Mister Mass

I’m sure many of us have. With Ouro available, doing every story arc on a character is much easier than it was back in the day. On Live I recall burying my characters in perma-debt in order to try to avoid out-leveling the content in each level band, running mission after mission for a contact in the hopes that the contact would finally relent & give my character the first mission in a story arc instead of another pointless hunt or door mission. My main has done every story arc on blue side, red side, & gold side, including the rogue & vigilante only arcs. Well, I say that, but I think there was some new content that dropped recently that he hasn’t done yet. So if you push it, you might be able to do them all before I get around to that new stuff myself & beat me to it! 😉

I’ll try to remember to post this for you when I get home from work tonight. But really, take & slot the confusion power. Everything else is gravy.

“Push the button Max!” - is what I always say at that moment. 😉

My first Praetorian after the Snap was a stalker (Dark/Ninja) & that was a breeze. I thought I was crazy to run a Sonic/Sonic Defender as my 2nd Praetorian, but it wasn’t really much of a struggle. My 3rd Praetorian was an Ice/Cold Corruptor & it was a smooth run. My latest issue is a Plant/Thorns Dom, & she has been the easiest of all. The ability to turn your overtuned enemies into your allies is priceless! 😎 Anyway, my advice is to play a character, archetype, & power sets that you enjoy. It would appear that just about anything can manage Praetoria, so the issue is having fun there.

Chimp in a suit always wins. 😎

I want to echo the suggestion made early in the thread about a plant-themed EAT for Praetoria. My latest goldsider is a plant/thorns dom, whose backstory is that she was the result of Praetorian attempts to breed/genetically engineer a human/plant hybrid capable of resisting Hamidon’s influence & begin to win back the world outside the city repulsion fences for humanity. But her designers built her too well - she proves able to resist not only Hamidon’s siren call, but also the control of the Seer Network, & dedicates herself to freeing living & growing things from both Hamidonian & Praetorian control - both of which she sees as perversions of nature. A plant-based EAT would be distinctive & appropriate for a world largely destroyed by war & ecological destruction.

Yup. 👍

This is such a good idea that I am angry at myself for not thinking of it. Make it so devs! Thanks Darmian! 👍

Darmian hit on one of the reasons for much of the StatesHate we see - so many players dislike the character because of the negative feelings they have for the developer. And as Greycat noted, as a player you have very little interaction with the character, & when you do, it is to rescue him from his (apparently much more powerful) evil dimensional duplicate. Statesman was supposed to be this powerful iconic figure in the game, but it just never effectively came across that way. Instead, to many players, he just seemed more of a Mary Sue than an icon. That said, I do miss him to some degree - but not enough to want him back. I would prefer that the game do what comics almost never can do - leave the dead alone & move on, allowing other characters to develop & grow, & eventually take up the mantle of iconic hero, earned by accomplishments you actually witness & take part in, instead of past history that you are only told about. So if Statesman’s role as chief iconic hero is to be replaced, I would rather see Hero One or Ms. Liberty take up the mantle, instead of a revived Statesman or a heroic version of one of his various dimensional or temporal duplicates.

Apparently the Sentinel is /Regen, not /Willpower. I finally got him through the tutorial, where he had been waiting patiently for weeks. So far, he look better than he plays - but style trumps substance! 😎

My next 3 projects are: Bots/FF Mastermind - who is a cross between Sue Storm & Brainiac 5’s mom. 😛 Water/Willpower Sentinel - my Aquaman/Namor/Mera homage. Widow - I never got my Widow to 50 on Live, despite enjoying her immensely - so this time for sure! 😉

