Zhym

After what happened to Overbrook, Eastgate, Venice, White Plains, Baumton, Astoria, and Woodvale—not to mention the level of everyday theft and property destruction—I'd expect that any insurance company in Paragon City has either long gone bankrupt or gotten very good at not paying out claims.

They're probably more for backup in case someone finally manages to take out Terra Volta or blow the Faultline dam. With the main sources of power being such juicy targets for villainous activity, is it any wonder that there would be a push for distributed solar energy at some point in the city's history?

You’re more concerned with the direction the solar panels are facing than the fact that they’re on a building in Dark Astoria?

Working from memory here, but check Events.

For SOs and basic non-set IOs, the simple rule is at more than three, the effects diminish sharply. For enhancement sets, that all changes because the enhancements typically boost multiple effects (damage/accuracy, damage/recharge, etc.) and are designed so that having the whole set won’t trigger ED. And a Hami origin basically counts as one of each of the two things it boosts. But with basic SOs and IOs, stop at three. I usually go for enhancement sets by the time any powers have 5 or 6 slots, so I don’t have a recommended basic slotting, but Dmgx3, Acc, End, Rech seems a reasonable approach. But really, you’ll get much better results out of an uncommon enhancement set, which shouldn’t cost much money.

And just to complicate things, one of the big advantages of the Alpha incarnate power is partially ignoring ED.

What if Manticore realized he had a whole bunch of non-lethal options in his quiver? What if the player had any effect at all over what happens in Who Will Dieeee?!?!?!?!1?

I was pretty sure Oro missions were the only thing a person could do while in them, but I didn't think regular missions prevented idle logouts. Something to test! ETA: I started a tip mission and went for a walk, and my character hadn't been logged out when I got back. Huh. I thought for some reason it was only Flashback missions that prevented logout. Good to know! BTW, the Dagger of Caernoz is a redside tip mission. But the Lost and Found Oro arc starts with a CoT mission, so that works well for getting some Guides to hit you if you're a hero and don't want to switch alignments. The only tricky part is that there are also Rikti patrols that will kill the CoT (and might wander by while you're resting), so you have to hunt those down. But if you get the right map, the Rikti don't seem to venture into the prison room, so that works pretty well.

Can you do tip missions while in a Flashback mission? If not, how do you keep from getting logged out? My badger does have a Preventative Medicine proc and the Panacea +HP proc, so those should add a good buffer. I'll try this out and see how much DPS he can actually sustain while resting. And it sometimes amazes me what a person can accidentally become an expert in. :)

By "every possible HP bonus that exists in the game," do you mean five +0.75% health set bonuses, five 1.125% bonuses, five 1.5%, five 1.875%, etc? That seems awfully expensive! And a lot of work. I may not want Immortal that much. ETA: I finally figured out that rest caps +regen (because that's kind of the point), and so the CoT Guide method doesn't require a healer—just boosting HP as much as possible and optimizing the number and level of Guides to come as close as possible to the toon's regen without going over. My badger's regen currently maxes out while resting at 134.78 hp/sec with his main build; the best I could do by maxing HP would be 153.88 hp/sec. That's probably not a big enough difference to make the time and expense of a second build worth it. So—what's the best blue-side mission to get a CoT Guide hitting you?

Nice! Out of curiosity—what was the "slow way?" Did you need to multibox? How long did it take? My badger is about to get the last of his day job badges, and so far it looks like getting Immortal might involve months of standing in fires. But his regen is kind of rubbish.

