Dr_Mechano

The portal Hopper badge is just a normal badge mission he gives out...

guessing that I'm simply going to have to wait to get the Rularuu axe...

Still the souvenier from Automatic Villainy shouldn't reference Last stand on Mole Point Bravo if it's not actually his first arc and Paragonwiki needs to swap them around.

Stupid Naylor...just give me the damn axe already...

yup Naylors was the only story arc I had open while it WAS open. What he said (see quote above) doesn't indicate that I already had too many open...he specifys that "come back when you can handle what it takes"...which seems to suggest I need to be of a higher level.

That particular story arc does have Soldiers of Rularuu in it, which only run from 41-50 according to the MA...

...so it may be that Paragonwiki is wrong and that it isn't a 35-39 arc...in what case that does need to be changed...

Arc I've already done was Automatic Villainy.

The arc I want to do is called Last stand on mole point Bravo.

Been trying to get the Rularuu axe unlocked for a long while now, I've hit 35 and done the first arc Naylor gave me...which, according to Paragon Wiki is actually his second arc, the souvenir even references the first arc as if I've already done it...

now the problem is he simply won't give me his second (suppose to be first) arc, saying that I'm not high enough level to do it but he gives no indication at what level he would give out his second arc. Paragonwiki lists it as 35-39...which I'm guessing it actually isn't...

So anyone know why Naylor is being a stubborn goit and not handing out the story arc which actually unlocks the Rularuu axe?

his exact dialogue when I talk to him is:
[ QUOTE ]
It's nothin' against you, mate, but this is one a' them really high-end gigs. It can't go wrong, or it's me neck. So, you want the job, come back when you got what it takes to handle it.

[/ QUOTE ]

The story arc I want to do is Last stand on mole point Bravo but the arc I've just done is called Automatic Villainy...

[ QUOTE ]
Not really funny quotes but it was a funny moment for me. I was in Crey's Folly with my blaster toon flying low and was approaching a group of Nemesis soldiers on some rafters when two of them shouted to me:

"Stop! I have orders not to let you pass!"

"Stop! You cannot pass!"

But I flew right past them anyway. I can only imagine their fustrated expressions after. :P

[/ QUOTE ]

"Stop you cannot...oh what's the point...he's not going to stop even if we asked him nicely...I mean...the only reason I want him to stop is so we can have a chat about the great Lord Nemesis, possible recruitment drive, give him a flyer, see what he thinks, tell him about our amazing dental plan and your own Nemesis double just for looking at the flyer..."

"...I'm so lonely sometimes..."

Some awesome ones from one of Naylors missions
[ QUOTE ]
Random Arachnos member 1: "Have you tried reading the manual for this thing? "
Random Arachnos member 2: "No."
Random Arachnos member 1: " 'Then initiate the over frequency amplifier while maintaining the etheric alignment.' "
Random Arachnos member 1: "It reads like stereo instructions!"

[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]
Random Arachnos member 3: "Do you have any idea what this thing does?"
Random Arachnos member 4: "Sure."
Random Arachnos member 4: "It's a phase transiter."
Random Arachnos member 4: "It, uh... Monitors phase states..."
Random Arachnos member 4: "and, uh, transits them through, uh..."
Random Arachnos member 3: "You really don't, don't you?"
Random Arachnos member 4: "No."
Random Arachnos member 4: "I'm living a lie."

[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]
Random Arachnos member 5: "What the heck does 'Harmonic Chronomitron' even mean?"
Random Arachnos member 6: "Man, I joined Arachnos because I couldn't afford a good education. Why are you askin' me?"
Random Arachnos member 6: "Well, that and the shooting people."
Random Arachnos member 5: "True. The shooting people is pretty good."

[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]
"Why do I volunteer for these things?"
"You'd think I'd have learned after Aeon had me collecting Shivan slime last month."
Combat start: "Why do these things keep happening to me?"

[/ QUOTE ]

Man working for Aeon really does suck for regular Arachnos.

