Arcanaville

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what would be much more awesome.... instead of gaelic names and such.....WELSH MYTHOLOGY!!!! ...
too bad nobody'll share my enthusiasm for wales

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Too many string pool overruns when they tried to code the tram station for Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysilio gogogoch

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Coincidentally, this is also the reason why the Shadow Shard isn't ultimately themed on the movie Barbarella. Although it might have been cool if it ended up themed on the movie Flash Gordon.

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I just never got over my outrage at the "Mystic Knights of Tyr Nan Nog" show that turned Irish myth into Power Rangers and it's ranckled me ever since.

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Well now, THAT is fair enough. That show was... like bargain basement Xena with a dash of phoney Baileys.

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Heck, as someone of Japanese descent, I'm happy when Japanese people even get to portray Japanese people at all, much less get any cultural elements correct. Japanese people were so happy to see a Japanese person playing a Japanese person in Star Trek, we didn't even care he had a name no Japanese speaking person can pronounce.

Of course, one of us did crash the Joy Luck Club, but the sad part is I doubt all that many people noticed.

Although it would be nice if my own culture, beyond ninjas and anime, was well represented, creating a zone based on Momotaro seems impractical, at best. If they had made a zone with shaggy monsters, and called them Japanese shaggy monsters, heck, that would have been cool with me.

They probably would have been shaggy ninja monters, though.

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Personally I hate the mindset that alts are the accepted way to keep playing. That's bad MMORPG design. You should never run out of things to do with one character. It sounds more and more like people just want this to be an Action/Adventure game instead of a MMORPG. You are not supposed to beat a game in this genre.


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"Easy to level and easy to run missions" isn't really compatible with "you should never run out of things to do." Friendly to one is hostile to another, unless you have a maniac dev team that can crank out one issue a week.

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They created a zone in I2 with very little content. A zone that no one visits or fights in due to A) Travel restrictions and B) Terrible missions. They could have spent some time to improve the zone, but they did not and so now you have a ghost town called Shadow Shard. Have you ever in your heroing career been given a mission from Paragon City to go into the Shadow Shard? No you haven't. They do not exist. Heroes are given no reason to go there and in fact you never have to go there at all. They are spending a great deal more time on the lower levels by improving their missions, creating new zones, and Task Forces. I think the higher levels have gotten a new throne room for Tyrant.


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The Shadow Shard is actually four separate zones with a couple of mission arcs and several task forces. I wouldn't exactly call it devoid of content. Its not really meant to be street-swept, so people don't naturally congregate there just to see the sights, but people do run the task forces that are there.


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Do you really think that it's fortuitous to continue pushing back content for level 40-50? It sounds like a method to thin out their long-term subscribers more than anything. A new player could very easily roll up a hero today and have him past the level 35 range by the time that Issue 5 goes live. The only thing that would be more pointless WOULD be to create a new level 1-5 zone. A level range you can go through in an hour of play?


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I don't know how to answer that. Is it fortuitous? Certainly not, I don't believe its accidental at all. If you're asking if its beneficial, it certainly is beneficial to the long term health of the game to have content continuously added for all level ranges, and not focus on only one.


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I'll reiterate. In a game where all you're doing is beating up bad guys, you need to give people a reason to keep playing with a main. Creating new low level zones isn't it.


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There's a level cap. They devs expect people to eventually reroll alts. The only way to encourage that is to continuously add lower level content to make it worthwhile to play through again. They expect to add content to the higher level part of the game so people can return to their mains periodically and see it. But they are also adding things like autoexemp to task forces so people can play their "mains" and experience bypassed content. In a sense, autoexem is in fact a form of higher level content.

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Okay heres when stupiditty shows his face,( swaping dmg caps) that just plain stupid I admmit blaster dmg dmg cap is lower than scrapps but theres a good reason why, scrapps are frotline fighters, and blaster stay on there sofa chair throwing power until the run away warning.


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If I could have a "sitting on a sofa while flinging energy bolts" emote, you can give me any damage cap you want.

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meh. more content for the levels that already have way too much content to experience. so instead of going to striga we'll go to croakatoada or whatever. Things that would have excited me: post-50 content and/or the ability to flashback to missed content (which i guess is largely post-50 content) with outleveled contacts.

