eviella

I was idly asking in one of my channels a few days ago if anybody ever took Sands of Mu anymore as one of their 3 free powers. I was thinking the two ranged were clearly better choices, and the Ghost Slaying Axe is useful in specific situations all the way through. Even if the Axe is limited, it helps relieve frustration when faced with ghosts.

So, or course, the very next character I create picks Sands instead of Nemesis Staff for RP reasons. Go figure.

Congrats to all, but to Redbone in particular. I got to see that arc very early on- Redbone is on one of my channels- and I still think it's the best storytelling I've seen yet in MA.

Has anybody gotten Master of Baracuda yet? I was just on a team that ran it and managed no defeats and no temps. The badge failed to award to anybody on the team; I was wondering if anybody else had that problem.

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It's no different than veteran badges.

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Don't ask me how I feel about veteran badges.

I don't have a problem with 30 days per badge as such; that sounds about right. Nor do I think we should be able to get all the badges quickly. I _do_ think that it taking over a year to earn all the badges from day jobs sounds excessive. Given the nature of the badges I would put the "ideal" time frame at 6 months to a year total.

The issue to me is not the time to earn one badge. It's the fact that, unlike pretty much every other badge (except perhaps the vet badges), these badges are all mutually exclusive on earning time. You can't work on two at once; you can only switch between one or another. (I know, you can't kill more than one enemy at a time. But you can be looking for more than one.)

Gratz on 500 redside badges, ir0x0r!

I could insert my subrants about Master Thief and Vet rewards; but I think those have both been beaten into the ground. So, I'll stick with expressing my admiration that somebody finally made it redside.

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As a badge collector i dont think any of the badges should be changed. The reason being is the there are those people who already have the badges, such as the epic heal, damage taken. Its not fair to those people that have already received the badges. I dont think they should lower the requirement for them just because people think its going to take too long to get. No epic badge is unattainable. Take a long time to get them, but thats why they are called epic badges.

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As a badge hunter who already has all the Epic Heal and Damage badges on their main, I wish to disassociate myself with this position. I can't speak for others, but I don't feel changing the badges would be unfair to me.

Ok, Epic badges, my purely personal take:

Fabricator is my personal guideline on what an epic badge should be, honestly: I had it in 14 days after I9 launched; I was the third verified with it on Badge-Hunter. It tops the progression for that category of badges. It takes quite a bit of time to get; but you can spread it out and have it not be too bad, or you can power through it. You would probably never get it in casual play but working on it isn't _that_ bad. My only real problem is no progress bar.

Mez: I'm honestly not sure where to file these. They're almost trivially easy to farm but I would be surpised to see anybody get even the third through normal play. They're probably pretty close to right considering earning all six is a bit of a joke on the badge collectors.

Debt: No real problems with them. I wouldn't mind the last one being a bit higher, given that once you hit 50 there's no reason _not_ to work on them unless you're SK'ing; and even then you can tweak your results with entering or exiting SG mode.

Mentoring: I don't think the last one needs to be increased; this one more than any will naturally vary a lot depending on your play style. I know some people who are desparate to get the last few; but I have an alt who had all 6 by 32 without ever delibirately trying for them, much less trying to farm them. I would look into the levels for the other 5; as near as I can tell the requrements for each successive badge get progressively EASIER, not harder. The first one in particular is long for a first badge in a long sequence.

Healing: I've got no problem with the first several; I was more than half-way to the 4th on my Bots/Poison MM before I ever heard of farming it. I think, given how much I still play that alt, that I would be well on my way to the 5th if I hadn't been farming it. I could deal with 25 for the 5th and 50 for the 6th just fine; even double might not be too crazy. 1 Billion is just nuts, as others have quite clearly explained. (And I look forward to earning Empath through AFK farming so I can post my statement that I would not be upset or find my accomplishment diminished if they dropped the requirement for others. )

Damage: The epics mostly prove that either a) you play badly; or b) you can stand around AFK a long time. Even tankers have mitigations of various sorts that make earning these in real play unlikely at best. The Accolade/Dull Pain bug is a big problem here.

