Zhym

Don't forget Mr. G! That one's the arc where you round up a bunch of former Praetorians as a gang to...well, do the arc, if you haven't. But it's another "you're the boss now" arc. Redside can be hard for people to get into for the reasons @TheMoneyMaker lists: early on, you're still running missions for other people. (And very early on, those missions involve killing snakes. Oh, the exciting life of a villain.) But that's because you're a nobody at first. What, you thought Arachnos busted you out of the Zig because you're special? Because you're destined? Hah, we've got dozens of "Destined Ones" running around. If you can survive for a while and gather some power, maybe then you can start acting on your own instead of doing missions for other people. Until then, sticking your head up too far is a way to get it cut off. It gets better later on, when you've amassed some of that power. Late-level redside is a lot better than late-level blue, IMO. Part of that is because it was developed later, so it didn't have as many of the story-writing sins that Issue 0 arcs had—some of which @groobark calls out like kill-alls. The arcs are shorter, the stories are better (I mean have you done Unai Kemen's arc lately? So very many "go click 20 glowies" missions), and I think it weaves a pretty good overall story, too. On the topic of the original post: Timed missions. Especially ones with short, unannounced timers. I think Unai Kemen has one of those, too, where it's a three mission arc and—surprise!—the third one is timed. Hope you didn't have anywhere to be.

Yup. Known issue. Maybe one day the devs will fix the bug, but in the meantime, follow the lesson of Count Rugen and don’t kill Tyrant too quickly.

On a related note, how hard would it be (ha, ha) to add an option to the S.T.A.R.T. vendor to reject common and uncommon invention salvage? There are already options to reject inspirations by size and type, or recipes by rarity or category. It'd be great if my characters could just opt out of getting common and uncommon salvage. Sure would save on time clearing out full salvage inventories.

Or use them at empowerment stations for buffs. Empowerment stations are supergroup base items that let you use common salvage (mostly) to get various small buffs to resistance, resistance to status effects, perception, etc. And buying an empowerment counts as crafting for the crafting badges. https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Empowerment_Station I usually find the empowerments to be a lot more useful than the 250-ish inf I'd get by selling common salvage at the vendor.

As @macskull explains, Wine doesn't use the Option key at all. It maps the Command key to Alt. So under the default mapping, CMD-<#> activates powers in the second tray. If you look at the Keymapping tab in your options window, you'll see these listed as Alt+<#>, because CoH sees anything with Command as Alt. CTRL-<#> activates powers in the third tray.

Fun little arc, especially with my sci-fi hero Andromeda Brain. It was nice to see the asteroid map used for story purposes for once. :)

Did I just see @cranebump complain about a mission timer? Get back on your own side of the street—that's my turf! I haven't played the arc in question, and given the author's hostile reaction to cranebump's review, I'm not likely to. Rule #1 for authors of any kind is that some people will hate what you wrote, or just not understand it. That doesn't make them wrong or their reviews false. I can't tell you how many times I've written something (usually a report, or draft of an academic paper, or even an e-mail) and gotten a response that indicated that the reader clearly hadn't read carefully, or completely misinterpreted what I wrote. But that wasn't (entirely) their fault. It just meant that I needed to do a better job of communicating the point I wanted to make. By the same token, "I felt confused as to why my hero was there in the first place" is not a lie; good authors will take that as a sign that they might want to be clearer about establishing the scene for less-than-attentive readers. (Not all readers read every word carefully—shocking, I know!) But I'd also say that the community of story-focused AE authors is so small, and the process of creating story-focused AE arcs so arduous, that an unsolicited scathing review of any AE arc seems rather churlish. What's the point of such a review? If it's to warn players away, story-focused arcs are already so lost in a sea of fire farms that most players probably wouldn't even know about the reviewed arc if not for the review. I'm not saying that every review needs to be glowing, but if the arc isn't worth playing it probably isn't worth reviewing, either.

Not directly, AFAIK. "Veteran levels" don't increase fighting level the way actual levels do—a character with veteran levels still fights as a level 50—more or less. Incarnate powers can bump that up to three levels depending on the content being run, and the whole incarnate system can significantly bump character power after level 50, but those are features of the incarnate system, not a direct result of veteran levels. A character who ignores the incarnate system could have hundreds of veteran levels and would be no more powerful than any given level 50 character.

The character I played it with wasn't quite as on-point as @cranebump's, but here's who I used:

This is a fun arc, start to finish. FWIW, I don't think the "Ocelot rule" really applies here when it's made clear at the start that your character is of a certain...archetype. BTW, the moment it went from being merely great to one of my all-time favorites was this: Perfect. :)

Maybe I like catching up with my BFF Ms. Liberty. You ever think of that? Seriously, though. Most of the time I just pop into the Excelsior Teleportation Zone to train, because I already have it macro'd for quick movement between zones. But sometimes it's nice to go back to Atlas Park, just because.

Dance for me, volunteers who keep this game running at no charge! Dance!

The only problem, which I realized only recently, is that Statesman was never the trainer in AP. It was always Ms. Liberty, wasn't it? So making him the trainer in Echo:AP doesn't really fit the known history. And that's part of why I'm not all that invested in Statesman—my toons never really interacted with him (except for saving his butt in the original Maria Jenkins arc).

Can you imagine what the final mission would have been like, if that PUG managed to get that far? (There's no way they managed to get that far.) Really, they did @Snarky a favor by showing their incompetence before he wasted any more time with them.

Had you read the thread, you might have seen that someone posted a link to that very AMA. https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/54934-do-you-want-statesman-to-return/#findComment-692180