InfamousBrad

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2) Dr. Aeon's bio on the City of Heroes web site implies he was originally known as "Carl Egon", who reportedly possessed the ability to summon aid through trans-dimensional portals (presumably said aid being other dimensions' versions of himself). However, when heroes encounter him in the STF, his summons battle-cry implies that he is summoning versions of himself across time instead (a view of his powers supported by his own name, and also by his relationship to Professor Echo). What's the real story?

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Covered in-game: Marshall Brass, "The Aeon Conspiracy" and "Echo Down the Aeons," level 15-20 villains. Capsule summary: Carl Egon did built a remote-control portal to hell and used it to assassinate the previous governor of Cap au Diable. This was over-the-top even by Etoile Islands standards, so he "stood trial" and "was executed" on TV, then given a new name and face and installed as Governor Aeon. His real identity is a closely guarded Arachnos secret. He no longer has the particular hardware that he used to tap into hell (see Golden Roller), but is busy with other goofy ideas in the meantime (see about half of the villain arcs from level 15 to 50, and the Statesman Task Force). When you see him in the STF, he's summoning alternate-universe versions of himself through Arachnos' dimensional portal in Grandville.

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Has anyone ever used Super Speed in zones like Mercy, Port Oakes or Cap au Diable? heh.

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Yeah, all the time. Took me a couple of tries the first time to figure out the road network in the Oil Spill neighborhood, but all the roads are marked and on the rare occasions you do have to backtrack, it's not terribly far.

Now, superspeeding in either Skyway City or in Dark Astoria? That's hell on earth.

Oh, thank Prime!

1) Where IS the Rogue Isles island chain? In some places it says 50 miles offshore of Rhode Island, in one other place 500. (Which frankly makes more sense. Having another country be west of Long Island makes less sense than having one north of Bermuda.)

2) What IS the legal status of the Nerva Archipelago? British Commonwealth? American protectorate? Completely independent NATO member? It's got a French name (the Etoiles), when did it pass out of French hands?

3) Are Primeva, Thorn Isle, and/or the Abyss in the same country as Crimson Cove, Hero Heights, and Agincourt, or are they (legally) "empty" islands north of there?

4) Were Primeva, Thorn Isle, the Abyss, Crimson Cove, and Hero Heights part of the Etoile Islands country, are they parts of the Etoiles that Lord Recluse never conquered? Or did he stop where he did because he'd reached the borders of the Etoiles?

5) Fill in the missing blanks, please? MERCY: Governor _____, Marshall _____. OAKES: Governor (vacant), Marshall _____. DIABLE: Governor Aeon, Marshall Brass. SHARK: Governor Cage (right?), Marshall _____. ST.M: Governor Sonata (right?), Marshall _____. GV: Governor _____, Marshall _____ (neither applicable? Recluse & Daos?). WB: Governor _____ (vacant?), Marshall _____ (I know this one's in game, I'm just not remembering it this minute).

6) Fill in the missing blanks, please? President of the US _____, Rhode Island governor _____, Rhode Island senior senator _____, Rhode Island junior senator _____, Rhode Island US Representative _____, Paragon City Mayor _____.

OK, I'm not crying "doom," please understand that. I just strongly suspect that I'm going to hate this even more than I hate Cimerora and the ITF.

1) This is yet another villainous strike force for maxed-out characters only, which is the last thing on Earth villains need. We need a strike force in level 10 to 15. We need a strike force in level 30 to 35. We already have a bunch of level 40+ strike forces.

2) Oh, goody, they want the fight with Reichsman to be "challenging." In my experience, what that means is "impossible for pickup groups" and "requires a specific mix of archetypes and powersets, including none of the ones I prefer to play." I doubt that Paragon knows how to make a strike force that would make people say, "Wow, this is going to be tough; we better make sure we have enough masterminds and at least one stalker."

So, my guess is that I'll probably never get to complete the new SF, unless I get somebody's "pity spot." So I'm really hoping that there's some non-SF content to the return-of-the-5th storyline, too, and/or that there's at least something more to i15 than one TF, one SF, and a search revamp for Mission Architect. If not, then this will be the 6th of the last 8 issues that was very unexciting to me.

I guess the only reason I'm not crying doom is that I love this game so much in its issue 7 form that I wasn't desperately needing any more content to keep having more fun in City of Heroes than I can in any other subscription MMO.

