Noxilicious

The correct answer is atom bombs.

If you're mutant origin she talks about how Mutants only started showing up after the first atom was split and how that shows how all atoms and how all life is connected and stuff like that. Or was that Krylov in Cap Au Diable?

Either way, the answer is atom bombs.

You got quite a lot of things wrong in that post there, Q_Candy.

First off, nothing suggests right now that you need to do the new TFs to unlock the Alpha Slot. In fact, it's suggested that you need to get the Alpha Slot before being able to do those TFs. Chances are you might need to do an Ouroboros TF to unlock the Alpha Slot, but the funny thing about the Ouro TFs is you can do them by yourself, no team required.

And if the I18 closed beta notes are any indication, giving solo-options to fill that Alpha Slots are part of the design. Read this post for more info.

As for TFs that last three to five hours being a problem? The funny thing is that devs actually agree with you. We hadn't seen five hour TFs ever since the Shadow Shard was made and even the Posi TF, once a three hour TF, was recently made into two one hour TFs. Even the two new TFs in I19 will follow that model. A year ago they might have been a single two hour TF, but as Doctor Aeon said, instead it's split into two one hour TFs. Much more manageable, don't you think?

Oh, and lastly, if you really cannot quit while you're on a TF, you might just want to consider quitting MMOs as a whole because that's a bit of a sign for addiction. I never had a problem quitting on a TF when something important came up, and I witnessed quite a few times how people quitted on my TFs because something regarding their children or spouses or work came up. If you got your priorities in order, you really shouldn't have any problems with quitting on a TF when you really have to.

So basically what you're asking for is that Stalkers should never be able to aggro more than one enemy at a time? Can I have that on my Blasters and Corruptors, too?

More seriously, the reason a Stalker's Hide suppresses is because it gives outright perfect stealth. They become literally invisible. The enemies with the highest perception are Snipers with 149 Perception compared to a Stalker's 150 Stealth, so in other words, only enemies that outright ignore stealth can see a Stalker, of which there are only three in the entire game and two of them are incredibly rare.

Compare to most other stealth powers that only grant 35 stealth. The enemies with the lowest perception are Minions with 45 Perception, so there's no enemy a /Dark brute would be truly invisible to and since Brutes are melee toons, they'll probably stay in visible range to most enemies. Furthermore, since most brutes love aggro, and Taunts practically force enemies to go into melee range themselves, a decent Brute shouldn't have many problems to stay in visible range to enemies even with a stealth power.

And as far as anecdotal evidence is concerned? I have a hard time not getting plenty of aggro on my Dark Miasma Defender when teamin g up with my Scrapper buddy despite my stealth toggle. He's the main damage dealer and the guy who kills our enemies dead, but I still get half the aggro simply because I have a couple of AoE powers myself. I'm just gonna go ahead and doubt that a Defender is better at grabbing aggro than a Brute running into the middle of the mob and firing of a PBAoE and Taunt.

On the subject of anecdotes, some more info on yours would be nice. How large was the team? What size where the mobs you were fighting? Were you at the aggro cap, which naturally would make peeling off aggro from others quite a bit harder? Saying that Stalkers totally grab more aggro than Brutes because of one vague anecdote is hardly hard scientific evidence.

But even ignoring everything I said, my biggest problem with such a change is that Stalkers are basically designed to one-shot tough foes like bosses, or at least two-shot them while they're in DO-range. What that means is that a Stalker would grab aggro from an enemy that's already dead while the rest of the mob still ignores the Stalker. If you now keep in mind that unsuppressed Hide automatically soft-caps a Stalker to AoEs, they would become virtually unhittable and untargetable.

Do you really not think this is the slightest bit overpowered?

There's also a couple other powers a Mastermind can have that gives you more pets, though they don't count as henchmen and are therefore not controllable like henchmen are.

Hell On Earth in Demon Summoning for example summons a few Living Hellfires while Gang War in Thugs summons ten weak thug posse members. The MM secondary Dark Miasma also lets you summon a Dark Servant as its last power.

So if you're a Thugs/Dark MM, you can have your six henchmen, a thug posse of ten weak thugs and a Dark Servant.

In the original trailer for the booster pack the leaf cape and aura were originally under the Nature banner until players pointed out this game has no Nature origin, but a Natural origin.

This might be super-unlikely, but I kinda got the impression someone said, "hey guys, it's time to make another booster pack let's make an origins-themed one" and someone else somehow misread Natural as Nature and it all spiraled down from there. By the time marketing or whatever other higher ups decide when something gets advertised and released said it's time to tell people about this new pack, there was no time to change the Natural costumes anymore.

