On Wednesday, I14 came out and I eagerly copied my test story arcs over to the live servers. I republished Axis and Allies as story arc #1379 and Celebrity Kidnapping as story arc #1388. I decided not to republish the Netrunner arc yet, since it didn't seem well received on test server, and after some self-reflection, it just isn't as cool as the other two. Not sure if I will rework it or create a totally different story for my third story arc.
I didn't have either the Freedom Phalanx or the Vindicators unlocked on live servers, of course, so I had to delete Statesman and Maiden Justice from the Axis and Allies arc before I could publish it. But I solo'd my own Celebrity Kidnapping arc, partially to test whether it imported correctly and partly for tickets. Just soloing one short arc gave me 140 tickets, plenty enough to unlock the Freedom Phalanx and Vindicators.
I then re-inserted Statesman and Maiden Justice into my final mission of the Axis and Allies story arc, using the "pet" versions that you see in the Mender Silos TF so they'd be somewhat soloable. Strangely, this pushed my story arc over the size limit; this was maddening because it was under the size limit on test. So there was some sort of bloat that occurred. I ended up deleting a custom character, the Soviet Sergeant, to make enough room for the heroes. I ran some tests and found I had some of my custom characters in the "All Custom Characters" faction instead of their proper custom faction; not sure how that happened, maybe an import/export from test problem. Fixed it though.
An LBXer was asking people to try out his story arc, so I found myself trying to solo the "Circle of Thorns Mistake" story arc, playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster). Despite being on the lowest difficulty, every other mob in the first mission had an elite boss in it, and all the mobs that weren't elite bosses were regular bosses. I tried stealthing around in this mission, but the mobs could see through my stealth. I really did give this story arc a try but after dying twice and realizing the objective was "Defeat Striker" and there were dozens of EBs each named Striker, I decided this mission would be impossible for me to complete, so I quit. I could not honestly give this arc a good rating since it was completely impossible, but I felt it would be awfully mean to give him a 1 star rating, so I ended up rating it with 2 stars and wrote the author some feedback explaining that I thought having an EB in every spawn was way too hard. The author later contacted me and told me his custom enemy group was bugged and it wasn't supposed to spawn all EBs, and made me promise to try it again later after he made some fixes.
Over LBX chat I heard someone ask whether "Police Woman" was a new custom character in the Paragon Police faction. This made me smile. Someone was playing one of my story arcs.
In response to another LBXer I next tried the "Cat War" story arc, which was really just one mission that had a lot of custom allies and enemies named after the author's cats. Plus lots of ninjas. This didn't make a lot of sense and was clearly full of in-jokes about the cats that I wasn't in on. But it was an okay mission, fun and quick, so I gave it 3 stars.
After that I joined a 5-player Liberty Force SG team doing Saul's Discount Task Force. This arc struck me as pretty silly initially, as the contact sends you to do trivial errands while promising great glory, but the execution was fantastic and the story was really pretty funny, so I had to rate it 5 stars. It was a Dev Choice arc, which meant it dropped no tickets (to the dismay of my team, who didn't realize this until we finished) but was lucky for me as I got an Unbreakable Constraint (HOLD/END) recipe.
We wanted tickets and I ended up with the star somehow so I dragged my team through my own story arcs, first Axis and Allies and then Celebrity Kidnapping. It actually felt a little weird because we were a hero team doing villain arcs, but some of my teammates got into the spirit of things and changed to "incognito" costumes since they didn't want their hero to be recognized while breaking someone out of the Zig. Of course, the photographer ambush probably spoiled THAT plan....
My team was a little disappointed in how easily Statesman and Maiden Justice dropped ("those weren't Heros!" one person said) so I decided to upgrade them to full AV status, but make then optional goals so the arc would still be soloable. Running through my arcs was really beneficial to me, since my friends all rated them highly (probably influenced by the fact that they knew me) and I got a packet of tickets for each person who played through it. (I think this is based on the rating they gave; I'm not sure if tickets are awarded if someone re-plays the arc.)
After that one of my teammates had enough tickets to re-publish his arc (which depended on some weapon lockables) and so we ran that next; I think it was called The Yellow Sign. This was an extremely cool Cthulhu Mythos story arc. We started off fighting mostly Longbow and acquiring mystical tomes, but soon started running into Innsmouth people and Deep Ones and other aberrations. The flavor text for this story arc was perfectly written in the Lovecraftian style, with extensive use of obscure words like squamous, antediluvian and congeries. The mood was perfect and I rated this arc 5 stars. The only problem I think was the final AV, a dual blades/willpower, was way too tough; the regen an AV gets from willpower seems ludicrously high, and our team of 5 (2 blasters, peacebringer, tanker, rad defender) beat on him uselessly for half an hour, before our peacebringer switched to a blaster for higher DPS which let us wear down the AV after only another 20 minutes. We finally whittled him down to 0 life which completed the mission, but then he instantly rez'd; but we decided to get out while the getting is good. Thinking about it, though, it kinda works for the final AV in a horror story to rez itself right after you thought you killed him.
Our team broke up at that point and I decided to make good on my promise to re-try the Circle of Thorns Mistake arc, again trying to solo it with Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster). This time it spawned in a more natural fashion with lots of minions and lieutenants, and I was able to see enough of the mission to get a feel for the story, which was apparently that the CoT summoned an entire race of angry lizardfolk which need killing. There was an invuln EB at the end of the first mission that I barely managed to solo after a hairy fight (he went Unstoppable, raising all his resists to 90%, and had minions healing him; had to drop all the fire lizards who were doing thermal buffs and heals first, then wear him down), then a regen EB at the end of the second mission who had an annoying habit of flying up into the ceiling and getting his head stuck in the roof so I didn't have line of sight to shoot him. I eventually beat him by luring him down and out-waiting his Instant Healing, then dropping him before it recharged. It was still pretty hard but significantly more doable this time, and I was actually able to complete it; I tried to raise my previous rating on the arc but I'm not sure if it took.
Another player was offering to play people's arcs if they would play his, so I found myself trying to solo the Fall of the Blackguards (Part 1) story arc. This was kind of a vanity arc where the members of the author's villain group all appear and are enacting some kind of evil plan, and you have to stop them. It was pretty EB-heavy and I got smashed flat twice by EB ambushes; technically they probably weren't ambushes, but a boss spawn that was triggered from rescuing a hostage, and the EB happened to spawn directly on my head (ow!). I think these EBs could probably have been regular bosses to make it more soloable, but I can understand that in a vanity arc you want all your characters to be AV level. 
But the EBs were fairly soloable (at least for Police Woman), so it wasn't too bad; except for the invuln brute who was quite hard for me since he would go Unstoppable frequently. I managed to drop him when Unstoppable was down; I'm finding Surveillance power to be invaluable for figuring out what custom bosses are doing, what powers they have running, and so on, not to mention the nice debuff it applies. I thought the back story was a little thin; I did recognize some of the players who were represented by enemies in this arc, but the mission didn't really tell you a lot about them and their "info" was left blank. The author told me she was mainly focused on functionality and would add more description later though. I think I gave this arc 3 stars, it was playable but felt a little unfinished, and it was a little light on background info. I really would've liked to know more about who these villains were and what motivates them, and other plot stuff like that.
I got a ridiculous number of Mission Architect badges on the first night, including:
Customizer
Workaholic
Extractor
Activated
Gamer
Ticket Taker
Admiring
Thrill Seeker
Hot Shot (I decided to set this as my new badge)
Eliminator
Early Bird
Architect X
Liquidator
Ticket Hound
Do Gooder (ironically, for kidnapping people)
Executioner
Author
Went the Extra Mile
Ticket Fiend
Encouraged
Destructive
Assassin
Safekeeper
Decimator
Motivated
Architect XXV
This puts me up to 571 badges. I had a ton of fun; I'm loving I14 so far and can't wait til I log in to play some more.
[u]Merit benchmarking since I13[u]
39.61MPH Lady Grey TF: 39 merits in 59.08mins (avg of 9 runs)
36.54MPH 3rd villain respec: 15 merits in 24.63mins (avg of 5 runs)
34.62MPH 2nd villain respec: 15 merits in 26mins (1 run)
31.73MPH 1st villain respec: 15 merits in 28.36mins (avg of 4 runs)
27.78MPH Ice Mistral SF: 25 merits in 54mins (1 run)
26.51MPH Hess TF: 19 merits in 43.0mins (avg of 4 runs)
25.48MPH Moonfire TF: 31 merits in 73mins (avg of 2 runs)
24.40MPH Dr Quaterfield TF: 111 merits in 273mins (1 run)
22.55MPH Manticore TF: 32 merits in 85.14mins (avg of 7 runs)
22.40MPH Synapse TF: 57 merits in 152.67mins (avg of 3 runs)
22.39MPH Sister Psyche TF: 50 merits in 134.0mins (avg of 4 runs)
22.24MPH Sharkhead SF: 22 merits in 59.34mins (avg of 6 runs)
21.47MPH Faathim TF: 73 merits in 204mins (1 run)
21.04MPH 1st hero respec: 27 merits in 77mins (1 run)
20.00MPH [u]OFFICIAL BASELINE FOR TASK FORCE REWARDS[u]
19.74MPH Numina TF: 36 merits in 109.4mins (avg of 5 runs)
19.52MPH Recluse SF: 25 merits in 76.83mins (avg of 3 runs) (took HOs instead of merits; 1 Ribo, 1 Nucl, 1 Enzy)
19.20MPH Citadel TF: 40 merits in 124.98mins (avg of 10 runs)
19.13MPH Positron TF: 64 merits in 200.75mins (avg of 4 runs) (2 failed TFs not averaged in)
18.02MPH Imperious TF: 28 merits in 93.21mins (avg of 27 runs) (3 failed TFs not averaged in)
17.80MPH Traitorous Vendetti villain flashback: 1 merit in 3.37mins (avg of 7 runs)
17.65MPH Loa Bone villain flashback: 1 merit in 3.40mins (avg of 5 runs)
17.39MPH 3rd hero respec: 20 merits in 69mins (1 run)
17.21MPH Silver Mantis SF: 38 merits in 132.50mins (avg of 2 runs)
16.84MPH Vahzilok Conference villain flashback: 5 merits in 17.82mins (avg of 9 runs)
15.92MPH Hit List villain flashback: 4 merits in 15.08mins (1 run)
15.22MPH Rise of the Vampyri hero flashback: 17 merits in 67mins (1 run)
14.46MPH Spy Hunt villain flashback: 10 merits in 41.49mins (1 run)
14.46MPH 2nd hero respec: 20 merits in 83mins (1 run)
14.23MPH Katie TF: 9 merits in 37.96mins (avg of 8 runs) (1 failed TF not averaged in)
13.46MPH Forging the Blackwand villain flashback: 8 merits in 35.67mins (1 run)
13.22MPH Kings of the Sky villain flashback: 4 merits in 18.15mins (1 run)
12.84MPH Origin of Power villain flashback: 3 merits in 14.02mins (1 run)
11.54MPH Breakout at the Zig villain flashback: 8 merits in 41.6mins (1 run)
9.92MPH Cap au Diable SF: 12 merits in 72.6mins (avg of 5 runs)
8.78MPH Escaped! villain flashback: 2 merits in 13.67mins (avg of 3 runs)
8.57MPH Mender Tesseract SF: 4 merits in 28mins (1 run)
7.74MPH Rumblings of the Past hero flashback: 4 merits in 31mins (1 run)
7.38MPH Rescue Fortune Teller: 1 merit in 8.13min (1 run)
6.86MPH Nictus Insurrection kheldian flashback: 4 merits in 35mins (1 run)
5.11MPH To Save a Soul hero flashback: 15 merits in 176mins (1 run)
4.68MPH Steal Facemaker's Chemicals villain flashback: 1? merit in 12.82mins (1 run)
2.93MPH Mender Lazarus SF: 6 merits in 123mins (1 run)
2.78MPH RWZ raiding: 2 merits in 43.19mins (avg of 5 runs)
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
*Pokes her head up from her mound of debt*
I'll have to remember that Statesman and MJ are optional next time I run your Mish. Kept getting my 'posterior' handed to me just by States with my Blaster, and defeated him by pure luck (if my last shot had missed, he'd of KOed me), and the less said about MJ the better.
Still, both are very good arcs!
@Aoide Muse
Arc IDs: #3571 Digital Love, #182068 The Rikti Roll, #334016 The Null Earth Saga: A Reflected Web
4/10/2009
I logged on Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) to find I had gotten some feedback on my Celebrity Kidnapping story arc (#1388); one person told me it was not very challenging, while two others told me they nearly died to the paparazzi ambushes. With some people saying "too easy" and some "too hard" I decided to leave it as is.
Someone on LBX was asking people to try the Poor Polly story arc, where you try and rescue a little girl's lost rabbit. But when you enter the mission you find you're too late, the rabbit is already rabbit stew and you have to destroy the stew pot to complete the mission. This takes like 10 seconds to do. There really wasn't much to the mission, but I gave it some bonus points for gleeful meanspiritedness (you have to go back and tell the little girl her rabbit is dead) so ended up giving it a 3 star rating.
I then tried Digital Love, a story arc by another Liberty person, which starts out with you helping this robot out, but then turns into a plot about a squicky but doomed love affair between the robot and a girl Carnie. I'm a sucker for tragic romance, so I gave it 4 stars.
From there I went into soloing Big Trouble in Little Paragon, a story arc written by someone I know on Triumph. This story had the premise that Fusionette had gotten in trouble with the law and you're helping her clear her name, and you uncover an anti-hero conspiracy in the police department. I'm not sure it's actually a good idea to go around shooting police officers just because Fusionette says so, and I think there wasn't enough evidence (and flavor text) explaining why the cops turned against Fusionette, and I ran across a couple bugs in the story arc (one mission completed instantly as I entered it, and the final mission was a defeat all on the Atlas map with that darn meteor, and I had to kill the meteor to finish it). Some of the dialog was cute though, so I ended up giving this 3 stars.
After that I joined a Recluse SF started by a friend. We had one false start where we were on Relentless difficulty, then quit and restarted the SF on Villainous difficulty. The team leader asked me to play a rad, so I brought Indigo Ifrit (50 fire/rad corruptor). Our team mix ended up being:
mind dom
rad corr (me)
dark corr
2 dark brutes
stalker
poison MM
fortunata
I thought we were too light on support classes with this team mix, but we gave it a try anyway. A lot of team members weren't real familiar with the RSF, so this went a little slowly. I wasn't really at the top of my game either, though; I was lagging horribly and playing a little carelessly and suffered a few needless deaths early on. Nevertheless we managed to get through all the early missions successfully, only to hit a brick wall in the final fight against the Freedom Phalanx. Our first two attempts at a frontal assault on the heroes resulted in team wipes without dropping any of the heroes. We then made a third attempt where the dominator used Domination and Mass Hypnosis to try and pull just a few heroes at a time; we got 4 of them, which was still enough to wipe us out. We just seemed to die too easily to the hero team; we maybe needed more buff/debuff or more aggro control. More something, anyway. After the third attempt we decided to call it quits on the SF.
I decided to try playing a sub-50 character on Architect Entertainment missions, so I brought on Millie Volt (27 elec/invuln brute). I first tried a story arc called Anvil of Evil, which I picked at random from the list of villain arcs with no ratings yet. This arc didn't look finished (most text was blank), and wasn't true to the "villain" morality as the contact would say "Good luck, Heroes!" and you were there to destroy the Anvil of Evil instead of take it over and use it. I quit that arc and gave it 2 stars.
Then I tried the It's a Little Earth As It Is story arc, by a Liberty player, which had the premise that the robots on a Disneyland ride went crazy and started taking hostages. This was actually a pretty funny concept and I loved the costumes; though, on the down side, the mobs were too tough for Millie to handle, especially the sonic blast/force field minions who would stack buffs on bad guys and debuffs on me. Ouch! Mission Architect enemies are surprisingly hard relative to normal PvE enemies. I enjoyed the concept behind this arc but didn't feel up to clearing the whole map (which was the mission goal) so I quit the arc but still gave it 4 stars.
After that I did a quick story arc called From Killjoy with Love, which was a basic mercenary op to take out some CoT assets. This seemed a decent and playable mission (though the force field bosses at the end were a little rough) but I felt it needed more story; I gave it 3 stars.
Someone on LBX was shilling his new story arc, Immortal Kombat, and with a name like that I decided I had to give it a try. I switched to Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper) expecting it to be a martial arts tournament for the fate of Outworld, but it actually seemed to be a mission to rescue a hero named Kombat from the clutches of some new villain organization. I thought the basic premise was okay but the mission needed to explain a little more about the back story of Kombat or these new bad guys, as I didn't really know what was going on. Gave it 3 stars and wrote a lot of suggestions in feedback.
After that I switched back to Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) and joined a 4-player Liberty Force SG team doing Architect Entertainment missions. We were tanker, scrapper, warshade and me, and people wanted to play on Invincible, which I wasn't sure was a good idea since I was the only "healer" with Aid Other, but it actually worked fine.
We first ran one of the warshade's story arcs, Alter Ego, where we did a lot of dimension hopping to encounter alternate universe versions of his main hero character. All of the alternate universe versions turned out to be horribly evil supervillains, so we killed them all, and then we decided this must make his hero character evil, so in the final mission we confronted his main character (who was in the process of turning evil and had just roasted a hero sidekick) and beat him up. I thought this was pretty fun (though admittedly it helped that this was a vanity arc where I was "in" on the in-jokes) so rated it 5 stars.
We then ran a very silly arc called Clowns, Fast Food & McArchvillains, which had fast food-themed enemies. I started off thinking this was absolutely too silly, but midway through I actually started enjoying fighting the hordes of Ronald McDonalds ambushes, beating up the Wendy boss (our team unanimously agreed she needed to be a sluttier redhead than the author depicted) and rescuing the Colonel Sanders hostage. It was just one mission long, but required a lot of fighting; I think this was just the right length as the joke would've worn thin in a second mission. This was fun enough that I gave it 5 stars too.