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Well, the ability to implement flashback is now in the game. It just needs to be implemented. The exemplar for TFs would do it handily. It may mean being literally unable to outlevel story arcs, though, as you'll probably exemp to your contact when you take their missions.

I would be unsurprised if it got into I5 or soon after, if it's going in at all.

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Auto-exemplar is one-half of whats needed for flashback. Mission dropping is the other thing.

Otherwise, a level 50 might take a mission, discover it requires something - like additional people - and be stuck at the exemplar level. If the exemplar broke if you switched missions, say, that would also work, but if you were running three exemplar missions to clean up or run through lower arcs, or one or two and those were the only missions you had, you could also end up exemplar trapped.

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I don't know if its been mentioned (too many posts for me to look at) but if anyone has read Harry Potter or played WoW it mentions Red Caps little fairy imp type creatures (which are from Harry Potter) and Fir Bolgs which is in WoW. Did they steal some ideas?

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Yes, from the same sources Harry Potter and WoW stole from.

Also, Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings.

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Yes, that would be the Quarrymen.

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The absence of a toxic damage type at launch is borderline inexcusable, but I imagine other things took precedence.

What surprises me is the lack of ability to add new damage types to the game without monkeywrenching the code.

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It always wigs me out, too. I didn't get the idea that it was a lot of actual code being changed, but rather tables of attributes for various powers. In either case, it seems ... painful.

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When they first said it was very difficult for them to code in toxic defense, my original instinct was to say "[censored]?" also. My best guess for why that might be the case is that it has something to do with an encoding problem for holding or transmitting the defense flags around.

This sort of thing happens programmatically when someone allocates bitwise flags to represent state, and they run out of bits. If there is a "defense against damage type" value with eight bits, representing whether a particular defense is good against against smash,lethal,fire,ice,energy,negative,psi,all, then whoops, no room for a specific-to-toxic bit flag.

Its at least one way to explain why simply adding it in might be a major chore.

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[note: these are more or less generalistic comments; we all know there's an exception or two to each of them; but even two or three of those sticking to a build would be too much. And its more like 'all but two-or-three' right now]


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After reviewing the list, I only perceive one, although I perceive others perceiving more than one.

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I'm a little disappointed in the concept for Croatoa, especially with the new zone and villians. One of the reasons why I like COH so much is the whole "superhero" concept. I feel they are still so far from exhausting ideas within it, that there is no reason we should see something coming even close to Everquest or WOW style concepts. If anything... it worries the hell out of me.

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I'm not sure what the problem is. Have you ever read The Mighty Thor? I mean, he goes to his home in Asgard on occasion, which is prettysword and sorcery-style fantasy at times. Being as it's based on mythological Asgard from the Norse stories, this should hardly be surprising.

Heck, it has giants, evil witches, and elves.

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To be fair, CoH deals in villain *groups* and not singleton villains, like a lot of comic book stories. Because of this, there are limits to what they can do. We have loosely affiliated gangs (hellions, freakshow), criminal or other organizations (malta, knives), religions and quasi religions (cot, carnies), creatures (DE, igneous) and races (Rikti). Supernatural entities are one of the few ways they have to introduce additional "villain groups."

The only thing about the superhero concept that CoH could have had that other MMOs did not have, but has never pursued, is the notion that the average superhero does not wade through thousands of minor villains most of the time. Occasionally, yes, but almost always to get to the real fight, which is with a single or very small group of villains that are roughly the hero's equal.

Missions are really random spawn points with a boss randomly in there. It ought to be that the hero(s) have to sneak/fight/force/incapacitate the minions to get past them to the actual point of the mission, be it blinkie or powerful boss, and *that* is where the mission should really begin.

The one-on-one hero on villain fight is severely under-represented in CoH, and when it occurs - hero vs AV - its considered broken.

Switching from fighting hordes of hellions to fighting hordes of giants - be they from fairieland or Alpha Centauri - does not in and of itself break the game concept. As long as the villain group is interesting, I don't mind that they might be magical in origin.

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Which two defender primaries are better than all the rest, and which two ATs are better than all the rest? Just curious; I honestly can't imagine what those two might be.

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Rad and Dark. Dark can do everything except boost your endurance and comes with pets, rad can do everything except free you from mez(though it does halve your mez duration).


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Personally, rad, kinetics, and dark seem fairly balanced when it comes to soloing. Kinetics and rad definitely have pros and cons when it comes to group buff. Dark seems to be a better solo set than empathy or force fields, certainly, but empathy and FF are at least as good if not better team buffers than dark, even with dark's bag of tricks.

