Dr_MechanoEU

Happy B-day oh bringer of cuteness!

2:30am
There were several brief flashes of light in the area just behind the movie theatre in Cap Au, growing in intensity with each growing second until a portal through time and space itself rent the air apart, energy arching off it, lashing out at any nearby surface, burning holes into the ground.

Out from this portal stepped someone who had seemingly disappeared without trace many months ago, plans and business left unfinished, nothing had been heard of him, his robotic minions had lain dormant, awaiting their fathers return.

Dr Edward Johnson aka the infamous Dr Mechano appeared in a hunched position with a smile as he drew in a long breath, "ah yes..dimensional power scaling, what cursed me in that other realm of the virtueverse is my boon here...Once again I am at my full power!"

Edward let out a maniacal chuckle and looked down to the assault rifle he had in his hands, "sorry Betsy but it's probably time to place you into storage..." He slung the rifle across his back. In the virtueverse he had been completely depowered, relying on the ammunition of his assault rifle and the forcefeedback of his cybernetics but here...

...here he was at his strongest, dark magic, demonic power and his robotic family lay here.

Edward flipped open the panel on his new mechanical hand, "This is Father One, broadcasting activation code Alfa, Oscar, Echo, Alfa, Tango, Tango, Alfa, Charlie, Kilo to all dormant units...awaiting respond..."

For a few moments there was nothing but silence and the smell of burnt ozone, finally a responds came though, a teenage voice, "activation code achknowledged, greetings Father one, we've missed you dad..."

"Good to hear your voice again Elise, judging by the readouts all the others have also come online, I trust Steve has been looking after the business?"

"We have been managing the finance and customers through phone services, Steve has been doing his usual face-to-face tactics...overall the company has made a ten percent loss as of close of business for the last tax year but not enough to substantially revoke research into other fields..."

"Get the lab equipment up and running, I want a television transmission within the hour, it is time to remind heroes that they've become complacent since my leaving..."

4am
Edward was mumbling to himself, the lab was exactly in a good state of repair, the place seemed to have been ransacked while he was gone, much of his research notes and tools were missing, no matter, a good bank robbery or two would replace the missing goods.

However the transmitter had been sabotage by Gold Brickers, parts stripped off, he had to make do with what he could, repairing it enough to get it up and running.

Now he took in a deep breath...it was time to go on the air...

Throughout Paragon and the Rogue Isles TV sets flickered form their regular broadcasting replaced with a symbol veteran heroes would know had always come to foretell chaos and anarchy, the symbol of a skull within the cog.

Edward was standing infront of the camera, to those with good eyesight, the ruins of the lab could be made out in the background.

"Greetings one and all, have you missed me Paragon?" Edward chuckled.

"It seems that due to a minor malfunction when saving your city from certain nuclear destruction by the hero known as Infinitron that a piece of equipment backfired, dispatching me to a nearby universe, much like this one...thankfully with my mighty intellect and a lot of time I was able to constuct my own portal back to the universe I know and love..."

Edward grinned, "Now I seem to remember my last broadcast being something about complacency among the heroes and villains of this world...well no doubt you have all gone complacent in my disappearance, I do not blame you, after all, who brought you the fun I did, on a city wide scale, nay on the global scale...nobody, nobody threatened you precious little Status Quo quite like I did..."

Edward looked down to his notes, lowering his reading glasses, "Now that I have returned I'm making the following announcements, one, heroes and villains will need to be on watch twenty four hours a day once more for when I decided it's time for the fun, after all, who knows what time is really fun time..."

"Big Als supermarket is having a sale on frozen Pizzas, two for the price of one, remember all other food places in the Isles are small time compared to Big Als..."

"And lastly...know this, those that have wronged me will have my vengeance, I have proven it once before that I can strike hard, fast and without warning, you will not know what hit you my friends, the sword of damocles hangs above your heads and know that at any moment it could drop to split you in twain, you shall curse the very day you were born as you scramble from the miserable wreckage that is your life..."

"On that note I think it's best to say goodbye for now and do stay tuned, coming up in the Rogue Isles is the early morning Arachnos educational slot, remember, knowledge is power and in Paragon City on channel twenty two you've got Magnum P.I., who doesn't love that moustached detective..."

