Nethergoat

I seem to remember I14 delivering some sort of system that was new and different and had a lot of content...hmmmm. What was it called again?

you can also just run up to it- hop on the guy-wire thing by the portal entrance and jog straight up to the badge.

the Shard seems deliberately designed to alienate players and keep people out (it's a bit better nowadays, but still...)
Why do I have the feeling it was Statesman's baby? =P


I think the devs resources would be better spent giving us reasons to explore the zones we've got rather than investing in Sam's dream of vast uncharted spaces. There's a lot of the game most people have never seen- give them a reason to see it, beyond "hey look, static spawns I can beat up on!" DA is one of my favorite zones in the game, but there is literally nothing to do there if you don't like crashing through wave after wave of zombies.

r/e exploration badges, the problem I've always had with them is they're very rarely put somewhere you would go naturally (like the top of the Atlas globe, or through the doughnut hole in Faultline). They're usually in some nondescript, out of the way place you'd never, ever find except by random chance or checking the internet.

Fewer exploration badges placed at points of interest would be much more of a draw for me than a huge number a normal player would never be able to find. Years back I'd be travelling around a zone, see something kind of cool and go check it out. But there was hardly ever a payoff, so I stopped doing that.

This is one thing WoW did right- if you see something neat looking or out of the ordinary, exploring it may well net you some sort of reward in the form of a quest or two, or resources, or whatever.

If they added that kind of thing to our 'locations of note' in this game it'd go a long way toward incentivizing the kind of exploration Sam enjoys.

absolutely.

my fire/ice blaster burns inspirations as fast as they drop when I farm DA and at any time has 4-5 effects stacked up.

come I16, anyone will be able to set up giant spawns of minions in their missions, turning the whole game into a giant hazard zone for inspiration eating purposes.

and Sam, I was using the "drop and burn" inspiration technique last night to farm the Skyway door of the Hollows with a level 11 archery/electric blaster. It wasn't as super efficient as my fire blaster, but it still worked pretty well considering I had one AoE and most of my powers were unslotted.

Any blaster with good AoE capability and access to large spawns should be able to generate enough inspirations to greatly increase their combat efficiency. I save purples, delete rez's and burn everything else as it comes in by periodically banging on my F1 and F2 keys.

Perfect.

=D

True!

Although there are no shortage of muggings & petty street crime to commit in the Isles. =P

It would be funny if you got a 'mission' to tag an Arachnos building with graffiti and it triggered a gigantic ambush...

For the same reason we never get the phone number of our broker/detective, the same reason we have to run X number of missions before contacts give us their numbers, the same reason we have to run all the way to city hall/that building in PO to pay our base rent, etc etc.

I will only accept if I can abuse my position & subjugate the locals!

truth doesn't require originality to have value.

I prefer "efficient" to "optimal", but the theory is the same.

And the devs don't worry too much about that efficiency unless/until it becomes too widespread. If a well run UberTeam can hammer out some TF in 20 minutes and earn its members a ridiculous Merit Per Minute average, great. But if nearly everyone who runs it is able to do the same thing, then watch out for the nerf hammer.

What's interesting about the same ten ruined buildings being copied-and-pasted across an entire zone?

I don't see the point of "exploring" a zone that has nothing to discover.

The original zone was completely unnavigable for many players & needed to be changed.
I liked the 'look and feel', but you couldn't really do anything there if you had super speed.

The fog is integral to DA and doesn't handicap anybody to any meaningful degree.

But what's interesting about Boomtown that it requires saving? It's basically an endless vista of ruined buildings- if you've wandered ten feet past the entrance, you've seen the whole zone.

somebody in some interview said it- I'll bet one of the more organized and enterprising folk around here remembers where...

If GR provides an 'alternate leveling path' as we've been told, along with side switching that's enough for me. It'd be great if they sicc'ed someone on cleaning up the crummy old stuff but I'll understand if they don't.

but they should probably date it, maybe with a warning pop up so newbs know what they're getting into. =P

I expect GR to be a huge leap forward in mission content in roughly the same way CoV was. They'll be able to apply the stuff they've learned since the CoV release, they'll have access to the MA toolset, and I wouldn't be surprised if we got things like braching dialoge trees & multiple choice endings.

Even if I'm totally wrong about all that, worst case scenario we get a giant CoV-sized pile of new story arcs and missions to run that should be at least as engaging as the other newer stuff like the RWZ and revamped Faultline.