Coyotedancer

I ❤️ the DB/WP types I had back in the day... I had a Stalker, a Tank and a Scrap and I adored all three of them. (Grey Kestrel and Palrah, the Stalker and Tank, were my red- and blue-side mains.) I'd say you can't go far wrong with any of the choices, honestly.

<- is, actually, secretly a ridiculously fluffy housecat *pretending* to be a coyote.

I tend to either solo/duo or run with a small family team of 3-4 these days. I have pretty much zero interest in "City of Dark Souls"-style challenges. That's just never really been my thing personally, and to be brutally honest, it's also not a level of play that the family SG is up to handling now, or, quite possibly, ever. I don't actively badge anymore, either, so I won't be chasing the Master of-s. Given all that? I'm basically neutral on the new options. I don't hate them, but I'm also not in any way their target audience. All that said, I'll continue to get iToys for my characters as they hit 50, just because I personally feel like that's just another part of finishing them. Like giving them an IO set build or finding the right badge title, it's become a part of 'the way things are done' for me. And, since I won't be dealing with the challenge modes often or at all, I'll still get to use them on a regular basis in the regular, old style content. I think it'll be interesting to see just how popular the hard-mode play actually is. Will everyone but the more-l33t-than-thou power-gamer types ignore it once they have the badges? Or will the increased rewards turn it into the standard mode of play with everything else being snubbed as "baby mode"? I have no idea... I guess we'll see once the challenge setting are widely applied to all of the other TFs and SFs and such.

This. I miss my title, darn it. 😞

New head-canon.... There's only one Infernal. He's neither Primal nor Praetorian, but hops back and forth from one plane to the other. Because that's exactly the sort of shenanigans a demon would get up to.

It'll be interesting to see if that particular combination of difficulty-plus-higher-payment results in a lot more "You must be *this l33t* to join" issues. Right now, you can run most tasks in the game with almost anything, so unless it's a master run or they're going for a speed record or something, team-builders typically aren't very particular about gear standards, AT or set choices. The challenge difficulties may change that dynamic as people figure out exactly what's needed to squeeze the maximum merits-per-minute out of them. Hopefully we won't ever see WOW-style gear scores and DPS metering become A Thing, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if the LFG doesn't get a lot of "X TF forming. 50+ power-builds only. No Sents/PBs"-style adverts once the challenge settings are more common.

My Tao Tiger (from back in the Live days-) laughs....

And then there's the issue of having to deal with some amount of almost inevitable pearl-clutching (If not outright wails of indignation-) from the Lore Purists among us any time you stray from "But that's what the game says!"... One silly example? I've actually gotten some fairly passionately-argued push-back because my Death Mage characters call that "Netherworld Dimension" something different. Not for making any real IC changes to what their powers supposedly are or do, mind... But for daring to call the Netherworld by another name. Forget that the Purists were dealing with a pair of characters whose entire concept bends what City canon has to say about the Circle magi all being inhuman, body-snatching asshats. Or that one of them was in the mail-order Wailer business. Or that they were having delivery troubles from S00p3rFr31ght, the Freakshow couriers they'd hired to transport said-Wailers. Nope. All that was just fine. But calling the source of their Dark powers the Void? THAT was apparently a step too far. 😝 Like I said, it was well into silly territory... But if you're conflict-averse it's something to keep in mind when you're coloring outside the lines. Purists aren't ridiculously common, but you also can't count on avoiding them completely.

Based on observation and talking to people in-game... I'd say it's at least 75%, but probably not quite to 90%. There are a lot of family-and-friends of Live-days players around, including my own nephews and their mom, who weren't actually Live-days players themselves.

Antlers... Overalls... A lot of bits that exist for one body type but not the others...

That would be a good one to add, I think. We still need one for the DE's Devoured, too.

Just taking a guess... I wonder if they meant "Can we please expand the Skin tab's color selection to include the regular costume color palate?" or something similar. I remember that "back in the day" it was said that the skin colors were intentionally mismatched from the costume colors to prevent people from having their toons running around looking like they were completely starkers.... But given the matching issues with some of those skin-type costume bits, I wonder if it might not be time to revise that particular choice. (And stuff the Seers. Kai wants her proper long kilt and Death Mage back-spikes. >_< )

I'm sort-of imagining Troo standing on his front porch, shaking a cane at a bunch of young whipper-snappers and yelling something about his lawn...

