Noxilicious

Happy bir--

I mean congratulations! You'll never forget your first 50.

Also:

Single missions that give badges are also accessible through Ouroboros, so you don't have to worry about that, either.

Except for messing up one of Efficiency Expert Pither's missions. If you do, you lost your chance at being an Efficiency Expert forever.

Are people calling Swan fat now, or is there a joke I'm missing?

Her legs look more like muscle than fat, anyway. Some people cannot afford super-strength without muscles ruining their looks.

Edit: Whoops forgot there's a second page when I typed this

So, Sam, my buddy...

Word on the street is that you're a quite... influental man, if you catch my drift? Wink wink nudge nudge say no more know what I mean?

Coming with Issue 17, Influence/Infamy gets replaced with Currency which you gain by doing real-time dayjobs! Spend most of your day doing menial, mundane and repititive tasks to gain pitiful amounts of Currency!

Think I am referring to the real world here? Hah! You silly people! I am talking about other MMOs where the best way to get money is to do any of those crafts where you have to craft the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over to gain enough money units to buy that half-way decent gear you *absolutely need* to continue, else you be slaughtered.

It's one of the reasons I quit FFXI. In essense, my day job was being a gold smith. I spent way too much time making the same stupid ring that I can with my pitiful budget to gain some pocket change just to properly proceed with the game.

If I have to repeat a task innumerous times, I'd rather it be slaughtering everything in my wake, not fill out forms at City Hall.

We're playing City of Heroes, not City of Accountants. We're the Supermen of the world, not the Clark Kents.

What I wonder is this:

Does CoX really have *LESS* end-game content compared to MMOs like WoW?

The problem I see here is that games like WoW keep raising the level-cap. What is today's end-game content is tomorrow's road-bump. You have new end-game content, but as others mentioned, the old end-game content simply isn't end-game content anymore. In WoW, you don't have more to do, you just have the same amount of something slightly different.

Meanwhile, CoX is stuck at level 50, and that is a good thing. New end-game content in CoX WON'T negate old end-game content. The Statesman Task Force and Hamidon Raids didn't negate end-game arcs, The Lady Grey Task Force and Rikti Raids didn't negate the STF and Hami, the Imperious Task Force didn't negate the LGTF and Rikti Raids, and the Reichsman Forces didn't negate the ITF.

End-game content in CoX is culminative, not mutually exclusive. I dare say we have MORE end-game content than most other MMOs, it just may not feel that way because 90% of that is end-game content we had for years.

And that doesn't even get into the whole gear-grind WoW and WoW-likes have. We have that, too, except it is, seemingly, not as necessary. If gaining the best gear in the new end-game content is what keeps MMOs like WoW going, then why don't you tweak your new level 50 with IO sets until it is an unstoppable killing machine? It's seemingly the thing to do in other MMOs, if that's what you're after.

And that's not all! As Tricia mentioned, just being level 50 doesn't lock you out of new content. In WoW, you hit level Max, you do level Max content. In CoX, you can do all the end-game content, you can also do lower-level content with your level 50 toon thanks to the magic of Ouroboros, and with exemplaring/malefactoring, what stops you from using your favorite level 50 toon to team with your lower-level friends? You're a level 50, the entire world is open to you, not just the fabled end-game.

Plus we're getting new end-game content, anyway. That's one of GR's stated purposes, another adding a way of being level 50s even better, a la Purple Recipes. And the beauty of it that you don't have to get the new improvements to play the game, and neither will GR's end-game negate CoH's or CoV's. You'll have MORE end-game, not the same amount at the cost of the old content.

Either way I look at it, what we get is win-win.

I dunno who and where exactly it's said, I *think* it's Positron at the second mission of Kuhr'Rekt's second arc, but when he beats you, he sighs and laments how you'll probably just use a medical teleporter and be back in five minutes.

He was completely right, by the way.

Fake Edit: I checked, it's not in Kuhr'Rekt's arc. I am fairly certain, though, that I saw that line in high-level villain content. Might be wrong, though.

Real edit: D'oh! It's actually the level 10-15 VEAT arc, and it's a generic Huntsman that says "Pathetic, although I bet you just hit a medical teleporter and try your luck against me again. Stupid lemming."

I solo'ed a Blaster up to 50, and not exactly a killer-blapper build, but just your average stuff. That means that if my enemies didn't die after my first few attacks, chances are, I'll face a trip to the hospital or run like a sissy coward.

Solo'ing is always an option, but for some ATs it means that you have to accept the occasional face-plant.

Also, to repeat an old but valid advice: Even three people are a team. You can play with only three people and do as well as with eight. After all, 25+, you can beat most AVs with just three in a team and have it be a challenge, and not even miss that there was an AV in the first place, as is often the case with full teams.

