Been out of the game for over a year. What's new?

Hey all! After a year+ hiatus (left right before Architect hit), the draw of power customization drew back in. I've noticed a few things are new, such as summons now follow you between zones and when you do an upgrade power for one of your minions, all the minions of that tier get upgraded at once.

What other new changes of importance have come along?

Also, if there's a good source for this info besides digging through a metric buttload of patch notes, let me know!

Welcome back!

I'm sure someone will come along to better brief you on the many changes of the past year, but I can point you to one of your new best friends for info www.paragonwiki.com From updates to user-created advice pages, you'll likely find something informative every time you visit.

If you don't mind picking over Issue notes one by one, Paragon Wiki is a solid source.

I've also been gone a while, but things i've noticed:

TF's give you merits now, instead of a choice for reward, longer/more challenging TF's give more merits. These merits can be used on purchasing specific recipes, salvage, inspirations or even Enhancements or used for a random Recipe roll.

You'll get prompted to auto exemplar/sidekick to a team who's leader is high/low-er than you.

TF's will auto exemplar you to there highest level, but you'll still have access to powers from five levels higher. Nice for us running 50's in something low like Positron.

PVP got revamped, everyone stopped doing it.

There's a couple new Epic Archetypes for villains, and come next issue they'll be unlocked by getting a villain to 20. Same with Kheldians.

Considering the forum you posted this in, I assume you're hoping for news on power and AT changes.

They finally fixed the chat channel custom colors so they stick.

E mail can now be turned off or set to friends/SG only; and soon, you'll be able to mail inf and items.

As far as power changes go:

Dominators got rebalanced. Domination no longer boosts damage, the extra damage was added to the basic AT modifier instead. Dominator powers in general got rebalanced; especially Psi Assault. Psionic Shockwave was "nerfed" - technically, it used to be bugged to be much better than it should, but the devs let the bug lie because just fixing that would have crippled the set. These days, it's just a good power, while the rest of the set got buffed to compensate; TK Thrust especially was changed from a minor damage kb power to a strong single target attack.

Dark Melee got buffed; Siphon Life is now a heavy attack, and Soul Drain and Midnight Grasp were "front loaded"; most of SD boost comes froin the first target it hits, and most of MG's comes up front and not in the DoT.

Invunlerability also got buffed; Invincibility was front loaded, the -def removed from Unyielding some other tweaks.

Energy Aura got a weak heal.

Electric Armor had Conserve Energy switched for Energize, which adds +regen.

There was another round of Power Proliferation, a few new powersets.

The Walk inherent power was added.

The purchasable Martial Arts pack added Ninja Run, which you'll see all over.

Thanks for the replies, guys. I had completely forgotten about paragonwiki. I did go back through the Issue notes and it was very helpful.

In general things have improved over the last couple of years; while the PvP changes were disliked that only affected a small minority of players... most of us really weren't aware of it other than in a vague "lots of stuff changed and the PvP'ers don't like it" way. It did chase a lot of the PvP crowd away though which is unfortunate.

Architect has had a bit of a rocky existence with all the exploits and super easy PL'ing it allowed leading to much readjustment and nerfing of AE. I tend to think of it as a good idea that needed to be developed a bit more to close loopholes prior to release. There was a period of "AE Babies"... new players who were playing level 50's and had never left Atlas Park... some hadn't ever slotted an enhancement. I haven't seen so much of that lately fortunately but it was bad for awhile.

The new Super Sidekicking feature was a huge plus, it completely eliminated the need for mentors... everyone will always be at the level of the mission holder or one level below. Higher level players still get XP when exemplar-ed as well, and they retain their powers up to 5 levels above the mission level.

Overall the game's going strong; issue 17 promises some more improvements to quality of life and Going Rogue is approaching and looking very interesting based on the limited information we have so far.

Most hit the highlights, but check out paragonwiki. I been away for a year myself, and i am having to hit Paragonwiki myself.

shoot i read online about PAX today, and CoH just updated announcements today.

It seems the last year or so, they spent alot of time, upgrading the internals of the game. You can now color your most of your powers. GR is going to have choices in missions, to send you good or evil (so my guess is that required ALOT of internal coding changes with contacts etc)

Issue 17, dark mirror is going to be going some time SOON. lol It has major changes to things like the environment in outside zones, reflections, cast shadows, and ambient occlusion per the videos. More fixes and overhauls on things like AE.

They also gave news on 18 (GR) and 19 (Incarnates is the name of that expansion). GR has the precurosrs of 19 in it, the first part of the new endgame system coming. GR is like 4 new zones, and atleast 4 new enemy groups. All sorts of stuff. I guess when we get 19, we will also get enemies that we can fight with our new incarnate powers too.

Lets see, demon summoning, dual pistals, electric control and KINETIC MELEE (looks cool as hell, my next lol) are coming soon. And we probably will also get a power set proliferation with that soon as well.

Over the past year or two, the amount of change this game has gone thru to re-invent itself is becoming impressive and almost staggering. I think alot of last year has been internal, to fix the engine for future upgrades.

The future is looking bright. WB.

I can't wait for the new power sets. Kinetic Melee especially.

I'm also looking forward to being able to take my Robot Mastermind (Technomancer Etc) over to Hero side. I already got a good idea for rewriting his bio.

Incarnates too? Finally!