CoHMR Aggregator (a review thread)

Been a couple days. Work's been a bit demanding so home has been a rather dinner-chores-sleep affair.

So here's a two-day-old review that's been marinating in my brain for a while: A Spanner In The Works, Part I (336662). Verdict - **. Review lower in this thread.

@GlaziusF

Hmm. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the custom AE powersets can be mildly unforgiving. Since this is a two-parter I'll test the waters with my level 50 spine/regen solo monster (all bosses no AVs 2 heroes at +0) and if everything looks lowbie okay I'll bring out a lowbie next time around.

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If you're trying to establish a narration outside the contact here it would help to have either the narration or the contact speak in a different font color and/or font face (bold, italic, etc).

That said, this is a 10-mission arc and you can't spare a mission about fighting crazy haywire electronics? Then again if it's really supposed to be 1-50 there aren't too many canonical things you could use that go 1-50.

Hmm. You should be aware that anybody in a team of or set for 2 heroes is going to encounter custom bosses. So the navbar objective should be more specific - maybe a name.

Also, I'm seeing elec blast/melee, aim, and a psiblaster with buildup, so I'm glad I brought the 50 in to clean house, these are not lowbie-gentle powersets.

Generally Clockwork bosses are Huge model, rather than Male model. I don't know if you're playing up the "converted clockwork" or the "reassembled Clockwork" mode, but if these are supposed to be barely altered Clockwork you should keep it in mind.

Bad lighting in here so I can't pick out exact details on these guys, but the reflection flight on the support class seems rather out of place, given that it's supposed to be like otherworldly.

"Ownage Class" just gives me the image of Freakwork, which may turn out to be true, but there's nothing wrong with "Ohm Class".

The boss trips early for some reason I don't quite understand, so I get his greeting and "something defeated" speech long before I actually get there, and he's tucked into this little side room so it doesn't seem like much of a discovery. Maybe use the same size map with a different end room to it.

He's a boss like the other four I fought to get here, nothing special, not even a name to him.

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Mr. Lonelypants gives me the line "You must defend the Comm Node" which seems odd as he hasn't generally used pronouns. "Defense of Comm Node imperative" would be better.

I mean, unless he's breaking from the collective consciousness to talk differently for one sentence now and again. Which, if true, is a rather understated effect since it just merges with the rest of his dialogue.

A destructible and a runner, in this tiny little warehouse map? Dang, that's a lot to worry about. Especially because the boss has a couple AoE attacks that can take out the node if you're trying to grab aggro nearby.

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So, now to hunt someone down in an outdoor map.

...you know, I really wish they'd put back the giant column of psychic energy into that captive animation. It'd save me wasting 30 minutes clearing out this outdoor map when Penny was right behind the building I started next to.

Eesh.

It's totally unpredictable where an objective shows up on this map, and the spawn difficulty setting puts giant mobs of green Ampwork everywhere.

Also you have the ambush triggering on the wrong objective - if you want them to hound a player escorting Penny the 50 feet to the truck door, they need to spawn on rescue.

I get my first good look at the customs in daycycle. They have kind of a black-and-gold or black-and-rust color scheme, which is kind of unfortunate since most of 'em have roboclaw arms or legs, and those have untintable silvery parts to 'em.

Penny says the King has gone crazy when I complete the rescue. ...it'd be nice to get a little detail there.

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Okay, so I've got possibly four different narrative perspectives here in the next mission briefing: my internal narration, Penny, Clocky, and The Loneliest Clockwork. I have no idea who's telling me what.

I'm just going to listen to the meta stuff in red text that tells me I have to cave the Clockwork King's braincase in.

It's kind of weird to hear a sprocket telling me to turn the King's lights out, but let's go with that.

I engage Clocky, have some cops join the party, go to pull a little clock off some cops so I can get some support fire damage... and it turns out that Clocky, who was about a hundred yards away from the exit, decided to do a runner.

And I was supposed to stop him from escaping. This is the second time you've sprung that surprise, the first time being the Ohm-class in the second mission.

That's not a good surprise to spring. Especially when it's an elite boss, who can't be easily knocked down or immobilized. Especially when he doesn't say anything that's remotely parsable as "I'm outta here!"

Get out, stop tormenting me, all is chaos - that's not "I'm going to bolt now" talk.

---

Hey, congratulations, this is the first I've seen an outdoor factory map in MA.

The problem with this outdoor factory map is that, while there's a nice intricate catwalk structure full of dudes, the actual action almost always happens around the periphery, which is kind of a gyp.

...Nemesis. Oh, sweet brass monkey Jesus, what's HE doing in the nav bar?

He's using an alien mind control device to mess around with the Clockwork King. Because... he can?

I mean, that's why DRECK would use an alien mind control device to mess around with the Clockwork King. But Nemesis's plan is never what he tells you it is.

The soldiers around the device are talking all funny, like they're supposed to be automatons. But Nemesis soldiers are actual people - there's a separate group of automatons.

Huh. Exit popups are scrollable. Who knew?

---

Storyline - **. Go here do this. Go here do this. Go here do this. Go here do this - oh wait you can't. Go here IT WAS ALL A NEMESIS PLOT. I take my own offscreen initiative to find this weird Clockwork outlier in the midst of a bunch of chaos I never see, and once I hit enough robots in the face to get Penny she takes care of producing leads. I am a very destructive Inspector Gadget, full of sound and fury, deducing nothing. I would like to see a/some mission(s) about coming to grips with the chaos and meeting the loneliest sprocket. You could probably fold missions 1 and 2 together and use that amalgam to introduce it, and... well, mission 4 functioned as basically a minimally interactive cutscene about the Clockwork King coming in and going crazy, so that might be replaceble with a TV broadcast in an opening clue or somesuch.

Also I'm not quite sure about this whole "the Clockwork King managed to get a piece of his mind into this little robot" thing. The Clockwork King doesn't have a robot army. He has a bunch of scrap that he's animated with his considerable psychic powers. It acts like a robot army because he expects it to - when he manages to unlock his power, usually in other dimensions, he can float around with hundreds of brass fin funnels and rain screaming psionic doom on the landscape. Clockwork can't take genuinely independent action - they don't even function outside of Paragon City. (Why, yes, there ARE Clockwork in Cap au Diable, now that you mention it. Whatever could be animating THEM? Bzzzt-zzzzl.) So, of course part of his mind is in that little robot. It's in every little robot. The new Clockwork are presumably the parts of his mind that the alien mind control device has... driven insane or put under the control of an alternate personality or something we'll never find out about because it's all in pieces now.

And Nemesis -- well, okay. I can buy this being a part of a Nemesis plot. Just a giant distraction for... some other thing. But why's he on-site supervising this whole thing? Is he more eager to rumble with heroes since he's a clone now, and there are always two or three of him hanging around? And why is he using an alien mind-control device instead of having built his own (and perhaps putting it in the back of a truck or similar)? I'll say it again - "use alien mind control device to tweak with Clockwork King, cause chaos, hang out to rumble with heroes" is a much better Freakshow plot.

Design - *. So I remember there being a small minion with melee, a big minion at range, a lieutenant with reflection-flight and energy blast with aim, and a boss with mace and buildup and psionic blasts of some type. Was that all there was? I don't know. And that's kind of a bad thing. Because the intro missions with the customs were coded to "ramp up" or something similar, I spent most of my time fighting giant hordes of them and never got a chance to get an individual picture, and it doesn't help that they all seem to be basically the same model at different scales.

