InfamousBrad

They're in THAILAND. Good luck getting the courts in Thailand to take action. No, a solution to this one will require technical and management effort on NCsoft's part; the courts aren't going to be any help. But considering that we're paying NCsoft about $25 million a year in subscriber fees, they ought to be able to afford to have a fraud department working on such cases. (Too bad for us that I suspect that they don't.)

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well that pkpkg site is interesting. I tried a tracert just to see where the site actually is, and the results come back as unreachable after I bounce off of 218.30.25.202

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I thought we weren't supposed to give the URLs of the RMT sites. But since somebody popped that cherry days ago and Lighthouse hasn't objected ...

I'm getting close to "zero tolerance for game companies that don't shut down easily stopped cheaters."

In addition to quoting the lowest price I've seen yet for infamy on one of these RMT sites (although it has gone up since Friday), the company that's spamming me at least once an hour for the last five days also advertises on their web page that for $255 and some change, they will level any level 1 character on any server to level 50 for you. The FAQ on there says that you can't play your chararacter while they're power-leveling it, because their teams of players will be playing it 24x7 for 10 or 11 days.

Lighthouse, come on now. Now, I don't care whether they're doing it from Thailand (where the IP address resolves to) or from some proxy server somewhere; how hard is it for the servers to notice that someone not from Thailand has been logged in from Thailand for the last 48 straight hours? And if they are using a proxy address, how hard is it to spot that the same IP address, or narrow range of IP addresses, has been logged into large numbers of characters simultaneously continuously for the last five days?

Frankly, I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that either NCsoft doesn't even have an anti-fraud department, or their anti-fraud department is completely incompetent. It should have been trivially easy to shut these people down in a lot less time than it has already taken.

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The combative inhabitants in a zone will move off the streets and to safer locations when a Rikti Invasion takes place.

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... but the civilians don't.

Remarkable.

The combat NPCs don't move around much. It's the cars that continue to drive around on the roads, and the couple of hundred NPCs walking around, that are making the lion's share of the network traffic in the zones with the worst lag. And it makes even less sense for them to ignore the Rikti; they're unarmed! That first blast of the alarm siren should trigger the panic emote, then a dash to the door, for every pedestrian non-combat NPC, and every car should stop in its tracks and not move until the all clear signal.

As for the Heavies, yeah, at this point we're even more in the area of saying that it makes more sense to shut Recluse's Victory down for the duration of the war than to keep tweaking it. I either see or hear about actual teams in RV maybe once every two weeks, and them usually looking for the AVs and SHs, not doing the actual zone event or hunting other players. And you just rendered the main zone event pretty much completely solo unfriendly. So if teams don't see any reason to bother and solos can't get anything done, what's the point of the zone? Especially when it makes no storytelling sense for that plot to still be going on while the planet's under attack, any way?

My Turn: "I Was a Hero"
by "Infamous Brad" Bradley

In the summer of 2002, I was a superhero.

My superheroics were neither long-lasting nor particularly impressive. My home town of St. Louis was barely hit, just a brief aerial bombardment of the airport and a few military facilities, with barely any Rikti ground troops committed to the mop-up. By the end of May, long before the Omega Team made their famous sacrifice and ended the First Rikti War, the fighting in St. Louis had ebbed, and all that remained was civilians like myself digging survivors out of the rubble and trying to manage the ongoing collapse.

In the wreckage, I found a Rikti Guardian force field generator with its power cell still working, and with some of its control circuitry intact. So, with the idea of helping my fellow refugees, I patched in some portable PC components, booted a rudimentary operating system, and started hacking at its command codes. By the time the war was over, I was probably operating at about the "security level" of what the Federal Bureau of Superpowered Affairs would call a level 2 force field defender. That is to say, I could make the force field generator repel itself (and a bulky PC) from the ground well enough that I could stand to wear the whole assembly on my wrists, I could use crude force bolts to bulldoze heavy rubble, and I could cast short-lived force fields around other people that were just barely good enough to deflect a knife, or if the Rikti had come back maybe some of the Rikti energy blade attacks. I wouldn't know for sure; it never came to that.

I never thought of what I was doing as super-heroics. I had no cape, no mask, no ballistic spandex unitard, no combat monicker, no vow to fight crime. All I had was a grim determination to use this scavenged technology to dig sanitary privies, clear debris, help re-open roads, help bulldoze shattered runways and landing fields for Red Cross supplies. Nor, after I'd modified it that heavily, did I think of my hand-held force bolt and force field generators as Rikti technology; I thought of them as old-fashioned MS-DOS technology to which a few weird parts had been grafted. I say this to explain why I never registered with the FBSA as a super-powered human, to explain why I never turned the gauntlets that I had built over to the UN as captured Rikti technology.

So as soon as the war was over, I was a supervillain. My career as an "unlicensed superhero" had lasted all of six months. When I was caught by Vanguard tech scouts, after three months of never turning the field generators all the way on again, I was placed on trial for failure to register and for illegal possession of proscribed technology, convicted, and sentenced to a life in hell.

I don't think that the American people have really wrapped their heads around what is actually going on in Ziggursky Penitentiary, even after TV specials like MSNBC's "Lockup: Inside the Ziggurat." For the whole 30 months that I was imprisoned in that miserable excuse for a third-world hellhole, in that sloppily run nightmare that never really lived up to the "standards" of a Zimbabwean or Burmese prison, I was forcibly drugged every day, against my will, with a drug that was designed to serve one and only one purpose: to lower my intelligence. They knew that I was smarter than the people running the prison; a low hurdle, that. So they knew they didn't even know what they were afraid I'd do: maybe pry a piece of concrete off the wall and use it as a screwdriver to turn the electronic lock on my cell into some kind of weird nanotech self-assembling giant killer robot, maybe brew a home made nuclear weapon from carefully hoarded spoonfuls of Beet Casserole. To prevent this, they drugged me to the gills with pills that lowered my IQ to about the level of the aforementioned beet casserole, while filling my dreams with the hallucinated torments of the damned.