Edward let out the laugh of a man unhinged as the transmission cut off, returning viewers to their normal early morning programs.

He was back...time to make some people remember him...

Have to agree that the only thing really making the natives restless is the semi-daily (it's not ever day but every other day it seems) 3-4 hour plus downtime, think everyone can agree that it's not exactly fun to be forced off during the middle of the day...

I joined Wondering_Fury for a farm mission, to be honest, I just wanted to get to 27 where I could buy generic IOs and then go from there.

The first 20 levels of CoV can be incredibly boring, especially if you've done it already, there's very limited scope for arcs to do, I've done all but Dr Creed and the unlockable pirate ghost badge contact before on my level 50 MM since this was prior to the XP smoothing and I tended to run out of contacts in each level bracket. He took me a year to get (Bots/FF is safe but not exactly speedy and heroside was calling).

Now once level 27 hits, it's the good period, where I don't have to worry about upgrading SOs, can primarily worry about slotting and power choices and just meander through the game.

Most farms (normally end up joining one for the 45-48 slog) bore me to tears but this one was chatty and generally quite fun, especailly getting to see Rage + Shield Charge + Footstomp in action, it's inspired me to start levelling an SS/Shield brute once I get my Dark/Dark Corruptor to 50.

Ah it was the 4th anniversery WoW celebrated but still you got a cute non-combat pet and an achievement, not exactly an amazing thing with regards the anniversery but it was atleast something.

hmm not sure..may have actually be 4th year anniversery...will go log in now and check the achievements list for you FFM, otherwise they may have just done it early.

It does have it's own virtual Band, the Banished Pantheon Blues Buskers...they preform in Pocket D every now and again (and yes I totally made that name up).

the WoW 5th anniversery celebrations weren't much...infact by and large they were quite small.

You got an account shareable non-combat pet, a baby polar bear (upt for a company named Blizzard really) and got a special achievement oh and level 80 elite Tauren chief would turn up outside a major neutral city and play 'power of the horde' every hour or so.

Still part of me thinks even something like that would be a bit a much for CoX.

Alright once again the servers are going down due to MA maintenance.

Place your bests on which faction/mob are being removed this time.

So far my options are:
None (likely)
Rikti Comm Officers (plausible but unlikely).
Freakshow (very unlikely).
High level Family (for old times sake)
A mob/faction of your choice (please explain why and how likely it would be)

Lets see what you votes are people.

Bonus points for possible maps being removed mentioned as well.

You know why it's so easy to Perma Rage with just 3 generic SOs...

...because the set was built around it, SS damage outside of the rage buff isn't all that great, infact because it's smashing which it seems like everyone and their dog resists except robots, you're not going to be hitting hard anyway.

The whole set was designed around perma-rage, it's why it has the annoying crash in it...yes they could drop the -def which does hurt some sets more than others, a /WP tanker isn't going to feel the defense debuff half as much as an Ice tanker would do.

I takes a LOT of inf and +recharge in order to get Rage to stack for anywhere beyond 10 seconds when you're solo, now with buffs you have longer periods of double Rage BUT then you can say the same thing for 8 x AM buffs that a Rad/X superteam has, due to the magnitude of buffs AM is effectively perma.

Also Controller damage is fine as IS it's just the combination of Fire and Kin that make it go into farming territory.

Here's a little fact, have you played a Fire/Kin through the early levels, soloing with one is like pulling teeth, infact soloing with any controller is like that, I've gotten my fire/Kin up to 14 and soloing with her is so painful I'm probably just going to delete her, I can't be bothered to wait 38 levels until she becomes good (meanwhile my Dark/Dark corruptor has remained steadly good for the last 19 levels). It's not until they get their pets and Transference that they actually become AoE damage gods.

Oddly there appears to be little to no background on the Cage Consortium themselves.

However it would appear that Kirk Cage bought the Island some time before Captain Mako became an Arachnos Patron due to the fact it was Kirk Cage who hired him to put a stop the the Miner revolts, which ended in the brutal death of Scrapyard.

So this is after Lord Recluse takes over the Isles but before the 'present day'...there's no clear date about when this all happens.