Also, enemy scaling does not work how think it does. Or maybe it does not work how I think it does. But here's how I think it works, and how it worked when it was originally introduced: enemies less than the player level spawn at their maximum level. Enemies higher than the player level spawn at their minimum level. In no case are enemies outside the player level brought down, or up, to the player level. So, while all your missions are set at 1-50, someone less than 30 will fight level 30 Nemesis and (I think) level 40 AV Nemesis, and see level 40 Psychic Clockwork running around. These are not reasonable obejctives for someone who's, say, level 10 to accomplish, at least not as a level 10. But since the missions are set for 1-50, that level 10 will stay level 10. Based on the range of the reasonable opposition, the arc should probably run from 40-50.

Finally, if I'm supposed to stop something from running away, give me some clue before I even engage it that it's going to try to escape, make its own dialogue clear that it's escaping, and most importantly, give me a reasonable chance of stopping it. Admittedly that last isn't always possible on an outdoor map right now, as I doubt you expected Clocky to park himself 100 yards from the exit to start with.

Gameplay - **. Aim and Build Up mean lots and lots of burst damage, and coupled with a boss's high-tier melee powers are lethal. Not a big problem for a high-level character, but still irritating. And the third and fifth missions are hunts for something, somewhere, on an outdoor map. Since you can find yourself getting shelled by snipers in map 5 and escorting someone over map 3, there's more impetus to clear things out, which can mean a lot of time spent fruitlessly beating things down. And failing missions in ways you didn't even know were possible is also a good bit of frustrating.

Detail - **. It doesn't help my perception of being Inspector Gadget, running around while somebody else did the work, that there were multiple, effectively undistinguished, perspectives in every briefing. Lonelypants spoke half the time in objective terms with no pronouns and half the time in somewhat normal conversation, and while he may have been set off by quotation marks that's no distinction at all with as small as the briefing text is. So I just gave up trying to sort out what "I" was thinking and what was being told to me and by who, and did what the omnipresent red warning text/accept text told me to. Give everybody a different font color if you can, but please bold, italicize, or otherwise offset "my internal narration".

Overall - **. The good news is that most of this is fairly easy to fix. Set everything to a workable level range, give the custom enemy group some distinguishing feature besides size, do something in the briefings to make my narration more distinct from anybody talking to me. The storyline I think would benefit more from including the things I do on my own initiative (battling the electronic chaos, finding the little robot) and it ends kind of anticlimactically. I mean, okay, it's a Nemesis plot and we take out Nemesis clone 528, but Nemesis is just lousy with plots and there's no indication this one's even anything special, although we've spent five entire missions trying to stop it.

First, thanks for the review! I think. It looks like my first outing is a bust, however you've provided me with plenty of constructive feedback. Seems I'm guilty of over-extending myself. I'll be revisiting this arc with a view to adjusting the newbie design errors, poor story-telling and customising the custom critters for greater differentation between ranks.

Currently I'm working on a horror arc that I'm enjoying, but I'll be giving it a thorough going over with a fresh critical perspective before release.

Another review: Talos Vice (338380). Verdict - *****. Review on MA Forums Thread.

Due to a change in the map and tweaks to the gameplay, I am requesting a re-review of Illpracticed Malpractice #246459

Well, it was supposed to be the last day of Halloween, but instead when the servers came back I played some Signal:Noise (341194). Verdict - ****. Review in MA Forums Thread.

So I grabbed some shuteye early Wednesday, and very early Thursday. Here's an arc from two days ago: A Spanner in the Works, Part II (336665). Verdict - **. Review lower in this thread.

@GlaziusF

Carrying this through with the level 50 spine/regen scrapper, all bosses no AVs 2 heroes at +0.

I think it'll turn out to be a wise choice.

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...I'm doing a mission chain for Nemesis. Uh... this arc's alignment Heroic, right? Yeah, that's how it's listed.

Hoo boy.

Let's see what the big brass man has to say.

Just so you know, Nemesis doesn't have much of a reputation for being, uh, trustworthy, or straightforward. If he's telling you to do something, your best bet is to do the exact opposite. ...or wait, he might be planning on you to do that, so it's probably better to pretend you never heard him.

This place is full of amped clockwork. None of them are saying or doing anything special, and for some reason there's an Arachnos terminal in here I have to interact with. (If you want more standard consoles they're wall details.)

...wait, what? The Clockwork King has a bank account and he's still building his army out of scrap?

Okay, okay, I'll roll with this.

---

...wait, what? Nemesis built the Amps for his own use, but then the Clockwork King took control of them when... Nemesis drove him insane.

Usually he's more careful than that.

More silent Amped Clockwork, a defeat all in a warehouse with plenty of crates to hide little robots, and two clickies later, I find out that...

Arachnos has commissioned the Clockwork King to build them new robots.

What?

Can the Clockwork King even build robots at all?

And what's wrong with Black Scorpion, their current builder of new robots? Is he just going to be laid up for months on account of getting magna stoned off of some oil refined from space or something?

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So now I'm planting a bunch of devices that I don't know what they are to "break the Clockwork King's control". Uh huh. Whatever you say, Brassy.

...t-t-TEN? That's a lot. That's as many as five twos.

Also, you can make glowies transparent to start so they become solid when you activate them.

Huh. So the Clockwork King... is apparently going to be using this whole project to plant moles in Arachnos.

...did they even know ANYTHING about this guy when they hired him? I mean, "can psychically control machines" isn't exactly a big secret.

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So now at Nemesis's urging I head over to an Arachnos base, clear it out, and find a single new trooper at the top level.

...I'm kind of embarrassed to say I didn't get a chance to look at him. What rank is he? I was AoEing down the other members of his spawn and he wilted a while before even some lieutenants dropped.

Maybe I just got super lucky with crits.

Oh, and all this time Black Scorpion was paying the Clockwork King to develop stuff! Okay, now everything makes sense. Because Black Scorpion so often doesn't.

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Huh. If enough troopers are produced they reach a critical mass? Like, these guys are self-replicating? We could be looking at a red-and-black goo scenario?

And the factory is... an abandoned warehouse.

Okay, true, if this had been a defeat all on an outdoor factory map I would have blown a gasket.

...it doesn't even seem to be a defeat all. At least the navbar doesn't think so, despite Nemesis's instructions to leave nothing standing.

Once again, these glowies should be fading in from transparent.

For some reason these lieutenants are worth about half what the Arachnos minions were in the last map. And they certainly wilt faster - I'm guessing Arachnos armor is just high lethal resist, and shield defense can't come close to that.

Ah, that's why they're worth so little - no minions in the enemy group. Maybe no bosses either. If you don't have any more room for customs, you could use Arachnos tarantulas to fill out the ranks, they're Black Scorpion's purview.

After a good old slugfest, he goes down, cursing my name. Not even a closing clue to show for it.

As far as Black Scorpion's opening rant goes, you can use $heshe to put in the appropriate gender.

And Nemesis tells me good job and he'll keep me in mind? ...uh, who is this guy and what has he done with Nemesis?

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Storyline - *. So... this is Nemesis. The same guy who's such a giant egotist his elite troops are all robot copies of himself. And he's trusting me to bring down the Clockwork King and put a stop to Arachnos' plans because... it's the right thing to do. Not for any personal gain of his. He doesn't even say anything about planning to fill in the robotic world-conqueror gap. I mean, the dude does have giant brass ones, enough to just tell a hero about some threat to the world, even though it'd lead to his ascendance, because heroes stop robot threats to the world. But there's no indication he's getting anything out of this, or that he's anything more than GENERIC_HIGH_LEVEL_TECH_CONTACT_05. Which really should not be happening with Nemesis.

