Lazarus

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All I have to say is DO NOT give your minions ANY level of Devices. A lot of people are doing this for soldiers, and they don't seem to realize how busted the AI is with Web Grenade. Spammity spammity spam! It's enough to drive you up the frickin' wall! 3+ Minions and my recharges are gone! They don't even try to kill you, they just murder the hell out of your recharge and immobilize you to boot (Sucks to be melee!!).

/RANT!

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I call your Minions with Web Grenade and raise you Minions with Caltrops as well.

Worst one was a mistake of my own: Bots/Devices Boss. Summoned all her bots and then proceeded to spam Smoke Grenade, which stacked with the Seeker Drones from the Protector Bots.

Death via invisible robots is not fun.

Remember the rule in the first post of this thread: You review an arc, then put one of yours up for review. That's why people have been getting skipped the last few pages.

The problem is that Middle tends to cover the areas that Front and Back don't. In many Tech Maps the hallways leading up to the first big room (which is the Front) are considered to be Middle. I found this out when experimenting with boss and battle placements and seeing where they appeared every time I changed the location settings.

Regen on the Standard setting only gives them the passive powers, which includes a weak regen buff, some small resistance to Smashing/Lethal, and magnitude 2 stun protection. Pretty weak overall.

Feedback on difficulty is good and all but it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes it just turns out that the complainer is a wimp who probably has trouble with the normal game content as well.

If you need to see how difficult they are on a team, just form your own and see for yourself.

I don't go sending "thank you" to comments I get. What I will do is send back a "working as intended" for something that someone thought was imbalanced or broken (for example, an AV fight that was made too easy by Allies, when the whole point is that each ally freed weakens the AV as they were having their powers siphoned at the time you rescued them). Or I'll ask for clarification if the feedback is too vague or mentions a bug that I cannot find on my own.

Put in a hostage or ally and under Animations set them to "Casting (Hold Spell)". I don't know of any way right now to do with without a captive involved.

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Publish one mission of the Arc, get people to run it since it's listed as "short", get the reviews/rates, then add in the later missions by editing.

By doing longer arcs, you have less of a shot of getting casuals to run/rate the thing, since they show up under "long/very long".

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That's essentially bait-and-switch though. You're not really offering what you claim to be. IMHO, authors who do this without warning deserve to be downrated.

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Like it matters really. As you add missions the length field will auto update to reflect it.

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Got 2 5-star ratings, 1 4-star rating. Some feedback tells included "I played your arc, very fun ; I rated it 5 stars. If you want, come try my arc [ArcNameAndID]"

The kicker ? The map is an outdoor mission full of arachnoids, without any text. Definitely 5-star worthy.

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Yeah, there are a couple of people doing this strictly for the advertisement of their own arcs. Pretty sure they never go further than just inside.

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I have a policy of never playing their arcs when they do this after some guy did it with all three of my arcs and left the same generic macro every time. Give me some real feedback and I'll take a look at your arc, but just giving me 5-stars does not obligate me into returning the "favor".

Made some changes to "The Portal Bandits":
* Kaon no longer summons Dark Servant or uses Petrifying Gaze. She and the Dark Servant were double-stacking their controls and debuffs so much that it was making the EB/AV fight in the first mission much too easy.
* Promoted the Nagan Duelist to Lieutenant rank. The group now stands at 3 Minions, 3 Lieutenants, 2 Bosses, and 1 EB/AV.

Edit Published Arc -> Save As

That will update your local .storyarc file.

Bad Thing #1: Giving Force Field set to an EB.
Bad Thing #2: Giving Force Field set to an EB.
Bad Thing #3: Giving Force Field set to an EB who appears in the arc three times!

Seriously, spending the entire fight either in Detention or having Force Bolt spammed at you is just going to lead to your players Rage-quitting and giving you a low rating.

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For instance, I received feedback on an arc that was floating in the 4-5 star range that consisted of "too hard, team kept dying." Since I was online I asked what specificaly was too hard and was informed "it was too stupid hard all the way through." Now, mind you this arc has exactly 3 custom bad guys (all end bosses/ebs) and the rest are regular baddies, so I was curious what exactly had happened. I pressed a bit for more details. Turns out they had a team of 7, one 50 who was getting the missions and six 46 to 48s and were running at the highest difficulty. That means the baddies were +3 to +7 to the majority of the team. Yeah, of course it was "too hard." His parting comment was, "it sux, one star from everyone" and sure enough, in a few moments, I got 5 new ratings and the rating of the arc dropped from showing 5 stars to 4.

