Unveiled Shadows (Arc #422173)

Your phone rings.
"I need to talk to you. Get here as soon as possible. I've sent you some coordinates. Thanks", the voice says and then promptly hangs up. It sounded like Foreshadow. Best head over to him and see what he wants you for.

Would you trust a group of villains if they became good? Would you take them under your wing? A group of Council has done just that and became the Reformed Council. Wearing more colourful versions of their uniforms, they seek your help from a failed mission. But, should you trust them? Only time will tell.

This is my first arc, so I hope you all enjoy it. Now this starts easy, but the difficulty ranks up quickly, so if you're not able to solo EBs, or if you don't have a team, you may want to find some help.

Arc Name: Unveiled Shadows
Arc Number: 422173
Level Range: 35-50 (though I'm not sure about the final mission, should probably check that :P)
Morality: Heroic
Enemy Groups: Council, 5th Column, A secret group

I'd love your feedback!

Decent arc to start, final mish AV spawned as an AV even though I was solo and no AVs were selected, I still managed to almost beat her until she ran away and that part ruined the entire arc for me im sorry to say.

Otherwise I liked the use of maps and patrols, nice little story with a couple of twists just left feeling a little deflated after spending a good 20 mins fighting the AV and almost killing her for her to then scarper and me to have a fail

Hmm...that's weird, I know I had her set to run, but she spawned as an EB to me when I played through it solo. Sorry about that.

Well I shall tell her to stop running then in a quick fix. Of course this means a new arc ID, but I shall post it as soon as possible. Thank you for the advice.

Edit: It has now been republished without the fleeing AV. Arc #422173 is the new arc number!
Edit2: Anyone know who to contact for changing the thread name? Avatea?

Oh my. I really am an AE noob. Sorry sorry sorry.

Review done as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

Playing this on a level 50 spine/regen scrapper, +1/x2 with bosses on.

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Hmm. No name or description on this contact. The model is Foreshadow, so I guess that's who it's supposed to be, but I have no idea why the 5th Column would contact WISDOM.

Eh, there's that to work out later.

I find some Council attacking the 5th. ...because that's not something Council usually do.

Apparently these are rogues who left with someone who I guess is sounding like a warshade. He's been captured and they called for help. Silver Soldier's bio calls him a Silver Surfer, which is probably not accurate, and in this warehouse (it's not even a 5th Column warehouse) they have a tendency to go chasing runners and get killed by my boosted difficulty.

...the blue Vortex soldier says [FILLER TEXT] in his clue. If that's supposed to be a joke, you haven't really set a very humorous tone thus far.

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Hmm. If there's supposed to be like an EB in this next mission you should probably warn about it.

There don't seem to be any so far, having rescued Shadow Quark, who is a custom dark/dark which I suppose is reasonable given the limits of the enemy creator.

In exploring the place for this computer we're supposed to hack I head up the catwalk in the end room, but shockingly there's nothing there. I'm surprised.

On the way down Shadow Quark lets off his "got damaged" taunt. Take THAT, gravity!

I find the computer after backtracking to one of the earlier side rooms I cleared out. I suppose that's reasonable.

The 5th are going to invade some Council bases! Which is unusual how? I suppose there must be some other wrinkle I don't know about.

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So in the middle of all the fighting in the first base I find a note about a Nemesis plot. Sigh. It’s not that I’ve played a lot of Nemesis plot arcs per se, it’s that Nemesis can be used to excuse a lot of apparent plot holes as actually being part of the plot all along. Except that doesn’t actually make them any less plot holes.

It wasn't a required objective and there's no more talk of it from the contact. I wonder if it's just a red herring. That’d be something new.

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Again in this mission there's infighting, so I'll leave you this tip - battles start (and play their dialogue) when heroes aren't there, so it's a bad assumption for battle dialogue to make that heroes are around.

I rescue Shadow Quark, who tells me about some machine I'm supposed to deactivate. And then I deactivate the machine, after which he decides that he can't let me do that and tries to kill me.

Uh... whatever floats your boat, dude? I'm aware this was all a Nemesis plot, but even so that seems a little random.

Afterwards I have an objective to take out the base leader, and after doing a lap of the entire base I finally find Arakhn down the entrance tunnel. She says she's going to get revenge on me for shutting down her machine that I don't know what it did, and then reveals she's been working with Nemesis.

Whose pawn wanted me to shut down the machine?

I don't even know anymore, but she does respond to the universal language of spine to the face and I go off to fight Nemesis, who's in another entrance tunnel, and who because of the difficulty settings of this map I fight (as I did Arakhn) at -1, or -2 to my effective level. You may want to look into that.

Nemesis goes all MWA HA HA I AM NEMESIS AND YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND MY PLAN as his hit points go down, but you know what? I really don't understand this plan. I don't know what the cover story was that Shadow Quark and his group were trying to accomplish, as it seems like more ordinary 5th/Council infighting. I don't know what Arakhn thought she was getting out of an alliance with Nemesis. Backstabbing Requiem's always a good motive. I don't know what the machine did or why Nemesis wanted me to shut it down or why Arakhn didn't, and was Shadow Quark acting out of loyalty to Arakhn when he turned on me or just fed up with acting like a hero?

This mission doesn't cough up any clues and the arc doesn't seem to have a souvenir, either. So I'm just in the dark here.

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Storyline - **. It started out at least modestly promising. Council trying to go straight was an interesting idea, but fighting the 5th Column isn’t exactly anything different from what the Council usually do. And similarly, trying to raid Council bases isn’t exactly anything different from what the 5th Column usually does. I only say this because the story treats these like rare occurrences for some reason.

And I’ve already documented my complete inability to understand what the heck was really going down in the last mission, and what motivated anybody in it, up to and including myself.

Design - ***. So not a lot of people like Citadel’s task force, on account of it having a lot of Council/Column bases in quick succession, some of them absolutely identical. This arc avoids the identical problem, but the last three missions are all in Council/Column bases, including the Requiem’s Last Stand and a Megamech base with apparently no information on the contact’s part or in the mission itself about the special nature of these maps, and I was expecting a base for the first mission as well, only to find a regular old abandoned warehouse.

I do appreciate a little variety in the maps types from mission to mission, and my issue here is not so much with the warehouse and the variations on the standard cave base in and of themselves. The mission briefing or perhaps the entry popup should do something to establish the nature of the place where you’re going.

Gameplay - ***. Stock enemy groups, generally reasonable fights, workable missions. Aside from running all over the place tracking down chained objectives in the last map, anyway. That one was a real downer, drained all the anticipation right out of me by the time I finally found the boss.

Detail - *. In addition to some of the odd little mistakes in the first mission and the missing contact name and description, there aren't any persistent reminders, no clues or souvenirs, talking about the last mission, which is just where things start getting really confusing.

As an added note, if you don't put any objective text in for an ally or boss, their name appears unalloyed in the navbar, which doesn't work too well as a description of what you're supposed to be doing. Kill? Find? Rescue?

Overall - **. This feels more unfinished than anything. The [FILLER TEXT] in the first mission and the lack of clues in the last, and the lack of any contact description or even souvenir all come together to give that impression.

The detail drops out just as the plot is twisting, leaving me sailing off into oblivion with no idea what's really going on. If the lack of clues and souvenir is deliberate, then it's a decision that really needs to be reconsidered.