Eva Destruction
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Posts posted by Eva Destruction
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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?
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5 hours ago, Carnifax said:
Personally I think DA is trying too hard. EVERYTHING is dark and edgy. The sewers run with blood (cos of course they do). Even warehouses are full of mist and darkness.
Mot is way too much of an Edgelord (except for that Mario bit where they eat people, that always makes me laugh). I mean I know your an ancient god of death etc etc but do you have to be all Blood! Spines! Flesh! about it?
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.
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12 hours ago, ZorkNemesis said:
If you want an example of bad crunch, I nominate Self-Destruct, one of the prestige powers from P2W. The ten-second explosion countdown with the sparking and smoking and finally the mushroom cloud resulting in you actually dying....and barely any damage is done. It doesn't have nearly as much impact as it should.
The only thing it's really good for is weaseling out of babysitting Captain Hotpants in the Underground trial.
12 hours ago, ZorkNemesis said:Also, LRM Rocket from Munitions Mastery. Despite being a rocket launcher, the damage leaves a little bit to be desired. How come Council and Column dudes have better bazookas than the superheroes?
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.)
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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.
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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.
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6 hours ago, ssutcliffe said:
I would also love to see a Redo key, for those times you accidently undo something you wanted by hitting ^Z too many times. And I'd love to see the absolutely horrible bug that suddenly makes you fall through the floor or magically teleport to start for no reason, when you're trying to rotate or lift things get fixed!
Good news, it exists. Ctrl+Y.
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On 1/24/2021 at 6:37 PM, Naomi said:
- Fixing item drift (I have never built outside of the plot for this reason alone, aside from lighting limitations)
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.)
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3 hours ago, TemporalVileTerror said:
While I imagine the same limitation which prevents the Market from being accessible in Bases may also prevent this, but being able to have Architect Entertainment Contacts and Doors available inside a Base would be absolutely incredible. ESPECIALLY if we could set the Contact to only provide specific Missions.
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.
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5 hours ago, Shenanigunner said:
Can't disagree, however... you can "bury" the current versions in other objects so that only some small part sticks out of, say, a wall.
That takes care of the ugliness, but not the size.
5 hours ago, Shenanigunner said:Again, can 't disagree, but I wonder how it could be implemented with any time-to-value ratio. The grid scaling gives quite a bit of precision if you use it right. I find it more troubling that you can only accurately move stuff if it's in front of you and to the left; any other relative positioning between your alt and it makes movement erratic or impossible. Not sure it that can be fixed (easily).
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.
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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.
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1 hour ago, BZRKR said:
Oh, and maybe change the scientist's powersets so she isn't the sadistic combination of high knockback energy blast and kinetics. My group's favorite is when she unexpectedly speed boosts you and then immediately loses sight of you when you zoom off.
That's Dr Todd in the Moonfire TF. The scientist in Hess is just a simple rescue.
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22 hours ago, DougGraves said:
Ernesto Hess - the final map with the giant robot is great. The rest of the TF could be better.
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.
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1 hour ago, CursedSorcerer said:
I always figured that Manticore's lore had him against the 5th Column, since it mentions that his parents were killed by Protean (who is depicted as working with the 5th Column.) Also, one of the missions could involve working with Swan (who's bio also mentions 5th Column.)
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.
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3 hours ago, Moonscribe said:
Haha, I experienced this for the first time solo on Homecoming a while back, and wow, I knew it was supposed to be bad, but I was not prepared. I'm not sure if I could have been. I laughed out loud when Dr. Q said "If it were a snake, it would have bitten me!" because that does such a great job summing up all the "revelations" in this TF that you probably figured out multiple defeat-alls ago.
But I love the Shard despite its many issues, and I had plenty of thoughts about how Dr. Q could be better when I ran the thing, so here's my suggestion for what the Dr. Q task force could become:
Mission 1: Combines the first five missions of the original TF. You are sent straight into a Rularuu cave, without any hunt missions preceding it, to rescue explorers from the Rularuu. But when you get there you find that some of them have been killed by high-tech weapons. Waiting at the end of the mission is a Crey boss whom you defeat and capture - maybe the cave is even a new map that transitions into a secret lab where Crey is capturing Rularuu for their experiments, which the explorers stumbled onto after following some mysterious researchers. This plus the fact that you can literally see Crey mobs all over the zone is more than enough info for Dr. Q to conclude that Crey is, in fact, in the Shard causing trouble.
Mission 2: Combines missions 6 through 13 of the original TF. NPC scouts have located a major Crey base for you (in Firebase Zulu, not Paragon City), and you go attack it and arrest the leader, NOT everyone in it. In that base you discover advanced portal tech Crey used to get into the zone, escaped Rularuu using it to build dimensional gizmos that could get them into Primal Earth if completed, and evidence that the tech comes from Nemesis. Also, there are Crey operatives planning to meet with somebody at an unexplored location about said tech.
Mission 3: Combines missions 14 through 16 of the original TF. You go to the unexplored location and find it is a Nemesis stronghold, which uses the cool map from the RWZ arcs. It's already under attack by the Rularuu, so you have to arrest all the Crey representatives and the Nemesis leader while fending off Rularuu ambushes. (Maybe said leader has a cool new experimental EB Nemesis has been working on there in secret - a weather control automaton, to follow up on the Meteorologist mini-arc?) You also learn about the times and locations of interdimensional transits planned by Crey and Nemesis.
