Lothic

I never claimed that any of my characters are unstoppable gods at any level. Obviously depending on level and powerset some are better than others. But I will strongly argue that I can probably make just about any character "effective" at any level.

I suppose we'll just leave it up to a differing opinion as to what the word "effective" means in this context.

This. I find it more fun to figure out how to make my characters effective at any level than to worry about only having "fun" at level 50. But like I said before to each their own.

At the very least it might have been cool to see Synapse standing there next to the Obelisk and then watch it zap him and then see him collapse as his power was drained. A few seconds of that would engender at least a bit of sympathy over his plight (or delight over his demise) as the case may be.

Again if you feel "upset" anytime the game forces you to EX down then I'd just suggest you avoid that content. There is no law that says everything in this game must be accessible to level 50s as a level 50.

You're acting like the entire concept of EX'ing is brand new. It's interesting to me that this idea really does still bother people that much. I guess if it does then you're going to have to be willing to miss various parts of this game. *shrugs*

I think what Positron fails to realize is that even though we as players are free to have "creative license to introduce our own background into the CoH world" he, as the Lead Designer of a well established game, essentially does NOT have the same degree of freedom to retcon the game world canon on a whim.

Now to be clear as the Lead Designer of the game Posi does in fact literally have the ability to retcon anything he wants. But what I meant when I said that he doesn't have that "freedom" is that as the caretaker of this long established game world he has the final responsibility to maintain a level of continuity that we, the players, can rely on. Like the game master of any RPG Posi wields the ultimate power in the game but as any GOOD game master knows that power must be tempered by consistency, common sense and the willingness to compromise in order to preserve the general well-being of the system. By analogy we know the President of the United States keeps a proverbial finger on the nuclear launch button, but we expect that button to be pressed only in a dire emergency, not as plan A.

Basically Posi's vaguely whimsical attitude about retcons demonstrates a relatively inexperienced line of thinking on his part. Sure he's been associated with this game for years, but that doesn't automatically make him the world's greatest GM. I'm glad he doesn't think he needs to be strictly locked into the past, but by the same token his open disregard for continuity is a classic rookie mistake in the making.

While some retconning might be inevitable, it should always be kept to an absolute minimum.
It should not be embraced as the scalpel of first resort but as the guillotine of last resort.

I think (IIRC) I'm up to around 55 badges when I start a new character.
It's pretty sad to get the first three Badges Earned badges before I even blink an eye.

Obviously when Laevateinn/Witch-Girl said "can we donate Inf" to the relief worker what she meant was "can I use my public INFLUENCE as a hero of the city to help the relief worker."

Yes I know "Inf is not money" in the strictest sense, but it's quite easy redefine our points of view to make the resource called influence effectively apply to anything you want within the game. This whole argument about whether Inf is a form of currency or not has been mostly just a matter of people not being willing to be flexible with their interpretations.

I agree that the Trials/TFs/SFs listed here have different types of tricks to make them easier and that some of them have more "gotcha" points than others. Those things have to be taken into account when coming up with a ranking of which are considered harder or easier.

I think the data Snow Globe and Blondeshell provided give us some valuable insight into this discussion. Ultimately any list like this is still going to have a bit of subjective vagueness to it because there will always be some factors that can't be totally agreed upon like which ones of these are more "popular" than others. But regardless of all that I think we can probably generally agree that for the time being Keyes is the hardest.

Well you certainly can't argue too much against cold hard facts.

I think the only thing you have to factor in is the fact that some of these Mo badges have been around for a lot longer than others so there may be more of those listed here just because there's been more time for people to get them.

Also I still think as time goes on the Underground Trial will end up rating as one of the "easier" Mo badges. I think it's "hard" right now just because it's new - the actual things you have to do to get the side badges are relatively straightforward in that one.

The UG Trial is a tad long, but it's orders of magnitude easier than Keyes. Like Nerius said people will be pretty much getting the MoUT badge blindfolded in a few weeks. I managed to get the MoUT badge after only 3 live server runs (I never ran this trial during beta). I'm sure plenty of people got it with only one or two runs. Any Master badge that only takes a few runs to get without even really trying -that- hard to get it will never rank as one of the "hardest" Master badges to get.

Yes the "randomness" was the main thing people focused on to complain about. But the fact that the "random animations" actually broke and/or interfered with existing animations is more than likely what actually lead to Devs giving up on what they had planned with this. For instance the banking animation MaestroMavius mentioned never worked reliably and depending on the way you moved and what powers you tried to use with it the animations would get choppy and it looked horrible.

So yes the "randomness" sucked, but that was far from the only problem they had with it.

Sure I wouldn't mind the Rednames confirming that for us here in the forum. But I be even more satisfied if they just had bothered to update the help text of this power so that it didn't look exactly like the temporary Halloween version.

I wish I had asked that same question eariler in this thread.

I think it's pretty obvious that team makeup factors into how hard or easy any single trial/TF/SF is. A perfectly constructed league will probably have an easier time with a MoLam than a poorly balanced team trying for a MoLGTF.

