GlaziusF

Can Stone Armor's activation sounds please fade after a reasonable amount of time? Whenever I go through a mission where I'm running Crystal Armor the incessant repetition of its three atonal chords threatens to drive me completely mad. I do not believe this is an intended feature.

Thank you for your consideration.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a level 50 stone/ice tanker, +1/x1 with bosses on. Lookin’ for a little light nightcap.

---

Snow Owl (my contact) certainly looks the part, but he really needs some notation in the contact description noting the famous and outlandish stuff he’s been responsible for.

Yeah, I was kinda expecting an elevator joke.

When I enter I immediately get a clue -- perhaps my ally was set to have no escorts, so he comes free immediately on entry? Even though allies don’t start following or fighting until you tag them, the objective to free them will still complete immediately if they have no guards.

Anyway, I take the measure of the enemy group. Pretty believable period minion suits and powers, technicolor swords and all, but I’m not seeing descriptions. (And some of these powers are kinda ridiculous scale for minions. Ten Thousand Blades? Dragon’s Tail? Rain of Arrows?)

One of the villain’s henchmen, an EB named Rain Delay, is apparently the next link in the chain. I find him on the fourth floor. Pretty clever concept, baseball bat/stormer, but a couple things. On somebody with KB resistance, Tornado can stack itself three or four times and lead to some seriously dire defense loss. Granite stands up to this, of course, but...

At low health, he drops a Freezing Rain and runs. I mean actually runs, as in “stop this guy from escaping” runs. No soundoff from him, no warning in the briefing or the navbar, and he’s about 50 feet from an elevator. Mission failed. On a guy with multiple ways of slowing you, knocking you back, and making you miss, that just ain’t fair.

So, trying it again.

This time, I find Zed-boy on the third floor. No sign of Rain Delay yet.

...he’s in a giant open room on the very bottom floor. (This map starts at floor 5 and goes down.) Oh lord.

Fortunately I can pull him into an enclosed office and block the door, and when he’s not busy being pancaked against the walls, Zed-boy helps do enough damage to shut him down.

He mentions a hostage on an upper floor, so now I go back through the entire office looking.

...and the hostage is also on the very bottom floor. Well, now. That’s actually interesting. Explains why Snow Owl wanted us in the first place.

To add inanity to injury, the Spoiler himself is right next door. He spouts off... movie references from the modern era, for some reason. I figured he’d be doing period stuff what with his opening quip.

...also, he’s illusion/mind control, the man with two confuses. Good thing I’ve got Minerals.

The Spoiler drops, and I wait around a bit for his pets to die too before the mission finishes. No longer will he haunt the Paragon City zoning board... but the future refused to change.

---

Storyline - ***. Well, I knew from the start this would dead-end. But I’m always up for a little retro-camp, and near the end I had a little realization about why I was getting involved to begin with, which is always nice.

But things are pretty bare here. In particular there’s really no reason for the Spoiler to be there. I’m not asking for a good reason, just an entertaining one. I mean, like...

“Ronnie Roberts was a humble ticket-taker and general dogsbody at the Paragon Cinemas. His only regret was that everyone always talked about the movies on their way out of the theater, so he never saw a movie he didn’t already know everything about. One late night in the stockroom, a freak bolt of lightning energized years of film reels, fusing them with his body and twisting him into the Spoiler, a nefarious ne’er-do-well intent on using his mastery of images to ruin the enjoyment of others by any means possible!”

Design - *. This map may be good for demonstrating the madness of in-game building codes, but it’s terrible for objective placement. Maps illustrate what they consider to be “front”, “middle”, and “back” now when you’re choosing them, so if it’s important you can avoid picking maps that put the “front” deeper in than some of the locations in the “middle”, or have the “back” as a little stretch of corridor off in the corner of a floor with two giant open rooms.

In this case it’s definitely important.

The enemy group is a wonder in terrible technicolor, and the enemies generally have distinct ways of doing things to tell them apart.

Oh, and there’s the surprise failable mission objective. There may be situations where this is appropriate, but this certainly isn’t one of them.

Gameplay - *. The minions are sporting some crazy high-tier powers just on their own. The bosses... well. For Rain Delay, any one storm power would present a formidably challenging debuff, but he has, as it were, the perfect storm, and on top of that I basically had to exploit NPC pathing in order to prevent him from escaping. The Spoiler himself is, as noted, the man with two confuses, and he can put out a decent amount of fear as well. Many ATs don’t really have much defense against these particular badstats, and as a result the final boss fight presents the equally attractive options of “use break frees the entire time” and “wait to die”.

Detail - *. The best parts of retro camp are the cornball conversations and outlandish stories, but the bosses rarely speak up (or do so inappropriately -- the Spoiler should be “ruining” period work that anybody playing the story would already know about) and the rank-and-file enemy group didn’t even have any descriptions that I could see.

Overall - *. A good concept for a comedy arc, but with little to no amusing detail and rather lacking in execution.

Tonight's random arc: The Spoiler's Building Code Caper (249899). Verdict - *. Review lower in this thread.

My current queue:

• Randoms!

If anybody wants in, the instructions are in the first post. A part of these instructions, perhaps pertinent to this post: I always vote 5 in-game, as it seems a bit uncouth to ask people to jump through hoops and then bomb their rating.

Something that isn't in the instructions but could stand to be said: CoH Mission Review isn't my private site. It's not even my site. Anybody's welcome to leave a review on anything, and it doesn't even have to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a spine/regen scrapper, +1/x2 with bosses on.

---

Oh, I do like this Crimson opening. Promises some high-stakes stuff. Let’s see what’s on offer.

Job one: go kick Requiem when he’s down. But isn’t he always?

Ah, he’s got a Cyclops body guard. That’s a little interesting.

...and he’s “sleeping” inside a cyst crystal? Nice touch.

He calls for backup, but nobody comes.