So here are two options for... well, the whole story, really. If the last mission was a Freakshow "plot" instead of a Nemesis plot, then some repentant Freak tells you about the fate of the mind control device - it was salvaged by somebody not them, which leads you through ampwork and a very confused Clockwork King to find out that Arachnos is looking to give their fortunatas robot slaves.

Or, the last mission was Nemesis but not using mind control at all, just motorized brass bits that looked like scrap but which he could remotely control as part of a Clockwork, and he was using this psychosomatic feedback to drive the Clockwork King insane. But with the device gone, Kingy has access to largely functional Nemesis tech, and Penelope Yinstop wants you to keep him from doing something he's going to regret with the new power.

Design - **. The custom group used in the final mission needs proper minions and bosses in it, otherwise it's a bunch of somewhat difficult fighting with less reward than punching minions. And the new troopers look pretty keen with the red shields but don't seem to be as resilient as the rest of Arachnos. Also, I don't really buy "abandoned warehouse" (also in the fifth mission) as a workable robot factory. Maybe if you swapped the maps for the second and fifth missions, and put the first one in an abandoned office or lab or something so you wouldn't have two missions in a row on the same map.

Gameplay - ***. I'm not a big fan of whatever scaling puts giant swarms of blues and greens all over the place. It makes defeat alls more frustrating because there's always some outlier who bolts, and it makes stealthing clickable objectives more frustrating because there's more things spread around to see and hit you. And the Ampwork are just as bursty as they were last arc, with all the attendant consequences.

Detail - **. The missions were pretty much empty. Clocky, the prototype, and Black Scorpion were the only ones who ever said or did anything special. This made Nemesis the prime source of information on my plans and the enemies' motivations, and he has serious credibility problems, to put it lightly.

Overall - **. This arc inherits some of its problems (the seed of the plot, the Ampwork) from the previous arc, and makes some of its own mistakes (lack of optional objectives or conversations outside the contact, custom group with abnormally low rewards). There's a lot here that can be productively overhauled.

Thanks for suffering through the second half of my story GlaziusF. I appreciate you playing something that was obviously not very satisfactory.

To clarify the plot; In Part One Nemesis gains access to Rikti mind-control technology and uses it to control the mind of the Clockwork King. With this control he gets the King to create Amped Clockwork who are indirectly under Nemesis' command. This has the unintended consequence of compartmentalising the mind of the Clockwork King causing his psychic powers to begin affecting regular electronic devices and sends him off on a psychotic rampage across Paragon. Your contact 10N3R is a new Amped Clockwork who the King has actually managed to maintain partial control over, and hence he asks for your aid to sort the situation out. He is a Spanner In The Works.

In Part Two with Paragon's technology back under control and the Nemesis plot foiled you are contacted by Nemesis as he doesn't want anyone other than himself to have access to the Amped. Through the course of the investigation you learn that Black Scorpion, chief robo-master of Arachnos has also discovered the Amped's existance and is funding the Clockwork King to create an army of Amped Arachnotroopers. Luckily you investigated despite being contacted by Nemesis who at first blush is a villain a hero wouldn't work with/for. Because if you hadn't then the self-replicating Amped Arachnotroopers would very soon have spread across the globe with the aid of Arachnos.

tl;dr version: Nemesis gains control of Clockwork Kings' minions and creates new ones, Nemesis loses control of said minions, Black Scorpion gains control of the Amped, you pummel Black Scorpion to stop them.

Hope that helps understand a plotline that I now see was too convoluted.

Hey, I may actually get some arcs done this weekend. Keen.

Last night's was The Tragic Tale of the Clockwork Queen (25451). Verdict - **. Review lower in this thread.

@GlaziusF

Hittin' this one up on my ice/axe tanker, low 40s, all bosses no AVs 2 heroes at +0.

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Man, dude, stop leaning on your period and give some love to the enter key here. Wall of text is kinda non-parseable.

Weird. Judging from the doc's unhinged rant this place was a robotics lab, but it bears a certain relationship to an office.

If you want to "camouflage" the research files in with the other clickies, give them all the same plural.

Ah, it's an office/cave/sewer. For... some reason. I guess it's supposed to represent the Freakshow attack?

Huh. Okay, looking over the clues, I don't get what she could learn about robotic AI by studying the Clockwork King. He doesn't have a robot army, he has psychically controlled piles of scrap.

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Dude does not stop with the run-on sentences. ...also he's about the worst liar ever.

But okay, let's go fight Nemesis. ...somewhere. Oh! Actually in the streets!

But this is Kings Row, not Founder's Falls. There are more upscale-looking neighborhood maps, but it's best just to make up a name the way the devs do when they send you to one of these. There are plenty of places generally under solid protection from the War Walls that villains nevertheless manage to find.

You need another "fake plural" here, and the box of possibly Clockwork parts needs a much shorter name. It's too tiny to see when it autowraps to the target window.

...wait, what? Nemesis is trying to take control of the Clockwork?

Why? For use as spies or something? Because they're really not that much of a power upgrade on anything Nemesis has.

And again with the talk about the Clockwork King having some kind of brain-to-robot interface. His robots should not work at all. There is no motive force aside from his own formidable psychic powers. The "Clockwork Captive" and "Mind of a King" arcs spell that out pretty explicitly.

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I get to a certain point in the ensuing warehouse and my NPC dialogue window gets bombarded with Nemesis patrols, Clockwork patrols, and what may be a fight in progress?

Most of the dialogue's copies, too. If you're going to have multiple patrols, create one talky edition and fill the rest up with silence. NPC dialog is basically broadcast-range now inside missions, so you don't need to worry about people missing something.

For some reason, the mission complete clue I get here is the same thing that minion says when I spring it from Nemesis.

...and apparently the Clockwork pulled a fast one on Nemesis? Man, getting punk'd by Clockwork is not the kind of thing you want on your resume.

But as far as I could work out their plan goes like this:

1) Get researcher to investigate them.
2) Wait for Nemesis to be interested in researcher.
3) Wait for Freakshow to kidnap researcher and make handoff to Nemesis.
4) Wait for Nemesis to bring researcher to the place where she usually goes to get Clockwork parts.
5) Kidnap researcher.

...I'm not sure exactly why parts 2-4 are necessary, here.

The debrief ends with "Why do you get the feeling the good Doctor is not telling you everything ?" run into the same paragraph as everything else.

...is that supposed to be my own commentary, there? It would help to set it off with a different color or text style, and maybe a different paragraph too.

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Wait, what? Those are clockwork from the Psychic Clockwork dimension? But.. but...

The Psychic Clockwork aren't independent robots, any more than the Clockwork Clockwork are! They're scrap animated by their dimension's Clockwork King too! It's just that he's got over his fixation on being a roboticist and instead rains screaming psionic doom down on the landscape with his giant collection of brass Fin Funnels!

When our dimension's Clockwork King gets serious (springing Penny in the LGTF, for example) his entourage throws around psionics too.

...and it's a defeat all in a sprawling, 5-floor tech lab.

With tons of patrols and battles around, all saying exactly the same thing.