Yep.... And, of course, the old, old deal with the demons that got the Circle into the disembodied fix they're in.

It's sort of fun to kick them around, though...

There's nowhere explicitly called "Hell" in the City universe, as VT said... But there is the Abyss. That's where the Circle's demons and their various named bosses (like the Envoy of Shadows and Lilitu-) come from. The little Wailers may be Abyssal as well, though their lore is less upfront about that than the Circle's demons. There do seem to be ranks and some sort of hierarchy among the Abyssal types... Lilitu seems to be an archdemon, for instance.... But as far as I know there isn't anywhere in the canon lore that really goes into that in any detail at all. Looking at the in-game power/status levels of the various critters is as close as it gets. Spectrals<Spectral Lords<Behemoths<Behemoth Lords<Blade Princes<(Named archdemon AVs like Lil) Hoarfrosts and Succubi are also in there somewhere. If any of the City demons are from "elsewhere" rather than the Abyss, I'd guess Batz and/or his gremlins. They seem more like rogue elementals than demons... But, then, the Abyss may be a very big and vary chaotic place, filled with who knows what kind of weirdness. Who's to say there *isn't* some corner of the place that looks just like Dante's inferno?

There was an old, old bug back in the Live days that caused this for awhile... I ran into it constantly with the Ninja MM I was playing at the time. You'd tell the pets to scram, but the game wouldn't ever *REALLY* dismiss them, so they'd be back the next time you zoned. The way around it was to use the text command to dismiss (/releasepets) rather than the UI. The old devs did eventually find a way to kill that bug, but it sounds like it may be resurfacing again.

Ugh. That thing is a prime example of a badge that's more annoying than fun. Obscure pixel-hunts are never the answer.

*imagines arachnoids in little red Santa hats* I want this. Someone,,, Make it so...

Just a guess, but I suspect Steg was thinking of "celestial" more in Marvel-style power-level terms than spiritual ones... That is to say, not so much people playing angels or Classical-style divinities on the Osiris and Hera scale, but people trying to play Infinity and Eternity.

It's one of the flex emotes, but... yeah. I can see it. 🤣

I don't know. If it's that much of a personal bug-bear to someone in the dev crew, it's a little silly for them to stop halfway. Following their reading of the Lore, it's absolutely appropriate to block all of those things as "time travel", and for the sake of consistency it could be (fairly compellingly, I think-) argued that they really SHOULD. (The aircraft-summoning Team Teleports should probably be disabled, too, to be honest. It's not like there's a Longbow or Arachnos base handy in ancient Rome... but then that's true of a lot of places where we call the things. They're magic, apparently. o_O ) Would that be annoying from a practical, quality-of-life for the players point of view? Yes. Yes, it would. But so are the lack of normal base beacons and teleport options to get there, and that certainly doesn't seem to have made any difference.

I don't get the pearl-clutching over the amps. The buffs are minor. I mean, sure, they can be nice to have on a lowbie who doesn't have a lot of other options... but they aren't an instant "I Win the World!"-button or anything. 2,5m is much more than they'd ever be worth in my opinion, at any level. And honestly, access to low-level SOs is a much, much bigger deal balance-wise than these things ever have been. If you want to grump about something making the early game easier? That's a much bigger target than anything a lowbie can get from an amplifier.

On some level, I still don't believe that I actually went and made this guy,,. *facepalms* I just don't DO joke characters... And yet... Here he is. I still grumped about adding him to the character count in my first post, though. I have to have SOME standards, dammit. 🤣 Name: The Swole Mage Character Type: Super Strength/Bio Brute Server: Everlasting Level: 50 Alignment: Hero Classification: The Oranbegans claim this one. Reluctantly. Group: Sanctum of Shadows. Though Tavaris usually pretends not to know anything about that. The Details: "Do you even lift, bro?" I guess body-building gym-rats have been around a lot longer than anyone in the modern world could have guessed...

While Ev is my "home server", I do have a few characters over on Torch, too... Traffic level and culture-wise, it reminds me a lot of Liberty back in the live days if that helps your assessment any. It's the quiet suburbs of the City world, but the neighbors are a good bunch.