Well, team-mates can, in fact, read what the contact says by clicking on the missions tab, and pushing the "more" button, so not only the primary person has a clue.
This did work last time I wasn't the primary person on a team, however the text shown through that is only the "Mission Preview" (I think it's called...?) not any other text, so keeping more important info in that part of your missions helps.
Of course I don't think a lot of people remember to do this, because feedback from missions I've made is always, "I'm the secondary person and I have no idea what's going on, you should fix that."
But yes, there really should be an easier way for secondary players know what is going on...
I'm a bit confused here. I don't think you can select lieutenants or minions from supplied non-custom characters to be the must-defeat character in a boss event. I think you can do that with custom characters in a custom group. For non-custom characters in custom groups, I'm not sure off the top of my head but don't think so.
I'm not sure what this has to do with flavor text, though. NPC chat is readable by all players who choose to read it. This includes boss chat. When I want mobs to speak flavor text, I create patrols, which will speak it reliably.
Mission exit statements are a powerful tool. I try to add a brief synopsis explaining the significance of the previous mission to every mission. This way, the player has to click it to make it go away, whether they read it or not.
<《 New Colchis / Guides / Mission Architect 》>
"At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths'?" - Harlan Ellison
actually, prior to the latest patch you could creat boss spawns using ANY level of enemy, not only bosses.
The advantage of this method was that you could create 'named' enemies that didn't automatically rip a low-level or small team apart.
for example, "Lieutenant Blake" could be someone you need to defeat, but he does not HAVE to be a boss to qualify to have his own flavor text. There are numerous examples of this behavior in the 'dev choice' missions...
I could, for instance, have a fire imp getting 'summoned' by a group of ruularu and pop up, spout something plot-evoking, and attack... obviously this is not intended to be a challenging encounter, and in fact said imp would give no exp if defeated.
In addition I could create a group of enemies all performing a particular emote... such as a drill commander drilling his troops, or a (popular example) Hellion lieutenant throwing molotov cocktails and clapping his hands at the result.
I am looking for an answer, not a workaround.
well, apparently you can do it with 'custom' characters, but based on the recent buffs to custom characters, it looks like that minion you have in the center of the group is going to slaughter the entire lowbie team.
(Yes, my defender yesterday got two-shot by a 'custom' +0 minion.)
Are you absolutely, absolutely sure you could do this before? I have a pretty clear memory of setting up a boss encounter with Crey and that only the boss characters from Crey were listed. That would've been last weekend, prior to the patch.
When you're setting up boss encounters with custom groups, you should have all characters listed, AV down to minion - but I thought that was still working as of yesterday.
And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines
I'd ask the devs to reconsider this change, explaining to them like you explained to us. It sounds very reasonable and seems like it'd greatly further the story-telling potential.
How does your avatar get her chest to shimmy like that without moving the rest of her body? I find it.... hypnotic.
Arc ID#30821, A Clean Break
The only problem with defeating the Tsoo is that an hour later, you want to defeat them again!
"Life is just better boosted!" -- LadyMage
"I'm a big believer in Personal Force Field on a blaster. ... It's your happy place." -- Fulmens
[ QUOTE ]
Are you absolutely, absolutely sure you could do this before? I have a pretty clear memory of setting up a boss encounter with Crey and that only the boss characters from Crey were listed. That would've been last weekend, prior to the patch.
When you're setting up boss encounters with custom groups, you should have all characters listed, AV down to minion - but I thought that was still working as of yesterday.
[/ QUOTE ]
If that's the case, then would adding the non-custom characters to the custom group allow you to create a boss encounter using lieutenants and minions?
Arc ID#30821, A Clean Break
The only problem with defeating the Tsoo is that an hour later, you want to defeat them again!
"Life is just better boosted!" -- LadyMage
"I'm a big believer in Personal Force Field on a blaster. ... It's your happy place." -- Fulmens
Yes, because I remember doing it with a crey 7th generation paragon protector last week 
edit-actually I remember doing it on test, I guess three weeks ago, just prior to it going live. Perhaps it simply didn't make it live.
If so, it's a shame.
It is true, it used to be different - but it was changed several patches ago, not in the most recent patch. Don't remember it being in a note, either.
If I'm soloing in the MA, I always use a tanker or scrapper.
<《 New Colchis / Guides / Mission Architect 》>
"At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths'?" - Harlan Ellison
I am getting a little tired of 'Killer' arcs, I was trying to make something with a good story that ANY lowbie could play with, not just 'solo specialists'.
something that would engage the whole team WITHOUT requiring them to stop in the middle of forming up or fighting to read a huge blurb.
[ QUOTE ]
If that's the case, then would adding the non-custom characters to the custom group allow you to create a boss encounter using lieutenants and minions?
[/ QUOTE ]
I believe so, yes. So that might be a workaround. You don't even need to recreate the whole faction, just put the thing you want to be the boss objective in it, and then set its companion spawn to use the original, non-custom faction.
And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines
This is very annoying.
I made a mission intended for a low level troller or defender.
