Jack_NoMind

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Suppose I want to add a patrol at the start of the mish without any triggering, but if its going to appear at the bottom of the other objectives, regardless of any trigger ordering in the mish, the patrol will appear at the end of the mish rather than at the beginning the way I want it to be.

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This is not exactly true, afaik -- it may appear somewhat randomly somewhere in the mission, but not necessarily at its end.

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Presently you can't. You have to delete everything after and redo them.

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You can edit the .storyarc file by hand in WordPad to avoid having to delete everything. It's pretty straightforward to do, but back it up first and be careful with cut-pasting anyway.

It cannot be done; not presently, and since there are no non-Task Force missions I'm aware of like that live, probably not for a while.

If we get the ability to create/edit our own maps, there are several tricks that could be used. In the meantime, the only way you're going to be able to manage it is to set up another mission in the arc with the other map. =/ Pretty kludgy, but them's the breaks. You might want to just write down your idea for the arc somewhere and wait for the MA toolkit to mature.

The order in which you create your objectives matters. If you set up several objectives, or objectives with large repetitions set to Any, you can actually push your objectives out of their spots.

So for instance, say you set up something like:

"Collect 10 glowies." (Any)
"Destroy 2 objects." (Back)
"Boss fight" (Back)

which is kind of a logical order for objectives. But it will literally process them in that order when creating the map. So say your map has 5 spawn points in "Back," and it randomly assigns three glowies to Back points. Then it will assign the two objects to Back points and, well, the Back's full -- so the boss fight gets stuck anywhere it can manage.

Have your most important objectives first, and any "Any location" objectives last.

The only way to re-order your objectives without deleting them all and re-creating in the correct order is to edit the .storyarc file by hand -- by default, it will be in your City of Heroes directory. Open it with WordPad or a similar text editor, it's all relatively straightforward to read. Just be sure you make a backup copy first, just in case.

Unless you make a custom States-like clone. You can manage something *pretty* close, as long as they don't stare too hard at the faceplate.

I would prefer simply permitting Boolean operators. So when you say, "Doing X will complete the mission, and also doing Y+Z will complete the mission," we could have (X) OR (Y AND Z).

This would be a very powerful tool for things other than just mission completion goals, as well.

Edit: with Glowies as g, Captive as c, and Boss as b, the examples you list are:

g OR b
c AND (g OR b)
((g AND c) OR (g AND b)) OR (b AND c) (with a multi-operation logic, this statement could be simplified)

Huh.

Okay, first off, this set does come with a significant debuff power -- one that improves survivability, no less, since HE has a pretty hefty -dam component.

And I'm with Zhao_Yun. Scrappers already have everything they themselves need to solo. They are, in fact, the only blueside AT which essentially guarantees this out of the box. There are soloable builds for other ATs, but that's not quite the same thing.

The only hole that makes sense for them to fill is their lack of support powers. The other classes get powers that make soloing easier; Scrappers should get powers that make it easier to team. I set up the power pool I suggested here in 'traditional' format because I think it's too difficult to get that change through the pipeline, as it were. But if I had my way, the set would have Thaw and possibly Forge, Cauterize, or Power of the Phoenix. (Edit: To get this into the five-power mold that other APPs have, I'd drop Fire Blast and, yes, sadly, Rain of Fire, replacing them both with Fire Ball. I'd prefer Thaw and Forge, but I'm afraid Forge would be pretty anemic as a Scrapper power, so unless it would be permissible to buff it, I'd likely end up with Thaw in T1 and PotP as a second T2.)

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char
Ring of fire
fire blast
rain of fire
fire ball

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Not gonna happen. That's two significant ranged AoEs -- and why would you want ring of fire? Especially over Hot Feet?

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It seems very counterproductive for a melee Archetype to have half of the powers in their APP cause scatter.

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Those powers also cause Slow (and Hot Feet further, inexplicably, causes -fly). And the scatter's not really so bad. To compare, Hot Feet has a magnitude 3 Afraid and RoF has a magnitude 5, compared to Burn's magnitude 50 -- and enemies will typically charge right back into a Burn patch after leaving it on my /FA scrapper.

Okay, so the title's a joke. I don't really expect the Scrapper Fire APP to be named "Pyro Mastery." Even though that is only one letter off from the Tanker equivalent, Pyre Mastery. And perfectly captures the essence of the Scrapper mentality.

Anyway, whatever name the Fire APP ends up having, here's what I'd like it to look like.

