InfamousBrad

It took me a second to notice it, but the female Big Trouble in Little China armor, chest piece, is a two-tone piece with skin showing. Which the UI has never allowed. Are we getting a tech improvement, or are the gold bits on that baked-in?

Not only have the old problems not been solved, it's got a new problem: the RSS feeds for Developer Digest and Community Digest are both broken.

As a former villain, as someone who hated Longbow passionately even before the Second Rikti War, I somehow expected the chance to kill, or stand by and watch somebody else kill, the CEO of Longbow to be more satisfying. Maybe it's because I knew that a Rulu-shin cultist was planning on benefiting from it; more likely it's because I was hoping that her death would have something to do with the fact that she runs an above-the-law mercenary company that uses flamethrowers to make arrests.

I realize that we've probably never seen Malaise without his mask, at least not that I can remember, but the realization that "Penn Jilette" from the earlier cut-scenes was Malaise seemed kind of abrupt.

As someone who used to spend a lot of time playing with Mission Architect, I want that Arachnos office map tileset expanded to include a full set of office maps, please! (Although it's a little too dark to be plausible, if you ask me, but I'm not the art director. Given my druthers, I'd want a whole tileset that looks like the Arachnos office in Recluse's Victory.)

I know you have the tech to branch dialog based off of souvenirs and badges. Manticore should have remembered that he and I had fought several times before, even if only from my souvenirs for completing Westin Phipps' arcs before going vigilante. And Darrin Wade should have made some kind of remark about my having worked for him before, off of my Thief of Midnight badge.

Unmoderated global chat, completely free, where anybody can set up a new account any time they need one, is and always will be a disaster. Create another channel, and you won't have a good channel and a bad channel, you'll have two bad channels. Gresham's Law. Or, as the guys from Penny Arcade taught us, the G.I.F.T.

And since this isn't a shardless game, moderators would have to moderate the Help channel on, what is it now, 15 servers? More? I lose track. So figure 80 full-time-equivalent positions just to 24x7 monitor all the Help channels and push the "silence" button on anybody who gets out of line. This game doesn't charge us enough to pay for that.

Sorry, not even minimally interested without the hat.

Thank you very, very much! One more bug report, though: minimum level on pool powers is still wrong; it's not letting me take Tactics earlier than 14, should be 4.

There really is no such thing as a "good DPS tanker," at least not prior to the late 20s to late 30s. If you want high survivability and good DPS, you're basically looking at a brute. That being said, my electric/electric tanker is pretty close to what you're looking at; Lightning Reflexes helps significantly with DPS, and electric melee gets reasonably good DPS with a seldom-resisted damage type.

With SOs: 1 acc, 2 dmg, 2 endred in Hot Feet and 1 endred, 3 debuff in Time's Juncture. It gets even better once you cram some Hami-Os or a 5-slot set into Hot Feet.

There was a point, on beta, where the copy tool was down and the database had been wiped, so we were all cash-poor. I ground out enough inf to slot as above, and that, plus unslotted Imps, was enough mitigation and damage to grind x1+0 Council missions until I could afford to slot the rest, almost without ever firing any other power. The combination of those three powers is just that good. Combine it with 6 slotted Farsight (3 rech, 3 def) and 6 slotted Thunderstrike in Ring of Fire and Char, and Katie bar the door, you're all but unstoppable against anything below an EB; I barely remembered I had other powers.

I have a level 50 ill/kin/psi that I parked when they took away the ability to speed buff the Phantasm; it was a small thing, but it did end up making a perceptible difference, and I was ready to move on to something else anyway.

It was a fraternity initiation of a 'toon, anyway, up to 18, but after that what you get out of any illusion build, not even counting your secondary, is almost complete invulnerability to anything but AoEs and player-targeted ambushes. The taunt magnitude on Phantom Army is amazingly useful. So, even though I didn't team with it all that much, I can see that being a big deal if you've got perma-PA: you're a perfectly good off-tank with some pretty impressive team buffs. Your buffs are only 60% as strong as they would be on a kin defender, but you're easier to keep alive.

