Texas Justice

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Hmmm...perhaps we should test your claim...

Party at Judas' place!

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No. Party in Austin. Judas needs to come and BBQ for us.

See you all in Austin.

Sorry, can't do a write up or pics. Maybe MissInformed, Moggie, or Neutra would volunteer, or even Manoa since she's coming from Cali. I'm too anti-social, and I tend to ramble. You know how it is with us old guys.

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But try finding a food not found in California

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Having just got back from Fremont, CA a week or two ago, I can attest to this statement. The Mexican food there was the blandest garbage I've ever tasted.

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True that. I went to San Jose a few years back and my Mom's cousin took me to a place that "has the best Mexican food you'll ever taste". While riding around sight-seeing later I looked at him and told him "You've been out of Texas too long if you think that was even DECENT Mexican food". He looked at me with a rather startled expression then said "Whoops, I forget you aren't from Colorado like most of the crew that comes out".

The only other Mexican food I've tasted that was worse was in Colorado. I found a place that advertised as "Authentic Tex-Mex Cooking" on the sign outside the front door. After struggling to keep down my meal, I asked the owner where she learned to cook Tex-Mex and she said "My mother" to which I replied "What in her recipe did you change? That was NOT Tex-Mex, I live on Tex-Mex when I'm back home in South Texas". She sheepishly responded that I was the first person who'd ever figured out she changed several things in Mother's recipes.

As for Neutra's suggestions, Hellz Yeah bring on the Devs. BaB, come as your SG toon and have anyone that knows you as BaB promise not to give it away. Enjoy the fun and the atmosphere. You may get an interesting perspective to take back to CA with you. Pohsyb, you must come and bring the box. Neutra and I can take turns stuffing you back into it on occaision if it will make you feel more comfortable. Castle, I don't know what to say. I hate crowds as well, and they make me more anti-social than I already am, but last years meet-n greet rocked big time, and that was without alcohol mixed in. If needed, do like I suggested BaB do and come undercover as your regular character. No one will know, no one will hassle you as much, and you may get some new ideas as well. Any other devs should come if for no other reason than to meet the people you make so happy each day and bask in the adoration.

Manoa, it is truly AWESOME that you will be there. I look forward to meeting you and the SO. From the looks of who all is coming (who's names I recognize at least) this should be even more fun than last year. Too bad we can't talk Miri and Vest into making the return trip. Something about having tickets to some Henry Rollins Rant the night before.

See you all there. I may take Neutra's suggestion and get a hotel room for the weekend. I'm considering blowing off w*rk that Friday to join Missy and Moggie for BBQ, and Manoa and company if they join in.

Hopefully they will not change their policy on your 6 month plan. And you have a decent bank. They at least called you to ask about it. I'd almost bet it isn't one of the big national bank chains. But I might lose, so no bet.

As some can guess, I'm still rather irritated about this, which is why I keep posting in this thread ad nauseum (couldn't resist that). Sorry, I'll try to rein it in.

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LH, for those of us who are adults and have been having our Credit Cards legitimately billed recurringly since joing the game, will we have to be concerned with an "Interruption of Service" over this issue?

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Yes, be concerned.

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Would this affect *non monthly* charges? I use my credit card to purchase a YEARLY sub. Have there been issues with this as well, or do I need to call my company?


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Yes. See the link in MissInformed's post or in my post above.

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Does this affect people who use check cards to pay? the number thay have on file is for my Bank of America check card. Do they still consider this a credit card issue or what?



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See above answer. I've seen reports that Credit Card companies are adopting this as well as bank issued credit/debit cards or check cards.

To answer some of the questions I've seen, and this is from personal experience (thanks for the link MissInformed), I'll say a few things.

Yes, some banks decline transactions from foreign (Non-US) IP addresses, including NCSoft's billing. This can be for monthly or even annual payments (which I've always done).

Others have said that actual credit card companies (not just bank issued check/debit cards) are also beginning to use this policy. YMMV

It really sucks when your subscription renewal falls on a weekend and you can't reach anyone at NCSoft or your credit card company to straighten it out for a few days. I mention NCSoft only because I originally thought it was a problem from their end, and after speaking to a wonderfully helpful person there I found that it was during the authorization process that the failure happened (which is before the charge is tried) which led to me calling the bank again.

