Arc 12647 - T.o.C, vol 1: Of feathers and fur...

Review as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a high-40s DB/Fire brute, +1 x2 with bosses on.

I forgot heroes and villains actually had separate contacts in Cimerora, okay?

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Right. Save an apprentice from Romulus's forces, who was working on... eh, it's not important right now.

Heading through the caves I'm reminded how badly a resistance-based offtank is going to get shredded against these Romans. I'ma go scale down and come back.

Right, it's a little more reasonable at +1 x1. Not so much terrible cascading -defense.

I find a map to Circe's Island and a hostage, who calls this whole thing out as being a trap for a prospective rescuer. Good thing Daedalus delegated this, huh?

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Unfortunately, Romulus still has a bunch of maps.

Ah, Croatoa. We really need more actual green forest maps that aren't that little corner of pseudo-Eden.

I rescue two generic Sybils and a named one who warns me of some kind of Satyr.

I also find Sister Solaris, but whatever animation you've chosen for her doesn't seem to have any particle effects associated with it, which makes it tough to pick her out in this environment.

I head back to the Satyr with Solaris in tow. He's a pretty reasonable diffculty and excellent visual axe/shield custom. These Satyrs appear to be actual mythological creatures, rather than the analogues to the warwolves of modern times that the cyclopes and minotaurs are hinted at being.

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And now to confront the Satyr lord with Daedalus, on another sprawling outdoor map.

The satyrs seem to be archery/SR minions with SS/archery lieutenants. Explosive arrow may be a bit off tone here, depending. The lord himself is an SS/Inv bruiser who calls in ambushes at low health.

Harpies. Sonic blast/claw flyers, and in this broken terrain they get good use out of the flight too. Nicely done ambush, even if dealing with them leaves the satyr and Daedalus to chase each other all over this backcountry.

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Daedalus sends us after the harpy queen in the hope that she'll provide some information on Romulus's search for some mystic item. I guess she's a more likely source than the Satyrs, who are all just party dudes.

The harpies have added War Legbone, er, Mace/Mental lieuts to the mix.

After rescuing a minotaur, I look around for the harpy queen, who looks to be psy assault/pain. She has anguishing cry, but fortunately the AI doesn't know the right range for that yet.

...also I have a minotaur who cuts through her like a combine harvester through a chicken. The ambush she calls doesn't even have time to show up before she's a crumpled heap.

She namedrops the artifact - a helmet that belonged to some guy from Chile.

The entire lot was god-forged, yeah, but out of his kit the shield's really the most famous part, with the spear coming in close behind.

I guess it depends what it's needed for.

But I guess Achilles was buried with it, as it's time for us to go to hell.

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Well, the underworld, anyway.

Apparently as a future dude Hades doesn't know what the hell is up with me.

Oh. Leviathan caves. That's not what I expected. And word of warning about these things, they're like half plot-specific spawns and therefore show up in MA half-empty, even though potential mission objectives are spread throughout.

I pick up Icarus, who is apparently THAT Icarus. He's psy/therm... well, the therm part makes sense, anyway.

I find a reliquary buried in the cave wall. It's the helmet that Romulus was after! ...but the mission won't complete unless I defeat him even though I've denied him his prize?

It'd make sense if Daedatron asked me to put down Romulus on the off-chance he might be trapped in the underworld.

In addition to recolored engineers, there are DBlade/DArmor minions and DMelee/Psi lieuts.

Romulus taunts me as his health drops, asking what I'm going to do with an ancient helmet anyway. ...actually, jury's still out on that. He doesn't say what he'll do with it either, apart from the presumed adding it to his war chest.

Things wrap up on an interesting note, even if the crushing fist of tragedy descends on Daedalus from a clear blue sky.

...pff, even the souvy is calling out that I have no idea what the helmet is for. That's just wonderful.

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Storyline - ***. I have three problems with this storyline.

