InfamousBrad

The guy who barked at the original poster was rude ... but I don't entirely blame him.

Especially hero-side, where the ratio of people who want to be on teams to people who are willing to start teams seems to be about 20 or more to one. Whenever someone complains in a global channel that they can't find a team, I suggest to them that they start one. The reply is always, "oh, no, I hate forming teams." So what we have here is a widespread cultural expectation that (a) recruiting is hard work and (b) 19 out of 20 of us are entitled to have the same 1 out of 20 of us do that hard work for us, on command, and we're entitled to be cranky and feel that there's something wrong with the game if there aren't enough of them around 24x7.

I'm not saying I'd bark at the original poster. But then, I solo a LOT. (Personally, what drives me to want to bark at people is when I'm solo, have my "No invites" flag on, and still get "Can I join your team?" /tells. Look, if I were interesting in forming a team, I wouldn't be in a hurry to recruit people who can't read.)

I asked a similar question back when I was reading the Blue Cow city of heroes comics, when War Witch originally died: what would you consider an acceptable reward to risk going into a mission where if you didn't rez within a certain amount of time, either via rez powr or an inspiration, your character was perma-dead, name retired? Would you do it for a history plaque? A special badge? Would a statue of your character if you perma-died, somewhere in the city (say, in Boomtown when they rebuild it), be reward enough?

Anybody who'd say yes to either of our questions is a more interesting player, to me.

I think Lady Sadako has all of the prophesies right except for #12, which is almost certainly a reference to the Statesman Task Force. I read "Create new thing which heals or harms, accelerate the race of arms, A million more to buy and trade, the inventors must all be paid, A flood of brains rain in the town," as a reference to the mad-scientist orientation of Arachnos. Which could mean anything, until you get to "but evil lurks to bring all down, The helmed one strikes with draining web, the war comes to a crucial head." Could the "draining web" mean anything other than the web weapon that's draped over Grandville, the one designed to funnel all of the world's super-powers into Lord Recluse? The "war" that comes to a "crucial head" is the cold war between the US and the Rogue Isles, which would truly be over if Lord Recluse were even more powerful than he is now and if the rest of the world had no superheroes to resist him.

Before I say anything else, I want to say thank you, thank you, thank you for getting us this information in time for the $WINTER_HOLIDAY sales. ...

Not that you made it easier for me. I'm not 100% sure I can get a 260 into this case, and a 285 is probably out of my budget even if I could fit it in. I had been looking at going deep into the hole to get a widescreen laptop, but almost all of them use 250s, which you didn't mention, but are probably about comparable to a 9800.

I will say that it's going to be with mild regret that I ditch my now-aging XFX brand 7950 GTX. This thing's been the best graphics card I've ever had, a real work-horse, and I got it cheap the same way that you're recommending to people that they save money: buy the absolute best 2-year-old graphics card. My 7950 is now, what, four years old? and still runs CoH with all settings maxed out even in the middle of a Hamidon raid or a saucer raid.

I should be able to bring my squid again, at least for the beginning of it.

That being said, I'm dying to know if a low level brute has any prayer of doing this and not hitting the debt cap.

I put a little more thought into your exercise, and I do see one potentially useful hero build that would stay at level 5 indefinitely. Well, three closely related builds: broadsword or katana or maybe dual blades plus regen on a scrapper. Why? Regen scrappers get both Fast Healing and Quick Recovery by 4. Take two attacks, and 3-slot with accuracy TOs; stick one heal and one endmod in FH and HR. You won't be hitting for much, but after the first hit the def debuff will be enough that you can hit consistently from then on. Your defenses are pure passives, and they're pretty good passives at that. You could solo with that build reasonably well, and as long as there was at least one tanker, defender, or controller on any team you SSKed to, you could probably survive and be better than nothing. Barely. Of course, you'd be toast the first time anything with a mez attack even coughed on you.

Edit: Yeah, going to level 10 expands your options substantially. You can even frankenslot with uncommon set IOs at that level, and by level 10, some (but not all) tanker, scrapper, and brute builds even have their mez protect powers.

