Lazarillo

It does more or less have one, it's just not really fully explained except in the final clue (which disappears quickly 'cause you have to read it between the last AV, and the final mission getting turned in), and a little bit in the final mission turn-in (which only the leader can see). As mentioned, it kinda suffers from the way story interacts with SFs, but it's kind of an amusing turn of events. Throughout the SF, Tarikoss makes it clear he is, like, super, puppy-kicking evil and he only wants to do business with people who share his decidedly negative take on morality, but that if you can get on board with a guy like him, he'll share the power you can all gain by helping him bind the demon. It's made pretty obvious that you shouldn't trust a guy like him and even the "heroic" NPCs warn you that you shouldn't let him take you for a ride. So it's pretty obvious that he's planning to use you to tap all that demonic power for himself. And then at the end...

Clones/Duplicates of my MM. Probably with a preference for Thugs or Demons, maybe Ninjas.

Hero TF has gotta be Moonfire for me. It's got a great level range where you've just got your primary t9 and there's a feeling of having really come into power. It's all Council, and who doesn't love nazi-bashing? Plus, it's all that with a Nictus and Striga bent, two bits of the setting that I find particularly neat. Plus, hey, lotsa badge credit. Atlas approves. Hess is probably the second best, for more or less the same reasons, but not quite as good, IMO. For villains, I voted Morty Kal. It's decently fun and straightforward, although it being relatively short tends to kinda snowball into people heavily speedrunning it, and I think it's one of those that's kinda fun to go slow and savor the destruction. Oh well. Tarikoss is probably 2nd-ranked, being generally fun and having a pretty amusing "twist" at the end (not that a lot of people catch it, given TF-style storytelling). Being lower-level, and particularly, lower-level with a fair amount of CoT can get rough, though. Co-op, gotta be ITF. It's the perfect example of how to just do fun team content, and even team storytelling, where everything is quite clear simply due to mission objectives, visuals, and very occasional smatterings of generally quite brief dialogue. Not perfect, but better than you see in any other TF, really. Haven't tried (and probably won't try, if I'm being honest) the new versions of it, but the original is classic for a reason.

My main is a Claws/WP Scrapper, a Time/Rad Defender, a Thugs/Traps Mastermind, an Energy/Bio Sentinel, a Street Justice/Invuln Brute, a Dark/Dark Dominator, and more, whose true in-character "super power" is that all rumors about him become true. So that gives me a whole stable of alts named "Lazarillo" (or vaguely equivalent names) that represent different beliefs about them. Because my own real life super power is altitis.

Whelp, having the difficult slider available to change at any time was nice, but I guess we're going back to the old contacts.🙃

Sure, as long as we can also raise the level caps on the individual arcs. Right now it's hard enough just not to out-level stuff and mess up story progression when solo. And frankly, given the...unique degree of "balance" that most of even low-level Praetorian enemies have, I feel like there shouldn't be anything wrong with that. But who knows. But yeah, otherwise, there's little point in adding a bunch of TFs that require turning off XP anyway.

Definitely Willpower's big hole. Although at endgame, one can Ageless one's way through a lot of those. It's only a band-aid since it doesn't have any sort of base to work with, but I find it works decently on that front, at least. Versus the previously-griped-about Mez hole that other sets have, and WP does not, I feel generally better about WP+Ageless than, say, about Elec or Invuln+Clarion when fighting Knives and Longbow (the latter of which is a lot, because Redside Bestside).

Scrappers have less HP to benefit from its massive regeneration, but still, Willpower is one of only two sets that (the other being /Dark) that can get full mez protection from toggles, and it gets a taunt aura (which a few other sets share, in fairness) to keep enemies from running away. Those might be "small" but personally I tend to feel their absence pretty strongly; at the very least, it's weird to see sets that lack those aspects considered "S-tier" to me.

Working as designed. Tedium is difficulty, didn't you know?

This feels quite backwards. Reward Merits can be earned super fast and in greater numbers across lots of different content. Empyreans themselves are much more grindy to obtain, and can be sent to alts and used for Incarnate stuff that Reward Merits cannot. I kinda shudder to think how much more I'd have had to grind many of my character if I'd blown Empyreans effectively on stuff that I can buy from the AH...

I'm not 100% certain this would work, but I feel like I recall that you can bind multiple "powexec" functions to the same bind, it's just that the game won't execute any but the first/last on the list. However, it might be worth checking to see what happen if you used a bind like this with two powers in the the bind that were mutually exclusive. So if you did, like a "powexec_name Ageless Destiny$$powexec_name Rebirth Destiny", might only fire off the active power, since you couldn't have both powers to activate at the same time?

As is Penny herself. One reason I will always and forever insist that her Superhero codename is Pitstop.

