Coyotedancer

Aaaand.... now I know the origin of Ordus Technica, the sometimes too-curious-for-their-own-good gaggle of Oranbegan technomancers (like Olympia, aka "Code Merlin") who are running around Nova Primeva, asking the Ordus Chronos time-travelers to bring back samples of any odd-ball technology or uncatalogued Mad Science they might encounter while visiting the Age of Troubles. They're a fun bunch... if regarded as a little dangerous when they want someone to test out a new invention. 😄 My own version of the general "stabby magi"-idea are the Order of Furies (a name that pre-dates First Ward, Night Ward and Dark Astoria's revamp by several years, for the record-)... Back during the war with the Mu, they were a group of lady mages and their thorn wielders who specialized in battle magic. Oreviel is the Prima Maga of their surviving members in Paragon's current era. Semnai, my favorite broadsword Brute, is one of their thorn wielders. In the Nova Primeva time period, Tessamun is a Fury. Somewhere along the line, they'll evolve into the Temple Guard.

Add me to the Fulcrum Shift chorus. Used well, that can be a scary, scary thing.

That's easy. Nemissary (my DarkityDarkDark Defender, on Paragon) Because I love him almost as much as Kestrel and he's every inch as much of a do-anything monster as she is. He was my first Oranbegan character. My first Death Mage. He has no idea what he started. 😄

There's so, so much tied up with my Oranbegans and their friends... Way too much to go into in a single forum post, honestly. It's a personal head-canon built up over too many years and too many characters to list easily. A few points, though? That's more reasonable.... Those oddly above-ground Oranbegan ruins in Primeva? ... My gang call it the Temple and it's the only significant outpost of the original Oranbegan civilization that was never pulled underground to protect it from the Mu and their airships. Why? The Tree made it so difficult to attack that there was no need to sink it. (That tree is one fierce plant. And she's grouchy. And yes, in my head-canon world, she's a she. As an Entity who was important to the Oranbegans long before the Mu came after them, she reflects the state of "her" people. Which is why she's mostly dead, fed-up with everything and not at all fond of uninvited visitors in the current era. In the post-Battalion future of Nova Primeva, things are very different-) Mot did a real number on the Circle in Paragon City... Parts of the Old City are still in shambles (More than usual-) after the Furies' incursions, and they lost a lot of Old Souls who won't be coming back no matter how many bodies the survivors snatch. That's making social and political waves, shaking up a culture that's been basically stagnant for fifteen thousand years. (That disruption plus the Battalion's invasion are the driving points of the backstory of Nova Primeva, the home of my Ordus Chronos time-travelers.) Dark Magic comes from more than one source. There's the Dark Dimension mentioned in City lore, of course, but there's also The Void, which is something else altogether. Some of my Dark types draw their power from one, some from the other... and a few, like Kai and Tavaris, manage to do both.

That does look like the Shard Reflections .

I'd miss a lot of my crew, both here and on Paragon... Palrah, Nemissary, Shonokin, Kai... But if I could only keep one, it would always be Grey Kestrel, (Either the original nightmare of a Stalker that's on Paragon, or the more recent Scrapper rebuild that I have here on Homecoming-) She's as close to a real "main" character as I've ever had. She's Dual Blade/Willpower/Mu in both incarnations, with a perma-summoned Adept partner.

I don't suck at the game.... But I also no longer have the patience or interest to do a lot with it. Tweaking a build to within an inch of its life? Sure. I can do that if I want to. But it's not something that I enjoy doing anymore, so I usually don't. The way I typically play doesn't demand it. A simple, solid build is good enough. Leading teams and TFs? Back in the Liberty days, I was one of the regular iTrial cat-herders. In Homecoming's early days, I joined and hosted all kinds of regular teams and PI smash-fests. These days? I'm solo/small-team only. I find that I no longer have the patience to deal with a herd of mostly-strangers acting like kinetic crack-monkeys who aren't going to listen to a word anyone says. So I don't. Movement? I bounce around like a flying Tasmanian devil. But, again, better solo or with a small team than in a full team or league where it feels like I'm always at positional cross-purposes with at least one other player. Or a dozen. I save my PvPing for other games, so I have no real aspirations for it here.

