RikOz

I case you hadn't noticed, Lieutenant mobs are always standing behind the Minions! :D Actually, that was the best angle I could get without opening the door.

Yeah, I've noticed some odd effects when my character is stealthed, and passes in front of one of those decorative water fountains. Within the outline of my character, the water vanishes and I can clearly see what's behind the water - like the wall of the building behind it. I've noticed this specifically with redside Circle of Thorns/ex-CoT contacts that use the "Mage" model. Their portraits often appear completely headless. My best guess at those is that, due to the high collars on those Mage robes, they had to separate the head from the body model and raise it up a bit so that it's visible above the collar. But the code that displays the portrait in the window doesn't account for that separation, takes a snapshot of the body model from the shoulders up, and since the head isn't actually attached, it doesn't appear.

In the Hollows: [NPC] Blood Brother Slammer: You know what we should do? We should go back to Kings Row or Atlas Park or whatever and grab a bunch of people, drag them back here, and then just make them walk around. Why? So we can rob them, of course. Duh!

Banished Pantheon shaman appear naked when seen through the sliding glass doors in office maps: Terrifying! Their garments reappear once the door is opened.

One of my toons is a teenaged female Martial Arts/Ninjitsu scrapper, and her bio is completely based upon the various things mugging victims in Atlas Park say. (Though it's mostly lines the victims say to the player after they're rescued.) "Every week somebody was trying to steal Mandy's purse! Finally, she decided she'd had enough, and she beat the tar out of the next mugger who tried. It was the most exciting thing that ever happened to her! Perhaps not coincidentally, several years ago Mandy's mother was rescued from a mugger by a hero, and told the hero, "I hope my kid grows up to be just like you!""

Heh. Even doing things "at level", I'm convinced that some of the Skulls mobs only have one attack: The Assault Rifle ability (Slug?) that has the Knockback. I've lost count of how many fights I've had against Skulls (and sometimes Hellions) who do absolutely nothing but fire Slug and then just stand there and wait for it to recharge.

Sparrows, Void of Dreams is really damned amazing!

Somebody told me a horror story of dying in Faultline and having to run back from the Skyway hospital!

I'm slowly edging closer to the top 50! Sitting at 56 right now, after starting somewhere around 107. Admittedly, much of my "rise" has been due to people ahead of me apparently dropping out. I've just kept chugging away, 2 WUs at a time on my gaming machine (I leave the folding going all the time, even when playing), and my old iMac working away at another WU.

Not an NPC quote, but the intro popup in a redside mission: "This is a nice office. It won't be, when you're done with it. But it's nice now."

I tried this idea myself a while back (on a Dual Blades brute), and yeah, it did get tedious after a while. I think I dropped the idea before I even finished Kings Row. I mean, I'm totally into being a completionist - I've "Loremastered" World of Warcraft (aside from the current expansion, which has bored me enough to quit again) on my main over there, including doing the entire "Old World" before the Cataclysm expansion streamlined the Old World into an on-rails questing experience. That meant traveling all over the entire world to hunt down questgivers in really obscure places., because the original requirements for the Loremaster achievement weren't "Complete these storylines in each zone", they were "Complete 863 quests on this continent, and complete 742 quests on that continent". So it was quite an effort, sitting at 862 quests completed and having to go over every single zone on a continent with a fine toothed comb trying to locate that one quest I missed. There was no "contact list" - you had to physically find and talk to each questgiver on your own. But the key was that I went back after I was at max-level and banged out the older quest content I'd missed. In subsequent expansions, I just needed to complete all the storylines as presented in order to fulfill the new-style requirements, which was easy enough to do while simply leveling up. And of course, in WoW, quests don't disappear and become unavailable simply because you leveled past them - you can always go back and do them at any time. So I think the issue for me, trying to be a CoH completist, was that it was frustrating having to disable XP and end up sitting there at one level for way too long. Unlike WoW, individual missions don't reward "gear", so you just do them for the sake of doing them. (This is one of the main reasons WoW quests remain eternally available - you might want to put together a particular appearance for your character, and the only way to obtain a specific look is by earning the reward from a specific quest, so you need to be able to go back and do it if you didn't do it when it was level-appropriate.) So in CoH, it just fits my style of play better to use Ouroboros to go back and hit up the missions I missed on the way up.

For D2, back in the day I found a mod altered the loot tables. It made specific pieces of gear guaranteed drops from specific bosses, so that you could actually complete the unique sets without endless farming (I'll note that I only started using this mod after beating the game multiple times the "proper" way). But yeah, I lasted about 2 weeks in D3.

I had to take a break from CoX midsummer. With the pandemic putting me completely out of work, I found myself with nothing to do all day except play the game, and with 94 alts I sort of bored myself to death doing the same things over and over on different characters. So I re-upped my WoW sub and finished out the BfA expansion. Bought the new Shadowlands expansion, and played it long enough to get two characters to max level. Then I found myself getting infuriated with the way-too-many things to grind up right out of the gate and not feeling like I was making any actual progress. So I canceled my auto-renewal this month. and used gold to pay for one more month purely to get this years Christmas stuff. Now I'm back to CoX, feeling refreshed and ready to punch bad guys again.