Finally we ran another teammate's story arc, Scourge of the Phalanx: Reunion, where he depicts the reformation of the Scourge of the Phalanx villain group (which my alt April Fool used to be in). This was pretty fun because I recognized all the villains we were recruiting, including a copy of April Fool (although the author couldn't make her a thug/TA mastermind since Mission Architect chokes on that powerset combo due to redraw issues). I've seen a lot of these vanity arcs so far and it seems they are much more fun if you know the players who are being shown, as I liked this a lot (gave it 5 stars); some of the ones where I didn't know anyone involved left me a little cold. This arc did fill in more back story on each of the characters, which I think helps.
After that our team broke up and I slightly edited one of my published arcs. I had gotten feedback from multiple people on my Celebrity Kidnapping arc that the second mission being so much lower level than the other two is jarringly inconsistent, so I ended up changing the second mission's enemies from Skulls into Tsoo. This changes the mission levels on the story arc from 38-14-40 to 38-40-40, which seems to flow smoother.
Over the course of the night, Police Woman got the following mission architect badges:
Poor Impulse Control (clicked 10 glowies)
Adventurer (played 10 story arcs)
Creator (25 players played my story arcs!)
Savior (25 hostages)
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
4/13/2009
I decided I wanted to promote my story arcs a little more, so I started a new thread on the Mission Architect Stories forum, I'll try yours if you'll try mine. In it, I promise to run through and review other people's story arcs, in return for their running through and reviewing mine; basically the same sort of arrangement that tons of people are already doing informally. This has been very successful for me so far, on all counts; I get people trying my story arcs, and I have a steady stream of decent to great story arcs to try out that I would never have found on my own.
On Friday I started off helping a VG-mate test a mission where we broke into a Catholic reform school to bust out one of the students (a villain based on another of our VG-mates who is a Catholic schoolgirl assassin). We had a good old time beating up ninja schoolgirls and kung fun nuns.
After that I solo'd the "Trademark Infringement" story arc; really just one mission full of villains with "rip off" costumes and concepts. This was actually pretty funny and I gave it 5 stars.
I started getting some bites on my "I'll try yours if you'll try mine" thread at that point, so I started soloing some of the story arcs that got submitted for my review. I'm really into mission architect now and pretty much spent all my time doing Architect Entertainment missions instead of TFs (my normal CoH activity). So I'm afraid my journal will be very Mission Architect focused and not so much TF/merit focused, at least for awhile. Fair warning, spoilers for several of these story arcs!
Playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), I first went through "It does a Body Good?" which introduces the Pugilists, a villain group full of evil jocks who attempted to poison the city's population with performance-enhancing drugs. I liked the overall story but I could never figure out how the Malta were connected to the plot and I found the final mission a little anticlimactic, so I gave it 3 stars.
Next I did "A Hero's Halo" which has the contact sending you out to find out where these "halo" costume pieces that have been popping up REALLY came from. Needless to say, a conspiracy was involved. I thought this was an interesting premise with good writing, and I gave it 5 stars.
The Demo Girls SG was starting a theme team of all VEATs, so I started a level 1 blood widow named Tehuantl ("jaguar" in the Nahuatl language). Tehuantl is a remake of my claws/will stalker "Jaguar Goddess", who I had enjoyed playing for awhile last year, but I eventually grew disenchanted with her name and powersets, so she had been idling at level 18 for months. I thought a claws-based Night Widow might be a good way to recycle her concept. Yes, she's admittedly a catgirl; but a human-sacrificing, blood-drinking catgirl! That should be okay, right? Right?! Heheh. Anyway, 8 VEATs seemed pretty strong; I was actually surprised that occasionally a teammate would die even through all the stacked defense we had (I guess it wasn't all THAT much on Training enhancements). We quickly steamrollered our way to level 11, unlocking our second costume slot.
After that team broke up, I tweaked my Axis and Allies story arc a little, based on suggestions; adding more intro info for the first mission. I then played Police Woman through the "Shadowlight: Part I" story arc, where I was fighting chess-themed time bandits. The villains were interesting and there was a decent story, though I think the time-travel aspect wasn't used enough; I rated it 4 stars.
Then I played Kashira (18 db/ninj stalker) through the "Cutthroat Competition" story arc (which was labeled as 15-22 villainous). In this arc, the Facemaker hired me for a little light bodysnatching, but then I ran into an opposing villain group who was trying to bodysnatch the same people I was! Hijinks ensued. This arc had a great finale where I rounded up a bunch of allies (who were heavily modified versions of the people I originally kidnapped -- basically, they got Vahziloked!) and beat up the opposition to settle the question of who would corner the market on kidnapped victims. This was really pretty cool, and I rated it 5 stars.
After that I played Mega (50 SS/elec brute) on the "Neutrality & Brutality" story arc. Here I repelled a United Nations-backed invasion force trying to pacify the Rogue Isles, then framed them for various misdeeds. This was a cool concept, but I felt the enemy group and the missions both needed some fleshing out, so I gave it 3 stars.
Next I played Mayday (50 fortunata) on the "Midnight Bells Toll" story arc. This arc was confusing to me; I think there were actually 3 separate subplots going on. In plot A you go back in time to rescue a woman from Cimerorans; in plot B you try and steal a dark and evil grimoire from the Midnight Squad; and in plot C you attack a High School Dance. The different subplots didn't fit together very well, and the writing needed a lot of cleanup, so I felt I could only give it 2 stars.
I then played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) on the "Unbearable Funk" story arc, which had the premise of Igor, a henchman, who is worried about his mad scientist's depression, and he gets you to commit various crimes to try and cheer the mad scientist up. Like corpse stealing and raiding the tech of rival mad scientists. Although Igor's speech impediment was rather distracting, the premise was pretty fun and the mad scientist theme was very well done, as a feud between mad scientists ensued. Was fun stuff and I gave it 4 stars.
After that, I joined a team for a bit, and we did "Johnny Sonata and the Hitmen", which has the premise that Johnny Sonata is getting his old band together (and will stop at nothing to make it happen). It had a very Blues Brothers feel, and all the dialog had great attitude towards it; very cool, and I felt it deserved the Dev Choice label. I gave it 5 stars.
I tried crafting a heroic mission (since all my published arcs currently are heroic), with the premise that the villains were holding a costume contest in Recluse's Victory and some gullible heroes fell for it and got captured, and now need rescuing. I managed to make a "Costume Contestants" faction that had a wide variety of different humanoid models from the basic factions in it, and yet took nearly no story space. Spent some time testing this mission, but I never could quite get it to work; the Recluse's Victory map has this big tech lab area before you get to the outdoor area, and my hostages would keep spawning down there and something buggy about that map would cause either the hostages or their guards to get embedded into the ceiling. I theorize that the tech lab's Z position is actually beneath the outdoor parts of the map, and some kind of snap-to-ground-level algorithm is catapulting my mobs into nothingness.
I joined a 3-player team of friends testing some arcs they were working on, then did a story arc called When Heroes Fall, a short mission about heroes who turn villainous; it wasn't bad, I gave it 3 stars.
By that time I had collected about 2000 tickets on Police Woman, and I ended up burning nearly all of them to unlock every single map pack and several of the costume packs. I probably don't need all this stuff, but I wanted to have lots of things in my toybox!
I played Schadenfreude (39 AR/pain corruptor) for a bit, joining a Liberty Force SG team that did the Grieving Angels arc, by one of the team members. This was a story about a girl supergroup that turned villainous (this seems a common theme in MA!); in this arc, the back story of the former heroines was developed in a lot more detail, and the dialog and the writing really conveys how some good guys want to still support the former heroines while others are reluctantly trying to bring them to justice. It was a much more convincing "heroes go bad" scenario, and I gave it 5 stars.
Later I played Police Woman on "The Love Talker: A City of Heroes Faerie Tale". I was initially very dubious about this story since I thought "Love Talker" was a silly name for the villain of the piece, but was quickly drawn in by the writing, which established a very strong faerie/Celtic myth atmosphere for the whole story arc. This arc did some pretty cool things with linked objectives and had some pretty spooky dialog and clues. I thought it was a great arc and I gave it 5 stars.
Sunday afternoon I joined a 6 player LEGION SG team doing AE missions, playing Schadenfreude. We ran through a story arc involving a villain group based on signs of the Zodiac, then another story arc based on settling the eternal feud between pirates and ninja; neither arc was quite finished looking, I think we were just testing them out, so I left both unrated. We did run into a weird bug where some team members would zone into a different instance of a mission than the rest of the team; never did figure out how to get rid of that, other than have everyone quit the team and restart the mission.
Another player suggested we do my "Axis and Allies" arc, which was awesome...someone wanted to do my story arc without me pushing them into it! Yay! This was really cool as we had filled up to an 8 player team by this point, and I had never gotten to test it with such a large team. It was also a little weird as I was playing Schadenfreude, who also is both the contact and turns up in some of the missions. I had to explain this was due to a "time loop". I found my teammates' reactions very rewarding, including one scrapper who yelled "OMG IT'S THE FRENCH! Get them!" during the second mission. On an 8 player team, the missions spawn MUCH more thickly than when I'm testing them solo, and I got to see a lot more of my customized bosses; it was really very cool.
After that team broke up, I played Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender) on a 5-player Liberty Force team that ran through "The Anarchitect", a story arc involving fighting lots of office workers who have been driven crazy by the unnatural architecture constructed by a weird being called the Anarchitect. It was fun to fight through this but the story didn't quite grab me, so I gave it 3 stars. Then we did another run through "Grieving Angels", as the author wanted to see how hard the AV enemies were on it. We beat them up pretty handily, but we were a strong team; at one point we had some AVs as allies, too (probably due to difficulty setting) which seemed pretty overpowering.
I wrapped up the night tinkering with making the first mission of a teen heroes story arc (I find it easier to think of villainous ideas, but I'm determined to make my third story something heroic for the sake of balance). I made a mini-supergroup of teenage versions of the Freedom Phalanx and had the mission hook be that a teen version of the player's hero was joining this SG. I knew it would be very easy to make the "kid" version of things too cutesy and saccharin, so I dragged an SG-mate through a test run of this mission to see what someone else thought. She was polite enough to say that she liked it, so I may be working on this arc some more in the future.
I got the following badges over the weekend:
Recognized (arc with 100 stars)
Virtual Victor (defeat 10 enemies in test mode)
Virtual Extractor (rescue/kidnap 1 hostage in test mode)
Story Teller (50 players completed my arcs)
Obliterator (destroy 10 objects)
Bug Fixer (test 1 story arc of your own)
Mission Seeker (complete 1 mission in test mode)
Virtual Do Gooder (rescue/kidnap 5 hostages in test mode)
Writer (100 players completed my arcs)
Virtual Ticket Taker (100 tickets in test mode)
Virtual Destroyer (defeat 100 enemies in test mode)
Virtual Victim (die in test mode)
Ticket Master (5000 tickets)
Button Masher (25 glowies)
Virtual Guardian (rescue/kidnap 10 hostages in test mode)
At the end of the weekend, Axis and Allies was up to 72 plays and Celebrity Kidnapping up to 47; both were maintaining an average rating of 4 stars. I was pretty happy with this outcome. I've been trying to gently promote them on global chat (but only when someone asks for a story arc to run; I'm resolved not to spam chat lines needlessly) and my review exchange program on the forums is really working well. I think people who I don't even know and never directly interacted with are starting to find my story arcs and play them, which I find really cool.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
4/15/2009
On Monday night I joined a Sister Psyche TF that was forming on LBX channel. I played Star Amethyst (20 warshade) and our team mix was:
FF controller
warshade (me)
2 blasters
scrapper
sonic defender
tanker
empath defender
I initially asked for and got an SK so I could hit harder and be tougher and stuff, but my mentor wanted to be able to go stealth into missions without worrying about me, so after a couple missions my mentor dropped my SK (I think he also thought he would be helping me get more exp). We seemed to be okay, being nearly invincible due to stacked force fields, sonic shields and empathy, and had pretty decent DPS, so I shrugged and let it go. I did get squished a couple times facing purple mobs, but we mostly did fine. The team did have some disagreement at one point on whether the tanker should herd or we should just follow the tanker into fights, but nothing too serious. Finished the TF in 1hr 56mins, gained 50 merits, and Star Amethyst got to level 24. I picked up Stygian Circle (yay, a heal!) and Super Speed (stacking with warshade Cloak of Darkness for near invisibility) for my level 22 and 24 powers. A Kinetic Combat (DMG/END/RCHG) recipe dropped for me also, which I was able to instantly sell at Wentworths for 800K infl.
Over Monday and Tuesday night I solo'd through the "Who's the Master?" story arc, playing Kashira (18 db/ninj stalker). This story seemed to be a combination martial arts and blaxploitation flick, which had me fighting ninjas and Harlem street gangs for the title of "Who's the Master?" I really didn't like the contact's attitude towards me and so was glad that I got a chance to beat him up in the final mission. I hit level 19 on this story arc, but also died twice against the final boss, who I think was a MA/willpower boss or EB with build up; a rough customer, but I managed to beat him on the third try, after candy-popping some purple inspirations. A little later I realized that all my level 15 DOs had gone red when I hit level 19, which probably explained why I was having a tough time. The story was thin and the missions needed some polish, but I had fun, so I gave it 3 stars.
Playing Schadenfreude (40 AR/pain corruptor) I joined the tail end of a Scourge of the Phalanx story arc with a 4 player Liberty Force team. This was fun as I got to see one of my villain characters with heavy cyberware modifications running around as an ally helping us fight Crey; I have no idea where the cyberware came from (I missed the first part of the arc) but it was an interesting visual. Didn't give this arc a rating as I hadn't seen most of it.
I spent extensive time over Monday and Tuesday developing and testing a new story arc, "Teen Phalanx Forever!" (Now published as arc #67335. Wow, 60k arcs after only one week.) I had resolved to make my third story a heroic arc since both my others are villainous, and the concept I settled on was an homage to teen superhero team books (Teen Titans/Young Justice/etc). The player is a recruit to a "Teen Phalanx" supergroup, which has NPC members that are children of the signature CoH heroes. I had one toon who already basically fit this concept that I reused, and had fun inventing a few more teen heroes, casting them in archetypical roles: the "good girl", the "bad girl", the "strong boy" and the "smart boy" - plus the player, to make a stereotypical "Five Man Band". I ended up spending way too much time agonizing over characterization, dialog and backstory for my various NPC allies; I'm really wanting players to think that each of them has a very different personality, so they seem more "real", rather than just bosses/lieutenants that follow you around.
I had the conceit that I would make each of the missions of this story arc correspond to one of the main task forces; so in mission one, Positron gives you tips on fighting Vahzilok, and mission two has Synapse telling you about Clockwork, that sort of thing, so you could feel like you did the Posi TF, Synapse TF, etc. with the NPC team. I made the level of each of the missions slowly scale up as the story arc goes on, which I hoped would give the player the feeling that he was gaining experience and leveling up along with the team.
One mission I spent a lot of time on was a "Monitor Duty" mission; this is kind of a classic superhero trope where one team member is always watching the Bat Computer (or whatever) and monitoring for incidents that require the team's attention. I kind of wanted to make the player feel like he or she was part of the Teen Phalanx team so would have to occasionally do team duties; but I didn't actually want to make it tedious and boring, so I tried to furnish the Teen Phalanx base with lots of clues that both give back story while also giving hints as to the overall plot of the story arc; plus I used some trickery with linked mission objectives to make some Freakshow bust in the door and "go after" the player holed up in the base. It was a lot of detail work to get this all working properly.
Something I really noticed while writing this story arc is that custom characters are REALLY the main resource hogs that bloat story arc size. As of this writing, I have only 4 custom characters in this story arc (the various NPC allies); but I also have four different enemy groups, each with its own unique AV, numerous glowies and hostages, and wrote extensive mission briefings and debriefings and probably a dozen clues. Yet with all that, my story arc's disk usage is only 57% ... while my Axis & Allies arc, chock full of custom characters but not nearly as much text, is bursting at the seams at around 98% usage, and only got down to that after I deleted two custom characters.
I have no idea how the general CoH populace will respond to this story (I could easily see people saying it is too fannish, too cutesy, has too many AVs, or a hundred other things), and I have no doubt I'll need to do lots of tweaks as people start offering input, but personally I rather like how it's turned out so far.
I did a lot of testing in the Mission Architect Test Mode, and as a result Police Woman got the badges:
Virtual Ticket Hound (500 tickets in test mode)
Architect L (50 architect badges)
Virtual Rescuer (rescue/kidnap 50 hostages in test mode)
Virtual Destruction (destroy 1 object in test mode)
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
4/16/2009
Started the night making a few edits to my "Teen Phalanx Forever!" story (arc #67335) in response to some very nice feedback provided by the first person who actually played through it.
A friend then lured me into playing his "BRAAAAINSSSS" story arc with him. This was a horror movie style zombie apocalypse. I've seen a lot of zombie-based stories lately, but thought this was pretty well done. There were well-meaning but foolish scientist NPCs that unleashed the zombie apocalypse on the world, and a wide variety of zombie types; of particular note was the two different zombie factions, "Slow Zombies" (pretty easy) and "Fast Zombies" (fast and lethal!). The final encounters swarmed us with fast zombies and zombies that summon other zombies and other horrors and quickly wiped us out; I managed to awaken and run away. I thought this was a little too lethal, but the other player said, "It's a horror movie, of course the people who fight die and only the people who run away survive." This made me laugh and made perfect sense for the genre, so I ended up giving this arc 4 stars since it really evoked the zombie horror movie feel, but I think you need to have a "zombie apocalypse, OMG we're all gonna die!" mentality for this to really work for you. It IS kind of killer GM at the end though, so you need to not mind dying.
After escaping the zombie apocalypse I lured my friend to try my "Teen Phalanx Forever!" story; with a scrapper and blaster on Invincible I wasn't sure how we'd do against the AVs (since even with the small team, Invincible would push them up to AV rank), but we actually did fine against Dr. Vahzilok, especially after a mastermind and another scrapper joined us. We suffered a near-team-wipe against the Clockwork King as he spawned within aggro range of us, but managed to regroup and beat him up; then the rest of the arc went just fine.
After that we started our way through the Freakshow Phalanx story arc, where the various signature heroes have somehow turned into Freakshow versions of themselves, and you have to fight your way through hordes of Freaks along the way. The story behind why this happened was pretty thin, but the costumes and dialog were great and it was fun just beating up all the Freaks and Freak "heroes". I gave it 4 stars.
Later that night I dragged another friend through "Teen Phalanx Forever!" making her lead and read all the clues and stuff; she seemed to have a good time.