There's a two-part story arc, "The Sky Raider Secret" (level 20-25) and "The Mysterious General Z" (level 25-30) that are the only "City of Heroes Classic" original story arcs other than the Freaklympics that I would still rate 5 stars. Marvelous conspiracy-theory stuff.

Although come to think of it, the two "City of Heroes Classic" Devouring Earth story arcs, "The Unity Plague" (30-35) and "The Terra Conspiracy" (level 35-40) are just about as good. In the 30-40 range, the Devouring Earth have some of the coolest mobs in the whole game, and those two arcs really do a great job of conveying the whole "holy cats, this madman really does intend to kill everybody on earth, and if I don't stop him, he'll do it!" feeling.

P.S. Do yourself the biggest favor anybody ever did for themselves and get the (expletive deleted) out of Mercy Island at level 5.

I honestly don't know how much more obvious the developers could have made it: Mercy Island is a slum. OK, upper Mercy isn't all that bad. But your level 5-9 contact in Mercy Island is entirely optional, and neither one of them is anywhere near as good as the level 5-9 contacts in Port Oakes. Grinding your way to 12 or 15 in Mercy Island makes as much sense as trying to grind your way to level 12 or 15 in Atlas Park. As soon as you finish your first contact in Mercy Island, zig zag to the Port Oakes ferry (or use your Pocket D VIP Card if you have one, it also exits to Port Oakes), tag your first Broker, and get on to the real villain game. It's more fun, and the rewards are substantially greater.

Missions open up at 5 in Port Oakes, at 10 in Cap au Diable, at 20 in Sharkhead, at 25 in Nerva, at 30 in St. Martial, and at 40 in Grandville, and the sooner you get to each of them, the happier you'll be.

Welcome to the Arachnos Party.

OK, totally out of character? On some level I'd rather play heroes, too, but 99% of my game time is on the red side, for many of the same reasons. After the highly detailed city of the Rogue Isles, going back to Paragon City feels like playing on somebody's train set, or, worse, like something some newbie threw together in an afternoon in Second Life. After going without the War Walls, being boxed up in them feels oppressive, like being in jail. The Rogue Isles have the architecture of a charming seaside town; Paragon City looks like a Fuhrerland theme park designed by the architecture team of Le Corbusier and Speer (with the possible exceptions of Kings Row, Perez Park, and Founders Falls, the only even halfway tolerable neighborhoods in the city). If you exclude the mind shatteringly awful issue 0, 1, and 2 content from the hero side, the villain side has about twice as much non-taskforce content, and the taskforces we do have average much higher quality. And yeah, hands down, no hero archetype is anywhere near as fun for me as stalkers and masterminds are, since I naturally gravitate to stealthers and/or summoners.

If it helps? Villains in this game really aren't all that villainous. There's a running argument these last four years about one level 40+ contact that I won't name for fear of dragging the argument into this thread, too, but the reason that contact's missions come as such a shock to the system, for most players is ... that they can't read. OK, that's unfair; the real reason is that unless you count kidnapping sub-missions in Mayhems and bank robberies in Newspaper missions, he's the first contact to ask you to actually hurt civilians. And at the risk of getting modsmacked for wandering too close to current events, robbing banks is feeling pretty cathartic for me this year.

(Yes, I know about the "deliver victims to the Vahzilok" mission. Pay attention, people: nothing bad happens to those people, because the mission is also designed to lead the cops straight to the kidnappers.)

One contact. At level 40+. Other than that and the bank robberies, you are pretty much never asked to fight civilians. The vast majority of the time, you don't even fight superheroes, because there just aren't that many of them in the Rogue Isles for you to fight; the vast majority of the time you're fighting rival villains. (Your average villain gets the Spider Smasher badge way, way earlier than your average hero does. Isn't it ironic, don't you think?)

Wow, that is every bit as bad as I thought it was.

Castle, is there any chance we can get lethal damage attacks boosted, across the board, to make up for the fact that they're almost universally resisted?

There are canonical groups that are only 1/1/1, and that's entirely reasonable -- if, and only if, it's something like a military unit where everybody would use the same combat style and wear the same uniform. The less excuse your mission gives for why everybody would be the same, the more you benefit from having a wider variety of enemies.

