RikOz

Just came across this shot of White Orchid, taken back on live. I like the way it came out.

Typo in the description of the "Nature's Wrath" badge in Eden: It uses the word "plaque" when it should probably say "plague".

Goldbar's level 40 armor upgrade: Goldbar's costumes seem to do well with the cel shading - it makes them looks nice and shiny.

So this next character is one that makes me wish they'd find a way to increase the allowed length for in-game bios. My main villain, both on live and HC, was Bruised Violet (dark/dark brute): At some point on live, I got the idea to make BV the younger sister of White Orchid (seen a few posts back), and I came up with a backstory for them. They were born and raised in the Dominican Republic. As teenagers, they were abducted by a magic-wielding supervillain named "El Demonio", who kept them captive for months while he performed evil, magical experiments on them. Unbeknownst to El Demonio, however, his experiments had the side effect of instilling magical powers in the sisters, and one day, they unleashed those powers, overcoming their captor and escaping. The sisters eventually made their way to Paragon City, where they became a crimefighting duo known as White Orchid and Blue Violet. Alas, time revealed that their time suffering at the hands of El Demonio had slightly different psychological effects on the sisters. Joselin (White Orchid) became resolved to grow strong enough to ensure that nobody else would have to suffer at the hands of evil like she and her sister had. Carmen (Blue Violet), on the other hand, resolved to grow strong enough that nobody could ever hurt her again. The practical result of that difference was that, while fighting criminals, Carmen tended to go quite overboard with the violence. Where Joselin was satisfied with subduing and arresting criminals to see they faced justice, Carmen preferred to administer severe beatdowns, instilling fear in criminals and feeling it was her duty to punish them. That led to increasing disagreements between the sisters, with Joselin insisting that Carmen moderate her approach, and Carmen refusing. This caused a rift between the sisters, and by the time of the Shivan meteor attack on Galaxy City, that rift had grown. They went to Galaxy City together to fight the Shivans, but became separated in the fighting. When it was over, Carmen was approached by agents of Arachnos, and it didn't take much convincing for her to decide to relocate to the Rogue Isles. She had no intention of working for Arachnos, though. In her mind, operating in the Isles would give her the chance to fully unleash her powers. She would be surrounded by criminals everywhere she went, and nobody would bat an eye at her taking them out. In her mind, this was true heroism, but of course it eventually gave her the reputation of being a villain herself. She changed her "hero" name to "Bruised Violet", changed her color scheme from blue to purple, and she soon built a reputation as someone to fear. Meanwhile, Joselin mourned privately, believing her sister killed in the Shivan attack. Eventually, though, Carmen began to regret her violent ways, and also to miss her sister. And so her journey back to the light began. In-game, around level 47, I started her on the transition from Villain to Rogue, via alignment and morality missions. I maintained her as a rogue until level 49, at which point she returned to Paragon City. To avoid being identified as the villainous Bruised Violet, she changed back to a blue costume, including a mask for the first time since she wasn't ready to reveal her true identity yet. Along with the costume change, she again renamed herself as "Blue Celestina" (celestina is a blue flower that grows in the Dominican Republic). I started her doing Rogue -> Hero alignment missions, and she reached level 50 on the final alignment mission. She then completed the hero morality mission, "The Unusual Suspect" (seemed appropriate), and made the final transition back to Hero. After another costume change, this time without a mask, she plans to soon reunite with her sister.

White Orchid (Energy/Energy brute) has reached level 50, and has transformed into a being of pure energy!

I just have my TAB key set to "Target Nearest", and that seems to serve me well in "general" combat scenarios. The main place this is less than ideal is when I specifically want to attack a Lieutenant first, because, apparently by design, Lieutenants almost always seem to be positioned behind their attached Minions. But for many enemy groups, I have priority targets that are usually higher than Lieutenants. You know the ones - Sky Raider Engineers, Malta Sappers, Carnival Master Illusionists. On Circle of Thorns maps, I'll prioritize the various ghosts/daemons to eliminate their -ToHit debuffs as quickly as possible. So I'll click to target those priority targets. I originally made the switch to "Target Nearest" because the default setting had that bad habit of picking targets on the other side of the room, which doesn't work very well when I'm playing a melee AT.

I wonder if it started as a play on "Kings Row is the best row."

The sun never sets, it just rises in the opposite direction.

