Samuel_Tow

What the hell are you talking about? At what point did anyone ever suggest that using Assassin's Strike from hide was "bad?" The argument has always been that it's INCONVENIENT, with a side order of "what do I do next?" I, personally, have never had a problem with Assassin's Strike being used to open a battle. That has always worked just fine, in the same way as using a Snipe to open a battle has never been a problem. The actual problem was that Assassin's Strike becomes essentially useless after that initial strike, and your Stalker is left fighting as a gimped Scrapper, even with elevated critical chances. THAT is the issues this change fixes.

At no point has opening with Assassin's Strike from hide been a problem and the only time the Demoralise effect was ever scoffed at was when it plain wouldn't trigger if you killed an enemy with your Assassination critical. There's nothing wrong with Demoralise now that it triggers every time, ESPECIALLY since it makes landing the follow-up Placate critical that little bit easier. I used Assassin's Strike to open with before, and I use it in exactly the same way again, because at no point was there ever anything wrong with it. That was never the problem. The problem has always been what to do afterwards, and now we have a very good answer.

So why not use an AoE that would "soften up" the enemies more? Because AoEs have only a 60% chance to score a hidden critical, and because enemies are never close enough together to be affected by one before you start a fight. Not unless you're talking about Lightning Rod, but that doesn't score criticals as far as I'm aware, thus it doesn't benefit from Hide. Moreover, the Demoralisation effect has a VERY wide radius, much wider than most AoEs Stalkers have access to. And, really... What do I lose if I delay my AoE until AFTER I've attacked with Assassin's Strike and half the people clutching at their heads? The 60% chance for a critical hit? I can live with that.

So why not just attack with something that fills up one level of Assassin's Focus? Because one level of it doesn't mean jack squat, and it's incredibly easy to achieve, anyway. For Dual Blades, Sweeping Strike and One Thousand Cuts have a 100% chance to give an Assassin's Focus buff and Vengeful Strike has a 90% chance. Big deal. And again - why would I waste my hide on one level of Assassin's Focus only to deliver a weaker Focus Critical later when when I can take out a dangerous target instantly AND STILL get a Focus critical later?

Please, be a little bit more conservative with charges of hypocrisy.

Or it could be that you have a one-track mind which cannot accept more than one strategy being used by a single player. No, players must either only use Assassin's Strike from Hide or never use Assassin's Strike from Hide, and if they do both, they're hypocrites. What you continuously fail to realise is what this change is addressing, and it's not that Assassin's Strike from hide has a bad effect. What it's addressing is what a Stalker does when he CAN'T use Assassin's Strike from Hide. Your old suggestion of making Assassin's Strike from Hide faster or more damaging does not fix the problem, because it does not fix the problem of attaining Hide, which is not fixable lest you make either Hide or Placate overpowered, and the power still remains interruptible.

What I find ironic is you used to be the guy who would constantly argue that Stalkers shouldn't try to play like in a Splinter Cell game, constantly trying to rehide and hope for more Hidden Criticals, and should instead stand and fight like their AT permitted. It's strange that I have to be the guy to remind you that no change to the Hidden Assassination Critical mechanic or circumstances can ever change one single, very simple fact - Stalkers spend most of their fights outside of Hide. It doesn't matter what you do to Hidden Assassin's Strike because that's only going to matter once or twice per fight. What they did was the smart solution. What they did was relaise that Stalkers, as originally designed, were garbage and essentially broken within a game system which does not permit them to hide and stay hidden. You insist that they should have simply "fixed" Stalker hiding, completely ignoring that what breaks it is core to the game's AI and combat system. "Stealth" does not exist in combat, and the only reason Placate even works is because it exploits an outright cheat, and one that is incredibly dangerous if used with any consistency. The real failure of Stalkers was that they were an attempt at a character type that could simply never work within this system.

