Zhym

I haven't played this yet, but a comment on this:

But Maneuvers lets you slot all of that, too—and while the initial defense boost is lower, it scales up in groups. And it's available as the first power in the set. Fair point, but you're grouping some third, fourth, and even fifth powers in that list. Travel powers already make the third power available at level 4 with no prerequisites. And instead of making both Tough and Weave available immediately, maybe they could be done like the travel powers—Tough is available at level 4, and Weave requires Tough and one other power. Applying the same logic to other pool powers would allow Tactics, Aid Self, and Intimidate at level 4 with no other powers from the pool. That's it. Fighting, Leadership, Medicine, and Presence are the only pools where the third power still requires level 14 and one of the first two powers. And those pools all have first or second powers that are worth taking. But the real problem IMO is that Boxing and Kick are so useless (other than as a Kinetic Combat mule). I don't have any good solution for that, though—other than removing Kick and Boxing entirely and replacing them with something useful.

It's a simple QoL change. I can't possibly be the first to suggest it. However: Tough and Weave are both really useful. They appear in lots of builds. Most of my characters have one or both. Then there's Boxing and Kick. The last thing most characters need is an extra, weak, single-target melee attack power. But we take one of them because we have to to get to Tough and Weave—and then ignore it. So why not just let us take Tough or Weave directly without having to take Boxing or Kick first?

Yeah, I had to remove my base portal TARDIS too. I wonder what part of the patch caused this.

The "dead" levels are usually where I take the "dead" powers I need to get other powers (I'm looking at you, Boxing).

True, and also sort of a shame. It's an easy way to keep her dialogue tree simple, but after all my character did for Katie (or, in one case, to Katie), it would have been nice for that to have been more deeply reflected in our interactions. Compare that to Penny Yin. If you run the Mr. G red-side arc "The End of a Yin" after having done the Praetorian Resistance arc "My Best Friend, Rusty," Praetorian Penny Yin has a few heartbreaking things to say about your betrayal. I actually felt really bad.

I assume you've looked at this thread already? If so, my only other note is that the "Cool Customer" badge is for Crey Cryogenecists, not Cryo Tanks.

Yup! I confess to using this thread (or the story-specific thread) to remind myself where I'd seen that name before. Pretty cool callback. BTW, a note for @Darmian: it looks like the "Info" box for Operative Sariss has the text for Bane Spider Hugo.

It works out really well IMO. ETA: BTW, I really appreciate how the mission objective text highlights where those objective should be (i.e., [back], [front], [middle]). It makes hunting the objective so much easier. Well, usually, anyway. In the mission in the ship, the generator that was supposed to be in the back was closer to the front (and hidden behind a stack of shipping containers). Again: AE gonna AE; not much to do about it. But it's helpful to know where the objectives are supposed to be, anyway.

Oh, right! We just don't see it in action (then again, I guess we usually don't). Am I right that the meteor hitting Atlas Park in 1966 was also part of the plot because of the AE map choices?

I just wish AE gave us the option to experience some of the things first-hand that can only be described. I want to see the repurposed Arachnos Flyer, physically visit the Meteors' makeshift base in the Geneva Hotel, etc. Ah, well. AE is what it is. I've been impressed with how @Darmian has used various maps for different purposes (although I think I've done ITF too many times for me to see the final map from that trial as anything else).

I just ran this (prompted by @TerroirNoir's excellent and hilarious reviews) and was likewise wondering what was going on with the lawyers. I assume they're custom hostiles with no attack powers, so they just follow you around with no way to hit you. Clever. The mission intro text says something about trying not to hurt the lawyers, which added kind of a TPN-trial flavor and made the mission interesting for my AoE-heavy blapper. I think I managed to avoid killing any lawyers, but I'm curious—does anything happen if you do lay waste to enemy and civilian alike?

Correct on both counts. I wonder if there's anywhere that archives what the level progression looked like in Issue 18, when Preatoria rolled out. ETA: Looking at Paragon Wiki, the level progression seems to have been the same since 2004. So what makes leveling go so much faster now?

It's not an unreasonable expectation, but it's not one that's going to be satisfied in Praetoria. The Praetorian content wasn't really written with the idea that players would do all the content on both the Loyalist and Resistance side—rather, it seems to have been designed for replayability, with players able to choose different paths each time through. And that was with Retail's much slower level progression. Add in the faster level gains in Homecoming, and I've had to pause XP just to do all the contacts in one faction (e.g., Loyalist Power), much less all the missions in all four factions. Note that although you can do the missions through Ouro, you won't always have the option to check in with the contact for your "true" alignment that way. As you probably know, many of the Praetorian missions prompt you to call either Calvin Scott (Resistance) or Provost Marchand (Loyalist) when you're working undercover with the opposite faction. If your character isn't of Praetorian origin, you can't do either of these in Ouro missions. If you started life as a Praetorian, you'll always have your "true" alignment contact available, even in Ouro—but you have to go to them in person (you can't call them because while you're in FB, they won't show up in your contacts). But the opposite alignment contact will never be available in Ouro missions. And at some point Calvin Scott disappears from Praetoria, even in Flashback missions, so my Praetorian Resistance character wasn't able to contact him for secret instructions, either. (To be clear, though, Calvin Scott is available as a contact in the arc for which he's the main contact; he just doesn't appear on the map otherwise). tl;dr: You can do all the Praetorian content through Ouroboros, but you won't have all the options in that content that you have if you run it as you level.

Is that...@Snarky?

Where is that? Is there a base access code for it?

