetic stuff. But then, a non-zero part of that animosity was needing to trade off between power progression and cosmetics that really should've been available by default.
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May 17, 2023 01:22
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Nonexistence posted:I do wish at 50 all your enhancements just automatically attuned and you got a slider to set your combat level to whatever, that way you could run contacts at any level with teams and have your nice IO set up but not be locked into an ouro arc. you can just slot attuned IO sets in the first place and get over the fact that at 50 you might have 2% less of whatever stat that wasn't already capped/in diminishing returns 
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May 17, 2023 01:54
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deep dish peat moss posted:The grin face is the best and I don't understand why everyone doesn't use it all the time, especially with the Death Mask Eyes or Bug Eyes. i used it on a character back on live, with some makeup to make it look like it had hosed up lips and some random dude liked the look of the character so much they sketched him lmao  truly an underrated face
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May 17, 2023 05:06
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it's endlessly funny to me that the homecoming devs introduced challenge settings so people with capped out builds have something that can fight back, but then from what i saw mostly gets ignored anyway because apparently the people with capped out builds aren't after being challenged also, that most team content devolves into everyone superspeeding and/or teleporting to the end of a mission so the same two or three people could beat an EB or AV. i understand most players left have done every piece of content a hundred times over so some speedrunning sentiment forming is natural, but it feels like you spend a lot of time skipping everything and little time actually playing, or not playing at all because you failed to build to superspeed through everything and solo AVs
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May 17, 2023 09:48
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I saw someone in general chat tonight talking about how they ran the #3 ranked guild on live and I chuckled at the idea of anything in City of Heroes, especially live, having been challenging enough for there to be rankings.
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May 17, 2023 10:44
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Literally the only thing I can think of as being ranked at all was Prestige, so that really just translates to #3 on the no-lifer list.a cartoon duck posted:also, that most team content devolves into everyone superspeeding and/or teleporting to the end of a mission so the same two or three people could beat an EB or AV. i understand most players left have done every piece of content a hundred times over so some speedrunning sentiment forming is natural, but it feels like you spend a lot of time skipping everything and little time actually playing, or not playing at all because you failed to build to superspeed through everything and solo AVs Really I just wish people would be more upfront with their intentions. Otherwise you get teams where half the members are speedrunning and the other half are kill mosting and it turns into a clusterfuck. I was on a Citadel the other day where somebody felt the need to stealth through and rush all the glowies on a kill all.  Remember when they removed the /enterbase command's infinite range and people melted down like it was the end of the game all over again.
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May 17, 2023 12:38
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deep dish peat moss posted:I saw someone in general chat tonight talking about how they ran the #3 ranked guild on live and I chuckled at the idea of anything in City of Heroes, especially live, having been challenging enough for there to be rankings. xXBudweiserXx?
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May 17, 2023 23:30
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I personally dislike basically all the IO set nonsense and 50+ content. They feel really divorced from what I saw as the main game - a dolly dress-up simulator which included punching. Yes, I played through a lot of the same content over and over, but I was a playing a different dolly with different fists. End game content was making a new character, and that was more than enough for me. Admittedly most of the times I was doing the same content I was taking different groups of people I had introduced to the game through their first times seeing the content so that might have made a difference.
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May 18, 2023 00:52
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The changes HC made to IOs and Incarnate stuff has softened me on them greatly. In their original forms they were tedious and awful and I'd much rather just roll a new character. Not to say I'm anywhere near as gung-ho about them as most still. And it does still rub me the wrong way that eventually any character becomes a self-sufficient god. The system really just doesn't fit if you're playing something more street level. Also doesn't help that despite some later additions Judgement and Lore still feel really limited and hard to match to a lot of my characters. Though even Epic pools still have that problem... Really my problem is that like all power accumulation systems of that nature, there's no real end goal. Sure, running Dark Astoria and the other post-50 stuff can be fun enough, but those don't last for very long. I seem to have settled into an uneasy balance of carrying forward from one decked out main to leveling the next and bankrolling them, but my attention span really starts to burn out when I'm spending more time juggling IO sets and build planning than actually playing. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 15:15 on May 18, 2023 |
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May 18, 2023 15:08
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