ZorkNemesis

Worth pointing out, Vanguard Shield/Sword have exceptionally high perception. They can aggro Stalkers through Hide. Cloaking Device and Smoke Bombs usually aren't enough to completely blind them.

0. Mess with the settings. Hopefully some of the new changes aimed at modernizing the game won't screw me up too much but if they do I gotta fix them. 1. Illusion/Arsenal Dom. Need a new Dominator to play and this sounds like it might be a good new experience. 2. Holstered weapons across the board. I got a bunch of characters with Bows, Pistols, and Beam Rifles that are looking to be holstered on character. 3. Respec my Cold/Beam Defender. The new Ice Mastery looks better for both concept and effectiveness. I might also look at Ice Mastery for my Spines/Ice Scrapper but I like Water Spout and Hibernate already.

I've got a few civillian outfits for a couple of my guys and gals. My Thugs/Sonic MM, Garage Band, has her look styled after that of a punk rocker. A Ninja Blade/Super Reflexes Stalker, Disco Ninja, who is heavily inspired by disco stereotypes. Bar Maiden, a Water/Poison Corrupter where I was trying for something Oktoberfest themed. Shotgun Surgeon, Assault Rifle/Pain Domination Corrupter, who's outfit is basically bloodied medical scrubs.

The Petrovich Brothers are the Lords of Death you fought during the two King's Row arcs, Veles and Chernobog. Also Morana who escaped the lab before you arrived.

I'm sure the live writers had plans for him, but whatever happened to Deadlock? He shows up, whoops Back Alley Brawler's ass and leaves without a word. I assume there was going to be a longer story with the whole new Superdine rings what with Veles showing Atta his lab but the shutdown really left a hell of an unresolved plotline behind.

I think there would be issues with that one since LRM Rocket and Arsenal Mastery use the same Assault Rifle as, well, Assault Rifle. The rocket launchers used by the Council/5th/Destroyers have their own set of animations due to being shoulder mounted and not held like LRM's Sniper Rifle animations.

I resemble this remark!

I can't check now, but what do these rollbacks enatil? I played a couple hours on Indom before this went down, does this mean I have to take my Defender through the Talons and Monsters in Cimerora again?

I know many of us suffer from altitis, and 1,000 slots is a lot of characters. What about the times when you don't have any creative ideas for new characters and just want to play, but you have 30+ level 50 characters to choose from and maybe another 15 or so in-progress. How do you decide who you want to take to the streets with when there's so many options? Sometimes I scroll through my list and wonder who I should bring out sometimes, like trying to decide what other game to play when i'm not playing CoX.

A thought occured after seeing the screenshots on Reddit. Are the renovated Vanguard compounds going to be applied to mission map variants as well? I know at least three missions in RWZ that take place in the compound itself, along with the one in Dark Astoria. There's also a bunch of outdoor missions in RWZ, will the Architect building also be visible or gone from those too?

Valentine Tips drop at any point after you're level 20 I think, you don't have to talk to anyone to get them to drop, they drop from anything as long as the event is active. The bigger issue with those tips is that they don't take your allignment into account and you might get tips for zones you can't access (for example, a pure villain can't deliver U'kon Gra'i's letter since both Positron and Blue Steel are in hero zones). Can be an issue if you're stubborn and don't want to flip sides with Null every so often.

I've seen this one before! I had a random book in the university grow to epic proportions as well. Couldn't tell you what caused it though.

I don't think such a mission exists. What you might be thinking of is Bobcat who is part of the Power storyline and she's chilling in the strip club side of Studio 55. And yes, it's a strip club, the dancers aren't wearing much of anything.

The train in the small side room where you get off isn't interractable, go into the main station to get on. If you can't click the main train, wait for the doors to close and try again.

Both my level 50 tanks use flight, it's not impossible. Hell I also chose powersets that don't like to fly but still made them work (Fiery Aura and Titan Weapon both have very good powers that need to be grounded to use (Burn and Arc of Destrucrion)). I also have a couple flying Scrappers that work; Flight and Savage Leap/Shield Charge feels like i'm dive-bombing targets. If you want to stay primarily at range and airborne, may I point to Energy Manipulation. One of the powers of the set is just a temporary range bonus that gives you the power to hit things from another time zone and is very easy to make perma'd. It also stacks with the range bonus from your sniper attack and Clarion if you go that route. For primaries I find the best to keep your distance are Archery, Assault Rifle, Beam Rifle, Ice, and Water as none of these sets have PBAoEs while maintaining solid AoE capabilities (though I can't recall if Geyser needs to be used on the ground).

City of Data has detailed breakdowns of each pet and what they're capable of. You can also review the power in-game with a right click and the Detailed Info tab will have a lot of information. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/entity.html?entity=pets_v_darkservant https://cod.uberguy.net/html/entity.html?entity=pets_shade https://cod.uberguy.net/html/entity.html?entity=pets_umbra_beast

Reminds me of the one time this didn't happen to me. Back on the live days, the ski challet was in beta and the santa gloves/boots were just added. There was an impromptu costume contest in the ski challet. Everyone who was part of it made a santa suit, except for me who took those gloves and boots and made a skiing outfit instead. I won it too, probably because my white and blue stood out among all the red.

