Megajoule

The Row is burning.

The air is full of smoke and flying cinders. The streets are full of rubble and wrecked cars. Flames crackle, sirens wail, and distant screams go unanswered. The ground itself shakes under the heavy footfalls of giant war machines, their cyclopean heads taller than some of the old brownstones. Smaller automata with sculpted, impassive faces march before and behind them in perfect squares.

The Row is fighting.

The roughly man-shaped figure is in the thick of it as usual, laying about him with his big fists and the blocky hammer that grows from them. The hot coals that serve him for eyes blaze with fury under the brim of the battered fedora, but the ragged scarf wrapped around the bottom half of his face hides the rest of his expression. He is brick and stone and bits of glass and cloth and rusty rebar; his foes are plastic and ceramic and gleaming metal. Compared to him, they are fragile but seemingly numberless.

These "Clockwork" are nothing like the sparking scavengers he knows. They all speak with the same voice, repeating the same recorded, amplified platitudes. It is the voice of Marcus Cole, but not his Cole; the words are those of tyrants. He's heard them before, when the lights started going out across Europe and stayed that way for fifty years.

Do not resist. Stay in your homes. The Leader will protect you and make your lives better. His armies are here to keep you safe. It's not like you have a choice, anyway.

The Row is bleeding.

Thin red streams run from cracks in the stone form, dripping to the pavement. It is the blood of police lying on the plaza, of firemen buried under fallen buildings, of ordinary citizens who took a stand, of parents and of children. He feels all these wounds, and they fill him with pain and grief and a terrible rage. Later, he will mourn them. Today, he fights to avenge them and defend those who still live.

He does not see the laser-drawn crosshairs at his feet until it is too late. He does not have time to move before the orbital lance strikes, like fire from heaven. It shears off his left arm at the shoulder, burns deep into his side, and cripples his leg. He screams, and the air screams with him, blasted aside by the beam's passage - a sound of thunder.

The Row is falling.

One hand and two knees land hard on weathered asphalt, thick fingers digging deep as if it were only clay. The street starts to grow up toward the ruined shoulder, but slowly, too slowly. Once the Row might have withstood even this assault, but the Rikti invasion and years of follow-up attacks have left him with little strength to draw on. The sick squirmy feeling in his gut isn't helping. (They probably have something to do with that too.)

The War Walker is a mindless, soulless tool of its makers, existing only to do their will. It does not feel joy or triumph as the target falls, nor anger as it raises a foot to stamp out this stubborn point of resistance and grind it under its heel.

Blasts of flame and focused sound and pure energy strike the giant's chest, knocking it off balance; a sudden gale springs up to push it back. An agile wraith flits about it, cutting here and there with flashing blades. Over the next minute, while the Row pulls himself together, the War Walker gets taken apart. He looks up to see his saviors.

Heroes. A few are familiar to him, the rest anonymous in their colorful costumes. It doesn't really matter who they are, or if they have any idea who or what he truly is. The one in the lead asks if he's okay, extends a hand to a fallen comrade.

The Row is proud... but not too proud to accept help when he needs it.

He takes the offered hand with his good one, feels their strength surge through him, lifting him to his feet to continue the fight.


[ The Spirit of the Row and "Faces of the City" at Virtueverse ]

"No one would have believed, in the last years of the twentieth century, that our world was being watched by beings immeasurably more powerful than Man but possessed of all of his mortal flaws. No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized, as a man with a microscope studies the creatures that swarm in a drop of water. Yet across the barriers that separate dimensions, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."

Claws speaks much truth. (This is a good post and you should feel good.)

Failed a run this evening, even though someone referred to (and quoted portions of) this fine guide. We just had too much melee and not enough ranged, and couldn't bring enough DPS to bear on Battle Maiden. (Some more debuffing of her sick regen would have been nice too.)

Ah well - my first attempt at the STF was also a failure, back in the day.

