Olantern

On a similar point, while I don't exactly agree with the Spewer of Smilies in this particular instance, the self-satisfied cynicism people are displaying in dismissing every positive thing anyone says scares me a lot more.

They seem to occasionally spawn "outdoors" in the Rikti War Zone, particularly the north of the crashed ship. I've seen the odd Rikti Priest (don't worry, that one's only a boss) up there, too, and those normally seem restricted to Rikti Invasion spawns.

Suggestion for the devs, if any are still reading this: Next time you put some new arcs together, it would be nice if they were for a range other than 20-29. There's so much in that range already that each character I play has to take a different route through it. For the 30-39 and 40-50 ranges, on the other hand, every character ends up doing more or less the same things, simply because there's more time spent in those ranges and fewer different things to do.

This is false.

In my opinion, zombies never had a welcome. (Seriously, I don't care for zombie stories; in my view, they're almost inevitably downers set up to make the target audience feel special by identifying with the characters who "understand the threat.")

There are quite a few possibilities here:

1) He can write with a pseudopod or something. The most-hated DE intern job is cleaning Hami's pencils.

2) He can levitate pens or whatever with the power of his mind.

3) He assumes control of a Bladegrass or whatever and writes through it.

4) The arc takes place before he fully devolved into an amoeba; at the time he wrote it, he was some kind of inhuman horror, but he still had fingers.

5) He took control of someone's mind and wrote through them. We haven't seen Hami do this, but it seems like a likely power for a superintelligent amoeba, based on my comics experience.

6) Perhaps the scariest of all, a sympathetic, non-DE human though he was so wonderful that the human wrote it on his behalf.

7) The most likely of all: whoever wrote the arc and whoever created the in-game Hamidon both worked from the same, extremely vague outline in the story bible, never even spoke to each other, and would be shocked at each other's interpretations if they hadn't left the dev team years ago.

The way people act as if marketing is the root of all evil around here is really starting to anger me. (Especially when it's portrayed as some sort of cyberpunk "cools vs. suits" thing where we free-spirited geeks are all united against the evil minions of The Corp, but that's a different rant.) What, do you expect a marketing department to constantly trash and badmouth its own game? Quite aside from that, I'm not sure what, if anything, marketing has to do with this whole situation; this is a personnel matter, not a game matter.

Also, I agree with the rest of the quoted post, and best of luck to Mr. Bruce in his continuing adventures.

One of my characters, a tech-origined broadsword/shield scrapper called the Knight of Gears, refers to his targeting drone as "S.Q.U.I.-R." (pronounced "squire," naturally). At one time, I knew what each of the letters stood for, but I've forgotten.

My time-traveling defender, who spent a lot of time in the 1930's, refers to his Oscillator as "Otto Gyro."

I didn't know that was an abbreviation for it. And yes, it's everywhere in the U.S. "U R 2QT lolz!"

If that's QQ, then what the heck is SMS? It's one of the regions on the Continent of Communication, along with Internet, E-mail, Cell Phones, and Spoken Language (I was surprised and impressed that he realized this was larger and more important than the Internet). For that matter, where are the areas devoted to Written Communications and Not-Cell Phones (yes, some of us Luddites still have those)?

Right.

It's been a while, but for some reason, I remember a dropship blast as being multiple ticks of smashing and energy damage.

One of the community reps will announce it if they do it again here on the fora.

Beyeajus, the xp is "all right." I vaguely recall it as being about the same as a Giant Monster, but it's been so long that I'm not sure. There are certainly MUCH easier, faster ways to get the same amount. This is not something you do to gain xp; it's pretty much incidental.

The tip itself is called "A Long Line of Spirits." The villain-aligned version has the Red Caps. A single run (soloing set as a team of two) got me about 1/3 of the way to the necessary badge on my Dual Blades villain created in August, so a substantial team, or a few runs through the mission, should unlock the daggers handily.

You're overthinking it.

Completing the Lady Grey TF does indeed spawn a Rikti invasion somewhere, but the zone is random, even as to side, so far as I know. You should also know that there is no badge or loot of any kind, other than inf and xp, for defeating a dropship. The rewards are not utterly terrible, but they're nothing to write home about, either. As you implied, the reward is the experience (in the non-game-mechanic sense).

