InfamousBrad

I've got a couple of characters that I've respecced often enough to be running low. None of them are all the way out of respecs, as a 6 year vet I've got a lot of vetspecs per character, but low enough to start hoarding them. So yeah, I'm grateful, at least. (Maybe this also explains why we didn't get one with i22, when the stalker changes were significant enough that quite a few stalkers could have used one?)

Having said what I did, I feel obliged to point out that for that other Cryptic Engine MMO, upgrading their player-created mission tool was something they did to make it easier for them to create their equivalent of Signature Story Arcs; the goal was to come closer to unifying what players use to create missions and what the developers use.

It took them over a year to get it done. It sucked almost all of the development time out of other parts of the game, to the point where even bug fixing all but stopped until it was done. It ran way, way over budget, so much so that the publisher gave up on and it sold it and got out of the MMO business altogether. And the users still aren't happy with it, so they have very little to show for it, and may never recoup that expense.

So, no, we can't have nice things, and maybe there's a reason for that: nice things cost way more than we're willing to pay.

I don't play other people's arcs because the search tool just utterly fails to help me find anything that I would actually enjoy. The 5-star system fails all the way down from Sturgeon's Law into Gresham's Law territory; to see that an arc got 5 stars tells me less than nothing useful about it. It doesn't tell me why it got 5 stars, it doesn't tell me who gave it 5 stars or anything about those people's tastes. That leaves me with just picking them more or less at random, and the last time I tried, half a dozen randomly selected, reasonably good looking five-star arcs got me six pieces of trash in a row.

When AE first came out, I begged for a matching system like the one that Amazon or Netflix uses: once I've rated some arcs 4 stars or better, and some arcs 2 stars or below, compare my tastes statistically to other people who've rated those arcs up or down the same as I did, and move arcs that they liked to the top of the list. Until they do that, finding anything that's both fun and interesting will continue to be basically impossible.

I don't use it to write arcs any more because writing arcs for myself is no fun, none of my personal friends play CoH (they play that other game, "because that's where everybody is"), and the arcs that I do have up there are languishing in four-star limbo -- last week I actually had one of my arcs played, and it was the first time in a year. So who am I writing them for?

Also, the tool just isn't very good. You can try to make it do something other than text intro that only the leader reads, kill all, text outro that only the leader reads, but the tool fights you the whole way. There's another Cryptic Engine MMO out there that has upgraded their version of AE twice since AE was last overhauled. Their current version allows player-created maps, branching missions, and full on-map event triggers.

(It's probably not a coincidence that "why aren't you using AE" and "why aren't you using PvP" threads are at the top of the General forum the same day. They're both features that were highly hyped when they came out. They both disappointed. They got one minor system update each. And then both of them were abandoned as too expensive to fix.)

I tried PvP in City of Heroes, and actually enjoyed a couple of my arena matches ... but only the ones on the smaller, lower ceiling maps, and the more I thought about that, the more I realized that it's probably impossible to build a really fun, really well working PvP ruleset for a game that has 80 mile per hour travel powers and rooting combat animations. You either set it up to allow one-shot kills, which is no fun, or you make it impossible to kill anyone, because by the time your attack animation finishes, they've run or flown out of range of your next attack. They work around this by making glue grenades ubiquitous, but at best all that does it turn CoH into a different game.

I still had some fun trying, though, until diminishing returns just utterly wrecked most of my favorite powersets. Several defensive powersets, actually most of them, specialize in stacking one thing over and over again, whether it's multiple heals or multiple regen buffs or multiple def buffs; i13 took that away from them and gave them nothing back in return. The "a little bit of everything" powersets suffered no such nerf. So it went from being horribly imbalanced in favor of the stacked +def powersets to horribly imbalanced in favor of the less specialized powersets ... no more unfair, I grant, but really unfun for me personally, and swapping one unfairness for another didn't count as an improvement.

There have been games I really, really enjoyed the PvP in. I don't think this even can become one of them, the combat model and the ruleset is just flatly incompatible with the idea.

For me it's tankers, scrappers, and brutes. Tab, F, play whack-a-mole with my attack bar, repeat ad infinitum. No thought or planning required. Though I will admit that my bots/ff mastermind was almost as easy: step forward, wait for the shooting to stop, step forward again, just remember to refresh the shields every 4 minutes.

My gut instinct would be: anything but a defender, corruptor, or (maybe) controller; nothing that really needs a team to be safe, because there aren't that many people in Praetoria, and most of them prefer to solo.

That being said, at roughly a couple of cents per minute, you can buy 5-minute duration large inspirations and solo anything with anything. Rest often, chew down inspirations as fast as they drop, and don't complain about having to die and come back a couple of times, and you don't even need that, not even with the squishiest thing out there.

That being said, the easiest character I've ever run through Praetoria was a brute.

This is about my most complicated UI character; I think only this one and my tri-form PB use 5 trays. Mostly I get by on 3:

Tray 1 and 2, slots 1-6: most-used attacks; if I have heals, they usually go in slots 5 & 6
Tray 3, slots 1-4: summons, as a rule, sometimes longer-recharge attacks
Tray 1, slots 7-0: toggles
Tray 2, slot 4: travel power
Tray 2, slots 5 & 6: heals
Tray 2, slots 7-0: more toggles
Tray 3, slots 5-0: long-recharge but frequently used click powers
Tray 4: temp powers and the occasional macro

So other than that I UI scale down to 85% and cannot begin to imagine how anybody plays this game with the map hidden or with it rolled down in its standard placement, and that optional tray for temp powers, it's a pretty stock UI. Oh, yeah, and I detached the team and league windows, team above chat, league below. (Why I can't save my league window options and its location, I don't know. Drives me nuts that every time I enter a league I have to resize and reposition that window.)