[ QUOTE ]

5) 80's Saturday Morning Universe - You can be a hero however you have to possess a mount that can talk/has human intelligence, a ridiculous side kick who is either an idiot or has powers that malfunction frequently and a companion of the opposite sex who you may never treat as anything other than a "good friend" and who invariably wears a skimpy outfit just to torment you.

[/ QUOTE ]

Where do I sign up for this universe?

Also your forgetting...GI Joe was an 80s cartoon, as was Transformers, Pole Positon, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors,UylsseeEEEeeeEEEees (nobody else can do the things you do!) 31.

There's a lot of scope in that 80's cartoon universe...almost...MMO worthy infact... (dun dun dunnnnnnn).

Edit: There's already an PnP RPG of 80's cartoons anyway...could use their ruleset..

Actually I'd just like to see a tights option like males get that simply makes the muscles more defined (you can have bare muscular or smooth) that way you could have muscular women without the need for a new body type.

In order to slove the nudity option...there simply isn't a 'bare' option for it, it has to use one of the 'tops with skin' options as a pattern.

Brain in a Jar ala Clockwork King please...

...if you want to keep him unique...remove the eyeballs and have just a brain...don't ask how it sees...it's just cool!

[ QUOTE ]
That is without a doubt the coolest custom case I've ever seen. Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that I'm a rabid Girl Genius fan.

[/ QUOTE ]

Sorry but I have to say that THIS is the coolest case mod ever!

Oh and there's a Dispenser to go with it...

Actually it didn't.

While yes they were immune to taunt they weren't immune to the various aggro management abilites.

Warriors had to use sunder, which reduces armor but gives out a lot of aggro with each application. Hunters could use Misdirection which caused the aggro generated from the next three shots to be dumped onto the team mate they cast it on.

While we lack the aggro management skills in City of Heroes we do have an aggro system, so while tankers would be unable to use taunt on some encounters (I don't mean to say ALL encounters should be like this otherwise the uniquess of the mechanic is wasted) they could still go in and build threat using their AoEs and smacking the hardest hitting target out of a group (and with the fact Tankers attacks generate more threat than other ATs) before the rest of the team begins blasting away at their respective targets. The tanker would tie up that mob for the duration of the fight so it wasn't wandering around beating the hell out of the squish team members.

There's a very interesting and actually one of the better 5-man instance dungeon bosses in WoW, the mechanic turns up twice.

It's a 5 man team, literally designed in the same way the standard player 5 man band for doing the instances would be.

The first version (quote from WoWwiki):
[ QUOTE ]
These mobs behave like a pvp group with a mage, healer, warrior, rogue, and sometimes a dynamite tossing goblin. Can't taunt them so they go for healers. Not too hard if done with a mage. Every enemy who fights with theldren is immune to a warrior's taunt, so crowd control is a must.

[/ QUOTE ]

I've done this fight once and I have to say it's probably the hardest fight in that instance because of the reasons above, the traditional crowd control method of taunting the mobs just doesn't work but other classes with CC abilties would HAVE to use them otherwise the healers would be killed far too quickly and it made everyone work for their loot. The NPC healer would heal intelligently as well, when his whole group was low, he'd throw up an area heal, when a specific target was getting hammered he would throw out heals to that target, meaning he had to be the first to die.

The second version:
[ QUOTE ]
All 5 of them must be defeated to beat the encounter. The style of fight is similar to an arena 5v5 match. Fears, Freezing Traps, Stuns, and Disorients work on any of the NPCs. Individual NPCs are crowd-controllable in additional ways, as listed above. However, they are all immune to Taunt, Enslave, Mind Control, and Seduce. The NPC pets can be affected by Taunt, and seem to follow normal aggro rules

[/ QUOTE ]

The group had a random makeup, it was always a healer as the main boss with 4 mini-bosses randomly chosen from a pool of 8.

Again that fight was normally harder than the end boss just after it due to the fact that you had to focus on every crowd control method but the standard one of just letting the warrior take the beating and often became 1v1 situations where other classes would take out their opposite number (lord know why when the ranged should target the melee and melee target the ranged, I think it's a personal matter of pride honestly, I know I would always aim to take out the NPC hunter in a one on one fight and have my pet tank his pet).

