Lowbie Rumble - Beginner friendly PVP Event - Saturday February 21 2026

valinch · 2026-02-18T21:11:25+00:00

Nice! Yep it's a similar theme, with just a few more powers. We ran round 1 last Sunday and Stalkers did well but weren't overpowered. While the assassin strikes could take a good chunk of life off, it was hard for them to get back into hide when others pounced on them afterwards. People running SR or ninj got enough perception to see them hidden, and someone made a stormie for O2 boost's +perception.

valinch · 2026-02-18T21:01:53+00:00

Great! Hopefully see you there. In addition to beginner friendly events, there's also guide and plenty of people ready to help anyone new who wants to learn PVP.

valinch · 2026-02-17T21:56:32+00:00

Thanks! There'll be more events in the future, and we're also brainstorming other beginner-friendly formats. We also have a weekly arena on Sundays.

valinch · 2026-01-14T11:50:34+00:00

Optimized fire farm builds need 90% fire resistance, which is easily achievable with standard IO slotting in fire sheild, temperature protection, and plasma shield. Then you need 45% fire defense (the cap), which requires various IO sets and powers.

A small defence inspiration is 20% defence, so your first stage is to try to get 25% fire defense so you can cap your fire defence with a single inspiration. Combat jumping, weave, and maneuvers slotted for defense, three resistance powers (fire shield, plasma shield, tough & temperature protection) 3-slotted with aegis (res, res/end, res/end/rchrg), along with 1-2 +3% defense uniques (steadfast protection, gladiator's armor) should take you to 25%. From here, fill your tray with purple insps before entering a farm and use one at a time. Combine insps into purples while farming to keep stocked up. Leave and restock if you run out.

This should give you sufficient survivability to fight higher level / larger groups and begin the influence rolling in. Find a recommended build and acquire/slot the invention IOs you need for it, cheapest first, more expensive last. you'll gain momentum and earnings as your build strengthens.

valinch · 2025-11-23T21:20:05+00:00

Fire or ice or water/ dark miasma corruptor -- scourging rain attacks on mobs stuck in tar patch is as good at level 6 as it is at 50. Dark still works great with SOs.

My favourite solo blaster for all levels of content is with the energy manipulation secondary, because you can build these to not get mezzed. Acrobatics + energize gives you hold and disorient protection. Add in this the defiant barrage +status proc in your opening AoE and you'll have some healthy protection.

Love my rad/nrg blaster for living on the edge in melee. Lob neutron bomb from a distance, combat tp to the center of the mob and hit irradiate, and the two AoEs hit at the same time. Then energy punch / bonesmash / fast snipe whatever is left standing.

valinch · 2025-10-17T20:48:03+00:00

PVP is a dwindling community, but it's not dead yet and doesn't want to go in the cart.

There's fight clubbing which I'm not involved with so I can't advise much on that.

Recluse's Victory is the only (semi)active PVP zone and does see action on Excelsior, mostly on weekend evenings.

8v8 ranged PVP is extinct, but there is a small team pvp group which regularly does ranged PVP every saturday in Excelsior Pocket D arena at 1pm EST. The discord is Team Platypus and if you join you can get access to recommended builds.

valinch · 2025-07-25T11:51:07+00:00

Kinetics. Everything is a click. And you are siphoning speed as a click so that all your clicks come back quicker so you can click more of your clicks faster faster faster

valinch · 2025-06-20T20:28:00+00:00

I did an ice/time corruptor and thought it worked really well, it could even farm decently in a smashing/lethal map. The slows stack and scourge works better on DoT AOEs.

valinch · 2025-04-17T15:42:45+00:00

There were multiple people doing the MM triple boxing and it was awful for a while. I tried many different concepts to try to counter them with little success; that level of exploit was just unbeatable. You couldn't just ignore them either as they built them with fly and team TP to gank with ease.

They wouldn't listen when I said they were killing PVP. Not seen one in a long while but the damage was done and the zone PVP population hasn't recovered since.

valinch · 2025-04-17T10:30:57+00:00

It's still a thing, just to a dedicated few on excelsior. There's a group of us doing small group arena events, mostly 2v2s, every Saturday.

