InfamousBrad

If anybody's collecting datapoints? Because now I'm deeply confused as to what determines what rank the bank robbery end boss is.

Level 20 thugs/poison MM, solo. Villainous difficulty. Originating Sharkhead Isle, sent to Steel Canyon. Outside mobs Family, SWAT Police, Longbow. Side mission mobs Tsoo. Three side missions: arson, rob Tsoo hideout (got Plasmatic Taser), break prisoner out of jail (Darksomethingorother, female Radiation Blast blaster or corrupter with a pathologically ugly costume). Blew up less than a quarter of the stuff outside, but enough to get plenty of time extensions. Robbing the vault spawned Valkyrie as an Elite Boss. (Who died like a punk in a matter of minutes between what my guys were doing, the rad blaster, and Gang War. Fortunately, I had the good sense to hit two Lucks before she could swung at me a second time.) For defeating Valkyrie, got a temp power lasting 24 hours in-game time that allows me to teleport my whole team to myself at will, very nice.

Searched that entire zone, leaving no part of it (even rooftops!) unsearched, and did not find an exploration badge. Asked in Help channel, neither had anybody there, either. Might be bugged.

This was the mission that earned me the first "defeat n vault doors" badge, which is Safe Cracker.

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FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENFORCERS:

1: The "hipshot" heavy Uzi burst doesn't seem to have any sounds.

2: Can we get heavier sounds for the Uzis? I'm not one for toilet humor, but it sounds like they're farting at people.

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The phrase you're looking for, to borrow it from Spider Robinson, is "asthmatic sewing machine." I'm told it's what a Uzi actually sounds like. But I could stand to have the volume turned up on it a little bit, too. But after running mercs to 40, trust me, eventually the sound of loud, clattering SMGs/assault rifles gets really old.

Mayhem Missions are optional - kind of.

How to Turn a Mayhem Mission into an Old-Fashioned Heist:

One: Go directly to the Bank. It's labeled on your minimap, and it is no harder to run around anything that might aggro on you on the way than it was to get to the contact in the first place, or to go anywhere else. Easier, if anything; you know that none of the mobs will be higher level than you.

Two: Deal with One to Three Small Ambushes En Route. There are unmarked spots on the pavement that trigger Longbow ambushes. One of them you have to trigger, it's at the door to the bank. But since you're taking the direct route, you should be able to get there triggering at most one or at most two of them. They are smaller than average spawns. They will chase you, but they do announce themselves in advance. So when you see the chat bubble, stop, wait for them to catch up, and kill them. (Solo on villainous it's 2 minions per spawn. Yawn. A couple of seconds per ambush.)

Three: Deal with the Bank Like You Did Before. If anything, it's easier. After you enter the second room, the last of the pedestrians should have run out into the street. And there are fewer guard spawns, maybe half as many as you're used to. Bypass or kill them and get to the vault door. Blow it up like you always did, click the cart full of cash like you always did.

Four: Deal with the Guard Ambushes Like You Did Before. Only it's even easier, because there's only two ambushes, not three. The first one will be a routine police or guard spawn. The second one will be a truncated, half-size Longbow spawn -- with a named hero. Since you ran directly to the bank without engaging in any Mayhem, this should always be scaled down to a lieutenant (pre level 20) or at most a boss (post level 20, not as sure of this part yet). To complete the newspaper missions that got you this mission, you had to defeat several of these types of spawns already.

Five: Profit. You're done, so click Exit. Elapsed time less than 10 minutes, probably. And, the first time you do this on a new map, you get an incredible temp power reward. And unlike in the old days, vault doors blown up and named bosses defeated count towards badges. Return to your broker, like you always did before, to get a contact.

Caveats and Variables: All of the above is known to be true for people pre level 20 running solo at villainous difficulty. Raising the difficulty by more than one means that the last mob spawn will have a boss, but then, at that difficulty, that should be familiar to you. After level 20, engaging in any Mayhem or raising the difficulty guarantees an Elite Boss, so take extra purple and red inspirations.

After level 20, taking in a team of 3 or more guarantees a signature Hero at full Hero/AV level. So if you just want to do a regular bank heist, get it over with in a hurry without any debt, and get on with running your regular missions, make sure your difficulty is set to villainous and do the job solo.

If on your way to the bank you pass a normal spawn of villains and you have any kind of stealth or invisibility (including temp powers), it's worth fighting them. (Solo on villainous it will be one LT and one minion.) If you find a key to their hideout (check your clues after the fight), you can run in, fight a half-spawn of Longbow who follow you in, and stealth through a very small map directly to a glowie that always rewards you with a new persistent temp power. This should take so little time and do so little damage that it shouldn't affect your chances to keep the end-boss at the lower difficulty level.

(Note: This part of my notes towards the comprehensive Mayhem Missions guide that I'm working on.)

When are we getting the last of the previous BK issues on the server?

Gang War is very cool, but after using it twice, I've got a couple of big problems with it. I can't shake the suspicion that they're this way on purpose, but let me see if I can change your mind.

First of all, given that I have to have a target selected to summon them, and given the long recharge time which means I pretty much have to save them for boss fights, is it possible that what I want them to do is concentrate hard on that target? I'm not saying that they have to attack it continuously until it falls down, but the selected target should be at the top of their list, as if it had fired a taunt at them, and stay there for longer than they currently do. As it stands, they take one swing at the selected target, hit or miss, and then randomly mill around picking other targets.

