FredrikSvanberg

I will just nominate this for now, not sure if I'll have time to get any more in:

Best Original Group
Dhahabu Kingdom and the Unfathomable Nightmare of Sand (453511) by @Zamuel

I'm nominating it for "best group" (the Changua Jinamizi) but if I could I would also nominate it for "best use of otherwise annoying map". I think it's one of the best arcs I've played recently so if @Zamuel didn't have an arc in "best heroic" already I would add this there too.

"Holiday In Praetoria"

So you been to school
For a year or two
And you know you've seen it all
In daddy's car
Thinkin' you'll go far
Back there your type don't crawl

Play ethnicky jazz
To parade your snazz
On your five grand stereo
Braggin' that you know
How the ghouls feel cold
And the tunnels got so much soul

It's time to taste what you most fear
Right Guard will not help you here
Brace yourself, my dear

It's a holiday in Praetoria
It's tough, kid, but it's life
It's a holiday in Praetoria
Don't forget to pack a wife

You're a star-belly sneech
You suck like a leach
You want everyone to act like you
Kiss *** while you *****
So you can get rich
But your boss gets richer off you

Well you'll work harder
With a gun in your back
For a bottle of enriche a day
Slave for soldiers
Till you starve
Then your mind is read by a flake

Now you can go where people are one
Now you can go where they get things done
What you need, my son

Is a holiday in Praetoria
Where people dress in black
A holiday in Praetoria
Where you'll kiss *** or crack

Des-pot, des-pot, des-pot, des-pot, [etc]

And it's a holiday in Praetoria
Where you'll do what you're told
A holiday in Praetoria
Where the tunnels got so much soul




Inspired by a comment someone made in the Cape radio global channel. He was right, the lyrics hardly need changing at all.

Ouroboroses.

I think that one problem is that stalkers pay a powers tax for AS, Placate and Hide - three powers that arguably all Stalkers should get as inherents but now they take up spots on the powersets that could be used for other powers like AoEs.


I would make all three of those powers inherent, or at least Placate and Hide (since AS is thematically tied to the powerset). Placate would of course be replaced by the PBAoE attack that was originally removed from the powerset to accomodate for it, and Hide should in my opinion be replaced with a thematically appropriate debuff.

• Regen: Venom. A strong -regen debuff.
• Dark: Blind. A strong -tohit debuff.
• Elec: Synaptic Overload. A sleep mez and -end/recovery debuff. Like a single target Static Field.
• Energy: Sap. A strong -damage debuff.
• SR: Hamstring. A strong -speed and -recharge debuff.
• Nin: Dart (use the Knives of Artemis hand crossbow animation!). A short but powerful Hold.
• WP: Nerve Pinch. A strong, long-lasting Stun.

Or if we want uniformity and something everyone can use, give them a short-ranged Bruising debuff, -resistance to all for 10 seconds. Heck, make it special: it doesn't cause aggro or break hide until the effect ends - that way it can be used to set up a boss for an AS.

If a Stalker can debuff targets it helps the entire team. If a Stalker's debuffs are somewhat immune to GM, AV, EB and Boss debuff resistances it would make them even more useful against those kinds of enemies.

Breaking the Barrier (And Putting It Back Together)

Title: I don't like it. Too clunky. I'd skip the part in parenthesis.

Overall: very nice formatting. Very readable. A bit heavy on the clues, some of them could use some color to make them easier to read.

Mission 1: So far so good, maybe a little too many objectives.

Mission 2: Intro says Crey's Folly, popup says The Hollows. Cool "trick" with the debris and the machines in the last room. I wonder why the Nagans are hanging out in a Rikti base though. And what a Rikti base is doing in The Hollows. Or Crey's Folly.

Mission 3: Ugh, Dr. Aeon. I'm on a controller. I hope this goes well. Ok, he spawned as a lieutenant so that was easy. Mission was fun, I might replay on higher difficulty just to take full advantage of the allies.

Mission 4: Feels sort of unnecessary right away from the introduction - the story about Suziku and her mishaps feels like it's over, so this mission seems tacked on. Let's see how it actually turns out. Ok, it was pointless filler - it didn't actually add anything to the story, and it just seemed to be there to "fill time".

Mission 5: Fighting Dr. Aeon over and over is fun but why are his clones so... how do I put this? Suicidal? They don't seem to care that they get defeated.

Annoying! "Talk to Suziku", it says, but I didn't see her anywhere and I got all the way to the end of the map where I found the computer I'm guessing I'm supposed to bring her to. Now I have to go all the way back to the beginning and look for her. Fortunately there was new stuff to fight on the way back through the map for the third time.

