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@Tachstar Might you be thinking about The Major's story arc? https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/The_Major It doesn't involve exactly what you are describing, but a somewhat similar mechanic - a surprise call from a very hush-hush contact who insists on using phone booths to communicate.

You can spend the inf on a second build for your Widow. @KaizenSoze has a thread about making an extra-tanky Widow, which sounds pretty fun. And if you find yourself accumulating too much inf again later on, you can make a third build for a purely ranged Fortunata, or some other exotic subvariant of your main.

I think your Forever Scrapper will end up being Elec/Nrg. Because: - Good balance of ST- and AoE damage in elec/, which is important in a Forever Scrapper, since you need that versatility to be able to use this character in a variety of different settings - exemped, itrials, solo, team, kill-alls, single hard target, etc. etc. - Elec/ has short activation times on its main attacks. This reduces the amount of wasted damage from attacking already-dead targets, which can be annoying. - No weapon-like animations in the elemental attacks. I seem to recall that being a bit of a peeve of yours. - Lightning Rod is a really fun power to use (like all TP'ing melee attacks). You need something in your Forever Scrapper that makes you smile whenever you use it! - Not much analysis behind the /nrg secondary, except to say that it just works. Whenever I play my /nrg armor scrapper, it is simply a nice, smooth ride. /Nrg has a full suite of utility powers when you need them, yet it is not very clicky outside of the utility powers. With all that said, I wonder if we need a separate betting pool re. how long your Forever Scrapper will in fact be your Forever Scrapper before being replaced by the next Forever Scrapper 😁 After all, a char in CoH is like a pair of jeans: In the time it takes you to realize that this is your best-ever, I-will-never-find-better pair of jeans, you will have worn them out to the point where they are at least halfway to being worn out and ready to be replaced ...by the next, magically perfect, best-ever jeans 🙂 My guess/bet is 6 weeks. Although that is based only on how long my own Forever Characters typically last before getting de-forever'ed, so of course YMMV.

Now I have a mental image of dozens of longboats full of large, bearded men wearing ninja robes and horned helmets, the ships running up on an English beach and the viking-ninjas leaping out of the ships with a mighty battle roar - only to start sneaking along the beach and trying in vain to not be seen.

I agree with this. Granted, a Numina TF does take longer than most of the other signature TFs, but not much longer, provided the team does a decent job of planning out the hunts for minimal delay between one hunt ending and the next one starting. It doesn't require a team of uber players, either; if just one member of the team is experienced enough to understand how to assign hunt-zones to the team in the right order, it is quite doable. ...provided that everyone is able to read chat and willing to do their part. If they are not, then Numi takes forever. But if the team is that bad, pretty much every TF takes forever 😉 At the risk of sounding like a mindless fanboi, I would also argue that Numi's TF is one of the more socially oriented TFs in the game precisely because coordinating the hunts requires communication between team members.

I wanted to highlight this bit, as I think this is a big deal. One thing I have noticed when playing AE arcs in general - and for that matter the canonical story arcs and TFs in CoX - is that if the story doesn't do a good job of making me care what happens to the main NPCs and/or groups in the story, then I lose interest in fulfilling the story's objectives and find myself merely facerolling attack buttons to get to the next part of the story. So, yeah, thanks for the tightening-up, I suspect the story is improved now. Dunno when I personally will find the time to play through 'Glitters myself, but one day...

Funny you should mention that - I had wondered myself if the PvA series would be better off as part of the larger Post Praetoria campaign. I didn't have a clear idea of how that would be done, but the 6-arc make-over you listed makes a lot of sense. For some reason I can't figure out, the two PvA arcs didn't grab me in the same way that your other goldside (and goldside-related) arcs did, so mixing the PvA arcs directly in with the overarching Post Praetoria campaign might help in that regard. That said, I think there are better uses of your time than creating 3 new arcs just to get to that magical number of 9 arcs. Your proposed combination of Glints and PvA looks like a coherent storyline, so no need to add anything to it. ...unless you already have one or more stories inside you that are just begging to be written, in which case by all means do so. What I am saying is, don't be a slave to the number 9. Edit: Added the missing word 'idea'.