<ul type="square">[*]Fire Blast : As Blaster power (damage reduced). Basic requisite single target ranged attack.[*]Hot Feet : As Controller/Blaster power (radius reduced). Even with the endurance drain, this is something that would be extremely useful. My only concern is that Caltrops vastly overpowers it (much cheaper for endurance, placeable, stackable, similar damage level). Still, I'd cheerfully take this power for some characters.[*]Rain of Fire : As Blaster power (damage reduced?). It may sound odd, exchanging what is certainly a better attack in the Tanker APP (Fire Ball) for this power... but I just can't see how any Scrapper could pass up the opportunity to make it rain fire.[*]Heat Exhaustion : As Corrupter power (recharge increased?). A lot of people were probably expecting to see Melt Armor here, but the tanker version of the power is so pathetically weak and slow-charging it's hardly worth bothering with (especially now that we have that delicious new -res PBAoE proc, which can slide right on in to Blazing Aura). I doubt the Scrapper version would be much better. So, instead, a single-target debuff, hearkening back to the olden days in which Scrappers' class role was bosskilling. Yeah, it won't be as good as Corruptor or Controller HE, but... I'd hit that.[/list]

You realize that's pretty much what a radio mission is, right? No real plot, maybe a few lines of dialogue, and a mission filled with enemies. In fact, probably about 2/3rds of the missions in CoX are that way.

Edit: No, okay, probably about 1/3rd. But I'm not really sure how much "Go beat up 50 more carnies" contributes to some of the story arcs. =P

Yeah... as far as I can tell, we don't have those tools yet. =/

I can see the importance of having a consistent feedback team, but I agree that I'm not sure I can volunteer for quite that much (it's the end of the semester for me, as well!).

I can volunteer to go through 20 arcs over a period of three weeks solo, under the assumption there will be enough shorter arcs to compensate for the inevitable bloated ones I'm certain will appear. I can probably make at least some of the team events, but those are a bit harder for me to promise for right now.

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Fought him and lost 4 times before time ran out. My Grav/Psi dom just didn't have the damage to finish him. Perhaps I should try it on a difficulty level lower than level 4 i was running on. THe drain psyche on the minions was wonderful though

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Haha, yes, I can imagine. One note about him and his pets -- Custom bosses appear to inherit AT inherents. So I'm pretty sure he's got the Mastermind inherent, Supremacy... which means that if you don't kill his pets (and keep them dead), he's almost impossible to take out.

Arc Name: Cops and Graverobbers
Arc ID: 32803
Notes: This is a single-mission arc with the required conditions Defeat Boss (x2), Protect Object, and Defeat All in Final Room. It is a 45-min timed mission! One of the bosses is a custom AV, set to full (extreme) powerset usage. I've soloed him as an EB successfully with my Scrapper, but he can be pretty tough to take down permanently. There are several pets available in this mission -- one available immediately, and three 'unlockable' through optional objectives. All pets (theoretically) spawn in the Front of the map. There are some issues with spawn and ambush placement and dialogue that I am not currently able to resolve; should the MA be updated in such a way that I can, I will update the arc accordingly. (Alternatively, if anyone sees something it looks like I could be doing differently, please let me know. I don't think there's anything, but, hey. I'm wrong, sometimes.)

I'd especially like feedback on this if you can run it with a team.

Oh, and -- check the contact "Unnecessary Interaction" dialogue for a bit of an CoH/Shadowrun crossover in-joke.

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For my arc:
Name: Future Skulls
Arc ID: 4727
Length: Long
Morality: Hero
Missions: 4
Enemy groups: Custom group, Skulls, Coralax
Description: A low level arc, the Skulls get an idea, and it is up to you to stop it from happening.

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Contact dialogue (mostly fixing commas/runons):
"$name thank you for coming so quickly." Try "$name! Thank you..." or "$name, thank you..."

"I have found something in the libram you brought to me $name." :: "...you brought to me, $name."

"old diety Merulina" :: "old deity Merulina"

"Something of power must have been there, I only hope it was not what we are seeking, since it was no longer there." :: "Something of power must have been there. I only hope it was not what we are seeking, since it was no longer there."

"One of the others must have been able to find something we can use $name." :: "...something we can use, $name."

"We are almost out of time and options $name." :: "...and options, $name."

"This last option is dangerous, with no guarantee it will work, but we have no choice." :: "This last option is dangerous, with no guarantee it will work... but we have no choice."

"Thank you $name for doing this." :: "Thank you, $name, for doing this."

"Thank the gods $name." :: "Thank the gods, $name!"

