Venture

Updated 5/1: fleshed out some NPC /info, fixed typos.

A few people have noted that the faux Family custom mobs are deceptively strong. Unfortunately I was not able to get regular Family to work for me. I tried making a custom faction for each of the two sub-Families stuffed with stock mobs, but they weren't spawning properly. I'd only get one or the other, and (e.g.) hostages with guards from the one that wasn't spawning would release as soon as you entered the map. The custom guys have their sets on Standard but that still gives them better attack chains and -Defense than regular Family get. The upshot is that despite the fact this is "just a Family arc" you might need to cut your difficulty.

Arc Name: "Two Households Alike"
Arc ID: 126582
Length: Very Long (5 mission)
First Published: 4/28/2009 01:52 AM
Morality: Heroic
Description: Feuding families, star-crossed lovers...you've heard this story before. The ending sucks. Maybe you can blue-pencil in a better one.

N.B: blatantly lifted tropes from any number of places; includes more than a few easter eggs as well.

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Just to put a date on it, I'm going to be off reviewing until after the 5th at least -- that's the end of the semester.

Well, The Happening does not even have a twist ending.

With the legions of bad twist endings out there you'd think it would be easy to name one, but I'm drawing a blank...check the Shoot The Shaggy Dog entry on TVTropes, that should have a few.

By having the protagonist as one of the rogue copies pushes the story from "block standard" into "relevant" or even "moving". The rogue copy sacrifices itself for the benefit of everyone.

It pushes it into "Give Me A Break" because it's a borderline Butt Pull and into "Who Cares?" since the copy was never real to begin with.

Of course this is me overanalyzing myself, since I really didn't have this planned out from the beginning. I discovered as I was building the arc that, hey, I could easily add this twist and make the story many times more interesting - let's do it!

This is why it's a twist just for the sake of a twist.

Instead I have the AE security patrols talk about having detected a rogue copy and investigating. If the players don't realize that they are talking about the character at that point I guess they weren't paying attention, or that the patrol dialogue had fired off too soon as usual.

With all the rogue copies running around there is no reason the player would assume his character is the one they are talking about. Players tend to be reasonably certain that a character they created is, in fact, who and what they created it to be. This is another reason why the Tomato In The Mirror thing doesn't work well in RPGs. (N.B. there is a canon arc that attempts the same thing, though it chickens out at the end, and it tends to evoke much the same reaction.)

Everyone doesn't like twist endings for some reason. Personally I love them.

It's not that people don't like twist endings. The arc I'm working on now has one. It's that people don't like bad, manipulative twist endings.

"Gengis Khan is stabbing Abraham Lincoln while Dick Tracy stares at Geordi with an erotic look in his eye again!"

Very stressful. I'll be in the holo-shed.

You'll also find it quoted in TVTropes' "Spoof Aesop" section.

That's actually one of the pages I haven't read...yet....

Arc #5299, "Magic, Mystery and Mayhem"
tl;dr: 3 stars. Offenses: problematic mobs, "just a bunch of stuff that happened", no closure

Agatha Deserie, Cabal member and Midnighter, asks you to help investigate the theft of magical antiques. The entry text on the first mission was "It seems quiet...too quiet". Ouch. The first mobs sighted were "Magical Assistant" (typo in /info: "preform") Minions and Trained Assistant Lieutenants. Minions come in Martial Arts/Willpower, Energy Melee/Devices and Illusion/Super Reflexes; Lieutenants are Dual Blades/Super Reflexes and Psychic Blast/Illusion Control. You can pretty much forget about stealth. There was an embarassing outcome of the random spawn system: the Lead Assistant (Gravity Control/Super Strength Boss) was shouting for his goons to "find the antique", which was in the safe five feet behind him. The item turned out to be a set of manacles used by Bombardi, a stage magician in the late 19th century. You have to find those, rescue two hostages (no escort) and defeat the aforementioned Big Bad. All the crooks claim to work for the "Mystery Magician".

Agatha determines the Magician's next target in Act II, a museum exhibition of stage magician props from about 100 years ago. You are sent in to safeguard it. You have to recover four of Bombardi's props, rescue two hostages (one of them a hero), secure 2 antiques (protect glowie objectives) and take down "The Radiant Glinda" Owens, Heist Ringleader (Mind Control/Psychic Blast). The hero is Bowen Alacard of the "King's Legacy" supergroup, a Gravity Control/Kinetics Boss. There are also a few Circle of Thorns patrols to deal with.

Ms. Owens, as it happens, is a new arrival to Paragon City. She was touring the country which makes Agatha think she may have been associating with this "Mystery Magician" before her arrival. Agatha wants you to check out the nightclub she recently appeared at. You only have 30 minutes for this (stated before acceptance) as it's expected the Mystery Magician will try to cover his tracks. There are a few of his goons on the scene when you arrive, but when you retrieve a Clue from a dressing table the Magician himself spawns, a Necromancy/Gravity Control Boss. He calls at least one ambush wave during the fight and runs at 25% health, it seems. He didn't get out, but you're told that he managed to slip away anyway. The Clue is a note giving a time and place for a meeting, perhaps at his hideout.