That's why when I came up with my list in my last post I assumed a level playing field with every Mo attempt in question being attempted by an adequately balanced set of ATs/Powersets that would work best for the particular run.

I think your rankings are close to the mark but I'd probably rate the STF and LRSF a bit higher than you did. Yes getting a MoLam or MoBAF may be tedious, but I think the "no death" requirement will always make the MoSTF and MoLRSF technically harder to do. You also left out a few of the other Mo badges (like the Lady Grey TF and Baracuda SF). With that being said I'd rate them as follows (easiest to hardest):

Kahn (Quad AV final fight but you easily fight them one at a time)
Imperious (Easily manageable AV situations)
Lady Grey (The Hamidon is the hardest part for the Mo badge)
Apex (Final AV fight on a timer)
Underground (The timing on the final fight and bombs may be difficult)
BAF (Some teamwork/timing required)
Tin Mage (Director 11's fight although easier with incarnates now)
Cuda (The extended ambushes make this an easy one to mess up)
Lambda (Fighting Maurader's res without nades sucks)
Statesman (Multiple hard AVs, easy to make mistakes)
Lord Recluse (Final AV's fight, unless well orchestrated could make you fail)
Keyes (Avoids the Green Stuff badge..and Loves a Challenge..old school master rules on new content sucks)

As far as which I'm proudest of I can't really say. I'll probably be proudest of MoKeyes because that's the only one I don't have yet.

Perhaps your expectations for this were simply set too high. *shrugs*

I'm looking forward to playing through these new "Signature Story Arcs" but I've never really had any expectation that they were going to be monumentally epic centerpieces for the entire future of the game. I've always assumed they were just going to be fun additional periodic content that I could enjoy along with the -rest- of the game.

Sorry if you thought you were going to get more out of it than that. Consider that this is a new feature that's just getting started. As time goes on it has the potential to improve quite a bit.

There was a time many years ago when this game was seriously attempting to try to encourage SG-based PVP raiding. At that time I could almost (almost mind you) understand the whole Matt Miller mindset that "SGs are supposed to be team-only content" and could almost understand why they might want to prevent us from being able to email SG invites to your own characters.

Those days are long since past.

Clearly the whole idea of SG-based PVP raiding never really happened and over the years the Devs gave up on trying to keep SG bases as places that could support PVP. The notable concession to that was when the Devs removed the "path restrictions" in SG bases so they no longer had to be legal/fair for PVPing. Basically I see the Devs' resistance to allowing us to self-invite our own characters to SGs as a last stubborn holdout to a design goal that essentially failed to happen. There is no longer any legitimate reason to keep us from being able to do this, assuming there really ever was a good reason to begin with.

I only hope that the Devs will finally see the stubbornness they are clinging to over this and will eventually realize that the purpose of SG bases in this game has fundamentally changed.

I suppose Bill and Eric were working together to take out Nan in the loyal interests of the Authority. But my guess was that they've both collectively done enough to annoy the Authority that at this point they just decided to work together to defend themselves against their common enemies.

She knew the Authority was going to track her down so I think she just decided to either desperately try to get Bill to help her go rogue or go down in a blaze of glory taking Bill out if he decided to be loyal to the Authority. I don't think she counted on Eric being there let alone siding with Bill.

Basically I think Bill and Eric knew they had Nan cornered and cut off from any support she might have had from the Authority so they just took advantage of the situation by removing her from the equation. My guess is that they figured even if she was going to turn against the Authority that they couldn't trust her anyway so it was better to deal with the "loose end" than to let her go. Maybe by taking care of Nan they hope to placate the Authority for a while so they can figure out what to do about the "disloyal faction" Nan was talking about.

Either way it should be fun to see what comes of it next season.

As it turns out they were actually "that tough to program into the game".

The Flypose emotes we do have that SpaceNut linked to have been in the game for several years. They're admittedly not very easy to use without keybinding them but they're better than nothing. At the time the Devs attempted to make them more like "built-in default animations" but they could never get that to work very well. The compromise they settled on was the pure emote version we have now.

Not sure about female ghost pirates but have you noticed that currently NONE of the costume powers being sold via the Paragon Market are the handful of female ones we know exist from previous Halloween Events. All the female ones are conspicuously missing.

If I had to guess most of this text is related to the fact that this power was originally a two week temp power from the Halloween events. If it turns out that this version of the power bought from the Paragon Market is actually the same two week version and not permanent then that would be fairly sucky for the price involved. Hopefully a Redname will clear this up one way or the other.

Yes I'm actually aware of the supposed "cape mount point" excuses involved with that particular costume set. That's why I chose it as my "Holy Grail" for the Devs to provide to us. If they somehow manage to let us have the Sybil set, despite all the mechanical and philosophical problems against it, then I'll be adequately convinced the Devs no longer have -any- problem with us looking exactly like the NPCs.