First is the crushing fist of tragedy descending from a clear blue sky at the end there. Was it supposed to be some kind of revelation that Icarus was dead? Going on the assumptions of myth, if Daedalus is free then he’d have come to grips with that a long time ago. If Icarus disappears during the course of the story arc, or slightly before it, then it means a little more to find him in the underworld.

Second is the bizarre mystery of the Helmet of Achilles. Supposedly it’s vital to Daedalus’s effort, but it may as well be a power crunch for as much as I know about why. Even though I understand that Daedalus may not want to talk about his secret weapon, he can at least let on to what the helmet’s useful for.

Third is the rather reactionary nature of the whole affair. Between the initial mission to recover Daedalus’s mapmaker and the final mission to recover the treasure he made a map to, there are three missions of putting out ancient Roman fires - the kidnapped Sibyls, then the Satyrs, then the Harpies. They’re the titular elements for the arc, but they just seem to interrupt the main plot, rather than being something that, say, Daedalus sends you to investigate.

Design - ****. The custom mobs are visually striking and generally pretty distinctive. Map selection isn’t necessarily ideal, but there aren’t many good options for outdoor forest maps that don’t involve the Spirit World, and the underworld isn’t easy to model either. Roman caves are already in use in this arc, rock tubes are boring, Oranbega variants are out as we’re only modeling the Underworld, not Hell, and mines are out for the same reason. The Leviathan caves are the best of a bad situation. Maybe you could make Arachnoid caves work?

I don’t get why Romulus is a necessary defeat in the last mission. Maybe when we get to the reliquary we find he’s already looted it. That’d be an easy reason, at least.

The one thing I don’t quite get about the custom mobs is why so much psy assault. Harpy slavers, fallen heroes, and Icarus all make use of it, but psionics don’t seem to really fit any of them.

Gameplay - **. This is where things start to fall apart. I’m not taking anything off for using the stock Cimeroran traitors - at least in theory they’re a level-appropriate problem, and it’d hardly do to have an arc in Cimerora with no Cimerorans. The boss fights are reasonable with decent helper NPCs, though the minotaur makes the harpy queen a bit of a joke.

First, there’s the matter of outdoor maps. It’s important that it’s possible to end them with decent speed, especially the large sprawling maps like you’ve got here. Compared to an indoor map, an outdoor map doesn’t have a lot of tactical variety; it’s just the same fight on open ground, over and over, so it’s much easier to get bored. You’ve made a pretty good effort to give important objectives particle effects or notable animations, but several important objectives (Sister Solaris and the satyr bosses) don’t really have any.

Second, there’s the matter of powerset choice, specifically powersets on the minions. Minions need to engage in melee range. At least half of them, anyway. AoEs and some defense sets rely on having multiple weak targets clumped together. Satyr and Harpy minions both prefer ranged. Minions also need to be careful with debuffs, even incidental debuffs attached to damage powers, and tons of stacked sonic blasts from the Harpy minions can seriously devastate damage resistance. War mace (shillelagh)/SR satyrs (or MA/SR satyrs if you think you can get awak with shurikens) and claw/invuln harpies would be more reasonable minions.

Detail - ****. The only really off element here was the map to Circe’s island. In an arc that’s otherwise pretty sparse with details, every clue feels like it’s supposed to provide some important information. A map suggests that during the course of the arc we’ll actually go to the place it describes, but this wasn’t the case.

Overall - ***. The big problems here are with the supposed feature groups of this arc, the Satyrs and Harpies.

As far as plot goes, they seem to be more a distraction to the plot that starts and finishes the arc: Romulus is up to something, take him down. If the arc were about taking them on as paths to Romulus, from the start, I’d have no problem, but they feel more like an obstacle than a focus, which is not what you want of the groups featured in the title.

And for reasons I’ve already documented, fighting them involves a whole lot of darting around hitting individual minions, which isn’t much fun.

The apprentice was abducted. I never said he was investigating on anything. He's not a private detective. Can't someone be abducted while doing nothing?

Exactly. I even say so in the flyer.

