InfamousBrad

The increased range from 40' up to 80' - is that only for single-target attacks, or does that include cones like Fistful of Arrows or Tenebrous Tentacles? Also, I couldn't tell from listening to the broadcast, but do the short-range powers in dominator secondaries get the range boost, too?

Defiance 2.1: In addition to the existing benefits, blasters now get an innate 40% res(all) that drops by 10% with each additional person they are teamed with, and an innate mag 4 protect (stun,sleep,hold,immob) that drops by 1 with each additional person they are teamed with.

Honestly, I have no idea. But the only reason I can't stand to play one is that when I'm solo, I get bored flying back from the hospital several times per mission in the mid 20s.

I can talk myself into almost any offensive set, but I've gotten really dependent on a couple of the defensive ones. In particular, I have to lean on myself hard to take any mastermind secondary other than FF, any scrapper or brute or stalker secondary other than SR, or any dominator secondary other than energy.

Assuming I wake up in time, I'm looking forward to this experiment. I'd like to be able to watch Coffee Talk on my tablet while playing CoH on the PC, and Ustream's Android app stuttered to the point of being unwatchable, even on a quad-core tablet. That being said: I can't find the paragonstudios channel on the Android client, it only shows up in my browser. Is this because it's not currently streaming? I guess I'll find out tomorrow.

When in doubt, I use real names. This is handy: http://www.kleimo.com/random/name.cfm

There's going to be a Praetorian Hamidon trial at some point, we know that much. I'd like for it to be the second trial in i23, but if not, I expect it to come in i24, because the devs have said on Coffee Talk that there will be some wrapping up of Praetorian plot threads in i24. That won't be the main point of the issue, but there will be at least some, and that presumably means PraeHami. (We won't be so lucky as to have it deal with the difficulties of reconstruction, as the Syndicate and the Resistance and the PPD fight for control over the capital. But a guy can dream.) Sadly, we know for a fact that it won't be a level 35+ zone in Praetoria. We've asked repeatedly; the devs keep saying no.

Another thing they've said repeatedly on Coffee Talk is that the main thrust of i24 will be the arrival of the Battalion. I'm assuming this means at least one incarnate trial versus Shivans; I'd be surprised if it didn't include at least a short-lived multi-zone invasion event, maybe a semi-permanent one, like the Rikti zone invasions from the Second Rikti War. I cannot say with any honesty that I'm looking forward to that part of i24, i25, and possibly i26; the prospect of yet another basically identical planetary invasion, where all that changes are the uniforms and the powers of the soldiers, fills me with "meh." But that's what we're going to get. The only possible way to excite me about The Coming Storm would be if we wrapped it up early in some dramatic fashion, and then went on to do something other than yet another stupid, boring interplanetary war in i25.

I'd like i24 to include another round of Powerset Proliferation. In particular, I really want tankers and brutes to get Spines before, or at the same time as when, they get Bio Armor, because the one thing I'd want to make with Bio Armor would be a bio/spines tanker. It's probably not going to happen though, because the last time we asked Synapse (or was it War Witch? I'm not sure) about powerset proliferation, the answer we got was "no current plans, not on the timeline."

And presumably there'll be more balance tweaks and bug fixes. Without knowing which ones, I have no idea how excited I'll be about any of them. (Fixing Oil Slick Arrow would make me extraordinarily happy!)

It wouldn't shock me, though, if one side effect of SSA2 will be all the original enemy groups getting buffed to bring them back up to being challenging to current player characters, say, with attack chains more like the ones that the Praetorian NPC factions have. We've had six years' worth of cumulative player buffs; the older mobs are laughable compared to where they used to be. (And they have to sell those new pay-per-hour buffs somehow.) Assuming the last remaining underperforming character classes and powersets get brought up to on-par with the rest of the game, I think I'd actually be fine with this.

I just saw a column from the Korea Times that speculated that, among other things, this was about patent cross-licensing. The article didn't go on to say which patents Nexon and NCsoft own.

There is no official in-canon or dev-speak origin of the Black Knights, any more than there is for the Drudges, nor any explanation for why First Ward is American but their spirit realm is British. It's just that way because they needed to fit Praetorian Hero-1 (Pendragon) into the story somehow, so they themed everything around The Matter of Britain, aka the Camelot legend.

Over the course of Bedwyr's arc, we find out that the Black Knights are the spirits/supers/whatever who, in the Praetorian timeline, banished the Banished Pantheon gods, and guard the Black Prison where they are locked up. Presumably Pendragon and Bedwyr joined them when they were carried off/when they died (respectively) back in the 4th century AD.

