LaserJesus

After having a day to cool off about this change I've done some thinking and I think I have a better alternative fix.

If this fix is indeed to stop buffbotting, then the ideal fix would be to make it so custom critters don't use any powers at all if they don't have any attack powers that deal damage, and make it so they don't use any powers if they're set to passive or non-combat. Enemies taking damage from allies in MA missions already takes down the amount of XP they give out. The issue is that these allies are making the missions significantly easier without reducing the rewards. The solution then should be the ability to remove that, by making it so any ally in a mission is forced to be able to attack enemies and therefore utilize the current balancing factor already in the game. As it stands with the current patch, people who use allies who do attack are punished twice.

Obviously this solution would probably be harder to code in and obviously take more work, but the Mission Architect was such an undertaking and has been publicized so much that it frankly deserves a better exploit solution than this.

40-45%? Lucky. I've got enemies that are giving out 117 influence at level 50, because I decided that a dance club should have gray con civilians dancing in it.

As of the latest patch, Drakule vs. The Werewolf Bikers From Hell, Holding Down the Fort, and Made to Wave the Flag all have missions where the player will get considerably less experience than normal. I'm not going to change a damn thing about them, since I worked too hard on all of them and the missions won't be the same without the NPCs flagged as allies.

Drakule vs. The Werewolf Bikers From Hell, Made to Wave the Flag, and Holding Down the Fort all just got their dicks smashed in with a sledgehammer repeatedly for an hour straight.

I wasn't aware that using non-combat allies for scenery was so exploitative. I've seen the error of my ways. I'll just stick to making newspaper missions from now on.

Damn you and all of your artz.

Thanks for the review! Now the obligatory explanations:

Places where there really should be clues: I agree. There actually were more during the process of making the arc, but I bumped up against the space limit hard. Damn formatting. The last mission especially had me cursing the filesize limit as I left it woefully under-detailed. When the filesize gets increased, this is the first thing that I'll be addressing for sure.

Inconsistencies: I'll level with you and say that this arc was written over the course of 6 months. Many things were probably forgotten by me over that period of time. I'm really embarrassed by the War Shaman gaffe though.

Grey-cons: The idea there is that the weak enemies are a metaphor for Malta's worldview, specifically the idea that nothing can beat America. They would have you believe that World War II was won with no effort on the part of the American military, and that the Soviets were defeated by the Americans as a matter of course.

The traitorous civilian cons grey because in order to get a civilian that doesn't have insane glowing eyes, psychic powers, claws, Nemesis guns, etc, I have to use the Crazed. Speaking of her, I did not even think of how pets would affect that fight. The "real" objective is to lead her out, at which point you get a new objective to break free of the conditioning, in white, which is a boss spawn of the Doctor O'Brien figment surrounded by his Lt. and Minion versions, who has speech indicating his increasing frustration with his inability to break you, followed with a pop-up on mission exit describing him giving you repeated electrical shocks out of anger. The return dialogue is the same for both succeeding and failing.

That mission was also supposed to have way more friendly Doctor O'Brien spawns, by the way. They were the first to get axed when I ran out of space. They were originally surrounded by full spawns of Doctor O'Briens named "Your Friend" but the color formatting in descriptions apparently doesn't work unless it's in a specific boss spawn.

Power Generator: The idea is that the redundant generators are all part of the same "main generator" system. It's not that you're taking out 3 backup generators and 1 main generator, it's that you're taking out 4 cells of a main generator. The first 3 can just be smashed because you just want them to not work so the base's computer can't offload the energy overload to the other cells. Each area of the base will have its own smaller generator to run backup power.

The reason for doing it was to create a distraction so the escape would be easier. Obviously splitting up is a terrible idea, but if everything went smoothly there'd be no tension. There's also the fact that writing dialogue for 4 characters at once in such a small area is mind-numbingly difficult, and having the player haul around 4 boss level allies (even ones who just have brawl, that hits a lot harder than you'd expect when a boss uses it) could easily frustrate people.