Which brings up the second problem. That is to say, they pick other targets ... if they do anything at all. They're just not aggressive enough. If they're not hit, they take forever to actually enter combat, even if I drag them right up to contact distance from something. They need to either be set to a more aggressive AI, or if they're on an aggressive AI already then their aggro range is either bugged or set too short.

Oh, and unslotted, they suck rocks. But one Acc and one Dmg DO cleaned them up quite nicely. (It may have helped that the Enforcer is slotted with 3 ToHitBuff DOs. Do they get the benefit of my Enforcer's leadership skills? It looked kind of like they did.)

Other than that, I don't have much to complain about; two thugs, an arsonist, an enforcer, my posse, and me went through Ace McKnight, an Elite Boss (admittedly on Villainous setting, so he conned only orange) in around 5 minutes. I was soloing, so there weren't a lot of Longbow minions with him; it's possible that their milling around and hitting random targets other than Ace helped distract fire away from the myself and my four main minions, which I guess might have been more important if the spawn size had been larger.

They last just barely long enough for two normal fights. When you get to that second fight, though, it is almost impossible to get them to actually attack something until one of them gets hit. And given that they're not really doing anything to attract aggro, the fight's half over by then. Yet another example of why I say that they need to be more aggressive.

Shots that miss a thug because of the Enforcer(s) Maneuvers aura aren't getting the "Avoided" or "Evaded" or whatever text it's supposed to be over their heads.

The Skyway City mayhem zone bad guy mobs are Hellions. This creates three minor problems.

First of all, what the heck? Since when are there Hellions in Skyway City? Since the indoor villains (rob a villain lair side quest) are Lost, and you already used Clockwork in King's Row, I'm thinking the outdoor villain mobs in Skyway City should be Trolls, right?

Secondly, again, what the heck? Skyway City's mayhem mission starts at level 16. In the CoH mission where the Outcasts are auctioning off magical items, it's made completely and unambiguously clear that there simply are no Hellions above threat level 14. You get that mission at level 19, everything else in that warehouse is level 19 or 20 -- except for the Hellions, who are still 14. So yeah, again, another reason to replace the Hellions with Trolls.

Finally, it set me up for a particularly amusing badge: I got one of the Steel Canyon zone event "firefighter" badges for defeating Hellions. I think the software thinks that since the only high level Hellions on a street map are in Steel Canyon, and only in the zone event, that it doesn't need to bother to check what map you're on when you're fighting sufficiently high level Hellions outdoors.

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I'm not sure I see the benefit of smashing a car though, when it blows up and knocks off about 1/2 your health.

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In the early levels, that's a very serious problem. But the good news is that cars are always level 10; eventually, I gather, it becomes much less of a problem.

You know what I wish? I wish that some or all of the time, the villain I get to break out of King's Row would be ... Jenkins. And some or all of the time, instead of that thorns scrapper, I wish the hero that came to stop me after the King's Row bank job was Flower Knight. In both cases, just for old time's sake, you know?

I also wish that the bosses (or when soloing on the bottom 2 diffs, LTs) you knock over to get the side-quest keys were named. Same for any villain bosses in the side quests. It's not like you don't already have a great list, somewhere, of random boss names for them.

FYI, apparently each of the Mayhem Mission zone maps has its own exploration badge that kicks in after you've spent enough time there. Judging by when I got mine, I'm guessing it's around half an hour? The one for Atlas Park (level 5 to 15?) is called Global Threat.

FYI, this guide has been supplanted by version 2.

I'm having two problems with it.

First of all, from level 2 to level 5, with Thugs, it wasn't working at all. None of my damage sloughed off to the thug. As soon as I got the second thug, it started working normally.

But the bigger problem I'm having with it is that if minions are in Bodyguard stance, they will not attack, period, until either they or I am hit. Which really, really, really cuts my damage output at the beginning of the fight, because until the enemy actually hits me, they're just standing around pulling their underwear out of their crack.

Would it be considered over-powered if they soaked damage while in Attack Defensive mode? If that's out of the question, is there any reason why Defensive minions don't attack when I do? If I can't have one of those things or the other, then Bodyguard is going to be a very rare situational thing for me.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention, I did notice one nice feature though: they don't aggro on the individual enemy that hit me, they aggro on the whole spawn cluster it was with. Example: In Follow Defensive mode, I attack one of three Mooks. As soon as any one of the Mooks returning fire hits me, they all open fire on that Mook. When that Mook falls down, they continue fighting until the other two Mooks are down, too. They won't attack anything else until the next one of us gets hit, but they do keep fighting until that spawn is cleared, which is very handy.

Level 7 villainous difficulty solo Mayhem Mission from Port Oakes to Atlas Park with a Thugs/Poison MM ... and the most fun I've had in this game in months.

1) I couldn't figure out any pattern to how many of each item I had to destroy to get the time bonus, either. But I suspect that's on purpose. I did notice that hardly anything gave more time bonus than it took to destroy.

2) I gave up after three cell doors in the jail. It was taking me way too long to break down the doors, and if I'd had to do all six to find the villain, I would have been out of time.

3) I only found one of the other side quests, and unfortunately I didn't find it until after I'd finished the bank robbery itself. I was out of time; I only got halfway in. I don't blame you for that, just saying why I don't have anything to say about the side quests.

4) Since they can't actually be destroyed, pets and minions need to ignore civilians unless they're told otherwise. Otherwise, if they've gone aggressive, they'll never catch up with you.

