rian_frostdrake

tv, no, they are stupidly expensive. there were some very funny ads of "im a hero, im a villain" that spoofed the mac/pc ads. also, for the topic, i dunno, chuck would have been out of place in that game since they didnt have a martial artist class.

well, just a thought, but since it appears a major stalker buff is imminent in i22, do you have other characters that might be a little less vulnerable to praetoria's ambushes until i22 and you get tougher? obviously, im not trying to tell you how to play your game, but it seems to me that it might help a bit if you didn't like your first run to run a different character. (for the record, i have been doing it with a kin scrapper and a cold/sonic defender. the defender had some rough patches, the scrapper seemed to be up to the task though really well)

well, we are forced to ask who has been a good leader? lord recluse is a tired sith retread with the central concept of having as much infighting as humanly possible for the laughably unrealistic goal of having "the strongest come out on top" despite massive internal attrition and a general lack of internal discipline. States is alternately aloof and ineffective. nemesis uses a bunch of silly and easily foil-able xanatos gambits. lady grey loses control of an entire division of her army. I mean really, who is a fit leader in coh? Part of this seems to come from a desire to not overshadow the player by making them the primary actor in the story. and part of it seems to come from the desire to keep the stories from being too complex to follow, so they are relatively simple. des's ascendance to power is part of a general character arc, she goes from being an evil lackey to a hero who takes a stand when a hero is needed. going deeper would be nice, but its not going to happen. would it be preferred that she was like blue steel and just negated actions at every step through the power of narration?

EDIt. reading you post, i dunno, palatine's primary power seems to be not screwing up as much and staying out of the way of the narrative, and not starting a costly and pointless internal war with groups with obvious shared goals when a metroid on steroids redecorates the landscape, i guess thats relatively good leadership compared to others, but that is the very definition of damning with faint praise. and noble savage is more muscle than real leadership, hes a nice guy, but what did he do exactly that showed he had leadership skills? and one is really forced to ask how effective a leader devore was, keep in mind, she tolerated having calvin scott in charge of her operations AND tolerated the various crusader contacts who seemed only too happy to murder civilians, control a drug trade and murder any number of people who are only tangentially related to cole. It could be argued that she is at least ad negligent as cole, as far as tolerating bat-nuts insane subordinates.

Its likely if they maintin the justification of "invasion style enemeis are raids, individuals are content like da, but it could also eventually include rularru, he certainly has an army. and if they are enjoying revamping zones, the shadow shard has been requested heavily and some dev, think its posi, mentioned wanting to get to the shard eventually.

there is now, it was in the van kreiger ustream thread, and good lord, i already appreciated vans work, but in copy and pasting his stuff, holy @#$% that man does a lot of work.

welcome back, was wondering what you were up to.

of course it did, it was like 50% shoulder

ok, i got nothin' else.

fun is not a quantifiable sum. reward for time invested is not something to be taken lightly. why do you think the katie hannon tf was so popular when it was able to be rushed for good rewards, or why people do that now with the lgtf? because rewards, for long term play are what motivate people. Ok, i have no idea what this means. are your referring to the darker story? i cna see nothing at all appaling with fw's story, and in fact prefer the darker , grittier nature to ..well a lot of current content, but please explain what exactly you mean. Presuemable da will be a story about people fighting a ancient god of death, a powerful group of eastern sorcerers and followers of a group of exiled deities, im guessing it will have dark elements but otherwise be about heroes stomping the big bad and villians stealing some of its power for their own.

i admit i am utterly dumbfounded by people caring that much for the fog, it was cute gimmick, once or twice, after that you quickly realized it was a bandage over a zone with a great concept and nothing else going for it(even the "giant monster" was simply an upscaled bp minion. I mean yes, it was a neat trick but this is in answer to our requests for a incarnate path that is solo-small team capable AND its not the lazy cop out people were saying would happen with simply a tip missions setup AND it doesn't deal with praetoria which some players are tired of and we still are getting push back because of two gimmicks? You mention liking first ward, if anything first ward is one reason i'm confident they can make the zone more than an empty two trick pony, because they did good things with first ward, or the haunted house. So what im saying is, lets actually wait till we see what they do with the new zone in terms of atmosphere, because they have done some good stuff very recently with a death-focused supernatural zone. and the old zone will still exist in all its barren wonder for people in oroboros, so you can still enjoy fighting there to your heart's content witht he effect you like, but now we actually see a story that seemed to have been forgotten be developed.

as for the circle of thorns, i do wonder some times if that was not the start of a problematic trend in the forums. people snapped to judgement and made a fuss, even though they worked with incomplete information, but they got a win, so i have noticed the community now snaps to judgement and screams very quickly these days. It does make me feel worse for having been a part of the cot thing, as it seems to have taught the community to be unreasonable and to not wait till it has actual information to make a judgement.

well, heres the thing though. those were the things that made the zone cool (the graveyard was nice too) but thats largely because the rest of the zone was nothing. the whole point of this is to make the zone immensely more cool. exclusive new enemies, likely new encounters and items on the map. after seeing first ward(and as i have been reminded, the haunted house), I have to say my faith in the devs ability to add elements to make a zone cool beyond the fog and flickering people if actully pretty high. so i understand your point, as it stands, dark astoria had 2 things going for it, the fog and the ghosts, now it will have more going for it. I am confused about why people thing there will be nothing added that will be as cool as a silly draw distance trick? If anything i expect the redo to amplify, not diminish the atmosphere, so we no longer need a parlor trick to give an otherwise unremarkable zone personality.

I dunno, i love the idea. dark astoria has a thing in it of immense power, such that even diminished divines went searching for it. as beings that are growing in immense power ourselves, we grow from fighting the thing of immense power, its frankly better than i hoped, if we get the same with characters like merluna, rularru, leviathan and the like, i will be immensely happier with incarnate content. the fog and vanishing people were a nice trick in a forsaken zone. this moves the story forward and away from being praetoria centered, uses an existing zone rather than diffusing the game further AND expands 2 interesting but underutilized groups, the banished pantheon and tsoo, to higher level problems. there is nothing I dont like about this idea, for me its one of the best things the devs have done in a while. were it not for the gamble pack nonsense, id be walking on sunshine right now.

well, as per prometheus, the coming storm is the battalion, shivans arent implied to have much intelligence, so not much of a choice in the matter, they may even be something akin to the hydra, slaves used as disposable cannon fodder.