Dogface

My arc needing review is "Trading Blood for Roses", #161399. I have tested it solo and with teams of 4 and of 8.

The combat can get to be hot and heavy late in the arc. The idea is, after all, that you end up taking on a Council project head-on.

I was running solo, invincible.

Intro:
Hrm, female contact dressed in clothing appropriate for a warm weather climate. This is always a good thing, but it’s still just pixels. The whole “Queen Auri”/”King Aurus” name thing sounds a little silly. Are they brother and sister (Egyptian incest royal marriage), does the Queen take the King’s name? Does the King take the Queen’s name (matrilineal inheritance). I know, tiny little issue, but some times tiny little issues can stick out.

Mission 1
Okay, Save the hero-king. ACK! It’s an outdoor bug hunt, where I get to wander around a gigantic expanse until I somehow manage to find all the objectives. I have quit some story arcs upon coming across one of these missions, that’s how much they irritate me. But I shall stick this one through. Good thing my beloved fiancee is visiting relatives, today.
Great goshamighty!!!!! The designer picked one of the gawdawful HUGE maps to inflict upon hapless players.
Finally! The ordeal has ended! That’s all I can conclude about this mission. It’s not challenging, it’s merely annoying.
Nitpick: “This unholy sigil has affected Aurus?” I don’t recall a specific drawing/diagram having been mentioned, before. That’s what a sigil is, after all.

Mission 2
Could the queen please be less whiny at this point? Tragic dignity would work better than feckless schoolgirl.
Ah, ANOTHER big outdoor map. This arc really wants me to hate it.
Okay, smacked spider-guy around, and now I have to waste time wandering around this stinking outdoor map some more. Some reinforcements to help Anansi if the fight starts to go against him would have been nice. He’s supposed to be a king, after all.
Found the whatsit. Evidently, Anansi’s subjects don’t think much of him. They just have the work crew there and nobody to try and stop you taking the clue once you get rid of them. An ambush would have made this more lively.

Mission 3
At LAST! An indoor mission. Only one objective. Let’s hope it’s not on one of those huge maps that forces me to run all over the place for an hour or more.
Diddled with a chest to see what would happen. Ah, appropriate “guardian” critters show up.
Alas, it IS one of those absurdly large maps, all filled up with nothing to do.
I found the incense. I found the incantation. I found the altar? NOOOOO! I can’t complete the objective, yet! More wandering around the big cave-o-nuthin’.
Oh! Okay, so the thing that might LOOK LIKE an altar isn’t an altar. It’s the gazing pool. The “altar” looks nothing like an altar but looks like a lectern and not an altar.

Mission 4
Ah, finally, bad-guy smacking time. I can hope that it’s not yet another almost completely empty map of huge size. My hopes are dashed.
Cool! Disembodied emotional essences can be *****-slapped.
I just destroyed something that weakens the boss. There is no immediate retaliation? If I were an evil sorcerer who had put a major chunk of my power into a handful of gizmos, I would certainly MONITOR those gizmos and send somebody out to apply judicious beat-down upon anyone who damaged them. This villain is worse than evil. He’s guilty of felony-level stupid.
Okay, last “rune” smashed; now I get to hunt around the big land of nothing to find the bad guy.
Finally ran into him. Evidently, he’s as disliked by his minions as is Anansi. Nobody ran to the rescue as I whittled him down.

Mission 5
Here we go, showdown in the spirit world.
I’ve got Peace and Love to fight on my side!
A mercifully small map, with an appropriately tough target. I understand why a possessed King Aurus is the goal, but since this is a “spirit plane” mission, it might be entertaining to require a battle against ones doppelganger before one can find Aurus.

Overall
Better than a large number of arcs I’ve seen, but it has one severe flaw: Overly-large maps with next to nothing to do in them in four out of five missions. I seriously considered abandoning the arc just for that reason. The majority of “play” time was spent running around doing nothing.

Were the airwaves filled with "Pearl Harbor" stuff in November and December of 1950? When was the USS Arizona Memorial dedicated? Twenty-one years after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Back in the day, Americans got on with their lives and LIVED. They didn't insist upon going back, revisiting, picking at, and wallowing.

When I was a kid, you didn't see every single highway curve littered with little shrines to the people unfortunate enough to have been killed there. Now, they're everywhere, giving us one more thing to wallow in. Yes, sad things happen. The world is not a safe place. Grow up, get on with life, and let the dead bury the dead.

Sorry, folks, but I am NOT a disciple of Dr. Phil, Oprah, Jerry Springer, or the rest of what American culture has allowed itself to become. We used to look forward, get on with life, and move ahead. Now we look back, swim in the warm sea of self pity, and wallow in the mud of self indulgence.

I just revised the arc that was reviewed here some time back.

"Trading Blood for Roses"
161399

No powers in the Regen secondary mitigate against -Regen. Does anything help against -Regen?

How does a "roleplayer" know that a character is a "stalker" or not?

That would have been my response.

Okay, I got a code so I could finally play GR. I input it and upgraded my account, no problem, on the NCSoft server. Since I hadn't played in a year or so, I downloaded the COH_NA_SETUP from the proper web site. I started it. I started the launcher. It downloaded a manifest, did a checksum, and then started "fixing" files. I was given an estimated time of FORTY TWO hours! The next morning, it had "reduced" to FORTY FIVE hours. I went through and checked various things. No fix. I contacted technical support, who told me to tweak ZoneAlarm or uninstall it if the tweak didn't work. I did so. Now the "fixing files" time was "improved" to FIFTY TWO hours, up from 42.

I came to this forum and, like a good little boy, I tried to use "City of Heroes Helper". It failed to do anything except crash, multiple times. Here's the dump on that: