Noxilicious

The thing with doing the Responsibility story arcs is, you usally don't have the time to stop and think "these people will be put on an unfair trial and consequently put into a torture camp", you think "they're trying to blow up the hospital and I need to stop them now or countless innocent lives are lost!"

You might not even like the Praetorian government if you're working as a Loyalist, but you want to help the people of Praetoria so you're doing cop-work.

Of course you might say if you really wanna help those people you'll go Resistance and try to free them from an oppressive government, but what do you see the Resistance doing? They're the guys trying to blow up hospitals! One thing you need to remember is that the Resistance's public face are the Crusaders. The Wardens are fighting an information war, they want to bring the truth to the people, but that involves almost solely covert work.

The Crusaders instead think the best course of action is to blow &!%$ up, damn the consequences. One reason that the Crusaders get all the press in Praetoria might be because the press is heavily censored, but another is that the Warden don't actually openly operate in the public eye like the Crusaders do. So to a Loyalist, this means that the Crusaders are the Resistance, there are no Wardens that mean well. To side with the Resistance means to side with Crusaders who blow up hospitals, and as a protector to the people that's exactly what you set out to prevent.

Your greatest fear as a Responsibility Loyalist isn't that the people will topple the government, but that a civil war will see the death of innumerable innocent people.

This is best exemplified by the flavour text of the Neutropolis Responsibility Morality Mission. Both the Resistance choice and Loyalist choice are actually opposed to Emperor Cole's plan to invade Primal Earth because a war would mean countless deaths on both sides, but where the Resistance choice has the Warden twist of telling the Praetorian people about the incoming invasion, the Responsibility choice is to keep it secret because you fear that a civil war would ravage Praetoria and, note that this is the important part, that there must be another way to prevent the invasion.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, true, but I'd never doubt that the intentions of the Responsibility people are good. That's the conflict of the Responsibility arcs. You're torn between protecting your people and working for a fascist government that puts these people at risk.

Enemy-based heals miss more often the lower the team's HP is. This is because the RNG hates you and wants you to die.

I've been playing a Dark Defender the past two weeks and whenever I use Twilight Grasp at full health for its -dam and -tohit, it hits 100 out of 100 times. When I actually want to use Twilight Grasp for healing, it misses.

Turns out I forgot to make a blood sacrifice to the RNG.

Actually, you can now start an arena match no matter where you are.

They added an Arena option to the Menu in I17. Just pick that option and create an event to your liking, then invite your buddy to it and voila, you can beat each other up.

As for levels, I know that you can exemplar down to his level, meaning that you'll be combat level 20 and have whatever powers you picked up to level 24. There might be a way to have him sidekick up to your level, but I am not entirely certain that is possible.

They are, actually.

The level-ranges for tips are 20-29, 30-39 and 40-50 if I'm not entirely mistaken.

Even then, though, each range has about ten to fifteen tips per side (meaning Paragon City or the Rogue Isles). I guess maybe you just had an unlucky streak.

Assuming there's at least ten tips per side and level range, you have two sides, three level ranges, and if you count the two options of each tip as separate missions, you get at least 120 missions. Of course, if you stick to one level-range, side and option, your options shrink to ten missions.

Edit: Oh, and as for Morality missions, there's only one per range and alignment. So four alignments and three ranges mean we only get 12 Morality missions. Personally, I hoped the Morality missions would've set themselves apart from normal alignment missions more, but c'est la vie.

I have this crazy theory that the Deadly Apocalypse interferes with tip drops. I have no hard evidence to back this up in any way, but I do know that during this Deady Apocalypse no instance in Sharkhead actually dropped tips. A mere minute after the event was over, I got my first tip again.

Knowing the RNG, this might just be a series of coincidences. The RNG is a fickle mistress like that.

Either way, sometimes it takes forever to get a tip, and then you get three tips from three consecutive enemies. Tips are not rare by any stretch of the word, but sometimes you just get unlucky.

For me, personally, it's Overdrive being a constant thorn in side whenever I'm trying to burn down an orphanage or taint the water supply of a homeless shelter. She's that perfect little goody-two-shoes Hero that fails to see the big picture.

...what? How burning down orphanages fits into the big picture? You wouldn't even be able to begin to understand, so why should I bother explaining it?

Incidentally, it amuses me how Maelstrom and Desdemona feature on everything Going Rogue-related, even have huge biographies on the GR website, but in-game they are little more than just two members of the Rogues Gallery. Not just that, they're probably the least interesting Rogues Gallery characters, overshadowed by all the others.

This is probably a stupid question, but can't you just buy GR straight from NCSoft's website? I'm Germany and I managed to buy the US version of GR just fine.

I wonder how Miss Francine is doing.

Well, the purpose of that part of the ToS is to keep people from ripping off DC and Marvel characters so they don't sue (even though Marvel still did). Really, if your friend's books are obscure enough, nobody will care either way.

Edit: Or apparently it's a horrible idea from a legal perspective. The more you know.

Personally, I just OD on inspirations. That pretty much solves all my EB issues.

