Zhym

"Enjoy some of the canonical reasons for notorious changes, and a heaping bathtub full of foreshadowing!" Anyone know what this is referring to, or have a Cliffs Notes version of what the heck happens in Piecemeal's Personal Story? I played it, and I still have no idea what was going on there. I imagine it doesn't help that it's been ages since I ran The Freakish Lab of Dr. Vahzilok. All I know is there was something involving teleporting, the matrix, the Arena, and a quick side trip to the Rikti homeworld. But the lore references and foreshadowing went right past me, alas.

I took both Pistols and Dual Wield for just that reason. Also, if you're leveling slowly through missions as I did with my DP/MC blaster, having one attack with -DEF and another with knockback is mighty useful. Dual Wield and Ki Push combine nicely for crowd control at early levels. At later levels, I still use Pistols and Dual Wield a lot, even though Executioner's Shot and Piercing Rounds are higher damage, just because they're so fast.

Have you seen what's going on in Paragon City? King's Row is overrun by Lost and Skulls, the Tsoo and Warriors are running amok in Talos Island, and there are actual alien invaders in Founder's Falls! Something would be very wrong if the police stations weren't in a state of emergency. Oddly, the Atlas Park station seems pretty quiet. I guess the police aren't all that interested in the Skulls and Hellions. More seriously: The sirens in police stations that have them seem to originate from the jail cells. In Atlas Park, you can't go to the jail area, which probably explains why there are no sirens there. Everywhere else I've looked, though, you can go into the jails and the sirens are on. I wonder if the stations were repurposed from the safeguard/mayhem missions, where the alarms would make sense, and the alarms just weren't removed from the city zone versions of the stations.

And kill snakes. Don't forget the killing snakes. So very, very many snakes at early levels.

Wow. I suddenly have so many AE arcs I want to run now.

If you're talking about getting to the Ouroboros zone at Level 1, you can already do that. You just need someone to open a portal for you so you can go get the badge that gives you the travel power. If you're talking about being able to run flashback missions—well, that really is a narrow level window. You can't flash back to missions that are still in level range. That's logical: you can't flash back to the present. Since the first level range for flashback missions is 1-9, we're only talking about having to wait about five levels to do flashback missions. And it's not like there's a lack of things to do in CoX during those five levels (or, as others have pointed out, just get those levels quickly). People who want to be able to do flashback missions between levels 10 and 14 but don't want to pause XP to do those same missions before they outlevel them seems like kind of a niche market.

I've only done that once. It was a name I had back one of the Live servers but someone had already taken by the time I got to Homecoming. So instead of Canned Heat (fire blaster police robot, of course), I named him Canned.Heat. Otherwise, if I have a character concept and the name is taken, I just choose a different name. If the name I wanted was a wordplay or concept name, the fact that it's taken just means that my concept wasn't as original as I thought it was. I did realize after I'd created one character that there were other characters with similar names. In fact, at one point I think Tomcat, Tom Cat, and Tom-Cat were all on the server at the same time. I have no idea why we didn't team up.

Building on this: Dual Pistols/Martial Combat is an amazing solo blaster combo. In addition to the great things about Ki Push, Reaction Time, Dragon's Tail, Storm Kick, and Will, the guns have a knockback effect that helps immensely with crowd control. Then when you start building up some defenses, you can take Swap Ammo and your guns can do extra fire damage (or do cold damage and slow, or toxic damage and debuff). And there's something about using Ki Push on a mob and then shooting them while they're still flying backwards that's so satisfying. It's just an all-around fantastic combo for soloing. BTW, thanks for enhancement sets being so affordable in Homecoming, a good blaster build can completely hold its own defensively. You just need to load up with sets that have +def. My DP/MC blaster has 40% ranged defense, 25% melee defense, and 43% smashing resistance, and that's far from the def/res optimization that's possible. But it's enough for him to go full blapper, run into a large crowd, and hit an alpha strike that will take most of the enemies out and make the rest easy clean-up. When you can do that with a blaster, Sentinels are...well, hats off to those who enjoy playing sentinels, but the one Sentinel I've played got less and less useful as he gained levels, because his defensive secondary doesn't really make him that much sturdier than my characters who just buff defense and resistance through enhancement set bonuses. The other suggestion I'd make is for a stalker. They can't take out the sheer number of enemies at once that a good blapper can, but they're great for moving through the story. Want to just run to the end and click the objective? Find the mission boss and defeat him, possibly in one hit, without bothering with all the mooks keeping watch? A stalker is great at that. The downside is when you get one of those defeat-all missions: stalkers are mostly about the up close and personal defeats. Defeat alls are kind of annoying with a stalker. And don't get me started on escort missions. ("That stealth you use so much? Turn it off, and escort this poor schmoe back past all the enemies you avoided to get to him. Hah!") FWIW, I ran a Ninja Blade/Ninjitsu stalker and a Claws/Super Reflexes stalker through all the red side content, and both were really fun to play.

Wait, I was wrong about that. That character has Flight and Super Speed, of course. Although SJ would work for a more old-school interpretation of that character. Anyway, the Flight/SS combo works well, too.

I have one character with both SS and SJ. That character's concept is...well, I think it's really super, man. Anyway, having both isn't as redundant as you might think, and while not taking both travel power pools might let me make him more powerful, I can't imagine he'd be any more fun (I mean, without turning him into a DP/MC blaster).