I loved those two fights because the mobs were actually on equal footing with the players, I could DPS down the enemy hunter by blowing all my cooldowns at once, he WOULD use his crowd control ability on the healers even with me holding aggro.

Those mobs weren't big sacks of HP, they didn't have any ability the players didn't have but thanks to the way their aggro worked, made the fights very memorable, more so than any other encounter in that particular instance in the second variants case.

That's what I like to see more of here.

Sorry to drag up this thread from the second page of the forums but...

...There is one contact Redside who rather obviously IS a Carnie with their mask removed, Vivacious Verandi, her will has been replaced by that of 'the carnival mistress' (according to her info).

So that does raise questions, are the masks important to controlling Carnies, since Verandi seems to be equally under the carnivals thumb yet obviously doesn't wear a mask.

Her arc is the infamous one that has Hardcase tell you to 'behave or else' with regards to stop the mischief and chaos you've been making for Verandi and he says it in such a way that it really peeves most redside players off who would gladly tell Hardcase to take a hike or pummel the everloving hell out of the wannabe hero.

My apologise TonyV, you also make that list then

As for That_Ninja, if you haven't noticed, the topic of discussion has actually moved completely away from the original post and its topic, I essentially admitted I was, for all purposes, being a prat.

It has now moved on to how we're all grateful the devs aren't the WoW devs and how these forums are actually very good manners and behavior wise compared to virtually any other MMO out there.

An interesting point.

World of Warcraft, 5 regular mobs (or 2 elite mobs) can completely overshadow the mighty adventurers who have, if they've been raiding since classic.. Slain 4 green dragons, 1 Blue Dragon, slain 3 fully grown Black Dragons, untold number of empowered drakes, an elemental lord of fire, several servant of the old gods, two old gods, the 2nd most powerful being on the planet twice, a gigantic demon, the 4th and 5th most powerful beings on the planet, the 3rd most powerful being on the planet, a corrupted titan (essentially a god) and a blue dragon aspect (a dragon god).

You think we have it bad when you've been through all that and the regular bad guys at the start of each new expansion in a number of 3 or more can give you trouble, by now you and your buddies should be the most feared thing on the face of the earth, with you around, why on earth would anyone decided to make trouble?

World of Warcraft Raid bosses are 40 or 25 times better than a single player if we look at their numbers.

Why?

1) Big old sack of HP, bosses from WotLK onwards have 5 million to 14 million hit points. A single autoshot from a hunter will do...probably 600-700 damage and that's every 1.5 seconds.

2) big instant kill abilities. Yup WoW bosses have em and have em in spades, you think our AVs are bad, atleast tanks can resist, dodge, block, evade and generally lessen their impact. Onyxia has one move which WILL wipe out a raid, one move!

3) Dumb as a bag of rocks. Everything is based on an Aggro tabled, some AVs have a random aggro table but they still wont specifically go for healers (as one NPC puts it "go for the one in the dress you fools!").

The only difference between their raid bosses and our AVs/Heroes is that our AVs/Heroes aren't huge, we're fighting them with superpowers and the reason they overshadow us is because if they didn't...well they just plain wouldn't be a challenge on their own.

I still stand by that we should fight teams of them on an equal footing rather than one vs eight though.

Hmm an interesting idea.

To be fair there's probably some merit in it, the loot system and now the achievements system all encourage a level of one-upmanship and general "I'm better than you because I play this game for longer each, I can raid seven nights week or I got REALLY lucky with the random drop system" and WoW, like Everquest, stuck to the whole "you need to devote serious amounts of time to this game to actually get anywhere once you've hit level cap" syndrome that City of Heroes distinctly lacks.

Anyone, even casual players, can eventually get 'the best loot' do the occasional taskforce, save up your merits for the high demand recipes or if you're after purples simple blow those merits on random rolls and pray to get lucky on something worth a lot.

To be fair the mythical casual player wont actually WANT purple IOs, they're not into the whole min-maxing thing IOs represent (to a not so major degree as WoW loot) so they can just poddle along within the game and generally have a blast smacking the hell out of bad guys for 30 minutes every night.