Contact: The idea is that the Lab Computer is just a piece of scenery that's a touchstone for all of the missions, instead of an object that you're physically interacting with. The idea is that there is no contact, just events happening in real time (excluding flashbacks). The computer looks much nicer than the default green circuit man, in my opinion.

All in all, I'm glad you enjoyed the story, and really happy you felt the characters were fully fleshed out. That was one of my two major concerns, the other being how well the presentation worked. The second one needs work, but I was wholly expecting that to happen. Completely throwing away the standard method of storytelling in the game and trying something completely different is bound to have some hurdles to get over.

Thanks for the feedback!

Glad you enjoyed the arc, Glazius! I definitely put a ton of work into that and came out with something I was pretty happy with, so I decided to leave it up. To address a few things:

Downscaled enemies: I don't think that higher level enemies have a higher damage scale by default, with the rigorous work of testing this arc. (Most of my testing was done with a level 8 brute, by the way, at +0/x1 with bosses.) It seems like a level 1 gunshot is no different than a level 50 gunshot, except for the level difference. I think it's specific enemies that have higher damage, like warwolves. Speaking of which, it seems like the downscaled council that I grabbed from the 20s range is really the hardest part of the arc, something that I'm having trouble thinking of a way to fix to my satisfaction. I want to have the whole high level group represented, but not be too challenging to the player. Hmm, maybe if I take the minion wolves out of the group, leaving only the LT and the rarely seen boss? That way there'll be less knockback and stun.

By the way, I pulled off the downscaling by using cleverly named custom groups. Just make a custom group with enemies that only spawn above the levels your missions are specifically set to, or even just take a standard group above the level of the mission and make that the main group for the mission. If you've done it right the name of the group will be yellow and you'll have a warning up in the upper right corner saying that there are enemies outside of the level range of the mission, and may be too difficult. You can still publish your arc if you get that warning.

I have had it completely not work in the past, but for now it seems to be working just fine. For the purposes of this arc I tried to avoid really mean enemies that low level characters just are not equipped to handle outside of specific boss spawns. No minions with control powers outside of chances to stun and knockback or a long recharging sleep power, no minions with heals, no horribly annoying debuffs (Death Shamans are the only shamans in my custom Banished Pantheon group). The Paragon Protector in the second mission can be found in the regular Crey group as Psychic Defender Clone. It's in the 20s range and is featured in some CoV mission tucked away somewhere. I changed the name and the description to the stock. Wanted to give experienced players the shock of "OH ****, A PARAGON PROTECTOR AT LEVEL 5?" without actually making them suffer through some MoG or Total Focus. Same with the whole Rularuu mission. No eyeballs or wisps (aside from the boss in the last room). The regular Natterlings gave no XP you say? Damn. Must have picked a summoned version on accident or something. I'll have to fix that.

Infected: Infected spawn in small amounts in Galaxy City, giving out the same description. Space is really tight in this arc, so custom descriptions for 3 different enemies are right out, especially since I'd have to make a custom group for them as well.

Short Souvenir: I really hate writing out long recaps of my arc. I tried it for the first arc I made, and couldn't bring myself to do it. I tend to try to make my souvenirs something that you'd actually keep around or was given to you during the mission and write a short paragraph that has the general gist of what went down. Considering my bad luck with space constraints, that's probably a good thing.

As far as space and how I'm doing, the answer is not good. Not good at all. I'm in the 99% range on this. To even get it published I had to cut a lot of text and side objectives, which is why the missions seem so dry at times. Trust me, if I had room I'd have far more little jokes and clues and such.

As for the humor, yeah, this one's not quite as light-hearted. I definitely went for far blacker humor with this one. Whether you find the scenario in the third mission funny or not really depends on how mean-spirited you like your comedy. I think it's great, other people have commented on it being funny, and yet others like yourself thought it was too serious.

