InfamousBrad

Dark Miasma: Assuming you don't let your pets kill the anchor and you keep Darkest Night up at all times, and slot Fearsome Stare for to-hit debuff, there's a lot of to-hit debuff there; stack that with Scorpion Shield and you're soft-capped against anything unless it has debuff resistance. Best AoE heal in the game, assuming it doesn't miss. Good pet with its own AoE heal. Easily perma mag 3 single target hold, and Tar Patch will keep at least some mobs from kiting your beasts. Honestly, you can't go wrong with Dark Miasma with any mastermind primary, it's the canonical overpowered mastermind secondary.

Time Manipulation: AoE to hit debuff combines with an AoE +def power (eventually) to make you and your beasts nearly unhittable, plus strong slows and an easily permable mag 3 hold to cut back sharply on your beasts getting kited, plus two strong AoE heal over time abilities. Perfectly playable with beasts (or anything else), it's the other canonical overpowered mastermind secondary.

Traps: Mez protection, AoE +def that stacks with their +def, caltrops to keep (some) mobs from kiting them, web grenade to immobilize runners.

Force Field: Stacking AoE +def, even better mez protection than Traps, and it has the virtue of leaving you free to use your primary attacks. Nothing much else to recommend about it.

Sonic Resonance: Surprisingly good. Strong +res, mez protection as good as FF's, and a lovely (if end-hungry) toggle debuff that is perfect for melee pets. Nothing misses you (or your pets), so learn to live with debuffs, but otherwise not bad.

Poison: Better than you'd think. Single-target hold will protect you from non-boss mezzes (albeit only one mob per spawn) and Neurotoxic Breath is a better debuff than people give it credit for being, and melee pets are necessary to get the most benefit out of Noxious Gas. But you'll have to live with drawing tons of aggro, having no self mez protection, and having only a single-target heal. Still, not bad.

Thermal Radiation: Good +res, an AoE heal ... and you'll be mezzed full time, so you won't get to use either. Not completely unplayable, especially if somebody else is tanking, but not recommend.

Storm Summoning: Better than it looks, once you get Freezing Rain, which may be the single best mastermind secondary power in the whole game, but the heal is only single target and the to-hit debuff power, the recharge intensive pet, and the pseudo-pet turret all have the unpleasant side effect, for a melee pet set, of scattering enemies in all directions. Very playable, but for expert players only.

Pain Dominance: Meh. It has an AoE heal (that you will be too mezzed to use half the time), an AoE regen buff, and (if you can slot enough global +rech to keep it perma) a little bit of AoE +res. The real downside is that it's a very active secondary, which leaves you no time for your primary attacks which costs you those debuffs, and, as I say, no mez protection.

Trick Arrow: The absolutely best AoE debuffs in the whole game. But you will scream in rage and delete the character and reroll when you get to level 35 and find out that Oil Slick Arrow disables your beasts, by causing them to stop attacking and cower at the edge of the circle until the fire goes out. DO NOT USE.

Given that we defeated Marauder in his home dimension, in his own SG base, I don't assume that he's dead or arrested. I assume that when his corpse despawns, it's him mediporting out, not us arrest teleporting him. I'm willing to be wrong about this, but that's how it looks to me.

Well, for one thing, the badge for defeating them simultaneously is bugged in this release, fixed in the next patch.

How much trouble teams have seems to depend on how much support you have. With enough global buffs or global heals, you can just spank them to death. Otherwise, it's a bit harder (I've had one team wipe so far), because there are AoE patches not to stand in, just like in Death from Below, but they're harder to see. Or, at least, I think there are. The uneven terrain and the murky graphics are making it hard for me to tell.

Depending on what you mean by "very very very long time," it's broken in a couple of different ways.

1) If you're queuing solo it won't necessarily average 5 minutes, because it is still (still!) counting the full 8-person teams who queue up in 0 minutes towards the average.

2) If you're queuing with a full or nearly full team it's still going to take longer than you think, because of a bug (that will supposedly be fixed soon) where it went back to taking a couple of minutes for trials to start, even with full teams, after you push the button. For now, just wait patiently for a couple of minutes; the time will be shortened in an upcoming patch.

Let me take this opportunity to beg, beg, beg for the LFG tool's UI to ...

• include the number of people in queue, and
• wait to launch with something about halfway between minimum and maximum, instead of at the minimum, team size, so we don't have it launching 3-person Positrons and 8-person Lambdas?

That's in addition to fixing the queue timer bugs mentioned above, of course.

Right this minute, the LFG tool is as useless as the paps on a boar hog. People see it pop up telling them "ready to start a Positron with you and 2 other people" or whatever and almost always, at least one of them will say "just 3 people? no way" and abort out. This causes the other people to get kicked their missions reset for nothing.

bwahahahahahahahahahahahah ... can't ... breathe ....

Dude, calm down with the gay panic. Nobody is going to think that you're gay just because your game's splash screen has a picture of guy in tights and a dance belt, shot from a low angle. Sometimes a superhero is just a superhero. Your male privilege is still intact.

I'm holding back the character name until I get it created, but it's the same as the "real name" of one of my current rogues. The primal version (bs/sr stalker) is a steampunk airship pirate, because she grew up assuming that Nemesis would have won by now, and planned accordingly. There is no globe-spanning dirigible fleet for her to rob, but she makes do.

So I figure her Praetorian counterpart would have expected Hamidon to have won by now, so she spent her life preparing to having to survive off of simple tech and what can be found in nature. The cities are still there, and even being rebuilt, but she makes do.

