Nightseed

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THESE MACHINES KILL FASCISTS
Arc ID: 118731

Factions: The 5th Column, Rebelling 5th Column robots, and someone else. You'll figure it out soon enough.

Creator Global: @Doc Photon

Difficulty: Level range is 30-34. There's two custom enemies you might find a bit more difficult and one EB, but most of this arc should be about as difficult as a typical 5th Column arc at those levels.

Length: Just three missions. The second one often ends very quickly. Good for when you want a fast one to blow through.

Synopsis: The 5th Column is in trouble -- their robots have gone berzerk and turned against their masters. The prevailing opinion is the new Autonomous Command droids are on the blink and have hijacked the rest of them. Maybe. But what's with the strange things the robots are shouting now, as they tear their fleshy meatbag masters apart?

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Rating: 4 stars

Mission 1: "A Worried Officer" explains that some of the 5th Column's robots have gone out of control and he wants your help to reign them in and find out why. After accepting the mission, he mentions that the problem might be to do with their new ACD robots, designed to act as field command units.

It's not clear why you'd want to help the 5th Column, nor why they would need your help. Even without their robots, they've still got plenty of ground troops. If you talk to him again after accepting the mission, he says something about the robots being a threat to everybody, but I think their needs to be some clear reason why you and the 5th Column need each other.

The mission itself is in a 5th Column/Council cave map (I've never done the Striga Isle task force, but I think that's where this map comes from). Your goal is to find information about what's going on and defeat an ACD named Botskrieg. The mission makes good use of patrols and battles between the rogue robots and 5th Column troops. The rogue robots are pretty funny shouting communist slogans.

After accessing a 5th Column computer, you find that the 5th Column's robots have actually been hacked from outside.

Mission 2: Next, "A Worried Officer" sends you to "Clandestinet", which is some sort of hacker haven in the Rogue Isles, to investigate the IP address you found in the first mission. There's not much to this mission. It's a single glowie on small office map populated with security guards. There's some clever entry text and patrol dialog, but this mission gets wrapped up quickly. After finding the information you want, your ultimate nemesis is revealed: The Freakshow! The hole thing is apparently a big Freakshow joke.

Mission 3: "A Worried Officer" informs you that most of the rogue robots have been repaired, but he still wants your help taking down the Freakshow hacker. The 5th Column has a set up a fake base to lure the hacker in (there's some exposition about cutting off all computer access except physically going to the base). "A Worried Officer" wants you to go there, spring the trap, and put the hacker down.

The mission is in another large 5th Column/Council cave map. Your goal is to defeat the hacker and everyone in the final room. No real surprises in this mission, more robot/5th column battles, some patrols and an ally.

The hacker himself is a custom NPC named Trash-80, and is also an elite boss. There was a small glitch with his unaware dialog, where $name didn't get replaced with my character's name. I don't really have a decent villain character, so I was playing this with my 28 tanker. I managed to defeat Trash-80 with the help of the wedding band temp power and a lot of kiting, but I can see a lot of people not being able to finish this solo. To be fair, there is a warning right in the mission description. Trash-80 has some good dialog as you're fighting, apparently very eager to convince you that this is all pretty funny.

After defeating Trash-80, you find a blueprint for a moon base. When you take this back to your contact he denies knowing anything about it, and begrudingly thanks you and tells you to take your money and go.

Conclusion: There are three problems I see with this arc. One, it's listed as 'neutral' but there's no real reason to help 5C as either a hero or a villain. There's an offhand comment about a threat to everyone (that most people won't see) and a mention at the very end of money, but I think it really needs to make the reason for helping them more explicit at the beginning of the arc.

More problematically, is why the 5th Column would come to you in the first place. They have lots of resources and lots of guys, so why put themselves into a vulnerable position when they should be able to hand the problem themselves (you do end up stealing their moon base plans after all).

Finally, the EB at the, while beatable by me, seemed out of place. The arc is pretty light-hearted, and Trash-80 is not presented as some dire threat that must be stopped, but rather as a practical joker looking for a laugh. This just didn't seem to me like an arc that would result in a climactic battle with a powerful enemy. This is more of a personal preference though, so if the problems of the motivations were cleared up, I think I would bump this up to 5 stars.

I hope this was helpful.

If anyone would like to give my arc a whirl, I'd love some feedback.

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Arc Name: Crasher & the Tech Web
Arc ID: 92952
Morality: Heroic
Faction: Custom Enemy Group, others
Creator Global/Forum Name: @Nightseed
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Mission Levels: 1-54, but developed with a mid-20s tanker
Synopsis: The Tech Web is making a name for itself on the streets of Paragon City. Help Meg Mason investigate this mysterious new gang.
Estimated Time to Play: Less than an hour

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To you, it may. That however doesn't mean it's the same for everyone else.

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That was bad quoting on my part. I meant 'why not' to 'hover should never be a viable travel power'. As long as it's significantly slower than flight (which could stand to be faster), there's no reason it can't be much faster.

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Are you serious?

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No, that was my attempt at dry wit.

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Hover is just too slow. If it were about 50% faster (whatever the unenhanced speed buff of AM or SB is) it would be a viable combat power. It should never be a viable travel power, IMO

[/ QUOTE ]Why not? Define 'viable'. Running, to me, is a viable travel power and I get that for free.

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Hover: We might buff it some, at some point. However, it should never be an effective travel power.

[/ QUOTE ]Why not? You don't think a power slot and 6 enhancement slots is enough of an investment to fly as fast as we can run?

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How about instead of Hover, rename it to Combat Flight and make it as effective as Combat Jumping?

[/ QUOTE ]It was called combat flight in beta. They renamed it to hover because you couldn't, you know, actually use it to fly in combat.

I for one admire the devs' resolve in maintaining the comic-book purity of this game and keeping aerial dogfights well out of it.

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I don't need a power that is just as likely to give a damage buff to my 0.3 BI hold and skip my 9 BI blast as the other way around. Yes defiance is sluggish, that's why i throw my holds first when i'm low on health. I don't need a critical, I need defiance to work sooner, more reliable and decay slower, that's what I need.

[/ QUOTE ]I'm not saying blasters need criticals, I'm just saying that criticals are a very good inherent power and mesh well with the scrapper play-style. I like the concept of defiance, but the margin for it kicking in and helping you is far too narrow to be as useful as criticals are to scrappers. I think if it kicked in around 80% and started getting close to the cap at 20-25% it would be much more effective.

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2. Criticals and Scourge are probably no better than Defiance at adding meaningful damage over the course of an evening of play.

[/ QUOTE ]I don't know about scourge, but crits are very very nice. It's free damage with no drawbacks. Best of all, it's more likely to kick in when you need it most (lieutenants and bosses). In contrast, defiance is less likely to kick in when you need it. If you're in a tough fight and losing health fast, it's very likely you'll be able to stay in that very narrow zone where defiance helps you. In those cases where your health may be dropping at a slower rate, you probably don't really need defiance anyway.

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They also start throwing lower echelon heroes at you around then as well (I've taken out the Sea Witch, and at least one other who's name I can't remember, plus Ms. Shock from the cape mission).

[/ QUOTE ]There are not words to express how irritated I am that villains get to fight costumed super heroes but super heroes don't get to fight costumed super villains other than arch-villains.