Ms. Mesmer

For those who don't know these gems of Brit cinema, Carry On....

It's pretty much always worked like that. Your damage to them is the same as to something of your level.

I agree about the level of the present spawns, but think a more elegant solution would be to have them be like ToT doors. They are the level of the one that clicks them that way, and you can only do it in a level-appropriate zone. No more teams of 50s running around in Galaxy City abusing the much lower HP and lesser powers of a WL that spawns there as a merit farm. Alternatively, find some way to make multiple copies of the critters, each at the median level range for the zone the present is in, and then apply the GM coding. This one-size fits all level 30 compromise isn't any fun. It makes things easier than they should be for 50s and harder than they should be for anyone below about the mid-20s.

I really hope they don't put that in the way that it works for Rikti and Zombie invasions.

I have some numbers to explain why. 40.83, 130, and 730. The first is the base damage of my level 15 Mental Blast on a natural even-con with no resistance, or a level-less mob from an invasion (assuming no psi resistance), the second is the HP of a natural level 15 Minion, the third is the HP of an invading Rikti or Zombie. I can take out a Minion of my own level in 4 attacks with no enhancements, it would take 18 attacks to do the same to an invading mob. Try it sometime during an invasion. What you'd end up with is most players that actually belong in lower-level zones just abandoning every snowman that popped out.

I can get behind all of these, though I don't really mind the squishy GM.

I'd add to them. I think the level-less encounters code should be looked at. If possible, making it so that everyone does the same percentage of damage to the mobs that they would to mobs of the same rank that were their natural level rather than the current situation, where you do the same numerical damage to them as you would for mobs your level. Trick or Treat could benefit from a sliding scale of difficulty. No Bosses solo in sub-level 20 zones, maybe sub-level 30, and no increase in levels based on team size for the same. As it stands, the events are just too difficult for a team of low-level players, and the ToT mobs are too difficult for low-level solo players of many builds and ATs, and perhaps a bit much for a good many teams of low-level characters.

Oh, I think you're right about that. Held animations for mobs are also wrong, with them swaying like they're stunned. It was just nice to be able to identify where this different animation was coming from.

Mine was 21.1 MB, but I know I missed at least 1 patch before this, possibly the last 2.

Edited to add: Oh, and this Walk animation is some seriously good work. I went back and looked at the Veteran Rewards teaser video, and there seems to have been some tinkering with it since then. Good job to BAB.

It will look a bit funny on some of my edge case concepts, of course. My teenaged rebel girl hero who doesn't wear heels because she's fine with her height, for instance, looks too... prissy, maybe? That's fine, though, I don't think you could come up with an animation that fit every attitude that a player can imagine their characters having.

I have not seen this high Trick to Treat ratio that you're talking about, and I've soloed the ToT part of the event on about 20 Characters so far. Never once did I get Dead Head before Ostentatious, and only once did I get Malleus before Ostentatious. I'd put the ratio at about 1 to 1 over the long run, similar to any other year. This sounds like the general issue of teams sharing defeat credit from Tricks, but not the costume credits from Treats. I think that's something that they should look into fixing, if possible, since it does discourage teaming.

Going into some of the other things. These GM-coded events do favor higher levels. It's a tricky balancing act, trying to make it even slightly challenging for high levels while making it anything beyond frustrating for low levels. That's a balance that they have yet to achieve, in my estimation, but many of the people who test these things tend to test them on their high level characters, so the input gets skewed toward that.

The Deadly Apocalypse doesn't really take that many teams, either. It can be done with a couple of full teams, provided that the leaders are above level 30 or so, and there is a decent mix of damage and buffs/debuffs. The teams were plentiful in the first week of the event, but it died down as most of the people got the badges on whatever characters that they wanted them on. The same thing happens every year with these things. It was hard to get teams to do the Zombie Apocalypse last year after the first week, for example. Die-hard badgers who want these badges on every character are just out of luck as the majority of players only really care about getting them on 1 or 2 characters, then move on from the event.

All of that being said, these large-scale zone events should probably be reconsidered to be tuned toward one full team, and perhaps find a way to tweak the invasion/GM type mob coding to make them a little more fair across the board. Perhaps make it so that you don't do the same numerical damage to them as you do to something of your own level, but instead do the same proportion of their total HP of damage to them as you'd do to something of your native level of that rank, assuming that that was possible. That would greatly increase the effectiveness of low level characters while, in most cases, increasing the challenge for characters at or near level 50.

Minor technicality, but it's only 441 days, since you can earn Patroller/Criminal at the same time as any other Day Job.

Not yet, actually. A lot of the Villain badges overlap the Hero ones. A quick look at Badge-Hunter's list gave me a total of only 147 personal badges that are unique to Villains. Add that to the 697 that a Hero could potentially have (695 that Badge-Hunter counts plus Passport and Bug Hunter, for anyone who was lucky enough to somehow end up with both) and we have 844, if a Hero can get them all. We may break 1000 with badges introduced between now and when Going Rogue launches, especially considering that a new expansion is likely to have a bunch of badges with it, but that's something that we'll have to wait to see.