Dr_MechanoEU

((inspired by the backstory for a character created by Cactus Brawler))

It's late night...or very early morning. Somewhere in both Paragon and the Rogue Isles, TVs begin to show a new advert. Its the time of the morning when the adverts are for dubious phone services, like dial a psychic (who usually lack real psychic powers) amongst other things.

An old man with grey, wrinkled, skin, a thick busy white beard and long white hair pulled back into a pony tail greets the screen. Turning away from a science set only ever really seen in hollywood 50s monster movies. He has one fully cybernetic arm and a cybernetic hand on the other. Dressed in a white, sleeveless shirt and blue cargo trousers.

"Oh hello there, didn't see you come in. Some of you may know me, I'm Doctor Mechano, founder and owner of Necrotech industries."

He begins walking, the camera panning with him.

"The company that bought you the Dream Partner and New You programs, advertised in several high end superhero focused magazines and on television. Well I have a new service to announce!"

Sitting back down in a large, comfy chair in a plush looking office, the very formal scene somewhat spoiled by the large Shivan, wearing a red and white tie, standing behind him.

"Are you struggling to find workers that will work for almost nothing? Are even illegal immigrant workers beyond your price budget? Having trouble hiring henchmen to work for affordable wages or simply want something that will do a job nobody else would want to do?"

The camera swings around to reveal a giant tank filled with some kind of bubbling semi-clear liquid.

"Well I introduce to you the latest venture from Necrotech, GEL. or Gelatinous Engineered Lifeform to give the substance its full name."

"GEL is easily produced and thus easily affordable for anyone. How does GEL work you ask?"

The screen fades into a montage of scenes.

"GEL is poured into a mould, much like regular Gelatine, once poured into the mould and left twenty four hours to set, simply introduce one end our patented device, capable of connecting to any computer, into the Gel and the other connected to a computer and you can program GEL to follow simple instructions using our special software, called GOOP or Gelatinous Origin Operations Program."

"Software so easy to use that anybody can do it, though we recommend that some computer literacy be required..."

"GEL can become a friendly and hairless pet for your children, no fleas or loose hair to worry about here. GEL can be poured into drains, sewers and even airducts to eliminate household vermin and unclog drains all in one function. GEL can even be used to make humanoid creatures to block your enemies path when making an escape."

"GEL is so affordable that the basic package, of only ninety nine dollars comes in industrial drums, suitable for making atleast three henchmen. Remember though, GEL isn't suitable for long term henching duties and is very simple minded, perfect for distracting Longbow during a Bank heist to get the money you need to hire real people."

"So that is GEL, the wonder invention and working solution for business seeking cheaper than cheap labour, aspiring masterminds and homes with pet allergy suffers alike!"

"Operators are standing by now if you call the number flashing on your screen, call now and we'll even through in a limited edition ten foot by ten foot cube mould, stocks are very limited on these moulds, so call now!"

The screen fades to the logo of a skull inside a cog with the words 'Necrotech industries: Because we care' underneath before going to another advert.

Sadly don't have pictures, however, while it may not count as an action figure, I do have a few prized item amongst my figure collections.

the 50th Anniversery Godzilla figure collection. Minifigs of virtually every single Godzilla creature, including three versions of the main man himself (Showa, Heisei and Millenium), also one of the few products to have a figure of my favorite Godzilla monster, Biollante. The actual Biollante figure I want (which is in size with the other Vinyl Godzilla figures) currently costs $675 on Ebay...well beyond my now shrunken budget.

Several of my Resident Evil figures, William Birkin G-4, Alexia Ashford (first and third form in one figure), Tyrant and Nemesis figures.

My main prized posession however is my limited edition American Mcgee's Alice Cheshire Cat statue, the thing is solid and stands at 21 inches tall. Limited to 1000 run and only available from Tower Records, it cost me $175 dollars (which was about £90 back then) to have it shipped over here to the UK, numbered 899.

Here's a picture:

its eyes glow in the dark.

Ok so this isn't just one movie like last time but two movies for one thread.

The first is Tucker and Dale vs Evil.

Watch. This. Film.

I cannot stress enough how much myself and the three other people I watched it with enjoyed this film, the two main characters are written wonderfully and well played with Tyler Labine (best known for playing 'Sock' in the TV series Reaper) as Dale and Alan Tudyk (best known for playing 'Wash' from Firefly).

It is a great horror comedy and ranks highly among the films I've watched recently.

I honestly don't want to say too much to spoil the film so seriously, rent it, buy it, whatever, just see this film.

Sadly this never got a UK theatrical release but then neither did the next film, though the next one had good reason not to.
__________________________________________________ __________________________
Kevin Costner in The Other Daughter.

These two films could not be further apart, Tucker and Dale kept you entertained the entire film. This film however bored everyone for all but the last 20 minutes.