Of course there's a lot of intentional vagueness regarding the origins to give players a lot of thematic play-room when thinking up characters, but human plants don't tend to a very natural occurence, more of a scientific freak-accident or mutation. Not that you need a plant-person to wear a cape made from leaves, but still.

I suppose it's also difficult to design flashy costume pieces for an origin that's not as immediately-suited for flashiness, but you know what? In the end all I said is bovine excrement really when it comes down to creatively using these pieces. Maybe my mutant would be complete with the translucent science cape or my scientist needs that magic cape. The origins in these games are little more than suggestions and when you decide to limit your costume choices based on how some packs are labelled, chances are you'll never have particularly stellar costumes.

Now what you gotta do is take down a Kronos Titan and you can call yourself a champ.

Also, I assume that Pandora is kind of a prototype Desdemona? If so, it's a shame because Pandora at least looks a lot more interesting than Desdemona.

Or the new one, for that matter. The space station is still part of Tina Macintyre's arc, except now it looks like a Praetorian lab.

I'm still holding out for November 9th even if that hope is defying all reason.

Yeah, the Neutropolis arcs unlock at level 15. Once you hit that level, the next Power Loyalist contact is Doctor Hetzfied.

Alternatively once you hit level 40 you can just Ouro the Last Stand on Mole Point Bravo storyarc.

No matter how you twist and turn it, when you're red the easiest way to unlock Rularuu weapons is doing a story arc, rather than going blue and hunting 200 bosses in a confusing zone or doing a 5 hour TF.

I dunno about anybody else, but after the first few times I have yet to get hit by his Siphon Power on any of my melee toons. Sprinting backwards is not exactly rocket-science.

The only thing that bothers me about that mission is that tips have no failure conditions. I had several tips with allies I had lead to an exit who got killed in an ambush but the mission wouldn't end. It's a very minor issue at best, yes, but it still seems awfully weird.

I was on Virtue and didn't win anything, baaaaaaaah.

My heart is broken.

As others have pointed out, the Lady Gray TF is the arguably least-unique endgame TF right now. The one thing that sets it apart from the others is the Weakened Hamidon, but that's a fight that actually encourages having the right mix of ATs to finish the TF (your Controller had to leave because she got an urgent phonecall? Good luck beating those green mitos). Meanwhile Doctor Aeon explicitly said in the interview that while he does want to encourage strategy and co-ordination with the two new TFs, he doesn't want that co-ordination to be in the form of needing one AT or the other.

With that in mind, it kinda makes sense the LGTF wasn't really mentioned.

That's one reason I feel that franchise-less MMOs have more potential than MMOs based on a pre-established ID.

Like, if you buy Franchise Online, you will always do so because you expect to see Franchise Character. This puts us in the situation where, if Franchise Character just stands on the sidelines all the time, we feel cheated out of our money with false promises, and if Franchise Character is a constant spotlight-thief it'll feel like we're just being the side-line characters and who wants to play a game where we're just an accessoir to major Franchise Characters?

And even if it's possible strike a balance, as Galadiman already said, Franchise Owner will love Franchise Character and its Franchise too much to let any random player be greater than Franchise Character. On the other hand, people who don't care for MMOs and don't play Franchise Online will feel cheated if their beloved Franchise Character is bested by PC #295277.

That's why not being tied to a franchise has a bit more potential. We can join this game not knowing who Statesman and Lord Recluse are. When we finally learn they're the big daddies of the game, we can fight them, surpass them, and there won't be any hardcore Statesman and Recluse fanboys who will feel cheated because their most favorite character ever got bested because, more likely than not, they're too busy celebrating their own victory over them.

Kheldarn, you break my heart with your frighteningly plausible prediction for the release date.

Well, the devs did say the Well of the Furies is only one way to become an Incarnate and the players will have other ways to achieve that status. If I recall correctly, they also said Praetorian Hamidon had its own unique way of becoming an Incarnate.

The idea of making the toons with the least amount of HP and resistance/defense also the one gaining the most aggro is very, well, it won't be fun at all for people playing those toons.

Maybe debuff-heavy Defenders and Corruptors might be able to deal with that, but most buffers buff, you know, the rest of the party, not themselves. So we have an AT with powersets that are meant to make others more resilient and more capable at taking and dishing out damage, and then make it all useless because the enemies will focus on you anyway?

