uberschveinen

I played a /regen Stalker for some time before they were buffed, and even then the only time I was ever short of a 'way out' power was in the midst of a colossal EB/AV brawl that just kept going. If I could brawl with that sort of enemy with the old Stalker health, I daresay a Brute can do so damned well, because the only thing that reliably killed me was taking huge instant damage before I could click things.

/Regen is a very active powerset, so you have to be really on the ball. You have, sans Katana primary, maybe 40% the rolling standard survivability of a modest Brute. But, this is because you have traded in your panic button for a whole damned panic keyboard. You can literally mash the numpad if things go wrong and have a good chance of living.

I think it's asking why it costs more to repel foes at melee range on a toon that fights in melee that it does to repel foes at range on a range fighting toon.

I don't care if Willpower is probably goingto be better. Willpower is henously tedious to play, because it's just there. Ten seconds of action when you turn it all on, and that's it for the night.

What I would LIKE, but what I also acknowledge is just not going to happen, is something to make Stalkers' burst damage worth a damn in teams that doesn't make them ungodly powerful in solo, where they are already just fine. How I would specifically do that is to make Assassin's Strike hit a number of targets equal to the size of your team, via Chaining. So basically, if you're solo, you just stab the guy as normal. If you're on a team with one more, three more, or all eight, it jumps once, three times, or seven times. And THEN, because the jumps use pet tech, use a Doppelganger pet so you see yourself appearing momentarily behind every one of the jumps, because it's by far the most awesome and appropriate way to give a Stalker AoE by having them appear out of nowhere and kill every weak one in the whole group in a matter of seconds. It'd solve the problems of not overpowering thme for solo, since it only works on teams and as scaling, would avoid differentiability by making them burst AoE with setup instead of rolling AoE like others, avoids the Cottage Rule by keeping the attack the same but wider, and doesn't make them unreasonably good against AVs. And, most important of all, it would look unspeakably badass.

But, of course, it's way too tech-heavy to be made so. Pity. In the alternative, I guess the best thing to do would be unresistable percentiles on AS, specifically BECAUSE that would make them work against AVs. It gives them a unique and important role that steps on no toes, and doesn't add even more LOLAOE to the mix.

The biggest problem with Stalkers is just that they are a single-target slow-paced set in a game that is increasingly focused on high-end large-numbers games. Stalkers can't farm at all, and aren't as useful on a team, so there's no gain to having one for much of the playerbase there. The rest is skeptical because they are harder to Incarnate...ise, and I daresay that will put them at the end of the long list of other 50s most have. The rest of the playerbase mostly solos, so they're there, but you'll never see them because they're in missions.

So it's a combination of fewer reasons to play them, and fewer instances where you will see them.

And, as an addendum, the addition of Arachnos Soldiers hurts Stalkers hard. They can be built to outdo a Stalker in most of its fields save the huge AS, and they actually benefit a team substantively. My Bane only marginally falls behind my Stalker in single-target damage and personal defence, exceeds him substantially against hard targets thanks to the magic of -res and Toxic out the wazoo, benefits the team with a few buffs, and if I have to do more I can swap build to al all-ranged all-buff pseudo-blaster.

I'm content if it takes a while IF it's good.

They are slightly more valuable than one endmod IO at 50 in Stamina. So, in everything bar click-recovery powers, they're damned handy. Even there, you're trading the regularity and value for the ability to fight while drained, which is very useful for many builds.

I am happy to wait years for the Praetorian side to get fully developed. I would much rather it go all the way to 50 with the same calibre of writing it has now, even if it takes six months for every five levels, than to see it rushed and weakened. Hopefully there's enough new money in Freedom that they can reinvest more in content creation, because I daresay GR-locked content will get more focus on the 'new shiny' to lure the free players into paying money.

The most moving mission I played was, like many said, the Looking Through the Glass mission. Although most of it was relatively plain, the lead-up to the final mission was worth it for the cutscene in the final mission itself. Everything about it was just... right.