"Crazy" is probably the wrong word here, as it implies that she's some sort of psycho killer who kills for the pure joy of it. I see her more as, say, a step beyond The Punisher. The overwhelming majority of her murder victims have been criminals, and in her mind she was "doing the right thing". The biggest exception would be the murder she committed in Paragon City, in one of the villain morality missions. I have a bit of a problem with that one, simply due to the fact that you *must* do that mission to complete the Villain alignment mission process, and unfortunately the mission is presented as doing evil for the sake of evil, which doesn't fit my vision of her. So that's one I'll have to "headcanon" my way around. Like, ignore the mission text's description of her reasoning and instead come up with her own motivation for the act, even if it's something simple like, "she was misled/deceived into thinking her victim was a major crimelord". In any case, an insanity defense doesn't always claim that the defendant is insane right now. Rather, the were insane at the time they committed the crimes. So this could be a case of her eventually having some run-ins with her sister, and these cause her to start rethinking her motivations.

Her sister is part of the difficulty. As family, of course she wants to be reunited with her sister. But as a hero (and she is fully a hero), she can't simply ignore her sister's crimes, or worse, try to hide her from the law (if for no other reason than doing so would make her complicit), so I don't see her supporting the Facemaker solution mentioned above. So maybe she can convince Carmen to turn herself in, and facilitate a peaceful surrender. As for any mitigating circumstances, Carmen could possibly plead insanity, based on PTSD from her youthful ordeal at the hands of El Demonio. She was quite young, maybe 13-14, when that happened. Joselin was older, like 16 or 17, and had already been acting as her little sister's protector for some time before they were abducted, so she had built up more mental/emotional fortitude and a stronger sense of responsibility. So she weathered things better than Carmen did.

I have two characters who are sisters. The older sister is a hero, and the younger sister is a villain. Origin: -- Joselin Beltre and her younger sister, Carmen, grew up as orphans on the streets of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. As teenagers, they were abducted by a magic-wielding madman who called himself "El Demonio", who kept them captive for several months and subjected them to horrific magical experiments. As a result, both of them manifested magic-based powers, and soon after they were able to use those powers to overcome El Demonio and escape. The two sisters eventually found their way to Paragon City, where they became costumed crimefighters. They loved flowers, so Joselin took the name "White Orchid" (Energy/Energy brute), while Carmen called herself "Blue Violet" (Dark/Dark brute). They worked as a heroic duo for a couple years, but Carmen gradually changed, becoming too violent when fighting criminals. It appeared to Joselin that Carmen was starting to enjoy "punishing" criminals rather than simply stopping their criminal activity and protecting civilians, and Joselin found herself having to frequently stop her younger sister from continuing to pummel already-unconscious suspects. As it turned out, the sisters' ordeal at the hands of El Demonio had ultimately had a very different effect on each of them. Joselin had decided to use her powers to ensure that what happened to her would never happen to anybody else. Carmen, on the other hand, gradually came to the decision that she would use her powers to make sure that nothing like that ever happened to her again. This difference in philosophy increasingly led to arguments between the sisters. And then the Shivan meteors hit Galaxy City. The sisters happened to be there when it happened, and they became separated in the fighting. When it was over, Joselin had gotten herself to Atlas Park. But she couldn't find Carmen anywhere. Unbeknownst to her, Carmen had found herself fighting near some Arachnos agents, and one of them saved her from certain death. She ended up escaping with Arachnos, and decided to take them up on their offer to come to the Rogue Isles. In her mind, at first, she saw the Rogue Isles as a "target-rich environment", full of criminals she could beat down with impunity, and without her big sister stopping her. Meanwhile, when Joselin had not discovered any word of her little sister for several months after the attack, she sadly resigned herself to the idea that Carmen had perished in the attack. In the Rogue Isles, Carmen grew more and more brutal, carving a path through the criminal underworld. Criminals everywhere trembled at the sound of her new name, "Bruised Violet". -- Meta-storywise, "Bruised Violet" is actually my "main" villain character. Back on live, I created her a few months before I created the hero, "White Orchid", and it was only later that I decided to make them sisters and created a backstory for them. While Bruised Violet started right off as a Villain for gameplay purposes, for RP purposes she started as a Hero, slowly slipped to Vigilante, and once she arrived in the Rogue Isles she quickly became a full-on Villain, in her actions if not in her mind. And eventually, of course, she became notorious enough that her sister heard of her, and not long after, White Orchid saw a photograph of "Bruised Violet" and realized, to her horror, she was the long-lost sister she had thought was dead. So I've recently been thinking that I might like to eventually reunite the sisters via some sort of RP "redemption arc", even if it only takes place in my head, since I don't actively RP with other players. I'm a story-lover at heart, and I don't want to just walk Bruised Violet to Null the Gull and switch her alignment and call it good. Even going Villain -> Rogue -> Hero via alignment/morality missions isn't really going to do the trick. The obvious problem here is that Bruised Violet has a pile of murders under her belt. While Paragon City/The United States may not be able to prosecute her for crimes she committed in the Rogue Isles, they are certainly aware of her criminal actions there, and that would be enough to deny her entry back into Paragon City. But in addition to her Rogue Isles crimes, at least one of her murders took place in Paragon City (in a Villain morality mission that was effectively a terrorist act), and there were plenty of witnesses who saw her do it, including the well-known NPC, Silent Blade (who is probably gunning for her). The USA can definitely prosecute her for that, and likely successfully. In other words, she's not going to come home to, "She's a Hero again, all is forgiven". No, her ass is going to The Zig. So I'm at a bit of loss right now as to how to pull this off. I obviously want to have her eventually return to heroism, working alongside her sister, which means I want to actually continue to play the character. Which isn't happening if I'm RPing her filling an ultra-secure cell in The Zig. I'd love some suggestions. Right now, all I can think of is perhaps the judge at her trial and sentencing might be persuaded to sentence Carmen to joining Vanguard and fighting Rikti. Perhaps by doing that, her superiors in Vanguard can observe her over time and at some point can recommend her return to "civilized" society.

