Lothic

I sort of think there's a difference between "camp" and "suspension of disbelief" that has nothing to do with superhero shows/movies specifically. I for one don't think that anything superhero based must automatically be labeled as campy.

For instance I think we can all agree that Adam West's portrayal of Batman was the very quintessential example of campiness. There was very little to make you think that he could have been an "actual" superhero like that in the real world. On the other hand apart from some of the more science-fictiony bits of technology Nolan's Batman uses his take on the character is just about as "realistic" and NON-CAMPY as you can get with this material. Sure one can argue that Bale's boogey-man voice was a little over-the-top, but I would hardly call it full-blown campy given the context of Nolan's movies. Overall the suspension of disbelief Nolan's movies offered was orders of magnitudes greater than many other previous superhero movies.

So where you say Nolan is trying to "fight back the campiness" it's really more to the point that there's effectively NO campiness to Nolan's vision to begin with. Hard to fight against a supposed negative quality that doesn't exist in this case.

Ah, oh well. Weirdly enough even though I've seen every one of those movies dozens of times, all of them even when they were originally released in theaters, I've never really had much overriding desire to play a MMO set in that universe. That's probably why I didn't remember it. *shrugs*

The "Titan" of September must not be that big a deal because I can't offhand remember what that particular game is supposed to be and I'm usually fairly aware of most of the bigger impending releases. *shrugs*

Eh, I'll cut the Devs some slack where it's due. Not every "event" can be full of content and/or supercool. Put it this way - this was more of a "shark week event" this year than the -nothing- we got for shark week in the last eight years combined.

Frankly I think it's fine the Devs threw something together for this while still concentrating on producing "real" content in the upcoming Issue 24 release. *shrugs*

As Von Krieger implied the "Max HP+ Rebirth" trick has been used in Cimerora, which is accessible to any alignment.

Well compared to the height of the Adam West era in the 1960s this version of Batman/Catwoman in these movie are just about as "realistic" and serious as a heart attack. I suppose everything's relative. *shrugs*

My guess for these is the same as I made like six months ago when we first started seeing pictures of Hathaway in the outfit. I think their function was left vague in the movie precisely to allow them to serve as implied "cat ears" (for the hard core comic geeks) without ever having to directly call her "Catwoman".

Basically it didn't really bother me that they were never fully explained because it was clear they were there more to serve as a "nod and a wink" towards the history of the character as Catwoman without having to be campy about it. I actually liked how she was handled as far as that goes.

Yes I'm actually quite aware of the history of this game as it pertains to earning the Empath badge. My main badger earned it back when it was still set at 1 billion HPs.

But I'm willing to look at the CURRENT state of the game where you have access to things that did not exist back in the 2005 timeframe. We have many more opportunities to heal mass groups of people in things like Mothership Raids and various iTrials. And while you can imply that farming it via the Rebirth power in a week is something that we should not consider the fact of the matter is that it DOES exist as a way for any AT (not just healing oriented ones) to have a viable chance to get the personal and SG heal badges NOW.

I stand by my opinion that while the 1 billion HP mark was ridiculously too high I believe the 10 million HP mark is probably for all intents and purposes too low as it exists today for a top level epic badge. We both know that the current 10 million mark will probably never be changed at this point, but that still does not diminish my feelings that I think the Devs effectively over-compensated when they finally lowered the threshold to that point.

As long as no one is suffering the 1 billion HP farce we started with I'm willing to agree to disagree with you on this point about the 10 million. *shrugs*

I actually suggested something like this myself several years ago. The idea was that the total number of badges would not vary among people whether you've played for 8+ years or only one and thus be a little more fair to all players interested in badging. They could have even come up with a "zero year newbie badge" so basically everyone would have that one badge as a placeholder regardless of overall vet time.

Not exactly sure if I thought of this idea first, but even if I didn't this shows that the suggestion is valid amongst multiple players. I realize that this will likely never happen now, but it's the kind of idea that should have been accounted for back when badges were first being developed.

I might be wrong but I thought that the lava in those missions had been nerfed precisely because too many people used it as an easy damage farm, especially by Masterminds who were able to heal all their pets for credit. At any rate I would double-check to see if lava was still a usable damage source for this.

I play a Peacebringer without Nova or Dwarf form because I frankly don't like how they look or how they work. Sure there's probably plenty of evidence to suggest that I'm gimping myself by doing that, but I've still had years of fun with the character regardless. *shrugs*

I honestly don't know how playable a petless Mastermind is or could ever be. The only real "problem" with it is that some teams might not be willing to tolerate someone playing something that gimp by design. A petless Mastermind player has to be willing to understand that some people won't want him/her on a team. But if you can get past that then I don't have a big deal with someone trying this as sort of fun semi-serious experiment.

Pretty sure you can find much better damage dealers for the purposes of farming than CoT crystals. The ideal scenario is to find something that'll do like 80-90% damage to you with one hit but is slow enough that you can recover all that back before the next hit.

There are guides on this in the player guides section that'll give you more specifics, but since you mentioned CoT a favorite critter used for "squishy" damage farms has been using a CoT Guide. Those are usually simple enough for farms because they don't have any special/unique damage types that are hard to deal with. Good luck.

