Samuel_Tow

This isn't nearly as problematic as you make it sound. It takes some getting used to, I will admit, but once you get the hang of it, it's actually significantly more comfortable and more productive than land-only travel. About the only problem is backpedalling, as with a normal camera angle, it will lift you up, but there are ways around that. Either look straight up and fly "up" (jump), or just make sure your camera is below the horizon so you don't leave the ground when you move back.

Again, it's a bit more tricky than ground movement, but it's very easy to use once you get the hang of it, and it has a number of very clever advantages. Auto-follow still doesn't work, though.

Fire Sword is actually pretty inefficient, however. It does less damage to the endurance than all other single-target attacks in the combo (and less than is normal) and its damage over time is actually pretty poor. It's good for shock damage for when something gets close or when you run into melee, but as a sustained attack, it's actually one of the worse ones. I was surprised to find this out, myself.

Chances are, the explanation is a lot simpler than we want to think. It usually is in these stories, which is honestly kind of disappointing to me, usually. Kind of like The Force in Star Was being Morticoccus or some such. I LOVE the idea of Rularuu being both a prisoner and a prison, along with all this entails, but I highly suspect he'll end up being just another sorta-god trapped in another dimension. The Shard has enormous potential for some very interesting stories, and I very, very much hope they take up this opportunity.

Why does this keep coming up? A wooden sword is still a sword, and I highly doubt you'd see anyone much opposed to adding that to the swords sets. Hell, Broadsword gets what is essentially a rusted angle iron for an option. A wooden sword is a sword. A wooden stick is not a sword. That's all it comes down to.

As well, I'm not opposed to another "smashing weapon" set. The game has... Ugh, I don't know. Let's count them. Katana, Broadsword, Ninja Blade, Dual Blades, Battle Axe... So that's... Five cutting sets. At the same time, it has all of ONE bashing set, and even that's a carbon copy of Broadsword, pretty much. We're about due for another bashing set, most definitely.

Now... I'm not sure if I'd want that to be a martial arts set, myself. If we DO get a new bashing weapon set, I'd like it to be a two-handed giant hammer, wielded sort of like how the Carnival Strongmen wield theirs.

Ack! That's the other big one! Zombies! All zombies you're likely to meet anywhere in the game share one property - they're incredibly vulnerable to lethal damage and incredibly strong against smashing damage. This is why I never knew the Vahzilok were supposed to be so dangerous - I initially fought them with a Katana/Martial Arts Scrapper. They're vulnerable to my damage and I can avoid their otherwise hard-to-resist attacks.

As a general rule of thumb, there exist two types of enemies with distinct physical resistances. Zombies are weak to swords and guns, but are strong against punches and hammers, and robots are strong against guns and swords, but weak to punches and hammers.

Generally speaking, soft targets are vulnerable to lethal damage. You can, thematically, hack off limbs, pierce easily and generally do a lot of damage. But because these soft targets feel no pain and don't rely on functioning internal organs, beating on them has little effect. Robots are the reverse. Hard targets in general are hard to pierce, as they're made of metal or stone, and your bullets and swords are likely to just bounce off. However, hitting hard targets hard with a lot of force can outright break them, which is why they're vulnerable to blunt force.

Frankly, I ENJOY having this thematic difference between the sets.

I wonder how many people are going to make comments like that when BABs very clearly said "very few." As in, people do die, it's just that's very rare and very few actually die. Like Cyrus Thompson, like War Witch, like whoever that guy was that Ghost Widow killed with a sideways glance. People do die. Just very few do.

You have to keep in mind that AVs have very low status protection, but have purple triangles that give them something like mag 50 protection to everything when they're up. Now, I'm not sure if this includes intangibility, but I suspect it does.

I know one thing - from playing around with Dimension Shift, it can be VERY useful. It lets you pause extra aggro when it occurs, it lets you give your team a breather, and if you're on the ball with where you aim it, you can detain around half a spawn while you beat on the other half.

I've only tried it on a Dom, however, and since I discovered I couldn't play Doms to my satisfaction, I can't give you any more information.

Hmm... AVs typically CON +5 to the team leader, but should spawn according to mission difficulty. Could something have gotten cross-wired in that regard?