And it seems like the apparent three important objectives (defeat Nemesis, help Crey, rescue the doctor) are ALL in the last room.

...who's supposed to be guarding the doctor? There's a Jaeger speaking up about defeating organics, but that may just be coincidence on his part.

Hmm. So maybe "Help Crey" wasn't in the last room. I've cleared it out but the mission hasn't completed yet.

Time to go back and search through all the floors again! Oh boy!

Ah. Okay, "help crey, defeat all clockwork" was the name for the defeat all objective, as I find out when I clear the last couple pixels of health off an Oscillator stuck on the underside of a platform.

So it doesn't get confused for two objectives you should probably call it "clear Crey lab of all clockwork" or something without a comma in it.

But I'd be more in favor of dropping it entirely and putting glowies or something in if you want people to explore the whole map.

I get a mission complete clue which is pretty much the same as the clue I got for freeing Dr. Trask, with some quote marks around it.

That mission was 400 tickets big! That's a lot of all to defeat.

...wait, what? They actually picked up the entire Clockwork King from his home dimension and brought him here?

Didn't they get the crib notes from Portal Corp that the dude was so psychically ripped he singlehandedly destroyed all human life on the planet?

I mean, I know Crey's pretty insane, but picking up some dude like that just to make better prosthetics?

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Hmm. Y'know, all that stuff in the navbar name of the mission, that looks like a list of objectives, should probably be a list of objectives once you get in the mission. The navbar name is just too long.

So I go poking around the standard Kingly lair, drop Babbage at the door, and take out a couple of dimensional stabilizers, which are supposed to be keeping the Clockwork King in this dimension... somehow.

What, did they use these to kidnap him?

Doc Trask has already been subjected to the fate I was supposed to prevent when I walk in the door.

On the one hand, that rankles. On the other hand, you can't very well have an arc about a Clockwork Queen and not get a Clockwork Queen.

The machine that did it is sitting around for me to bust up, but I don't know what good it'll do and its guards don't vomit ellipses into the chat box like everything else around here, so I leave it be for now.

This is some pretty sweet visual work on the Queen and her guards, but I feel obliged to say that the Clockwork King already has robots that create other robots - they're the Assembler Duke/Prince.

Well, the King shows up, lording over the pile of bones, but with a new ally I drop him fairly quickly.

Ah, that's what the machine does. Completes the mission. ...and summons a horde of the new-type clockwork.

I'm not sure why it particularly needs to be destroyed, though. Its grisly work here is done.

And I get another odd comment when I tag back to the contact that is... supposed to be my inner monologue? Maybe?

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Storyline - *. So a doctor wants to make better prosthetics (that's cool) and thinks the Clockwork King's robots are the key to it (um, no, unless we got psychic veterans) so researchers kidnap the fully ascendant Clockwork King who scrubbed his world clean of life, to study him. (WHAT.)

My first problem is that there's no "there" there. The Clockwork King doesn't have an army of functional robots, but psychically animated scrap metal. DATA has known this since I was a wee Security Level 20 scamp running errands for Colleen Saramago.

My second problem is that bringing something that destroyed its world into this one without any apparent precautions is a cataclysmic level of dumb.

My third problem is with the Clockwork's plan to retake the researcher -- as outlined above, it goes through the completely unnecessary steps of a handoff through Freakshow to Nemesis and subsequent baiting of Nemesis to a particular location.

You know what makes sense here? The Clockwork King always wanted to be a brilliant roboticist. Maybe there's a universe where he actually was one -- and this is the logic the doctor follows in hopping a portal to Epsilon Tau 27-2. Sure enough, Kingy seems to be rather eager to make progress on her designs - but Nemesis catches wind of things and et cetera et cetera, and the entire time the King just wanted another robot intelligence because it gets lonely talking to yourself all the time. Maybe the jammers in the final mission are designed to lock his dimension off, and they get finished just as you show up.

Design - ****. Extra points for the Clockwork Queen and the little builders - her design is very striking, and while the little guys don't make narrative sense they at least look the part. Minus points for putting the little builders in a group with no bosses or minions, making them worth about as much as half a sprocket apiece.

Gameplay - **. Some of the enemy choices are a bit frustrating. Psychic Clockwork are very small, like to keep at range, and scatter easily from knockback. Nemesis snipers have a giant perception range, which means they can hit you from about a city block away with a clear line of sight, and the outdoor city maps definitely provide clear lines of sight. Those are fairly minor problems - the big one is clearing an entire 5-floor tech lab of Clockwork, when at any given time one could just dart off and get lost behind the scenery.

Detail - *. The contact briefing is just a wall of text, which is very hard to read at standard resolution. Break it up some with double line breaks to create paragraphs and offset some ideas from others. This is especially vital if some of "my hero's thoughts" are supposed to be mixed in there somewhere, and they need to be different from the other text, in color or style or both, so I can figure out when "I" am supposed to be speaking. Also break up some of the in-mission dialogue with spaces so it fragments more cleanly across lines instead of just overrunning the edge.

Overall - **. Something needs to be done about the defeat all on the giant lab map. I'm in favor of cutting it out entirely. And while the Clockwork Queen is some nice visual work, and the outcome of the last mission interesting in isolation, the plot that led there was pretty unbelievable. And I wonder how much "internal monologue" I missed because it was just lumped in with the rest of the contact text.

Tonight's arc is a re-review of Illpracticed Malpractice (246459). Verdict - ****. Review in MA Forums Thread.

...and that's the last of my queue! Looks like it's time to go back to random arcs.

Tonight's random arc: Apples of Contention (3184). Verdict - *. Review lower in this thread.

@GlaziusF

Since this seems to need a formidable solo character, running this on a mid-40s DB/Fire brute. All bosses no AVs 2 villains at +1.

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Ah, Eris. How many people only know you from the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy? Probably too many.

DJ Zero's dialogue ends with "Could you do me a solid and check the orchard from where they came?"

While, uh, grammatically correct to never end a sentence with a preposition, "where they came from" is modern casual usage, and it's hard to imagine DJ Zero being very far from modern casual.

Also he should say something about popping a portal open for you, because he does that thing on a regular basis.

Hmm. Seems like a pretty monolithic custom group. Arch/TA minions who occasionally drop a flash arrow on you and pop Aim, DM/Regen lieutenants, DM/Kin bosses, with annoying Siphon Speed action.

Nothing notable in this mission aside from a glowie... which then chains into three destructables. Locations don't work too well in an outdoor map, so now I run around looking for stuff to break.

And that chains into a boss fight.

Looks like Extreme Stone Melee with buildup/Dark Armor. Seismic Smash and Tremor hurt. A lot.

Unbuilduped, Seismic Smash does over 1000 damage, with 35% smash resist on my part. Combined with the ticking aura that's a oneshot.

Just insult to injury when he pops Soul Transfer for an unavoidable stun and then tags me with Seismic while I'm reeling.

(sorting through the clues after the battle, the objective that drops the feeling of dread should be dragged to be before the crate-busting and boss fight.)

---

Ah, discord. Time to safeguard a bow.

Weapon rack, looks like a standard destructible. I know an ambush is coming so I insp up.

Strangely, on approaching the bow I get a clue drop about how I lost my memory of something, which is echoed in the mission-complete clue. I'm betting that was like a phantom captive or ally or something when the bow took damage?

---

Now to seek the legendary ointment. Mmm, panacea.

Back to another outdoor map, looks like.

The same woods map as the first mission.

