RikOz

Unfortunately happened to me while stealthed in a cave. Recharged too close to a big crowd of Tsoo, ended up frantically trying to hop away...

Last night I heard some villain chatter that I had totally never heard before. I was collecting exploration badges and history plaques in Atlas Park, and there were a couple Hellions sitting on the wall right next to one of these plaques. I assumed they would ignore me since my character was around level 15 or so, but no. As I approached, one of these Hellions told my character: "That dress makes you look heavy!" It was particularly amusing because this character's backstory specifically mentions that she is a former Miss California, a fact of which she apprised this thug before fireballing him. But yeah, my character got fat-shamed by a Hellion.

Yah, I had noticed that I can be standing right on the sub, hitting it with melee attacks, and some attacks will keep saying "Out of range".

I was rather surprised while doing a Safeguard not long ago. I was fighting the Lost vandals who were busy slaughtering parking meters and trash cans, when a panicked civilian ran right past ... and one of the Lost pulled out his shotgun and blew him away. Like, whoa, did that just happen? I mean, the civilians are usually completely ignored.

Perhaps simply add an "out of character" comment to the bottom of the Twinshot popup, indicating that her missions will teach game mechanics. This would be similar to the way some missions have differently-colored text after the actual mission text saying things like "This mission is more difficult than normal - you might want to bring some friends."

Thanks - I double-checked at that link and read Positron's dialogue, and I definitely did not talk to him during the arc. I'm curious what will happen when I get a Technology character leveled high enough to do the arc.

I ran my main through Percy Winkley's "Origin of Power" story arc. The arc purports to be explaining all of the modern origins, but I realized after it was finished that it never covered Technology. Percy sent me to speak with War Witch (Magic), Synapse (Science) Penelope Yin (Mutation) and Manticore (Natural), and then handed me the "finale" mission to stop the Circle of Thorns from doing something-something. I brought this up in the Help channel, and the person I talked to was redside and said that the redside version of the arc does include a Tech contact. So now I'm wondering if my run-through on blueside was glitched (which would be odd, because the arc progressed to the finale with no apparent hiccups), or if the omission of Technology was simply an oversight on the part of the original devs.

Huh, must be a recent change. I originally made the character back on live and it wouldn't let me. I'll assume the filters would still stop me from using "Nazi" - back on live I made a character that I ended up calling "Grammar 5th Columnist". He was a joke character who did nothing but sit in chat, correcting people's grammar. It amused me for ten minutes 😛

As I understand it, that was actually one of the main selling points of original WoW - "More quests! Less grinding!"

WoW stops showing the yellow "!" over questgiver's heads once you are too high-level to get any XP from them (though a few years ago they added an option to "Show low-level quests" to make things easier for completionists*), but you could still talk to the questgivers and get the quests anyway. If you're RPing (it is an RPG after all, even if you're not actively and formally roleplaying), that makes sense because, while your character may be too "high level" for the quests, those threats are still threats to the locals. Contacts in this game telling you, "Oh, my missions aren't worth your time" basically encourages the exact problem Aaron Thiery was describing in his story arc - heroes becoming complacent. * A few years back WoW also added a special weapon for completionists: The Foam Sword. It does exactly one thing: "Mortallly wound trivial monsters". If you use it on a mob that is far below your own level, it reduces the mob to 1 hit point. The reason (which I discovered for myself many years ago when I was trying to earn the "Loremaster" achievement for completing every quest, and was trying to complete low-level quests at level 80), is that there are a good number of quests that require you to wound/weaken enemies and then use a magic item on them. Unfortunately, at a certain level discrepancy, you're going to kill every mob with one hit, even if you strip your character of all gear and just punch them. One-shotting the mobs made these quests impossible to complete. The Foam Sword solved that problem.

That's actually one of her more modest outfits. That's my character "Triple-N", a name I chose because the filters wouldn't let me call her "Nearly Naked Ninja" 😄 That actually occurred to me - I hypothesized that they were some sort of triggers for events, and weren't actually supposed to be visible. But the lighting artifact explanation makes sense. Thanks!

Ouro, heh. One problem I found with that is the limiting to level-appropriate powers while I'm leveled down. Due to rearranging things as I've learned more powers, some of those powers gained at lower levels are now scattered across three power bars, or even removed completely if I found them to be no longer useful (like my fire/fire blaster's Ring of Fire immob, which never ever worked when I needed it to). It results in awkward gameplay when the available powers aren't grouped neatly under my fingers, and I have to click some of them because they're on different bars now. I mean, doable, but annoying.

Not to mention that I've recreated several of my characters from live, and the new versions of some of them are higher level than I ever got them on live. We'd need the ability to pick and choose which specific characters to resurrect so that a lower-level old character doesn't overwrite their higher-level new version, and I'm guessing that would be a whole lot of work for somebody.

Er, yes, I mentioned that in the OP. These aren't abandoned warehouses - webs that stretch across corridors don't survive constant traffic.

