Ms. Mesmer

This is also entirely possible.

Thanks for the updated icon, Shadow State. I may just use that if they don't get around to fixing it soon.

Funny thing about that is that I still agree with that sentence of his post in reply to what he quoted. The dialogue says that missions can be dropped for bugs or difficulty, so dropping for bugs isn't "the only reason" that we have this feature. I don't think that we should be able to drop any mission that we feel like dropping just because, so I probably should have read the rest of his post a little more thoroughly. I honestly hope that they read the logs of the Carnie hunts in PI in Harvey Maylor's arc that I always drop because, while they aren't bugged, they are poorly-designed, given how scarce Carnies can be in that zone.

The dialogue in the window when you choose to complete a mentions says for difficulty or bugs, so I'm inclined to agree. The original design intent for the feature in the first place was probably for bugged missions that simply wouldn't complete, but they realized at some point that this would also be useful for missions that turned out to just be too difficult for some builds to handle solo, so they gave explicit consent in that dialogue.

It does. I lost the one that I was holding onto to get the other badge title when I switched from Rogue to Hero, never having left Paragon City between getting the Halloween Tip and doing the Morailty mission.

Just so you know, MacArthur was a very forward-thinking man. He drew ire for wanting a more well-rounded curriculum when he was Superintendent of West Point, including liberal arts, government and economics. He was criticized for being too comfortable with the natives in the Philippines. Most-tellingly, he was instrumental in instituting what we in the Western world would call a more enlightened system of government for Japan during the occupation. If things had gone a bit differently after he was relieved of command, I doubt that he would have been any more conservative than Eisenhower as President.

Of course, this is all our real world version of MacArthur. For all we know, the MacArthur of Praetorian Earth could have been a bloodthirsty imperialist.

Edited: Sometimes a couple of extra words make something less clear, rather than more. Funny thing, that.

I agree on most of your points, especially about better in-game information about the banner event.

Number 3 isn't as much of a problem as you might think. The mission isn't timed, it's the ambush waves that are. If you see that a banner or other event is up that you'd like to participate in, go ahead and exit the mission and abandon it. That will reset the mission to do at your leisure.

You don't get it, you don't understand analogies (and I'm not the only one who has noticed it), you don't get the point of making oppressors our virtual victims being a repudiation of their evil acts, while using the reference to title of a book that fostered oppression as a reward for a heroic act is not, and is so completely different as to be opposites. It's like a brick wall of not understanding talking to you. You even invented history without ever even bothering to look it up, but didn't say a word when you were called on it.

Like I said earlier, it really doesn't bother me all that much that the badge has the name that it does, but you are just being stubborn about this. Golden Girl is far from the only one that keeps harping on it, and I've made a grand total of three posts on the subject now. You, on the other hand, have been the "Defender of the Faith" here for most of the thread. I'm done with you on this subject, because it's not really a concern of mine, and because you refuse to even make logical sense. That was the whole reason that I let myself be dragged into this discussion, in the first place.

Someone mentioned alternative names for the badge. They went to popular culture for most of the others in that series, so what about Farmhouse or Bucket of Water, probably the 2 most well-known methods for killing fictional evil witches. One of the counter-arguments about this badge name, after all, is that most people probably don't even get the reference, so let's give them a reference that they will get.

I'd also dare certain posters in this thread to show where Batman has killed anyone that isn't some kind of nightmare or alternate dystopian future story in comics (Tim Burton's movies have him implicitly killing, but they are pretty far from the source, what with hubcap bombs and automatic weapons on the Batmobile), or to show me where Wolverine is killing people all the time as a superhero, not as a soldier in the past. He has killed a few, but that also is what paints him as a renegade among the more traditional superheroes in the Marvel Universe. Edited: Batman did technically mortally wound Darkseid's body at the end of Final Crisis, though Darkseid would have survived that, had the Black Racer not consumed him, but I'll count that as a kill, I suppose, since Batman may not have known that shooting him wouldn't really destroy Darkseid. So, that's one, when the universe itself was on the line.

Oh, and Nethergoat:

This is some kind of absurdist humor, right? They "caved" to Marvel in the wake of the lawsuit settlement, since Marvel had an android character named Bastion. No Wiccans were involved in that.

The Vamp Lords were actually terrible on my Dark/Dark, and even my level 50 Rad/Psi, because they'd use Dominate immediately, holding me before I could even get Darkest Night or Radiation Infection on them, and then tearing me apart. Luckily, both of those characters had the mob badges, and were solely in it for the tips, so I could run to nearby Police Drones or a Wentworth's kill field to just let them die.