You could argue rad and dark being slightly better overall, but I doubt you could argue that they are decisively better overall.


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The two AT's that are far better than the others are Controllers post 32 and Tankers in their current state. Nothing can really compete with tankers in terms of damage to be taken(rightly so) but also damage able to be dealt(thinking mostly of energy, fire(primary), and axes here as I don't have much experience with others)

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Restricting the conversation only to the post-32 game, then, I don't see post-32 pet controllers universally better than scrappers, say. Having played one of the supposedly "uber" combinations of ill/rad, I can't see that the set is universally better than all scrappers, and it doesn't even have the order of magnitude faster soloing speed so many people seem to think it has. DM/invuln probably solos faster than Ill/rad.

Are tanks, as a set, better than scrappers, as a set. Hard to say; my experience with actually playing tanks is much lower than with scrappers. But I don't find them massively "better" than me when I'm teamed with them. They can take a ton more damage, most of the time, so that does make them inherently more survivable. But they don't necessarily pump out equal damage to scrappers - at least, no tank I've teamed with besides burn tanks is consistently outdamaging me when I'm playing a scrapper. Or a blaster, for that matter. Energy transfer used to be the big fat exception to all this, but with the boost to the self damage, you can't just arbitrarily consider attack chains that use energy transfer as fast as you can cycle it. End, especially, seems to be the thing that holds back tanks from operating at their mathematical peak more so than (most) scrappers.

Whats probably the most interesting thing to me is that even if rad and dark are the "best" defenders, they do not appear to be overrepresented among defenders on average. And tanks and "post-32" controllers do not appear to be over represented among the ATs in general. So it seems not everyone shares this opinion, or alternatively, enough people don't care when they decide what to play. Either way, this issues itself does not appear to be hurting hero diversity.

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Again and again I point out it is not perfect balance that must be achived but rather perfect domination that must be avoided. If two defender sets are vastly better than the rest then their is an issue. The exact same issue that occurs when two AT are better than the rest.


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Which two defender primaries are better than all the rest, and which two ATs are better than all the rest? Just curious; I honestly can't imagine what those two might be.

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If this has been asked..then its a bump..if not..then here goes...

Wasn't the Blaster AT to be looked at as a whole for I5?

I seem to remember an entire blaster community clamoring for some love right before I4, and States answer was something like "Not till I5".

What good are the new powersets if the AT is still bad news?

Inquiring minds want to know.

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I presumed that, since at the time that statement was made they were obviously working on I5, that it meant "not until we get I5 out the door."

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Yay more shared power sets between controllers and defenders. There was not enough overlap already.

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My thoughts exactly! Yeah for only one primary to call our own!

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Kinda weird when you consider that the developers refuse to let scrappers and tanks share more powersets for diversity reasons.

Uh huh.. Riiiiiiight.

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Yes. Energy Melee for Scrappers! Start the campaign today!

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It's not diversity - the devs don't want to give scrappers attacks with a BI of 9-12.

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Although, replacing stun with energy transfer seems perfectly reasonable for */energy blasters. After all, energy transfer is the ultimate expression of blaster melee: score the hardest hit you can, but its gonna cost ya.

Edit: would I use energy transfer as a blaster if I knew it would do 140 self damage? Well, compared to what the boss will do if I let him live another five seconds? You bet.

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Yay more shared power sets between controllers and defenders. There was not enough overlap already.

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I'm going to mark it, at 12:25 pm ET I5 has it's first offical complant.

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Please do. Because as far as I am concerend it is !@#$%^& stupid.

No incentive to play a defender anymore unless you want to play Dark/, /dark, /psionic. At 80% funtionality between the two there is no point. Heck just hit 41 and you get ranged damage then also.

Cheers!

Cheers!

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Sonic debuff and trick (which I interpret to be "debuff" and "mezzing") arrows are shared between defenders and controllers. Trick arrows make sense to be shared between them, because trick arrows probably range across debuffs (the purview of defenders) and mez (the purview of controllers).

However, archery and sonic blast was added to blasters and defenders only; controllers did not get these sets.

I suppose a good reason for being a defender is at least stylistic: you can be a sonic debuff/sonic blast defender, assuming sonic debuff is a defender primary and sonic blast a defender secondary. Ditto trick arrow/archery defender.

