InfamousBrad

I don't think the mission design of Lambda is irretrievably broken, but pick-up groups are choking on all of the issues I predicted that they would after running it with a series of unsuccessful PuGs on the beta server:

1) Without clear instructions to the contrary, you can't stop half the people from trying to rush the Sentry, which does nobody any good and just leads to team wipes.

2) Without more time and clearer instructions, people aren't gathering anywhere near enough molecular acid to shut down the portals, and since the instructions on how to find it in your power tray (especially if, like a lot of people, your toolbars were full during that part) and how to consolidate the temp powers are not provided in the mission itself. So teams get utterly swarmed.

3) If you let the LFG Queue tool build your teams, it launches you in with a random team of 9 people which might not have any tanks, might not have any debuffs, might not have any buffs. And even if they do everything right, I'm not convinced that a randomly generated team of 9 people can finish that final stage. Also, no matter who checks what radio buttons in the LFG window, it stops adding people at 9, period, so if you are light on something or other, you will never get it.

What I suggested at the time, I still suggest:

A) Clearing the walls and the courtyard should be a mandatory step before the door to the Sentry unlocks. And ...

B) The gather-weapons phase needs clearer instructions in-game.

C) The queue tool needs to take all the people who volunteer to join a raid in progress and keep adding them until the raid is full.

And, now that I think of it, maybe instead of trying to paper over a bad UI choice with written instructions, maybe what the molecular acid and pacification grenade really needs is a different UI. Maybe instead of using the normal temp-powers interface, you should take a tip from the Warburg nuke mission and put those two powers on the Target windoid, with a counter next to each one for how many you have in your inventory?

And, yeah, 5 minutes isn't enough. Not for content that allows PuGs. It can take most of that time just to get the cats all hearded up the elevators.

What prompted me to ask the question is that it needed, not a retcon, but a retro-active clarification of which of two conflicting stories is the official one. In the in-game pre-i19 arcs, we're told that the Praetorians had bases in Paragon City before Portal Corp found them; in the comic books, we're told that the Praetorians didn't have inter-dimensional travel until they stole it from us.

SPOILERS BEGIN HERE

Frankly, "Primals fired first" is, of those two stories, the only one that makes sense once we were told that, in Praetorian Earth, Nemesis never developed superpowers. In Primal Earth, the conspiracy goes like this: Nemesis became obsessed with one of the supers who foiled his 1930 attack on the US, Dark Watcher, because of his plane-walking ability, but that same ability made Dark Watcher impossible to capture for study. So Nemesis invented and released Superadine to produce a mass outbreak of new supers, in hopes that his spies would identify a new plane-walker before that person mastered their abilities. The Nemesis Army did find and capture a plane-walker. Nemesis concluded, unfortunately for him, that artificial plane-walking would require electronics and/or nuclear technology, two technologies he finds personally distasteful, so he leaked his research findings to one of the two founders of Portal Corp, then stole the portals from them once they built them.

And that's why, in issues 16 and 18 of the Top Cow comic books, Antimatter has to reverse-engineer portal technology from telemetry readings taken when Freedom Phalanx kidnapped Dominatrix. Until then, they couldn't have put agents, let alone supers, into Primal Earth.

(Unresolved issue: is there a Praetorian equivalent of Dark Watcher?)

END SPOILERS

This is what happens when you let investment firms who don't even level characters of their own to speculate in XP futures, it distorts the markets all out of whack. The reason they didn't see this coming is that XP supply is adequate to current demand, it's merely being bid up out of actual consumers' price range by Wall Street investment banks and sovereign wealth funds.

The whole bit about "hand crafted" XP is to distract you from their real fear: that if they expanded the supply of XP to match demand, defeat inflation, and keep all supers employed, the Invisible Bond Superhero would go rogue, become an Invisible Bond Vigilante, and kill everyone. Nobody's ever actually seen an Invisible Bond Vigilante, but the Invisible Hand of the Market assures us that he is out there, somewhere. (On the other hand, nobody's ever seen the Invisible Hand of the Market, either.)

1. Add Lifetime Subscriptions. $299 and never pay again unless you buy an add-on pack.

2. Use that money to upgrade to an engine that supports faster, easier art-creation tools.

3. Use the faster, easier art-creation tools to make instances a holy heck of a lot less repetitive, and to once a year or so update the exterior zones to reflect current storylines.

My impression back when I first started (issue 4) was that what they intended for origins was that each origin have its own storyline that you were strongly incented to do, because fighting villains of your own origin would be the only cost-effective way for you to get SOs, but that (after level 5) finishing out a storyline for your origin would only give you 1/3rd to 1/5th of the XP you would need to unlock the next storyline for your origin, so you'd have an incentive to team with people of different origins.

If they ever do go back and rewrite Atlas Park, Galaxy City, King's Row, Perez Park, Steel Canyon, Skyway City, and Boomtown, that's what I hope they do with it: have an explicit storyline that passes through those level ranges for each of the five origins, so that if I'm a magic-origin hero, I know which contacts to talk to if I want to pursue the conspiracy upwards that starts with the Hellions' sudden and inexplicable wealth of magical artifacts all the way up to the ultimate origin of those artifacts, (*SPOILER REDACTED*) in the 30s, and what they're up to. Because (aside from all of the tedious street-sweeping) the biggest problem with the 5-20 storyline now is that it's impossible to keep track of, because the clues to each of the game's storylines is spread almost completely at random across more contacts than you can do without turning XP off every 4 or 5 levels.

