TalynDerre

Mechanically, they fight more like Super Sky Raiders than like Malta. Their doctrine of "use bosses to draw fire while dropping high-tech support buffs" is very Sky Raider-esque. Also, with their specialist AI, they try to get around the tanks and target the squishies. Malta, on the other hand, is based around targeting the tank super, nuking their defenses down (between Sappers draining END and the rank-and-file imposing -DEF debuffs) and then taking them out with ludicrous single-target damage. So they feel very different to fight, even if they have a very similar narrative vibe.

My wife squashed a big female wolf spider back when before we got married, about Carl-sized. (She used a textbook, and then piled a few other books on top of it to be sure, and then called me, on my cell phone, to come home and rescue her while she stood on the couch.) That spider was so big that when I peeled all the books off, its body had left a dent in the carpet. When I told her afterwards that it was capable of jumping up to three meters, she told me that if she had known that, she would have just fled the house and let me deal with it when I came home.

So, I'm late to the party here, but I'm pretty sure it's Earthquake being dropped by the Masters of Ruin. Earthquake is auto-hit, and reduces your DEF, which means it absolutely ruins the day of people with Super Reflexes and Energy Aura.

So... how did it go?

I made a Dual Pistols / Super Reflexes / Super Speed Sentinel the other day named Arms Race. That's pretty punny.

I love the aesthetic of Kinetic Melee, but the long windup times do make it tough to fully contribute in large groups. I've found that I can make it work on Tankers, where I basically only target Bosses and AVs when in a full group anyways, so I can get my hits in before all the AoE takes out the minions.

I was actually using this as an example the other day, when explaining 'origins' to a friend who doesn't play City of Heroes.

Blame the French! Which, to be fair, I usually do for everything anyways, but in this case it is actually justified. Like almost all of our military terms, 'melee' is a French word.

I have a lore/backstory question about the Rikti War: What happened to the rest of the world during the Rikti invasion? Which cities, besides Paragon, were the hardest hit? Did different nations fight back against the Rikti in different ways? Were there other portals to the Rikti Homeworld in other cities, or is the one in Paragon City the only one?

I swear... swear... that back when I first started playing on Live there was an arc for lowbie Natural heroes that had you tracking down some WWII era artwork that was stolen by the 5th Column. It was in Atlas Park, it was your first introduction to the 5th Column, and it ended with a boss fight in a warehouse covered with 5th Column flags where the villain swore revenge against you when you defeated him. This arc apparently does not exist. I have no idea what I am remembering.

I made an Arsenal/Arsenal dominator that I had queued up. I've only had a chance to level her to about level 6, but I'm enjoying her so far. Once she gets to 20 I'm going to run all the Striga stuff with her.

In the costume creator, for Assault Rifles, when you 'customize powers' there is a significant disconnect between when your toon makes the motion of firing the weapon and when the muzzle flash and the hit effect actually happens. This only applies to certain powers. Burst: seems fine Slug: the flash and hit happen about 0.75 seconds too early. Buckshot: seems fine M30 grenade: grenade launches about 1 second before the animation. Also, the grenade ALWAYS launches towards the bottom right of the screen regardless of which way your character is facing Beanbag: seems okay Sniper Rifle: the flash and hit effect are about 1 second late. Flamethrower: seems okay Ignite: seems okay Full Auto: it looks like the muzzle flash and hit effect are about a quarter-second late This seems to happen with all types of rifles, both holstered and not-holstered. I only tested this on a Female body type, not sure about other body types.

I just spent a couple hundred million on IO-ing out two alts, so I've been demoted from "Easy Street" to "Comfortable."

Colonel Rick Flagg from the Suicide Squad movies is a Mastermind.

Add a 'Farm' tag in AE, so I can exclude it when I want to find actual story arcs.

I would love it if you picked a gunpowder weapon with a 'silenced' option (the Mercenary Mk2 AR rifle, or silenced dual pistols), it would change the gunfire sounds to the Hollywood Silencer 'thwip's.

Parody is protected speech (and, since this isn't for-profit, it's probably Fair Use) but I don't want the Devs to have to deal with that drama to prove it.

