Eva Destruction

This. Is the arc about your character or is it about the player's character? If your character is a part of the player character's story, you're doing it right. If the player character is just an audience for the author insert's story, you're doing it wrong.

I was thinking more along the lines of being able to take control of them, and having them be on your side, but that would work too!

(I fell while fighting Castillo, and fought the Titan in the water. So I wouldn't have had to deal with a lot of turrets anyway.)

Probably has something to do with whatever the kids are farming these days.

Weapon sets for critters have higher accuracy, just like they do for players.

Are you using the default "Standard," "Hard," and "Extreme" settings? Of course, a lot of mission creators do. People assume, and rightly so, that for a high-level mission the "Standard" setting is too easy....and critters set to "Standard" only give 75% XP. So they pick "Hard," because that should be a more appropriate challenge right? Oh, and it gives full XP! Unfortunately, critters of Lieutenant rank or higher will have Aim or Build Up if set to "Hard." These powers have a lower buff value than the equivalent player powers, but they'll still bypass the softcap. Of course you can use custom settings to avoid these powers and still have a critter that gives full XP, but that requires more work than some people are seemingly willing to put into it.

The entire question of "challenge" of course depends on what kind of mission you're dealing with. Farms are deliberately designed to be as easy as possible while still giving out maximum rewards....of course there's no guarantee that the creator will know what they're doing. As for AE story-based missions....they run the gamut from "as easy as possible, XP be damned" to "equivalent to standard groups like Council" to "equivalent to standard groups like Arachnos" to "I'm going to kill you" with quite a bit of "whatever powers looked cool/would be thematically appropriate" and "I have no idea what I'm doing" thrown in.

Yes, yes it is. In which case, we have a problem, and we really should put him back. Otherwise, all those heroes slogged through eight hours of Dr. Quaterfield for nothing.

(Of course since we're villains, we could always get the heroes to put him back...possibly by telling them that if they don't they slogged through eight hours of Dr. Quaterfield for nothing.)

Considering the fight takes place on the same Sky Raider base that is covered in turrets in the Silver Mantis SF...yeah, that pretty much writes itself, doesn't it?

A farm is a farm, whether they're custom critters or not. No, it's not an exploit, any more than it's an exploit to fill the map with behemoths. But it's still a farm, so if you do it and it gets reported and taken down, don't complain.

Now if you have an actual story....say Bubbawheat's Matchstick Women arc. The custom group has a fire theme. They all do fire damage. This makes sense in the context of the story. They would be stupidly easy for a Fire Armor character. But it's not a farm and it's not an exploit and it won't be taken down.

tl;dr: It's not an exploit, but could be a farm. Exploits are against the ToS, farms aren't but they can still be removed from mission architect. Oh, and a lot of people don't like them cluttering up the search interface.

Probably because they're too stupid to deal with the redraw. Rikti got gun swords because people could take advantage of their stupid AI to make them easier. Giving custom critters the same disadvantage would require too much tweaking to the reward system, otherwise it would be exploitable.

Technical limitations. I doubt we'll ever get these.

Yes. Yes we would.
They would lag to hell, it would make the file sizes huge, too many possibilities for exploitable or just plain broken maps.

I have used the SG base editor extensively. I don't see how it, or anything remotely resembling it could be applied to Mission Architect. Any map editor we ever get would have to be a different animal entirely.

It would make them take up more space. Even if you chose not to use power customization, they would take up more space since there would be a power customization entry in the architect file.

Lower level enemies are too easy for higher level players. They have fewer powers, their powers do less damage, and they don't have all the debuffs, mezzes, and other stuff that higher level enemy groups have. This is why we have warnings for higher level critters appearing at a lower level than design intent. Higher level critters are just plain more dangerous.

I'd like that too. But last I checked, DisableParticleEffects still wasn't working, and there are some critters that can't even be colored.

Because there wasn't time add them. A better question is, why are they STILL left out, especially since the Doppelganger system accounts for widows at least.

Not sure how Doppelgangers are handled for squids and Arachnos soldiers since I don't have any....anybody know?

Huh, you're right. Both the villain and rogue options let you screw him over. I stand corrected.

I still want him to show up in a later story mission. Preferably at level 40+, so I can throw him in the Shadow Shard and watch him get eaten by giant eyeballs. Really, he's too stupid to be allowed to live.

Battle Maiden in the Apex TF and the DE in tip missions also have higher to-hit. War Walkers buff each other's to-hit. Ticked-off Bobcat has higher to-hit. The devs realize how insanely survivable soft-capped characters can be, and are designing enemies to compensate. I have no reason to believe they're going to stop anytime soon.

What sours me on the Darrin Wade arc is that after you find out what he's up to, the arc is over. Full stop. He's essentially used you to further a plan nobody in their right mind would go along with and you now can't do anything about it because he never shows up again.

It makes us look like fools temporarily? I'd say agreeing to allow clones of my badass evil self to exist makes me look like a fool permanently. Granted, you can let the clone die, but then what was the point of taking over the cloning facility in the first place? This is assuming your character can even BE cloned with all their powers intact, which really only makes sense for Mutant, some Science and "not human" Natural origin characters.

I started off reading her text as crazy, but as the arc went on I realized the "crazy" was too coherent. I chose to read it as her speaking to you in code, pretending to be crazy so Mother wouldn't catch on.

At least Dark Watcher acknowledges that he's not supposed to be telling you this. So you could read the Rikti Plague arc as you just playing along. Also, I believe villains find out about the Rikti from Timothy Raymond, who is a level 30-35 contact.

