Evangel_NA

The Evangel Task Force - A Fictional End Game to CoH

Hello all. To go along with my Farewell Video I've also created a two-part, extremely challenging end-game task force for teams of 8 to run and enjoy together. Built like an in-game task force the series is 10 missions long, over two MA Arcs, and spans the life of City of Heroes, revisiting past foes and giving Paragon City a fictional finale that ties into the farewell video's reasoning for us heroes leaving.

The task force is very challenging designed to be run by a team of 8, with many extreme AVs and big battles, and some twists and turns and complex mechanics. It is possible to solo this or run with small teams but when the AVs are reduced to EBs it's simply not as climatic. I recommend teams of 8 with good difficulty settings, a lot of the story is conveyed through dialog in missions and popup messages, but teammates can still read the story and clues as desired!

The point - as always - is to have fun and enjoy my version of the end of Paragon City, with some inside jokes to the game's past and a fictional rendition of how things went down for Paragon Studios. I hope anyone that plays it enjoys it, shoot me a message in game @Evangel and I'd gladly tag along and enjoy the fun!


Difficulty: Challenging/Very Difficult
Time to complete: About 1.5 hours (about 40 minutes per arc)
Suggested team size: 8




Evangel | Infinity Server

Well a lot of the shots are above the waist. I can neither confirm nor deny that Evangel is wearing pants in those shots...

A Farewell Tribute - "Memories"

So when I heard City of Heroes was closing I decided the best thing I could do was make a tribute farewell video. I love the initiative here to save or rebuild CoH and I wish it the best of luck and have offered up my writing/editing skills if needed. But I didn't want CoH to die with me crying and screaming "plz don't go plz don't go!" I wanted to give it a proper and fitting farewell, and wanted to say goodbye to my online avater Evangel with a meaningful salute. I joined this game in beta and have been a proud subscriber for 8 long and exciting years. Evangel was more than a character he was a part of me - and I've chosen not to carry him into another game. If CoH is reborn I won't recreate an Evangel - he stays with Paragon.

So I made this (long) video to say goodbye and focus on the part of City of Heroes I will miss the most - the memories. 8 years is a long time to have a virtual family and cast of friends. It's a long time to play a game and stay loyal to a universe despite changes you may like or hate. So starting on the day that the sunset was announced I started filming and editing together this short video.

The video is a symbolic journey that provides a fictional reason for leaving as well as a lot of imagery and mood to close out this chapter of my digital life. Everything from the camera angles to the dialog to the color schemes to the settings all were chosen to represent things about this game that represent strong and emotional memories of my time in Paragon City.



I hope in watching it people can remember what CoH meant to them. And whether we save it or not I hope people will be able to view it and feel the joy/pride I have for being a hero in Paragon, and share in my idea to not tarnish CoH's memory but embrace it. All good things must end, and if this is truly the end then this video is my goodbye. Feel free to share it, forward it, email it, etc. It's about 50 hours of work that has made me cry, laugh, and smile. It's my City of Heroes legacy and I can only hope you all enjoy it as much as I enjoyed editing it!




It's set to the appropriately titled "Moving On" by the legendary God known as Michael Giacchino. I recommend viewing it in full screen and in HD quality:

Link --> http://youtu.be/5hWfkHa4cBI





Go. Hunt. Save CoH.
Evangel | Infinity Server

(note: this is also posted on CoH Titan, so sorry for those already reading this on that server, just wanted to spread the word to all CoH heroes!)

Sadly that is the case though no matter what route you go. At least this way the player won't be responsible for activating the unconscious person. A patrol or even nearby boss set to villain definitely could though. One workaround is to make a custom character (unless you specifically want a signature character from game that is impossible to reproduce) and make the character have no attack and some stupidly low defense. That way if they accidentally are interacted with they will be killed relatively quickly and will go back to being dead. Of course that would mess up their text and they would eventually disappear.


It's sad that there is no option for something like this. I know it's a relatively unique request but when AE was released it was all about allowing the user to be creative and the tagline was always "you can't do that... yet!"

I feel like "yet" never came...

Nope, if the ally is unguarded the clue auto-drops at mission entrance as it is considered "complete". The only workaround to that is if the mission has an outdoor/indoor element (i.e. the breakout map) and the ally spawns inside. Since you start outside the clue won't auto-drop and will only hit when you "interact" with the ally. So that is one workaround but gives you a limited number of maps you can work with.