As far as the Hunters not being over the top like Von Heksung, he is far more insane than they are. Hell, he's pretty much a serial killer that only targets monsters. The reasoning behind them not using the ritual is that they don't feel like taking any chances, and killing you would be far easier and less time consuming than using the ritual and fighting Drakule's soul. As Von Heksung states in Rise of the Drakule, every time they have to kill him they lose dozens and dozens of men. I'd explain this better in the arc, but space issues. Arrrgh.

Making the emotional aspects boss only is something I'll look into. In any case, I think you'll enjoy Drakule vs. The Werewolf Bikers From Hell more. It's probably more over the top than any of the others, and definitely one of my more recent ones, so it's better just due to the fact that I've gotten better at making these over time.

Dhahabu Kingdom and the Indelible Curse of Hate
Arc ID: 367872
Author: @Zamuel
Rating: 5 stars

Short Version
An arc that has quite possibly the best title I've ever read and a really great aesthetic that eventually won me over completely despite some major and minor issues with difficulty.

Plot Synopsis
Queen Auri of the Dhahabu Kingdom from an alternate Earth has sent a message through dimensions asking for your help to save her people from a curse that is causing people to become filled with insane rage.

Story
The plot itself is good enough and makes sense; the overall arc of the story doesn't do anything mind-blowing, but does what it sets out to do. However, the style of the whole thing is great. I love the alternate Earth the arc is set in. None of this was explicitly stated, but this Earth's society seems to have evolved in such a manner that ancient African cultures remained dominant. Everyone you'll see has dark skin tones and are dressed like they're either from an Egypt-esque society or an ancient African tribe. The nerd in me started thinking of scenarios where this Earth gets more direct sunlight than Primal Earth, making it so the genetic mutation that caused people's skin to get lighter in areas further north of the equator never happened; the kingdoms of Africa never fell out of power and eventually took Europe and China's place as the societies that ended up conquering and colonizing much of the world, and more. Again, all of that is rampant speculation, and I think it's a good thing. There's really not a good way to lay out all this kind of stuff in an MA arc and have it not feel like I'm having exposition crammed down my throat. Plus, speculation is fun.


Then again, that's not necessarily a BAD thing...

The world's technology level seems to be a fantasy 1700s level; I don't want to say steampunk because it definitely is not that aesthetic; with magic being more common. The author uses custom enemies and recolored standard enemies to great effect to achieve the style, and the names of the enemies and their descriptions and just the whole thing in general is just really immersive and just plain cool. Only real hitches in the recolored enemies are due to limitations of the system (Arachnoid arms apparently don't inherit the skin color, the contact headshot in the window doesn't inherit the colors) or one very specific case where a dark-skinned Steel Strongman had dark red pants in low lighting, and well, from a far distance this occurred:


Okay, I am REALLY glad they invented pants. Though, that's not really much better.

Did I mention the title? God dammit, I really love that title.

Only typos that stuck out enough for me to notice and remember were a couple instances of missing punctuation in the accept text. Just stuff like periods missing on the end. However, speaking of that, at first I was confused why the accept text was also included in the send-off text but then I realized that it's there so a team can see it. The accept text is your character saying something, all pretty generic stuff that any hero would reasonably say like "Alright, I'll help you" or "Maybe Spider King Anansi has something to do with it." (Again, great names. Makes everything seem really awesome and pulpy.) A team wouldn't get to see that otherwise, so that's a pretty awesome touch. I wish I had the room to steal that for all of my arcs, but I have a bad habit of running up against the character limit. However, the Drakule arcs all have a bit of room, and some of that accept text is pretty funny...

Mission three was really light on the text. Two clues, like one or two things of system text, ambush dialogue, that's pretty much it. It feels like space might be an issue here, and there used to be things that got cut out. However the mission feels really dry, especially since the map spawns empty; as it should. System text on all of the glowies and dialogue for the boss would make it feel far more polished. Some of Queen Auri's dialogue could use some punching up as well. It's not bad, but she could use some more characterization. Right now she doesn't quite feel like a unique character with a unique personality.

