My First Thoughts on Reichsman Strikeforce

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There seems to be some confusion as to the use of the dimensional ground ray in the final fight of the Task Force. Before Reichsman’s hit by the ray, he is in a phased state and is running a rather nasty debuffing aura. When he is hit by the ray, it “grounds out” some of his power and he returns to a normal state and his aura is shut down. This will persist for the duration of the fight. The dimensional grounding ray isn’t intended to be used at specific points in the fight; it should be used early on, and one hit will do.

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Does he need to be hit once by each person on the team, or does it take a few minutes for the ray gun to take affect? When I did the taskforce, the final Reichsman stayed phased for several minutes after we started the fight. I know others on the team were using their grounding rays, and I personally used mine three times. Each time, it said my target was unaffected by it, the standard "He's phase shifted, you can't touch him" message. During that time, he was unaffected by any of my attacks or taunt as well, causing him to tear through the team.

Thank you for the post, Mr. Harlick. It's very interesting to hear, though some parts do not jive with what I've observed in-game. I'll have to make another run soon and pay extra special attention in case there's something afoot.

Looking forward to seeing the changes you've got in mind though.

Still waiting for his Official BackAlleyBrawler No-Prize

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Does he need to be hit once by each person on the team, or does it take a few minutes for the ray gun to take affect? When I did the taskforce, the final Reichsman stayed phased for several minutes after we started the fight. I know others on the team were using their grounding rays, and I personally used mine three times. Each time, it said my target was unaffected by it, the standard "He's phase shifted, you can't touch him" message. During that time, he was unaffected by any of my attacks or taunt as well, causing him to tear through the team.

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I think this may highlight something: Task Force Reichsman may be bugged. I ran this last night and never saw him phase shift. Our team sort of staggered shooting him with the gun, since we had no idea when we should use it. It never seemed to have much effect.

(For the record, ran it with 1 ill/kin troller (me), a rad/* defender, 2 blasters, 1 tank, and 3 scrappers, I think. Took us awhile, but we took him down without major problems.)

And Horatio, hey. Just today I was listening to an old episode of 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction that you guest-starred on, and wondering if you had a redname. Welcome to the boards.

My big issue with this and most of the other task forces is that if your not the group leader, you don't get any of the story! You really don't know what is going on, npc dialogue is often lost in the fight spam.

I had no idea why all the AVs were in suspended animation. Were they prisoners? Were they robots? I had no idea or what the significance of the attack on city hall and the time capsule.

Quite frankly, considering the lightness of this issue, I expected more than standard maps, and same 5th column mobs. Seems to me if you were defeated you would want to come back with something new to improve your odds...

Just did it again with a non optimal PuG team. It's frikkin BRUTAL. We finished it, but dam.

"Sorry bucko, but CoH and CoV are the same game." -BackAlleyBrawler
"Silly villain, CoX is for Heroes!" -Saicho

Just finished the Reichsman SF on Pinnacle. Coordination using the temp powers was a little sketchy (being a new SF and all), so we ended up wiping and fighting our way back to Reichsman through all the 5th Ambushes.

Surprisingly, the Mastermind temp power actually worked ... or at least looked like it worked. It was still a slugfest at the end, though, working through all of Reichsman's HP. We did it, though, and I'll show you my Arbiter badge if you want proof.

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Switching voices, I am aware of the canon issues with the story. The problems are purely my fault; when I came up with the original flow for the story I was under some mistaken impressions on some events in the game’s history. While I did make some adjustments to the story due to the feedback from the training room, I didn’t get all the details nailed down as best I could. Due to a tight translation deadline, I was unable to get final text passes into the build that was going to the Live servers, but rest assured I’ll be doing my best to address them over the next week or so to bring the story of Reichsman’s return in line with the existing history of the 5th Column.

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I just want to say here that Mr Harlick is being quite modest. The current version of the SF story, informed by player feedback in the Beta, is radically re-written from the original one. I was frankly astonished by how much changed. This was a ton of work and writing flexibility.


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On the villain side of things, our intent was to try to do something a bit different for the end fight. As has been previously stated, we wanted to do a “gadget” fight; something that was more than just hit the bad guy until he fell over. And we wanted to encourage teams to include different ATs, to help shake up some standard team compositions. Certainly, the end fight is more difficult without having each of the appropriate ATs on the team, but it is still doable. Each of the temp powers is intended to make stages of the fight easier. There is no one “golden solution” to solving the fight; by including some or all of the ATs that can take advantage of the various temp powers, you can approach this battle using different tactics.

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As feedback I must once again disagree with the Temps being tied to given ATs. It is not that the Temps make the fight possible or impossible, it is that they make it more interesting. Limiting the Temps to specific ATs limits what players can try or how they can experiment with the encounter.