Blizzard do seem to silently encourage the aformentioned posting style and I think I know why...

It makes any kind of sensible feedback on the forums completely ignoreable because it's on the forums...a place filled with such drivel and dire awfulness that it is a cesspool of filth and venturing into it would be utterly pointless.

Case in point, any kind of decent feedback the devs want, they actually visit a third party forum, ElitistJerks (not as bad as the name sounds honestly) because that forum is where all the hardcore theorycrafters hang out because their sick of the BS on the official forums.

Even then the devs can and will actually ignore any decent feedback because they "know what's best" (while I admit Issue 13 PvP changes did suffer from this a tad, WoW is much worse) despite the fact the community can and will point out the major flaws in their proposed plans (Hunters had a massive nerf patch recently which the devs claimed was balancing their DPS when the EJ community pointed out the nerf went that tad too far and pushed hunters past the point of doing decent DPS and into doing the worst DPS for a DPS class in the game, even if well played).

Atleast here the devs do tend to listen to the playerbase when there's a major gripe (issue 13 PvP withstanding admittedly but you don't know what's planned further down the road) and not just wave their hand dismissively going "Pshaw peasants, your theorycrafting means nothing, we know where it's at" (despite the fact they seem to rubberband constantly on hunters who really are the red headed step child of the WoW community).

Be surprised I actually HAVE been into the WoW forums and the steam forums (which a truly, truly terrible places the pair of them). You do learn to drown out the drivel though and just except that use the WoW forums (and those that post on the Steam Forums) are essentially the archetypal(sic) "Counterstrike Kiddies".

To be fair I have come to expect well, just plain more, from the City of Heroes community, it's your own fault people, your too friendly.

I admit it was probably the style of the post that did it, it was frankly rude, confrontrational and...well..whiney, I know that brings out the worst in people but at the time I was peeved about that quote from Avatea, I probably should have looked at the Dark Knight returns poster I have on my wall, taken a deep breath and gone "yes Joker, why am I being so serious about something that in the long run, really doesn't make a difference to me or the world..." it can be scary when you take your life advice from a psychotic clown but that line really does work when it comes to posting things on the internet...

To those that have provided more to this topic than just where they choose to eat and quips, replied with people that probably have more business sense and knowledge of how corporations work than I do (Arcanaville, EvilGecko, ArachnosElite and InfamousBrad, the rest, shame on you).

You actually took the time to type a reply that made a lot of sense and actually helped me see the other side of the view point in a way that was easily understandable WITHOUT being sarcastic, rude or just plain not helping. I achknowledge that what I had said in the original post was tantamount to inane drivel of someone who doesn't understand how these things really work.

Thanks to you four I probably will be spending money on the SUPERSCIENCE booster pack because I realise that by buying such a pack, I am making NCsoft stand up and notice that this game IS worth reinvesting the money we spend on it back into the company and then some from various other projects. Yes I know some of that money is going elsewhere but I really do suspect now that money from other games is being funnelled in to help their AAA western title to become truly great.

The rest, carry on you discussion about various fast food outlets you eat at, atleast those four listed actually helped to change my mind and see it from another viewpoint.

As for why I haven't replied in a couple of hours, I've been at work, where I do really wish Blockbuster would stop spending money on utter drivel like Meet the Spartans and it's ilk and focus on genuinely brilliant titles like the Wrestler (plus stop sending us 2 copies of games you know are going to sell out the day of release dangnabbit...Infamous and Prototype may not be the worlds greatest games but they're a good source of fun...the Michael Bay of games if you will, take them for what they are and don't expect more out of it).

Edit: Although this does raise further questions, Tabula Rasa and Auto Assault were judged on their own merits when the descision came to cancel them, would it have been worthwhile, especially in Tabula Rasa's case where it had turned into a fairly good game, to not use funds from elsewhere to keep it going?

To be fair there's probably overheads I'm not taking into account, employing staff to be GMs and community mods (plus their own dev team), the cost of running the servers and untold amounts of other much smaller things which add up to be a lot bigger than I can probably imagine.

