Iannis

Maybe they just needed some server defragging or something

Lately when I log into the Virtue server that server has some intermittent issues with bad rubberbanding and mapservering and whatnot. Go back to play characters on Freedom and that server is just fine and dandy. Although once I logged into Sharkshead on Freedom and it was horrific lag. They probably bugged the Ghost of Scrapyard and his hundred followers, or something, sharks was turning into a black hole zone a lot while the issue was still on Test. Pft, maybe multiple Scrapyards are spawning at once and sinking Sharkshead back into the sea through a million man march.

it's a very heavy arrow?

my demon/ta didn't get to EMP arrow level on test, what with them never level bumping demons. Isn't it just damage against robots but otherwise a Hold (to stack with Ice Arrow, I suppose) with a nova crash? That'd seem like super awful suck arrow to me considering the only robots at 40+ are probably Malta mecha. Oh, and Praetorian/Psychic clockworks. Do Tarantulas count as robots, or freaky malformed Widows stuffed inside armor? I never thought about it.

not so much needing a tank that can handle it as needing people able to listen and destroy the generators in unison.

and if you have a guy who isn't using his proton gun on the Hydra? Forget about it. You can easily get away with not using the flamethrower on the hydra tentacles since they don't seem particularly vulnerable to those goofy things, but the head NEEDS the ray guns firing on it. After that it's just an exercise in mopping up the Rikti ambushers.

Mutation should've opened up a minigun for AR.

The Super Mutant hits you for 999 points of damage, shredding you to a pile of bloody meat with his minigun!

At least now there's not a Quantum or a Void hunter in practically every pack

VEAT arc is like 3 missions, the first of which ALWAYS sends you to Mercy Island (because devs hate villains and know we hate mercy), and then another mission or two...and the higher level ones only become, like, a single mission. "I'm a Destined One!" "Nu uh Kalinda re-Divined the destined one list and you're not on it!" "THEN I'LL JUST BEAT HER UP AND PUT MY NAME ON IT AGAIN." "wow you really are a destined one!"

VEAT arcs feel like they were an afterthought rather than real story arcs like the squids get to run. While rewriting half of them would be nice I'd rather the devs just go ahead and make new content everybody can go through instead. Although if they rewrote them I'd sure like to see the Arbiters faction of Arachnos get involved. The Arbiters are even higher ranked than Recluse's patron lackeys--and considering the Arbiters bring the hammer down on Recluse's top lackeys when their individual scheming threatens to upset the status quo shouldn't they consider a powerful rogue Soldier of Arachnos an individual that needs to be dealt with? Or even recruited back into Arachnos as an Arbiter?

I remember being disappointed the Statesman at the finale of the VEAT arcs didn't reward Archvillain. The badge description says you're an AV because you pounded on Statesman's face. But, then again, maybe the think they'd have badge whining. 'wahh they took one of the badges unique to LRSF out and made it available in a level 50 VEAT mission, too. now you can only get Servant of Recluse, Annihilator and Master of Recluse out of his SF!'

The only choice on a pug that can't knock him out before his Unstop is recharged is ask if anyone has Shivans or the vanguard robot, and drop them on him. I think the VG bot's plasma lasers have -regen or something, too, it might've actually been *intended* to fight Honoree's hax godmode. But I've never failed to kill honoree even on bad pugs.

I failed rommy once. he didn't eat the healer blob because rom was pulled stupid and he was behind a corner or something out of LOS of fluffy, and we couldn't outdamage the stupid thing's healing capability. I've never seen rommy fail to eat his nictus blobs except that one time...of course, most people have enough sense not to try dumb pull techniques on him anymore.

Since they already ran with the goofy Patron idea, maybe you should unlock Recluse as a Patron Pool option available upon earning the Usurper badge. Rather than 'borrowing' powers from a Patron, you gain access to the "Archvillain" Patron Pools...which are just the Hero AT equivalent epic pools copied over. The Patron pools themselves were generally either 3/5 or 4/5 of the same power copy pasted over but with a thematic Patron twist (Scirocco has red lightning, Widow has negative, Scorpion has the big arachnos whompin' stick, Mako has Chum Spray), so who would complain about the hero pools getting proliferated?