I feel like you're really crippling yourself by setting the limit as low as 5, if for no other reason than that you're effectively ruling out anything but corruptors. There's nothing in the world more useless than a mastermind before the first upgrade power, unless maybe it's a stalker without assassin strike. Dominators typically get their first interesting-to-a-team primary power at 6, too. And with only TOs for accuracy, and not enough slots to slot for anything but accuracy, no brute is going to be able to hit anything, or hurt it if he does. That limits you to corruptors, where you're most likely to find secondary powers that are team buffs or auto-hit and your primaries are more likely than the others to have useful side effects.

Among corruptor primaries, I'd be inclined to stick with Ice Blast for the recharge debuff or Dark Blast for the to-hit debuff. Among the corruptor secondaries, there are a lot of good choices, but the ones that really jump out at me as useful even with TOs at level 5 are Dark Miasma and Radiation Emission, or just barely maybe Pain Domination.

And since you only get four powers and four add-on slots at level 5, here's what I'd do, if I were going to do this at all on a villain, a dark/dark corruptor: 1 Dark Blast (1 acc) and Twilight Grasp (3 acc), 2 Tar Patch (1 rech), and 4 Darkest Night (3 endred). Every other fight you get to give your team +30% damage from the Tar Patch. And if they don't kill the anchor, you get to give them all +15% def(all) and +30% res(all) by debuffing all the enemies by that much. If it doesn't kill your endurance, you can pick one enemy and Dark Blast them repeated, adding another 7.5% to-hit debuff (effectively +7.5% def(all) to everybody on your team versus that enemy) to the 15% from Darkest Night. And you still get a weak AoE heal that has some slight chance to fire.

Now, if you were at all tempted to increase that to level 6, picking any mastermind primary and combining it with Dark Miasma, same slotting, would let you replace that worthless TO-slotted Dark Blast with minions with actually useful attacks. I'd go with Mercs, if I were never going to level beyond 6, because their defense debuffs would help alleviate your rotten accuracy from lack of slotting. A level 6 mercs/dark mastermind would be slightly better than worthless -- and hey, any time you SSKed to 18 or above, you'd get a medic.

Do you have your own dedicated map editing person on staff to finish the job of filling in the missing maps, then start in on new instance maps for us? Or are you stuck begging for time from the same general pool of artists who are mostly busy on canonical content, to work on your projects on a catch-as-catch-can basis?

I still cling to the hope that the mutant-themed booster pack will contain all of the missing anthropomorphics parts: horse, dog/wolf, bull, squirrel, bird, raccoon, skunk, and weasel heads and ears and tails, bear heads, and big "paw" gloves. (Also: monstrous fur legs and feet for female characters under bottoms with skin.) Seriously, how weird is it that the only animal-themed heroes and villains we can make are cats, bunnies, lizards, reptiles, and insects?

If the mutant-themed pack is something else, then I hope that they release a pack like this one separately. They could call it the Well of the Furries pack.

You know what I want the most? A Josh "Shag" Agle -themed booster pack. Costume parts, mostly: fezz hat, bubble spacesuit helmet shoulders, leopard-print jackets, Hawaiian-print shirts, leopard-print tops with skin,* cigarette holder detail 2, floral lei chest detail. It should also come with tikidrink and martini emotes. And what I'd really love is a Shag-like cat non-combat pet, an organ-grinder monkey non-combat pet, and a Vespa travel power, but I'm not holding my breath on any of those last things. Come on, Shag's space-age tiki-lounge art style is a natural for this game!

* No, we don't have to have two-color tops with skin for this. Make the spots black.

I think I'll be there again. The character copy tool didn't run in time for me to bring any lower level characters or any heroes, but I'm leaning towards showing up in Cap au Diable with my level 30 brute, just to get a taste for how this feels on a lower level character. If we can't put together at least two teams of six, redside, though, I'll move over to a hero-side character.

I was on the six-villain team already mentioned. This was a *tough* fight. I've been on easier Hamidon raids. In fact, counting the time to spawn the Winterlord and the waiting time to get into the portal, I'd say that it took significantly longer than any Hamidon raid I've been on in the last couple of months. And, yeah, despite substantial regen debuff from my Assault Bot's plasma cannons, and all three Warburg nukes, there was no way we were going to take him down in that timer. If the timer'd gone 80% longer, I think we could have done it. If it'd been 100% longer, I know we could have.

So given that it takes as long as a Hamidon run, killed about the same percentage of us as a Hamidon run, and requires organizing a team roughly 1/3rd the size of a Hamidon run, I'd call 6 merits "insulting." As long as it takes and as much work as it takes, you are not going to see anybody doing this after the first week, not if it's only 6 merits.

I'm hoping that you set it very conservative and are timing our runs at this, in order to calculate the actual, final merit reward? If so, please remember to factor in the average amount of time it's going to take one to two full teams to spawn a Winter Lord in the first place. Thank you!

Other than that, all I want to say is that Lord Winter's pocket portal is a beautiful map, one that makes me wish we had winterized, snow-covered versions of all the zones that would replace the existing outdoor zones during the same server maintenance as the one that activates the winter event, and revert during the first server maintenance in, say, February or March. Seasons for the win, especially ones as pretty as snow-covered Croatoa. Maybe some day. In the meantime, beautiful artwork.

Oh, and the new /em snowflake emote is very cute. Almost kawai.

Edit: Two more things I just remembered.

Contrary to what it says in the patch notes, the version on the test server does not turn off [Walk] when you slip or slide, including on the ski slopes. The result is hilarious looking, and harmless, but probably wrong.

And we had a level 50 team running around Cap au Diable clicking Mysterious Gifts. As in prior years, they were spawning (that I saw) as level 13 to 20, and might have gone lower, that is, the level range of the zone. Now that we have super-sidekicking, if you're going to allow people to click presents in zones below the level where they could trick or treat (and given the nature of the Lord Winter sub-event, you almost need to), it would be worth the effort to make the "You've been naughty" snowbeasts level-less, if there's time between now and when it goes live. Please?

Right, I did forget to mention that they changed the timers this year. This year's timers SEEMED to be: 10 seconds per door, can't use the same door for 60 seconds (not as sure of that one), no restriction on using a door someone else has just used. Does that match other peoples' experience? There also seemed to be what I was guessing was anti-macroing code, where sometimes the doors you'd been using would all just lock up on you until a longer timer had run out or until you left the area and clicked one new door.

Deadly Apocalypse 2009: This is new for 2009; there is a 25% chance that any apocalypse event will schedule this instead of zombies. Four banners appear, representing monsters, ghosts, fiends, and women; an odd selection, and one that provoked some discussion of misogyny on at least one of the global channels I'm in.

Players have 16 minutes to defeat all four banners. How to do so is, and I want to stress this, not documented anywhere in the game. A buried hint says to go talk to Anna or Granny Beldam; they do not have the instructions, either. That left players to find out the mechanism to defeat the banners by trial and error. This resulted in roughly half of the Deadly Apocalypses I participated in failing, and failing in a manner that generated long, loud, personal, and very hostile arguments over whose fault it was that the event failed; people who had guessed wrong or learned it wrong were consistently very angry that those of us who did know wouldn't do it their way, and insisting that if instead of half of us doing it right and half of us doing it wrong, if we had all done it wrong, it would have worked. Those arguments alone made me very tired of the Deadly Apocalypse long before the end of the event.

(For those who ignored it or who learned it wrong, the only way to unlock the banners is to defeat a specific number of enemies at all four of them simultaneously. If enemies are not being defeated at even one of the four, the unlock process will not even begin. No matter how fast you are defeating them at one, or even three, of them. However, once the banners are unlocked, it is essentially impossible for anything less than a full team of 8 to defeat a banner; they have too much regeneration, and will shrug off the total damage output of even three level 50 characters. So you must split up to unlock, then combine to defeat. Get it right, next year.)

16 minutes to defeat all four banners is very tight timing for an average team, especially in the lower level zones. In Mercy Island, where most team members have no travel powers and the island is divided in half by a high wall with only one door, it may actually be impossible without at least four team mates who have the Assemble the Team veteran reward. But I hesitate to suggest that you lengthen it, because 16 minutes is a long time to lock all NPCs out of the zone if nobody's fighting the banners, if we're just waiting for them to expire. I don't know what the best possible answer there is.

Once all four banners are down, a random Giant Monster with a special name appears somewhere in the zone, and everybody who was at the last banner to fall gets a distance indicator on their compass. Everybody needs to track down that monster FAST, even though it has an incredibly long timer on it, because the giant monster is, frankly, a punk, and dies in seconds to the first six or so people to show up. If nobody from your team got there, or if you get there too late to get a high enough share of the damage, your whole team misses the reward.