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I've been there Red, but in my case it was someone complaining that my arc was too hard to solo...on Invincible. That arc is also marked in the description as "Challenging" too, go figure.

A Praetorian version that someone made in MA. There is no Blue Steel in the game other than the trainer in Kings Row.

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I have no clue what it would take for an arc to hit HoF. In fact, I doubt that this is even possible redside. The only way a redside arc might hit HoF is if farmers start giving ratings on arcs.

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I have no idea what you are getting at. AE arcs are not side-restricted at all. That Heroic/Neutral/Villainous tag is just for search purposes.

Only one I've seen is a Praetorian version in an arc featuring Marauder. He was quite Judge Dredd looking.

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Well, I trimmed my arc down to 99.7% by removing some details and shortening text... and I still can't publish my mission. I can test from within the editor, but from the outside page, publish and test are both grayed out.

This is incredibly frustrating. The arc works fine on Test.

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I had that happen. After doing a copy/paste on every text field and then comparing the .storyarc file with the original, I found that there were a couple dialog boxes that were saved from Test using an older format from a few patches back. They finally got updated to the new format and the arc was publishable on live.

The issue was in a description box for a Hostage. It's supposed to be quote-contained now but it was in the file all nbsp; limited.

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Not only did I already do that (a few patches back), the exact same story arc file is publishable on Test but not on Live. I don't think that's a matter of having old data in the file - something in the software is different between Test and Live even though it's not supposed to be.

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This was an arc that was publishable on Test, it is on Test still. This file I tried to take over to live is the backup I saved on Wednesday morning and yet it got saved in a way that made it unpublishable on Live.

Make sure when you go to the ticket window and look for the packs that you don't have "Hide Recipes..." checked. If you do then you won't be shown the ones you cannot afford yet.

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Well, I trimmed my arc down to 99.7% by removing some details and shortening text... and I still can't publish my mission. I can test from within the editor, but from the outside page, publish and test are both grayed out.

This is incredibly frustrating. The arc works fine on Test.

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I had that happen. After doing a copy/paste on every text field and then comparing the .storyarc file with the original, I found that there were a couple dialog boxes that were saved from Test using an older format from a few patches back. They finally got updated to the new format and the arc was publishable on live.

The issue was in a description box for a Hostage. It's supposed to be quote-contained now but it was in the file all nbsp; limited.

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How do complaints get cleared? When you edit and republish? Never?

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Just ignore it. Unless you get multiple complaints from different players (and probably not unless you get dozens of them) you won't be getting in any sort of trouble.

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So I did a bit of testing, went into my custom critters screen and switched all AR using minions to Fire Blast and made sure I did the selecting under Corruptor.......they still attack when held.

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Because it's still the same powerset, all the Categories do is help you find powers. You'll notice if you select All Powers you get the entire list.

For example, Fire Aura for MA Critters is using the Tanker version. Even if you choose it from the Brutes category it is still the Tanker version (Brutes get Plasma Shield at level 16, not 20 like a Tanker does).

Just like how you cannot choose Dark Miasma first from the Defender category, it's the blast sets first just like from Corruptors.

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Mine is to get a favorite list so you can store all the missions you want liked and would love to play again or show to a friend.

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/double signed

We also need a "I feel lucky" button that will show us a random arc within our search criteria.

We need a way to set level limits on arcs without kludging around with villain groups. Also would allow us to search for arcs by level range.

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How is the classic "form a team and play through one arc from each member" strategy not on there?

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Now if only forming a team didn't make the ticket drop rate utterly suck.