In case you're not aware, Null the Gull has the option to supress movement speed buffs from other players. Speed Boost, Accelerate Metabolism, and a couple others are included.

If you do pick a partner, you'll get extra lore and the Connected badge if you do all the bonus objectives. While Vince and Lorenz both have similar side stories about finding an amulet or some family sellouts, Maros adds additional story concerning Sharkhead's red/blood coral. Maros will also add another fight with Barracuda partway in so be aware of that. To partner with Maros, you have to have completed his Cult of the Shaper story arc first. Also you will have the option to bring your partner along for the second-to-last mission in the warehouse when you go into the coral itself (this will not be immediately clear in the mission briefing, talk to your partner before starting the mission). Be sure to check the radio just inside each mission before continuing to activate extra objectives.

Intuition Radial offers Damage, Range, and Hold (most Blasters have at least one), along with defense debuff, slow, and tohit debuff which are fairly common debuff effects in a number of Blaster attacks.

Generally no. There are some powers that give status protections (for instance Burn in Fire Manipulation gives Immobilize protection and Wild Fortress in Plant Manip. has Confuse protection) but a Blaster would usually have to heavily invest in pools for status protections and that's not really viable. Rune of Protection is the best option if you want status protections but it requires two other powers in the Sorcery pool to get and can't be up 100% of the time due to a non-enhancable recharge. Blaster's best status protection: kill them first. Use your powers to prevent then from acting and kill them before their statuses can go off. Use your nukes to alpha strike, abuse knockdowns if you have them, some sets get weak AoE controls that can help with set ups or when things get hairy. And don't forget that if you do get controled, Blasters can still use their T1 and T2 primary powers and their T1 secondary at any time so you can still fight even if you're encased in a block of ice. Worst case scenario if you're really struggling, the Defense Amplifier from the P2W vendor gives some status protection. As long as you're not getting focused with controls that they get layered to hell it should give you plenty of leeway to work with. If you're worried about being knocked over, look into a Blessing of the Zephyr or Karma knockback protection enhancements. You can slot one in a travel power or defense boosting power and knockdowns will never be an issue again. Very, very few enemies do more than Mag 4 knockback so this would cover pretty much anything that isn't Diabolique or a Fake Nemesis.

Something that kind of bothers me are the rewards for the arcs added to the 15-24 range. Heroes get five badges and two temporary powers from Laura Lockheart and Grahm Easton, but Villains only get two badges from Bane Spider Ruben and Brother Hammond. Why is there such an imbalance in rewards? I know for the heroes this does mean doing each arc twice to get everything but still the Villain rewards get kind of shafted here. My suggestion: There's a perfect place already to add a branching reward in Bane Spider Ruben for another badge and temporary powers, similar to Grahm Easton and sparing/killing the Tsoo leader. At the end of the arc you are given the option to either hand the Suggestion Engine to Arachnos or keep it for yourself. If you give it to him he'll remark that you still have the psychic damper that you were given early on. Here's what I think: if you keep the engine for yourself you should get the Gifted Speaker badge as usual but get a ten-use temporary single-target Confuse power as a bonus so you can actually use the engine for a bit before it fails as suggested by the writing. If you give Ruben the engine you should get a different badge instead, something related to being unable to be swayed or hypnotized perhaps? You should also get the Psychic Damper as an auto power which can provide some minor Psi defense and some Confuse protection for a few hours in-game. I know this isn't a terribly big thing but the imbalance of rewards for these four arcs always kind of bothered me. This could help a bit. Thoughts?

I had a friend of mine try Outbreak, he's only played the game once before where I took him through Destroyed Galaxy (bad idea in hindsight). Outbreak is certainly a better tutorial than Galaxy for sure but there's still a few nuances that don't get well explained however he agrees that it was certainly a better tutorial to start with. He had difficulty navigating at times when it came to the compass telling him where to go, the worst cases where upon exiting a mission there was no prompt to go back to the contact (Coyote in particular) and the compass doesn't tell you where the Contaminated are, I had to point him in that direction since he also is the kind of person to skip through text. I'll run it again myself to compare it to what I remember, but I think it's a good start. I would also like to point out that he decided to get the Isolater badge. I only told him about it after he started aimlessly KOing dudes after the first two. I'm not sure the game's clicking for him but if he sticks around we might have a future badge hunter in the making. Whatever popup is supposed to appear upon collecting an Explore badge the first time appeared as a placeholder instead.

I admit I don't have a whole lot of variety. Most of my level up paths follow the same story arcs and I typically play solo. I do mix up which arcs I play, like sometimes I'll go Hollows while others I play Twinshot. Gold i'll pick a path based on my character headcannon and what they would do for/against Praetoria. It's rare for me to do radios/papers, but I enjoy tips (devs: please add more allignment tips, they're the best villainous content by far) and often run those between major arcs. Occasionally I jump into TFs, I keep the LFG tab open and if I see a shout I'm in to i'll go for it, but I generally don't form teams myself.

Stalkers are about subtly and assassainations. A morningstar or hammer really isn't the best for trying to be unnoticed as they're heavy, clunky, and messy. Of course we might get them repurposed for Stalkers, but Mace and Axe are very much not "stealthy" weapons.