Corruptor is the only one that could use a tweak, but to be honest I'm not sure what I'd want to replace it with. Primay: Ranged Damage. Secondary: Support. It's basically an opposite-day Defender, so... Aggressor? Instigator? Those are more value-neutral than Corruptor, at least.

It definitely seems like some of my toons are 'luckier' than others. My Tanker Leading Lady and my Sentinel Unity Black Tango, in particular, end up just dripping with purple recipes and very rare Incarnate Salvage and Enhancement Catalysts and whatever. Other level 50s seem to get these rare drops rarely or at all. Maybe some sort of weird hiccup in the loot algorithm? Or maybe it's just observational bias.

I don't know about grind, per se - I remember basically going straight from Brickstown / St. Martial to the Rikti War Zone and never looking back because the War Zone arcs were so good - but I definitely remember the game being a lot harder at low levels. I think we forget just how much inherent Fitness gives us, and being able to get your 'good' travel power at level 4 means that you can now just run or fly away from anything that you can't fight. The Hollows wasn't so bad, but Perez Park and even northern King's Row were both deathtraps. You felt fear when you got a door mission to go up there at level 8.

I would love to see a flooded / wrecked by a hurricane zone, maybe on the island marked '3' on your map. It should be a high-level zone, so that Redsiders have options for 40+ content that isn't Grandville. I like Zep's suggestion of a more prosperous zone focused on white-collar crime - maybe it could have been that before the hurricane. Now, you have the more elevated areas that are still mostly functional, which have Arachnos, Crey, and Malta enemies. You have the flooded zones, which have high-level Snakes and Coralax, and maybe some Rikti deserters who are not part of either the Restructuralists or the Traditionalists, and who are trying to lay low. And you have the now-exposed fortified areas that have been revealed by the flooding, where Longbow, the Council, and Nemesis forces now battle each other AND Arachnos over the few bits of defensible dry ground. If you wanted to focus on some weirder stuff, you could have one of the Nemesis bases be a Shadow Shard portal, so that area has now been taken over by Shadow Shard-type enemies, and it would be a chance for Redsiders to do more Shadow Shard shenanigans.

My first redside 50 was a Mercs mastermind, and I always argued that they weren't as bad as everyone said they were... that being said, I'm really liking the Merc buffs. Just... so much gunfire. Everywhere. Shell casings for days. Love it. That being said, it can be tough to get pets to match your character's aesthetic and/or RP persona. Pet customization - even limited pet customization, if the full thing is too hard to program - would encourage me to make more MM toons. I'd love to put gas masks on my Mercs/Poison minions, or turn my 'fantasy' zombies into 'sci-fi' zombies, or put hazard markings on my Robots so they look like repurposed industrial equipment, just as a handful of examples.

For my Tankers, Scrappers and Brutes, I hate the Carnival Bosses with a passion. The Master Illusionists are awful and the Ring Mistresses and Dark Ring Mistresses are even worse. On my Sentinels, I don't like fighting the Incarnate Banished Pantheon, they have the right combination of debuffs and straight damage to ruin my day. On my squishies, I don't like Malta Gunslingers, IDF Commanders, Rularuu Beholders or anyone else with the DPS to burn me down before I can return the favor. And NOBODY likes Ruin Mages. Ever. For any reason. Also, Longbow Wardens, Paragon Protectors, and anyone else with Moment of Glory are not necessarily difficult to fight, but they are annoying. You basically have to defeat them, wait two minutes, and then defeat them again.

It's a hero shooter - it plays like a cross between Team Fortress 2 and WoW. Its monetization is just The Worst, and it is deservedly getting a lot of flack for that, but it is a slick FPS with well-defined classes that is fun to play, and as long as you don't care about cosmetics (and I don't) it's totally free.

Not gonna lie, I really like the 'flooding a zone' ideas, but I am 100% sure that cannot be implemented with the server technology. Flooding would require massive changes to the zone architecture - essentially, each 'stage' of the flood would have to be an entirely new zone, architecture and pathfinding-wise.