City of Heroes Homecoming Issue 27, Page 7 Enters Beta

City of Heroes Homecoming, the officially licensed private City of Heroes server, has deployed it's first major update in almost a year to its beta server for testing.

The team wasn’t kidding when they announced the update would be arriving “very soon” just days ago and it turned out to be quite packed with new features and content. The major highlights include:

• Piecemeal’s Personal Story – Issue 27 Finale: The finale of an original story arc added to City of Heroes
• Co-Op Striga Isle & New Villain Story Arcs: Striga Isle has been converted to a co-op zone and features a number of new story arcs.
• Rikti War Zone Revamp: The Homecoming team has revamped the Vanguard base in the Rikit War Zone with new sections and multiple connections to the surface.
• Advanced Mode — Lady Grey’s Task Force: Homecoming added an advanced difficulty mode in a previous update and this latest update allows players to tackle Lady Grey’s Task Force with additional challenge (and rewards).
• Role Diversity Bonus: Players can earn a reward bonus once every 18 hours (per character) when completing a Task Force or Strike Force with a variety of archetypes present on the team.

There’s more in the update, too. New Arsenal Control (Controllers & Dominators) and Arsenal Assault (Dominators) power sets have been added, Villian Epic Archetypes received an expansion of their customization options (as well as balance tuning) and much more.

For all the details, read the full patch notes at the Homecoming forums.