When in October of 2005 the Etoile Islands responded with military force to the illegal internment in the US of some of their registered diplomatic personnel, they offered as a humanitarian gesture to evacuate as many of us victims of the US war on high abilities as would fit on their helicopters, yes, I am unashamed to say, I became something new again: not merely a supervillain, but an international supervillain. That's what they call me when I rescue civilians in the Port Oakes from the Hellions and the Circle of Thorns. That's what they call me when I rescue American tourists in St. Martial from US-based terrorist groups like the Freakshow and the Carnival of Shadows, or from demons from hell itself. That's what they call me when I give the press evidence I found that American religious-right congressmen are secretly selling US superheroes' secrets to the enemy. Because I accepted that humanitarian refugee flight from a foreign government, and because I teach information technology at that foreign government's elite university while doing such side jobs as I can to fund my research, jobs that include saving up to and including millions of innocent lives, I'm an internationally famous supervillain.

Except now I'm not an international supervillain again. Now the same organization that turned me over to the US "justice" system, that bears the guilt of sending me to Ziggursky Penitentiary, calls me a superhero once more. Because the Rikti are back. And suddenly my force field generator gauntlets are needed again, in White Plains, Rhode Island, in the desperate fight to keep the Rikti from widening the newly re-opened portals from their world to our own. Fortunately for the whole world, those gauntlets do a whole heck of a lot more tricks now, tricks they could never have done if they were still locked in an evidence locker in Paragon City, including providing me with instantaneous control of a whole fleet of standardized Aeon Corporation combat robots.

But it's all very confusing to me, because every morning when I wake up, I have to decide what to wear. Do I wear my black cargo pants, a button down shirt, a vest and a hat, and defend the Etoile Islands from (for example) attempts by Freedom Phalanx to destroy an experimental anti-Rikti air defense weapon that Statesman paranoiacally claims will be used against him? If I do, then I'm a supervillain again, for fighting Statesman, even when he's in the wrong. Or shall I put on my Vanguard uniform and go fight the Rikti in White Plains, even if it sometimes means having to defend myself from "rogue" agents working for Statesman's famous grand-daughter, "Ms. Liberty?" If I do, then I'm a superhero again, no matter what some individual NATO Longbow officers think. Unless during lunch I get called back to defend civilian scientists in the Etoile Islands from opportunistic attacks by the Malta Group, in which case I have to change clothes and be a supervillain again for a few hours, before going back to White Plains and being a superhero for the rest of the day.

I suppose my confusion won't last forever. I've been asked by my superiors in Vanguard not to tell you everything I know, but I don't think that they'll object to my telling you this much. The war is going very well. I do not think that it will outlast this calendar year. And since we know so much more about the Rikti already than we knew in the last war, I can confidently predict that this time, the peace will be permanent. Which means that I'll no longer be needed to fight the Rikti. So I guess they'll go back to calling me a full-time supervillain again.

If you're expecting this to be an impassioned defense of technocracy, the political ideology of the Arachnos Party in the Etoile Islands, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I'm far from convinced that it would even work in the United States, or maybe even anywhere else in the world except for in the Rogue Isles. If even here. But I do know that until the land of my birth rediscovers the principles that they let Statesman talk them into discarding decades ago, they'll keep calling me a supervillain. I can't go back to being a superhero, or even what I really want which is just to be an ordinary American citizen, until America once again lives up to its promise to be one nation, with liberty and justice for all.

Since the destruction of the Well of the Furies, the world has now had almost eight decades to learn to live with the widening gap in human potential. Put up against the tens of thousands of years we lived with the Well of the Furies bleeding off our top potential, 80 years isn't very long at all. So it's not terribly surprising, I suppose, that our first reaction was reactionary and cowardly and, worst of all, ad hoc. But we're going to spend the rest of the lifetime of the human race in a world where the range of magical ability stretches all the way from none up to nearly godlike, where the range of human intelligence reaches from barely conscious up to to the level of Hamidon Pasilima or Dr. Aeon or Reichart Von Gehirnsturm, where the range of natural in-born human physical abilities stretches from klutzy up to levels we think of as trans-human. Are we going to extend to everybody on those continua the same freedoms, the same rights, the same privileges? Or are we going to keep arbitrarily declaring a third of our top performers "supervillains" for as little as paperwork screwups or Statesman's personal dislikes?

I sincerely hope that we choose the former, and not just for myself. The Rikti are not the last threat to human survival we will see; not even the last threat in my lifetime. Through the miracle of experimental time-travel technology, I've seen at least a possible future, one in which the current unjust system continued and free mankind failed to safely harness the talents of a third to half of its best. It was a world where, after several waves of planetary war any one of which would make both Rikti Wars look like they were fought with wet firecrackers, almost all of humanity's billions of lives were lost. And the few remaining living envied the dead, having been degraded physically to the level of sub-intelligent slaves to the aliens, the monsters, and the machines.

(Retired computer programmer and part-time event promoter "Infamous Brad" Bradley was sentenced in 2003 to 20 years in prison for failure to register as a superhero and for trafficking in prohibited alien technology, and escaped from prison in 2005. Vanguard has neither confirmed nor denied his claim of membership, although he did show Newsweek convincing-seeming documentation of his claim and film footage of him fighting the Rikti in White Plains in Vanguard uniform alongside other Vanguard members. Vanguard's official spokesperson Incandescent reminded us that "Infamous Brad" speaks only for himself, and his views are not to be interpreted as reflecting in any way upon the opinions or policies of Vanguard.)

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Hero A hands the item to B who hands the item to C who sells it on consignment, bought by D who trades it directly to E for some other nice loot.

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Assuming hero A can be linked to one of the gold-farming services, presumably by sting operation or such? A gets banned. If B still has the item in his possession, the item gets deleted; if not, an equivalent amount gets subtracted from B's inf total. For second offense, B gets banned, too.

Look, what do you have to offer for an alternative? If there aren't going to be any penalties for the buyers, then any penalties on the sellers are pointless, because they don't address the root of the problem. If you don't believe me, look up the history of Prohibition and the effect that not having penalties for consumption and use of alcohol back when alcohol was illegal to manufacture or sell had on America.

