Eva Destruction

Dr Quaterfield is the worst TF, and that is not my opinion, it's an objective fact. In another thread someone condensed the whole dragged-out mess into five missions without losing any of the plot. And the plot isn't all that great in the first place.

Since there won't be any new Dev's Choices foe a while, could you please give all the previous winners their Dev's Choice status back, so players can get full rewards for them and they won't be stuck behind a page and a half of farms in the search?

I'm still unsure whether the zone is a failed attempt at being scary or a failed attempt at camp horror. If the former, I would really like to know who came up with the Mario nom nom nom, and how much they were trolling the rest of the dev team.

The only thing it's really good for is weaseling out of babysitting Captain Hotpants in the Underground trial. That is because they get bazookas. We have to fire a rocket from a frankengun. Redraw shemdraw, gimme an actual rocket launcher for LRM and it might actually make Munitions worth taking (at least until the novelty wears off.)

I've been leveling up a War Mace Scrapper and I find the set very satisfyingly crunchy. Also very satisfying in the make things dead department.

Don't write Corruptors off so fast, Storm Summoning doesn't require you to heal anyone if you skip O2 Boost, and any supervillain worthy of the name has at least considered getting their hands on a weather machine at some point.

Good news, it exists. Ctrl+Y.

I kind of assumed this was unfixable but yes yes yes, fix this and everyone who builds above the plot will love you forever (and we'll finally be able to create a base in the void by building at the bottom of the base, where the drift is currently atrocious.)

Yeah, it does. The AE accolade power doesn't work in instances. Which is unfortunate because I'd love to have a holodeck in my base.

That takes care of the ugliness, but not the size. It gives you quite a bit of precision with small items. When you place a large item, it's just one or two grid points out of alignment, and you try to line it up again you have to drag it back from the other side of the room sometimes, and if your base is big there's also lag to content with so it takes multiple tries to get items lined up and then you get carpal tunnel syndrome. Moving things up and down is fairly easy, but moving on horizontal axes is not so much.

Items I'd like: -More surfaces, with various size options, ideally with sides and a bottom, ideally tintable -More generic building block items in general, again with sides and bottoms, and ideally tintable. -Lighting options that produce colored light. -Salvage storage racks that aren't huge and ugly. Alternate options for enhancement and inspiration storage would be good too. -A merit reward vendor NPC; the ATM doesn't fit the theme of every base -More decorative NPCs, not just civilians. -Lava -Force fields, in various sizes, like the blue force fields at the border of villain zones. Big ones to keep visitors from going off the edge in outdoor bases, smaller ones for builders to get creative with. -Silent versions of items that make noise. Features I'd like: -A "nudge" command to make precision placement of items easier -The ability to easily disable click-to-teleport -An "eyedropper" type tool, so you can select an already-placed item if you want to place more of it. -F5 settings to stick, so if you select "attach to floor" all items you place with attach to floor until you change it. So if you want to place multiple wall items on the floor, you don't have to cycle through attachment options for every one.

That's Dr Todd in the Moonfire TF. The scientist in Hess is just a simple rescue.

Hess doesn't need that much editing I don't think. The trap in the first mission needs to be beefed up significantly. Toss the scientist from the second mission into the first, and you can do away with the second entirely. Add some objectives to the third and fourth missions to make them more dynamic instead of just "beat up this guy and click this blinky." Beef up Burkholder to reduce the "the AV died before I even saw him" issue. The part that really needs to be revamped is the radar stations. While taking them out is a nice way to add to the idea that you're assaulting a major Council stronghold, the execution is dumb. They send you back and forth across the map, and if you took Fly as your travel power or if you're a slow loader the mission is done before you even get in. So here's my idea for a revamp: make them not instances. Put the radar stations right out in the zone, Cover them in turrets and Council. Then, once you accept the mission "Take out the radar stations" you have to go click a blinky at each one, to shut down the radar station and collect whatever information is on there. They're open world blinkies that can be done in any order, like getting those flowers for Marauder's girlfriend. Long interrupt time, so you have to fight the turrets and Council at the base instead of just stealth-clicking. Yes, it's possible that someone else in the zone will clear the base before you get there, but if the respawn time is short enough it shouldn't be much of a problem, especially since Striga isn't usually heavily populated. That's just my idea for working with what's reasonably feasible; the ideal revamp would remove all that "Burkholder's the only one who can pilot it" crap, you beat him up, take his robot, get a nice cutscene of you piloting the Mega Mech out of the volcano as it self-destructs behind you, and then, I dunno, drive it to Boomtown to fight the Council War Walker? It would be nice to be able to drive it to Grandville to take potshots at Recluse's stupid tower (building Vigilante alignment points in the process) but I don't think it can swim.

Manticore's lore has him rich enough to provide you with a really good lawyer when Crey inevitably sues you for all the stuff you did on the TF.

Thank you for proving my point. 5 missions, and there it is, that's the plot. With the final mission being in Oranbega, it opens up some possibilities for a more interesting map. We just stroll on into Oranbega on a regular basis, you'd think after a while the CoT would set up some magical defenses or something, wouldn't they? Have the map itself attack you. And then the final room is where they're doing their evil magic ritual thing to try to take advantage of the situation, more magical traps, and you have to fight a group of EBs or AVs or whatever would pose a challenge to a team of that level, the point is there is a group of them to make it more "you just interrupted our big important evil magic ritual thing."