I got the following mission architect badges on Police Woman last night:
Overachiever (100 non-required objectives)
To the Rescue (50 hostages rescued/kidnapped)
Plugged In (25 arcs completed)
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
I wonder if PW will ever hit my "Quarantine" arc and post about it here
shameless plug
*arc 47776*
4/20/2009
I spent most of Thursday night editing, testing and fine-tuning my "Axis and Allies" villainous story (arc #1379). I had gotten a complaint that most of my custom factions had no lieutenants, making most of the spawns nothing but minions. Originally on test server, I had had a custom minion, lieutenant and boss for each of the French, British, Soviet and US armies, but I found this took up WAY too much story arc space, since custom characters are the biggest resource hogs in mission architect. As a result I had deleted all the lieutenants except the US one, who I thought looked more cool than the others.
I tried to address this complaint by demoting the French boss to be a lieutenant, while keeping the British boss a boss; since the British and French armies are all mixed together in an "Allies" faction on the Dunkirk map, this gave the Allies a mix of minions, lieutenants and bosses. Someone else had told me the story of the Russian political officers who would shoot their men if they tried to run away, so I determined that one of these guys needed to be my Soviet lieutenant; I ended up naming him "Soviet Commissar" and giving him the thugs/sonic powersets, so that he could fire dual pistols and yell at you and yell at his men. (There was no obvious way to make him kill his own guys for cowardice, though, heheh.) I decided to pretend the thug minions were partisans throwing molotovs and stuff; admittedly a rationalization, and mercs maybe would've made more sense, but I have a lot of merc MMs on this arc already and the political officer just looks more right with dual revolvers than a submachinegun.
To squeeze the Soviet lieutenant into my story I had to delete another custom character, and I ended up deleting the custom "Bodyguard" minion from my "Secret Service" faction that guards the President in the final mission. I was able to repurpose some of the Crey agents to act like bodyguards, though, by adding them from the Crey standard faction into my "Secret Service" custom faction. This makes it still look like President Truman is being guarded by Secret Service agents in black suits, and gave me enough room to squeeze in that Soviet custom character! A couple drawbacks of this workaround, though: the Crey Agents still have Crey bio stories if you pull up their info, and also the only level 50 Crey agents are those snipers that hang out in Peregrine Island. The snipers kinda work for guarding President Truman, but I had to delete the Secret Service ambush from the mission, because an ambush of nothing but snipers is The Suck.
I also rewrote the souvenir for the mission to be a lot more like a standard CoH souvenir, with the story arc name and a plot synopsis; and with some trepidation, I renamed the boss in the first mission from "The Furor" to "Der Führer". I had originally named him "Furor" because I figured all Nazi terminology would be banned for inappropriate content, but I must've had a dozen people tell me that I had spelled it wrong, so I eventually decided that people care more about correct spelling than they do about Nazi terminology. I did get one person who said he was Jewish and felt squicky about the NPCs Heiling him as the Führer, which made me feel very guilty. 
The best I could say to this was, hey, at least you get to kill Hitler in the very first mission! I know that may sound rather thin, though, if you are sensitive to this sort of material.
While editing at the Rikti War Zone Architect Entertainment office, I noticed a RWZ mother ship raid was forming. I still need the bomb badge for that so I hopped over there and tried to join in. The one team that had room for another person had already gotten a bomb, so I decided to try soloing (eventually picked up a fortunata though) in hopes that I could snag a bomb at some point. I mostly did OK soloing, but a number of players were purposely trying to grief the raid by herding excess Rikti onto the raid, which caused many deaths and at least one raid wipe. I know some people feel like it's their sacred right to inflict suffering on other players (even I do this sometimes; after all, I *do* have a character named Schadenfreude), but this seemed quite rude. Griefers love when people get upset at them, though, so I said only "Thanks for helping pull for us!" Never did get a bomb credit, but I did pick up a bunch of Vanguard merits.
After the raid I spent some time trying to test my Axis and Allies arc changes, and I finally came to the conclusion that having to fight Statesman in the final mission is just too much for a soloer to handle, even if he's set to the weak "Signature Pet" version. I kited Statesman around for half an hour trying to kill him, but he would just go Unstoppable any time I got him low on life, and in Unstoppable the damage I could get through to him wasn't enough to counter his natural regen. I eventually DID kill him, but only because I got fed up with fighting him and dropped a Vanguard Heavy (figuring I had earned more than 250 Vanguard merits during the raid, so why not). This is more effort than I expect from a typical soloer, though, so I decided I had to cut Statesman from the mission, leaving only Maiden Justice (aka Ms Liberty of WW2) as hero in the "Invade America" scenario. I hated to do that because defeating Statesman while conquering the world seems such a perfect finish to the arc, but he was just too darn hard to kill for a soloer.
Also on Thursday, I ran through the "End the Deadstorm" story arc. The plot of this story was to stop a cosmic horror known as the "Deadstorm", a mysterious entity that basically was threatening to cause a zombie apocalypse. I fought lots of zombies, an evil priest, a nasty werewolf and ultimately an evil high priestess or avatar of this entity, and along the way I rescued a psychic ninja zombie mime (I think?) that was fighting for the good guys. The story was okay, but not terribly coherent either, and I was puzzled why the Deadstorm minions didn't seem to include any actual stormies. Gave this arc 3 stars.
On Friday we got a patch that deleted Prisoners as a usable faction from Mission Architect. Sadly, this wrecks the first mission of my "Celebrity Kidnapping" villain story (arc #1388), which starts with a jailbreak during a prison riot. Fortunately I had only used like 55% of my story space in this story arc (although a lot happens in this story, I originally used very few custom models so had tons of space to spare), so I was able to correct this by creating my own "Convicts" faction, with two orange-jumpsuited Convict minions in it. I made one a mace/regen swinging a wrench, and the other one a dual blades/regen with two daggers. This seemed to work as a substitute for the Prisoners, though I miss the cool randomly generated names the Prisoners had.
I also decided to revamp the second mission of Celebrity Kidnapping, which had a bunch of Tsoo hanging around in the office where you pick up the ransom, with no really good reason for having Tsoo except that they're about the right level for the story arc. Another player had suggested I should make this mission more interesting by having a bunch of hobos in here, with a crazed hobo lord; and I liked this idea enough that I made a custom "Vagrants" faction. I put a custom minion and custom boss into this faction, and padded the faction with some of the standard mobs that look like vagrants (mostly Scrapyarders, but a few Warriors and Lost). For the hobo lord, I was just itching to use Marlon Brando's line from On the Waterfront, "I coulda been a contender! I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am." The plot of On the Waterfront inspired me to make the hobo lord the washed up brother of Willy Wheeler who was a promising boxer once, but Willy made him to take a fall in order to make money betting on the other guy. This let me turn the (formerly unrelated to the plot) hobo into foreshadowing that Willy can't be trusted, which I thought fit nicely. I also heavily rewrote the souvenir, then republished.
Friday night I played Tehuantl (11 blood widow) with an 8-player all VEAT team of Demolition Girls SG. We smashed our way through a King's Row mayhem, a Skyway mayhem, some VEAT story missions and some paper missions, ultimately getting Tehuantl to level 16. I took Spin, Super Jump and Hurdle as power picks.
After that team broke up, I solo'd Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) through the "Empire - One Alliance" story arc (except the last mission, where a brute friend joined up). This was a conspiracy plot involving the Malta, Knives of Artemis and Council all fracturing into sub-factions who wanted to work with the (alternate dimension) Council Empire, and others who wanted to oppose them. This was a neat idea but somewhat confusing; I felt like I needed a scorecard to know who was on which side at any given time, and one mission actually had me facing Knives of Artemis in Oranbega (something I had always joked I'd make in order to torture players to the max). But the story and writing were pretty good so I gave it 4 stars. Police Woman got the Resolute badge (25 heroic arcs completed) for finishing this arc.
Checking Wentworth's I found salvage prices are all over the place. I'm mostly profiting, making good money flipping the mid-level rare salvage items, but I also ended up with a huge pile of 40 Deific Weapons that I had snagged for 2M-3M apiece (back when the high sale price was 4M each), but now I feel like I can't sell them because the price has dropped to 1M each, probably due to ticket purchases of rare salvage. Overall I'm making money though, up to about 330M infl in cash; some of this income is from killing stuff in MA missions, too, though.
On Saturday I played Police Woman, joining a 5-player LEGION team on another run through the "Brainssss" zombie horror mission. I joked that horror movie logic dictated that I was toast, being a female toon running in high heels. But actually I was ready for the insane zombie rush at the end, kicking off Vengeance when our first squishy teammate died, which gave us enough defense to survive the fast zombies.
We then did a story arc called "City of Heroes, Too" which had the premise that Northport, a city very similar to Paragon City, has its own set of heroes that the team (presumably villains) need to beat up. This played mostly like a mayhem and simply involved beating up a large number of Northport police and around a dozen costumed heroes (custom bosses). This was cute but there wasn't a lot of story to it, other than one day you decided to come here and smash things up; I rated it 3 stars.
After that we did a story called "Super Roman Infestation" which was a Defeat All on an outdoor map with nothing but bosses on it, each of which was dressed like a Cimeroran with a pumpkin head. This was pretty obviously a farm, so after fighting 2 spawns we decided to bail on that arc. There was no story at all and the mobs were pretty dippy, so I rated it 1 star.
We then tried "Cybernetically Challenged" which started off looking like it might have some story, but the first mission completed as soon as we entered (with a hostage seen leaving), and the second mission completed even before I could enter (I guess when the first person zoned all the way in). We thought this might be someone trying to farm mission completions somehow, so also bailed on this arc. It did not seem quite as lame as the previous arc, but still no great prize, so I gave this one 2 stars.
From there we went to the "Rinsanity" story arc, which looked like a vanity arc involving SGmates of the author getting kidnapped by Carnies and needing rescue, but it was actually pretty well done, and I gave it 4 stars.
After that team broke up, I solo'd through "Nuclear in 90 - The Fusionette Task Force"; this was a level 1-14 arc, so I played Strong Woman (a 10 inv/SS tanker that doesn't get out much). This story involved finding out why other members of the Nuclear 90 were helping out the Hellions and trying to rescue them. Shockingly, Fusionette does not screw up and get captured in this arc. There was a lot of good dialog and excellent characterization in this story arc, and I rated it 5 stars.
After that I joined a Sharkhead SF, playing Millie Volt (27 elec/inv brute). We had a team of:
4 brutes
1 kin corr
1 dominator
We really had no problems, except that during the Defeat Shockstorm mission, storms in my local area knocked out cable and consequently my internet connection dropped and was down for hours. By the time I got back, the SF was long over.
But upon returning, I did notice that my heroic arc, "Teen Phalanx Forever!" (arc #67335) had gotten a lot of good ratings and found its way onto the front page of the mission search tool, at least for the moment! Being near the front of the default search gave my arc massive exposure and it felt like my story had "gone viral", as a lot of total strangers were trying my story arc as a result, which was awesome. Most people seemed to like it, but occasional low ratings would periodically drop my arc's average rating from 5 stars to 4 stars, which would push my arc from page 1 to page 200 or so; my rating must've been very close to 4.5 as it kept fluctuating between 5 stars and 4 stars, which was actually quite nervewracking. People on the "MA Arc Finder" channel kept hinting darkly that there are "grief voters" out there that like nothing better than to 1-star all the story arcs that have high ratings; I'm really not sure if people out there are doing that or not (I'm not sure how I'd even tell), but I guess it's possible. Nevertheless by the end of the weekend, "Teen Phalanx Forever!" had 95 plays (in 4 days since being published), which is more than either of my other story arcs had scored to date (in 11 days since being published), and even with that many plays through, was still maintaining a pretty good average rating. I was psyched!
Late Saturday night I played Schadenfreude (40 AR/pain corr) on a 4 player Liberty Force team. We started "Rikti Farm", which was, as advertised, a Rikti farm; we got bored of that quickly and quit to do the "Johnny Sonata" dev choice arc instead, a Blues Brothers-ish story where you help Johnny get his band together.
After that we tried the "Butterfly Effect" dev choice arc, where Dr Aeon sends you back in time to validate his theories about time travel and causation. Of course you totally screw up the time stream, with hilarious effects. I loved the custom models (especially the variant versions of the named characters) and the story line of this arc, as did my team. I rated this 5 stars and we promptly went into the sequel story arc, "Return of the Lizard People", which was also awesome and I gave that 5 stars as well. We started the next sequel story arc, but it was late and I needed to go to sleep before we could get through it all.
On Sunday, I solo'd my way through the 15-19 arc "Council's Good Graces" on Kashira (19 db/ninj stalker) and then its 20-35 sequel, "Council's Long Con" on Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker). The first arc was a little bland and basically had me just doing whatever the contact said without much understanding of what was going on; theoretically I was doing this to ingratiate myself with the Council, but since the guy was sending me out to wipe out Council bases, I was very suspicious that he was actually a double agent for Longbow that was playing me for a chump. I ended up rating that one 3 stars. The second arc involved trying to recruit away a weapons scientist from the Sky Raiders, and doing a fair bit of ground work to set up the perfect circumstances to make that happen; this plot seemed a lot more involving and I gave it 4 stars.
I had made thousands of tickets up to this point but not really figured out what to spend them on (except for unlocking more mission architect content, which I've been happily doing). So at this point I made my first ticket purchase of a non-Architect item: Spy Girl spent 70 tickets on a Bronze 35-39 roll, getting a level 33 Red Fortune (DMG/END/RCHG) recipe. This was actually pretty good, being something I'm likely to use, and valued at the Black Market at around 500K (7.14K infl/ticket).
After that I solo'd Millie Volt (27 elec/inv brute) a little, clearing up a couple grey missions, completing her second costume mission (and setting up hotkeys to use the "lightning bolt" costume change), and then going through the "Amulet of J'gara" story arc. This was actually a heroic 25-33 story arc, but Millie was close to level so I played her anyway. The story started a little slow, investigating the disappearance of some Midnighters that were poking around in Croatoa; but had an excellent finish, with a very cool looking final mission, which caused me to give it 5 stars. Millie hit level 28 and picked up Invincibility.
A pickup team invited Millie to join them, and I figured, what the heck, I'll try. This was a 5-player team doing a story called "The Fight" which had no story, but was a defeat all with tons of custom dual blades wielding bosses. So, a fairly obvious farm. The team was all level 27-28 villains though, so seemed like a normal team; unfortunately as level 27-28s it did not seem like we could actually handle big spawns of custom bosses, so the whole team wiped except for me with my shiny new invincibility. The team seemed impressed with Millie's durability (though truth be told I was candy popping purples and greens to stay alive against these guys, even though they were all lethal) but the mission didn't look doable since no one else could survive against them, so we decided to bail from it. I gave it 1 star as it had no story to speak of. (I actually would be willing to give some stars to obvious farms, if there is an actual story; I gave a few stars to that mean-hearted farm mission where you are looking for the little girl's pet rabbit.) The team wanted to reform to try a different arc, but I didn't want to get sucked into another farm so I excused myself.
Switched over to Triumph server where I played Kid Valkyrie (50 bs/regen scrapper) on a 7 player team running a mission in test mode. Kid Valkyrie's been idle for a long time, but writing "Teen Phalanx Forever!" made me want to play her more. I tried offering critique to the mission author of the various problems I saw with her mission, whose premise was that we were heroes breaking a falsely accused hero out of prison (though for some reason the PPD had decided to incarcerate the hero NPC in a Longbow base). About halfway through, though, my Internet connection died again, so I called it a night.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
4/22/2009
I logged on Monday night to instantly get awarded three Mission Architect badges:
Bard (250 players played my arcs)
Acclaimed (one of my arcs got 250 stars, cumulative over all voters)
Illustrious (one of my arcs got 500 stars, cumulative over all voters)
This was pretty cool. I think nearly all of these badges came from my Teen Phalanx Forever! story arc, which has been getting lots of positive feedback, which I've written up answers to in this thread. The main complaints I've gotten so far are that the arc is too easy/not enough exp, but since I've also had someone say the third mission was too hard for him to complete, I don't feel comfortable making it any harder.
Playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) I solo'd my way through the Poaching the Lion story arc, in which I fought a shadowy criminal organization called Codename Lions. The new villain group seemed rather generic and the story didn't give me a strong idea of who they really were and how they differed from, say, Sky Raiders or Family; and the missions themselves were pretty straightforward "Go kill Boss X", nothing too special. I ended up giving that story arc 2 stars.
Someone on LBX was complaining that I14 had "no new content" on it and generally complaining that CoH sucks. This really annoyed me and I felt like I had to respond to him. How can anyone look at the ten thousands of story arcs published via Mission Architect and say "Nope, no new content here!" It seemed unbelievable to me. Someone else did say that some people would complain even if they came up with a cure for cancer. Sadly, this is too true.
I switched to Schadenfreude (41 AR/pain corr) and joined a 3 player Liberty Force team running through the Scourge of the Phalanx: Iron Forged arc, a vanity story written by an SG-mate that is centered around some of our villain alts. I felt the enemies in this arc had some issues; we fought a lot of elec blast robots that drained END dry, and we fought two ninjitsu AVs who repeatedly 1-shotted (well, 2-shotted) our brute, and a willpower AV that took us half an hour to whittle down to 0 health. Our brute was the mission author and definitely agreed he needed to tone those enemies down. I did feel pleased that the NPC analog of my villain alt, a thug mastermind, seemed to be the most helpful of all the NPC allies, being both aggressive and dangerous to enemies; whereas a brute NPC ally seemed unclear on the concept of how to attack stuff.
Finished the night doing some tweaking of my Celebrity Kidnapping story arc. Based on feedback I had gotten, I revised Paris's background story to explain why she had super powers, and made the instructions for mission 1 more clearly state that you need to go through the sewer grate to get to the interior areas of the Breakout map. I was testing my changes by soloing Millie Volt (28 elec/inv brute) through the story arc when a random 27 robot mastermind asked if he could join me. I was really just testing, so was inclined to say no, but then thought, what the heck, I can drag him through testing my story arc just as well as solo it! I restarted Celebrity Kidnapping and invited the mastermind; in a duo, the spawns were definitely larger than when I was solo. I was on Ruthless difficulty, also, which made the spawns bigger and higher level. We even suffered a wipeout against the Paragon Police in the Breakout mission, as their glue arrow made us stick around while the other random patrols pathed into us, resulting in a big furball. I got my teammate killed again during the last mission when a pair of Family consiglieres along with their 2 attendant Singularities seemed to perma-hold the mastermind to death. We did mange to clear the mission and successfully complete the story arc, before calling it a night. I was worried my teammate might've gotten a negative impression due to his deaths, but he said he had fun!
