Eva Destruction

Who says they're giving them away? What's to stop the Lost from just taking them? As a group, they are more powerful than these gangs, they go to 30 while the Skulls and Hellions stop at 14 and the Trolls and Outcasts stop at 20.

High-level Lost come out of Terra Volta and go rampaging through the Hollows when nobody is looking, beating up greys and taking their guns.

Lower-level Lost wander through Kings Row and Skyway when nobody is looking, picking up all the guns the Skulls and Trolls dropped when some hero beat them up.

"Extreme" in that case refers only to custom critters using the "Extreme" power settings. In your case, that would be the allies. The system doesn't distinguish (another flaw); if there is a critter inside with its powers set to "Extreme," you get the warning.

Your AV is a dev-created critter, and those generate no warnings. You could make a custom group out of Ring Mistresses, Rularuu eyeballs, Longbow Nullifiers and Sappers and get no warnings.

If you want to remove those warnings, hand-pick the powers for your allies. It's kinda cheating, but the warning makes your arc look harder than it is, when you are really using the setting to make allies more survivable (at least I was). Then it will say "Enemies with custom power selections" just like half of all the other arcs out there.

(And I played your arc after reading a review, my first attempt was a long time ago back in the days when higher-level enemies didn't scale down properly and +7 Hro'Dotz hurt me lots...the point is I read a review and knew I'd be fighting Rikti, so I assumed the warnings referred to allies.)

That makes it sound like Arachnos deliberately turns a blind eye to their operations.

The Rogue Isles don't hold elections, Recluse assassinated the previous president and took over, and he's been a dictator ever since.

They have social programs, it's called Haven House. Of course if you don't like it, Arachnos always needs redshirts.

[insert lawyer joke here]. Seriously though, it would be in their best interest to at least keep up the pretense of a justice system, even though anyone they want to go free is miraculously "not guilty" despite DNA evidence, security camera footage, multiple witnesses, and showing up in court covered in blood and chewing on a human arm.

Technically you can't kill Tyrant again. You can kill him again through time travel, but as far as your hero's storyline is concerned, he's dead. (Let's ignore helping a teammate kill him....there's really no way around that without removing any pretense at story resolution).

Characters do die in canon. If you have done Maxwell Christopher's arc, the original Nemesis is presumed dead for you. There is an arc from Crimson where you condemn a Malta agent to death. You kill Ms Liberty on the RSF (again, ignoring the fact that the RSF must be repeatable for gameplay reasons.) There are other arcs where an NPC gets killed...and yet when you run it again with an alt he is still alive.

At some point the game designers have to throw up their hands and decide that, in order to maintain a persistent world and yet allow some resolution to story arcs, each character's journey through the game must be self-contained.

We are talking about the same guys who toss torches around a place called OIL SLICK, right? Yeah, they would totally do it again.

Sale of Rikti tech is illegal, there is a mission where you have to stop Crey from doing it. So the kind of people who would be willing to "buy" the Rikti tech wouldn't necessarily be inclined to pay for it, especially once they have a ginormous Rikti sword. Rikti sword beats TV on your head every time.

The Shadow Shard zones are zones. You don't need to join a TF to enter, just go to Firebase Zulu and walk through the portal. You do need to do Faathim's TF to get inside the Storm Palace Death Star itself, but the interior is pretty much a darker, gloomier version of the one in the Chantry, where Faathim is. I'm pretty sure you can just stroll into that one, since Faathim is the contact for a TF, and I don't think there is a prerequisite to start his TF.

If I'm wrong, you there is an instance of the Chantry interior in the redside "Alone in the Darque" arc.

But this game isn't "City Where Everybody is Good." It's "City of Heroes." There are heroes. We are them. Everybody else is pretty much...like everybody else is in the real world. As heroes, we usually only meet the good ones, because they're the ones who want to help us, but there is nothing in the game canon that says the average inhabitant of Paragon City isn't as much of a self-serving, complacent jerk as the average inhabitant of wherever you live.

Every time I walk down the street half the pedestrians look like hobos. I don't live in a bad neighborhood either, people are just slobs.

Longbow/Freedom Corps are not countries. They don't get to declare war.


Comic book militaries are incompetent. If they were competent you couldn't make up your own super-powered military that follow whatever rules are convenient for the plot.