As for the rest of your questions, I think you're confusing Sorceress Serene and Black Swan in a couple of places. I haven't gotten around to replaying it since early in beta (I'm halfway through it on live, I got distracted by a busy weekend) but as best as I can recall it from beta, Black Swan is the one that disguised herself, joined the Black Knights, married King Lor, and had an affair with Pendragon, all as parts of a long and elaborate plan to unlock the Black Prison. Ironic, since the Black Nights were specifically in Night Ward to hunt her. But the whole thing was her playing Nemesis' favorite game: "Let's you and him fight!"

Where Serene comes in is when the Talons team up with Black Swan to help her unlock the Black Prison, so that they can get Serene and her coven back to join (or re-join) the Talons of Vengeance. There's basically two plots going on there, and they just discover that they have a convergence of interests right before the Black Prison break.

Apologies for not digging up the link, which may not even be available (the Going Rogue sub-site was down last time I looked), but Hamidon turned to evil in 1948 after Truman nuked the Chinese for crossing the Yalu. Tyrant's web bio on the Going Rogue webpage says when the first Tellurian Plague attack was, the one that wiped out Paragon City and started the Hamidon War, I don't remember if it gives an exact year. But the war wasn't terribly long and has been over for about 15 years, so call it around 1995 or '96, I think. Basically, the difference between Primal Hamidon and Praetorian Hamidon is that the Praetorian Earth version of Dr. Pasalima an extra 25 or so years preparing for his attack.

I don't think I can respond fully to your criticisms of Praetoria without getting mod-smacked for bringing real world politics into it. But in game, I've served alongside both the Paragon PD, and Arachnos troops, and the Praetorian PD, and the Praetorian PD scare me less. They scare me a LOT less than Longbow, Wyvern, and Hero Corps do; in no sane civilization would what Longbow does for a living be legal.

Mass murder? Really? Of whom? If you're going to bring the ghouls into this, Praetor Berry didn't start in on the Olympian Guard super-soldier project, or the Goliath Warwalker project for that matter, until (and yes, this is canon, I checked with the dev team) their world was attacked by a timeline with 10 times as many supers in it; that's more our fault than the Praetors'. Brainwashing? The BAF is one of Praetor Tillman's projects, I've said that I won't defend her. Fascist outlook? Have you BEEN to Paragon City?

Drugged water ... I've been meaning to get around to pointing this out for at least a year now, thanks for reminding me. It has only been a hair over 15 years since ninety percent of the entire human race was killed in the Hamidon War, a planetary disaster bigger than what the great plagues did to the native Americans. Under those circumstances, part of me thinks that putting low dose anti-psychotics and anti-depressants in the drinking water is a brilliant solution, no more controversial than fluoridation. I wonder how much the dev team agrees with me; notice that within days of Calvin Scott's destruction of the Enriche facility, riots broke out all over the city. After a planetary disaster on the scale of the Hamidon War, I think it would take at least a generation to see even minimally sane human beings again.

Remember that the people of Praetorian Earth did vote for Cole. They begged him to take the job, repeatedly, after he'd turned it down. In a decimated world gone entirely mad with grief and rage, what alternative did they have? Let the warlords keep slugging it out until there wasn't anybody left?

And as for Skyway City, been there lately? The murder rate's a lot higher there than it is in even the worst parts of Praetoria City, probably even including the tunnels. No shock, given that it's canon that the Paragon City government is heavily infiltrated by Council and Family controlled politicians, and probably by the Circle of Thorns possessed and Crey cloned and Nemesis duplicated ones by now.

Praetoria City has the Praetors and the Powers Division, but is what Paragon City has any better? Is the FBSA really doing any better of a job policing Paragon City's supers than the Powers Division is? Because after 7 years in Paragon City, I'm just not seeing it. Heck, I think Arachnos does a better job of policing its supers than the FBSA does.

As you point out, this patches-of-death problem has existed for almost two years now. If teams would learn to taunt the targets out of the death patches, instead of just standing there, it wouldn't be a problem, now, would it?

In fact, that's been part of the learning curve for Magisterium. Leagues I've watched have discovered, miraculously, that you can do a lot more damage per second to Tyrant if you taunt him out of the lightning patches and keep fighting instead of scattering, letting him heal back up, and starting in again.

It's not my job to tell other people how to play their characters, but I hold in silent contempt any tanker, and just about any brute, that can't fit a level 10 power, that requires no slots, into their build somewhere by level 49. For it to be so common not to do so that none of the tanks on a 24 person league have it? Inexcusable. It'd be no different, in my opinion, if you skipped all of your defensive toggles and then complained that the game was hard. Taunt isn't just an aggro management power, it moves mobs around the map. Learn to use it.