I don't know if this is possible, but ... I would love to be able to remove selected contacts from my "Active" contacts tab. In particular, there are certain contacts that get added to the list when characters reach a certain level, and for whatever reason you never outlevel them, so they stick around. I'm talking about First Ward contacts that get added at level 29. I'm simply not going to do First Ward/Night Ward on every single character, and I get a little tired of the contacts cluttering up my list. It would be nice to be able to remove them / shuffle them off the the "Inactive" tab. Aside from those "automatic" contacts, there are also some RWZ contacts I'd like to delete. And frankly, any contact in the higher-level zones, particularly PI, simply never go away unless you take the time run them out of missions, because there aren't any higher-level contacts for them to introduce. There are many of them that, once I've completed whatever arc they offer, I don't intend to do any more missions for them. For example, after completing Harvey Maylor's Carnival of Shadows arc, he continues to offer a bunch of street-sweeping missions (all of which are "defeat 50 X") that I just don't want to do, but he won't leave my contacts list until I do.

I just came across this skyscraper in Moscow, Russia, the Mercury City Tower: and it reminded me of a couple of the towers in Paragon City: At first I thought the Mercury City Tower's design might have inspired the CoH buildings, but after further research I learned that the MCT was completed in 2013.

Taking time out from villainy to appreciate some fine art.

I really need to start exploring the bottom half of the color palette one of these days. I think my comic book roots being in the old "four-color process" days has prejudiced me toward preferring bold primary and secondary colors. I'm a traditionalist, I guess, but it wouldn't hurt me to start exploring some different shades.

I liked the way this shot of Darkray turned out: And this shot of Deepfire's current costume turned out nice. (She's not really pink, it's that Atlas Park lighting.)

On redside, I recently got sent on a mission to take out all the Arachnoids in a cave. The mission entrance was one of those "jump down a hole in the ground" things. Got inside, killed every Arachnoid, but the mission wouldn't complete. I went around and around and around, trying to find that last hidden mob, with no luck at all. Even used Reveal to make sure I hadn't overlooked a side passage somewhere. Still no luck. To make things worse, I decided to just exit and reset the mission. Problem was, despite looking everywhere, I couldn't even find the mission exit. I finally resorted to just logging out while still in the cave, so that when I logged back in I'd be outside. Then I just called the contact and autocompleted it. I'm really starting to wonder, though, if there is some sort of bug involving the feature that is supposed to show you the last spawn/glowie on the map once you've cleared everything else. It only seems to work consistently on Council/5th Column maps. On other types of maps, it's really hit or miss whether it works. I once did a CoT mission that required rescuing a whopping 21 hostages. Found 20 of them, but despite retracing my steps through the entire map, multiple times over the course of the next half hour, including Revealing the entire map, I could not find that last hostage and there was no map marker to show me where it was.

WoW had similar problems with phasing, particularly if completing an arc resulted in visual changes to an area. There was one story arc in the Cataclysm expansion that, when it was over, an area previously occupied by the enemy forces was now occupied by friendly forces. But somewhere in the middle of the arc, you needed to fight a particularly tough mob in that area. If you couldn't beat him yourself, you might put out a call asking for help. Somebody would come to help, but they'd get there and not be able to actually find you, because they had already finished that arc. There were in a completely different phase from you, and would be seeing something completely different. I think it was finally fixed via grouping mechanics - you would have to form a party, and party members would be pulled into the same phase as the party "leader".

That's exactly why I don't do Tips missions in Talos. It's like, seriously, every single mission sends me to those northern islands or to the far borders of the map. Nothing in the major central section of the big island.

I finally encountered a cave "room" that's even worse. The blue cave maps (as in the Map you access by typing "M") for some reason don't differentiate vertical levels the way building maps do, so I guess the blue caves are all considered to be on the same vertical plane, regardless of what they actually do. So there's this "room" that is actually two rooms, one above the other, and the route between them is a big sweeping, curving tunnel. It's all fine and dandy running down into the lower room, but good luck if you find that you need to go back the way you came. The game map just shows your character icon running around in one big room, and it's next to impossible trying to find the route back up because the map is no help at all.