Act IV is the Fight Scene: you head to the Magician's hideout to take him down. Glinda has escaped and presumably joined him. On arrival you also get tasked to rescue Bowen Alacard again and recover 5 stolen antiques. Both Alacard and the Magician spawned frontloaded, but defeating the Magician just causes him to respawn elsewhere. Defeating him the second time clears the objective, but his defeat Clue says that whoever was inside his clothes turned to smoke and dissipated, so you Never Found The Body. Alacard got wedged in the geometry early on. Agatha turns all the stolen stuff over to the Midnighters' even though no one can figure out why any of it was of any interest in the first place.

The arc suffers from not having any closure. The player never finds out why the antiques were worth stealing, who or what the Mystery Magician really is or why the Circle of Thorns got involved. At least some of these questions really ought to be answered. The mobs are problematic as well. Not only is stealth pretty much a lost cause, there are enough control effects being thrown around to potentially overwhelm a melee's protection. The respawning Boss trick was cute and thankfully not overplayed.

Is that where I got that from? I don't even remember that episode....

Arc #42221, "Secret Origins (Tech): The Snake Women of Epsilon V"
tl;dr: 3 stars. Offenses: tedious glowie hunts, plot issues, powerposing

This arc purports to be an "in-game origin story" for low level heroes, with the ceiling running between 5 and 20. It also says it makes a lot of assumptions about your character, making me skeptical. I ran it with Venture on his second build at CL2.

The initial briefing from Your Pointy Headed Boss casts you as a stereotypical computer nerd working at Architect Entertainment. YPHB says holograms are showing up in the wrong missions and wants you to fix it NAO. You enter a tech map and see the following in the nav bar: " Locate the Spare Parts, 35 computers to check, Find the Bug".

Yep.

The map is empty at first until you click on the spare parts, which you use to "MacGyver up" a weapon. Then various lowbie mobs start patrolling the place. You have to check all35 computers. "The Bug" turns out to be hostage Hank Carter, who claims to be a US Space Force astronaut projecting his hologram from Epsilon V. He asks if you have any kind of communication device but seems to run out of power before he can abuse your cell phone much. You tell YPHB that it's fixed.

Next, you get a call from Hank, who wants your help in freeing his ship from an energy field. His Tech Guy gives you instructions for turning the AE system into a teleporter. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? You head back into the machinery to make the adjustments...only to find Clockwork all over the place. After dealing with them and adjusting four machines, you use a terminal to look up the US Space Force. You find a reference to them on a conspiracy theory website (which includes a 9/11 reference, which should probably be deleted -- doubtful the attack took place given the divergence between City and real history). You sneak back to work while YPHB deals with an irate hero who thinks the missions don't give enough rewards.

While YPHB is distracted you call Hank back, but get Ernie the Tech Guy. Ernie tells you about the Snake Women that have the ship trapped and says he can teleport you right to their computer core now so you can just shut it down. What Could...yeah. You find yourself in a Snake cave map full of Snake Women, customs with Claws and Energy Blast attacks. The Claws attacks shred your Defense pretty quickly (even on an SR...you have very little -Defense resist at that level). The last room has Snake Men, standard Snake models (complete with standard /info, making them stand out). Then I lost conn and had to do it all over again. In the cave you find an insect person hostage that runs away after being freed and some Rikti technology. This part's a little problematic for two reasons: one is that the Rikti are not space aliens, of course, and the other is that your character recognizes the Rikti tech because "it's been all over the internet after the war" when actually information on Rikti technology is very tightly controlled. When you return to earth (how?) you decide to use the captured tech to become a superhero yourself. Hopefully you won't get caught using illegal Rikti tech.

While you're doing this you get another call from Hank, who tells you they've found there's a shield around the computer core, so you'll have to take that out before you can be beamed into the core. Why any sane person would go along with this is beyond me, but once more unto the breach.... You land on the surface of Epsilon V (Talos coastline map) where the Snake Women are slaughtering the insectoids (case error in the bones: "THis...") Snake Infantry show up on this map with Robotics. You have to find and destroy six generators. This is a pretty wretched mission if you don't have a travel power. Since it's capped at 10 you won't unless you have a temp. On your return to earth you are afflicted with righteous indignation over the Snake Women's slaughter of the insectoids and resolve to do something about it.

For the finale Hank beams down to meet you at the computer core. Unfortunately, YPHB follows you into the teleporter and ends up somewhere in the caves as well. You have to find them both, plus take out four energy field generators. Both the Computer Core and YPHB spawned frontloaded for me. Hank was a Robotics/Willpower and spawned behind all four generators, meaning he was completely useless. There's a Snake Queen and Royal Consort deeper in but you don't have to fight them. The last call you get from Hank reveals that you were travelling in time as well as space.

The writing is cute in a lot of places, unpolished in others. The Rikti technology angle is best dropped, frankly. The arc powerposes your character heavily. It does disclose that on the label, of course, but it still limits the arc's appeal to those who don't mind such things.

Yeah, but as far as I could tell, the war left them without bodies. It wasn't until Zoira came along in the 1800s that they finally were able to achieve corporal form again.

"The Library of Souls" shows that the Circle was body-napping people way before Zoria showed up...that's only when they started operating anything like in the open again.

Are you 100% positive about this? Thorn Isle, at least, seems like it would have to be Oranbega. Or at least have been the Circle of Thorns possession for quite a long time. After all, the very thing they get their name from comes from the giant tree growing there.

