Noxilicious

As a related issue, one thing I hate is when I'm on a team and I wanna read the contact dialogue, everytime someone zones, enters a mission, etc etc, the dialogue window just says "loading...".

Usually I just go to ParagonWiki afterwards if I'm too annoyed, but still, it's a needless annoyance. Like having someone repeatedly close a book you're trying to read.

It's bugged?

I do have to agree with the OP, this is not a respec.

This is just rerolling your toon with an ambiguous power-boost and an XP penalty. Not only that, it limits you further by locking away contacts you already did away from you.

It's a masochist's reroll. As others have mentioned, it just makes the game more of a grind, actually REDUCES the amount of content you can do and basically only works to min-max your toon when that's what IOs and eventually Incarnate Levels do for you.

/unsigned.

I can't recall ever being kicked from a team. Then again, most of the time I'm the team leader, and I generally like myself enough not to kick myself.

That said, I'm also in that camp that never kicks people simply for power choices, only for bad behaviour, including leeching. 'course that happens so rarely I have yet to encounter such behaviour. In my experience people just get along in the game.

There's been one situation where I wished I kicked someone, though. Now, there's a few things I need to specify about my teams first: Everyone is welcome on my teams regardless of AT or powersets and I usually don't give orders, at most I just give suggestions to the team. What that means is that I do give an order, I expect it to be followed.
So I was doing Maria Jenkins' storyarc and we were at the mission with Black Swan, you know, the one where you don't actually need to beat Black Swan. Knowing that, I explicitly told everyone not to save the hostage until Black Swan is defeated. Naturally one Scrapper decided that orders are unheroic so he went for the hostage. At +2/x8 I just hoped he would faceplant and since we've been steam-rolling AVs up to this point I figured just seven people were enough. Naturally circumstances conspired against us and the Scrapper was the twinked out with IOs kind so he did save the hostage as we were fighting Black Swan. Minutes later we team-wiped and since the mission was officially complete, we couldn't just hosp it and return.

Yeah, I know you can just keep doing the non-arc missions to get Black Swan again, but at that point I was so pissed at being cheated out of my Dimensional Warder badge I told the team I just don't feel like playing anymore. Later, though, in tells someone basically agreed with my sentiments, since he didn't just cheat me out of the badge, but six others as well.

So I guess the moral of the story is I should've just kicked the jerk because those six other people were awesome. Hindsight is 20/20, I suppose.

Even if six hours is an exaggeration, it's pretty much a fact that the Shadow Shard TFs are the longest in the game, with Dr Q taking the cake.

And that's not a good thing. The Shard TFs were designed with an assumption that ultimately proved to be wrong: That players will do TFs in multiple sessions. Except, due to the nature of TF, doing one in more than one session would be a greater hassle than doing it in one session. You'd have to organise multiple playing sessions and that involves matching up the schedules of up to eight people, hoping that there won't be any short-term complications. That'd also make it pretty much impossible to do TFs with people other than close friends or reliable SG-mates.

So naturally, instead of several 30 minutes to one hour sessions, people just did TFs all in one go. That's why SFs are so short compared to TFs. They were actually made with the idea that people will do them in one go. Now, instead of generic missions meant to pad a TF, you get to do unique stuff like entering a hellish dimension, poking ancient beasts in the eye, utterly wreck an enemy fortress and visit a cave full of pink explodey crystals. You know, things that are actually fairly unique and you don't see everywhere else in the game.

With that said, I honestly cannot support NOT trimming down the Shard TFs. The only way to even justify their length would be to make them normal story arcs. Without the limitations of TFs, there's no pressure to do it all in one go, what with being able to freely form a new team or even just solo. Of course, that won't change the fact that the majority of the level 40-50 blue-side content is seemingly filler and padding missions, but hey.

As Swellguy said, neither side will die because most people will most likely go rogue/vigilante. So far the only reasons not to choose the middle-ground a character concept/roleplay and the vague promise of some sort of reward for not switching.

You make it sound like it's a problem of choosing red-side or blue-side once GR comes, when in fact the obvious choice is both.

Every name that basically just lists your powersets and/or your AT.

My favorite is still Firekintroller with honourable mention for CONTROLLLER. I actually think he also had a little brother called DOMMINATOR.

Edit: Actually, the sad part about those two names is that they suggest there are actually toons named Controller and Dominator.

I am the platypus!

edit: what the hell? I cannot all-caps in this forum? Another reason to post on PU!

I heard those PU dabbles in drugs trafficing, arms trafficing and human trafficing.

Also they kick puppies.

Well, this is about DR, so as far as I care, only 18 hours matter.

Let's just say the rest of the time is interpretive dancing.

