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Wrong way around. Faultline had a revamp, Hollows always had a contained story. And they're both cool. +1, though aware of the extraordinary amount of work these involve. I'd love the hazard zones to get some love.

I liked this post because I believe in you, PK. ... Please like my post too. It's really important to me. Edit: aww yeah, 500 rep! Making it into the big leagues! Just 102 more rep behind Juba, the race is on!

Yup. Not convenient enough, apparently. So now all those features are obsolete too and clutter up the place. That's one thing that CoH has developed well - most older features still matter.

I agree with your point, though I'm not sure I'm seeing the suggestions you're referring to. The practical suggestions look like minor tweaks to me. And yeah, I do agree that travel is in a pretty good place. Even better as the origin power pools broaden our options.

SWTOR is a bigger culprit to me. I haven't played much of it and still have much, much more to do and explore despite years of sporadically playing it. Recently they enabled the galactic travel menu from anywhere, whereas before you had to use it from your ship. So if you want to do things immersively and still use the ship, you're basically just picking a very roundabout way of accessing a menu that is always on the menu bar. For someone not used to the game, it's kinda just depressing and reaks of desperation to please and maintain their veterans. It's an offputting smell to me. At least in CoX, travelling still feels organic when you choose to. That's a really big deal for me.

How can you call yourself MunkiLord if you are yet to fling your poop? I figured that would be your superpower.

Good point.

I echo you entirely, but am totally aware it's a very minority opinion. I love the feeling of being in a big world, so I travel everywhere at a slow pace when there's no pressure. I wouldn't want the game to become inconvenient, but I would insist that the conveniences are at least immersive. The TUNNEL system makes no dang sense to me.

Everybody wants to be a Scrap, Because a Scrap's the only AT that knows where it's at. While playing Scraps you always has a welcome mat. 'Cos everybody digs a swinging Scrap.

Best place to find a Nemesis plant? In a Nemesis pot.

All scrapping is dps but not all dps is scrapping sorta deal? I could echo that.

Ah yes. Quite. They may be pseudo melee, but where do dominators fit on the damage output spectrum?

Good lord, this should not be a prickly discussion. Is there even anything to disagree over?

Ah man, they really got me by putting elevators with 'up' arrows that go down. Dastardly fiends!

Someone I was playing with once asked "why don't we just fly to the top floor from the outside?" It's wrecked me ever since.

I've never dished out damage on a brute as well as I have on a Stalker. The MM suggestion has come up a bunch of times and it has weight. MMs definitely need some love. The new henchman AI was really neat, though. I'm always in the corner of having more challenges and difficulty options, but I think adjusting the way that players have settled into playing their characters is rife with trouble. The new options should ideally be extrinsic.

Totally! Having a few dialogue options that alter why a character is doing what they're doing, even if the outcome is the same, would make all the difference for me in those circumstances. Redside is totally devoid of options for villains who genuinely believe they're doing the right thing. (I think)

I mean character agency rather than player agency. I was thinking mainly about the Dean MacArthur story, Brother Hammond and the Pandora's Box SSA. There are a few others too. A lot of what happens there is supposedly the character's idea, but the dialogue options and goals are funnelled down specific routes or use idiosyncratic speech to get you there. There's even a cutscene at the end of the Mortimer Kal SF where the character speaks, "Are you kidding me? The Flames of Prometheus are mine, Positron. I can take as much as I want! Why would I ever give you anything?" It just sounds... shite. The more passive "Ok, I'll do that" at least doesn't push the character into a particular persona.

I love redside. Prefer it, even. I really like the darker, grimier aesthetic over the copy-paste, often nonsense zones of Paragon City. I like finding little nooks with passive storytelling and I'm a sucker for the European architecture style. It has so much more uniqueness in a much smaller area. I like the stories too. Actually, the ones that give the character more agency bug me more, for the way that they put words in the player characters' mouths. Your character still plays the audience surrogate role and is, at best, a secondary agent in the world just like with blueside. I think if you can be ok with that and plot your characters around it, it takes the edge off that henchman feeling. I kinda prefer having characters in that spot, where there's indefinite upwards progression for them or that they're under pressure enough to drive them. I lose interest with the later stories when the game tries pushing player characters into the world's greatest hero spotlight. I would absolutely love an entire character arc from 1-50 that, through player choices and the character's own initiative, allows you to conduct your own masterplan to unleash your own havoc somehow. But that's a tall order. Plus I like villains as characters in general.

Tomatoes are not a fruit, I don't care what science says. If I tell you to go to the shop to get some fruit and you come back with tomatoes, we're going to have a very bad time.

I like my characters to feel humble and in the background, filling some small niche in Paragon City or the Rogue Islands rather than taking centre stage or engaging with everything. I often explore with my characters while I haven't fleshed them out and I'll look for their place. Even my main is just a Black Marketeer. They're flies on the wall for everything outside their realms. I often find the character is nebulous until I've defined their fatal flaw. That seems to be when their personality spirals to life and their costume and bio follows. Even little things like 'melancholy', 'out of touch' or 'over-eager' changes the way the character looks and feels. I seem to keep making heroes with insect names but no insect related powers. Only noticed the other day.

No. It's all down to how well the league does. If your league clears the bomb stage quickly, that obviously means more time in the pit. If you don't have anyone pulling from the three bomb areas into the pit, that's a lot of missed opportunity. You might have people going AFK, leeching or having computer malfunctions - enough of those and the damage output of the league drops. I'm sure there are other factors too. If everyone is well behaved, coordinated and dishing out high damage, then you'll get more merits for sure. I don't think I've ever got as much as 1400. This, I didn't know. That's handy information.

I think it's more like 8 missions, including a couple of quick hunts. Redside SFs are definitely less offensive than the TFs that came before it. None of them are particularly outstanding, but at least they're speedy, easy to follow and they make fun use of cutscenes.

Going to throw my vote behind Citadel. Everything about it is uninteresting. Synapse at least has Babbage and the Clockwork king going on. It's a slog, but I like the Clockwork as a villain group. That puts it 2nd worse for me. I'm never particularly excited to do a Manticore either. All four of the oldest TFs really need reworking. The Shadow Shard ones are at least not so in the way, and I kinda like the existence of an endurance test. That said, I wouldn't miss them if they got culled down to something a bit snappier and more interesting.

I'd love to see stuff like this. But also, my #1 wish is a total head-to-toe revamping of streetsweeping anyway. I don't think anything about the way things are is a problem, but there's certainly value in diversifying the ways players can get income, whether influence or merits.