RikOz

I've got one better: Rescuing a whopping 21 hostages on the biggest, most complicated freaking Oranbega map I have ever encountered. I was probably in there for a good 40 minutes, trying and failing to locate the last three. I ended up having to exit the mission, travel from Talos to Atlas, purchase the Reveal power, travel back to to the mission, and Reveal the map to see if there was simply a room somewhere I had failed to discover. Indeed, there was, and I rescued two of the three remaining hostages in there. Unfortunately, I could not locate the last hostage, and this final room was filled with those portals that constantly barf out more demons so they're impossible to completely clear out, and thus the markers for the last spawn/objective on the map could never kick in. I wasted nearly another hour in there before I finally gave up and autocompleted it. Took me a minute to get "Bo Derek run" 😄 Yeah, those Green Ink Men are a pain.

Alternat thanks you for the mention, and is proud to have coined "The Awning Storm"! (which occurred to me after your mention of Ouroboros as a base of operations) And yes, it was Alternat, together with her comrades, Stabby Steffi and Mandy Manslapper, who first called out the threat of The Basketball Courts. They are currently considering a 3-pointer plan to deal with the situation.

Also, some of them are just simply outdated due to later content changes. For example, there's at least one Council street-sweep mission still present in Steel Canyon, which I assume is a leftover from the days before the 5th Column was reintroduced. Now it's next to pointless to attempt because most of the Council you can find are in a pitched battle with the 5th Column, and at level, you just can't defeat the Council faster than the 5th Column wipes them out. When they're not actively fighting, it's just one unconscious Council guy on the ground, surrounded by 4-5 5th Columnists that you also have to fight.

I'm more or less the same with most of my characters. I write short bios that more or less just explain how they got their powers and decided to become an adventurer. Then their costumes follow a progression, where their initial costume is just something simple they improvised at home, but becomes more refined and improved as they acquire resources and experience. There are exceptions, of course. Some had financial backing or large resources of their own right from the beginning, or were part of specific projects to create superpowered people.

Heh, I decided it would be fun to make sort of a Japanese girl version of Captain Underpants. Here's Captain Buruma!

I would like to see the Gold Bricker flight pack added as a backpack option. I see it's available as a temp power, so... (One of my hero alts is a reformed, rehabilitated former Gold Bricker, and I wish he could still use his old flight pack. I currently use that Sky Raiders porter backpack because it's the closest approximation.)

On the labeling of stats: "Stun" or "Disorient" - pick one. That caused me plenty of confusion early on, when I would hover over a power to see what enhancements it could take, and then could not find an enhancement that did that thing, until I finally figured out the labeling inconsistency. Likewise, "Slow" or "Snare".

I just voted, and we're in 2nd, 15 votes ahead of WoW Classic. EDIT: I'm also impressed that I did not have to create an account on that site to vote!

Don't sap me bro!

Heer Oranje: Daan Visser, while not a direct descendant of the legendary William of Orange, is related to the famous Dutch house through a chain of marriages. Erm, that is, his great-great-aunt married into the house a century ago. Daan himself is unmarried. When his biophysics research resulted in his gaining superpowers, however, he came to the attention of the house's more prominent members, and they elected to name him the house's Champion. The House of Orange provided him with the resources he needed to become a full-fledged superhero, including obtaining for him suitable training and equipment and sending him to Paragon City to gain experience and develop contacts within the superpowered community. While he does not hold an actual noble title, the house chose to grant him the honorary title "Heer Oranje" (in English, "Lord Orange").

But just for the record, the cyborg "auras" are combat-only - they don't show if you're not in a "combat stance".

Tell me about it. I soloed the entire arc on a mid-30s fire/fire blaster. Extremely painful, but I'm glad I stuck with it.

Heh. My character, "Cybernetic Queen" is based on a sexbot from a song. She started out looking a lot like a Praetorian clockwork, and as she levels up she's gradually replacing parts of her body with more human-looking parts.

Interesting article on Cracked.com on exactly this topic: https://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-we-train-teenage-girls-to-love-psychopaths/

Ooh! I have an elec/elec brute named Elektricheskiy Shok! I originally called him "Old Soviet Hero", as he's a middle-aged Russian man who grew up in the Soviet era and was a member of a government superhero team, and emigrated to the USA/Paragon City in the early 2000s. I haven't fully written his bio yet, though. Right now his bio just says, "I am capitalist now!" (Though I will admit I don't know how good the name is, as I just relied on Google to translate "electric shock" into Russian for me.)

I have a character named "Epic Gear" whose costumes are purple and incorporate those big gear-shaped shoulder pieces. He's a direct spoof of "elitist" WoW players (I've played WoW since 2008, except for when I'm playing CoH): Epic Gear began his adventuring career on another world, in another dimension, where he was a mighty warrior known to all as Pwnmastr. In his long and storied career, he defeated elemental lords, lich kings, murderous dragons, demons, and even a few ancient, evil gods. In short, he was one of the most elite, hardcore heroes of his world. Alas, a teleportation spell gone wrong, probably cast by some noob casual adventurer, sent Pwnmastr hurtling through dimensions until he landed on this ... "Primal Earth". Although this new world was vastly different from the one from whence he came, he saw that there were evils to conquer and villains to pwn, and he set forth to become a hero here as well. Despite being still early in his career as a ... "superhero", he is clearly already one of the elite. See how he is clad head to toe in epic purple gear! On the other hand, another of my "tribute" characters is named "Mendacious D" (mendacious: adj. Lying; untruthful) made to resemble Jack Black's wrestling costume from Nacho Libre. His bio reads, "This is the greatest hero in the world. This is not a tribute." 😄

