Nethergoat

Wheadon makes terrific genre entertainments.

Nolan makes terrific films.


Who's ouvre you prefer depends on where your entertainment preferences lie.

very cool!

I love how small the internet can make the world.

sounds good to me!

/signed


the CoV location is such a bother I just run an alt I don't play over to the registrar, log him out & log him back in when rent is due.

me?

my ar/dev, who's been around so long he still remembers the halcyon days when one of the first 50's on live was an ar/dev who caltrop'ed his way to the top running around the sewers, saw smoke grenade go from 'ridiculous' to 'pointless', was neutered by ED, remembers when Gun Drone was Gun Turret, etc etc.

I'm hoping it gives him the necessary boost to make him fun again- hopefully I won't have to do much fiddling around with his range-defense capp'ed build to take advantage of perma insta-snipe.

I'm not all that performance minded- aside from my handful of IO'ed to the teeth characters I get along fine with frankenslotting, generics & of course a -KB & a stealth IO for everyone.

I usually slot as I level, reslot around the mid 30's and maybe add a set or two, and otherwise don't pay much attention to it.

But I find, when confronted with the blank slate of all these respec'ed characters, that I know *just* enough about inventions to get myself in trouble.

"Well I *could* buy generics, buuuuuut....."

I'm having fun with it, so no harm to anything but the 88's prestige total. =P

I'm expecting to have a goodly lump sum for the INFcinerator after I24 hits.

Lately I'm actually using my inf kitting out the million characters I seem to have respec'ed but not enhanced prior to my hiatus. =/

Welcome back!

2b is still enough to buy most anything you want.

Major changes during my year off all seem to have favored easing monetary policy- for example, I bought up a bunch of Super Packs to get the full Elemental Order costume set and incidentally collected enough ATOs to make a cool billion in profit & also around 1k in merits, which I'm slowly converting to a-merits which I'll cash in to generate another massive windfall.

And this is all without having touched converters or any of that newfangled stuff.

And as mentioned, all the old tricks still work.

I've made a few billion flipping ATOs, and at the lower end it's easier than ever to find a "good" IO recipe that costs you next to nothing to buy & craft & which sells for 4-10m with good turnover.

Back after a summer hiatus- friends graduated, road trips taken, son entertained I return to the fray.

First, a content note/reminder to myself:
Dear Goat:
Please turn Scab Factory's difficulty back down to baseline, thanks!

While he can certainly handle +0/x3 in general, in the context of a mayhem mission there are some roadblocks, mostly involving ambushes, and my son doesn't respond well to defeats. Especially defeats that land us in jail. Plus taking longer to defeat spawns prevents building up a big bankroll of extra time so he can run around the map on his own blowing stuff up once we complete the main objective.

He weirdly had an intuitive understanding of the jail dynamic-

"Dada, let's break down that door!"

So we did.

Then he said, "dada, do we have a friend here? let's break them out too!"

And this was the first defeat we'd had, first trip to the jail, he had no prior knowledge of the 'Jailbreak' side mission.

"We do! Good idea!"

Took out the wall of guards with some help from inspirations, then broke Stardusk out.

Which led to part 2 of difficulty slider dismay, because of course she got mulched by the first spawn we ran across outside, which bummed the boy out.

"Where did our friend go? Let's go rescue her again!"

I don't like having to explain the limitations of the game world to him, preferring to leave the concept of 'suspension of disbelief' to some future date when he is slightly less full of wonder and infinite possibilities.

So, I'm just going to turn my difficulty back down so we don't end up in jail and I can keep whatever friends we come across alive indefinitely.


Before my short break I logged in one evening and hooked up with pretty much the same crew I ran the Virgil Tarikoss with last week. Asked if I was up for a Silver Mantis, as I'd never run one I said "sure!"

Ran the first mish and everything was white/blue so we made a team decision to bump the difficulty and restart. Unfortunately, the bump was a bit higher than I think most of us expected and we went from white/blue to red/purple.

Still, the first mission went down smooth so we figured we'd go with it.

Unfortunately, we had one team member with a propensity for aggroing additional spawns- while we could deal with one huge red/purple spawn, two generally led to a team wipe. Especially fighting Tsoo...I think one big battle we had there were like 5 sorcerers clumped up on us.

*shudder*

Anyway, it was a slog but I was able to see it through to the end. It was a fun team, everybody had a good attitude and even though the unexpected length blew my bedtime all to heck I'd do it again.

It was pretty generic stuff, except for a fun final battle on that one oil rig map. We had to destroy gun emplacements & fight off hoards of Sky Raiders to lure out the Hero, which we managed okay. Very cinematic, as he finally showed up when we were at the top of the rig, alas aggro managment was again our downfall and a few added spawns led to a wipe.

We reconvened down in the water, I claimed a bunch of Team Inspirations from email & we made ready for a major assault, but the guy had inexplicably flown off to a far corner of the map- our stalker spotted him while doing reconnaissance.

Minus the giant cloud of sky raiders, we made short work of him and his lieutenants.

I have no idea how long the whole thing took us- four hours?
Something completely ridiculous.

On the plus side, Scabby picked up most of 5 levels- a little street sweeping or a newspaper will get him over the hump. And it was a really fun team. Our Bane player had recently returned to the game a couple months after giving away all his stuff & deleting all his characters except for the Bane.

"I literally have like 100k" he said in response to my comment about needing to pick up some fresh IOs. After we finally finished the run I got his global, switched over to one of my marketeers and sent him 200m to get back in the swing.

Now, even team handicapped as I am, I've been on a few PUG TFs that started dragging on, either from too much difficulty or team composition problems or a combination. What usually happens is people get testy, start arguing or blaming everyone else for wipes, and then start dropping like flies.

Not this time!
We lost one player, but that was it- the rest of us stuck it out to the end. And it was a happy, supportive team, especially given the environment (a bunch of early 20's battling a sea of reds & purples from super annoying factions like Tsoo & Sky Raiders).

Also, *everyone* on that team had terrific costumes & great bios. That seems to be a virtue RP thing- I mean I still see some duds, but more often than not the RP crowd puts more effort into their appearance than your average 'casual player'. Most teams I hook up with there's usually one character I think is pretty cool. On this team, *everyone* had a really neat costume that made me think "man, I wish I'd thought of that!"

So, great night even with the massive time overrun & a sleep deprived morning the next day. My boy is up at 7:30 come hell or high water, and dada whining about a task force than went over schedule by 3 hours doesn't carry any weight with him.

neat thread, thanks for putting in all that work!

that 900m ruined the niche!

last time I checked in on my psi blaster working that vein, nada.

amazing how one little typo can scare off even the most battle hardened heroes/villains! =P

Looks fun, aside from a heaping helping of gratuitous slo-mo & OMG LOOK AT OUR 3D! setups.

I'll check it out.

excited enough about the blaster changes & the potential for the ar/dev combo in particular than I logged in my ar/dev this afternoon- going to unlock his alpha & get him all ready for I24.

skyway is so terrible I've avoided it for years.

Annoying to navigate for runners, the content is absolutely abysmal, graphically snoozeworthy (and on purpose too- it really captures the essence of a freeway overpass, another place I spend as little time as possible), annoying enemies.

The only thing it has going for it is the Troll Rave.

Even so, I don't think it needs to be axed- folk who like it for whatever reason can still hang out there, for everyone else it's easy to skip.