Robotics, balance issue: Protector Bots potentially stack up to mag 14 AoE stun: 2x photon grenade, 8x photon seekers. That's on top of having two single-target heals and granting extremely high +def(all) to every pet and to the mastermind. I can't believe they've been this overpowered all this time without being nerfed, they're the single most overpowered power choice in the whole game.

Mercenaries, balance issue: Because it seldom lasts long enough to kill an Elite Boss or an Archvillain, Serum actually reduces the effectiveness of the target you cast it on - once the duration runs out, it zeroes out the minion's endurance, dropping that one minion's DPS to zero for the rest of the fight. At a bare minimum, it needs its duration increased by at least 50%, preferably doubled, or else it needs the endurance crash removed.

Poison, bug: Noxious Gas doesn't display the Real Numbers values for the pseudo-pet it creates, making the Real Numbers info display for the power completely useless.

Poison, balance issue: Poison relies very heavily on single-target debuffs, Envenom and Weaken, despite the fact that the only times in the entire game that you ever fight a single target for very long, that target has 85% debuff resistance. Some percentage of the Envenom and Weaken debuffs needs to bypass debuff resistance.

(And yes, I agree that Poison Trap is the single most useless attack in the entire game. The bare minimum suggestion I'd make for it would be to halve the casting and interrupt time, make it auto-hit, eliminate the sleep component, and give it endurance drain values consistent with other long-recharge AoE endurance drain attacks, say around -40% endurance and -100% recovery unenhanced.)

I stand by what I said on the very first day Demon Summoning went to open beta: demons would be a lot less annoying if they were about 2/3rds their current size.

The Lambda facility guide should include a warning after phase 1: if you do not clear the guns on the walls and the guards in the courtyard before you engage the Sentry, you will have to fight them AND the reinforcements AND Marauder simultaneously.

Frankly, I wish that you would simply make that a required step before the door to the Sentry opens, between step 1 and step 2. Herding a PuG team so that none of them try to rush the Sentry, and worse, so that none of them rush the lower level of the facility before the rest of us are with them to harvest temp powers, is going to be like herding cats.

Finally, I've run the Lambda trial unsuccessfully twice now. (The LFG queue stops filling leagues at way too low a number.) And this is the first time I've heard that the harvested temp powers are tradeable. I can't imagine how you would trade them? Where's the UI for trading temp powers? Can you add the instructions for how to give your extra molecular acid temp powers or pacification grenade temp powers to someone else to the Lambda guide, please?

Apologies if this approaches thread necromancy, I didn't see this until it showed up in the off-site Dev Digest just now:

I'm one of the really unlucky ones: both of my favorite PvP characters got nerfed into oblivion, not just rendered even with other people but rendered completely unplayable in PvP, by diminishing returns. The fact is that some builds in City of Heroes just plain have nothing but the same effect stacked lots and lots of times. Take away the ability to stack +def, and what does a bots/FF mastermind have to fight with? Take away the ability to stack slow and -rech, and what does a mercs/poison mastermind have to fight with?

When I saw the final image, my first thought was, "How long are my 'bots going to be stuck on those railings?" And my second thought was, "Man, I hope I don't have to escort any hostages up those stairs!"

(Seriously, what is it with this game's pathfinding AI and stairs?)

As usually happens, massively.com benefits from having a "reporter" who specifically covers City of Heroes news.

Level 20 to 40 TF/SF - how is that going to work? If a team of all level 20s do it, will the mobs be level 20, or level 40?

Some other lounge-music fan beat me to The Lonely Bull, annoyingly.

Hrrrm. I suppose it's interesting-looking. It'll depend heavily on the writing, of course.

But excuse me for being cranky? But, well, as far back as when Mission Architect was new, and then repeatedly since then, we keep getting asked what kinds of environmental art assets we'd like added to the game ... and this is not something that anybody, let alone any significant number of us, asked for. I would really have preferred the art department's time had gone into something a little more interesting AND useful, like the long overdue space station and lunar colony and underwater city maps.

In general, I'm up for option 1, because leaving low-res textures in the game is going to look jarring, and people with lower-end machines won't realize how ugly they've made their characters look. We already have this problem, to some extent; some of the textures look like they go well together, if you're on a low-end machine, and they just don't.

But I do have at least two characters that use a non-animated tail, because it's supposed to be part of the costume, not something growing out of their bodies; girls dressed up like cats, not anthropomorphic females. So that may have been a bad example.

P.S. My first choice would be "none of the above." My first choice would be to redirect the art department towards making new environments and re-detailing the oldest environments. We have nearly a thousand costume parts, but only about a dozen types of zones.

I'm imperfectly happy with the name (I'd have gone with something more descriptive like Friendly Praetorians), but an RP hero SG for Praetorians is something I'm definitely looking for for two of my characters, a responsibility Loyalist and a Resistance Warden. I'll contact you in-game.

I have at least one character who's in. I'll email/global chat you in-game to set up a time.