Wonderslug

If you do decide to give Guild Wars a whirl, I would actually suggest starting with Nightfall, the second expanshalone, for a couple reasons. First, you get access to heroes, which are like the AI henchmen only a) you can fully customize their skillsets and b) they are not quite such morons. You also have more control over their behavior. Second, it's probably got the best balance between story progression and mechanical progression.

Prophecies (the original game) is slooooooooooooow as hell when it comes to handing out the good stuff and suffers from a certain monotony of visual design (Pre-Searing Ascalon is lovely. Post-Searing Ascalon is a uniform smear of brown that goes on for a billion years. Then you get a uniform smear of blue-white mountains that takes another billion years, then some greeny-brown swamps that are almost a relief but still take a billion years, then a uniform tan desert full of beetles that eat all your enchantment spells (for a billion years), and then uniform blue-white mountains again, and then uniform grayish black punctuated with lava (also horrible firey death). Nightfall, to be fair, also contains quite a lot of brown, but there are many more shades of it and it's broken up by expanses of greens and blues and such). I think it's really best experienced with a character who's already completed one of the other campaigns, which also lets you skip the first two post-tutorial areas entirely.

Factions (the first expanshalone) I actually like quite a lot in most ways, but it slingshots you forward at warp speed by comparison--you will likely be level 15-16 by the time you exit the tutorial island, and you can get access to most of the available non-elite skills shortly after. It's also quite brutal if you're a raw beginner.

This happened to me once; near as I can recall, logging out fully and exiting reset whatever variable had run amok.

"Player becomes dev" is not news. You know Castle started as a player, right? And Sunstorm? And Synapse? I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that a good portion of the 40+ new devs hired in the past two years were players first, too, to say nothing of the CR staff.

The difference here is that in this case Dr. Aeon's "secret identity" is now public knowledge. This, I confess, strikes me as an unwise move destined to haunt him in the form of conspiracy theories for some time to come.

Your first build has the Force Feedback proc in Footstomp toggled on. That means Mids is behaving as though you had +100% all the time.

Also, the effective global recharge on both builds is identical. Your second build is way overcapped on 5% bonuses. Check the View Active Sets button--you're getting no recharge benefit at all from Dark Consumption, Boxing, Energize, or Tough.

It's hard to go wrong with Ninjitsu. It goes with everything. The most obvious synergies are with NB/Broadwsord (for stacking defense with Divine Avalance/Parry) and DM (for tohit debuffs and the extra self heal), but really it works with anything. It is the Swiss Army Secondary of scrapperhood.

Not quite sure what you mean by mez effects and DoT. If you mean your powers, all mez powers you get access to will break the Hidden state, with the exception of Blinding Powder. If they do damage, they will critical (except for the PPP holds, which explicitly mention in their descriptions that they deal no critical damage). DoT powers that deal a fixed amount of damage will deal all their critical damage as a single lump sum. DoT that has only a chance of occuring (which really only applies to Spines) is not factored into critical damage.

If you mean enemy powers, generally mezzes that deal no damage will not break the Hidden state. DoT will as well, but it's a bit more complicated. If you get hit with a DoT effect, then Placate a target, you will very likely still be able to score a critical if you activate your next attack fast enough; there's a "grace window," so to speak, likely due to latency and the fact that the server resolves attacks as soon as they activate, no matter how long they take to actually animate in actual play.

(It may also be useful to understand a few things about Hide and Placate. Hide has two effects: the stealth effect and the Hidden status. Both suppress for 8 seconds, but they are entirely separate effects. Hidden is what matters for criticals; Assassination does not care whether you are visible or not, so long as you are Hidden. It's very Zen that way. Likewise, Placate (the power) has two effects: it inflicts the placate status effect, which prevents the target from targeting you, and it grants you the Hidden status, which enables criticals. It does *not* reactivate any stealth powers you have, and other abilities that inflict the placate status (Smoke Flash, the sleep IO proc) will not trigger the Hidden state.)

Finally, I don't want to dissuade you, but there are some things you should be aware of as a first-time stalker that often catch people used to other ATs off guard:

Most importantly, stalker builds are tight, especially early on. Really tight. Ludicriously tight. You get a lot of important stuff opening up early and will be scrambling to shove it all in until at least the mid-20s, possibly even later.

There are five powers in Ninjitsu you will want sooner rather than later: Hide (no choice there); Ninja Reflexes and Danger Sense, your defense toggles; Kujin-In Rin, your mez protection; and Kuji-In Sha, your Reconstruction clone. You'll probably also want the tier 9, but by that point the mad scramble should have abated some. As for the rest of the set, you can do some fun tricks with Caltrops, but your mileage may vary, and Blinding Powder has some useful properties (the debuff stacks with your defenses, it will take the Contagious Confusion proc, and notably, it does not break Hide). The only really dubious power in the set is Smoke Flash. There are ways to use it effectively, but they are likely more trouble than they are worth.