There's a problem with that that I've run across. If you save one generator, but trigger the ambush for another, that ambush could run past the first generator and destroy it anyway. I've lost generators I've saved a few times. Like, I'll save it at, say, half health, go do something else, come back and it's been destroyed. Kind of like you could fail the Protect the War Walls mission once upon a time.

Really, there just needs to be more leeway for mistakes. Mistakes happen, and it's no fun losing your mission less than a minute after entering it.

That's false on its face.

Wasn't there a grace period during which your henchmen would stay alive even if your mentor was out of range?

Here's where I stand - you can make a big story as personal, dramatic and heart-wrenching as a small one. It's a question of writing and storytelling, not so much a question of source material. Granted, many people fail to do so, and fall into the "Super Man reverses the rotation of the Earth to turn back time" pitfall. But as Super Man also shows, it's possible to have an incredibly powerful hero fighting incredibly powerful villains and STILL make it compelling.

For me, writing a cosmic story that's compelling is more difficult than writing a mundane one, but when you manage to pull it off, a cosmic story will always be more interesting. A cosmic story is unique and meaningful, whereas a mundane story is always one of a million like it. Why should I care about THIS specific character out of the thousands of other heroes?

I will admit, I have a penchant for the extreme and unrealistic. Whenever I get interested in a story or inspired to write one, it's inevitably something that leads up to a cosmic event or an ancient secret. That's just what I like. And I think I've done pretty well, actually. The one real story I've written and completed is at the same time about as grand and epic as it gets, and very much about personal struggle and self-discovery IN this epic setting. After all, you only ever get to see a person's true self right in the moment of truth.

Eh, I have a problem with the general concept of a Tanker as it's depicted in the game. Tankers in fiction are typically very durable and hard to kill, but also at the same time incredibly strong and dangerous in a scuffle. Our Tankers may be kind of dangerous, but compared to their melee counterparts, they're far and away a lot less so than they ought to be. When I think "Ben Grimm, The Thing," I think someone who goes out and punches things first and foremost.

Personal opinion, of course.

Yeah, I was about to comment on that one. I think this one is just bugged and just plain bad! I'm sent there to rescue these people, but I CAN'T LEAD THEM OUT! That's right, the only way to rescue C'Khelkah and General Arons is to literally kill everything else in the cave, while praying to your lucky star they don't die in the melee. Why aren't they escort objectives? Why can't I bring them to the entrance and have them run out? Isn't the POINT of the mission to save them?

I know, I know. The RWZ arcs are jam-packed with helper NPCs like they're going out of style, to the point where I'm not sure if there is ONE missions where you're alone without someone in tow. But still, even with an escort objective, I could still drag them around with me if I wanted to. All I have to do is not take them to the door, and they'll follow me. But if I WANTED to take them out so they don't die and fail my mission, I could.

I really don't get it. If the mission fails when they die, why can't I take them out? If I can't take them out, why does the mission fail when they die? It's a borderline conundrum.

Well, speaking purely for myself, most of mine ARE global threats. They actually come in two varieties - global (and up) threats, and those who work for them. If you see one of my villains doing something, you KNOW he's either working on something really bad for a lot of people, or he's working for someone who's working on something bad. I don't buy into the psychopaths and mercenaries for the same reason - they bore me to tears. Random murder and wanton violence may have its place, but to me it's just pointless, and mercenaries are only interesting when they come up against moral dilemmas and introverted self-discoveries.

That's a big failing in CoV, by the way, that the game seems to have been designed expecting you to be a psycho or a mercenary. Almost everything is about "Do this for me and I will pay you." or "Do this for the evulz!" There is very little... In fact, there may be literally NOTHING for the self-made villains with plans of his own and an ACTUAL agenda beyond "Do evil, please Arachnos, gain levels." Seriously, we're all like drifters, going from job to job with no purpose in life. I want my volcano island lair!

Well, yeah, but... Let me put it this way - if you don't brush your teeth, you get lots of cavities and eventually lose them. You SHOULD brush them, and to not do so is irresponsible. But that doesn't make it INTERESTING. Not nearly as interesting as, say, going to an amusement part that one time in the year. And, predictably, your mind is going to retain a lot more memories from that one amusement park visit than from brushing your teeth every day.

