Kelenar

More weak guys. Making one archvillain keel over will never compare to seeing that perfect cone just crumple from Full Auto or something.

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Remember that the AE is basically an official vehicle for fanfic.

You're playing fanfic.

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But with a slightly lower chance of finding out that Spock is somehow carrying Goku's baby.

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(2) Have you given any thought to the best way to weight the mobs? As difficult as this step is, I think it's necessary if you're going to be able to use the results to look at balance changes -- i.e., the (alleged) S/L disadvantage, etc.

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That one would be a pain. If Herostats or something could log the individual enemies somebody personally damaged, and you managed to log that information for dozens of characters levelling from 1-50 in a variety of ways, it might be meaningful. (And even then, I suspect it'd have problems like the differences between hero and villainside, or that people regularly avoid certain groups like Malta.) Otherwise, it would really just be a guess.

There's another thread about it here.

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Sure, I've seen good player arcs. The problem is they're so rare. It seems like everyone's trying to be oh-so-smart-and-witty, and everyone who isn't seems to come up with material on the level of thrill of To Save A Thousand Worlds or A Hero's Hero: "Hey, stuff is happening! Go to these five locations and beat up bad guys! Move!" And that's before we comment on people's compulsion to always cram their arcs full of the most absurdly overpowered custom critters they can think of, seemingly never interested in telling a story that has much of anything to do with either the City of Heroes or the City of Villains. And don't even get me started about how everyone's story is about their own characters, with their own characters making cameo appearances, and the factions led by their own characters serving as filler enemies.

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This is much more along the lines of my own experiences, yeah. On the custom enemies, well, I think a lot of people are using them for the potential novelty of fighting against brand-new enemy types with brand-new plothooks. Unfortunately, with the power setup, they're hard to balance and not really that interesting most of the time. Dev enemies give us stuff like sappers, comm officers, sorcerors, and snipers, who offer interesting tactical problems. You can't really reproduce those in MA. Custom factions being capped at about 14 enemies at an outside max doesn't really help, because it discourages giving a single minion type multiple models... and don't even get me started on the inability to put in one-per-spawn enemies like sappers. Using lots of custom enemies also seems to be very much correlated with that 'not even seeming like it's in the CoH universe' thing you mentioned. Really, if an arc is solely or even primarily custom enemies, I usually refuse to play it unless the description really grabs my interest.

That said, I'll stand behind some of the use of their own characters as the leaders of filler factions. When done well, it actually gives a face to them instead of just 'oh, hey, here are these other guys that need beat up.' (Which is kind of how the Knives of Artemis always come off in the canon material, to me.) The ever-common 'Oh, I'll come with you on this mission, since you'll never beat up [Archvillain!] without my help!' contacts are downright obnoxious, though.

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Born in Battle is way more annoying to get than any blueside accolade in my opinion. Especially since I either A: play Masterminds or B: use defense sets over resistance sets. Seriously, after what, 4? Years of playing my first Mastermind I have yet to get born in battle.

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Not to mention that Force of Nature requires, what, 100 signature/safeguard hero kills? I don't think I've ever hit 50 with more than 15.

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That it doesn't do that in the slightest? Seriously, where do people keep finding these Architect arcs that exceed developer-made content in terms of quality? Because I looked, and I can't find them anywhere. I've tried high-ranked, I've tried low-ranked, I've tried developers' choice, I've tried by recommendation. I've seen a handful of good ones and a whole sea of arcs I'd rather not comment. I might get a few corny jokes or some in-your-face comedy if I'm lucky, and that's a pretty bleak prospect. If I'm not lucky, I end up on such gems that make me regret ever setting foot inside the Architect building.

Seriously, I mean that. It's gotten to the point where I start feeling uneasy as soon as I see the inside of that damn place. I've almost never left with a good experience, not even after making MY OWN arc. Pretty much every time, I leave thanking all the gods that I can set foot outside again, and usually spend a good five minutes just being happy to be ANYWHERE but there.

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Are you comparing them to the best dev arcs, or the average dev arcs? Because I've personally seen plenty of MA arcs that rival the brilliance of things like the Citadel Task Force ("Some Council guys stole my blueprints. Go beat up Council to learn more. Go beat up Council to learn more. Go beat up Council to learn more. Go beat up Council to learn more. Go beat up Council to learn more. Go beat up Council to learn more. Go beat up Council to learn more...") or any of the nine thousand 'Rescue Lawyers from the Devouring Earth' missions in the mid-30s heroside. Have any of them topped my favorite dev arcs? Not just yet. But the good ones seem to at least be on par with a LOT of content in the heroside game. Redside, it's a little shakier, but there are still some not-particularly-enrapturing arcs out there (Kristof Jaeger, the VEAT arcs, Vivacious Verandi...).

Illuminati? Somebody hit the Hagbard Celine signal!

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.... wait'll you meet Romulus and his Pet Nicti Recluse and his henchpeople are so many small, purring kittens compared to that Triad of Terror.

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But Romulus has nothing on Bonefire, man. I mean--

... wait, it's not opposite day?

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If you're playing a brute, what you can do is...before you get SOs, slot your attacks for accuracy and endurance reduction TOs and DOs - don't bother with damage slotting.

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This is pretty much my standard on any character with end problems. 1 acc/2 end in every power in my attack chain as soon as I get DOs. Works wonders for those end-sucking tanks and brutes.