This is one film where it mistakes 'building tension' for 'taking ages for anything to happen', a common mistake in lower budget horror films. Now the last 20 minutes are actually really good but the film run time is an hour and 40 minutes, meaning almost an hour and a half of not much happening and Costner being soooo incredibly wooden its untrue. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if he phoned it in and was just looking for a paycheck.

Building tension to a crescendo climax, when done well, really works but this was an example of it done badly.

Had we not been watching this film for review purposes, it'd been turned off at the 45 minute mark.

Hmm several points.

Now I've noticed you've taken Mind/Empathy which really isn't the best pairing to do anything solo, infact Controllers full stop aren't that great solo up until the late 30's (where some like Fire control/Kinetics and Illusion/Radiation Emission turn into group killing and single target killing beasts respectively). They're a team focused AT back when the game still cared too much about the Holy Trinity but never really bothered to enforce it.

If you like holding mobs and playing solo, I'd recommend a Dominator over a Controller. The City of Villains Archetypes were designed around having more soloability and damage than their heroic counterparts (apart from Stalkers/Scrappers, Scrappers are better solo).

Remember you have more than just healing in Empathy, I've seen quite a few new Empaths take purely the healing powers because they think, like other MMOs, that healing is the best thing in the game. While it is very helpful at lower levels (pre 30) it becomes less and less useful up until level cap and only becomes useful again in Keyes Incarnate trial.

Buffs and Debuffs reign supreme in CoH with healing being a nice side benefit which makes it different from a lot of other MMOs who ARE focused on healing with buffs and debuffs being fairly minor additions.

This means that there is no 'holy trinity' for 95% of the content, especially at higher levels when Scrappers can fill the role of 'Alpha Strike absorbtion' just as well Tanks. The only time a Tank is prefered (but not strictly needed if there's enough buffs or debuffs on the team) is when fighting Archvillains or for the new Incarnate Trials (where they are needed admittedly).

Sorry Remus but the game was NEVER 'Challenging', those things you quoted as making the game a challenge...really didn't.

1) Everybody and their mother got Stamina ANYWAY, there is no challenge in having a power pool that virtually everybody takes just so they don't blow out endurance at high levels. Oh you had to fiddle with your build, well whoopdefreakingdo, that's not a challenge, that's just unneeded logistical work. It had gotten to the stage where Stamina was a massive crutch power and it either needed to be an Inherent OR it needed to be nerfed along with all powers having their endcost cut in half.

2) Just because YOU want to run in 'super awesome hotsauce hardcore mode' doesn't mean everybody does. Sorry but you want a challenge...try soloing as a controller before you ascend to godhood like they do at later levels (ill/Rad or fire/Kin being the prime examples), even on the basic difficulty doing LEGACY CONTENT (you know, the part your harping on about being designed with balance in mind) is incredibly slow going and just down right dull.

3) Incarnate abilities add stuff at level 50, you want knockback protection while levelling, you're going to HAVE to take acrobatics or slot atleast 2 KB protection IOs. Want it while exemping below 45, acrobatics. Incarnate abilities affect purely the endgame, you still need stuff whilst bringing up your characters in order to negate weakness.

4) The game has been made more 'new player friendly', you know how much of a pain it was, as a new player, having to blow through 3 of my respecs (back when you couldn't buy Respecs either with ingame currency OR real money) in order to get a build right, it wasn't fun or challenging...at all...

Sorry Remus but I'm seriously going to have to disagree with you, the 'challenge' we had wasn't the fun kind of challenge, it was the boring kind, the kind you get sent on by corporations for 'team building exercises' which are about as fun as having your face frozen off. Infact most of it wasn't a challenge at all. Most of it was negated by looking up a build for your character on the forums!

There is no challenge in copy and pasting!

I'm sorry when was this mythical area that required 'skill'?

The days of burn tankers herding entire maps?

Or perhaps you mean after the GDN/ED where teams of fire/rad corrupters could make any content a joke?

Sorry but CoH has never required 'skill', most MMOs don't require skill, they require pattern memorisation at most.

As I said earlier, the Praetorian content could have easily been single team content, infact if it WAS designed as single team content we probably wouldn't be running up against the problems we're facing now because:

1) Designed for small teams means less annoying gimmicks, which in turn means they don't need to be retuned in order to make them fit the playerbases style (like Keyes is in the next issue, Underground, the TPN and MoM probably will be). They can still use gimmicks (heck the final Romulous fight is a Gimmick).

2) Big fights can be saved for something truly worthwhile, look at Hamidon, the dude is huge, that is a big comic book event style fight right there. The Mothership raid is less about fighting 1 big bad guy (he tends to keel over very quickly) but more about surviving the onslaught of thousands of Rikti as you plant bombs etc.