Speaking of rewards: there are no rewards other than normal XP and inf for unlocking the banners. Each banner gives a badge when defeated. Defeating the giant monster gives a badge, two merits, and one of four temp powers: two ultra-short-duration long-recharge mez powers, and two ultra-short-duration self-buff auto powers. By comparison to the temp powers from the Winter Event, thse are weaksauce, but at least they are new rewards.

Zombie Apocalypse 2009: Each zone spawns either a Zombie Apocalypse or a Deadly Apocalypse (below) on a recurring basis. There is also a chance of one or the other whenever someone turns in event salvage, year 'round; half of those will be in Paragon City (and environs) and the other half will be in the Rogue Isles. Zombies spawn using the same code as Rikti invasions; defeat a certain number of minions, lieutenants, and bosses, and one elite boss, for four badges.

As with Rikti invasions, it remains impossible for any team, or even multiple teams, to win the boss or elite boss badges without at least half of the team being level 30 or above. In theory, enemies are level-less; in practice, they're level 30 enemies, with level 30 enemy powers and resistances; you get (effectively) temporarily sidekicked up to level 30, but your powers don't get level 30 enhancements and you don't get any new powers. What this means in practice is that in Mercy Island in particular, which is a far out of the way zone never visited by high level characters (unlike Atlas Park), a Zombie Apocalypse is just one pointless team-wipe after another. This is actually slightly worse for zombies than it is for Rikti; even fewer low-level characters resist toxic damage than the mix of energy and lethal that make up most of the Rikti attacks.

At the midpoint of this year's event, because of complaints by heroes that it was taking them too long to get the badges, a decision was made to speed up the timer on apocalypses. I cannot say from my own experience what the effect of this decision was on heroes, but for villains, this decision was an unmitigated disaster. Because we have so few zones, this meant that at any given time at least one, usually two or three, zones were under some kind of attack, and during those attacks, all street-sweeping missions are impossible. Four times in three weeks, I got stuck waiting half an hour or more, while an event happened for which I could earn no more rewards, before I could continue on with my mission; one of those was during a strike force. Please revert this change.

(next and final: Deadly Apocalypse 2009)

Eochai and Jack in Irons 2009: No changes were made from past years, at least not that I could tell.

Almost continuously, all level 20+ zones spawn one of two giant monsters: Eochai, or Jack in Irons, with Eochai appearing two or three times more often than Jack in Irons. Each one has a very limited number of possible spawn points in each zone; each spawn point is decorated, when they appear, with a scattering of pumpkins on the ground. Each giant monster spawn is accompanied by a mix of minion, lieutenant, and boss Unseelie ghosts, of a fixed level for each zone. Defeat Eochai for one badge and 2 merits, defeat Jack for one badge and 2 merits, defeat 21 Unseelie, total, for the third badge.

My only comment on this is not a new one: it also makes exactly no sense to me for these to spawn in PvP zones. The spawn point at the memorial plaza in Siren's Call is especially problematic, since that's a popular spot for fighting and right on top of an exploration badge. Please remove the Halloween Event giant monster spawns from the PvP zones; nobody's fighting there normally, that's for sure.

(next: Zombie Apocalypse 2009)

(With apologies to AmazingMOO for starting another thread, but I want to cover more than just the Deadly Apocalypse zone event.)

The 2009 Halloween Event ran from October 20th through November 11th, a total of 22 days. I informally polled about 30 people; of them, all but one thought that that was way too long, that it had gotten dull by the end of it. November 11th is also way, way too late to still be celebrating Halloween. If the event is to run anywhere near this length (and I can excuse that, since some people do have a lot of characters to badge), it really should start earlier. In my personal opinion, October 20th is also way too late to be starting it, given that Halloween decorations start to go up (at least in my neighborhood) at the beginning of the month.

I also noticed that all but one of the announced ending dates for the Halloween Event were for nights on which the servers were not scheduled to be rebooted. I've heard it claimed that events can be stopped, manually, without rebooting the server, but it has never happened in all my years of playing City of Heroes; events end when the server is rebooted. It would minimize confusion about when the events will stop if you just announce up front that they will end during server maintenance on a given date.

With those two issues in mind, I would like to strongly suggest that the 2010 Halloween start and end earlier, and both dates be set for Thursdays, the currently scheduled day of the week for server maintenance, that is to say, from October 14th through November 4th.