I did the same thing with Captain Buruma! ("buruma" is Japanese for "panties" - it's the Japanese pronunciation of the English "bloomers").

I actually discovered a trick to that when playing a blaster. I figured out that it's best to not start with my Snipe, particularly when the Freak cons yellow or orange. Because what was happening was, I'd open with Snipe, and that would immediately drop their HP low enough to trigger their heal, and it would end up taking 2-3 weaker attacks to finish them off. I realized it would be better to use a single weaker attack first, which wouldn't trigger the heal, but it would lower their HP enough that a quick Snipe would finish the job. As for Shock Treatment, the characters I recently fought her with were level 24-26, so apparently not high enough that she would have Power Surge, but I still defeated her surprisingly easily. For my stalker it made sense, because of Assassin's Strike, and for the other toon, maybe Shock Treatment was just particularly vulnerable to Radiation Blast's effects. (And speaking of Radiation Blast, I was delighted to discover that it is particularly effective against those PITA CoT ghosts.)

It actually just occurred to me that it wasn't my EM brute that smacked her down - she's too high-level for this particular mission. I think it was actually my Radiation Blast/Martial Training blaster. Same result, though - ST went down easily. And yeah, I get that I can run away until Power Surge times out, but in the tight confines of a warehouse that's extremely annoying. Since you mention Unstoppable, I'm reminded of fighting Praetor White/Marauder in Tina McIntyre's arc. He was insanely frustrating at first because I didn't know what power he was activating (none of my /Invulnerability alts had Unstoppable yet, so I wasn't familiar with what it looked like). Somebody finally told me what he was doing, and I was able to look at the power description on one of my /Inv alts and learn how it worked, and how freaking long it lasts. I had been pounding on him thinking, "This has got to wear off eventually", and he'd always kill me before it got to that point. Once I understood which power he was using, I changed my tactics to "hit & run", basically just smacking him often enough to keep him from resetting, and then laying into him once Unstoppable finally expired.

There are a couple Blueside tip missions where the villain Shock Treatment puts in an appearance, and I have traditionally dreaded having to fight her. The main reason being that, if you couldn't defeat her in three hits or fewer, she would turn into a completely unhittable ball of red lightning, and the best thing to do at that point was exit, reset the mission, and try again. Basically, she was nearly impossible to defeat with some power sets/ATs. I just returned to the game after a break of a few months, and the last two times I have encountered Shock Treatment, she's gone down fairly easily, with no sign of activating that ball of lightning defense. Granted, one toon was an Energy Melee brute with the new energy store & release mechanic (which I'm loving) and the other was a Katana stalker whose Assassin's Strike hit hard enough that it only took one more hit to defeat Shock Treatment. So maybe I just happened to encounter Shock Treatment with two toons that were particularly well-suited to fighting her. Even if that's the case, she still seems to have folded like wet tissue. I'm fairly confident that my same EM brute had fought ST before on that same tip mission and it hadn't been so easy before. (On a side note, I'm not even sure why Shock Treatment is even in one of those missions - the one where Arachnos has kidnapped some homeless people. Based on some comments from the Arachnos mobs ("We don't need another interruption"), I don't think she was working with Arachnos. It sounds like she just accidentally wandered into the middle of things at some point before my arrival. She does seem awfully confused.)

Just when I think I've heard everything in The Hollows, something new surprises me: Outcast Initiate Chopper: No. We run second. Break in first. Are you kidding me with this? This is why we get caught, people!

While collecting badges and reading placards in Terra Volta, I was intrigued by this neatly-laid-out selection of junk. A cinder block and three mismatched hubcaps.

Last night I popped into whichever PvP zone that is off of Steel Canyon, and spotted this one: Warrior Bruiser: This is not 'good-bye', it's just 'I won't ever see you again'."

I've never understood the behavior of going through a portal and then just AFKing on the other side. Happens constantly in WoW, where people go through a portal and then summon their largest mount, and then just sit there. Of course, in WoW you can just run right through them, but still.