The detox afterwards is a bit of a pain though.

Ouro flashbacks share a lot of mechanics with Task Forces. That means everyone needs to be the minimum level of the arc to even join and everyone will be exemplared to the maximum level to the arc if they participate. It also means that everyone will get the Merit Rewards, and that you cannot recruit more people in the middle of a flashback.

I don't know whether doing Flashbacks from an SG base doubles your Merit Rewards, but if it does I imagine it'd be part of a bug/exploit and not working as intended.

Of course, some people also think Brutes will die out now that Tanks can go bad. Or that Defenders and Corruptors will replace each other.

I don't see why all the ATs can't just co-exist with each other. Yes, there will be some people that will only play at 100% efficiency and only pick the 'best' ATs and power-sets, but most people are happy if you can just smash stuff. Brute or Tank, Corruptor or Defender, what difference does it make on a normal non-challenge team?

I'd also like to know what "all indications" are because so far an incoming Brute nerf sounds like unbased speculation.

Me, what I imagine will happen is that most tonns will be come vigilantes/rogues. If that happens, both red-side and blue-siders will simultaneously get more players.

Personally, though, I actually quite like the Rogue Isles, so I am definitely not abandoning them. In fact, I'm not too terribly fond of the blue-side content at all, so I might just be more likely to have my heroes fall from grace.

While we're on this subject. While I was doing stuff in Grandville yesterday, I saw someone broadcasting for an "SB corruptor" yesterday. It broke my heart to see a powerset reduced to just one power like that.

As others have already mentioned, making alt toons is a big part of this game. For that reason the devs had actually smoothened the leveling curve in the first 20 levels several times in the past.

Of course, making alt toons isn't for everyone. If you want to keep playing your level 50 instead of making a new toon, as others have also said, Invention Origin enhancements let you become a lot stronger and iron out your weak spots. You might wanna check the Archetype forums for build advice if you decide to go the IO route.

And with Issue 19, likely to come out at the end of this year, you will get ten Incarnate Levels to give you a more solid sense of progression. Do note, though, that these Incarnate Levels are separate from your Combat Level or your Security/Threat Level, so someone with all ten Incarnate Levels would still show up as level 50.

As for content you can do, there's really no designated 50s-only content. Rather, the 45-50 bracket constitutes as this game's end-game. If you decide to IO yourself out, you might just wanna do those 45-50 story-arcs you haven't finished yet. Who knows, you might even get a purple IO recipe! Those fetch a pretty penny in the auction house.

There's also a couple of Task/Strike Forces you can do in the 45-50 range. Both Heroes and Villains can do the Imperious Task Force and the Lady Grey Task Force, while Heroes get the Statesman Task Force and Kahn Task Force and Villains get the Lord Recluse Strike Force and Barracuda Strike Force. Those offer some unique and interesting challenges you may not have seen before in this game, however they require a team to start and do.

As for raid content, I'm afraid the game doesn't have much to offer in that regard, unlike say, WoW, which seems to be extremely raid-heavy in the end-game. Right now we have two raids, the Hamidon Raid and the Mothership Raid. In the Hamidon Raid up to 50 Heroes or Villains take down a humongous bacteria for which you will eighter get about 50 Merit Rewards or a Hamidon Origin enhancements. Note that while HOs are definitely superior to SOs, clever use of IOs can get you quite a bit further than simply using HOs.

In the Mothership Raid, Heroes and Villains join forces to assault the Rikti Mothership. Generally about 16 to 24 people participate in this, and you fight a nigh-endless stream of Rikti. There's no tangible reward at the end of this raid like with the Hamidon Raid, rather you get about 200 to 300 Vanguard Merits with which you can buy high-power summonable pets, larger salvage storage or costume pieces.

With I18 you can also do Cathredal of Pain raid where up to 24 level 50s can participate in. I cannot really tell you more about it though since it's not live yet.

And going back to the original topic, as a frequent team leader myself, I can attest to the fact that communication is key to a team's success and enjoyment.

That said, I also try to be as light as possible on orders. Some teams are steam-rolling death machines, acting autonomous, without any outward input. Others require meticulous planning in order to succeed at your objective. With that in mind, unless I see that the team is struggling a lot, I don't consider it necessary to appoint a lead man or designated puller.

And while we're on the subject of differing team potentials, you never know a PuG's difficulty treshold until you've already done a mission. For that reason the first mission I run is always +0. Nothing is more frustrating than going into a high-difficulty mission only to see that you cannot complete it without huge amounts of frustrating. Generally, though, every team can do a +0 mission with relative ease, and from there I can raise the difficulty to something more appropriate. If the team had a couple of close calls, I'll stay at +0. If the team beat everything in a decent tempo and everything went smoothly, I'll go to +1, and if we just brutally steam-rolled everything, it'll be time for +2 or maybe even +3.

In other words, always adjust the difficulty to the team, don't expect the team to adjust to the difficulty. By having an easy first mission you have a chance to see how good a team is and can pick a difficulty that is challenging without being frustrating and everyone's much more likely to enjoy themselves.