(Not go get ahead of myself or off-topic more than necessary, but the Winter Holiday event has the same problem. May I please request that it also start earlier than usual, as in US Thanksgiving or the day before, and end no later than the first maintenance period of January?)

As of 2009, the Halloween Event now consists of four zone events: Trick or Treating, Eochai and Jack in Irons, Zombie Apocalypses, and Deadly Apocalypses. Let me treat each one separately.

Trick or Treating 2009: Several changes were made, from past years.

Quite a few doors were disabled for Trick or Treating, compared to past years, but it wasn't entirely made clear whether or not some of them should have been disabled. For example, it's unsurprising that the inner (decorative) door in Studio B no longer works for trick or treating, and the data pillar in the AE buildings. I can sort of understand why the Arachnos office building interior mission-doors in Port Oakes and Cap au Diable don't work. But was it intentional that the doors inside the Golden Giza worked? Did anybody check any of the various "hotel lobbies" like the ones in Port Oakes and St. Martial, or the Crey building in Nerva?

Trick or Treating does work in PvP zones, and I'll be dipped if I understand why anybody would want it to. To me, it just invites griefing, by giving people a way to add XP debt to a fight that they're winning by knocking on a door next to where they're about to kill someone; at the very least, I'm pretty darned sure that nobody was Trick or Treating normally in those zones. Why enable it?

Treats now drop small inspirations instead of medium, drop costume-change temp powers as before (or a rock), and do not drop event salvage. This was presumably done to reduce the incentive for "fly-by knocking," tapping a door and flying off without fighting the mobs that spawn from a Trick. I hate it, because it turns the vast majority of "Treats" into no treat at all: a costume power you already have and a worthless inspiration. At the very least, I would prefer that they bring back the medium inspirations; they're not that valuable, and they would at least help replace the ones lost from fighting bosses solo (see Tricks, below). It also doesn't give feedback when it grants you a costume temp power if you already have the power. This is misleading, because at the very least, it resets the timer; granting the temp power, even if you already have it, should display a message in the Reward subchannel of the chatbox.

Tricks spawn one or more enemies, and taunts them onto the person who knocked; the taunt feature was added last year, again to discourage drive-by knocking. This year, defeated enemies from trick or treating were the only source of event salvage. Having the defeated enemies drop costume salvage was a good change for people who were trick or treating with teams and who have archetypes that can't absorb an alpha strike, like defenders and some corruptors; under previous rules, those people never got any event salvage unless their sturdier team-mates shared it with them.

It remains a problem, though, that solo trick or treating poses a really, really uncomfortably high probability of spawning two lieutenants, a boss, or worse, a lieutenant and a boss. This is especially rough in the pre-level-20 zones, where frankly, nobody but tankers, scrappers, brutes, masterminds, and some dominators have any chance of surviving such a spawn. This is even more true given how many of them do negative energy damage, which is almost completely unresistable for low level characters on average. Trick or treat enemies also almost all debuff accuracy or to-hit, which is rough on solo characters who don't yet have SOs or level 25+ IOs. Both Trick or Treat bosses also mez, and only 6 of the game's 14 archetypes have native mez protection, and only a few of them before level 16. I would like to strongly suggest that there be two spawn tables for Trick or Treating, one for pre-20 zones, and one for post-20 zones. The pre-20 spawn tables should have all the boss spawns removed, and the double-lieutenant spawns.

I also strongly suspect that you have an off-by-one indexing bug, new for this year, in your spawn table. There was one spawn type that, in past years, was the most common solo spawn from a Trick: 3 zombie minions. This year that was the rarest spawn. Unfortunately, the Dead Head badge assumes that zombies will be very common, and is set to require 75 zombies. On every character I badged with, solo or in teams, I had all 4 of the other badges half an hour before I managed to get Dead Head. Please double-check the code that picks randomly from that spawn table for indexing errors; if there is no bug and it is behaving as intended, please reduce the Dead Head badge from 75 zombies to 50.

(next: Eochai and Jack in Irons 2009)

As of 9:30pm CST Wednesday night, the character copy tool seems to be down.

How about one that's already in the game? The Uzi has a single-shot mode, you know. And the pistol models that Arachnos minions use should at least be available with the Spider Smasher badge.