That's the other part of the difficulty of this event, as has been mentioned earlier, that these mobs are mainly level 20ish to middle 30s in difficulty, even if you're fighting them on a level 1. A Crone is pretty much a Death Mage that doesn't explode, for instance, and that Chill of the Night is just completely unfair to throw at low-level melee character. It would be nice to get a few of their powers deactivated based on level range to make them more balanced with what you're normally facing in that level range.

This is definitely true, but it got even worse with the changes from last year. I have about 13 characters that are in their teens that simply won't bother with this until at least level 25, unless they can get on a decent-sized team. Before last year, I'd be fine to take the occasional beating from a Werewolf on a lowbie, but getting whomped on a good percentage of Tricks is just not fun.

You really don't understand her argument or the underlying difference at all, despite your claims that you get it, do you? She is not upset that we are defeating actual witches and getting a badge as a reward, she is upset because the reward is named after a book that at least helped to cause a good deal of real world injustice. There is no parallel to making the purveyors of said injustice the enemy and giving a reward for beating them up that doesn't even reference said injustices that they committed. That is a false analogy by definition. What you're saying here is that a square is a decent analog to a circle because they're both shapes. That's preposterous.

Perhaps you should join Spinal Tap if you can't see the difference here.

It is SG mode that's causing it. It looks to me like they forgot to add a Prestige value to compensate for the reduction. Fortunately, given the normal mission completion Prestige bonus, you're probably only missing out on about 500 Prestige.

I did exactly this tonight and found one other way in which these tips are like the alignment ones. If you do a Morality mission, you will lose your Halloween tip, if you have one saved. So, you'll have to Trick or Treat a little more to get a new Halloween tip once you have made the switch, no saving one for after.

He actually really doesn't have a point there, and here's why. The Nazi-inspired characters are evil, and the badges that you get from them don't link you to doing those acts of evil. The only people that should have a problem with there being Nazi-inspired groups in this game that you mow down in droves are Nazi sympathizers. I'm not really pushing for the badge name to be changed, but Golden Girl is right in that this is an award for doing something heroic that gets its name from something very unjust in the real world. The analogy to the Nazi-inspired mobs that we tear up just doesn't fit here.

This quite simply does not line up with my experiences.

Level 21 Warshade, in human form with none of the resist toggles on, down to 1/2 health after dispatching the Streng and yet able to eliminate the two Zombies that were with it afterward.

I do have to rescind part of my earlier observation, though, but not part that will help your case, even a low-damage AT solo, my level 20 Dark/Dark Defender with three damaging attacks (unless you count Brawl and the origin power, which I didn't use), using no Veteran attacks just defeated Libri Vermis solo at even-level. It wasn't exactly a fast fight, but it is more than doable. This same Defender outlasted the Clockwork ambush waves. During the last two waves, I didn't even use Darkest Night because it was tripping the grief tag on the already run-prone Clockwork, so I was fine with more than half of my mitigation tied behind my back.

Both of these were slotted with nothing better than level 20 DOs, and not even in every slot.

Now I'm not saying that I like the difficulty of Trick or Treat since last year, especially for the low-level soloer or small team. I'm on the record last year as saying that the Bosses and double Lieutenants are way too much, and would love to see them scaled-back until at least level 30, and I stand behind that still. I'm just saying that it isn't some stealth increase to the base damage of all of the mobs involved, but rather the abundant higher-ranked mobs that we see now that is causing the difficulty to be out of balance.

When did they elect McCarthy? Tyrant's bio makes a mention of President MacArthur, as in General Douglas, having been killed, but I see no mention of Joe McCarthy.

They aren't. They just took that last little bit that the Werewolves, Sorceresses, Spirits, Vamps and such left you with after you dispatched them. I know this because an even-con Zombie or two can't even make a significant dent in my low-level Defenders. I know that you're frustrated by the difficulty of the Bosses and abundant Lieutenants, but it's clearly clouding your reasoning here.

The same thing goes for the comments about the tip mission. The Clockwork do come in waves, but they wait until the previous wave is wiped out before spawning a new one. It's no different than how wave ambushes have worked since they've been in the game. The Clockwork aren't even all that tough. I just don't see how that mission is giving anyone difficulty outside of maybe the EB at the end for a low-damage AT who is solo.

Not necessarily. In this post in a thread in Technical Issues on the subject, a player claims that a GM told them that you don't get the temp powers themselves when sidekicked. It explains the behavior seen by Bad_Influence here and the others in that thread.

Just to reinforce the point, I checked dates on patches since that change here and here. There have been 29 patches since that change, 1 on a Monday, 13 on Tuesdays, 7 on Wednesdays, 7 on Thursdays and 1 on a Friday. It's still disproportionately common for the patch to come on Tuesday, even after the change in scheduled maintenance time.

I got an Apocalypse triple from a Trick or Treat mob last night. That more than made up for the lame rare recipe from the Power Hungry badge.