Your argument is, essentially, the same one we kept hearing about Defiance 2.0 after it came out, about how it changed the AT and how that's not what Blasters should be like and how this is a change for the unskilled player and so forth. The bottom line is that the AT is MUCH stronger now especially offensively. It may no longer play precisely how you'd want it to play, but it plays provably better, and it plays in a way that's uniquely its own. You may not see it, but I do, and I couldn't be happier with the change. This isn't an issue that you're going to be able to ruin for me.

Yes, we can have both. Heroes and villains are split into two separate worlds. That may have been a dumb idea at the time (Rick Dakan sure seemed to think so), but that's what they went with. As such, PLAYER villain victories don't have to have anything to do with PLAYER hero victories. This is something I've been trying to drill into people's heads since City of Villains came out. You don't need to pit player villains against player heroes to have a game which revolves around heroes and villains duking it out.

The WORST thing that could have happened is to give heroes and villains a shared storyline, and that's precisely what they did. I would have been perfectly happy if villain story arcs went one way and hero story arcs completely another. I would be twice as happy if they never dealt with the same events, either. I can sort of see Diviner Maros and his standalone missions which have you set the stage for some of the later hero arcs. That can work in a sort of ping-pong fashion, where a villain arc has the villains do something bad, then a hero arc has heroes recover from it. The next villain arc has villains recover from the heroes' success and so forth. You're still not putting player actions against player actions, you're still presenting a one-sided story, you just alternate whose side the player is on in each chapter.

Yes, heroes and villains can very much win. All it takes is for them to not be involved in the exact same instanced mission.

No, there is no disparity. You are simply taking an unfairly one-sided stance. There are no "hero players" or "villain players" in this game any more. Everyone owns both City of Heroes and City of Villains. "Heroes" don't want anything, nor do "villains" want anything in particular. What PLAYERS want is an all-around good experience. I play both heroes and villains in about equal measure. I want to have a fun, satisfying experience when a play a hero and I want a fun, satisfying experience when I play a villain. I will never be satisfied as long as it's seen that one side of the experience has to suffer for the other to be better. These are not two different games played by two different people. There is no "us vs. them" mentality. This is about the quality of the game as a whole. Making heroes look bad so you can make villains look good is a zero-sum equation. You have not made THE GAME any better, you've just moved the perks and drawbacks around and effectively accomplished nothing.

You have, as a point of fact, accomplished less than nothing, because villains were not made to look any better. They're still lackeys of Darrin Wade and they're still going along with someone else's plan, happy enough to subsist on what's left behind after the real villains - the NPCs - are done having their share. This development satisfies me neither as a hero player nor as a villain player.

The real kicker is that's really not that hard to do. Being vague and general actually takes less effort to pull off. It's just that it's very hard to resist being so specific, because then you can't show how clever and biting your writing is, or at least it's not as easy to do so, and that's just hard to do once you're used to doing it. And that actually is one part of what bugs me about contemporary City of Heroes writing - it seems like whoever is doing the writing really wants to show off how well he or she can write, so a lot of it comes off as forced and exaggerated.

I'm not sure I can agree with this. You're really taking the term "sandbox" to such extremes that I have a hard time seeing it as relevant to modern-day gaming. Maybe in something like Second Life, maybe in MineCraft, but these are exceptions to the rule as far as I'm concerned. They're as popular as they are because these games are literally THE ONLY GAME in their respected genres, and this collect essentially all the people who have even a passing interest in that particular genre in one place, making them economic successes. I'm really not sure if there's much room for competition there.

More appropriately, I'm more than positive you can have a sandbox game close to your definition that's all combat all the time. A sandbox does not have to be a world and the player characters that populate the sandbox don't have to be humans and don't have to have regular lives. What you're describing is less of a general-terminology game and more of a "life simulator," and that's not the same thing as a sandbox. This, as a point of fact, is one of by far my largest beefs with most Fantasy MMOs - they go out of their lives to be medieval simulators. You need to chop trees, cook food, craft tools, go to marker, build houses and so on. That's not fundamental to a sandbox, not as far as I'm concerned, not even if we go with your general definition.

To me, the fundamental defining characteristic of a sandbox is the ability to craft your own experience, but that CAN be done within a world with rigid rules. It does not have to happen in a world where nothing is defined. A sandbox, in other words, does not have to be a level editor like MineCraft essentially is in order to be a sandbox. The City of Heroes Architect, as you mention, is a sandbox, but that's still based on levels, it's still based on instanced maps and it's still limited to the assets the game provides. Crucially, it's still all about combat because the whole of City of Heroes is all about combat. You CAN perform non-combat activities, but they don't reward you.

In general, I don't need a sandbox game to cover the "regular" part of a character's life. I don't need a sandbox to cover pooping, eating, sleeping, foraging for food, finding shelter, maintaining gear or finding entertainment. Yes, a sandbox can have all of this, but I don't believe it needs to. To me, a game which sends you out into the world with the only goal of killing stuff, getting better at killing stuff and finding bigger stuff to kill with NOTHING else covered can still be a sandbox, even by your definition of it.

This does make me chuckle from time to time, to be honest, and it IS true. Take for instance what may well have been THE biggest solo-friendly change in the game - the ability to scale AVs down into EBs. This was not done with the intention for players to solo missions that had AVs in them - this is Jack Emmert we're talking about, and he still insisted that basic bosses shouldn't be soloable. This was done because downgrading an AV into an EB enabled small teams of just two or three people to succeed on these missions, where an AV would require a mid-to-large size team of five people and more. It wasn't a solo change, it was a change to enable small teams. And a lot of the game is designed like this.

I think the broader issue is that we really do have a game where teaming is so gosh-dang convenient and inexpensive that even a solitary git like me occasionally does it. Ever since the LFG queue started including TFs and started allowing me to queue from inside an instance, I've spent my entire time in the queue waiting for this or that TF. Why would I not? If I don't get one, nothing changes. If I do get one, it's a nice change of pace. If I can't run it at the moment, I can always refuse. This cheap cost of teaming means I don't need a reason TO team, I need a reason NOT to. Of course, the LFG queue plain doesn't work because people refuse to use it, but that's through no fault of the system.

No offence taken, no worries And you're correct in the sense that having Oranbegan people in Oranbega is technically less complex than having Oranbegan foreigners in Oranbege. However, look at what the arc up to that point has set up as the status quo - filler enemy groups. We have the Carnival who have only a tangential link to the plot, we have Malta who have no link to the plot, we have the Nemesis Army who have no link to the plot. It's pretty obvious the arc is throwing just whatever at us. Within this setting, it seems to me like throwing what at first seems like "whatever" at the player, but is later revealed to actually have been deliberately chosen might seem actually more logical than what you'd logically expect to find in Oranbega.

Obviously, that's just the opinion of one guy who likes explanations, and it's really just one way to go about it. Most crucially, I need a reason for why the Circle of Thorns didn't discover Wade's trap if they were evidently heavily present at the ritual site. NOT having CoT present at the ritual sight seems like the easiest solution.

I don't see it so much as a deliberate humiliation against the character of the Statesman or against Jack Emmert's person so much as I see it as wanton disregard for an iconic character bred from a wanton disregard for his creator. The Statesman deserved better. If he HAD to die, he deserved to go down swinging, and he deserved his death to have meaning. The way he died, he was essentially a log we tossed into the fireplace for no reason other than to power the engine of the story along. That's not how you kill THE iconic hero of an entire fictional universe whose face is on quite literally every bit of promotional material for the game.