"Using the dagger and the time of the ceremony, we should be able to scry out the exact location of the ceremony." :: "Using the dagger and the ceremony's time, we should be able to scry its exact location."

"We were successful $name." :: "We were successful, $name."

"We have found the location of the ceremony out near Salamanca." :: "We have found the location of the ceremony: Out near Salmanca."

"You did well. $name." :: "You did well, $name!"

Other:

In the final mission, the Skulls sacrificing victims appear to be the ones trapped. Perhaps select a different animation for them?

Do your custom bosses have ranged attacks? I hovered above Bonesnap and pinged him to death, and all he did was run around aimlessly on the ground. If your bosses have only melee, they need to be able to fly.

Other dialogue has the same issue as the contact dialogue -- you need to offset $name as though they were actually saying someone's name (so with a comma or as a separate exclamation/imperative).

Bonesnap says, "You again!" But I don't remember encountering him before...

Overall, nice flow to the arc and good use of custom critters. Was very happy with the lack of Defeat Alls, especially on the larger maps. (The third map was maybe a bit *too* big?) Rated 4/5.

Arc 32803: Cops and Graverobbers.

One-mission arc, timed mission (45 minutes). Custom EB at the end with high difficulty; one pet encountered at the beginning, three more available from optional goals. They will spawn at the Front of the map, hopefully.

"Defeat All" objective listed, but it's actually just Clear Final Room.

Arc Name: Cops and Graverobbers
Arc ID: 32803
Faction: PPD/Banished Pantheon/Custom
Creator Global/Forum Name: @JackNoMind
Difficulty Level: medium/hard. Will be definitely hard when it's possible to make 'finishing off' the EB/AV a requirement.
Synopsis: The Banished Pantheon has seized a local office building, and it's up to you to stop them -- with some help from the PPD. This challenging mission is best on a team!
Estimated Time to Play: 45 minute timer. Depending on how thorough you are, it may take up most of that time.
More Details:
Pet-heavy mission (via optional objectives). Final room will be much easier if you collect all the pets. There are some known issues regarding spawn locations -- not much I can do about those right now.

Mostly it's intended as a fun-filled zombie-stomping romp. So far I've only tested and run this with one character; I'm going to try to get together a full team in the near future to see what it's like at max size.

Feedback Desired: All the obvious, of course, but I'm especially looking for typo/grammar/parsing error type stuff. I'd like it to feel at least somewhat polished, despite all the things I can't do with MA to make it quite 'perfect' just yet.

Edit: Oh yeah, one other thing. Due to the interactions of minimum and maximum levels, this mission will always occur at Level 40.

Does the MA script honor regular expressions or logical operators in any form or field?

The specific thing I'd like to accomplish right now is make a boss spawn if a particular optional objective is failed. This clearly isn't possible to do in the editor proper. However, I can think of a half-dozen ways of making this happen if I could specify, say, a NOT in one or more fields while hand-editing the script. So -- can I? If so, what syntax does the MA recognize?

Kheldians are tank-mages, by that standard.

Edit:

Look, I want to point something out here, that may not have occurred to folks. Having lots of Defense bonuses available makes Resistance sets better. Adding, say, 25% defense all will usually make a much bigger difference to Invulnerability than it will to Super Reflexes -- SR will typically already be at or close to the softcap. It'll help in the sense that it lets SR free up some power slots, but there's not a whole lot it can do with those to improve its survivability.

Adding Resistance bonuses, conversely, would significantly help sets like Regeneration, Super Reflexes, Ninjitsu, Shields, and Ice Armor. With the possible exception of SD, these are not sets that really need improving like that.

I'll grant, yes, aesthetically speaking, more Resistance bonuses would be nice. But like I said above, I really don't think we should expect to see a whole lot of improvement in this area -- and certainly not a shift to the 2:1 value ratio people seem to be asking for.

I have no idea why D wasn't used in the first place. If they're worried about crowding, there's plenty of floaty space outside a Zulu-esque portal can lead to.

I think a UI element with an increasing/decreasing glow would be good; it's less distracting (and less easy to immediately 'read') than a pulsing light, and so serves the same function as the increasing/decreasing volume. Making this available only to people with the sound disabled ("deaf mode"?) would also be acceptable, although I think that some players who simply can't distinguish between sounds very well might complain.

This topic has been coming up an awful lot lately.

In brief: More options = more optimization. I think that's why we've mostly only seen Defense instead of Resistance, and why I don't think we're very likely to see much Resistance in the future.

