FredrikSvanberg

I think Vigilance should just be a static endurance discount dependent on number of team-members BUT with a nice damage bonus when the defender is solo.

Say 15% endurance discount for the first team-mate and another 2.5% for each member after that. That's a constant 30% discount on a full team without anyone having to get hurt. About an SO's worth of end red in every power.

Conversely, when the defender is going solo a 20-30% damage buff doesn't seem unreasonable. Whatever the number should be it should bring the defender up to about Corruptor levels of damage before calculating in Scourge.

No, I can't. My menu doesn't have any shortcuts at all.

Hair gel? Wax?

What idiocy is this?

You use hair spray, the kind marketed as "concrete". That stuff can easily cover for Viagra in an emergency.

Thanks for your review!

But they destroyed the usefulness of the list by forgetting to put the shortcuts back in, so you can't use it with just the keyboard - you have to use the mouse. I had memorized a bunch of keystrokes to get to certain emotes and now they don't work anymore.

He's only been kidnapped once.

Unfortunately he's never been rescued, so nobody knows where he is. That's why he doesn't show up in the game.

I played it based on a comment Venture made on the VU2009 channel. I was all like "Five stars? Who are you and what have you done with Venture?"

Since the Venture impostor didn't reply I assumed that the real Venture had gone to play your arc and had been cleverly trapped inside the MA by those evil Crey scientists, and a reprogrammed copy loyal to the Countess had been released to promote the arc in order to lure more people into the trap.

Yes, my powers of assumption are that great.

Anyway, I decided to risk entrapment myself by playing the arc and go looking for the real Venture. I figured if I rescued him from the MA file storage it would get my next story a better review. Unfortunately I was too late. The body bag... Well of course my contact told me it was some scientist nerd he knew called Lorenz or Lothar or something like that but I knew the truth. Those bastards. They had killed Venture!

Now it was personal. I went back inside, axe and burning skin aflame, and started chopping and burning every damn thing I could find. Those freaks kept getting back up and I kept smacking them back down. Some guy called The Orderly acted all tough but spent most of the time running when he wasn't on his back from one of my mighty attacks. Took his good time to die though. I found some nerds in there, probably other people who had tried the arc and got trapped just like Venture. I released them before they could be copied and we left. I felt just like Rambo releasing those P.O.Ws from the death camp, it was sweet.

My contact looked surprised to see me, a little nervous perhaps. I think he knew that I knew that he was in on it, and I was on to him. I put a little pressure on him and he revealed that the real mastermind behind all this was some Uber-Dork, and he was waiting for me in the next mission with all these machines designed to catch me and put me away for good. The next time you saw me it would be a loyal copy spouting Crey propaganda. Never!

I rushed inside, swinging my axe everywhere. A loyal sidekick waited to be rescued, so I did. She had almost got caught but the process had given her unexpected powers so she turned out to be very helpful once we found the uber-dork. We waited around for his Instant Healing to wear off, hitting him now and then just for show but of course it was pointless - he couldn't be damaged. While he was glowing and screaming about his grand scheme I ran around and killed his goons. Finally he stopped healing and together with Spunky Sidekick-lass I kicked his ***.

With the girl clinging to my manly arm I returned to my sweaty contact. He looked flustered, as if I had stolen his girlfriend or something, and mumbled something about dinner reservations. I was confused. "Was this it? This was worth five stars? No, my idea about Venture having been captured and replaced by a clone made more sense. This was three stars at most, and only because I can't give two and a half."

Now for the constructive criticism: uuuh... oh yeah, I didn't think the Uber-Dork needed all that Regen. I didn't quite understand why he had psychic powers either but that didn't bother me. With Instant Healing or whatever the power is called he is basically invulnerable for 3 minutes or so. If I had been on a squishy that would have been boring. The Orderly had similar problems with being slow to die but I don't think he used Regen. Willpower probably. He was just annoying because he kept running away instead of fighting. That's not your fault of course, unless you set him to prefer Range and gave him Melee powers, or something like that.

The custom Crey and Freakshow mobs were rather pointless. The Crey weren't explained very well. Some of them were apparently undead? Reanimated dead tissue? I didn't have time to read all their info before they died so I never quite got what they were about. And the custom Freaks only showed up as part of the boss spawn and maybe an ambush - a waste of custom mobs if you ask me. The entire last mission could have used those custom Freaks with perhaps a few normal Freaks scattered around instead. To be honest I prefer the real Freaks, but I didn't get a good look at the custom ones (except Uber-Dork, and he wasn't pretty), so if I had been fighting them for a whole mission I might have liked them better.

I'm pretty sure it's been in this section for the past year or more.

Every time I play a TF I get the dreaded "let's speed through this" in team chat. It always annoys me, since I'm not just there for the merits but in fact want all the drops, xp and other rewards. Not to mention that I usually enjoy the fighting.

My suggestion is to add a new kind of challenge setting: Defeat All. It would turn all missions on a TF into a defeat-all in addition to the regular objectives. If the challenge is completed the team gets a large merit bonus (since they invested all that extra time), one badge per TF and possibly an accolade if they get all the badges.

I can't think of a good name for the badges at the moment and I don't really know what the Accolade should be - maybe a 10% merit bonus - but I would still love to see this option because I know that there would be people out there trying to get it, and then I'd be able to find more TFs that don't stealth or speed-run through everything.