I am, by choice, mostly a solo player, so availability of teams doesn't factor into my faction choices. I just ... genuinely prefer to play a hero. I'll agree that the writing and storytelling on redside is really good. Alas, it doesn't offset what I see as downsides. As others have pointed out, playing a "villain" doesn't really feel "villainous". Aside from a handful of missions attacking Longbow, you spend most of your time beating up other criminals. That doesn't feel like being the most villainous, that just feels like being a bully. Most well-written villains in comics (and other media) aren't just evil for the sake of being evil, they have a genuine, worthwhile (if only in their own mind) end goal. As it is, our villains have no goal beyond becoming the most villainous villain. We don't even have the option of a goal as simple as "getting rich", because even the missions that are framed as robbing a bank or stealing a bunch of stuff don't actually result in a "haul". We just get the same Inf and salvage drops we'd get from any other mission. To "get rich" we have to play the AH market the same way the heroes do. The environment also annoys me. After a while, "dark and gritty" just gets tiresome. I had a related problem with playing Horde in WoW, because while the writing was great, the environment was "all orcs, all the time" regardless of what race you actually played. This was really driven home for me during the Warlords of Draenor expansion, where we went back to the orc homeworld and saw that orcs are perfectly capable of impressive architecture, but our Horde orc aesthetic seemed to call for nothing but round, red-roofed hut after round, red-roofed hut. The actually impressive orc architecture on Azeroth, meanwhile, was all actually designed by a freaking goblin.

I was really curious about these way back during live, and I'm still curious now. I see these in the warehouse maps, looking like strands of spider silk. At first I thought they were just unintentionally-visible seams in the textures, but then I realized that something like that would be more of a straight line. Then there's the fact that these things are floating a couple feet above the floor.

For most of my female characters, I shorten the legs to the minimum, hips to minimum, and waist to or near maximum, then increase the Physique slider to bring their butts back up to where I like them. I mostly do this because it does a satisfactory job of mostly eliminating the monstrous bowlegged thigh-gapped run animation that comes with the standard settings, but I also like the aesthetic results.

I don't recall ever seeing these at all.

I stopped even bothering with my immob on my fire/fire blaster because it never, ever worked when I really needed it to. And now in her 40s enemies go down too quickly to worry about Ring of Fire. EDIT: LOL, my lvl 19 Ninja Blade stalker just had to chase a same-level Outcast all over Steel Canyon. C'mere and let me stab you, you crook!

I've boggled a few times at orange-conning lieutenants running away from me. One time I had Morana, a red-conning elite boss in the KR Skulls storyline, try to run away from me.

Yup, like I said, this was alt #47, so it's fun to take different approaches on different characters. Amongst my alts I have two themed "super groups" of ten members each. But since I can obviously only play one character at a time, I have to spread out my time on each character to keep the characters within a particular "SG" at or about the same level. So in those cases, the "RP" outweighs the leveling.

My question was about why it felt so much easier at level 5 than the same missions at level 8-9, when my initial thought was, "If these are so tough at 8-9, they must be a real bear at 5". I know we're meant to be gaining XP - that wasn't the point. As far as NPCs helping, the screwed up pathing of the NPCs in the Shining Stars base makes their help extremely unreliable. Half the time they start to follow you, and then turn around and run back the other direction. When you go to rescue Dillo, Twinshot doesn't want to budge past the room's entrance, so she's no help unless you can kite the mobs over to her. The last few times I've done the mission that introduces Grym, Flambeaux hasn't shown up for the final fight at all - she's still back there running between the elevators or something. And the Save Manticore mission is entirely solo.

I'm one who likes to level by doing missions. My usual progression through Atlas Park goes like so: Matthew Habashy's initial quests -> Officer Fields or Sondra Costel -> Aaron Thiery and by the time I've arrested Thiery and defeated Arbiter Mesten, I'm level 8. At that point, I typically go talk to Twinshot and do the Shining Stars missions, then I'm off to Kings Row. Every time I've done the Shining Stars stuff I find that I'm confronted with Orange-conning "Arachnos" lieutenants, and they are quite a challenge, regardless of AT and powersets (though, naturally, I've gotten better at dealing with them as I've done it more). The main challenge has been those lieutenants' Web Grenade - it kinda sucks having all your recharge speeds slowed down when you only have maybe three attack powers to work with. That got me thinking, "Atlas Park is a level 1-5 zone. Are these missions even doable at level 5, when Twinshot first becomes available?" So I set up an experiment. 1) Rolled alt #47, a Radiation Melee/Regeneration stalker. 2) Train only first two powers in each powerset. So took Contaminated Strike and Hide at creation, Radioactive Smash at level 2, and Fast Healing at level 4. Also allowed myself to use Brawl and my origin power, Mutagen. 3) No XP buff (unnecessary), no Prestige Enhancements. Took Ninja Run to make it easier to get around. 4) Complete all of the storylines and all of the missions from the origin contacts in City Hall, and the followup missions from other AP contacts I'm introduced to, as long as those missions take place in Atlas Park (so ignoring any missions that send me off to Kings Row). 5) No starting Inf from other characters, but converted first three Merits earned into Converters, sold for starting Inf. 6) Used Inf to purchase and equip full load of level 5 TOs (2 +ACC in each attack power, 2 +DEF in Hide, 2 +Healing in Fast Healing), then used TOs from drops to eventually upgrade all TOs to 5++. 7) Turned off XP at level 5. Capping at zone level, preventing outleveling any contacts so that I could take and complete every single mission available. 8 ) And, finally, talking to Twinshot after everything else was completed, and attempting the Shining Stars missions up through "Save Manticore", at level 5. It was ... much easier than I expected. In fact, it was probably the easiest run through the Shining Stars missions I've had. And I'm not sure why. A couple factors I've considered: Being a stalker gave me a bit of an advantage, via the big crits when attacking from stealth? Previously waiting until level 8+ to start the quests meant that the "Beginner's Luck" buff was lower than it was at level 5? Thoughts?

It was just really odd seeing them all of a sudden. It was just those two, no others that I could find. I level all of my alts via missions, so I've covered most of the ground in Atlas Park many many times on many alts, and this was the first time I'd seen them.

Well, I did think about asking if Mirror Spirit is supposed to be gender-fluid.