On Tuesday night, I played Strong Woman (10 inv/SS tanker) through a couple lowbie story arcs. Started with The Other Heroes, where the contact tries to get the Freedom Phalanx or the Vindicators or someone to try and stop an Arachnos incursion in Atlas Park, but they're all busy, so she ends up asking you to do it. The plot and the dialog were pretty interesting and I love who they used as the big bad guy of this arc (a very underused Arachnos mad scientist), but found the final mission a little anticlimactic. I gave this arc 4 stars.
From there, I went into the Bricked Electronics story arc, where the premise is that a mutant contact with the ability to sense impressions from electronics devices sends you off to investigate the origin of a cell phone he found that has some kind of bad vibes emanating from it. So far it's kinda cool, but it was a Very Long arc and I only got about halfway through before I needed to call it a night.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
4/24/2009
Over the course of Tuesday and Wednesday night, I played Strong Woman (10 inv/SS tanker) through Bricked Electronics, a lowbie blue side story arc. The premise is that Mark Freeman, who can pick up some sort of psychometric impressions from electronics devices, found a cell phone giving off weird vibes, and he sends you off to investigate where it came from, and this leads you into uncovering a Goldbricker plot that culminates in foiling a bank robbery. I thought this arc had some good ideas and some nice character development, but also found the plot a little murky with a lot of loose ends. I gave it 4 stars.
A 50 empath friend was looking for something to do and I switched to Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) to team up with her; picked up a friend playing a 50 ice blaster and we did some AE missions. We first went into Hero of Twilight, which was a fantasy-themed story arc where we fought lots and lots of elves in an effort to (I think) save the elvish kingdom. It was sort of generic fantasy fare but the elves DID have cool costumes, and playing a sword and shield scrapper kinda worked well for this story. Here's a screenshot of Blond Justice fighting elves. There wasn't really a unifying story, and I felt some of the mobs had some balance problems (archery/invuln elf bosses that would go Unstoppable, illusion controllers with the full illusion set) and so I gave this arc 2 stars.
From there our team went into the Knights of Rularuu arc, which started off with investigating some Malta, but then segued into the main plot where you fought a lot of Rularuu. There were some very cool custom Rularuu mobs that had a look & feel that fit right in with the other Rularuu. Here's Blond Justice fighting Rularuu. This was a cool arc but I thought the original contact and the early missions didn't seem to fit well with the later, more serious Rularuu missions, and I ended up giving this arc 4 stars.
Our defender had left and I and the blaster ended up duoing through Operation Doolittle, which I lost my notes for, but I think we uncovered a plot where the bad guys were planning on nuking the Rikti homeworld, and we had to stop them. I was a bit shaky on this premise, as I get the impression most heroes (and villains for that matter) would like to nuke the Rikti homeworld, but I think the idea was that Genocide Is Wrong, so we needed to stop it.
Reviewing other people's story arcs has become a very popular activity on the Mission Architect Stories & Lore forum, where people post a story arc and typically the reviewer will critique the story arc (some people are nicer about this than others). On Thursday, someone posted a criticism of people who are posting reviews, and this generated a near flame war. I've also started a "review" arc, partly to promote my own stories and partly because it's a fun way to choose story arcs to run, and so I tried to take this meta-critique at face value and absorb what value I could from it. My response to this is posted here.
Thursday night, I played Millie Volt (28 elec/inv brute) through The Environmentalist Encounter, which posits a heroic Environmentalist group coming to the Rogue Isles to start trouble. The Environmentalists have cool heroic type costumes and elemental based powers; but as a result they are a little too good at debuffing, and I spent most of the story arc with my recharge rate and my defenses floored by their debuffs. I ended up uncovering the Environmentalist plot to nuke the Rogue Isles, which does not sound very environmentally friendly, but they really hate villains. I managed to beat the first two Elite Bosses, but the third and final big bad guy was an Ice Armor Elite Boss who soundly thrashed me, mostly due to Chilling Embrace completely wrecking my ability to do damage. After getting beat up by the final boss, I decided to let the timer on the timed mission run out, with the result of the Rogue Isles being destroyed (at least according to the story). My contact yelled at me about letting his home country get nuked, but I guess I can live with it. I thought the story was a little thin and the mobs too powerful, so I ended up rating this 2 stars.
A friend on LBX was looking for a task force, any task force, so I took a break from Mission Architect to team up. Playing Star Amethyst (24 warshade), I organized and led a Moonfire TF, recruiting mostly from LBX and ending up with a team mix of:
warshade
peacebringer
3 controllers (thermal, empath, kinetics)
stone tanker
scrapper
It took awhile to recruit enough people for a team, but we ended up with a good archetype mix, and once we got going we did really well. We stealthed the missions that we could, used team teleport to rescue Dr Todd, and finished the TF in 1hr 20mins, gaining 31 merits (23.25 MPH). Star Amethyst hit level 26 on this TF and took Unchain Essence (the corpse bomb power).
After that I played Yuki-Onna (50 ice/cold corruptor) on a Lady Grey TF organized on the Villains of Liberty channel. As a result we had a mostly villainous team:
2 stalkers
invuln brute
kin corruptor
cold corruptor (me)
2 dominators (one disconnected mission 3 and never returned)
some sort of controller
We ran this for speed and utterly blazed through the TF, finishing in a speedy 38min 42sec for 39 merits (60.47 MPH).
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
4/27/2009
On Friday night I played Tehuantl (16 blood widow) on an 8 player all-VEAT Demolition Girls SG team, which rescued Wretch (as part of Seer Marino's story arc) and ran through the Origin of Power story arc for 3 merits. This got Tehuantl to level 18, where I took Indomitable Will for mez protection.
On Saturday morning, I solo'd Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) though the Paragon Caper story arc, in which I got framed for a bank robbery and had to spend time clearing my name. This arc felt a little ironic for me as my character (whose concept is that of a normal police officer) had to fight a lot of PPD who had disdain for "superheroes", but probably most people wouldn't have this problem. There were a couple plot holes but overall I thought the story was very well written, and I gave it 5 stars.
Police Woman also picked up the Monitor Duty day job badge (from being logged out near a base portal) and the Rapid Response Member accolade; this now gives her a total of 607 badges.
After that I played Linda Lightspeed (33 kin/rad defender) on a Manticore TF organized by the Orange Group SG, with a team mix of:
2 controllers (kin and sonic)
warshade
scrapper
2 defenders (rad and kin)
2 tankers
One tanker quit the TF after he realized he was exemped down and consequently wasn't get exp, but we had another tanker anyway, so this wasn't a problem. Despite being in the 30-35 level range for Manticore, I actually have Linda's exp "turned off" in order to use merits to get recipes at level 33, so Linda didn't level at all. We finished in 1hr 50mins and after the TF I spent 60 merits to get:
1 Lockdown (ACC/END/RCHG/HOLD) Wentw=1.5M
1 Lockdown (chance of +2 mag) Wentw=5M
1 Scirocco (chance of lethal) Wentw=2.6M
On Sunday afternoon, I played Kyrie Eleison (33 bs/inv scrapper) on a 7-player LEGION team doing Mission Architect story arcs. I played through the tail end of the Project Z Rays arc, which seemed to have something to do with Crey but I didn't see it all, so I didn't get the full story. Then we started on An Offesnive Defense System which was about a robotic security system run amok; this was full of killer robots that often summoned other robots (being robot/traps MMs). The preponderance of protector bots and force field generators had all the robots at the defense cap, and combined with their lethal resistance made it feel really hard to hurt anything in this mission. I think we had at least one team wipe where we ran into what seemed like a hundred robots and robot pets with force field buffs, which lagged out some of our players.
From there I switched to play Mayday (50 fortunata) on a Recluse SF with a team mix of:
2 thermal corruptors (one had shields; the other did not)
3 brutes (elec, will, inv)
crab
plant dominator
fortunata (me)
I kinda wish I had played a corruptor instead, though, because it felt like we did not have enough buff/debuff for this team to really work (despite Mayday having all the widow leadership toggles). We were pretty slow to kill Crimson and slow to kill the Kronos Titan, which made me worried about our chances of success on the RSF. No one else seemed especially stealthy, so I ended up being the one to fetch the secret codes on the Vindicators mission, which was the first time I had done that, so was kinda neat.
During the last mission the team wanted to pull the Freedom Phalanx to the top of the Atlas globe and fight them there. I was a little dubious about this (the fighting area up there is very small and it's easy to slip and fall), but we gave it a try, and it DID seem to keep the non-flying heroes out of the fight (Manticore and Synapse, at any rate; Back Alley Brawler apparently can SJ up there), which helped reduce the amount of damage we took. It did take several tries to defeat the heroes though, and our invuln brute disconnected and never came back, so we were shorthanded for the final fights. Our first pull we killed Numina, then wiped out. Second pull someone tried to jump Positron (who somehow got separated and was on his own) before the rest of the team was ready, but the other heroes somehow chain-aggroed onto us, causing a team wipe with no progress made. The third attempt we did a frontal assault on the heroes under Atlas's statue and beat Sister Psyche before wiping out. The fourth attempt was another frontal assault where we wiped out after getting Positron relatively low on life, but didn't actually beat any of the heroes. The fifth pull we tried pulling to the top of the globe again, and this time finally cleared all the flying/SJing heroes, and then were able to jump down and finish off Manticore and Synapse to complete the RSF in 2hrs 16mins. I got a Nucleolus SHO as reward.
After that I played Star Amethyst (26 warshade) on a Citadel TF with a team mix of:
sonic defender
thermal controller
warshade (me)
5 blasters
With no tankers or scrappers, I decided I was probably the closest thing we had to a tank, and so I tried to lead the way into fights; though we also had a very aggressive blapper who also liked to do that. We had insane sonic and thermal buffs, though, so we all were at the resist cap anyway (85% for a warshade) so this worked fine. One problem I did have is that knockback from the Council weapons was throwing me all over the place; I'll need to get a KB protection IO at some point. With 5 blasters (even with one who was afk most of the time) we had plenty of DPS, and a couple times I used warshade stealth + superspeed + warshade recall friend to stealth through missions. We tore through the TF in a fairly speedy 1hr 22mins, and Amethyst got the Slayer badge and level 28 along the way. I took Inky Aspect (warshade version of Oppressive Gloom, a PBAOE low magnitude stun) as a new power, and this really seemed to help control mobs that I ran into to attack.
Finished Sunday night doing more Architect story arcs, playing Kyrie Eleison (33 bs/inv scrapper) on a 4-player team that ran through The Prisoners from the Land of Oz, where Glinda the Good sends to to rescue Tiktok and Dorothy Gale from the Clockwork and Vahzilok. The Oz theme was neat but I think needed to be used more, and some of the missions needed more to do; but it was a fun story and I gave it 4 stars.
After that our team grew to 5 players and did Pandemonium, which involved traveling to the Panda dimension and fighting lots of hostile pandas, who all seemed to be either controllers or ninja, and between various fears, confuses, holds, slows and assassin strikes, I found myself faceplanting a lot. I have Kyrie's exp disabled currently, so the debt doesn't really bother me, but the pandas were quite painful to fight. The mission author was on the team and he was talking about cutting out the plant controllers, which would at least get rid of the evil carrion creepers.
Kyrie had collected a lot of tickets and since she's pinned at the level 33 "sweet spot" I like for recipes, I burned a bunch of tickets on Bronze reward rolls, getting:
1 Efficacy Adaptor (ENDMOD/RCHG)
1 Smashing Haymaker (DMG/END)
1 Analyze Weakness (DEFDEBUFF)
1 Impervious Skin (RCHG/RES)
1 Lethargic Repose (ACC/RCHG)
1 Freebird (ENDRDX)
2 Kinetic Crash (KB/DMG/ACC)
1 Air Burst (DMG/END)
1 Focused Smite (ACC/DMG/RCHG)
1 Ruin (ACC/END/RCHG)
for a total of 770 tickets. My initial impression of this recipe draw is that it's total crap, but 770 tickets isn't much; I had plenty more tickets I could've spent, but no more inventory room for more recipes. I may try Silver reward rolls next time.
Late at night I solo'd Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) through Death to Disco! which is a fun arc where you go back in time to stop criminals from changing the timeline so as to keep disco around forever (consequently crushing rock and roll). This was a fun idea, but I think it needed a little more fleshing out. I gave it 4 stars.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
4/29/2009
I started Monday night browsing the market for knockback protection IOs, following Star Amethyst getting KB'ed all over the place on the Citadel TF. I managed to purchase two level 19 Steadfast Protection (KB protection) for 1M infl each, which seemed like a great deal; I'm thinking the price on these must've dropped due to the ability to get these more easily via tickets.
Looking at the Mission Architect interface, all my story arcs seem to have reached something of a steady-state at 4 stars with varying numbers of plays. Periodically I get someone who gives me 5 stars and a rave review in feedback, alternating with 3 star and 1 star reviews with no feedback whatsoever. I notice that all the highly rated story arcs (other than the Dev Choices) seem to get pushed down from 5-star averages to 4-star averages over time, and I now seriously give credence to the idea that there are a lot of people out there who simply enjoy 1-starring highly rated arcs, either out of spite or in an attempt to move their own story arcs higher in the relative standing. This really bothered me for awhile, but I think I've reached a state of acceptance on it.
Switching to red side, I played Millie Volt (28 elec/inv brute) through part of The Bravuran Jobs, a story arc where you're doing odd jobs for a vaguely unscrupulous yet aristocratic third world dictator. Over the course of this arc, a couple friends from LEGION SG joined me to help out. This was decently written and felt pretty appropriately mercenary, but we found the third mission was too hard for us. I think this was because the custom mobs in this mission all had buff/debuff sets, including the minions who all seemed to be either thermal or kin, so essentially each spawn we fought was like a superteam of 6 to 8 corruptors, and their buffs/debuffs gave them mad synergy over our team of 2 brutes and 1 MM. We ended up abandoning this story arc after two team wipes; I didn't want to lose my progress, so I logged Millie off without quitting the arc, with the intention of continuing it solo. But even after I came back hours later, the mission still seemed to spawn groups of 6 mobs which weren't soloable for me (they would tend to stack debuffs then heal each other of any damage I did to them), so after dying a couple more times I threw in the towel and quit the arc. The story was decently written, but being completely unable to get through this mission, I couldn't justify giving it more than 3 stars. I talked it over with the story author via forum messages and we have the theory that even though I reset the mission to try and solo it, maybe the mission was still spawning for a team of 3 due to the wacky semi-TF-like code that AE missions use, so it may be easier if you just run through solo and never invite anyone.
My team switched up to play level 33s instead of level 28s, and I switched to Primadonna (33 sonic/kin corruptor). I had previously avoided leveling Primadonna up, as I was keeping her at level 33 and slotting level 23 IOs in order to be optimized for quick Cap SF runs; but since reward merits were introduced, the reward for running the Cap SF is much less, and now no one runs them any more. Instead, quick Sharkhead SF runs (and the occasional villain respec) seem to be the preferred source of red-side merits now, and I'm actually finding my 33 stalker to be a lot more helpful and fun to play on those. This coupled with the fact that I've occasionally wished I had a high level kin to run on ITFs and RSFs has motivated me to start leveling Primadonna up further.
Anyway, my team first tried a story called The Freakshow which turned out just to be a Freakshow farm mission, which we quickly got bored of and abandoned. We then went into The Missing, which was a fairly nice missing persons investigation, with good writing and story through most of the arc. I didn't like the ending of the story, however, because even though you accomplish all the mission objectives, the framing story basically forces you to fail at the end, which was rather unsatisfying. Still, it was pretty decent aside from that, and I gave this 4 stars.
Another friend joined us and as a team of 4 we tried testing the first mission of H G H which was one of the team member's attempts at writing a farm arc with some story around it; there were five missions and custom enemies, but the story hadn't been quite fleshed out yet and all the missions were, at least initially, identical. So we quit after the first mission to do something else.
Finished the night doing Pandas vs Rikti, where you travel to "Panda Earth", an alternate dimension populated by space pandas, and you help them fight off a Rikti invasion. I thought this story would be totally silly, but it was actually very well executed, with good dialog and writing, panda damsels in distress, panda quislings you have to put down, and a terrific Riktified panda as the big bad guy. My team did run into problems in the last mission when half the team needed to log off, and the remaining 2 of us (both squishy and very vulnerable to Rikti mezzes) got beat up a lot before my teammate volunteered to switch to a level 50 to stomp the final mission so we could see how it all ended; I don't think it's really the fault of the mission that we got beat up, we just had a much weaker team for the last mission than the rest of the arc. Anyway, something in the water on Panda Earth may have brainwashed me, but I thought this was really well done and I gave it 5 stars.
After that team broke up, I was still on Primadonna idling for a bit when a pickup team invited me; I agreed to join and found myself on a 6 player team doing a farm mission, which was an outdoor city map with nothing but Rikti Communications Officers in it. I'm not normally into farms, but I figured I'd give it a try to see what it was like; apparently the Rikti Comms Officers are disproportionately high exp, probably due to the devs moving the exp from Rikti portals to them. We cleared the map once; the team wanted to do it again, but it was late so I excused myself and called it a night.
On Tuesday night I logged on Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) and decided to burn some of her accumulated tickets. Spent 1000 tickets on the "Payoff" badge, which is sorta useless but shiny and I figured I would want to buy it sooner or later; then burned off my remaining tickets on Silver reward rolls at 525 tickets apiece. For my trouble I got:
1 Force Feedback (chance of recharge) Wentw=1K
1 Regenerative Tissue (+regen) Wentw=20M
1 Entropic Chaos (chance of heal) Wentw=25K
1 Scirocco's Dervish (ACC/DMG) Wentw=2M
1 Obliteration (ACC/DMG/RCHG) Wentw=7M
1 Pounding Slugfest (DMG/END) Wentw=50K
1 Kismet (DEF/RCHG) Wentw=5K
1 Cloud Senses (TOHITDEBUFF) Wentw=25K
1 Malaise's Illusions (ACC/RCHG) Wentw=1K
This seemed a much better value than the tickets I had previously spent on Bronze rolls, which did cost less tickets but gave me a lot of junk that I didn't want, also. The Regenerative Tissue recipe was the big prize from this recipe draw; after some pondering, I decided to put it up for sale on Wentworth's, and it instantly sold for 20M influence. Theoretically, I probably could've crafted and slotted it for some alt, but my guess is that the value of these recipes will go down over time as more of them get into the market from the ticket vendors, so I figure that if I don't immediately have a use for an expensive recipe, I should sell while it's hot.