I'd go beasts/arrows if oil slick arrow wasn't cripplingly bugged, and I'd go beasts/poison if I could stand being constantly mezzed, but instead I'm going beasts/traps. (Besides, web grenade is almost essential when fighting flying foes using beast mastery. Stupid Longbow Eagles.)

Oddly enough, I have a fresh one handy, I was considering respeccing mine today:

http://www.cohplanner.com/mids/downl...02EB3F2381FD60

47.8% smashing/lethal defense, 37.5% energy, everything else around 30%. +132 hit points before accolades. Maxed-out hold in Poison Trap. Both single-target attacks, so I'm not 100% useless on missions that erase pets like the middle section of Lambda Sector. Not as much +rech as I'd like, maybe, but that's what the Alpha slot is for.

There's one particular "win" for the heroes, by the way, that (ironically) only the villains see: when we go to Boomtown, it looks different from when you go there.

This has driven me nuts for years now, because all the way back on day one of City of Villains, it was a plot point that Longbow and the PPD have pushed far enough into Baumton that re-construction has begun; one of the original CoV story arcs is about attacking a construction site there to slow them down. The devs remember this, too, because the level 20-30 villain morality mission takes place at the same construction site, where (does it still count as a spoiler after several issues?) you kidnap and attempt to ransom a redeemed villain who's donating his wealth to the reconstruction effort.

I have been begging, begging, ever since issue 6, for them to merge the geometry from instanced outdoor Boomtown into the actual Boomtown. Would it really be that hard?

- - - - -

That being said, one of the panels they've announced for the Player Summit is a focus group with the players on what zone should be revamped next and what should be done with it. If you think that the US military has allowed Paragon City's wealthiest neighborhood to be over-run way longer than is politically plausible and you want to see Perez Park at least partially cleared, or you want to see the street crime pushed back into the back alleys of Steel Canyon, or you want to see Baumton rebuilding begin, or whatever, either go yourself or persuade someone else who's going to make your case for you.

You put it more politely than I was going to. Seriously? Making the 2XP WST one that only level 50s can join? Why would you do this? It makes no sense.

MTX offerings? What is MTX?

I'm not the world's greatest at reading facial expression and tone of voice, but when I asked Zwill and Synapse during the last Coffee Talk if i22 would be out before 2XP, Zwill seemed really, really dubious. He said "anything's possible," but with so much emphasis on the world "possible" as to imply "but it's not especially likely."

I think it'll be in April, on or shortly before the anniversary date of the 28th. So put me in the betting pool for the Tuesday before the anniversary, April 24th.

Mind you, if it were earlier than that, I'd be delighted. After being on i22 beta, I can barely stand to play my stalkers on live.

I thought about it some more, and I can suggest a simple fix to the inconsistency between the hero and villain versions:

In the hero version, once you get Tryska down to 25% health, she "surrenders." (Flips to friendly, drops to hands and knees.) And the objective changes to "Arrest Tryska." When you talk to her, she taunts you that while you're dealing with her, Darrin Wade's trap is killing Sister Psyche, but if you hurry, maybe you can stop it. Objective changes to "Try to save Sister Psyche." Stepping back through the portal triggers the cut-scene and Tryska teleports away. That way, no changes are needed to the villain version.

1) BUG: Hero side, last mission, when Sister Psyche tried to follow me up the first rope bridge, she got stuck in terrain, on the rock just to the left of the bridge. Could not be moved without GM assistance. And she was immune to friendly teleport, which meant that I couldn't teleport her out myself.

2) Story complaint, same mission: And after I escort her all the way to the ritual site, Manticore is already there waiting for me. What the pancake? What'd he do, just buy his way in? Suggested fix: I know the modelers will cringe, but instead of escorting Sister Psyche, we should escort Manticore ... carrying Sister Psyche. Before you freak out, it's a waist-up custom model only, can use all the standard walking and leaping animations.

3) Inconsistency between the two stories: If in the hero mission, the hero kills Tryska (or whatever her name was) before the ritual, how is she still there for pseudo-Aurora to possess after the ritual in the villain version?

4) Chronology nitpick: When heroes rescue Penny Yin, we are explicitly told that it's been "many years" since we met Penny back in Faultline. And yet? Neither Jim Tremblor nor Fusionette have aged a day. If Penny's in her 20s, should they both be grown-ups in their late 20s or maybe even 30?

5) Thank you! for the Carnie skinned office that's in both versions and double, extra special thank you for the Nemesis-skinned warehouse that's in the villain version. I have been complaining for at least five years now that it takes half the fun out of fighting a steampunk villain if he doesn't have one or more steampunk lairs, so thank you. Now get cracking and make a Nemesis-skinned lab, with coal-fired generators, clockwork computers, nixie-tube displays, and cleaner, shinier versions of Dr. Vahzilok's lab gear! Please, please, please? P.S. Those maps are going to show up in AE, right?

One more half-serious suggestion: At some point in that last hero mission, Penny and Shalice should have had a conversation about Shalice's current problems. Why? Aside from making story-telling sense (Earth's current most-powerful psychic counseling, or at least consoling, Earth's used-to-be most-powerful psychic), it would have meant that "Who Will Die?" would finally meet the Bechdel Test.

Depends on what powersets have recently been made available. If something really good drops right before 2XP (I'm looking at you, Staff Fighting), I tend to make one of those. Otherwise, I spend that time on stuff that's annoying to solo, because it tends to be even easier to find teams during 2XP.

(I used to skip 2XP weekends altogether, because the servers just couldn't handle the load, and I couldn't handle the constant lag and rubber-banding. It's amazing how far server optimization has come since the bad old days.)