My first suggestion would be to call your credit card company and ask to speak to the Fraud department, preferably a day or two before renewal is to occur. If it is prior to the charge, inform them of the upcoming charge from a non-US IP address and ask them to whitelist the charge. If it is after it has been denied, ask them to clear it and authorize the charge, then raise a stink about them denying charges you authorize without notifying you. It should be simple for their system to automatically generate an email with an explanation and a contact number or email address to resolve the problem so that you aren't denied access to the game (or anything else you may legitimately be charging). The lack of any notification by the fraud department was what caused me to lose my temper fully. I didn't unload on the poor sap that helped me at the time, but I did call back later and ask for a supervisor and give him a thorough tongue-lashing since they didn't try to contact me to either verify the charge or at least let me know they had denied it and why. The supervisor was very courteous in letting me vent my rage, and agreed that it would be a wise policy to implement although he wasn't sure if their computer system could do this. He did tell me that he would pass the suggestion along to his superiors. He also apologized for any inconvenience I suffered and asked if there were anything he could do to make amends, but simply laughed when I requested that 100 thousand dollars be deposited to my account. Go figure. He did thank me for not requesting more than 100 thousand.

Knowledge is power, and being forewarned, I hope that none of you go through what I did that miserable weekend.

Yes. And from what I hear, the minimum as well. This is the reason for the change that doesn't allow levels 45 or 46 to choose an HO as a reward. I guess we can get SO's as rewards that we can't slot for a level or two, but for HO's they won't let you have it until you can slot it. Only level 50 HO's drop now. Period.

Geez Frog. Have you ever found a thread you didn't necro?

I still have my 52 HO's, the few I tried to get. It wasn't worth the hassle to me, especially once we started having Hami breaking the hold. I'd rather have him held and defeated than almost defeated and either getting a yellow dawn or a Hive crash.

Or better yet, have a title to the piece that announces the intent. PvP Q & A with Castle would have told me right off that I didn't need to waste my time reading it.


Edit: Especially since many that read the Scoop may not bother checking people's forum titles or know who's PvP oriented or not among the staff. Not everyone spends all their time on the forums after all, and those who aren't into PvP may not recognize a PvP'ers name.

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Rewards

Characters over level 40 cannot select the Multi-enhancement from the Eden Trial. Added SO Enhancements to the Eden trial choice dialog box.



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The problem I have with this is that the level range for the Eden Trial is 39-41. Why should a hero who is in the correct level range (Level 41) not have a chance to receive the Multi-Enhancement that is the original reward?


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Personally, I see almost no value to the Titan-Os. You get a multi-aspect enhancement that you outlevel soon enough. OTOH, you can chose the rare recipe that makes a multi-aspect IO that you'll never outlevel and, if you don't want it, is worth more on the open market because it's part of an IO Set.

I think the Devs are doing everyone a favor by restricting the availability of Titan-Os.

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The problem isn't so much with the restriction, it's that the restriction is lower than the top level for the trial.

And yes, the Titan-O's are a bit useful to some. Even if they cap the level of the Titan-O to the top level of the Trial, that would be a 41 Titan-O. Considering that I've received SO rewards that are a level or two above what I can slot as rewards for Arc completion or killing an AV, and that I've received 41 Titan-O's when running Eden on a 39, they are still useful. And, the reason you get a choice isn't just because of the timer, it's because some people just aren't interested in crafting, so the rare recipe would be even more useless to them unless they were really hurting for inf.

All your comment did was blur the issue at hand, namely that capping a reward at a level that is lower than the level for the Trial is is a poor approach. Others have offered very good soultions for it in this thread.

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Rewards

Characters over level 40 cannot select the Multi-enhancement from the Eden Trial. Added SO Enhancements to the Eden trial choice dialog box.



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The problem I have with this is that the level range for the Eden Trial is 39-41. Why should a hero who is in the correct level range (Level 41) not have a chance to receive the Multi-Enhancement that is the original reward?

There is a short enough level range to this trial as it is, and this is essentially telling anyone that is at the highest range for the Trial not to bother running it. I ran Eden at 41 JUST for the Multi-Enhancement, as I used it as a pre-cursor for starting to plan out my Hami-O's.

I would agree that the solution to the problem should not be to remove or limit the reward, or make a change to the reward such as the "all HO's are 50" code, but instead, find and fix the bug that is causing the problem.

A better option would be to either change the upper level of the reward to 41, or if this is due to the different level of the rewards tables, to put the reward and the Trial into a different table. If the reward is going to be capped at 40 no matter what other options we present, why not change the level range of the Eden Trial to 38-40 (if you want to keep the same tight level range) or alternately, either 37-40 or even 36-40?

I'll see you at Dave & Busters BillZ.

This should be a blast.

There's an easy fix for that. You can bind one of the commands to a key to set the distance to a specific number, and then bind the same command to the same key with the Shift modifier to set the distance back to the base number. For example, you could bind u to set the # of feet to 300, then bind Shift+u to set the # of feet to 10. When you are on the character you want to see the effects, hold down shift and press u, then when you switch to the character you don't want to see them on just press u and you are good to go.