I'm sure, and I'm also aware that it's a mess. In "The Envoy of Shadow" Akarist says that the ruling body of Oranbega was called the Circle of Thorns even before the pact was signed, when it was after the pact that the Envoy gave them the first Thorn Blades. Either Hell was taking advantage of aggressive branding or it's a slip.

The Thorn Tree should not be out where it is, agreed. Maybe it's not the Thorn Tree but a Thorn Tree, planted more recently to take advantage of the Mu power source. Personally I get the feeling that the CoV team either did not even bother to read the existing lore in a number of places, particularly as regards the Circle, or had and didn't care that what they were doing didn't jive with existing canon.

As for how long the Oranbegans have been in the Isles ruins...the war ended 14,000 years ago. So yeah, they've had some time.

Arc Name: "Blowback"
Arc ID: 4643
Length: Very Long (5 mission)
First Published: 4/8/2009 08:42 PM
Morality: Heroic
Description: Malta and the Rikti learn that the enemy of my enemy is my enemy, and a Malta officer learns that you can't retrace your steps after you've walked off a cliff.

Arc Name: "Chains of Blood"
Arc ID: 4829
Length: Very Long (5 missions)
First Published: 4/8/2009 08:54 PM
Morality: Heroic
Description: A (very) non-canon story about the Circle of Thorns and Legacy Chain.

Arc #2150, "Win the 2009 Freak-lympics"
tl;dr: 3 stars. Offenses: tedious outdoor object hunt, problematic mobs, "just a bunch of stuff that happened"

Dreck offers you a chance to prove yourself as a villain by joining the 2009 Freak-lympics. As a villain arc I ran this with my 34 Widow. The first event: the speed steal. You have 15 minutes to collect four glowies in a jewelry store map, then deal with a Boss spawn. The store is guarded by custom Security Guard mobs, all of which are Mace/Willpower Lieutenants. The boss is "Detective Volt", an Electric Blast/Manipulation Boss who calls more of the LTs when low. The customs hit very hard.

The next event is the 500 yard smash. You are sent to the Skyway map to destroy objects. There are 18 assorted objects which makes this map fairly tedious. You also have both Synapse and Mynx, but they are optional targets (I took both out), along with a Galaxy Archon ally (whom I ditched).

The twist comes in Act III. One of the team leaders, K1L0HURTZ, has "ideas" about his future if he wins. Dreck doesn't want that to happen. You, being a non-Freak, can intervene without it coming back on him. You're sent to the "Blow Longbow to Hell" event in St. Martial. This takes place in the Longbow officer's club map. The target is a Noise Tank, and about the entire map agroed on me instantly. It took most of my tray but I pulled it off.

Act IV is an all-out assault on Atlas Park. Your targets are the Security Chief, the Activist, Azuria, the Hero Corps Field Analyst, Henry Peter Wong, Ms. Liberty, and "the New Hero". As you can imagine there's some humorous dialog mixed in here. Wong is a Merecenaries/Invulnerability Boss. The Analyst is a Super Strength/Willpower Boss and took forever to wear down. Dropping him spawns a Freak ambush determined to keep you from winning. Azuria is a Dark Blast/Dark Miasma Boss. The Security Chief is a hostage held by Freaks and an escort. Ms. Libery was almost impossible for me to defeat. I blew almost an entire tray three times and won by the skin of my teeth the fourth time.

Then...the mission turned out to be bugged. The "new hero" was not to be found anywhere. I searched the whole map, defeated every mob, freed the Rikti Magus ally I bypassed earlier (I skip allies whenever possible)...no luck. There was no way I was going to fight Ms. Liberty or the Analyst again so I bailed on the arc.

Arc #2142, "Ninja Crimewave"
tl;dr: 4 stars. Offenses: bad pacing, tedious hostage escorts

Coyote calls on you to stop a bank robbery in progress. There is supposed to be another hero on the scene but it's expected he'll need help. When you arrive, you find the bank under attack by the Crescent Clan Ninja. (None of which use Ninjitsu due to the bug. Some do have Super Reflexes though, so goodbye stealth.) You have to rescue Kid Samurai (Katana/Willpower combatant but not ally, takes off on his own, has a bad attitude) and the bank manager, and defuse a bomb. The manager tells you the ninja didn't take anything, they just set the bomb and waited for heroes to show up. Rescuing the manager (I think) triggered an ambush, which arrived just after I had disarmed the bomb and completed the mission. Coyote tells you the Crescent Clan used to be part of the Tsoo but their leader got power-hungry and split off. Then more calls start coming in....

The Crescents start hitting businesses all over the city simultaneously. Coyote dispatches you to cover a nearby jewelry store. This is a fairly short run, you have to clear the store map and find one glowie, containers of poison gas. The other heroes find similar things, nothing stolen but bombs, gas, etc. Kid Samurai, however, has not checked in.

In Act III, Kid Samurai has tracked the ninja to a nearby state park, which the ninja have now set on fire. Coyote wants you to help him and has sent another hero ahead. This one has a "get a team" warning on it. That appears to be for the Greater Oni EB (Fire Control/Storm Summoning), which wasn't all that tough. You also have to rescue Kid Samurai (typo in objective: "Saurai"; at least he follows you this time, albeit on aggressive and still with a bad attitude), Flower Knight and three civilians...who are escorts. On an outdoor map. Yeah. The mission pretty much becomes a clear-all because of this. One of the hostages does have some information for you. She overheard them talking about a "Xing Chao", an informant they wanted to kill. This act was pretty tedious, frankly.