Nagans: I don't really like this custom group. To me it's too much of a mish-mash and not enough of a theme. Lizard-people, ok. Somewhat similar uniforms, ok. But their powers are all over the place, and their uniforms aren't uniformal enough. Everyone is a different color. At least they are well balanced - there are so many different kinds of them that it's unlikely that you will meet a combination that stacks anything dangerously. At least solo on standard difficulty. Maybe they will begin to stack up radiation and other nasty stuff on a large team. I'm of course very picky when it comes to custom mobs, but to me the nagans don't add to the story as much as they distract me from it.

Overall the quality of the arc is top notch, however, and I appreciate the work that went into the design of the nagans, even if I for various reasons don't like the finished result. That's a pet peeve of mine though so probably not something that would be a problem for anyone else. My opinion is that if there's a canon group which can possibly do what the story requires, a custom group is always unnecessary. In this case the arc was more or less intended to show off the nagans though, so of course they can't be replaced.

And here are my notes on last week's arc.

Contact: Midnighter? Why? If you want a "neutral" party, the Vanguard would have made more sense. At least they have a reason to oppose Nemesis, since he started the Rikti war. Midnighters have nothing to do with Nemesis. Also, having a generic Midnighter magician as a contact doesn't really help me feel anything for the contact or his story. Make the contact unique, with a name and a personality. I think that would help with the writing too, since it's rather bland right now.

Mission 1: Statesman? How about using Citadel instead? He's a robot so would want to make sure that Nemesis isn't copying robots. He might be next! If possible I would change this map to something else since you use an Arachnos base map in mission 4 too. I didn't get the impression that this was supposed to be an actual Arachnos base, but maybe I misread something.

Mission 2: Here's a perfect place to introduce some of the new automatons. Maybe the Stone version was used to excavate the laboratory, and some of them are still around.

Mission 3: Cool map. Despite shutting down his factory Nemesis is still churning out robots? What was the purpose of this mission then? Might be better to say that Nemesis has already churned out enough robots to invade Grandville, instead of making the entire mission feel pointless by saying that he's still producing robots.

Mission 4: Lord Recluse? How about Black Scorpion instead? He's in charge of the Arachnos robots division, so he would want to make sure that Nemesis isn't copying them. By the way, why wasn't Nemesis copying some of Arachnos' robots?

Mission 5: The introduction to this mission seems to go into unnecessary detail. Instead of rambling on about what happened to Statesman and Lord Recluse, just tell us that they are on the scene - we'll see for ourselves what has happened to them. In fact you don't even have to tell us that they are going to be there; since we already recruited them we expect them to be there.

The side notes talking about what Nemesis will spawn as and that there will be a Rikti heavy present really disrupts my sense of disbelief. Then I was disappointed when I didn't find the Heavy. A warning for potential EB/AVs is ok, but try to rewrite it as something the contact would actually say. Oh and if anything in the mission deserved a warning it was the Arachnos Flier. I thought it was an ally when I first saw it (since that would have made sense) so I didn't even worry about it, and then it killed me.

The new Nemesis automatons should really be introduced earlier, as some people have said in this thread, or at least mentioned in some of the clues. Maybe each mission before this could introduce one of the new kinds of automatons as a unique spawn, and then they all show up together at the end. Or if you don't feel like showing them too soon, put some boxes of "spare part" in the missions that hint at new kinds of automatons being produced.

Lord Recluse says "Let us bring down this traitor" as if Nemesis was working for him and has somehow betrayed him. This doesn't make sense.

Statesman was trapped in a different kind of energy field this time around. It should probably be the same field in both missions, if possible.

I'll throw my arc into the ring. I'm currently playing last week's arc so I'll be adding some comments to that later on. Here's the arc I'm entering:

The Murders In The RWZ Morgue: (#452144) There has been a murder in the Vanguard base and Longbow needs your help to catch the killer.

When I update it the status bar says that there's an error, but it works just fine anyway.

First time I played it with a Defender, second time with a Scrapper.

I'll just comment on something I remember thinking about when I played it: the first mission really should use Knives of Artemis. The custom enemies aren't exactly an improvement, with their spamming of web grenades and smoke grenades and other annoying powers. I remember wondering who these guys were and why it was a custom group.

Not to mention that the 1-star griefing will be much more difficult when a single dislike-vote doesn't cancel out 7 like-votes, or whatever the rate is. With a like/dislike system each vote carries the same weight. It's a whole lot more fair than the current system.

Congratulations, a well deserved victory.

I suggest "Sparky" for gremlins and "Buzzy" for voltaic sentinel.

And "Dummy" for confused enemies.

But brooding.

Or is that Smallville?

Maybe all PPs have the 50% bonus xp. Try killing some more PPs and see if they all have the bonus. Maybe they have it to make up for some of them giving lower xp by MoGing.

The arc #458169 is a farm called "Pandora's Box" by @Nepenthey, not "Repercussions".

Well this confirms everything I've ever suspected about JRPGs. Good thing I never played them.