In fact, far from being out in the cold, defenders are the only AT that apparently are getting both new primaries and new secondaries, if I'm reading this right: blasters are getting two new primaries, controllers two new secondaries, and defenders two each. Yes, they overlap blasters and controllers, but only defenders can actually leave the gate in I5 with two completely new sets. There has to be some fun points for that.

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This Earth's Jack Emmert still avoided many of the dark fates that alternates met in different timelines.

On Earth Omega 3-227, Jack agreed to attend the first annual Regeneration Scrappers Convention in Houston, Texas, without advance scouting.

Only this security camera image of him survived the ensuing chaos.

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One word:

EWWWW

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Don't feel too bad. here's a picture of Omega 3-227's Jack just two weeks later, explaining to a fan the need for travel power suppression.

This Earth's Jack Emmert still avoided many of the dark fates that alternates met in different timelines.

On Earth Omega 3-227, Jack agreed to attend the first annual Regeneration Scrappers Convention in Houston, Texas, without advance scouting.

Only this security camera image of him survived the ensuing chaos.

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I caught the voices behind me eating my Cheetos. Now I am out. Damn them.

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I've found if you cut little notches into each and every one of them, the cheerios will slip off of the unwound paperclips they use to fish them out of the box.

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I hear voices in my head when I squeeze my eyes real tight. I write what those voices tell me on parchment with a raven quill using specially prepared ink from Tasmania. Then I let the parchment bathe in moonlight for two days, after which I transcribe the words to my computer. The result is pure creativity.

When the above process fails me, I inflict head wounds upon myself... this never fails.

-Gil

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I steal ideas from my imaginary friends, who are all highly creative.

Sometimes I ask them where they get their ideas from, but they just stare at me and then return to that thing they do with the corkscrews and the lima beans.

When they are not around, the head-trauma thing is a good stand by, though. Once, when I was blocked, I hit my head so hard on my desk that I ... err ... what was I saying again?

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City of blasters was a myth? You either have no idea what you're talking about or that was supposed to be humour.

In Pre I2 days, blasters were king. No other AT even came close. Period. That's what they are refering to by saying city of blasters.

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No...it's a misconception. As someone above me noted, it was City of /dev blasters, on the strength of *one* broken power.

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There were also the fire/eng blasters, leveling in the blink of an eye through the 20s in DA and the 30s anywhere they wanted.

Nevertheless, although there were times that blasters were disproportionately popular relative to other classes at no time do I think they ever were very close to 50% of the logged in characters much less more than that. So whether you think a number like 40% qualifies as "City of Blasters" or not is a matter of opinion.

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Which is why egyptologists are often reluctant to call the egyptian mythology a religious mythology and instead a sort of explaining mythology, an approach to explaining the universe. When the known universe changed, so did the myths. Pretty much like science today changes with what we know, and nobody thinks that's strange at all. Ie. Egyptian mythology has more in common with science than with religion...of course with the difference that science follows it's rules (scientific approach etc) and egyptian mythology had theirs.

Today we really can't say if the Egyptian gods were "gods" per se or more like embodiments of concepts and explainations (since our knowledge comes almost exclusivly from funerary goods and legal/administrative records). The Egyptian multiplicity of approaches (the more important a phenomenon is, the more explainations there are) and tendency to combine gods support the theory that Egyptian mythology while indeed being a system of belief (and a constantly developing such system of belief), it wasn't a religion as in the "this is the ultimate truth" variant.


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In a sense, this is true of most religions: that they are at least in part designed to explain the world and how it works, or at least the bits of it they are concerned about. Its a very blurry line indeed between "the rain falls because the rain god made it fall" and "the rain god is the embodiment of what rain actually is." Returning to comics for a second, its like asking if the Endless are embodiments of concepts that would exist without them, or if the concepts exist because of them (a very Aristotean argument, actually).

I wouldn't agree that makes these religions/myths very much related to Science, with the capital S, though. Despite all the (silly, unwarranted) squabbles between Western Science, and Western Religion, throughout the years, its Western, JudeoChristianIslamic religion's subtle but significant perspective that the world isn't the way it is because God makes it that way, but because God made it that way, that is at the heart of Science.