However Recluse did own the Isles since before 1984 of which Bloody Bay were a part of, however he sold off Bloody Bay in 1984 to another villain. the meteor shower happened in 1989. Mako also fought against Arachnos when they took the isles by force. This means Mako was around back when Lord Recluse first came to power so it would suggest that the Cage Consortium have been around for quite some time.

As a rule Player characters will never get Non-player character items, especially signature NPC items such as BaB's gloves.

Trust me, I would love to be able to have the Clockwork Kings style brain in jar with the floaty eyeballs as a head options sadly it's about as likely as me winning the lottery for it to turn up because it's what defines the Clockwork king.

NPC costumes are specifically tailored to that NPC, it's not like they used a player model and simply stuck the bits on. If we were to get NPC costumes as parts, there is nothing more I would love trust me on this (I would willing pay £20 for all the non-signature NPC costume pieces in a booster pack) then they would actually need to be made for atleast 2 models if the pieces was gender restricted to male (male and huge) or all 3 if the piece wasn't to be gender restricted.

Only recently have they been making NPC costumes available to the player but these costumes come in the same issues when the NPC group was introduced (Vanguard and Romans have NPC versions and a version available to player characters).

The amount of work it would take to make all the NPC options available to us is quite staggering and sadly this late in the games lifespan, it's very unlikely they'll bother.

Personally I wish they'd have made all the regular NPC faction costume pieces available to us from the start bar the ones like Tarantulas and snakes (different body types completely).

Hope that doesn't depress you too much but it's the sad truth of the matter...

It could have been a onestar bandit as they're nicknamed if you dropped from 5 to 3, a drop from 5 to 4 would have indicated someone thought it was good but not uber impressive, as happened with my little arc (it seemed to bounce between 5 star and 4 star with regularity between the 11 plays its got so far).

I too know the annoyance, of the 11 plays, 5 haven't provided any feedback either directly to me through global channels, the forums or through the tell system.

The thing may be that it may be our American friends playing it and rating it, even if they leave feedback it doesn't seem to reach us across the pond from what I can tell.

Actually even if you clicked once and the payment went through successfully, it still charged you twice, what happened to me, got no error please try again message, everything went through fine BUT it charged me twice for some odd reason.

Added in two glowies to the second and two glowies to the third mission with ambushes along to go with them also added clues detailing what you find.

Also reduced the size of maps two and three down from medium to small.

Thanks for the review GrinningSpade, it looks like that is the major complaint with my arc, I will be adding some non-required glowies and a couple of patrols to each the second and third mission, reducing the the third mission to a small Arachnos base map (didn't realise how big medium was).

Well I know how much you dislike lowbie status Col. but I'm asking for you to run my arc.

A proper Heist
Arc ID: 82059.

Designed with low level villains in mind.

Also you'll have more work coming your way, I've promoted your cuteness on the US forums, so expect some requests coming from them as well (they have been warned there's a long waiting list) but so far people loved it

Try to ask that they switch the code from US to EU as I suggested to another player who may have bought the wrong one, however his english wasn't very good and logged off before I could send him/her the name of someone who could speak with him/her in his native tongue.

Seems like my refund went through today as well. It was probably as GG says (agreeing with Golden Girl...oh the horror) that they had to clear a massive backlog of refunds with the website being a tad [censored] and all.

been waiting 3 days now at the 'give us your last 4 digits of your credit card' stage, I've updated the question but had no response so far...

...I do love CoH but the support side of things really needs a kick up the backside in the EU.

Lawful Evil Farmer...so you grow man eating plants or you just follow the laws of the land but you sell you product thats amazingly tasty but for such a high margin that only the nobility can afford it, leaving the peasants to starve to death while you cackle because it's all perfect law abidding, not your fault they can't afford your so-good-it's-almost-addicitive produce.

You evil person you...

nope, still in internal testing, they're up but you can't log in with a character.

Well it's 3pm...time to test if they're up yet or not...shall report back and see...

Don't worry you're not the only one, getting CTDs after every 3-4 hours of play (sometimes sooner), the game seems to have gotten a wee tad unstable since Issue 14...