Heraclea

I always take and use Lore pets because they're fairly easy to justify concept wise, for me. I figure that once a character becomes such a big deal that they're level 50, they ought to have retainers or some such. Thinking up names for them is an amusing exercise. I tend to reuse just a few lores; most of my characters have Cimerorans or Talons/Knives of Vengeance; Anima Sola is the exception, she has Phantoms. The practical reason for these choices is that I refuse to unleash pets the size of BP Ravagers on teams.

Judas Priest - You Got Another Thing Coming

This is why I think that the one important bit of text in AE is 'boss' fights, Ordinary players don't read mob descriptions; only the small minority of AE focused players pay attention to them. Elaborate backstories for your contact are likewise lost for most players. So is stuff like the contact's sendoff dialogs. Patrol and captive texts have more potential, but most of them fire on entry, meaning that they may not be noticed. Only boss dialogs fire when the players actually approach and aggro the boss. They appear in NPC dialog and sometimes in word balloons, letting players other than the team leader read them. This is really where the work needs to be done,

Branching trees of missions would be absolutely great, but AFAIK they are not possible in AE. All you can really change is the dialogs given if a mission ends in failure.

I usually pass purples on from my tankers to other characters. Purples are mostly for characters that need recharge, recharge, recharge, and my tankers seldom do. They are a lot more beneficial to other ATs in general; a lot of the melee ones were passed to a fire/regen scrapper who does need all that recharge. On a single target melee attack I'd rather have another Kinetic Combat foursome slotted on a tanker than any purple set that fits.

It's a month long game of 'How many synonyms for Beholder can you come up with, without saying "Beholder".'

Arbiter Sands and Captain Castillo are two of the most intriguing and best characterized enemies in the game. The fact that they reappear in the Ms. Liberty and Market Crash TFs adds interest as well. Still need to do more with Mold Wall, though,

One of my goals is to have a level 50 melee character running the 'standard' (i.e. tanker, brute, or scrapper) versions of every armor set and every melee attack set. I may make an exception here for Stone armor, which I rather dislike. Then again other sets I thought I wouldn't enjoy, like a Dark Armor/Savage Melee tanker, turned out to be more fun than I figured. Most recent ding here was an Energy Armor/Broadsword brute, not the world's greatest combination for DPS, so I will be speccing her as a tanking brute; and a Claws/Fire scrapper, who is pure DPS. Up and coming here is Ice Armor/Ice Melee on a tanker. I now have a level 50 character of every AT except any Kheldian or Arachnos, with the single exception of defender. Kheldians do not interest me; when I played them on old live they always seemed starved for slots. I now have a defender (poison/dark) at level 30, which is a new personal best for me for the AT. I have almost 5 full pages of characters on Torchbearer, and of those 28 are level 50. All but one or two of the 50s has all their incarnates unlocked. All with the unlocks become +3 incarnate level very quickly; transcendent merits make sure of that. That's generally the point where I consider a character 'finished'; they will continue to receive small upgrades after that but sll the big milestones have been passed. More recently I've been going back and revising builds on my early characters, who were eagerly slotted with whatever dropped, and acquiring more planned set bonuses on them.

Melodysheep - Chase for the Charms

One thing that may help is to set your grid snap to 4x4. Cycle through those by pressing f1 or f2, forget which it is, one of them. I find the flicker more annoying with the Grass plates than anything else. I've taken to just using Miyuki Gravel floors colored bright green to represent grass, which us just as attractive, can be tweaked to blend in with the hills and trees more easily, and is a lot less hassle. (What are Hirano and Miyuki, anyways?)

If you had built a base in the old game, many of the restrictions on item placement and various line of sight rules were all related to the possibility of base raiding. You had to obey the PvP rules in building even if you never used the base for PvP. IIRC only certain rooms could house power, control, and teleport objects as well. Each standard teleporter could serve only two zones. You had to unlock the teleport beacons by visiting each target zone exploration badge location while in SG costume mode. Base raiding also worked off the prestige system, where every base item cost prestige, supergroups had to pay a prestige rent, and prestige invested in items destroyed by PvP was lost. The way bases work on HC, with room clipping permitted, many bases being built above or below the walls, and prestige not in use, the return of base PvP is basically not possible here for better or worse.