I have become curious about the villain "Mangle". In the hero alignment mission, "A Talking Cylinder", we rescue the hero, Arc Flash, who says she wants to help Mangle because he's a "tormented creature" (and then the player goes on to defeat Mangle). I also recently discovered a villain alignment mission, where you go to give Mangle the beatdown and put him in his place, and Overdrive shows up to stop you, again calling Mangle "tormented" and in need of help. I think I may have gotten a similar story in the vigilante version of the Talking Cylinder mission, but I've only done that one time, so I'm not totally sure. In any case, does Mangle's story ever get resolved? Perhaps in the higher-level villain alignment missions? My highest-level villain is 29, so has not yet done any of the next two tiers of alignment stuff. I'm kind of wondering if Mangle has an arc similar to Frostfire's arc on blueside. I'm not asking for spoilers; I'm mostly just curious if this actually goes somewhere.

I've noticed this as well.

Psimonator, my Psionic Melee/Electric Armor Scrapper Psimon Psanders was a psickly child, most likely due to the fact that he and his mother lived next door to a psuperadine lab. Fortunately for Psimon, he turned out to be a mutant, and when his mutation manifested it pstrengthened both his body and his mind. Unfortunately for Psimon, his mother died after getting caught in the crossfire of a gun battle between rival gangs of psuperadine dealers. It was then that Psimon decided to take on the persona of Psimonator, and psytematically punish all drug dealers and their ilk, psundering their lines of manufacture and distribution.

Carnie Illusionists/Master Illusionists need a bit of a nerf, and I'm going to approach this as a logic issue. Those danged Phantasms, Decoy Phantasms, and Dark Whatsits hang around way too long after I've defeated the NPC Illusionist herself. In particular, I'd like to complain about the Decoy Phantasms. The logic: These are illusions, not genuine physical entities. Logically, they should require the caster to "maintain" them, and the caster should not be able to "maintain" the illusion while unconscious. Thus, all of these illusions should, logically, despawn shortly after the Illusionist is defeated/rendered unconscious. Even if the illusions are the result of the NPC directly affecting the player character's brain, those effects should quickly fade upon the NPCs defeat. Why it's a problem: These illusions are often cast by an NPC who is guarding a hostage, and the hostage cannot be "rescued" until the NPC caster and all of her illusions are "defeated". If the player is not able to defeat the illusionist before she is able to cast her illusions, the whole fight is pointlessly dragged out for a stupidly long time. This is why I'm singling out the "Decoy Phantasm" in particular. I can fight and "defeat" the Phantasm and the Dark Whatsit. The Decoy Phantasm, on the other hand, neither deals nor suffers much damage at all. Once the other illusions are "defeated", the Decoy Phantasm is more or less part of the scenery, less of a threat than, say, Caltrops. It doesn't actively attack me unless I move into immediate melee range, and even then it isn't particularly dangerous. Trying to kill it is just wasted effort. The Decoy Phantasm is basically nothing more than an arbitrary, pointless waiting game. The player doesn't "defeat" a Decoy Phantasm. The player simply waits it out. Which takes entirely too long. Waiting simply for the sake of waiting is Not Fun(tm). If the idea was to make the player wait while actual human enemy reinforcements rush to the scene, that would at least make some sense. But simply forcing the player to stand around waiting for mechanical reasons is, again, Not Fun(tm). Solution: Drastically reduce the timer for these things to despawn after the NPC illusionist is defeated.

I decided that my fire/fire/flame blaster, Flaminatrix, needed a black costume. For those situations requiring stealth.

Indeed. It's also why I love my fire/fire blaster so much - fire solves everything (mostly) 😄

I play almost entirely solo (I've completed precisely two TFs - Citadel on my SS/Rad brute, and Market Crash on my Fire/Fire blaster). With 75 alts at this point, I've naturally soloed my way through a lot of the same low-level missions/arcs with a multitude of different ATs and powersets, and it's been fun (and sometimes frustrating) discovering what is strong and what is weak against particular enemy groups. For example, I've learned to never again accept a Banished Pantheon arc on a psychic character, and that brute-force melee is pretty ineffective against CoT ghosts. I just completed a lengthy CoT arc on the aforementioned SS/Rad brute, and with all those ghosts he had to punch, and punch, and punch, and punch... GAH! When doing the Midnighter arc in Steel, I'm in the habit of setting my notoriety to -1 before entering the Lady Jane mission if I'm on a melee toon.

I usually have some RP reason (if only in my own mind) for the origin I pick. Or thematic reasons. For example, I have a "supergroup" made up of twelve of my alts; they're all Science origin because they all got their powers from a super serum created by the team leader. The lone exception in the group is Natural origin, because she's a Martian and was already a trained warrior (Broadsword/Shield) who didn't need any superpowers, and the fact that she's not human meant the serum wouldn't have worked on her anyway. She's a member because she was already a personal friend of the team leader. (Actually, there's a mutant in the group, but that was a mis-click when I rerolled her after I decided I didn't like her original powers, so for RP purposes she's still Science.)

That would be cool, because even playing on a 32" TV, I cannot distinguish the little letters on those tiny buttons over the input line.