Megajoule

BBQ Pork:
Oh god, yes. I'm a vet, I have plenty of respecs banked. I rarely have the need to use them, but when I do, the huge pain of redoing a 50 always gives me pause.

"Dreadlocks" is an I0 model, and six years later, it really shows.

In most of the GR missions, there is NPC text. It's just that you're usually too busy/waist or chest deep in mooks to see it. It's part of the spam, like the ambushes themselves.

QuiJon:
That sounds reasonable to me. (If anyone cares about my opinion and/or "reasonable.")

Counter opinion: I think custom bubbles are a little overused as it is. I get that people want to stand out and personalize their character, but if you open any random comic even today, I'd guess that over 90% of the bubbles are plain black on white with round borders.

Now, I do have a colored macro for when my Peacebringer uses his "goa'uld" voice, and ditto for my character who sometimes speaks with the Voice of the Legion. And it might be neat to have my robot speak with a more squared-off font. But do we really want to encourage more rainbow chat spam?

A minor and a maybe not so minor tweak: slightly changed the name of a set of destructible objects, and knocked the final boss's primary set down from "hard" to "standard" - he only gives 75% xp now (down from 88%), but several people (myself included, honestly) found him just too hard to solo on some characters. This should help. If anyone finds him to be too easy now, please let me know.

How many times has something like this been suggested before?
Come on, folks. Really.

This again? (It's not "another" discussion about names, it's the same one.)

No. Just no.

One of Westin Phipps' infamous missions sends you up against a bunch of costumed do-gooders, the Civic Squad. They're pretty awesome.

That's the general idea, yes. (Or to someone with the ability to see spirits.)

Some great and fascinating responses so far. I'm glad others picked up on the "masks" aspect, in a genre where our characters wear even more than the usual ones; and as for miens and such, let's just say I almost wrote "in the Umbra" in my first post.

One of these days, I'll play a dominator. Really. Hey, look at how long it took me to get a controller!

I also have a bad tendency to play tanks like brutes, and vice versa.

A friend and I were running through missions as a duo this weekend. I was playing one of my few supernatural characters, and got to thinking how some villain groups might look to the Sight - the ability (voluntary or not) to look past the mundane surface and see the spirit within. Arachnos Tarantulas, for example, are already creepy enough - especially the Mistresses - even with most of the awfulness of what's been done to them hidden behind armor plate; in the spirit realm, however, they must appear positively Gigerian. The motley-clad minions of the Carnival of Shadows don't look so bad at first... until one notices the strings tugging at them, and the fact that there's nothing, absolutely nothing behind the empty eye holes of the masks.

This thought led in turn to a familiar subject among my playgroup. It's customary to keep a costume slot on our characters to represent that truest, essential self when visiting Croatoa, the Psychic Plane, etc. Here are several of mine, including details that would be difficult or impossible to depict in-game. I hope that this will inspire others to imagine and share how their character(s) might appear to those with eyes to see.



Miss Megajoule - is clad in armor resembling the Justice set, in silver and light blue. In her right hand is a sword whose blade is blue cleansing flame; on the back of her left forearm is a blue energy shield that swirls like a soap bubble. The fine engravings on her armor are actually physics equations.

Sky Raider X - wears a modern U.S. Army uniform from which all insignia has been torn away. The uniform bears the cuts and holes of many old wounds, with accompanying dried bloodstains. His eyes are always shadowed by the rim of his helmet. On his back are a pair of (functional) steel wings, with sharp feathers.

the Watchmaker - wears, along with his customary suit, a jester's cap within a battered crown. (He's tried taking it off, but it sticks stubbornly.) A large pocket watch, with a cracked face and missing most of its innards, yet still ticking, hangs from a fob. In one hand he holds a tarnished brass flute, whose merry piping compels obedience and/or dancing.

