Adeon Hawkwood

I'm not particularly surprised, once people got the hang of the BM fight MoApex became easy to the point that I've gotten it accidentally on several characters compared with other MO badges which require you to deliberately make the mission harder Apex just requires a reasonable speed. The drones don't add much to the fight so people tend not to bother reviving them even on a non-MO run (which gets two of the three badges) and killing BM in the required time is pretty easy as long as the majority of the team are moderately experienced at the fight.

I think this is a hold-over from various FPS games (especially console games). I seem to recall that a few N64 games used a similar setup. It makes a lot more sense with a Joystick than a Mouse though.

I'd disagree on that, most FPS games I've played default to A and D for strafing. It does differ from the convention used in a certain other major MMO but then CoH predates that MMO so it can be excused for not copying.

What about the Abandoned Sewer Trial, the Eden Trial, the Cavern of Transcendence Trial, or the various Respec Trials then?

Both the Alpha and the Interface buff your pets. Additionally they also get the level shifts form Alpha, Destiny and Lore.

I'm slightly confused here. One of your complaints about the Incarnate system is that the progression is locked away behind raids. Would it really be any better if other things (special recipes, special stores etc.) were locked behind raids instead? We've already seen numerous complaints about the current crop of costume items being locked behind the raids, I think the fact is having anything locked behind the raids means that someone will complain.

I think a better analogy would be comparing the STF/LRSF to the ITF. My experience on Virtue is that people are running Keyes a reasonable amount but not to the level that they run Lambda/BAF.

Personally I enjoy Keyes, it offers a nice change from the frantic action of Lambda and the lagfest of BAF.

The problem there is that if they do that and make it strong enough to be a risk to melee characters it will obliterate squishes. Making the damage independent of defense/resistance and a fraction of the character's max hit points means that it is equally damaging to all characters.

Yes and no. In theory you can just keep paying your $15 and ignore the changes. However, part of the change is that your $15 will now give you 400 Paragon Points per month and Paragon Reward stuff.

You can, if you choose to, completely ignore that and let them accumulate but if you do then you are, essentially, missing out on a part of what your subscription offers. My hunch is that the devs are making decisions on how to divvy up content/costumes/etc. between Free/Premium/VIP based partly on the assumption that VIP players will use their free Paragon Points to buy a portion of the Premium content released in that month.

That depends on your definition of "grind". I consider TF Commander to be a horrible grind (mostly because of Synapse and Citadel) and I would never do it if it wasn't for the health boost. Also, some of the unockable weapons could easily be viewed as a grind, especially the ones Red Cap and Ralaruu ones for Villains (which have very limited access without side switching).

The problem with the Help channel is the same problem that you get with "City Chat" in multiple other MMOs. Our Help channel isn't as bad as most of the other examples I've seen (although I also expect that to change once Freedom comes out) but for some reason a wide-scale multi-zone all-inclusive chat channel seems to bring out the worst in people.

The conclusion I've come to over the years is that chat channels (of any type) are the second worst way of forming teams (the worst is sending blind invites). Unless you have decent moderation you get an off-putting chat environment and channels that do have moderation are not inclusive.

The problem here is how do you regulate it? Global channels are not linked to servers so there's no way for the game to know which ones to show. That means the devs (or someone) would have to go through and manually add them to lists.

I think you're missing my point. Globals being the best way to form teams IS a problem. The problem with globals is that they are not inclusive. You have to go out and find them which generally means asking someone who already knows which ones are good for your server. This isn't a particularly good method of helping a new player find teams.

The trial queue was an attempt to circumvent this by allowing people to easily form and join teams without needing to belong to global channels.

And what would be better?

Yes, Hamidon debuffs Healing and Regeneration but he completely ignores Defense and Resistance (except for EoEs which are powerset independent) so Healing and Regeneration are what it's all about. What does Regeneration have more of than any other set? Sure, a Regeneration character will need support to tank Hami but then so does every other melee character out there and a Regen has a large chunk of what is actually needed which helps lessen his dependance on others.

I disagree. It was an attempt to solve (or at least mitigate) some of the issues associated with teaming in CoH. Specifically the problems that there are, in general, not enough people willing to form teams and that Global Channels are currently regarded as the best way to form teams (which is a bit of a problem problem since finding good global channels is not something that is intuitive).

I agree that it, mostly, failed but I think the goal was a good one.

I think that the 5 minute delay was a poor design decision on the Devs part, unfortunately the Open Beta patch notes did not actually reveal that was what it was doing (I don't know if others found out earlier, but I had no clue until the patch went live).

The problem with the 5 minute delay is that it encourages people pre-forming leagues to either make the league closed or recruit a full league in order to avoid it. This in turn means that pre-formed leagues are much less likely to pick up people from the queue. Therefore the 5 minute delay is actually making the queue situation worse. Previously I would leave a few open spots on my league in case someone was in the queue. Now I'm penalized for doing so. With that in mind I would suggest one of two solutions.

First option is to remove the 5 minute delay entirely. The "willing to join event in progress" option seems to work now (I've seen people pop into open leagues that lost people) so starting with a minimum size open league is no longer the death sentence it was before. If a league is understrength then the queue should allow other people to trickle in so it has a full complement for the AV.

The second option (which I prefer) is the intermediate method of starting an open league once either it has reached the mid-point between min and max size or 5 minutes has passed. This allows a pre-formed league to leave some spots open (4 on Lambda, 6 on BAF/Keyes) and still start the league immediately. Hopefully overtime this will become more common encouraging other people to use the queue to try and grab those spots.

Except that even with the regen resistance their regen is still reduced to about 23.5 HPS so all it really proves is that Defenders can hit 23.5 DPS which is not really that much, even for Defender.

As a counterpoint though a /Traps MM can reasonably softcap all positions and take an Epic Shield to get more resistance to S/L/Something than the /Sonic MM.

I've got 4 purple sets, 5 x 6.25% bonuses (3 Positron's and 2 Expedient Reinforcement) and 3 LotG 7.5%s. I only have two slots in Hasten but it's close enough to perma (120.1s recharge so it's technically down for 0.83s) which gives me a 235s recharge in Call Reinforcements and 232.8s in Summon Blaster (they have slightly different slotting since I used Soulbound Allegiance pieces to bring up the numbers).

That being said my definition of perma for those powers would be "likely to be recharged by the time I notice the pet has died" anyway so I'd consider 4 seconds off to be good enough.

Well, there are the Signature Story Arcs coming with Freedom.