Thing is, we hit our target so often that missing is so much more noticable and noteworthy. I've been known to scream whenever a Build-up/Aim Snipe misses more than once a mission, but sometimes that 5% chance to miss at any time likes to meet its quota within five minutes. In the end, it's just bad luck.

For all intends and purposes, it's a viable option, and on my VEAT, I didn't any travel powers and did just fine by relying on the Jetpack Quartermaster.

I suppose the same will work just fine blue-side once you unlock the Shadowshard, or even at level 1 once zone restrictions disappear almost completely with I16. Jut be aware that if one of your contacts decides they hate and send you to the ***-end of Independence Port, you might wish for something faster, but other than that, travel powers are mostly a matter of convenience, not necessity.

You want a reason to hate in-game States?

Well, here's his speech during the final VEAT mission:

"The criminal mastermind known as Dr. Brainstorm has somehow altered the fabric of the universe and allowed the archetypes of the Rogue Isles access to powers that they did not have previously.
By using the Hypothetical Frameworks used by inventors the world over, he laid the foundation of his master plan.
We believe that even Dr. Brainstorm could not foresee the full effects of this, as many of the heroic archetypes have found similar new sources of power.
Surely this is to maintain some sort of cosmic balance, but to be sure Positron as well as the city's top scientists are looking into the situation."

Long story short, Statesman hates Power Proliferation and that is why we kick his butt.

I, too, am the exact opposite of the topic-starter. For me, one important aspect in character creation when coming up with their raison d'etre isn't just why they wanna fight crime or do evil, but why they wanna do so in Paragon City/the Rogue Isles, and as a consequence, most of my toons come from Paragon City, and all come from 'this universe'.

Though I do willingly shackle myself to the game's lore in a desire to be part of said lore, I also love that the game actually gives you a canon justification for all kinds of out-there characters, what with the prevalent role of dimension and time travel. In any game, I would just casually dismiss self-proclaimed night elves in Sci-Fi Town and cyborg ninjas in Fantasy Ville, but the beauty of CoX that every toon just feels right at place, no matter how different they are from the norm.

Steelclaw, you are a god among heroes.

Okay, so lots of people mentioned a mission blue-side where you have to save 50 hostages, and I have to wonder, is this exaggeration, or is that the actual number? At this point, I cannot tell anymore.

I do have to agree, though, that many end-game arcs feel artificially lengthy, with lots of filler missions, the worst being Carnie hunts in PI. Christ, it's like every contact wants me to hunt the rarest group in CoH, and 100 of them at a time. And why? Because they're bored like that, I guess.

The worst time was Madeleine Casey's arc. So I give that voodoo guy some plot item for him to magic around with, you know, nice plot stuff. Then, I swear, he gets all "oh, you want a mission to do? Whatever, go beat up some Carnies and Rikti in PI, kill some time".

One suggestion I saw here, I forgot by whom, is to split the mega-arcs into several smaller arcs. I'm entirely certain that might just fix the problem of tediously long arcs. I have to think of Mage-Killer Zuhkara's arcs: She has three or four of them, all relatively short with three missions, but they're all connected, all essentially one large arc, and I found it so much easier to do three or four small arcs than one mega-arc.

The thing with me is, I don't care too much about rewards or merits at the end of an arc. What I care about is that feeling I accomplished something. With contacts like Zuhkara and Vernon von Grun, the end of an arc is always a nice time to stop and I can continue later when I feel like it, but virtually every end-game hero arc, I end up thinking "when will it end? Oh god, when will it finally end?"

Maybe it's because with smaller, inter-connected arcs, there's less filler missions but more story content, because I swear most hero arcs can be condensed into three mission arcs by cutting out the filler garbage.

And please, PLEASE, do something about the Carnie hunts in PI. They are, by far, the most tedious part in the game. It is NOT fun to travel around PI for hours to kill 100 Carnies, when you find like five every fifteen minutes. Hunt missions with ridiculously large numbers are bad enough, but make the necessary enemy type rare as hell? Whoever came up with that is in dire need of a lobotomy.

I4 is just another stupid low-content issue! This game is dying!

Pshaw, Statesman/Lord Recluse is where it's at.

Or, for added effect: Statesman/Tyrant/Reichsman/Imperious.

I think I'll better stop here.

See you next week.

OH NO I CANNOT PLAY FOR TWO HOURS WHATEVER SHALL I DO WITH MY LIFE NOW.

Here's a little known secret: The devs don't take the servers down to mess with the players. They do that to fix issues. The servers are down PRECISELY because they care about the gaming experience.

You can't have your cake and eat it, too. If that bothers you, well, good luck in finding an MMO that doesn't bother you.