On the other hand, player expectations are implausibly high. I mean, come on: sure, the Circle of Thorns has dozens of minions, dozens of lieutenants, about a dozen bosses. But at any given level range, it's 2 to 3 minions, 2 lieutenants, 2 bosses. We could wish otherwise, but given the need for the servers to story a copy of the story arc file as it existed at the time you started it, for every player who's started it, and to transfer that file to the client every time they log in until they're done, even if they're on dial-up, the art form has built-in constraints.

For what it's worth, 3-5 minions, 2 lieutenants, and 3 to 4 bosses makes for a very varied set of random spawns, even on difficulty 2 or 4. But, then, that's so many custom characters that you have to squeeze to get in even 3 missions with dialog.

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You're level 6. Turn off sprint.


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But... But... I like to run fast!

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You're level 6 - that ain't happening whether you have Sprint on or not.

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I actually had someone give me that reply as to why they were running sprint at level 5. I was malf'ing down to help them level and they kept stopping to rest because they ran out endurance.

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This game got perceptibly easier for me when I got in the habit, on most characters, of binding my side mouse button to "powexecname Sprint" and thumbing it as soon as combat begins. Once the fight begins, even most tankers don't need to run more than a couple of steps at a time. Thumb it back on when the fight is over. That one step cut in half how often I had to rest between fights, without making it any harder for me to keep up with my team.

I'm massively relieved that somebody else has taken on the project, because my first reflex was to Luke Skywalker "No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!" in horror. Some days I spend more time in Mid's designing hypothetical alts than I do in-game. It's a great tool, I can't imagine playing CoH without it.

Ghost Widow cannot change sides unless all of Arachnos does. (See "Oh Wretched Man," Seer Marino, villain level 15-20.) If she tried, she would cease to exist. No, not even if Lord Recluse himself changed sides. That being said, who's to know what side Arachnos is on in Praetorian Earth?

We don't even know yet what "side" means in Praetorian Earth. If you work for the PPD busting criminals in Praetoria, does that make you a hero, or a villain? If you're trying to overthrow Emperor "Tyrant" Cole, are you doing it so you can usurp his place, so you can destroy the world, to free the oppressed, for the lulz, or some combination of the above?

Around about the time that Ouroboros and the Menders made contact with Primal Earth, we got a Paragon Times report from an alternate timeline where Manticore was one of Lord Recluse's lead henchmen, from their Latin American lair -- Guatemala, was it? So it's canonical that there's no way to predict what side Manticore is on in any timeline without going to look. Oh, except that we do know what Praetorian Earth's Manticore looks like: he's Chimera, he's a loyal sidekick to Emperor Cole, and he wears the same suit in blue so that's not Praetorian Earth's version of Manticore in the video.

(All I know for sure is that I can't create a mirror universe version of my main character, because he already has a goatee. I guess I am the mirror universe character?)

Up to the mid 20s, AoE heavy EQUALS heavy endurance drain. You can have modest endurance usage, or you can have an AoE attack chain early on. They really don't let you have both.

Although once you get to level 6, a necro/dark mastermind is probably as close to what you want as can be delivered.

It's not. Beats me why, though.

I add an ally if it advances the story, but my rule of thumb is no less than a lieutenant, no more than one level below the end boss. End boss is a lieutenant or a boss, ally is a lieutenant. End boss is an EB, ally is a boss. End boss is an AV (something I'd probably never actually do), ally is an EB.

What I suspect you're seeing people react to, though, is that some archetypes just don't have any means of keeping allies alive. I did a lot of my early testing with masterminds, and got used to being able to shield or heal allies. You might also be doing your testing with defenders, controllers, tanks, or corruptors. But if somebody is soloing with a scrapper, blaster, brute, or stalker and the ally runs off by themself, or does something equally stupid that draws too much aggro, they're stuck unless they want to wait around until the ally regens their hit points.

But any ally powerful enough to take the kind of abuse that allies sometimes take without any help from the player, is also powerful enough to solo most of the mission. Which is why I mostly stick with boss end bosses and lieutenant minions. I may yet write stuff where the last mission has an EB end boss and a boss ally. Nothing above that.

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Spending a half hour playing any content, and only getting 200 tickets feels like I'm banging my head off a wall.

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Wait, what?

Using medium sized maps, default groups or custom groups with the full mix of minions, lieutenants, and bosses, every mission I've ever written has given somewhere around 140 to 200 tickets per mission. That's more like 10 to 15 minutes per mission, not half an hour, but still.