I would feel a lot better if you had also said at the same time that the actual RMT, not just the spamming for the RMT, was also zero-tolerance. Any account believed by NCsoft to have sold inf or items for cash should be deleted and the IP address banned, any account believed to have purchased inf or items for cash should have the items deleted and the inf debited from the character (on first offense) or deleted and IP banned themselves (second offense).

Otherwise, the situation you're in is someone who's busily stomping on ants while not cleaning the kitchen: as long as the "food supply" is there, as long as customers can get away with buying inf and items, there will always be a steady supply of new sellers, who will reappear faster than you can "squish" them. Make sure that every player knows that they can't get away with cheating in this fashion, though, and the demand for RMT will decrease to an easily managed trickle.

I can live with it. I've got the accolade on all the characters that I care about but one, and time to take care of that tonight. I'll miss it, but it's more special if it passes into history. That way those of us who were there ("we few, we happy few") can say, "you should have been there."

Hmm. I will say this, though. One of the reasons I didn't pick up on this is that Dra'Gon and his fight were completely unmemorable. I remembered Ga'Memnon and Hro'dotozh (or however they're spelled), but Dra'Gon? When somebody mentioned him to me the day after I did that mission, I could barely remember that there had been a Rikti by that name.

That those are ancient Hellenic references (Agamemnon and Herodotus, respectively), plus that there are at least a couple of anime references I gather (I didn't get those, had to have them explained to me) mixed in with the Biblical references rather obscured the main point here. That's why I thought of the Four Horseman Rikti hard suits the same way I thought of it when I saw the Four Riders of the Apocalypse in NCsoft's Auto Assault, as an obvious homage (and one that everybody and his dog uses) but not necessarily as part of a bigger story.

Still, it's very nice to hear what the designer was thinking, thanks Positron! I'm especially relieved to hear that this is the end of the story arc but not the end of the plot line. I don't see how you're going to advance the plot line in issue 11 and still have time to catch up all 2,000+ missions in the game so that they reflect the current plot line instead of being stuck back in 2003's plot line, but I'm really rooting for you to be able to do it.

Loved it. I hadn't expected the higher resolution to make that big a difference, but it really did. What did you render the saucer raid on that it came out so clean?

Two nitpicks, though. I got the sense from what the Dark Watcher said about his visit to the Rikti homeworld that it was hardly "harrowing." I would have said "mysterious" or better yet, "intriguing." And frankly, as far as I'm concerned the "ultimate mystery" of the 2001 Rikti war isn't the fate of the Omega team; most of wrote them all off for dead. The "ultimate mystery" that is also solved, and I would have hyped in the trailer, is, "What do the Rikti want?"

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To find out we could've had the 5th back makes me go: ;_;

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May I call your attention to the fact that the launch pads in Steel Canyon and Port Oakes still aren't done? Obviously they decided to save the 5th Column for an outer space or moon zone, just like we suspected all along. Issue 12, maybe?

Oh, it does, period.

Let's take the simplest case, going from solo/heroic (or solo/villainous) to a 2 person team, same difficulty. Before: 3 minions = 3 * 0.08 = 0.24 salvage per spawn. 1 lt + 1 minion = 0.08 + 0.1064 = 0.1864 salvage per spawn. Assume equal numbers of each sized grouping, you get 0.2132 salvage per spawned group in the mission.

Now add a second person. 1 lieutenant + 4 minions = 0.1064 + 4 * 0.08 = 0.4264 salvage per spawned group. 2 lts + 1 minion = 0.08 + 2 * 0.1064 = 0.2928 salvage per spawned group. Average that, you get 0.3596 salvage per spawned group. That gets divided evenly between the two of you, so the net result is 0.1798 salvage per person per spawn point. (Yes, the end boss will add its own 0.25 salvage per mission. For most missions, there are enough spawn points that this disappears into the noise. And I've left out the less frequent cases, like single lieutenant spawn or 2 minion spawns. I think it averages out.)

Adding that one additional teammate resulted in a 16% drop, per mission, in how much salvage you get. There are those who claim that that 2 person team will complete missions at least 16% faster than a soloist will. Maybe on the hero side, for non-scrappers, that's true. For my mastermind, except on very rare perfect teams, it's emphatically not true. That's why I argued, while issue 9 was still on the Training Room only, that the per-lieutenant and per-boss numbers needed to be increased.

From the article:
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The storyline for issue 19-20 of the comic book came from me, and it was really a chance to tie in comic book events to the game. So, a lot of elements from those two comic books will be reflected in the game.

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You know, if you'd been doing that all along, I might have subscribed to the thing. At the very least, I would have cared a lot more about it! So, when do we get #20 on the FTP server?

Trick Arrows for Masterminds (1.0)

SYNERGY WITH MASTERMIND PRIMARIES

MERCENARIES: GOOD. Mercenaries' built-in resistance to smashing and lethal damage, and the Medic's heal, render them better able to do without any healing or buffs from you than most of the mastermind primary powersets. Better yet, the Medic even occasionally heals you and applies Stimulant to provide some status defense. High damage output mixes very well with your damage resistance debuff(s) to absolutely slaughter enemies. If you can get the Spec Ops to fire them at the right time, their own web grenades and various hold powers mix even more slows, recharge drains, and holds in with your own. An excellent choice. And if they do light the oil slick (not the easiest thing to make them do even if you want them to, though), they still fight at full efficiency from outside the edges of it. Very good choice.

NECROMANCY: POOR. Most minions don't have any kind of heal until level 32, and even then it's not much of a self-heal. Their resistances aren't high enough to make up for the fact that 5 of the 6 of them do their best fighting at melee range, and that they do their best fighting at melee range eliminates almost all of the defensive potential of Entangling Arrow. They don't do energy or fire attacks, so you don't have to worry about them being the ones who light your oil slick, but if something you're fighting does, you are so screwed it's not funny because there went about half of your damage output. Bad choice.