5) On villainous difficulty, solo, I got a named superhero at LT level with more or less the same powers as a LT-level Hellion D_mned. And I don't mind one bit, because hey, name, and hey, unique costume -- coolness! I notice that after that mission I had a counter bar for defeat-n-named-heroes, and boy is that a cool badge to want.

6) I did get the Global Threat badge. Since it came up under Exploration, may I assume that these are based not on what you do in the map but how long you're actually on the map?

7) Raptor Pack reward. Oh Em Eff Gee. Heroes are going to give birth to a porcupine, breach presentation, with all attendant sound effects, when they realize that villains are given two hours of flight time somewhere around level 6 to 8.

8) Thank Ghu for ranged attacks. I dread to think what it would take for a brute or a stalker to deal with a jail cell door or a car or any of the other things in here that have huge explosions.

While I had more fun than a pig in Congress, I predict that you're going to get a lot of negative feedback on the design of these. For one thing, it ruins the immersion of all of the people who were role-playing double agents; while they could justify robbing banks that are owned/used by supervillains, attacking Paragon City will be harder for them. But there'll be a lot more people who have a problem with the Mayhem part of the Mayhem mission, because it's just too relevant. It basically turns all of the Destined Ones into state-sponsored terrorists. I'm cool with that, but I suspect that a lot of them won't be.

You may be able to alleviate that somewhat by adjusting the mission text so that people are told that if they head straight for the bank and go around the cops and so forth, there's plenty of time to rob the bank. That won't make the first group of potential complainers happy, but it at least skips the terrorism aspect.

I'm pretty sure that Steamy Mist doesn't debuff your runspeed any more. If it does, it's completely imperceptible to me. Great guide!

Did the /newspaper missions for CoH make it into I7, or is that farther out into the future? And will heroes get the option to complete the same mission when they share it with somebody else, like villains do, in I7, later, or not at all?

This is version 2, and replaces the previous draft.

CONTAINS SPOILERS

First, let me refer you to my favorite guide to the backstory, for those of you who haven't seen it, the Guide to Villain Backstories, a spoiler-rific summary of what we learn about all the CoH villain groups through the various story arcs and task forces, plus scattered NPC monologues and dialogs.

COV Plot Overview

All of the player characters are, in effect, in the same Villain Group, what everybody else calls the Destined Ones or Project Destiny. All of our various villain groups within that are no more distinct from Project Destiny than the various factions of the Freakshow are from each other, as far as the story line is concerned. As you surely know already because the subject has been beaten to death, one of Earth's few Incarnates (human beings with the power of an incarnate god), the evil Lord Recluse, took over the Italian fascist supervillain group Arachnos ages ago, staged a coup d'etat here in the Rogue Isles in 1964, and rules the isles as their monarch, through appointed governors of each of the islands. Project Destiny is a plan by Lord Recluse to co-opt into Arachnos a prophesied group of super-villains who are capable of rivaling him in power. There's a lot more to the Arachnos story arc than that, enough to justify an entire article the length of this one just dedicated to them, but the one that you'll run into (visually) the most is Project Fury, a separate attempt by Lord Recluse to clone an army of super-soldiers from his own DNA. (See Arachnoids, below.)

The other Big Story that's going on, across all the islands, involves an ancient alien underwater goddess named Merulina. Due to the intervention of some as-yet-unspecified Egyptian villain group (the Blood of the Black Stream is how one villain describes them), an oil tanker has been sunk directly over the underwater city of her followers, and the resulting pollution is killing the intelligent (hive mind) coral reefs that they depend upon. The Red Coral Crystals from those reefs have magical properties, and are highly sought by both super-heroes and super-villains despite a long-standing international ban on their harvesting, sale, or possession.

Each island (or in the case of PO/CaD, half of an island) has its own Big Story.

Mercy Island: The Snakes (see below) have an underground city and tunnel complex under the whole island, and have been there for at least 400 years, maybe longer. Every so often for that whole time, some superhero (usually religious/magical origin, in the past) has come along, wiped them off of the surface, and forced them down into the tunnels until they can hatch up enough of a population to retake the surface. Southern Mercy Island is in the middle of such an uprising now.

Port Oakes: Family headquarters for the Rogue Isles. The official governor (and Family top boss) Manuel Morricone has been arrested and is on trial in Spain. This has created a power vacuum, in which Arachnos is taking a hands-off stance while letting two factions fight it out. One faction, usually just labeled as Family but sometimes as the Marcones, is seeking to put Manuel Morricone's son Emil in the governor's seat. The other faction, the Mooks, are led by the Verandi family and seek to put their own candidate in the governor's seat. The fighting between the two factions has created openings for the Hellions, the Lost, and the Snakes to operate fairly openly. The Council has been here for decades, paying "taxes" to the Marcones to let them ship goods through the Rogue Isles to the US. There are also ghosts of long-ago pirates haunting a fort in the northeast corner of the island. This is also the point at which the Coralax Hybrids, human beings taken over by the coral hive-mind of the goddess Merulina, are starting their war against the surface dwellers over the pollution of their reefs.

Cap au Diable: The city center, Aeon City, is the headquarters for perhaps Earth's wealthiest and most popular supervillain, an unscrupulous mad scientist member of Arachnos with a really, really effective PR department, Dr. Aeon (who is secretly the same person as the much-reviled evil mad scientist, the supposedly executed Dr. Egon). Dr. Aeon, while experimenting with geothermal power, found out that a late Renaissance priest bound an immense demon into the volcano, and Aeon's Power Transfer System is tapping magical energy out of that bound demon to power the whole Rogue Isles. Virtually everybody else is there to steal tech from Dr. Aeon or magic from the demon. Dr. Aeon has his own personal arch-nemesis, a time traveler named Professor Echo who is from an alternate dimension where the PTS has, in fact, destroyed the world, who has traveled here with his universe's now-repentant Dr. Aeon to prevent our Dr. Aeon from doing the same thing. The Circle of Thorns is seeking the secret of the volcano; almost everybody else in the zone is to fight, defend, or rip off Dr. Aeon.

