Lazarus

Well it is flat out said in the description as well that this is a followup to a previous arc. I don't have room to give a huge "Previously on" clue for those who don't play the previous one.

I had thought that you had played "The Portal Bandits", looking back it seems that you played a different arc instead. I probably wouldn't have asked for you to play this one had I known. Alas.

I honestly don't see many people getting confused with that line.

While Longbow were originally started to combat Arachnos, you find them all over the place anyways. Patrolling Atlas Park, fighting the Rikti in RWZ while having spitting matches with Vanguard, and in many of the redside Shadow Shard missions it is Longbow occupying the Shadow Shard instead of those army guys. Plus, those guys aren't in AE to begin with.

It makes much more sense if you played the first arc and read his description. He's a hero who Portal Corp has on retainer, like how Blue Steel is a hero who works for the PPD.

I wish we had a proper portal like the one that shows up in that Tobias Hansen mission in Striga Island. Another item that is strangely missing from AE.

They have scales, tails, walk on digitgrade feet, and have the word "Naga" in their name. You didn't see where the hostage got the lizardpeople idea?

Complaints about grammar in NPC dialog are a pet peeve of mine, especially when I'm trying to portray a character as one who talks in a manner that doesn't sound "artifical". Suziku is a type of person who speaks quickly and would likely have spoken that entire line in a single breath. That is the idea I tried to convey.

LTs and higher get Danger Sense as a Standard power with Ninjistu, it includes +perception.

Only the Assassins, Suziku, and Takala have increased perception. However they will alert other critters in their spawn, just as Rikti Drones alert nearby Rikti.

I'll have to check, but there should have been a reference. Anyhow, it took place in the arc that was referenced in the arc description and first mission briefing.

You just answered your own question.

Most teleports occur through the medical teleport system, via short range teleport by heroes, or through portals opened by Rikti. As we know from the Vanguard arcs, it has been said that Rikti mass-teleports can be detected remotely.

Anyhow, this particular teleport was special as the explanation at the end of this mission shows. In case it wasn't clear enough, they didn't just teleport across Paragon City but ripped a hole through spacetime in the process and Portal Corp would definitely detect that. Maybe I should add some dialog in the mission about the Nagans having to defeat some Rularuu who appeared in their lair right after Suzi and Company disappeared.

Well she certainly didn't arrive alone in that first mission. Also the previous arc was all about them acquiring this technology in the first place.

The idea was that you only recieved GPS coordinates and assumed that it was underground when it led you to some empty lot next to an abandoned building.

Nope, just the Assassins and Takala have +Perception. Only 5 Assassins appear in this mission total because of their special characteristics.

Actually, they are although some are a bit less obvious from a distance.

Each subgroup has a different basic uniform, looking at their outfits and descriptions you can piece together a hierarchy and theme within each subgroup. They are designed to have a lot of variety in offense, support, and defense. I really tire of groups where mostly everyone has the same basic attacks and powers.

Whatever your weakness is, there is a Nagan who can exploit it. The massive variety of them also means that you never know what the next spawn will be holding in store for you.

She appeared twice in "The Portal Bandits". She's still holding a bit of a grudge.

He probably heard a little about something she was developing but wants you to see how far it has progressed and get more details. After all, he said that he is busy coordinating hero efforts to push back the Rularuu wherever they appear.

Odd, you should have run into some right in the first room.

Great, he spawned in a room with no Malta this time. Sigh.

He might be assuming that Suziku doesn't know enough English to understand that word?

There are only two back spawns in the map and they're both in that room. They always spawn together, so it mimics an interrogation.

I don't know where you'd get the idea that she has unrestricted freedom in a Longbow base. She doesn't have her weapons or robots either.

Hmm...

It's a crapshoot. In most of my test runs I found lots of Malta standing over dead Longbow and Nagans during the escort out.

I'm very, very close to the file limit here. Some stuff had to go and usually it's Debriefings as only the team leader gets to read them anyway so I put more info into the Briefings and Clues instead.

The idea is that you are going to the epicenter of where the "dimesional fabric" was disrupted in the first place. Think of it as finding the right spot to place an emergency support jack under a failing support beam.

She's accompanying the team and as you'll see she is not unarmed this time. Plus you were going along but apparently got delayed. Looks like it needs some clarification.

Give the girl a prize.

Actually it would not fit at all. The spawns are HORRIBLE in that damn map and there is little to no control over them, assuming that you can even find the objectives through all that fog.

Originally Suziku was right at the front of the map but was moved when it had to be written due to AE's publish breaking the mission badly when it was moved from Test to Live. Originally it had a defendable objective that worked well on Test, but fails almost automatically on Live. The mission got a hasty rewrite and it made some sense that Suziku may have panicked and got lost in the caves somewhere when the Rularuu overran the Longbow team.

Mostly being minions and LTs, you're lucky if they don't die pretty fast anyway. They're also a holdover from the original version of the mission.

By design.

It would be nice if that was possible, but then on the chance that she did get killed since she is a combat ally it would make the mission fail too easily. I don't want to create another Lady Jane scenario here.

Maybe instead Suziku should have a critical part needed to activate them that hadn't been installed yet.

Not a bad idea. However space is at a premium right now.

Another artifact from the old version. So many damn text boxes to check and they all look the same after a while.

