Wild Claw

Already a bunch of good suggestions. 🙂 Illusion Control seems to be a front runner at the moment, but the comments on confusing and baffling enemies does make Mind Control a very interesting alternative that I hadn't considered before. I can see springing for the special 'animal form' travel powers from the P2W vendor, and needing to run all the costume slot missions to really nail the shapeshifter. I'll say that I did try /Kin and /Traps before, but they didn't click for the character. And /TA, though it has 'Trick' right in the name didn't work out at all. 😉

So I've had this character concept in my head for awhile, but I've never really figured out a satisfactory AT/Powerset set up for it. Nothing I've tried so far feels quite right. So I thought I would throw it out and see what others would do for it. The basic idea is a shapeshifting trickster, like Loki, Maui, Huehuecoyotl, a Pooka, a Tanuki, or some such. There's lots of mythological versions of this character. How would you approach a character of this type in CoX? I'm not asking for a detailed build here, more what you feel are the critical pieces that you would pull together in CoX for this. What would you consider the cornerstone features?

DCUO did that, having minigames based on flight & superspeed (I don't remember if they had any for acrobatics, their third travel power choice). Of course, the way they implemented it meant you really needed to plug a controller in rather than using a keyboard to get the necessary agility to pull them off. Basically that was the second thing that made DCUO stick out to me as something they did that made it vaguely interesting. The attempt to make consoles & PCs use the same base game mechanics. The first thing was they seemed to base the game on the 80's versions of the canon characters, which I thought curious but appreciated as the 70's & 80's was my peak DC comic-reading time.

With all the stuff you can spray around a base, and how badly the NPC 'pathing' algorithm works on straight stairs sometimes, I'm fairly sure that's gonna be *really* difficult with regards to enemy patrols, escorts and the like. Still would like it, though. Some of those really pretty bases would be fun to have adventures in.

Just a thought that occurred. You know how when you get to the last two or three enemies on some missions, they light up on the map? Suggestion: Have that number be affected by the character's perception score. So characters who have boosted their perception get to see the number of enemies on the map earlier. Alternative Suggestion: Have any enemies within a certain radius show up on the map regardless of how many are left, with the radius increasing as your perception increases. I'm assuming the same rules would apply as per stealth vs perception, so that the map couldn't be used to bypass stealth.

The Cape and the Aura missions are still there, but you have to initiate the contact yourself (City Representative in Atlas, Mr. Rodney in Cap au Diable, don't think there's a Praetorian equivalent?) they don't pop up automatically anymore. There's a bunch of contacts that used to pop up when you hit certain levels that don't anymore. Some still do, but there are a bunch that don't.

Needs to have an *intense hip thrust* animation. 😉

Did you get the Superior version, which can only be slotted once you're 50? Unlikely, I know, but it's the first thing that popped into my head.

I know this is dumb, and kinda pointless, but I would love to have the wolf howl as an alternative activation animation/sound effect for any fear-type powers. Just 'cause. 🙂 That and beast run/ninja run for sprints. For that matter, convert all the Prestige Sprints into alternative animations for Sprint. I'm sure extending the power customization to Sprint and other inherents will be a serious pain, and probably not worth the effort, but there it is.

My main is a MA/DA brute, not a combo allowed for on live, but here it is. Have to echo the commentary above, without set/proc IO's DA is really tricky to work with and needlessly frustrating. However, set/proc IO's seem to be built very specifically to plug that endurance hole, to the point it feels like overshooting the mark. You go from 'Dear lord, this sucks.' to 'steamroll' without ever hitting the 'I have to pay attention, but I can deal', that other sets seem capable of building with SOs. I have no idea how you fix that without making the IO-ed build even more so. And yeah, Cloak of Fear feels like it's not effective enough for it's cost.

Okay, trying to put together an arc of my own, and ran into a couple of odd situations that I don't know how to deal with. The basic idea behind the arc being a in-universe fan is putting a (nominally bad) novel about a 1920-40's Hardboiled Detective story into AE, and it's coming out a bit... weird. 1) The first mission is to steal files from the Rogue Island Police. The only police station maps don't allow filing cabinets, however, as filing cabinets and desks are wall collections, and the two police station maps only allow floor collections. Am I missing a better map to use for this? 2) Is there a way to have a boss 'escape' upon defeat, without failing the mission? Like the way Captain Castillo will teleport away, so he can fight again another day.