Stalkers still wouldn't get PP, though, I bet. Castle hates the idea of stalkers with a Recovery power open to them for some reason. QR got yanked from /regen and /wp to make room for Hide, instead of yanking something like Fast Healing (which would be waaay more preferable to losing than losing QR. am I right?)

Burn is a victim of being nerfed to nigh uselessness. The RUN AWAY component it inspires in all non-Robotic or non-AV class enemies. The smallness of the burn stack itself. Lighted Oil Slick arrows are a REAL burn, not this puny little campfire Fire Armor's burn produces.

It almost makes you wish Burn was like a Res build-up instead of a pretty useless offensive power. Fiery Armor is such wet paper sack armor that being able to click a Resistance build-up to take a large alpha strike would be nice. (I deleted my last /FA. It's just so horribly weak, you have to have a different scrapper or tanker meatshield to hide behind. All for a second build-up power)

Phoenix is great because it's the only self-res that you REALLY USE A LOT. /Regen, /WP, /DA...pfft, why take your revive? But Fire Armor *needs* their corpse nuke revive since they're corpses so often.


Maybe turn Burn into a floating fireball pet that scorches, combusts and spits fire...like a fireball version of the Warshade fluffies :P It'll burn you up!

VEATs were built around stacked Leadership being incredibly awesome.

But combat jumping costs essentially no Endurance for some defense, and you can plop handy IOs in it. So it's nice. Hover should be just as cheap, imo, especially considering it's so frelling SLOW.

Yeah, Purples are just really rare drops.

Unless you're farming it for like 3 hours each night and not seen a drop. Then you've either got terrible luck, or maybe the high level Family actually had their recipe drop rates nerfed (I know the devs got mad at redside for farming a Family mission and nerfed level 40+ family xp/inf, but I always assumed drop rate for recipes is the same regardless of how they nerf a faction otherwise. frankly i don't like farming enough to have checked it out, and assumed RMT farmers only used the Lib TV Nemesis farm map because it was SO HUGE they only had to get fillers for their farm runs once every 40 minutes instead of every 20--honestly, who is DUMB enough to farm a faction that has auto-venging lts?)

heh, yeah, I used to sell 50 generic IO recipes (hey, it helps a crafter out somewhere get a badge to craft Inventions cheaper, right? personally I never gave a hoot since it was too much effort to transfer stuff to alts--but now I might turn my main badger hero into a Crafter, since I can email enhancements to myself finally and bypass the ripoff prices of the AH) and I only later noticed I was getting ripped off marketing generic recipes...hard. So I said, 'lolflippers', and I vendor all generic recipes to Ouro now. That's some free money people stopped getting from me.

learn all the recipes + easy access to all tiers of salvage (which are VASTLY overpriced on AH) by using Tickets to roll common salvage from AE = yay?

oh yeah, I had kind of forgotten Faultline seemed to have retconned the story around a bit when they revamped it. Brain fart.

but still, the CoT used to absolutely swarm over original faultline trying to cause a bigger quake. Think a CoT goal is to get the lost city of Orenbega un-buried.

Mutie pack comes with Secondary Mutation random self-buffing power. I guess if the 2 costumes don't impress you, maybe having a personal Mystic Fortune will get the 10 bucks. i hit myself with the buff inherent (available at level 1 instead of being level 4 like NR for...no reason at all) and got a strength to Acc, melee/ranged/AoE def, perception radius buff. 20 minute recharge time. I guess it lasts 20 minutes, too. And one that's that's def to all the non-positionals (Tough Hide? Now they're just making fun of Resistance)...end redux/regen/status resistance...+movement speeds..+recharge...

Dunno. They'll probably get as many sales from the buff as they got sales from people just getting the ninja pack for NR. $10 for the ability to hit yourself with some fairly nice buffs. Only one I could see people whine about is the Movement speed booster since people whine about the Mystic Fortune movement speed booster. Seems a better power than the self destruct or the body slider thing the super science pack had, and whatever it was the wedding/valk packs had (emote throw rice? heh)..i've only seen self destruct useful in Sewers teams. And when people accidentally blow themselves up because they had it on their bar.