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There is plenty of material to make new ones and still be able to reuse a majority of existing powersets, such as Defence/Assault, Summon/Control, Support/Melee, Melee/Control, Blast/Control and so on and so forth.

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Come oooooooon, melee/debuff!

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Overall having caped resists is about the same as caped defense. They perform the same mathmatically. Defense does better with controls/debuffs that are not auto hit since they can be avoided, while resists does not have to deal with the random number generator to survive.

The only real reason to want defense over resists I can think of is the defense is far easier to cap.

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Which always confused me. Small +defense(All) powers are everywhere, along with piles of set bonuses in recipes, especially for positional defenses. Resist seems to get so little by comparison. Has there ever been a reason given for this?

Pretty much, I just read the descriptions. If it doesn't have a decent outline of a story or reason for you to be fighting in there, it's... probably not an arc with a story. This has gotten me one farm so far with playing about 5 arcs a week since MA came out.

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Eh.

I know you have it set up above where you can adjust the frequency - but I can see far too many people learning about this and *not doing so* because their little phrase is "lulz kool." I already see that, fortunately rarely, with binds.

Personally, I'll keep my characters personality in my hands via RP. Putting in an in-game system, I think, would turn most "personalities" into simply "annoying." (Yes, I *do* see where you can "just ignore their banter" or "ignore the banter channel" - I think within a week it'd be shut off on all my characters second only to Depth of Field.)

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This. One experience teaming with somebody who had a macro to shout mystic-sounding gibberish for every single attack on his mage-type character is enough to make me not want to encourage anything similar. It'd look a bit silly for characters to be jabbering an endless string of quips during battles, anyway. If it were capped at about a 5% chance of triggering on any given event and you had multiple lines available to mix things up a little, it could be tolerable.

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Are you getting tired of the game nerfs? If so, plaese speak your mind here.

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What nerfs?

Or do you mean, tired of things getting fixed? No. Not tired of that at all. *wish they'd fix the character info screen*

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STOP TRYING TO NERF MY WALL OF TEXT.

A single mission in the middle that's at a completely different level range from the others is one of the very few things that will prevent me from even giving an arc a try.

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I'm not trying to make the argument that MA is the best way to make money in the game, here.


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I made 40 million off selling bronze level 35-39 rolls (70 tickets each) from running just a few MA arcs. Might not be the best but it's certainly not the worst. Just sayin.

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No kidding. I think people are discounting how much money you can save using the MA tickets. I haven't paid out of pocket for an uncommon or rare piece of salvage for a recipe I want to make in weeks. So for 550 tickets I can save 500,000 to over 1,000,000 Infamy and that just doesn't get old.

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This. Pretty much any time I get a recipe that requires a piece of rare salvage that is consistently going for 2 million inf on the market, I can hit the AE building and have one of them after doing about one arc. Guaranteed. Usually, I'll have enough tickets left over to roll up a silver recipe or a pile of bronzes.

For money making, I was getting about 10 million inf per hour of solo play in random AE story arcs on my dominator. The market's still a little engorged with recipes, but silver rolls are still a gold mine. Is it the best money ever? Probably not. But you're not going to bankrupt yourself playing in the MA if you roll wisely.

I'd at least like the option to drop them once out of range. I tend to avoid even looking at contacts on characters I team until level 20 or so, because I know I'll most likely outlevel their arc. Getting stuck fighting 5 missions full of -6s just to clear up an arc slot isn't fun in any way.

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So if I put a "battle" in my mish, they just fight and leave everyone dead. There's nothing left for players. Also all the dialog (inactive, first spotted) gets played right away, the players usually don't get to hear it.

I've added a trigger for my battles. Now they have to accomplish an objective before the battles show up. Hopefully the players will run into at least one once the map clears out a bit.

But is there a better way to do this?

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Really it's a matter of selecting the right map. The battle starts when the players come within a certain range. In maps that wrap around themselves, the battle will start two or three encounters before they can see it and it's usually over by then. On the right maps with the right placement, they will come across the battles as they happen or at least be in visual range when they start. Trial and error is the only way to figure that out unfortunately.

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This, unfortunately. On one of my arcs, I managed to position it so that a certain battle is right in front of an elevator, so the player enters the range to trigger it as they enter the range to see it. At the moment, though, it's nothing but trial and error.

1000001000002000000wwwwwwwwwwwwaaaeawdwwwww333If the chat bug is fixed, I haven't noticed yet.

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I haven't seen a genuinely dangerous environment in the game, save for a little lava. Part of villainy is having a base rigged with tricks and deadly traps, poisonous gasses, crushing rooms that cause desperation as the team looks for a weak point in the wall to evade death, etc.

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There are some on that one Sea Witch mission v-side. Traps that just summon a pile of Controller pets on you if you get too near them. Very nifty.

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Fingers

oh and animated Tails

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Animated costume parts altogether. Throw in some shaders and light sources too.

Well, it's 'buffs' and not 'changes.' That bodes well, right?

The problem is that what is 'soloable' varies by about three orders of magnitude between different levels, ATs, and stages of IO'ness.

But yes, I generally think people should at least put in warnings if they really felt the need to include extreme/extreme fire blast/willpower AVs.

I like the idea in general. It's PvP... in a way that would feel a lot less out of place in a superhero game.

Yep, it seems like it was only for heroes. Well. Good thing this is a villain arc and I have just enough room in my arc description for a 'NO LOWBIE HEROES' warning...