I view street-level crime in super-powered universes the same way - controlling it is important and vital, but hardly the gripping action and drama that actually moves the story. It's there, it happens, and it ought to be depicted happening every now and then. But that's not what it's all about, not if you can arm-wrestle gods and move mountains. If you can do that, chances are there's something much bigger that's going to come up and THAT will be what's interesting in the story.

That quote you quoted wasn't to say fighting street crime wasn't IMPORTANT, but that it wasn't INTERESTING. I don't avoid pitting my absurdly powerful characters against street crime when it comes to that, but I just depict them solving it with all the glory and fanfare of someone toothpicking a weenie at a cocktail party. It's there, it happens, let's deal with it and get back to the tasks that CAN'T be done by anyone else.

There's also this tiering system that I think may well be unique to Paragon City. Usually in super hero stories, you have a few heroes. Sometimes you even have many, though such gatherings are rare. I am not aware, however, of any story that deals with a whole CITY of them, and we have literally hundreds of thousands of heroes. And not only that, but we have hundreds of thousands of villains, and crime occurring every time you turn your back. It's safe to say, then, that in Paragon City, you look at your own power bracket, and you trust the other heroes to handle things in their own brackets. Say you're on your way to stop a nuclear bomb and you see a man being mugged. OK, you stop to help. The reality, though, is that you'll see dozens of them on your way, and if you stopped to help every one of them, the bomb would go off. Instead, you have to trust that a hero who's actually in that level bracket will be about to help. And since the city is crawling with them, that's usually a safe bet.

I know what Escrima Sticks look and act like, as I studied Wing Tsu/Escrima a while back (just barely studied, I'm still inept), but my point remains - they don't belong in Dual Blades. You don't cut people with them, you don't stab people with them. They belong in Dual Blades as much as dual axes and dual hammers do, e.i. not at all.

That said, I'm not opposed to a set that revolves around dual Escrima sticks, or just dual sticks altogether. Such a set might be a hard set, but I don't see a problem with it. I DO have a problem shoving a stick all the way through a person's torso, however. It looks silly and goofy, like those slasher movies where people get impaled on stupid things like chair legs, shovel handles, large pipes and other people's forearms.

Right, I read "Only Affecting Self" as intangibility, whereas it's the locking effect of being unable to use a lot of powers. It's not Only Affecting Self that makes a character untouchable, but re-reading that, I sort of assumed you both meant to say "phase." And with that in mind, the post makes more sense and my reply makes less sense in general.

Well, and that, but it's sort of a symptom of the same problem - Tankers are team-centric, with the expectation that your team will be doing a lot of your damage. Since your inherent only really matters on a team, err... Why would you NOT have one? Brutes, for instance, have damage even WORSE than Tankers, but still manage to be decent damage dealers.

Now, an inherent doesn't have to be a carbon copy of Fury, but there really isn't much of anything it could affect other than offence, either directly or indirectly. A Tanker really shouldn't need even MORE protection and survivability from his inherent, especially not if we're looking to help solo (seriously, what Tank has trouble surviving when solo?), so either it should help with endurance, or help with damage. How, I don't want to say, but there isn't much else it CAN help with that would be meaningful.

Here's the thing, though - when we start switching sides, I'll just make heroic Brutes to act as my tankerish heroes. Frankly, Brutes are what Tankers should have been all along, in my eyes.

Otherwise known as Plotline Death, or "Why didn't they use a Phoenix Down on Aeris?!?"

The Lemur makes a good point. The mission, as designed, isn't the problem, no matter what my stance on protect objectives may be. Other missions employ this mechanic and they work just fine. The problem is that the generators are too weak, the enemies too numerous and all their AoE makes saving them very hard. As well, there seems to be a bug with script triggers that's been going around at least since the latest patch, and I suspect since I16 went Live. A LOT of scripted even triggers fire far, far, FAR too early. Like, I'll hear the end boss's dialogue as soon as I set foot inside a huge instance, and he's nowhere around me. On the mission where you have to fight Sefu and WMD, they both activated far too early and got into fights long, long before I found them.

Really, what ruins this mission isn't the fact that it can fail, it's that it can fail so damn easily. Take two steps, attackers spawn, and by the time you turn around the generator is gone. This shouldn't be happening so easily.