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Starting at 1 PM PST/3 PM CST/4 PM EST the servers will start the spin down process to have an unscheduled patch applied to all live servers.

The patch will begin at 1:30 PST 3:30 CST & 4:30 EST.

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Never any love for us hicks in the Mountain time zone. I was a Liberal Arts major. Any of you smarter folks in the other time zones help a poor lettered rube know what time the servers are coming back up?

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Mountain time is directly between Pacific and Central times, so either add an hour to Pacific or subtract an hour from Central and you have Mountain. Unless you are in one of those odd places that have Mountain time part of the year and Pacific time other parts of the year, in other words, no Daylight Savings Time.

To put this in the current context, that last time given would would be 1:30 Pacific, 2:30 Mountain, 3:30 Central, and 4:30 Eastern.

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I really don't know why they think they need to call a power set by one name internally and another name externally.

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Happens ALL the time with legacy code. It's usually a total nightmare to rename labels in a large and complex in-use program, for very little gain apart from the very occasional point of confusion with external users.

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To expand on this in another way, it is also a matter of getting used to refering to certain code by one name and a decision being made later to change the name. IIRC, the set was originally named Gadgets, but changed to Devices either before closed Beta or during early closed Beta. When you use that name when talking to others on the same project for a while, it's a habit to continue to use that name when discussing it, even though the name has been changed. Since Castle routinely talks to the programmers, it would be natural for him to refer to it by the same name they use, or anyone else that discusses these matters in-house at Cryptic.

All of that is just to point out how amazed I am that after all of the public discussions of various powers and powersets that the Cryptic team members have taken part in, this is one of the first times I can recall such a slip being made by one of them. There may have been others, but I really can't recall what they may have been or if they indeed happened. That's a pretty good track record. The other thing that amazes me is how big of a fuss is still being made over such a simple slip.

Oh, and for those wondering about the Dev Haste set, it is still Perma-able, and I believe it also still contains a Defense buff. They may need to increase that defense buff on the Dev Haste power or give it a Tough Hide component.

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Odd, my fire blasters have never had problems pulling singles...

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/signed

Many of these are no longer playing, but they all had a lot to do with my growth in the game.

Col. Steele / Miriya / Lt. Steele and many other alts - Art, my best friend from Colorado. We worked together, gamed together, saw movies together, and had so much in common. He was the one that first saw a mention of City of Heroes in a gaming mag, long before it was released, and knowing my love of comics, he told me about it. We hopped on the old boards, and had a blast, although he was even more of a lurker than I was. I got my Beta invite before he did and drove him crazy taunting him about it. When he finally got in the game, I got my first taste of teaming by duoing with him and sk'ing him a lot. You need to get back in the game soon.

Fryce - Another good friend from Colorado that I also worked with. Steele and I got him in the game, and he made some rather ... unusual ... power and slotting choices. He stayed in debt so much and died so quickly his favorite phrase was that he died when a Girl Scout threw a box of cookies at him. Fryce gave way to Fryce II, although I can't remember if he officially added the II or just re-rolled his level 20 Fire/Ice Blaster. This was before Respecs were added. Marty, you are pretty much the brother I never had. You also need to get back in the game.

Slayride1 from the Beta forums. I never got to play with him, and never knew the names of his toons, but I learned quite a bit from him about how to be detailed in reporting bugs or anything else to the devs. Always gave good advice, or told people straight off that they needed to stop smokin' crack.

600 Dollar Man and Spoon. These two guys cracked me up. Lt. Steele and I had a blast teaming with them, and wound up playing with them often. We eventually got invited to their SG as we'd been playing with so many of them. These two were also techs, so we had that in common as well, and never got impatient with each other when we were running missions and someone said "BRB, Phone", knowing that it could be up to 30 minutes before the call was over.

Texas Heat - The leader of that SG, and the first tank I teamed with regularly. Yeah, you stole the name I wanted, but pfffft to you.

Xanatos, Poison, Geist and so many of the early Beta testers, for giving so much helpful information on the Beta boards. They were always very forgiving of my many mistakes, and taught me a few things to expect about my first, and only, MMO.

Maus and pouncy - Much like Sable, these two always kept me laughing. Although I think I had Maus on my friends list as just Maus. It was through them that I first teamed with Sable Shadow, running the Synapse task force over and over.