Influence/ Infamy: I personally think the numbers for the last two are too high; but not by an order of magnitude like the healing or possibly even the damage badges. They are, as has been pointed out, the ones you would get in actual play. I would personally drop them somewhat; but I don't think I would want the last one to go below 500M; and I wouldn't have a problem with a Billion for #6 and either 250 or 500 M for #5. The whole SG tax is a completely separate issue; but I would deal with that by crediting for inf earned before awarding prestige or some other workaround rather than dropping the requrements that much. (And unlike some of the other badges, I can accept as valid the argument that dropping the requrements would not be fair to the people who already have them. I'm not sure the argument is _sufficent_, but it's valid.)

Probably a longer post than you wanted; but since the thread was still polite I figured it was a good time to figure where I stood and post it.

Nice job, Snow_Globe. And thank you.

One correction/ addition: Besides Shady/Shrouded and Multidimensional, there are the Mayhem/ Safeguard explorations and Cage Fighter. While those are also for going to locations, they are locations within specific mission (or arena) maps, and perhaps should be mentioned.

Thank you for changing this, Positron.

I may personally still have issues with any of the damage badges being used for an accolade. But, given that it already went live with Nigh required, and the problems that adding a requirement would cause, this is probably the best solution possible at this point.

Mind you, if it takes more than a week to go to live, I should have it the hard way anyway. But I definitly support this one in principle. And thank you for listening to us.

Well, I'll chime in once again suggesting that this requirement is silly. I keep wanting a redname to tell us what they were thinking when they set this as the requirement; I really cannot understand it.

Also, I might as well drag out my other gripes on why this is a bad requirement for an accolade:

1) It, unlike all the other accolade-required badges, is not equally available to all archtypes. A Brute, Tank, or Scrapper can get it much faster than anybody else; and don't even get me started on how long it will take my MM. (Mind you, I'm enough of a badger that I'll get it eventually, one way or the other. But I doubt many other MM's will.) It's not quite as blatant as if they had required a healing badge for an accolade, but the difference is a matter of degree, not type, in my opinion.

2) The badge doesn't even record all the damage you take. If you have other Accolades, only damage that gets past those accolades count. My MM, who has the other two +HP accolades, loses over half the damage they take in a farm to that, and I would guess even more in actual play. If my MM gets hurt, I'm doing something wrong; that's part of why we have so few HP.

Anyway, there are my thoughts again. Sorry if you've seen them already, but they seemed worth bringing back up.

I think I've got it:

Frostfire actually has reformed and is working with Flux and the PPD, providing an early test of the young heroes ability against an Elite Boss class foe.

Which explains why he never actually goes to jail. :-)

The Accolade powers are all rewarding at semi-random. I got High Pain Threshold, but not the other two powers.

On another note, has anybody found an exploration badge in the Steel Canyon Mayhem Mission? A friend and I looked for at least 20 minutes after everything else on that map was destroyed and could not find one.

Other than that, exploration badges have been found in all the Mayhem Missions. Atlas, Kings Row, Skyway, Independence Port, Talos, Brickstown, and Founder's Falls.

As far as I can tell, Peregrine requires a lvl 45 character to get to, and nobody has seen it yet.

Two more badges from mayhem missions: Vandal (for destroying fire hydrants & such) and Outlaw (for defeating Police)

Pictures at vidiotmaps.

I just got impounder in a mayhem mish, achievement badge:

You've done your part to help keep Paragon City's streets clear of traffic.

For destroying cars and trucks

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as nice as having them is, the badge cartel is going to be going nuts for weeks trying to figure out how you get what exactly ^^;;

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Eh, not so much, on at least a few of them. I suspect the hard-core badgers, like myself, will get a couple on log-on, and a couple more after we pick up whatever new history and exploration badges are available.