Large groups of metahumans should be reserved purely for threats that would appear genuinely world/universe threatening or where the enemy is in such number that it requires there to be many, many supers. Rularuu the Ravager is a lot more worthy of "oh crap, call in everyone!" than some shmuck I've been punching around in level 20 tip missions.

3) Gets rid of the 'cog in a machine' effect of not feeling like you're actually serving any purpose. Like you could simply disconnect and the trial would continue without you. On single team you feel worthwhile (I know Sam will disagree with this).

4) People are more inclinded to atleast try single team content, they'll happily give it a go, the old but crap heroside Taskforces still get run despite being crappitude of the highest order (looking at you Seige). I imagine people would find their setup for each individual trialforce (it's my new name for trials that should be taskforce sized)

It is very weird that when the industry itself is moving away from huge raids (the big Gorilla MMO developer noted that the 10 persons version of their Raids was vastly more popular than the 25 persons version) that City of Heroes is moving TOWARDS this.

It is quite scary how close your signature is to the album cover

I think one of the other problems is that what we're raiding doesn't feel like it should require 24 people.

I mean you do have the handwave of 'oh they're empowered by the well' but that is still a handwavey response as to why these AVs are suddenly worthy of a full set of 24 people to take them down.

I mean the new AV in the TPN trial is freaking Maelstrom...a guy who we've been battering around since level 20! Surely you could have atleast picked Chimera or Black Swan.

For me personal, I know this would have taken more developer time, there should be concurrent content, small team and raid.

Small team would be the Praetorian stuff as we have it now, with less gimmicks admittedly. The big raid stuff would be the 'world ending threat' of a Galactus level bad guy. A reformed Rularuu, a merging of Primal and Praetorian Hamidon into mega-hamidon, stuff like that.

In comic books, they only throw big numbers of supers at the really big threats, the Praetorian AVs just don't feel like they're worthy of being that level of threat.

The other problem is the lack of feeling of progress. One of the reason the BAF and Lambda are popular are that you can see a big change once you achieve you various incarnate slots, you feel super powerful which cannot be said of Keyes or Underground. Instead of designing the next raids in this tier to require Incarnate powers (which they seem to be doing), design them as if nobody had Incarnate powers, make them tough, yes but make it so that players who are unlocking their Incarnate slots for the first time get a real feeling of progress.

*also hugs Second Measure*

Well that puts a stop to one of the major gripes I had with the latest issue, especially since it was basically nonsensical, I could see the reason behind the BAF and Lambda change (even if I didn't agree with it) but the 15 emp merit unlock was just puzzling.

I am incredibly curious as to why they're locking the powers behind the 15 emp merit gate when none of the powers are worth it.

The new Alphas are Endmod (not really that useful to be frank, sure it boosts stamina but you might as well go the EndReduction if thats your conscern and reducing an NPCs end to zero does exactly nothing), Hold (largely useless in the Itrials since everything seems ridiculously resistant to behind held), Healing Boost (which will be useful in later Itrials since apparently they want to go the MMO standard and make healing more useful than simply buffing/debuffing) and Resistance (which will probably be like the Defence boost Alpha and only provide around 3% additional resistance, it'd need to provide atleast a +20% resistance, like bumping Invulns 30% resistance to energy etc up to 50% to be remotely useful).

None of those are very good compared to the straight out damage, endredux, Defense, Recharge or tohit (lets be honest...does anyone actually take tohit, it seems to be the least picked Alpha).

The Destiny one is a league teleport and a heal...wow...compared to every other Destiny power...that is some major suckage.

The only good one out of the bunch is the new Judgement power, useful for Martial arts characters...and it's locked behind 15 emp merits because...?

The Inteface slots are...eh..they're not as crappy as the Alpha or the Destiny but chance for endurance drain, chance for imobilize, Maximum HP debuff seems ok but will probably be tiny debuff that doesn't really add much and Chance to confuse which is damn near useless in the ITrials anyway. Compared to the near always useful -regen and -resistance debuffs...they're unfortunately just not upto snuff.

So yeah...why are they locking powers that are essentially WORSE than the ones you can unlock freely behind a 15 emp merit gate...it just makes no damn sense.

Meet PROFESSOR BRAINULON, GREATEST MIND EVER! (yes that is how he introduces himself)

Yeah my bad, 18th of next month.

*slaps forehead* doh!

Is one of the rewards for doing the new halloween trial which will be available from the 20th, 2 days after this pack is nolonger available.

Remember people it's limited time only, will be removed from the store on the 18th.

Oh Finally a Brain in jar head item, wanted one of those since I started playing the game!

Woot!

Sorry Kasoh...but you're a Cat that is playing DnD judging by your avatar, I can see why you'd be annoyed at 3.5...all that dice rolling would distract your kitty mind from DMing with the urge to chase things.