Anti_Proton

Originally Posted by Tyger42

By some. By others, it was actually dreaded for that reason. Well, specifically because of one of those makers.

Originally Posted by Lazarillo

I think it wasn't so much that Malaise became more powerful, or was being boosted by someone else, as it was the Dirge of Chaos screwing everything up. Breaking the Dirge's effects was the main reason Psyche was weak enough for Malaise to take hold in the first place. And consider that once that hold was lost, she flattened him without so much as a finger-snap.

Originally Posted by Tenzhi

Yeah, one of the worst offenders for me is the dreadlocks.

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

The clones are easy because they have no personality or motivation - costumed villains have their own personalities and motivations, and they need to show them, otherwise they just become normal goons.
In the Protean example I mentioned, Vandal, Nosferatu and Requiem have their own personalities and motivations, so those would need to be written into the story arc - there needs to be a reason why they're there, and they need to express themselves, even if it's only with 1 or 2 text bubbles.
But because they'd have to be written into the story, that means they'd have to be there in the end fight, which wouldn't work if were are less than 4 heroes running the arc.

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

That can be difficult when team sizes can be between 1-8 - there could only be one "real" costumed villain for us to fight, and 1-7 "fillers", depending on the team size.
For example, when we fight Protean on Jenni Adiar's arc, the game adds "filler" 5th Column with him, based on the size of the team - having more or fewer of them with him doesn't really change the story, because it's all about fighting him.
But if there were costumed villains instead of the 5th Column, then they'd have to be very generic, and not have any impact on the story, as there's no guarantee they'd all always be there if the team wasn't a full 8.
It works fine on, say, the KTF, where we fight 5 AVs in the final room, because there's a minimum team size, so the game knows there'll always be a certain number of heroes in that battle, so the story can be written to include all 5 AVs - but that can't be done very easily for normal story arcs, because every story arc needs to be soloable, so the game can only ever calculate encounters from the idea that there might only be one hero doing the arc.
Like with the Protean fight, the game has to make it Protean plus x number of 5th Column because it has to balance it with there being 1-8 heroes - it can't make it, say, Protean, plus Vandal, Nosferatu and Requiem, because there's no guarnatee that there'll be at least 4 heroes on the team - which means it'd have to remove one or more of the named bosses if the team was smaller than 4, meaning that those named bosses couldn't be written into the story, just in case the team wasn't large enough to spawn them, which would totally remove the impact of going up against a group of individual costumed villains.
All normal story arc boss encounters are based around 1 named boss plus x number of goons vs 1 hero plus 1-7 friends, which gives total flexibility for team sizes, with zero impact on the story.

Originally Posted by AkuTenshiiZero

First instinct: "Kirby as in the artist?"
Second instinct: "Nah, nobody knows who Jack Kirby is anymore. This must be pink-puffball related."

I stand corrected.