RikOz

Deepfire, Radiation Melee/Regeneration stalker:

Last night, some time after the Everlasting server was taken down and put back up, I encountered these charming fellows in Atlas Park. Previously, I'd never seen these mobs anywhere but in the Rogue Isles. Odd glitch, or on purpose?

I suspect the technology was developed by Loki and Hela.

Spotted this confusing bit as I flew past the AE building in Faultline: "She was in his street clothes..."

(Nothing really fancy about this, more of a fun concept.) I rolled up a character named "Cybernetic Queen", named for a song about a sexbot by German power metal band Iron Savior. I decided to start her out looking robotic/Clockworky, and have her gradually upgrade her body with more human-looking parts. And then she gives them All their fantasies Their lust and dreams She brings them down Down to their knees Cybernetic queen of passion Is guaranteeing satisfaction And while she burns in fire Melting down in sweet desire Her heart stays cold (Based on the lyrics, she's a Fire/Ice scrapper)

Oh yeah, I already had Flight and Combat Jumping. Ended up grabbing Hover as well, since it was pretty much either that or Quickness.

Ironically, later on the same day that said I avoided group content, I ended up joining in on a Citadel TF (though it was on my SS/Rad brute). That was much more enjoyable than I expected. None of the poison I was conditioned by WoW to avoid! The "defeat everything" nature of most of the missions meant there was nobody trying to skip over stuff. I did go ahead and respec my Dual Blades/SR character last night to get rid of Quickness, but that led to my ending up needing to take a pool power that I didn't really want because at a certain point, Quickness was literally the only option available between my primary/secondary powers.

Heh. Years ago in WoW I made a female blood elf warlock named "Hexpot". Then I had fun insisting that it was pronounced "Hesh-po". EDIT: Oh, and one of my main characters in that game was a female gnome rogue, who wielded a pair of razor-sharp daggers. I named her "Jillette", and was quite astonished that the name wasn't already taken.

Nah, not rude - I pointed out the age thing my own self. I don't mind the blue caves at all - I too have always wondered what the big complaint was (though I kinda understand the frustration with the "cake room"). My own complaint is strictly about it being difficult for me to navigate places like that at a full sprint. It becomes doubly difficult when the sprint is combined with stealth - on top of moving too fast for comfort, I can hardly see what I'm doing. In a more "open" map it's not a problem, but the textures in blue caves combine with the stealth to greatly confuse me. I don't recall having these issues back when the game was live, but I only got into the game a year before it shut down, so it's possible that I simply never leveled a Super Reflexes or Ninjitsu character high enough to select those powers back then. I may take to just toggling the stealth/speed power on only when required, specifically when I'm ready to enter combat. The mob spawns aren't usually so close together that I can't stop and turn on the stealth before I enter aggro range. Alas, can't do that with the Quickness power, as it's an Auto power, not a Toggle. I'll admit that I'm generally not big on speed. My playstyle is pretty deliberate and methodical, and I honestly enjoy fighting my way through an entire map and clearing everything. I saw somebody mentioning that they like using Super Speed's stealth benefit to race past everything to the end of the map, where they defeat the "boss" to complete the quest. More power to them, I say. But from my perspective, that defeats the point of this kind of game. I saw the same kind of thing in WoW all the time, where it was "Go! Go! Go!" and people's only concern was the reward at the end rather than enjoying the adventure. In that game, people were constantly complaining about getting "dazed" every time they rode their mount through a crowd of mobs, when the solution was to go around the mobs. But no, that would take them four seconds longer and apparently expecting them to go around was an outrage. Plus, I always thought it was pretty funny that people would go out of their way to avoid fighting in a game where the primary activity is fighting. But when it comes down to it, the "hurry up" mentality is why I generally play solo, and avoid group/team content. Being in a hurry frustrates me, and my methodical deliberation is going to frustrate the other people, so I stick to myself. When I was a comic collector I always preferred the "solo" titles over the team books, too.

