SlickRiptide

Embrace it while you've still got it. In another ten circuits, you're going to look back and find yourself bewildered about where it went.

Well, I hate to say it, but if nothing changes in the contact finder then blueside is going to be one massive case of "unlocks".

The reason is that the new intro experience throws out the roots of the contact tree. The contact finder does not "find an available contact" in its current implementation. It finds the next contact associated with a zone content arc. By that I mean people like David Wincott, Montague, Jim Temblor, etc... It does not pull up any of the ordinary contacts or even any of the story arc contacts.

So far, the only "ordinary" contact my newbie brute has been introduced to was a single introduction from Montague. Otherwise, the only way to get a new contact that isn't part of the zone story chain is to "unlock" it by doing scanner missions until you get a safeguard, and then (or so I hear) the detective will offer you another of the regular contacts.

A blueside player who follows the path of least resistance is going to be facing an even worse case of railroading than redside if the current implementation goes live. At least, that's how things look to my level 18 Freem brute at the moment. Maybe something will change at level 20 that I haven't reached, yet.

I've made a character like this before, when I was trying to make a real "fist fighter" before the alternate animations were added.

I think I took MA/Will but I skipped all of the kicking attacks. Instead, I took any melee attack from the power pools that wasn't a kick. Boxing, flurry, air superiority.

I filled in my attack chain with temp powers - Revolver, Gabriel's Hammer, St. Louis Slammer. That's all there were at the time. I guess there are more now - A tazer, at least. I also had my vet powers, which I allowed on the basis that they fit all builds and Sand of Mu was a punching attack anyway.

All in all, it wasn't half-bad. I doubt it would win any contests for "best performing build of the year" but it was playable. Those melee temp powers deal a reasonable amount of damage.

So before the scaling code was implemented, Kraken (just to pick one) was a Monster and not a Giant Monster?

Of course, that's a whole other "Did you know?"

In the early days (before Issue Seven, according to Paragon Wiki) Monsters such as Kraken and Babbage did not scale to each individual attacker's level. The Kraken, for instance, had a level of 14(?) and would con grey to higher level characters with associated combat penalties in regards to higher level players.

It was not at all uncommon for high-level heroes to take down lower-leveled monsters for fun, badges, and just for revenge for having been defeated by them when the heroes themselves were young.

The "purple patch" caused all Giant Monsters to scale their damaged given and received to match the level of the attacker. (It's slightly more complicated than that, but the previous link to the Wiki explains it.) The upshot is that ALL Giant Monster class creatures are a challenge to everyone, no matter their level. Likewise, all heroes/villains can make a meaningful contribution to defeating them, regardless of the apparent level difference between the monster and the hero.

Did You Know: The Salamanca Lake Monster

One of the many mysteries of the Zone known as Croatoa is the lake monster said to inhabit Lake Salamanca. "Sally" is prone to showing up only when you least expect it...

When Croatoa was in beta test phase, the discovery that there was an actual "lake monster' similar to Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, was a source of vast amusement to many people.

In the beginning, Sally was an actual monster-class creature. I'm not sure if we still use that classification any more, actually, but on the scale of "bad guys" you pretty much had Minion, Lieutenant, Boss, Arch-villain, Monster and Giant Monster. Only the last level was truly the sort that required groups of heroes to handle. (I'm pretty sure this was before Elite Bosses were invented.)

A Monster could be handled by a small team or be soloed by a higher-leveled hero or by certain combos of archetypes and powers.

Anyway - Sally was a friendly sort, in that all she ever did was swim around on a very long timer. The problem, if problem you think it to be, was that there was a badge for seeing Sally and it tied into an accolade involving badges throughout the zone. There was not (and still is not, to my knowledge) any way to award a badge just for coming into close proximity with a NPC. The only way to collect the Believer badge was to attack and defeat her.

This led to a certain amount of controversy on the forums, with plenty of teasing by the badge collectors about Sally burgers, and plenty of impassioned arguments by the Sally backers about the needless hostility towards a rare mythical creature that wasn't even being aggressive, just to collect a badge.

Never mind that you have to defeat Sally TWICE to get the badge.

Nobody would likely be surprised that I was solidly in the "Save Sally" camp. In fact, the "movement" got dubbed as the "Save Sally" movement. LadySadako was one of its champions and she offered many fine arguments as to why there ought to be a peaceful way to get the badge. The controversy even brought the devs out to respond - ArcticSun, the web lore guy at the time, wrote a Paragon Times Article that purported to give a justification as to why Sally needed to be "defeated" for the safety of all Salamanca. heh.

