MTeague

After 20 odd years, of people constantly re-writing it's history via Ourobous? Paragon City would have imploded upon itself from the network of ever expanding paradoxes, and would no longer exist. At best, it would be some kind of Niflheim place like Night Ward.

Fold Space, when used as an opener, is logically, not that different from aggroing a group of mobs, and running around a corner to group them up. If used in mid-battle, perhaps a case could be made for more, but I have only seen it used as basically an opener / pull. It just has some convienence baked in. I don't think it needs a nerf, but I'm willing to change my mind if you can paint use-cases that are more than just herding mobs around a corner without spending the time to DO it.

Honestly, a lot of temp powers aren't worth using. Flashbang grenades? Confiscated beanbag? Yawn. Penelope Yin's gift to summon some clockwork minions? Ho-hum. The temp powers that are worth using, I do try to make decent use of, especially if they're time limited. "Iron Blade" or "Rune of Warding" from Croatoa come to mind. You need some good +accuracy to all powers from set bonues to make best use of them, but they're great on a Defender or Controller. Blaster, less important, you can burn things down anyway. Temp powers that you can re-aquire, I'll use plenty. Jetpacks. Shivan Shards. I try to save Shivan Shards for Arch Villains or stupid-hard missions, but for those fights, smoke'em if you got 'em because you can always get more. Really handy for Portal Jockey. Temp powers that are good, non-re-acquirable, and limited by use... yea... I conserve too much. I've never burned up a "Ring of Peebles". I do use it, but just barely 2 minutes of use at any given time, then quickly back off again. The Ice Armor temp power, too.

City of Heroes has always been an incredibly alt-friendly game. The two other MMO's I played were EverQuest 1999-2005, and World of Warcraft 2008-2015. For both games, I needed to spend... truly ridiculous amounts of time levelling my "main" characters. Getting them geared up, and making constant trade off with other members of my respective Guilds to struggle towards shared goals. I always itched to see how other classes played, but between work, family, and efforts on my main characters, it was difficult to get any Alt to any respectable level, much less have a raid-worthy alt. When I finally did manage to get a few raidworthy alts, I was burning myself out badly, costing myself far too much sleep for far too long. I'd begun to develop health issues from lack of sleep. In 2016, I swore all Guilds, forever. But between those two treadmills, from 2005 to early 2008, I had played City of Heroes, City of Villains. CoH was FUN. Extremely casual friendly. I could play alts to my hearts content. There was no endless treadmill of raidset after raidset to "gear" your characters. Guilds / Supergroups were entirely unnecessary. I could spend as much or as little time in game in a week as I wished, without having to feel like I was letting anyone down. I could alt around and still get a good night's sleep, every night, without straining real life obligations. A part of me always regretted leaving CoH for Warcraft, especially given how burnt out I was by the end of 2015. I was always idly interested in going back to CoH, but it had been shut down in between. I was delighted when my annual "city of heroes 20xx" google search finally came back with a hit in June 2019. I still refuse to join anything expect a personal supergroup, that is just "Never Again" territory. But I enjoy pickup teams and TF's, and I enjoy being able to dabble into a little bit of everything, while still keeping balance in Real Life and getting a good night's sleep. CoH does so much that is "right" from my admittedly biased point of view. There is no "loot drama", no "OMG I should have won that piece of gear!" that can plague other MMO's. You don't have to make it a full time job all by itself. This is what online games should be like.

Honestly, I still hold out "never gonna happen but maybe" hope for an Opt In system where you can flag certain of your redside alts to be a "nemesis" of a blueside character, and vice versa, and then in some kind of specialized tip mission, have an end fight against that alt of yours. But, that alt would have full access to all of their set bonues, have full access to all of the incarnate powers (if both lvl 50+), etc. Every single power that your character has, that NPC copy could use against you in mission, without exception. (or if you only had bluesiders, then some kind of "rival" flag for your alts vs your other character)

On Live, I used to fear going into Bloody Bay to get a Shivan Shard. I would go at 2:45 am, to try to minimize the chances of being ganked. On Homecoming, I'll enter any day, regardless of time. I don't give it a second thought, and I'm genuinely surprised on the rare occasions I see another soul in the zone at all. So far, each time, they've been another person looking for the Shivan Shard quest. Now I do play on Everlasting these days, and maybe on Indomitable or something the story is quite different. But I often forget anyone pvp's in this game at all.

