Kelenar

And this is why my main started making plans to assassinate Dr. Vahzilok after arresting him ten times.

So techy characters can do real-time combat hacking in SR4? Now I'm kind of annoyed, since some of the guys who did SR4 went on to write Eclipse Phase, where that sort of thing should be pretty common, but is pretty much not even feasible. Though that's one of my sole gripes about Eclipse Phase, so it's still doing pretty darn good so far.

Nah, mine is...
Make Elec/Ninja Stalker.
Go, "Eh, this isn't that great," at level 8. Delete. Reroll as a Ninja/Ninja Stalker.
Go, "Well, actually, Elec/Ninja is probably fun once it gets going. Damn." at level 6. Delete. Reroll as an Elec/Ninja Stalker.
Go, "But really, why play a stalker? I've been in more of an AoE mode anyway right now, so this won't satisfy me until I've played it for weeks!" at level 13. Delete. Reroll as a Fire/Elec Blaster.
Go, "This combo is pretty cool, but I feel like having something a bit more self-sufficient at low levels, too." at level 9. Delete. Reroll as...

This happens about once a week for me. I don't have the literally hundreds of concurrent alts many people do, but I'm sure I've deleted 500 characters...

The best part is, that seems to be the most common placement for that mission. Apparently heroes are really gullible.

Some days, just keeping people from being burnt alive by Destroyers counts as a pretty nice thing to do, y'know?

Reminds me of some of my English teachers...

Yeah, this is the one big one people tend to forget, I think. If you were to go to a planet where the native microorganisms considered your body tasty but weren't bothered by your immune system and natural defenses, there'd be nothing stopping you from just sort of decomposing.

Of course, this is assuming it's carbon-based or otherwise cares about the chemicals in our body. If silicon-based life were to visit Earth, I can't imagine much would happen to it. Though I guess plants might like to grow on them.

This. And as a bonus, make the new zones have no Arachnos presence at all.

But, keeping with the original question...
Blueside: Steel Canyon: Imperial City actually... wait for it... looks like a city. The zone has skyscrapers, and it's laid out in a way so that they look like a natural part of the landscape. Steel Canyon just feels like somebody roped off a few square miles of downtown New York and declared it to be a city. Revamping it with the new layout style would make it much cooler.

Redside: St. Martial: For one of the coolest-looking pre-i18 zones, St. Martial has some of the least interesting content. Like EvilGeko said, half of it is about Johnny vs. the Wailers, and it contains two of my least favorite contacts in the game, Vivacious Verandi and Hardcase. (Though, admittedly, this is only because 95% of the heroside contacts are bland and personality-less, and thus too boring to even disdain.) Plus, the zone already looks great; a revamp could make it amazing, whereas it's going to take more than a facelift to make most of the Isles look nice.

And then Calvin Scott founds NERV and things really start going downhill for everybody.

This could be awesome if it somehow got done. One of the big problems I had on my TA/ Defender in the 20s was that I could often draw a lot of pain in my direction before I finished applying the debuffs that would let me survive it.

I've noticed the same thing. Still very little debt, but a lot of downtime to regain health on some missions. And I don't know how the XP bonuses for the various groups line up, but most of my hero/villain characters would be fighting at least +0/x2/bosses by level 10, where my Praetorians are slogging through +0/x1/no bosses and still taking longer.

The problem is, at low levels, challenging = tedious for most combinations. Getting through a fight by the skin of your teeth is thrilling and interesting... until you realize you have to wait three minutes to heal since you just used Rest after the last fight. Doing a whole mission like this just gets really annoying after a while, and some groups can pretty consistently do it to me--Destroyers, with mezz-resistant lieutenants/bosses every few mobs, like kicking the teeth out of my characters who rely on mezzes for defense.

That said, I'm thinking I might experiment with some new build tactics and see how that goes. It seems like Praetorian characters would get better-than-average relative performance out of debuffs, soft mezzes, knockback, and Hover.

Ironically, my big problem with it, I think, is that it makes my characters feel absolutely not superpowered. A low-level blaster, with a little strategy and use of inspirations, can wipe out hazard zone-sized spawns of Hellions or Skulls. Meanwhile, in Praetoria...

this happens. I don't want the game to be a cakewalk, but needing to pull out every trick I can think of to survive three random schmucks with guns is pretty antithetical to the whole 'superhero' feeling for me.

Awww jeah. This one, I might have to join.

There are several all-KoA missions, mostly given from a few specific 40+ contacts. Malta has entire arcs that are primarily dedicated to them. Do the Indigo and Crimson arcs and you'll see enough of both to last a lifetime.

Also to be noted--now with GR out, you can earn an alignment merit every other day just by doing tip/morality missions. One alignment merit can be used to grab some very nice stuff--you could probably pretty easily make 100 million every two days doing this, just by using it to buy a pricey recipe and sell it on the market. Whether prices eventually go down from the supply increasing like this remains to be seen. Doing it that route, though, should let you go for cash with any character that soloes well.

This sounds pretty similar to Exalted 2e's current state, yeah. New additions and errata of things in the corebook are strewn throughout half a dozen other books, and some things have had multiple revisions made of them. Yo dawg, we heard yo like errata, so we errata'd yo errata so you can try to figure out how the rules work now while you try to figure out how the rules work now.

On the upside, you get a Magnitude: infinity repel power that you can use to push heroes around.

To unlock the Cathedral of Pain trial, you need to kill 777 Circle of Thorns minions while running backward in a broad counterclockwise circle around Perez Park during the real world equinox. If you complete this in one in-game day, you get the 'Intransigent Arquebus' badge.