The boss is some sort of spines... I don't know. No visible armor. Was she actually pain dom?

I don't even get a bit in the system text for taking her out, let alone a clue.

I roam around the map for a good while before finding an urn down a side forest passage, tucked away at the very end.

Bit frustrating, but at least I have the magic goop I came for.

---

Oh dear. A solid parade of bosses? That's actually terrible for XP these days, with the reduction. You can't have known about it at the time, of course.

But while it was soloable with a few hiccups until now it's veered into terrible territory.

Especially since all the bosses are DM/Kin. Can't hit anything, no powers recharge, enemy damage stacked up to the heavens.

"Wait 30 minutes for the mission to auto-fail" is not a reasonable option. "Find a team" is not a reasonable option.

A solid parade of DM/Kin bosses is not a reasonable opposition.

Eros comes free. Limos (DBlast/Miasma with Blackstar) follows. Eris (Broadsword/shield AV downgrade) is next up.

I get her down to a pixel of health, and then time's up. Can't carry enough lucks to not die and insights to actually be able to hit her.

---

Storyline - ****. And DJ Zero gets Eros out anyway. Pretty serviceable story, delving more into the movers and shakers of Grecian myth than the existing one(s). There was a bit of something that didn't seem to go anywhere with my odd amnesia concerning the second mission. Maybe it's spelled out in the actual ending, though absent console commands I'm probably not going to see that.

Design - ***. I was kinda expecting the Roman caves or Eleusis at some point, not the same outdoor woods map twice. Rather a pain to find glowies and other objectives, at least it can be - the enemies really need some kind of particle aura or notable animation to make them stand out. And for the last mission, springing Eros should be the last link in the chain, not one of the first, since I really have no reason to stick around and beat down anyone when he comes free.

Gameplay - *. I was only able to survive the last mission through the liberal application of temp stealth and Nectar, and even then I was just a bit short of actually beating it, even with a Shivan fruitlessly trying to pound on Eris. The "special bosses" were a good step up from the rank and file, though the Stone Melee one from the first mission was entirely unreasonable. Overall the custom group seemed pitched to be frustrating, all debuffing accuracy with the bosses peeling off damage and attack speed to boot. And I'll say it again - a last map full of all bosses isn't rewarding anymore, and given the incredible self-stacking capable of /kin bosses with, say, Transference, Siphon Power, and Siphon Speed, it's just not reasonable to throw a solo at it -- or a team for that matter, unless that team stacks enough defenses to never be hit or enough lockdown to hold down bosses forever. And if that's the case then the normal mix of enemies would be more rewarding than solid bosses. They about came up to minions on the reward scale.

Detail - ****. Everything's reasonably done, though the various powersets on display may or may not be related to the description of their related enemies. Then again, the description may not relate to anything the game can model.

Overall - *. Not an average. Would have been good fun without the nigh-impossible final mission. Saying "don't run the arc" isn't reasonable, as especially given the recent changes to XP for groups with missing ranks, a normal spawn for a good team would be a better payoff than just solid bosses. I counted 8 customs (3 in the custom group, 3 sub-bosses, Eris and Eros) and not much text, so you could, if you wanted, put together another minion/LT/Boss arrangement and use that enemy group for a mission, then mash 'em both together for the final map.

But that aside, the senseless boss rush is what sinks it for me. If I got Eros as an archery/TA or archery/empathy ally and the mission was full of normal enemies I'd have a much more positive impression of the whole thing.

Care to take a look at the Patriot Palace Massacre? (#342403) Be brutal, I'm always looking to improve.

Any chance of my arc The Fall of Rapture (299507) getting some feedback? Thanks

@GlaziusF

Since this is supposed to be solo unfriendly, playing this on a pretty tough solo: my level 50 spine/regen scrapper. All bosses no AVs 2 heroes at +0.

---

Wow. Taking orders from a box of scrap electronics. How the mighty have fallen.

Well, not like I have any better leads on this strangeness among AIs. ...or any idea what it actually represents.

When I spring the ally in the mission (grav/kin seems to be a natural synergy) I get a clue from DATA that "the outbreaks are getting worse". Well, okay, but... WHAT's getting worse? Are they shutting down? All facing the same direction and listening? Doing multiple indefinite encores of Hello Dolly?

Fighting goes pretty well, but this dude needs to not have Dimension Shift. He pulls it out rarely enough but I'm talking, like, EVER.

Ah, that's what we're here for. The HVAS.

Something... else (?) cuts in through its battle diagnostics as it goes down.

Apparently its mobo got gooped up but given how much blue the weapons put out that's not surprising.

My contact seems to think he knows what's going on and we can take care of this easily, but the arc length suggests something else is at work.

---

My contact says "this time it's an Arachnos lab", which I guess means that's where the next.. major outbreak is? Or clue to what's going on here?

On springing an Arachnos trooper I find out that the virals had better not get at the Arbiter drones. But.. aren't they kinda made of people?

This mission features a larger cast of viral robots, including what looks like custom repair bots and drone controllers.

Robot chatter is kinda amusing. The boss less so, since he manages to land a Siphon Speed, run away, get stuck behind some crates, and summon up a giant swarm of robots while we're dealing with his entourage.

Interesting concept though.

---

My contact seems to be throwing more and more apostrophes in as time goes on. He's getting a bit impenetrable.

Hmm. It looks like, in creating the "besieged Malta", you've broken the usual moratorium on Sappers the game generally imposes.

Sometimes they show up multiple times per spawn!

I spring Crimson, who talks up my contact but I get a note in the clue window that there's something suspicious about him.

Apparently this is supposed to come after I find the intel about Crimson being in China, but it's in the last compartment (along with the parts) and Crimson was in the first one.

---

Hmm. Does the end of the briefing suggest that my contact is being compromised, too?

There seem to be two quarreling factions here. It doesn't look as though the conversion process works well on things from a parallel earth, as they've just started fighting everything.

Inside I find... oh. A PPD Quantum who has... somehow conjured up a stone mallet to beat on some robots?

Anyway, I free him and then take on a boss... with an escort made up entirely of other boss robots.

Once he goes down, the system text says something about how the news is both good and bad and I should get back to my contact... but I haven't found any clues on this mission at all.

I go back through the mission, find another Quantum, but... that's it. No clues to be had.

---

So, one last mission.

I'm not really sure why this one is supposed to be the hard one considering the hoops I've jumped through before. Is it the last ambush of lieutenants?

I get three boss allies, two of whom slaughter their guards before I get there thanks to their damage auras.

Four destructibles later, it's all over. Not even a final boss to kiss goodnight.

---

Storyline - ***. This is a hard one. I picked up that something was weird when the bosses started calling me "variable" in the middle of their rants. At first I thought it might be a perjorative, but no, it was being used literally. I'm not sure exactly how to interpret what's going on here, though. The underlying "test" slips through more and more each mission, my contact is furthering my distrust of it by calling out its own mistakes -- and apparently my hero takes the last mission at face value? I get that the whole thing is a dry run by some would-be AI overlord but how am I supposed to take the souvenir? "Well played old chap see you next game"? Weren't people actually getting attacked by these things? How much of it all was a lie? Because I'm disposed to toss a comically-large anarchist bomb into that bin of parts and start hunting down the Perfect Machine fo'realz. Putting innocent people in harm's way just so you can avoid doing it on a grand scale is hardly laudable.

