twelfth

Wow. Didn't realize that the Arc was more than a year old.

Did a longish runthrough on this arc a few weeks back, and I have to say that INTERNET is full of fail. Normally I would probably just unpublish the thing, but it is my highest-played arc - so I'm loathe to do that. However, pretty much every mission needs major revisions. So we are looking at the REBUILD OF INTERNET:

General Objectives:
1. More Killer, Less Filler
2. Cut wordiness in the Text. I love Betty the Nanny, but damn.
3. Get more consistent level ranges

Mission One:
1. LOSE THE GOLDBRICKERS. It's bad enough that you're dropped to level 20, but these guys have massive amounts of suck due to all the -resist that they throw out. I've played the arc several times in teams, and the first hallway full of Goldbrickers is usually leads to a team wipe. This is no kinda good for a lighthearted comedy Mish.

2. Decrease spawning size. You know, I thought that the mission seemed a little bare in original build, so I put in some more patrols. At the level you're mal'd down to... no, just no. Less is more, let's just focus on what the objectives are in the mish and leave the rest of the map to fend for itself. It's a small enough map not to require stretching out more mobs.

3. Consider replacing Goldbrickers with custom colored Freakshow (Gold Freaks?).

Mission Two:

Just ******* lose it. I like the idea of going into the Chat Room to beat up people...but we can lose this. Even at 20 ish, Trolls are annoyingly difficult and the Minions of BatZuul, while an exotic critter group... they are an exotic critter group from a SF. That means that they are on average more difficult than same mobs at that level. Really damned annoying in solo and there are not allies here.

Also, the jokes in this mission were less than crisp.

Mission Three:

1. Might drop the Map size. Feels long. However, if we lose mission 2, then this could provide some longevity for the rest of the arc.

2. Prawn Stars still do not appear to have any Bosses, which is an i15 no-no. I don't remember if we got a memory increase on i17, but if so, I could have room to put in a new custom. Also, look at Leather Prawn powersets - he's pretty dang difficult to knock down and is probably one of the more difficult critters. Which is odd since he's only an LT.

Mission Four:

1. Need to redesign Mapserver's group, now that we have a few more options on custom critters. Will lose the Nictus and the Void Stalkers, etc. Might go with Psychic Clockwork and Various Robots. Maybe Rogue Robots.


Might consider bringing the whole Arc down in level range to make this a low-to-mid Arc range. This would probably necessitate lowering Mapserver's difficulty, but we'll have to see. Seriously, though, this is a pretty serious teardown and rebuild. Would require several days of work, not sure if I have the fortitude for that, but I do like the arc in general.

Necrobumping my thread on this for a few notes:

1. In speaking with some other players, I found out that the Destructible Generator detail was removed (again). I checked to see if my TF:M was somehow grandfathered to exclude this and lamentably it was not. So, the final mish now makes even less sense than it did before.

2. The Final mish may suffer from the Buffbot nerf (there are 3 allies available) - but I do recall receiving XP for mobs and stuff, so something it better than nothing. Mission 1 also has one allies and Mission 2 has two, but I am thinking that should be a negligible hit to XP for the most part.

3. No other changes appear to have been made due to the various patches and everything appeared to spawn as necessary. Still considering dropping some of the clickies in the first (Malta) mish.


Still, these concerns might be enough for me to redesign the final mission entirely. The updates/patches to AE do open up the following possibilities:

1. New Atlas Park map (Fashion Show), which would get rid of the need to explain why there's a giant F'in meteor in Atlas. I think I could hack up a rationale that there's an award ceremony for Ms. Lib

2. With the new custom critter XP weighting, I think I could mock up a custom of Indigo that gave reasonable XP while losing her Hide power (making it easier for people to find her). That is, if I wanted to include her as the final boss (as above). However, I don't know what the spawn points are on the map, so I don't know what kind of wiggle room I have to adapt the original mission parameters.

I really do need to update the arc at this point and would like to make the ending a little more satisfying for players, so this is a decent opportunity to do that. I'll probably need some test players willing to comment on it.

Well, I'll look into this, we'll see what options are available once I can get into the editor.

You know I'm on Virtue as well, usually have time for a horrible snark fest. Global is the same as on here and I've got a few 50s on both sides or WTF, I can always SK or Exemp

Is this scrapper /regen or stalker /regen or both?

I talked about this in a global channel. They mentioned that the world detail had increased with the patch today, so it was necessary for come users to lower their settings to compensate. I didn't see anything about it in the Patch Notes for today, but maybe it wasn't something that they felt like was necessary to post.

Hey folks. Not a common poster on here, but I got an issue after today's patch.