Ironically the top damage and debt badges usually must still be farmed because most people build their characters towards -not- taking damage or debt. Damage badges in particular are still relatively hard for most ATs to get and are probably set exactly where they need to be difficulty-wise.

As far as heal badges go it could be argued that 10 million HP healed is almost -too- easy in the greater scheme of things. I would have been happy if they had pegged it at around 50 million. That would have still made it much more reasonable than the 1 billion original but also left it hard enough that you couldn't just get it with a short couple of days of Cimeroran AFK farming. Still it's much better than it used to be so it's not that big a deal either way.

The trick to farming the damage badges is finding a mission that has critters that will reliably damage you over extended periods of time but will have no real chance to kill you outright. It takes longer to farm a Defender than say a Tank or Scrapper because they have fewer HPs to lose per hit thus it takes longer to rack up significant damage. Find some mission that'll let you park next to a critter while you are in Rest - this will greatly increase how much damage you can take (and recover from) per hit. There are player guides to this if my summary was not helpful enough.

I suppose with the upcoming pool additions it might almost be possible if you also min/maxed it with a perfect set of enhancements to beef it up. But no matter what you did to try to offset the core weakness of a "Mastermind not using its pets" at best I think you'll only get it up to being "playable". Something like this will probably never be "over" powered no matter what you do.

Well there was a time when you needed to heal 1 BILLION HP to get Empath (instead of today's 10 million).

Suffice it to say it was effectively impossible to get that badge unless you were willing to setup overnight AFK farms every day for many months. Frankly I'd rather have that badge be where it is now (relatively easy) instead of encouraging people to have to go through the ugly pain of that. *shrugs*

I don't think many powers will "heal" full health critters and have it count for heal badges. But if you use one of the Rebirth Incarnate abilities with the "+Max HP" quality it'll work like that. The trick is that those powers grant the targets a higher HP total then "heals" them up to that new higher total.

Which is actually a point of contention now that the Devs have haphazardly decided to let the annual vet badges go unsupported. This means that people like Bimble who were lucky enough to get his 8th anniversary vet badge are probably going to remain one of the lucky few to ever get that badge. Most people since CoH:Freedom went live have not gotten their latest anniversary vet badge (my 8th for example was due in April) because the Devs somehow lost the ability to reliably award those badges to the vast majority of players.

Bottomline it's going to be a bit more confusing to determine "the total number of badges any one character can have" because now there are some people who are quite randomly going to have more possible badges than others.

WoW's seemingly "tame" graphics are actually what let games like that get away with being more violent and sinister than their ratings would suggest.

Just to be clear I personally wouldn't mind vicious looking wolves as pets. I'm just pointing out that the Devs of this game (just like in WoW) have to worry about all sorts of silly politically correct issues that could generate more complaints than not. Keeping animals in this game relatively "emotionless" is probably safer from a public relations point of view than having PETA-type people whine about this, that or the other thing. *shrugs*

Right. But since GG was responding to this:

It seemed pretty clear that the only reason GG thought Avengers turned out well was that she thinks Whedon wasn't allowed to have -any- specific creative input. Effectively she's saying that as long as Whedon can't behave like "Whedon" then he's good - which is a very backhanded, roundabout way of saying that she thinks he sucks. *shrugs*

I suppose we shouldn't mention to GG that Whedon still managed to kill off Agent Coulson and cram the movie with obvious other Whedonisms that made the movie great despite his supposed lack of being able to express his trademark "coolness".

My guess is that they are going to let the I24 snipe changes have a chance to be played out for a while first. It's always possible that NO changes to Voltaic Sentinel will happen because Zapp will work well enough to be considered a substitute for a "third blast". *shrugs*

It's funny that I was already thinking about respec'ing my PB with the new T5 Fighting Pool Cross-Cut power but now I'll have to consider working in Air Superiority as well.

Yeah the Devs' handling of this issue was almost worse than the problem itself.

A few months ago they finally sort of admitted that they had given up on getting these things to work after the CoH:Freedom changes basically broke the system. It's not like the awarding of Vet-type badges were ever a 100% error-free affair even before that. But the fact that they let people keep complaining about not getting their latest badges without letting everyone know they had already considered it a no-go was a bit irksome.

Since then people like Zwill have told us that the Devs still want to try to resolve the issue someday. But I pretty much consider it a lost cause despite the several suggestions we the players have offered them as reasonable alternatives.

Given that this is a superhero MMO I can almost buy the "first-time superhero outfit is a bit unpolished" excuse for Penny. But she's really pushing that excuse to its limits in this case.

That's a cool idea. But sadly I think the Devs are more willing to have people like you suggesting that they be more vicious than have "concerned parents" complaining that little Johnny's game-pets are too mean and scary for him.

What I'm saying is that it was probably safer to have them be the way they are than for them to be otherwise. Pretty much the same reason why we don't have obvious blood splatter from defeated enemies. *shrugs*

This is exactly why I don't bother to over-analyze whether or not level ranged content appropriately matches up to my characters' current alignments. The level 20 threshold for alignment switches is completely artificial - if my character concepts call for them to be played as Rogues or Vigilantes from Day One then that's the way I play/envision them regardless of the current limitations of the game system.

Once my characters hit level 20 I'll switch their alignments to match the established concept, but by that point it's a complete meta-game formality. It's not like all of my characters suddenly decide to have morality-altering epiphanies the millisecond they become level 20.