---

And now it’s a little more explicit that this is a backline to the Kahn TF. With the Reichsman running free, Crimson wants a line on what the reborn 5th is up to, and I get to extract a loyalist.

Ah, Vandal! Cool, he’s got a nice suit. No real match for Nosferatu, at least a +2 Nosferatu, but he does help do some damage before the vampyr becomes an ex-bloodsucker.

The lieutenant Wolfpack bot I get as a supposed help is even more chaff before Nosferatu’s chill. And I find that the 5th has been storing files on Omega Team?

Maybe that has to do with the patrols that were talking about burning the files and then shucking their uniforms. I wonder who they were with?

---

Well, judging by the fake automatons in the next mission, it’s probably Malta. Who fed the 5th information on Omega Team for... a reason.

Oh. Controlling Reichsman. That’s a pretty good reason.

Apparently the Malta pumped Infernia for information, and she, having missed their big coming-out party (with the giant robot door prize and everything) went along with the whole charade.

---

Look, if scientists were afraid to try crazy wild ideas to save the world we’d all be sitting in caves afraid of fire.

Still, a little more intel never hurt nobody. I explode some trucks and set off their theft alarms, capture some bosses, and drop a 5th EB, who spills the whole plan: fueled by all Axis Amerika and steered by the Malta, Reichsman and the 5th will stomp on human faces forever.

(I find Max Action and the Civic Squad as some kind of allied hostage? But I can’t really interact with them as the navbar objective would seem to indicate. Did I miss somebody?)

Crimson seems to think that the Omega Team ruse was just a distraction - Malta have had the codes to Reichsman’s prison for a year, but were waiting to spring him so people thought the Omega Team capsule was somehow involved. Ultimately they wanted to... well, I suppose we’ll see.

This cliffhanger’s good stuff.

---

Hmm. Okay. So I’m going to go spring enough Statesmen that Reichsman’s hybrid synergy drive runs out of gas in time for the end of the Kahn TF. Crimson points me to Gyrfalcon, and warns me that there was some other purpose for gathering intel on Omega Team.

So I pop out Hippie Statesman, Genius Statesman, Petite Phalanx Statesman, and Francis Statesman, who hates being used as a dimensional battery. AND EVERYTHING ELSE. After picking off one of Hatesman’s entourage who wandered up into the catwalks, I feel the dimension start to collapse inward as someone tries to smash the last pod.

Ah. Ajax. Now it’s all starting to come together. Malta got at him, too, and played on his guilt at being the last apparent survivor. (But how on earth did he get into phase? Did he just bull through the dimensional barrier?)

Apparently the mission wasn’t somehow setup to insta-fail if I let the timer on native Statesman’s pod run out, so I click it to... complete the mission? Aw, I was hoping Gyrfalcon got cloned for Kahn, or something similar.

---

Storyline - ***. Anybody who’s been in a comic shop during a massive companywide crossover event has acquired at least a passing familiarity with the concept of the tie-in book. Well, this is Crimson’s tie-in book, about foiling an attempt by Malta through social engineering, heavy disguise, and baldfaced lies, to free Reichsman and....

And....

And it kind of escapes me what comes next. Actual physical remote control, either directly or through a backdoor in the hybrid synergy drive? Nosferatu mentions finding and thwarting some attempt at physical control of the Reichsman but I don’t think it’s brought up again. Social control, through shepherding the Primal 5th Column and liaising with Axis Amerika? Certainly plausible, but I wonder if even the Malta could keep it up forever. Distract him while they try to hijack the drive to power a certain alternate dimension’s Zeus Omega 1-5-0? I’ve just made that up entirely, of course.

The spycraft kind of flies out the window in the last mission, as supporting the Kahn-running Civic Squad is of immediate importance, and Ajax shows up through some unexplained mechanism to slot the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the past.

Admittedly at that point it probably doesn’t matter what the Malta are planning unless we might be helping to accomplish it, which we aren’t. The missions shift focus from investigation to accomplishing a set of known objectives, but the threads of the earlier investigation (how did Malta get the codes, and what are they planning) keep on getting resolved anyway. It feels artificial, and deflates a lot of the mystery and secrecy that had pulled me through the arc up to that point.

Design - *****. Great use of thematic maps and mission features to set the stage, though my general advice about patrols applies here: patrols have a giant sound-off radius now, so you can get away with one talky patrol per message you want to convey and have the rest tromp around in silence.

Two caveats with this whole affair. One, the containment device glowie in the last mission is talked up to have disastrous consequences if it’s activated, which I assumed (as it turns out unreasonably) would include premature mission failure through some clever mechanism or other. It would help to either make the objective optional or describe it with positive language instead of negative language (inspect the containment unit, maybe?) Two, I have no idea what’s supposed to be done to accomplish the optional objective on the Axis map. I combed as much of it as I was comfortable with and found the Civic Squad, but was at a loss with how to interact with them.

Gameplay - ***. I don’t make difficulty exceptions, even for missions designated as TF-style, but the bulk of the opposition here were stock EBs/AVs with generally reasonable powers. Except in the last mission, but because of objective placement and generous use of allies it played out as half normal mission, half interactive cutscene, which is a decent enough ending.

This is really all down to the Skyway rescue mission. Generally when that map is used in canon it seems dirt-simple. Run down the single ribbon of elevated highway, grab Olivia Darque, run back to the truck. In the Mission Architect, with a sufficiently beefy objective list, it undergoes a startling transformation. Objectives can be placed on the slightly lower strip of elevated highway off to the left of the main drag. And on the street level at the south end of the map. And down under both strips of highway in the slums. So even if you don’t punch your map reveal button like a chump, you may have already run over the proper location for your objective, only ten stories up.

I don’t know if I wound up clearing that entire map, but after my first circuit came up several objectives short I did start wiping out everything I could see so that my old friend the tab key could be of some use. And it took a long, long time to get down to the vacant lot behind a concrete partition that held the last boss fight.