Frankly, for that to be an issue you need to play like eight to ten hours without stopping, like say, go to work or meet friends/family or go to bed, stuff that'll take those remaining ten to eight hours.

Really, once you reach this point, Diminishing Returns in Strike Forces shouldn't be your main concern.

Is "EPICS AT 50!" the new Merge The Servers now?

This is all I'm hearing, quite honestly.

For what it's worth, I never had much trouble with Crimson in that mission. Of course, I'm also not too proud to binge on red inspirations.

The fleeing Arachnoid, on the other hand, is annoying because, as someone has mentioned, he's got some good regen going, and he's got a lot of immob resistance. I actually failed this my first time and out of sheer spite I decided to bring some friends back in time to beat him up for real.

I failed the mission? SCREW THE TIMELINE I BEAT HIM. Is my official stance on this, anyway.

As others have said, I make it a point of never joining "we need a ___" teams, and all my teams are parties and everyone's invited.

Though one time on a Peacebringer I ended up with six more people, with all ATs represented. Not to any real tactical advantage, it just amused me to no end.

All I got from Part_Troll's post was "Bah Humbug!"

The fun thing about the Praetorian government is, I cannot see many of my villains joining it.

I think it's Abrahms who keeps saying that Tyrant is a bigger villain than Lord Recluse simply because his rule is much more Orwellian, and he's probably right, but what does that mean to me as a villain? Many already feel that City of Villains is more like City of Mercenaries/Lackeys, but the truth is, in Praetoria, you'll always be a lackey to Emperor Cole.

Sure, the Rogue Isles have some rules, basically just the "don't hit an Arbiter" thing, but aside from that, Lord Recluse basically tells you to go out and be evil while doing his best cartoon villain laugh. Hell, you could tell him, to his face, that you plan on dethroning him, and he'd just tell you that you have guts and he likes people with guts.

In Praetoria, you just need to think for a moment that you cannot do anything without Emperor Cole telling you to do it and you'll find a gank squad at your door. The Rogue Isles allow me to be closer to actual villainhood, Praetoria will always require me to be a lackey to the one true villain around.

On Primal Earth I can destroy Paragon City on a bi-weekly basis and in the rare chance that I do get caught, I'll just join the prison raid next Friday and spend some time in my summer home in the Etoile Islands. On Praetorian Earth I am nothing more than part of Tyrant's glorified janitorial squad, little better than the blue Clockwork he employs.

So why would a villain want to join a place where you either have to be an expendable lackey or face the death penalty when Primal Earth offers me so much more?

Know what pisses me off?

When I'm running around the Rogue Isles, kidnapping and pillaging and burning houses down and all that fun stuff, and some punk decides I need to fight him in the arena and he keeps bothering me until I decide to put him on ignore.

I think we can all agree that person is a ******. If he wants to PvP so bad, well, there's PvP zones for that!

And that's basically what the Fire/Kin in the OP's post did. Telling someone who's doing stuff in a PvE zone to come do some PvP is unreasonable, but so is asking someone in a PvP zone not to do PvP stuff.

The 8th and final rule, if this is your first night at PvP Club you have to PvP.

Now I kinda wanna make an AE mission and just pit the two against each other. You know, once Desdemona becomes part of the AE.

On that note, has there been a Statesman vs Lord Recluse mission in the AE? I'd be curious about the outcome.

Regardless of where the Resistance stands morally, they will always be the lesser evil compared to the Ingsoc.

I heard they're going to include some feature where if you don't play your toons for like ten days or so, they get more XP from enemies for a while.

Just sounds like wishful thinking on part of the players, though.

Well, my own search notes always state my power sets, followed by "No blind invites." I like to think that's pretty reasonable.

Anyway, the only search note that really annoys me is the "my level or higher ones", if only because if you refuse to go even five levels below your level, that being the treshold for keeping your powers, you must have some serious paranoia for lower-levels going.

Maybe some of these people think a level 40 joining a level 35 team gets less XP? Of course that's wrong, but I wouldn't wanna ask these people that only to have them snap at me, anyway.

Out of curiosity, how many end-game mobs resist Smashing and/or Lethal damage? The way it seems, those are the two most commonly-resisted damage types. Just wondering how that compares to enemies who resist psi.

On that note, I never had much of a problem with Council robots, even that one mission that was full of them and only them. I didn't even have the smash attacks, either. I have yet to try the Praetorian robots on my Blaster and the Malta robots... well, it's Malta, they're tough either way.

It's really just the Carnies who not only resist and defend against Psionic Damage, but do Psionic Damage themselves. Even the Carnie AVs (downgraded to EBs) were unsoloable for me even with gratutious use of inspirations. It's a grudge I bear to this day.

Makes the third costume slot mission red-side hella fun for me, though.