Coyotedancer

<_< >_> I want a pitchfork.

I love the huge office tower door that's secretly a cave... "Unfinished basement," I tell myself. 😆

Ooooh, yeah. Bad memories there. SO MANY bad memories. (I play fliers. I also ran duo a lot with Mr. Coyote back-in-the-day. Who has Super Speeders, almost exclusively. You don't want to know how many times he'd just jet off while we were crossing a zone, leaving my lowbie in the dust. To get mangled by whatever happened to be close when he hit the leash range. Or killed by the snipers on the nearby roof-tops. Not fun times, that. I do not miss it. <_<)

Something like that, yeah. 😝 "You guuuuuys! You're playing the game all wrong! You're supposed to be doing it THIS WAY, not like *that*. Don't you know anything?"

Try it solo instead of bringing your buddies and steamrolling it.

I suspect they really, really wanted us all to give up our farms and run their Hard Mode content as often as possible. In spite of a lot of us being people who either don't have that kind of time or don't have any desire to team.

You would have gone faster with one farmer and one lowbie. Having three or more people on the map slows you down, since the increase in clearing speed and "team bonus" won't really be enough to offset the reward splitting.

It gets pretty wild once you have all five of your guys, five extractions and a handful of specters out there in a fight. If you use your attacks often, it isn't unusual to have three of them out there drifting around.

Yeah.... After taking my Fire and both Darks out for some fun on scanner missions this morning, I think the click has won me over. I do miss my Defensive opportunity a little on Shonokin (Dark/WP) but the extra damage more or less evens things out. He's still slower than proverbial Christmas, mind... He's just never going to be fast at clearing a map... But beta!Shonokin is definitely less glacial than his current Live counterpart.

Make it an option. I, for what are probably obvious reasons, love the current Circle spectral models.

'Did some running around with Ananka this morning (Necro/Thermal/Heat) and everything seems to be working as it should. I love the spectrals being "walk-through" now, and having a couple of them out there with all of the extractions and the guys was pretty high on the Horde-of-the-Undead spectacle meter. It may not be as large a group as a good Gang War, but it's right up there. Love that. Comparing the dead man's party on beta to running the very same mission with the boys on Live, the Brainstorm version was a total stomp-fest. It took about two thirds of the time to clear all of the goons out of the same +1 x8 Council mission that I had held on both versions. Going back in at +4? The zombies were still prone to getting shredded in both cases, but the beta grave knights and lich fared a little better.

*hands out the torches and farm tools*

That... looks more like an emu than an ostrich. o_0

All the Things! *rabble* *rabble* *rabble*

Battle Without Honor or Humanity has been on my playlist for years... Back in the Liberty days I had a Claws/Energy Brute named Ashura. It was her theme music. 😆 I haven't rebuilt her here, but still.... Hotei forever, yo.

Or even just leave the old Defensive option... I actually do use that sometimes when I'm running solo, and suspect I'll miss it once I get the chance to really do some poking around on beta with my little collection of Sents.

Having those primary and secondary powers sooner comes with some pressure to slot them if you want to be able to use them, and the earlier that happens the less you have available in the way of slots to spare. Picking things up in the 30's and the 40's is easier. You have enough slots elsewhere by that point to start filling things out relatively easily... In the 20s? No so much. We're all going to end up feeling like we're slotting tri-form Peacebringers. 😝

I suspect I'm going to end up missing the extra enhancement slots more than I like having access to more powers, honestly. Having an extra power or two while lacking the slots to make them (or something else-) useful is just a recipe for Sad Coyote. 😫

One of the complaints about this is that it will make the experience of having exemplared 50s joining a lower level team "even worse". That (and as a general reaction to any "Just make the goons harder!"-type suggestion) is why I brought builds into it. An exemped 50 with attuned sets like I use on my support characters, who were explicitly designed in some cases with the idea of running with mid-level teams in mind, aren't really a fair balance point. A native-level character in the 30s who's running a well-engineered set-build isn't either, really, if most of their at-level team-mates are rocking a bunch of SOs and maybe a couple of specials or procs. For those less well-built types, having a stronger power pick at a lower level might be a Good Thing, where it could seem like over-kill on the better equipped one. The point is just that when it comes to what's an acceptable set of buffs for the goon squad, we have to consider that it's a pretty complicated landscape out there in-game. The playing field isn't level on the player side, and really CAN'T be with all the variations possible between individual characters. Designing for the high end leaves the low end struggling. That's not a fun thing.