I recall, back when I was playing Diablo 2, that I noticed enemy mobs, aside from end-of-level bosses, had the same abilities that were available to the player. The challenge came via the simple fact that there were always so damned many enemies. My complaints about general enemy power design are few: #1: Overreliance on Knockback/Knockdown, particularly at low levels. Examples: Hellions and Skulls who appear to have only one attack: the AR attack with KB (Slug?) All the mobs in a spawn will run up to you, and then just stand there waiting for that power to recharge so they can knock you down again. This is mainly a "fun" issue - spending most of a fight flat on your back is not "fun". It's cheese, particularly loading up enemies with KB at low levels when a player does not yet have access to counters. #2: Stacking ToHit debuffs. Three words: Circle of Thorns. Again, cheese. Low-level characters (pre-25) can't easily counter it. You can only carry so many inspirations, and even if you load all 10 slots with yellows, those aren't going to last you through a full CoT map. To make things even worse (though this may have simply been my really bad luck with RNG, across every single one of my characters), for the first several months of Homecoming, CoT maps seemed to be grossly overpopulated with those ghosts (I'd see map after map which were almost entire populated with ghosts, with hardly a humanoid mob in sight), which meant being under near-constant ToHit debuffs. That appears to have either been fixed, or the RNG has finally balanced out for me. #3: A higher-level thing: Mobs with "you can't touch me" abilities, like MoG and similar abilities from other PSs. They simply last way too long. They turn what is supposed to be a fight into "twiddle your thumbs for three minutes until the power wears off". That's not "challenging", it's "boring". Of course, I understand that bosses with those abilities (like Marauder) were originally intended to be approached with a group, where you'd likely have at least one AT/Powerset that could mitigate/counter the ability. It would be nice if the game could differentiate between a group and a solo player, and change tactics accordingly, but I don't expect the HC devs to do that.

Doing Television's arc redside, and I'm inside the horror movie to get rid of the Freakshow who have somehow been sucked into it. Metal Smasher: "'No, let's just watch some movies tonight,' you said! Metal Swiper: "Dude, I had NO idea! Metal Smasher: "Well, at least there's some violence in here to sate our media-shortened attention spans."

That works. I usually screenshot these things so I remember to share them later, as opposed to sharing them immediately when I see them.

After I rescued this hacker from the Hellions (screenshotted because I didn't feel like trying to type out his name):

Well, here is Colores Secundarios in all her glory. She received the same insult Primarios heard from a Skull about her costume burning his eyes, and she probably deserved it more than Primarios did :P Not gonna bother posting Neutrales - her costume is identical to the other two, but in black/gray/white.

I'm not who you were asking (and my comments here are probably better suited to their own thread), but I honestly have a hard time playing redside as a villain altogether. Part of the problem is that this game commits a RPG no-no: It constantly tells me how my character feels and what his/her motivations are. I can put up with this when I play blueside, because at the very least I typically agree with the motivations/feelings, and I would like to imagine that I would do the same things my character does if I had real superpowers. (I mean, my main characters in WoW were paladins, and the first characters I've rolled in every other MMORPG I've tried have been whatever that game had that was closest to a paladin.) Redside, though, seems to consistently want to paint my villains as mustache-twirling degenerates who commit evil for sake of being evil. The game won't let me decide for myself why my villain is a villain. Back on live, however, I did have one "fascist" character. He was a joke character, though, and I rolled him on blueside. His name was "Grammar 5th Columnist" and he did nothing but sit in chat, correcting people's grammar and spelling. I got tired of the joke and deleted him after only one "session" :D

I've finally gotten around to resurrecting a particular trio of characters I had back on live, a team I called "Los Colores". They're triplet sisters from Argentina. I was originally inspired to create them after reading about a town in Argentina that has a very disproportionate number of multiple births. There is a theory that Nazi Dr. Wossname had something to do with this, as he performed experiments with twins in concentration camps, and fled to Argentina after the war. The sisters call themselves, "Colores Primarios", "Colores Secundarios", and "Colores Neutrales". They wear costumes that are identical except for the colors. I haven't had time yet to get a full set of screenshots, but I wanted to share this one of Primarios because of the completely inappropriate comment from a Skull in Kings Row.

Unless I have a specific reason for a character to be taller or shorter, I don't bother with the Height slider. However, like the two previous posters, I usually shorten my female characters' legs. It appears to me that the original devs gave the female model "comic book legs" by default. And I think the unnaturally long legs of comic book women works well with a comic book's static images, and probably even for 2D animation (cartoons). But the unnaturally longs legs don't, in my opinion, work well for 3D animated models. They look okay when the character is standing still, but as soon as they start running ... ouch. They end up looking horribly bowlegged, particularly with the default wider hips. So the first thing I do with my female models is drag both the Legs and Hips sliders all the way down, and then I rebalance the narrowed hips by boosting the Physique slider to put a bit of meat back on them.