Detail - ***. This is Crimson’s tie-in book, and it feels a little like a tie-in book written by an author with a bone to pick with editorial’s handling of the marquee title.

Don’t get me wrong, here. I’m not going to hold up the Kahn TF as a shining jewel of plot and characterization. Nor am I going to object to the characterization of Crimson as the smartest guy in the room, because that’s his dang job description. But part of the reason Crimson is the smartest guy in the room is that he understands that there are certain pieces of information which are dangerous to know, especially if they’re about the wrong people. Or perhaps the right people, depending on how you look at it.

I can understand running a combination of overwatch, disinformation, and good old spying (specifically the part where you fight a dude with an iron bowler hat and another dude with a bear trap for a mouth) to make sure other people can live with their comfortable illusions. But those illusions come out of Crimson’s deliberate choice rather than their deliberate ignorance. It feels more vindictive than anything for Crimson to be looking down on people for not seeing the whole picture, especially considering he’s blocked off parts of it.

By and large the dialogue and descriptions in this arc are clear, often humorous, and generally fitting, but running across the occasional bit of bile is akin to eating a delicious cherry pie and then biting into a Warhead candy some jerk shoved into it.

Overall - ***(*). So, confession time. When I trawl through CoHMR looking for randoms there are some sorts of arcs I avoid, because I know I’m probably going to skew them low. It’s something I’m probably a little more personally sensitive about, maybe unreasonably so, and as a result I try to avoid it

What is it? Well, it has to do with the player-character separation that I keep nattering on about. As a neutral example of this, consider the scenario in mission 3 where I’m looking for objectives in the middle of a 5th Column attack. My character knows that she shouldn’t be wasting time on the troops, or the distracting patrols Malta cooked up, but as a player I know that if I don’t take them out it’ll be a lot harder to target and find what I’m looking for. There are things I as a player know, about the history and development of CoH, that don’t really have an in-character equivalent. My character can flash back to the time when Sister Psyche was in Aurora Borealis’s body, but not to the time when, say, smoke grenades did a -50% to-hit debuff.

By and large the Mission Architect has to operate through characters talking to other characters, even if its ultimate goal is for you as a player to tell your story to me as a player. And the arcs I tend to avoid are the ones where I suspect there’s going to be a lot of player-to-player talking with maybe a bit of ill-fitting character veneer slapped on top.

This arc doesn’t do it very egregiously, mostly in the occasional side comment to a story that’s pretty much capable of standing on its own. But that makes it worse, in its own way -- you’ve got this decent setup for a completely character-driven way to say what you want to say, so why pull back the curtain?

Anyway, this would probably be at least a four-star arc in any reviewer’s hands but mine, though you might want to have that Skyway City map looked at all the same.

Tonight's random arc: Project Parallel (316325). Verdict - ***(*). Review lower in this thread.

Random arcs I flipped through trying to find one I hadn't played before:

A Spanner in the Works, Part 1 (336662). Verdict - **

My current queue:

• Randoms!

If anybody wants in, the instructions are in the first post. A part of these instructions, perhaps pertinent to this post: I always vote 5 in-game, as it seems a bit uncouth to ask people to jump through hoops and then bomb their rating.

Something that isn't in the instructions but could stand to be said: CoH Mission Review isn't my private site. It's not even my site. Anybody's welcome to leave a review on anything, and it doesn't even have to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

@GlaziusF

Running this on my mid-20s stone/stone brute, +0/x2 with bosses on.

---

Contact is pretty visually distinct, but he could use a description now that you can add one.

Okay, so another villain group’s being raided by the Rikti for some reason and they need an outsider like me to bail them out. Well, alright.

I rummage around the trash cans in the initial room before finding part of a map, which the Rikti spawn an ambush to get their hands on.

The structure here is a bit odd, though. There’s a bunker down in the caves... has this villain group been working above a Rikti bunker all this time, or is the conceit that the Rikti expanded their bunker network to break in?

Anyway, the magus goes down fairly easily, but the room itself and the rather large spread of his minions means that I have to find a Rikti swathed in glowing energy walls who just completely spaced out during the fight before the boss will count as complete. You could probably just narrow it down to him alone to clear this fight.

---

And now the Rikti are messing around in the sewers under the base with some high explosives. Alright, easy enough to stop.

There are some SG lower-ranks bumming around here, mostly getting slaughtered by the Rikti. I don’t really get the chance to see many of them alive.

...and the Lost, as the level dips down below 30. I didn’t know that worked the other way. Maybe you could just make a custom group out of normal Rikti, or mess with mission pacing so nobody faces -1s by default. The “Lost” talk just like Rikti do, so I’m betting this wasn’t intended.

Looks like I’m putting together some sort of map pieces? Also while the clear-all is pretty reasonable, for some reason it doesn’t count the bosses and such spawned by battles, so the mission completes while I'm fighting for my life against a couple Chief Soldiers and spray around some damage to hit the normal minions with them.

---

Yeah. No idea why this map is so important or why it got broken into pieces, but apparently I’m going after the last one now.

It would seem that this whole punch-up has been over.. the soul of some Oranbegan? What could the Rikti even do with that? The maguses aren’t exactly very sophisticated.

It’s not really clear from the debrief what it was, either.

---

Oh, alright, it’s a phylactery. Still not sure why the Rikti wanted it.

Hmm. The problem with this Oranbega map; that is, the special map called “Oranbega”, is that it’s all twisty corridors and intersections, and there’s hardly any room for anything. My ally and the end boss spawn in the same room.

You may want to take Detention Field off of him, though, so he doesn’t lock away the end boss. Took a while before I realized her health bar wasn’t going down because of being a boss but because I wasn’t affecting her.

Lich down, cash in hand.

---

Storyline - **. So, the Rikti are invading this supergroup to get a map. Like, an actual paper map, not the encryption keys to reveal a map. It’s a magic map so I suppose that makes a little sense. Over the course of the first three missions we collect the pieces of this map, only to find that the Rikti... already have what it points to? Or they already have the phylactery related to it, and they’re looking for the place of power it points to, because...?