Bloody Bay: The inhabitants of Bloody Bay were the victims of an unsuccessful attempt by the Statesman to prevent an alien attack on the earth. The "Shiva Strike" meteor that was the aliens' weapon fragmented, and six fragments of it have landed in the Bloody Bay area, where the radiation from those meteors is slowly raising a zombie army for the purpose of wiping out all life on Earth. Officially, both Arachnos and Longbow are there to evacuate the survivors, but they can be seen ignoring the would-be evacuees as both sides pursue research on the Shiva Strike zombies aimed at turning them into controllable weapons against the other side. The Freakshow seem to be there to harvest anything scavengable from the mostly abandoned town, and the Circle of Thorns can be seen using mind-controlled slaves to excavate the island for something, but I don't know what yet.

Sharkhead Isle: Half to 3/4 of the island is one big open-pit bauxite (aluminum ore) mine and the associated refinery/smelter, all under the control of one big private sector corporation, the Cage Consortium. Its CEO, Kirk Cage, is the current governor and has high-level contacts with, or is himself a member of, the Family. For all that the bauxite mines are profitable, they're also a cover for the excavation of several caches of the famous Red Coral Crystals. Longbow has covertly stirred up a miner's strike in an attempt to paralyze the economy of the Isles. Governor Cage has hired the Sky Raiders to defend him against the strikers and against any interlopers, and looks the other way (for no known reason, but money probably changed hands) over the permanent Freakshow base at one end of the main island. The main graveyard, Potter's Field, is situated over an ancient giant monster (the size of the whole island), which both the Circle of Thorns and the Banished Pantheon are researching in hopes of being able to control it if/when it awakens.

Siren's Call: Siren's Call isn't actually in the Rogue Isles; it's a shorefront part of Paragon City that was devastated years ago by a nuclear detonation that Arachnos got away with blaming on an out-of-control superhero. Now that the radiation levels have dropped, several supervillain factions including Arachnos are using it as a way to enter the Paragon City sewer system and abandoned subway lines, as a way to bypass the war walls and enter the city proper. Lord Recluse's agents in the area are specifically passing along an order from him to the Destined Ones that he wants them (us) to conquer and hold the area, while Longbow (and the various player characters) are trying to shove Arachnos (and, time permitting, the other NPC villains) out prior to re-establishing the war walls.

Nerva Archepelago: Longbow has invaded nearly all of the islands in this chain of islands, though they only thoroughly control three of them: their fortress island of Agincourt, the central island they call Liberty Isle, and the far eastern island they call Hero Heights. Crey Corporation operates openly in Hero Heights because, as in Paragon City, hardly anybody seems to realize that Crey are supervillains. In the northeast corner are two islands with vast Mu ruins underneath them partially or completely occupied by the Circle of Thorns, one of which has a major inter-dimensional portal and the other the mystical tree from which all of their Thorn magical weapons are harvested.

St. Martial: At least half of this vast island is taken up by various Family casinos, the largest of which is run by this universe's Frank Sinatra, Johnny Sonata. Everybody else is here to rip off or otherwise attack Johnny Sonata or the Family. Pretty much everybody else is there to rip off the tourists.

Warburg: From 1964 to 1982, Warburg was the headquarters of Lord Recluse's plan to develop intermediate range ballistic nuclear missiles. It was officially shut down (and placed under international monitoring? via a 1982 treaty. Recently, the military governor of the island has declared independence and merged with a faction of the Malta Group, and has adapted the original Warburg missiles to deliver Malta-designed anti-superhero (or anti-supervillain) warheads. However, the lab area has been over-run by lower level Arachnoids from Project Fury.

Coming soon: Grandville: The capital of the island chain; all we know of the story line so far is that the ground and sub-surface levels of the island are effectively under the control of escaped higher-level Arachoids.

Coming soon: Recluse's Victory: Is not actually in the Rogue Isles, it's actually a version of Atlas Park in Paragon City that's being fought over in some kind of time-travel storyline. Which is especially amusing considering how many times you're told, as a Destined One, that Lord Recluse has outlawed experiments involving time travel. It also includes giant battle mechs copied from Council senior roboticist Archon Burkholder (of the Striga Isle story arc).

SO WHAT IS EVERYBODY DOING HERE?

Arachnos: The Arachnos units you see throughout the game are the uniformed elite military forces of the Isles. Apparently at least one unit, the Rogue Arachnos in Warburg and parts of St. Martial, has mutinied and gone independent and have merged with the Malta Group, merging Arachnos weapons of mass destruction technology with Malta anti-supers weaponry.

Longbow: The world's largest superhero group. Founded and funded and trained by Freedom Phalanx, and backed by their own huge private mercenary army. The Longbow Wardens are FBSA-licensed superheroes and affiliate (sidekick-like) members of Freedom Phalanx, apparently mostly of mutant origin; the rest of Longbow are "normal" human mercenaries with military heavy equipment. They completely occupy a huge island base in Nerva, which they've renamed Agincourt, on the pretext that Nerva is a "disputed international zone," which I take to mean that they don't consider it to be legally a part of the Etoile Islands. Additionally, they can be found literally everywhere underfoot in the Isles, which they have arguably entered legally under the UN doctrine that allows superheroes and their helpers to cross international borders in "hot pursuit" - in this case, in hot pursuit of escaped prisoners from the Ziggurat, namely us.

