Mirai

For me,

Badges > MA >> PvP

and

PvP = 0

I have four defenders who will make very very good use of this buff!

I've had the two lowest level ones set at -1 difficulty to help speed them up a bit. I might want to set them back to same level when I17 goes live.

How about something like:
Octimo-F
Octimo-M

Or the old Latin approach:
Octima
Octimus

*reminisces*

Strangely enough, I use the MA for what it was originally intended: an alternate means of progress in the game. I don't farm or exploit. I like missions with good plot, and I don't mind taking my time to get through them.

So don't take away my XP. It's annoying having to redesign my arcs for the XP nerfs, but I can do it. Take away the XP, and the only reason I'll have to use the MA is to take screenshots in test mode.

Well, let's look at the affected objectives in just my most recent arc.

Mission 1:
- Ally (control but not buff)
- Ally, wandering (offensive, will kill steal if you give her the chance)

Mission 2:
- Ally (control, not buff)
- Captive

Mission 3:
- Ally (offensive, will kill steal if you give him the chance)
- 3 Captives
- 2 Battles that include friendlies

Mission 4:
- Ally (control but not buff)
- 7 Captives
- 3 Patrols, friendly

Mission 5:
- Ally (control but not buff)
- Ally (offensive, will kill steal if you give him the chance)

Yes, I'd say that arc is pretty much broken now as far as XP is concerned.

- Hunting missions in hazard zones given by security guards. Each of these missions block access to door missions until I take it. So I take it, talk to the guard, and drop it. Among other things, this notably includes the dreaded mission to hunt the Rikti in the Abandoned Sewer Network.

- Elite boss fights for certain characters against certain EBs. Sometimes things just don't match up well. I might be using smashing damage against an EB who who has very high smashing resistance, for example. Some of my characters can handle most if not all EBs I run into, while some of my characters just aren't cut out to fight EBs at all.

- Multiple simultaneous glowie click missions. There are just two or three of those that aren't timed that I have to worry about, all on the hero side, but they do sometimes get in the way. (I let the timed ones fail.)

Well, looking over my story arcs, it appears that they've been pretty thoroughly wrecked by this exploit hotfix, and none of my arcs are in any way exploitive. Hopefully the fix to the hotfix will improve things, or I'll have some heavy rewrites and/or deleting to do. And even if it improves things, I'll probably still have to make modifications here and there.

In the meantime, I suppose that I can create some very simplistic arcs that just involve beating up the standard enemy factions. Yawn. I have a hard time believing that the exploits were so massive that they needed to nerf everybody else so badly, but I don't know what the exploits were, so I'll grudgingly try to give the devs the benefit of the doubt here.

Just please hurry up with that patch. I have some captives who need rescuing.

I pick powersets mainly for soloability and variety. Thanks to altitis, that's given me more than 40 characters. There are a few powersets I stay away from for aesthetic reasons, but most of the powersets I avoid are just not solo friendly for me.

I normally build my character concepts around the powersets rather than trying to adapt powersets to character concepts.

And all of my characters can fly.

Note that this can come in very handy when fighting the Praetorian Infernal. I may not be able to hold Infernal, but I can keep that portal next to him quiet while I deal with him.

I did missions as normal. The only thing I do differently for the double XP weekends is that I focus on my slower leveling characters, especially my defenders. I didn't gain more than one level with any given character. No farming for me.

Am I a rare exception to the double XP farming rule? I doubt it.

The biggest problem in the game is that the Baby New Year mission map isn't in the Mission Architect. If I17 fixes that, I'll be very happy.

I'm also annoyed by elite boss fights that can't be dropped or failed. There aren't too many of those, but I don't have much else to complain about these days. (I've sworn off the CoV patrons because of this issue though, so changing those missions would be nice.)

Strangely enough, although I don't expect to ever use it, I think the Positron TF revamp is the most important part of I17. Letting that blight of a TF sit unchanged for years was one of the dumbest moves the devs ever made, in my opinion. (I blame the producer. That kind of thing is always the producer's fault.) It's the first TF for the heroes, and first impressions count for a lot. It's a great thing to change for new players... although it's worthless for me.

Ultra Mode - I have no real interest in this. I'll probably turn those features off, because I value performance over improved shadows and reflections.

Animated Tails - I have a character who could really use one of those.

New Badges: Wow, exploration badge glut. I thought my list was huge enough already. You don't seriously think I'm going to waste my time running around for those, do you? Because of course I will.

In-Game E-Mail: I used to require all my characters to be self sufficient, but dual builds have left some of my characters gasping for inf. Yes, I will use this feature.

Increased Mission Count: I could really have used this five years ago. Nowadays I usually only have one or two missions in my list, thanks to the mission dropping feature. Still, I might find a use for it.

Overall, it's looking like a great issue. No big feature (like a new zone), but Lots of new stuff to play with.

The generic civilians could really use an upgrade. They're very dated.

On the other hand, "ultra mode" to me just looks like improved shadows and water reflections. If there are new textures, I haven't seen examples of them yet.

It's not that new, but one set that I put off for ages was Fire Control. The damage output was just too low. Thanks to multiple veteran attacks, I finally made a Fire/Sonic controller. She's up to level 27 these days.

More recently I decided to finally break down and create a Necromancy mastermind. I was never able to find a good fit with the secondaries except for Dark Miasma, and I already have several characters with Dark Miasma. But after my Thugs/Dark got to level 50, I decided I might as well create a Necromancy/Dark.