Spectreblade

Just a small correction to what you said about Bodyguard. It's not an even split between the Mastermind and henchmen.

To quote ParagonWiki

I've done all three to varying degrees.

My main character has existed longer than badges have, and I've collected who knows how many on him over the years without even really trying. I deliberately sought out and got all the ones that were required for the Accolades that grant combat powers and stat buffs, but other than that, I don't really go out of my way to get them.

I was a regular at Virtue's Fight Night arena PvP events, and while they were running, they were the highlight of my week. It had a more laid-back atmosphere, unlike the ultra-competitive streak that most PvP had. The collapse of Fight Night, combined with the I13 PvP revamp which did more harm to PvP than the good it was trying to accomplish, were what drove me away from the PvP scene. Which is a shame because I love a good fight, having a Scrapper as my main and all. Even though any serious PvP'er would wipe the floor with me, even before I13, as long I put up a good effort, I find it fun. The I13 PvP changes were not as well thought-out as they should have been, and I think the main reason was because that was one of the things added to I13 to make up for the Mission Architect being delayed, and not something done for its own sake.

But I love the Mission Architect, and I've used it to create some arcs, as seen in my signature. I am also one of the many who will use the upcoming improvments to revise my arcs. I enjoy creative writing, and I would love to do it for a living, but according to Sturgeon's Law, the odds of me turning out to be the next J.K. Rowling, or even be good enough to make a living at it are not in my favor, even though I've enjoyed some modest success in writing contests and such as I was growing up.

I think the term "sheeple" came from an ad campaign if I'm not mistaken.

At any rate, sometimes my tastes coincide with the mainstream, and sometimes they do not. I don't really care either way, whether in build choices in-game, or in real life.

As far as in-game goes, my first character that I created when the game first came out, is Spectreblade, a Broadsword/Dark Armor scrapper, and that was back when Dark Armor was undisputedly the worst defense set in the game. As both the set was buffed and my experience with it grew, he became more powerful, and as my main, he is also the character I've invested the most in developing in terms of time and influence.

I also tend to get my Stamina prerequisites at Lv. 22 and 24, and Stamina itself at Lv. 30 as opposed to having Stamina at Lv. 20 as conventional wisdom often dictates. And if the primary or secondary set of one of my characters offers another endurance management power, I'll often take that instead of Stamina.

My video game buying habits tend to be halfway between rabid conformist and rabid non-conformist. I will rarely buy a game the day it comes out. Usually, I wait to see if it generates any kind of buzz. I figure if people are talking about it, it has some merit, at least. Then I wait until that buzz dies down a bit so I can save money by getting a used copy.

Yep, TvTropes has to be one of my favorite sites on the net. It's right up there with these forums and Facebook in terms of time-wasting potential. I've made a few edits on there, and have even wrote a few of the articles there from scratch.

Out of all of my characters, the only one I have plans on switching alignment with is my Mercs/Storm MM, Major Thunderstorm. He was the henchman of a mad-scientist type villain who took his weather control device after his boss got busted and went into the mercenary business. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to reimagine him and his squad as an A-Team type group.

All of my other existing characters have their alignments pretty much set in stone by their backstories.

My main character, and my namesake here on the boards, is Spectreblade, a Lv. 50 Broadsword/Dark Armor/Darkness Mastery Scrapper, and my main villain is Orochi Dragon, a Lv. 50 Ninjas/Poison/Soul Mastery Mastermind. My other 50's are Magatama III (Rad/Rad/Dark Defender) and Armorbound (Energy/Energy/Leviathan Stalker), and I have many other lower-level alts. I am a member of the Paragonian Knights, and have a few AE arcs to my name (See sig for details).

All of the custom characters I've created for arcs are my own characters as either allies or major enemies, except for my custom villain group, the Yamata Clan, featured in my arc "The Serpent's Revenge". Out of the rank and file of the clan, the lieutenant-ranked Tsundere (War Mace/Willpower) stands out the most in my mind. Though the idea of a Tsundere as a custom critter wasn't entirely my own (I was inspired by a blog I'd stumbled across from someone else planning to create one), I just couldn't resist the temptation to create it.

My search comment on all of my characters is "No farm missions, please." Other than that I just use the flags to indicate whether or not I'm willing to team at any given moment. It's not really that much of a hassle to change it.