Same here. I have a lot of characters I'm attached to and that are fun to play, but for sheer playing joy there's nothing like my DP/MC blaster.

All the travel powers are good, and they're much faster now than they were on Live (thanks, Homecoming team!), so I usually just go with whatever works for the character's theme. But here are my thoughts on each pool: Flight often feels the most heroic, and sometimes I'll log into one of my flying characters just to soar above the city for a while. No other travel power inspires that for me. Back in the day when travel powers were much slower, Flight was also good for being a "passive" travel power; you could point yourself to your destination, hit "R", then go take a bio break while you waited to get to where you were going. Thankfully, that's not much of a concern now. Leaping is the most all-around useful IMO. Combat Jumping is so great as a low-endurance defensive buff that many builds use it even if it's the only jumping power taken. Super Jump is fast, maneuverable, and as @Riot Siren says it's useful just about everywhere. With Double Jump, you can usually get to most heights and can Super Jump across pretty much any zone* as quickly and easily as flying there. Add a jetpack and you can go anywhere. Speed is a lot of fun, and a natural choice if you're going to be taking Haste anyway. It's not as easy to get vertical movement, though (you can jump farther when you're going really fast, but I've never really gotten the hang of that), and a lot of zones are really hard to run through—so much so that any raw speed advantage is often overcome by having to run around buildings and other obstacles. Teleportation—well, I can't say much about this. I only have one character with this as their travel power, mostly because it almost never seems to fit the theme. Also, it takes more work to use, and I always seem to overshoot my target, or have to triangulate my teleportations to get to where I want to end up. But Teleport Target, Fold Space, and Team Teleport are all really useful team support powers. For pure travel, don't sleep on Athletic Run (or Beast Run or Ninja Run, if you like a weird running stance), available at the P2W vendor. They won't get you across large distances as quickly as the travel pools powers do, but they help a lot with letting your superhero jump to things a superhero out to be able to jump to and overall not feeling too slow. Athletic Run plus a jetpack is often all you need. But I usually want some power from a travel pool anyway (i.e., Combat Jumping, Haste), and so it's easy to take whatever travel power comes with the pool I need. * Independence Port not included in "pretty much any zone."

You’re looking in the Abandoned Sewers, not the Sewers, right? I’ve made that mistake more than once.

I like Tendaji, so I wouldn't mind an arc where it turns out he isn't really dead. It's a superhero comic—no one has to stay dead (unless they were Jack Emmert's characters). Clones and faking one's own death are classic options, but CoX does have Ouroboros. Or, given that Tendaji was killed by Nemesis (the faction, if not the arch-villain), there's always the Nemesis Plot option. Why would Nemesis want to fake a minor NPC's death? Well, there you've got me stumped, but it's a plot possibility, anyway.

I'm not sure why I'm using a spoiler for an official in-game story arc that's over 10 years old, but:

Well, now that you mention it: what does a dude who is totally invulnerable need with a helmet?

Maybe that is in the narrative. I don't remember at this point. What I do remember is seeing the "Find the Mission Exit!" prompt in the nav menu and hopping out to the mission exit. I do like TP beacons as convenient ways of "capturing" someone without having to escort them.

I'm glad this wasn't an escort mission (I'm always glad that any mission was not an escort mission), but the bolded portion wasn't an actual requirement of the mission, right? When Syzygy showed up (captured, again*) and says that his orders were not to let my character out of his sight, my character's response was, "Good luck with that." He usually runs with stealth on, see. And while he'll often turn that off to let his "helpers" tag along, he's not going to do it for someone who says his orders are basically just to keep an eye on my character. Especially not on that map, which is a PITA to keep everyone together on. So—bye, Z! Good luck with...well, whatever! *There really needs to be an AE arc that hangs a lampshade on how your allies in AE missions always seem to have gotten captured by the time you get there.

Pretty fun story. I do like the "Mars Base" theme. Good use of existing maps to fit the theme. Spoiler comments on the last mission:

My main is a DP/MA blaster, and Ki Push is a wonderful thing. All those fancy powers don't do them much good if they're spending all their time flying backwards, waving their arms helplessly in the air.

The wacky thing is: I knew that. I mean, I've played through all or most of those arcs, and I remember how they continued threads from the in-game official arcs. I just forgot it with @TerroirNoir2 added the note about this in the write-ups here. And now, apropos of nothing, I'm trying to remember which AE arcs let me beat up Reese. Because beating up Reese is never not fun.

Ohhhhh, right. I was getting confused because @Darmian's chapters are following on from the official in-game arc chapters. I was lost there for a bit, wondering why I don't remember seeing Imperial Crusader chapters 1-5 in this thread. D'oh! I've updated the TV Guide posts with the subtitles.

I've tagged "Spirals" parts one and two accordingly. Is there anything else in the TV Guide I should be tagging this way? Or, put another way, has Engineria done the previous episodes in "Imperial Crusader?"

Travel powers have been buffed enough now that there's an "easy" workaround for the ski slopes. Just make a build at level 50 with flight, afterburner, and evasive maneuvers, maybe slot some +fly enhancements, and you'll be fast enough to fly though both the ski slope and slalom courses fast enough to get all the badges. It's the only way I could get them, anyway, since I'm astoundingly bad at navigating those slopes in the way they were intended.