Eva Destruction

The thing is, my allies' secondaries only affect them. How do self-only defensive sets help farmers? They just make the ally live longer so they can leech more xp and tickets. That's why my allies are lieutenants, they are part of the story but I don't want them to leech. I would like them to not be shredded though.

And my elec/rad ally is using his heal just fine, when he is injured. He AMd me too.

I have a mission with two allies, one DM/Shields and one AR/Regen. It seems that since the last patch, they aren't using their secondaries at all. They both have their secondary cranked up to Hard (for survivability, since they're lieutenants) but my Shield character was running around without her shield out, and my Regen guy wasn't healing at all, even when he was almost dead. He did rez when he died though.

Anybody else have this happening? Is it just because they're lieutenants, or did allies in general just get squishier?

Also they weren't playing their "stranded" animations on a warehouse map, but played them just fine on an outdoor map.

Melee characters DO have access to jetpacks you know. The nice thing about caltrops, as opposed to other AoE slows, is that you can fly off them. Well, unless you get webbed by a lieutenant, but you can kill those first and....who am I kidding, Knives, Malta and Carnies are TEH HARD and we need MOAR RIKTI!!!

Ok, I agree it would be very difficult to make an arc where you conquered the world, and make it convincing. However it is possible to build an arc where you end up one step closer. It is possible to build an arc where you go act ruthlessly as a means to an end, rather than the "being a jerk IS the end" villainy of Westin Phipps.

Westin Phipps is not a villain. He's just a bully. Whatever will I do with a blind mother and her children? Don't care, not my problem. That's the kind of stuff you should be doing in Mercy Island.

I wanna be a supervillain people! Think Dr. Doom, think Nemesis. Only, you know, without the part where they always lose.

The "Axis and Allies" arc sounds like it has the right idea.

I guess you'd have to define what you consider "REALLY BAD." There's the puppy-eating, nun-shooting Westin Phipps kind of bad...which doesn't really appeal to me. I'm a busy villain. I can't take time out of my schedule of holding small countries for ransom, building death rays, and assassinating people who don't agree with me to squish a bunch of insignificant peons.

Then there's the kind of REALLY BAD I like to play, which I guess you could define as TOTALLY RUTHLESS. I am bad, I want to take over the world and rule it with an iron fist, and I will squish any insignificant peon who gets in my way. That's the kind of bad I want to see more of, because there is practically none in dev-created content.

I'm working on a villainous arc where you end up with some nasty WMDs of some sort, and during the arc you show a general disregard for life, property, and human decency. Not sure when it'll be done though.

I say, if you need them to tell the story, use them. A lot of these "annoying" enemy groups have great story potential.

What you could do, to cut down on the annoyance factor, is make a few custom knives critters, without the caltrops, and mix them in.

Weeeeelll, if you want to get techinical, according to canon AE missions are completely non-canon, so....

Not sure about the archery on that boss, when I think "Longbow" I think "Why are they called Longbow if they all use guns?" (unless your group is deliberately trying to live up to their name) but the costumes do look nice.

If you use the right map and put the battle in the right place it will spawn when the player is near, and the player will likely see it. But you have to fiddle a lot to find the right map, and usually set the battle to Medium difficulty at least.

Yes, I want fake fights too.

And yet, my Malta Gunslingers (boss objectives) are fine. My Zenith Mech Man captives, however, were not.

In fact, all my defeat boss objectives were fine, even though my arc uses a Zenith Warcry boss and Archon Burkholder, both of which iirc have default descriptions over the 300-character limit. The only problems I've had with stock character descriptions were with the aforementioned Mech Man captives and an Infernal Demon ally.

What kind of cops you get depends on your level. The SWAT guys are 20+, the uniformed and undercover cops are the lower-level ones.

The giant robot is still there, cause chicks dig giant robots.

Yep, same problem, but only with captives in my case. Clicking "Default" didn't fix it. I had to delete some of the description....which meant it was no longer the default description, so it now takes up precious precious file space.

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I really can't even see how you can have a good story and boring missions. Missions are pretty much the same. There are certainly ways you can make a mission a grind, but about all you can do to spruce it up from a normal CoH mission is to add the novelty of custom foes.


