Zombie Man

Anything attempted after saying "Watch this!" will be a spectacular failure.

Normally, and we're talking the norm, what happens all the time, the servers are down 2.4% of the time in the space of a week for maintenance.

This week, the week of a patch update, which happens, normally, about once a month, the down time is 5% of the week.

Next week, it will go back to 2.4%.

So... let's cut out all this talk of "Zomg! why is it *ALWAYS* down!!!!!11!111???"

Other MMOs do indeed have as much, if not more downtime than CoH. So, let's not say things which are demonstrably untrue.

Forgot to mention The Super Challenge Deadly Apocalypse: The banners share the same spawn spots as the Giant Monster from the normal Halloween event. In Kings Row, I went to one banner and Eochai was literally on top if it with his Unseelie attendants. In another zone (I think it was Atlas or Galaxy) Eochai was close enough that others brought him in on accidental aggro.

Strategy: If you have only a handful of people at a banner, or time is running low, have someone lead the GM away. They can be a huge time sink for this timed event.

Feedback:

• One of the reward was a medium inspiration (for when you already have the other four rewards). I'd recommend changing that to a roll on the magical salvage table (common, uncommon, or rare) -- the same roll table found in the Brainstorm-to-InventionSalvage conversion table. It's more fitting for the event.

• Wimpy GM -- After the several minute onslaught needed to defeat the Banner. The GM is very anticlimactic and goes down in 30 seconds. I'd like to see that beefed up; however, if it is beefed up, then a single team in a zone will have trouble completing the events. So, here's my suggestion: Have each Banner spawn a Greater Mystical Aspect at each of the Banners; but you only have to beat one to win the event. Once one is beaten, the event ends but the other three GMs are still there until they naturally despawn. This way, a single team can beat the event; and if the zone is loaded with many teams, then there's plenty of GM to go around. Also, this obviates the need for a wonkily working distance locator.

• Trick or Treating -- Please, please, please: Make the trick-spawns use the 'purple' damage scaling code that GMs and just about every other zone event critter uses. (And for those zone events that still don't use them -- Steel Canyon fires and Skyway raves -- change them to purple damage scaling code, too.)

Clicking on the <*i*> in the nav bar brings up mission info. Golden Girl posted the lore info. Here is the mechanics info:

Tactical Summary
The Haunting Banners are surrounded by powerful magical barriers, initially rendering them invulnerable. As you defeat Defenders, the red progress bar will begin to change as blue appears, signaling that the Banners are becoming vulnerable. Once the Banners are vulnerable, they focus energy and grow stronger, indicated by one or more glyphs that 'activate' as needed to protect the Banner.

Pay attention to these glyph markers on the ground: they represent the Banner's level of protection. The more glyphs that are visible, the stronger the Banner's protection. Each Banner has its own type of protection, indicated by the color of the glyphs.

As each Banner is defeated, the Event UI icon 'blacks out' and also disappears from the MiniMap. If all four Banners are defeated in time, a Greater Mystic Aspect appears. The UI changes when this happens and shows the distance to the Aspect.

So, what happens is this:


1. Event announcement of unusual magical activity in a zone.

2. If you're in the zone at the time:

• lights go out in buildings
• fog descends (like Dark Astoria, but not as dark)
• citizens cower and flee
• spooky old horror movie music

3. A minute later the four Banners spawn marked on the minimap with red, blue, green, and purple dot-icons.

4. If you're near a banner, you GUI is taken over and you see in the nav bar four badge-like icons for the four banners and a red bar. Also, there is a 20 minuter time counting down.

5. You have four minutes to get to the zone and form up teams and arrange yourselves at the four banners. (Five minutes including the first minute from announcement to banner-spawning.)

Strategy: It is helpful to use /broadcast and have teams communicate with each other. And rather than each team take a banner, it's easier to ensure coverage of all four banners by having each team split up their members among the four banners. That's because if you have less than four teams, you'll need to split teams anyway. You must have the four banners being 'worked' simultaneously to proceed to the next step.

6. At the 16:00 minute mark, foes, i.e. 'Defenders' will start to spawn at the banners and attack you. By defeating a steady stream of them at each banner, you start to wear away the protective glyph protecting the banners. Contrary to a rumor floating about, the 'Defenders' do not have to be Elite Bosses. With only two or three people at a banner, you barely get any Bosses, let alone Elite Bosses, and this minigame progresses without the spawning of Elite Bosses. (In fact, the EU Test Server had a single team beat the event.) As you defeat the Defenders, the red bar in the nav window moves from red to blue.

7. Once the red bar goes completely blue, it disappears and now you can start destroying the Banners. The Banners have very high resistance and they regenerate hp. It's nearly impossible for just one to three players to take down a banner by themselves (at least not in a timely fashion). Thus, strategically, if you don't have at least a full team of 8 or more at a Banner, it's best if everyone in the zone run to the same banner and overwhelm it. For small zones, it's easy to go in the order of the icons of the Banners (and clicking the icon pops up a waypoint to get to it). For large zones, it's best if a zone event 'leader' announces the Banner and travel by order of nearness.

8. Once the four Banners are destoyed, a Giant Monster will spawn in the zone (called a Greater Mystical Aspect). Your nav bar will indicate how many yards away the GM is and you can triangulate on its position. GMs go down very quickly once you start getting more than 10 players there, so, hurry. [Previously, it was said that the Defenders rush to the GMs position... I don't think that is the case anymore -- I tried to use the Defenders as a guide to find the GM and they were chasing the *players* or doing nothing.]

9. When the GM is defeated, there will be a pop up reward window.

Object.

Not to mention providing support for Aion now.

The saddest part of Jump Bots is that there's almost never a situation where they need to jump.

It took three years to get the Lich, which has to play nice with it's melee brethren, to stop doing Knockback and do Knockdown instead.

So, there's hope...

Guide to Types of Respecs

(I just got around to updating the first post... now that we can do that.)

Thanks!

Just a suggestion: the lists of things to do could use a little more formatting for readability. You might want to think about making them into Google Docs so that you can easily format them and update them and the links to them never change.

You might also want to check out similar guides listed in this post under Guideposts to look for / Long range planning.

Naming a game port when starting the client could possibly speed things up. See here:

paragonwiki.com/wiki/Client#Game_Ports

Create a MA mission and set it to level 38. Once you get your team together, start that mission. If that doesn't automatically change everyone to level 38, then have them enter the mission and exit it --- that should ensure everyone is level 38. Now, Go. Kil. Rikti.