Well, with the story laid out, the Save Sally movement at least got one of their demands, which was an explanation for having to fight her. However, the devs were suitably impressed and/or amused enough that they went further. When the issue went live, (or maybe some short time afterwards; it was years ago and my memory is faulty on good days) Sally had been altered. Instead of fighting back, she was revised to take one hit and then dive beneath the waves, "defeated". You still have to attack her to make that one hit and get your badge credit but with some things, game mechanics are game mechanics and you have to just go with the flow. Sally was "saved" thanks to the efforts of the players who didn't want to have to beat up a mythical creature just to say that they had seen it.

On a related "Did You Know?" - It was once possible to use "Teleport Foe" to drag Sally up into Salamanca. It may even still be possible for that matter. It turns out that Sally is not much more than just a neck and head, in reality. It made for an amusing sight to see her "swimming" through town trying to get back to the lake. heh.

My one character who could be said to be emotionally attached to Galaxy City is a guy who thinks that his superhero career is actually a lucid dream. He'll probably shrug and figure that "those things happen in dreams" just like zombie invasions and a lot of other weird @#$%.

The devastation isn't quite as bad as you might expect, though there's some hand-waving about "reconstruction" to explain that away.

The zone that could really benefit from combat phasing of the entire zone is Croatoa. After all these years, you could actually save the place instead of letting it sit in a time warp.

We've kind of derailed the Pax train at this point. Is there anything more to say about Pax?

Re: Public Quests - The closest I've seen to Public Quests is the Giant Shivan zone event in the new tutorial. It's basically a Public Quest with a delay of just a few seconds between resets.

I would like to see more such events. Hopefully, this tech means that the devs are actually planning to design more such events across all level ranges.

Given the way this game's population has always done things, I'm a little surprised that a solo incarnate path would have been a hindsight thing.

I'm not sure that it matters, though. If Freedom is hugely successful, then it will be partly because we're getting an influx of players from other games where constant end-game raiding is the standard way of doing things. They'll not only be fine with it - they'll expect it as the accepted way of doing things.

We who are here now will slowly become the minority in expecting something different.

Speaking of "historically accurate": I thought it might be interesting to show how Red Sonja looked in her first appearance. The artists changed her up as time went on.

On a random positive note, I really like that Numina poster. When the "Who Will Die?" story is done, I'd like to see the promo/chapter pictures offered as base decorations.

If I might suggest - turning the thread into a personal attack thread is a good way to get it moderated and/or locked.

As for the barbarian costumes, I really just don't get the obsession with thigh-high boots any more than I get the obsession with suits of armor. Whatever a barbarian woman should look like, I can say that something she might have worn while walking a runway in Milan is not it.

Arguments about the historical validity or lack thereof being relatively pointless, IMO.

Even Red Sonja, Mistress of the Chainmail Bikini, wasn't above dressing to fit the occasion:

Trials of any sort are of small interest to me. End-game raids were never my bag in any other MMO and they're not going to become my bag here. If they produce a fair amount of non-incarnate content across the level ranges, I'll be happy to buy that and contribute to the cause.

Here's hoping that the haunted mansion has a good story to go with it. I imagine we'll see a lot of Ghostbusters showing up this Halloween. heh

The barbarian stuff looks good, except for those thigh-highs. I hope that those are not the only new boot choice. Red Sonja wouldn't be caught dead in those. The White Queen might wear them but she's about the furthest thing from a barbarian.

At least it's not Yet Another Suit of Armor.

There are a ton of emote animations in the game. You can see a menu of them if you look at the "text input" line of the chat window (lower left corner of the screen, normally) and click on the "chat balloon" button.

If one of the choices is "greyed out", it means that emote has to be unlocked. Typically it has to be purchased from the market but sometimes it needs to be unlocked by other means. For instance; the Facepalm emote is a promo from "liking" City of Heroes on Faceboook. Dice7 is unlocked by earning the "Burkholder's Bane" badge in-game. (Before the game was free-to-play, those "for sale" emotes were components of expansion packs that were purchased as a package.)

You don't have to use the UI to activate an emote. You can activate any emote by typing either a semi-colon (';') or the emote slash command ("/em") followed by the emote name.

A list of emotes along with their emote names and examples of their animatiom can be found on the Paragon Wiki Emotes Page.

In addition to ordinary emotes, there are "costume change" emotes. These are emotes that are designed to be played before a costume change, either manually or as part of a macro.