Most of the time I'm either "not looking for a team" (but might join if asked nicely), or "not accepting invites" (I want to solo, or I'm busy doing non-combat things like accessing the market or crafting and plan on logging when I'm done.) Usually, when I actively want to team, I'll ask on my SG channel if there are any running before I turn to putting "Looking for mission team" on and hoping for a PuG.

Although the search flags reset to "not looking for a team" upon logging out, "not accepting invites" doesn't, even though it appears to. Sometimes, a SG team is forming that I want to join, and I ask for an invite, only to have it bounce back in the inviter's face because of that bug.

My favorite site for idle surfing is TV Tropes. Just be careful, because TV Tropes will ruin your life.

On the subject of the AoE enemy phases (Dimension Shift and Black Hole), I sometimes wonder if they would be more effective if they were changed to single-target ones like Detention Field and Sonic Cage. I can imagine the AoE phases could be useful as a panic button, but I tend to think of a control set's AoE hold as its panic button, like Gravity Control's Gravity Distortion Field.

As for the worst power I have personal experience with, I'd say Poison Trap from the Poison set. The thing doesn't even work as advertised. It supposedly gradually saps the endurance of enemies in the cloud, but the chance of the end drain actually hitting is so low that I'm convinced that it has to be the result of a bug.

I don't see it happen too often either, but I opinion on it is that if a team is going to kick you for your build choices, you wouldn't want to be on that team anyway.

I think it's important to have some way of managing your endurance on any character, but that doesn't necessarily have to be Stamina. That just happens to be the most popular one since it's available to all AT's.

If I have a character that has other options for managing endurance and I don't want to give up 3 powers from the Primary or Secondary for the Fitness pool, I'll go with that instead. For example, I have an Elec/Mental Blaster that uses Drain Psyche, a DB/Fire Scrapper with Consume, a Kin/Energy Defender with Transference, and a Spines/Regen Scrapper and a Willpower/War Mace Tanker with Quick Recovery instead of Stamina (although the Spines/Regen has Swift from Fitness to counter the speed penalty of Stealth, which I took to fit his shapeshifter concept).

In some cases I have characters that will take Stamina on top of the endurance powers in their primary or secondary. In those cases, it's usually because there are powers in the primary/secondary that I don't plan on taking and I can spare the 3 power choices for it. That's usually either because I wouldn't find them useful without a heavy investment of enhancement slots, or at all. Another of the benefits of the Fitness pool that isn't mentioned often is that they don't need a lot of slots to be effective. You'll only need 3 slots, at most, for a Fitness power because they all have only one enhanceable effect, and, especially for the earlier powers in the pool, I can get away with leaving them with the one slot that came with the power if I need to. Examples in my roster would be my Rad/Rad Defender (Accelerate Metabolism), my Energy/Energy Stalker (Energy Drain and Conserve Power), my Mind/Psi Dominator (Drain Psyche), and my Ice/Cold Controller (Heat Loss).

But regardless of whether a character uses Stamina by itself or in conjuction with other powers to manage End, I'm usually not in a hurry to get it ASAP, like many who insist on taking it at Lv. 20. I usually take the prerequisites at Lv. 22 and 24, then Stamina itself at Lv. 30. Until then, I rely on end cost reduction enhancements. Even after I've gotten Stamina, my standard slotting for an attack is 3 DMG, 2 ACC, and 1 END.

Schools in Philadelphia were closed yesterday and they're closed today. Work was open yesterday, but the hotline they have set up to see if it's open told us to "use your best judgement" to decide whether or not to go in. So I stayed home yesterday.

Work was open as usual today, but I couldn't make it even though they expect us to, because while most buses here are running today, the one I take to get to work isn't. Unfortunately, I didn't find that out until I'd spent almost 40 minutes waiting for it. So I'm staying home again today, posting here with a cup of hot cocoa at my side to help me recover from spending so much time outside for nothing.

Public and parochial schools were closed here today, but my workplace wasn't .

A second storm is slated to hit Philadelphia tomorrow evening and last well into Wednesday. And it's expected to be just as bad as the one that hit this weekend .

The snow is just starting to fall here in Philadelphia. We're expecting about two feet as well. Looks like I'll be snowed in this weekend.

Spectreblade generally tries to save anyone in danger, but as a modern-day chivalrous knight, he has a soft spot for damsels in distress and an intense dislike of those who would harm or take advantage of women. And even above and beyond the demands of the code of Chivalry, it was a jealous rival for the heart of one such damsel that bound the soul of his armor's original owner to it, and since then, the spirit of the armor has felt a need to make up for that failure to save her from him.