Wyvern: A private security/mercenary company secretly funded, trained, and equipped by Manticore of Freedom Phalanx as a side project. They've been hired by Longbow to provide additional manpower; because Wyvern has a grittier, nastier reputation than Longbow, both sides are trying to keep this a secret.

The Legacy Chain: An international alliance of magic-using superheroes, sort of like MAGI on an international level but much older. They're here because of the isles' high concentration of magic-using supervillains. They work with Wyvern and Longbow occasionally, and like Wyvern, seem to want to keep that secret.

Rogue Isles Police: Lightly armed civilian police in the Isles, mostly corrupt.

Private Security and Cage Consortium Security: Lightly armed rent-a-cops.

The Snakes: Back in pre-historic Greece, one of the Incarnate level super-villains was one of the three Gorgon sisters, a snake-like human super-villain named Stheno. Stheno is still alive somewhere in the world, and still laying eggs. Those eggs, the Cobra Purebloods, are said to have the power to convert ordinary humans into Snakes via bite (but never shown to do so in the game). They have a whole underground city beneath Mercy Island, and every so many hundreds of years when there are enough of them they emerge and try to conquer the surface world. This most recent time, they were mostly driven from the surface by Arachnos (hence all the battle damage in Darwin's Landing), but not completely, so they're still plotting to break back out and conquer the whole Rogue Isles.

The Infected Ones: Laboratory waste from top secret Arachnos research on the Arachnoids (see below) contains small amounts of a mutagen that the Infected are trying to take advantage of, by drinking it and bathing in it in hopes of obtaining superpowers of their own. In some cases, it works, but the side-effects are apparently pretty unpleasant.

Hellions: Hired by someone in Egypt (the Blood of the Black Stream?) to come here to disrupt Family operations in the Dockside and Oil Spill neighborhoods of PO, and to attack an Egyptian company called Gaza Petroleum. They've discovered on their own the existence of the demon under Mt. Diable, and since it's a fire demon, their local leader Duke Mordrigor wants to free it. There are also several high-ranking Hellions, led by an Elite Boss named 3K Kelvin, trying to recover a magical artifact that was stolen from them by a defector named Billy Heck.

Marcones/Family: Gangsters fighting to retain control of all smuggling, money laundering, and casino operations in the Isles, especially in Port Oakes, Sharkhead, and St. Martial. Verandi/Mooks: Gangsters fighting to overthrow and replace the Marcone Family, to take over the same operations. Whichever faction wins will also inherit the governor's seat in Port Oakes.

The Council: The Nictus and their human allies are everywhere, apparently, not just here and in Paragon City. Most NPCs suggest that Arachnos is tolerating them for now because he hasn't made up his mind what to do about them, and that the Family lets them run smuggling operations out of Port Oakes as long as they pay their taxes and do their smuggling quietly. They don't seem to have any grand plan; other than using the Isles as a way-station on the smuggling route into and out of Paragon City, their people mostly just seem to be involved in petty crime.

Spectral Pirates: Trying to defend their home fortress in Port Oakes, because they don't seem to realize that they're dead and that the fort was taken over by living villains long ago.

Skulls and Trolls: Never explained, but since they're partners with the Family in the Superadine Connection, I assume that they're here because the Family runs Superadine through Port Oakes. But that doesn't explain why there are instanced Troll missions in Cap or big public gatherings of Skulls all over Mercy.

Lost/Rikti: During the Rikti war, the Rikti dug in everywhere, including here. The Outbreak drug and Shift (the real name of the previously un-named drug that turns humans into Rikti) are both manufactured in Port Oakes for export to the world. In Nerva, the Rikti are fighting back against Crey tech-thief raids. According to the Guide I referenced above, the Hydra are servants to the Rikti, but you only see them in one mission that I know of, and that one not in this dimension. Note, by the way, that the Rikti have at least one spy inside Crey Corporation in Nerva.

Circle of Thorns: If you've seen the original Guide to Villain Backstories, then you know that the Oranbegans (whose ghosts are now the Circle of Thorns) were the deadly enemies of another ancient magic-using civilization, the Empire of Mu. It turns out that there is a huge, abandoned underground complex of Mu ruins underneath the islands of Primeva and Thorn Island in the Nerva Archipelago. As a result, there is a ridiculously complicated fight going on over control of the trade in artifacts from that ancient city, involving (at the very least) Arachnos, Longbow, the Circle of Thorns, the Devouring Earth, the Rikti, and Crey Corporation. On the smaller island, Thorn Isle, the Circle of Thorns have pretty much unchallenged control, and it serves as their current international headquarters. The immense Thorn Tree that gives the island its name gets its size, and the mystic power that the Circle uses for its weapons and talismans, from the fact that its roots have wrapped around a vastly powerful ancient Mu power-cell that used to power the city's defenses.

Coralax Hybrids: Pre-human undersea intelligent living coral beds from just offshore of the Rogue Isles have taken over the bodies of various human beings. They've started coming ashore to fight the human beings whose pollution is threatening their survival, presumably as part of a plot to exterminate our kind. The Slag Golems in Sharkhead are piles of toxic waste animated by the same coral crystals that empower the Coralax Hybrids. See also Freakshow, below.