Tabula Rasa seemed like a waste, it had only be out six months to a year before being canned, other MMOs have survived on the same numbers Tabula Rasa had at the time of its cancellation and even at launch the game was nowhere NEAR as bad as say Hellgate:London was (god that game was awful).

Was it a case of releasing too soon, not being tested enough, the development costs spiralling out of control (as InfamousBrad has mentioned) causing the money to run out in the testing phase of things?

Though I imagine that Tabula Rasa also had the same problem as Age of Conan has, first impression blues. The two games both had very real problems at launch, Age of Conan now struggles to gain subscribers because the first impression on release of the game was pretty poor, it wont matter how good Age of Conan gets, it will still suffer with that first impression.

Tabula Rasa would have had that very same problem thanks it is rather unsteady launch, even when it became, thanks to the tireless work of their devs, a pretty solid MMO (though it still had some problems), it still had that ghost of it's initial launch hanging over it, word of mouth had already spread.

Perhaps it was best to put Tabula Rasa down when it did, rather than to keep funnelling money into it from elsewhere to keep it a float to suffer a slow death.

Thank you Gecko, that was the kind of answer I was hoping for not some snarky response about steak and such.

I will be the first to admit that we are treated well, even if Issue 15 is a bit of lame duck, we do get vastly more dev contact than almost any other MMO I've ever been with, they (for the most part anyway) listen to what the players have to say and I do suspect that NCsoft is gearing up to really make a massive push for putting City of Heroes back in the limelight with Going Rogue.

Which I will be, I wont be purchasing any more MA slots, Respecs, Renames and despite how much I want the SUPERSCIENCE booster pack, I'm now not going to be buying that either.

And technically Booster packs are still THEIR product even after they've been bought, it's not like Steak where I can do whatever the hell I want with it when I get it home, it's applied to my account, I quit the game, that money is gone for good. With Steak atleast I'd have had an enjoyable meal out of it.

[ QUOTE ]
I really like steak. I hate tofu, though.

The grocery store I buy my food at sells both.

Do you honestly think it's reasonable for me to bang on the manager's door and demand that, because I hate tofu, that any money that I spend on steak should be used to further enhance the store's stock and inventory of steak, and that it specifically not be spent on maintaining the store's tofu stock?

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes but said store hasn't renamed it's Steak section "Paragons of Steak" with it's own little kiosk and additional attendant to run it , made a big show and tell of it to all the customers and even mentioned that thanks to the upsales of steak, they've got new types of steak in (i.e. The number of takeups on the wedding booster pack allowed the VEATs to be moved forward an issue from 13 to 12) but then all of a sudden the store is spending that steak money on Tofu.

As people KEEP missing out in my posts, we don't know enough, if money that Guild Wars and Aion is currently earning is being partly funnelled towards helping their AAA western title City of heroes to develop and progress. If that is the case, I've got no beef (sorry) with it, if the funds are only going one way (from City of Heroes towards their Aion marketting department for when it comes to the West) then there is a problem.

While I doubt the devs or mods can answer this it would be nice to know that as a whole NCsoft is just as focused towards making City of Heroes a truly epic success as they seem to be focused on making Aion appeal to western audiences.

Yes but I really would prefer to see money spent on City of Heroes going back into helping City of Heroes develope further and progress rather than being spent on say Guild wars or Aion, which is what I thought buying things like Booster packs would do.

As I said above, is the money from Guild Wars and Aion being partly funnelled into the development of City of Heroes, it's something we don't know but I do hope is the case.

Hopefully it's not being dished out on a subscriber numbers (or in Guild Wars case, expansion bought numbers) basis, City of Heroes isn't NCsofts big earner and Aion or Guild Wars 2 would probably be taking the lions share of funds if that was the case. While I don't think City of Heroes should take the lions share I hope it's being dished out more equally.

This is a quote from Avatea on the EU forums with regards the upcoming paid for additional MA slots.

[ QUOTE ]
I know how strongly a lot of you feel about micro-transactions, and if I weren't part of the team I would probably feel the same way.