I also particularly liked the Crusader arcs in Praetoria, not just for their actual moral content, but because of how every one you talked to was a proper character of their own. Every one of them is there because they've lost everything else, or had it taken away from them. You see all these people who have been through the same sort of hell, and get to see how each one of them reacts, whether they go psychotic, get angry, get addicted to potent drugs, or just stop caring altogether. But the best of them all is Wardog. You can see everythign he was; an intelligent and just person, with high ideals and the wisdom and perspective to see them through, but who has been completely destroyed as a person by the thing's he's been forced to do. He's the only one who genuinely sees the horror of what he's doing, but does it anyway, because he knows it's necessary. And just as you're beginning to see the man he once was, he and all of the men you've been working with the whole time reveal that they've been planning to sacrifice their lives the whole time. Then, even as his plan falls apart around them, and everything they've worked and sacrificed for falls apart, Wardog's last act is to stand and die so that you can escape. You're a reflection of everything he once was, and he refuses to let that die with him.

Other good arcs include all the Malta arcs, especially the World Wide Red ones. They're one of the few older-style arcs that are not only not SUPERHERO-brand silly, but deadly serious. Malta is constantly portrayed as a colossal and colossaly deadly organisation that is barely within your powers to survive, let alone defeat. They are everything that is right about a serious superhero story, and the moment that catalyses it best is when they send the KRONOS TITAN to ambush you. Instead of sitting around and dying slowly, as soon as you show yourself a genuine threat they send the single most powerful piece of hardware they have to kill you.

I also like a lot of the RWZ missions for the same reason, especially The Thin Red Line and The Horror of War. They do a great job of getting across that this is a serious situation, and the way the situation gets increasingly grim as you escalate it works great. I particularly liked the huge hallway full of bodies in the last LGTF mission. It shows that you're not the only ones fighting to save the world - just the only ones who came back. I wish there was a mission arc that showed you the original Rikti Invasion story told properly, because there's so much potential in there and in the Alpha/Omega team battle. There's something deeply stirring about this invasion going so badly wrong that it takes the best part of the entire WORLD'S superhero population to make this last stand, that it will almost certainly kill most of them, and that it probably won't work. I want that arc so much.

Also, a lot of the morality/alignment missiosn are very good. Mechanically, but also plotwise. I also like the Time After Time mission for villains, because it's the perfect capstone for the character's career, and makes the character feel genuinely powerful. YOU destroyed the world at least once, and you're going to avoid that by going forward in time, killing Lord Recluse, and throwing his shattered helmet at the feet of the current version of the most deadly man in the world.

I think the best way to expand the current Incarnate system for solo players is to use the existing technology of Tips and such, which everyone likes. Incarnate-active players can find, I don't know, Heroic Intervention or Diabolical Plot missions, themed around the finding of some element of notable power that you must keep out of/retrieve from the hands of evil folk or go get for yourself, based on morality. Each mission includes a Thread as a reward for completion. Get ten of these and you can run a Crisis Mission/Master Plan mission, themed around one of these groups having gotten its hands on something much bigger than usual for heroes, or for villains as one of the many webs you've put out there finally coming to fruition. Complete this once a day for a selected piece of Common Incarnate Salvage, or a random piece with a small chance of uncommon. That way it's much slower than the team-based method, but not to the point of being entirely ineffectual, and offers a method of offlien earning that is both interesting and uses no new technology.

Funny, because I KNOW that some of the things in my published arcs are in the same boat as other 'BUT IT'S A CHARACTER'S NAME IT MUST BE INFRINGMENT' names, but get through fine. It's almost more insulting that it's entirely capricious as to what it blocks.

Oh, I was asking more if you could do them as a single review, because they're meant to be one story. If that's not an option, Glory of our Empire would be better, since it actually functions as a standalone arc. I can only imagine someone doing Day of Infamy by itself is going to have absolutely no idea why things have gone from the canon standard to ATLAS PARK INVASION OH GOD NOW THERE'S NUCLEAR KOREANS AND IT'S ON FIRE AND DID I JUST BEAT UP ALL OF D17.

It's hard for me to tell how 'seperate' they can be in practise. For all I try to look at it objectively, I've spent so long trying to take something and make it the way I want to be that any attempt I make to look at it the way it actually reads is going to contain an irreducible element of seeing it the way it was meant to go.

Hey again. I took the spur of Arc Invalid as a reason to fix up both the Operation Oedipus arcs, and though Glory of our Empire is substantively the same, Day of Infamy is greatly improved. Mostly by dint of the last map actually working, and properly.

But I'm just not sure if Day of Infamy does what I want it to do. I'm mostly concerned with the third mission. Right now it's in-keeping with the rest of the game's style, but somewhat hammy for the sort of thing I was going for. The alternative was just making the map as desolate as possible, but that makes for boring maps and a missions that's gameplay-redundant. It'd be great to get an opinion on that, since that's the last thing I've got to consider in that arc before I start to finalise it.