Stylish! 😎

Heh... Pretty much all of mine are "retired" these days. I think I've played the game exactly twice all summer. 😝

The Reflections belong to Uuralur, the Keeper of the Garden of Memories. He's another of the "Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Game" aspects of Rularuu that we never run into as player characters... The Shard zones are, bar none, my favorite pieces of real estate in the entire game. I'm even fonder of them than I am of Primeva. Back in the day, the characters that I played (my beloved "bird things", a group of which I have here on Excelsior-) were almost all members of a species of non-canon Rularuu. They were Faathim's creatures. His attempt to create guardians to protect the Shard's human natives from the servants of his brother-aspects. I used to just take one of my crew out there to randomly fly around and look at things pretty regularly. 'Gather up a horde of eyeballs and then outfly them, diving around the islands and rocks until they forget about me. Bouncing around on the geysers for the sheer fun of it. I still do that sometimes. (Yeah, I play fliers almost exclusively, so that gives me an advantage when it comes to navigating those zones, and my enjoyment of the landscape is no doubt heavily influenced by that. I've also been out there enough over the years to actually KNOW parts of those zones. I can navigate them without the map.) I sort-of enjoy the relative emptiness of those zones, and their size... I'd argue very strongly against making them smaller. The sense of vastness is a big part of their appeal. Make them co-op? YES. Absolutely. Please do! I've always wished that my red-side birds could "go home" as easily as their blue-side cousins can. Having half of the flight cut off from the Shard never made me a happy camper. Incarnate content? Sure. Why not? That would mingle well with it being co-op.... Just don't make it an Incarnate-exclusive zone. Streamline the TFs? Yeah... I'm for that, too. There's just way too much filler in some of them. (Doc Q... I'm looking right at you, buster. <_<) Adding a couple more for the as0yet-unseen aspects would also be fun, though I know it's a lot of work. All that said... This is another case where I hope The Powers That Be are cautious and thoughtful about what they change. I'm wary of them trying so hard to "fix" the Shard that they end up ruining it. But then, as I said in the Magic thread, I worry about that with the Oranbegans, too. I'll have those concerns about any part of the game world that I've heavily tied my crew of characters into.

I'll toss in a second vote for the Tuatha... My Carwyn really needs to be able to look like the big shaggy beast he's supposed to be. His human disguise is okay, but it's not as much fun without antlers.

A unicorn horn would be good... I'm not so sure I can agree with that creepy-ass mask, though. Yikes! 😝

I don't care a thing about the magic types in this game. 'Hardly notice they're there, honestly... ... *looks at her forum avatar* *looks at her character list* ... What? 😄 It's no secret who my favorites are, I guess. I've sort-of been all-in on playing an assortment of at least semi-sympathetic Oranbegans and their associates since the later years of the Live game. I concocted an entire post-Battalion "alternate future" around the temple complex in Primeva and what the Circle might evolve into once they solved their "gave up our bodies to keep the demons from having our souls"-issue. Given how tightly I've tied my gang into the CoT as they exist at this point in game canon, though, I have to admit some wariness about any major changes The Powers That Be intend to make with them. Raising part of the city under Paragon? Have at it! That could be good fun and wouldn't mess with Primeva. I wouldn't have to do a lot of tinkering with my crew to work around it. Make some huge cultural change in them, or start doing what members of the Ars Magica mailing list used to call "Nailing down every chamber pot in Mythic Europe"? (That is to say, defining every detail of the canon world so completely that there was very little room left for individual players or GMs to spin off in directions of their own without contradicting Holy and Untouchable Established Lore-) That could get annoying pretty quickly... Even though I'm rarely an active roleplayer these days, I'd really prefer not to have to rewrite the interconnected histories of basically every character I have on Everlasting. As for the rest? I have much less of a stake in them. They're all in punching-bag territory, so anything new they get may or may not even be something that I realize IS new, with the possible exception of those places where Mu history intersects with the Oranbegans.

I don't even think free pizza would be enough to get me to PvP in this game... So, no. PAPs as a reward would not suddenly make me interested in doing it.

This gave me bad, bad Aion flash-backs... I played a Templar. I wanted her to have armor that actually LOOKED like armor, rather than a fluffy mini-dress and corset. The grinding it took to find the pieces to reskin to build something even remotely like that? Un-Freakin'-believable. I eventually did it, but... yarg. It was one of many, many things I hated about the game.

It really does sound like the combination of DShift and a Super Stunner to me... I wonder if someone on the team was trying to "save" the OP from the Stunner's sapper effect by Dimension Shifting it just as it rezzed? 'Pretty sure that wouldn't work, even with perfect timing, but I could imagine someone trying. That would explain both the end drain and the "you can't touch me!".

