Mind Forever Burning

I already have both TT:Assault and Assault on everyone (+90% dmg is pretty nice).

I hadn't thought about the AoE taunt. Hm. I don't know if that will keep bosses from scattering, but I could try it. I'd have to respec someone though - from here up it's all about getting pets.

Got to 32 tonight. Progress will be much, much slower here on in...

After playing around some more, it looks like +3 lieutenants are the sweet spot for now. I can take them out with a single venom/suppression/frag grenade chain assuming I don't screw up the sequencing. I took frenzy on two of the Crucibles for lack of anything better but I hardly have any use for it.

I don't know what Omega Maneuver and the pets coming up will really do for me. My current problem is bosses scatter without stacked web grenade which is tricky to handle, and given how much longer they take to kill they don't seem to be worthwhile. Plus there's the lost tickets thing.

I miss the ability to click on a thread title and jump to the first unread message in a thread. That alone may decrease my desire to use the forums by about 22%.

Also maybe I'm missing it, but is there no way to show all posts in a thread on one page anymore?

The word "*****" is getting filtered? That is sad.

Where'd your avatar go?

UberGuy posted in another thread that it might've been that Inventions was getting anemic, but honestly when an entire forum contains only 9 varieties of posts I was starting to wonder if it was time to reorganize.

I hate the smileys though. It's not so much the actual graphic but the quality is terrible; there needs to be alpha channel smoothing around the edges.

The team is 22. I need to bump up the difficulty somehow - even without having taken Frag Grenade (yet - haven't actually visited a trainer in a while) I can't actually get the last part of the attack chain off against +1 lieutenants anymore. The target dies too fast.

I'll see how +2s do but I might want to switch to bosses (even though that'll cap me on tickets every map - right now +1 lieuts just about get me there). I wonder if there's a boss I can fight with natural kb resistance to keep frag grenade from scattering...

All level pacts were sold for 1B apiece. The team is level 11 currently - was hoping to get to 12 before 2xXP but oh well.

As expected the team is now nearly unkillable with stacked TT:Maneuvers. I'm fighting maps of +1 lieutenants and will start fighting +2s as soon as I can slot more accuracy.

<qr> to Victor...

It's possible that having a bazillion story arcs in the Missions directory could break the AE interface somehow, but other than that, yeah, just hard drive limitations.

Something borrowed...

Well I'll be snookered, you were right.

Whoa. I was expecting a lot less than that. I'll arrange in-game.

I'm honestly not sure what my leveling speed will be. I think a setup where payment is done in installments would probably work best. I don't want anyone to feel like they got a raw deal.

I'd bet good money that there will be day jobs associated with Going Rogue.

Get out of my mind, you!

Nicely done! And you didn't even have to use 2x XP weekend!

I'm preparing to set up and play a 3-box VEAT "superteam". This team would be all Crab Spiders: with the capped defense from TT:Maneuvers the team would be nigh invulnerable from level 10, and the stacked Venom Grenades would melt foes starting at level 12. All the AoE goodness Crabs bring comes with long activation times so 3-boxing them effectively seems fairly doable.

If there's interest, I'd be willing to sell level pacts to this superteam for infamy. However, before people respond I should mention that my play time is considerably more curtailed than Smurphy's, and it's unlikely I would hit 50 within a month. On the other hand I do plan to play some during 2xXP weekend. The fairest deal would probably be to scale it to specific rates for hitting 20, 30, etc.

All characters will be on Virtue (villainside, duh). I plan to roll them on Wednesday, so any deals would have to be worked out before then.

If there's no interest in such a venture, no worries - I'm not trying to push this on anyone.

Make the mission's minimum level 53 or 54 and that's how the critters will spawn. Pre-i15 you had to do some trickery to make that happen, but now you can just specify it in the mission parameters.

[ QUOTE ]
It's funny that thanks to being able to buy the exact rares and uncommons I need I've taken to hoarding common salvage and selling off everything else for 10 inf a pop. Most of the racks in the base and personal vaults are crammed with commons as a result.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's odd, I do the exact opposite: hoard everything except common salvage. Common salvage, at 8 tickets per random roll, is just incredibly easy to generate on demand whenever I happen to care.

<qr>

I find this an odd title for a thread about non-canon arcs. "Canon fodder" is usually used to refer to jumping-off points in canon for fan speculation and/or prediction.

Venture, while I'm generally in agreement with you here, I do think that the rhetoric becomes overly vitriolic at times.

There is a point at which criticism becomes unproductive. I understand your point that people who aren't willing to learn from criticism shouldn't be writing arcs - disagree, but understand. Even assuming that stance, though, there are people who are willing to learn from criticism who get so turned off by the delivery that the actual positive changes delivered within it get lost. In other words, I think a somewhat softer touch would actually further your own cause in some cases.

That said, I don't quite understand the personal attacks mounted on you. As far as I know you've never attacked an author, only the work itself, so responding with personal attacks is inexcusable.

It's not a huge deal, but yeah, the stories and lore forum is where this stuff goes.

Not sure why the two forums aren't next to each other. *shrug*

Spawns follow specific rules for how minions, lieutenants, and bosses appear and in what numbers. Solo, you should either be getting 3 minions or 1 minion 1 lieutenant per spawn. The number of minions/lts/bosses in your custom faction shouldn't affect this mixture, unless you don't provide minions or lts at all, which is not the case here. I've heard reports that the game tries to put as many customs in each spawn as it can before duplications occur (i.e. if you've got A B and C minions, you'll always get ABC in 3-minion spawns, not AAB or BBC).

Getting no lieutenants (or very few) sounds pretty unusual, but I have seen maps where this tends to happen more often than not. There was also a bug a while ago where only 3-minion spawns would appear, and that made lieutenants very rare (that was in the i7ish time frame)... and although that bug was fixed, something similar happened very recently which made bosses start to appear for duos on CL2 and CL4.

Those are all the relevant info-bits I can think of. None of it directly explains what you're seeing but it might help you diagnose.

I'd try a few different maps to see what happens.

Issue 15 introduced the spawn placement markers in the mini-maps. When the devs did this, they also fixed some issues with maps that had front/middle/back reversal problems (i.e. spawn placements labeled "front" were actually at the back of the mission or vice versa).

So my guess is your map is the victim of an unintended change related to that cleanup. I would /bug it, particularly if the map claims to have more spawn points now than it actually does have (which is what it sounds like from your description).

Good luck with getting the bug fixed though... There have been many similar changes since i14 was released that were never corrected. You may have to redo the arc with the new limitations. It sucks, I know, but I have nothing better to offer.

I'm not aware of issues with this, and I've seen the 3/4...1/2...1/4 text working recently both in my own missions and in others'.

So yeah... not sure what's going on here. Is it possible you're not playing the mission you think you're playing (i.e. the publishing lag)?

Jeez, they go for that much now?

Wasn't the CoX backstory basically cooked up by high school nerds writing Champions modules? The fact that it holds up even this well is frankly amazing.