Jocas = Joking??

Was there ever any reasonable lore mention of this whole Dagger of Jocas / Quills of Jocas thing before the DD trial when Dream Doctor basically shws up and, deus ex machina, says "O hai! Here is this super-powerful magic dagger that will actually kill you, haha!"

And then they just call it quills and give it to Black Swan in the Tyrant trial as another deus-ex-machina mechanic??

Or is it just, oh yeah, Dream Doctor / Midnight Squad used this "dagger of jocas" to imprison Rularuu. Oh look here it is again. And it brought quills!

The Dagger of Jocas and Quills of Jocas come up in a Maria Jenkins mission with Black Swan:

When clicking items in the Midnighter's club to earn the Midnighter Archivist badge you click on a plaque on a bookshelf titled "Rularuu Library". One of the books it lists is "Crafting the Dagger of Jocas" by Pontice Doub.

Not a newly added item to the lore.

I asked EXACTLY the same thing in a different thread a few days back Agent. The topic was a lil different, and my question sorta hijacked it..but..

I still think its a cop out, 2 tiny mentions, and I doubt many people have even seen the Midnighter One. Even then, I dont think it says anything more than..Dagger of Jocas. We still dont know who or what it is..other than it had a knife and spikey bits. And considering the thing was basically the ONLY reason that most leagues can even kill Tyrant..a little more depth would have been good.

The Dagger's abilities are apparently meant to function almost like the dimensional grounding ray in the Reichsman TF, only apparently on a much more grand, permanent, and thorough scale.
Against Rularuu it was supposed to basically rip out everything he ever ate and pretty much kill him, though I guess Silos' tampering made it only shatter him into multiple pieces.
Without Mot's support, Diabolique would just disappear in a puff of ectoplasm and Mot would lose the last of his outside world connection, leaving him powerless.

Based on these, I conclude that the Dream Doctor is the Co-Verse version of the Nasu-Verse's Zelretch, only a lot less fun, and that the Dagger of Jocas was actually based off of Medea's Rule Breaker. (which destroys contracts and connections.)

And to think, he could have just had Shirou trace another one if he wanted to kill Rularuu. Unfortunately, we'll only be getting psionic melee and not full on psionic weapons. So we'll never truly be able to TRACE ON! much less Pray UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Or it could be C) utilizing preexisting lore in a new and creative way as opposed to inventing something completely out of left field.

Well I think both dagger and quils have very limited target ofchoice for great effects. We know quils severe connection to well and give that power to user of quils but there are a few things we don't know and I can only make assumptions.

1) Both Black Swan, us and Tyrant are connected to same Well namely humanities well so when Black Swan used quils on us it severed our connection to well and give it to her same with how we used it on Tyrant. This doesn't mean however we can use quils on beings that are not connected to our well or even if they amange to severe connection of those individuals we may not get the power up since it is a different well than ours.

2) I think somehwere in game it was mentioned that Rularuu ascended forcefully severing his connection to well much like how MoT and Diabolique tried to do it. My guess is dagger of Jocas severe existence that those of rejected by well namely those who tried to and manage to ascend. Since well itself can't severe that connection it probably give design of dagger to a mortal who can create and use it. Much like how he intends to fight against battalion by choosing a champion in its stead.

I second what Ven says. Option C is rubbish. Maybe the Jocas isnt 100% left field, but it may as well be. Even the quote Tex gave, tells you NOTHING about it, besides that it IS a blade. Which you know..is pretty obvious since its the dagger of jocas..

I remember doing DD for the first time, and when the Doc pulls the dagger, out of his you know what, I was thinking..um, what? Dagger?? It is just too fortunate that it is around. Hell, why didnt Pappy Smurf, or Doc just stab everyone he could with the dagger if it is just so super awesome?

Funny, when I ran the DD for the first time and saw the mention of the Dagger... I instantly got all giddy because he was about to go all "Rularuu imprisonment/shattering" on her.

I knew exactly what it was, and what it had been used for in the past. Wasn't "out of left field" at all, AFAIAC.

I guess to some folks, who aren't as familiar with Midnight Club lore, it might. What exactly were you expecting in place of the Dagger/Quills mechanic?

Just because YOU got the jocas reference, not everyone did. The bit of history is very minor, for such a HUGE outcome.

Sorry, there's not enough rum in the house for me to reply to that.

It's actually very well foreshadowed.

Chekhov's gun only needs to on the stage, it doesn't need to have great big arrows pointing to it.

I really sometimes wonder why Venture continues to play when I don't think I've ever seen him say something positive about the game in his forum posts? I mean, caustic as even folks like Sam and I are, we STILL find and praise good aspects of the game.

Maybe his forum criticisms are meant to be a ruse so we never suspect 'his' real identity to be Golden Girl. Or maybe Golden Girl's a front for Venture?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

I actually wasn't at all surprised that the Dagger/Quills of Jocas were brought up. I'd have expected them to be brought up in relation to Rularuu or the Shadow Shard or the Shadow Realm, of course, and this rewriting of them as being some kind of Incarnate mcguffin doesn't sit well with me, but bringing them up is not a surprise. They're talked about as background lore of the Midnight Club, they show up in a mission about Black Swan and the Dream Doctor talks about them in his own personal story mission. For them to NOT come up would have been disappointing.

In a sense, though, ret-conning them into an Incarnate-related artefact, disappointing as it may be, is in-line with the Well of the Furries being cast as the major and almost sole source of above-divine power. This in itself is a problem, and you see the consequences of that problem in instances like this, where previously unrelated artefacts are now all of a sudden tied to the Well. This is the central problem behind giving everything and anything in your fictional universe a singular backstory explanation. You create a plot bottleneck that every story has to squeeze through, thus causing many stories to be twisted together when they would otherwise have had nothing to do with each other.

I'm hoping that the story team's work on phasing in the concept of "ascension" will lighten the load on the Well of the Furies and open up an infinite number of possible paths to ascension and possible sources of power, with the Well serving more as the catalyst than the literal source. Once we start seeing Ascendants drawing power from their own personal being, be it through divine knowledge, absurd technology or powerful magic, we'll start seeing storylines open up quite a bit more, and problems like this - the needless cramming of divergent stories into the same plot point - ought to be less frequent, or at least less grating.

In a sense (and provided anything actually comes of Ascendants), I think our story writers have learned their lesson and listened to popular feedback regarding the Well. A little more like that, and a few more stories like SSA2.1, and I might actually start being optimistic again.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Okay, how about if the devs add a footnote to all references to the Dagger of Jocas saying:

"* See Issue #12! - Praetorian-Pounding Positron"