If the rain falls because the rain god made it fall, there is no real inquiry past that point. Whatever happens, happens because the rain god wanted it to happen, and science is really cosmic psychology. When the rain falls because God made the world, and within His clockwork-like mechanical world, rain falls because he designed the world to incorporate rain, you can start asking really interesting questions, like "what is it about the world that God made, that rain falls when it does." You can try to take it apart and see how he did it. You can easily do this all the way up to the point where you ask "how did God make string-like constructs in a 12-dimensional space, that the quantum fluctuations inherent in them give rise to the particle families we see today?" At no point do you say "the string god hath decreed that all vibrational modes above the planck constant shall be cancelled through divine providence, allowing a bountiful harvest of low mass particle to emerge upon thine universe."

By in large, its the (originally religious, and mostly on faith) belief that the world operates mostly autonomously from God or gods, and according to a set of rules, not motivations, that allows Science to operate at all. That Mother and Daughter don't always get along so well anymore is a sad irony.

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This tends to be true for a lot of Greek mythology (and a lot of other mythology, actually). Consider the evolution of the Robin Hood story, or the Arthurian mythos. It doesn't take long at all for stories to get blended, embellished, and renovated as time progresses. Every time I read anything about Greek mythology, almost everything I read starts with the phrase "in some versions of the story..."

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This is due to the fact that most myths were passed on by word of mouth. Time would fog up the memory, and each teller would have their own take on it.

I've never heard of Hephaestus not being Hera's son, however. That's very odd.

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Actually, I don't think fading memory has as much to do with it as a natural tendancy for people to want to embellish stories. You don't accidentally forget there wasn't really a Maid Marion in the original story, for example.

As to the point about Statesman being an incarnate in the sense of possessing the power or actual being of a god, its an interesting thought; Statesman as Shazam. Its a shame we couldn't get Alex Ross to do the CoH comic, but I hear he's kinda busy right now.

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Uhm, well, the fact that you have 1 slot in build up, but 6 in power thrust tells me this is a concept build; anything I say is very likely going to miss the point entirely.

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Why do you say that?

With my HO's, I'm at the damage cap for my entire primary power set except for Nova and Explosive Blast. I only need build up on those. Power Thrust is very useful in PvP. For PvE it's not that great, but I'm lvl 50 now... so the Arena seems to be it.


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Even though you are at the damage cap with 6-slot dmg/acc, you might still want to have fast cycling BU and Aim, especially Aim, for the arena, for the to-hit buffs against defensive sets, like SR and FFs, and even blasters packing PFF. You might even want to multislot Aim with to-hit buffs just for that purpose.

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Here is my plan for the next iteration of the Mighty Mighty Zubenelgenubi (currently at level 50). From the 4-slotted Hasten one might infer that he’s heavy on the HO’s. One would be correct. There’s about 50 in him now.


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Uhm, well, the fact that you have 1 slot in build up, but 6 in power thrust tells me this is a concept build; anything I say is very likely going to miss the point entirely.

I guess, since you only have 50 HOs, I could recommend getting the other 20 and making a complete set.

Other than that, you have power blast twice, good choice since its a pretty good power (I'm assuming thats really burst), and 3 slot hover and 1 slot fly. I know you said that flight was mandatory, but if you use teleport to get around, maybe hover would be good enough for in-combat flight, and you could substitude fly for conserve power. I dunno if that breaks concept, and you don't have slots for it, but it still makes a good pre-nova booster, and its still 90 seconds of no endurance worries when it does come up. Conserve power is much more useful in PvE than PvP, though.

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Anyway, I think the major religions have lost the idea of the psychopomp... hmm, wait a tic, I wonder if Uriel counts as a psychopomp? Isn't he the angel of death?

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He might qualify as a psychopomp, depending on what you might believe he does.

It's interesting how popular Neil Gaiman's "Death" character was/is.

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You would think that being portrayed as a cute girl would play a big part in it relative to the target market (although actually Sandman seemed to attract readers of both genders, at least when I was reading it), but then you look at Terry Pratchett's Death (esp. as in Reaper Man), and you see there is a lot more to it than that.

You could even argue that the George Burns rendition of God in the Oh God movies taps into a subtle piece of this: deep down there is something irresistably appealing about the notion that whatever awaits us beyond this life, its fundamentally kindly and non-judgemental.

Not all psychopomps are kindly and non-judgemental, of course, but at least they all tend to be, while maintaining an aura of mysteriousness, fundamentally understandable.