Placta

Not the specific long example, but I did nod to General Aarons from that Serpent Drummer mission. (And if I'd thought of Lady Jane, I'd have mentioned her as well, although I haven't had trouble with her recently... AI fix? I've done the mission so many times I know how to handle it?) And frankly, if all a NPC is going to do is cause chaos until they get themselves dead, I'd rather they not be there at all.

Oh Lord, Warburg. I get that the scientists are nearsighted and I have to turn off stealth so they can see me. I get that they're not in great physical shape so I have to turn off Sprint (even if I don't have a stealth IO in there) and still stop every 50 feet so I don't get too far ahead. Do they have to be so dumb they have to be manually led around every loose cobblestone?

I did the Neuron/Anti-Matter mission today. In that mission, you get three NPCs to... I don't know, I think they're supposed to help you somehow. I can't imagine how. First up, there was Day. She spawned in that one lab room that's kinda divided in two with all the equipment in one half, a high area in the other overlooking the rest of the room. I'm in the half with the equipment when she activates and starts attacking everything in sight. When I finally get to her, she's down to half health, and I've got no way to heal her. So I try to back her off so she can passively regenerate, but there are still Clockwork in the room. She finally stopped attacking everything when the damage got to be too much. Fillion's up next. I met him in the Lab Equipment room. He went after the Lab Equipment. I left him to be a dumbass. He may have gotten himself blown up. He stopped following me, at any rate. In the last room, just before Anti-Matter, I met Harris. I wanted to wait for Light Form to cycle (I'm a little short of perma, and it seems to know exactly when the worst moment to crash is) before starting the fight, but oh my god he just ran in and my fight-or-flight reflex ticked to fight. He dropped and Light Form crashed; fortunately I had enough inspirations to survive until it came back up but it was not a good time. Anyway, my point is (tl;dr): Can we have guys like this NOT be aggro monkeys? (General Aarons, I'm also looking at you.)

A stable market. Reworking the snipe changes. Moving electric sustain to Lightning Field/Dynamo. Making the respec reactor room not tedious. But my favorite change is fixing the bug where I couldn't log in and play.

Paragon Wiki is accurate for the pre-shutdown game. Like all the 5th Column stuff, Ubelmann got changed to Council when they took over, and was never changed back until the SCORE years, or maybe VERY early Homecoming.

I knew I didn't have the full hour, which is why I ran by myself. The third clue tripped me up; I needed a second hint ("you'll see it on the way in" tripped me up, pointing me away from the right location but once I figured it out I knew what it meant, which makes it a great riddle). Then I blew through the next few before running out of time. I was on the last clue when I had to go, and realized where it was pointing about two minutes later. But the most important thing: I had a great time. Thank you for organizing this event (and, indeed, for all you do for the Excelsior community), and see you next time!

I did the Daedalus – Future Threat, Create Power Supply mission, set to x8. Mission took about 15 minutes to clear (objectives are glowies so there's little danger of accidentally completing) and I got about 30 gamma tanks per run. Cryos were less frequent, I averaged about 2-3 per run before I gave up and went to the Protector hunting ground in Eden and ground them out there.

Madame of Mystery from Madeleine Casey's arc is rough unless you can debuff her. She's got high resists to just about everything and the temp power you get to fight her isn't that great. Some (all?) archvillains can push their resistance to 100%. It's not quite as important nowadays with level shifts and Lore pets, but fighting Reichsman and his million hp without resistance and/or regeneration debuffs can become a marathon. Of course there's RHW Tyrant.

Issue 0/1 content has some big flaws that the devs realized were bad design and phased out (overly long, lots of hunt missions, mission doors spread willy-nilly across city zones, taking forever to get a contact's phone number (this one has been retroactively fixed), multiple contacts with the same missions so they didn't have much personality...), but there are some stories that grabbed me from that time: • The Clockwork Captive and The Mind of the King: The guy kidnapped by the Clockwork to work on them comes to the conclusion that they shouldn't work, and then a second arc where you try to figure out how they do. • The Vahzilok Wasting Disease: One mission with a nasty debuff, and Dr. V himself. • Ubelmann the Unknown: You get to punch a time-travelling Nazi in the face. • Corporate Culture, The Revenant Hero Project, The Evil Countess Crey: The first arc sets the tone for how dealing with Crey is going to go. Revenant Hero gives you a look at Crey at their worst. (There's also a mission, not part of the arc but related to it, where you see Invisible Falcon captured by Crey... and then fight off several waves of Crey ambushes hoping to do the same to you.) Then the last arc paints a surprisingly tragic picture of the Countess as you and she go after each other. • The Library of Souls: A Circle of Thorns traitor, and learning what the Circle really is. • Upon the Psychic Plane: Vanessa DeVore's origin story. (The Hunt 100 Carnies mission can go pancake itself, though.) • Operation World Wide Red: Malta's grand plan, and I just love it for how big the stakes are. Also two Kronos Titans. (Also from Crimson but not in Ouroboros, the Joe Boxer series of missions is good too.)