Let's use the IT analogy of The Rogue DHCP Server. We're a fairly computer savvy crowd here.

DHCP servers exist on a network to hand out IP addresses to workstations and laptops so that they don't need to all be configured by hand, yet made sure to all have unique addresses and get the proper routing info to tell them how to navigate the network and access necessary servers and the Internet.

Now say that for whatever reason someone sets up an unauthorized DHCP server on that network. Maybe they were just playing around trying to learn how it works and connected it to the network by accident or didn't know that it could interfere with the proper DHCP server. Now suddenly there is another DHCP server handing out improper address info to the workstations and they don't know not to trust it. This confusion can grind a network to a halt until the rogue server is disconnected.

Think of this one stabilizer as being improperly designed and/or configured and is out of phase with all the others. It's unexpected, it's throwing things out of whack, and it's acting like an magnet or antenna for the next rift to open.

It wasn't known that Malta had gotten enough info to try and build one, nor that they'd try to do so and then run it.

Perhaps they thought that they would be the ones to fix the problem and make themselves look like good guys in the process.

It's very much like how an array of small radio telescopes are combined to function as a single much larger telescope that would have been impossible or unfeasible to construct.

Odd, they do have guards.

It is a good possibility. Often I see other critters ignore that Gun Drone for some reason after they've killed the owner.

A valid nitpick now that I look at the list of Malta boss names in ParagonWiki.

Another bug introduced when the arc was published to live. *sigh*

Sounds like the Longbow backup was already dead by the time you go to the battles.

Yay!

That does sound like a better idea.

Ouch, I'd rather have not gotten a rating at all.


I can see that this needs a lot of rewriting, unfortunately my usual editors no longer play the game and it's taken so long just to get anyone to take a serious in-depth look at the arc like this. I'm tempted to rip it down for the rewrite but at the same time just getting 10 ratings takes forever with the current deadness of the AE environment.

Originally I had conceived of this arc as something like the game Time Crisis, but since we don't have a way to carry over the timer to the next mission I could only do it by having a shorter timer each mission. However, I realized as I was finishing it up that it would be problematic and unfair if the player got over an hour to blitz through easy enemies like Freakshow and Council, only to be given less than 30 minutes against custom critters like the Nagans.

I had a little space left over and thought "why not create a side-mission like in Mayhems?" Hence the bombing objective that appears if you happen to look in that one glowing crate full of them.

That complaint has come up a few times. Some people like being able to use their imagination to fill in the blank, others don't seem to like that at all for whatever reason. Then others would be mad if it turned out to be something utterly stupid. There really was no way to win with this one, so I left it a clear case of "Dude, Where's My MacGuffin?"



Most of the complaints I've had here were because of the Assassin LTs that I added as a Stalker countermeasure since this is a villainous arc. I'll just say that there is a good reason why I don't auto-spawn them and have to add them manually (there is a total of 6 of them in this entire arc). I take it that you didn't have much trouble with them?

Originally I added destructibles as a way to add more NPC chatter to the missions without loading it up with extra bosses. Since they include ambushes anyway, I decided to run with it and add some extra triggered ones to keep up that feeling of urgency that they give.

Yeah, these look rather inappropriate for arcs plus we already have both the in-game tags and these.

No one can be masochistic as Terminus was.

Assuming that you didn't skip the tutorial when given the option. Even still I only do it to grab the Jail Bird badge myself, most of my villains never went to the Zig.

Anyhow, it would have made some sense if the contact wasn't just getting you a fake ID but an entire fake background and history, with some people set up to lie about you as references and maybe even some plastic surgery.

Like this little guy will.

That's because Lesbian Hellions are actually funny.

Back from the future, are we? Got any good lotto numbers?

Um, are you referring to a conversation with Bubba or the one you had with me?

<threadjack>
Since when? All Villain ATs can solo decently to awesomely, much better than can be said for most Hero ATs. Villains were built with a priority on soloability, heroes were designed the other way around.
</threadjack>

Serial killers tend to have better grammar.

And neither are the rocket boots costume option, but they do animate when Fly or Hover is turned on, and Wings do the same during flight or jumping. Is it such a big thing to ask for jetpacks like the ones Wyvern, Longbow, Goldbrickers, and the Skyraiders have that animate when you turn on Fly or Hover, but don't disappear when the power is turned off? For the Nth time already, I'm asking for new COSTUME options, not new powers.

Exactly. Why should the authors and those who play our arcs be punished for wanting to be creative and not using the same old boring (and often stupidly easy) mobs that the rest of the game uses.

Standard/Standard should be 100% XP, it's supposed to be the damn baseline anyway. Anything higher should be worth more as you're taking a lot more risk when you start throwing around powers like Build Up and Energy Transfer.

So ninja clothing just grows out of their skin naturally, right?

Meh, you can keep your Empaths. Recovery Aura is really the only special thing they got over the Redside buffing sets and so many builds have access to ways to refill their endurance anyway.

The only AT that'd be at risk of becoming endangered would be the Tank. Brutes have the same resistance caps and the highest damage cap as well. Sure most Brutes don't care for playing tauntbot but that's why we bring debuffs and crowd control for anyway.

Stalkers will do fine. They won't suddenly become more popular but they won't become any less popular either.

Indeed. Fix the damn text boxes before adding any new functions to them.