Vardra

This is interesting. I'd also be curious to see what happens if you use a group (for example, snakes) that has a gap in the middle of its level range. I may need to test that myself at some point.

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...or do natural selection a favor and through yourself in front of a train...

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Quite an impressive collection of words. However, I'd suggest that, prior to your next major speech, you double-check your thesaurus for tampering - as "through" is not a synonym for "throw".

Further, I feel obligated to remind you that some of us are quite solidly armored (or otherwise protected) - to the point that standing in front of a speeding train would represent at most a mild inconvenience.

Now, if you only seek to recruit those weak enough to be controlled by base physical threats or confused by complex concepts - then, perhaps, you may be on the right track.

Can't answer on the ticket count, because that's not something I've ever cared about, but I'd suggest:

Wholesale Soul Sale
Two Chicks at Once

I sent you this review of "Two Chicks at Once" in game, but I figure I'll put it here as well because I'd really like to see this arc fixed quickly. Well... that, and I'm going to want a review of my arc once I've actually got it finished. ;-)

Great arc. Good use of clues, in-game speech, etcetera. A few spelling errors, but I lost my notes on those and will have to find them when I play through again.

So I'm cruising through on my level 39 brute; all is going well. I'm getting LKed up a few levels, but I've got all my defenses already, so I'm not missing any important powers.

And then I hit a brick wall. No, not one of the EBs you warn about; I'm typically pretty good at being able to solo EBs. The problem is the snakes in mission four. (I think it was number four?)

So, you look at the snakes group. Level 1-52. Great - so I get LKed up to level 41, I fight level 41 snakes, right? Wrong. See, the actual level range of the snakes is 1-35 and 46-52. So, at level 41, I'm running into groups of level 46 snakes. Which happily rip me to shreds.

Now, if the final answer is "I'm too close to the file size limit and can't put in a custom group to lock that mission to level 46+" - well, ok. I know that in i15 you'll be able to manually set level limits, so it'll be trivial to fix this problem then. And maybe I can get through it before then by eating a tray of insps and waiting for my uber defense buff for every group. Maybe. But if you *can* fix this before then, I'd certainly appreciate it.

It feels a little silly to post just to link to someone else's post, but I think it's warranted here. The original post is by The_Cheshire_Cat, can be found here - it's the sixth post down from the top - and is in reference to one of his story arcs: The Beating Heart of Astoria: A Play in Five Acts. Arc ID: 170547

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As much as I hate to give away my secrets, I honestly didn't think it was that much of a trick to begin with :P (I'm working on something fancier at the moment with er... less success so far).

You create an escort, set it to required. Set the surrounding enemy group to "Single" so that only the escort is there. Set enemy group alignment to "Rogue" (Which makes the escort hostile), and set combat abilities to "Pacifist" (So the escort won't aggro on the player). Now you've got an escort that the player can choose to fail, but it won't attack the player so they have a choice whether they want to complete/fail the mission.

Also, the glowie can't have you fail the mission. It actually doesn't fail you on the escort until the body fades for whatever reason, so really it was the escort that caused the fail and the timing was just a coincidence on the glowie.

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My advice is to add a note like "(Story focused [SFMA] arc)" to your arc description. The keyword "SFMA" isn't used by everybody, so searching for it will miss some good arcs - but from the point of view of someone making an arc, adding it in certainly can't hurt.

Something I'd like to see is a simple guide to getting colored text in the mission descriptions - what the html codes are, and what colors are used by the default game for things like "This is an objective", or "Warning, this mission may be a bit difficult."

And now, so I can actually add something constructive:
I needed to put level limits on a mission, but wanted to leave the main group as PPD rather than "custom". So I made a custom group that contained only PPD minions and lieutenants from the right level range and put it in as the guards for a "boss". Set the boss to a single custom character (ranked as lieutenant), and I got my level range, some extra speech, and all without actually making the mission any harder than it was before.

I'm sure that's not new to 95% of the people reading this - but it took me a while to figure out how to make it work, so here it is.