Agent White

I think the confusion is that Thunderous Blast is a scaling crash. It wipes out your recovery every time, but the actual endurance drain is based on the number of targets, so if you just use it on 1 target it doesn't seem like there's a crash.

But yeah, it definitely has a crash. I can't wait to get to use it as an actual AOE now.

Is that the fault of the system or the person willfully ignoring it then? There are only so many incentives the Devs can drop in our lap before it's a simple "I win" button. I'm fine with letting the outliers that have no interest sit and do nothing with their 50s.

Any reasonable person might say "Hey they keep handing me this stuff. I guess I could use it".

Mostly redside, honestly. Blueside has several story arcs, the earliest being in Faultline, that award the badge.

Villainside has... Vincent Ross and Marshall Brass, the latter being pretty easy to miss.

On the other hand, you can -always- access it at 40 because you can just run into Recluse Victory and grab one of the exploration badges.

I think they were imagining it to be something like having market locked power sets or ATs, the characters are locked when you go premium unless you buy the set/AT. Obviously it doesn't apply to incarnate content.

It's called being ironic.

I don't think it's a bad idea. part of the idea of DA is to repeat to get your incarnate gear if you don't want to do trials. Making 'the next arc' a higher base difficulty isn't the wrong way to go, it just makes it like any other part of the game where you need to gain levels before you can do the content.

And I think with the Emperor's Sword arc we've seen that they will continue giving us goodies beyond DA for solo-incarnate stuff so by the time Battalion comes out we will likely have at least a couple more arcs to run with. And perhaps by that point they'll have started phasing out shards which should make lower end incarnate stuff even easier.

Now if they just suddenly kicked out a new incarnate zone that's 54 to whatever, yeah. But I don't think that'll be the case, there's probably going to be more inbetween stuff in there.

Plenty of content for it. Whole trial right there for you. And more on the way.

I'll agree there. Visually it's stunning. Though practically, it's kind of a pain in the ***. It's worth checking out once or twice, but contentwise there's no real reason to go there unless you're a total masochist.

Actually it is clear. It's a higher level ability so it's gated behind higher end game content. It's that simple. You can disagree with it all you like but that's the nature of the beast.

See I have to disagree. Because while level range assumes a kind of timeliness with the storyline, character level does not explicitly express -age-. There's a difference between someone that's new to being a hero in Paragon and someone that's new to life. It's not just a simple case of "My character was born a god". It's as simple as, my character was a retired cop that gained powers or a teacher or the like. Or is a robot. Or an alien. The beautiful thing about the concept and costume creator is that it lets you create almost anything.

What Twinshot does is assume you're young and human and new to everything. What the original Origin arcs did was assume that you were of your noted origin and that was it. They explicitly left it out to fit in any kind of character concept, they didn't try to give you a voice and they didn't try to assume anything about your character except your powers were based around your origin and even in that matter they gave leeway be being ambiguous. Twinshot just pares down a -lot- of that ambiguity. I mean it feels like it was written if you're an 18 year old that just developed their powers.

And the difference in how they teach you about the game. Twinshot assumes you don't know anything, again, because you're completely green. The only origin arcs assumed you were completely green -to Paragon City-, again giving leeway that your character was more experienced but simply from out of town.

Like I said, there's just ways to do it that allow for a broader character concept and Twinshot does not do that. It's not about power gaming mary sues with God concept characters, it covers even simple stuff like the middle aged scientist that had a lab accident or the FBI agent that delves into the occult. Etc.


That's different though. That's a timeline thing, not a character concept thing. That just assumes that you've previously done content. It's not trying to give your character any kind of voice it's simply saying "yeah you did these adventures" and the way City is set up that can still be true because Ouroboros let's you time travel, so when the Dream Doctor says you did something, you just may not have done it yet. That I don't mind so much because it's easier to assume these events happened than to assume you power leveled via AE or did nothing but street sweeping.

Well when I say it gives your character a voice I mean more specifically that in dialogue your response options are in a very specific voice, as in, the responses are from a specific type of person. For the most part, most of the game gives generic responses like "Sure" "Ok" or simple questions like "Why would he do that?". Stuff that doesn't give you any kind of speech pattern or specific inclination. However there is stuff that does try to change that like some of Twinshot or First Ward where your responses are dictated as a specific kind of character. Things like the SSA and Dark Astoria do this wonderful kind of trick where you're given -options- to allow you to choose an answer and pick your own voice or at least the closest option your character might say.

That would probably be why the AT 'guide' when you select a character lists every value as ? for Khelds.

I can understand it a little. It doesn't necessarily have to be 'the most powerful psychic'. The way Katie is written pretty much assumes your character isn't psychic in any way. Or that you have a human, organic mind that -can- be read (remember we've got -robots- for example). It's written in a way that it puts your character in a niche, even if they wouldn't normally occupy it.

Unlike say, the SSA1 finale where Lady grey says something along the lines of "I'm going to give you a spell to let you breathe in space, in case you can't already do that" (again, like, robots don't need to breathe, or you're a wizard already or whatever). There's ways to write this stuff that doesn't peg your character into any particular hole.

It's probably one of the biggest problems with some of the newer content. Twinshot/Graves arc tries to give you a 'voice' and treat you specifically as a young newbie. First Ward pretty much assumes you're a normal human that wants to help the Resistance/First Warders and Carnival of Light (and has never previously met Katie or Noble Savage) even if you're still a loyalist or villain or Resistance member that ran those very arcs.

Compare it to like Dark Astoria, which is a nice epic and magically oriented story but never tries to put your character into any specific cast except as the person that has to defeat Mot.

I definitely don't envy the writers though. it is a tough job and it can be hard to try to keep things accommodating to most (reasonable) character concepts. Generally they do pretty well, in fact Night Ward I think did a better job of leaving the player character more ambiguous, not trying to assign a particular voice or reactions [...well, except it continues on as heroic content villains can do, but that aside]. So it's not really an extreme problem to the power player RP'er folks or the guys that create Gods and Mary Sue characters, it can be a general kind of problem. It's generally pretty easy to handwave but it can break immersion when you -have- to handwave it.