The problem is that Angus McQueen's arc has been rendered completely obsolete by the second Rikti invasion. The level range doesn't matter. Even at level 1, you can see that the second Rikti invasion IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.

It could be explained as an act of desperation since his princess is in danger. He has the power, he just doesn't know he can use it. So when it really matters, he can call up ALL his power, even the part he doesn't know he has. Or seeing Penny in danger prompted a moment of lucidity, in which he could tap into his full power. Since he's still crazy, these moments are few and far between, keeping him from taking over the world.

I'm not agreeing with his inclusion in the task force, as I feel it was pretty much a gratuitous cameo, just trying to offer up a possible explanation for his new power level.

Agreed.

Also, back to the topic of this thread: Roy Cooling's arc has now invalidated half of what Indigo says. All her allusions to mysterious "friends" that you gradually investigate can now be dismissed with "Yeah yeah, Malta. I know about them already. Here's a cell phone, call me when you've got something good."

The only other means mentioned were trials. Trials are team content. Granted, "packs" are usually paid for, so there's some misleading naming going on here already, but I'm not holding out hope, especially since multi-team content has been officially announced at a meet-and-greet somewhere.

Where in Black Scorpion's posts did it say that only late-game TFs would be eligible? If the TFs are selected randomly, you could very well end up with Dr. Q > Synapse > Sara Moore > STF (yes, it can be completed quickly, if you have the right team. Or it can be impossible to complete at all if you don't.) Which means you will have gone a month with no opportunities to work on your Alpha boosts.

Well if you actually like it, then yeah, I guess you could say it has a better plot.

I don't like the plot. I don't like the fact that low levels are introduced to Malta, and shown that they're a shadowy paramilitary organization made up of total idiots, I don't like the fact that it takes the emergency mediport system from a background mechanic that we're better off not thinking about too much to an actual plot point that needs to be addressed yet doesn't satisfactorily address it, I don't like the gratuitous cameo from Captain Castillo, or the incredibly contrived Rogue PPD enemy group just to give heroes a "new" enemy group to fight.

That depends if you're discussing old content or old writing. I am in complete agreement that old mission design is very much lacking and subscribes to the maximum timesink philosophy. I also agree that a good mission has to have BOTH good writing and fun gameplay. But if you cut the extraneous garbage, some of the older content could be quite good. If you cut the shinies, a lot of the newer content would be completely meh.

It's funny that you bring up Star Wars, because the prequels are a lot like the new content in a lot of ways. They are shiny and stuff blows up. They don't need to worry about telling a compelling story because stuff blows up and it is shiny and we get to see Yoda kick some *** so people will go see it and they'll make a bazillion dollars.

Granted, the original trilogy didn't make you sit through the film equivalent of fed-exes and hunt missions, and you didn't have to watch our heroes defeat every single last Storm Trooper on the map, but a lot of what people hate about the original content could be solved by simply cutting all that stuff out.

There are cats. As well as some weird rodent things that we are told are supposed to be pandas.

Which now that you mention it, makes NO sense at all. Then again, that entire task force makes very little sense, so I guess it's to be expected.

On the other hand, you do need to have these stats. Whereas a coordination-type challenge is equally open to a relatively new player, or a player who isn't concerned with IOs, or a Scrapper trio, because the minimum stats needed are lower.

Meanwhile, these "stat check" challenges are still not idiot proof. If your tank can't hold aggro, or your debuffer keeps standing in the wrong place and dying, or someone with all the "right" powers never uses them, you just spent all that time putting together the "perfect" team just to fail anyway.

I dunno, grab a Rad Emission character and find out. As far as being entirely shut down by EMPs, probably not. EMP shielding is the first thing comic book tech gets. Otherwise the fight would be over pretty fast.

Not entirely surprising. Malta does rely on lethal damage, which Rikti lieutenants and bosses resist, and mezzes and end drains, which Rikti get AM to protect themselves from.

I would suggest that the IDF would win simply because they can churn out War Walker and Olympian Guard EBs in force. They also have replacable AVs in their Goliath War Walkers. None of the other groups have any AVs except for signature characters. Cole can also conscript whoever he wants to, and devote however much of Praetoria's resources as he wants to outfitting his army.

It's also the fact that on a single-team task, anyone can step up and be an "organizer." The OP provided an example of this. I have my own pet example, of a poorly thought-out MoLGTF attempt. We really hadn't thought of how we were going to tackle Hami, we were having enough trouble finding someone to tank the damn thing. When we got to Hami, EVERYONE threw out suggestions on how to win, and everyone was listened to. We won, by the way, not by using pre-established strategies, but because every individual was recognized and expected to contribute to the team's success.

On a large-scale multi-team raid, there is no room for that. People flat out tell you "these are the leaders, you do what they say." At Hami raids, you're told to stay off Request unless you're a leader....which is just another way of saying "shut the hell up, nobody cares what you have to say." And the sad thing is, it's necessary. Everyone has to act as a cohesive unit, so you can't act unless you get a consensus from everyone, and that's much harder to establish with a large group than with a single team. At that point, talking in the "leader channel" and throwing out suggestions just confuses people.

I don't enjoy running Fed-ex missions. However I have to do this activity that I don't enjoy in order to get the reward of being able to continue with my story arc.

I'll agree with you, I don't understand people who do things they don't enjoy so they can keep doing things they don't enjoy. Unless the reward for them is to have some uber awesome toon to do these things with....I still don't get it though, probably because I use my uber awesome toons to do things that I DO enjoy.