Eva Destruction

Extreme Bosses? No thanks.
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Dream Paper
#1874
Level range: 11-20 with a 15-20 mission. Adorable kittens should know better.

My contact is Alfonse Rubel, and the Lost are overrunning his crash pad. He doesn't know why, but he wants them gone. Ok.

I get a little explanation of why this apartment building looks suspiciously like an office, and some patrol dialogue suggesting the Lost are looking for something. The remaining tenants consist of an Outcast and Grandma Yan...who decides she feels safer following me into a firefight. I find a jar of paper leaking...drugs? It suggests the Lost had already found it...if that's what they were looking for, and they'd already found it, why are they still looking?

So it's Grandma Yan's "medicine" they were after. Improperly stored and suspicious looking medicine. Can I see your prescription form Grandma? Ok, so she's being drugged by the Tsoo? You would think, if a guy dressed like a ninja handed you some improperly packaged "medicine," you'd start questioning whether he was really a doctor? Anyway, Alfonse is mad and wants me to go after this Tsoo drug peddler.

Well ok, so it turns out he wasn't giving Grandma Yan anything bad after all. That might explain why the Lost left it there. I heard some Outcasts too, in a canon tie-in that is really not necessary.

Ok so the Lost weren't after the powder, they were after the paper. I am once again confused as to why they just left it there. Now it's been taken into evidence, and they're busting into a secure police lab to try to get it back.

And now the Lost have turned this into a holy war, as is their wont. They are forcing their captives to read their "scripture," fortunately I rescue them before they get to the "thou shalt wear a television on thine head" part. What they did see is pretty freaky apparently. While recovering the evidence, I catch an inadvertent glimpse of teh freaky. Time to put it down and back away slowly...

Conveniently enough, one of the captives is immune to the "scripture," and able to tell me what's up with it. Two hours? Huh? So within these two hours, Alfonse got it, gave it to Grandma Yan, the Lost showed up, I took it, got it to evidence, and the Lost tracked it there? Seems like that would take longer than two hours. Unless someone's reactivated it somewhere along the line...

Ok, so the stuff was planted? This might make sense, except the Lost are trying to get it back. Who's Mr. Blaloch? And why would anyone bother donating pieces of paper, or go out of their way to give it to an old lady? If it's origami paper, why would she use it to wrap up her medicine, and if it's ordinary paper she could buy stacks of it cheap.

Trolls actually do have lairs in Steel Canyon all the time, due to random assignment of story arc missions and paper missions, but anyway...I do find out the source of the Dream Paper, and now it's time to take it out.

Some smashing and clue collecting later, as well as a fight with an inadvertent distributor, and the dream paper ring is finished. As is the arc, with a few things left unanswered.

For one, how did they convert the guy to their cause? If it was the paper, then wouldn't they want it distributed, to convert as many people as possible? If the purpose of the paper was to distribute "for crazy homeless guys with TVs on their heads' eyes only" messages, it's a lot of effort to go to, considering some of them are psychic, and some of their dialogue, as well as the Rikti info suggests they have some level of telepathic communication available. There's also the problem of the two-hour time frame, as well as the fact that cheap yellow office paper is, well, cheap and unremarkable, and not worth passing around, especially if an old lady is just using it to wrap her medicine: 1) wouldn't her supplier wrap it up for her, and 2) a pad of paper you can buy for a dollar would last her a very long time if used for that purpose.

Despite that, as an investigative arc it was pretty well done.
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I'm now level 16 (Mez protection at last! You lowbie arc authors do love your Madness Mages, don't you?) and won't be accepting any more submissions that cap out below that. I could probably use another one or two <20 arcs.

The blue room with all the water in it. It isn't as bad as some of the rooms in Council maps, when you have blinkies to find and there are a million places for them to hide. Council maps only annoy me when they contain blinkies in some of those rooms.

The blue and brown caves are also annoying only when they have some of the really bad rooms. There are blue and brown cave maps that are relatively painless. There are also Oranbega maps that I find relatively painless. And then there are maps where I waste half an hour hunting down a blinky. I hate those, and for the love of [deity], don't use "random" cave, Oranbega, or Council maps.

Yes, I know a boss can be optional IN THEORY. Not so much when it's an EB standing right in front of a required blinky.

I guess what I'm saying is, making something "optional" is not a license to turn it up to 11, or for that matter to include an AV without a warning.

Oh, and another thing I dislike: defendable objects as required objectives. They are very squishy and nearly guaranteed to fail on teams or high difficulties. I might not downrate for them, since it's a legitimate objective, but I don't like them, especially if a blinky would work just as well.