Perhaps its just my advanced age and the inevitable declining reflexes, but ... I'm finding that I really despise powers that force me to sprint everywhere if I want the power's other benefits. Right now it's "Quickness" from the Super Reflexes PS: "Your Quick reflexes allow you to move faster than normal, as well as resist slow effects. This power is always on and permanently increases your attack rate and movement speed." Another one is the stealth power from the Ninjitsu PS - if you want the stealth and the benefits of attacking from stealth, you have to also sprint everywhere. At least I can toggle that one off when I don't actually need the stealth. Dammit, I do not want to sprint everywhere! It's complete hell when I'm in a blue cave or a Council/5th Column base map and I'm running too fast to make corners, or I run right past side passages because I'm moving too quickly to notice them. Or I can't stop fast enough and zip past one group of mobs just far enough to aggro the next group as well. I had the Quickness power slotted with a level 30 Flight IO, and a lvl 30 Run SO. I unslotted both of them, and I cannot see any appreciable reduction in my speed. I've never yet done a respec - would doing one allow me to "unselect" the Quickness power altogether, or do respecs only let me reslot everything?

I was doing Mercedes Sheldon's storyline to retrieve those artifacts, and while doing the Warriors mission inside that entirely-too-large cave map, I found myself asking, "How did they get these cars in here?" I mean, before even considering that the cave entrance isn't nearly big enough, there are the facts that the cave was on an island, half a mile from the nearest significant land, and there's no bridge. I was flying around Talos Island when I spotted a lone car driving very, very slowly. First thought: "That guy is cruising for hookers." Why are all of the hospitals completely windowless? (Headcanon: Paragon City hospitals are purposely heavily fortified.) What combat advantage, precisely, do Sky Raider Porters and Tsoo Sorcerers derive from teleporting away the instant you engage them and then teleporting back after you've kicked their buddies asses?

Seahawk: Water Blast/Willpower sentinel. Former pro football player who had to retire due to his physical mutations being incompatible with the uniform. I also have a SS/Rad brute with Super Leap for his travel power. His origin is that, despite warnings from everybody he knew, he was always pounding down energy drinks. But they gave him superpowers! Who's laughing now?

Yeah, and there is a complete lack of "impact" sound effects for melee characters when attacking an object. It ends up looking like the character is just waving their fists at the thing.

Another potential confusion is the fact that the Midnighter Representative's name and reticle are gray, which is usually indicative of a "decorative" NPC you don't need to interact with.

Heh, here's what one of my characters looks like before she drinks her super serum:

I'd like to see a guide that organizes when I should talk to certain contacts so that I'm not missing half of the storylines due to outleveling them.

Of course, in a mainstream comic book universe, all of the characters aren't confined to one city like we are. There could be multiple characters using the same name, but they all operate out of different cities, distant from one another, and in the case of C-list characters on down, may be completely unknown outside of their own stomping grounds. Kind of like band names. There may be a bar band named "Rock Monster" in every city, but nobody cares except for avoiding duplicate names within the same city. But if Rock Monster from Spokane, WA lands a record deal and becomes nationally recognized, all those other Rock Monsters are going to need new names.

I've been noticing this kind of thing a lot ever since I came back to the game. I'm sure I remember needing to completely clear maps, but now it seems I only need to defeat the "leader" and the handful of mobs in his immediate vicinity. I usually still finish clearing them out, though, for XP and drops. As for the OP's side note - yeah, the helper characters in some missions seem to have become undesirably aggressive lately. I no longer make any attempt to keep No Mind alive in that one Shining Stars mission, since he consistently charges right into the middle of the first room that's full of Praetorian clockwork and gets his ass kicked. And on the last three alignment missions I've had where Overdrive is present, she has aggro'd on groups in different rooms or on different levels from where I'm fighting, and got clobbered. This seems like new behavior - in the past she's always stuck close to me. Which reminds me of something that has always bugged me: why do these characters insist upon flying inside buildings? IMO, they should only fly if I fly. Otherwise, stay grounded. In another Shining Stars mission, Grym (who is supposed to be the best-trained fighter in the group) keeps dying on the first fight because he insists on standing in the fire, but I think that has always been the case.

At the very end of the Midnighter Club storyline, which starts with rescuing Percy Winkley and ends with curing The Lost, there's the final bit where you gain entry to the Midnighter Club. When you finally enter the club, the yellow pointer is sitting on Mercedes Sheldon, erroneously marking her as the person to talk to. The pointer should be on the Midnighter Representative behind the desk, since he's the person you need to talk to before you can complete the mission. As it is, there's nothing to indicate you should talk to him if you don't already know.