The 5th Anniversary event was going on that night and AVs and GMs were spawning randomly in city zones. I have all the badges for those on Police Woman already, so I swapped to Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) to go after those. Blond also picked up a level 37 Performance Shifter (chance for END) IO recipe at Wentworth's for 4M, which seemed like a bargain; I had been looking for one of those for awhile to complete a Performance Shifter set, but they had been very expensive before.
While hanging out in Atlas Park and Steel Canyon, Blond Justice joined an "event" team going after the AVs and GMs, and we beat up a Winter Lord, Ghost Widow (twice), Lord Recluse, the Kronos titan, Babbage and Jurassik. It seemed like AVs and GMs were spawning all night; typically a bunch would spawn in a row, but there were long lulls between them where there wasn't much to do but wait. I ended up switching from monster hunting to join a SF that was forming on LBX.
So I switched to Primadonna (35 sonic/kin corruptor at this point) to do the Ice Mistral SF. Our team mix was:
2 brutes
3 corruptors (rad, dark and kin)
2 stalkers
We had some initial problems staying together as a team and working out lackeying, but pretty quickly got it together and did fine for the rest of the SF. I found that Dreadful Wail + small blue + Transference was a wonderful way to deliver a nova, yet not have to deal with the END crash; though it hurt if the Transference missed. In the final mission as we were getting close to the big bad guy, I warned the team "AV up ahead". One of the brutes replied, "AV, Smavy!" then instantly died, which was actually pretty funny. I think it was from a chain reaction of psychic crystals exploding all around her, though, as she then said "Now exploding crystals, THOSE really hurt!" We then proceeded to beat up the AV and win the SF, but we kinda pushed our luck by fighting the massive CoT ambush that shows up at the end, and ended up with a total party wipe despite the SF being complete. We could've probably exited the mission to avoid that, but we were totally in scrapperlock mode. It was still fun though, and on the bright side, hospitalling saved us a long run back from the boonies of Nerva. We finished the SF in 1hr 28mins and gained 25 merits (17.05MPH), and Primadonna hit level 36.
After that I joined some friends on Protector server, dusting off Dreamwind (28 storm/psy defender on Protector) and SKing to a 6 player team of Demolition Girls SG running level 40ish radio missions in Peregrine Island. We also did a Founders Falls safeguard and fought a Rikti invasion, getting Dreamwind to level 29, before calling it a night.
Returning to Liberty, I played Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) on a quick Sharkhead SF, with a team mix of:
3 brutes
4 stalkers
1 storm corruptor
We had two false starts because one of the players was actually on an Architect Entertainment mission, which didn't prevent us from starting the SF but utterly messed up the team when you tried to zone into a mission (splitting the team into multiple instances of the mission). We finally figured out what was happening and who needed to quit their current story arc, before getting a good start on the third try. We blitzed through the SF in 26mins 7sec, gaining 22 merits (50.54MPH). I spent 20 merits for a recipe draw, getting a fairly decent Scirocco's Dervish (DMG/ACC/END).
After that I switched to Kyrie Eleison (33 bs/inv scrapper) to solo my way through The Oblivion Lens story arc, where you find a mystic artifact, give it to Azuria for safekeepping, then of course she loses it and hijinks ensue as you try to get it back. This story was okay, but not gripping, and had some plot holes, and the custom enemy group, which was a bunch of shadow monsters summoned by the magic lens, felt a little bland to me due to not having a lot of dialog and mostly looking the same (there were many flavors of shadow monster, but all of them were black and shadowy with dark powers, so they all seemed alike). I gave that story arc 3 stars.
Quite late at night, I succumbed to greed and joined a friend who was recruiting for a red side farm. I rationalized that I wanted to know how these farms worked, but let's face it, it's all about the tickets. I played Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) with exp disabled. The actual mission seemed to be full of dual blades enemies who couldn't jump or fly and had no range attacks, so the main farmer could hover above them doing AoEs without any risk. I started off trying to melee these guys but quickly found that just meant I was taking damage, which wasn't helpful, so I ended up standing on an elevated ledge where the mobs couldn't reach me. This was kind of dull (I really had nothing to do, except occasionally Recall Friend to get people who got disconnected back to the team) but generated several thousand tickets before I got tired and called it a night.
I did use some of these tickets on more Silver reward rolls at the 30-34 level range, getting:
1 Decimation (chance for build up)
1 Ghost Widow's Embrace (END/HOLD)
1 Analyze Weakness (DEFDEBUFF)
1 Expedient Reinforcement (ACC/RCHG)
1 Touch of the Nictus (HEAL)
1 Touch of Death (chance for negative)
1 Numina's Convalescence (HEAL)
1 Impervious Armor (RCHG/RES)
1 Force Feedback (chance for RCHG)
I didn't have the energy to check the prices of these at the Black Market, but I figure the Decimation and the Touch of Death are probably the good recipes out of this batch.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
I was one of the stalkers on the Ice Mistral SF, and it wasn't quite a team wipe at the end. Being a cheating cowardly stalker I hit exit with a few hit points left and survived. As I mentioned afterward, I'm a stalker, I hit and run, and if I get hit I run even faster. Of course, then you were all talking about a free ride to the hospital so I self destructed anyway to do the same thing.
Anyway, it was good teaming with you again.
5/1/2009
On Wednesday I logged in Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) and got the Jubilant 5th Anniversary badge. I think Police Woman is one of only two alts I have with all the anniversary badges. (My stable of toons has a fair bit of turnover...)
I went to Architect Entertainment and modified all my story arcs to have keywords in their original description, including the [SFMA] story focused mission arc keyword. I had originally really resisted putting these in, since I thought SFMA would be a meaningless acronym to most people, but the arc tags seem to have really caught on and even been stickied on the Mission Architect Resources forum. So I figure, I better get with the official standard. I hear that an official keyword system will eventually get added to the in-game system, too.
Also, as a result of extensive player feedback, I tweaked the French lieutenants in my Axis and Allies story arc to no longer use kinetics. I originally gave them this powerset as a joke because someone suggested the French should be good at running away, but it's admittedly ahistorical and stacking Siphon Speed is kind of unfun for the player.
Over the course of Wednesday and part of Thursday night, I solo'd my way through the Eclipse over Paragon arc, which is about a Council plot to turn everyone into werewolves. I got the Impulsive badge (clicking on 50 glowies) as a result. This seemed a good (but not amazing) story and I gave it 4 stars.
After that I played Kyrie Eleison (33 bs/inv scrapper) and duo'd with a controller friend who wanted to test H G H, a story arc involving athletes on some kind of rage-inducing steroids. There wasn't a lot of story yet, it mostly just involved beating up a lot of angry baseball players.
I spent the tickets Kyrie had acquired on Silver rolls, getting:
1 Impervious Skin (+mez)
1 Cloud Senses (ToHitDebuff)
1 Gaussians Synchronized Fire Control (chance of build up)
1 Kinetic Combat (chance of knockdown)
1 Ghost Widow's Embrace (ACC/END)
....nothing too thrilling except maybe the Gaussians (build up).
After that I played Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) on a speed Sharkhead SF organized on Villains of Liberty, with a team mix of
2 stalkers (including me)
3 brutes
1 rad corruptor
We blitzed through this in 26mins 35sec, getting 22 merits (49.66 MPH). I immediately blew 20 merits on a recipe roll, getting
1 Performance Shifter (RCHG/ACC) BlkMkt=500K
and for good measure burned a bunch more tickets on Silver rolls, getting:
1 Cacophony (END/CONF)
2 Ghost Widow's Embrace (ACC/RCHG)
1 Stupefy (END/STUN)
1 Kinetic Combat (chance of knockdown)
1 Positron's Blast (DMG/END)
1 Ghost Widow's Embrace (HOLD/RNG)
1 Aegis (RCHG/RES)
After that I played Spacegirl (50 mind/rad controller) on a Lady Grey TF organized on LBX. Our team was
1 scrapper
1 rad controller (me)
2 stalkers
1 brute
1 crab
1 cold corruptor
1 dominator
A stalker freed Penelope in the first mission while the rest of us beat up Rikti for fun, then we all got TP'd back to the door to fight the Clockwork King. The second mission we fought through everything the "normal" way, but the third mission we purposely failed. Fourth mission we kinda blitzed the mitos without any particular plan, but people knew what they were doing so that seemed to work well enough, and then we stealth/TP'd to the final encounter in the last mission. Honoree was able to go Unstoppable on us, but we managed to drop him anyway, and finished the LGTF in 51min 8sec for 39 merits (45.76 MPH).
I saw a couple friends online who had started newbie defenders, so I rolled up a newbie MA/regen scrapper to team up with them. I got the name "Adventuress" and tried to give her an athletic, rangy look vaguely patterned after the Sonya Blade/Lara Croft sort of look. The three of us teamed up for radio missions in King's Row; we suffered 2 team wipes against the dreaded Vahzilok, but managed to beat them up eventually and all gained some levels. By the time the team broke up, Adventuress had reached to level 5.
Finished the night soloing Primadonna (36 sonic/kin corruptor) through Ashley McKnight's Origin of Power story arc, getting a badge and 3 merits for my trouble.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
5/4/2009
Started Friday night playing Linda Lightspeed (33 kin/rad defender), joining a 5 player LEGION SG team running the H G H arc, which was basically farming a big map full of custom mobs. I'm kind of uneasy at the farming/PLing that is going around in Mission Architect, and apparently it shows; I'm worried that my attitude towards this may be offending some of my friends, who don't feel the same way. I ended up joining this team because a friend basically said "You wouldn't like this" and I said "I can handle it for awhile" and I spent some time SBing and Fulcrum Shifting to help out. It was some decent tickets, and I had Linda's combat exp turned off (since I want to stay level 33 for recipe rolls), which helped relieve me of any guilt about getting PLed.
I took a break for a bit after that, then later that night I played Tehuantl (18 widow) on a 6 player all-VEAT team doing story arcs. We first did Vanguard Performance Appraisal and Development Plan Review, which was about a live fire test of some security robots that some subcontractor was trying to provide to the Vanguard organization. Naturally, the robots went rogue and tried to kill us, a lot. I found the corporate speak and software development jargon especially funny, mostly because the story arc was using language exactly like the way people at my work talk. I found myself saying, "The robots work as designed! It's the requirements that were bad!" which made the mission author laugh and say "That's just what a developer would say." I ended up giving this arc 4 stars.
From there we went into my Celebrity Kidnapping arc, which I really enjoyed as a 6 player team is the biggest I've taken into that arc. As a result, the ambushes were fairly big, and I gleefully waded through a horde of Paparazzi enemies. I was a little shocked at how well my Police Woman avatar did; she's just an AR/dev boss (not even an EB), but somehow managed to kill 4 of my teammates. I think Smoke Grenade was involved, and despite all 6 of us having the chance, none of us had taken the tactical training that gives the team +acc and +perception. I wasn't sure whether to be happy PW was doing so well or embarrassed that my mission was beating up my team! We managed to battle-awaken everyone, outfight the police and get Paris out safely though.
After that team broke up I played Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) on a quick Sharkhead SF organized on Villains of Liberty, with a team mix of:
3 stalkers
2 rad corruptors
1 brute
1 night widow
We blitzed through this in 45mins 33sec for 22 merits (28.98 MPH) and I cashed in 20 merits to get a Stupefy: Chance for Knockback, which wasn't all that exciting.
I did pick up enough salvage to craft a Touch of Death: Chance for Negative Damage recipe, completing a set of 6 for Spy Girl which gave her an extra +3.75% melee DEF, which was kinda nice.
Finished the night playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster). Prices on common salvage seemed to be going through the roof, so I experimentally tried cashing in some tickets for common salvage and selling them at Wentworth's to see what would happen. I bought 49 common arcane salvage rolls at 8 tickets each, getting:
9 Alchemical Silver (~80K each)
10 Ancient Bone (~20K each)
6 Demonic Blood Sample (~6K each)
7 Masterwork Weapon (~10K each)
9 Rune (~1K each)
8 Spell Ink (~10K each)
Note: these prices were just the last sale price at the time I checked; they were flying up and down non-stop though, so take them with a grain of salt. (I ended up holding the 1K Runes until a later session where I sold them for 20K each.) Nevertheless, this was a total value of 1.115M influence for 392 tickets, or about 2.84K infl per ticket.
Is that good? I'm not really sure. Using these numbers, a 70 ticket Bronze roll needs to yield 200K, a 525 ticket Silver roll needs to yield 1.5M, and a 3500 ticket Gold roll needs to yield 10M influence, in order to equal or exceed cashing tickets for salvage. This makes using tickets for salvage sound very appealing, from a financial perspective, anyway. Two problems with this approach though: first, one trial of 49 salvage might not be a big enough sample size to know anything for sure. Second, getting salvage is a lot more boring than getting recipes.
I then solo'd my way through The Ideality, Part 1 and The Ideality, Part 2. These were two linked story arcs that introduce a new villain group that wants to convert all humans into cyborgs. The writing style was decent, but I felt there were some plot problems that made it difficult for the story to really make sense, so I ended up giving both these arcs 3 stars.
I did get the Marauder (25 objects destroyed) and Businesswoman (4000 items sold) badges along the way, though.
On Saturday, I spent some time editing Celebrity Kidnapping after receiving an extremely detailed review from another player, which I found very helpful. Most of it was fine tuning of words and phrases, but one significant gameplay change I made was to reduce the impact of the Paparazzi ambushes in the final mission, by splitting them up a bit. Not only this reviewer, but a couple other players had mentioned that they had gotten overwhelmed by Paparazzi in the last mission (due to stacking holds and no break frees, I imagine), so it seemed to make sense to change it up a little.
Originally, fighting the Family boss would cause two "easy" Paparazzi ambushes to spawn; I changed it so only one ambush spawns, replacing the other ambush with a second triggered "named reporter" group that is a static spawn near the front of the map. I decided this other named reporter would be "Lois Watson" (one of the hostages you save in heroic radio missions), and gave her dialog really playing up her schtick of being Unbelievable Man's girlfriend. "Freeing" Lois (by beating up her camera crew) then triggers the second Paparazzi ambush. I was hoping that making these changes would let you still fight a lot of Paparazzi (which most people seem to enjoy) while spacing the ambushes far enough apart that they're somewhat manageable.
I did a quick test run-through of Celebrity Kidnapping on Millie Volt (28 elec/inv brute) just to make sure I didn't break anything. Seemed to be okay. We'll see what people say though.
After that I joined friend who was forming a Positron TF. I played Strong Woman (11 inv/SS tanker) and our team was:
2 tankers (including me)
1 emp controller
1 blaster
1 scrapper
The other tanker was in her 20s, exemped down to 15 by the TF and sidekicking me, so I mostly followed her lead, except when she was AFK or scrapperlock took hold of me. We had one wipeout against CoT in the Rollister mission, but dusted ourselves off and kept on going. At one point, the controller had to log for a few missions to get her husband dinner, and a little later the other tanker had to AFK a couple missions to deal with the stray dog her husband had adopted while she was distracted. This slowed us down a little but we were able to keep making progress even so, and we finished the TF in 4hrs 24mins, gaining 64 merits (14.55 MPH). This got Strong Woman to 16, and I took Resist Energies, Fly and Swift, in that order. Taking Resist Energies at level 12 is kind of nonstandard (most tanker builds seem to advocate taking it MUCH later), but I felt like it would be helpful for me versus the Clockworks' energy damage and END drain, and the COT's negative damage.
Late on Saturday night I was fiddling with Mission Architect on Police Woman, working on making a sort of samurai epic story arc, when I accepted a pickup team invite from a stranger. I ended up duoing a level 52 Malta mission with a storm defender; we had one wipeout against a nasty group that included a gunslinger, a sapper and some robots, but managed to get through the mission. The stormy seemed pretty happy with this, having apparently died several times trying to solo this mission.
I was only briefly online Sunday night, but I played Adventuress (5 MA/regen scrapper) for a few missions, soloing my way through Officer Wincott vs the Trolls for 2 reward merits. This got Adventuress to level 7, and I took Quick Recovery as a new power. I also wrote up an origin story for Adventuress, making her an army brat looking for her father, a soldier who served under Colonel Duray, and went missing once the Sky Raiders split off from the legitimate US Army.
I started on the Shift Awesome! story arc with Police Woman, which seems to be a story about a mysterious alien ship that appears in orbit over Earth, and you have to figure out what is going on. I only got partway through the arc before I had to call it a night.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
5/6/2009
On Monday night I mainly solo'd Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) through AE story arcs. I finished Shift Awesome!, a story arc where you explore an alien ship, learn a little about them, then decide to kill 'em all. The feel of exploring the alien ship was really cool, but was partially dispelled by one mission where you're randomly fighting Crey on the streets. I also felt the alien race needed more back story and the act of destroying their ship wasn't quite dramatic enough (you just click a glowy and are told it gets destroyed). I ended up giving that story 3 stars.
After that I went through The Once and Future King Sac, which is a story all about the author's hero and time traveling aliens who try to screw up the author's back story. The player is tasked with fixing the timeline so the author's hero can become the inspirational figure that he will be in the future. If you can get past the fact that it's all about this other hero and not so much about you, there is some decent writing and plotting. Though I did feel there were some balance issues in that a lot of the enemies were buffers/debuffers, and all the allies seemed to be Elite Bosses. I gave this story arc 3 stars.
