Venture

Since Inherent Fitness scales with level, it actually does not do a whole lot for you at low levels. The origin ranged attacks are pretty much meaningless too. Beginner's Luck is the only real boost lowbies have gotten.

The game does need to be more difficult, just not at low levels. Praetorian mobs, and evidently everything coming after them, are just absurd.

I've rerolled my main at 50 twice now. Of course, I didn't delete the old versions. I shipped them off to other servers and retconned them.

Seconding the recommendation for a "Huntsman" build, eschewing the powers that draw the mace. I have one of these myself on Justice at level 50, slowly gathering shards. You'll get much more survivability than a Blaster and some status protection -- you will want to invest in at least one -KB IO.

Mids DataLink for the character's build plan -- he's currently missing a few pieces. It's not a terribly expensive build. I sacrificed some Defense for +recharge.

You'll have to side-switch if you want your character to be a hero, of course, but that's not a big deal these days.

And to buy them we had to walk five miles, through the snow, barefoot, UPHILL BOTH WAYS....

No, they're not. They're condescending, judgmental, superficial, artificial creations intended to demonstrate the supposed moral superiority of the speaker.

I've fixed the typos and tweaked some small details (fixed the patrol spam in act 3, changed the text for the action figure clue in act 2, other minor changes). I'm pretty happy with the arc's story, though. I know acts 2 and 3 are similar but I feel it's necessary for the player to have to go back for more information on SANTA once the truth is known. I considered having the player abduct a researcher in act 3 so the Wardens could beat the information out of him, showing that when push comes to shove they're not that much different from the Crusaders, but decided that was blurring the lines a bit too much.

Most people (of the whole 11 that have played the arc ) seem to have bought the distinction between what Donovan has you do and what the Crusaders would have done, so while it may not have worked for this commentator I disagree that changes are needed.

Since I already specified "murder in cold blood" there really isn't any ambiguity. If there is a jurisdiction that considers premeditated killing of a human being in cold blood to be less than first-degree murder it's news to me.

I'm with Bob Heinlein on "juvenile offenders".

I'm just going to stop here with your examples because the answer is going to be the same down the line: ethical actions are not fungible. Good deeds don't "cancel out" bad deeds. I don't care what someone does with the rest of their life; if they've killed in cold blood they can never be forgiven for it. State programs to the contrary notwithstanding; such programs are the result of bleeding hearts putting sentiment above rational decisionmaking.

None of this is particularly germane to the real question, though, which is whether or not villains in City are too easily redeemed. The answer by any reasonable standard is not just yes, but hell yes. To borrow a line from Gross Pointe Blank, going over the career of a high-level villain is going to read like a demon's resume (which, given the setting, it may actually be). I've got a level 50 villain that I "redeemed" over on Virtue named Koronos. Let's open up his souvenirs and badges and see what he's done. I'll just list the high notes:

• "The Vahzilok Conference" -- captured citizens off the streets and delivered them to the Vahzilok just to create a distraction.
• "Oh, Wretched Man!" -- murdered an entire base full of Arachnos agents just to obtain information without being reported. N.b. the fact that the deaths took place in combat is non sequitur as you took a job that specifically required their deaths.
• "Kings of the Sky" -- blew up a Longbow base to cover theft of information, killed Ballista-1. Again, the decision to kill was made in advance of combat.
• "Any Body Will Do" -- captured Scrapyarders to be handed over to the Circle of Thorns for use as sacrificial victims to bribe the Circle into leaving Cage personell alone.
• "Forging the Blackwand" -- murder of a Scrapyarder and a Longbow hero to obtain components for a magical weapon.
• "Sabotage!" -- blew up a Longbow base just for Jaeger's satisfaction.
• "Snuffing the Light" -- killed a Longbow agent to obtain his access codes.
• "Brawling with the Big Boys" -- another Longbow base blown up.
• "Psimon Sez" -- destroyed the sanity of Rikti converts to use them as cannon fodder against Aurora Borealis.
• "Blurring the Lines" -- assassination of a Longbow agent to preserve a Rikti infiltrator's cover.
• "Pied Piper" -- planted a device to attract demons to Paragon City just to get them away from St. Martial for a while.
• "Light and Darkness" -- assassination of a PPD Kheldian officer. Of course as we'll see below in the badges he was already a cop killer.
• "Von Grun's Science" -- captured Pyriss and delivered her for dissection. Numerous other offenses in Von Grun's arcs.
• "Seaweed" badge: killed Sea Witch
• Mayhem mission badges: far too many acts of property destruction and terrorism to count.
• "Villain/Reformed" badge: defeat 1000 Longbow. Unrealisitic to assume this was done without fatalities. Likewise with "Outlaw/Thin Line" which somehow the character doesn't have (or even a progress bar). N.b. a cop killer can pretty much forget about ever getting so much as the time of day from other cops even if some idiot in the government pins a badge on him.

