NightshadeLegree

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Oh and of course, the end result of encouraging these lowbies to get out of the game and play. The cynic in me tells me that the lowbies will just offer to pay for their levels, which will leave them broke, at which point they will post on the forums asking for more inf drops.

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The other week I rolled a new character on Freedom about an hour after the Hami fix went live. While running around battling Hellions I saw several people in broadcast offering to pay for a spot on a farm team. Presumably lvl 1s aren't in much demand for the boss farms...

So if that was the immediate response to being shut out of just one type of farm then Atlas Park broadcast when I16 goes live should definitely provide some free entertainment

Energy/Energy Blaster - you will believe that a Hellion can fly

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Grandville: Just awesome in every way - jaw dropping visuals, great music, non-stop spider smashing action as you explore and some very cool story arcs. Then there's the Fab. I love to take Nightshade up there to see how far I can push her performance. I'm really looking forward to taking a brute in there

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Wow, I hate Grandville. It's so vertical that it basically requires some sort of flight power. I've even had trouble getting around it at times with SJ. I made the mistake once of trying to do an arc there in Ouroboros with no travel powers restriction, and it took me 10 minutes to figure out how to get up to where the mission was.

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I was on a high that I'd hit 40 and made it to Grandville, and I wanted to savour every minute of it. The only travel power I used for days was Sprint.

(Naturally I only did that when solo. On teams I'd use the raptor pack.)

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Besides being annoyingly vertical, it's positively overrun by enemies who throw web grenades at you, so at any given time while you're traveling to the next mission that's 700 yards in the air, you'll get grounded by a grenade and possibly land right in a nest of Bane Spiders.

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I went out of my way to aggro as many as possible, which wasn't difficult with an arsonist and a (pre-Handclap fix) bruiser

I think what I'm trying to say is... if you want to get to your next mission as quickly as possible then Grandville can be hard work, but if you want to explore, while revelling in your power by killing anything that gets in your way, then Grandville is pretty much unbeatable, and that's why it's my favourite zone in the game.

Well, that and the fact that when I walk into Spider City and that music kicks in I feel extremely badass.

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The Rad Snipe is one of the reasons I have a Rad Blast defender at all. I love the sound, I love the animation, and the rest of Rad Blast isn't too shabby either.

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I'm glad I'm not the only one to roll new alts because the powers sound cool. My new Rad/Rad made her debut in Atlas Park last night, and I've got to say X-Ray Beam is another good one - shooting laser beams from your eyes at level 2! Doesn't get better than that

My first defender as well. I'll brace myself for the "r u healor?" questions now...

This was the most enjoyable weekend I've had in the game since I resubbed after the 5th Anniversary reactivation weekend. I did hardly any regular missions, but chasing the Accolade on my 5 highest level characters (from 23 to 50) was an absolute blast.

Plus I got in on my first Paladin takedown while waiting for an attack, and did my first Hamidon Raid - just a great three days all round

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As long as the difficulty stays set for the minimum required teammates. You start on 1st diff with the virtual team slider set to 7 for Manticore, it stays that way throughout with AVs staying AVs. If you can't manage it, then you should have brought more players.

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Keeping the AVs as AVs for soloists would barely open up the TFs at all. I've spent enough time lurking in the Scrapper forum to know that AV soloing is a very specialised activity (or get a Shivan, but meh... don't like Shivans.) So it'd be a step in the right direction, but a terribly small step.

Perhaps it'll never happen, but there was a time when regular story arcs didn't downgrade their AVs either. That changed, and so could this. Since most of the TF AVs appear elsewhere as EBs it wouldn't be that time consuming to implement.

Some of the TFs/SFs would still be close to unsoloable by most players - the LRSF and the ITF come to mind, but I'd at least like to try.

Zones I don't like:

Boomtown: As others have said it's unremarkable to look at, and the enemies aren't very interesting. A Hollows style makeover, with a 5th Column base and some arcs that followed on from the events of the I15 TF would be brilliant though.

Founders Falls and Peregrine Island: FF has made no impression on me. Every mission I picked up sent me to a different zone, so all I did was run back and forth from the contact to the train station. I really had no reason to stay in the actual zone.