It also makes forming a team, or finding a team being formed, far more difficult. Now rather than my normal mantra of "bring whatever character you most want to play", I have to ask SG-mates "could you please break out that other character you have instead of the one you most favor which you are currently on?"

Please consider revising this.

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My big issue with this and most of the other task forces is that if your not the group leader, you don't get any of the story!

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You don't have the team leader copy/paste the story text into Team Chat? Get better teammates .

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Surprisingly, the Mastermind temp power actually worked! It was still a slugfest at the end, though, working through all of Reichsman's HP. We did it, though, and I'll show you my Arbiter badge if you want proof.

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....

Okay, I believe you - I know you know what that looks from when it actually worked on Test. But can you give a bit more detail?

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Surprisingly, the Mastermind temp power actually worked! It was still a slugfest at the end, though, working through all of Reichsman's HP. We did it, though, and I'll show you my Arbiter badge if you want proof.

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....

Okay, I believe you - I know you know what that looks from when it actually worked on Test. But can you give a bit more detail?

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Well, as I amended that post to say, it either worked or looked like it did. Reichsman would go untouchable, I'd call for the MMs to hit him, and in short order I'd start to see damage pop up over his head again. Unfortunately, there was so much carnage around him (pets from 2 Masterminds, Shivans, and other stuff in addition to us) that I didn't actually notice if there was any sort of visual cue. Like I said, it could just be my optimism tricking me into thinking that the power was working, but I know that every time he became untouchable, he became touchable again very quickly.

ADDED: It's just been brought to my attention that Black Scorpion's power should keep him from becoming untouchable at all, instead of breaking him from an already-activated untouchable phase. How I missed this, I have no idea. So, I guess it isn't working after all.

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As feedback I must once again disagree with the Temps being tied to given ATs. It is not that the Temps make the fight possible or impossible, it is that they make it more interesting. Limiting the Temps to specific ATs limits what players can try or how they can experiment with the encounter.

It also makes forming a team, or finding a team being formed, far more difficult. Now rather than my normal mantra of "bring whatever character you most want to play", I have to ask SG-mates "could you please break out that other character you have instead of the one you most favor which you are currently on?"

Please consider revising this.

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Just like to say I whole heartedly agree with this post. Moving them temp powers from being AT specific would open the TF up a lot more, yes there are those teams that can stack enough debuffs to weaken the Almighty him/herself into being a kitten but not every team is going to be that way.

Once the MM power gets working again, I think you'll definitely see an upswing in the TF being run BUT it shouldn't be the case of having to bring an MM, if you have two Brutes, allow one to choose the Ghost Widow power and the other to choose Black Scorpions power.

I'm not sure how you would get such a thing to work (pop up reward upon defeat of all AVs with temp power selection maybe?) but it would certainly turn the SF (which, with the storyline, is a damn sight better than the first version on test, I mean a LOT better, by a country mile better) from a "run it once for the badge, never again" type SF into a "Will rerun it" type SF for those not building the big debuff teams.

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Hi, I’m Bruce Harlick, aka Horatio, the guy who was in charge of the Reichsman Task Force and Strike Force. (snipitty, snip, snip)
-Horatio

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Not having played the TF or the SF yet, I can not comment on the issues.

However, I wanted to mention how much I apreciated this response. Especially considering how frank and candid it feels compared to a canned PR statement.
Thanks; I really appreciate that.

Now, I concur to the above suggestion: We need an Horatio character in game. I imagine a villain that want to appear sophisticated and only speaks through Shakespeare quotes. Bonus point if he mangles them too.

I just hope you guys actually consider raising the merits on the Villain side. Twenty merits for that SF is not enough, seriously. Dragging the patrons through the cave one by one should be worth 20 alone.

"Sorry bucko, but CoH and CoV are the same game." -BackAlleyBrawler
"Silly villain, CoX is for Heroes!" -Saicho

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Now, I concur to the above suggestion: We need an Horatio character in game. I imagine a villain that want to appear sophisticated and only speaks through Shakespeare quotes. Bonus point if he mangles them too.

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Now see I immediately thought of Horatio Hornblower.

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I just hope you guys actually consider raising the merits on the Villain side. Twenty merits for that SF is not enough, seriously. Dragging the patrons through the cave one by one should be worth 20 alone.

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We will be increasing the merit award for the Strike Force to 30 merits later this week.

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Your wish has been granted.

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Now, I concur to the above suggestion: We need an Horatio character in game. I imagine a villain that want to appear sophisticated and only speaks through Shakespeare quotes. Bonus point if he mangles them too.

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Now see I immediately thought of Horatio Hornblower.

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My first thought was "Alger".

I'm not sure what this says about any of us.

Welcome to the boards, Horatio!