The only way that I know to raise the tickets/mission is to use large maps and eliminate minions ... at which point I (quite rightly) get graded down for content that is arbitrarily long, arbitrarily hard, and hostile to most characters' builds.

Do you know something that I don't, about designing high-ticket-count missions? Or are you saying that unless every spawn is all bosses, a mission is a waste of your time? What am I missing, or misunderstanding, here?

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One things the devs promised early on was that they were adding a lot of datamining tools so that they could find and punish people who did this. I haven't heard anything about that since the system went live, though. If they are punishing people for ratings griefing, they are doing it very quietly.

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If they are punishing anybody for ANY exploits or abuse in Mission Architect, they're doing it far too quietly. They're leaving people with the impression that they were bluffing.

I can't report on other peoples' moods, but I can report on mine: I'm avoiding MA until issue 15 at the earliest, but not because of nerfs. Until the rating and search systems get improved, it's as useless as the paps on a boar hog. The nerfs make me hopeful that some day the system will be used for story telling, and not power leveling. The only part of the nerfing process that makes me angry is that there is no sign that Positron has carried through on his threat, which is why whenever I pass through Atlas Park or Cap au Diable on Virtue, it is increasingly evident that people have concluded he was bluffing. And they may be right, for all I can tell. I hope he's not; if the powerleveling gets back out of control the way it was because Paragon Studios doesn't have the guts to penalize blatant exploiters, MA, and for that matter much of the rest of the game, will be dead to me.

I think I would have been more excited about this two years ago than I am now, because two years ago, I would have paid good money to be able to level up through City of Heroes with a mastermind. Now that I have a level 50 controller and a level 40ish peacebringer, I'm less excited.

I am delighted to see that it's in an entirely different universe than Primal Earth, and one that looks a bit more ultra-tech than ours. An even more science-fictiony version of City of Heroes is something I've wished for ever since I first joined. And yeah, given that I feel like Statesman's America and the Rogue Isles are both equally reprehensible systems, a neutral super-character who opposes both of them, and who opposes Emperor Cole's "utopia" as well, while fighting for justice for the victims of all three, is something I could really, really be down with. The sample artwork in that trailer looks really, really pretty.

But it's going to rise or fall, with me, on the basis of the writing, so I sincerely hope that it's not issue 16. Now that I know that you're working with roughly the same mission creation tools that we have, with mediocre tools for cut scenes and branching missions added on, I know that you just haven't had time to do anything really impressive. And, frankly, I'm hoping for something a lot deeper, a lot more intelligent in its writing, than either City of Heroes or City of Villains. When we're shown Emperor Cole's utopia, I hope that it's written and shown in a way that makes more sense than the nonsensical politics of The Council, the almost non-existent government of Statesman's America, the puppy-kicking Arachnos. Even super-villains, when they govern, end up having to actually govern -- show us that, finally, and you'll make me a very happy man.

But even if that's not the direction that you're taking the storyline, I personally would much prefer that you took your time and wrote it well and thoughtfully than if you rushed something out just to introduce side-switching and power customization.

I think the ratings system should die in a fire.

But my problem is not the same as yours. Yes, ratings must be anonymous. And they need to give us back anonymous feedback, too. Because let's face it, even if you're a saint and wouldn't go looking for the 0-star rater's arcs to revenge-rate them, others would, and lex talionis is bad.

My problem is that the ratings system includes no way of knowing what other peoples' tastes, or mine, are. I've figured out what gives an average of 5 stars, I think, and I've about concluded that any arc likely to get 5 stars is one that I don't want to play. What I want is an arc that was rated 5 stars by people with similar tastes to mine. Anything short of that is not merely worthless, it's worse than worthless.

OK, here's one I know they'll never do because it would involve building, then animating, custom skeletons, but I still want it: Animal Summoning. Especially if they ever made hero masterminds. In fact, I want a bunch of hero mastermind summoning powers: Police Leadership (like mercs, but with PPD), Ninja Leadership (like Ninjas for masterminds, only white uniforms instead of gray and black, and something else instead of the Oni), Animal Control, and Elementalism (uses the various controller pets as mastermind minions). Have it use the blaster secondaries as its secondaries.

Other than the animal control, they could do the rest in a long weekend, and debug it in two weeks of closed beta. But they probably never will.

Moderator08 is still not showing up in Community Digest. If Ghost Falcon hadn't replied to this thread, I wouldn't have found it there.