I get that the end boss defected to the Circle some time ago. I’ve got no freakin’ idea what the Rikti are doing mixed up in all this. I mean, sure, there are Rikti maguses, but those are special troops, for the express purpose of dispelling the magic barrier locking them off from their home dimension. They’re not engaged in what you’d call general-purpose magical activity.

What I could make out of the overarching story seemed to focus around the end boss, but she wasn’t really talked about until the exit briefing in the third mission, so that’s the vast majority of the arc without any mention of the one thing that really ties it together. And therefore the vast majority of the arc really isn’t tied together.

Design - **. The Rikti bunker doesn’t make a lot of sense. Not the one in the third mission, that one’s fine; it’s supposed to be an invasion of a Rikti base so a bunker fits there. But the bunker-under-derelict office in the first mission is kind of weird given that the premise is “Rikti invading a supergroup base”. Why not just use, say, a tech lab set and put Rikti on it? Are they supposed to have come in in some kind of ground-crawler?

I mean, that’s fine, but set up a little in the briefing or similar.

The last map may be called “Oranbega”, but it’s not the best map for general-purpose use. It’s about 90% corridors and 10% very, very tiny rooms. They’re not even special corridors and tiny rooms, they’re all drawn from generic map tiles. I forget why it’s a special map, exactly -- maybe it’s the introduction to Oranbega that shows up in the Hollows? -- but you should pick a different one.

Also now that it’s possible, it would be nice if you decided on a desired level range for this arc instead of just leaving the lower bound trawling.

Gameplay - ****. Watch for defeat alls in maps with blind corners or other difficult-to-see areas, like the sewer map. We have a nice little objective radar now to help with such things but that doesn’t mean going back to the first room to pop a conscript who ran behind a pump any less frustrating.

Aside from that the opposition was stock and generally not given over to crazy crossfire scenarios, and the end boss was reasonable with help, once she popped out of her detention field anyway.

Detail - ****. Individual missions had reasonable objectives and I was never misled by the navbar or confused about a single mission’s story by a clue I found inside it. I unfortunately didn’t get a chance to size up the custom group of henchmen but as they were all allies who mostly died offscreen that doesn’t much matter.

Overall - ***. Decent scrap against stock enemies with a custom to cap it all off. Motivations and objectives are clear on a mission-to-mission basis, but there’s a bit of poor map choice and the story doesn’t come together well.

Tonight's random arc: Quoth the Raven (74617). Verdict - ***. Review lower in this thread.

My current queue:

• Randoms!

If anybody wants in, the instructions are in the first post. A part of these instructions, perhaps pertinent to this post: I always vote 5 in-game, as it seems a bit uncouth to ask people to jump through hoops and then bomb their rating.

Something that isn't in the instructions but could stand to be said: CoH Mission Review isn't my private site. It's not even my site. Anybody's welcome to leave a review on anything, and it doesn't even have to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

...haven't logged on to my first 50.

I'll go back! One day! I promise!

You do know that if your assassin strike doesn't kill its target everything nearby gets a modest to-hit penalty and a chance for fear, right?

The fear has a percentage to activate, but the to-hit penalty doesn't. This suggests how stalkers are intended to fight in crowds: keep the enemies as a whole frightened and swinging at air while they methodically carve up one at a time. Admittedly this requires you to forgo the thrill of that initial kill out of nowhere, but build up works just as well when you pop it visible.

Hey mate. If you're up for 'em I have another few arcs. Take your pick. There are a couple of villain arcs you didn't get to last time (The Bravuran Jobs, Backwards Day) and a new hero arc appropriate for a level 50 (Operation Fair Trade).

@GlaziusF

Running this on a level 50 DB/Fire brute, +1/x2 with bosses on.

Apparently this arc’s been refactored into easy and difficult versions. 397625 is the difficult version and that’s what I’m playing. 397624 is the easy version, and I’ll play enough of that for an enemy group comparison when I’m done. The difficulty I’ve chosen is the “usual” difficulty on this character, where I can get through any given canon mission chain solo. We’ll see how it goes.

Incidentally, did you know there were like two dozen arcs named exactly “Pest Control” by various authors?

---

Ah, Dobbs. Your go-to guy for all things pestular.

Looks like an intro mission to the new customs with Arachnoids brawling with ‘em. And giving as good as they get, generally.

The one kinda sore spot is a boss with Build Up and Stone Melee. That’s just hurtin’.

Also there’s a guy down here makin’ like he came to fight Arachnoids. Laughable on the face of it, but I don’t pay it much mind.

But hey, now Dobbs is all riled up on account of he doesn’t much like competition.

---

Time to go headbutt some Crey. The rationale Dobbs gives doesn’t seem to fit well, though. Maybe he took my description of the uniform and ran it past his various informants?

Up until the end level Crey are containing the ants pretty well. The only battle they don’t win is one where some kind of boss ice ant spawns.

And then the end room, with boss skull ants and the dark armor powers that give +perception.and stealth. Honestly nice effect, but there’s too much accidental overaggro.

Does the end console only spawn when all the skull ants are down, or was I just terribly unlucky in not noticing it until then?

Anyway, looks like Crey is just using these strange organisms for research. Apparenly a rogue member may have created them. Whether this is a rogue rogue member or a “corporate will disavow all knowledge of your actions” rogue member remains to be seen.

---

Oh boy, time to crash the mandatory voluntary employee recreation day! I imagine many people there will want the sweet release of death anyway, so.

Oh. Well, can’t have a picnic without ants.

The navbar just says “6 Crey employees”. I like it when I get some hint on what to look for. Body bags? Rescues?

Seems like rescues.

The generic employees dump some dialogue into the system text. I think you’ve put it in the wrong box.

No clue from this mission, but from the employees I get a name.

---

Dobbs says he’ll look into it while we stop the ants from tearing up St. Martial.

