thunderforce

99% is just wrong, not even close. There are plenty of archvillains in the original arcs; Dr Vahz is just the first. (Some of the original ATs will even struggle with EBs, short of outlevelling them twice and going back). In 35-40, the original level cap, 2 of the 5 origin contacts have you fight an arch-villain. When issue 1 comes out, 3 of the 4 contacts in 45-50 have you fight one. It wouldn't be anywhere near 99% even if we ignore Task Forces and Trials which all force you to team up. The one piece of endgame content is... Hami raids. Good luck doing those solo. This isn't just semantics. You said "City has always been about the option to solo" and the original design just doesn't bear that out, short of the option being "be a scrapper". Listing the proportion (quite a bit less than 99%) of the game that you can solo if you don't mind it being somewhere from ghastly to dull on three of the original ATs doesn't in any way support the idea that "City has always been about the option to solo". The original design suggests that heroes were not expected to solo all the time, some of the ATs were not really intended to solo much if at all, and it was felt to be entirely fine for lots of the content in the game to explicitly force or effectively demand a team. To pick an extreme example, what about the Cavern of Transcendence says to you "we always have the option to solo in mind"?

I think that's a bit of a rose-tinted view, I'm afraid. In the early years of the game, what do you do when Dr Vahzilok turns up, an archvillain, at level 20? If you are lucky or have a rich alt you are fully slotted with DOs, and just under half your power picks have gone on Fitness and a travel power and its pre-requisite. For bonus points, imagine a) you're a controller b) you don't have a rich alt and c) your power picks didn't go on that because your build is bad because you are new, and there is absolutely no way to get a respec until level 24 at the very earliest. Damage him? You might as well lick your monitor in the hope he will drown. I think much of the original design is as close to enforced teaming as you can get without actually making it literally compulsory (the bits where it is compulsory aside); and in particular three out of the five original ATs are somewhere between terrible and dull solo depending on powersets and level.

Out of interest, is it the clunky writing in general, the specific tendency to insert as many cyclopean adjectives into a sentence as possible, or the thinly-disguised racism? (This is not entirely correct; some of Lovecraft's racism wasn't disguised at all.) Obviously if I use a term that originated in Holmes fandom I must be a Sherlockian. That makes sense, because words never spread outside the groups that originally used them. Perhaps we can drop the lit crit now and talk about whether the Nemesis invasions in multiple zones are a good game mechanic.

Sorry, I forget the terms (which are not from this century) are not universally recognised. "Watsonian" is an in-universe explanation; "Sherlock took this client's case because he sympathised with her plight and found it intriguing". Doylist is an out-of-universe explanation; "Sherlock took this client's case because Conan Doyle had thought of a new kind of locked-room mystery which demanded that the client be a vicar's daughter."

I rather like the original request; Kameron's struggles to get to 50 as a goldsider have provided some interest in server chat. Also, suggest a goldside mission in 40-50 where Black Swan requests your assistance in dealing with Positron's incursion into her domain, which ends with you capturing him. 🙂

I suspect this will be a bit of a Marmite idea, and it's certainly half-formed, but: the pet summon and upgrade powers could gain toggles (all the time? configurably? as a result of taking an autopower you have to squeeze in?) in addition to the manual cast power. Rather than locking you into a cast time, your time spent not moving and not using any other active power would accrue, with the pet power taking effect and charging you the endurance after enough time. (If more than one power is needed, what order do they happen in?) For example, suppose I'm a Beast Mastery MM. One of my wolves dies. If I stand still and use no powers for 1.97 seconds - either all at once, or in dribs and drabs as I tap the movement keys for my own reasons - one of my wolves pops back into being and it eats some endurance (the full amount? Then these toggles can be horrible. 1/3 of the full amount, assuming I have 3 pets? Then we made MM easier, not just involve less busywork). 1.67 seconds of inactivity later and Train Beasts goes off. I think my inclination would be to pro-rate endurance costs by the number of pets affected. This is, yes, a net buff to MM over and above taking away busywork, but I think the alternative could render this useless. I don't think this renders MM brainless, just turn on all the toggles and stand around. It's still a lot of endurance going out uncontrolled, and I don't think you should be able to control the priority of operations other than by turning toggles on and off. The skilled MM would want to think about which to use as toggles and which to control manually.

Scientific Law salvage claims to be a "proven scientific principal". Typo for "principle".

Nemesis turns up in several zones at once during the event. I appreciate there's a Watsonian explanation for this ("He would attack all of Paragon City, spreading their defenses so thin that even the combined might of the city's Heroes would be unable to stop his automaton army"), but from a Doylist point of view it's undesirable. It's harder to organise teams/leagues for it, especially for redsiders. Rikti or zombies turn up in one zone at once; everyone knows where they have to be. The odds of being annoyed by it if you're in a zone and doing something else are higher. Worst case, you're trying to hunt 50 of something that isn't grey to you in a taskforce. It produces a large number of messages in whatever chat tab you have it in, potentially causing you to miss other messages you cared about. This is exacerbated by how chatty Nemesis is for each zone he attacks. None of these is a major gripe, but they're all irritating and it's not clear the event would be damaged in any way if it happened in one zone at once like every other zone event.