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don't the individual mission blurbs in the AE interface contain information like "Defeat all, escort hostage, boss, AV?"

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I wish.

I'll add some of my own rules of thumb, things that work for me. (One 4-star arc, one five-star.)

<ul type="square">[*]Show, don't tell. Take a long look at all of the information you put into mission intro briefing, mission send off, successful returns, and clues. Is there any of that that you can move to word balloons inside the actual mission? It takes almost no effort to add a patrol. One front patrol, one middle patrol, and one large patrol is 6 lines of dialog that you can insert into any single mission, and they will almost always be told in that order.

Now considering adding up to 3 "allies" set to "non-combat" and "run away." (Not captives. Allies get better dialog options, and there isn't anything you can do with a captive that you can't do better with an ally.) One front, one middle, and one back is another three 4-line dialogs that you can add to your mission, and again, they will nearly always be told in that order. And, obviously, never forget to give your end-of-mission boss some dialog, too.

Patrol, ally, and boss dialog show up for every player on the team, and usually in the middle of the screen. Clues only show up in the team leader's clue window, and even the team leader may not have the clue window open. Chat-text gets buried in the chat window among all the combat results, team chat, and reward drops. This is a comic book game; use word balloons as much as the system will let you.
[*]Moving is better than standing still. When you add the ally and boss encounters described above, take a long, long look at the animation options, and use the heck out of them. They may not work on some mobs, either because of animation issues or because they trigger a power during setup that cancels the animation. But if you can get them to work, they are always a welcome alternative to the generic "taunt" animation.

Also, once you've added your dialog patrols as described above, consider adding even more non-dialog patrols. It's possible to over-do this, if for example you make all of the spawns patrols. But somewhere between a quarter and half, it makes your mission look like people are actually living or working there, not just waiting to be beaten up.

And if there is any justification you can fit in for a fight to have already broken out on the map, adding one to two battles gives you yet more dialog you can fit into word balloons, and it's yet more movement, yet more another alternative to mobs just standing around. Doesn't it seem odd to you that nothing bad ever happens to the NPCs until you show up?
[*]NPCs with names are better than NPCs with titles. Google "random name generator" and pick one. If you don't give an NPC a name of their own, players won't care about them.
[*]Name-drop whenever you can. Over in the Guides section, there are a couple of concise (and spoilerific) summaries of the canonical plotline. Get to know it, if you haven't already. You can also find a list of every mission in the game, by contact, in a nice graphical-layout form at RedTomax.com: heroes here, villains here. You can also find a list of all of the canonical mini-boss names for each faction by searching for that faction name on ParagonWiki; it also has a list of the Police Radio missions and the Newspaper missions.

So rather than make up a name for a new magical artifact for your McGuffin, why not use one from a Newspaper mission? Rather than make up a politician name, why not look at the list of existing Paragon City councilmen in that one higher-level Circle of Thorns arc? Rather than make up a new name for a high-tech lab or business, why not either use the name of one of the hero stores, or one of the high-tech business names already used in missions? Sure, it's less work and arguably more creative to make up your own, but people feel a thrill of recognition when they see someone referred to in your story and go, "Oh, I know who that is!"

It also spares you from having to put in long, long text data dumps to explain who the character is, what the object they're chasing is, and why they should care. If you use canonical story tokens, many of the players will already care when they arrive.
[*]Use Unique maps sparingly. Yes, they're pretty. Yes, you're bored with the generic randomizable maps. But it it still absolutely possible to over-use them, because if you use them sparingly, and only at dramatic points in the story, it adds a lot of emotional punch to the scene that you use them in. If you use them in every scene, the impact is lost.
[*]On generic maps, use the smallest map possible. Once you're done writing all of the dialog-patrols and dialog-rescues and battles that you need to move the story forward, set the map size to the smallest possible map that will accommodate those options. People want to move the story forward, not stay in a single map all day grinding identical mobs. The one possible exception might be on the fifth and last mission of a high-drama story arc, where you're going up against what's supposed to be their whole army at once ... but still don't. Really. Nobody wants to do this. Any use of a map described as Large will cost you at least one star in average ratings, because by the time anybody gets to the end of a Large map, they're almost certainly bored.[/list]

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Mystic Fortune's costume just keeps getting better and better.

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Very nice. You've got a great Dr. Fate vibe going there.

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He is a gifted surgeon, and nothing more.