Heraclea

Goldside needs a total rethink to be team friendlier, and it should be possible to invite heroes and villains to run the levelling missions there as well. You do sometimes see teams running First Ward and Night Ward material. But I have run one character 1-20 through Praetoria and I am in no hurry to run another. The factions there make it impossible to form casual teams of people on different paths or stages. The mobs also do not scale well; while a mission set for a team of 8 full of CoT spooks is bad, a similar mission spawning Seers for a full team of 8 is worse, and actually having the full team of 8 won't make it any more fun. This doesn't happen, fortunately, because the factions pretty well prevent teaming in Praetoria.

Funkadelic - Maggot Brain

Godspeed You Black Emperor - First of the Last Glaciers

Probably about as serious a storyline as you will get from me. The Council gets advantages from their offworld allies. The Fifth Column seeks a counter for that. Story based MA. Contains five missions. Last mission pits you against an AV cllass custom mob. Uses unpopular standard mobs.

Anon. - The Flame of Wrath for Squinting Patrick

Heraclea and Wonder Woman would probably see eye to eye on most things, but Heraclea would be puzzled why the political system of the DC Amazons seems so poorly laid out and unrepresentative. Some of my other characters have quite odd agendas like reviving the Hapsburg or Merina monarchies or converting the world to a secret sect of assassins in the name of Mustapha Ibrahim. Some are emissaries of bloodthirsty Aztec gods, sent to Paragon City for the sole purpoese of killing Skuls. All of these characters fancy themselves to be heroes in their own minds. A wider world might not think them so.

This is what I did not understand. Any attack you can fire in that short instance gets the buff; hurry up and don't bother to choose wisely.

That was more or less the point. I had understood that the proc meant that the next attack has increased chance to crit; so if Quills pulsed in that time frame it might consume it rather than an attack I intended. Apparently the proc, if fired, stays until it expires and is not consumed by the next attack.

The Heywoods - Billy Don't Be a Hero

The Cyrkle - Red Rubber Ball

On my Spines scrapper, I was more worried about Quills eating the proc, rather than something more desirable like Ripper. That character has unusual considerations: only one single attack, so only one set of Kinetic Combat; Quills having a strong need for endurance reduction, so Multi-Strike is better than anything else I considered in it, including purple sets. I ended up putting the proc in Spine Burst, which is my usual alpha strike, that way it may be active for Ripper, which is the followup.

Lord Sweitzer is easy to unlock - blueside - at I believe level 30. What you need to do is to run the Brickstown 'Who will Die?' contact (forget the name, they are not far from Serafina) with a relatively small team until you are awarded the 'Bloody Hands;' badge. Apparently fighting the Numina clones and similar foes counts as progress towards it. One run should be enough on a team of more than four. Then head to Null the Gull to evil up, and Lord Sweitzer should appear in your contacts. He may not give you all the missions you need below level 46 - you need the Peregrine mayhem for the accolade. But he is open to you by this plan.

In issue 27, the very first accolade I try to get on a hero is the exploration accolade for Atlas Park, which unlocks the long rage teleporter power. Once you have done it a couple times, you remember all the places you need to go: - statue by the supergroup registrar; - portal by Recluse Victory entrance; (both inside city hall), - in front of hero corps guy by SG portal; - somewhere inside the Vanguard foyer, just run around until it awards; - top of City Hall by the flag - top of Atlas's globe - ledge on a random building in the NE quadrant - ledge on a random building by the Steel Canyon gate These last four will require a jump pack or similar travel power from the P2W vendor. Now you have the Passport accolade and the Long Range Transporter power. Next stop is Night Ward, entered by the swirly near the tram, to enter the haunted house immediately above the zone in point. This gets you House Hunter and, more importantly, Midnight Club Member. Finally, since now you're a midnight club member, take a SG portal to Croatoa or Founder's Falls. These will take you straight to a university without having to wander these zones at level 1 or 2. Enter the Midnight Club building on the right hand side facing the main building, proceed to the middle of the club (claiming badge by the vendor in the side room) and enter Cimerora by the crystal. Entering Cimerora should immediately grant you the Entrusted with the Secret badge and the Ouroboros portal travel power. Approach Marcus Valerius by the fountain for an exploration badge. Cimerora is the first day job badge I seek, Cimeroran Citizen, which is +5 to resistance across the board. I usually log out of a new character once they get there to allow that one to mature.

I tend to mark down Admiral Sutter for three reasons: baffling maps that give you no clue where to go, dancing around and breaking contact in the final mission, and presence of overused IDF mobs. My models for new content would be: - Imperious Task Force - good story, cosmic stakes, and interesting enemies, fun for teams - Market Crash - solid sense of humor on that - BAF Trial - short (except for that cutscene), worthwhile, and to the point

Very difficult content already exists in the game, and it exists in spite of players' current level of defense and skill. Case in point: Moonfire TF. Yes, that Moonfire. Currently the Dr. Todd mission is very often completed by the ATT trick, which probably is a cheat that should be removed. She is squirly and suicidal, and worse, has kinetics powers, which mean she is wont to run off randomly and will do that if she sees any mob. If I wanted to add difficult content, I would not nerf any one's powerset but I would add more content like this and raise the stakes. Rather like keeping Desdemona alive in the Underground Trial, losing Dr. Todd fails the TF. This wouldn't nerf anyone, but would put clearing and controlling ambushes and controlling aggro at a premium. It would require a bit of teamwork, in other words. The template for harder content is right there.

Dandy Warhols - Good Morning

Ludovico Einaudi - Oltremare

Cage the Elephant - Broken Boy

One other question I had - does the crit chance of Critical Strike affect Quills at all? Since Quills is going to be basically on all the time if I am in combat or expecting it, I probably don't want it eating up the critical chances.

My opener is indeed Throw Spines > Ripper, so I think I am covered there. Thought about using Scrapper Strike in Quills, but good old Multistrike is much better on endurance and works fine until I get to Obliteration.

My spines/energy scrapper just hit 47 and it's time to go SRS BZNS on the build. I currently have the Critical Strike set in Throw Spines, because it is usually what I open with. Is there a better place for it? I likewise have Scrapper's Strike in Ripper. Does it too belong somewhere else?

IME, adding a bit of defense to resist based sets is much more worthwhile than adding resist to defense based sets. Even 5% defense stops a fair amount of incoming damage cold. And if it is debuffed away, you aren't missing much. 5% resistance shaves a tiny bit off the damage numbers, and if you're playing that close to the redzone you probably aren't going to make it anyways. Defense is for scrappers, who don't benefit as much from resist based sets but aren't any harder to build for defense than brutes are. The Kismet Accuracy button (actually To-Hit) is also worth having for debuff resistance.

Dark Melee is also worth considering. It too is a punching set, and with the right colors it looks like secondary super speed punches while not being annoyingly 'dark'-ish. There are the weird alien tentacles you'll be summoning. Its heal is more reliable than Rad's.

I have an account but it's been months since I logged in. The Discord interface is one of the ugliest and most ungainly things I have seen in a good long while, and at any rate I do not have a microphone set up, so I can't participate fully anyways. My strong opinion is that if immersion-breaking live VOIP chat of any kind is needed to play an online game, that game is already broken.

Gas Giant - Storm of my Enemies