I want to say this though. This is our opportunity to make sure that we get enough funding for our ongoing and future development. Bear in mind that any money an NCsoft game makes serves to finance all NCsoft games, not just ours since we are not an independent game developer.


[/ QUOTE ]

Sorry NCsoft, this may be me being selfish but if I buy a Booster pack, respec recipe, rename token or now additional MA slots I don't want that money being spent elsewhere.

NCNC was renamed Paragon Studios to show it's new design focus on City of Heroes so why on earth is money that players of said game being lumped into a big pool and then dished out accordingly.

Is the money I spend buying booster packs going towards the marketting campaign for Aion, a game I have no interest in. I understand it's one big business but I didn't mind buying the booster packs because I thought it was all going back into helping City of Heroes develope and progress, to help fund the future of City of Heroes.

Of course perhaps what I'm not seeing is that it could go both ways, is the money Aion is currently earning in Korea being soley dedicated to Aion or are we seeing those rather large funds being shifted to Paragon Studios?

Hmm a difficult subject that we definitely need to know more about.

yes but what I'd like to see is that States/Recluse remains the same but everyone else moves down a notch.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Is that what you are talking about?

[/ QUOTE ]

Where to draw the line of EB vs AV conceptually is obviously not the simplest matter, but my feeling would be the following rules:

Flunkies
Anyone who is a flunky for someone else should be an EB (at best) in all but the most extreme circumstances (ie. Silver Surfer material).

Players
Could this character be mistaken for a player (taking into account background and appearance/powers), if so, they should be an EB. This blanket would cover the entire Freedom Phalanx and co. as well as Lord Recluse and pals. They're heroes and villains, we're heroes and villains.

Monstrous
Does this character *look* like it should take a team to fight? If so AV or Monster class is fine. Dr. Vaz in his flesh-mecha, the clockwork king and pretty much all the current monsters fall under this.

Story Excuse
Recluse has activated the web? AV. Aeon and his gizmo? AV. Romulus and his massive Nictus infusion? AV. Obviously this has to do with presentation, some will be more believable than others, but personally I'm just happy so long as they *try* to explain why we're fighting an AV instead of an EB.

That's it... yes there is wiggle room and yes it will vary based on the perspective of whose deciding, but again, I'd just be happy if they *tried* to go in this direction, even if I didn't agree with all their choices.

[/ QUOTE ]

Nearly completely agree with this statement.

Lord Recluse and Statesman are AV/Hero worthy if only because they're Incarnates.

However the rest of the Freedom Phalanx should be of similar power level to the rest of us, they have more experience heroing and survived a war but any level 50 player character has done their fair share of heroing and probably saved the world numerous times, they've also (especially if they were around at Issue 10 launch or been through any of the Rikti invasion weekends) survived the second Rikti War and a Zombie Apocalypse...

Which always peeved me wasn't the Freedom Phalanx or the Four Patrons but the fact that Ice Mistral, Wretch etc were AV status...they're sidekicks to sidekicks (Wretch being Ghost Widows sidekick while she is a sidekick to Recluse) and that is just all kinds of wrong. Present them all together as a team of EBs but don't notch them up to AV status...they're NOT Archvillains...they're regular villains.

As mentioned by others, Hue Change is the first step in a much longer road to full power customisation.

If they can (or have) work (or worked) out a way to stop powers colours being 'baked in' it opens up a lot of possibilities.

The first comes to customising MM pets, not only would you be able to recolour the basic pet model to colours of your choosing (I'm guessing pink and black would be the favorite colours here) but as has been shown on the MA with Issue 15, you can recolour (to some degree) enemy NPC models, which means not only could your MMs pets be a different model to other peoples, they would also be different colours to other peoples.

With that for MM pets the next step along is 'design your own' but I think that is pretty much the biggest pipe dream compared to MM pet model replacement.

Basically even getting just the Hue change would open up the possibilities of animation choice, the devs wouldn't NEED to create whole new powersets unless it's something that you just can't pull off without doing so (shields for example). For example a scrapper 'punchy set' could simply be MA but with the option to replace the kicking animations with punching ones of the same length.