At least back on live, getting these components was an alternative to reward merits. Been a while since I've run any of them, so Homecoming may have changed it. I don't seek shards, and thread components are so much easier to come by. But the ones that drop, I do use until I get my Alpha made (running WSTs for Notices as needed); usually that makes both t3 abilities and sometimes the second t1.

First, you don't need shards for anything, you can use thread components which are easily gotten through trials and Incarnate arcs. If you're really determined to get them, though, best advice I can give is do stuff like ship raids or zone invasions (Rikti, zombies, Nemesis) where you're defeating a lot of enemies quickly. Windfall temp powers may help. I don't know.

I considered a solo build for my emp/psy corruptor but then realized the build I had already had an attack chain and what little gain I'd get from dropping the teammate-only empathy powers wasn't worth the hassle of maintaining two builds.

1. My peacebringer has a human-only build that I run at levels where Light Form's going to have high uptime (won't be perma till 50, but it's still good with a few seconds' downtime) and a triform build for low levels where the the forms really help. I'm planning something similar for my warshade. 2. With my controllers I've used my second build for a solo build that focuses on damage (single-target immob and hold slotted for damage rather than mez, fighting pool attacks, buffed by Assault) and plays like a dominator wannabe. This gets abandoned once I get the pet(s) slotted up and can put the damage burden on them. 3. Someday I might make a level 50 build for my blaster but right now I'd rather send the inf to alts for their builds.

Done until Legatus becomes less tedious to get.

Vanessa is your typical mad scientist, except she's not mad. Sure, she's brought some dead mice and rats back to life, but the final result of that experiment is a single vial of serum to be used on her in "the ultimate unfortunate circumstance" and she steadfastly refuses to test it on anything else, especially humans. Gwen isn't trying to create life. She isn't trying to bring the dead back. She makes zombies because she wants to make zombies. She made shock gauntlets to control and power her pets via lightning because it's How Things Are Done. She's a cackling madwoman in general. Vanessa sees Gwen as the epitome of everything she's worked so hard not to be seen as and a disgrace to science heroes everywhere. Gwen thinks Vanessa could be cool if she'd stop being so uptight, but Vanessa's dislike has rubbed off on her and she's stopped trying to be friends. It's hard to imagine Vanessa warming up to Gwen unless Gwen has a massive personality change, and unless she does there's no hope for settling their issues. (Meta irony in spoiler tag.)

Teri was born to fly. She knew it from a young age. She was even surer when she sprouted wings that were good for nothing except increasing her clothing costs and molting all over the bloody place. She tried everything she could think of to awaken her latent flight powers, but nothing worked. Then she found out about Peacebringers and worked to become one. The second she merged with her Kheldian half, she finally felt whole. Powered up, she took the skies for the first time, and her wings unfolded and flapped. Everything was right. She's never gotten tired of the sensation, but that first time was something special. Edit: For Chelsea, it was the first time she could touch another person with her bare hands after being in isolation and/or having to wear a containment suit for so long. This was the final sign: everything would be alright.

Talk of suicide. Nothing graphic.

I believe a 20 can still do Temblor's arc (and Penny's). At any rate, I've definitely run Doc Delilah's and Agent G's arc on both Praetorians I've brought over.

Chelsea went through a rough time after her 14th birthday. The Swimming Pool Incident where she discovered her powers was bad enough, but then she spent weeks locked away in isolation in fear that if anyone got too close to her they'd be electrocuted too. As the tech to control her powers got easier and easier to manage and she was able to rejoin society, she realized if she didn't use her powers to help people, they were just a horrible thing that happened to her and her friends. Now they're a horrible thing that happened to her and her friends turned into something good for her (and her friends), Paragon City, and the world. Tori is a superhero gadgeteer. The sale of one of her custom order gadgets fell through, and when she tried to auction it off, the only interest she got was from Arachnos, Crey, the Council, the Sky Raiders, etc. So she decided the smart thing to do was to "sell" it to herself and step up as a hero. Jeni had a superhero webcomic and decided to drum up interest by cosplaying as her main heroine and going around Atlas Park taking on some Hellions and such. She turned out to be good at it, and her blog about her adventures became even more popular than the webcomic. Cat is the sole survivor of her planet's destruction and her adoptive parents were murdered in front of her. When she was bitten by a radioactive kitten, she decided if the universe wanted her to be a superhero so badly, she should go along with it before she turned green or went blind or something. Fel just wants the money that SHE WON, FAIRLY AND LEGITIMATELY, back, you GOOD-FOR-NOTHING [unintelligble].