It might be an age thing. 🙂 Most of the creatives in my family had their professional careers ranging from the 60's to the 90's. The few that are currently active make a big deal from making sure their name is always displayed prominently on everything they do 'for free' because they don't trust word-of-mouth by itself to work. Mainly because they've been burned too many times by the recipient of 'for the exposure' work deliberately obscuring their sources.

Possibly. However, a good chunk of my family are professional writers and artists, and their response to that is "Doing something 'for the exposure' is a waste of your time." Being a professional creative is just like being a professional anything else. If you want to sell your work, sell it. If you want to promote your work, do it yourself. But giving it away is just giving it away. Don't expect to get anything from it, because the chances that free use is traced back to you by someone who is willing to buy things is so low it might as well be negative numbers for all the good it does you.

Technically BBC doesn't own the copyright on K9. A lot of the Doctor Who characters are still 'owned' by the writers, believe it or not. K9 is owned by Bob Baker, which is why there was an Australian production called 'K9 Adventures' back in 2009 that BBC had nothing to do with. 🙂 They couldn't explicitly connect it to Doctor Who, but they *heavily* implied this K9 was the same one that stayed on Gallifrey with Leela and got off before it got locked into the Time War.

The next deadline for copyright extension for Steamboat Willie is 2024. Which isn't really that far away, legislation-wise. Previously, Disney was 'lobbying' a good ten years before the deadline, so they're running late this time.

I don't remember one being there, but that doesn't mean much. 🙂

I remember the same thing, @Greycat. That there was some stupid fundamental glitch in the code for the kiosks that it was far easier to just turn the things off than to spend the days/weeks/months combing through the spaghetti to find the memory leak. Personally, I would like to see the original code scrapped and rebuilt with new features in addition to the old usages; things like being able to look up an in-game Paragon Wiki, or extended bios for other characters, that kind of thing.

It wouldn't surprise me to find out when that description was written there was an intent to have something similar to the Kheldian Nictus/Quantum thing and have an occasional Hamidon-themed encounter randomly show up in your missions. Never happened, of course, but I could see it being a thought they had at the time.

It's not just Mastermind pets. I've pretty consistently used one of the P2W Pets, whichever one seems RP-reasonable for the particular character, and in some missions the NPCs address the Pet for some reason. 🙂

I think as a *travel power* Teleportation is okay, but if I understand the OP what they are wanting is the 'combat use' teleport. Basically the Combat Jumping and Hover equivalent in the Teleportation pool. Quick *bampfing* around from which they can launch attacks. The current makeup of the Teleportation pool has Teleport Foe in that spot, and that really doesn't satisfy the desire.

In the Reactivate Seer Network in First Ward by Vanessa De Vore. I'm tempted to make a toon by the name of Power Drone Pet now, but that's not right. 😉

If I was approaching the costume creator 'from scratch', I'd have an aura slot for path, hands, legs, torso, head, and eyes as separate things. Heck, to be honest I'd build it with a halo flag on every part slot, just for future expansion. But without a complete costume system overhaul, I don't see that happening.

This one is interesting, conceptually. I'm not sure how exactly it should work, but it's a fascinating idea. I assume the Hybrid would do the whole 'two aspect boost goes to 5/8, three aspect boost goes to 1/2, four aspect boost goes to 7/16' that is normal for multi-aspect IOs?

Just as a note: I'm slow-leveling a character right now, and just yesterday had to go find Peebles because she didn't show up in the "find contact" list at all. Wincott did, but Peebles didn't for some reason. I don't think Temblor showed up either, but I'm not sure I'm remembering that correctly.

I don't have a clear memory of ever being 'propositioned' by the others, but I do know that you used to get sent to David Wincott and Stephanie Peebles at some point. Although my memory of Peebles was a 'go visit this person as part of an arc', not a 'get introduced to them as a contact'. I get the feeling those arcs have been truncated at some point, probably back in live during the Going Rogue overhall that re-arranged where a lot of contacts and missions got relocated with the removal of Galaxy City proper.