Zhym

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.

Ooh, holiday event early? I'm in favor!

Petless Mastermind of course, his Pets even despise him, so they left. Maybe Daemons/Time. Except he'd need to use the Time powers to slow himself and his minions.

When the servers are back online, I want to make a villain named OVH Tech Support, who never responds to any messages. I'd level him up a bit then park him in Warburg where people can come by and beat the everloving crap out of him as therapy. Consider it a public service. I just need to figure out the right AT for a "unresponsive tech support" villain.

The thread has gone a little off the rails, but what the heck, I'll bite on the original question. It's not like I can log in and play at the moment. :) For me, "why Sentinel?" was that it was the only AT that fit my character concept: The Bureaucrat. As a bureaucrat, his main feature is implacable immovability. In other words: invulnerability. But I also saw him as a secret agent type with a gun. Well, the only way you get guns is in a blaster-type AT. So The Bureaucrat became an AR/Inv sentinel. And...he's not all that fun to play, honestly. Maybe it's because I've been spoiled by my DP/MC blaster, who is amazingly fun to play. The Bureaucrat is only level 20 ATM, so it's not completely fair to compare them, but even at the same levels, The Bureaucrat just seems...lacking. I don't think it's purely a matter of damage output, either. I think it's more that it's so easy to build defenses and resistance with IO sets now that a defense-based set just doesn't add to the fun value the way another damage-based set does. Or who knows—maybe if I leveled him all the way to 50 he'd get some powers that would make him more fun (besides, invulnerability doesn't really live up to its name until the higher levels anyway). But at level 20? All he does is make me miss my DP/MC blaster. YMMV, of course. Lots of people enjoy their sentinels, and good for them. But my foray into the AT hasn't been entirely satisfying.

Yes. The contact is an old-style pay phone, but you can only get missions at that pay phone.

This thread is every executive I ever had back when I was in IT, standing over my shoulder as I tried to diagnose an outage. “Is it fixed yet? Is it fixed yet? Is it fixed yet?” 🙂

Hey, that could be another red-side contact to go with Radio and Television. Except that if it's an OVH telephone, it only answers once every 12 hours.

Now I'm kind of sad that I can't have a character who wields a gun in one hand and a blade in the other. ...can I?

Calvin Scott's story does get resolved, after a fashion, in Provost Marchand's arc. It's easy to play out of story order since Marchand becomes available at level 35, but his arc takes place after all the Incarnate trials. I'm not sure it resolves Calvin's issues satisfactorily, but it does at least answer where the hell he went after the reveal in the MoM trial.

How about one where Radio and TV settle their differences and team up against their common enemy: Internet?

Was that change also meant to keep self-affecting procs from firing (e.g., Numina +Regen/+Recovery and Regenerative Tissue +Regen)? That appears to be the current behavior. More on that here:

FWIW, I found this in the patch notes for Issue 27 page 1: "Reaction Time: If you are concealed (from Stealth or a similar power) this power will not impact foes unless you are in combat (it will no longer accidentally break stealth)." Stopping damage procs in Reaction Time from firing would make sense as part of avoiding drawing aggro, but it looks like procs that only affect self may also have gotten caught up in that change. And maybe that change was applied to powers that give stealth but not for +stealth from IOs?

That could be it. Reaction Time's +recovery and +absorb are still in effect even while stealth is active, but maybe whatever Stealth is doing to keep Reaction Time's debuff aura from aggroing mobs is also suppressing its procs.

After further testing, whatever is going on seems to be tied to Stealth. If I detoggle stealth, or do something that drops stealth, the proc slotted in Reaction Time fires. When stealth goes active again, the bonus disappears after the 120 second timeout. Now, why would stealth affect whether Reaction Time procs fire?

Yup—that's just an error in my post. I've fixed it.