My primary methods of coming up with unique names: Coin a new word. My main is a leather-and-chains clad, female, fire/fire blaster named "Flaminatrix". Multiple word names, because odds are good that somebody else isn't going to pick the same two-word combo. Make my characters originate in countries where English isn't the primary language, and name them in their native language. One of my self-contained super group concepts, the Solar Angels, is a team based upon the bodies of our solar system. They all have either multiple-word names or, since they're an international team, names in their native languages: Mother Sun (team leader, scientist who bestowed powers on the team), Girl Mercury, Venus Lass, Erdmadchen (German), Ms. Mars (an actual Martian), Fille de Jupiter (French), Saturn Signal, Princesa Urana (Spanish), Neptune's Child, and Notta Planet. I have a Dutch character named "Heer Oranje" (Lord Orange), a Latin-named character, "Delcambre". I've only had two "that name is unavailable" situations, and I found satisfactory workarounds. One was a SS/Rad brute I originally named "Rad Bull", whose origin story was that he drank so many energy drinks that he developed superpowers. When I moved him from Reunion to Everlasting, somebody there already had "Rad Bull", so I changed his name to "Red Beef", eventually decided that was silly, and settled on "Roentgen Bull" ("roentgen" being a unit of radiation measurement). Another was "Iron Savior", which is the name of a German metal band that sings about a sentient AI spaceship called the "Iron Savior". Alas, the name was taken, so I chose an alternate name for the same thing, based on a line from one of the band's songs, and he became "Savior Machine".

Are you talking about streetsweeping missions (i.e. getting people to choose the patrol mission when offered a choice between patrol mission or door mission)? Or do you mean just "grinding" at random bad guys for the sake of it? If the first, then the best incentive would be to overhaul a number of things to make them less frustrating. For example, doing something about all of the "Defeat X Council" missions in Steel Canyon, which are a problem because nearly every Council to be found is lying unconscious on the sidewalk at the feet of half a dozen 5th Columnists. As I understand it, those missions were created long before the decision to reintroduce the 5th Column, so they were at one time more reasonable because you could actually find groups of Council soldiers to fight, instead of having to beat up a bunch of 5th Column just so you can punch their one prisoner. Then there are the Skulls in Kings Row, which are suffering from level problems - particularly the ones in the northwest area that are several levels higher than the player characters are when they get the relevant missions (a lot of them are just plain too high level for the zone). If the second, well, grinding is boring when there is no end objective other than XP. I also have "moral" objections - I'll cheerfully stop a mugging or two on my way to a mission, or defend myself if attacked, but mindlessly beating up every gangster I see, regardless of whether or not they're actively committing a crime, goes against my conception of what a hero is. Sure, I know those Hellions in the parking lot are probably criminals, but unless I see them doing something, I don't have any evidence to justify beating them up. That's just me, though.

Well, it was "early" in my career, so I probably didn't think of that 😄 But seriously, sometimes the quest had other objectives, or there were two quests in the same area - like one quest was to kill X number of a certain kind of mob, and another quest to enter a (non-instanced) cave to fetch an object or rescue a prisoner. My usual modus operandi was to head for the cave, killing any mobs along the way and then killing the mobs in the cave, and usually by the time I arrived at the prisoner or MacGuffin, I'd fulfilled the kill count. So I found it really frustrating when the DK would stand 50 yards from the cave entrance just yanking mobs around. This was also a time when the the Death Knight class was brand new, so a lot of DK players thought that Death Grip was really neato and used it gratuitously. Many even had macros that would cause their character to yell, "GET OVER HERE!" every time they used it, apparently in emulation of a character with a similar ability from some arcade fighting game that I never played.

Early on in my World of Warcraft career, I ended up always declining group invites from Death Knights. Why? DKs have an ability called "Death Grip" that allows them to target a distant enemy and yank them to the DK's location. The first couple times I teamed with a DK, while I was on my paladin, the DK just stood in one spot, while I ran around trying to hit things with my sword, only to have my targets repeatedly Death-Gripped out from under me. I was all, "Look, the point of teaming up to complete a quest is that two people can kill the requisite number of mobs faster than one person. You deciding you want to kill everything yourself completely defeats the purpose of teaming, so I'm going to leave this team now." EDIT: I should point out that I'm describing open-world quests, not instanced content.

My psi scrapper's secondary is electric armor, and that seems to be working quite well. Granted, he's still low-level, so don't know how it will work when he's higher.

Would be cool if it were possible. I have a "team" of heroes who are all science origin, having all gained their powers from a scientific process invented by their leader. For one of them, at level 15 or thereabouts I decided her powers just weren't working for me, so I deleted her and rerolled, and got her up to 15 again before I realized I'd inadvertently selected "mutation" for her origin. D'OH!