Coyote tracks down the informant in Act IV. It turns out the crime wave was just a diversion for the Crescent Clan's efforts to find him. That's a bit "non-covert" for ninja but that's Lampshaded back in Act I so I'll roll with it. The police are taking him to testify before a grand jury even now. Coyote is of the opinion that the man is probably a Tsoo member planted in the Clan to sell them out, thus using the legal system to destroy their competition, but that's neither here nor there. Kid Samurai and Flower Knight are already on the scene but Coyote expects the Clan's leader will send his best to whack the informant. He wants you there as well. Your objectives for this one are to find both allies, 3 hostages, the informant, secure the evidence and defeat "Madame Xu"...no, you don't get overtime for this. What you do get is tragedy: you find Kid Samurai has been killed by the Crescent. Thankfully, none of the hostages are escorts. The Big Bad is a Psychic Blast/Martial Arts.

Indictment in hand, you are sent after Doctor Wu, the clan leader, in Act V. Flower Knight is on board again, out for blood after Kid Samurai's death. This mission is kind of a let-down after the previous two...it's on a short casino map, you basically just run in and beat him down. He's a Ninja/Dark Misama EB, can be problematic because of the fear.

If 3.5 stars was an option I'd have given that, but I erred on the side of mercy and went with four. There really isn't a theme, the pacing is off, the writing could use polish in places and act III is just plain tedious...but the Architect does pull off Kid Samurai's death well. The bad attitude may be annoying but it does connect you to the character.

So I got this in a PM today (name redacted)....

[ QUOTE ]

You know, subjective feedback is only helpful when you actually offer some "I think this can be done better this way" feedback too. Oh, and thanks for ignoring my questions, that was a really nice finger of you.


[/ QUOTE ]

Just for the record...it is not my job to write your arc for you. I may choose to make a suggestion if the issue is somewhat peripheral and has some fairly obvious fix, but much of the time the problem is too central to the arc and requires real authorial decisions. Those are up to you.

As far as replying to questions, I try to, but sometimes I have to put that off for a bit and play catch-up later. I do have a life outside of this game, and frankly after reviewing an arc I've already spent a good amount of time on someone else's work. If I invest the time to enter into a full dialog with an Architect then I'm either not spending that time getting to review other peoples' arcs or I'm spending more time than I should in City, which I probably already am anyway.

Just commenting on some of the Circle lore here:

Oranbega is only in Paragon City, the underground cities you go to in the Rogue Isles, I believe, are the ruins of the Mu civilization. At least I'm fairly certain, I'm a bit rusty on my CoV lore. In any case, it's not Oranbega.

This is correct. They look the same because the Mu and the Oranbegans both come from a common culture so they have similar architecture.

Exactly what the Mu ruins in the Rogue Isles are is still up for grabs a bit. Some parts of CoV seem to claim the Isles are what is left of Mu itself. Others say they were an outpost. The latter is more likely to be correct given references in the earlier CoH material.

Also, it doesn't say anywhere that someone has to be of Oranbegan descent in order to become a CoT mage.

Also correct.

In fact, there are no people of Oranbegan descent, as because of the pact they made with Ermeeth to destroy the Mu continent, they all became ghosts, so Polyantha saying that you can't become a true member because you don't share their bloodline doesn't make any sense.

The pact was with Hell, not Ermeeth. Ermeeth (Prometheus) is the god who taught Tielekku's magic to humans. It's not clear in the canon how Tielekku felt about that (an old Paragon Times article suggests she wasn't down with it, but in-game text indicates the ancient Oranbegans still venerated her) but Tielekku's other student (and Ermeeth's former squeeze) Hequat (Hecate) objected most vehemently.... The Circle cut the deal responsible for their current status with the Prince of Demons, through the Envoy of Shadow.

It is not stated anywhere that all Oranbegans agreed to the pact though that is the default assumption. This is a bit of ambiguity I play with in "Chains of Blood".

But I was sure you had to have the Mu Bloodline to become a Circle mage. I could be wrong, though.

It is implied in various places that the ability to wield magic is tied to the body, not a metaphysical quality of the soul. Thus, when looking for hosts, CoT magi will naturally look for ones with strong "magery", and such people are likely to have Mu ancestry. However, contrary to what a lot of players have assumed, it is not the case that everyone in the City universe who can wield magic has Mu ancestry. It's the most likely case, but the devs did leave wiggle room for people with other ideas for their characters' backstories.

N.B. since, again, the Mu and the Oranbegans came from the same homeland (Atlantis?) that what exactly constitutes the "Blood of Mu" is also ambiguous, and something I play with in my arc....

Discounting "The Rise of O" because I didn't assign it a rating, and assuming I've counted correctly, I've now reviewed 50 arcs, with an arithmetic mean rating of 2.9. The average dropped a bit as I ran into a few Wall Bangers.

There are only four arcs left in my queue: 2142, 2150, 42221, 5299.