So the Titan Ants I’m supposed to drop have good stone armor but don’t seem to be a big jump above the normal boss bull ants, as they’ve got no buildup or I believe Rage.

...not that I WANT them to have Rage. That’d just be silly.

Huh. That’s odd. I get a clue on mission end about Lockland, but that seems like it’d make a more appropriate end clue for the previous mission.

On the plus side, this map has shown me something I never knew before - enemies can spawn on the beach in that St. Martial map with all the rubble. “The Flush”, is it?

---

Dobbs still has no leads on the Crey madman who may have made these ants, but he did manage to find their queen. Well, well.

...this is Atta’s cave. Only full of ants.

SO MUCH REPRESSED PICKUP TEAM RAAAAAAAAAGE. But seriously? Atta’s cave is h-u-g-e HUGE with about 5000% of your RIRDA of busy intersections. This is a terrible map to find anything in. It’s a double terrible map to find anything in when most of the mobs have perception-boosting armors of one sort or another!

The exterminator has entirely too large a perception range thanks to his targeting drone, and aggroes on me right when I run in. Fortunately this means I fight him alone.

I can kinda see the idea of having glowies which drop bits of inf and inspirations, as many glowies in the main game do this. But all the destructibles and glowies, while kinda nice for flavor, don’t really mean anything past the first repetition. They just make noise and get in the way. (Also, it’s spelled jewelry. One less E than you think.)

Finally I find the ant queen. Either she calls silent ambushes or a patrol wanders in midfight and I wipe. (This is why ambushes should always make noise, so the player knows what’s up.)

Yep. Multiple silent ambushes. Peachy.

The ant queen goes down.

I get 770 bonus tickets, and that’s with remembering where the boss room traditionally is in the Atta caves.

---

Storyline - ***. It does an alright job of linking the missions together. It’s functional, doesn’t try to be complicated, and is generally true to its contact’s character in the way it’s approached. The connection to Crey Industries does kinda come out of nowhere, though. Maybe we pick up the canister the exterminator in the first mission was using and go from there? That seems about right.

Design - ***. The big capper mission is Atta’s cave. Atta’s cave is way too big. The bonus from carving through only part of Atta’s cave is greater than the total payout I’ve gotten from some entire 5-mission arcs. The destructibles are an interesting bit of flair but the glowies, while they would be sensible if used in a canon mission for the purpose of extra inspiration refills, are just a lot of sound and annoying.

The environs are capably done generally, and the ants are impressively insectile, though unfortunately the auras around them often obscure some of the nice detail. As a cute little touch, the ants in the easy-mode mission look like extremely scaled-down versions of their selves in the difficult mission, though you’ll only notice that it for some reason you want to play both.

Gameplay - *. As I’ve remarked in at least one other review, there’s a difference between being challenged and being “bludgeoned with math”. I reserve the latter case for situations where my base to-hit is floored so I only connect when the RNG is feeling generous, my base defense hits -50% or below so I only get missed when the RNG is feeling generous, an enemy can chain confuses so I can only do something when the RNG is feeling generous, enemy groups have wide-spread and auto-hit or high-volume endurance drain so I get all the fun of being chain-held by Malta Sappers with the added bonus of actually dying in reasonable order, my base recharge is jacked up so I can go get a drink while the little teeny dots in my power bars come back, or an enemy (especially a boss) acquires significant burst damage capacity through a nuke or Aim/Build Up so the RNG can kill me off at will.

This arc bludgeoned me with math a lot. And you know what? The easy arc actually did it way more often.

Here’s the thing. For a while I thought of thorn assault as basically an all-range version of spines. Not that spines isn’t a good mixed-range set, but even so. But there’s something about thorn assault that you may not realize: crazy mad staggering defense debuffs. On everything. That stack with themselves, and often get the chance to, because it’s one quickfire set.

The difficult ants mostly use spines, except for one lieut. The “easy” ants use a whole lot of thorn assault.

You know what’s a decent mixed-range set to face in mass numbers? Claws. Leave out Followup and maybe Slash for the -def (though in a decent mix it’ll rarely come up) and it’ll do just fine.

Apart from that, the only real objections I had were Build Up on the bull ants, Liquefy on the Magma Ants (though they rarely used it, if it connects that’s a long-duration chop at both to-hit AND defense), and maybe Midnight Grasp on the Skull Ants (it’s so strong Paragon Protectors save that and Inferno as desperation attacks), perception-boosting armors on any ant that’s got them as the last three missions offer lots of opportunities for chain aggro, and Willpower on the end boss, because its natural regeneration plus the standard AV regeneration is a big deal.

Detail - ***. The ant descriptions are alright, generally. The two big problems I have are: first, there seems to be an end mission clue showing up one mission too late; second, the exterminator’s maniacal “you’re too late to stop me” rant is hinted at in the clue to mean that there’s some trick he’s got up his sleeve, but the mission proceeds as the briefing indicates that it ought to, with the ant queen going down and the ants tearing themselves apart.

Overall - **. An arc with serviceable design choices and story progression brought down by what is to all appearances unintentionally boosted difficulty.

Tonight's random arc: Pest Control (397624 + 397625). Verdict - **. Review lower in this thread.

Random arcs I flipped through trying to find one I hadn't played before:

Kali's Scythe (445456). Verdict - ****
Drakule Armageddon V (257242). Verdict - ***
Evolve or Die (411446). Verdict - *****
The Night Has A Thousand Eyes (121455). Verdict - *****
The Labors of Rustam III: The Longest Day (78130). Verdict - **
The Sinister Song (454892). Verdict - **.

My current queue:

• Randoms!

If anybody wants in, the instructions are in the first post. A part of these instructions, perhaps pertinent to this post: I always vote 5 in-game, as it seems a bit uncouth to ask people to jump through hoops and then bomb their rating.