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so you have that misconception. That's the point.

People will discover this is not the case - and hopefully the devs will improve the tools to make it even better.

Prevent 30 firbolgs from escaping, defend the reactor from waves of foes, these are very different missions from the normal move through a map and defeat each spawn in sequence.

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Those missions are interesting because they are unique. I know plenty of people who hate the "Stop 30 Fir Bolg" mission. I like it because there's nothing else like it, but if there were 50 of them, it would get really old really fast.

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Ambushes, patrols, defendable objects change the dynamics of a mission.

enemies that talk, npc's that interact - these change the feel of being in a mission.

A mission should not be 19 standard spawns standing their silently pounding their fists, then 1 boss spawn who talks. When people realize that and what they can really do with a mission - then we will start seeing much better missions.

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People are doing that now. The tools are available, if someone chooses not to use them it's not the limitations of the architect that are to blame.

They seem to use the same skin, at least close enough that people won't immediately say "hey, that's a villain CoT map!" like they will with office and warehouse.

They do have different layouts, or at least the same layouts numbered differently. So if you can't find a layout you like under one, try the other, I guess.

*note: When dealing with the CoT tileset, "random" is not an option. The MA claims it is, but it LIES.

I am only slightly kidding.

Does it let you pick from the standard group "Pets" when creating a custom group? I know you can have the boss-level Mastermind pets as boss objectives (listed under the "Pets" enemy group), and I've run a mission where I had Mastermind zombie minions as allies, so they're in there in some capacity at least.

Incidentally, when I had the zombie allies I could control them like a Mastermind. I already had my pet window open though, not sure if it opens automatically.

The ally bosses talked as you walked by, and it was a fairly linear map so you had to go through all of them to get to the blinky. Seriously, it's late and I'm drinking, don't make me look it up. The arc used the SFMA tag and had to do with vikings, and warned about a reward-less mission in the description.

A bunch of cool new guys standing around on a cool new map is still a bunch of guys standing around waiting for you to come along and shoot them.

There are plenty of things you can do with the mission architect now that makes the mission more than just a bunch of guys standing around waiting to be shot and a bunch of stuff to read. And honestly, there aren't that many things in dev-created content that we can't do in MA to enhance the gameplay aspect.

You want to talk gameplay? Ok, I think the final mission of Silver Mantis's task force is way more fun than the ITF, despite predating it by two years. Especially since you can't just team-TP your way past anything that you have to not be an idiot to beat.

Ok, imagine World Wide Red told in five missions, using only the maps that arc uses. (And without the giant robots, because NOOOO, they can't just limit them to outdoor maps, we can't have them at all.)

Now image the RWZ storyline told in five missions, with all those "cool new maps" it has. (Which we've all seen a zillion times unlocking the Midnight Club.)

Which is the better story?

Pretty easy to do, just pick a map where every spawn point can be replaced by an objective (this one used one of the troll caves), place as many allied boss spawns as you want, and I guess you'd fill the rest of the spawn points with stuff that triggers off the boss objectives you placed. Which, since they're allies, you can never complete. Then add a blinky, so the mission can actually be completed.

Just FYI, the Giant Robot map from the Hess TF is one of the ones where every spawn point can be replaced, although you will get shot at by the turrets.

It's a bug. There was a thread about it a while back, I don't think a solution was found.

I've played missions where some allies belonged to <ally group> and some belonged to <enemy group>, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it.

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I suppose there's not much detail here... I'm just trying to avoid re-inventing Dawn Summers (or worse, Jar Jar Binks).

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Or worse, Fusionette.

Seriously, having to rescue someone once is fine. Having to rescue them AGAIN in the very next mission, not so much. And if your plucky young hero uses obnoxious powersets or is an overpowered kill-stealer, the sympathy quotient just keeps going down.

I've seen a lot of it on legitimate missions too. Allies with buffing powersets help the player with tough EBs without killstealing too much.

How do I know this? Not farming....

And why do they call them Meow farms?

I played an arc, can't remember the title, where one of the missions did not contain a single enemy. There were a few allied boss spawns that said things as you walked by, and you clicked a blinky to complete.