That, really, is why it comes off as mean-spirited to me. It's like development team couldn't stand the thought of somebody else's work getting top billing in "their" game. And this, really, is one of the biggest things that turn me off an established work's future instalments - when you get a bunch of new people in charge, or a bunch of the old people decide that what the product should all of a sudden be something completely different from what it used to be. If I didn't like what it was, I wouldn't have bought it in the first place. Losing what I liked about it, to be replaced with a ton of stuff I don't like nearly as much can kill a franchise for me. And Matt Miller's seeming inability to work with established artwork, story and characters, to the point of asking what kind of boss he'd be if he forced his team to work on the existing game instead of replacing everything with their own creations is just galling. What kind of boss would you be? A GOOD boss who cares about the consistency and integrity of his product, god damn it!

I'm the kind of person who likes specific works, not specific creators. I have a HUGE playlist of music at home and I have many favourite songs, but I have no favourite artists or favourite albums. I've never been interested in watching a movie because of who directed it or a game because of who wrote it. Dragon Age 2 was lesson enough to that effect. I am, as such, primarily interested in City of Heroes and what it offers me, rather than the divergent "vision" of whoever's in charge at that particular time. Wasn't that one of our primary beefs with Jack Emmert? His vision? "Old stuff is old" is not a good development policy.

It's a basic rule of game game design and storytelling that if you do a good job, people tend to be a LOT more forgiving about your eventual creation's inevitable flaws, often growing to accept them as part of its charm. For instance, I REALLY like the World Wide Red story arc because of the general story it tells, and I'm willing to overlook the often waste-of-time missions, the repetitive Malta encounters and the HIDEOUS Giant Monster ambush. I'm much less likely to be nit-picky, because it's just a well-imagined story that someone put a lot of effort into having make sense.

By contrast, when a story or a game is done badly, people will be naturally predisposed to criticise and nit-pick it. Because when we don't like something, a lot of us are actually motivated to find newer and better reasons to hate it.

When it comes to the SSAs, people have offered a lot of hand-wave, fan-made excuses for the various gaping plot holes. If I actually liked the arcs, I might be predisposed to accept those explanations as reinforcing my satisfaction. Being that I don't like the SSAs in the slightest, I'm much more inclined to reject them as counter to my dissatisfaction. It's probably irrational, probably not very moral, but that's just how I feel. I can excuse shoddy company politics if they at least produce a good end product, but when it seems like the end product sucks BECAUSE of shoddy company politics, that makes me angry.

They no longer hate NPC villains. They still hate PC villains just as much since even though we get to kill more people, we're no less servants of a bigger bad with a better plan.

They did. You don't suffer the 20-hour suppression window on the actual arcs in regular playthrough. That's only true if you repeat them via Ouro.

I'm not objecting to the insinuations of the situation so much as I'm objecting to the conversation being so heavily tied into the specific wording my character used. My point is that having loose, descriptive dialogue options like "Ask about ____" instead of "Hey, sugar, tell me about ____" would indeed limit the conversations' ability to play off player wording, but in most cases where this shows up, it's a loss I wouldn't really mind. That sort of back-and-forth isn't inherently bad, but at least to me, it's far less important than having my interaction less rigidly defined, so I wouldn't mind losing it.

This is precisely what I like about the change, myself. I've never been a fan of "attack chains" because they make the game hugely monotonous for me. Dual Blades is easily the worst. Once I realised my DB Scrapper could go Empower -> Sweep -> Attack Vitals -> filler attack -> Repeat I was essentially playing Guitar Hero, because every fight was exactly the same as every other fight, and all of them were just a repeat of the same exact sequence of button presses. Right now, even with Dual Blades for my Stalker, I never feel pressured into combos. A lot of the time, I need to choose between completing combos OR going for attacks that build Assassin's Focus, as well as judging whether I want to wait for three stacks of focus and potentially have nothing to use it on, or use it with two stacks or even one and chance the critical.

To me, this kind of system requires me to actually fight a fight in real time, and my degree of success depends almost entirely on what I actually do and how I react to each situation as it comes up. It takes a LOT of importance away from "preparation" and I've never been a fan of fighting fights before they even begin through stats and build. One big reason Stalkers became so much more interesting to me (in addition to their becoming much stronger) is that they've become a LOT more involving. And that, really, is what makes the actual gameplay that much better.