Once the queue empties I will probably take a short break from reviewing to publish another arc myself. After that I will start taking requests again but there will be some changes to how I do things. I'll say more when I'm more certain about them. I will tell you now that I'm not even looking at requests posted in this thread after I said I wasn't taking requests, so we can get the angst over that out of the way now.

Arc #26931, "The Balance of Power Part I"
tl;dr: 3 stars. Offenses: weak theme, overpowered ally

Theronius, Tactical Operative of the Cosmic Paladins (author insert), needs your help. This bunch of galactic guardians is spread too thin, and they've got a starship nearby that's been hijacked. The hostiles have planted bombs and taken hostages. He wants you to go in and handle it, warning you not to take the aliens for granted. The intro is kind of like handing someone a gun and telling him to walk into the next room and shoot the person inside, but we can take it as read that these Cosmic Paladins have had dealings with earth before and have some bonafides the player can check out with Longbow or the like if so inclined. The bad guys, the Granox, are vaguely Borg-like in appearance and sport a variety of powers. 3 bombs, 3 hostages (allies), one named LT to take out and an ambush when you click the last bomb...pretty straightforward. Afterwards, Theronius confesses that the Granox wiped out his civilization and he just ran away.

For Act II he asks you to take out a Granox slave base, freeing all the slaves. You have an ally already at the asteroid...who, on approach, reveals that all the slaves have been executed. It seems the Granox knew you were coming, and worse, they're planning an invasion of earth. You have to defeat another named LT, the Slave Overlord, who mocks you in the last few seconds of his life. Theronius is distraught as he took great pains to conceal the planned attack and suspects an infiltrator.

The invasion hits in Act III. Theronius takes it personally, believing the Granox are destroying earth because he asked for your help. He thinks, though, if you can defeat Goltharn, their master-at-arms, it will rout their troops. Vanguard and Longbow are on the scene when you beam down, fighting the Granox in battle spawns. You first have to rescue a hero, Black Petal (Fire Blast/Empathy EB) to trigger Goltharn's spawn (Axe/Crazy EB...OK, I just couldn't tell what his other set was). There are destroyable objects about the map but there's no benefit in protecting them. Goltharn's combat banter says his emergency teleport fails, suggesting he is Killed Off For Real. He does drop a flash dr^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinformation key containing the location of the Granax homeworld, 3 parsecs from earth. (That's what, Barnard's Star? 3 parsecs is pretty close.)

Act IV: This Time It's Personal is a counterattack on the Granax homeworld with Theronius and your ally from Act I. You are to plant bombs and take out Xer'Tul (author insert) in one of their underground cities. This is another straightforward run. Xer'Tul (Energy Melee/Invulnerability AV) folds like a busted flush against the allies, particularly Theronius (same). Theronius thanks you in the debriefing.

The arc is pretty generic. It does have a bit of a theme but the Architect doesn't do much with it. The overpowering ally in the last mission is irritating, and Acts I and II are a bit unsatisfying without even Bosses for their Big Bads. It could use some work. As it stands I wouldn't be very interested in part II.

Arc #1356, "This is War, Part I - the Revenge of Hro'Dtohz"
tl;dr: 1 star. Offenses: Wall Banger, aggrivating mobs, "just a bunch of stuff that happened"

This arc takes place after Dark Watcher's RWZ arc and after the Lady Grey TF. Lady Grey tells you Hro'Dtohz is not taking these defeats lying down and has ordered a new wave of offenses against the city. One Vanguard unit in particular is cut off at a very strategic location and she needs you to go in after them. You have to rescue a few Vanguard members, one of which may be not what you expect, and then take down a Heavy Assault Suit. In the process you find some battle plans indicating Hro'Dtohz is really pulling out the stops.

The carnage continues in Act II, this time with Serpent Drummer himself pinned down in a Rikti base discovered under the ruins of an old SG base in RWZ (LGTF mission #1 map, I believe...haven't run it in ages). Just to make it worse Malta is on the scene too. As it happens when you get there, the Malta commander is a hostage. He joins up with you, his rescue triggering another hostage, a Master Gunslinger, whom I did not find unti the trip out. Serpent Drummer is another rescue and an escort, meaning if he bites it you fail the mission. Rescuing him triggers the spawn of Dra'gon, who managed to take out the Malta TacOps (what a pity). Dra'gon summons three ambush waves as his health declines...unfortunately for him, two of them are on your side. On completion Serpent Drummer tells you that his whole unit was wiped out, that the Rikti kept coming at them regardless of their own losses.

Next, the Rikti launch an assault on Kings Row, but the commander appears to be holding back. You are sent in to investigate. There are piles of ash everywhere, the remains of people blasted by the Rikti, along with patrols of Rikti, Vanguard and PPD. You've also got a few Boss spawns and at least one Heavy. The primary targets are the two Field Commanders; taking them out triggers the spawn of the main commander Naun'Kom. It seems he decided to try to take a city sector for himself rather than destroy it as Hro'Dtohz ordered. Vanguard takes Naun'Kom in for interrogation....