Mission 4: Combines missions 17 through 19 of the original TF. There is one Crey base in the Shard and one in Paragon involved in the next transit, and you head to the one in the Shard while NPC heroes simultaneously shut down the one in Paragon - maybe you even get to communicate with them remotely, and hit glowies to deactivate security systems in the other base, cut off squads of bosses coming at you through the portal, etc. Unfortunately, Countess Crey's legal superpowers have already gotten her out of jail by this point, despite your heroic efforts with Janet Kellum earlier. You must defeat her and Hopkins as a team in order to shut down Crey's efforts here for good. But in the process, you learn there was a second portal base Crey was using where they were transporting Rularuu into Paragon, and they've lost contact with that base.
Mission 5: Combines missions 20 through 22 of the original TF. While Crey's second portal base was easily shut down by other heroes after Countess Crey's arrest last mission, the transported Rularuu have already escaped into Oranbega and you must stop their final attempt to build a portal to the Shadow Shard and start an invasion. This time you do have to go to Paragon City, but at least you don't have to go back, and the mission is in Peregrine now so it's relatively quick to get to it. You must defeat every Rularuu mob present, but the map is mostly Circle so it is not a defeat-all. But you do also have to defeat a powerful Circle AV on site, perhaps Baron Zoria himself (or rather, the powerful Oranbegan mage who has been possessing his body - I forget what happened to him in canon, so not sure if this works or not). Or maybe a cool new Circle AV who is harnessing the power of Rularuu directly, Rulu-Shin style, and thinks they can channel it into a new magical power source that will lead Oranbega to supremacy once again.
Moral of the story is as before: please don't let the Rularuu out of the Shard, it's bad. Also of course the Countess successfully argues in court she was there to shut down these illegal operations in the Shard, not oversee them, and gets out of jail before you know it.
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."
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3 hours ago, gameboy1234 said:
There's been some discussion about telling story through the mechanics. I think frequently the location of a mission matters. If we're to feel like we're moving through a story, sending us to random locations on a map doesn't really cut it. Some thought the physical location of a mission on a map, and how it integrates into the story are also important. Like if we're to discover a secret Council base, then we should be doing that, each mission moving closer somehow to that secret base. To me a lot of current missions don't do that. This might involve some special maps, but they don't have to be very special. Adding some carefully chosen equipment and enemy characters so that each map doesn't feel identical to the last would help. If we're investigating Council for stealing equipment from a warehouse in the first mission, that equipment better show up in the secret base in the last mission
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....
2 hours ago, BurtHutt said:I mentioned (as did others) the text and dialogue is lost on the team if they aren't the lead. In addition to changing some of these TFs, you could also change the way the mission info is disseminated. One of my previous suggestions was to have unique loading screens and on those screens have 1 or 2 sentences summarizing that portion of the TF/SF etc. The Devs could simply use relevant (to the TF) screenshots as the loadscreen (pics of the main characters might be a good option) and then a quick summary.
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.
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2 hours ago, iBot said:
- As already mentioned all TFs should allow for a team to run them at whatever level the leader is so if the leader is level 25 the mobs scale accordingly just like normal missions work. That means Posi can be run at level 50 or Manti at level 25 with properly scaled mobs. If at all possible, allow for incarnate level mobs as well to really stretch those end game builds if the leader is 50 +1.
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.
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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.
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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.
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2 hours ago, Haijinx said:
There are some that didn't work for me
So may be difficult to do them all?
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.
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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.
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11 hours ago, Hedgefund said:
I cast a vote for revamp of TFs but I'd like for that discussion to include that SFs have a huge glaring hole at 30-35. Redside could also use a lowbie (Posi-like) as well. The 8-15 range goes by so fast that a lowbie SF doesn't seem as needed but I'll save that discussion for that thread. My only point here is that a tf thread also include SFs and lack thereof.
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.
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On 12/12/2020 at 4:33 AM, ZorkNemesis said:
It was stated though (during the Ouroboros initiation arc by Twilight's Son) that nearly every attempt to actually alter the time stream through Ouroboros has failed to have any meaningful effects (though based on Dream Doctor's comments during the 5th chapter of Dark Astoria, Twilight's Son may not be truthful as he's actually responsible for the very event he wants you to prevent in that part of the initiation). For reasons unknown, Laura is the only known exception to this little bit of lore. Time travel seems to work in strange ways in the CoX verse.
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.
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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.
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6 hours ago, Ironblade said:
This sort of already exists.
When the task forces were originally created, there were no Reward Merits. When the merit system was added later, the devs datamined how long it took to run each task force and strike force and assigned the merit rewards accordingly. So, if you've run one task force and another gives slightly more merits, it should take slightly longer.
Having said that, we didn't have so many fancy travel powers when they assigned the merits so some of them (Dr Q) now give an excessive number of merits compared to how fast we can actually complete them.
P.S. I *THINK* the devs said that they scaled the system to award one merit per 3-1/2 minutes of effort.
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.
Opinion piece; the worst TF/SF and why
in General Discussion
Posted
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.