Lazarus

I've been feeling the same way about a lot of the Tip missions I've been running into, especially in the late 20's/low 30's, back on Primal Earth. If I wanted to fight three bosses at once (1 boss summons 2 bosses as an ambush at 3/4 HP) then I would have cranked up my difficulty first.

The problem is when you take away that choice and make everything harder.

This and the lack of many other things that Praetoria should have already had on launch is why I have yet to make a Praetorian since GR went live. Fortunately I have so many new things to do with so many existing toons in the meantime.

I already know from my long stint in beta that I'll have to roll a Brute in Praetoria if I don't want to be pulling my hair out every other mission.

Circle of Thorns maps are pretty much as Temple of Doom as you can get.

Canonwise nobody has more of a connection to the Kheldians as the Council and 5th Column do.

Was he the only boss in the group? If so then he can appear anywhere if your team is big enough to spawn bosses. If you want there to be one special boss: make a separate boss for those regular spawns, then go to Custom Groups and click edit, highlight your special boss on the right side of the screen and right-click to set the "Do Not Autospawn" option. After that the special boss will only appear if you choose him to be the boss in a boss detail.

As for surprise attacks, Ambushes cannot be used as end of mission criteria. You cannot make it required for you to kill an ambush.

What you could do instead is make the special boss spawn in the back room where you had your glowie and make him required to defeat. In the Boss detail settings you'll find an option to set when he will appear, choose when that glowie goal is completed.

You can't do contacts inside AE missions right now, that's something new with Going Rogue and it has not been migrated to older parts of the game yet (AE dates back to issue 14 last April).

It is possible to have friendlies inside the mission, the usual way is to use Allies, Escorts or Captives. You can set a boss to be friendly, but if he is not alone in that room he'll attack any enemies who happened to spawn close to his position and therefore say all his dialog before you get to meet him.

Well we don't learn if we don't ask questions. Feel free to take a look through my own arcs as well as those in these lists for examples of what can be done with the AE system.

Your mileage may vary. I'm never fooled by recolored mobs myself and immediately just think "Oh, 5th Column wearing blue uniforms. How creative." /sarcasm_off

Well no matter what you will see minions more often than any other rank, so you might as well give them the most variety. It also makes various mezz/debuff stacking issues less of a problem as the more critters you have the less often the game throws more than one of the same kind at you.

However don't just make 1 boss. That may be fine for solo on a short arc but in a longer arc (or with a team) seeing the same boss over and over gets old. 3 minions/2 LTs/1 Boss is a ratio, not the total number of enemies.

I feel the same, as it is there is little reason to even bother with EBs. They don't give much more XP than bosses (if any more at all) for the extra hitpoints they carry and they are still stupidly vulnerable to cheap tricks like knockback. An EB will hardly take a team much more time than a boss would have either, while at the same time annoying a soloer who has to do more work while not getting a much larger reward.

The issue of Attack Text preceeding Unaware and Aware Text IS a new thing.

Then they shouldn't be allowed to purchase more. End of story.

To see manly men perform many great acts of manliness?

Oh I know, there's that scene where Mickey Rourke's character tells a sad story and sheds some manly tears when only the audience can see his face.

My only problem with Psi Mastery is that it looks like it has a huge "nerf me" bullseye on it just because of Indomitable Will.

The numbers on Link Minds are low enough for it not to be imbalancing IMO.

The only recurring theme I see here is that the Scott Pilgrim crowd insists that by liking that movie they are somehow much more smarter than those who preferred The Expendables. It's just another case of a group complaining about people not liking their favorite movie.