This post on the current "quickest" way to get the Immortal badge (through 50 hours of AFK three-box farming) got me thinking: First, I wonder if anyone has gotten the Immortal badge since Homecoming started up other than by multiboxing. Is it even feasible to do it that way? My badger is a DR/MC blaster who can handle about 40 dps, or roughly 144,000 damage per hour. He's managed to take a little over 5,000,000 points of damage. So to get him the Immortal badge without multiboxing would take about 659 hours of standing in fires. That's technically possible, but it seems a little ridiculous. I could make a second build around maximizing HP and regen, but even that probably wouldn't cut down the farming time for the badge. Second, the Immortal badge doesn't seem like it could be gained in normal play—not the way the game is played today. In the early days, when people might have thought of the game play as fitting the tank/damage/healer trio, maybe it made sense to think that players could take and be healed of 100 million (before Issue 16, 1 billion!) points of damage through regular game play. But now that the focus is so much more on avoiding damage than taking it, does anyone get the Immortal badge except by farming it? Take my badger, for example. It's taken him 623 hours of game play (since January) to take that 5,000,000 or so points of damage. At that rate, he could expect to get the badge through normal game play about 11 years from now. A badge that can only be obtained through farming, and can only be had in a reasonable amount of time by multiboxing, seems kind of broken. Whether or not multiboxing is allowed or tolerated, the devs surely don't want to encourage it, right? So how would I suggest fixing it? I'd probably set 10,000,000 damage as the modern "Immortal" level. That's enough that it's not easy to get and is still an accomplishment (or Achievement, technically) that doesn't require multiboxing. My badger would still have to AFK damage farm for 34 hours or so to get that, but he could also get there through lots of game play. Here's the progression I'd suggest: Badge Current Dmg New Dmg Tough / Stoic / Slammer 100,000 100,000 Indestructible / Hard Case / Big Dog 250,000 250,000 Adamant / Ironman/Ironwoman / Laughs it Off 1,000,000 500,000 Unbreakable / Iron Willed 10,000,000 1,000,000 Nigh Indestructible / Concussed 25,000,000 2,500,000 Invulnerable / Marvel of Modern Medicine 50,000,000 5,000,000 Immortal / Challenger of Gods 100,000,000 10,000,000 That roughly doubles the damage needed for the next badge at each level. If you want to keep Born in Battle as hard to get as it is now, that could be changed to require the Unbreakable badge instead of Ironman/Ironwoman. But the new level of 500,000 would also reduce the number of people who have to damage farm to get Born in Battle (which I'm guessing is about everyone). What do you think, sirs?

I was with you until these points. A no-market restriction makes sense if you want to play old-school: the market makes the game a lot easier to play and vastly improves QOL, but it's also kind of broken and overpowered (when the inf received from missions and enemy defeats is essentially meaningless, that's a sign that something is really unbalanced, IMO. In this case, it's happens to be unbalanced in a way that most players like). So having a character use only drops and enhancements they can buy from regular vendors using inf that drops? That's a very Issue 0 challenge, and I applaud it. But not teaming with anyone is a bit too much. I get why it would be cheating to join most groups, since you'd still be taking advantage of the market and its cheap IOs, you'd just be doing it indirectly. But if you could find other players who are also playing the "drop challenge," that seems entirely within the spirit of the challenge. As for deleting on defeat: nope, not my jam. I am not and will never be that hardcore.

Oh, great. You realize you just cast a "Summon @Snarky" spell, right? Any moment, I expect him to show up and post a rebuttal, at least for PuGs.

I soloed every arc on redside once. The next slow-path character (and first real badger) I rolled up did most of the arcs again, but there are a few that I just find too distasteful. Westin Phipps, for example, is just a little too evil to enjoy helping, and Jezebel Jones's second arc is a bit too close to sex trafficking; Lt. Harris is even worse, IMO, but I still did it because it has the cool side effect of clearing all those Longbow out of Fort Darwin. And then there are a few that I think are just silly or aren't worth the effort of going through brokers to get to. But I'd say I've done 95% of the redside contacts at least twice. In a few cases, once was enough. Others, I could run over and over again (Vernon Von Grun, I'm looking at you—and listening to you perfecting your evil laugh). You have a point about the 1-4 content setting the stage. I just don't think they're good as missions. There's so little variety—and it's even worse if you slow things down and do both Burke and Kalinda, since they have basically the same arcs of "Go kill snakes. Now kill some more snakes. Next, kill even more snakes." The saving grace is that the missions and arcs are short. I actually don't mind them that much. But if I were trying out redside for the first time, they'd leave me completely underwhelmed. I just broke out of the Zig, and the exciting, dangerous, and (one hopes) lucrative world of villainy is about...clearing snakes out of tunnels? I could easily see someone deciding to go back to playing their hero at that point. Which is a shame, because it gets a lot better fairly quickly. Many of the best-written and most fun arcs in the game are redside (I listed some of my favorites here). But as much as the early content sets up the factions and your character's (temporarily) low position in this world, it doesn't do a great job of showing what fun redside can and will be.