*Somewhere in the ancient temple complex of Primeva, a grey-robed Oranbegan mage named Karcharias coughs and looks a little uneasily in the direction of the sea* "I feel that I must apologize. The ritual text was damaged and somewhat... incomplete... when Edratarees and Nehemes unearthed the chest which contained the three scrolls. I was forced to... improvise... certain segments of the summoning. It... It did not go quite as planned. The good news is that a quick journey to Nerva and the kind assistance of Seaweed Joe's Sushi Shack has saved the cabal from certain starvation. The... bad news is that our casting of the incomplete ritual has summoned a Dire Beast intent on HAVING everyone for lunch rather than... you know... making lunch. I am sorry. It was a silly mistake." When in doubt? A mage did it. 😝

I'm just going to leave these here since we're talking back details and long coat costume bits... This is what the Witch version bolero coat looks like with wings. On Live, we had a brief window (About a week right after the magic pack was released, IIRC-) when we were allowed to make costumes using both. I was lucky enough to have one of those outfits on Ty, my junior DB Tank. For the record, the fur collar clipping was a non-issue for the larger wing sets like hers. We were also able to use the wedding tux Tails Coat together with wings for *YEARS*, until that was "stealth nerfed" one day near the end of the Live period, without any warning or commentary from the devs at all.... Which caused some griping and angst on the old forums as at least one poster lost a favorite costume to the unannounced change. There was absolutely no clipping at all involved with that combination. (I spent quite a bit of time playing both this particular Dual Pistol Blaster, as well as a winged Dual Blade Scrap whose "signature costume" involved that tails coat... I'd have noticed if there was anything funky going on with the combination of their outfits, the wings and a lot of Very Silly Animations. There really wasn't anything odd there at all.) ... And yes. I would really love to have both options back again. Whatever minor clipping issues they might have in specific circumstances (With the Tiny Wings, say, or maybe Staff's on-the-floor breakdancing-), would still be less ridiculous than the everyday "twisting cape" problem or the weird transparency issues that no one says a word about. ETA: If anyone wants to see those costumes "in action", I probably have demo files or FRAPs videos somewhere, but I would need to dig them up and figure out how to make them available to view.

Tempting... but I already have two "in progress" characters that I haven't finished. A third would just drive me completely batty. 😄

Not gonna lie, here... I kind of love it.

Switching characters so often is the only thing that made it tolerable... It still wasn't exactly a fast or exciting process, but at least mixing things up and bashing goons with each of the gang in sequence was just different enough to let me keep at it. Plus, I knew that I only had to go through it *once*. Only the cat can get away with being a bobble-head. 😝

I still say the Beast set's boss pet ought to have been a bear or a gorilla using the semi-upright demon rig instead of an ugly-ass armadillo-wolf thing.

I got lucky there... I didn't have to grind Aeon until I wanted to kick puppies. I had a string of cooperative/supportive ToT leagues who knew what I was up to, and let me cycle through all of my alts to get the new Halloween badges and their attendant PAP rewards. Pooling the lot was enough to pay for Snickerdoodles' "little black cat" mode... But, yeah. I know what you mean. I've probably gotten under a dozen PAPs total since they were introduced just running around doing my usual solo or small-team game-play. Full-team types who spend their time in TF/SF-land have done better, no doubt.... but these things seem designed to be a real pain in the butt to get for anyone else.

While I managed to put together a costume for my own little black cat that worked around the oversized head issue well enough not to make the goofy proportions a complete deal-breaker, I'm honestly still wondering why our Powers That Be thought it was necessary or desirable to make something as often-requested (People have been asking for both larger and smaller character models for as long as I can remember-) and resource-expensive to attain so difficult to actually use. The 'Here! Have what you always wanted! But wait... MONKEY PAW PLOT TWIST... We're going to make it so awkward-looking that many of you won't want to/be able to use it!'- thing may not have been an intentional "gotcha" on anyone's part, but it sort-of works out that way. XP Personally, I think it needs to have two options after purchase. One with the oversized head for people who want goblins and house elves and one that keeps the actual character's proportions like the spawnable Mini and Giant character-clones that the devs occasionally drop on us.

*Somewhere in the Misty Wood, a guy named Carwyn looks up and says "Oh, HELL yeah. This!"... before going back to sadly lamenting his lack of proper antlers.* Take pity on my poor fae huntsman. He's a sad, sad thing without his antlers. (Extra credit if we could also have a deer tail. It would be adorable.)