NightshadeLegree

You think this is bad? On my first hero I solo'd the entirety of the Hollows, working my way up through all of the story arcs, only to find that the culmination of the entire zone was a task force with a minimum requirement of 8 players. A truly dismal anticlimactic end to 10 levels of the game that I had, up to that point, greatly enjoyed.

Forced soloing is, and always will be, less of a problem than forced teaming. Imagine if Praetoria's storyline ended with a TF with a minimum requirement of 4 or 6 people. Easy enough to do now, but good luck putting a team together for that in 6 months time when everyone is running Incarnate missions or whatever the new shiny is.

I hate running story focused missions or task forces on teams, because everyone's always in such a damn hurry to gogogogospeedrunftw! that it's impossible to follow the plot. I've ran Imperious a couple of times, Katie Hannon once, Lord Recluse once and Reichsman once... and in every single case I had to find out what I'd just done by reading the summary on the wiki afterward. Reichsman is particularly imcomprehensible unless you're leading the team.

Give me TFs that can be ran solo, with Elite Bosses in place of AVs, and I'll find some sympathy for those complaining about the forced soloing in GR. Until then... /shrug.

"There were times, I'm sure you knew, when I bit off more than I could chew..."

Synching that line with your MM being swarmed by Ghouls made me lol.

Great video.

I prefer to think of Praetoria as a taste of things to come. Now that the devs have shown us what they can do with the new tech used for the zones and the story arcs I can't wait to see what they can do with that in Paragon City and the Isles. Over and over as I've played through the new content I keep thinking the same thing... this is what CoV should have been. It really does feel like a brand new game, and I'm far more impressed than I was expecting to be.

Visually Praetoria looks incredible and completely outclasses red and blueside - especially blueside. Standing on a rooftop in Imperial City and looking east to Cole's Tower, then turning west to see Neuron's tower and knowing that this is 3 zones you can see, is amazing. Praetoria makes Paragon City look terribly small and cramped and dull and dirty and...

Seriously, those war walls have got to go.

Do the 20 transfers per day accumulate over the 24 hours? I ask because I used 20 last night and I only had 2 more available this morning.

Anyway, thanks for this. Since I organise my inumerable alts into themed groups with a different theme on each server this has been a huge help for me to get everyone in the right place. In some cases this has led to me moving entire groups so that they're sharing a server with their heroic or villainous counterparts.

Okay, since they're all on my account I know they'll never meet, but still... it's nice to think of them in the same 'world'

I've just returned to CoH after several months on other games (sometimes a change of scene is good) and, having recent experience of how this focus on endgame can poison and warp an MMO and its community it feels great to be back in CoH, where end game is one thing to do, rather than the only thing.

In at least one game I can think of (it'll go unnamed but I'm sure everyone knows which one I mean) the endgame doesn't increase your options. It narrows them. Sure there's so many max level raids you could do, but few people do any of them - except for speed runs to gear up for that one 'end of the end game' raid.

My 'solution' was to reboot my entire character roster at the start of this year - restarting every character I had at level 1 and keeping track of their progress through an excel file, recording server, AT, powersets, time played, current level and location etc. It's interesting, for me, to be able to compare their respective levelling speeds.

The only rule I set myself was that I won't have more than one of the same powerset combination on the same AT, which has led me to come out of my 'comfort zone' and experiment with some powersets I'd not previously looked at.

At the moment I have around 70 'active' characters, all between levels 1 and 15 or so, and about the same number of concepts lined up (mostly with placeholders sitting on their names until I get around to starting them.) That's spread across all ATs and all 11 servers, and every powerset is represented at least once. I'm also planning ahead, with a dozen or so of those character concepts who are either heroic villain ATs, or villainous hero ATs... just waiting for Going Rogue.

I don't have any hard and fast rules about which character I'll play at any time - though I do try not to let any one character get too far ahead in terms of time played. Sometimes if I see a topic in the forums claiming that such-and-such an AT/Powerset combo is terrible I'll look to see if I have one of them. If I do, I'll play them for a bit. If I don't I'll probably roll one

I can't help wondering if, around the time GR started development, some unsuspecting player found the character they'd named Maelstrom was suddenly generic'd

One of my early-ish memories of the game is playing through Oh, Wretched Man one afternoon and being rather star-struck by my first in-game encounter with one of the big name NPCs.

I'm not surprised Ghost Widow is popular. She's a great looking character; is introduced in an arc which is still my absolute favourite in the entire game; and she has an utterly awesome signature ability in Soul Storm.

Mind you... sympathetic? I'm a little less willing to call her that since reading the bio of Veluta Lunata, the unlockable Port Oakes contact at Fort Hades.

Nightshade Legree is an ex-cop, a corrupt New Orleans narcotics officer who relocated to the Rogue Isles when internal affairs started closing in. Taking kickbacks from drug barons, intimidating witnesses, falsifying evidence, probably a murder or two. Sure, that's evil.

Except in the Rogue Isles, you don't call it evil. You call it surviving, because the chances are that almost everyone around you is just as bad, if not worse.

/signed for giant robot power, but only if my thugs can get a combine power that enables me to summon a cadillac that they all pile into so we can go and do some drive by shootings.

Call it "To the Thugmobile!"

It wasn't until 2008 that I had a PC with enough graphics capability to run an MMO. I discovered the genre through a F2P called Requiem, and was intrigued enough to start looking at other titles.

My only previous exposure to CoH was a half remembered snippet from a video game review tv show that ran very late at night called, I think, Bitz, which had ran a story on City when it was released. It must have made an impression, though I just remembered some stuff about superheroes and flying and alien invasions...

So I suppose I tried it because I wanted to use super powers and fly and fight alien invasions. Handily enough during my trial period a Rikti Invasion was triggered in KR, so I got that

Even during my trial period I couldn't get my head around the idea of paying for a game over and over and over again - i.e. the monthly subscription. But those two weeks were a lot of fun (and really showed me the difference between F2P and P2P MMOs) and a few weeks later I decided I really missed my trial characters and signed up (incidentally bringing the 10 day WoW trial I was on at the time to an abrupt end...)

It's interesting to me that there's about as many people won't play sets based on the visuals as on the effectiveness or playstyle. /Stone seems big for that, though power customisation (which I was initially meh about) has led to me to create two (well one Stone/Stone and one Earth/Earth - which looks great with lava.)

I'm coming to the end of the alt rolling spree that inspired this thread. I've now used every powerset available at least once (albeit so far some of them for not very long) All except two: Ice Armor and Thorny Assault.

Ice Armor I'm having a really hard time with. It's the only powerset I can think of that completely obscures your character 99% of the time. Thorny Assault isn't quite so bad, but I've only had one idea I liked so far for a spiney character and I used that for... well, Spines. More a case of deciding on a costume that I like for that one I suppose.

Other than that the only conclusions I've come to so far are that Stone Melee is much more fun to play than I expected (yay screen shake!) and Psychic Blast/Mental Manipulation, whilst thematically consistent, is incredibly boring to look at and play.

I love Automatic Villainy. I played through it in the course of a single afternoon during Nightshade's rise to 50, as I just couldn't put it down. It seriously messed with my head. If you're unaware of how the CoV storyline actually concludes, as I was, it can be extremely disconcerting.

I almost got killed in the second last mission during the big reveal, being so busy reading the clues that an ambush caught me completely unawares.

I'd like new Assassin Strikes for Energy Melee and Dark Melee. I found it impossible to play my MA stalker until I had an alternative to that awkward crouch, and I'd be more than happy if the same alternate was made available to EM and DM.