I would rewrite and revamp all of the early issue content so that: - The contact lives in a zone where the enemies she pits you against are in fact found; and - Almost all door missions take place inside that zone. Tightening up the writing for the material would help. I would also add a cutscene editor to AE.

I tend not to give up on characters, but I will put some away for a while. I spent a shedload of merits and inf getting a Dom to level 50 and getting enough recharge for perma-dom, only to discover that permadom was yet another demand on my attention as I played and that I really wasn't enjoying it. There's a super reflex tanker that I gave up on when learning of the weak taunt aura; now that it's apparently the equal of other sets, I may pick that one back up. The only character I really partially stripped down to give stuff to another is a Titan Weapon/WP scrapper. I found the attack set jerky and clumsy, and it does not exemp down well at all. The handwriting is apparently on the wall for Titan Weapons, and as such I am reluctant to invest time and effort in improving the character. Exile from Torchbearer to another server is her likely fate, but I haven't pulled the trigger yet.

Next up in our tragical history tour is that poor, misunderstood Hungarian countess, Elisabeth Bathory. Based on this portrait: Collar needs work.

Ranavalona @Heraclea Crowned Heads Torchbearer CH-10012 Mostly done by Ranavalona and Empress Carlota

Rather, this game is a superhero concept creation utility with villians you can use to test your concept out on. Understand this and PvE difficulty is not an issue.

I've poked my nose in the zones once or twice because I am an explorer at heart. Been there on unstealthed melees and other inappropriate for PvP characters. I didn't even get the honor of being ganked, there was no one there. I took on a couple of PvE mobs in the zones until I remembered that even PvE objectives in the open world played by PvP rules. Got toggle dropped and debt from fights I could have easily handled anywhere else. Not my idea of fun. Now one thing that might make visiting the zones more popular is if we were to make the Arachnos/Longbow door missions available to a wider spectrum of levels. Those door missions are played by normal PvE rules once inside. Problem is, they can only be taken by characters in a narrow band of levels corresponding to the level of the PvE enemies in the zone. These missions have an XP hazard bonus and are very useful for levelling, and might be popular for that reason alone -- if more characters could take them. Making them available to any character above the minimum according to the normal exemplar rules would almost certainly boost their popularity.

Actually, the only mythological names I have in my roster on Torchbearer are Heraclea, Penthesilea, Medeia, Omphale, Nereis, Belphoebe, Antiope, and Lampito (Indomitable). Here's a handy resource for naming Greek Amazon characters. Can't vouch for the fact that they may already have been taken, but except for the ones I listed, wasn't me. 😉

Alice Cooper - Eighteen

Eagles - King of Hollywood

Espers - Widow's Weed

I run many old-line task forces, and my level 50s probably spend almost half of their time playing at lower levels, It's a lot more fun running a Synapse when you have all of the recovery procs slotted already, and fully slotted attacks and defenses. I don't enjoy a lot of the highest level content. I find endless IDF enemies monotonous. White square labs with poorly defined spawn points seem lacking in tactical options. That is not the game I came back to play. Much rather be running a Citadel or a Manticore on a level 50 than running an Apex or Tin Mage.

I don't often PvP because my mains and most invested builds are melee characters. I have never played a game where PvP is really fair or fun for melee characters, and CoH is no exception. The armors you invested in are useless. You get endlessly CCed. In CoH being CCed also drops your toggles. And you get bursted to death from across the zone by characters you won't live long enough to get to, and who will scoot away if you get close. If there were something akin to cage matches in CoH PvP I might try them.

I just made a water/rad blaster, and so far I think the combo plays quite well.

I remember the Dreck mission. Wolves farming. Demon farming on the Infernal map, which worked just like fire farms today. The first coming of the Winter Lords. I had a good time and made friends doing all of these things, too. You aren't going to keep human ingenuity bottled up, especially in a game as friendly to creative types as this one.