Let me say thank you for something that, honestly, I don't know if anybody but me cares: thank you for showing that non-powered heroes still matter in the City of Heroes and still make a difference.

Thank you also, by the way, for not filling it with standard disaster-porn: looters, rioters, etc. Disaster sociologists have known, ever since William James accidentally invented the field with his surprising first-hand scientific reporting from the scene, back during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake: human beings are better people than we give ourselves credit for. Major disasters have an odd way of turning everybody into heroes.

As soon as I saw the room shown in picture 3, I typed in global chat: "Devs h8 MMs." When I got to the map shown in picture 5, I stopped, swore for almost a full minute, and then typed in global chat, "Wow, [string of expletives], I wasn't kidding, the devs really DO hate masterminds."

I ended up being pleasantly surprised. OK, yes, I did lose all four minions at least once in the room shown in picture #3, but it didn't matter -- not least of which because I had six-slotted Force Bolt. After all these years of Virgil Tarikoss's Strike Force, I got to be the one pushing somebody else's minions into the lava! It was surprisingly gratifying.

And I don't know what you did to that last map to make minions reticent to enter the lava, but I wish you'd go back and do it to the last Virgil Tarikoss map and to the room we fight Trapdoor in for Mender Ramiel. Please!!! I have no idea what you did that made it possible for me to fight a Elite Boss speedster with AoE knockback on a flat rock the size of a dinner table in the middle of a sea of lava without losing a single minion, but it needs to be done to all of the environmental-hazard maps. And maybe to the catwalks in Keyes Island. Seriously, how did you do it?

Well, I can tell you this about the Television arcs: they're already aging badly. I'm roughly Melissa Bianco's age, I think, or anyway roughly the same age as the person who wrote this. So when they quote early Simpsons, when they quote Babylon 5, when they quote Mystery Science Theater 3000, when they refer to the controversy over when MTV stopped playing music videos, when they quote UHF (!!!) reruns of Dragnet and Leave it to Beaver, I get it.

Not one person in 100, born after 1961 or so, is going to get half of those jokes.

City of Heroes skews old, I gather; I get the impression that the average CoH player is probably around age 30. But that means that to the average City of Heroes player, they're making jokes about television series, all but maybe one of which (American Idol) went off the air before that average CoH player was born. No matter what country they were born or grew up in. And that's going to be more true, every day, the longer arc stays there.

They could rewrite Television's arc every couple of years, replace the Babylon 5 joke with a Battlestar Galactica reboot joke, replace the Simpsons joke with a How I Met Your Mother joke, and so forth. But they're not going to. So, as much as old guys like me love that arc, sooner or later it's going to have to go.

Before Dr. Graves, there were three canonical "Idiot Ball" story arcs/series on the villain side: Willy "Dealer" Wheeler, Kelly Uqua, and Television.

Television is the most defensible of them: it's a god. A young and very powerful god. You made the mistake of looking into the trap, and now you're mind controlled. This would be a loathesomely awful arc if it weren't for the non-stop supply of spot-on pop culture jokes -- those jokes are the only reason anybody tolerates this.

Kelly Uqua is almost forgivable, for the same reason that the stuff related to Dollface in Dr. Graves is almost forgivable: she's an apparently AV-level Rikti Mentalist who takes you by surprise. Given that, unlike Television, we eventually get a chance to fight her and she dies like a punk, though, no player will ever forgive this arc for the fact that never, not once, not even at the end, not even after multiple people have yelled at you all the evidence why you needed to, does your character ever "pop a Break Free." Your character stays under her mental control until she is done with you and then you go away. No wonder people hate it.

But there is no plausible excuse for Willy "Dealer" Wheeler's arc. None. There is no way that any player character with enough survival instinct to have made it to level 15 could take even Willy Wheeler's first mission and not realize that his mysterious employer was from either Longbow or Wyvern. I can just barely not resent the idea that my character might be helpless enough against Rikti mind control to fall for Kelly Uqua's tricks; there is just flatly no way it's acceptable to imply that my character is dumb enough to fall for Ace McKnight's.