With PI it's the behemoths in the parking lot of Portal Corp. Actually, it's not the behemoths as such, it's the fact that noone pays any attention to them.

Zones I love:

The Hollows and Faultline: Fun to explore and great story arcs. If every heroside zone was like this my villain alts wouldn't outnumber my heroes 3 to 1.

Grandville: Just awesome in every way - jaw dropping visuals, great music, non-stop spider smashing action as you explore and some very cool story arcs. Then there's the Fab. I love to take Nightshade up there to see how far I can push her performance. I'm really looking forward to taking a brute in there

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So the time investiture really isn't much of an argument if you ask me. So A and C in Billz' list are pointless. Leaving only B: The Antisocial player.

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Also D: The player who wants the full story, and to take it at his/her own pace.

Putting together a team of 8 people to do a TF may not be that difficult. Putting together a team of 8 people who don't want to speed run it is difficult.

I like TFs - there's a lot of good stuff in them - interesting stories, unique maps, encounters and enemies. I'm just tired of going to the Wiki following a TF to find out what I just did.

The Elite Boss Heavies get obliterated when they show up in my experience, so the Drop Ships would be wiped out in no time at all were they to be downgraded to EBs. Besides, taking down Drop Ships seems to be the new thing to do during invasions. By my count at least 4 servers have done it now, and seem to have had a pretty good time doing so.

Now all they need is a badge

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Therein lies the issue of the solo mindset.

They don't care. They don't care if there's nothing in the game that can't be soloed. They -want- to solo it. They don't want teams so they don't want team oriented content. Appealing to the side that accept there's stuff in a game which encourages teaming is a waste of time. It's not their playstyle so why should they care?

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Why should they?

Why should they care when the average team's approach to this 'special' team content is "how quick can we speed through this TF for the merits?"

If Task Force storylines were more accessible to everyone, rather than solely to the team leader, and if more teams actually played them the way they were meant to be, there would be less calls for them to be made soloable.

I've teamed on regular missions which I could have solo'd, but felt like teaming with others. I've teamed for invasions (a lot - getting Heavies to spawn is definately 'team' content') Making TFs soloable would not kill teams. All it would do is open them up to those who either find it difficult to put teams together, or find the experience at some level less satisfying than it ought to be.

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You mean Proton Volley? I always thought it sounded more like the photon torpedoes from Star Trek...

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I think it is Proton Volley. Looking up the wiki I see it's a snipe, which could be why I've rarely seen it being used.

Guess I'll have to roll a Rad/ now

I've crashed twice (one in Cap au Diable, Freedom, which isn't exactly a surprise) but that's out of over a dozen invasions. Today when I saw the Atlas Park alert I just took a moment to tone down my graphics settings a little.

I'm glad I did. My scrapper finally got the third of the badges in the ensuing fight around Ms. Liberty - my first ever accolade power

Which one of the Rad/ attacks is it that makes the War of the Worlds sound effect when fired?

Actually, can anyone confirm, is it the exact same sound effect?

Masterminds ARE underpowered. I've heard horror stories of Bots/Traps MMs NOT being able to solo AVs! While soloing a mission against Malta on Relentless a few weeks ago one of my pets got killed!

Buff MMs!

I got caught up in a Rikti attack on Kings Row during my trial account two weeks. That was what prompted me to upgrade to a full account, because it was awesome.

I'd been fighting purse snatchers and muggers for a week, and then the sky turned green, the sirens went off, and I stood there staring at drop ships until (it seemed like only seconds later) suddenly there's alien invaders attacking me! I remember aiming a kick at a Headman Gunman and seeing him teleport out of my reach and start firing at me from a nearby rooftop and being absolutely amazed at how dynamic the fight was, and utterly exhilerated as I climbed up the fire escape after the bad guy.

I still love the invasions, and every time I see an alert that they're hitting a low level zone I hope there's a new player there having the same reaction that I did in Kings Row that day.

So today, while loitering in KR waiting for a Rikti attack, I joined a team fighting the (completed) Paladin. It took a little while to get eight heroes together but finally the team, ranging from level 15 to 50, defeated him. Best 2 merits I've earned in ages

The Paladin was one of the first GMs I saw when I started playing, and my initial attempt to take him on went like this...

