Mister Mass

I have had characters not be able to get the Bonefire Plot out of the appropriate contacts at the proper level range. But I have had no problems with getting the Clockwork Captive story arc going. I try to do all of the story arcs & badge missions while in the appropriate level band, & level lock until I do so. There are several reasons why you may have issues with this. The first is to make sure you did not outlevel the arc. For older content like these, locking at levels ending in 4 or 9 is usually correct. The second reason comes down to patience. Each contact has a dozen or so missions, including hunts, that it can randomly offer you. So if you are unlucky, you may have to play through most or almost all of their other missions before you get offered the first mission of the story arc. Contacts now are coded to offer you a choice of missions - with a hunt the top choice & a door mission the lower choice. Keep choosing the lower mission until you finally get the first mission of the story arc (which now helpfully has an open book icon & the name of the story arc) & you can finally get started. It is worth noting that once you start the arc, you don’t have to stay in the level band in order to continue it. You can continue to level & do more missions in the arc as you go, although the story arc mission levels will be capped by the story arc level band. But this can lead to the third reason that you can’t start a story arc - there is a cap to how many story arcs you can have open simultaneously. If you have reached that cap, the contact can’t offer the story arc to you until you complete one of your open story arcs. Note that only major story arcs suffer this limitation - mini-story arcs do not count against the limit & appear to have no limits at all. Zone arcs like in the Hollows or Striga are mini-arcs. The major story arcs are identifiable by the blue bookmark on their icon. So if you are still struggling to get your story arcs open, checking through your old contacts to see if they have open book icons with blue bookmarks & then completing those arcs may help.

Tanker Bruising (now gone) didn't stack as well. But most buffs & debuffs in CoX stack. That is really one of the defining differences between this game & most others - that & the fact that most buffs & debuffs aren't so miniscule as to almost not matter at all. And with stacking, even small buffs & debuffs can add up to something quite significant. This is City of Buffers/Debuffers - & I am happy to be in it! 😎

Yes, this bug seems to have been squashed. I was recruiting for a red side SF yesterday, & one of the team members was sure that he was going to get dropped because of this - & was astonished when it didn’t happen. I was mildly surprised that anyone still thought it did.

"Keep Redside Alive!" That is this week's discussion item, right? I remember when Issue 6 & CoV came out. I bought it, but had no intention of playing it - because I was playing City of Heroes because I wanted to be a HERO, not a villain. Being the new shiny, the vast bulk of the playerbase trotted off to the Rogue Isles, while I plugged away (mostly solo) on my army of alts blueside. Eventually, the the new car smell wore off, & most of the playerbase returned blueside. Eventually, I began to check out redside for myself. With the Rogue Isles being mostly a ghost town, I mostly soloed - which was fine because it gave me the time to actually read the mission descriptions. I found myself enjoying the redside ATs like Brutes & Corruptors, & thought that the material on redside usually to be better written than blueside. To my surprise, I found myself enjoying "playing the bad guy" at least occasionally. Given the paucity of players redside, I despaired of ever getting a chance to run the Strike Forces, but as I levelled up, I began to get invites from a group of highly experienced players looking to fill out their groups. I didn't know it at first, but they were speedrunners, & it took me a bit to learn how to keep up. While this was the antithesis of the way I would normally want to play, I must admit that I found speedrunning the SFs to be exhilarating fun, & I learned a lot about what highly capable players with top end builds could accomplish in the game. And I gained a belief that, while the redside playerbase was small, it was very, very good - & probably contained the best players of the game, or at least a disproportionate percentage of them. With Issue 18 & sideswitching, I took the opportunity to allow some of my heroes to get a chance to play redside content, but I resisted the temptation to sideswitch my redsiders over to blueside. And with co-op content becoming more & more prevalent in the last few years of the game, I saw no need to do so later either. I would run alignment missions to go Rogue, & they were fine - able to visit Paragon City & run blueside TFs when desired, but still remain redside. With the Incarnate system effectively 100% co-op, there was no incentive to switch at level 50 either. I got a Brute, a Corruptor, & a Stalker to 50, & would have done the same for my Dominator, Mastermind, & Widow if NCSoft hadn't pulled the plug on the game. On Homecoming, I have split my characters evenly between blueside & redside (with almost half of those starting goldside before heading to Paragon City or the Rogue Isles). But some of my bluesiders are "redside" ATs & some of my redsiders are "blueside" ATs. I no longer feel the compulsion to assign alignment based on the old AT paradigm, instead going with what I feel fits best for the character. So I am part of the minority that plays redside regularly. I organize & run WST SFs almost every week. They are a bit slower to fill than most WST TFs, but they usually fill quickly enough. Anecdotally, the players seem more appreciative of the chance to run one than they do blueside - although that may be skewed by the fact that I ran 3 Mortimer Kals back-to-back-to-back Sunday night, & Kal needs to be unlocked, so the opportunity to join one is lower. So redside is hardly dead. But it is undeniably lower population, which is both a symptom & a cause of some problems. It is a symptom of the fact that there are things about the Rogue Isles that turn off much of the playerbase. And that lower population causes those players who prefer a higher population to keep away - so the cycle is self-reinforcing. Let's look at some of the reasons players don't like the Rogue Isles: They want to play Heroes Some players are never going to satisfied with playing on the dark side. Let's just accept that. (I have a Hero that will never go Vigilante, let alone Villain or Rogue, because he is a true-blue Hero.) But one way to entice some of these player redside would be to allow them to play Hero in the Rogue Isles. If there were an equivalent to scanner/Safeguard missions for Heroes in the redside zones, allowing a Hero to foil smaller villainous plots, culminating in a mission to avert a disaster or major plot, there might be some incentive for Heroes to spend time in the Rogue Isles. Even better if there were a series of contacts & a story arc chain for Heroes righting wrongs in the Rogue Isles & weakening Recluse's & Arachnos' grip there. But this would require revamping the alignment system to remove the bar from pure Heroes going to the Rogue Isles (& Villains from going to Paragon City.) And, unless it convinced more of the playerbase of the attraction of redside, it also likely wouldn't alleviate the issue of redside teaming - as the Heroes coming over to play Hero would not be inclined then to work with the Villains on pure redside material. They hate the look & feel of the Rogue Isles No getting around that - redside is grim & dirty quite a lot. There is definitely a Behind the Iron Curtain decaying dictatorship feel there, which is most pronounced in the intro zone of Mercy Island. That first impression is strong & it lingers. Some of the intermediate zones aren't as bad, but this comes back with a vengeance in Grandville, as you see the squalor the lower classes live in, while their Arachnos masters live way above them in their fortress in the sky. I must confess that this is not an issue for me. I agree with the suggestion that Arachnos should have put up a better front (as we see in the gleaming impossibly perfect Praetoria) but I would argue that this was the intent of the raised central section of Cap au Diable & of the Grandville fortress in the sky. The fact that these areas are not as attractive as intended is a sign of the utilitarian-minded & aethestically-challenged nature of Arachnos & Lord Recluse. YMMV. Some of this is selective memory at work, as chunks of Paragon City are rather unattractive. King's Row is rows of tenements going to seed (evocative of Jack "King" Kirby's Suicide Slums in the otherwise prosperous Metropolis). There is nothing attractive about Independence Port - except perhaps the giant octopus Lusca. 😉 Brickstown is dominated by the looming ziggurat of the Zigursky Penitentiary. And the Trial & Hazard zones like the Hollows, Boomtown, & Crey's Folly put the Rogue Isles to shame in terms of being dreary & desolate. [Cut off by work - how rude!]