I finished Monday working on making another story arc; I don't actually have the ability to publish a fourth arc, but am hopeful that someday I'll either qualify for one, or else there'll be a way to buy or unlock additional story arc slots. Since I was worried that some of my friends are annoyed at me because I don't like boring farm missions, I decided to try and make a farm mission with some story behind it. I had been kicking around ideas for a samurai epic story arc, and this kinda works for farming because I can use big open maps (representing field battles) with lots of dual blades and katana guys. I promptly screwed up the farmability of my mission by adding an AV to be the boss, some samurai archers, and Oriental wizards throwing fireballs and hurricanes. Oh well, so it won't be a very good farm. But the pseudo-Japanese fantasy army sure looks cool in test mode!
On Tuesday, there was a big patch that changed a lot of architect stuff around, mostly to address farming, I think. Many people seemed very upset by this and were crying DOOOOOOM, but, c'mon, surely people had to know this was going to happen.
I also found that the patch broke my most popular story arc, Teen Phalanx Forever!, so I very quickly had to edit and republish it. The AE console user interface didn't tell me that the story arc was broken, but if I tried to play it, it would simply fail to start. Going in and editing the story arc showed that I had 2 new errors, though; these turned out to be that the descriptions for the hostages in the first two missions exceeded the 300 character limit. Ironically, I had not changed their descriptions, but was directly using the default description for Maemae von Whooters (hostage #1) and Penelope Yin (hostage #2). I trimmed both of their descriptions to be under the limit, and after that the story arc seemed to be happy again and could be published and played.
The patch did fix some of the Architect badges that weren't awarding, and over the course of the night I got the badges:
Builder (an arc earns 5 votes with average 3.0 rating or higher)
Constructor (arc earns 10 votes, average 3.25 rating or higher)
Engineer (arc earns 25 votes, average 3.5 rating or higher)
Designer (arc earns 50 votes, average 3.75 rating or higher)
Master Builder (arc earns 100 votes, average 4.0 rating or higher)
I didn't get all of these when logging in, I think they only updated once someone new rated one of my story arcs.
Police Woman's market manipulation has been going really well; I stopped reporting my purchases and sales here because it's kinda boring, but her cash reserves crossed 500 million influence for the first time last night. Some of this was earned the "real" way (killing mobs!) but the great majority was from Wentworth's. I lost a fortune investing in ~40 Deific Weapons at 3M each before I14 (now they are like 300K each or less) but made it all back day trading on medium rare salvage, whose prices have been going crazily up and down for weeks now.
I played Primadonna (36 sonic/kin corruptor) on a 5 player LEGION SG villain team doing Ambassador Kur'rekt's missions, which got Primadonna to 37. Then after that team broke up I solo'd my way through the Midnight Squad story arc; one of these missions, "Collect the Amulets of Corax", was particularly frustrating for me as I searched back and forth through Oranbega for the last Guardian of the Amulet for half an hour before finally figuring out I needed to kill some random CoT minion (who was part of the spawn for one of the Guardians) to complete the mission. I got through the story arc eventually, unlocking Cimerora and getting 5 reward merits.
I popped over to Triumph server briefly, playing Alice Slaughter (31 db/will brute) on a 3 player Demolition Girls SG team doing regular missions for Psymon Omega. As a brute, I was teamed with a crab and a pain MM; this was a surprisingly well balanced team for red-side. This got Alice to level 32, where I took Swift because I thought the animation for One Thousand Cuts is kinda dumb, but I really miss Swift on characters that don't have it. (With Quick Recovery in her secondary, Alice hadn't gotten around to taking Stamina.)
Finished the night back on Liberty server, where I played Adventuress (7 MA/regen scrapper) on a 3 player Liberty Force SG team doing lowbie architect missions. I joined in at the tail end of Murder in Triplicate which actually looked like an intriguing murder mystery. The last mission was a very short timed mission where you're supposed to arrest "the killer" but have many named enemies that are "suspects". But my teammates admitted they hadn't bothered puzzling through all the clues so we just attacked everything we could find, and consequently time ran out before we found the right guy. I ended up not rating this arc, since it looked kinda cool but I didn't get to see most of it.
The team leader volunteered to run us through Teen Phalanx Forever! without me even goading the team into it, which was pretty awesome. The other two players hadn't done this arc before, but seemed to like it, especially the final AV, who got a lot of laughs. This also got Adventuress to level 9, and I took Crane Kick for my level 8 power to give me a third attack.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
5/12/2009
Last Wednesday night I mostly puttered around in Mission Architect. I set up some of the gameplay elements of my hypothetical fourth story arc and did some self-testing, beating up my various samurai and ninja and stuff. I ended up getting the Virtual Ticket Fiend badge (1000 virtual tickets while in Test Mode).
Enough people played and rated my Teen Phalanx Forever! (arc #67335) for me to get the Renowned badge (1000 stars on one arc). Since I had 223 plays so far, I was able to calculate that 1000 stars meant that my average rating was 4.48 (rounded to 4 stars), just barely below the breakpoint between 4 and 5 stars. This info seems consistent with the conspiracy theory that certain voters manipulate the rating system to knock all arcs out of the 5 star range.
I solo'd Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) through a very cool time travel based arc called A Tangle in Time, where an evil mage trapped me in a time loop where it seemed like I was repeating my actions over and over. The time travel aspects were very cleverly handled, there was good dialog and the effects of the time travel loop on the various NPCs was really well done. I gave the arc 5 stars.
After that I duoed with a tanker friend through an arc called Escalation, where I got into a grudge match with a minor villain with an interesting schtick: she had the ability to respawn on defeat into a new "clone" body each time, and over the course of the story, her clones progressively became more and more powerful. This was a cool idea for a villain, and the dialog really showed the villain's personality, and especially her growing obsession with defeating the player. I felt like there needed to be a little more to do in each mission though. I gave the arc 4 stars.
On Friday night I started off playing Tehuantl (19 widow) on an 8 player VEAT team of Demolition Girls SG doing various missions in Sharkhead Isle, which mostly went well except one time where we got utterly stomped by a Night Widow throwing smoke grenades. Despite all 8 of us being VEATs who totally could have taken Tactical Training: Leadership for some extra perception, none of us had, so we were utterly blinded by -per debuffs. We did end up completing the Paragon of Vice badge mission and got Tehuantl to level 23; I took Stamina and Foresight as new powers.
Late Friday night I solo'd Police Woman through Yellow Submarine-Save Pepperland, a story arc in which you rescue members of the Beatles from creatures known only as Blue Meanies. This story arc didn't seem complete (you only got to save 2 Beatles, then the arc suddenly ends without closure), a lot of stuff wasn't very well described, and the plot would be incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't a big Beatles fan. I gave it 2 stars.
On Saturday morning, I played through Childhood Horrors, where you start off saving some random guy, but you end up uncovering a massive plot to hack into the hospital teleporter network specifically to mess with Ms. Liberty's head. Ms. Liberty ends up in a coma and you have to go "into her mind" to try and save her, and while there you find out all about poor Megan's deep seated psychological problems. The last mission had a very creepy and disturbing mood, and the arc overall made good use of dynamically spawned objectives; I thought the dialog was a little stilted and there were some gameplay issues, though. I ended up giving this arc 4 stars.
I got the Allegiant (54 month veteran) badge mid-day on Saturday, then played Linda Lightspeed (33 kin/rad defender) on a quick Manticore TF organized by a friend, with a team mix of:
tanker
scrapper
3 blasters
kin defender (me)
cold defender
My friend was 3-boxing the tanker, scrapper and one of the blasters, so most of the time the tanker and the scrapper were essentially AFK (often not even inside the mission), slowing us down somewhat. It was kind of a pain to be a kin for a team with no melee, but the cold shields helped and we managed to get by. A zombie invasion showed up in Crey's Folly just as we got a hunt mission there, which also slowed us down. Nevertheless we finished in 1hr 12mins for 32 merits (26.67 MPH). After the TF I picked up a set of 6 Thunder Strike IOs which I slotted into Linda's Cosmic Burst, getting global bonuses of +4% run speed, +7% accuracy and +3.75% range defense, all of which seem very nice for her.
After that I played Primadonna (37 sonic/kin corruptor) as a lackey on an Imperious TF, with a team mix of
storm controller
kin corruptor (me)
poison MM
3 scrappers
blaster
warshade
We had a few problems; two of the scrappers were very low (a level 46 and her sidekick) so had low DPS and died a lot, and our controller had to take a 20 minute AFK right before the last mission, which caused a lot of people (including me) to get bored and switch to alts til he got back. During this time one of the scrappers wandered off to Ouroboros to sell and consequently got auto-kicked from the TF due to being in a non-coed zone. As a result we had to do the final mission with a team of only 7. In the last mission, Imperious managed to aggro Romulus when we weren't really ready, resulting in a team wipe for us. We regrouped and beat up Romulus, but it was something of a messy process with lots of deaths. Finished the ITF in 1hr 56mins, for 28 merits (14.48 MPH) and got Primadonna to 38 and Fulcrum Shift.
Saturday afternoon I felt inspired to start a new story arc review thread, Who Reviews the Reviewers, where I run through the story arcs of forum reviewers to see whether the critics can actually write, too. Towards this end, I solo'd Millie Volt (28 elec/inv brute) through Two Households Alike, a mafia story drawing a lot of inspiration from Romeo and Juliet. This was a good story overall, with good writing and dialog. The final mission was pretty tough (willpower AV/EB, ack) but I managed to beat it, and the finale and the final souvenir were cool enough that I gave the arc 5 stars.
After that I played Millie on a 5 player LEGION team, running through Looking Back: A Fifth Anniversary Celebration which was a wonderful story arc filled with nostalgia and references to old forum personalities and CoH nerfs and patches. The timeline that was presented reminded me of a lot of old CoH stuff; I'm quite surprised that it's been 4 years since ED already. I still remember when I used to slot all of Police Woman's attacks with nothing but damage. I gave that arc 5 stars.
We also went through a silly story arc called Crazy Ladies on the Loose which seemed to be a farm where you fight scantily-clad fembots. This seemed a farm with no story to speak of, so I gave it 1 star.
The team then fought an extended zombie invasion of Cap au Diable in which we got all 4 zombie badges, then went into a story called Hot Pants where our goal was to find the contact's stolen pants. This was full of double entendres and silly jokes. It was nonsensical, but fun, and I gave it 4 stars.
From there we went into Crimes of Fashion which was an amusing arc where you are basically henchmen/enforcers for the Facemaker, and acquire various fashion accessories from various villain groups. We did have a team wipe during this arc when we grabbed 4 glowies at once, and got flattened by the resulting 4 Arachnos ambushes. It was also silly but fun and I gave it 4 stars.
All these adventures got Millie Volt to level 30, where I took Tough.
Late at night, I solo'd Adventuress (9 MA/regen scrapper) through Hunter of Beasts: It starts with a riot. This indeed started with a riot, requiring me to clear an insanely huge outdoor map in order to stop the riot; but from there the arc suddenly transformed into a rather thoughtful and moody investigation on the trail of a serial killer. The serial killer's final victim still haunts me (especially because I was alone and it was really late at night, I think), so I thought that part was really well done, but grinding through a massive kill-all was awful enough that I could only give this arc 3 stars. Adventuress did get to level 10, though, and trained in Dull Pain.
On Sunday morning, Police Woman got the Architect (AE day job badge), Windfall (10 tickets over cap) and Cataclysmic (destroy 50 things in AE) badges. This puts her badge count at 623.
I solo'd Spacegirl (50 mind/rad controller) through BluDeth, in which I'm working for Vanguard to investigate some strange occurrences, only to discover it's a mysterious computer virus that's now able to infect people. Vanguard is all set to wipe this virus out, but for some reason the story forced me to want to save the virus (which was actually a computer AI), and so I "go rogue" (start fighting good guys) and end up beaming the AI into space where it won't hurt anyone. The writing style was pretty good but it was awkward how it forced me into saving the virus when I actually thought it deserved deletion. I gave that arc 4 stars.
I received a formal review of Celebrity Kidnapping, which motivated me to make some changes to hopefully improve the story. The main complaint was that the enemies threw way too many holds, which makes sense because I have mad ambushes of Paparazzi throwing illusion control powers around. I ended up changing a Family boss, which was originally a Consigliere that can both hold you and summon a Singularity to also hold you, and switching that for a Quantum Gunner, which sucks for kheldians but is better for everyone else. Unfortunately, those were the only two choices of Family bosses that were at the level 40 range. So I guess I'll just have to suffer from being yelled at by kheldians in feedback; but then kheldians are used to running into quantum gunners everywhere, so maybe they won't notice. Also I changed Paris to have more thermal powers, so she can buff Thaw and hopefully mitigate some of the holds being thrown at the player.
I played Strong Woman (16 inv/SS tanker) as a sidekick on a Synapse TF organized by a friend, with a team mix of
scrapper
tanker (me)
3 blasters
kin controller
cold defender
emp defender
With three flavors of buffs we were in good shape and beat up lots of Clockwork. We didn't have much in the way of stealth capability, so ended up fighting our way through all the missions. Managed to beat up Babbage for 2 merits, and complete the TF in 2hrs 36mins for another 57 merits (22.69 MPH). This got Strong Woman to level 21, and I took Health and Stamina as new powers.
Sunday evening, PhiladelphiaPA named Teen Phalanx Forever! as one of his top 3 favorite Liberty server arcs, which was awfully nice! Thanks!!
Monday night I played Mayday (50 fortunata) on a "quick" Lady Grey TF organized on Villains of Liberty channel. Our team mix was
2 fortunatas
rad corruptor
rad defender
tanker
2 scrappers
brute
We were on Vicious difficulty, but nevertheless stomped the TF easily. In the last mission we nearly had the final AV dead before the last team member zoned into the mission, and ended up stalling for a minute so that she could get in before we finished the TF. Even with this delay, we finished in 29mins 15sec, for 39 merits (80.0MPH).
After that I did some market manipulation (prices are fluctuating like crazy, giving lots of opportunity) and fiddled with my incomplete fourth story arc some more.
Finished the night beginning to solo through the Facing Chaos story arc, which seems to be about a harbinger of doom warning that something awful is coming, so I better do something about it. But I only got through the first mission before calling it a night.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
5/13/2009
On Tuesday night I finished soloing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) through the Facing Chaos story arc, which was about a king sending you to battle "Chaos", which required fighting a lot of CoT and miscellaneous monster-like enemies. The story did not really make much sense and there was a lot of weirdness that was trying to convey a "chaotic" feeling but just seemed distracting to me. I ended up rating this story 2 stars.
I did some editing on my Celebrity Kidnapping story arc; I had gotten a couple feedbacks complaining about the middle mission being much lower level than the other two missions (they had a max level of 40, 30, 40), so I decided to try and even this out. The second mission is basically full of vagrants and bums, so it's hard to think of a plausible level 40ish enemy, but I ended up putting in some Freaks, which are kinda on the scuzzy side, so I thought might be reasonable. While doing this, I noticed that the Prisoners faction had been added back to the mission editor, so I happily ditched my custom Convicts faction and put Prisoners back into my "Break out of the Zig" mission.
I republished the arc and did a test run through it with Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker); now the mission levels go 38, 39, 40, which should be a lot smoother for malefactoring high level players down.
Finished the night playing Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender) on a friend's 6-player team running Unai Kemen's level 50 missions in Peregrine Island; we beat up a bunch of Hydra and Freaks before I called it a night.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
5/14/2009
My blue side marketeering has been going really well; Police Woman just crossed 600M infl as a result of day trading on salvage. Eventually I will need to spend some time figuring out what I can actually buy with all this; I suspect the cost of purple recipes has been increasing faster than my bankroll has.
I spent an extensive amount of time reworking my Axis and Allies arc, in response to several detailed feedback messages I'd gotten.
Some people complained of too many masterminds, which was actually true; I do think it makes sense for enemy bosses to be mercs MMs, but having some lieutenants that were also MMs was probably overdoing it. I changed both my French lieutenant and Soviet lieutenant from being mercs or thugs MMs to being just plain assault rifle.
I added some spiffy looking "mission titles" to every mission, naming them after the WW2 German military campaigns connected to each scene; so this was "Operation Valkyrie" for when you kill Hitler, "Case Yellow" for the invasion of France, and "Operation Barbarossa" for the invasion of Russia. I don't think the Wehrmacht actually had a war plan for invading America in their wildest dreams, though; I ended up deciding to name that mission "The Eagle Has Landed". (Yeah, I know that book/movie was really about taking out Churchill, not Truman. The title still sounds cool.)
Someone told me she thought capturing the President should be more dramatic, or at least give a clue; so I added a clue which the President coughs up as you catch him. Terence Stamp screaming "KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!" still really sticks in my mind after all these years, so I made this clue an homage to when General Zod captures the President in Superman II.
After republishing the story arc, I ran Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) through a test run of Axis and Allies to make sure everything worked, and cackled gleefully when I got the "Kneel before Spy Girl!" clue.
My main brute, Mega (50 SS/elec brute) used to be one of my favorite characters, but has been pretty idle for several months now; I'm thinking it's because I've become disillusioned with electric armor, which seemed awesome several issues ago, but feels underpowered now. I decided to restart her as a SS/will brute to see if that felt better (though I transferred the SS/elec version to Triumph server first; it feels worth $10 to not delete a level 50) and got the new version of Mega to level 2. I could've easily played her more to level her up, but then I thought I may as well let her build up some patrol exp first.
So I ran Blond Justice (50 broadsword/shield scrapper) through the Blondes Revenge story arc, where I fought blonde terrorists who were planning on taking over the power grid as revenge for blonde jokes. This arc sadly was not as funny as it sounds, and I ended up rating it 2 stars.
Then I ran Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) through The Roots of Domestic Terror where I tortured a terrorist into giving me his high explosives, then I used these to set bombs all around a diplomatic summit. After exploding the building, I went back in and dragged the surviving diplomats out and executed them in front of the press. This story arc was trying to be really evil and terrorist-like, but kept inserting humorous bits that broke the mood. The uneven tone, plus some hard-to-believe plot points, caused me to rate this arc 3 stars.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
5/18/2009
On Thursday night, based on some player feedback I started off trying to think of more plot ideas to add to the first couple missions of Teen Phalanx Forever! to explain what the Vahzilok and Clockwork are up to. Basically I had set up those missions mostly to introduce the teen supergroup, and the motivation of the villains in those missions was incidental, and someone called me on that.
I came up with the idea that Dr. Vahzilok would be operating an illegal mail order bride operation in order to raise funds for his research. Only, instead of getting a desperate East European woman, Dr. V instead would provide a female zombie stitched together from parts provided by involuntary donors (thus explaining why Ms. van Whooters is being held captive).