From your primary you will probably want to pick up two of the standard attacks early. Some people opt to struggle through the low levels with only one, but I can only assume these people are masochists or sculpt marble with toothpicks as a hobby. Also from your primary you have three Important Stalker Powers opening in rapid succession: AS, Build Up, and Placate at 6, 8, and 12. In most sets the level 18 attack is also quite desirable.

If you've done the math at this point you've probably noticed there's not a lot of room left for things like, oh, pool powers. You should probably resign yourself to postponing Stamina, travel, or both for longer than you may like, and plan accordingly. You may even forgo one entirely and compensate with IOs for recovery or things like temp powers or slotted Hurdle for travel. You can also postpone one of the Big Three until things calm down: I've found it easiest to do this with Placate (though this is useful as mitigation as well as a damage boost) or AS (yes, yes, blasphemy, but for much of the early game it's really overkill for anything but bosses).

On the subject of AS: it produces big pretty orange numbers, but it is not the totality of your offence. It's easy to forget that, but don't. If you ever find yourself going out of your way for the sake of getting an AS off when you have other less finicky powers recharged, you're probably doing yourself a disservice. You have a bit less HP than a scrapper, but your defenses are just as sturdy, you do nearly as much base damage, and you have a better chance to critical even before factoring in Hide and Placate. Fear not to scrap.

Finally, remember that Ninjitsu has no inherent KB protection, so you will probably want to plan either for Acrobatics (tricky due to the aforementioned tightness) or make arrangements for IO solutions.

Far as I know the only video is the footage from the Hero Con keynote address.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SItM3OLqb5w&feature=fvsr

The pistol stuff starts at 22:00.

I'd love to see "official" high-level Legacy and Wyvern, but I think the canonical stance is that by the time you hit 30, they can no longer keep up with you (Serafina excepted)--there's one mission in the 40s where you kidnap a Legacy researcher, but the contact says pretty much just that, and the researcher himself is a normal civillian model.

That makes a certain amount of sense, and I can see the appeal of that in terms of story progression, but a) there's nothing to indicate that this is what's happening except for one mission from one guy ten levels later, so for all practical purposes they just disappear for no reason* and b) an unfortunate side effect is that in the 30+ game your only real "heroic" foes include Longbow, Longbow, Longbow, and more damn Longbow, who I consider to be some of the least visually interesting guys in the entire game. It's like fighting a heavily armed group of people who for some unfathomable reason all decided to be candy canes for Halloween.

I also think it's silly how little level overlap there is between the various types of Legacy, so for big patches of time you see all fire or all earth types, which is rather dull.

So yeah. I generally like to stick with established canon where applicable, but this is one instance where I have no trouble telling canon to get bent

*Tsoo are another big offender here. Both mechanically and canonically they're pretty badass, so why do they just *vanish* at 30/40?

Thanks, all.

Wholesale was my second arc, the one that's seen the most tweaks and, thus far, the one I'm happiest with, so I was pleased when Dr. Aeon gave me a head's up over the weekend--if somewhat surprised, since I really haven't done much promotion of my stuff, and it kind of fell off the radar after a brief flurry of plays when Lazarus stumbled across it and reviewed it.

I keep meaning to put up a consolidated thread for my arcs as soon as I get another one finished. Maybe this will finally motivate me to finish up the several I have in various stages of completion.

Most AVs in Maria Jenkins's missions do indeed have a minimum level of 48, save for Tyrant, who spawns only at 50. I can see how setting to +2 might bump a 48 AV up to 50, although I expect that's not the way it's supposed to work if you're under 48 yourself.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=125627

Should be accurate still, save for Freaks.

I think the Champions playstyle appeals more to the twitchy FPSer in him. But I shall mention his children miss their daddy.

Courier is the default monospace font just about everywhere. A combination of [font=courier] and [code] should do what you're looking for,

Jacob's Ladder: It's very slightly wider than Shadow Maul/Sands of Mu (but also considerably faster). Make of that what you will. Damage-wise, you break even at 1.1 targets.

Thunder Strike: You understand the power correctly. Main target damage at 50, enhanced, will be ~239; the splash will be ~117. With Build Up, ~362 and ~177 respectively. It is your AoE workhorse, so if you don't like Thunder Strike you will probably not like Electric Melee, no matter how awesome Lightning Rod is.

Chain Induction: The way this works is this: you hit a target, and if that target survives, a "pet" is summoned that then shocks another random target in range. If that second target dies, or if there is no third target in range, that's the end of it. Otherwise, another pet is created which shocks the third target, and so on. The maximum number of leaps is four, meaning you can hit up to 5 targets total.

The initial hit will be ~161 enhanced, with the leaps each being ~76.

This covers level scaling up to +7.