In my recollection, the beta forums for that issue were disproportionately populated (or at least posted on) by "responsible" and hopeful mission authors who used it as an opportunity to get a head start on the story arcs they wanted to create. Alas, this probably gave the Devs an entirely wrong idea of how most people would use the system. Those who discovered MA exploits during the beta period kept them quiet, in order to use them immediately after the issue went live and the rewards became "real."

IMO, one effect of this mission is to emphasize that most AVs are really just big bags of HP... and similarly sized bags, at that. Game-mechanics wise, they're all about the same level of power, that being "powerful enough to stand there and get beat on by a full team for a while." Their supposed AT or power levels relative to each other in lore doesn't matter.

The first time I tried running this mission, with no prior knowledge, on my defender at +0/x1, I got rushed by multiple waves spaced about ten seconds apart, each with a Sapper. Ten seconds is about how long it takes me to take down half of a solo ambush. In very short order, I was sapped and dead. I /bugged it. Ambushes aren't supposed to work that way, in my experience.

I've attempted the mission only once since, with a scrapper. THAT was one heck of a rush, and I still only barely pulled it off; it was never "easy", and I don't know if I could do it twice. Every other time I've gotten the tip, I've dismissed it. Not for me.

Those who wish to measure the size of their e-peens have stuff like the Scrapper Challenges. IMO, it's nice to know the game won't throw multiple near-simultaneous waves of You Lose Now at someone who's been innocently soloing through tip content.

IMO, it's not even that it's hard, it's that it's so much harder than any other tip mission I've seen in the same range - if your average tip is a 3 or 4, that one cranked it up to 9 or 10. And there's nothing to suggest this to someone who hasn't run it before and doesn't immediately go "oh hell, THAT one" and drop the tip as soon as it turns up.

I know that when I got to the top of the ruined tower in the wrecked version of Ouroborous and saw Rudalak the Mad lookin' back at me in all his colossal redness, even my nigh-omnipotent future self had a moment of "... huh."

Switching the focus and/or most common form of abuse from inf and xp farming to badge and accolade farming would not, IMO, be an improvement.

I prefer having this arc over how it was in Beta because it's new content, focused on the Incarnate system, rather than the same TFs we've done before. I probably won't like it quite so much when it's not new content.

I felt the same about the Midnighter arc, curing the Lost, and Cimerora back in the day. And I think it's good to have those things in the game for people to whom it is new at any given time. But I can also see where the OP's coming from.

I think I understand the OP, actually, and in some ways I agree.

This is in the same category (IMO) as not wanting to have to wait until 35 and run an ITF to unlock Roman costume bits on a new character who really should have them from level 1, when you've already done dozens of ITFs on others; or wait until 35, do the Vanguard intro arc (to unlock merit drops) and then get on a saucer raid just to get the nice sword/bow/axe/rifle/whatever; or find a way to get to the Shadow Shard for the Rularuu bits; or yeah, capes. Which still require jumping through hoops to honor someone who's already come back at the head of a Rikti invasion force, at the same level that we're now getting EATs unlocked just by dinging.

It's padding, filler, makework. Tedium for the sake of tedium, because "that's what all MMOs do." Go through this fifteen-part attunement questline or you can't come on the raid. Grind a hundred Overseers because we say so. Did you collect all of the plot coupons for Castanella and save the Lost? Well go do it again, or no ITF for you! Doing this stuff once I can understand, or on the characters for whom it should be explicitly part of their story, but on every single one? Why, because Jack said so back in 2005?

This particular example doesn't bother me personally so much because for RP reasons, I won't be touching the Incarnate system with most of my characters; only a few of them "should" have access to that kind of power. But if I did want to make full use of the new feature, and had to do the same arc more than a couple of times just to set a flag, then yeah, I can see myself getting a little tired of it. Much like I already am of the Midnighters, or the level 40-50 hero arcs from Issue 1, including the very aptly named "Eternal Nemesis" - epic, yes, but one hell of a slog.

BAB, you are greatly missed.

Welcome back.

Been away for the holiday, so apologies for coming a bit late to the thread.

I'm imagining a Crey billboard with a giant OBEY just slightly darker than the background (and normal text etc in the foreground).

And replace it with a better one, yes.