It may be smart or realistic or what-have-you for enemies to focus on the team's buffers and debuffers first, but it will make those ATs a lot less fun to play. Of course one might say this simply requires a change in tactics, like killing the entire mob immediately before the Defender dies, but who really likes fights that last five seconds? Or instead of a Tanker we just get two or three Controllers and lock down those mobs, but then we're at the same position where enemies cannot do any reasonable damage against the team, it just changed from only attacking a nigh-invincible AT to not being able to attack at all.

So what do we do know? We can just make every enemy a lot more mez-resistant and make Controllers and Dominators another priority target, but then we just neutered another couple of ATs to make things realistic and intelligent or whatever. More useless ATs to make the game more challenging, brilliant design.

Now don't misconstrue this as me saying that challenge is bad. Far from it. It's just that this idea of challenge isn't fun. Instead of making Tankers useless by having enemies ignore them and making Defenders useless by having them get killed immediately, why don't we give enemies more AoEs? Many buff-sets have PBAoE buffs and buff-toggles requiring them to be close to their melee compatriots. It could make it so that position becomes more strategic, like say, this enemy group has lots of cone attacks, so it's best to buff your buddies from behind enemy lines, whereas the other group uses PBAoEs so now the Defender wants to stand as far as possible from the enemies while still being close enough to sufficiently buff their buddies.

Of course even that would have several flaws, but I'm just throwing out ideas here. What I'm trying to say is that challenge is good, but challenge should promote proper team-synergy, rather than by changing combat mechanics in such a way that several ATs get neutered and we're left with the bare-minimum to defend ourselves.

Put differently, you can make the game more challenging by giving us tougher foes, so that we feel more powerful ourselves for toppling them, or you can cripple the players, at which point we'd just feel frustratingly weak and derive significantly less joy from the challenge.

I was kinda scared at first when he mentioned what to take from the Reichsman T/SF, so I was doubly glad to hear we won't have a fight that involves "boiling down to 10 minutes standing around and hitting an enemy".

I also like hearing that they want the new TFs to be challenging without encouraging cheap tactics. That's one thing that always bothered me about the LRSF, the way it seemingly forces the players to either embrace strategies that completely neuter all difficulty in that fight or fight 'fairly' but end up with a nigh-impossible fight.

Paragon Wiki is your friend. It sounds like you left some time before Issue 12, so that's probably a good point to check for new stuff.

Among the bigger things there's now two epic archetypes for villains,
day jobs that give you special boni when you log out at certain spots as well as patrol XP that you get by logging out anywhere and lets you earn 50% more XP for a while,
a merit reward system that lets you earn merits for completing Task/Strike Forces and story arcs with which you can buy recipes rather than getting them from the market or relying on random rolls,
the "Mission Architect" that lets you write your own storyarcs and play storyarcs others have written, the ability to customise the colour of your powers,
a super-sidekick feature which sidekicks all team-members to the mission-holder rather than forcing you to play sidekick tetris making forming teams much easier,
enhanced graphics options which make everything a fair bit shinier,
enhanced difficulty options that let you tailor the difficulty of missions to your preferences better,
and missions that are dropped from enemies that are beaten once you hit level 20.

Then there's also plenty of nice Quality of Life changes.
Epic ATs are now unlocked at level 20 so those with altitis can finally enjoy those ATs too,
the leveling curve in the first 20 levels was smoothened to make getting to that magic Stamina level 20 easier (which won't even matter as much anymore in I19 when the Fitness pool becomes inherent),
the ability to turn of XP in case you don't want to outlevel a particular story-arc or mission,
Domination for Dominators no longer boosts their damage, instead they now always do Domination-style damage,
pets and henchmen are now persistent so they don't disappear when you disappear. This is especially nice for MMs who previously had to resummon their henchmen,
the upgrade powers for MMs are now AoEs, so instead of using two powers on six henchmen each, you just have to use each power once to upgrade all your henchmen,
there's now e-mail filtering so you will no longer be spammed by gold-farmers,
you can now hold seven missions at once instead of three,
unlocking the Patron Power Pool now gives you access to all four Patron Power Sets rather than locking you into one,
Villains also gain access to the Ancillary Power Pool immediately (Heroes still need to switch sides and do a Patron arc to unlock the PPP),
I0 and I1 contacts now give out their cellphones out much sooner,
and a lot more.

Of course there's also several more powersets, TFs, SFs and story arcs as well.

I was kinda hoping for November 2nd/4th myself, but they just announced there'll be a Rikti Weekend starting November 4th and I doubt the devs would start an older event the same day they release a highly-anticipated feature. Who would hunt Rikti when they can become Incarnates?

Then again, the new Praetorian War TFs are based in Vanguard so who knows? At this point I consider November 9th a much more likely date.