Goldbrickers: A private army of tech-thieves, mostly stealing from Aeon Corporation but occasionally taking contract jobs for Dr. Aeon, secretly working for the CEO of the local candy company. The CEO of that company is secretly the not-yet-seen invulnerable super-villain King Midas, and the Goldbrickers are his private army. No, really, it's that lame, I'm not making this up.

Luddites: Protesters, including some magic users, who suspect the truth about the Power Transfer System (PTS) and are trying to convince people that Aeon's power grid is too dangerous, and could destroy the whole human race. Considering the fact that most people consider Dr. Aeon to be a brilliant philanthropist, nobody listens. Other than to aggravate low level villains, they're mostly here for comic relief.

Vahzilok: Dr. Vahzilok has many subordinates in the Isles, and they openly operate at least five business chains: the Facemaker plastic surgery and super-villain costume boutique, the Happy Corpse mortuary overflow and corpse pickup service, Spare Hearts organ harvesting company, Tan and Grow tanning/mutagenic spas, and The Bonesaw nightclub.

Clockwork: Actually, they're not here, in the sense that the Clockwork King's telekinesis doesn't reach this far. The demon under Mt. Diable is animating various Clockwork and fragments that were brought here for study. In essence, they're the same beings as the Gremlins that you see around PTS transformers in CaD.

Spetznaz: Former KGB agents gone mercenary; they're looking for the guy who ran the Soviet Union's super-soldier program in the hopes of bullying and blackmailing him into making more super-villains for their mercenary squad. Not seen around the islands, just in one story arc.

Sky Raiders: They're running some independent operations trying to steal tech from Aeon Corporation and Crey, but mostly they're here as mercenaries, hired by the governor of Sharkhead, to protect the Villa Requin neighborhood from the Scrapyarders. As mercenaries, they also run some operations both for and against Arachnos, and suppliment their income with petty crimes.

Scrapyarders: Striking employees of the Cage Consortium, but they have no intention of going back to work even if their demands are met. They're actually an undercover front for Longbow. It's not clear to me yet if the same thing is going on with the striking Dockworkers in St. Martial, but Family operatives in St. Martial have commented on the fact that they can prove that the Dockworkers are getting their propaganda leaflets and signs printed in Paragon City and smuggled in.

Crey Corporation: Countess Crey sends her people anywhere they can get away with accumulating more high tech supervillain gear for her, and the Rogue Isles in general and Nerva in particular are very handy to her purposes because the law is so murky here. They're conducting human experiments on every captured supervillain they can get their hands on (including several Arachnoids and a whole building full of Rikti monkeys) in those sheds behind their office buildings, but mostly what they're here for is because it's even easier to get away with illegally hoarding and studying Rikti tech here than it is back in Paragon City. Note that at least one of your Crey contacts is almost certainly a Rikti double-agent inside the company.

Freakshow: Mostly the Freaks are just here to steal from the various tech supervillains. Their local headquarters is in a junkyard in Sharkhead Isle, but you find them all over Sharkhead, Nerva, and St. Martial. A substantial faction of the Freaks, calling themselves the Cult of the Shaper, have broken away from the rest, and have been taken over psychically by and are voluntarily working with the Coralax.

The Tsoo and the Carnival of Shadows are both here to prey on the tourist trade that are attracted to Aeon City and the casinos of St. Martial.

Nemesis: Prince Nemesis runs a small handful of spy operations in the Isles, mostly to collect information on Crey and Arachnos, but also to interfere with both organizations' attempts to control the inter-dimensional portal in Nerva. He also has at least one front organization here just to "launder" his patents and collect royalties, presumably because it's easier for him to get away with it here.

Wailers: A sub-species of demons here to collect Johnny Sonata's soul, as part of the deal that made him the world's wealthiest and most famous singer. Much of the architecture of the Golden Giza casino in St. Martial is designed to keep them at bay.

Devouring Earth: We are given to understand that Hamidon's creatures have begun to infest every nation on the Earth; the local outbreak is on the beaches of Nerva and St. Martial.

The Banished Pantheon are mostly here, and harvesting corpses from the graveyard in Sharkhead for zombies, to study the Leviathan under Potter's Field.

The Warriors appear in only one mission, having come here to pick up something that another faction offered to sell to them. They do not seem to have any permanent dealings of their own in the Rogue Isles.

Malta Group: Is there any surprise that the CIA's own pet superhero/supervillain group is sniffing around Lord Recluse's suspected orbital weapons of mass destruction research facility in Warburg?

Arachnoids: These are Lord Recluse's big project other than us Destined Ones. Remember that he considers what happened to him back in 1930 that turned him into an Incarnate to have been purely scentific, and he is convinced, as a scientist, that given enough time and resources he and his scientific underlings can duplicate the process. To that end, Arachnos has secretly cloned thousands of copies of Lord Recluse (which suggests that this is what he looks like under that uniform now, ewww), and then experimented on them in attempts to augment their power while keeping them under his control. At least two of those research facilities are in Mercy Island, but you see yet more clones in cloning tubes in at least half of the Arachnos research facilities everywhere in the Rogue Isles. Quite a few of the Arachnoids have escaped from captivity, and they have colonies in Warburg and Grandville.

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Now let's look at the results. You just to an attack of a magnitude that only an Arch-Villain/Hero can throw. You are hurt pretty bad, but you are still on your feet. You pets are in rough shape but still on their feet.

