I played this as a level 44 fire/fire/soul brute on difficulty level 4. I was too lazy to drop it down. As a fire/fire, I'm fairly used to dieing, I use Rise of the Phoenix on regular occasions - not enough to need to slot it for more than one recharge, but regularly, and I don't count it as being defeated unless I have to go to the hospital.
So I did read the full description and came into this arc knowing full well that it was intended to be bad. And it wasn't anywhere near what it could have been. In fact, there were many points in this arc where I was quite enjoying the challenge level of it. The custom enemies - outside of the Bosses and higher - had no horribly annoying powers like confuses or cages or extreme knockback. They were very challenging - healing, -def, -res, -acc, +def, ranged fliers, stealth, mastermind. But enough variety that most of the time they weren't over-stacked.
The story was an interesting one, it does railroad your character - I believe that's the correct term, your character has no choice but to continue on with what the contact asks, outside of quitting the arc altogether. The objectives were nothing completely annoying. There were some ambushes, one mission with 5 fake glowies and 1 real one, though I luckily got the real one on the first try so I don't know if there were other tricks with the fake ones.
The final mission however is another story. The rest of the arc has saving grace to it in my opininon. It's flawed, but still a lot better than most of the arcs that someone just threw together. Then you enter the final mission. One: It's a defeat all. Two: the map is maxed out with boss objectives with no dialog and an AV-class extreme custom (downgraded to Purple/Red EBs for me) that decides to run at about half health because of it's own AI with my debuff toggle on him (not because it was set to run which I first thought was a possibility). I was able to solo the purple EB with moderate difficulty, but after taking a couple of them out, I decided that the challenge was not worth the tedium, and I quit the arc.
But coming into it expecting the every possible mistake one could make, I was disappointed. It was a solid three stars - excluding the final mission, which is worth -1 star by itself. Voted 3 in game owing mostly to the fact that it half succeeded in being a bad arc.
Heh, thanks for trying it out.
The final AV is not set to run. If he ran it was the Artificial Stupidity (sic) at work.
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
@GlaziusF
Alright, time for some schlock. This one's getting attacked on my spine/regen scrapper, level 49, diff 2, plenty of break frees.
So, are you expecting a low ranking here? I hope I can deliver.
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Hmm. Seemingly innocuous items rigged with heinous traps. ...I think I'll spring all of them.
You know, it may just be because I saw MA custom minions in their raw, formative years, but these guys are pretty much typical of that time.
I mean, I can tell you're trying to be annoying here, with rad blasts, and broadsword buildup, and dark blasts from a ninja, but ninjutsu isn't broken anymore. Anguishing Cry is a nice throwback, too.
(also I'll say what I said about enigma silver - the flight on the robot guy seems to keep him from summoning robots)
The non-required glowies do spring a trap, as I was warned they would, aaaaand on hitting the regular one it looks like I'm headed on some kind of crazy head trip. Gotta be murder on those maintenance techs, though.
Oh yeah, the boss also has Atomic Blast on him, like all bosses used to I think. He opens with it. Don't they all.
Hmm. Why do I feel like I just walked into Ninja Scroll?
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Ahahah. So did you max out this map on patrols? Whatever it is, the boss wound up right frickin' next to the console he was supposed to be guarding, so that's a bit of hilarious.
Getting jumped by dark/rad blasters out of the rafters is its own little breed of fun, too.
No clues about the anti-agent or the flash drive I received. Deliberately bad or just oversight?
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...hospital administrative wing? You're not going to toss me into the asylum for no adequately described reason?
And this security chief is talkin' all mind-controlled. I guess that's why the "defeat the instigator" clue shows up, but it'd be nice to get a clue from him. Something about drool in the helmet or something.
Also be nice to get some actual interaction time on that laptop.
Oh. It was all aliens. Of course.
Wow, these guys are even more of a pain. Energy aura, psychic shockwave, a little unstoppable on the boss -- surprised he's not raging.
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And I open up the first door in the lab to find an alien battlemaster staring me in the face. DB/energy, and I'm surprised he doesn't have Overload or call for help.
...oh right, they're all over the place. And the mission is defeat all.
...but you know what? I don't think optional bosses count in defeat alls. Let's find out!
No interaction time on the board member corpses either.
So the end boss is mind control/broad sword, of the rare-status-effect-spamming sort that I was expecting this whole storyarc to be full of.
And optional bosses DO count in defeat alls. Good to know. Gets a bit repetitive after I get into double digits mowing down the EBs.
...what, she actually whips it up? I was expecting some kind of stupid nonsensical haha-you-die screwjob.
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I'd like to apologize for the relatively large value of these ratings. I was honestly expecting a complete and total Ed Wood production and what I got was, in comparison, fair and reasonable.
