Agent White

I believe the more direct comment about it was in one of the coffee talks, which is why I'm not bothering to dig it up, too much video to search through.

Certainly food for thought but at the same time, get your moral positing and symbolism out of my superhero movie. I agree with you and I think you're right but at the same time, I don't really want it to be that 'simple' and black and white. I really just don't want that point made at all because to me it's dipping too far into the realm of the real and the practical instead of the fantastic that batman and the superhero genre really represent. it's a great ideal, but not the one I really want to have.

Then again I'm an escapist

Just got back from it. I really enjoyed it, it surprised me and gave me what I wanted out of it which was a lot of fun action and some twists that caught me off guard.

I don't really want to go in-depth into it, but there are a few things that come to mind that bothered me some.

There was just a smidge too much convenient movie timing for me. So many characters showing up 'in the nick of time' where in many instances they really shouldn't have had any idea where said character was. Or the travel time just seems very clipped, especially the long distance between Gotham and The Pit. The way it's shown in the movie you'd think the place was just a hop skip and a jump away. They do illustrate that a month passes but it goes at such a quick clip it feels like too much passes within a single jump cut. Obviously it would've been anticlimatic to show 'the journey' or anything and it's more for the story telling, it still seems too quick and easy. I was also put off by the liberal use of the "SURPRISE!" as something jumps on screen that by all rights the characters should've seen well ahead of time, particularly 'The Bat'.

Second was Bane's mask, which rolls into my third point. I still don't quite get what the function of the mask was. Something about a plague, painkillers, and being horribly disfigured. I just never really caught the exact purpose, like what exactly it was doing for him other than 'holding back the pain', so, was it like a continuous dose of painkiller? It seems kind of contrived when, y'know, painkillers can just be taken. It seemed more just a gimmick because 'He's Bane' than serving any realistic purpose that could've have been done with something more practical.

Which actually rolls into my next point. This movie feels much more like a direct sequel to Begins than Dark knight did and it kind of removes what I felt was one of the themes of the Dark Knight and that is the growing 'madness' of superheroes. The whole escalation of 'you fight thugs wearing a mask they're going to start coming up with their own masks'. The Joker exemplified this so perfectly and was a true 'Super Villain', Two Face was leaning into that 'madness' of being a 'freak' which to me has always been part of the appeal of the Rogue's Gallery. Bane and by extension Talia are villains, but in a more realistic terrorist feel. They're almost a step backward. That's another reason why Bane's mask doesn't work for me because it feels so superficial. It felt more like a tacked on ornament than anything truly defining about the character.

Even Scarecrow's cameo plays into that feeling. We're introduced to the whole mask/supervillain feel in Begins and even in Dark Knight he's still running around as The Scarecrow. But in this he's simply back to 'Dr. Crane'. It was a wonderful cameo and I quite liked it, but it felt less like he was 'One of the Freaks' and more like 'Just Another Criminal' in this.

Even Catwoman, actually. It's never about BEING Catwoman, it's never even a thought that she's a 'costumed freak', she's literally just a cat burglar and by coincidence her preferred outfit happens to have goggles that flip back to 'kind of' look like cat ears. But that's about it.

I'll be honest I was never that big on the whole 'League of Shadows' thing. It worked well enough as a set up for begins, and thematically it makes sense to bring it full circle but at the same time I kind of think it's disappointing to book end it like that so much.

Still I really quite enjoyed it. The gripes I cite above are really relatively minor, they're hardly make or break for the film. I enjoyed all the characters and the twists legitimately caught me by surprise. The action was great and it had a few moments that really hit me right. While I wasn't thrilled with the characterization of Catwoman as it pertained to her being any kind of superhero/villain, I think her personality was just perfect and Hathaway did a killer job, I just think her theme was a little mishandled. Bane was great too as a very imposing and downright frightening character, his voice just gave me chills. But really thinking on it now it just feels like they dialed back the 'superhero' feel a notch below even what Begins had (which was already, and practically, minimal to begin with).

I do agree a bit that it's not really a proper ending for batman, it felt less like 'The Dark knight Rises' and more like "Bruce Wayne Ends".

Yeah I'd say DA is a pretty perfect template for future content. It's got just about everything I like in my story arcs.

It's written with less hero bias than most of the co-op content to date, it offers a variety of options from villainous choices to optional objectives for added flavor/mechanics, it's very well written and sufficiently epic, and there's enough different things to do among the missions and the arcs it doesn't feel like I'm just doing the same thing over and over. There are some small caveats of course, like I'm not thrilled half of the contacts are strictly Cellphone only, but it's pretty minor (and largely aesthetic).

For trials, I think MoM and Magisterium are pretty good templates for iTrials. MoM is good because it has complex mechanics but it has several break points to cool down, prep, and let leaders explain stuff. Magisterium is pretty much a straight up beat down, which has it's own kind of merits.

There's a sort of message for them. There isn't any individual message for when they spawn by themselves, but there is an event message when the Croatoa War event begins and they spawn fighting each other

Now that you're a vigilante you have to move to the Rogue isles. Then you'll start getting villain tips

On route? yes.

ETA for it? No.

You can also burn astrals for shards at a 1 to 1 rate, which is cheaper than the 1 for 4 rate for threads (cheaper because it takes 20 threads to do a common thread component, and 4 shards for a common shard component).

We're honestly not sure how they plan to change the system.

But are merit rewards even that relevant? With the advent of alignment merits it's really not hard to nab recipes for considerably less work. The only thing I seem to use merit rewards for now is enhancement converters, otherwise I'll hit fort trident/the crucible or just the auctionhouse.

Honestly I feel the merit reward prices for recipes needs to drop like 30% all around.

Yeah honestly, I feel with the nuke change that Electric Blast is going to become more like Dual Pistols in that the T9 becomes a gamechanger. Until you get Hail of Bullets, Dual Pistols is just kind of mediocre. Not that bad, but far from that good either. Hail of Bullets really swings things around and I feel the new thunderous blast is going to do the same thing for Electric Blast. Much more of a key power for the set's main tactic.

I went with Barrier on mine, it's been pretty handy.

Though frankly, if you're talking about survivability on Trials, ehhh. There's not really much you can do, pets just die -horribly- on trials kind of regardless.

For stuff like regular content and Dark Astoria though, Barrier does just fine.

As for Lore. Honestly, my stance on core vs radial is that -I'm- pretty much some of the best support for my pets already, so I may as well go for more damage.

Probably not the answers you're looking for but that's what I went with on mine. Also used the Support Hybrid tree for added Defense

It's pretty much like that right now as it is. What's there now is nothing better than newspaper missions. I mean, besides the omghugelong taskforces

Numina's isn't bad for the Ranged defense. For the most part though, a lot of the sets don't have super 6th bonuses. At best I usually 5 slot like Doctored Wounds or Regenerative Tissue for the Recharge bonus