Damn you! Just when I thought I had gotten out, you pull me back in! I finished Police Vs. Alien 2 a few days ago and thought I would take a break from goldside AE arcs, but now thanks to you...

Assuming the character has not earned any Empyrean Merits of his own (a faulty assumption, of course, but this is just to keep the calculation simple), you would need to mail him a total of 408 Empyreans to get him to all t4's.: - A tier3 costs 7 commons, 1 uncommon and 1 rare. That will cost you 18 Empyreans to create. - A tier4 costs 2 tier3's, 2 commons and 1 very rare. The latter two items will cost 32 Empyreans to create. - Thus, a tier4, craftef from scratch using only Empyreans, will cost 68 Emyreans to create. - 6 x 68 = 408 Empyreans total = 8 Transcendents and 8 single Empyreans. Or perhaps it is faster to mail 9 Transcendents and let your pure goldsider keep the change 🙂 @Zepp Maybe your question was rhetorical and you already know the math for this better than I do, but nonetheless the answer might be helpful for some other readers of this thread.

Yes, you do 🙂 I have recently played through all of Glimmers, Glints and Gleams on my dedicated goldsider character, and missing that one mission (Glints 4.1) is nagging at my OCD. 😉 A couple of other feedback points: 1) I thought the were very well thought-out and added a lot to the various arcs they appeared in. I would like to see more of them in future arcs or in possible future reworks of the existing arcs. Interesting groups, and they fill a gap in the game lore. 2a) Ref. your ideas for a new naming convention, I agree that getting rid of the Glitters/Glimmers/Glints/Gleams prefixes and calling them all "Post Praetoria Campaign No. X.X" makes the whole thing appear more cohesive and more RPGesque. 2b) How set are you on the campaign title "Post Praetoria Campaign"? It is, of course, very accurate in describing what the campaign is about, but to my artsy sensibilities it feels almost too clinical in its descriptiveness. In order to sell the campaign to future AE users (or reselling it to someone like myself for future replaying), something slightly more dramatic might be better. Perhaps something along the lines of "Post Praetoria Power Plays", since there are many different groups who take turns throughout all the arcs vying for power among the ex-Praetorians. Or something else that includes the words Post Praetoria (which I agree signifies nicely what the campaign is about) but with a few fluff words added to make it sound more grand. Anyway, your campaign, your choice, these are just my loose pre morning coffee thoughts. 2c) Putting the name of each arc last in the sentence makes the most sense to me. I would, however, place the "fork title" before the number, like this: "Post Praetoria Campaign - Tech - 2.2: Fortunes in Faultline" rather than "Post Praetoria Campaign 2.2 - Tech: Fortunes in Faultline". Makes it easier to identify at a glance which fork one is looking at.

Looks promising. Despite your warning, I will probably use this without modifying it in the slightest 😉 Are any of the attack powers just slot mules or do all the attacks get used - not necessarily in every fight but at least on a somewhat regular basis?

Awww, now I want a purple enhancement set which gives my character +Accuracy when playing the Find The Cursor minigame!

A storm/anything defender or an anything/storm corruptor or controller will be happy in melee range. My personal suggestion would be storm/Water defender for the added knockdown from /water attacks, but anything with storm involved is fine. From what I understand, Hurricane is not KB but Repel - are the Cimerorans resistant to that as well? A Fortunata Widow has ranged attacks but is quite survivable in melee range. As a side bonus, you can build it as a hybrid widow-fortunata and have good melee and ranged attacks on the same character, meaning that you can change up your playstyle on the fly.

