Lines

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.

I mean sure, that's totally fine. I'm not defending or condoning anything here, just that these threads often get derailed and that there is a trend.

Y'all gotta accept Jubakumbi and his path-less-trodden opinions into your lives as a necessary evil. Let them thoughts flow. Things just escelate if you resist them.

I'm guessing there's some messy behind-the-scenes model action going on preventing this, but I was wondering if the trenchcoats (that were once unlocked by veteran reward, I think) could be moved into the normal jackets and sleeveless jackets costume option? The trenchcoat option is a lot more limited in what you can pair with it, especially when it comes to gloves. It would be nice to be able to mix it up with some of the other sleeves too. But knowing this game, I'm betting those trenchcoats are attached to the character models' pinky toe or something.

That's exactly where I predict I'd end up under those circumstances. I like to have goals and to have resistance. Character development is a part of what makes RPGs neat. I'm not too sure you'd have much game left without it.

I notice you've never won a day. I have. October 15th. Won it.

I take a few prompts from a bunch of characters for most part, who have become their own things in their own ways, but my main Tanker, SENTRYMAN is a pretty direct Superman influence. Only, where DC have wrestled with Supes to try to keep him relevant, Sentryman totally leans into the irrelevancy. He's an outdated, washed up relic of golden age superheroes, still fighting the cold war and completely out of touch with modern life.

It's not that your build up power recharges instantly to click, like with the stalker ATO. It means you get the build up effect procedurally applied directly to you.

They're on the AH and are seeded there at a fixed price. They're listed under Salvage > Special.

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot.

I think that's more or less the consensus. Though I'm well down for going all out communism here. But only for those cool fluffy hats.

A combo of Knockup, chase the target and then knockdown with Air Superiority would be the most superhero goddamn thing if it were an effective tactic.

October 15th is mine. I will be recognised for this feat and it will henceforth be celebrated across the forum as Linesday. Everyone look forward to Linesday.

All in favour of a red-and-gold forum theme revamp, say aye.