Storyline - ****. Non-canon tends to putty over the issue of playing errand boy at 45. And aliens just showing up out of nowhere, with only a little drooling sycophant as foreshadowing. (It helped that they showed up just as I was getting bored with the regular security forces.) The whole "I've poisoned you to persuade you to play along" thing is nothing I haven't seen before, as is the doc actually being in with the aliens from word 1 and calling me in as more of a very pointy diplomat. I was expecting nonsense and got cliches, which I just can't get mad over.
Design - ***. I can definitely tell the enemies apart, even at a glance. There's a glowing green minion, an invisible minion, a lieut with a tech shield and a lieut without. The aliens only have one lieut and one boss and the minions were pretty much speed bumps so I didn't care. I liked that the aliens and the security forces shared a color scheme, even though it might have just been an attempt at homogenization. But there's one map that's just patrols, and another map that seems to have maxed out on elite boss spawns. The former was actually a good bit of fun, but the latter was really more of a slog.
Gameplay - ****. The difference between this and the mime arc is that I took someone of the intended level range in for this one. I've got about one actual rare set - a Gaussian - on this character. The rest is just me playing the spiner for quite a while and being very used to her. The enemies certainly have a lot of what are supposed to be unfair tricks, but at this point I've attained... I guess you could call it parity in unfairness? Anyway, they have trump cards, I have trump face cards, and it was pretty fun and frantic when it came down to it. Only had to hosp out like twice the whole arc, and revive brought me back up another three-four times. That said, this is definitely a Not For Wimps production.
Detail - ****. A couple of little missing bits - clues, interact texts - probably just artifacts of a first draft.
Overall - ****. If I ran into this completely blind I'd call it a perfectly average arc. I was expecting torture and got the comfy chair, which while annoying at times isn't much MORE than annoying. Honestly if some of what I suspect are deliberate bad design choices are scaled back a bit this is a pretty decent challenge arc.
I guess what I'm saying is, if you want to make something completely bad you have to try quite a bit harder than this. So in that sense it failed.
Up with the overworld! Up with exploration! | Want a review of your arc?
My arcs: Dream Paper (ID: 1874) | Bricked Electronics (ID: 2180) | The Bravuran Jobs (ID: 5073) | Backwards Day (ID: 329000) | Operation Fair Trade (ID: 391172)
Smurphy ran "Psychophage" as a candidate for his 20 billion inf MA contest and gave a brief review in his thread. I'm posting replies to his comments here so as not to derail.
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This has never happened to me. I don't think it can without someone pulling a spawn to the door early.| I died before I even zoned. Not good. Possibly due to team stupidity. |
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| Force Multiplier Enemies = potentially too hard. I think Sonic Dispersion probably should go. Stacked Resistance makes fights take too long. I like the difficulty of the fights but Multipack rooms became very tough but do-able. Quite fun except for massive +Resistance. The enemies don't die as quickly as I like when multiple Suppressor bosses are next to each other. |
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| Huge amount of ambushers from many sides wiped us in mission 2. Lots of dispersion bubbles. Maybe it was Patrols... multiple. |
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Mission 4 Going about the same. The Omicron are good. The bosses with Tier 9s could be annoying but we had no problem with it. Someone says the AV TPs - I did not notice the AV teleporting. If the AV teleports that would be annoying and not fun. I get mezzed on the AV ambush. We wipe. I think the team woulda been fine if I had a BF. Not sure on how I feel about the Mez. There wasn't much of it but there was just enough to make some spots really troublesome. Probably just need to know to use Break Frees. |
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| Needs some spice, some more action of some kind. Some more unique encounters. Something special. |
For the benefit of anyone who might be tempted to try this, some more on the arc's litany of sins (mostly not of interest to Smurphy):
- The arc was created in response to this thread, which opened with a gratuitous swipe at me. It stopped them cold.
- As noted above, the custom critters were designed to kill teams. Soloists, especially ones with high Defense and good -Def resist, can probably handle it with nominal difficulty if they don't crank up party size. Large spawns, though, will produce lots and lots of stacked -def, -tohit, -resist....
- The arc is essentially a Crey/Rikti arc in drag. The Contact is a thinly-disguised Expy of Countess Crey (lampshaded in act I's opening Clue which says she started the company with money from her deceased husband's estate). The Omicrons use a mix of psy powers and blades, just like the Rikti (further lampshaded by the Big Bad, who uses the old-school Rikti sword and mocks human speech). I did that deliberately to see if the instigators would pick up on it (they didn't) and to lampshade the fact that any story set in a mainstream superhero setting could easily be recast using City factions. (Thus casting aspersions on the supposed "need" for custom mobs.)