I repeatedly tested with a fresh L1 TA/A entangling arrow and snap shot. I also tried a 33 Dark/Emp, a 50 tank, took friends in it. It was soloable by all 1-50, but not a complete cakewalk.
It has ...or HAD...a LT filling the Boss slot. Now I need to check if thats still valid, and see what happens with the new ranged attacks. I'm guessing they will tear up little miss Bowpeep. Grrr
If you just use a boss, but set him as a standard difficulty, won't he exemp down for the people on heroic and become a lieutenant?
Arc ID#30821, A Clean Break
The only problem with defeating the Tsoo is that an hour later, you want to defeat them again!
"Life is just better boosted!" -- LadyMage
"I'm a big believer in Personal Force Field on a blaster. ... It's your happy place." -- Fulmens
In Live, I've never been able to set bosses as standard enemies below Boss.
In fact, I haven't ever been able to set standard bosses that are members of custom groups, even (custom groups selected in Boss event, no standard enemies appear). Which is freakin' annoying, since it means all my standard Boss in boss events have the wrong group name.
So I suspect this was a Test > Live change you didn't notice previously.
I noticed that my custom boss in my test map is now spawning at Lt level, even with two people in the group. I even bumped his encounter up to medium.
I guess I am going to have to cycle through every character I've been logged in on while working on MA to see if it is player difficulty rank -related.
[ QUOTE ]
well, apparently you can do it with 'custom' characters, but based on the recent buffs to custom characters, it looks like that minion you have in the center of the group is going to slaughter the entire lowbie team.
(Yes, my defender yesterday got two-shot by a 'custom' +0 minion.)
[/ QUOTE ]
Yeah, ran into that a lot on my own missions. No wonder everyone's afraid of this thing now.
Stand UP.
FIGHT BACK!
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
well, apparently you can do it with 'custom' characters, but based on the recent buffs to custom characters, it looks like that minion you have in the center of the group is going to slaughter the entire lowbie team.
(Yes, my defender yesterday got two-shot by a 'custom' +0 minion.)
[/ QUOTE ]
Yeah, ran into that a lot on my own missions. No wonder everyone's afraid of this thing now.
[/ QUOTE ]
Authors need to exercise some care when designing custom mobs. It's hard to make mobs easy.
Generally, standard/standard minions with scrapper or blaster primary and secondary sets are fairly equivalent to minions that appear in the standard groups. But when you start using hard and extreme, and (paradoxically) tanker attack sets like Super Strength, Mace and Stone, you start running into problems with characters getting one- and two-shot.
The MA really needs an automatic calculation of difficulty based on the presence of EBs, AVs and bosses, and the sets/levels chosen for the mobs, number of ambushes, etc. Right now you have absolutely no idea how tough a mission is going to be, unless the author deigns to tell you in the description.
One thing that would really help players would be to get and use powers that stun and immobilize, and not just focus on damage and defense. If a mob is stunned or can't touch you, they're not going to do much damage. Especially at low levels, an immobilize is almost as good as a hold for the majority of standard mobs.
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
well, apparently you can do it with 'custom' characters, but based on the recent buffs to custom characters, it looks like that minion you have in the center of the group is going to slaughter the entire lowbie team.
(Yes, my defender yesterday got two-shot by a 'custom' +0 minion.)
[/ QUOTE ]
Yeah, ran into that a lot on my own missions. No wonder everyone's afraid of this thing now.
[/ QUOTE ]
Authors need to exercise some care when designing custom mobs. It's hard to make mobs easy.
Generally, standard/standard minions with scrapper or blaster primary and secondary sets are fairly equivalent to minions that appear in the standard groups. But when you start using hard and extreme, and (paradoxically) tanker attack sets like Super Strength, Mace and Stone, you start running into problems with characters getting one- and two-shot.
The MA really needs an automatic calculation of difficulty based on the presence of EBs, AVs and bosses, and the sets/levels chosen for the mobs, number of ambushes, etc. Right now you have absolutely no idea how tough a mission is going to be, unless the author deigns to tell you in the description.
One thing that would really help players would be to get and use powers that stun and immobilize, and not just focus on damage and defense. If a mob is stunned or can't touch you, they're not going to do much damage. Especially at low levels, an immobilize is almost as good as a hold for the majority of standard mobs.
[/ QUOTE ]
used to be... have you checked out how damaging some of the new 'ranged attacks on melee mobs' are?
Nothing like a shuriken that can take off half of a controller's health thrown by a minion.
It's amazing how we are losing functionality with MA, as opposed to gaining it.
Okay, I was trying to recreate a mission chain which was so bolloxed after the patch as to be totally unplayable.
I started to set up 'boss spawn' flavor groups and discovered something highly disturbing:
Boss spawns no longer allowed luts or minions to be the 'main' character! That means that there can be no more groups of low-level enemies standing around sipping coffee, or (in this case) a lot of the 'flavor text' to let the non-leader players know exactly what the heck is going on in the mission.
is this a bug? a known issue? a stealth nerf so essentially everyone but the primary player on a team has no clue what the hell is going on?
All I know is, it renders utterly useless any attempt to give the non-leader players any clue as to the actual storyline during game play, which for me means that the MA is now nothing more than a glorified farm creator.