...and Hro'Dtohz sends the Four Riders to destroy the base he's being kept at before he breaks. You're sent in to stop them. Lady Grey says you'll have allies on the scene, some unconventional Vanguard forces and, she thinks, Malta.... Sure enough when you get there, Rikti, Vanguard, Malta and even Nemesis (which are hostile) are all fighting it out. There are four ally spawns and the four Riders, all required for completion. War, Death and Pestilence weren't a problem. Famine, of course, has the damn END drain aura. I dragged him over two Zeuses, which dented him, then managed to plink away from just outside the aura with Focus and Shockwave. Then the mission bugged when it refused to acknowledge one of the allies was freed, probably because it was freed by NPCs. I had to reset it and do it all...over...again.

Act V gives you one simple task: assassinate Hro'Dtohz. Lady Grey gives a somewhat overblown speech about how necessary this is despite any code against killing issues you may have. I'm just going to cut to the chase here and drop the Wall Banger: Hro'Dtohz turns out to be a Nemesis Automaton.

Yeah.

The debriefing does leave doubt as to whether or not he was always an automaton, or whether this whole arc was a Nemesis plot, or what. Frankly, I don't give a damn.

Arc #2922, "Hunting the Dark Dragon"
tl;dr: 3 stars. Offenses: overuse of special maps, padded, overproduced, problematic mobs, throws the Idiot Ball, Crazy Prepared villain, "just a bunch of stuff that happened"

Peter Stemitz asks for your help in stopping the Circle of Thorns from summoning dragons. A mage named Rollister may have already summoned one; you are sent in to investigate. In fact, when you get there (Hequat's temple map, bit much for the first mission), you find there are four dragons to rescue. The first, "Rynn" (Electric Melee/Electric Armor Boss), says she was at a rock concert when she was forcibly teleported here. The next, "Player" (Super Strength/Willpower EB) was one of the band members. "Pik", the drummer, just fled when rescued. "Officer Blake" is a police dragon, who says he and the other cops working security at the concert did their best to move people away from the "tornado" but he, Rynn and half the band got caught. Rollister turns out to be an Arch-Mage of Madness (meaning this would take a while if you didn't have three allies pummeling him) and complains while you fight that the dragons have to fight for them or the Dark Dragon will destroy everyone. Following his defeat, Player gives you his guitar and tells you not to worry, the dragons have a secret way back to their own world.

Next, Stemitz asks you to check out the caves under Thorn Island, the theory being that the presence of the Thorn Tree would mask anything big and nasty the Circle might have summoned, like a Dark Dragon. He then says he can't sense the Thorn Tree any more, thus covering up for the fact that it's not going to be on the map. When you get there, the place is full of Malta (evidently, someone blew the respec trial early). A hostage tells you the Dark Dragon summoned the Malta after flipping off the magi who summoned him, and the Malta leader might know more. New objective: take out Weedkiller leader. Fiction Green Epsilon tells you (after his beatdown) that the Dark Dragon was from a world familiar with technology and offered the Thorn Tree to Malta in exchange for their services.

Now that Malta's involved, Stemitz calls upon Crimson for intel. Crimson suggests checking out the Warburg robotics factory. This is three special maps in three missions -- when everything is special, nothing is. The briefing does not mention that you can enter the central building or where the door is, so if you have't done the LRSF or seen this map in another AE arc you may be a bit stumped. In any case, Your Princess Is In Another Castle, making the use of a special map even more egregious. "Sister Hecate", a Knives Boss, tells you the Dark Dragon has already left. Oh, and there are KoA patrols...kiss your stealth goodby. We also get patrols of "Space Pirates", the Dark Dragon's boys, including a Robotics/Force Field model, a Claws/Energy Assault model and one other that didn't live long enough.

Act IV takes you to the Dark Dragon's next target, the Arachnos sub base in Overbrook...fourth special map in a row. You are to find the base commander (hostage, warns you that Mako is coming in his approach bark) and the Dark Dragon. One of the hostage's guards, a Shadow Trooper, tagged me for about 1200 points between FollowUp and Spin. Instant death. After releasing the hostage on the rebound, he ran off warning me that there were a bunch of pirates coming, thus revealing that he was actually the Dragon (of course, you're scripted to be slow enough on the uptake to not be able to do anything about it). I got a large enough spawn of that, with all the Force Fields cast by themselves and their Protector Bots, my ToHit went into single digits. Turning on Focused Accuracy helped a little. Moving on to the Big Room, I cleared the entry spawns then hit stealth and looked around. Sure enough, no sign of the Dark Dragon, but there was a computer glowie. Clicking it spawned Captain Mako and friends, Rocks Fall Everyone Dies style. Fortunately, "everyone" in this case was the numerous Malta spawns I hadn't cleared. Mako (+1 EB downgrade, PToD's up) tore into them, and just to give you an idea of how wretched Malta really is, three or four Unyielding spawns taken one after the other got him low enough to trigger Elude at which point the survivors finally snuffed it. Then, having watched all this stealthed, I finished off Mako. This makes two missions in a row on special maps with a Your Princess Is In Another Castle ending. The Clue is a mocking message from the Dragon.