Cybored and Shrapnel - I teamed with these guys one day shortly after my first SG disintegrated from people leaving. They had several people that had left for the other games as well, and after running a few missions together, they took me into their SG and gave me a home. They helped me learn that a fire blaster was useless against Infernal (when he was still fire-proof) and basically only good for tossing a smoke grenade, laying a few trip mines, and tossing some caltrops out. Oh, and ferrying inspirations to the tank. :-)

Miss Informed - For being so thoughtful in your posts, and never bashing on me for being a D.O.M.

DeepBlue, PlatinumArsenal, Major Decoy, Doctor Why, Pippy and all the other members of The Core, my current SG. Thanks for taking me in.

Team Awesome - You guys and gals have always made me laugh on the forums, long before I was invited to join you in the game. And you make me laugh there. Well, sometimes you make me wanna puke, but I just close the TA window when that happens. Even though I've left, you folks are still tops in my book.

Quatermain, Abraxxus, Powers of Kings, and Maribelle. The leaders of my first several Hami Raids. Thanks for making it so easy for newcomers. It helped that I'd read Tic Toc's Guide to Hamidon Raids on Justice and for that I thank Tic Toc. I especially like that next to last bulleted item in the guide. It may become my new sig.

Many others that I can't remember the names of.

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I think I died 3 times on the final mission, all to the Thorn Tree itself, and I had a full Domination bar at that point too. Once we got to the point where we were all attacking it (Brute, MM, Dom, Corr), it went down pretty easy, and no one died... unlike the first Respec trial, where we had multiple TPKs in the final room.

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I wanna group with Positron's Dominator! What server? If not Champion, then I demand you guys open Server Transfers.

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According to a prior Positron posting he is playing his Dom on the one true server, Justice.

He didn't state what server States is playing his Plant/Psi Dom on however.

Also, Positron has appeared in full glory on several servers during the Pockeet D weekend event a while back. He had to resort to appearing outside the confines of Pocket D (Void Walking IS against the rules BTW) due to the sheer number of people crowding around him. And yes, he had all his powers. That same night I recall seeing Ghost Widow, CuppaJo, Silver Mantis, and one other whose name I can't remember. All had their full complement of powers. When bringing in the Signature Heroes and characters, yes, they use the codes to bring them in, but they don't use those powers unless it is a special event. Since I didn't participate in the End of CoV Beta Event, I don't know how those heroes were played, but it was likely with toned down versions of what they have available to them.

I also recall some events on the Test Server quite a while ago (Arena Testing?) where some of the Devs participated using their Uber characters with power combinations there is no way a player could get.

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2) The Hydra in Perez used to be farmed for xp. 8 man teams would be constantly hydra hunting in the lake.



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Also, Hydra Spit attacks used to have a very short range. During Beta it wasn't uncommon to see several Blasters, and even some Defenders, "hover-sniping" the Hydra in total safety.

I "believe" that Prisoners also had no ranged attacks and were farmed in much the same way, leading to the reduced XP and the implemtation of ranged attacks on all villain groups. Several Beta testers would use these groups of Prisoners as testing grounds to try to get some damage numbers on differing powersets and attacks. (I still miss SlayRide's posts.) Hopefully, one of the other beta people will correct me if I'm wrong.

... that Enervating Field used to do damage? It wasn't all that great, but I recall sitting on the War Walls in SC during beta with EF running on a Family Lt., with him running away from me when he couldn't do damage to me, circling around agro'ing anyone he went near, then coming back for more with the other villains following him. Between Moonbeam snipes and the DoT from EF, I could kill the LT's and others with no risk, so of course, they had to remove it.

... that at one point in Beta, the agro range was tweaked overly much which would result in every mob in a group agro'ing even on a long range snipe? They'd also cause the groups around the corner to agro as well, so you could somethimes have 4 or 5 entire spawns agro'd before you could get more than 3 attacks off. Luckily, this was a case of the dev's over-tweaking the settings to see how things went then dialing it back to a relatively more acceptable setting.

... that Smoke Grenade had a misplaced decimal that caused massive debuffing (400% ?? 200% ?? can't remember the number)? Before they found the misplaced decimal, SG was considered over-powered so they added a To-Hit roll, so that you would miss someone standing right next to someone you hit. This made no sense due to how a real Smoke Grenade would work. THEN they found the mis-placed decimal and corrected it. However, they left the To-Hit roll on the power making it essentially useless. You could also stack your own SG's multiple times, which they also removed, which most players agreed with, except for those that had six-slotted it for recharge. Remember, there was no respec at that time so you were stuck with the slotting.

... that I'm too tired to think of any more of these right now?

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--"Queen to Queen's level three" (exceptionally nerdy ST reference).

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was that a Barkley (SP?) refference?

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More like a TOS reference.

Whom God's Destroy.