Mechanics
All of the missions are relatively short with great map choices for all of them. Well, the third one was too easy, since it takes place in an abandoned mine, which CoH has about a thousand of. However, some of the custom enemies and custom groups are a recipe for aggravation. The first mission doesn't really have issues. None of those enemies are really bad in any manner. However, the second mission has a minion with web grenades, a minion with poison that has weaken, an LT with kinetics, and to top it off, one of the Arachnoid EBs as the mission's boss. That last one isn't really something I think should be changed, since it is a standard enemy (albeit an annoying one with all the regen) but the minions with web grenade and poison, though thematically appropriate, can easily get really damn annoying. Thankfully I was an SR scrapper so it never became an issue to me as I was dodging them, but someone with no defense who's playing on a big team or with higher difficulty settings is going to have some real issues with the constant heals, debuffs, and web grenade spam.

Mission 3's only enemies were a single renamed BP spirit mask and custom enemies that spawn as an ambush horde if you steal the sacred treasure from the treasure chests. You're warned not to do it by Queen Auri, and it gives you a long timer to change your mind, but due diligence and all that. The ambush is an all lieutenant group of gravity control/regen guys who had the reflections fly. Their gravity and regen are custom with some of their standard powers missing, but with some higher level powers that make them pretty beefy. Granted, they'd give out reduced XP anyway for being an all LT group, but fighting a tough enemy and not getting any rewards for it was a bit of a letdown. That's pretty nitpicky though, since you don't have to fight them all, but still. Something to think about.


Wait, did they throw one of their chests of sacred treasure at me? They don't revere it at all, they're just being dicks at this point.

Fourth mission has a custom group of all recolored enemies. The obvious choice, the Banished Pantheon Shaman shows up finally, but only Storm Shamans. The other LT is a recolored Steel Strongman, which will also drop some heavy -tohit on you. I'd suggest swapping out for an Avalanche Shaman instead. Still fits with the Corrupted Shaman's idea that they're nature shamans that have been magically compelled to do the villain's bidding and makes the -tohit less awful. The villain himself is Dark Blast/Willpower, willpower set to custom. He seems to just have the toggles, the autos, and strength of will. Unsure of whether he has the status protection or not. He does have blackstar, which I think is fine, since blackstar actually gets used at 25% health like a proper nuke tier 9, and at this high level I expect EBs and AVs to throw out some nukes every once in a bit.


Seriously man, I'm trying to do a thing here. Stop stealing my thunder.

Last mission also has issues. The only lieutenant in the custom group is mind control and has confuse. That will blast right through any positional defenses (like mine) and confuse on a lieutenant is pretty rough. Not a lot of people resist that, and there's going to be a lot of that flying around. The final EB in the arc is also way rough. Looks like he's dual blades/willpower, with what seems like every power but the self rez, thank god. This means he puts out tons of damage and has a ridiculous regen rate due to higher hit points from the first auto, +regen from the second, and then really dumb amounts of regen from rise to the challenge. He ate through both of the boss level allies you can optionally summon in the mission with no effort, and killed me a couple times thanks to his high amount of attacks and blinding feint and his mind control allies ignoring my defense. Had to bust out the archmage/geas combo on him to finally take him out. He should definitely be toned down. Rise to the challenge needs to go, and I'd take out blinding feint as well.

Final Thoughts
Despite some areas with the potential for some real headaches, this arc won me over with pure style. With some tightening up of the difficulty this arc would definitely be one of the best arcs I've played in MA. Good work.

That Paragonwiki page is pretty lacking on actual information about the mantles of the four winds. The established canon for it I believe is really only in badges and Scirroco's backstory. There's an order of monks called the Order of the Four Winds who give out mantles based on the four cardinal winds and others. Scirroco has one (that he stole), Levantera and Borea both have one, and Ice Mistral has one, though it doesn't seem that she has one of the cardinal winds. When she was given hers, it caused her to go insane with rage and she became a villain.