...most of which is not viable to experience in a TF, though, since mission text is can often only be experienced by the first person to click on certain things (who in many cases, must be the team leader). There's not much rich to the Aeon SF when I have to lag behind a team wondering what the heck is going on, and just being assured that yeah, it's somehow important. This is a big point of why for TFs, shorter tends to be better, because team content, and story rich content, are very highly mutually exclusive, just due to the nature of the way the game handles things. And why Aeon still needs a SSA mode.

I don't think it's as fine a line as "yes" or "no". We're in Praetoria. There are shades of gray (even if it looks awfully blue to that one silly Circle of Thorns guy). There's a degree to which I think this idea "claims" the game, which is where I think the problem comes about. The game belongs (or, at least, "should" belong) to the larger playerbase, not to the development staff of any one community. And in that regard, player characters shouldn't really feel held in any different a regard to server-team characters, as I see it. Plus, as noted, they did try this already, and it fell really flat, to me at least (doubly so since the team member who did the arc left anyway, maybe?). Doesn't mean there can't be story potential, but it needs to be approached in a way that doesn't commandeer the characters or the game world in too great a degree. The Vigilante and Rogue arcs were both good examples of how to do new content right, IMO.

I'd really rather not. Piecemeal tried it and it honestly felt kind of unfulfilling when I realized I was just playing their character's origin story. On top of that, I dunno, it just feels...incompatible with the game's true form. Like, for better or worse, this game doesn't really "belong" to the current dev team. Trying to make it "theirs" might give a sort of misappropriated in the same way that, say, having them take on preexisting canon character names (like the original dev team did) wouldn't really feel right, either (and to my understanding, is deliberately avoided by the HC team in part for that reason).

Out of curiosity, had you just pulled them out of storage, and was the storage window still open? I ran into this bug at some point a while back, where every time I used a Catalyst, I also ended up putting one back into storage. So they were depleting from my personal inventory twice as fast, but weren't actually getting used up.

I mean, they can go back and remove all Incarnate rewards from non-Trials, then, eh? Vet levels are an "anomaly" in and of themselves. We're ironically not supposed to have that without farming anyway...just farming trials instead of whatever else. I'm talking about AE as a whole. When the current patch goes through (because let's be honest, we've been told this has already been in testing for a while; minds are not getting changed at this point), it's not going to affect me, true, because I've already been shown the door when it comes to AE. However, removing Veteran Levels is symptomatic of a much greater issue (one that, again, would be solved far better by re-implementing the MARTy system, and for that matter, would solve the problem of people just inevitably going back to farming Battle Maiden or Infernal instead). It's another step in the wrong direction, and my take is that they should re-evaluate what their actual goal is, how best to use AE, and how best to discourage farming, rather than simply doubling down on a process that hasn't curbed it in the least, but has and will continue to push people away from player-created story content.

They cut rewards in half and will be turning off character progress after hitting 50. How is that anything but discouraging its use?

Because he made the claim that no rewards was irrelevant if he was able to RP with SG. And if two stories are equally good, what's the line between them?

I am saying they should be valued equally. A good story in AE should be equally rewarding to a good story in the game's basic content. And vice-versa. It comes back to the point of disincentivization. The dev team actively discourages playing AE for story content, relative to playing the rest of the game for story content. And they don't do this out of anything against AE story content (as far as we know), they do it because they simply don't care, as much as they care about slowing down farming. It's simply acceptable collateral.

Content should be equally rewarding across the board. If I were to go through AE and find an arc that's as well-written as Operation: World Wide Red, I shouldn't have to settle for it being less rewarding simply because it was player-created content. If all people care about is RP for RP's sake, then they don't need the gameplay rewards (and if they do need the gameplay rewards, they shouldn't be disincentivized to RPing their gameplay by getting half/no progress depending on content level).

It's not the farmers than ran people out of AE. It was the Homecoming team nerfing AE rewards across the board as a punitive (and ultimately useless) measure against farmers. Trust me, you won't find many people much more anti-farm than me, but this is one spot I don't hold against that crowd. They need to revert reward values and just turn MARTy back on. Simply decide was is (un)acceptable and set that as a hard limit.

That's a real shame because it basically pigeonholes this set into a very specific theme, and doing an entirely separate set with such little thematic difference feels like time that could be better spent on something more new and unique.

It's far worse for people who want to use AE for non-farming purposes, really. But most of those people were already driven away, I guess. Survivorship bias, kinda? AE is only used for farms, so nerfing it now only means nerfing it for farms, right? That's the way it's being looked at, anyway.

There are no reasons given (though we all know what they are). (And the doubly amusing thing is, I agree with those reasons, but this change does nothing to address them, while being punitive towards the people who aren't the "problem".)