- In keeping with the tendency of bad arcs to use Meaningful Anagram names for Contacts, the Contact's name with her middle initial (which you don't learn until act III) is "Diana X. Stadov", which anagrams to David Xanatos. It would have been nice to have made her plan a Xanatos Gambit but that's hard without branching missions. I suppose I could have thrown in a line somewhere revealing that even if the player hadn't gone along he'd have ended up fighting the Omicrons anyway as they'd come after him to get a sample of the X-Omega nanovirus.
- Other Gargoyles references: named Bosses Hudson, Lennox and Vogel and the Lexington Memorial Hospital, mainly thrown in to provide hints for the above.
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
I suspect the enemies at the door was a teammate running and shooting stuff (encouraged) and then retreating to die away from them (discouraged). Teammate's of mine should know that if you are going down you better be on an enemy's feet. I suspect the AV teleporting comment was lag or possibly me Team Teleporting and the usual confusion that results. I did not notice the AV Teleporting and like you said it isn't possible.
Hopefully, a way will be found where you can somehow cram more crazy encounters into the mission.
Still not sure why you call that a litany of sins. Personally I still think that arc's the best you've made thus far (well, except for the monotony on the last mission; that could go). Sure it's Just A Bunch of Stuff That Happened (and a collection of cliches), but it's an entertaining Bunch of Stuff that actually has some fun and challenging gameplay to go along with the story.
If you'd like a suggestion on spicing it up, switch out the custom EBs in the last mission with reskinned unique bosses and EBs from standard factions. You can probably drop a custom minion or such to get the space without significantly affecting the gameplay, and suddenly running into maybe a Man-O'-War or a Super Devoured amid a bunch of aliens would be maybe not unexpected, but certainly entertaining. 
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
Characters
I don't think of the gameplay in "Psychophage" as challenging. I think of it as tedious. "Challenging" would require that it be something you could fail, and you can't, unless you never had a chance of succeeding in the first place. Otherwise you can just throw yourself at it again and again, chipping away until you finish.
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
Okay then, let me rephrase that, haha: it's not an enemy selection almost all players can just walk over while yawning, like so many other arcs have.
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
Characters
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Actually, the only way you can fail a mission is if:|
Originally Posted by Venture
I don't think of the gameplay in "Psychophage" as challenging. I think of it as tedious. "Challenging" would require that it be something you could fail, and you can't, unless you never had a chance of succeeding in the first place. Otherwise you can just throw yourself at it again and again, chipping away until you finish.
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A) it's timed, and most people dislike those. Bonus annoyance points if the clock is set to 5 minutes and you're given no warning of it in the mission text!
b) the final boss runs and escapes (which is more annoying than challenging)
c) you have a required escort who dies (which, being something half out of your control, could go either way as far as challenging/annoyance)
So even the "challenging" things are nothing more than annoyances and tedium.
=/
-STEELE =)
Allied to all sides so that no matter what, I'll come out on top!
Oh, and Crimson demands you play this arc-> Twisted Knives (MA Arc #397769)
Another missed comment:
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Maybe after Freedom launches I'll go through this and update the customs a bit, at least costume-wise. Of course, if I really cared about improving the entertainment value of the arc, I'd delete it.
| Love the customs... and this 7 year vet loves the sins of the arc. Was challenging with Stalker... but pulled it off just fine. |
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
Arc ID: 283197 "Psychophage"
"
Keywords: Challenging, Ideal for Teams, Non-Canon Story
Length: Very Long (4 missions, medium or small maps)
Morality: Villainous
Enemies: Custom Groups
Level Range: 45-54
Description: Dr. Stadov has been locked out of TriChron, her research company. Corporate politics at work, or something more? She's looking for an operative willing to find out...by any means necessary. Set outside the City canon. N.B. this arc commits almost every possible sin in arc design. Version 080809
Notes: This is about the worst thing I could write that I would still put my name on. It was created for the "Canon Fodder" thread since it seems to be precisely what they're asking for. There are a few violations I couldn't bring myself to commit (it has no Mary Sues in it, I didn't create factions with no Minions...a few others) but for the most part it should be taken as an example of what not to do.
In terms of difficulty, all of the mobs are on Extreme (actually, IIRC, in one case I had to use custom settings to go past Extreme). While my purpled-out Claws/SR main (Venture/Virtue) was able to solo this with nominal difficulty, my less impressively slotted DM/Regen (Phil Noir/Virtue) died seven times on the first map, four of them against Security Chief Hudson, with several deaths on each of the next two and I lost count of the deaths on the last (probably on the order of 20-30).
I'd say "enjoy!"...but you probably won't.
One comment so far (name redacted): " 4 stars for aspiring to cheesy B-movie greatness. 5 if the medics had not been attack-happy psychos.
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"