Not only that, but my in-depth research (see full list of sources below) indicates that all of us are a$$holes from time to time, without even realizing we are doing it. I base this conclusion on this: https://www.somethingawful.com/news/do-better/

One thing to keep in mind when picking a powerset is that PBAoE's are (IMHO) not quite as useful in Praetoria missions as on blueside, because some of the enemy groups' ranged attackers on goldside are smarter about spacing out. I don't know if this was an intentional design decision, but I have noticed on several goldside runs that e.g. the clockwork and Seers spread out around you when using their ranged attacks, so that you often can't get hit more than one or two at a time within a PBAoE. EditedToAdd: Forgot to mention that I did take a Rad/Dark tanker through all the 1-20 gold content without problems, so the PBAoE thing is not a major issue. Just one more thing to consider when deciding on a primary/secondary.

+1 to this. Except that we shouldn't have to do our own bragging, we should have Recluse to that for us. I.e. summon vanity-pet-Recluse and/or the Patrons and have them bow down to us in public and say in /local something to the effect of "I am humbled and I acknowledge the supremacy of $character. All hail @character, morituri te salutamus."

I respectfully disagree. The Health/Stamina/Endurance aspect is a huge timesink but not immersive at all. If anything, they are immersion-breaking. And what the H. is up with the weird design decision to make Health and Stamina inherent powers until level 30 or so, but then both of those powers get taken away from you at higher levels?!

Question for @KaizenSoze and @Bopper: Both of your builds use 5 ST attacks (some melee and some ranged, and not quite the same 5 in the two builds) and 2 melee AoE attacks. Do all of those attacks actually get used in your respective attack rotations or are some of them just slot mules for set bonuses? I ask as a simple minded man who prefers his attack rotation simple 🙂

Lies! Peaceful co-existence is a lie perpetuated by the vile flourtortillaistas to keep us corntortillenos from standing up and fighting for our corn-given right to rule!

+1

Any melee cone with less than 90 degrees arc, I assume that most of the times I use it, it will hit only a single target. And thus I treat that power as a single-target attack when deciding whether its DPA is high enough to be worth using in my attack chain. I don't use any special techniques to maximize the number of targets for the narrow-cone attacks. As I only expect to hit one target, anything more than that is gravy. Attacks with cones of 90 degrees or wider, I assume 2-3 targets per attack when deciding whether its DPA is high enough to be worth using. For these cones I target the second-closest opponent, hoping to get the closer opponent within the cone that way. But as others have said, repositioning is only worth it if it can be done within a very short time, otherwise the setting-up time is basically a prolonged activation time.

Lvl 25-30 because as others have said, you finally have enough of your powers to feel somewhat powerful, but the character still has that new-character smell to it.

Corn. Preferably the soft kind. Oh, and blue corn if possible, although if I am honest I probably would not be able to tell a blue corn tortilla from a normal one in a blind taste test.

I use a spreadsheet listing each character and all the aspects that I might want to sort them by. Using the data filtering tool to show only characters that fit certain criteria (for example only lvl 50's, only melee'ers or only goldsiders) is helpful if I can't decide which one I want to play. It is also handy to know which characters don't have a particular accolade badge yet, so that I can grab them when e.g. a Maria Jenkins arc team or one of the TFC TF's are offered in LFG. My spreadsheet is way more elaborate than it really needs to be, and I track a lot of info which is probably irrelevant. But I actually enjoy building databases and spreadsheets, so in a way it is part of the entertainment value I derive from CoX. In-game, only the 6-8 characters I like the most are on the front page of the character selection screen of my main server. All the others are spread out across other servers, so that they don't clutter up my view when I log in. Influence generally gets channeled to one of the front-page characters for easy accesibility. I don't play the market, nor do I farm, so I never have piles of excess influence, recipe or IOs to keep track of. But íf I did, I am sure my beloved spreadsheet would be able to keep track of them 😉 Edited to add: Fixed a typo.

I pronounce it "uh-RAH-chn". With the ch towards the end being similar to the -ch in a Scottish Loch, as @Krimson said. There is a real-world thing called arachnophobia, and I believe (but might be wrong) that the proper pronounciation of that word places the emphasis on the second syllable. So I figure we should do the same with Arakhn's name,