NINJAS: EXTREMELY POOR. Has all the same problems as Necromancy, only worse. Your piddly little accuracy debuff isn't enough to stack measurably with their piddly weak innate defense bonus; their lack of either any resistances or any self-heal makes them entirely dependent on you to provide buffs and heals that this set completely lacks. Worse, not only will they flee and stop fighting the target if the oil slick ignites, but the Oni will almost certainly light the oil slick even if you try to stop him. People keep making this mistake, thinking they're supposed to take Trick Arrows with Ninjas because both get bow and arrow attacks, but trust me when I say that it's a huge, crippling mistake that does more than anything else to convince people that trick arrows is unplayable. DO NOT MAKE THIS MISTAKE.

ROBOTICS: VERY GOOD. The Protector Bots are defenders and healers par excellance, and more than make up for the fact that you do neither one. They don't heal you the way the mercenaries' Medic does, but they do provide you with a force field bubble that's at least as useful as the Medic's very intermittent heal. They have naturally good resistances. They fight from range, so they won't care (most of the time) if the oil slick ignites, and since all of their attacks are energy or fire it's very easy to get them to ignite the oil slick if you want them to (and hard to stop them if you don't). What's more, those massive area effect slows and the occasional area effect hold do a very, very nice job of keeping enemies bunched up for those heavy overlapping area effect attacks and stacking area effect stuns. By far, the best choice to go with trick arrows.

THUGS: AVERAGE. Once you get the second Enforcer, their stacking Maneuvers make up some for the fact that you have very little defense and no healing to offer them, and they do do good damage from range for the most part. But they do have some serious problems when used with trick arrows. First of all, they tend to spread out, robbing some or all of them of that Maneuvers innate bonus. But worse than that, both the Gang War posse and the Bruiser will retreat from a flaming oil slick and then panic altogether and refuse to engage at all for the rest of the fight, so do not take Oil Slick Arrow if you build a thugs/arrows mastermind, or at most use it when all your pets are down and your team needs help. This is an okay choice with trick arrows, but not as good as mercs or bots; worth considering, but frustratingly hard some of the time.

TRICK ARROWS AND THE POOL POWERS

The most important question you'll have, given how many of the secondary powers you have to take to make it work, is do you have to take Fitness, particularly Stamina, with Trick Arrows? The answer turns out to be "no." This is one area where the long animation times work in your favor. Some of the powers have room for extra slots, and it helps to stick one or more endurance reducers in those. And by the time you hit level 33 or 34 you'll have to throw extra endurance reducers in your second minion upgrade power if you want to be able to do a full setup without having to rest halfway through. But it absolutely can be done, if for no other reason than unlike many of the mastermind secondaries, it has no toggle powers.

For travel powers, really, only two stand out. You'd absolutely like to take Leaping, because as a debuffer you will draw aggro. The set doesn't weaken enemy accuracy enough to help you with that, and unlike poison it doesn't do anything to debuff their holds, immobilizes, and such. So if you don't take Combat Jumping and Acrobatics, even though you'll have to 3-slot them for endurance to run them full time, you'll keep wishing that you had. On the other hand, while you may not want to take Superspeed for your movement power, Hasten is the only reliable way to perma-hold most targets prior to level 37. And even then you'll want to use it sparingly, for the most obnoxious minions and lieutenants only, because Hasten without Stamina will do a number on your endurance burn rate.

As I said above, you would like to have at least two powers from Medicine. You might really like to have one or two powers from Concealment; I know I personally can't live without stealth, and preferably full invisibility, when traveling to many really obnoxious mission locations like Primeva. You'd probably also like Tough and Weave, from Fighting, but I pretty nearly guarantee that they won't fit into your build. As for the patron powers, there's a lot of overlap in function with powers you already have, but you probably would like to at least have the shield power available, if probably none of the others.

CONCLUSION: SHOULD YOU PLAY A TRICK ARROWS MASTERMIND?

If you are a new and inexperienced player with a low threshold for frustration, probably not. If you are determined to use ninjas or zombies for minions, absolutely not. But if you're comfortable with the game, planning on pairing it with mercs or bots or maybe thugs, understand what the debuffs do and when to use them, and want a flexible, highly strategic secondary power set where you really have to think fast on your feet and no two fights are the same, and you like a really cool high-tech look for your powers? Then very possibly yes.

THE INDIVIDUAL ATTACKS

Level 1: ENTANGLING ARROW. 2.17 second animation. Unenhanced, it fires a 17.88 second magnitude 3 immobilize, that is to say it will immobilize nearly all minions and lieutenants on a single shot. It also debuffs attack speed and run speed by 10% each. Multiple hits on the same target will stack immobilization magnitude, but will not stack debuffs. Recharge time is 4 seconds before enhancement. Best of all, it comes with a free +20% accuracy right out of the box. You have to take it, anyway, but it will be one of your bread and butter attacks. Even without enhancement, you can effortlessly hold 2 minions out of melee range and in the target area for your minions' area-effect attacks; most people, for whom that's as much as they want from it, would slot it with just 1 accuracy enhancement. Slotted 2 accuracy, 3 immobilize, and 1 recharge, or with a level 25+ set of Enfeebled Operation, you can perma-immobilize 3 or 4 minions and lieutenants, almost any boss, almost any player, and even some elite bosses, stacking up to magnitude 9 to 12 immobilize on players and up to 18 on bosses.

Level 2: FLASH ARROW. 3.33 second animation. Unenhanced, it fires a 30 second 90% perception debuff and a 30 second 3.75% accuracy debuff at the target and up to 15 other targets within 35 feet of it. The unenhanced recharge time is 15 seconds, which is plenty fast enough unless you're planning on taking it as your only travel power. The perception debuff is auto-hit. The accuracy debuff is auto-hit in PvE, requires a normal accuracy check to hit players, so PvP is the only reason you would even consider putting accuracy enhancements into it. How much perception is 90% debuff? For all practical purposes, it's about equivalent to giving everybody on your side the equivalent of regular Stealth, except that it goes away if the target gets hit. Other than that, you can get within about 5 to 7 feet of an even-level target without it noticing you; if it cons above you, the perception range is a little farther. It does, of course, stack with actual stealth. And it has the nice feature of being immune to stealth suppression and to Negative Stealth. This is apparently why Cryptic doesn't think that it's such a big deal that it only gives a 3.75% accuracy debuff, or about 6% if you fully enhance it. But let me tell you: 6% is nearly nothing. Considering that your own tier 1 minions con blue (one level below you) to your enemies and are therefore at a defense debuff to start with, that 6% doesn't even bring them up to even defense with you.