Yup and if I had chosen the shield, you would have said it was predictable.


It is pretty common in greco-roman myths to see the Gods toying with mortals in a way so that what they are trying to achieve fires right back at them. It's called Irony of Fate. That is what I was trying to somewhat illustrate, with a twist, here. But I can't blame you for not knowing that.

See it as another dimension to the main plot of the arc.

As you are sent to Hades to help Daedalus, the last thing he would have wanted is to be reminded of the tragic fate of his only child.

It's said in the synopsis. "Help Daedalus start his quest" and you did just that. He is just asking for your help to get the item. Nothing more.

See, I don't agree. The arc is pretty much a race against time. Daedalus has a very secret plan. Romulus has spies watching Imperious and co (which is rather pro-active). Romulus understands something is going on with Daedalus, he wants to know what. Daedalus realises that when his apprentice is abducted.

When Romulus has the maps, we don't know the extent of his knowledge of Daedalus' plan. Mission 3 is where Daedalus starts realising that and sends you fighting against "feathers and fur" rather pro-actively.

I designed the arc specifically so that it doesn't look like most of the arcs in the game or in the MA, i.e having reactive contacts.

I guess I could set it as optional. Though I thought that since, as a hero of legend, you and the biggest enemy of Cimerora are in the same area, it would have made sense to arrest him.

Well that's a rather odd comment. What is wrong with having one type of Harpy or shades of former heroes/villains having psy powers? I guess I could have used only dark melee/blast, but then you can imagine the nasty comments from furious players 1 staring my arc. We all hate spectral demons, don't we?

I tried balancing melee/range the best I could. The problem is you can never make all the playerbase happy. Not everybody plays melee characters.

To be honest, having MA satyrs would absolutely kill the immersion to me. And why would a harpy be invulnerable?

Regarding sonic blast, have you ever encountered Wailers? My Harpies are not more difficult and I haven't seen that many people complaning about how tough that particular mob is.

You have played many arcs featuring Arachnos, Knives or even the absolute worst villain group of the game yet highly popular Malta and yet you complain about my harpies and satyrs? I don't understand...


Anyway, thank you again for reviewing for my arc, even though I find it unnecessarily harsh.

I was just searching for some past posts I'd made somewhere and saw you answered, so this is a monstrously late response. I'll see what I can remember.

Nah, actually, if you'd chosen the shield, I would have gone and googled "shield of Achilles", seen all the results, and thought "cool reference bro", for while I enjoy the Grecian mythology I am rather pants at the Iliad.

Really? I thought the last thing he would have wanted was for Romulus to snag the helmet and make a clean getaway. Being as how that was the reason he sent us into the caves in the first place. I mean, if Icarus turned into the final boss or something because he found out Daedatron sent me and exploded in sorrow and then Romulus yoinked the helmet while I was distracted, that'd be pretty prime.

Or, I suppose, if the actual reason Daedatron was doing all this in the first place was to throw himself into his work and forget his dead waxed son (and the apprentice in the first mission let on about this, maybe?) that would present a rather bittersweet closing to it all.

Classical examples of tragedy are more than just "a sad thing happens in the middle of victory", they're pretty counterpunchy in nature -- you get nailed by the exact opposite of what you were trying to do. Oedipus decides to leave home so he doesn't end up killing his dad and banging his mom and winds up, through no small measure of arrogance, killing his dad and banging his mom, though it takes a while to find out.

See, I didn't get that impression. I figured that after mission 2, which had a definite "put out the ancient Roman fire" feel, Daedatron was all "oh Zeus he's got the satyrs working for him now, get that sorted while we try and figure out what he's doing" and we just happened to find a clue following that chain.

I mean, Romulus does not strike me as the type of guy to only have one plan at a time. He is acting in direct opposition not to Daedatron but to Cimerora in general. Having Sibyls would be bad for the secret of the secret plan, but also bad for other reasons.