I got as far as making models for a Vahzilok Bride (a zombie in a wedding dress) and a Vahzilok Wife (a zombie in a pink sun dress) and ran a test mission where these aberrations would attack the player, groaning "Love me...!" But then I had a change of heart and decided this was Too Silly, so I didn't end up actually publishing these changes. I figure I'll scrap these changes and try to think of something less ridiculous.
Instead, I ran Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) solo through a run of Why Do Bad Girls Like Bad Boys?, a very fun story where you help a charming cad work out the issues he has with his two mistresses, who happen to be a Carnie boss and a Knives of Artemis boss. It's a very different sort of plot from the norm, has good characterization and was a lot of fun; I gave it 5 stars.
After that I solo'd my new version of Mega (2 SS/will brute) through Kalinda's first story arc, getting to level 5; I took Mind over Body at level 4.
Finished on Thursday night playing Schadenfreude (42 AR/pain corruptor) on a 4 player Liberty Force SG team running coed architect missions in Rikti War Zone; we did a run through a Scourge of the Phalanx story arc (basically a vanity arc about our villain group).
I had been letting unclaimed tickets pile up in my reserve, and on Friday night I found that the unclaimed pile caps out at 9999 tickets. I did get the Bounty badge for 50 "over the cap" tickets, from overnight story arc authoring rewards, though. I didn't really want to "waste" tickets, so I claimed 500 of them; but in hindsight maybe I should let these pile up some more so as to ensure I get all the "over the cap" ticket badges (those are probably easy to get while farming, but I've been mostly avoiding farming).
I solo'd Mega (6 SS/will brute) through The Siphon, a low level villain story arc where you basically are trying to complete a magical ritual that supposedly will give you incredible cosmic powers. This was decently written with good clues, but didn't have many characters of interest and had a lot of somewhat tedious hunting for ingredients for the ritual. I gave the arc 4 stars. Mega leveled up to 8, regaining the wonderful Knockout Blow power.
I played Tehuantl (23 blood widow) on an 8-player all-VEAT Demolition Girls SG team running mostly missions in Sharkhead; we ran through Fortunata Hamilton's If At First You Don't Succeed story arc, and Darrin Wade's Midnight Draws Near story arc. This got Tehuantl to level 26. I had a forced respec at 24, but ended up basically picking the same powers I had taken before. At 26, however, I took Mental Training, which locked Tehuantl onto the Night Widow career track. While playing, I got a level 24 Steadfast Protection (RES/+3% global DEF) recipe drop, which was really nice. I crafted it and am still pondering which alt will use it.
Late Friday night I played Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) on a quickie Sharkhead SF. Our team mix was:
fortunata
3 brutes
2 stalkers (including me)
We blazed through this SF in 33min 52sec for 22 merits (38.98 MPH). I spent 20 merits on a recipe roll, getting a rather unexciting Aegis (END/RCHG) recipe.
On Saturday I played Strong Woman (21 invuln/SS tanker) on a Sister Psyche TF, with a team mix of:
kin controller
FF controller
2 invuln tankers
will tanker
nrg blaster
archery blaster
scrapper (disconnected after mission 1 and never returned)
Though 3 tankers is probably too many, and the scrapper dropping so early left us at a DPS deficit (since I think the missions will now still spawn for 8), the nice kin and FF buffs kept things moving along at a good rate. I tried to let the higher level tankers lead the way (well, sort of..) but if they hesitated, I was pretty quick to jump into the next group of Freaks, or pull the next group towards us. I seemed to be the only tanker with Taunt (I have pretty conservative beliefs on tanker builds) and being an invuln with bubbles, I felt utterly fearless. I excused this by saying "They were looking at me funny!" and another team member said, "It's probably your costume!" So I had to say, "What's wrong with my costume?" And the team was all like, "uhh.. nothing! It's awesome!" Strong Woman has a pretty traditional superheroine costume; I really don't think it's anything too racy, but it's admittedly a Leotard of Power.
We got through the Sister Psyche TF without any serious problems; I ended up crashing on exiting the final mission of the TF (I think other people did too; this seems a new bug) so didn't get a time on the TF, but did get Strong Woman to level 25, taking Invincibility at 22 and Knockout Blow at 24, and upgrading to SO enhancements.
After the TF, I ran Strong Woman through her cape mission and 2nd costume mission, which let me readjust her "shoulder" cape (from veteran rewards) to be a more traditional "half mantle" cape (from the cape mission). Also blew through a very grey story arc from Flux, destroying Frostfire in record time for an extra 7 merits.
Late Saturday night I played Police Woman for a bit, accepting an invite to a 5-player pickup team that did a couple of missions against Malta and Cimerorans.
After that team broke up, I solo'd Police Woman through Torchbearer, a story arc that has you recreating some of the Freedom Phalanx's "historical" battles against Nemesis, the 5th Column and the Rikti. This was kinda cool and had some fun "historical" detail (historical is in quotes since it's CoH history, not real history), though I did catch some errors compared to the "canon" CoH history. The missions weren't terribly immersive and the framing story was kind of awkward, but it was still fun, so I gave it 4 stars. Along the way I got the Unpredictable (100 glowies in AE missions) badge and my ruthless profiteering at Wentworth's scored me the Marketer (sold 5000 items) badge, which gave Police Woman an extra auction house slot.
On Sunday I played Adventuress (10 MA/regen scrapper) through the Dream Paper story arc, which was an entertaining investigation about some mysterious apartment break-ins. Midway through this story arc, a friend invited me to a Positron TF, so I quit the arc to do that.
The Positron TF had a team mix of:
regen scrapper (me)
archery blaster
storm defender
peacebringer
This team actually did quite well; the stormy was careful not to blow stuff all over and was using O2 Boost for occasional heals, and the rest of us did pretty decent damage. We didn't have a stealther, so fought our way through everything, but it didn't seem to be a problem for us. Finished in 2hrs 34mins for 64 merits (24.94 MPH) and got Adventuress to level 16; I took Focus Chi, Combat Jumping and Integration as new powers.
I then went back to finish Dream Paper, having to re-do the first two missions. The investigation was pretty good and fairly fun, mostly fighting Lost. There were good characters and clues and I got to redeem a hapless paperboy from the Trolls gang. But at the very end, despite busting the big bad guy I still had no idea what was going on or why the Lost were stealing this stuff, and I was left with a lot of unanswered questions. It was still pretty good overall, though, and I gave the arc 4 stars.
Late Sunday night, I played Schadenfreude (42 AR/pain corruptor) on a 4-player Liberty Force SG team doing coed architect missions in Rikti War Zone. I joined for the tail end of Legacy of Joe, the Longbow Eagle and dragged the team into doing the first two missions of Axis and Allies before we called it a night.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
5/22/2009
I started Monday night duoing Mega (8 ss/will brute) with a stalker friend, going through the Out of the Gutters arc. This was a pretty well done alternate villain starting story, where you're a Rogue Isles resident who gets fed up with all the Destined One nonsense and decide to become a villain yourself. Despite a team wipe fighting Arachnos in one of the missions, I gave this arc 5 stars.
After the stalker logged I went on to solo through Angelo Vendetti's Council Cargo story arc, beating up the vampyr for 4 merits and getting Mega to level 10, where I took Indomitable Will.
I then solo'd Kashira (19 db/ninj stalker) through the MacGuffin Delivery Service arc, a story about stealing a cursed item, then trying to get rid of it. This was very well done with cleverly crafted missions, and I gave it 5 stars.
I finished Monday night playing Primadonna (38 sonic/kin corruptor) as a lackey on an Imperious TF with a team mix of:
storm defender
fire scrapper
regen scrapper
plant dominator
fire tanker
kin corruptor (me)
FF mastermind
shield brute
This ITF went pretty well, except for the final fight against Imperious which got pretty messy as the 6 other players started the AV fight without either the tanker or me (lackeyed to the tanker). Nevertheless we won, finishing in 57min 50sec for 28 merits (29.05 MPH). This also got Primadonna to level 39.
I spent most of Tuesday night working out a respec for Thunder Girl (50 will/nrg tanker); my main goals for the respec were to keep max HP near the cap, but also try to get her defense to various damage types as high as I could. Plus give her high regen. Yeah, I guess I wanted it all. Anyway, her build isn't quite "done" but after using her free respec, her current powers and slotting give her:
69.45% lethal resist (willpower toggles + tough)
43.76% lethal defense (willpower toggles + weave + IO bonuses)
39.66% energy/negative defense (willpower toggles + weave + IO bonuses)
3118.60 max HP
I felt pretty good about these numbers. I was particularly worried about cascading defense failure against Cimerorans on the ITF, so I'm hoping the high lethal resist/defense and natural willpower regen will make this situation more manageable.
I ended up testing Thunder Girl's respec on a Katie TF, which exemps her to 34 (negating some of her IO bonuses and higher level powers), but she still seemed pretty invincible. Though a big part of this was probably our team mix, which had 4 defenders:
kin defender
emp defender
storm defender
rad defender
nrg blaster
will tanker (me)
fire scrapper
regen scrapper
With this team mix we had no real problems and finished the Katie TF in 34min 45sec (a good but not great time) for 9 merits (15.54 MPH). Thunder Girl hadn't done the KTF before, so I got the badges and costume unlocks also.
Someone was recruiting team members for high 20s Croatoa door missions on LBX, so I switched to Star Amethyst (28 warshade) and joined this 6 player pickup team. We had no healing on our team, but we did have a sonic and a stormy, so seemed to do okay. With sonic shields and kheldian synergy buffs from the team, my resists were capped, so I felt pretty good on this team, which quickly got Amethyst to level 29. I also found that Ghosts are incredibly annoying for my warshade to fight; with no bodies left behind, two of my powers were completely negated.
After that team broke up, I started Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) on the Enter the Darkened story arc, which I solo'd through over Tuesday and Wednesday nights. This story had me fighting off a drow elf invasion from another dimension; it had some plot and balance problems, and I gave it 3 stars.
I also solo'd Mega (10 ss/will brute) through a few radio missions and a King's Row mayhem. A friend on a low 40s brute was having trouble finding a team, so I switched to Schadenfreude (42 AR/pain corruptor) and we teamed up with a scrapper to make a 3-player team that ran through several of Levantera's missions in Rikti War Zone. This got Schadenfreude to level 43.
On Thursday night, I solo'd Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) through The Strange Tale of Silent Witness. This was an arc about the magical origin of another hero, and then that hero's archnemesis comes and steals his powers and I need to help get them back. This all left me feeling somewhat like a spectator to the story, which was really about someone else. I gave the arc 3 stars.
I also spent some time tinkering with possible changes for my Teen Phalanx Forever! story. As-published my arc comes in at a trim 59% of the story arc space, so I have some room to play with to add more material. I've gotten feedback that the first two missions could use more content in them, so I've been trying to come up with ideas to add.
I'm currently thinking of reviving (ha ha) my Vahzilok Stepford Wife idea, only instead of playing it straight, have everyone think it is a terrible idea except for Dr. Vahzilok himself, who doesn't understand why people don't want zombie wives. And everyone who tries to tell him it's a bad idea gets consigned to being broken up for body parts. I've played around with this in Test Mode a little and may end up pushing it to Live eventually.
For the second mission I'm thinking of having the Clockwork King try to set up "World of Clockwork", a rival virtual reality game to Architect Entertainment. I think this would be funny, but not sure what other people will think; with how well Teen Phalanx has been received so far, I'm a little afraid to change it too much. Going to probably tinker with all these changes some more this weekend and see if it works well enough to publish.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
5/26/2009
Spent much of the weekend reworking my Teen Phalanx Forever! story arc. I had two people say the first mission against the Vahzilok felt too "been there, done that", and one that said likewise for the Clockwork mission. I had patterned these missions closely after the "official" missions where you fight Dr. Vahzilok and the Clockwork King; originally I thought this would add to the immersion as you'd be "doing" the canon story arcs with the team, but in hindsight I can see how some players might get a "same old, same old" feeling from it.
So I started adding stuff. The baseline Teen Phalanx story arc started at a trim 59% disk usage, because despite writing reams and reams of dialog and clues, I only had 4 custom models in the whole arc, and custom models really take the most space.
I promoted the "Vahzilok Mail Order Bride" plot from my "test" arcs to my "live" arcs, extensively rewriting mission 1 as a result.
I also pushed the "World of Clockwork" plot from my "test" arcs to my "live" arcs. This idea wasn't nearly as well thought out initially, so I spent a lot of time polishing it; finetuning costume details on the clockwork LARPers and giving them Everquest/World of Warcraftish dialog. I originally wanted a handful of "beta tester" hostages being guarded by clockwork LARPers, but the Clockwork King's headquarters only allows for 6 "rescue/ally" spawn points, so I could only squeeze in a couple. I added lots of fun clues and dialog. I'm particularly proud of how squicky the "World of Clockwork" promotional poster came out.
Finally, I decided the final boss, Citadel Vista, would be so obsessed with replacing Citadel XP, that he not only would try to defeat the Teen Phalanx, but he would also try and replace the Teen Phalanxers with robotic duplicates! So I changed the final Robots ambush to be Robotic Teen Phalanx attackers, re-skinning a couple of my teen heroes with gunmetal and red LEDs to make them look sorta cylon-ish.
With all these changes, I've managed to fill up my story arc's disk usage to 97% percent, but I feel like I added a lot of content. I'm starting to think that for future story arcs, making the first draft come in at around 50-75% disk usage is going to be better than starting at 99% disk usage; both Celebrity Kidnapping and Teen Phalanx Forever! followed this model, and this has allowed me to add immense amounts of improvements and additions as a result of feedback since their original publish date. My Axis and Allies arc was bloated from the start due to the number of custom models, being at 99% on test and 103% on live, forcing me to remove story elements to republish on live; and any new changes I make, require me to remove something else. As a result, I feel like Axis and Allies is the least polished of my story arcs now. (Though part of that is because it was the first one I wrote.)
I was a little uneasy about modifying Teen Phalanx Forever! since it had gotten a lot of positive feedback so far, and the new story elements are a little on the silly side as I'm trying to keep the story light-hearted in tone. But I'm quite pleased with how it's turned out so far, and find myself playing my own story arc and laughing at my own jokes (a bad sign...I'll need a straitjacket and padded room soon). I'm hoping other players will like it too.
In non-architecting news, I played Kashira (19 dual/ninj stalker) on Friday, joining a 4 player Fallen LEGION team doing Marshal Brass's missions. A teammate complimented Kashira's costume (which is basically a maroon martial arts outfit with tall stockings, hair bandana, fist wraps and Japanese swords), calling it a "cute ninja girl outfit...when she's visible", which was nice. We had one team wipe early on, and another near-team wipe a bit later against Arachnos while rescuing Amanda Vines, where everyone else but me died and I managed to pop a purple and lead Amanda Vines through a gauntlet of enemies, finally reaching the mission door to win the mission. That felt pretty cool. This all got Kashira to level 21 and Stamina.
I solo'd Mega (10 SS/will brute) through Dr Shelly's Midas Touched story arc, getting 7 reward merits and level 11. Then I ran through Pretenders to my Hobo Throne, which was a lowbie villain story about helping a professional beggar fight off some rival hobos; this seemed mostly okay but had some odd mission choices, like kidnapping the Icon tailor and Facemaker tailor to help make the hobo a new outfit. I gave that story arc 3 stars.
Some friends started joining me and I ended up leading a 4 player team through a run of Escalation, a story where you fight a villain who respawns with a new clone body every time you defeat her; only she gets mad that you keep beating her up, so she starts amping up her clone bodies with additional super powers each time, until you finally face an AV/EB in the last mission. We had one team wipe while facing a massive clone army and attendant robots. I had run through story this once before and kinda liked it, but there were tons of improvements this time through, so I gave it 5 stars. This also got Mega to level 12.
Late Friday night I played Adventuress (16 MA/regen scrapper) on a Synapse TF. Our team mix was:
dark scrapper
SR scrapper
regen scrapper (me)
fire blaster (had to quit about halfway through)
AR blaster
sonic blaster
FF controller
peacebringer
Despite having no proper healer, the controller kept us in force fields, and that was plenty enough for the scrappers to tear up the clockwork without serious problems. We had no stealther or TPer so ended up fighting through everything rather than sneaking through the few missions that you can. We beat up Babbage (with outside help) and ended up finishing the TF in 3hrs 15mins for 59 merits (counting Babbage's award; 18.15 MPH). This got Adventuress to level 20; I took Swift and Hurdle at 18 and 20. Not that I really need Stamina (since she already has Quick Recovery), but I really like moving faster and jumping higher. While visiting Wentworth's after the TF, Adventuress (whose costume is khaki shorts, white tank top, combat boots and a good tan) got a costume compliment from a passerby, which was nice.
On Saturday I played Millie Volt (30 elec/inv brute) on an 8 player Fallen LEGION team doing door missions that mostly required fighting Longbow. We started off having buggy missions where some people would zone into one instance and the rest of the team would zone into another; this was due to having some people on AE story arcs when they joined the team, I think. We kept trying to go in/out the mission to get people in the same place, having people quit the team and rejoin it, and having people log off and back on. Nothing worked until we completely reset the mission and re-entered it.
I think we were kinda light on support (we were a mix of brutes, stalkers, doms and VEATs) and we had three straight team wipes against Longbow, then beat an Infernal AV with great difficulty. I did a lot of pulling to corners to mitigate aggro, earning me the comment "You're the most pull-y brute I've seen"; I did try running straight into mobs a few times instead of pulling, but with our limited support, usually this didn't end well. Despite these problems, we did complete a lot of missions and got Millie to level 33. I took and slotted Lightning Rod, which is an INCREDIBLY COOL power ... I love the crack of thunder, the lightning special effect, and the enemies falling down! The only downside is that you can't use it while hovering, which is kind of a downer as Millie uses hover/fly for travel.
Since the "over the cap" badges are mostly going away, I decided to start claiming tickets from the reward pool. Millie claimed some of these and spent 3700 tickets each on 2 Gold reward rolls, getting a Positron's Blast (DMG/ACC/END) and a Devastation (Chance to Hold), both of which are quite delicious.
