TalynDerre

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.

If I was put in charge of revamping TFs, the three things I'd look at were length, the fact that only the team leader really 'gets' the story, and adding some 'boss mechanics' to keep players on their toes. Length: Penny Yin is too short. All the Shadow Shard ones are too long. I'd argue even that the ASF is too long - it's super cool, but it really feels like it could have been TWO task forces. A TF should take between 45 and 90 minutes - long enough to feel like a real, self-contained story, but short enough that I can actually play it through between when I put my kid to bed and when I need to go to bed. The second part - tell the story NOT through the wall-o-text mission briefings, but in-mission. It doesn't have to be a cutscene. NPC setpieces in maps that explain what they are doing, why you are trying to stop them/assist them, and then adding enough clues and little explanatory text boxes that a person feels like they know why they are here would be enough. The ASF does this pretty well. Even the Incarnate Raids, which I don't otherwise love, does a good job of getting everyone up to speed about what the heck is going on. Finally - boss gimmicks. They are great, I love them. Lucky for us, the newest TFs are already doing this. Posi 1, the Reichsman fights, the Battle Maiden Fight in the Apex TF, and of course the ASF all have fun boss gimmicks. I want to see more of those. The most important thing about them is that they should give players something to do in the boss fights besides 'stand back from the tank and then hit it till it dies.' Secondary targets, telegraphed AoE attacks, environmental hazards, or even just the boss making himself temporarily invulnerable and running to a different room for a different set-piece would all be fun. Here's a possible boss gimmick - let's say that there is a new TF where you have to fight Nano-Malta, Malta Operatives who have been juiced up with Battle Maiden's nanobots. The final boss is against Director 11. The fight takes place in a large, outdoor 'arena' type map. The boss has three stages - the first stage is a standard 'tank and spank', where you have to reduce his AV health bar to zero, while also fighting off the occasional wave of regular Malta bad guys. Basically, think of the Director 11 fight from the Tin Mage TF. Once he hits zero health (or 5%, or whatever), Director 11 activates his failsafe, becomes temporarily invulnerable, and calls down an airstrike on himself. But the airstrike doesn't drop a bomb, or napalm - it drops the blue nanobots from the Battle Maiden fight. The players have to evacuate the bombed-out area before they get eaten by the bots, and then dodge the airstrikes while fighting off Malta drones. Finally, once that stage is done, you go back to fighting Director 11, but now he's piloting a special, nano-tech infused Zeus Titan. The players have to whittle down his health bar again, still dodging the blue goo, but the matter is further complicated by the fact that Malta has now put snipers with nanotech super-rifles on the balconies around the arena. When someone is targets by the sniper, they are given a crosshair warning and have to put a pillar or other obstacle between them and the sniper, otherwise they get hit with a HUGE damage hit that can one-shot anything other than a topped-off Tanker or Brute. The players have to choose between playing 'duck the rifle shot' all throughout the fight or sending one or two damage dealers away from the AV fight so they can take out the snipers. That is, admittedly, a complicated example, but a complex, multi-stage boss fight like that would really make a TF memorable and fun to play. Especially if there are multiple possible paths to success, so it improves the replay value.

Well, let's see: Michael Myers (Halloween) is a Natural Invulnerable / Broad Sword Tanker. Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th) is a Magic Axe / Regeneration Brute. Carrie White (Carrie) is a Natural (or possibly Mutant) Gravity Control / Psionic Assault Dominator. Freddie Krueger (Nightmare on Elm Street) is a Magic Claws / Dark Stalker. The Phantom (The Town That Dreaded Sundown) is a Natural Axe / Super Reflexes Stalker. Leatherface (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) is a Natural Titan Weapons / Willpower Brute.

Turn 'em into Hero (or Villain) merits - at a 50 to 1 exchange rate, 10,000 merits converts to 200 Hero Merits. Now you can get up to 10,000 Hero merits, or 5 MILLION merits (mwa ha ha).

I have started playing Overwatch 2 now that it's free to play. It's fun so far, but I don't know how long I'll play it.

I, too, am very much looking forward to Ashes of Creation - if it can create even a fraction of what it promises, which is a truly dynamic world where players have genuine agency in shaping the game world, it will be groundbreaking. However, I am also deeply concerned that giving agency in shaping the game world to people on the internet with too much free time (i.e. the people who are most likely to be able to effect meaningful change in an MMO) is going to end up creating a non-fun experience for the rest of us. I would LOVE to join an in-game tent settlement and help it grow into a town. I want to be part of a developing community, where we pool our resources and share and generate wealth. I don't want my contribution to be nullified, griefed, sabotaged or destroyed by someone who can spend twelve hours a day in the game.

Oh man, I loved that webcomic.

I felt the same way, but I was too much of a coward to say it. Thank you for putting it out there.

I'd be interested, but I think you might be overestimating how much interest there would be - especially since, with a global playerbase, there is literally no where in the world you could put this thing that wouldn't require air travel for the vast majority of potential attendees. Perhaps, instead, trying to piggy-back on to an existing comics or video game convention might be more practical? Get a booth at SDCC, or something like that, and then arrange a meet-up and play date for CoX fans who are already there or might be interested in going?

Oh, and on the original topic - I love soloing as a Sentinel. Big missions, little missions, even those pesky defeat-alls - for some reason, it's just more fun to do it as a Sentinel for me.