And that's a solution to the problem of villains getting crapped on how, exactly? I thought the point of bringing up problems of villain presentation was to fix villain presentation, not to make hero presentation equally as crap. And, by the way, for all the "victories" people keep citing as villains having won, not one is an actual victory for the actual player villain involved in it. It's a victory for some NPC's grand scheme that you get to mooch off of. Dean McArthur and Vincent Ross are pretty much the closest the game's come to giving villains a clear win, and it is, consequently, the most satisfying I've left a story arc since Time After Time.

How does "toy box game" sound?

A good start would be actually putting in multiple options to at least have the basis of calling it a choice, which is something a lot of dialogues in the game don't have. I'd extend that to say that a dialogue is something which involves participation from both sides of that conversation. It's not a conversation if it's just one person delivering exposition and character development while the other says "continue talking" in one of so many guises.

That's actually where the duality of "dialogue vs monologue" came from initially. I realised that I really don't mind having NPCs monologue at me with my only input being "Accept/Ask about something else." Really, if that's all a dialogue comes to, then I don't mind it being presented like that, especially if I can keep it after the fact as a clue. If we're going to go through with making dialogues, then at least let's pretend they're actual dialogues.

This I completely agree with. It really wasn't until I sat down to develop a dialogue of my own that I realised just how little description the player's choices need to be given in order for them to be meaningful from context and, therefore, just how much freedom the player can be given by NOT making his dialogue participation so specific. It's actually surprisingly simple to tell players WHAT their characters are saying by choosing that specific option without actually telling them HOW their character said it.

Of course, then you lose on the ability to bounce around witty repartee by having my character assume the hero Twinshot is referring to MUST be a man, only for Twinshot to specify that SHE is Miss Liberty. Despite she, Miss Liberty, being the heroine we've seen the most of by the time we get to level 4 because we've levelled up at her. Despite the fact that we've already spoken with Numina to even get to Atlas Park. Despite the fact that our own characters may be female and therefore less likely to automatically assume any great hero must be a man.

Frankly... I would not miss that in most instances I can think of off-hand.

Well, I can obviously only speak for myself, but that's a Stalker habit I won't be changing, not when I'm by myself, anyway (and that's the bulk of my playtime). Assassin's Strike from Hide is simply better in a situation where speed isn't that important and, what counts more in my book, it just feels more impressive. I mean, I'm already hidden. Why would I NOT open with Assassin's Strike? There's something special about opening a fight with one enemy dead and everyone else confused and cowering in fear

Now, granted, in a team setting... That's a bit different. I imagine I won't be using hidden Assassin's Strike as much as I used to, but considering that was a major pain in the *** when teaming, I consider this a change for the better. If I can position and assassinate in time, great. If I can't, I'm no longer reduced to a gimped Scrapper, and I like that.

I'm in much the same boat with my Dual Blades Stalker. One of my favourites is Assassination -> Attack Vitals -> Assassin's focus for one long chain of attacks and about three or four enemies dead by the end of it It IS irritating that Assassin's Strike lights up with the same ring both for the Dual Blades combos (Sweep, Empower) AND for Assassin's Focus, though.

The animation time of all Assassin's Strike powers got reduced to just the attack animation, with the windup removed entirely. It just so happens that most Assassin's Strikes were nearly entirely made up of windup, so what you're left with is a somewhat sudden animation that's all attack. Personally, I like it. It's that kind of explosive instant damage that really makes me yell "BOOM! HEADSHOT!" every time it happens, and it's what makes me instinctively reach for Assassin's Strike every time it lights up

I actually managed to pull off an Empower combo with a level 3 Assassin's Focus critical in the middle. That was... Entertaining

Quite the opposite - the new changes are intended to sidestep this mechanic in an actual fight, such that you no longer have to rely next to entirely on mechanics that are essentially our of your control. I would still suggest you make use of Hidden Assassin's Strike whenever you can just because it's a very good power, but you no longer have to worry about the other 99% of the fight. I would DEFINITELY suggest making use of Placate both for the free critical and for the mitigation it offers, though care must be taken when using it on a team. That aggro isn't disappearing, it's swapping to another team-mate.