Went to log into Virtue (and later checked to see that the same was happening on other servers) and my toons are black silhouettes on the character select screen. They have one or two details which are actually colored and rendered (such as a face detail, glasses, chest detail, auras, or jackets), but the rest is a black shadow. When I logged in, the in-game environment was basically a greyed-out mess with only a few lighting effects visible.

I got this on test back during the i17 open beta, but it did get resolved (I don't particularly remember how)

Anyone else getting this, and how can ya fix it?

EDIT: Okay, fiddling with Ambient Occlusion settings seems to "correct" it, just by wiggling the slider (you can put it back to the original setting without retriggering the effect). But each time I zone, the greyed-out-whatever returns. Same if I go from the game world into the Enhancement screen. More fiddling around shows that I might have shadows too high? I seem to be able to move between the enh screen and game-world without provoking the error again. ...and Zoning appears to have been made normal. ... So apparently I need to be on the lowest shadows setting. :P

If I am a winner, I permit NC Interactive, Inc. and NCsoft Europe Limited to use my name, likeness, photograph, hometown, and any comments that I may make about myself or this contest that I provide for advertising and promotional activities. I also certify that I am at least 13 years of age and am eligible to participate in this contest.



So it was that Ocho had his first, and last, day as a Free Hugs guy.

Wow, deserving winners all around!

The Animations can be changed under settings. There should be one for hostage/captive animation.

FYI: I believe the pre-i17 patch is still nerfing XP benefits for having captives/hostages in your mishes. You should be aware of this because your audience may want to get (as-close-to-) regular XP benefits in that mission.

Not sure where to look for this, but were there also changes to the ITF?

We ran this last night and found that the TF was not operating as it had in the past. In specific, we were unable to pull one of the Nictus away from Rommie using four snipes and a taunt. They just sat there and refused to aggro/get pulled away from Rommie.

We eventually just had to go in and bully through the final fight, which was a little difficult with our team. However, what was even stranger is that we didn't have as hard of a time as we figured we would (only one team wipe with all 4 AVs on us). The chatter in team was that we felt that Rommie's Resistances had been dropped considerably. There was some debate over this since we had a Rad Emission and a Dark Miasma debuffer on the team dropping down -resist.

Anyway, Just checking in here to see if there was another case of "TF Updated 'cause Critters not WAI" that happened on the ITF (Nictus now have resist taunt?).


Subjective Comment: If we're now required to bulldoze through that last mission, then I has a sad. I really liked how that TF could use a lot of different strategies depending on team composition. I thought it was a clever adaptation that kept the TF fresh for multiple replays.

Eh, I'm just glad they're getting some of the MA community involved. We're the ones consistently tooling and fooling with the system to its maximum potential. Building an exploit, while ingenious in some cases, is not really utilizing the system to its utmost.

I'm with Joe on this one: stagger solo; double up on teams.

While trying to stay away from the joke-character, there is something to be said for the Battle Butler archetype. Presently I'm thinking of the one from Hudson Hawk (who had blades/knives strapped to his arms), but you could do something a bit more serious with it. RP his /WP as impeccable poise, manners, and decorum (and fashion sense!). This might be good if you have a friend you want to level-pact with to be your IC boss/employer (maybe a squisher archetype you want to duo with).

By the way, I don't know if you're taking this into account, but there are some hairstyles (the buns from the Martial Arts booster pack) which are now invalid. I believe I saw somewhere that the MA was affected and forcing invalid status due to them.

*headdesk* I know they could screw up the MA a bit more, but really... it's like we go one step forward and nine steps back. Or just fall over completely.

As I've said before, the OP's opinion is mostly based off of the temporary pre-i17 XP ally nerf we got. Nerdrage has passed. Thanks for everyone posting though. Never had a thread reach nearly 100 replies.

Okay Bill, since you asked, here is the at-present build. Toon is actually at 31 at this time but I haven't slotted anything yet. Actually enh values might be one up or down or 25 vs 30 or something like that, but this is basically how it looks.

Looks like a fat lot of mess, Bill -- I got to pay the bills for the next few hours, so I won't be able to jump back try to jimmy up a build. IIRC, I know the present build is not too different at level 30 except:

Attacks are generally somewhere still in the 3-4 slotted range; Follow Up might be 2 slotted, Eviscerate might be 2-3 slotted still.
Took Health instead of FH in the teens;
I don't think I have many franken-sets in place at this point.
Present Enh slotting is still in the pre-20 acc/end redux arena.

Thanks for looking at things on this, btw, trying to get this hammered out before the new freespecs hit.