This litany of sins does not portray someone eligible for redemption. It portrays a war criminal. In order to believe this character is now a hero it is necessary to handwave away his past. Rescuing a few kidnapping victims isn't going to cut it.

Meaning you don't actually know what you're talking about.

No, it isn't. Soldiers who kill in cold blood as opposed to in the heat of combat tend to find themselves in front of war crimes tribunals.

How many of those people were sent up for first-degree murder?

Nope. There are things people can do that can never be forgiven. Sometimes things break in a way that leaves them unfixable, and you can do that to your own life. It's not even hard.

I'd rather the devs didn't give us any bull.

You can't, without employing massive amounts of handwavium.

It is possible to get a villain to level 20 and redeem him without doing anything unforgivable while still running the content. I did it myself with a Tanker I chose to reroll as a Brute. I don't think it's possible to get anywhere near level 50 without pole-vaulting across the Moral Event Horizon, at least not without unbelievable tedium (e.g. only street-hunting other villain groups for XP, avoiding just about all arcs, etc.)

There is no redemption for anyone who's put a body in the ground in cold blood. Redemption in this game is way, way, way, way too easy.

There isn't and you can't. The arc is a heap of comic book conventions thrown together with no real thought about the underlying logic or implications, sprinkled liberally with killer GMing. Which makes it much like the majority of the game's writing, particularly of late.

The reason mediporting technology is not widespread is because it would change the world too much. A mission writer would, for instance, have to handwave Medicom away every time he wanted to kill off a character for plot reasons or write a murder mystery. This would get old fast. It only exists in the first place because the idea of permanent death in MMOs is permanently dead; paying customers won't stand for having their characters Killed Off For Real by a lag spike. When you have a genre convention like that in the mix it's a bad idea to try to explain it. Since it doesn't make any internal sense in the first place trying to explain it will cause more problems than it solves.

A lot of architects filled their available slots a long time ago, meaning you're excluding a lot of people who aren't willing to delete their arcs to make space for new ones.

That said, I'll throw in the only one of mine that qualifies: "Cole In Your Stocking", #474611.

And until the devs bite the bullet and do what needs to be done -- which is nerfing buffs and debuffs -- the game is going to continue to not make sense. Designing around a system everyone knows is broken is wagging the dog.

No.

What does this have to do with it? Aside from the fact that he could easily be lying (and just wants power for its own sake), it doesn't in any way, shape or form mitigate what he's doing. Golden Girl is right on that point.

"Evil, be my good" is pretty rare even in comics. Most villains at least claim to be doing the "right thing" by their perspective. Even Recluse claims to be building a better world.

Thanks for the review!

We'll let you off the hook...this time...

I see your point, but I'm going to leave this as-is. The "busy" text is presumed to be read when the player is in media res so to speak, and in all likelihood won't be read at all anyway.

Boris' name is a "wacky handle" and actually something of a joke that might be a bit too subtle, particularly for the younger players. He's named for Boris Karloff, narrator and voice of the titular character in the animated holiday classic How The Grinch Stole Christmas.

And:

Can't do it. Can't trigger multiple patrols off one objective.

They can call it what they want, but gluing feathers on a rat doesn't make it a swan. The only "shades of grey" in Praetoria are black and almost-black.

For an example of what I thought the plight of the Wardens should look more like, try "Cole In Your Stocking", #474611. </unabashedplug>