Actually, not quite true story. Plastic Man was one of Quality Comics’ big stars. As superheroes fell out of fashion in the mid to late 40’s, Plas was able to avoid cancellation by morphing from a superhero comic to more of a humor comic, particularly with the artwork of the brilliant Jack Cole. So he was one of the handful of superheroes still active in the mid 50’s, outlasting even Fawcett’s Marvel Family. But Quality was ready to get out of the game in 1956 & sold 4 of its most successful titles to DC - Blackhawk, GI Combat, Heart Throbs, & Robin Hood Tales - so 2 war comics, a romance title, & an adventure title. There is no evidence that DC purchased Plastic Man or any of the defunct superhero characters at that time. So when the Elongated Man made his first appearance in 1960 (a year before Reed & the Fantastic Four) DC wasn’t duplicating a character a character it already owned - unless you count Jimmy Olsen, who had been making appearances as Elastic Lad since 1958. DC did begin publishing a Plastic Man title in 1966, during Batmania, apparently in hopes of launching a cartoon series with the character. No cartoon & low sales led to the cancellation of the title until the 70’s, when Plas hit the small screen in cartoon form & got his title back briefly. Other Quality heroes were rebooted by DC as the Freedom Fighters in 1973, getting their own title in 1976, during the DC Explosion - only to be cancelled right before the infamous DC Implosion in 1978. Almost coterminously, DC I believe leased, then bought, the rights to the Marvel Family from the heirs of Fawcett Comics in 1972, & started publishing the adventures of arguably their greatest rival from the Golden Age. So I always assumed that DC had done the same with Quality heroes at this time, purchasing the rights to the characters & publishing new & reprinted adventures. But there are many comic book historians who believe that DC had no legal right to the characters. They note that the characters would have fallen back into the public domain if their trademarks weren’t being maintained by their original publishers, & since a decade or more had passed between the last published usage by the original publishers & DC’s subsequent usage, these historians believe it is clear that the trademarks had not been protected. I don’t pretend to be a legal expert, but I do note that one of the Quality characters that DC revived as part of the Freedom Fighters was Phantom Lady. After Quality stopped publishing her adventures in 1943, she was dormant for several years, until Fox Feature Syndicate gave her a solo title in 1947, with art by noted “good girl” artist Matt Baker. Risqué cover art from this title would be part of Werther’s 1954 “Seduction of the Innocent” attack on comics as contributing to juvenile delinquency. Phantom Lady stories would be printed by a few other comic companies on the late 50’s & early 60’s. So it would be hard to argue that Quality was protecting their trademark on the character by the time DC claimed ownership of the character in the early 70’s. But as one of those precious few comic readers from the mid-70’s who enjoyed the Freedom Fighters, all of these facts are irrelevant. Uncle Sam, the Black Condor, the Ray, the Human Bomb, & Phantom Lady (along with Plastic Man, Doll Man, Miss America, Kid Eternity, the original Quicksilver, Firebrand, & the rest of the Quality heroes) are part of DC lore now to stay. 😉

The Fleischer studios immediately realized that animating flight was easier than animating leaps. Proto-DC okayed the change, then began to implement flying in the comics to match the cartoons. But this was essentially recognizing a process that was already in place in the comics: Superman had often demonstrated an ability to control his leaps that defied the laws of physics - often with the explanation that his cape allowed him to alter his trajectory, but often with no explanation at all. Being able to fly just made it easier to explain how Superman could pull off some of the super feats that his writers & artists wanted him to do. This actually it pulled into the infamous Superman-Captain Marvel lawsuit. Neither character could fly at first, but both were shown demonstrating increasing control on their leaps, & eventually flying on very similar timescales. The Proto-DC lawyers pulled a bunch of examples of super-stunts performed by Superman that were duplicated in Captain Marvel comics a few months later. The judge looked ready to rule in Proto-DC’s favor, until the Fawcett lawyers pulled examples showing that many super-stunts performed by Superman were previously performed by Captain Marvel. So both sides were shown to have engaged in selective use of evidence, & the lawsuit dragged on for years. Since I am pontificating on comics history, I do want to note that the likely source for Superman’s Action #1 super leaping was John Carter of Mars. Carter was a prominent star of newspaper comics, in addition to pulp novels, & his creator Edgar Rice Burroughs explicitly stated that the reason the earth man native could leap such prodigious distances on Barsoom was because Mars’ gravity was so much lower than Earth’s. The same explanation was given for Superman, as native of the high gravity planet Krypton. Joe Schuster learned to draw by tracing newspaper comics, & his leaping Superman was likely taken from renderings of John Carter. One more fun tidbit - the first Kryptonian travel power wasn’t flight or super jump, it was super speed. The very first panel of the newspaper comic strip that Siegel & Schuster hoped to sell was of a super speeding Jor-L running home from his lab, establishing that Kryptonians had superpowers naturally because of their advanced evolution. When the boys from a suburb of Cleveland couldn’t sell their Superman strip to a newspaper comics distributor, they cut up the panels, which had been set in standard newspaper format, & reformatted them for comics magazine size, & reluctantly sold it to a comic book company looking to fill the 1st issue of their 4th monthly anthology title - Action. And to everyone’s surprise, they changed history.

The Luddites continue to be a productive source of quotable quotes: [NPC] Luddite Friar: Illustration 4 is entitled 'How to go limp.' [NPC] Luddite Torch Bearer: Does this mean I have to throw away my PSP?

"Juggernaut" as a word entered English in the mid-19th century from the Sanskrit "Jagannatha", which a name for Krishna, specifically in reference to a huge wagon that carried statues of gods, including Jagannatha. In British pop culture, it was believed that this wagon would run over everything in its path, & so soon gained the connotation of an unstoppable force. So referring to something or someone as a juggernaut long preceded Marvel Comics in the 1960s adopting this concept to a character.