Something that isn't in the instructions but could stand to be said: CoH Mission Review isn't my private site. It's not even my site. Anybody's welcome to leave a review on anything, and it doesn't even have to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

Tonight's random arc: Assault on Aru Prime (174586). Verdict - ***. Review in MA Forums thread.

My current queue:

• Randoms!

If anybody else wants in, the instructions are in the first post. A part of these instructions, perhaps pertinent to this post: I always vote 5 in-game, as it seems a bit uncouth to ask people to jump through hoops and then bomb their rating.

Something that isn't in the instructions but could stand to be said: CoH Mission Review isn't my private site. It's not even my site. Anybody's welcome to leave a review on anything, and it doesn't even have to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

Review as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a low 30s necro/dark mastermind, +0/x2 with bosses on.

Nothing says evil like zombie soldiers, after all.

---

Awful lot of chained ellipses in the first briefing. Admittedly this may be to convey a particular speaking quirk of the Admiral’s but unless she actually stops mid-sentence and trails off you might consider other punctuation.

Okay, so we’re looking for some kind of ancient artifact that can destroy psionic potential, and covering that up with another op. I’d be worried about keeping cover but it all boils down to pushing buttons in the end.

So, information extracted. Everybody in here aside from the security patrols seems to be from the minions-only group of civilians. Not that I mind the punching bags, but a group with only one rank of enemy isn’t worth very much. Maybe you could use civilians escorted by the lieutenants and bosses in the security corps?

---

Now to put the screws to this peaceful planet while they’re waiting for the cavalry to arrive, destroying the entire planetary shield and murdering most senior defense personnel.

I like the way you set up the activation and completion messages of glowies to chain into each other. Nice touch.

In addition to the normal security forces it seems there are several unheralded vanilla boss spawns, in addition to the named one. Nice touch for a high-security installation.

But they go down just as easily, and now we’ve looted some shield technology.

---

So apparently we disrupted the artifact’s transfer with our bombardment. Whoopsie! The admiral’s sending me down with a scanning device to look for it.

(Incidentally, that’s a good candidate for an opening clue.)

The other aliens are kicking around down here as well - dropping a commander (robots or just the pulse rifle? Can’t tell now) gets me the clue that they may have beaten us to the punch in nabbing this artifact. Judging by the lack of presence in the important places I looked, this seems true.

Oh, and the place is full of civilians trying to find survivors and lamenting the destruction of war. Poor dears.

---

Well, looks like they’ve got it on one of their ships and are going to take it off somewhere safe. Can’t have that.

Oh, Arachnos. I was expecting a tech lab, but there are definitely some starship lookin’ pieces in here too.

I’m not entirely sure what the entry message means. I guess the side tunnels are those bits to the right part of the map and the main ship is to the left? Because assuming it’s the other way I end in a small empty room that I think is going to be some kind of boss place.

Huh. Nope. Okay, so the west part was the side tunnels and the east is the engine core. And I can understand doing that, because it definitely looks appropriate, but that room is a terror to navigate even if you’re not a mastermind.

---

Ah, now we save our home base ship, and the tech lab tiles come out. Surprised you didn’t go with Longbow to match the white color scheme, but I guess the Freedom Corps logo can get a bit too prominent.

Damn. Okay, spawn density plus every Azeri Engineer’s moral obligation to summon their robot friend plus even greater spawn density because of objectives means that in certain rooms and arrangements I face about twenty enemy forces.

I’m worried about how the artifact defense is going to work out. Fortunately it’s just a glowie. I can hardly imagine trying to protect something given the crazy expanding spawn numbers.

No clues for this mission, though... and no souvenir, either? I guess this was a casualty of a diminished arc size.

---

Storyline - ****. This is a pretty credible first half of the story. Well, it works in itself and resolves what it sets out to do, but this is the first half of the story of some kid on Aru Prime who’s going to find a giant robot or something and save the Azeri Alliance from the murderous Terran Federation. It’s a good victory for the villains, is what I’m saying.

The only problem I have is that the crystal’s a bit of a MacGuffin. It’s all well and good to be chasing after it, but using it is also plot-important, and that just happens off screen. I was kinda hoping we’d get to plug the thing in and see it turn on (dropping the last desperate push in a mission exit clue or something). Maybe that’s a thing with space issues? Well, you’ve got more space now.

Design - ****. The various details in the missions do a good job of portraying both the conditions on the ground and the scale of the atrocities I’m committing, with the one last exception I noted above.

There’s this weird jagged lower scale to the missions, though. I came into this arc on the low side and I believe getting bumped up from the start to 35, but this spiked to 41 for the last mission or two. The character I came in with can generally hit above her weight, so I’m not really worried about that, but I didn’t see anything that would necessitate the bump. I mean, if there are canon mobs in this mix that’s a really impressive accomplishment as I didn’t recognize them at all in with the enemy group.

My only problem lies in recognizing the Azeri mobs in combat. I realize they’ve got about the same amount of variety to them as the Aru mobs, and I could pick those out just fine, but the problem is that the Azeri also necessarily include a decent swarm of battle drones, which introduces a certain amount of noise.

Gameplay - **. The first two missions start out alright, even if the civilians are still a bit of a threat that don’t reward very well. But then, it’s looking for a couple glowies on a sprawling outdoor map with random patrols, and then trying to find glowies in the labyrinth of an Arachnos reactor room, and then the last mission.

The Azeri versus Terran battles spawn Azeri bosses. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be bad, but through some freak of luck all the battles managed to take place in close proximity to the EB spawn, which meant that I ended up fighting the EB AND a boss AND their complete complement of minions, ALL of whom had spawned robots.

Maybe putting in a couple identical minions so only one in every three spawns robots would be a good step towards making the last mission less of an aggressively uphill fight.

Detail - ****. Some generally nice description on enemies and various clues that winks out (the clues, at least) for the last two missions. I probably shouldn’t be attributing all of this to space issues but given the profusion of customs and the age of the arc it feels more that the ending detail, including a souvenir (and I was expecting a medal!) was deliberately trimmed than that it was left out.