Arc numbers updated in Sig. Would have kept the old ones but had the choice between that, or recovering three hours of work from autosave. No contest.

Re-worked the firts arc slightly to fix it up with the changes, and had to change the last arc substantially because of the Marchand map fixes. Funny, because it ended up a lot better for it.

Looking for players to help me finalise both arcs right now. Glory of our Empire is set, as far as I know, but Day of Infamy I'm not so sure on. If you play Day of Infamy, could you tell me what you thought about:
+ Using other languages; for all that it's appropriate I'm not sure the chances anyone will ever read it.
+ The missile silo mission; to what extent the lead-in felt like a proper extension of the story and not a ill-concealed plot device.
+ The third mission; whether you'd prefer it as it is, if it it'd do the job better if it was devoid of enemies and nearly empty.
+ The final mission; if the map feels appropriately epic for the conclusion of a biblically-long story.

I'm also open to any and all suggestions or comments. Doesn't mean I'll incorporate them, but if you've got an idea I'll certainly listen.

Thanks for any reviews. I've got some more in the works, but I'd like to get these finalised before I focus on them.

Are you still looking for arcs to review? If so, I've just revamped two of mine, taking changes that made them unplayable into an opportunity to make them work. Arcs #372627 (Operation Oedipus: Glory of our Empire) and #505627 (Operation Oedipus - Day of Infamy). I'm after opinions on how to improve them, and I could certainly use the publicity.

Operation Oedipus a Malta-based story, meant to be run after the Crimson arcs, and it's meant to bring a conclusion to the fight against Malta. I play it at least as serious as Crimson, because this is a Malta arc, and anything else would be wrong. It's particularly long, increasingly global in scale, and soon goes from having grim undertones to just being outright grim. It's intended for Heroic types, but marked Vigilante because the sort of things that start happening could foreseeably upset people who want their heroes to work paladin-style. Both arcs are meant to be played together, but I've split it so that the first arc is a self-contained story if need be. As a warning, some of the missions are very long, all but a handful of the enemies are Malta, and I've gotten inventive with some of the fights and that makes some unusually difficult. I've not got a level-appropriate character that hasn't beaten them yet, but I have had to reduce the difficulty sometimes.

I'd particularly like an opinion on mission 3 of Day of Infamy. There's two distinct ways I could play it, and I'm not entirely sure which is better. I'd like your opinion on whether it's better as-is, if somewhat hammy, or if it'd feel more right if the map was almost completely empty so as to get across the desolate feel, at the risk of making the mission more or less devoid of gameplay purpose.

Thanks.

Just redid two of my own. Had to stop using one map entirely, but I'm actually much happier with the way the reboot worked out. Took some work to rewrite the climactic mission, but turned out to be worth it.

I'd rather be able to buy a version of Marchand's office with actual roof battles. I spent days fine-tuning the first version of the map so that each of my four boss encounters had an individual 75% chance of spawning up there and half the time were all up there, and then they decided to fix the heinous evil of not always being able to get things up there by making it so nobody could ever get up there.

It's not even a joke. I would purchase this map for cash moneys if I could.

Ih depends on how 'magicky' you want them, and how much fluffing you're willing to do in the background. Their offensive set should be their big deal, with the secondary their 'other' thing. If you want to be primarily a technical-type with some magical ability, a mechanical primary is best. If you want to be a magic user with some knack for devices, go mechanical secondary.

I think an Assault Rifle/Dark Miasma works best for the device-user as your biggest trait, with a strong secondary in magic, or even if you use magical devices as well. You'll be constanbtly using the secondary so it stands out, and Dark sets are, as far as I feel anyway, the most 'magical' of the sets. It helps that AR/Dark is a savagely powerful combination, because the different tricks nature of AR meshes extremely well with the wide utility of Dark. Your buttloads of cones work so well with Tar Patch, and all your cones are your huge damage attacks, so you get so much out of it. Ignite is brutal at the best of times, but with -Res from TP and the Hold, it's almost horrifically powerful. Seriously, damage a little less than a nuke on a still target, and you can use the fear effect it has with TP and corners or just TP to keep melee fighters way back. The sets also do levels of damage bordering on the biblical. Tar Patch, Flamethrower, FA can be done almost every single mob without even using sets, and will utterly obliterate most swarms, and leave you with a few near-dead Lts and a boss or two to deal with. It's also damned survivable to boot. I've rolled many a Corruptor, but the AR/Dark was the first one that genuinely felt like the engine of destruction I wanted.