I mean honestly, even the defenders cry about how weak the accuracy debuff is, and theirs starts at 6.25%, slots up to about 10%. By comparison, the accuracy debuffs from poison and dark miasma are 11.25% unenhanced, and the defense buff (not counting the regular shields) from traps and force field are 10% and 7.5% unenhanced. Heck, I grant that accuracy debuff is dark miasma's special trick, but that 11.25% is before however much accuracy debuff that can be stacked from the other powers in that set. The 90% perception debuff from Flash Arrow is sometimes nice as an unreliable travel power or for getting into position before a fight, but almost never affects the actual fight. It by no means makes up for such an incredibly weak accuracy debuff. I count this one as one of the horribly broken powers.

But what else are you going to take at level 2?

Level 4: GLUE ARROW. 2.67 second animation. You know that really annoying glue grenade attack that PPD SWAT Equalizers use? Bingo. Fires a 50' diameter glue trap at the spot where the target is standing that lasts for 30 seconds. (If that target is killed, the animation will disappear, but the glue area is still there. Notice that if the target is not killed, merely knocked off of the glue, the patch stays. It really is anchored to the ground, even though you fire it at a target.) The target must be on the ground already, but that's what Entangling Arrow is for. The arrow further prevents flight and jumping, and debuffs run speed by 90% and attack speed by 20%. In PvE it effectively slows the attack speed even more than that, because between each attack all affected targets will try to take at least a couple of steps out from the glue patch before firing again, making it the poor man's "fear." Default recharge is 60 seconds. It can, in theory, be slotted with some of the Slow collectable invention sets, but none of them seem worth taking to me. Take it, slot it with up to 3 recharge reducers, and love it. It's a set-defining power.

Level 10: ICE ARROW. 3.33 second animation. Unenhanced it fires a 9.536 second magnitude 3 hold at a single target, with a recharge time of 18 seconds. See, that's the problem though: 18 plus 3.33 seconds. Compare that to the other mastermind secondaries that get single target holds, poison and dark miasma. Both of them get it on a 16 second recharge; animation times are 2.00 and 1.67 seconds respectively. That means that the single target hold from ice arrow is the same duration but at default rate of fire is 3.66 seconds slower, half of that unenhanceable animation time. For defenders, that's not crippling, because their default hold time is much longer, 11.92 seconds. For masterminds, though, with that 9.536 second default hold time, it means that unless you slot it with level 40 or above inventions, you can not perma-hold anything that cons orange or above. Yellow or above, if it has even token hold resistance. Until you slot it with level 40+ inventions, the hold time and the refire time don't overlap, so you can't even use it to briefly hold bosses or players. You're still going to take it, and you're going to six-slot it as fast as you can with 2 acc, 2 hold, and 2 recharge. (Not 3 hold and 1 recharge, or you lose precious fractions of a second to the enhancement diversification limits.) Because even if all it does is reduce the enemy to firing one shot every 16 or 17 seconds, that's still 16 or 17 seconds that that enemy isn't firing. With any luck, with most primary sets, you can kill even the most aggravating lieutenants in that 16 or 17 seconds. Oh, and lest I forget to mention, targets that aren't held are also debuffed 12.5% on movement and rate of fire, and debuffed a little more on jumping height.

This is the other bread-and-butter attack that I consider to be broken because of its numbers. If nothing else, notice that you cannot make it work properly with any of the collectable invention sets; even at level 50 something like Essence of Curare won't perma-hold.

Level 16: POISON GAS ARROW. 2.67 second animation. Applies a 20 second unenhanceable 15% damage debuff, auto-hit in PvE, to the target and up to 15 additional targets within 25 feet of it, with an unenhanced recharge time of 45 seconds. Even fully slotted for recharge, you can't quite have it up permanently, but it's a pretty nice damage debuff. It also sleeps about 66% of the minions in that area, magnitude 2 sleep with a default duration of 7.152 seconds. But considering how many AoE attacks mastermind minions fire, the sleep function is pretty nearly useless in PvE. It will almost never last longer than a second or two before it gets interrupted. On the other hand, that's also a 66% chance (if it hits) of a magnitude 2 sleep on a player, too. Most blasters, controllers, and defenders don't have sleep defense, just sleep resistance, so for them it's a detoggle if it hits. Take it, slot it with at least one recharge, use it every fight.

Level 20: ACID ARROW. 3.33 second animation. Applies a 20 second unenhanceable 15% damage resistance debuff and 15% defense debuff, auto-hit in PvE, to the target and up to 16 targets in a 25 foot radius around it, with an unenhanced basic recharge of 20 seconds. That's effectively a 15% boost to your minions' damage and for all of your teammates, roughly double the bonus you'd get from Assault in the Leadership pool. With even one recharge reducer (to make up for the animation time), that's effectively permanent. It also does a tiny imperceptible amount of damage over time, that does require an accuracy check. City of Data says that it's basic accuracy, but HeroStats was reporting about a 20% accuracy debuff. So if you care about PvP accuracy or you care about the damage over time, you're going to have to 3-slot it for accuracy if you want it to hit. Defenders care a lot about the damage output from this power and slot for that, because they have next to no damage output of their own; you have so much damage output through your primary powerset that this trivial attack isn't even perceptible. Take it for the (effective) minion and teammate damage output buff, slot it with one recharge, vaguely consider slotting it for accuracy and damage, and use it against any opponent with decent armor.

Level 28: DISRUPTION ARROW. 2.67 second animation. Your first ground-targeted attack, applies a 5.25 second unenhanceable 15% damage resistance debuff every 5 seconds, auto-hit, to every target that comes within 25 feet of the spot you shoot it at for the next 30 seconds, with an unenhanced recharge time of 60 seconds. That sounds kind of nice, and against some obnoxious bosses and above it is, although even they may easily escape it. But consider this: by the time you fire your more important first five arrows, even if you don't fire Entangling Arrow more than once, the fight's been going on for 17 seconds. How often do you need to debuff enemy damage resistance another 15% that late in the fight? The answer to that question tells you whether or not you care about Disruption Arrow. I took it to experiment with, but will probably respec out of it soon. If you do take it, and want it in every fight, slot it heavily with recharge reducers.