Don’t remind me! I recall getting absolutely inundated with tells in PI asking my main to be a bridge when he hit the magic level. Was it 43? I don’t recall. Apparently I have purged that from my memory. 😛

You know, despite how much I play Goldside (1/3rd of my characters on Homecoming have started there) I didn’t know this. I had toyed with the idea of starting my Widow there, but I didn’t want to miss out on the VEAT-only story arcs redside. You learn something new every day. Thanks y’all!

The story arc completion rewards are relatively huge. I have been burned a few times, outleveling contacts, by not shutting off xp before completing a contact’s story arc. Sometimes it has just been from mindlessly forgetting that I need to shut off xp - but all too many have been from thinking “no way the arc completion bonus is more than 5 bubbles of xp!” 😛

This reminds me that many of the tricks I learned to do in Excel were for spreadsheets I wrote for games I was playing. Nothing inspires me more to work than games! (And usually the tricks I learned for games eventually were useful for work. 🤷‍♂️)

This is actually a good point about the way that redside chains contacts. Despite the advice above to run newpaper missions in order to convince a broker to give you a bank mission, & then after the bank mission a new contact, certain contacts are not gained that way redside. Instead they are gained by an introduction from the previous contact in the chain. The problem here is that Lorenz Ansaldo & Operative Vargas are in the same level band, 20-24. If Lorenz was in a lower level band (say 15-19) he might give you the introduction to Vargas when you hit level 19 or 20, even without doing any missions. (I don't know that this is true, since I always do all of the missions from all of the contacts redside anyway, but this seems to be how the origin contacts work blueside.) But with the 2 contacts in the same level band, I don't see how you can get the introduction to Vargas without doing missions for Lorenz. As far as I know, you can't get Vargas as a contact through the brokers or the Find Contact window,only through introduction by the previous contact in the chain, Lorenz Ansaldo. This would appear to be an issue that the original Devs didn't consider. Certainly your desire to only play Roguish story arcs was not in the Devs' minds when they created these original CoV contacts, as side-switching & the intermediate alignments like Rogue were not yet part of the game. Adding a way to sidestep these contact chain requirements would be good design. I do note that their is a way to do that already - through Ouroboros. You can do any of these original arcs through Ouroboros once you are high enough level to do so, with no introductions required.

Is there a facial option that allows one to bleed artfully from one side of the mouth? 🤔

Okay, I have started my 4th run through Praetoria, not counting my main who ran all of the arcs through Ouro. None of my runs have followed @Redlynne's 2 paths, but this guide continues to be useful for the information it contains. So thanks @Redlynne! My first Praetorian was a stalker who chose Resistance in the tutorial & then played good guy through the arcs - always reinforcing alignment in Warden & Responsibility arcs, & always betraying alignment in Crusader & Power arcs. My second Praetorian was a Defender who chose Loyalist in the tutorial, then played bad guy through the arcs - always reinforcing alignment in Crusader & Power arcs, & always betraying alignment in Warden & Responsibility arcs. My third Praetorian was a Corruptor who chose Loyalist in the tutorial, reinforcing alignment in all arcs except Crusader, which he gleefully betrayed. My fourth Praetorian is a Dominator who chose Resistance in the tutorial. She will reinforce alignment on all arcs except Power, which she will disdainfully betray. This just goes to show that there are a lot of paths through Praetoria. Thanks to @Redlynnefor blazing a path! Keep Goldside Alive! 👍

One of my coalition-mates set up a Discord when we rediscovered CoH last year. We used it a lot at first, but soon dropped out of the habit of voice chat. As many people have noted above, there is little in CoH that requires more than line or 2 of explanation, & we are all well-versed in typing in chat in game. The occasional hilarious typo only enhances the fun! 😉 So now we mainly use Discord to leave written messages for one another, the most common being what characters need which Weekly Strike Targets each week. The other use is when one of us crashes out of game due to a power outage or somesuch. Having a way to communicate when we can't get in game is helpful. 👍

I beat the OP to 58 back in January, but was reasonably certain I was not the oldest person on these boards. Good to see that at least 2 posters in this thread topped me. Now get off my lawn! 😡

It might not the best use for the proc or set, but I like to drop this into the crappy cone that so many blast sets get early on. Knocking down a chunk of your opponents is always entertaining, & -KB protection as a set bonus is welcome on squishies & certain armors. The set might not make the final level 50 build, but it makes the ride along the way more fun.