Noxilicious

I had actually discussed this with a few friends before, funny that.

Anyway, I do think it should focus on Statesman and the Freedom Phalanx, if only by virtue of them being the iconic Heroes of the City.

The thing with CoX, though, is that there's a lot of lore, but not all of it is necessarily expansive enough for a whole movie, and mashing together Carnie and Crey and Malta plots would probably just create an incoherent movie, so picking a story that can be expanded into a full movie that also just so happens to be coherent is key.

For that reason alone, the Rikti War IS the prime movie candidate. It has quite a bit of pre-game backstory, and several in-game story arcs as well as a Task Force dedicated to it.

HOWEVER, artistic liscence shouldn't be ignored. I am entirely in favour of modifying the CoH lore, heavily if need be, to create a suitable movie. What I would personally love to see is a movie with Lord Recluse as the main baddy, mostly because I want to see big fight, acted or with CGI, between States and Reccy, and, I dunno, focus what it means to be a hero in a modern age or some philosophical stuff like that. We can work the details out later.

I suppose it would go similarly to what Blpup said: Have a montage of Marcus Cole's and Stefan Richter's life pre-super powers, y'know, WWI (maybe retcon to WWII to make Marcus seem more contemporary to the audience?), Marcus poisoned, finding the Well of Furies, etc etc.

Super-powered Marcus returns to Paragon City, a place ironically known for its debauchery, amoral nature and most of all, absurdly high crime rate. So, we'll spend a few scenes establishing that Paragon City just isn't a nice place to be in. Changed by his war experiences and his travels with Stefan and endowed with the power to actually make a difference, Marcus decides to become everything that Paragon City isn't: He becomes Statesman.

Of course, this means more montage time. Statesman cracks down on crime, setting an example for the people of Paragon City, and more and more people pick up their capes and make their home a better place. I don't know about the pre-WWII villain groups, but if we just set this after WWII, or even later, this is also the perfect opportunity for cameos of the game's Archvillains and even player heroes and villains.

Somewhere during or after the cracking-down-on-crime scenes, we'd establish that there's a new presence, Arachnos, but right now I'm not sure how. In fact, I'm absolutely uncertain about how the movie would progress after that. I'm just kinda stuck on the 'Statesman and Lord Recluse beat the crap out of each other' scene, and I just wanna build up to that. Maybe somehow include some of the plot of the Statesman Task Force? The whole Web thing? Well, I'll think about this later, but those are my thoughts on the matter so far.

Actually, Elite Bosses DO give quite a bit more XP than bosses.

HOWEVER, scaled-down AVs and Heroes only give a marginally better amount of XP than bosses and I do agree that scaled-down AVs should give actual EB-like XP.

For starters, the actual EBs already set a standard. To give scaled-down AVs different XP-rewards is just... arbitrary. Furthermore, scaled-down AVs are potentially more difficult than normal EBs, due to powers-selections tailored towards AVs and the presence of Purple Triangles. It makes little sense that a harder enemy gives less XP than a weaker enemy, based on the Risk-vs-Reward ratio that the devs try to balance.

The reason why it seems like that EBs give pitful, boss-like XP is that there are actually few genuine Elite bosses in the game, and we meet lots more AVs and Heroes, or their scaled-down EB versions if we solo or play in small teams.

Long story short, it makes little sense that a scaled-down AV/Hero-type enemy gives Boss-type XP, especially because there's precedence in genuine EBs giving more XP than bosses.

I actually kinda like how some villain groups in CoV only appear in certain zones. It actually makes those zones feel more unique, unlike the zones in CoH where any given enemy group in one zone can be found in two other zones as well.

In CoV, those mini-villain groups always feel like they belong there. The technology-fearing Luddites are protesting in Doctor Aeon's city, what with him being the big science man of Arachnos, the Wailers show up in St. Martial because Sonata makes deals with devils, the Coralax and the golems in Sharkhead Island enmass there because of the presence of the Leviathan. It just gives these zones a unique flavour.

I do agree that many of these groups are still rather underrepresented. Especially the Luddites and Midas' minions, who don't even seem to have arcs dedicated to them. They really should get the same treatment as the Scrapyarders. That group, at least, feels immensely significant in Sharkhead Island and show up in and out of arcs a lot of time.

On that note, giving the Legacy Chain and Wyvern a greater presence on all of the Rogue Isles is definitely a good idea, just to mix it up with the Longbow encounters. They're all good-guy groups, and there is absolutely no reason you shouldn't encounter them more often or in place of Longbow. Hell, a few more hero groups that try to clean up the Rogue Isles would be great, too.

Yeah, Praetoria gets retconned big time. Now it's not just the Goatee Dimension anymore.

Of course, this only means we need a NEW Goatee Dimension.

I don't even get negative rep. I feel so cheated.

I too am attracted to ancient albinos in black life-support armor.

So, because there's 50s that don't want to exemp down to play with you, they're being snobs? If anything, it works the other way around...

The 50ies that DO exemp down, and then boss everyone around, sure, those are snobby, and that's the kind of OP I expected when I clicked this thread, but how a 50 plays is really their own business, not yours. To call them snobby because they don't wanna exemp down for you, frankly, makes you appear snobby and bossy instead.