Yep, here are my notes from the stream:

Trial name is "Sic Semper Tyranis" -- Latin for "thus always to tyrants!," which was, if memory serves, what the conspirators yelled when they stabbed Julius Caesar in the back.

Before phase 1: Dream Doctor gathers everybody in the Astral plane, we overhear (from there) the IDF slaughtering the last of the Talons of Vengeance, then we teleport in. Dominatrix and Praetorian Aurora Borealis are there to defend us.

Phase 1: Defeat 250 IDF. No different from the IDF anywhere.

Phase 2: All through this phase, Chimera (initially off screen) targets a couple of random people every so often and drops the tier 9 archery power on them and everybody around them. Hug the healers. Fight 1 of phase 2 is a tank-and-spank against Shadowhunter (Praetorian Woodsman). Fight 2 of phase 2 is a tank-and-spank against Pendragon (Praetorian Hero One). Fight 3 is a chase-and-hunt against Chimera, who teleports all over the map, so bring a jetpack if you don't already fly. At end he "pulls a Nemesis" (my phrasing) and says, in effect, "you fools, getting defeated by you was part of my plan!" and teleports out.

Phase 3: For this phase, Chimera (off screen) uses Quills of Jocasta instead of the standard archery tier 9, which turn off the targeted player's incarnate powers briefly. Defeat Black Swan, who every 15 seconds or so summons 3 more portals to her shadow realm, which buff her while they're up, but are easy to spot and defeat.

Cut-scene: Tyrant chews you out, says "look what you made me do!", Dominatrix and Aurora pull an inexplicable "Penny Yin" moment and tell you to hug close so they can shield you, because Tyrant detonates a hydrogen bomb over Nova Praetoria!

Phase 4: If you fly up, you can see that it is destroyed buildings all the way to the horizon; everybody in Praetorian City is dead except for you and Cole. You get new temp power in the APB bar, Quills of Jocasta (which presumably suggests that Chimera died in the blast), PBAoE click power that when fired next to a glowing "Well of the Furies link" pillar blows up that pillar. They respawn fast, keep killing them while the rest of the team tank-and-spanks Tyrant, who has roughly the same powers as Statesman and Lord Recluse combined. At end of fight, he gets back up, as a level 50+0 non-incarnate, and you kill him dead dead dead. Congratulations. You won the Praetorian War.

I'm a little touchy on the subject of "ligers." Here in St. Louis, we had a major scandal a little while back: a local exotic-animal rescue shelter was making up the gaps in their funding by intentionally breeding ligers for sale on what is euphemistically referred to as "the secondary market" (namely, to be butchered for their meat, blood, bones, fur, and teeth, all of which supposedly have magical medical properties in some countries).

But one side effect of that is that, because it was in the news here off and on for months, I know bloody well what a liger looks like, and that's not even vaguely a liger. If you were going to just make up an animal, you should have made up your own name for it.

Yeah, I noticed that about Marshall Blitz, too. Between him getting broken out of jail by forces unknown (is there any way that that's not Malta?) and Vanguard launching (supposedly) every remaining rocket in Warburg, is issue 23 going to get a Warburg revamp? Have we seen the end of Warburg Nuke temp powers?

Regarding Manticore, does anybody else remember the pre-launch, first announcement, trailer for Going Rogue? There's a sequence there where Desdemona thinks about a series of heroes and villains. All of the villains have red auras except for Ghost Widow; all of the heroes have blue auras except for Manticore. People have wondered ever since then what that meant, but I could very easily see Red Widow's return and Scirocco's actions in Dark Astoria meaning that Arachnos is getting one or more new patrons, say, Red Widow for Ghost Widow (although who her sidekick would be, I have no idea) and Mu'Drakhan/Mu'Vorkhan for Scirocco/Ice Mistral.

As I game that out, that moves Manticore to the Rogue Isles as a contact or just in morality missions, with somebody else picking up the anti-Crey TF. The three openings in Freedom Phalanx get filled by Penny Yin, Desdemona, and a player-created contest winner. Presumably Penny Yin takes over the revamped Sister Psyche TF. Red Widow and Mu'Drakhan get replacement arcs for the Ghost Widow and Scirocco patron arcs; Mu'Vorkhan takes over the Ice Mistral SF.

(Before anybody says that Ghost Widow can't go Rogue, two things: Posi/Numi shows that no, the dead can actually change, if you throw enough magic at it, and also, loyalty to Arachnos can become awfully flexible if she concludes that Recluse, et al, are not acting in the best interest of the Arachnos party or according to true Arachnos methodology. They left themselves a loophole if they want to write her over to some neutral side. Heck, maybe Ghost Widow, Scirocco, Ice Mistral, and Serafina replace Marshall Blitz in Warburg. Weirder things have happened.)

And I still think that in issue 24 or 25 we quite possibly find out that Sister Psyche escaped death by mind-riding Tyrka, she ends up taking over that body in one or more story arcs or TFs the way she did Aurora Borealis after the First Rikti War.

Now, one of my questions: if Hero-1 gets de-Riktified, does Ms. Liberty lose her nifty belt and sword talismans? And another: between WWD and the DA arcs, they worked overtime to make sure that we noticed that Vernor von Grun and Pyriss have moved to the big time. Where's that story arc going? Fifth patron and sidekick?

OMG, is that Big McLargehuge in the first photo? I'm such a fan of his movies! You should have gotten Maemae von Whooter to pose for the female suit.

I see an amazing three belt buckles already for the belt -- are there more?

I see that all of the gauges and buttons on the chest detail can be color-changed except for one. What does the red button do?

You cannot get me that helmet and those backpacks soon enough; I wish I had them weeks ago. I'm seriously eager for these.