a) No, powersets do not need to be homogeneous. b) But I disagree that they're being made that way. I do think the devs are trying to make them comparable in effectivness, which is a different thing. Electric Blast saps. Energy Blast is the ragdoller. Ice Blast has slows. Fire has DoTs. Dark has -hit, etc. Empathy and Dark Miasma both offer support, and wildly different means to achieve it. Mind Control and Fire Control both offer control, and strongly different ways to acheive it. Battle Axe vs War Mace? OK, those are closer. But they always were pretty close, going back the Eldar Days. Are all sets comparable to each other today? No. Sonic Resonance is nearly useless for a solo Defender or Corruptor, vs say, something like Trick Arrow, or Rad Emission. Should every set be able to solo well, even on Defenders? Well, I would like it if that were so, but I'm not a dev, and I'm not privy to the Dev's opinions on that question. (Yes, I'm aware Sonic Resonance can be great for Masterminds) I don't think doom and gloom is warranted, but everyone's milage is going to vary.

CC "has no place" in endgame content? .... I'll be curious to see how you like content involving Blackwing Industries.

I respect your right to your obviously strongly held opinion. I disagree that this is operatic tragedy. Plant was wildly overtuned, and everyone knows it. After the first few pages of reflexive panic, most of what I've seen on the focused feedback thread was "OK, we can make this work".

If a powerset got a major revamp, that traditionally happened. But I don't believe there's ever been a firm promise there. That said, considering how much is changing in the upcoming stuff currently on beta testing... for those powersets, I consider freespecs much more likely than not. Given that there's also some non-trivial AT level changes, they just decide everyone gets a freespec. Just... remember that's at their discretion.

Yup, lol. I'll still file that under "pain, agony, and suffering." 🤕

if I'm hungry for pain, agony and suffering, I can always do an Ouroborus "No Enhancements" badge.

I greatly appreciate that the ability to respec exists. Back in 2004, not every game had them. Some games were just "too bad, that was the choice you made, live with it or create a new character." I would be happy if the Full Respec just also had a VIEW ONLY detail of what powers you HAD taken at which levels, for your pre-respec build, and (again, view only) how many slots had been in the pre-respec build. We can screenshot before respec, of course. But while screenshots can tell you what order you took powers in for your primary and secondary, it's not the same thing as knowing precisely what level you took every power at, and what level you allocated every slot at. Even with a screenshot, you have to guesstimate some of that. Having a View Only for prior build during respec would help avoid easy mistakes.

Many things are possible, but this absolutely does not jive with my own personal recollection. I played a Mind/Kin troller in live. Always been my favorite combination, even back when people shunned Mind Control for using confuse and "lowering XP". (Which really did happen, people would quit teams over it) I seem to remember always getting an equal share of XP for all mobs. Scrappers and blasters did not outlevel me rapidly after a few hours on the same team. Now that said, what might have been so, is if you did NO damage whatsoever, might you have gotten no xp for a given mob? I still don't think that's how it worked,.... but I can't conclusively rule it out, as I no longer have logs of any kind from those days. Maybe. But even as a controller, I was always damaging mobs with holds and sleeps, and later with Terrify, all the time, as well as spamming Transfusion to keep my teammates standing. Mostly what I think it was, was when your team was very successful on a regular basis, you gained XP faster than you gained influence. If you piled up debt here and there (remember the joys of running Oldschool Positron TF, back in Oldschool Faultline, or the joyful mission with hordes of CoT daemons? That was the Debt Emporium). Working off that kind of debt would delay me from levelling up until I'd earned enough Inf to afford my next batch of enhancements. It may have also mattered if you fought bosses or not. I always played on at least "Rugged" difficult, back under the old notoriety system, so every mission would have bosses, and bosses are worth quite a bit more in both XP and Influence.

Admittedly, I do use the Black Market / Wentworth's a lot. But I think the last time I had trouble massing influence was back in Live, circa 2006. If you have no interest in crafting at all, you may still find it very helpful to post your orange salvage and yellow/orange recipes on the AH. They'll sell well. If you do not want to use the Auction House period, another option can be (Heresy alert!!) using the "No Xp" button to deliberately delay your levelling, so you can spend more time with your current enhancements before you need to upgrade them. This can let you fit in more story arcs, do more Safeguard / Mayhems, get in more TF's as you're levelling up, as well as letting you pile up the currency.