[Broadcast]Enthusiastic Newbie: There's a giant robot walking down the street!
[Broadcast]Some Other Hero: That's the Paladin.

So I attacked it (what can I say, I knew very little about GMs at the time) and following a quick trip to the hospital rethought my strategy...

[Broadcast]Enthusiastic Newbie: Does anyone want to team to take on the Paladin?
[Broadcast]Meh, it's already built. No badge for that.
[Broadcast]Enthusiastic Newbie:

Until today every other attempt has went much the same way.

I know there's a badge for stopping the construction, but maybe there'd be more interest in defeating the completed Paladin if there was a badge for doing so? As far as I know all of the other GMs give badges.

Task Forces with no minimum team size and AVs scaling to EBs for soloists unless set to Relentless/Invincible.

Dear Devs,

Please consider allowing TFs to be started by small teams or soloists. I'm getting really tired of being left standing at the gates like a door sitter by speed teams.

Sincerely,

Imperious.

All this talk of TFs (which I'd be hugely in favour of opening up to soloists/smaller groups) makes me wonder... how far will you be able to bump the difficulty up in terms of team size before you're encountering AVs instead of EBs?

Edit: in regular mission arcs. I know AVs always spawn as such in TFs, though I'd love to see them spawn as EBs for soloists - Orobouros style.

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If everybody was SKed to maybe 3 levels below the person who set up the mission, that would do a lot to make regular missions attractive compared to AE.

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3 levels below?!

This might work in an AE farm, but not in a real mission where, y'know, the enemies hit back. Just imagine a level 10 trying to do Frostfire when everyone else on the team is level 7...

[/ QUOTE ]Running with pick up groups usually winds up in a bigger spread than that already in my experience. You end up with 4 or 5 players within 3 levels of each other and then the rest of the team lackeyed to them.

You act as though people didn't run real missions with a three level spread in the team before.

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A sidekicked or lackeyed character is -1 to the other character, not -3. The only reason you could possibly have to want most of the team to be -3 to the mission is for PL'ing.

I hope auto-SK is never proliferated to regular content. If anything I'd sooner see it gone from AE, because that's a major factor in making AE the farm factory it currently is.

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Yeah Posi might Ban your account.

Farming AE Missions and Lvling to fast will get us banded. Now we can map for 8 and run solo or farm 2nd account. He just gave us another option to increase farming and another reason to ban accounts.

Before you release this and Posi gives us the stupid speech again you better test and see how fast you will hit 50 now.

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There's a big difference between the imp/comm officer/hami farms and soloing a map of regular enemies set for 8.

Anyone who can clear an 8 man map at level 1 probably deserves to hit 50 in a day

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If everybody was SKed to maybe 3 levels below the person who set up the mission, that would do a lot to make regular missions attractive compared to AE.

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3 levels below?!

This might work in an AE farm, but not in a real mission where, y'know, the enemies hit back. Just imagine a level 10 trying to do Frostfire when everyone else on the team is level 7...

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The most powerful ally I've encountered so far is Arbiter Sands in Faultline, who gave the impression he could have finished the mission himself, but even he couldn't keep Fusionette alive...

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You've never done the Mender Lazarus TF, clearly. Last week we teamwiped and Nosferatu and friends finished the last mission for us.

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You've been luckier than I. The first time I did the Lazarus TF Nosferatu and Burckholder's main contribution to the final fight was to aggro Requiem and co. while I was still trying to get in position to thin out the rank and file.

They did at least manage to defeat Requiem for me, but that was all.

The existing Praetorian arcs from Tina MacIntyre and Maria Jenkins are pretty old school - lots of defeat alls on outdoor maps and in the generic science base. Any plans to update these missions to coincide with GR?

In one of the missions Maria Jenkins says something like "If the Praetorians do invade then Portal Corp will be ground zero." It would be fantastic if Peregrine Island got a makeover to reflect exactly that - Praetorians controlling one of the Portal Corp buildings, and with a presence on the streets of PI, would be much cooler than the Behemoths in the parking lot we have now.

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If they let us solo TFs/Trials the smileys will go into overload!



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I know it isn't mentioned, but an option to solo the TFs with EBs rather than AVs is very high on my wish list.