SlickRiptide

Out of curiosity, a question for the thread: Did you (that is, you the reader) "get" the pop culture reference in the hero name "No Mind"? If so, what did you think it referred to?

I'd just like to say that Super Speed + Lava = Thank Deity for Rocket Board!

Skipping past all of the SPOILERS --

Speaking of Twinshot - Did they fix the references to "Miss" Liberty to correctly refer to "Ms." Liberty?

Protector is a lightly traveled server anyway. OTOH, I usually see some villains chillin' around the Isles when I pull out my Huntsman on that server. I'll see if the Protector gang I run with wants to go redside next time there's a get together.

Arcanaville is an AI? Hmm... Yesss.. The math... The unflusterable rational thinking... The Star Trek Animated Show... Yes! It all makes sense now...

I'm still trying to figure out if she gets her CB trucker lingo all wrong because she got it wrong or because the writer got it wrong. I suppose it doesn't really matter in the end. heh.

Huh. People are really down on Roy Cooling. I'm normally pretty critical but I enjoyed Roy, primarily because his arc addressed part of the reality of living in a town where there are "haves" and "have-nots" and people begin to ask why those inequities exist.

Characters live within the mind of their creators. All that exists inside of the sever is a bunch of bits, a bag of hit points, a costume description, and a table of powers and enhancements.

If the characters are such that you would like to keep access to those power sets without leveling them up again then rename them and give them new costumes so that anyone acquainted with her would not recognize them.

Otherwise, delete them.

Heh. ST:TAS was awesome if only for yet another episode of Harry Mudd.

Even as a kid, though, I started to raise an eyebrow at how often the answer to the problem of accelerated aging, accelerated youth, turning into a plant, growing six heads, whatever, was "The transporter remembers our patterns. Jump into it!"

On an almost entirely unrelated tangent - I once was fortunate (or not) to witness an episode of the home shopping network that featured Deforest Kelly maybe a year or two before he died. He had a career in Westerns in his younger days, and they were selling all kinds of trek memorabilia and talking about his career as a whole. He seemed a little dubious about being there, and not entirely focused on the task at hand (which was selling Trek). The hostess would be extolling the virtues of some piece of Trek merchandise and Deforest would pick it up and look it over while the camera was supposed to be showing it. heh.

Anyway, some woman called in and started going on and on about some old western, and gushing about how she loved his performance in that film. He said, politely, "I wasn't in that film." The woman got flustered and started arguing with him about it. "Are you sure? I was certain...", etc... He remained polite, albeit somewhat peeved, and the hostess called for a short commercial break. When the show came back, Deforest was gone and he didn't come back again. heh.

My attention was focused elsewhere so I still have not played these arcs beyond the initial few missions.

I will say that one touch I liked was when you first go to the local Arbiter and pretend that you've been mind-wiped he says "Mindwiped? I'm unaware of any local individual who has been authorized use of those powers, let alone deign to use them on you."

The implication is that Arachnos actually does have some kind of investment in my villain and in helping him achieve his potential; that he's special in some fashion.

Sure, he gets testy right after, but it's basically a for laughs deal at that point. Honestly - I like it better than having Ms. Liberty send me to Blue Steel just so that I can learn how to use the tram (and send a few Skulls to the hospital, as it turns out).

The problem is that the tutorial is really a fence that keeps players penned into a small area. The buildings in the tutorial don't really represent anything like the actual buildings in the area where they appear to be located.

For my part, I had placed the tutorial just outside of the arena, based on the view of the statue. However, the tutorial is just the tutorial. It doesn't actually have any kind of one-to-one mapping with the real zone. It can't; at least not without using force fields to keep people in it instead of geography.

Conversely, Twinshot's "destroy the meteors" mission is based on the real map. Some minor details aside (there's a billboard missing next to the police station, for instance) that really is Orion Beltway. I wish that they had extended that to the rest of the zone but they minimized the work required by hand-waving the the zone was being reconstructed already. Including, apparently, the area that ought to contain the tutorial. :-/

On the plus side, the area in the Twinshot mission got the same graphical makeover that Atlas Park got. You can see it plainly if you compare the front of the Hotel Geneva from the real zone to the mission zone. I have a bunch of comparison screenshots that I took when I was considering a thread similar to this one during beta (It would have been a spoiler then, so I decided against.)

In this particular game, the mentor/exemplar system cause levels to be halfway meaningless, anyway.

This game does not have the traditional end game of your favorite fantasy games, where every year you stack a new end game on top of the old end game and assign it a new set of level numbers.

Fifty is the top. If you think that numbers signify anything other than the number of powers you happen to have available to use in any given situation then you need to take off your fantasy game glasses.

An end game sort of like what you're used to does exists now, though for many years it did not. The "end game" was hitting the top and starting over with a new build or doing PvP. We built sideways instead - The inventions were added, and the Architect and other such things.

Incarnates are the current "end game". Your level won't go up but you can grind through various fantasy-game-style raids to earn credit towards giving yourself new power levels that exceed the level cap. Those power levels are primarily useful in the end game raids themselves, though if you think about it, that's not really so different than the same raids in the fantasy games.

If you power level through City of Heroes on the theory that "the end game is where the real game starts" then you will miss out on most of what the game has to offer. This is not one of the fantasy games where the lower level stuff is just there as a time sink to slow down how fast you get to the end game.

The journey is more important than the destination, here.

When I was first exposed to them in beta I was hoarding them and allocating them one per attack power.

Now, I just put three slots in each of my first two attacks as soon as feasible and dump all five enhancements into them. If it's a melee archetype, I'll sometimes put the knockback proc into brawl as someone else suggested.

Yeah, they're way better than depending on TO drops.

Here's the next travel power I want:

Everything here seems to be in order, except for "brand new shinny" -> "brand new shiny".