There really isn't much you can do, but one thing I will tend to do is use the ally as an escort or, if you want them to be combat-ready, find another way to introduce the clue. What I will do sometimes is have a glowie so that I know it will spawn further into the mission than the ally, then have the glowie nav text say "Meet <person>, then lead them to <glowie name>." Technically the meeting of the person isn't necessary, but from the nav text it appears to be, then have the glowie be something where the ally "explains" their story to you and that way you can give the ally a clue. It's a horrible and annoying workaround for a bug that should be very very very easy to fix but of course AE gets the bottom of the work-order because you can't trick freedumbers into buying new toys with AE so it's not making them money. AE used to get slow fixes before freedumb, now fixes are almost non-existent...

There was at least a bug at some point (which maybe they still haven't fixed?) where if the boss was set to "empty" enemy group it would auto-spawn the native group if the boss was the same enemy group, unless you set the entire mission to empty.

So one solution is as quoted here, another is to make a copy of the boss in his own enemy group then it shouldn't spawn the native group. I recall that being a workaround in the past.

Actually, by presenting even more examples of how the end-game is a lagfest you did enforce my point. Go back and read the point I was making. I'll wait here for you.

Classic way of trying to denounce my post by not actually addressing the point - and instead actually enforcing my point.


Thanks!

Not just the particular maps that others have mentioned but it was the idea of who you were fighting that stuck out to me. The point of the origin-specific content was that it gave you a small sense of character. I know not everyone takes all of the origin stuff into account when making their character and not everyone takes time to write a four paragraph bio for their character when they create them - and that's fine, as said multiple times already, there are other options for people who are more fast-tracked - but for those that do it's nice to step out of the gate with your hero and do something that is in line with the origin of your character.

So it's not a particular map or mission, it's that if I make a science hero I get a science story, if make a magic hero I get a magic story, etc.


The biggest argument I see against this complaint in this thread is that "the missions suck, who cares, you get better missions/xp/blah blah blah now" but that totally misses the point of the OPs comment. It's just about having some flavor and some choice.



For 7 years the player base has complained that there is a lack of variety in the content, and the devs have spent 7 years addressing that by adding more and more content. But if you're trying to convince people to play this game, forcing the same content on every new character just comes off as a grind - and it's going to turn more people away than it recruits. Unless the object of the new game experience is to recruit farmers.

You know, I gotta say - and I mean this as no slight against you personally - but I'm tired of the "reduce lag/server space/random technical comment" excuse that is being used by the devs for everything lately. So worried about their precious freebies that they limit our pet spawning ability (something earned as a vet for the years they have spent paying the devs) and if this is honestly a reason for removing contacts because of the few missions they spawn the excuse is getting lame.

The launch of Freedumb has hardly boosted CoH's server load to an extent that content needs to be removed to prevent lag or save space. I've played on two of the three heaviest traffic load servers and have never seen numbers of players that even approached the load the game had at launch - and we never had particularly frustrating instances of lag at launch beyond those kind of early bugs that all MMOs have.

So the "reduce lag" excuse imo has become the corporate answer to everything and I'm sorry but I'm not buying it. Not when one of the most lag-inducing content is the iTrial farms that we are so heavily encouraged to play non-stop. Let's take lag away from the early content to trick those freebies into becoming ViP and then encourage them to lag out with iTrial content... sounds legit.

The devs at one time said this was the case but I know from personal experience that this rule is in fact not enforced. A friend wanted a character name change and tried repeatedly for over a year to contact the owner of the name.

Finally he contacted a GM about it and the GM confirmed the account had not been active for over 2 or 3 years. So the GM was kind and offered a "one time" name change saying it wasn't something they normally did but in this case they would.


So if names are *supposed* to be released after so many days of inactivity that system is either not working or has been removed.

The story of the arc was fine but imo it's a gross misrepresentation of the remainder of the game. A person playing the game for the first time does the tutorial which now has no instanced missions. Then they come and are forced to run this arc which spends the first half of the arc showing off the new combat phasing technique and flashy gimmicks like turning your character into a Hellion. You don't get your first door mission until about the 4th part of the arc, and by that point you're already level 4-ish. You go a full four levels before getting a door mission. Then you finish the new opening set of arcs (which as the OP states gets you to around lvl 9 or 10) and then suddenly BAM - everything is door missions.

Now I know they say "we're going to add more combat phasing" but they also say "we're going to add more base design" and "we're going to add more AE features" but how often do they really deliver on their promises?

I think a newbie playing this game now gets a very very very bad representation of what the remaining 40 levels of content is going to be like.




I hardly call them arcs either, but like the OP stated and like I stated, it's a matter of giving the player base some options. It's like the architect said in The Matrix - it's all about choice. In a game based on repeatability (you have 12+ slots per server for crying out loud) why would you ever remove content??

You might not like them, that's great - but others might. Like many others I have a couple dozen 50s. Some of them I fast tracked through the lower levels, some of them I didn't. I like having some flavor. Calling something "Freedom" and at the same time taking away choices seems like a juicy contradiction...