For the finale, Longbow has tracked the Dragon to a building in Faultline. There is a signal coming from the building that will decay in 30 minutes so it's believed that's how long you have to stop the Dragon. You get to choose whether or not to intervene. You're warned to bring a team and that the Dragon will try to escape. My guess at this point is that he's an AV so if he runs, he'll get out. I went in alone anyway. This was another special map, of course, the Castillo map from Doc Delilah's arc. The exterior was full of friendly Longbow. The interior was full of Malta, which I stealthed past. Dark Dragon himself was on the top, of course, in the room right next to the elevators...so he only has to run for a few seconds. However, he wasn't an AV, or if he was his PToD didn't turn on in time. I was able to knock him down and kept him from running. There were two guards in the room, also mandatory kills, one of which I think was an LT I barely noticed. The other was a Ice Melee/Willpower on max that had to be killed twice. In the debriefing Stemitz tries to make it sounds like there's some moral ambiguity in here somewhere, which I'm just not seeing.

The arc has some good writing at points and has some references to the canon missions. Unfortunately it overuses special maps, which is particularly obnoxious in acts III and IV as these are really just padding. Act IV also throws the Idiot Ball, which I might have overlooked (it's not a crucial plot point) but that's on top of having a Crazy Prepared villain. It's not a bad arc but it's overproduced...sort of like Waterworld.

Arc #38226 "If You Teach a Man to Make a Fish"
tl;dr: 2 stars. Offenses: borderline Wall Banger

The UN's GENE program attempts to clone Mako...evidently to correct the world's shortage of psychopathic amphibian killing machines. The level range on this is 20-30 for the first mission and 25-31 for the second...since it was short I didn't both changing builds.

Anyway...Act I opens with Dr. Barlow of GENE (Genetic Enhancement for Neutralization of the Enemy...this is a UN project? Genetic warfare?!) asking you to retrieve some of Mako's teeth, lost during his fight with Scrapyard. You are to get these teeth by beating up the Scrapyarders...in a Neutral morality mission....okaaaaay. I managed to stealth the map and got the tooth while only slicing up a few members of the resistance.

In Act II, Barlow tells you they've created a weaker, controllable version of Mako. Right. Fortunately, we don't have to wait to see What Could Possibly Go Wrong, as the Coralax have attacked the lab. You have to recover some glowies, meet up with Barlow (Energy Blast LT) and clear out all the Coralax on a two-level tech map. Of course, the Mako clone has gone^H^H^H^Halready was Axe Crazy and has to go too. Barlow tells you the clone was emitting a psychic signal the Coralax homed in on and wonders if the real Mako has that ability as well. He gives you the tooth as a souvenir since his superiors don't want him working on this project any more. I can't imagine why.

This one's a borderline Wall Banger.

Arc #18145, "The Fuhrer's Fury"
tl;dr: 3 stars. Offenses: morality issues, "just a bunch of stuff that happened", gratuitous faction

Note: the next arc in the queue was #1881. That is not coming up for me. If you own it and can get this straightened out I'll move it back to the front of the line.

Zaxo Stryker (author insert) wants your help in reclaiming Delta Zeta 24-10, a.k.a. Axis America, from the Nazis. First he wants you to steal the co-ordinates from Portal Corp. Um, yeah. He promises to talk to his friends and get the charges dropped for your assault. Yes, it says Heroic on the label.... The mission uses the Portal Corp tech map and only requires you to find one glowie. I don't know if there are any fakes because the first one I found was the right one. I clicked out without having to fight anything (so, zero reward....)

For Act II, Zaxo has jury-rigged a portal in his supergroup's base for dimensional travel. "Don't worry, it's been tested." What Could Possibly Go Wrong? You're to explore the area since it's been ages since anyone has been to this dimension. You end up on the outdoor factory map filled with custom Axis mobs (one class of LTs, the 9th Squad Meta, has no /info). These include healers (Pain Domination) and buffers (Kinetics). The Power Armor variety have Invulnerability turned up high enough for Unyielding. so kiss control effects goodbye. Your objective is the Axis leader and any information he has. The first Boss I ran into, a Fire Melee/Fiery Aura, was not the leader. The leader was General Gerard, a Martial Arts/DiedTooFast. He carries orders in German from someone named No. 163.

Zaxo translates the orders and for Act III, sends you to the staging area those troops came from. You are told "Kill them all. Don't give meany of that goody goody talk either. We're dealing with murderers and the worst scum I've ever met." Um, yeah. Amidst the slaughter you find a kid who ratted out a possible resistance cell in his neighborhood.

In Act IV Zaxo has found an Axis training base. He can't take it out himself so he wants you to team up with him and destroy it, saving the children imprisoned within. Zaxo spawns frontloaded and has no /info, apparently as Assault Rifle/Energy Manipulation. The first child you find is already indoctrinated so you kill him...yeah. No. 163 turns up again...wasn't I supposed to have killed every...oh, never mind. There are five actual children you don't have to kill.

For the big finish, Zaxo has found the "Cryogenitic Storage" facility where the Fuhrer is being kept. I looked, there's no trope for Hitler On Ice for some reason.... Zaxo is accompanying you to destroy the freezing equipment, thus killing the Fuhrer and demoralizing the Axis. He spawned frontloaded, he also despawned frontloaded as he pulled a Fusionnette and snuffed it in the first room. All of the control units also spawned frontloaded. Blowing up the control units gives you a new objective, Defeat The Fuhrer...what a surprise. The Fuhrer is an AV, "the world's strongest metahuman" but now weakened after 40 years in cryogenic suspension. He's a Dark Melee/Dark Blast, both turned to 11, and calls one ambush wave that showed up about 10 seconds after he kissed the linoleum.