Level 35: OIL SLICK ARROW. 2.67 second animation. Ground-targeted like Disruption Arrow, it actually fires two separate traps at the same spot on the ground, both of which last 30 seconds. One is a 50 foot diameter circle that slows enemy movement by 90% (enhanceable, but who would?) and reduces their defense by 25% (enhanceable). It also has a 5% chance, 5 times per second for the whole 30 seconds, to knock the target down. It doesn't debuff their attack speed per se, but of course any time they spend trying to get out of the oil slick and time that they spend trying to stand back up is time that they're not attacking. This by itself is reason enough to take the attack, even though its very long recharge rate (180 seconds, unenhanced) means that you'll probably only get to use it every 3 or 4 fights. However, there is some very bad news.

The other thing that it does is put a 50 foot diameter target on the ground where if either you or the enemy hits it, either with a direct attack or an AoE attack, either energy or fire, it explodes into flame and does a fairly high damage (over time) attack to anything trapped in the oil. Defenders love this attack, and think it's the greatest thing since sliced stupid people on toast because so few defender powersets get any significant damage. Unfortunately, for masterminds (especially masterminds with melee minions like zombies or ninjas) it has a huge crippling bug. The same "terror" effect that makes PvE enemies try to escape the oil also works on your minions. They will run as fast as they can at least 25 feet from the center of the oil slick, and cannot be coerced into entering it.

The last word I have is that Cryptic is aware of the bug, has some idea what's causing it, but considers it low priority because so few people are affected by it. So few people are affected by it because there are so few trick arrow masterminds. There are so few trick arrow masterminds because trick arrow has 3 bugged powers out of the 9. Catch 22.

Oil Slick does have one other use, one that isn't officially ruled an exploit (yet) even though Cryptic admits that it wasn't how they intended it to be used. The targetable part of the Oil Slick can be used as a harmless "enemy" for any enemy-targeted powers, like the Howling Twilight resurrection or various power and speed and so forth transfers from the corrupter Kinetics secondary powerset. Cryptic has admitted that this would be almost impossible for them to fix. So even though this power may cripple you (depending on which primary you take) when it lights up, it may be worth taking for the advantage it offers other players on your team. If you do take it, you probably only need to slot it for recharge reduction, although you may want to consider slotting it for defense debuff if you also expect to be using it against targets with very high defense. Probably not, though. And as with Glue Arrow it can, in theory, be slotted with some of the Slow collectible invention sets, but none of them seem worth taking to me.

Level 38: E.M.P. ARROW. 3.33 second animation. An unenhanced recharge time of five minutes (300 seconds) means that even if you slot the heck out of it with recharge reducers, it isn't going to be often that you get to use it much more than three or so times per mission. But it fires a fairly sweet 17.88 second (unenhanced) magnitude 3 hold, normal accuracy, at the target and up to 15 other targets within not 25 feet, but 35 feet, of the target. Better yet, half of those targets with actually get hit with a magnitude 4 hold. What that means is that fully slotted, it will apply a 30 second hold to up to 16 targets, including almost all minions and lieutenants and roughly half the bosses. And that stacks with your magnitude 3 ice arrow, which will let you at least briefly hold at least one other boss that escapes the EMP Arrow. It also applies a small endurance debuff to each target, but because of the reduction from defender values, the result is so small that it's not worth enhancing. It also does an unenhanceable roughly medium damage attack on every "robot" enemy that it holds, somewhat handy when fighting Nemesis's Jaeger bots I assume. Be warned that it hits your endurance pretty hard AND cripples your endurance recovery for 15 seconds after being fired. This is a set-defining power; if this doesn't appeal to you, I don't know what you see in trick arrows anyway. Take it, slot it with 2 accuracy, at least 2 hold, and the other 2 slots up to one more accuracy, up to one more hold, or up to two recharges. There are no obvious synergies between this and the collectable invention sets, but since you're probably going to six-slot it anyway, you may want to consider pairing it with level 40+ Essence of Curare or even something rarer. But probably not, because all of those sets trade off way too much hold time for way too much accuracy, and save their really useful set bonuses until you get at least five or six of the set so they're hard to mix and match.

(continued...)

Masterminds are not defenders.

That would go without saying, except for two things: masterminds do sort of act like defenders to their minions (and occasionally to their teammates), and mastermind secondary powersets are largely excerpted from the defender primary powersets. But there are two important differences that override those similiarities. The less important of the two is that masterminds need different things from their secondary power than a defender does. Like corrupters, masterminds are first and foremost damage dealers (and, if the player intends to do so and knows what he or she is doing, damage sponges); almost no mastermind cares as much about the secondary powersets as a defender cares about the defender primaries. But the even bigger and more important difference is that when a mastermind uses the same power as a defender, they are on average about forty percent weaker.

For some powersets, the difference between 60% and 100% is perceptible, but not major. You only heal about half as much? Heal twice as often. Your shields deflect 40% less? Sure, but the enemy lasts only half as long because you're doing twice as much damage. But for trick arrow, some of those 40% shortfalls come out in the worst possible places. That means that if you follow the defender trick arrow guides, expecting trick arrow to do for you what it does for them only less well, you will be deeply disappointed.

WHAT TRICK ARROW WILL AND WON'T DO FOR A MASTERMIND

Trick arrow will not make you "uber" in PvE. If you want to be "uber" and just steamroller all enemies, take dark miasma or force field, like everybody else. As of when I'm writing this, midway through issue 9, the five mastermind secondary powersets are not even vaguely balanced, and anybody who tells you otherwise just doesn't know what they're talking about. Trick Arrow is at best a second tier powerset, and for PvE may actually fall behind both traps and poison.