I can buy the idea of finding myself inside a robot uprising and having it turn out to just be a test, but... an actual test, on a more limited scale. Maybe DATA's looking to get some more combat data off a bunch of captured robots, and "what do you mean they called you fleshbag and ranted about organic tyranny, oh these heroes and their fantasies". Or just... someone, somewhere I can actually trust.

Design - ***. Not too sure about the wings on the summoner robot. They seem a bit extraneous. Aside from that the customs are pretty reasonable.

Not sure about the progression, though. Elite boss first map, normal boss second map, boss clusters on the third and fourth maps (on the third map they take out my supposed ally)... and the last map is just a bunch of destructibles, without any guaranteed boss?

There's a problem with the order objectives show up on the third map, in that I find Crimson before anything vouching for him, and I had Titans show up blocking the door of several compartments so Crimson actually bit it trying to fight them.

I realize you're supposed to avoid the Titans, but since they can park themselves in front of the passages between compartments it may be better to put some Herc Titans in the rogue spawn as well. A sufficiently difficult battle will put a Zeus in sometimes anyway.

Gameplay - ***. And peel out the Sappers from the rogue Malta, can you? Not using the standard Malta spawn means Sappers are fair game in spawns, sometimes multiple times per. If you wanted to make a balanced Titan squad you could put together some sapper stick/gun drone amalgam to be a minion, maybe. Trying to endure focused fire from five bosses in mission 5 while beating down one of them was also a bit much, even if I had two potential bosses as distractions.

Also, mission 4 had me backtracking looking for some kind of clue I was supposed to have found, per the system message for the police chief defeat -- but as far as I could see there wasn't anything there.

Detail - ***. Or maybe I can actually trust my contact, I just can't understand him because of all the faux folksy apostrophes. Here's the thing about English - it's only 25% efficient, so it can tolerate a bit of noise and still get the message across. Tossing in apostrophes constitutes noise, and there are usually far too many for me to understand a sentence at a quick run. Pare them down by about half, maybe more.

Aside from that, everything looked more or less alright, but putting a faction of "shameless self-inserts" in the last mission massacred the last chance I had of taking it remotely seriously.

Overall - ***. A more understandable contact, a plot that left me sure of something, a final mission that was actually as challenging as advertised, or prior enemy groups that weren't composed entirely of bosses would help this out.

Last night's random arc: Catching Lightning in a Bottle (60639). Verdict - ***. Review lower in this thread.
Tonight's first random arc: Impossible Kung Fu Mission (111367), previously reviewed. Verdict - ****.
Tonight's second random arc: Tangled Webs and Reflecting Mirrors 1: The Deal (133330). Review... not forthcoming. The arc seems to have been invalidated by an update and subsequently removed.
Tonight's third random arc: Origins - Volume 1 (57077). Review also not forthcoming. The author has three extant arcs and this one seems to have been removed.
Tonight's fourth random arc: Leaving Crey (301947), previously reviewed. Verdict - ****.
Tonight's FIFTH random arc: Through a Portal, Darkly (287046). Note new arc ID. Verdict - ***. Review lower in this thread.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a level 50 spine/regen scrapper, all bosses no AVs 2 heroes at +0.

---

Okay, it generally helps to offer up a statement of the mission objective in the mission briefing.

Carnies... and the Circle. Uh, okay. Let's see what this is, then.

The cops have already collared one boss when I step in. Good for them.

Oh gawww. No! Bad! Arch-Mages are like bosses with 75% resistances to everything! DO NOT USE IN REGULAR SPAWNS UNLESS YOU LIKE INFLICTING PAIN ON PLAYERS.

And then I find the boss. I was expecting a joke on how you occasionally get Strongmen voicing Carnie lines, but nope, boss level War Mace/Waste Your Time, er, Regen with Instant Healing.

Apparently he's decided to take off his helmet and make a name for himself, which is kind of odd since as far as I knew the Strongmen were just psychically dominated meatwalls.

He's about halfway up the building. The ascent continues!

Hmm. A cloud of steamy mist with no obvious source. Ah! Hello, ally.

So somehow, I know Shanghai is hanging out here? ...alright.

Ah. There she is. After I run downstairs, to the entrance, and back up, she was in the boss room all along.

Okay. Her body hop is a sort of free-roaming thing that doesn't need physical contact? It would have been nice of you to say something about that, Lumi.

---

Carnies raiding the Library? I can buy what they'd be doing there, but it honestly strikes me as a bit off. Generally they prefer to put on a show and siphon off some exuberance. If they're going to kill someone then they take the whole thing so it doesn't go to waste, but absent any particular malice on the Circle's part I can't see them wanting the Library.

Both the Circle and the Carnies operate under their own twisted territorial moralities. I guess the Library might be particularly tempting even if they're not planning to consume it, just use it as a large "captive audience".

Two important notes: first, allies or captives with auras will run them and damage their captors. They may even kill them before the hero actually shows up.

Second, not only can battles start when heroes aren't there, it's exceedingly rare for them to start when heroes ARE there.

I get an electric blast ally but it doesn't seem to be necessary, this is just a normal Carnie boss. She even pops her Mask of Vitiation trying to handle one of the battle groups that gets out of hand. (Air Thorns fly EVERYWHERE.)

Seems an awful waste of a big outdoor map just to put one boss fight in it.

---

And, alright, there's a massive prison break in progress by some factions who want to get the villain to work for them, so I go in to smack all of them upside the head. Works for me.

Huh. Looks like a whole bunch of other villain groups have decided to show up. After the same guy?

Judging by his description it would seem so.

Also when I pop Ohmboy free I get some cop reinforcements who are allies. Not sure what to make of that.

Also Shanghai shows up immediately after I spring Junk, when she should probably be around after I drop him off if the PPD allies who show up then are supposed to be an indication. Pretty sure that "rescue" is the tag for the spring and the objective is for the delivery.

Lumi says I'm "right to be suspicious of Ohmboy". Did I... have a reason for that? Given all the other possibilities crawling around that prison compound I'm not sure I'd make the leap automatically.

---

The Circle would apparently steal and use a piece of tech to keep Shanghai out of their library. Doesn't seem their style.

But they're here busting things up.

Shanghai in her new body is here, as is Acupuncher.

...okay, I actually expected a puncher out of that name, but whatever.

I find Dr. Aldritch, who tells me he's finished the prototype and runs off... with no clue of where it is. Perhaps this "Ophelia" in the navbar knows where to find it.

Apparently she's a Carnie Ring Mistress. She doesn't say anything, and drops down off the top rope while I'm fighting some Circle.

When I take down the last jugglers in her spawn, the mission completes. Somehow. No clue, no system text, no nothing.

Oh! Okay, the mission was just to spring the doc. ...so why didn't it complete until I took out the Carnie?

---

And now it's time for the denouement. That's French for "when the villain gets it". ...on a cargo ship. Um, yay?

The ship is full of Freakshow. Why is the ship full of Freakshow?

Anyway, I pick up the various swapped-around people on my way to the back, take out Junk (MA/Robotics), and then drop Shanghai, who's inside Acupuncher, a Spine/Waste Your Time, er, Regen with access to Instant Healing.

And, jammed in that body and focus-fired by four ally bosses, she doesn't have much chance. Once Instant Healing drops, anyway.

And that's all. Not even a souvenir for my troubles.