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I'd be surprised (happily mind you) if this game was still around in 5 years,

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Like Goldbrick and Whisper, I don't think they'll actually shut down the servers for quite a while -- although NCSoft is more, ehm, profit-minded than many of its competitors, the kill switch is probably more costly than letting it run on its own inertia.

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and I still wanted to play it.

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But there's the kicker. We're actually still watching the more successful second-generation MMOs -- EVE, CoX, WoW, and arguably a few others (Lineage 2, which is equal to or larger than CoX in terms of raw subscriptions... possibly others that are big in Asia that I don't know much about) -- to see how things go down. But if the first generation is any guide, the development team will move on to sequels or newer projects and the community will slowly follow. If they're still releasing Issues three to five years from now that are more than just basically new missions, costumes, and badges, I'll be suitably impressed. If there's a community half the size and involvement of the current one, I'll be pretty much flabbergasted.

(This is assuming, of course, that the economy doesn't implode and eat new Internet development, or something else equally nigh-apocalyptic. All predictions invalid in case of armageddon.)

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You young whippersnappers don't have enough perspective. Some MMOs hang around for a very long time. Kingdom of Drakkar, a 2-D graphical MUD, is still going after 20 years. Ultima Online is still around. Everquest is 10 years old, and that's a very dated game now, likewise Diablo II. If a game like EQ is still hanging in there, I'm not expecting any plugs to be pulled on CoH for 5-10 more years, longer if they update the graphics periodically.

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Young? At any rate, I think my perspective's pretty good, financially speaking. Drakkar offers a free-to-play version, and EverQuest, if I recall correctly, is part of a dual-subscription deal with EQ2. I haven't been able to access Ultima's billing model in the few minutes I have to type this up, so I'm not quite sure how they're handling it. Shadowbane and Anarchy Online, two more long-running games, have both transitioned to free or partially free to play models. D2 never charged subscription fees.

Maybe the games haven't been shut down, but that doesn't mean you're still getting value out of any sort of lifetime subscription.

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And finally, I don't think sequels are a good idea. People get attached to their characters and don't want to start all over again in CoH II. Just build onto this game, and if necessary replace the graphics engine. There's already infinite potential in a game like CoH.

Oh, and I believe the word is that Blizzard is working on a new, secret MMO.

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Not so much secret that they're working on it, but it's not clear what it's going to be.

The engine can be upgraded -- although the more extensive the upgrade, the more difficult and painstaking it is to do in a live environment. Changing the mechanics substantially cannot be done without launching a sequel. And no matter how well the new Architect box launches, it will never generate the kind of buzz "See screenshots for CoH 2! &lt;site name&gt; exclusive!" would.

Good idea? Bad idea? I dunno. Profitable idea? As long as they can back it up with lots of shiny, absolutely.

SOs at 5K, near-purples at 8K? Not that I think bounty is worth a damn as it is, but there does seem to be a little bit of a pricing discrepancy there.

Hm. That's an interesting question.

I don't expect CoX to last much more than three more years. Either the monthly-fee MMO market will bottom out (very unlikely), NCSoft will shut it down due to insufficient profitability (unlikely, but possible), or a sequel will be developed and announced (likely). Launching a sequel would allow them to not only improve the game's engine (which can and is being done gradually already, it seems), but overhaul its playable mechanics and generate new interest in the franchise.

CoX predates WoW, and I don't even expect WoW to last for more than three more years without a proper sequel... or if not a sequel to WoW directly, at least a new property for Blizzard. NCSoft launches new properties all the time, of course, but most of them fail (anyone remember Auto Assault?) and many of them are in competition with one another for virtually identical markets.

At the best plan, two years is just slightly under $300. That makes it, theoretically, economical to pay that much for more than two years' of time. But while I think it could last as long as three years, I couldn't say how close to that mark it would hit...

I'd probably be willing to put down $200-$250, with some sort of 'rollover guarantee.' Not for a lifetime subscription, necessarily, but, say... the lifetime of CoX, plus a year's subscription for any single other NCSoft game if 'lifetime of CoX' proves to be less than two years from the date of subscription purchase. (Which would include any NCSoft-published sequel.)

It might be fair or economical to charge more than that, but I would be a lot more reluctant to buy. As it is, I've never had my account active for more than half a year... and that's a pretty hefty chunk of change for a broke-[censored] college student.

I've wanted something like this for a while, but am not sure how practical the idea is. I'd like it if all global-like channels were available to monitor, so I could set it up to notify me of zone events and the like.

I'd run the client even while I was logged in -- that way I could keep an eye on SG or coalition chat, zone events, and the like while doing things in other windows. Hooray for the multitasking generation!