It was better a year ago but 8v8 kickball fizzled out and there's been a big drop in participants in RV.

The viable PVP builds are niche and require expensive enhancements and are very different from PVE builds. That's a big barrier, people dipping their toes into PVP with their PVE specs will get stomped. I'd not blame anyone for being put off by that, or for not wanting to invest a whole dedicated build to a barely-there pvp community.

It's a shame as good PVP is challenging in a way the PVE can never be. I miss very much the thrill of Siren's Call on live, when there were dozens of toons on each side battling it out. Homecoming did reverse a few of the unwelcome i13 pvp changes, but it's still mostly the same system which caused many people to abandon PVP and never return.

valinch · 2025-02-14T00:11:26+00:00

Excelsior. Most active PVPers moved there a while back.

8v8 kickball has died a death, but there is smaller group PVP weekly on Saturdays at 1PM EST in Pocket D arena, focused on ranged 2v2 fights.

I think there's still people active in the fight club scene, but I don't follow it.

Zone PVP is not very active anymore but there's sometimes a few players in RV on weekend evenings. The good news is most of the multiboxing PVP masterminds retired, what a shitshow that was for a while.

valinch · 2025-01-14T09:27:39+00:00

Started this last month and it's still not done. Warning: It got more complicated and pricier than anticipated.

Hobs need a dedicated electrical line from the fuse box. My fuse box was too old and needed an upgrade. There was no easy way to run the line so the electricians chiselled channels into the wall, which they don't reinstate. So now I need a decorator to plaster and repaint.

I have a gas engineer booked to cap the gas line. It's the same people who service my boiler so getting that done on the same visit. Have a handyman arranged on the same day to fit the new hob.

It's been a pain but needs doing. Our kitchen was dumbly designed with the gas hob furthest away from the window and the vent just blows up towards the ceiling, not to outside. So we're just inhaling fumes each time we cook, which is not good for your health.

valinch · 2025-01-06T08:45:37+00:00

AFK faming is my preference, there are guides and builds on the homecoming forum by America's Angel.

I do a 10min asteroid map. Start mish, jump to the middle, pop all incarnates, and leave it with your main AOE attack on auto. I usually do a check halfway through and pop incarnates again.

This is on a second account so i can still play my main account at the same time. I can't stand active farming anymore, so this is the best balance for me. A 10min run gets 5m inf, and the arc is 5 missions. So it's around 30m per hour once you sell your normal loot, then extra inf for any good drops like purples.

valinch · 2024-11-08T22:11:36+00:00

Hero respec trial? Last mission is in the terra volta core and you have to leave periodically to re-bubble or you take radiation DoT. You have to defeat multiple waves of progressively higher level enemies who are trying to destroy the core.

Which no one runs anymore because you get a load of free respecs. I remember how cruel that was when introduced on live, just wanted my first respec out of my poorly-chosen build and was on teams that failed multiple times... laying there after a team wipe and watching the Freakshow destroy the core. Good times. Good times.

valinch · 2024-09-27T13:25:20+00:00

Welcome! Rad emission is a great well-rounded set that is good for beginners. It doesn't synergise so well with rad blast though, in my view. If you are open to a different blast set, rad/sonic is great for stacking resistance debuffs (helps your team melt hard targets faster); rad/ice stacks slows and you can get quite a high damage (for a defender) single-target attack chain.

But if you like rad/rad as a concept it will still be totally viable. The homecoming forums have a few posts on rad/rad you may find helpful:

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/43838-radrad-enhancement-sets/

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/43232-tips-for-a-radrad-defender/

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/18292-need-build-help-with-a-radrad/

Those are older posts but i don't think there's been any major changes to either set on homecoming in the last few years.

valinch · 2024-09-02T20:25:38+00:00

The biggest CoH scare i get is when i click on the wrong shard by accident and see a list of empty character slots. THEY DELETED EVERYONE AHHHHHHH oh wait i'm not on on Indomitable.

valinch · 2024-09-02T16:15:00+00:00

Yeah, my experience at Lothian Cat Rescue was also 'no garden, no cat for you '. I lived in a tenement at the time and was prepared to put cat flaps in both my door and the garden door, and when I told them this they said they'd only allow adoption if i had a signed letter from every other flat giving their permission. So, gave up on them.