And honestly, trying to get information from the satyrs strikes me as a bit wrongheaded, as about all they could tell you is the location of the nearest a) punchup b) kegger. The harpies... mmmaybe? But they only come in in the first place because we're hunting the satyrs.

Or leave him to hunt for the artifact until Hades locks the door on him? The whole reason it's okay for me to go into the underworld is because I'm a futureman and Hades can't get a fix on me. Romulus does not have that advantage.

I guess the issue is that while mind CONTROL is reasonable for ancient mythic enemies to bust out on occasion, mind BULLETS have something of a futuristic feel to them. I couldn't tell you why I think this specifically, but it's probably because weird non-technological powers in science fiction come under the umbrella of "psionics", which incidentally was a word coined for that express purpose, whereas weird non-technological powers in fantasy are just magic.

Invulnerability doesn't really have a genre or time "lock" in my mind, it just means 'generically resistant to damage'. Maybe since they're raiders they get a magic pinfeather from the harpy queen to make them more resilient?

Well, Wailer minions have only one sonic attack, which they stop using when you get in their face, and they don't mind closing to or staying at melee range. The AI for custom characters is a little more generic and won't stop yelling in your ear even when it's close to you -- it also gets two powers to cycle, and stack, to the wailers' one.

As for the satyrs, between the range exclusivity on the minions and the general complete lack of ways to easily group them up, since I fought them in the open ground of outdoor missions, they got frustrating to mop up, which is different from being hard.

I complain more about custom characters than I generally do about canon mobs because when you're using a canon adversary you don't have any control over their powers, and custom-designing a more reasonable version may not be possible, or may chip away at your arc's allotted space in ways you're not comfortable with.

Contrariwise, when you're using a custom character you have complete control and have made the decision to use the space already, so I have no problems with suggesting alternate powersets.

I specifically avoided the shield for that reason. In the Illiad, the shield is largely described. I wanted to focus on another part of his armor, which was also created by Hephaestus. What I did wrong, however, is that I didn't publish the Tales' parts 3 and 4 where everything is explained. I blame it on not playing the AE anymore. So I understand you complain.

Sure, except that I am not Homer and this is the AE, not my personal Illiad...lol. Again, the whole arc isn't about that particular aspect, it's just a small added twist. No need to read so much into it.

You seem to know Satyrs and Harpies better than anybody else...lucky you!

Sure, though he has friends that are from the 1940s and he sometimes bonds with nictii...

And yet, you suggested Satyrs used Martial Arts, which can only be anachronical.
Your conception of mind bullets is yours only, judging an arc on that is completely wrong. You can interpret it any way you want, it doesn't mean that they are inadequate to my characters.


I really don't want to argue with you and I really appreciate you spending the time on my arc and I have absolutely no problem with my arc being reviewed, I wouldn't have asked you otherwise. The only thing I didn't agree on was that basically everything you complained about in my arc, could be found in any arc in the AE, if you looked for things to find. Inadequate nitpicking based on very personal opinions on very vague concepts.

You reviewed my other arc, From Tartarus with Love.., and it was very helpful. I actually made some changes after reading it. Here, there's nothing I could use, hence the disappointment...

I've been working this over on and off for a while and I think I've come up with something.

You introduce Daedalus's cartographer and the stolen maps and the secret of the secret project in the first mission, and that whole thread is just kind of hanging over the three interstitial missions, never really being addressed except perhaps for a tangent at the end of the fourth.

As a result, however you've written the briefings, it feels like the three central missions don't really address the overriding plot, and we come back to it only by chance.

So what about this? Mission one becomes mission four, mission four becomes mission three, mission three becomes mission two, and mission two goes to the front of the arc, with the plot rewritten to work the same way. Daedalus takes initiative springing the Sibyls from the satyrs (or asks Imperious for permission to handle it) because he's worried they're being used to uncover the secret of his secret project. In mission three the harpy queen blabs about the artifact and that now all they need to do is find the way, whereupon mission four is showing up too late to prevent Romulus's men from taking the map to the underworld, though the cartographer still has the map committed to memory.