RikOz

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.

I'm not sure this is a bug, of if it's "working as intended" and the sound is just lame. Or maybe a glitch at my end. Basically, the sound effect for "Eviscerate" in the Claws power set is just ... odd. All of the other power sound effects are appropriate - lots of *shish* and *slash* and such. Eviscerate, on the other hand ... your character dramatically leaps into the air, does an aerial somersault, comes back down and uses both claws to rip open the opponent's abdomen, and the sound that accompanies all of this is a barely-audible *pf*. Not even a *pif*. Just *pf*. It's a bit of a letdown after such a dramatic buildup.

I made spreadsheets to avoid this. I only have two (out of 94) characters with the same powerset pairing, but they started out different - one was a blaster and the other was a corruptor with a different secondary. The corruptor just wasn't working, so I rerolled her as a blaster, but alas, the only powersets that matched her concept were the same as I already had on another character.

Thanks! Now to see if I can get ReShade actually working with CoH. It doesn't seem to automatically launch with the game like it does with WoW.

Tried this out - I could get it working with WoW, but not with CoH. Nor did I find CoH on the preset list.

Even in WoW, this is true. There are few things that generate more umbrage on the message boards over there than sticking PvP into PvE content. Tons of people, myself included, have absolutely no interest in PvP (maybe if I was much younger, but at my age I have no interest in trying to keep up with twitch-gaming teenagers), or having PvP disrupt our PvE in any way.

Yeah, that occurred to me after I posted. I'll look into that. I do seem to recall that some of my characters who previously had the coupons, but less than 10 when I logged them out, still had that <10 number when I logged them back in, but I could be mistaken.

The best part of Faultline is definitely punching Castillo.

Having taken a break from the game for a couple months, I've been back and logging in a lot of my characters (mostly because I hate seeing 100+ days of not being logged in 😜 ) Many of these characters had been left logged out in a Wentworth's, and most of those already had the Day Trader day job prior to my logging them out in that location. Upon looking into their Salvage, I was dismayed to discover that none of them appear to have earned any Invention Discount coupons while I was away. Those characters who qualified should have each had a full stack of 10 coupons.

New albums and DVD releases typically drop on Tuesdays as well.

Cinematic slow motion 😄

My speedster is a kin scrapper. Stupid-long animations aside, my rationale is that she's not hitting with her fists, she's using her speed to super-compress air and hitting with what are effectively shockwaves.

Yeah, it's just the fact he's getting older and his powers are fading, but he doesn't want to hang it up / retire. I'm guessing he's in his 50s like me, and I can understand it. I'm only a cook, and even at that the hours on my feet are starting to get to me.

My main, Flaminatrix, makes pretty good use of the Spectrum pieces, I think:

The superhero shows and movies figured out soon enough that the spandex simply doesn't work well for live action. In print, that "painted on" look works because that's exactly what it is. The artists draw a naked figure with the appropriate musculature, and then just add the lines and colors for the costumes afterward. Real spandex on a real human body just doesn't work that way unless you actually do paint it on, so it just looks stupid. As for costume contests, back on live I only got to play for a year, since I only discovered the game about a year before it got shut down. And in that time I think I only participated in one, and was rather unimpressed when the winner they selected was a straight-up Captain America clone. I've participated in a few on Homecoming, though I don't make a specific effort to win them. I only really participate if I happen to be in Atlas Park when there's one going on, and I just join in on whichever character I happen to be playing at that moment (I'm pretty proud of most of my costumes anyway, so...). The only exception was when somebody announced a "Goth Girl" costume contest in Kallisti Wharf, and I just so happened to be playing my one villain who looks kinda goth, so I headed over there to enter (didn't win). As for capes ... I don't use them on most of my characters. I think that's largely influenced by my years of playing WoW, where they've never managed to fix the graphical clipping issues with cloaks on characters that carry their weapons on their backs. That, and cloaks/capes look awful on certain WoW races due to hunched postures (male orcs and trolls) or tails (mainly draenei, and tauren to a degree) causing the cloaks to hang badly. In CoH, it's mostly my male characters who wear capes, partly because I don't like the male run animation and a cloak hides it.

*sigh* With this pandemic thing keeping me out of work for more than four months now, I eventually needed a change of scenery from playing CoH ... I mean, I can only play the same game so many hours a day. So I broke out my bass guitar and started playing that more, and then I bought a new electric guitar, since I'd been without one for a while, and I've been relearning a bunch of the old songs I used to play on guitar before the bass became my "main". And, well, I re-upped my WoW account, and have been getting in on the tail end of the Battle for Azeroth expansion before the next expansion comes out. Of course, in my absence, Blizzard introduced a swell new mechanic that, as is typical of Blizzard, is probably great if you participate in a lot of group content, but utterly sucks for solo play. It's called "Corruption". Your new gear can randomly drop with a Corruption score on it. Corruption has the benefit of increasing your combat power in various ways, but this is balanced by various deleterious effects. Specifically, your own gear randomly tries to kill you. So I come back after a year away, get a couple of my alts to max level and start trying to gear them up, and before I understood exactly how Corruption works, one of these characters had accumulated a quite high Corruption score, and next thing I know I'm fighting some basic random mob and suddenly all these Corruption effects go off and I'm dead to some random crab. Brilliant!

Mad Freak Slammer: Okay, here's how it goes. I give my dastardly plot ideas and you all go, 'oooo' and 'ahhhh'. Capo Gunner: It's like I always say, 'If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, riddle them with bullets'!