TigerKat

One reason for people publishing to test is that when the AE was first released there were no testing tools. No invis mode, no invincible mode, no insta-defeat target, no insta-complete mission and no cycling through. Players had to test missions the long way. The only thing test mode did was prevent debt, however this comes at the expense of earning zero XP, inf, inspirations or tickets.

So players had the choice of play testing the long way with no XP and no debt, or the long way with XP and possible debt. Players who took less pride in their work and didn't want to feel their time wasted (i.e. no XP) naturally published first to do their testing.

Proper test tools takes away much of that incentive by giving a much shorter test path, but I'm sure there are those that would still publish first anyway (assuming they actually test).

The search should really default to "Looking for Feedback" and "Final" status, as you don't want it showing off stuff that's probably incomplete.

Try rearranging your objectives by dragging an objective to its new position on the list. Typically you want things to be in the order of A, B, C and then D.

If you want a boss with no critters accompanying it you'll have to set accompanying group to Empty under standard critters. However from memory when I last used this you also had to have the mission's enemy group set to Empty too.

If you have to set the mission to empty you'll need to add patrols and/or bosses to prevent the map from being empty.

See this post here.

Actually, to see the glow you need the shader quality set to "medium" or better. I was uncertain about their being no glow when I initially started testing on a non-ultra-mode machine. After testing on an ultra-mode capable machine the difference in glow and no-glow is noticeable, even in bright light.

I guess the AE decided I could do with the extra challenge.


The addition of regular Skulls to the group has created a different problem. Most of the spawns were 3 minions only, creating dearth of Supa Skulls. You'll need to add minion rank Supa Skulls to create a sense the scene is being over run with them.

After thinking about it I suggest experimenting with Dark Miasma set to hard. That will make the dark powers associated with Skull bosses much more obvious.

I still recommend getting rid of the ambushes on the EB. This time round the ambushes turned up when I almost had him but I didn't quite stand up to the extra hurt the they brought. Another problem with the ambushes is that they could steal the player's thunder by defeating the EB for them. Which would have happened if the EB missed with Twilight Grasp too much.

I dusted off an old level 5 dark/rad defender and tried this arc.

In terms of canon I think level 10-14 is appropriate level range. From memory that is when the link between Skulls and Family are properly revealed in story arcs.

Ambushes look to be set to medium. For low levels I suggest setting them to easy. Especially in mission 4 where the ambush comes immediately after freeing a captive. After being killed by that ambush I discovered the captive was actually an ally but he didn't help me earlier as I was too far away from him when I killed his captors.

In the final mission you need to add minions and bosses to your Supa Skulls group. Because of the way spawns work for custom groups, most Supa Skull spawns contained 3 lieutenants. I was able to handle a spawn with just one Supa Skull but I received a beat down when I tried to go against a trio of them.

I was able to handle the final EB fine (he spawned as a boss). For some reason his powers of thugs/dark armor seemed anti-climactic. That could just this thread setting my expectations for dark blast or melee.

I'm not sure if there were ambushes or not on the EB. I think there were but most of them got cleaned up by Supa Skulls. If you do have ambushes, I recommend getting rid of them. EBs are a hard enough fight already at low levels, adding an ambush is just a recipe for a face plant.

Overall I think the EB is fine. It's the other stuff in the final mission you should focus on balancing (Supa Skulls and ambushes).