---

Storyline - ***. Couple problems. I don't really buy the reasons given, but I can buy the Carnies and the Circle coming to blows, especially if the Circle are doing something in one of the Carnies' adopted neighborhoods. In fact, that can be part of the investigation in the first mission - the Circle grabbed a few people the Carnies considered themselves as protecting, then the Carnies jacked some Circle mages, and back and forth et cetera. Also, why does Shanghai keep jumping between heroes? A keen desire for irony? Seems like it'd be better to jump into some innocent civilian and then slip under the radar, at least with a manhunt on. (Also I was kinda expecting Shanghai to brain-jump in at least one of the missions, with that ally betrayal code that's so popular these days.)

Design - ***. Some issues with timing and completion - a boss fight as the only required objective on an outdoor map (if the ally was required, he freed himself), the early appearance of Shanghai at the prison break, the seemingly superfluous Carnie boss in mission 4. Also, the last map is full of Freakshow. I don't know why. Did they all just decide to hop a lift to the Rogue Isles? Does Junk have a large following of Freakshow fanboys?

Gameplay - ****. No real annoyances, aside from the Arch-Mages and the self-imposed backtracking in the first mission. But the final mission was a bit of a letdown. Four bosses vs. an EB is more than an even match just on the face of it. I appreciate seeing them again for the comedy one-liners, but if you have space maybe you can rank 'em down a bit to represent the lack of expertise in controlling another hero's powers? (Shanghai doesn't operate under this limitation, obviously.)

Detail - ***. I don't think I get any clues after mission 2. Especially since I was supposed to be drawing conclusions about stuff, like Ohmboy or Dr. Aldritch's device, that didn't get a chance to really shine in the limited space available in the NPC dialog window. Ophelia in mission 4 is a complete enigma, with no dialogue, system text on defeat, or clue text on death.

Overall - ***. Needs a better Carnie/Circle backing story and a little more consideration given to objective timing. And some more clues never hurt anybody.

@GlaziusF

Taking a look at this with a level 50 spine/regen scrapper, all bosses no AVs 2 heroes at +0.

Also, this arc ID seems to have changed to 287046.

---

Hmm. Starts off pretty standard - the Council take some parts to make a portal to Reichsman's world. I think they've actually been there a couple times already, but it's not like old plans suddenly become useless.

So I drop the boss, who tells me the parts are in another castle, and go running through the base to find some clues as apparently I picked one of the three routes without any glowies on it. I find several decoy crates and a terminal with a shipping destination, which has a nice ambush attached to it that would have meant something if the mission didn't just complete.

Yeah, I know it's almost impossible to do anything linear or guaranteed in a Council base. Not like it's a giant slog to go running around, though.

---

Okay, so the Council... bought black-market portal tech from someone else? I'm not sure what the comment about the shipping codes is supposed to mean, here.

Hmm. After I empty one crate I get a clue about all of them. I realize this is a limitation of the way clues for collection objectives work, but could you maybe fold that in with an end-of-the-mission clue? It's like being told in advance "okay, you're not going to accomplish anything, but here's some busywork".

It especially rankles since the map is huge and the crates take a while to examine.

On inspecting them all I fight a Vampyr who believes I've ninjaed his parts. He tries to flee at 25% (I believe) which is credible but doesn't really have much of a chance at success. He should probably bolt around the same time his support comes in if catching him is supposed to be a challenge.

The end clues for this mission and the last one have been redundant with things I've found in the missions themselves. I have two clues from this mission describing the scrap metal, and nothing else.

We actually possess text formatting tools in the Architect. You don't have to use underscores for emphasis. And "jacked" seems rather informal given the rather straightfaced tone the doc has been using to date.

---

And now, to a remote world to try and stop the Council from finding the Council Empire.

Good job on the technicians' part. Nemesis shows up trying to take down the Archon too, but the ambush gets caught up in a side group I didn't clear. No love lost there.

Though given how many Nemesises are out there in the multiverse I can't draw any conclusions about this being interference from Nemesis on the mainland.

Outdoor maps are a tricky thing to populate. Too few objectives and somebody can be running around through a giant mass of spawns to find the one thing that matters. Too many and you up the odds that one of them's going to end up in a blind corner or otherwise overlooked.

I think with, what is it, 7 destructibles, 4 hostages, and a boss fight? This map has just a few too many. It helps a bit for recognition if the objectives are "noisy" -- the beacons themselves are just fine but the techs, boss, and computer could do with some poses with extra geometry or particle effects.

Again, I get an end-mission clue pretty much replicating the boss defeat clue - the Archon told me where he came from, so I'm going there. ...so was that internecine fighting that led to the scrap shipment, then?

---

Ah, a Nemesis Rex world. I can't think that the techies would be too keen on random dimensions given how many of them there are that are full of things that try to kill us, but I guess under time pressure you do what you can.

So, while I'll see as soon as I click the light column, I'd still kind of like the technician to tell me whether I'm going into a Council base or the alternate world to wreck these things.

Oh. It's a tech lab. ...a Council tech lab, or? Anyway, there are lots of talky fights and patrols. My standard spiel: you only need one talky, unless the others say something different. One loud, N-1 quiet. My other standard spiel: battles can and do start when heroes are just getting off the elevator.

I finally find one of the things I'm looking for on the top floor, and the system text and clue text act like I've just wrecked all of them.

Anyway, once they're all down, mission's over. That easily? With how the scientist was talking, about the need to get a team since Nemesis would reinforce his forces, I was expecting... at least an ambush. Or a surprise boss objective. But nope, neither.

Ah, okay. So I was going to another dimension to do this mission, and they found out where the base was when I shut the portal.

...but didn't I already get the base's location from that Archon I dropped in the ruined world?

---

Anyway, burning question: why the scrap metal? Why the diversion?

Oh. My contact found out... somehow, that it was just a head fake for the heroes.

That's a little disappointing. I was expecting shenanigans.

Anyway, in addition to some vital devices to destroy, there's some equipment here to recover. Still crated up, too. What was it, spare parts? Put in the particle impellers and say they fold up for easy carrying or something?

Huh. And after some explosions and glowie clicks... that's it. Mission over. Arc over.

...aw phooey. And logged out before this mission, forgot to check my clue window when I logged back in, and thereby overwrite all my souvenirs. Happy happy joy joy.

---

Storyline - ***. My main problem here is the pacing. This arc has three missions with boss fights and two missions where I just have to destroy something - and the "destroy" missions are the last two. That feels more than a little anticlimactic. And the fourth mission I fend off an attack from Nemesis Rex... and then mission five is playing repo man for Portal Corp. I mean, sure, I set out to get the portal tech back from the Council but preventing Nemesis Rex from getting a beachhead in our dimension is probably a little more important than that, right?

So here's something. Mission three is set up to give me the base location anyway, per the clues I get. So in mission 4 I go in there, there's Nemesis in the base for whatever reason, and I get the parts back -- and in mission 5 Nemesis Rex, who was keeping the portal open from his end, busts out in Portal Corp and I have to take out his troops and either some fakes or the man himself there. That wraps up the earlier plotline just in time for the new pressure to hit.

Also I'm really not sure about the whole "distracted by scrap" thing. I mean, on the one hand, it's a reasonable thing for the Council to do. On the other hand, the question of why it happened is hanging in the air through the Nemesis Rex mission, implying that this was some new wrinkle that's gonna be even better than Nemesis -- and then it gets resolved in the briefing of the last mission.