That's a large part of the problem. Early redside content is...not good. Snakes, snakes, and more snakes. Plus Dr. Graves, which is the redside version of Twinshot's slow-roll tutorial arcs, but even worse. It's at the mid to upper levels that redside really starts to shine. Once you get there, the story quality is much better than most hero arcs. And, as a nice bonus, the arcs tend to be short—something I really appreciate when my character is in the 40s and the hero options are really long Issue 0 arcs (with all the mission design flaws that come with them). BTW, if you're interested in reading about some of the arcs some redsiders think are worth doing, check out this thread: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/21898-the-mean-missions-guide-a-villainous-levelling-journey-through-story-arcs/

Understood. I meant in general, not your list in particular. I've seen @TwoDee's list, or something like it, a few times and it always has First Ward and Night Ward after several TFs and iTrials, which makes me wonder what I'm missing about the overall story progression.

Why are First Ward and Night Ward so late in this list? I always pictured them as basically coming right after the L1-20 Responsibility, Power, Warden and Crusader arcs.

The badge moved in Issue 27, Page 2. You're looking in the Abandoned Sewers, not just the Sewers, right?

I suspect you're basing your opinion of incarnate powers on the early results. And that's fair—the T1 powers aren't game changing. But at T4? Yeah, those are game-changing. A T1 Alpha Musculature, for example, boosts damage about 5% if you've already hit ED limits on your damage powers. Nice, but not something you'll notice if you aren't looking for it. At T4, however, you can get a 30% boost to all your damage. That's pretty significant. Ever wish you could slot an extra enhancement in every power and have them ignore ED? That's basically Alpha T4. Destiny is also great. T4 Destiny Barrier, for example, can temporarily turn a blaster into a tank. The incarnate system is pretty confusing and kind of a pain, but the rewards are definitely there, noticeable, and worth the effort of getting the T4s.

I think this might explain it: So normal behavior is that running any SSA resets the 7-day timer for all SSAs, but the first time for each SSA counts as a freebie. What seems to be happening here is that you only get one "first time," regardless of alignment, even though the arcs are actually different between heroes and villains.

Have the rules for getting 4x merit rewards in an SSA changed lately? I started running though Who Will Die? this afternoon for the first time on a toon. When I finished the second episode, the option to get 4x merit rewards wasn't available because "[y]ou can only receive this reward from repeating Signature Story Arcs once every 7 days." But I hadn't repeated the arc, or the episode. I did WWD3 just to see if that was a glitch with WWD2, but it did the same thing. I know I've done WWD all the way through in a single day before and gotten 4x merits each time, so is this a recent change? Or is something bugged? FWIW, this toon (current a hero) had done WWD as a rogue, but well over a week ago. I don't know if that could have affected things.

Thanks for this tracker. I finally got around to running the setTitle bids and using the log parser, and discovered that there were several badges I didn't realize I was missing. Some I thought I already had; others I hadn't realized existed. So that was a great help—I was quickly able to pick up over 20 badges in an afternoon thanks to the tracker. One note on the settitle.txt bindfile: if you create a coh/data directory, you can put the settitle.txt in there and load it without a path. I'm on a Mac and couldn't figure out what the correct directory path is supposed to be ("C:\coh" isn't a thing on the Mac, though it probably is once Wine is involved), so putting the file in coh/data was the only way I could get it to load. Also, I don't know if was just me or an issue with the parser, but the parser loaded all my badges except Celebrity, for some reason. Might have just been a once-time glitch, though.

FWIW, I couldn't find any Circle of Thorns in Romero Heights. Raimi Arcade, however, is chock full of them. There's a skyscraper just northeast of the Raimi Arcade marker where the CoT hang out in enough numbers to hunt them quickly. After I found that spot, it took 5-10 minutes to get this badge.

Thanks for this. I spent way too much time wandering around Moth Cemetery and Romero Heights wondering where all the CoT were. About ten minutes hunting in Raimi Arcade, though, and ding—badge.