I think this would be a mistake. Something that is very noticeable is that the City of Villains archetypes are all solo-friendly whereas the City of Heroes archetypes are mostly not, part of the way that at launch City of Heroes believed in enforced teaming (arch-villains turning up even when solo, go and kill stuff in Perez at level 7, etc) but this idea was rightly backed away from. This was even more true at release; tankers could easily be practically immortal solo but had to tickle everything to death, controllers could lock everything down with ease but had to tickle everything to death, defenders... yep, tickling time, especially since if you ever do team you want to get all the good powers from your primary in along with, probably, Stamina and your travel power pre-requisite. We raise an eyebrow now at a defender with one attack, but at launch, a defender whose primary has no bad powers and who takes them all gets their second attack at level 24. Blasters, of course, were in a different boat - no tickling, but no self-sustain and any time you get mezzed, comedy ensues. Even warshades and peacebringers got bonuses from teammates and special enemies they found it (very, originally) hard to beat themselves; VEATs get pseudo-Leadership that works for them. Hence, I think a support-only AT like this would be a large retrograde step; a newbie trap akin to "I'll be a healer".

For completeness, I've added a list of things only incarnates can do (well, sort of, it starts with Mender Ramiel who now also ends the CoH/CoV lists). I've not done this stuff so I even more invite corrections.

It happens all the time with ordinary SO drops. The TF/trial completion drops are guaranteed to match your origin, but the rest are random. You maybe haven't noticed because by the time SOs start dropping from normal mob defeats, they're also vendor trash.

"Different than" is common in American English, so Tina might just have said it. Matthew Habashy has a mission called "Get to the Hellion's underground caverns". This should be "Hellions'"; they are plural.

Added Fields, Costel, Thierry; I'd forgotten Habashy starts a mini-arc. Minimum level for Summer Blockbuster is, I'm told, 15.

It takes an average of exactly 15, obviously, since there is a 1/5 chance of getting the enhancement you wanted each time you spend 3 converters. (Even if we couldn't reason like that, it would be absurd to quote a number to 11 significant figures, as you have done.)

NPC dialogue: "I heard that $name stole the stuff the Tsoo stole from that archaeology display! How did $name get the jump on them". Missing question mark.

There's no scaling of SOs at low levels (you can check by viewing them in the AH on a lowbie). On Reunion we have irritating base teleporter macro spam in General, so I can assure you it's not, alas, fixed. On Discord we were told by a member of HC staff that the intention was to make it only work in close proximity to Base Portals. No. I'd quite like to see what it's like at some point; ideally with a group all of whom have hilariously outlevelled it. 😉

Whether or not you agree, it's pretty clear that Acroyear is saying that they think if players in general use this option, it will be bad. That's not something they can fix by not doing it personally. In all candour, posting one word to a line in 72-point type doesn't suggest calmness to me. (For myself, I'm rather for this proposal. If it turns out to be "too good" at low levels, it would presumably be easy enough to add a bit of a scaling factor so that SOs below 25 (and DOs below 15) are still better than TOs but less effective than they are at level 25 and up. I think the answer to the "ghost town" problem Acroyear mentions is to fix the base teleporter exploit.)

Darn it, I've tried to be disciplined about searching the thread. NPC dialogue in Cap: "Earlier in Nerva, I saw a Longbow Nullifier yelling at a guy from Wyvern, but he backed down when some some members of the Lega". Stuttered Plea For Help tip mission, end popup: "You've already been contaced by Werner". Missing 't' in "contacted".

Could someone give me an example of a false dichotomy, please?

I think it is at least possible (and was meant to be forced to be the case that?) she offers you it first, but it's still odd now since eg Azuria might have sent you there during the Posi taskforce. Looking again, she also tells you that the Circle have been "have been a plague on this for many, many years". A plague upon this what, we ask ourselves? Cerulean (First Ward) gives a souvenir which says "You entered the memories of an Apparition where you witnessed it's origin". "Its"/"it's" again.

Things to do in City of Heroes and things to do in City of Villains, sorted by level, if you think they merit inclusion.

There's a tip, "An Unearthly Shard", one of the options for which is: To be clear, the error is the hanging double quote at the end, which is present in-game.

I wouldn't, but... it takes 10 days to accumulate a full load of Patrol XP, which is about equivalent to a level's worth of ordinary XP. In other words if you (for example) devote 250 slots to farming characters, your overall Patrol XP accumulation will make you one full load every hour. I don't know how long it takes a farmer to earn a level's worth of ordinary XP, but it does seem like you'd need hundreds of characters, not 3, or 1 on each server, to have Patrol XP coming in as fast as you can use it up.

Laura Brunetti has a non-arc mission (the Wiki lists it as "Investigate the lost city of Oranbega" but ISTR we got a different title). "The Circle's origins, as far as we know, date back to it's founding by the nefarious Baron Zoria in the 1920's." "It's inner reaches are guarded by wards of protection, so you'll need to disrupt the Circle's enchantments to complete your mission." Two "its"/"it's" confusions.

Back on live around issue 16 I wrote two guides - Things to do in City of Heroes and Things to do in City of Villains - intended for experienced players wanting a quick reference to possible story arcs, badge missions, accolades, and task forces/trials that can be done in particular level ranges. They were getting a bit out of date (for example, you don't now have to worry about getting your two Stamina pre-requisites in before 20...) and I've just updated them for Homecoming. I suspect there are at least some errors and omissions (the update was just based on issue patch notes on the Wiki, the SCORE patch notes, and things I've noticed while playing) and I welcome corrections.