This could be fixed with a text edit: early on the in the arc, there needs to be italicized or orange text where your character starts to wonder if Dealer is a conspirator or a patsy, because this is obviously a setup, and then your character decides to play along in hopes of finding out and destroying whoever it is that's hiring him.

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And, on an entirely different note, yes, I agree: the Origin of Power arc is a total head-scratcher that seems to completely and totally ignore the entire first 5 years' worth of the game canon. Now that the Incarnate arcs are out, after listening to Prometheus long enough, I think I almost see what you were trying to do here - but it fails. Hard. Especially the villain one.

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I like the idea behind the several contacts' worth of Portal Corp arcs. I just think they had no business being written until or unless the studio could afford to make the various alternate timelines look different from Primal Earth.

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Oddly, I can't think of a single hero story arc that deserves to die a horrible choking death on writing or storytelling grounds; some of the best writing in the game is on that side, like the two original Sky Raiders arcs, or the later Freakshow arcs, or the Malta arcs. On the other hand, there isn't a single arc in the entire game that was written prior to issue 6 that doesn't deserve to die a horrible death for lousy game mechanics: endless commuter quests, street hunting missions for mobs 10 levels below you, pointless repetition of identical instance maps, and the canonical City of Heroes crime against gaming, constantly having to travel the length of four zones to get from one instance to the next in the middle of a story arc.

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No, wait, I take that back: the Kheldian arcs are crap. To be fair, the Arachnos Soldier arcs are even worse.

There are markers for them on the map, they're contact icons. (General directions: at the cop shop in Skyway City, on the boardwalk east of the south ferry in Cap au Diable.)

The hero-side arc makes good use of, and writes nice in-character dialog for, a villain group that really needed a story arc like this, to show off their motivation and what it's like to be them. I approve. (Some will claim continuity error: I can only assume, however, that all this really means is that since this arc caps at 20 and Darrin Wade's arc is level 20-29, Darrin Wade's arc post-dates this one.)

Have we established what the minimum level is?

Players should probably be warned that both arcs end in an elite boss -- although it's a fairly weenie elite boss.

Useful observation: if you run both arcs with a rogue or vigilante incarnate, you can take the astral merit reward for both of them.

The last map on both arcs is no more a clue to which zone is going to be remade than the maps in the Apex and Tin Mage task forces are. This is not a game where the story alters the gameworld, not all that often anyway.

My final thought was: what is Penn Jilette doing in these arcs, and why is he hanging out at the Monkey Fight Club in Sharkhead?

During beta, I wrote up a four page list of criticisms of these three arcs. A lot of my suggestions got used, but you've put your finger right on the biggest things that didn't: the whole concept of "I'm in a competition with a bunch of really unpleasant people" sucks, and all the way through from beginning to end it assumes that you are human, and that you're rude, dismissive, and prone to over-estimating yourself. At the risk of channeling Venture, there is an Idiot Ball in this arc, and you spend a lot of time holding it.

Heroes definitely got the better end of the deal on the tutorial missions. Twinshot's arcs do a better job of teaching the material, they work better as the tutorial they're supposed to be. Twinshot's arcs actually tie into the issue 19-22 storyline; Dr. Graves' arc is just kind of random. And even on her worst day, Flambeaux is less annoying than even the least annoying of the characters in Dr. Graves' arc.

These arcs didn't need to be fixed, they needed to be yanked out and replaced with something completely unrelated, done over, and done right, from scratch. Unfortunately, as I pretty much expected, by the time any players saw them and were able to give feedback, it was way too late for that.

My advice? Skip it altogether; just grind the Death from Below trial. It's more fun, and will level you past Dr. Graves before you can blink.

It's in the Known Issues list -- not handed out yet, will be soon.

"First World problems."

Given that I didn't intend to spend any money above my subscription, I'm disappointed with myself that I caved and bought a $5 costume pack. The 1600 points I had banked went to buy a 2nd enhancements bag. $20 for a bag still feels offensive to me, but it is nice to not have to run back to the vendors as often when leveling a lowbie character.

(I was startled to see that it awarded me another reward token, even though I spent only $5 on points. Shouldn't I have had to spend $15 on points to get that token?)