Trick arrow will not heal or buff your minions or your teammates in any way. There are no "heal arrows," no "shield arrows," no "strength boost arrows," no "resurrect arrows." Trick arrow does exactly two things, both of them moderately well. It debuffs enemies and it provides a fair amount of soft control. But if you can't stand to see your minions get hurt and stay hurt for most of the mission, if you expect to play with other players who you think will be counting on you to keep them from getting hurt and heal them after each fight, do not play trick arrow.

You would think that you can make up for this by taking pool powers, like Medicine and Leadership. That's not terribly likely. Unlike poison or dark miasma or force field or even traps, you really can't make a good solid trick arrow build using only 4 of the 9 powers. No, because of the relative weakness of each arrow and the long recharge times, you really are going to have to take at least 6 of the secondary powers, probably 7, and maybe all 9. Count in the 6 non-attack primary powers and that's 11 to 15 of your total 23 powers. Figure in 3 from Leaping (because it does nothing for you to protect you from status attacks, remember, so you will need Combat Jumping and Acrobatics) and that's 14 to 18 of your 23 powers used up. You'll be doing well to fit in even two pool power sets, and not very complete excerpts from all of those. You'd like to have 3 fitness, 2 leadership, 3 medicine, 3 leaping, 2 concealment, and at least 1 patron power, plus 6 primary powers and 9 secondary powers. That's 6 more powers than you can have, and at least one more power pool than you're allowed. No, this is going to be a very tight build, no matter how you customize it.

Nor is it bug-free. The numbers are just plain flat-out wrong on 2 of the 9 powers. As I'll explain below, by applying a blanket 40% reduction to the defender numbers without thinking about how that would work out, they have gimped 2 of those powers into weeping uselessness. One more has a horrible bug with no projected fix date.

Worse, there's one other number that you need to know, and that number is 26.17. 26.17 what? Twenty six point one seven seconds to fire all 9 attacks, just from the animation times. That can't be shortened at all, because animation times aren't affected by recharge rate enhancements. How many fights last 26 seconds or longer? What's more, that's 26.17 seconds that you can't move, standing there stock still aiming your arrows. How often, even for a mastermind, is it a good idea to stand still for 26.17 seconds? For most other secondaries, not only do you never really want to fire all 9 powers at once, but of the 5 or so that you might want to fire in any given fight most of them have animation times ranging from 1 second to just barely 2. Only one trick arrow attack fires in less than 2.33 seconds, and two of your most important attacks take 3.33 seconds each, with you locked down unable to move, just to fire them.

So what will trick arrow do for you if you're a mastermind?

First of all, it is a lot of fun if you like that kind of thing. 9 mostly identical combat animations, that differ only in the shape and animation of the arrow head before it fires. And long combat animations, which annoys some people but it looks very cool standing there aiming the shot "just so" before firing it. But after each shot comes a "blast" or "hit" animation and each one of those is flashy, cool looking, and different from each other. With trick arrow, you really see what the attacks look like. (That's important, because most of the attacks' effects are actually quite subtle.) And it's a very "high tech" looking secondary, much more so than say poison or dark, which suits some people's character concepts really well. And for all of the reasons I've already listed, it's a very rare secondary, so you'll gain instant cool points for being the only trick arrow mastermind your team has ever seen, practically.

More importantly, though, it is chock full of area effect attacks, and that suits masterminds very very well. When you're using a single-target debuff power set like poison (and trust me, I've run the same primaries with poison just as high), you debuff the holy heck out of one of the targets in front of you ... and their buddies pound the heck out of your minions and you. Trick arrow debuffs less than poison (and much less than dark miasma, if more attributes than dark does), but it debuffs all of them.

But the greatest thing that trick arrow does is that it is a god-send in long fights, because its strongest debuff is versus movement and attack speeds. If all attacks hit the same target, as in a boss or a player, it debuffs attack speed by 40% and run speed by 190% (that is to say, all the way down to the absolute minimum for any target that isn't immune to slows) while also turning off flight and jumping. And because of the run speed being floored, melee enemies are combat debuffed even more than that, as they try futilely to switch targets or to keep up with someone who's kiting them. Oh, and it's the almost the only mastermind secondary that comes with stacking hold attacks. Yes, I know that with careful management you can sometimes double up holds using poison or dark miasma. But with trick arrow, you just fire them.

(continued...)

I love this. Things need to happen in an MMO, and more science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) content is always good.

But here's my greatest concern about this: the war really ought to change everything, shouldn't it? I'm not going to say that nobody does anything else, but if the entire human species is at war with "another species" from an alternate dimension, with superior tech to our own, shouldn't that have an effect on every other mission in the game?

At a bare minimum, doesn't Recluse's Victory become a distraction? How can Recluse justify continuing to invest major resources into that particular plan to take over the world if the Rikti are at all close to conquering him? Especially if doing so also diverts enough hero resources into that alternate timeline that it weakens Earth against the invaders? The STF can stay with some text changes, I guess; simply explain somewhere in the text of the mission that he hopes that the weapon will end the war. The LRSF would need to get its text changed (and probably should anyway) to explain that it's a counter-strike against the STF.

But aside from that, really, shouldn't someone (or several someones) have to go through every villain group in the game and ask, "how would they change their plans, what would they do differently, if the human race were in danger of extinction?" Or does the Superadine Connection keep on pushing Superadine as if nothing had changed, does the Council continue their giant robot plans as if nothing had changed, does the Talos Island conspiracy continue hawking magical artifacts as if nothing had changed? Do the Superadine Connection and the Talos Island Conspiracy keep fighting each other as if nothing had changed, do the heroes and the Circle of Thorns keep fighting as if nothing had changed, do the villains and the Coralax Hybrids keep fighting as if nothing had changed, do the Marcones and the Mooks keep fighting as if nothing had changed? Does Does Dr. Vahzilok continue killing off superheroes and supervillains for research raw materials when those superheroes and supervillains are the only thing standing between him and the Rikti? Do the Sky Raiders and Malta stop hunting super-powered beings for the same reason? Do Vanessa diVore and the Clockwork King remain villains or do they go back to being heroes as they were during the previous Rikti War?