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Not to pick on you, or to say that I think this is a bad thing (I actually kind of like it), but consider the equally common situation of a blast or breath weapon that would do even half as much as your example, so let's say 1000 points of damage. You come off quite fine, yes, taking only 250 points of that before your (probably non-existent) resistances. However, you did so by shedding 125 points of damage to each minion ... on top of whatever damage they took from the initial AoE. If we're talking about something that can hit them through their shields (and several examples come to mind), that extra 12.5% damage on top of what they were already taking may mean that an AoE attack that would previously have only wiped out the level 1 minions also wipes out the level 2 minions and reduces the level 3 minion to a sliver of health.

You could do a little better if you saw it coming, of course, by switching only the level 1 minions to bodyguard mode. That way you shunt off 60% of that 1000 points to them, taking only 400 points yourself. Presumably they weren't going to survive anyway, so the extra 200 points they took are pure overkill. You, on the other hand, still had to "soak" those 400 points, and given how unlikely it is for a mastermind to have any damage resistance at all, you're hurting pretty bad. (And if you're a soldier, by setting all the level 1 minions to bodyguard, you just sacrificed your medic. So in that case, you might only want to sacrifice the soldier soldiers, so you took 500 points, not 400.)

What was the alternative? To stand around the corner, like we currently do, and send them in on Attack Aggressive mode. Which means that you don't take damage, they take less damage, and the tier 2 and 3 pets are still alive to be healed back up.

I'm still in favor of this because I can imagine some circumstances where it will actually be helpful. (And would be more so if there was any way for a mastermind to resist teleport foe. I still think there should have been some kind of status and teleport resistance power in our patron pools, expletive-deleted it.) But when fighting some of the toughest foes, it's going to tempt masterminds to do stupid things that will make things worse for them rather than better.

Hmm. I had to think about this, and I'll probably still be thinking about this weeks or months after it goes life ... and that's a good thing.

When on teams, about one out of every five times somebody gets all crabby with me about unpacking the level 1 minions at all. The opinion, which I understand but don't entirely share, is that level 1 minions don't contribute enough damage output to justify the annoyance factor of having to navigate around them or deal with them chasing runners or pulling adds.

On the other hand, if I set my level 1 minions to Follow Defensive, and only send Attack Aggressive commands to the level 2 and 3 minions (can I do that with a single macro button without playing games with their names, will the $$ separator work?), I lose the ability to direct their damage output. By my estimate that means that about a quarter of my damage output will now be spread out at random or otherwise wasted; only a little of it will hit the primary target I'm trying to take down.

On the other hand, it means I can actually use a weapon of my own and have 3/5 of the incoming damage spread among the level 1 minions. If I'm using my soldiers, the medic can heal two of the three (if not quickly) and I can heal him. If I'm using my robots, the protector bots can heal the 3 of them ... but probably won't in time to do any good, unless they're still standing between fights.

This changes one of my rules of thumb for PvE which is that the first time I see a mastermind pull out a weapon of their own, I want to kick them from the team. It means that they're drawing more aggro than any corruptor can keep up with on their fragile selves, and time they spend making their own attacks is time that they're not managing their minions. Now, though ... I'm not sure how this'll play out. Maybe, not for sure but maybe, they've actually made masterminds' use of primary attacks viable.

I think I suddenly see why you thought it wasn't painfully stupid to give masterminds three personal attacks in their patron power pools. I still don't think I agree. I would rather that at least one patron offered a status defense, and that at least one patron offered combat invisibility, and that at least one patron offered some kind of minion travel-power buff, and the fourth some kind of click-power long-recharge self heal or hit point buff like Dull Pain. But suddenly I see why you thought that at least some masterminds would be able to withstand the aggro they'd draw from using all those cone and AoE attacks.

... on the other hand, unless you give people more macros on their starting tool bar, it means that the 9/10ths of all masterminds who don't read the forums or study the documentation will be using their minions in sub-par ways. Could you at least consider replacing the totally useless Follow Aggressive command with a Bodyguards button that does /petcom_all follow defensive?

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So why are we getting the costume token now? Won't this tick off people who go to the tailor for some minor reason and wind up using up the token, and then, when I7 comes out, they're out of luck for the big costume change?

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The costume tokens have nothing to do with Issue 7. There's a thread by Cuppa in the Training Room forum (forgive me for not linking, but I just woke up) that basically explains that the /cov command may have broken some people's costumes, and if it didn't, the change that locked out the /cov command might have. She didn't say, but judging by these patch notes there were also still people with the Sleeveless Jackets option who were being screwed during costume changes. (I thought they'd already fixed that bug? It hadn't happened to me in weeks, at least?)

And as always in the past, when they fix a bug that might have screwed up some number of people's costumes, they hand out free costume tokens so those people can fix their costumes. I assume that everybody gets them, not just the people with broken costumes, because doing it that way would put too much workload on the support GMs.

They haven't said that we'll get more free costume tokens when issue 7 comes out. But they haven't said that we won't, either. Since issue 7 hasn't even made it to the test server yet, it'll probably be at least half as long from now until issue 7 goes live as it was from when they gave out the free Christmas costume tokens to when they gave out the free Valentine's Day costume tokens, so I figure the odds are better than 50/50 there'll be more free costume tokens then, too. I'm not counting on it, but that's my guess.

Now that I take the time to study them, I'm really disappointed in the Mastermind powers. Except for Black Scorpion, and one change for Scirocco's set, what basically everybody gets is two cone attacks, an armor, and a single-target hold.