It's funny you should mention that in relation to Citadel, where the first two missions are usually the same door. It's extremely immersion-breaking. I think the Hess TF does a good job of making it feel like the missions are set in the world, with the last three mission doors being on the sides of the volcano and the Megamech visible through a window in the map. Now if only they could send you to the radar stations in order instead of making you run back and forth across the map.... Sutter and Kal do a pretty good job of keeping everyone updated on the plot, using floating text that the whole team can read, evolving mission objectives, and short cutscenes. The cutscenes could be shorter--the Faultline and Fusion part is completely unnecessary, since they have nothing to do with the plot, Odysseus doesn't really need a cutscene either--but they're far better than the infodumps in some of the iTrials.

Regular missions do NOT work like that. Regular missions have a 5- or 10- level range, just like most TFs do, Some of the newer ones have a 20-level range, but that's the limit and people tend to run them at the high end of that range. Mobs do not scale accordingly for higher levels; low-level mobs have fewer attacks, lower damage, fewer status effects, fewer debuffs. Higher level groups will mez you, two-shot you, debuff you, and hang out with Sappers. A team running Posi often wipes if you accidentally aggro two spawns at once, whereas high-level TFs expect you to fight multiple AVs at once, and teams rarely wipe. Making low-level TFs remotely playable at 50 would require pretty much an entire redesign, and would make it significantly harder for low-level characters to find a TF team on which they can actually play instead of jogging along while a tricked out incarnate Brute solos the whole thing.

Some of the worst of the slogs could be made less so by just cutting a few missions. Yes, the full Posi treatment would be preferable, but we all know dev resources are very limited. I'd honestly rather have a quick and dirty fix than wait an indefinite amount of time for a total revamp. Synapse: cut the three substations down to one, combine "defeat all robots in headquarters" and "defeat Bertha" into one mission (cutting the patrol in between), cut the first warehouse. Citadel: Cut the second mission, the "defeat base leader and guards" after you take the parts to the guy, and two of the three defeat-alls at the end. Manticore: Turn the first defeat-all into just a rescue. There are only two defeat-alls in this TF but the maps tend to be huge. Numina: Get rid of the hunts, they are just a time sink. Dr Q: Hold an AE contest to rewrite this TF, winner gets put in the game. You can cover the entire plot of this long, pointless slog in five missions and even with the limited tools available in AE it would still be more interesting than what is in the game. The other Shard TFs could use some cuts but this one....they had an entire new zone to play with, a whole new chunk of lore that could have been explored in so much depth, and this, this is what they came up with. Did the development team hold a "write the worst TF" contest? Was it a deliberate middle finger to the playerbase? Was someone high? Does it really matter? It's terrible.

Everybody head to Warburg and stock up on nukes. Then we'll nuke the year from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

What do you mean, didn't work? If you mean they didn't turn yellow when you finished them, if you fail the last mission of an arc, it won't turn yellow. I've also one or two not turn yellow even though the last mission wasn't failable, not sure why, but they did turn yellow when I ran them a second time.

I've done them all on my main, I have another character who turned off XP and completed everything on the way up, until level 40, so I only have some of the 40-50 arcs left to do on that one. I am not insane enough to try to do it all on every character. Because that is insane.

The 8-15 range goes by fast blueside. Redside, once you get past DFB level, and good luck even getting one together without talking to the seagull and switching to rogue, there isn't much to do in that range. There has been no new redside content for that level range since CoV launch; meanwhile, heroes have gotten the two Skulls arcs and the revamped Posi TFs, as well as the Hollows and all the old-skool content. A 30-35 SF is sorely needed as well. I don't expect the HC team to put more effort into redside than blue to make up for the OG devs hating villains, considering the player base leans heavily blue, but the Posi and Yin "revamps" are really all-new TFs, so if the bluesdie TFs are revamped (which I agree Synapse and Citadel sorely need, Manticore and Numina too but not as badly) then redside should get some new SFs as well.

She's not an exception. She's still "dead" when you redo the arc,, and has been removed from the time stream, except she's hanging out in Ouroboros, outside the timeline, instead of being dead dead. IIRC, Mender Valen explains this. There's a loophole that lets you save her, but it still doesn't let you alter the timeline.

Yeah, some aspects of these late live arcs are not well-designed. I run this particular arc anyway because the last mission is hella fun, but the last time I ran it with a team we ran all over the room trying to figure out where we were supposed to click. And that's another aspect of bad design; all these "talk to this guy" who will only talk to the team leader so the rest of the team misses out on the plot. This is an MMO, mission design should not discourage teaming.

In theory, but the merit rewards were set many updates ago and most were never tweaked, unless someone figured out some massive shortcuts like with Katie and Eden. IIRC, they also made the merit rewards for longer tfs higher than the time to completion would suggest they should be, to encourage people to put up with the slog. DR Q doesn't give an excessive number of merits considering how tedious and pointless it is. I can get merits anywhere, but every Dr Q is 2-3 hours of my life that I'll never get back. It's still a do it once for the badge and never again TF.