Eva Destruction

I don't PL, but I do run on a static team every Tuesday. We only play those characters on that team. They level fairly fast, even faster now that we can crank up the difficulty.

I have absolutely no attachment to the two characters I got to 50 on those teams. They are just a Tanker and a Corruptor. They are not characters, they are roles on a team. They never had a chance to develop. All their weaknesses were compensated for by the team, and all their strengths were in service of the team. Level 50 in under 100 hours. I never got a chance to know them.

Now all those characters that I solo a lot, turn off XP half the time on teams, spend hours on in Mids, spend hours with at the market, take the time to write up bios, create interesting costumes, get all the accolades and the badge titles I want to wear over my head, know what they like to fight, know their strengths and weaknesses....those I know. They are characters, not just a bunch of pixels and numbers created because the team needs a tank or a buffer.

Another random story is random.

You currently can't set an ambush to have a Unique character in it and guarantee that there will only be one of him. An ambush needs to be of an enemy group.

If this happens to you /bug it. If you play an arc where this happens, /bug it.

My theory? There were some issues on test at one point that allowed authors to fill out a custom group with underlevelled minions and lieutenants to create all-boss spawns that circumvented the XP reduction for all-boss groups. This was still being discussed quite late in closed beta. What may have happened was the devs threw a band-aid fix on the exploit, that may have inadvertently messed up legitimate custom groups made up of Standard critters, and since players didn't really have time to test this, it was pushed live.

There are a few, VERY few, reasons to use Mitos. They were probably removed because adding the ability to scale scale enemies down below their proper level made them exploitable, and fixing that wasn't worth the effort, for the very very few people using them legitimately.

The LRSF version of Ms Liberty, there is no excuse for.

Hard data on what? That even on Standard, custom critters are often more difficult than dev-created critters, especially pre-level 40? That the number of people playing MA arcs is declining? That people don't want to fight custom groups? That levelling by fighting groups containing all three ranks is slower within the MA than outside it?

We may know, or at least suspect, that those things are true (although even before the xp reduction a lot of people may have been turned off custom groups by the fact that so many of them are poorly designed) but how exactly do you propose we go about gathering hard data?

I would be content to have the old difficulty options for TFs. It's still not good enough for Ouro, since I'm usually soloing it with heavily IOd 50s, but better than nothing.

Personally, I find it amusing when I get negative rep and positive rep for the same post.

I don't bother awarding negative rep, if I feel someone is truly deserving of negative rep on a continuing basis I put them on ignore. Like some other people, I do use positive rep when I agree with a post but don't really have anything to add to the thread.

Thank you for the review, and for pointing out some nitpicky little things that I missed.

I had one of those point-by-point replies all written out and then the power flickered and my computer rebooted, thus sparing this thread my long-winded reply. The short version:

Mission 1: The bulletin board is supposed to be included in the "employees to find" objective. I tested it after reading this post, and it worked fine. Don't know why you got "2 employees to find"....bug?

Mission 3: The issues with the liquidation teams are probably due to a recent change in the map used, since my original map was rendered unusable with the i16 addition of "middle" spawn points in front of the door and way in the back. On the original (slightly larger) map one or both would usually spawn outside of "trigger patrol dialogue" range. Might have to tweak them somewhat. Will tweak Legion Black's dialogue to indicate that he leads team Alpha.

Mission 4: Crey do go up to 50, but after 45 they are all tanks. These are annoying and tedious, so I added a couple of less-tedious customs. I had to call the group "Crey Security" since just calling them "Crey" made my customs not spawn. The crate is a destructible since when the arc was published you couldn't do chained blinkies, and it remained so because of some wonkiness with blinky spawn points on this map, and to allow guard dialogue. Might have to tweak the clue to incorporate the fact that you destroyed all the emitters but one, which is currently indicated only in the Global message. Fake Keyes does have a clue, or at least he's supposed to.

Mission 5: It should be timed. It was timed. Then they introduced a bug that made the timed mission auto-fail when the captive escaped, so I had to take the timer off. The briefing text field is maxed out, so there is no room for "This mission is supposed to be timed but there is a bug that causes it to auto-fail, it's been around for months, pester the devs to fix it!"

I've been seriously considering making Alwani an escort instead (barring the bug that makes escorts stick around and follow you, even if you set them to leave the mission) but I'm not sure if that would be too annoying, since he has a 2/5 chance to spawn on the opposite end of a fairly large map.

General comment on clue-less objectives: There are a lot of clues already, and the arc is pushing the file size limit. I had to pick and choose which objectives warranted clues. Some of the optional objectives didn't make the cut. The body bags in mission 2 are just there for flavor, to show that the freaks aren't messing around, and the one in mission 3 is referenced again in Keyes' rescued dialogue; the laptop might get a clue though.

Again, thank you for the review.

There have to be explosions. Superheroes blow stuff up. Supervillains blow even more stuff up. No thank YOU, people like Michael Bay, for giving shiny, eye-candy explosions a bad name by tying them to "plots" that don't even measure up to glorified toy commercials.

But yeah, Rikti war. Plenty of explosions there. And let the Freedom Phalanx stay in the background. Make up some original characters for the movie, and let them develop over the course of the war. The main characters of the CoH movie should be more like War Witch and Apex; characters more like the ones we play, not some "uber-awesome" premiere superteam that was designed just to be uber and awesome. Also, I want to see Steven Sheridan in his "Doc Science" persona in there somewhere.

The problem with fighting a group designed to exploit whatever hole you have in your defenses with fire armor is that you have quite a few holes for them to exploit.

So it is with some trepidation that I suggest my arc "Freaks, Geeks and Men in Black" (161629). One custom boss and he's not particularly tough, a sprinkling of fairly easy custom minions because the all-tank Crey you get at 45+ are tedious and un-fun, the rest is all standard enemies, but it does contain two missions full of Malta. If you're ok with fighting Malta, I suggest this arc.

Yeah, I think the "unlimited budget" thing is the drawback. It's harder to softcap than /SR, and therefore more expensive, or at least so I've found. You also don't get that recharge buff /SR does.

My DM/Shield Scrapper is a monster. She's my first toon to solo AVs, and she's no slouch in regular missions either. Soul Drain > Shield Charge = lots of dead stuff. My first indication that this one would be teh awesome was on the ITF that I dinged 50 on; the entire rest of the team wiped on the ambush at the Oracle, and then I realized that nobody had led her to the altar....So I went and grabbed her and did it, while surviving 8-man Invincible Nictus boss spawns. No other character I have has ever done anything like that.

For pure carnage it would have to be Eva Destruction (AR/Fire). AoEs, AoEs and more AoEs, near-perma hasten, Build Up + Full Auto recharged every spawn. Her evil counterpart Dawn Apocalypse (AR/Dark) is no slouch either, again very high recharge, plus she can actually keep people from dying.

If it's a lowbie arc, you should be using customs sparingly anyway. The fact that they are way overpowered for a lowbie is far more annoying than the reduced XP.