In before "form your own TF teams" and "horrible idea, people will just spawn missions for the minimum number of players before entering with a full team". For the first objection I'll just say "ok, but I can't force people to stick around for my arbitrary rules" and for the second I'll add that they could make the TF missions always spawn for 8 people if this challenge is chosen, if that's going to be a problem.

Ah, first suggestion for me in the new forums. Be gentle.

My guess is that he doesn't know that the text box will in fact let him write below the bottom of the box, so he thinks he must fit his post within the visible space provided.

I cannot confirm or deny my 60 month veteran status as that may or may not compromise a potential NDA in the future.

Hm... I might have noticed some weirdness but I chalked it up to Cimeroran mez protection so I didn't really pay attention. I removed Confuse from my powers tray a few ITFs ago and haven't been using it since. Mass Confusion seems to work fine though but I mostly use that when Domination is up so again the observation is probably skewed.

Is this the thread we post in to get people to give us rep?

Like all rating systems it's bound to be abused and fail.

Thanks for the review!

I'll just clear up some of your questions.

The Doctor is a canon contact, more about her can be found here: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Doctor_Friedkin

Executable Number 6 is one of her allies in the web, mentioned briefly in canon missions. Having him look like a recolored Paragon Protector saved me some mission space and I thought of it as him poking fun at Crey, or possibly using a hacking device which made him look that way to enter the mission. It wasn't supposed to be that important.

You're right, mission 3 is annoying with the way the hostages show up. I'm going to see if I can find another map where all of them will fit in the last room. Having the MA file storage server look like a sewer is supposed to be a joke about the average quality of the missions stored in it. Or something.

The office-to-cave maps were supposed to represent the Doctor hacking into the administration layer of the Mission Architect through a normal mission. At least that's what she's doing in mission 2. In mission 5 it's not so clear, I agree.

For my twist end to work a real-world mission wouldn't work. The Doctor is also all about the web and existence as a digital ghost so for her it makes more sense to pull the player into her world and make him do things her way. That way she can actually help him access the places he needs to go. But mostly it's because it's a story about the MA so it makes sense to make it all take place within the virtual world.

I'm glad you liked the custom MA staff enemies, I spent a lot of time working out the balance and testing them with different ATs. I think I created a pretty cool group which could provide a challenge both for teams and solo artists. I only wish I had room to fit more different-looking types of enemies in it, for greater variation. Since I made the group I've found more MA staff types standing around in the AE buildings and I wish I could use them all.

Once again, thanks for the review.

Hm... not a bad idea. What would the set bonuses be?

I'm for anything that gives me more options.

There's a lot of details cluttering up the market buildings/trucks compared to other parts of the zones.

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I guess I'll use some less obscure lore the next time - the precedent for "heroic" outcasts is a well-hidden CoH "secret".

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Do you mind pointing out that story arc to me? I honestly don't remember it. It might've been something I played years ago or skimmed through.

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It's ok, almost nobody remembers it.

It's a throw-away comment in the introduction to a hunt mission. The contact tells you that Outcast are causing trouble in Boomtown by pretending to be heroes and fining civilians for jaywalking. It's silly because as we all know there are no civilians in Boomtown, but the idea of mutant kids running around pretending to be real heroes and "fining" people for petty cash instead of mugging them stuck with me.

I don't think it's a stretch for a splinter group of Outcasts to decide that "hey, maybe we CAN be heroes!"

Thanks for the review.

I guess I'll use some less obscure lore the next time - the precedent for "heroic" outcasts is a well-hidden CoH "secret". The explanation for these heroic outcasts however is right there on the bottle: these Outcasts are breaking off from the rest of the gang and trying to become actual heroes. By doing so they have crossed your plans, and you have decided to crush them - or Desdemona has, if your character lacks such motivations.

Your helpful spelling tips were wasted on Desdemona, she insists on speaking like that. At least when I'm writing her. She also wishes to remind you that the Longbow in her building were there for the same reason as the Outcasts - they had heard the rumours she had spread and figured they would protect her, despite her protests. She told you so after you were done with the mission.

Thanks for noticing "cemetary", nobody else did. I'll fix it, eventually.

I suppose convention demands that Teremex tries for a final attempt at treason but on the other hand I'm writing him and I decide whether it's his style or not. He's an ancient highly intelligent wizard who sees a chance to get what he wants in exchange for something he doesn't care about. Why should he attack someone who already beat him once?

Once again, thanks for the review.

If you're taking submissions again, feel free to try my other arc: 1152, The Doctor Returns. It's got enough character hijacking and identity crisis to choke a Venture, but is still good enough to get three stars from him.

I noticed Venture talking about the arc in a global channel and decided to check it out. Certainly not as bad as he would like us to think but he seems awfully fixated on the sanctity of his character's identity and the necessity of every story being about the player's character, for some reason. This story is obviously NOT about my character, since my character isn't anything like what the protagonist turns out to be, so I don't have a problem with that. To avoid spoiling too much I'll just say that my character only contributed his name and appearance to this story. I gave it 4 stars because while it was very well made... well, once the twist was revealed I wasn't having much fun. Just going through the motions until the now somewhat obvious end. I loved the first two missions and the custom enemies in them, and wouldn't have been upset if the arc abandoned the twist and treated it as a straight-up zombie invasion. Perhaps you can make another arc which treats the zombies as the real threat?