As for fighting dropships, I've done it a number of times, having been around back when there were "scheduled" Rikti invasions. As in 99% of the rest of the game, you don't need to worry about something like getting enough energy resistance. Defeating a dropship requires four things.

First, you need a sufficient number of people willing to do it. Because the ships can't be slowed, taunted, or diverted, not to mention the fact that they have a lot of hit points and resist damage significantly, you need a certain number of characters to pump out enough DPS to destroy the ship before it leaves the map. The smallest group I've seen succeed was about three full teams, mostly but not entirely composed of level 50's.

Second, you need someone who knows the ships' flight paths. The ships appear for a short enough time that you need to be ready to attack them soon after they become targetable. Dropships cross zones on preset tracks, some of which are probably too short for some teams to deal enough damage to destroy a ship before it gets away. For example, you'll have more time to destroy a ship that's flying across Atlas Park from west to east (the long way) than from south to north (the short way). For what it's worth, several of the successful runs I've been on have taken place in Talos Island, which has a long, curved flight path that takes the ships through much of the zone.

Third, everyone fighting the ship should be able to fly. Having everyone purchase a jet pack could take care of this. The ships fly very high in the air, and even with long-range attacks, they're hard to hit from the ground. They move slowly enough that melee characters with flight powers can get in regular hits against them. I'm told by teammates who've tried that Superjump can't substitute for flying here.

Fourth and most importantly, people need to act with a modicum of thought. Not much, just a modicum. The group needs a leader to tell everyone which ship to target, and the group members need to concentrate fire on that ship. Everyone fighting the ship needs to keep in mind that they could get killed easily and just accept it. This isn't a situation like a high-end task force where there's an uber-buffed tank keeping some damage-intensive AV from one-shotting everyone else; this is a situation where everyone, but everyone is just piling on the DPS, and the enemy attacks so slowly and rarely that it can't even dent the attackers as a group. If you die, just get up and get back in the fight. After all, debt protection is in place during a Rikti invasion, so who cares? By the way, for what it's worth, I've taken hits from a dropship on a blaster and not been killed outright; it seems to take about two blasts to kill any character.

All that said, fighting a dropship is, in many ways, the simplest "destroy a huge bag of hit points" fight in the game. You don't need to worry about aggro, debuffs, or any of the usual things. The challenge is just being ready to act on something that's completely random in its placement and initiation. The best advice I can give is to wait until a "scheduled" period of Rikti invasions, learn the ship paths, then call for signups for a specific date and time on your server's subforum.

Forgive me if I sound snarky about all this; I don't mean to. In closing, I should say that I've been on three or four dropship attacks over the years, and it's the most enjoyable thing I've done in the game.

I'd say that's a pretty good guess. I'm definitely not a conspiracy maven like many on these fora, but, after more than a year, I've come to accept something that someone stated back when the Cyborg pack came out: "From now on, all the good costume parts will be in pay-for costume packs." (Frankly, I'm shocked by that, since I certainly didn't believe it at the time.) We should start advocating for more leaks, so that we get the occasional decent, free costume element, rather than having every dang thing either unlockable or purchase-only. I like the packs fine, but I'd like to see some more free stuff, too.

And yes, they do look good. It makes me wonder what else is/was going to be in the pack with these things.

In the last thing I read about it, it sounded as if he'd changed his mind about the angsty and brooding stuff. (That was the point of the article, the fact that he'd changed his mind about how to interpret the Superman material.) Sorry, I don't have a link, and I don't think the original thread survived forum wipe.

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I wouldn't mind seeing Foamy's take on Superman again. I thought it had some potential last time.

I believe he's recently stated that he'd do it pretty much as he did Batman, i.e., an angsty, brooding, grimly realistic character. Personally, I think that's fine for Batman, but I don't think it's a good approach to Superman.

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The reality is that I don't think a good Superman movie can be made any more. Mainstream audiences aren't interested, and geekdom audiences aren't interested in a character who has to have planets flung at his head to be put in danger. (This, incidentally, is the reason everyone's fallen so in love with Batman as the World's Greatest Superhero: because it's easily to put a "normal" human, even one with improbable physical skills and, apparently, the combined abilities of the Oracle of Delphi, Sherlock Holmes, and Einstein, in situations that look physically perilous. Can't really do that with Superman.)