Sparkly Soldier

She also talks at the end of her arc about how she's fallen out with the Freedom Phalanx because they don't trust people like her with ties to Preaetoria. I thought at the time that meant she was a heroic Praetorian defector who used to work with Maelstrom on the other side, though Ricochet's existence does make it hard to deny that Twinshot's supposed to be her counterpart.

Sparkly Soldier Yuki's story revolves around a future war against the Nictus, so any mission that has her fighting the Council, especially the Nictus, is all kinds of appropriate for her. A lot of the dialogue surrounding those arcs ties in smoothly with her own story, from portentous rumors by the Council soldiers about Arakhn and Requiem to just their exasperation with her constantly getting in the way (as one Galaxy Archon said, "Sparkly Soldier Yuki again? Would somebody just shoot her already?"). Plus, the idea of a giddy otaku schoolgirl thwarting their schemes time and again is just so much fun to imagine: I can just see Arakhn burying her face in her hands while Requiem's in the background banging his head against the wall upon receiving the news that a middle-school girl and her talking toy cat just ruined another one of their plans.

Astorian Shade, as her name suggests, has a serious grudge against the Banished Pantheon, and her progress through the game is really the story of her becoming powerful enough to eventually return to Dark Astoria and challenge the newly-awakened Mot as an incarnate to avenge herself, her family and her hometown. Anything involving the Pantheon sends her on the warpath, and her very first fight against the Spirit Masks, by luck of the game mechanics, just happened to perfectly sum up her feelings about them. She was rescuing a hostage from the BP, fought the zombie guards, then drew her axe on one of the Spirits as it approached and began smashing and chopping at the wooden mask. The hostage was freed and tried to run over to thank her, but Shade instead kept swinging at the mask until the hostage finally gave up and ran for the exit. Had that been a written story, she would have kept furiously swinging the axe long after she'd reduced the mask to a pile of kindling.

My other characters aren't driven so much by any particular conflict, though Twilight Detective's an occult noir-style detective from Salamanca trying to get to the bottom of what happened to it and stop the Red Caps once and for all. He also has an uneasy relationship with the Cabal, since they use the same sort of magic he does toward the same goal, just much more powerfully and indiscriminately.

I checked it out too and, though he's still available in the missions, I didn't see Statesman on the contact list (the screenshot looks like it's trying to use him as an AE contact). Sister Psyche's still there, but now Statesman's missing and there are two almost identical versions of Ms. Liberty. I'd bet it's a glitch caused by replacing Statesman on the task force: they probably switched Statesman's contact ID with a copy of Ms. Liberty, and it affected the contact roster in MA too.

An elephant that never forgets to kill, to round out Beast Mastery?

If it's a bug, I hope it inspires the devs to really work something like that into the tutorial, with an Arachnos flyer for the heroes to fight too. That just looks all kinds of awesome.

I am, and I love it! However...

Hey, a free wooden horse! And a bunch of Greek soldiers too! Best gift ever!

Then it could be the last loyalist contact in the game. Geez, I was just complimenting an idea that I thought sounded interesting... it wasn't even my idea, it was yours.

Edit: Though thinking about it, FW could also be used to end the loyalist storyline. An extra clue could pop up at the end for loyalists saying that, due to your actions (perhaps stealing Diabolique's amulet) and/or just knowing too much, you've now been branded an enemy of the state. That way anyone who plays through First Ward can't help but get moved in-universe to the resistance/Primal side.

This is one of the things I love about CoH. A mission can have all kinds of equally viable strategies depending on the build, and if you're using concept builds, it really helps blend the character into the setting and make the missions feel like their stories come to life. My flashy energy blaster charges in and spends half the time raining havoc on the enemies and the other half running away from them in a panic, and it makes perfect sense for her character. Meanwhile a more stealthy, secretive character can slip through the shadows without being noticed and quietly take down the enemies one by one without much of a struggle, and that fits their personality too. If it's possible to complete a mission a certain way, then it's definitely okay to do so - and if it makes sense for the character, even better.

The statement I find most revealing is this one...

Thank you everyone for posting (and though I'd hate to use it on anyone, I didn't notice there was an ignore function - I'll remember that!), and I'll still be here - one frustrating conversation can't begin to outweigh the months of fun before that, and I really appreciate all the replies and encouragement.

To help get things back on topic, Longbow's attitude kinda does make realistic sense to me. They started as Ms. Liberty's idealistic, if legally dubious, "Peace Corps with guns" and went in with the same gung-ho attitude and inexperience. To that extent, I don't think their actions are inherently bad, they just take the implicit comic book question of "what right does one private citizen have to go out, break into a bad guy's warehouse and capture everyone there?" and extends it to a bigger, organizational level, where the question becomes that much more noticeable.

But then they started dying in battle, getting tangled up in quagmire situations like the Rogue Isles and watching major villains like Recluse keep getting away scot-free and, as time passed, the ones who survived, succeeded and so became the experienced leaders of Longbow also became hardened and embittered by their lack of progress, giving them a very myopic "us versus the world" mindset. And so after that initial "we're gonna save the world" enthusiasm wore off, we start seeing things like the tip missions, where this or that rogue, vengeful Longbow unit decides it wants to kill a suspect rather than apprehend them.

None of this reflects very well on Megan, though. I'm not sure if it'd be better to have her character darken to reflect the change in Longbow, or if she needs to hand off Longbow altogether since her idealism and its increasingly vigilante methods have drifted so far apart. As it is, she kinda seems like a public figurehead who really doesn't have much interest in what's going on with them, and I don't think that's what the story's really aiming for (at least, I hope not - I like Ms. Liberty!).

But about the flamethrowers, I'd always thought that was harsh too (and the NPC desc makes it sound even worse), but a few other people made a good point: heroes can have fire powers too and, whatever rationales can be applied for a single fire-blaster hero fighting bad guys without killing them (they can control the temperature to incapacitate rather than kill, they're careful about where they aim, the flames are some special chemical or energy effect that doesn't cause permanent damage and so on), we could guess that Longbow's flamethrower tech can work the same way.