The US army is present in the War Zone. They were more present in the Crash Site, mostly they have been replaced by Vanguard, but their tanks are still there. They just never actually did anything, because they're a comic book military, so they were replaced by one with cooler stuff.

You really should go. Screenshots don't do it justice. Buy a jetpack if you can't fly, and look around. It's pretty easy to avoid the enemies even if you aren't 50 (and being 50 won't save you anyway unless you're melee), and it's a really pretty zone.

Here's some pretty purple sky:



Yep, the big "Death Star" is Lanaruu's palace. You enter it at the end of Faathim the Kind's TF. That is the only thing it's used for.

It used to be one of the few places you could find large groups of level 54 enemies, so it was used for Stupid Scrapper Tricks, but that was before X4XP and AE.

Did you miss the "at lower levels part?"

What workarounds? Choose reasonable powers for your custom mobs. Know what powers do what. How is that a specific workaround? It is called "knowing what you are doing." It also involves something called "playtesting." It's not the system's fault if people don't do it.

And the "default" setting for custom mobs is "Standard," on that setting many custom mobs are EASIER than standard mobs, especially at higher levels. They also give less XP because they are easier. That is why custom settings were put in.

That would probably solve a myriad of problems, wouldn't it? For one thing, your melee/defense critter COULD be worth full XP, if he's the melee heavy-hitter paired with a ranged critter -- or even more so, paired with a critter that debuffs, slows your movement, or mezzes from range.

For another thing, buffing and debuffing enemies would be inherently worth more if they're paired with high-damage enemies. An /Empathy boss isn't worth much on his own, because he has nobody to heal but himself. But if he starts healing everybody else....you can't one-shot him to make him stop, so it's like adding /regen to your entire group, on top of whatever powersets they already have.

It would also get rid of the one loophole that you can't close without screwing over legitimate custom groups: enemy groups specifically designed to deal the kind of damage you have capped resistance to. Fire armor farms, I'm looking at you.

People who don't understand the concept of "no matter how many powers you have, you can only use one power at a time" should be kept away from AE, and possibly sharp objects.

The "rule of 5" should probably be explained somewhere though, since it isn't immediately obvious. A player might be justified in thinking "well I love power X and power Y, but they have a really long recharge, so I have five more powers to fill out my attack chain, and this eighth power is situational so I have it just in case...every single of those powers make my character more powerful, why don't they do the same for critters?"

I wouldn't want the system to default to showing any number above 100% either. You know some idiot will look at that and think, "hey, this critter will give teh uber XPeeez!" no matter how that 200% is presented. You could paint it bright red, you could phrase it as "100% (capped from 200%)," you could put the 200% in tiny letters in the bottom right hand corner of the description screen, and it would still result in maps full of face-splittingly difficult foes placed there by someone who thought they give greater rewards.

I admit I am going from memory here, and it may be memory from i17 open beta, so that may have been fixed.

However it brings up another point: not all secondary effects are created equal. Today I fought a few Rad blast bosses. My defense? What defense? Eat two purples....what defense? Granted, a minion would have dropped before he got the second shot off, but a boss...Rad blast =/= Energy blast, which again doesn't equal Electric blast.

Check the power stats on the right hand side. It will tell you useful stuff like "KO Blow does 1200 damage at level 50." Then check your character's HP and cringe.

I honestly don't know what else to tell you. My experimentation with the XP slider has shown that its gauge of "difficulty" is not always accurate anyway, at least not by my gauge of what is "difficult" (Why do the first attacks from Energy Blast give more Xp than the first attacks from Electric Blast?), and it in no way accounts for power synergy across multiple critters (if you're making a whole group).

You can make everything else Dual Pistols/Katana and give them black trenchcoats and sunglasses so they at least THINK they're cool.

Besides, everybody knows that Eagle's Claw isn't really cool unless you put a Kinetic Combat proc in it. Do the math and you'll see I'm right, there's a coolness factor equation on the Scrapper Forum somewhere.

Yeah, that's why I suggest just adding a second attack. More customization and all. Since a character with a melee primary must take the ranged attack if they don't have an offensive secondary, and not all secondaries are created equal, sometimes you don't need the added difficulty, or XP increase, not to mention what a more frequent ranged attack would do to lower-level critters.

Except that one power blast and one power bolt looks cooler, and more like "I shoot energy blasts 'cause I'm an energy guy" than "I have to shoot this so you don't exploit me." At least I think so.