Linky.

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News 8's story on the event is now online!

http://www.news8austin.com/content/t...sp?ArID=156166

If you scroll down you can play the video. I'm in it! Well... in the background. For 3 seconds. (1:08, on the right, with the cap.)

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hhmmm, i was on there too.... crud. a whole 4 secs. (:12-:16) shout out to yukie, who was sitting next to me in the event and in the news cast.

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Woohoo. I made it into the video for 3 secs. (:34-:37) in the shot with Neutra and Cuppa. True, it's mostly the part of my face you can see over Cuppa's head, but I'm still there.

Also, it was fun to finally get to put faces to so many names I've know from in the game and on the forums. Meeting Gil was great since I got to spend just a bit of time talking to him. I spoke to Cuppa several times, but I was mostly staying on the fringe of the Justice folks during those talks.

A really nice treat was meeting the Lone S.T.A.R. folks from Victory. I had run into Texas Titan/Texas Wrangler back in Beta when I mostly played Texas Red, and he and MA-SH spotted a Mrs. Texas Red on Victory while we were talking. Unfortunately, I thought Victory was one of the servers where I had the names in use, but I was mistaken on that. Alas, there is already a Texas Justice and a Texas Red on that server. So much for the possiblilities of a future cross-server move for those two.

The most fun was getting mistaken a few times for Rich Weil from NC Soft. The first time was a cameraman coming over and telling me they were ready for my interview while we were talking to Cuppa. That was when she realized that he and I were dressed almost alike, except for my shirt not having the NC Soft logo above the pocket.

All in all, it was a great time, and well worth taking Friday off. Next time, I'll take off the day of the event as well, since I didn't get there until around 5:30, and missed my photo op with Cuppa and the rest of the Justicites in attendance.

A special thank you to MissInformed for helping with the hotel arrangements, and calling everyone she knew on her cell phone. For someone that doesn't use their cell much, you sure used up the minutes during the event.

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We will do more of these in the future - and next time I promise it will be somewhere that will hold more people

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Try Atlanta - we hold millions here...

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I'll see your Atlanta, and the Oregon from the post before you and others. We'll just tuck 'em off in a corner and still have lots of room left here in Texas.

Seriously though, I doubt that CyberJock's thought there would be this large of a turnout. If they had realized the large turnout they might have, they would have likely booked a larger site, or more likely, charged a nominal admission fee or sold tickets to this. I highly suspect that they would have still had an extremely large turnout even if they had been charging a fee. The other possibility might have been to have split the event into several days, with different NCSoft games and devs featured on different days.

I do wish more could attend, and seriously hope that future events of this nature will occur in various parts of the US and Canada (at the very least), and possibly even in the UK and other places where they have a large playerbase. Also, a little more notice would be nice as well, to allow those that are in the general vicinity to have time to make plans to attend. I got lucky in that my school district,and more specifically my campus and department head, appreciate me enough to allow me to take off during a fairly busy time for such a purely personal matter.

I look forward to meeting the players that attend, and getting to put faces to many of the names I know only from the game and the forums. Oh yeah, it will be a good time to get to meet the red-names as well.

Are there any updates needed for this guide in the post-ED world?

For any that are new to the raid, or have never read this, it is a very good guide for what to expect and how to handle yourself at the Hami Raids.

Yeah, it's a bump, but an on topic bump.

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Warning! Manticore is a BAD man!

This is what I learned from my experience at the CoH PnP game. I got to play Swan during that game. Well, we all know that Swan wears gauze and dental floss and calls it a costume. What I learned was that she is SIXTEEN years old.

You would think, considering she is Manticore's sidekick, that he would tell her to put on a little more clothing. But nope, good old Manticore is enjoying the view and keeping his mouth shut. Like I said earlier, Manticore is a BAD man.

I wish I could be bad too.

-SYB

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I knew there was something about Manticore I liked, aside from hiis attitude and archery skills. Us Dirty Old Men have to stick together.

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And yes we had no travel powers, we had the... Mynxmobile. Please don't ask, I was trying not to fall over laughing the whole time

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BWHAHAHAHA! omg I'm dying here!! mynxmobile <snickers> How about the Statesman scooter? The Positronplane? or would that be the Posiplane? Thanks Luna for the laugh.

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That's Positron-Glider.

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No offense pos, but you seem a bit too heavy for a glider, what with that armor of yours.

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And besides... can't you fly anyway?

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No suppression when he attacks from the glider. I thought that would have been obvious. Posi has already told us that he doesn't attack anything that attacks the heroes in range of them since they are too low level and give him no XP, don't you think he's smart enough to find a way around the suppression as well?