Not much to say. I think it was intended as a parody of generic missions, but not much was done with it, so it ended up being a just a generic mission. The usual "glorified paper mission with a humorous boss at the end." Although at least what was there was actually funny, if you don't mind meta-humor.

There is no such thing as an optional objective, unless it's a blinky. Bosses especially are not optional. They have an annoying tendency to spawn in hallways, unless you're using an outdoor map, and then there is no guarantee they won't spawn within aggro range of a required blinky or captive. Not everyone has stealth.

I agree with everything he said. Especially:

*cough* Fire Armor *cough*. If you're going to use it on an EB, add a warning in the mission description. Fire Armor EBs have 90% Fire resistance. This makes them IMPOSSIBLE TO KILL for some characters.


This too. Especially if it's in an arc not marked as "challenging" and is sprung on you all of a sudden at the end of an otherwise fairly easy arc. "Challenging" means challenging throughout, not maps full of standard Council culminating in a "Custom" AV with all the powers selected to avoid the "Extreme" warning.

I have seen much gratuitous use of these, usually to make sure you receive clues in a specific order. There is no story reason to use them, the player doesn't learn anything new from one objective that suggests another one, there is nothing like "you need a password from the boss to get into the computer," it's just that the author feels their clue order is so vital it justifies wasting my time. If those clues would make no sense in a different order, those clues need to be rewritten.

Another one I've now run into twice in the last two days: Mobs that give no xp because their "concept" requires removing standard powers, but are no easier than a standard mob. And are part of a custom group used heavily throughout the mission. I don't mind a spawn or three with lousy rewards, but a whole arc with lousy rewards because either the author doesn't understand how the system works or just HAS to have a bunch of petless MMs with cranked up defensive secondaries is a waste of my time. If you don't understand the mechanics of AE, there are plenty of resources you can look to, and if your "concept" requires removing powers you need to be more flexible with your concept.

I found this very hard to judge, as I had played the arc before, so I had some recollection of the storyline.

The biggest problem with a team was that mission 2 was extremely chaotic, and the required bosses were lost in the shuffle, and with no clues attached to them it made the story hard to follow. There were also very few Family on that map, considering the family feud was supposed to be the inciting factor to all the chaos. This was exacerbated by the "which side is that guy on again?" aspect once we got on a first-name basis with everyone. I admit I am bad with names though.

The fire imps were very much a filler group, with some contrived attempts to shoehorn them into the arc. And yeah, stacking Smoke. That was me complaining, after eating a few yellows and still being blind. Also, I did see a named boss (Katrina something) spawning with the optional boss of the final mission, should she be set to "do not autospawn"?

Nemesis doesn't do a lot of time travel. If he did, he'd go back and warn his past self that his latest plot is going to fail. Or maybe he did go back, and his past self figured that was part of the plot...

Our Nemesis is going around systematically eradicating the other Nemesisises. Unless that's just what he wants us to think.

There's those plastic surgeons in Icon that can do it for you like, now.

That's only because the robots are feeling out our weaknesses and lulling us into a false sense of security.

I for one welcome our new robotic overlords.

Huh, so they do.

The Grandville map only has "any" locations though, so it could still be the source of the problem. Since it'll allow you to fill those twice, I'd also suggest manually counting your objectives to make sure they don't actually exceed the limit.

Sometimes that number is wrong.

For example, the St. Martial map says it accepts two captives. You can create two captive details, but only the first one will spawn.

This gets even more confusing if a map allows "any detail type" placement. In that case you have to actually go by the numbers listed in the map description (and then make sure those are right), since the editor counts those "any detail" points twice: once for bosses, once for captives.

The problem with any rating system is that if you don't like the same stuff as everyone else it doesn't help you very much.

However, even with that caveat, the current system needs work.

Then the problem is likely that the map allows you to place more "boss" details than it will actually spawn. Those battles you added are pushing out the required boss spawns. Remove some of them, and the map should be fine.

Not the first time it's happened.

There was a comment from Positron when MA first went live, to the effect that you shouldn't have to complete a truly bad arc to give it the 1-star rating it deserves. Of course with the way the search engine works, those bad arcs would sit at 0 stars and 0 plays forever if you had to finish an arc to rate it. It works both ways, it means the author's friends would have to actually beat the mob of Extreme/Extreme AVs to 5-star it.

Those are good ideas, although I'm not sure about rounding up. Four stars is four stars, and the search engine should be modified to reflect that a legitimately 4-starred arc is still worth playing.

You can only give a custom critter two powersets.

Create an optional "fight a boss" objective, set the alignment to "ally," and give them all the "unconscious" animation. You'll have to mess around with spawn placement, since they'll get up and fight if approached by a hostile.