Overall - ***. Not intended as an average. The arc started out well, but later missions got a bit more annoying and a bit sparser on supporting detail, ending in a mission that had an unnerving tendency to put me up against quadruple odds, with no clues or souvenir to be had.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a level 50 DB/Fire brute, +1/x2 with bosses on.

---

Ah, Igor. When you want a dab hand with the needle and a willingness to stick all manner of jury-rigged devices out in the harshest weather, you can always count on an Igor.

So let’s go fetch some bodies. For SCIENCE! And also maniacal affective disorder.

Oh man. ZOMBIES. Zombies with freakish undead strength! Zombies with bone clubs! Zombies with bone claws! Zombie soldiers with guns! Zombies with... freaky radiation powers? Okay, I can kinda buy that. Though watch the rad/rad synergy, a little casual combat had me down under Base Defense -50% (the technical term for this is Base Defense: Haha, No). Zombies with... gravity control and sonics? You lost me.

---

Zombies ain’t cutting it, it would seem. Welp, time to hold the world for ransom. Let’s just nick a standard in-package doomsday device here.

Man. Freaky radiation zombie plus soldier zombie equals base defense minus a hundred. (So do two freaky radiation zombies in quick succession, before the click radiation powers wear off.)

I see some bosses in here. A claws... something, and a necro... something. Casually using necro on bosses can turn out wrong, as you can get focus-fired by the minions and lose all your accuracy. It isn’t as bad without the lich vomiting darkness everywhere, but you might want to keep it to just minion zombies.

Wisely I decide not to prod happy fun doomsday device and just leave it in its protective packaging.

---

Doomsday ain’t cuttin’ it either, it would seem. Only one hope remains: horrifying abominations of mad science! What has man wrought?

...well, I suppose we’ll see.

Oh. Standard super mutant. Big, blue, exposed brain, giant power gauntlets. He is silent, some might say stoic, as we head for the exit.

I bypass the guard and drop the super mutant off, and this turns out to be a pretty big mistake as I wind up facing a +2 axe/will elite boss with buildup.

And a name you probably never thought would be relevant again, but surprise surprise! That’s Rick and his mask, alright.

---

Even a super mutant doesn’t work. Igor’s so shocked he drops his accent.

And decides to go off and extract a brain that still loves mad science, in the vain hope of getting his doctor’s spark back.

Unfortunately he runs into a bit of trouble. Well, well.

So I hook up with an elec/elec brute and start laying waste to some zombies.

And then the doctor on the top floor, whose energy melee/energy aura suit gets shredded by the both of us.

Unfortunately then I have to run Igor back to the main door before the mission will complete. I think there’s a better way to do this, but more on that later. With Igor’s grim work both finished and started, the arc’s over.

---

Storyline - ****. A little light mad science parody, though I was a little disappointed we didn’t spend a last mission butting heads with Igor’s now-overenthusiastic master. Never addressed (perhaps not important?) is the source of Igor’s animosity towards Dr. Weirdstrum. It’s not as though there isn’t a whole academy’s worth of mad science out there in the Rogue Isles so we only need to pick on one guy.

Design - ***. I’d suggest dropping the two required escorts. In the third mission, it means that if the super mutant dies it fails the mission, and I’ve had bad experiences with custom bosses getting lucky before, so the design encourages people to fight the elite boss in that mission without any help. In the last mission similarly, if Igor dies it fails, and after the doctor drops he needs to be led to the exit.

I would have suggested making Igor an escort who responds to being led to the doctor in the last mission, except the Mission Architect is apparently interpreting all escort arrival directives as “do nothing”, so having him respond on arrival would disable his combat capabilities for the fight.

Also it’s a little off for the doomsday device to be just a single glowie in a plain wooden box at the end of a lab map. Maybe we can pick up a bunch of crazy components with no idea how they fit together? Just a thought.

Gameplay - ***. I applaud not giving all the custom zombies dark powers as that often makes it impossible for me to fight enemies in large groups. Unfortunately two of the lieutenants have such drastic defense debuffing powers that it makes it impossible or me to survive against enemies in large groups. I’d suggest making the radiation zombie just have radiant aura and accelerate metabolism.

Also, watch the use of Aim and similar short-term buffing powers, especially on boss and elite enemies, who can take out an entire health bar in a good burst.

Detail - ***. While I can appreciate the desire to replicate the cinematic Igor accent, giant blocks of Igor text (such as is found in every briefing) stop looking like words. The practical payoff seems to be Igor being so shocked on one briefing that he temporarily drops his accent, and honestly it’s not worth the hassle.

Overall - ***. There’s definitely some comedy going on here, but the customs can be a bit of a doomed endeavor to fight, the escorts you grab in missions are set up so that you’re reluctant to rely on them as allies, and Igor is true to the flavor but a real pain to actually understand.

Tonight's random arc: Unbearable Funk (3573). Verdict - ***. Review lower in this thread.

Random arcs I flipped through trying to find one I hadn't played before:

Impossible Kung Fu Mission (111367). Verdict - not spelled out, in the neighborhood of ***.

My current queue:

• Assault on Aru Prime (174586)

If anybody else wants in, the instructions are in the first post. A part of these instructions, perhaps pertinent to this post: I always vote 5 in-game, as it seems a bit uncouth to ask people to jump through hoops and then bomb their rating.

Something that isn't in the instructions but could stand to be said: CoH Mission Review isn't my private site. It's not even my site. Anybody's welcome to leave a review on anything, and it doesn't even have to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a mid-20s stone/stone brute, +0/x2 with bosses on.

---

Ah, Tarixus. How’s it floatin’, dead man?

Mission 1: Defeat the Warriors Three. Well, this is going to be a short arc!

Nah, probably not. But I am getting involved to make the needle in this power struggle point due Arachnos.