Organic Armor is very spikey. There's an alternate gloves/boots that doesn't have the swirly spikes on them. It looks like it's a WoW warlock pet or something, though, how in the world this is mutation themed I dunno. Maybe Outcasts are going to get an interesting appearance retconned in. Also, it looks pretty freakin' sweet with the spikey scrapper Spines tinted to match.

oh, if anyone cares, you can use the freaky faces with the Widow, too (but not the head spike armor).

omg there's a mutation that turns you into a Rikti Monkey apparently. either that or it's a joke the devs put in that you can't roll.

Stalker /Regen and /Willpower.

killed by NO QUICK RECOVERY FOR YOU.

lol, enjoy your wide open to pummeling regen/heal-based sets on a low-Health AT. Hope you have a high tolerance to getting splattered against the wall frequently...I'll enjoy using SR or Nin.

Or maybe Doctor Geist, except calling himself Mister G. Sort of like Mister Sinister is a doctor in a few fields, but he chooses to go by a really lame name of "Mister", instead.

Doctor Geist got to make something of himself when he didn't have that Arachnos bully yelling at him.

Paragon still had the crashed Rikti Mothership to worry about, in Statesman's defense. He was assembling the heroes in case the Rikti got it operational again. Sure, he can punch motherships and bomber vessels down solo, but they're not worth xpz anymore because they're gray...and it's pretty destructive when he does it his way.

Recluse being able to summon all villains to him was just crummy writing. "Oh gee, if I join Arachnos I have the opportunity to be a subservient minion to Lord Recluse my whole life! Huzzah for villainy!"

Pfft, a real villain would've skipped out of Mercy on day one and gone to subjugate some 3rd world country nobody cares about under their thumb. Destined One Program? Only idiots like Black Scorpion would buy that load.

I think it's all mixed up and messed up from being really old, and the Mu and the CoT have their own versions of the war that was fought between them.

But yeah, Orenbega is the ancient forgotten city under Paragon City. It's not Atlantis. I seem to remember Faultline was caused by the CoT trying to tear it back up to get it flying through the sky again (and destroying Paragon City in the process). It's like one of those ancient flying wizard-god cities of Netheril out of D&D lore. They have a flying city gap! The Mu have flying islands...or at least Scirocco does.

free to play will only become the standard if they begin jacking people like MAD with microtransaction fees.

and it's much more likely they'll just keep subscription fees and try to jack you with microtransaction fees for a new tidbit of content every chance they get.

i think they had already tried selling billboard ad space and nobody took them up on it. It'd be kind of funny if they just had ads for NCSoft's other games on billboards. Not like NCSoft would have to pay itself to put up ads in their own game.

Museums would be interesting. Galaxy City could finally live up to its name and have an aeronautics and space museum located in it. Or some kind of science museum. The Arena being the big attraction of Galaxy...yeah, never took off the ground.

I thought something like Piercing Ammunition buff would be good. Supposedly Mercs are really crazy good, but ONLY after you get your minions and lts slotted with an Achilles' Heel chance to resistance debuff...and all 5 pets count as different sources, so they can stack the res debuff like crazy. Very nice for a bunch of pets that basically exclusively inflict Lethal damage. I've never bothered to try that out since Achilles' Heel res debuff is an expensive invention on redside's dead/market flipper run market though.

But a set that only gets good with IOs is sort of a suckily designed set, and there weren't even IO sets back when Mercs were created...

So. Serum--a useless buff--could be converted into a buff that grants -Res to a selected mercenary's attacks for a brief period. Sort of like how Ninja's Smoke Flash grants a selected pet the ability to bust out a few critical hits for a spike of damage. Smoke Flash Jounin, he goes choppy choppy better. Piercing Ammunition a Merc, all mercs do better blasty blasty (and your teammates too)

Just make sure to sic the merc you buff on the Boss so he's not wasting those shots, heh.