Balanced

You realize that this is issuing a challenge, right? You're talking to the community that produced Dying Man builds and an SG composed of Goth scrappers who stood around reciting bad poetry while killing everything with Death Shroud.

Yep. He's not even noticeably derpy.

This is pretty much what I always wanted it to do--knockback and/or repel toward a central point. I don't think the game currently has a mechanic to support that, but it would be a lovely thing, not just for Black Hole, but for some of the other cage powers and possibly new powersets as well.

I suspect the devs would be reluctant to load the effect with serious damage, however. As an alternative, I would suggest a set of stacking debuff auras on the sphere pseudopet--ideally Speed, Recharge, Damage Resist, and Knockback protection. The debuffs represent time dilation (you slow down as you approach the event horizon), lensing (the sphere is pulling attacks in toward the target, making them hit harder), and the gradient of the power's "pull". The multiple auras are different sizes--a target right next to the sphere is affected by all of them, while those farther away are less affected.

I've seen the same thing with the Frost path aura. I bugged it and started a thread in Tech Issues & Bugs back in July. (The thread dropped like a rock.) Here's how I described the issue at the time:

The Devouring Earth would have to have done some major restructuring of the local geology to have "dusty, barren...Crags" anywhere near New Orleans. The highest elevation in the whole state is about 535 feet above sea level, and that's nearly 300 miles away from the city. The terrain around New Orleans is more like swamp, river, swamp, lake, swamp, same river, lots of swamp, lake, swamp, big lake.

I'm not saying it's impossible, since weird rock formations seem to be part of the DE's schtick, but "dry and rocky" are not descriptions that spring readily to mind when contemplating New Orleans.

That said, I like the look of the zone, and the Seed works. I'm not sold on the Avatar yet. Big shoulders are so Eighties.

Brilliant. I was already grinning, then lost it completely on the Raiders line. The final panel was just a bonus.

It was twenty-thousand years ago today,
That Eermeth taught the band to play,
They've been going in and out of hosts,
But they're guaranteed to raise some ghosts.
So may I introduce to you
The cult you've known for all these years....

(You may have been going for metal, but that's not what I saw. )

Agreed. The minion look is too elaborate for my taste, and I would like to see the brown return.

The Thorn Casters aren't bad.

The Energy and Life Mages--I'd call them absolutely bang-on. Cool updates while retaining the fundamentals of their classic looks. I'm interested to see what Soul Mages will look like now.

The boss-class mages? Much improved over the former attempt, but I find them too busy. Especially the Death Mage, who seems to be compensating for something. Also, they all appear to be wearing glowing purple pansies on their belts. I can't say that really screams "ancient menace".

He also plays some interesting structural games with the books, placing some extra constraints on his writing. Significantly, he does all this while making most of them very engaging, entertaining stories. The Taltos series was one of my picks.

I will say, however, that I think I actually like The Phoenix Guards best of his work. He just has so much fun with the language in it that it's irresistible.

"Oh God! Sticky and now it can bite back!"

The most important things about these suggestions, I think, is that they demonstrate that you understand where most of us are coming from. In my opinion, the goal should not to be to change any of the major characters (unless there is a long-term, story-driven change, perhaps), but to use new tech and art to make them more true to their original theme.

Go for vacuoles and get a twofer. Vacuoles are probably the simplest organelles, basically "pouches" hanging from the cell membrane into the cytoplasm, and have varied functions. Among other things, they store materials, serve as pseudo-stomachs full of digestive enzymes, and encapsulate and isolate potentially harmful foreign objects.

You could have vacuoles containing bodies, bits of junk, "clear fluid" (nothing), and maybe even captured heroes. I wouldn't make them targetable (too much clutter), but if you wanted to make them more than just decoration, you could make them clickable instead, and have various things happen when you click one depending on what it contains. Clear ones could trigger AoE buffs, debuffs, or damage (from various chemicals or enzymes), ones with bits of junk could award minor salvage, ones with bodies could grant an inspiration, tip, or (rarely) a crafted temp power, and captured heroes could revive from suspended animation and either function as a pet for the duration of the raid or buff you before teleporting away.

Of course, if the devs wanted to redesign the raid again, the captured heroes could even be PCs engulfed by Hami, trapped until they fight their way out or someone rescues them.

He's been such a tight-<bleep> since he became a hero that he hasn't taken a dump in over 80 years. Super strength and invulnerability can come with a terrible price.

If I understand Arcanaville (and what I recall from the devs) properly, it's not your participation score, it's the league's "participation score".

Your participation score gets you out of the "10 threads" hole, but does nothing further.

The league as a whole earns a score, with bonus points for various things, that is used to weight everyone's roll for a drop table, but doesn't do anything to get you out of the "10 threads" hole. Thus, once you've done the minimum to get out of the hole, your motivation should be to make the whole league as successful as possible.

Say you're on a top-notch league, one that gets every merit (or whatever they base the league bonus on) but you're having connection problems, and spend a lot of time mapserved or even disconnected. Your leaguemates will probably get a slightly "richer" set of drop tables than a flat distribution would give...but you might well get only 10 threads. If you manage to get out of the hole, though, you get the same chances at the drop tables as everyone else on the league.

Conversely, if you bust your hump, but your league is borderline, you should be safe from the 10 threads table, but you're not going to have any better than the baseline chance at the higher drop tables.

Is that about the size of it, Arcana?

Is the Praetorian version of Coyote a speedster, do you suppose?

As I understand it, the Praetorian tutorial is sticking around (in fact, given the devs current obsession with the place, I wouldn't expect Praetorian anything to go away). I imagine people will continue to use it. The fact that the new tutorial is new, combined with the fact that it allows people the same AT options as the Praet one without side-switching or Praetorian backstory complications may mean it's more heavily used, though.

Nitpick--

Stantz: No! Nobody ever built them like this!

Love the picture, though.

It seems unlikely to me that they'd just let people fall into the mapless void and get kicked out into a regular zone. That would be awfully sloppy, and there's no reason for it to work that way. I don't think they're deleting the zones, just redirecting new characters away from them. If they leave them alone, an offline character in the zone should be able to load into it, complete the tutorial, and leave normally. The only change they'd need to make would be to connect the Galaxy exit button in Outbreak to the new Galaxy zone.

Alternatively, they could run a one-time cleanup script that would transfer every offline character from Outbreak/Breakout to the Galaxy tutorial zone. They'll probably need something like that to transfer offline characters from current-Galaxy to ruined-Galaxy, anyway. If they do that, they'll also need to clean up any dangling missions on the character.