I'm happy to say that Stalkers still don't play like Scrappers. Far from it, they play far more differently from Scrappers now than they did pre-I22, when they were essentially Scrappers with a stronger alpha strike and **** AoE. This change takes their gameplay in an entirely different direction, and one I'm VERY impressed with.

I don't consider it a rewrite because I'm not changing anything of consequence. The only reason we fight CoT in the final mission is because we're in a CoT cave. That's really not part of the plot, it's a gameplay element. The plot, when you boil it down to its points is: Learn about ritual -> Get specifics on ritual -> Perform ritual. The person you learn about the ritual from is meaningful - Vanessa is a powerful psychic. The person you get the specifics on the ritual from is also important - Akharist is a prominent Circle mage. But the specific NPCs populating the instances themselves really aren't terribly relevant to the plot.

Let me put it this way - if I swapped Malta and the Nemesis army, such that Nemesis troops raid DeVore's loft and Malta attack Portal Corp, would any part of the actual plot be affected? Would it matter? These guys are really just thrown in as "enemy group A" and "enemy group B." And, really, so are the Circle. They're there because that's where they live. But swap them for anything else and the plot doesn't change.

Actually, this wouldn't be the first time this has happened. I have previously raided 5th Column bases which had been taken over by the Freakshow, raided abandoned buildings that the lost had settled in and in the Library of Souls, taken the soul of Ashton Fletcher through an old cave that had become infested with the Devouring Earth for reasons completely irrelevant to the plot. In fact, Power Loyalists have a mission where they must go to a laboratory and retrieve research results. But because walking into an instance, speaking with an NPC and leaving would be boring, the plot has us dupe the resistance into attacking the lab so we can save it, turning an information handover mission into a combat mission, instead.

I'm not trying to change the plot so that something else happens. I'm trying to change the setting ever so slightly in order to preserve the plot exactly as it is. I honestly don't consider this a rewrite. I'm not changing things so Sister Psyche survives or anything.

You know, maybe that's just me, but nothing in a story can ruin it for me than when I can spot the hand of the writer working from behind the scenes. When I look at a plot twist that's supposed to be powerful and realise that this was done because of behind-the-scenes politics, the magic is instantly gone and I can no longer bring myself to care about the story. Picking the Statesman to die because the previous lead developer made him would have killed the SSAs for me even if had no other reason to dislike them (and I have others, lots of others), just because it's both mean-spirited and it ruins the illusion.

Of course, I get technical limitations. I get that I can' blow up Nova Praetoria with a neutron bomb, because that's where all new Praetorian characters start. That has to stay. So when the game makes the inevitable and obvious plot twist that forces the bomb to explode underground and not kill Marauder and Dominatrix and everyone on the surface, I don't begrudge it. There was no other way to handle it.

But when the previous lead developer's character is killed and humiliated and the current lead developer's character is promoted to premier hero, that just pisses me off. There was no need for this, not a practical need, anyway. Someone decided to god-mod the story for reasons not at all related to that story. We didn't lose an iconic hero because of anything in the plot. We lost him because of company politics within the company that employs the writers. That's precisely why the magic is gone, and it's gone forever. I've now seen the man behind the curtain, and no amount of yelling at me over loudspeakers to ignore the man behind the curtain will change that.

I know the whole thing is fake. Obviously, it's fiction. It's a game. It's written, scripted, coded and planned ahead of time. Of course it's fake. But I still liked to pretend, I still liked acting as thought it were real, as though the plot points transpired because that just how events came down. But that is no longer an option. These days, most events seem to happen because a writer needs to get the plot somewhere, regardless of what the story has to do to get there.