This is a fairly middle-of-the-road arc. It has a hatful of new mobs, none of which are necessary or add to the story in any way. Axis America mobs are available, as are 5th, of course. Hitler and Nazis in general are the low-hanging fruit in any case. Heroes that stay anywhere near the straight and narrow will chafe at the morality issues. There is no real theme and not much of a plot; there is little or nothing connecting one mission to the next. It's basically five missions of beating up Nazis with new models.

Arc #1571, "The Council's Good Graces"
tl;dr: 4 stars. Offenses: no-closure ending

This is actually the arc before #1579, "The Council's Long Con". The arcs ended up in my queue in reverse order somehow, and the Architect never pointed it out to me. So it goes. This whole arc is in the 15-19 range.

Alberto Galdi, once a powerful Archon but now a recruiter thanks to an injury, offers you a chance to get in good with the Council. For your first task he asks you to go to a warehouse, wipe out everyone and grab anything you find and bring it back to him, no questions asked, as a display of trust. The "warehouse" is a Council base (the low-level map). You find five crates of weapons and some shipping instructions. Galdi tells you afterward that the Council does have traitors from time to time and needed to be sure you'd follow order without question to wipe some out.

It turns out the base was shipping large quantities of quantum weapons to another base in an area that doesn't have Kheldian problems. Galdi wants to know what's going on. An inspection would tip off whoever is behind the scam, but if a villain shows up to trash the place they'll probably just blame Arachnos. Of course, you're actually going to be looking for clues. You have to find two glowies amidst many decoys and defeat the base commander. You find evidence implicating the base commander in the smuggling of quantum weapons to bases in Paragon City. Galdi, however, says the commander may not have even known that he was doing anything wrong...which won't keep him from being punished, of course.

Act III, the finale, sends you after the Archon who recruited that commander, who was formerly a 5th Column member. This is a standard Council base map. You only have to defeat the Archon and his spawn; he takes a cyanide pill on defeat so you don't get to question him. He does let slip during the fight that he's not the one in charge of the scheme. Galdi tells you the trail is now cold, though, and whoever is running it won't move again any time soon. He gives you an unofficial Council patch and says you can consider yourself an ally of the Council.

The ending is somewhat unsatisfying as there is no real closure. Yes, it's part of a series but every "chapter" has to stand on its own. (And as it happens, the next chapter doesn't really build off this one.) It does have good writing and gameplay.

Arc #1026, "To Hell and Back"
tl;dr: 3 stars. Offenses: bugged mission, possible death trap, weak theme

Yes, this arc is jumping the queue. It's pohsyb's, he asked me to review it. Yes, red names get professional courtesy, deal with it.

What they don't get is mercy.

Poh Poh, a Fire Imp and clearly an unreliable one, has a job for you. He wants you to stop a girl from going to Hell. His master wants the girl; Poh Poh seems to think the girl is going to take his place. The first task is to get a key from the Circle of Thorns that will get you to Hell. This mission has a level range of 25-35. The first thing you find is Rachel "your typical biker chick seduced by an evil demon lord", according to her info. She tells you on the way out that you have to "gaze into the abyss" to find the key. "The abyss" turns out to be a portal glowie that when clicked...summons 7 Boss demons. Rachel, it seems, already made off with the key. Because of the small map size some of the Bosses are bound to end up uncomfortably close to one another. Defeating them all is optional, but you do have to destroy the source of the Void spawn...which did not spawn. Oops. The mission does warn you that this happens sometimes on entry. On the second try the "source of the void spawn" did spawn. It was the cauldron object, fairly easy to destroy and didn't appear to summon any ambush waves.

For Act II you are sent to a "bad place" Rachel used to frequent...a biker bar (speakeasy map). Technically you only have to click one glowie and don't have to fight anything. Realisitically you will be attacked as soon as you enter the bar, by so many Thug/Devices Bosses that my client turned into a PowerPoint emulator. They are hostile to each other so you don't have bust every head in the place but you will get hit with a lot of firepower. Once everything was dead I picked up the glowie, which was Rachel's sketch pad. It had a sketch of the demon lord Menloth with little hearts around it and another sketch of a chapel.

Poh Poh knows what chapel she's drawn and sends you there for Act III, telling you to stop the wedding and not to say anything about his involvement to his master, whom we can assume is Menloth. The wedding takes place on an Oranbega map with Biker and Demon Wedding Guests. The Bikers are Thugs MMs with Gang War...which does not expire with the caster's death. Demons are Fiery Melee/Fiery Aura. Your objective is to take out the reverend, a Dark Blast/Dark Miasma Boss who spawns right near Menloth. There's nothing said about Menloth having to survive, and I don't think it's even possible to have that as an objective yet, but I played along and didn't target him. After the Reviled Reverend snuffs it you get a new objective, to beat up Rachel, who is now looking much more demonic. Both she and Menloth are, I think, Fire Blast/Fiery Melee, Boss rank. Her defeat clears the mission. Poh Poh is happy that he has the master all to himself now. Um, yeah.

It has its moments, but it also has problems. Whatever problem is causing the triggered objective on the first map not to spawn is clearly proving to be harder to track down than hoped. Act II is too close quarters for that kind of spawn, doubly so with Boss Masterminds. It needs some work.