I don't want any cone attacks. I didn't become a Mastermind so that I can rush into battle; I hire people or build droids to do that for me. The holds are good news. The armor is ecstatically great news. I'll grudgingly concede a use for the cone or AoE immobilizes. But that other cone attack is both completely useless and aggravating.

Is there any chance at all, at this late a date, to persuade you to swap out the plain cone attacks for the same summonable pet that the Corruptors get? My nearly level 40 droid MM would love to add an Arachnobot Blaster to the set, even if it didn't take orders. My level 40 mercs MM would equally love to have a coralax guardian or a coralax blue hybrid, or maybe a Mu mystic. I think the pets fit the MM concept a lot better, and I mean a lot. Because as the sets are laid out now, I honestly can't see any Mastermind taking any set except Black Scorpion's.

Do stalkers really want pets?

It seems to me that having a pet along, especially in the post level 40 game, all but guarantees that most PvE fights will start before the stalker can get into position. That means AOEs flying in all directions, which pretty much eliminates half the stalker's own natural abilities. If I'm right, then it better be one heck of a pet to make it worth it.

I'm looking at those cool looking tables in images 1 and 5, and wondering if it's at all possible to sit in those chairs. /Em ledgesit won't work, because the chairs are tucked under the tables. Could it possibly be true that you've finally put in a right-click or other way to interact with a chair to sit in it? Please?

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The thing I don't understand is that Longbow were created to go to the Rogue Isles and intervene there. What are they doing in Paragon City?

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What, indeed -- considering that none of the people who live in Paragon City (CoH) ever see them? I remember doing that first mission for Radio Free Opportunity, in my first week in the game, and finding King's Row guarded by Longbow, and ever since then I've been asking what the (long series of profanities deleted) they're doing there? And in Steel Canyon (cape mission, others)? And in Skyway City (Peter Themari story arc)? And in Boomtown (I forget which story arc)?

If I were living in Paragon City and every day when I went out onto the streets I saw this many identically-uniformed heavy-weapons-toting vigilantees and nobody else, not even the cops I'd be thinking "military occupation?"

But even story telling reasons aside, it's poor game design, because it's pointlessly repetitive. I say pointlessly because it's not as if Cryptic doesn't already have all of those other alternatives in their mission-design palatte to choose from. It's a sad, horrible failure of imagination that whenever they need good guys for the story, it's almost always the same red and white uniforms, and whenever they need bad guys for the story, at least half the time it's the same set of robes.

Let me say something first: I'm very excited about Issue 7, and it can't get here soon enough, and I'm all in favor of most of what I've heard about it. But I just learned one thing, today, that is almost all by itself enough motivation for me to hate Issue 7. Mayhem Missions will be versus Longbow.

What Anarchy Online Would Be Like if Cryptic Developed It: Your level 60 characters will still be fighting Leets more often than anything else. Oh, but these aren't just any Leets! They still look like Leets, they're still bipedal hamsters who parrot meaningless slogans in l33t-speak. They're not giant leets, or even differently colored leets. But these leets have new special powers! Oh, yeah, and every third mission or so we let you fight something else, too.

What Neocron Would Be Like if Cryptic Developed It: Your level 35 characters will fight their way out into the wastelands, and in ruined laboratories under the ruins of a nuked-out civilization they'd be fighting ... rats. Not giant rats, not sentient rats, not rat colonies, not mutated rats, not cyborg rats, but the same old rats you fought in the level 1 sewers. But these are special level 40 rats that have a few new powers and who do enough damage to hurt your level 35 characters.

What World of Warcraft Would Be Like if Cryptic Developed It: Your level 60 WoW characters would have to put together 60-person raid teams to and go on elaborate quests in order to unlock the mighty mystic portal that only opens once per century ... to fight pigs. Not giant pigs, or magical pigs, or pigs that look or sound any different from the ones you were fighting for XP at level 1. But these are special, level 60 and up pigs that have one or two new attacks and which have enough hit points and damage output to fight a level 60 raid group!

OK, I think I've made my point. I never want to see another Longbow or Circle of Thorns mission. Ever. I'm done with them. I am sick to boring death of those two groups. Neither of them are even the especially interesting or unique groups. Except for the Wardens, Longbow are just ordinary mercenary soldiers in silly red and white tights. And the Circle of Thorns are the same stupid wizards that are in every science fiction or fantasy game on the market. Cryptic has dozens of interesting, unique hero and villain groups in this game, and they hardly ever use them!

At least in City of Heroes, while you do have to fight the Circle of Thorns all the way from level 5 to level 50, at least they don't make up over half the missions, and all the trials. In City of Villains, though, you fight Longbow in your first mission, you fight them in at least every third mission all the way to level 50, you fight them in every mission in a PvP zone, and you fight them in the cape mission. And who do you fight in at least half of the missions other than the Longbow missions, once you hit Port Oakes and from then on out? The Circle of Thorns, of course.

Give those two groups a rest, please? Please tell the content developers that they're not allowed to create any more Longbow or Circle of Thorns missions for the rest of 2006?

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We will probably slip in some NPCs who can buyback Enhancements at somepoint, but the trainer issue is a little more difficult from a technical standpoint.

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Simple solution: Put the trainers and enhancement vendors in the entrance lobbies, where only that side can get to them. Put an Arbiter and a Quartermaster in the hallway between the Rogue Isles entrances and the elevator. Put a Freedom Corps Trainer and some as-yet-unused minor signature hero trainer in the hallway between the Paragon City entrances and their elevator.

(While you're at it, any chance of having an Icon clerk in the hero lobby and a Facemaker nurse in the villain lobby?)