Okay, so I defeat the three warrior bosses who use unconventional (for the Warriors) weaponry -- nice touch, by the way -- and find their assault plans. Time to go zombie-stomping.

As an aside, since there’s only one clue in the mission you don’t need to make it and the end-of-mission clue say basically the same thing.

---

Hope this is a small map, because the briefing makes it sound like I have to wax everything in it.

Okay, pretty compact, actually. Battles going on, pretty interesting, but a couple things: first, the NPC dialogue radius is pretty big these days so there’s no need to have multiple battles with identical dialogue. One talky battle (per unique talk) and silent battles for the remainder will do fine. Second, battles will pretty much always start where you can’t even see them, so battle dialogue that assumes anybody new is there doesn’t make much sense.

The Pantheon talk about protecting a Coven, which doesn’t make much sense. I think that’s the enemy group that shows up every Halloween chasing the Malleus Mundi.

The closing-mission clue once again recaps the single clue you get from grabbing the only glowie.

---

Okay, so some nobody has absorbed the power from out the crystal and is going to be a big threat in our taking it back from the Warriors.

I say “Bring it”.

The guy actually goes down pretty quickly... is that Energy Aura he’s got on? Well, that’d be why, though it does fit a temporary arcane powerup.

Anyway, the closing briefing says something about the Mu restoring the power to the recovered crystal, but as far as I know we haven’t actually recovered the crystal yet. Was it supposed to be a glowie on the boat?

---

Heh. Tarixus decides we should give the Warriors a nice present for their troubles. I’m all for that. So, let’s steal something from the Banished Pantheon.

In the sendoff Tarixus calls them “witches” but the Pantheon magicians are all “shamans”. “Witches” can refer to either the Coven or the Cabal, neither of whom seem to be involved here.

Hmm. According to the crystal clue I drop it in a protective container of some sort. Now that we have opening clues this would be a good opportunity for one.

---

And now to place it. The ending room looks a bit empty, so I get ready for a fight when I place the crystal.

Well well well, look who broke out. They yack as they go down about spoiling the trap I’ve set, and I find some sort of midnighter amulet on one of them.

Apparently even though I’ve bopped them one they still have the energy to spring the trap meant for Odysseus. Faithful to the end. Tarixus is pretty satisfied with us going 1-0-1 against the Warriors, and the arc’s over.

---

Storyline - *****. The story is a pretty simple one, but I’ve marked it highly because it does something that in my experience is unusual in Mission Architect: legitimately builds to a head in mission three and achieves closure over the last two missions through repetition of story elements even though the “big boss fight” is over and done with.

There’s nothing unusual about what goes on, save perhaps for the intervention of the Midnight Squad, (but then again they’re feeling their druthers a bit so I can dig it) and it’s a decent reason for a villain to get involved butting heads with the Warriors.

Design - ***. One of the good things about the Warriors is that their costume design is so spartan (if you’ll forgive the pun) that it’s easy to make customs that look like they fit in, and these customs certainly manage that, while still being distinguishable from the rank-and-file due to combat auras that Warriors don’t have.

There are some places to deposit opening clues now that the technology exists, but more than that there was an awful lot of duplication - doing a single clue-yielding objective to complete the mission and acquiring both its clue and a mission complete clue that said essentially the same thing. This isn’t really necessary, except perhaps for space concerns which aren’t relevant here.

Also, I couldn’t pick out anything I did on the cargo ship in mission 3 that actually accomplished the plot objective of retrieving the power crystal. Unless the EB had it stuffed down his pants or something.

Gameplay - ****. Stock enemies for the most part, and reasonable customs otherwise, in missions with sensible geometry and therefore not a whole lot of running around trying to find stuff to do. Word of caution: now that you can peel powers off enemies individually, you might want to take Aim, Build Up, and powers that work like them (especially Rage) off of bosses, as the scales end up a bit too punishing.

Detail - **. This is where the arc falls down. In addition to some more specific concerns, it has a tendency to use German/18th-century capitalization, capitalizing all nouns of any sort, which makes for a choppy read and the occasional bit of confusion. The names for the customs and the way the arc characterizes various enemy groups don’t make a lot of sense.

The Warrior custom bosses all have names based on their various weapons of choice, which seems a bit at odds with the group’s roots in mythic symbolism. The titular three custom bosses - an archer, a brawler, and a dagger master - could stand to have more mythical names, say Apollo, Cratus, and Hermes, or if you can find some mythological trio of strength, speed, and brains (archery equals brains because you have to aim, you see) among the Argonauts or in the Iliad that would work too. The super-Hewer, gone mad with power (as you do) could call himself simply “The Axe”.

While the game occasionally uses “coven” as a collective noun for the Banished Pantheon, this can cause confusion with other enemy groups who are much more witchy than the shamans of the Pantheon. I’d suggest calling a shaman a shaman and referring to the BP as “cultists” in collective, having the minions talk about protecting the crystal or serving a boss Spirit as appropriate for the map.

Overall - ***. An arc that feels in large part like it could have come out of the game, with a simple but novel (in my experience with MA at least) story progression. However, it’s marred by the occasional oversight with clue presentation, and generally unpolished text.

Tonight's random arc: Warrior's Three (64855). Verdict - ***. Review lower in this thread.

Random arcs I flipped through trying to find one I hadn't played before:

The Tannhauser Gate(96322). Verdict - ****.
The Labors of Rustam: The Cold and The Dark (54293). Verdict - ***.
The Echo (1688). Verdict - ****.
Through Rose-Tinted Glasses (101681). Verdict - ****.

My current queue:

• Randoms!

If anybody wants in, the instructions are in the first post. A part of these instructions, perhaps pertinent to this post: I always vote 5 in-game, as it seems a bit uncouth to ask people to jump through hoops and then bomb their rating.

Something that isn't in the instructions but could stand to be said: CoH Mission Review isn't my private site. It's not even my site. Anybody's welcome to leave a review on anything, and it doesn't even have to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.