AE System
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Welcome to Architect Entertainment -- Neutral
Death for Dollars! -- Neutral
Bare Knuckles of Rage (9304)
*

Character/Supergroup Origins
--------
Birth of a Fossil -- Heroic
*

Classic Super-Hero/Super-Villain
--------
*

Comedy
--------
The Extadine Lab -- Heroic
The Great Chicken Caper of '09 -- Heroic
MacGuffin Delivery Service (1567) -- Villainous
ParaCon -- Heroic
The new and improved Lord Recluse Strike Force -- Villainous (though I wouldn't recommend against a hero )
The Fire Bunnies - Neutral, They are only bunnies after all...
You Say It's Your Birthday! (3630) - Neutral
*

Comedy/Drama
--------
A Super Team is Born -- Heroic
Attack of the Space Clowns (18749) -- Neutral
Cause of How Some Silly Stealed My Wings #1481 -- Neutral
Lawyers of Ghastly Horror -- Heroic
How to Survive a Robot Uprising -- Heroic
Dr. Duplicate's Dastardly Dare -- Neutral
It's a Nice Day for a White Wedding (9059) -- Neutral
TURG FICTION: Ghost in the Machine, Act I - Heroic (althoughs romantic villains could try this too )
Rum Runners of Bloody Bay (3691) - Heroic
*

Crime/Gangs
--------
The Bravuran Jobs -- Villainous (16809)
*

Drama
--------
*

Global Domination
--------
Axis and Allies -- Villainous (10597)
*

Heist
--------
Celebrity Kidnapping -- Villainous (20161)
*

Historical (Realistic)
--------
*

Historical (CoH Lore)
--------
The War on Superadine - The Regulators in their 1980's drug war (Heroic) (Arc 7959)
*

Holiday
--------
*

Horror
--------
Dark Dreams -- Heroic (18914)
The Amulet of J'gara (1709) -- Heroic
Project: Perilous - Into the Chthonian Pit (#3586) - Neutral (Unless you happen to be a mad cultist, in which case, go nuts!)
Small Fears -- Heroic
*

Large-Scale Crisis
--------
A Hero's Halo -- Heroic
This Is War, Part I - the Revenge of Hro'Dtohz -- Neutral
Win the Past, Own the Future - Heroic
*

Magic
--------
The Magical Miss Fitz (5079) -- Heroic
Chains of Blood (5492) -- Heroic
*

Military
--------
Redoubt Operations #1: Fires over Kalago -- Heroic

Red Storm Rising Arc 4912 Heroic
*
Misc. Adventure
--------
The Portal Bandits (3326) -- Heroic
*

Mystery
--------
Blowback (18575) -- Heroic
Dream Paper -- Heroic (13030)
Dream Paper 2: Restless Sleep -- Heroic (16797)
Dream Paper 3: Broken Dreams -- Heroic (13064)
*

Mythology
--------
Anactoria's Descent Into the Underworld -- Villainous
The War of Fate: Betrayal (19698) -- Neutral
The Seelie War -- Heroic
The Unseelie War -- Villainous
Tales of Cimerora, volume 1 : Of feathers and fur -- Heroic
*

Nemesis Plots
--------
Brass Reaver: Part 1 -- Neutral
*

Player-Chosen Outcome
--------
Hunting the Dark Dragon -- Heroic
*

Sci-Fi
--------
Adventures of the Space Marines -- Neutral
Adventures of the Space Marines 2 -- Neutral
Netrunner -- Heroic (14434)
Above Mars - Part 1: The Wellington -- Neutral
*

Un-themed Survival/AV/Time Challenges
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The Meatgrinder -- Neutral
*

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Every time I put in a EB I place an optional ally in the mission at a place where you will always find them before you get to the end. (It does no good if the EB is blocking your path to the Ally, like I saw in one arc).

Anyway, usually any feedback I get on difficulty is specific enough that I can tweak the problem. It helps a lot if the person provides their level and AT/Powers as well.

Oddest complaint ever was someone who said that one of my arcs was very hard to solo...on Unyielding.

Well, good!

I test everything at Tenacious/Malicious so I'll have bosses around the base level and all adjustments are made from there. If Hard difficulty is actually "Hard", then go cry more.

Eventually I just went ahead and added to the disclaimer on one of them "May be challenging." You might wipe the floor with my critters or they might wipe the floor with you. That is the only warning you're going to get for that arc.

The Lazarus Arcs Feedback/Discussion Thread