I can understand trying to restore the original challenge of the badges, but... the Paragon devs left them alone when they introduced Incarnates and didn't touch them over the next five issues. Homecoming left them alone for a couple years. Why now? Also, badges get easier over time. Alpha shifts made Master Ajax (and to a lesser extent, Tin Mage) easier. Avoids the Green Stuff got easier with Incandescence Destiny. When the Magisterium was in beta, Positron made a post saying he wasn't even sure The Really Hard Way was even going to be possible at the time but would get easier as we got more powerful. (Last and least, I find it a bit silly to give Incarnate rewards for a challenge that disables Incarnate powers, but meh.)

They're all women, mostly in their mid-to-late 20s. Also all heroes, regardless of their origins (and currently ignore the Arachnos logo by Val's name on the character select; she was a double-agent and blew her cover but I've yet to play that out). I also gave most of my characters last names by searching for "Irish last names" and giving them one from whatever list I opened. In the beginning I wasn't careful and so some characters have Scottish or even (egh) English names. (Rachel's (probably) French but adopted her present name when she came to America.) The three exceptions: I named Dani Connelly after Jennifer Connelly; Nelle Connelly is Dani's Praetorian counterpart and had to have the same name; and Anastasia Romanov is named after... well, that Anastasia (I figured in the Rogue Isles she would follow Western customs and just take her father's name as is). (For first names, I would guess if you throw out some of the weirder ones (Anastasia, Guinevere) and look at when the rest peaked in popularity, you would get a very good idea of how old I am. I'm glad I was never partial to the name Karen so I didn't use it for any of my characters in the before times.)

For IOs, 50 is the cap. SOs and the various multi-aspect enhancements that drop from the Sewer Trial, Eden Trial, Hami Raids, and Aeon SF can go to 53 via combining. (It may be possible to get DOs or TOs to 53 if you really, really wanted. I can't imagine any practical purpose for this.)

For Cat, it'd be a blip. She'd make some big donations to her favorite charities. Most of my characters would either do the same or use the money to improve the supergroup's equipment and facilities. At the other end of the spectrum, there's Rachel. Rachel's never had money and has no idea what to do with it. There's a very good chance she wouldn't have a clue what she found, assume it's nothing important, toss it in the trash, and never think of it again. On the off chance she realizes what it is, and learns it's a winning ticket, she'd still have no idea what to do with it, and after praying on it she'd put the ticket, unclaimed, in her church's collection basket (in an envelope, so none of the other parishioners are tempted to take it) and let them deal with it. Fel would have a long chat with her mirror about which one of the crooks at the poker game set fire to that building to lure her out so they could give her the ticket. They paid up, after all; ain't right to keep them on the list after that. Ivy would shoot a super-low-budget (three, maybe four figures) commercial for her "psychic reader" business and use the rest to buy advertising time until it ran out.

Most of my characters either open it or toss it into the junk pile and never think of it again. Mere knows it's a letter from her future self, probably saying something she couldn't the first time they met. It's probably something she needs to know. Similarly, Kim opens it in the hope that it's a message from her mentor from wherever he's disappeared to. Erin hopes that it's one of her family who's recently learned she too survived the Rikti War. Chris wonders if it could possibly be from her Nictus' previous host. He's dead, but anything's possible, right? Tara thinks it might be connecteed to The Book (the one that mysteriously appeared in her backpack one day and taught her how to tap her powers). Stacy and Val assume it's a threat from someone they knew in Arachnos. Ivy, someone from her pre-amnesty days. Heather hopes it's from her world, or at least someone who knows about it. Vanessa triples the security on her home/lab and devotes everything she can to finding who left the letter for her and how they knew where to leave it. She also begins looking for a new place to move her lab. The letter and its contents are irrelevant. Rachel, being homeless (largely by choice – before settling in Paragon she'd been a wanderer for hundreds of years – and she's mostly couch surfing nowadays), doesn't get much mail, so she's confused but a little delighted by the novelty. Faith knows it's from her father, so she soaks it in holy water and banishes it back to him in Hell. Edit – I can't believe I left this one off: It would be far from the first piece of creepy fanmail Jeni's gotten. Maybe, despite the trappings, it's not so bad. Even if it is, she knows how to deal with it.

I've run this mission a few times and there are no words for how much I hate this badge now. They're not common spawns, as far as I know there's no way to identify them until they start transforming, and my badger's a blaster – holding back so I don't defeat them too fast is antithetical. I get 3-4 per run, and there's usually one that's defeated by dots mid-transformation that doesn't give credit. Farming Romulus sounds more fun tbh.