I could make a case that nothing changes for Dr. Hamidon or for the Banished Pantheon or for Crey, but it seems to me like other than their story arcs it feels to me like literally thousands of missions' text would need to be rewritten or else new people would constantly be asking why all of the criminal gangs they're fighting are acting as if there weren't Rikti paratroopers dropping out of the sky around them. And when have they had time for that?

(P.S. And yes, I agree with the other posters who've argued that this would make a great time to introduce a Rikti player character villain epic archetype. Too bad it's not going to happen, though.)

Unusually large number of typos in the first paragraph of the first page: Overbrook doesn't have an "e" in the name, unpleasantness is spelled with "ant" not "ent," and there's a transposition in the word "capturing." Might want to clean that up.

On the villain side, not that I've seen. For the hero side, there is a spreadsheet of enemies and where they're found on VidiotMaps.com somewhere.

1) I'm disappointed that this poll showed up in the Tanker and Scrapper forums but not in the Brute forum.

2) That's especially important to me because it's a point of long-standing annoyance to me that there are no weapon-based Brute powersets.

I can't see either Tankers or Scrappers getting Ball and Chain, it's too villainous. But it'd make a great Brute set, now, wouldn't it? Dual Swords would, too. But then, I'm still jonesing for an Axe or Broadsword brute.

[ QUOTE ]
The problem with OK'ing submissions is partially an issue because of manpower. Depending on the number of submissions, you'd need people entirely devoted to reviewing, approving and ultimately putting that stuff into the game. That's not trivial, to be honest, when dealing with 100,000+ subscribers.

[/ QUOTE ]
Would it really be non-trivial? You've had contests before that required judging of entries. Remember the costume screenshot contest, the one where the reward was a guest shot in the comic book? You probably had nearly all 100,000 subscribers enter that one, and you got it judged on time. You've held other contests, too. And I think you're probably over-estimating the number of submissions you'd get; I'm certain it wouldn't be anywhere near 100,000. I'd be startled if it reached 1,000; the numbers on this one probably wouldn't be much higher than, say, any of the previous video contests.

As I said, you don't have to release the mission editor to have a story arc text contest. And you could review the text descriptions of missions in next to no time, no? Considering they'd be re-using existing mission maps, how long would it really take to populate them once you picked the winners? A day? Two?

I wouldn't go along with the exact mechanic that the original poster suggests, but I had a vaguely similar thought, because I do agree with the original poster that this game could benefit from some user-created content.

Here's my thinking: there are a ton of backstory and mainstory arcs on the hero side that never show up on the villain side, or that get dealt with in maybe one sentence of text buried in a mission briefing or debriefing. There are also factions in the Rogue Isles that we see, but never really find out why they're there, what they really want, like the Trolls and the Warriors and the Tsoo and the Legacy Chain and the Banished Pantheon. Lacking Portal Corp access, villains have next to no access to the Shard or to any of the alternate dimensions. Villains also have no access to Croatoa, either. Overall, the hero side has about four times the missions of the villain side. But Cryptic keeps saying that to produce quality content takes time. OK. Here's my suggestion, the one I was holding off on until things calm down a bit, the one I was going to make next week anyway:

Hold a player-written story arc contest for City of Villains. Players can not create any new NPCs, new factions, or new maps. Just specify which NPC gives out the missions, at what level range. Then write the mission briefings, mission debriefings, and a small amount of triggered NPC text. For each mission, specify which map type and which faction(s). Limit one heavily customized "special" map per story arc, limit one signature hero, archvillain, or elite boss per story arc, maximum of one outdoor ambush per story arc, maximum of one helper NPC per story arc, no temp powers or costume pieces or badges given out. Top three story arcs, as chosen by Cryptic, get implemented.

[ QUOTE ]
That's an interesting article....since I arrested ARBITER SANDS last week....who the hell let him out?

[/ QUOTE ]
Oh, please. Arachnos invented the emergency teleporter. Their emergency teleporter system has so much longer range and penetration than yours that it's not funny. Besides, where'd you have him teleported to, when you arrested him? The Zig? Oh, please. The single most realistic thing about City of Heroes is the level of competence displayed by Paragon City's most visible "public/private partnership." The Zig can't even keep the Clockwork King locked up, so like heck they're going to keep a top Arachnos government official locked up, one whose partners (like him) have the power to go back and edit history.

Or maybe the US traded him back to Arachnos for Manticore, in a spy exchange. That'd make some sense.

[ QUOTE ]
No offense to anyone but is it me or is Stateman's speech sounding something along the lines of what President Bush gave to the public before invading Iraq.

[/ QUOTE ]
It's not just you. For crying out loud, who writes Freedom Phalanx's dialog, Kyle Sampson? "Balance of power"? "Weapon of mass destruction?" Flat-out lies about how we don't know "yet" if Statesman's brother in law is "building a rapid strike force"? "If we fail to get the job done in the Rogue Isles, Arachnos will certainly follow us here?"

And never mind the parts of that that aren't true (the Tangle doesn't "destroy" anything, there is no invasion force), if the Etoile Islands are such an obvious threat to the US, where in the heck is the US government? Does the US even have a President? Is there some reason why Congress hasn't responded to the fact that top Arachnos officials have actually be arrested as far inland as Overbrook? Who left it up to the Statesman to decide these things?

And yes, I agree that telling Arachnos in advance to keep an eye out for our 8-man mini-sub is just about the dumbest possible thing Statesman could possibly have done. At the very least, that whole paragraph should have been peeled off and stuck under one of those "Top Secret" links like the ones in the Backgrounder articles.

Seriously. Statesman can't open his mouth, in the comic book or in the game, without making Arachnos' propaganda that Statesman and Freedom Phalanx are seeking to run the whole country through some kind of quasi-religious personality cult, that there is no longer any meaningful rule of law in the US, and that the threat of Statesman exporting this quasi-religious personality cult of his by force is what justifies the level of repression and military vigilance in the Isles, look vaguely plausible.

Minimum suggestion, here? The game's backstory establishes a doctrine of superheroic "hot pursuit" across international borders. Tell us that Arbiter Sands, who was recently arrested in Overbrook, has escaped and is being pursued by a task force under Statesman's supervision. That would at least drape a veneer of legality over this enterprise.

Invention Salvage and You! (Version 2)