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Order_of_the_Four_Winds

Finally got around to posting all of my other arcs to the website, which include:

Drakule Armageddon 5: This Time, It's Personal! #257242
'Tis Nobler in the Mind: #257226
Drakule vs. The Werewolf Bikers From Hell: #340316
Holding Down the Fort: #379065
Made to Wave the Flag: #384776

Feel free to review whichever once they show up on the site. Alternatively, while we wait, you could re-review one of my earlier arcs. They've probably all had at least some changes since you played last, considering it's been a while.

New arc published! #384776: Made To Wave the Flag is intended for heroes of levels 45-50. I've spent a lot of time working on this arc, and it's probably my most ambitious one to date. This arc utilizes a lot of storytelling methods that were both incredibly hard to write, and could very easily not work altogether. Some of the things that I tried to do:

• Have the events of the arc unfold around the character instead of just being spit at them by a contact.
• Have multiple people in the different briefings, switching out cast members as necessary and attempt to make it clear who is talking without gratuitous use of "he said" and "she said".
• Have the missions happen out of chronological order.
• Try to have the character do things in the briefings so they are an active part of the plot without stepping over my bounds as an author.

So, yeah. There's a distinct possibility of none of that working as well as I intended, so any constructive feedback is incredibly welcome. Essentially, my main concerns are as follows:

Does the story make sense?
Are the characters and their emotions and reactions to events believable? Did I overstep any bounds with my involvement of the player as an active part of the story?
Is it too hard?

Plus, I want to know if the fourth mission seems "set up to fail", or if it's clear what you're supposed to do to succeed. Because yes, it is easy to fail that mission, but I do drop hints at exactly what you're supposed to do. My question is whether or not they're obvious enough for people to pick up on them.

So, please take the time to try out this arc (and all my other arcs, they're awesome, I assure you!) and any feedback you give me is greatly appreciated.

I've given feedback on Talos Vice both in game and in its thread. The time has come yet again for me to subject one of my arcs to review, since I've just published one that I feel really needs a thorough looking over.

Arc #384776: Made To Wave the Flag by @LaserJesus (Hey, that's me!)

Trapped inside of a Malta facility, you and 4 other heroes must fight against all odds to escape a madman's grasp. A story about duty, loyalty, and what one must sacrifice for the two.

A few notes: The story assumes that the character playing it is a human(oid) with superpowers, with the superpowers not necessarily being as important as a living human analogue. The story is far more serious than any other I've written so far, even if I can't completely avoid comic relief. I'm mainly worried about the delivery, whether the characters are sympathetic, how easily the story is followed, and obviously the difficulty.

I patiently await to get an automatic -0.05 for not having any titles for the missions! (Damn you, filesize limits)

Played through with my level 22 Dual Pistols/Traps Corruptor, Cory the Chameleon. He's a mobster, but fits perfectly with the visual style of the arc. I just couldn't pass up the opportunity.


White suits are just so damn fashionable!

Loved the screenplay style text in the arc. Especially the flashback with Back Alley Brawler. Something about BaBs being so hard-bitten cracked me right up. I also enjoyed the 80s versions of the classic Paragon City gangs. Hellions in pastel colors... just so wrong!


Chief: You're loose cannons! Both of you! But you get job done, god bless you!

Didn't realize I didn't have bosses on when I went into the arc, but Cavalieri was still tough enough to defeat me twice before I finally went and grabbed Croquette to help. Seems like he could be just a bit easier. Maybe use another secondary besides willpower? That HP boost on top of resistances can be pretty rough. Invulnerability gives comparable resistances, and doesn't have that problem.

However, that wasn't enough to detract from the enjoyment of the arc. It was the final battle after all, and the arc being only 3 missions meant that it didn't get into the zone of frustration. The underlying premise and delivery were excellent enough to make this a 5 star arc easily.