As far as I know it’s always been that way. That’s my recollection from last year, at least. So if you’re level 50, Peregrine Island or Kallisti are the places to ToT. If you’re lower than that, check the level ranges at a tram. You can also exemp/sidekick to the appropriate level, which is part of why everyone tends to ToT in PI—after joining a league. And it’s why PI teams that end up with lower level team leaders (usually, when a 50 team lead drops) break trick-or-treating. ETA: The Paragon Wiki archive’s description of ToT door knocking mechanics includes the requirement that the zone be level-appropriate: https://archive.paragonwiki.com/wiki/Halloween_Event/Trick_or_Treat

Once "Chase Manhattan" bank is in Pittsburgh, all bets are off.

FWIW, I ran this solo with my tricked-out DP/MC blaster and found it surprisingly challenging. But this was the first thing I ran since the aggro changes hit and the incarnate Cimerorans got buffed, so that may have been part of it. I agree, though, that this arc didn't quite make the impression that The Graveyard Shift, The Freakish Lab of Dr. Vahzilok, and the Aeon Strike Force did. Honestly, I ran it once and couldn't tell you what it was about. But then, I find that most of the Cimeroran story arcs and missions seem sort of the same.

Yes. If I were lead dev, my prime directive would be, "No powerset changes until the respec system is revamped." I am getting a big hit of nostalgia, and not in a good way. It's taking me back to the days of the forums complaining about each round of changes and Jack Emmert saying, essentially, "This is the game design I want; deal with it." It would be great if the process of making changes to the game involved the players more. Beta seems lately to be purely testing to see whether anything breaks; maybe it's only my impression, but feedback about planned changes seems more likely to lead to minor tweaks than big changes. Maybe we need an Alpha server where the devs can have players try things out and see what we think before committing to them. The actual Page 5 changes mostly look good to me at first glance, FWIW. But it would be nice if the dev process were more, "Here's what we're thinking of doing, what does everyone think?" and less, "This is what we're going to do."

I'm not sure, but this may be a limitation with Wine that it will only show full-screen on the primary display.

That would actually be about the right price, IMO—if not still a little overpriced. Because the only thing Aether can be used for at the moment is to buy permanent versions of Halloween costumes, we can actually do a really primitive comparison: It takes four pieces of Halloween salvage to buy an NPC costume that lasts for 14 days. At the moment, Halloween salvage is going for 30k-100k. We're in the Halloween event, so salvage is probably cheaper now than it would be in, say, May. So let's use the high end of that range: 100k at that value, the price of a 14-day costume is about 400k. For about 10M, you can have that costume all year. It takes 10 Aether to buy a permanent costume. Aether looks like it's currently around 3M. So that's 30M inf to buy a permanent costume right now. Spending 30M to dress up like an NPC seems insane to me (so you can imagine what I thought of spending 200M to do it when Aether was at 20M—not that I didn't do it for the badges), but at 3M for Aether the cost of a permanent costume isn't ridiculous if you plan to wear that costume full time for three years. I'd maybe peg the "reasonable" price of a permanent costume at 5M-10M inf, which would put Aether at about 500K-1M value. Of course, all that assumes that the only thing you can buy with Aether is costumes, and that people care about how much costumes cost. I suspect that if the costumes had been rolled out in Page 4 at a cost of 200M each...well, we might have thought harder about it. (On the other hand, we had a way to get the equivalent of 600M inf from one 4-star Aeon run, so wealth was rushing into the economy as fast as it was getting spent. Possibly faster.)

That's not looking like a great gamble right now. With the new ToT badges giving out 2 Aether each, there's been an influx. The last price I saw was about 3.1 million, and that's before everyone's had a chance to get the new ToT badges on all their alts. IMO, the initial price of about 20M each was inflated due to (1) extremely low supply (at the time Page 4 dropped, no supply) and (2) high demand from badgers who needed 150 Aether each to get the new badges. Both situations were temporary. But there's also an argument that prices are going to be artificially low for the next month, since (1) supply is increasing from the ToT badges, and (2) demand is low because (a) most badgers have their Page 4 badges by now, and (b) temporary costumes are plentiful, so why pay for a permanent one right now? What will happen after that? My guess is that the price will dip back up in November after a big drop this month but stay fairly low. As the game goes on, the supply of Aether will increase. The big question is whether there will be enough interest in the things Aether can buy to use all the supply. Aside from the badge factor, I'm guessing there won't be. And if the pricing ends up what was used in beta—1,000 Aether for the mini-me costume, for example—that might actually be so high that most people won't even bother trying to save up that much. So, personally, I see increasing supply and decreasing demand. I personally wouldn't bet on it increasing in value. That's just my guess, of course.

To be fair (to...us?), it's not an illogical decision. You have to be a zone-appropriate level to go trick-or-treating, so it makes sense to run ToT in a level 50 zone. That limits the options for heroes to PI or Kallisti. Kallisti might be better since heroes and villains could both play in the same zone, but it would also be a damn big zone to hunt for GMs. Plus, in PI the hospital is right next to the motel, everyone knows where the GMs spawn, and the base portal is close to the motel. Lag aside, it's set up pretty well for the event. I do think there are some people who prefer to ToT in Kallisti, but for the most part, players have decided that PI is THE place because it's, well, pretty much THE place.

BTW, “lag” means something specific—it’s latency between your computer and the server. It usually shows up as rubber banding. What's happening in PI seems to be good old fashioned server-side slowness. There’s too much going on in the zone for the servers to keep up. So you get things like powers taking a really long time to activate. It’s not a network thing and it has nothing to do with your processor, memory, or graphics. It has everything to do with the mayhem going on at the motel. Basically, if the slowness drives you nuts, avoid combat in the streets of PI for the next month.