As with ordinary emotes, costume change emotes come in two flavors - standard and unlockable. You also have the option to activate them via the user interface or by using a "slash command".

Using the UI - The simplest way to change costumes (assuming your character currently has more than one costume slot) is to look in the upper right corner of your screen, click the word "Menu" and then about 4/5's down the menu for the word "costume". You'll be shown a graphical representation of your available costumes. You can activate one by simply clicking it. For client/server performance reasons, you are limited to one costume change every 30 seconds.

The costume UI also has line of text at the bottom that reads "Select Costume Change Emote" and a clickable menu. The menu shows your available costume change emotes (CCE). As before, the grey ones with padlocks on them are unlockables. A free player has five or six standard CCE's available. Click the one you want to use (or none, if you prefer none). Now, when you click your alternate costume, the CCE will play as a transition between the two costumes. If you have "none" selected, the switch will be made immediately, like flipping a switch.

Slash Command - The "/cc X" command will change from your current costume to the costume in the slot indicated by the digit you put in place of the X. Costume slots are numbered starting at 0, not 1, so the command "/cc 2" will actually set your costume to your THIRD costume, not your second.

There is also a "/cce X cce_name" command that will explicitly play a particular CCE. Here again, the Paragon Wiki Emotes Page can show you samples and tell you the cce_names to use with the command.

Actually, the interesting thing is that freems can create all the arcs they want and test-play them. You have to be Tier 6 to publish the arcs. Interesting bit of marketing that way.

What's the deal with that snake woman? Is that an existing NPC I've just never encountered or is it something new?

Did You Know - City of Heroes CCG Player Designed Card

When City of Heroes launched back in 2004, the Powers That Be were experimenting with cross marketing the game into other hobbies.

Jack Emmert had worked previously at Eden Studios, the pen and paper RPG publisher and he tapped them to design a PnP RPG for City of Heroes.

Similarly, Sean Fish aka Manticore, the lead story guy at the time, was friends with Dave Williams of Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG), the publishers of Legend of the Five Rings and other popular CCG brands.

AEG was tapped to produce a collectible card game based on City of Heroes that incorporated lore that was written or at least vetted by Sean and artwork that incorporated new art while also leveraging existing assets from the published CoH comics. (The citation for the "authentic" lore is long gone now, but I once had a PM from Dave Williams in reply to a lore question in which he assured me that the lore was solid because he was personal friends with Sean and it all came from the "horse's mouth", so to speak.)

AEG sponsored a "You Are The Hero" contest in which players described their character's origin in 200 words or less. The winner was a hero named "Ahnek Rah-Zul" and was incorporated into the CCG. Two sets of the game were printed - The first was named "Arena", and the second was named "Secret Origins". Ahnek Rah-Zul appeared in the second set.

These days, thanks to website reorganizations at AEG over the years, you have to use the Wayback Machine to see the original character model of Ahnek Rah-Zul.

Sadly, the CCG sold only moderately well. Meanwhile, AEG was caught up in the opening throes of the Great Recession that we're all still dealing with, so the game died a quiet death. No sets were printed beyond the initial imprint. The CCG was eventually even disconnected from AEG's main website, though many of the pages can still be called up if you know the links to them.

As can be seen by reading that page I linked from the Wayback, the initial idea was that the two games, MMO and CCG, would be cross-connected. You'd win codes at CCG tournaments for in-game MMO prizes, and the MMO might also somehow award you with CCG promos of one sort or another. That idea never came to fruition and is no doubt a big reason why the CCG never really caught on very strongly. It's a fine, quick battle game but it was intended to supplement the MMO and without that connection it didn't really appeal to a mass audience.

One point of interest - The Vanguard members make their first appearance in the CCG before they appeared in the MMO. Gaussian is implemented as a Sidekick, even. heh.

For those curious about the game mechanics, the Wayback page has links to the original GenCon demo decks that are still good. You can download those PDF files, print them, cut them out and play a battle with a friend.

The CCG was unique in one aspect - It incorporated "generic hero" cards that you could use to create your own personal tournament-legal hero to play with. AEG even created a "hero builder" on their website that is still operational. It's still fun to play with even if you'd have a hard time finding anything useful to do with it these days.

For the curious, more information about the CCG, including full card listings, can be found at Paragon Wiki's CCG page.

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Congrats. As the opposite end of the spectrum, I salute your diligence.

I'd say you managed to achieve a pretty awesome level of awesome already.