SSA 5 Discussion (And countdown till its live!)

By the way, there's a new Intrepid Informer post here:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...63#post4075263

In it, Positron confirms that Statesman will continue to be used as the face of the game, and that the content changes caused by his death will be done in Issue 23 later this year, including the STF being given out by someone else.

So..in 80+ years of life stateman never learned to be aware of his surroundings?

its to late to trade in for a smarter main hero isn't it?

Ok I was kind of taken by surprised in a "colour me impressed" kind of way.

That's my first impression from having run it just the once in a redside team that munched everything - but even then the cut scene made me, how shall I put this... a tad thoughtful - in the kind of way I felt when I first saw the wreck of Skyway City in the Sutter TF.

This was more poignant and it did work for me so props to the writers for this one.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Only ran the hero one so far but States did not have any compunctions in throwing down in Lord Recluse's strike force after we zapped Ms. Liberty, so why did he suddenly hold back here? I suppose it makes sense in a "Paragon" type of way.

The maps were nice and having the option to revive him but failing is a nice touch as well. The arc was fine, going to have to do the redside arc in order to see if the final fight is any different.

I enjoyed it, but I did have a problem or two. Mainly that all of that end stuff could have been avoided if Statesmen had taken five steps to his left, and THEN approached Wade. Second that there was no big battle. Don't get me wrong, I know Wade wouldn't have stood a chance, but he could have used a couple of unwitting decoys or lackeys to have distracted Statesman and or forced him onto that spot. Would have felt much better to me.

And yeah, gotta admit I was somewhat surprised by the difficulty of those last fights. Had to rethink my strategy and go tankermind on it.

Nothing but pain and fact i was still five steps behind Wade..again. GRRR! And I had a bad feeling going into that last fight Wade had an ace up his sleeve..
I hope he read the small print because it's going to bite him.

Hmmmph.

So, I just wrapped up the blue-side story.

Apparently, the players who all complained so bitterly about being overshadowed by NPC's can rest easy now. This chapter is specifically designed to mollify those players and assure them that their hero is, in fact, the most fearsome and powerful hero in the game. Even the newest Grand Arch Villain is afraid of my hero.

Of course, that's how things should be right? I'm the guy paying the bills, and it's my story so I should be the star of my story and nobody else should ever be as big, scary, strong or effective as me.

Yay.

I called the plot correctly, though on the wrong target. I figured Wade was pulling a Doctor Doom on the Well itself, not on Rularuu. I guess we can hope that Wade is suffering from Super Villain Syndrome and that in ten years of preparations he somehow has failed to understand the nature of the Well and Statesman's connection to it, and that he now is stuck with becoming a sock puppet when he least expects it.

Poorly written garbage whose conclusion was in fact completely ruined by the pre-revelation (no, let's not mince words, spoiler) a few weeks back. Paragon, fire your entire marketing team, they are sinking your ship one hole at a time.

And this is coming from someone who doesn't really care about the story that much.

We might need an Incarnate Trial to defeat Wade

Pretty embarrassing to get killed by a guy named Darrin.

Another forced-failed mission, my least favourite part of the game. I know players are supposed to think "the big hero is dead, now I'm number one!" but I already thought that. Our heroes are the focus of the game, I consider Statesman a minor supporting character. So his death isn't really a big deal to me, other than my inability to save him makes my hero look bad.

So anyway- I get a Hero Merit and decide to go cash it in in Fort Trident... and of course, there's Statesman. I guess the medi-port kicked in.

1) BUG: When villains search Darrin Wade's lair, they don't get the clues they're supposed to get.

2) I don't care how much contempt I have for an enemy. If I'm weak to magic, and he's magic origin, and I get into an argument with him on top of one of the most famous magic sites in the world, I am not going to get so distracted that I stop to argue with him while standing directly in the center of where the ritual circle used to be. At some point in Statesman's death scene, he really should have said to himself, "Yeah, okay, now that I think of it, that was really stupid of me. What an embarrassing way to die."

3) As others have pointed out, but I want to point out in more detail: almost all of the old-time villains, and probably more than a third of the newer generation ones, are walking around with the Thief of Midnight badge. That Darrin Wade is Rulu'shin is probably one of the worst-kept secrets in the game; he tells you as much, himself. And (once again, I have to remind you) you do have the capability, now, to modify what happens in a mission based on what badges people have. Those of us who have the Thief of Midnight badge really, really shouldn't have been told that we were surprised to find Soldiers of Rularuu in Darrin Wade's lair(s), aka, "The Idiot Ball: U Haz It."

4) There is something wrong with the geometry of the edge of the Sybelline temple map where the last fight takes place. Once the Aspect of Ruludak got scared of me and flew off, he sank completely into the geometry there, and became completely untargetable. I had to drop out of bodyguard mode, fly to the opposite end of the map with my 'bots, and wait for him to get unstuck. If I hadn't been a +3 incarnate, that could have made it a much more annoying fight.

5) Let me disagree with Venture as respectfully as I can: I think the soldiers of Rularuu are the best enemies in the late game, not the worst. Unique models, counters for everybody's abilities, an existential threat as opposed to random recently powered up thugs, and a dangling plot thread since issue 1. By level 50, the Council and the 5th and Freakshow and the Circle and Longbow and Arachnos are boring; Malta and Knives are boring looking and even more annoying to fight than the Rularuu; the Carnies are fun but I can't take them seriously as an existential threat; the DE are a serious threat and cool looking but I hope they finally get more than 2 mobs at level 50 before we see them again; we're done with the Rikti for at least a little while, I hope. So I'm delighted to see the soldiers of Rularuu get some in-game time.

6) Reading through Darrin Wade's notes, he complains about "some meddling time traveler," specifically, something that my character hasn't done yet, won't do until issue 22. As the Klingons say, "I hate predestination paradoxes."

7) I was under the impression that the reason all this time travel back to Cimerora, including all of the future tech we've dumped on Julia whats-her-name, didn't further screw up the timeline is that shortly after we're done with it, the dormant volcano it's built on blows up. It's also awfully near the Italian mainland for that temple to be just standing out in the open and not have it be a tourist site. So I think the map should have looked a lot more worn down than it is, a lot less of it intact and above ground. It's also 20,000 miles away from Paragon City, and we travel there in a tug-boat or a container ship? This would have been a good mission to use a teleporter of some kind to get to and back, or a jet plane on the runway in Cap au Diable, something other than a ship.

By the way, DancingBeaver has uploaded the cutscene music here:

http://pureboredom.syphernet.com/pos...tatesman-music