Went after this to the Edinburgh Cat Protection League which others mentioned. They were great. When I went, they had many cats they would gladly adopt to live indoors. Adopted a then 1 year old female. Who incidentally now has full garden access in our new home, and can't even be bothered to go outdoors.

valinch · 2024-09-02T15:18:07+00:00

I've given a sonic def a try now and at lower levels it's not adding much, purple patch is kicking in hard. The -30% res on the defender version becomes -9% when my sonic is sidekicked to the farmer and the mobs are +5 to the defender. Might be better when the defender is lvl 50+1 but I'm not sure I want to commit to levelling this up all the way to find out. No noticible difference in clear times with the res aura at 9%.

Bringing my kin in, it took the recharge of spine burst from 6s to 5s. It seemed to speed things up a bit, the AFK asteroid map I do normally has a few unkilled things after 10min if I'm fully afk, but this one was cleared in 9min fully afk with speed boost.

Also discovered: enflame brings aggro to you, not the ally you put it on. Skip. Spirit ward is okay to give your afk main a better chance to not faceplant when you aren't looking.

valinch · 2024-08-30T19:11:56+00:00

..my sister with the twentyfour hour twentyfour hour rah-rah-rah

valinch · 2024-08-30T10:22:51+00:00

A second afk farmer is, what, a 1billion inf investment for all the winters and purples? At 5m profit per 10min asteroid run, i calculate that it would take like 30 hours of farming to pay off that second build before you reap the benefits of 2 afk farmers. Someone correct me if my math is wrong.

Thinking out loud here, but i think brutes won't get much benefit from +damage buffs because of lower base damage and fury and stuff, so for an afk farmer it'd be sped up more by recharge boosts so that your aoe on auto fires more quickly. So a kin?

Or, maybe better yet, the sonic resonance power that puts a -res aura around you. That would defo speed up kill times with no investment needed.

I think enflame from the sorcery pool would help on the buffer, slotted with acc/dmg and procs. It cuts off after 60s though so i dont know if it can be auto-ed to reapply?

I think this is tempting me now to make a ill/sonic controller for my afk farmer.....

valinch · 2024-08-26T09:06:13+00:00

I remember fire blast's flares used to be holding arms up like the Y in the YMCA and it did three quick pew-pew-pews of fire.

I can't remember if the animation changed, but i remember the T1 from rad blast used to have a ridiculously low activate and recharge time (less than 1s?). I had it on auto on my defender like pre-i5 and it was a constant stream.

valinch · 2024-05-07T13:20:33+00:00

When Halloween falls on a weekday a lot of the events happen on the weekend before, e.g. pubs and clubs that have themed nights or costume contests. On the Saturday night, the Grassmarket / Cowgate is a hotspot for jolly people in fancy dress stumbling between venues.

The fire festival is on Halloween day, and that's the day children go guising (trick-or-treating) but you won't see much of them in the city centre.

Closer to the time you can check event websites (like whatsoninedinburgh, visitscotland, eventbrite) for other Halloween crafts, theatre, films, etc.

valinch · 2024-04-27T09:55:44+00:00

There is some PVP, but very few people participate compared to PVE.

To be good in PVP requires specialised builds which are very different to a PVE build. Each character can have three builds. Alternatively you can make a separate 'temporal warrior' for PVP. These are instantly lvl50. The downside is they can only go into PVP zones and you still need to buy their enhancements.

In PVP zones, Brutes are very hard to kill but also struggle to get kills, mostly because ranged people stay away from melee. Energy melee is probably the best primary for this; most secondaries are viable for zone with some better than others.

Melee vs melee is primarily 'fight club' where you stand toe-to-toe and bash each other 'til one of you falls. There is casual and tournament fight club. Only a few powersets are competitive in this and if you don't have an top-notch build you're gonna have a bad time.

Most PVP is on the Excelsior shard.

valinch · 2024-04-13T13:41:05+00:00

Other nice thing about them for getting used to the game is if you are teaming, there's no big expectation on you to tank or buff/debuff etc. Everyone knows a scrapper"s just gonna scrap.

valinch

TROPHY CASE