As for the tangent of who he actively seeks out battles with, he has a dislike for Rikti, who killed many of his co-workers at the museum he worked at during their first invasion, while he was powerless to stop them. In light of the recent revelations about their motives for attacking, he has become more tolerant of Traditionalist Rikti, but Restructurists are still fair game.

I usually run on +0, x1, Bosses, no AV's regardless of what character I'm playing, mainly out of being too lazy to figure out the right combination for each and every character I have. At first I tried starting a brand new character at that, then raising the spawn size by one every 10 levels. Under the old system, I raised my difficulty every 10 levels as well, and thought doing the same for just spawn sizes would produce roughly the same results. But I found that while some of my Lv. 50's can easily handle +0, x5, Bosses, no AV's, others got slaughtered by it.

I should also point out that Transference isn't a cone. It can only drain one enemy at a time, but all allies within a close enough radius to that enemy will gain endurance. And as Eric Nelson said, putting a range enhancement won't have any effect on the radius around the enemy.

I've been thinking about moving a few of my lesser-played characters on Virtue over to an east-coast server to make room for a few new characters when Going Rogue comes out. So far, I'm leaning toward Infinity, but I haven't made a final decision yet.

I just wanted to comment on some of the suggestions in this thread, and make a few more in addition to the earlier post.

I second the idea of "mayhem matches" and other objective-based PvP scenarios. To some degree, this already exists in the zones, like how you can steal ore samples or launch codes from other players in Bloody Bay and Warburg instead of getting them yourself and get your Shivan or Nuke that way. Or even a more explicit objective-based scenario in the territory-control aspect of Recluse's Victory. Putting those rewards in the PvP zones was partially a way to lure players in, but it was also to give PvP'ers an objective to pursue in their battles with each other beyond simply fighting for its own sake. The idea is already there. It's simply the execution that's lacking.

I already mentioned that I'd like to see the I13 changes rolled back, but I also understood a few the balance issues they were trying to correct, namely damage type imbalances and overuse of kiting tactics. Unfortunately, the changes did more harm than good for PvP. To address the issue of overuse of slows to keep a melee AT at bay, Instead of Travel Suppression, which only made the problem worse despite all melee AT's getting inherent debuff resistance, I'd add Speed Debuff Resistance to Luck inspirations, like how Sturdies have TP protection and Insights give Perception.

I'd also revamp the bases in all the PvP zones to be more like those in Recluse's Victory, with a few extra amenities that would alleviate some of the concerns.

First, I'd have them all completely indoors so that people don't have to worry about being TP-Foe'd into an ambush while talking with the zone mission contacts and such. In addition to that, I'd add in a contact for the PvP Tutorial that has been suggested by others. I don't know how one could create a structured tutorial that'd effectively teach about the unstructured nature of zone PvP, but it is a sound idea.

To address the issue of some types being less heavily resisted than others, instead of giving everyone equal resistance to all types of damage inherently like the I13 changes did, I would borrow an idea from another aspect of the game and put Empowerment Buff Stations in the PvP Zone bases so they can more conveniently craft themselves temporary patches to the holes in their build. This would solve the problem of type advantage, while still requiring skill on the player's part in recognizing their weaknesses in order to counter them instead of just giving it to them for free.

Finally, I'd put Arena Terminals in the bases, so that the "fightclub" PvP'ers can have an easily accessible way to conduct their duels without fear of interruption. I do realize that the same thing can be done without actual terminals now since the Arenas can be accessed from anywhere via the main menu, but the Terminals would be there more as a reminder of their ability to do so.

I use Excel to do some things involving this game, too. Whenever I get an idea for a new character or a respec of an existing one, I have a two-page "template" that I print out. On one page, I put in the powers available in their primary, secondary, and whatever pools I want for them, and then I have a clear picture of what powers are available at what level. The other page is what I track the powers they get and where I allocate enhancement slots on, which I fill in level by level as I play them.

I use that mainly as a build-planning tool, though, so I can see at a glance where a character's been, where it is, and where it can go build-wise while offline, or even away from the computer.

Though competition can often bring out the worst in people, and I dislike that uber-competetive mindset, I enjoy having the varied experiences that only battling against another player can provide. As for how I feel it should be fixed...