Those who have not completed the simple expedient of getting every available exploration, history, accomplishment, and non-epic achievement badge ahead of time will be wondering, though.

The problem is, you only get the temp power the first time you do the TF; not every time.

Otherwise, several of us would be working on it already, I am sure.

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Why are ALL the exploration badges in PvP zones the "villain" graphic? I know it's petty and small to think this, but isn't it sort of giving the PvP zones to the villains? I just ask because it bugs me everytime I view my hero's badges and see those exploration badges with the red "X" graphic.

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I, also, would like to see these changed. But I want the exact opposite: I want the Villains to get the hero badge for them. Fair is fair, and it would single out the PvP badges from the rest on both sides.

Well, my take on getting "event-specific" badges: Everybody should have a shot at getting every badge; even if that shot only comes a few weeks every year. The one exception I would make is with Celebrant; and only somewhat: Have Celebrant award the 1st May you actually log in on. Have a new one- say "Party Animal" or whatever- the 2nd May. So, this anniversary, those of us who weren't here (and all the villains) will get Celebrant; those who were here the first time would get the 2nd badge. Continue as long as the game survivies; everybody now has a chance at all the badges. But longer-term collectors will always be one or more ahead, and able to show it.

That's just my opinion, though.

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Its fixed. Processing your ore will earn you the Gunner badge. Expect this in the next full patch to the Training Room server (basically sometime after Pocket D goes to Live).

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I took my scrapper out to try and get this today, thinking that 7.3 Megs was a "full" patch. I processed ore once, but did not get the badge. Has anybody else tried this yet? Is the fix in, or not? (Processing ore once seems awfully easy for the badge, to be fair.)

Badges are _mostly_ for the sake of having badges. But there are some execptions.

There are Super Group badges, that unlock things for your SG base.

There are accolades, which are generally earned by earning several other badges, that give additional powers, or unlock costume parts, or let you respec your character.

On the CoV side of the game, there are several contacts that require you to have a specific badge before they talk to you.

The gladiator badges let you use the gladiator matches in the arena.

Hope that answers your question.

You also occasionally get Banished Pantheon masks showing up at agincourt. Actually, all sorts of weird fun stuff turns up there; the Monkeys and the Masks are just the two major things of interest to badge collectors. Everything can be found elsewhere; those two are just the hardest to get the right missons for.

Totally different question: Vidiotmaps is claiming Headhunter, for killing 50 heroes in PvP, is now available. Can anybody confirm this one here? It sounds hard, but not as bad as trying to get disruptor the right way.

Ok, I need to disagree here. My character did not spend 5 hours without zoning in either Siren's Call or Warburg to get these badges. I think this is one of the "It's been fixed, but only time since a certain patch counts" situations.

If you want to be safe, don't zone. I only found out it was working by logging about every hour just to be safe and getting it before I expected.

Well, I'm up to 170 now. Bonecrusher, Ironman, Mad Scientist, and the Legacy chain Lt gladiator are now done. For those who missed that last one, the second Veluta arc has been reset, and you can get sent on it a second time if you did it a while ago. Good Legacy LT farm. And, just for reference, MM/Bots healing other bots on your team counts for the healing badges; I hadn't done any healing myself for several minutes and was soloing a mission.

Serious question: Does anybody know for sure what is needed for Disruptor and Longbow Warden 2 right now? I somehow missed them when they were bugged, but I don't want to start grinding PvP, espically with a MM, until I'm sure it's fixed so you _do_ get them the right way.

The other question, is how many of these tricky badges are we going to simply be kicking ourselves on when issue 7 shows up?

Well, I finally got Weatherman today with the help of some like-minded badge-aholics. One thing that I don't think has been mentioned much on that one, is that it's a very slow grind: we were averaging a grand total of three bosses a reset, ramped up to max and with 8 people. The map also spawns Tsoo; two of us finished off the Swift Steel gladiator and one of us got Tracer almost incidently.

Which puts me, however briefly, into a tie with Taser at 166. Go me!