If you buff all the goons to counter high-end builds you make them absolutely awful for anyone who ISN'T running one of those min/maxed nightmare characters. You just can't "design for the high end" while forgetting that the mid-ranks and low-end "running on SOs or Commons only"-players have to exist in the same space, and will face the same opposition.

Taking my DP/Energy Sent out for a short spin on a radio mission... I don't hate the click. It's actually nice to know exactly what I'm tossing that Vulnerability effect on. Also "moar damage" may sound like a really boring way to change things for our Sents compared to other suggestions that have been made, but on Aken it was both noticeable and welcomed. I'll have more time to tinker and poke at things in detail this weekend with my other Sentinels. but as a quick-and-casual first impression? I like this. It seems like a solid improvement.

Tinkering around with my zen-mode farmer, Ossuni (Active-only type Claws/Fire Brute)... I have to agree with the general consensus here. The recharge on Burn is longer than it needs to be. I don't have it on auto with Suni. I trigger it manually when things cluster in close, and I tend not to use it in a constant rotation. I still found the timing slower than seemed reasonable. Being a zen-farmer, I'm not in any particular hurry to clear maps, so I didn't take careful note of my time on the first bit of Fire City, but clearing individual groups was definitely somewhat slower than on Live currently. I should have more time to do some detailed test runs this weekend, and I'll time those just to see exactly what difference the Burn changes make.

Kai and Ajda - The LIbrary “It’s been pretty busy in here this morning,“ the dark-haired girl answered. “‘Bunch of people in and out. I don’t remember seeing anyone who was green, though. Kai?” The other girl closed her book and added it to the stack, shaking her head. “I’m afraid not. There was a blue android looking for the Cambridge translation of Metamorphoses over in the 3000s… and a little red Abyssal Servant picking up something at the reserve desk for its summoner… Oh, and those twins with the green *wings*… But I haven’t seen anyone with green skin.” “Gods, those wings… They really need to watch where they’re putting those things in tight quarters. ’Nearly knocked a couple of people over just turning around. It’s worse than people with backpacks on the train. But… yeah. Not green skinned.” The girl grinned. “I’m Ajda, by the way. Ajda Dare. Applied Metaphysics. Most of my classes are at Salamanca, but Central has a better library. This is Kai.” The brown-haired one nodded. “Kylie Stolver. I’m in the History and Secondary Education programs.”

If you join one of the big Motel of Murder leagues, sure... It's a little different if you're solo/duo or with a small team.

[ It's been quite a while since I tried forum roleplay... but... Why not? I do have two members of my crew who are Paragon University students, after all. Although one of them is only visiting the main campus. Ajda's from "spooky U" over at the Salamanca campus. 😝 ] Kai and Ajda - The LIbrary One brown-haired girl with wire-frame glasses and a stack of books half the height of a wailer queen piled around her looked up briefly, and then returned to flipping the pages of a dusty history written in Latin, quietly grumbling something about Caesar Divi Nervae Filius Nerva Traianus Optimus Augustus and exactly what he could do with his conquest of Dacia. The taller, darker-haired student next to her snorted, holding back a laugh. “That sounds more like something the Greeks would have tried,” she whispered. “Poor Democritus… So, still nothing about Pendalexius or his ship?” “Not a word. I think conventional history miiiiight not be our best source if information this time. We are going to have to go more exotic.” The brown-haired girl’s accent was odd; a soft blend of French and English and Caribbean that could only have come from the Etoilean islands. The other was pure Paragon. “The Midnighters?” “I think so.” “Damn. That means we have to reshelve all of THIS crap... Binks'll murderize us if we just leave Rome all over the table.”