After that team broke up I solo'd Mega (now a 12 SS/will brute) through the Freaks and Geeks story arc, which was about a Freakshow plot to kidnap nerds and turn them into Freakshow. This was technically a level 20-40ish heroic arc, but I kinda wanted to get Mega more exp, so I played her through it anyway. The first mission was funny and charming, but the later two missions weren't nearly as fun, and I ended up giving this story 3 stars.
On Sunday I played Strong Woman (25 inv/SS tanker) through a Citadel TF, with a team mix of
1 rad defender
1 cold defender
1 inv tanker (me)
1 shield tanker
1 kin controller
2 shield scrappers
The team seemed to be okay with 25-26s running unSK'd since we were pretty strong, but I insisted on an SK as I wanted to be tankish, running around aggroing stuff and punching them in the face. With good buffs and good DPS we had no problem smashing our way through this TF, finishing in 1hr 31mins for 40 merits (26.37 MPH). This got Strong Woman to level 27; I took Tough Hide at 26.
I playtested some of my story arc changes some with Mega, which got her to level 13.
Monday was a holiday and I started the afternoon playing Mega as a lackey on a 4 player LEGION villain team, doing 47ish missions in Grandville. This got Mega to 15. We had one team wipe against Malta who were camping the entrance to a mission and defeated us one at a time as we entered. We had no "healer" type (we did have a traps corruptor, but FF Generator wasn't enough mitigation) which made some missions pretty rough, and eventually motivated me to switch to Schadenfreude (43 AR/pain corruptor) to play "healer". This seemed to smooth things out quite a bit, and we were able to go on to defeat Crimson, Ms Liberty, and then the whole Vindicators team.
Monday night, I played Samurai-ko (37 katana/will scrapper) on a 3-player Sisterhood hero team, running mostly Crey missions. This got Samurai-ko to 38, where I took Stamina (I previously had Quick Recovery, just took Stamina for even more recovery).
I started a newbie ice/emp controller, getting the name "Milady de Winter", and giving her a white lacy outfit with a hint of blue, befitting someone with ice powers. With that name, she really should be a villain (since she's one of the major antagonists in The Three Musketeers); my intention is for this character to eventually betray to red side when City of Rogues comes out. I already have a couple villains that I think will switch to blue side; none of my existing heroes seem like the type to jump to red side, so I thought it might be fun to make a couple that would. Milady solo'd a couple of Azuria's initial missions, then joined a 3-player lowbie team doing street hunting in Atlas Park; that team eventually grew to 8 players and entered the sewers. I was the only support class on this 8 player team, and it was quite lively trying to keep 7 lowbie characters alive using only unslotted Heal Aura and Heal Other. Nevertheless we did fine and Milady got to level 8 before calling it a night.
Finished the night soloing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) through Hunting the Dark Dragon, which is purportedly is about CoT summoning dragons from another dimension, but in actual play the dragons are just lizardfolk who apparently got kidnapped from a rock concert. The most powerful lizardman ends up hiring Malta and Space Pirates and manipulating Arachnos into fighting you, and you have to either stop him or let him go. This story didn't really make much sense; I gave it 2 stars.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
5/27/2009
I logged in to find that my revised Teen Phalanx Forever! arc got a 5-star rating and a positive story arc review from the most established story arc reviewer. He has a reputation for being critical, and his review style is so distinctive that I could almost write my own text for a negative review of my arc in his style -- so I was extremely pleased to get an unsolicited positive review. Yay!
From there I played Fire Emerald (36 fire/fire blaster) on a Synapse TF as part of the Task Forcing to the Top project that is being tracked on this very forum. Our team mix was:
2 emp defenders (including our TF-only character)
3 shield scrappers
1 rad controller
1 fire blaster (me)
We didn't have a proper tank, but had lots of scrappers. Somehow our scrappers and our rad controller shared tanking duties, which had the highly desirable result of them doing most of the dying and me not dying at all (a miracle for a fire/fire blaster). We all yelled at our hapless empaths because neither of them had either Fortitude or Recovery Aura. Well, we weren't really that obnoxious about it, but this did eventually guilt trip one of them into taking RA as a power pick after leveling.
We didn't really have a stealther so we fought through most everything; we did try stealthing two times that I remember, one of which ended in tears (all the "stealthers" dying and the rest of us coming to rescue them) and the other time seemed to succeed, teleporting us to the end boss. We beat up Babbage with no problem and a minimum of outside help. We did have some problems with AFKs; one scrapper had to AFK for 3 or so missions to pick someone up at the train station, then in the last mission one of our empaths went AFK and never came back, even after we beat the Clockwork King and got the "Task Force Complete" message. Unfortunately that defender idling inside the mission kept us from actually being awarded the merits for the TF, so no one wanted to actually quit the TF until that happened. We didn't really want to kick the AFK defender at the very end of the TF either. The team leader came up with a compromise solution, that we would wait 10 minutes for the defender to come back, and if she didn't get back, she would get kicked at that time so we could move on with our lives. In the intervening 10 minutes we wandered around Skyway City stirring up trouble, and helping to beat down the Babbage generated by another Synapse TF; ultimately the time ran out and the team leader reluctantly kicked the AFK defender, causing the TF completion dialog to pop up with 2hrs 58mins as TF time, earning us 61 merits (including 2 Babbages; 20.56 MPH). This was also the last TF that Fire Emerald needed for the Task Force Commander accolade.
After that I played Schadenfreude (43 AR/pain corruptor) on a 5-player coed hero and villain team in Rikti War Zone doing the "Save the World" mission. The Rikti were very harsh on the squishy members of our team, with hordes of ambushes smashing us repeatedly, while our stone tanker merrily chugged away tanking first Hro'Dtohz AV and then ambushing Nemesis AV. Nemesis had nasty AoEs that again blasted the squishy members of our team while leaving our stoner unhurt. After several runs back from the hospital we eventually recruited 2 more players who finally gave enough DPS to beat the Nemesis AV. Whew! This got Schadenfreude to level 44, where I gladly took Vengeance as a power pick. After finally beating that mission, the team broke up and I called it a night.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
5/29/2009
Wednesday night I started off playing Mega (16 SS/will brute) testing and re-testing my Teen Phalanx Forever! story arc as I made minor tweaks as a result of player feedback; the major one was I nerfed one of my super strength allies to no longer have Rage, to cut his DPS a bit since he seemed to hit too hard. A couple other players wanted to join me and I ended up leading a 3 player villain team through a Skyway City mayhem.
After that I played Primadonna (39 sonic/kin corr) on an Ice Mistral SF, with a team mix of
3 fortunatas (only 2 had buffs)
1 kin corruptor (me)
1 claw/ninj stalker
1 dark/fire brute
We did fine on the SF, getting through in 1hr 25mins, only wiping out to ambushes after we had beat the AV and already won the TF. This got Primadonna to level 40 and earned 25 merits (17.65 MPH).
Switched to Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) and earned the Commuter day job badge, and ran through a story called Kidnapping an Idol where you rescue (I think) a teen J-pop singer who gets kidnapped by a rival record label. The writing was uneven but the plot and mission design were pretty good, and I gave this arc 4 stars. I also earned the (soon to be meaningless) Escapist and Mission Engineer badges.
I was sick at home on Thursday and spent most of the day on City of Heroes. Started off playing Yuki-Onna (50 ice/cold corruptor) on a Recluse SF with a team mix of:
3 rad corruptors
1 cold corruptor (me)
1 ninj stalker
1 invuln brute
1 shield brute (linkdead most of the time)
1 kin corruptor
With the insane amount of buff/debuff we had, even with one person mostly linkdead we sped through the RSF and easily manhandled the Freedom Phalanx (we did have some deaths, but battle rez'd and beat them on the first try). Finished in 43mins 23sec and got an Endoplasm SHO.
After that I played Indigo Ifrit (50 fire/rad corruptor) on another Ice Mistral SF, this time with a small team of
2 rad corruptors (me, and a 2-boxed character who never entered missions except the last one)
1 ninj stalker
1 SS/shield brute
I'd never seen a SS/shield brute in action before; he seemed to do insane AOE damage between Rage, Fury, Foot Stomp and Shield Charge. With a small team, even with one character basically not being played, we were able to very quickly move through the SF, finishing in a speedy 43min 55sec for 25 merits (34.15 MPH).
Recipe prices seemed lower than usual at the Black Market, and after the SF, I had Indigo buy, craft and slot a fifth Positron's Blast in Fire Breath (+6.25% global recharge) and a fifth Decimation in Blaze (another +6.25% global recharge). This puts her total global recharge at 66.25%.
After that I played Mega (17 SS/will brute) through the Time Loop story arc, in which you fight with Wyvern and unwisely meddle with time travel, getting stuck into a "time loop" where you repeat the same actions in each mission (with minor changes). This was a neat idea with decent writing, but I felt it had some plot holes and some elements that didn't make sense. I ended up giving it 4 stars.
A friend on a 50 thermal corruptor wanted to join me as a malefactor, and we played through the last part of Time Loop together, then I dragged her through the first mission of Celebrity Kidnapping. This got Mega to level 18, where I took Super Jump; not strictly necessary, but I was tired of relying on jet packs and jump packs.
I tried soloing Mega through the Fine Literature story arc, which was a fun story where an insane and insanely bad author tries to force publishing houses to publish her books, or else. Particularly fun are the villain's custom henchmen, who are all given the names of literary personalities. Custom mobs were too rough for Mega to handle at her low level (curse you, Jane Austen and your empathy heals!!) and so I ended up switching to Blond Justice (50 bs/shield, soft capped defense) who had a much easier time with it. The story was short and fun but needed a little more content to really be awesome, I thought; I gave it 4 stars.
Teen Phalanx Forever! was at 5 stars and made it to the front page of the Architect Entertainment default search for most of the day Thursday, which caused a lot more people to notice and play my story arc, providing a steady trickle of ticket awards and feedback tells, which was really awesome. Alas, it could not last, as I eventually got a low rating with no feedback (presumably a grief vote) which pushed my story arc off of the front page. Nevertheless this all got my arc up over 300 votes, which was quite nice.
Joined a hero-side 2nd respec trial on Samurai-ko (38 katana/will scrapper). Our team mix was:
1 shield tanker
2 will scrappers (including me)
2 dark armor scrappers
1 ice blaster
1 rad defender
1 rad controller
We had a bad spread on level range, with too many lowbies and not enough mentors. We ended up with 3 sidekicks and 3 mentors, me running unSK'd at 38, and the blaster had to quit due to lack of a mentor (I tried SK'ing him but this didn't raise him high enough to get exp). Being unSK'd at the low end of the 38-43 range got me killed a couple times, but overall it went well enough and we finished in 1hr 31sec. Samurai-ko got to level 39, and I chose to take the respec and the badge (rather than merits); I didn't really need a respec, but thought I'd bank it for a rainy day.
After that I played Schadenfreude (44 AR/pain corruptor) on a 5-player LEGION villain team that mostly beat up high level Snakes, along with a few Crey and Longbow. This got Schadenfreude to 45. I also had someone tell me that one of the I15 TFs has a 5th Column vampire NPC named Schadenfreude, too; not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand I think it's an awesome name for a 5th Column boss (obviously); on the other hand, I've had this character name since CoV came out. Hopefully it won't be a problem for me to keep it.
I had been toying with the idea of starting a super reflexes brute for most of the day, and late that night I finally broke down and did it, starting an SS/SR brute. After exhaustive trial and error on trying names at the character select screen, I finally settled on the name Sabine; I was vaguely thinking she'd be from the Cimeroran period, maybe from a rival people (to mirror the historical Romans and Sabines), but ended up giving her a background story that she was a hero that crossed the line into killing people, and got sent to the Zig as a result. Figure she might be a candidate for "going rogue" when that happens. Still tweaking her costume (currently a sort of blue jump suit with white boots); already did one run to Pocket D's tailor to make a costume change, and expecting to do another one the next time she gets played. I ran Sabine through Kalinda's first story arc, getting to level 4, then did the Dr. Geist and the Scientific Method story arc, which is a really wonderful mad science story for lowbie villains. I gave it 5 stars. This got Sabine to level 5 before i called it a night.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
4/9/2009
On Monday night, Police Woman's (50 AR/dev blaster) marketeering pushed her over 3000 sales, getting me the Auctioneer badge and a 19th auction house slot.
I solo'd Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) through a couple of Maria Jenkins' missions, and managed to beat an Infernal EB and a Marauder EB.
I played Yuki-Onna (50 ice/cold corruptor) on a "weather channel" Imperious TF that was recruiting from LBX. The premise of this TF was that every team member had to be some sort of storm, cold, electric or ice character. Our team ended up being:
2 storm defenders
1 storm controller
1 ice/cold corruptor (me)
1 emp/elec defender
2 cold defenders
1 elec blaster
The team leader (who was, in fact, a stormy) warned against using hurricane or tornado, which seemed very un-stormy to me, but as a cold corr I didn't have these things so I sorta shrugged. Capped defense from cold shields let us easily coast through the early missions, though our DPS felt a little low; we had only one blaster for DPS and he seemed AFK most of the TF.
In the final mission we made our first attempt against Romulus while the blaster was still AFK, but with no real "tanker", weak negative resist (sadly neither Steamy Mist nor Arctic Air help against negative damage) and low DPS we ended up suffering a wipeout. We had a second attempt where we nearly suffered another wipeout, but the blaster returned from AFK and things seemed to turn around from there, letting us knock the rest of the Romuluses out to complete the TF in 1hr 45mins.
After the TF finished, I burned a free respec for Yuki-Onna in anticipation of the I14 respec grant. I respec'd to the following build:
Villain Plan by Mids' Villain Designer 1.401
http://www.cohplanner.com/
[u]Click this DataLink to open the build![u]
Yuki-Onna I14: Level 50 Science Corruptor
Primary Power Set: Ice Blast
Secondary Power Set: Cold Domination
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Leadership
Ancillary Pool: Leviathan Mastery
Villain Profile:
Level 1: Ice Bolt -- Thundr-Dmg/Rchg(A), Thundr-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(3), Dev'n-Dmg/Rchg(3), Dev'n-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(5), Dev'n-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(5), Dev'n-Hold%(7)
Level 1: Infrigidate -- HO:Lyso(A), HO:Lyso(7), ImpSwft-Dam%(9), LdyGrey-%Dam(9), ShldBrk-%Dam(11), Achilles-ResDeb%(11)
Level 2: Ice Blast -- Thundr-Dmg/Rchg(A), Thundr-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(13), Dev'n-Dmg/Rchg(13), Dev'n-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(15), Dev'n-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(15), Dev'n-Hold%(17)
Level 4: Ice Shield -- LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(A), LkGmblr-Def(25), LkGmblr-Rchg+(27)
Level 6: Combat Jumping -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A)
Level 8: Freeze Ray -- BasGaze-Acc/Hold(A), BasGaze-Acc/Rchg(17), BasGaze-EndRdx/Rchg/Hold(23), BasGaze-Acc/EndRdx/Rchg/Hold(25), NrncSD-Dam%(27), G'Wdw-Dam%(29)
Level 10: Glacial Shield -- LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(A), LkGmblr-Def(42), LkGmblr-Rchg+(50)
Level 12: Hurdle -- Jump-I(A)
Level 14: Super Jump -- Jump-I(A)
Level 16: Swift -- Run-I(A)
Level 18: Bitter Ice Blast -- Decim-Acc/Dmg(A), Decim-Dmg/EndRdx(19), Decim-Dmg/Rchg(19), Decim-Acc/EndRdx/Rchg(21), Decim-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(21), Thundr-Dmg/Rchg(23)
Level 20: Arctic Fog -- TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx(A), TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(37), TtmC'tng-ResDam(37), TtmC'tng-EndRdx(37)
Level 22: Stamina -- P'Shift-EndMod(A), P'Shift-EndMod/Rchg(29), P'Shift-EndMod/Acc(36), P'Shift-End%(36), P'Shift-EndMod/Acc/Rchg(50)
Level 24: Ice Storm -- Posi-Acc/Dmg(A), RechRdx-I(31), Posi-Dmg/Rchg(31), Posi-Dmg/Rng(31), Posi-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(33), Posi-Dam%(33)
Level 26: Assault -- EndRdx-I(A)
Level 28: Benumb -- Acc-I(A), Acc-I(39), RechRdx-I(40), RechRdx-I(40)
Level 30: Tactics -- EndRdx-I(A)
Level 32: Blizzard -- Posi-Acc/Dmg(A), RechRdx-I(33), Posi-Dmg/Rchg(34), Posi-Dmg/Rng(34), Posi-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(34), Posi-Dam%(36)
Level 35: Sleet -- RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(40)
Level 38: Heat Loss -- Efficacy-EndMod(A), Efficacy-EndMod/Rchg(39), Efficacy-EndMod/Acc/Rchg(39), Efficacy-Acc/Rchg(42), Efficacy-EndMod/Acc(42), Efficacy-EndMod/EndRdx(43)
Level 41: Shark Skin -- TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx(A), TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(43), TtmC'tng-ResDam(43), TtmC'tng-EndRdx(46)
Level 44: Spirit Shark Jaws -- Decim-Acc/Dmg(A), Decim-Dmg/EndRdx(45), Decim-Dmg/Rchg(45), Decim-Acc/EndRdx/Rchg(45), Decim-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(46), Thundr-Dmg/Rchg(46)
Level 47: Hibernate -- Dct'dW-EndRdx/Rchg(A), Dct'dW-Heal/Rchg(48), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg(48), Dct'dW-Heal(48), Dct'dW-Rchg(50)
Level 49: Vengeance -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A)
------------
Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Sprint -- Clrty-Stlth(A)
Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Scourge
I have some of the IO sets listed above but not all of them; I'm actually missing all the LotGs, Basilisk Gazes and most of the Positron's Blast from the above build, along with one set of Decimation. The main change I made in this build was to drop Mace Mastery for Shark Mastery (or whatever Mako's thing is called). I had originally planned to respec back into Aid Self, but decided Hibernate actually thematically makes more sense for Yuki-Onna (who is a snow spirit) and is probably better in a lot of situations (maybe PvP).
Tuesday night I saw a friend playing a newbie fire/SR brute, and I logged on April Fool (50 thug/TA MM) and malefactored down to duo with him for some level 6ish missions in Port Oakes. He was shocked that I had Aid Other at level 6; I'm a Medicine Pool junky, I guess! We got him to level 8 before calling it a night.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"