Design - ***. Man. I coulda taken ANYBODY through this arc. But I saw the big orange archvillain text and figured, "welp, somebody has high frustration tolerance". I'm guessing Nemesis himself was supposed to show up in mission 4? I never even saw him. I realize this arc was probably made in the days before they put auto-warnings on, but would help a lot if it were billed as "no required EB/AVs" or something similar. Or tagged "easy". The overabundance of objectives in mission 3 was a bit of a problem. The several occasions where a clue and/or system message pop up on a single objective that make more sense coming from completing all of them were momentarily disorienting as well.

Gameplay - ****. Most of the tear-my-hair-out moments were pretty minor and just involved covering large Council/outdoor maps looking for objectives. Not in themselves a pain, but as I said earlier some kind of visual noise around an overworld objective is always helpful, especially since hostages don't flee on outdoor maps.

Detail - ****. Some duplicate mission end clues and a lot of duplicate dialogue from battles and patrols that didn't really need to be there. But aside from the need for a little pruning, everything looked pretty reasonable.

Overall - ***. The arc needs to be relabeled so that it's clear that it's solo friendly, but more importantly the missions need to be restructured so that the last mission is the big confrontation with the Nemesis forces from another dimension, rather than just cleanup of all the plot points the actual climactic mission couldn't resolve.

I haven't had a lot of free time this Thanksgiving weekend, but I did have a little time to draw up a random mission and go To Hell And Back (43610). Verdict - *. Review lower in this thread.

Also because it's gone up and I had a bit of time to spare, The Fall Of Rapture (299507). Verdict - **. Review in MA Forums Thread.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a low 40s ice/axe tank, all bosses no AVs two heroes at +0.

---

Oh. Timed mission. Sense of urgency. Nicely done.

It'd be nice if the briefing explained this time limit and the reason for it.

Now, uh, why am I angry, exactly? Innocent until proven guilty or they collide with my fist, right? I mean, there are all sorts of ways for a virus to get out of a lab. Most of them are accidental.

Anyway, I find a bodybag on the first level, which apparently I can tell is a casualty of the Dante virus right away. It takes me a long time to read the nametag, though.

I head up to the third floor and find a whole lot of battles with the same exact dialogue for each one, and... nothing.

Though down on the second floor I find the computer I was looking for... and get jumped by archmages.

Since I don't have to fight them it's alright, but archmages are really closer to elite bosses than bosses in challenge. I believe they would have been elite bosses had elite bosses existed at the time.

---

Oh boy, I WILL be fighting one. I can hardly contain my enthusiasm.

Also can I get some multiple paragraphs all up ins? Makes individual ideas easier to figure out.

Um. So to find this guy I should look in... Oranbega? That's all I get?

Oranbega is an entire lost city. That's like telling me he's somewhere in Paragon City!

Oh, this is the map called "Oranbega". It's actually pretty reasonable as far as Circle maps go, but it's basically made entirely of corridors.

Bah bah bah MULTIPLE ARCHMAGES AS ESCORTS?

At least Varal's a normal boss.

Oh wait. NO HE'S NOT. And there's an Agony Archmage in the escort! Go go Absorb Pain!

...where are all these Behemoth Overlords coming from? There's like eight of them. Is this two ambushes that both got severely lost?

Looking at the NPC dialogue, it would seem so!

And there's one more coming, too.

Through intervention at the hand of some god, I manage to pull just the Agony mage off when I get back from the hospital, along with two ambushes of behemoths.

And then I defeat the Inquisitor... and find out I actually have to take out his entire spawn of three arch-mages.

Let me be very clear here: archmages have about 80% resist to all damage. Natively. Coupled with the buffing powers, ONE archmage is a giant meatwall of a nightmare.

Three, fought together, is NINE TIMES THE NIGHTMARE.

I get two clues on completion which a) could probably just be the one mission complete clue, as the boss clue just describes the mission complete one anyway, and b) could stand to be the archmage's actual words.

Apparently the big piece of vital information he has for me is that... the Dante virus preferentially targets people with magical
potential. Thanks, pal. I'm sure MAGI wasn't going to work that one out on their own. Eesh.

---

...oh, Baron Zoria. Poor, misunderstood Baron Zoria.

"With this thorn, I gain the power of an ancient civilization!" shouted Zoria.

The acolyte said, "No, Zoria. You are the ancient civilization."

And Zoria was a crystal.

He shows up in the end of the "Smoke and Mirrors" Ouro TF titled Baron Zoria but with Akarist's description, and his model is the Akarist model from the Library of Souls arc.

But Baron Zoria is part of the library of souls. There's a circle mage jacking his body, as it is with all the other mortal members of the Circle of Thorns. (We don't know who it is. It's probably not Akarist, though,) Publicly, yes, the Circle of Thorns is a revivalist cult led by Zoria, but given that I'm level 40 for this arc the truth should be out there, especially for Cadao Kestrel.

Anyway, I'm going to stock up on Shivans as I have no idea what the difficulty will accidentally be.

Ah, the Leviathan cave map. Notable in that it has so many special TF spawns that half of it is completely empty. Except for the spaces to put glowies, anyway.

Also since I get something to start the mission that strikes me as a nice place for a begin mission clue.

...uh, okay. So this mission is coded "ramp up" which means that it starts with giant swarms of minions.

Except they're giant swarms of lieutenants, since the enemy group doesn't have any minions.

And a sizable majority of them start battle by popping AIM AND INFERNO.

Oh, and there's Blackstar and Dreadful Wail in there too. Glorious.

A boss who is... Fire Control/Willpower? Seems like it. A self-rez with a giant damage period afterward.

...so there's this attackable minion who charges right into melee when half the lieutenants drop damage fields and the other half drop tier 9s and all of them have AIm or Build Up.

And I actually have to get him out.

Alive.

Yeah, no. Before I even realized where he WAS his body was already sliding down the hill.

I don't think I'll be replaying this to see what happens if by some miracle of chance and strategy I can actually get him out alive.

---

Storyline - ***. So as far as I can figure the plot goes something like this: a mad Crey scientist decides he'd like a walking tour of Hell, so he creates a virus to send himself there, and to ensure that a hero comes to take him back, he releases it to the general public. I didn't really get the point of the detour into Oranbega -- if the Circle were in such dire straits that they'd be coming forward voluntarily, striking out to take some of them down would be counterproductive.

Design - *. Three consecutive unnanounced timed missions. Agh. A boss group composed entirely of Circle Archmages. Aaagh. A group composed entirely of lieutenant and boss enemies, many with tier 9 powers, most with Build Up. Aaaaagh. Having to lead a damageable minion through said group and somehow come out the other side. MAGNA AAGH.

Gameplay - *. MAGNA AAGH. I feel this is all I can say on a family-friendly forum. The first mission is somewhat reasonable, but the last two are exercises in cranial-architectural interfacing.

Detail - **. None of the custom enemies had any descriptions - they were all using the default description for their rank. The archmages also have their default descriptions, even the custom ones, even the ones who pass off clues that ought to be their descriptions for all the relevant info they give you. And then there's that doubled-up clue in the second mission.

Overall - *. Not an average. The second mission was a giant slog of a boss fight. The third mission was a giant slog in every fight followed by a task which may be a mathematical impossibility unless you see it coming and try to lose the hostage so he can't run into the middle of the lieutenants' zone of death. I might have come away with a slightly more favorable impression if the escort was non-combat, but the crazily high difficulty of the custom enemies and the mandatory-defeat group made of archmages were the real pains here.