To summarise: Having a preferred playing style does not make you a snob. Calling others names because their preferred playing styles don't benefit brings you closer to being a snob yourself, though.

Silly me, I forgot we're making movies here, not super hero avatars for us to play.

It's bloody super heroes we're talking about. We have a prerogative to be as flashy as humanly OR superhumanly possible. It's not just our right, it's our DUTY!

More seriously, though, those 'hardships' in creating characters because I need to artificially look out for the colour of their powers didn't make me feel any closer to any character, ever. In fact, I'd wager most people felt their characters were actually more foreign to them because they didn't have as much control over them. Now that I can make characters with blue fire, I can make characters closer to what I envision, and thereby characters that I enjoy playing more.

We are not creating characters to make a commercial success and appeal to as many people as possible. We make characters that appeal to ourselves, that we don't get tired of looking at after a few hours and then delete.

Remember, we're not just the creators, we are also our own target audience. Mr Lucas may face the risk of losing millions by getting as close to his vision as possible, but all I get from getting as close to my vision of my characters is greater enjoyment of the game. NCSoft gets the same fifteen dollars, but I get just that tiny bit more fun.

Lastly, if I wanted didn't want to create my toons as I see fit, I'd go back to Ye Olde Generic Fantasy MMO and dress up like a hobo just like my twenty million identical twins. More character customisation is NEVER the wrong thing.

We should all just take it to the Suggestion board and make a huge mega-thread about how an enemy with this much HP is rather... ill-conceived, so the devs finally get that message. It's pretty swing-and-a-miss, that Reichsman fight, as an attempt at an epic final for an arc.

And in a very special episode of NCSoft, CoX finds out it has an advanced stage of cancer.

DOOOOOOOOM.

I dunno, lots of you DID establish that custom mobs are harder by virtue of using player numbers, not enemy numbers. Of course, that doesn't change the fact that the OP made an enemy group with such an imbalanced synergy that player-death is inevitable.

I've been told I'm pretty tasty at night.

More seriously, Noxilicious is kind of a mutation of my original nick, Nocturn.

This was before I was fluent in English and new words like 'nocturnal'. Nocturn was the name of some shadow elemental in the German translation of some Japanese RPG for the SNES. Being yound and stupid like that, everything dark was instantly five times cooler.

That lasted for a couple of years, but as is the matter with things, eventually you grow older and those silly interests you had earlier left you, and omgdark just isn't interesting anymore, and to find something unique, after some brain-storming I went with the Latin word for night, Nox, and slapped a y on the end. Perfect!

Except it's not as unique as I would like to think. Plenty of places have Noxies. Usually I circumvented that issues with names like [adjective]_Noxy or [noun]_Noxy, but eventually I grew tired of that. I actually got called Noxilicious by some internet buddies (or Noxious when I annoyed them, heh), so I figured, may as well pick that.

Yeah, yeah, I know he got an HP nerf in Beta, but honestly, I feel it still isn't enough.

The problem is that due to Reichsman's high HP, the devs did something they tried to abolish elsewhere in the game: It heavily encourages very little flexibiliy in team-forming, just so that there will be lots of -res and +dam, otherwise, the fight will take simply way too long, and that's with a full party.

That's a whole new problem, too. You can start the Reichsman Forces with a minimum of four people. This suggest it is balanced to be plaid by at least four people. For pretty much every other Task Force or Strike Force, the minimum requirement is reasonable, but I'm not insane enough, nor do I know anyone who is, to try the Reichsman Forces with just four people and beat Reichsman with so few toons.

If even a full team will fight for half an hour simply because they didn't bring the absolutely required -res and +dam, do the devs honestly expect that a team of four will endure the utter tedium of fighting an enemy with 200 thousand HP?


Now, I get why Reichsman has tons of HP. In the early Task Forces of City of Heroes, the AVs at the end are mere footnotes, if anything. Any team of eight can tear down most AVs without breaking a sweat. With newer challenges like the Statesman Task Force, Lord Recluse Strike Force and Imperious Task Force, the final confrontations actually feel like actual confrontations.

The LRSF has the entire Freedom Phalanx at once, the STF has Arachnos' top lieutenants at once and a super-powered Lord Recluse, and the ITF has Romulus with his three Nictus Essences and plenty of ambushes. These final confrontations feel epic because they are A) not over immediately and B) they feel challenging.

The Reichsman Forces lack that. They firstly fal flat on the challenge, in the case of the Kahn TF only having two AV-powered enemies at a time, which to a full team at high levels is still trivial, and because the percieved time is longer than those other final confrontations. Whether the Reichsman fight IS longer, I cannot say, but it's not a secret that many feel it takes longer. I can safely say this is because fighting a single enemy without a lot happening for a long time is, simply, boring. Reichsman outlives his welcome.

Reducing his HP is not a perfect fix, but it will reduce the tedium of the final confrontation by a large margin. Brevity CAN be a virtue, and it's one that Reichsman currently lacks.

Not quite related to my main suggestion, but in the Kahn TF, doubling the numbers of AVs in the final confrontation, and releasing two AVs at a time, might serve to increase the feeling of threat the current final confrontation utterly lacks after the first five minutes. Of course, that also means the minimum team size needs to be increased, maybe even pushed to 8, but let's face it, this is an end-game Task Force, and as the final confrontation is, it's an affront to expect a four person team to finish it.