Thanks for all the text changes to the SF, it really improved the 'mood' of the SF in giving us high level villains our due, rather than be duped lackeys.

Three things:

1. Please work with Castle et al. in datamining how groups do against Reichsman. Some groups just don't have the DPS to kill Reichsman after banging on him for half an hour. Reichsman's regen and/or total hp probably needs further adjustment. For some groups it will be *essential* to bring a MM (once the MM power is working), and that's not good game design, IMO.

2. AXIS AMERICA!! I know you've been reading our complaints about this. Could you please address this? Reichsman comes from Axis America dimension and within a day of his 'release' the dimension is full of Primal Earth 5th Column. That is very jarring. Either the story needs to be adjusted so that Mueller or Schadenfreude were working behind the scenes for the past year and ferrying troops back and forth (which would explain where the dimensional coffee pot came from), or, simply switch the foes in that mission to the Axis America faction.

3. The final mission ambushes. I know there were back and forth adjustments of the ambushes from a lot to a little. Well, there back to a ridiculous amount of way over the top a lot. I quipped to my teammates that I was going to petition that mission because someone created a 5th farm. A full half hour of non-stop ambushes (that weren't even tied to fighting Reichsman) was just too too much.


Overall, I like how it's shaping up.

As a minor point, can we get a bit more backstory in the Schadenfreude's bio about who this character is? My initial impression was that he was the Axis Earth version of Nosferatu, but that's just a guess.

Horatio, first I wanna thank you for the response. Second, I wanna mention that the biggest thing I took from your response is that this TF can be soloed. That makes me very happy. Being /SR my main will need inspirations(damn Carnie AV), and it will probably take several hours. But I'm a very happy person now.

Also, you forgot to say a corny one-liner, put on sun glasses and march off screen. I'm very disappointed.

QR

I just did the Reichsman SF. First time into the room, my team didn't know what was going on, as nobody had done it before. The ambushes got us separated and we wiped. Then we all went in and went through the ambushes nice and slow and together to Reichsman's room, and then we got Reichsman into a corner and figured out what our temp powers did and annihilated him in less than 20 minutes. Granted, we were really debuff heavy, myself being a /poison MM, and we had a rad corrupter, a fire corrupter, and a dark corrupter. Still, I only saw him use his phase power twice, and neither time did he get all the way back to full. Is the mastermind power really broken? I think it might be a PBAoE. We were all bunched up next to him, after all.

I actually have to say that the strike force is far better than the task force. The task force is pretty much the same as any other task force, but the end boss has more hit points. At least the strike force brings something interesting to the table.

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Switching voices, I am aware of the canon issues with the story. The problems are purely my fault; when I came up with the original flow for the story I was under some mistaken impressions on some events in the game’s history. While I did make some adjustments to the story due to the feedback from the training room, I didn’t get all the details nailed down as best I could. Due to a tight translation deadline, I was unable to get final text passes into the build that was going to the Live servers, but rest assured I’ll be doing my best to address them over the next week or so to bring the story of Reichsman’s return in line with the existing history of the 5th Column.

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Thank you so much. I really appreciate this post. I'm sorry if I've been overly harsh about the story issues, the lack of response prior to this made me worried that they would never be addressed. This response makes me feel much better.

I've always enjoyed the WWII connections in the superhero genre, and the 5th Column and Axis America were CoH's WWII tie-ins. I was very upset when they were removed, and very excited as the 5th slowly began to be re-added through the Lazarus TF and the Imperious TF. Issue 15, though many were unhappy that it seemed small, had me thrilled, as the 5th freeing the Reichsman was exactly what I'd wanted to see since I first read the timeline and learned that he was still in stasis under the Freedom Phalanx headquarters. So, you can probably understand why I might have been upset about the canon issues.

Again, thank you very much. Next week I'll have plenty of time to check out any changes you make and give feedback, and I'll make sure to do so.

Welcome to the forums, Mr. Harlick, and thank you again for taking the time to address our concerns.

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I just want to say here that Mr Harlick is being quite modest. The current version of the SF story, informed by player feedback in the Beta, is radically re-written from the original one. I was frankly astonished by how much changed. This was a ton of work and writing flexibility.

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I'm hoping he's talking about the Hero TF here. Very little has changed in it.

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Welcome to the forums, Mr. Harlick, and thank you again for taking the time to address our concerns.

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This, many many times over.

Just one little additional comment because I've said plenty about canon and the TF already: the original Axis America troops looked like this and they aren't in the game any more. The unlockable Axis America critters in the Mission Architect are wrong. They're just the Council Empire models, with human faces instead of Fifth Column masks.

Please bring back Original Flavour Axis America.

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Welcome to the boards, Horatio!

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/e sunglasses

YEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH

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Welcome to the boards, Horatio!

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/e sunglasses

YEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH

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