Also, you're not just powerful, but powerful early on. Tar Patch is so early and the best power you get. Flamethrower is an attack most sets would give up two or three powers to get, and you get it early too. Ignite gives you the capacity to devastate Bosses almost unreasonably early.

Ignite is so good that it makes your actual tier 9 seem kind of underwhelming, and Full Auto is a GOOD power. It's one of the few powers in the entire game that makes you go 'wait WHAT' at the damage it does before you even slot it, and when you DO slot it, wow.

It doesn't stack because it's already silly-good, especially in conjunction with Surveillance and Poisonous Ray. The two of those together do pretty substantial damage, and when combined with -60% resistance to the least-resisted damage type in the game, it can do alarming things. My Bane with just vanilla IOs and no -KB can defeat Ballistae faster than my ultra-pimped characters just by abusing these three in concert.

I see plenty of reasons to take it. Even soft-capped mine can get pretty hard at times, especially against anything with -Def or +ToHit. More to the point, because it provides two different brands of boost at once, it really helps out against the nastier debuff foes. Also, a little +endMod helps out in the bigger fights, which is naturally when I'll be using it more.

A Praetorian Warburg weapon. Maybe introduced as a component of the high-level of PRaetoria we'll eventually see.

It might also make the game a bit easier for some of the stupendously hard EB fights in Praetoria, especially once they get difficulty-changers.

They're all solid and playable characters now, reasonably balanced within different playstyles.

The tank is for the guy who hates dying and wants to be unkillable before they actually worry about damage. The recent upgrade saw them become decent at damage, but they're still the worst out of the 4 main melee archetypes. They do enough damage to get along, and if you build them for AoE it makes them a little more effective. Fair enough; a decently-built high-level tank can stand in front of any Giant Monster outside of a zone event and take it all day long, or tank four Rikti Magi solo for five minutes. You will never ever have debt unless you do something really dumb.

Brutes come next. They have better defenses than a scrapper, and on some builds can get very close to tank defenses. They also do around the same damage as a scrapper, depending on fury and enemy class. The telling factor is playstyle. Even though it's been toned down recently, the Brute forces you to be all GOGOGO CHARGE ATTACK, like permaScrapperlock, and it just gets you killed more often. Some people like this playstyle, and Brutes are for them. Others don't, and they aren't.

Scrappers are next, and they're a different playstyle again. They're entirely self-contained, and don't have to rely on playstyle to deal damage. They do comparable damage to Brutes, and better against Bosses, at the cost of that edge in survivability. But in this game, where it's trivially easy to cap defense, there's not that much difference. It mostly comes down to playstyle.

Then there's Stalkers, but they're mor complex than I want to deal with here.

In City of Whateveryourchoice, there's no such thing as a 'required' archetype. Ever. Any team can defeat any reasonable challenge. The only things that anybody has trouble with are the bleeding edge challenges, like Ship raids or Hamidon if you've got not quite enough guys, or the Master Of challenges. Hell, last night I got bored and saw Adamastor up, so I just grabbed the first eight guys I saw. No care for team composition or actual level. I think only one of them was another level 50, and four were 25 or less. One Controller and two MMs, no debuffs. This team went on to kill every single Giant Monster heroside. GMs are a major challenge, and if a team of whoever-shows-up can take out ALL of them, that tells you just how much AT matters. Admittedly, I had to go make another two teams to take out Lusca, but Lusca's actually 8 GMs.

There has been nothing posted anywhere ever as to why back details won't happen. Literally not one post that even ackowledges that people have been asking for them for six years now without result, let alone a proper explanation of why we can't have them. The popular excuses you see floating around are exactly that; popular, invented by other players of the game in the absence of actual reasons, and usualy demonstrably incorrect or at the least misleading.

We have no idea why they haven't been implemented after so long, whether that reason is technical, fiscal, or just an attitude thing. We don't know whether it has ever been worked on. Every time something new comes out for the back, like the capes, the jetpack powers, the halfcape, the wings, and the cloak, a whole new level of antics brews up as people ask why, if we can have these things that seem to take much more developer hours and are in vastly less demand, we can't have back details. We never get a response.

Most people eventually give up on asking, because without any recognition from the development crew, there's not much point in going on. There's always new players to come and ask the same questions. Mayeb one day one of the developers will take the twenty seconds to actually give us any answer. Most wouldn't even care if it's true any more.