It’s finally here, and by here we mean on the Brainstorm beta server: City of Heroes Homecoming’s first big patch since April 2023 (and obviously its first since announcing it had secured a license to operate from NCsoft two weeks ago) is finally up for public testing. We’d had teases, but now we have full patch notes and of course open access to try it all out before launch thanks to the PTS.
Most notably, Issue 27 Page 7 includes two new powersets: Arsenal Control (for Controllers and Dominators) and Arsenal Assault (for Dominators). Unsurprisingly, the powersets borrow heavily from the existing Assault Rifle, Devices, and Traps. If your ears can tolerate the rat-a-tat-tat of Assault Rifle, you’re about to be super happy.
For endgamers, HC is revamping quite a few of its epic power pools in order to balance them and reduce that feeling that you have to take a certain one that violates your toon’s theme just to compete; it’s also adding a ton more to flesh out the offerings across archetypes.
The page also offers the Second Chance At A First Impression personal story finale in the Rikti War Zone, a revamp of Striga Isle to make it co-op and stuff it full of new arcs, a revamp of the Rikti War Zone and the Vanguard base, an advanced difficulty mode for Lady Grey’s TF, some much-needed buffs for Storm Blast, buffs for Council and Circle of Thorns enemy groups, some nerfs for Cold Dom and Storm Summoning across non-Defender archetypes, and (blessed be) a halving of Sonic Resonance’s Liquefy cooldown to 150 (which is still too long, but as a Sonic Res fangirl, I’m cheering). Plus, there are new costume parts, badges, emotes, vanity rewards, and a long list of supergroup base items.
Finally, the team is instituting bonuses for task forces and strike forces with diverse party makeup (as opposed to whatever the steamrolling single-archetype meta of the day is). Incidentally, we asked whether hybrid epic archetypes count as all of their roles simultaneously, and the answer is an exciting yes – go roll some EATs, fam.
We don’t have a release date yet, but last patch took about two weeks on the public beta for launching, so that’s probably a good estimate. You can go snoop everything yourself on Brainstorm right now until it’s on the live servers.
And speaking of those live servers… they broke peak concurrency again last night.
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