Taxibot Gamma - is a Tin Woodsman-style metal man painted yellow and black and checkerboard. A door in his chest opens to reveal not a heart, but a gem which shines with a bright green light that hurts to look at and burns the skin.

the Spirit of the Row - is a large man dressed in 1930s fashion (shirt and trousers, fedora, long coat, scuffed shoes) with a scarf wrapped around his face under his eyes, in the style of the old "mystery men". An aura of power surrounds him; despite his humble attire, he carries himself with the quiet dignity of a king.

Officer Martinez - normally appears to most people as an ordinary Paragon cop. But in the realm of spirits, anyone can see him for what he really is: a vengeful ghost shrouded in the dark energies of the Netherworld, his shirt always wet with fresh blood from his mortal wounds.



the Abomination - is monstrous; there's no other word for it. This crudely stitched-together ogre is larger, stronger, angrier, more real than the pale shades and stumbling puppets that are most of Vahzilok's minions. Shadows gather around him whenever he stands still for more than a moment, but he's never completely still, twitching and snarling.

Dr. Forsythe - would be dressed in a surgeon's garb of cap, mask and scrubs, which are soaked to the elbows and knees with the bright red blood that pools around his feet, leaving a slowly-fading trail behind him. His eyes are kind yet terribly sad.

Foxtrot Maiko - is a bare-faced Japanese girl on the edge of womanhood, her slim form poured into a dark catsuit. Her fingers are knives. She holds a pair of gymnast's ribbons on short sticks; these are also razor-edged, and trail gracefully behind her as she twirls and skips. And she always smiles, even when the blood sprays across her innocent face.

Operative Kowalski - is a thug, plain and simple. A little taller, perhaps, than the other Arachnos goons; and he gets a tattered spidersilk Huntsman's cape with a fancy collar, along with the single nearly-invisible thread leading back to his master. But his spirit is still a nasty, twisted, brutish thing.

Tamaki:
yes, yes, we get it. I13 Ruined The Game Forever. Does this jukebox play any other tunes?

I expected a continuum as well (Hero - Vigilante - Rogue - Villain), but I kind of understand why they went with what they did.

Welcome, welcome.

Neat idea, Dementor. I hope it'll get some dev attention.

I think it's entirely appropriate and in-genre for you to make your incursion into this dimension in a vacant alley or parking lot. The only way to make it better would be adding some lightning FX and the new costume-change power that makes a spherical pit in the pavement under you.

In My Opinion:

It's a little excessive, especially for squishies and (I imagine) new players. For an expansion that was apparently designed to draw in more of the latter, the difficulty seems tuned for experienced players, both in terms of skill and having some veteran powers to assist.

The really egregious part - and I've seen this in the other new content, like alignment missions - is the frequency of ambushes. I have yet to survive the swarm of Malta (about one spawn every ten seconds?!) that jumps me in the "Malta Gunslinger Action Figure" mission, even on a scrapper; sooner or later, one of the Sappers tags me and I'm done. The squishies have no chance at all. It might be more "realistic" than usual Malta tactics, and pose a real threat, but it's not fun.

V-Max shares an origin with the videogame character/tokusatsu hero Viewtiful Joe, except that his hometown and native milieu is Paragon City; he's cut from the same cloth as other agile, wisecracking, secret-ID-juggling teen heroes as Peter Parker, Virgil Hawkins, and Terry McGinnis (with a touch of Ron Stoppable).

VERB is, um, "strongly inspired" by a certain Schoolhouse Rock segment and further fleshed out by elements from the 70s "blaxploitation" genre. Can you dig it?

the Stellar Champion is a little bit of ROM Spaceknight, a whole lot of Jack Kirby, and the rest is "planetary romance" - the genre that gave us heroes like John Carter, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Luke Skywalker, and Captain Proton.

EDIT: oops, almost forgot my newest character: an honest cop, killed by dirty ones, returns as a gunslinging ghost. Contains elements of The Crow, Robocop, John Woo and other two-gun Hong Kong action films, and possibly a little of The Shadow.