Troy Hickman once said something I remember to this day. Paraphrasing, it went along the lines of "Hell, conversations are hard enough to keep on track even when I'm writing them!" I firmly believe that the man had the right idea, the notion that a lot of the time, a story just "wants to be told" a certain way and you really shouldn't try to force it to a different way lest you ruin it. And that's precisely the opposite of what I've seen done in the game for a long time now - the story is being pushed and pulled and kicked around wherever executive meddling needs it to go. That alone would be bad enough, but that I can see that just by going through the stories is even worse.

Actually having thought about this, the concept of the "energy nexus" is actually already established in the game. The villain Aura mission has the player steal artefacts from the Carnival of Shadows, then offer those artefacts as a sacrifice to "the powers," which must be done in an energy nexus where several lay lines cross. Tarixus even explains that the Circle of Thorns often build their temples directly over those intentionally. Granted, heroes wouldn't know about this, but it would still make sense and be consistent with canon to require this powerful ritual to take place over an energy nexus.

The reason I'm going on about this is we're left to guess and assume why we had to go down there, and I could have guessed we did because Santa Claus bought a duck. Nothing is ever established and Akharist says nothing of the sort, aside from the suspect-grammar allusion of "I'll tell you where the ritual is." A ritual "is" nowhere, because a ritual isn't. It "takes places" somewhere, and if Akharist had told me "where the ritual must be conducted," then I might have bought it, but it still leaves things a bit too convenient and makes me feel like the plot is being written on the fly.

---

The concept of the energy nexus is established in game canon. The concept of strange occurrences happening since the Statesman's death is established at the first mission in the arc, and it's easy enough to believe. Now we need a reason why the Circle didn't find Wade's hidden artefact, or why they didn't attempt to use the ritual and activate it before we got there. So how about this? We go to section of Oranbega where the Ritual site is to take place and find the corridors filled not with Circle mages, but rather with the Rikti, who've used the confusion of the Statesman's death, a death which must have affected mades greatly, to launch an attack.

Why would the Rikti attack the Circle? They fear magic because the Rikti have no magic on their homeworld. They killed all mages and destroyed all gods by killing their worshippers. The animosity between the Rikti and the Circle is longstanding and bitter. With all the other weird stuff happening - Malta attacking the Carnival, Nemesis attacking Portal Corp - would it really be THAT surprising to see the Rikti attack the Circle? Because the Rikti are not magically-inclined, they're unlikely to spot Wade's ambush, they're unlikely to try the ritual and even if they found the artefact he hid, they'd have no way to know it was important. What this means is we, as players, would have no reason to question why a CoT cave is filled with Rikti and the Rikti would have no way to upset Wade's trap.

Moreover, it's conceivable that Wade tricked the Rikti into attacking the Circle of Thorns. He has plenty of magic artefacts and it should be fairly simple for him to pose as a Circle mystic and attack a Rikti assault group in the vicinity, then lead them back to that specific spot. The two groups are already hostile to each other, and Wade could conceivably do something to hamper the Circle so as to ensure the Rikti take over the cave. He could then use the commotion to slip in, set up his ambush and slip out and no-one would be the wiser.

We'd still have a completely surprising plot twist because the clues left to it only make sense in hindsight after you know to be looking for clues to a trap, but at the same time the trap would still make sense and not come out like such a hat pull at the tail end of a story seemingly written without a plot twist planned for its ending. That I honestly would have bought, and all it would take is a few extra sentences from Akharist and swapping the resident enemies in the CoT cave with one sentence of entry pop-up explanation.

You're right, that was easy enough to explain. I seem to have missed one generation, and apparently misread who Zuko was referring to as his grandfather. It still doesn't explain how Bumi is still alive and has huge rippling muscles as a 120-something-year-old man, but he's insane so we can probably overlook that.

Thank you