It is available at any character level on the Paragon City tram as the bottom choice. If you didn’t know it was there, you would never scroll down to see it. (I know I was playing for a month before I found it.) The Homecoming team uses it as the site for costume contests. It is the starting point for the Market a crash TF. Higher level content will occasionally have a mission door there.

I drop all of my white & yellow salvage & (non-PvP/Purple) recipes on the AH for cheap so that enterprising buyers (who are less lazy than I) can buy them for crafting purposes. Actually taking the time to sell stuff at vendors is way too much work for the return. 😛

Your badge total is LEET! 😎

You need to complete every story arc in Nova Praetoria to earn the badge. So that means completing every mission from every contact from all 4 factions in Nova. To crib from Redlynne: Nova Praetoria (1-10)Resistance Crusader (RicochetR > SpliceR > Jack HammerR)Loyalist Power (Deputy Assistant of InformationL > WarrantL > ReeseL)Resistance Warden (Robert Flores > Tunnel Rat > Doctor Arvin)Loyalist Responsibility (Chief Interrogator Washington > Cleopatra) Yu don't have to do them in that order, but you do need to do them all. Doing them through Ouroboros counts. It is worth noting that the SCORE & Homecoming devs repurposed (usually purchasable or veteran) badges from Live for new uses on Homecoming. So Agent of Praetoria, instead of being gained by purchase, is now an accolade earned through playing content.

You mention Indigo & don't mention the Indigo-Crimson milk run? Basically when doing a story arc or mission for one or the other, you get sent to talk to the other one face-to-face, with Indigo in FF & Crimson in Peregrine Island (at least close to the ferry.) Have these 2 superspies never heard of a cellphone with encrypted comms? Aren't they concerned about the possibility that Malta or other agencies are using high-powered listening devices to eavesdrop on their mission briefings to you that take place out in the open, instead of in a SCIF? When they do this, I feel like pulling a Maxwell Smart & insisting on a Cone of Silence. 🤫

So now yellow salvage seems to have crashed back to earth, selling this weekend at like $1K a pop. Was someone really trying to manipulate the market on this, buying up supply, then relisting at a higher rate? The amount of clicking would have been enormous for what amounts to a small return per click. Did our notional yellow salvage flipper finally get bored? Run out of funds? Move on to another niche? Move on to another game? Inquiring minds want to know! 🤔

Back on Live, I always wanted to run all of the badge missions & story arcs in each level band before outleveling the content. Permadebt was the solution. By plowing on debt as much debt as possible, I could basically double the amount of content I could run at each level band & thus usually convince the recalcitrant contacts to give me all of their badge missions & story arcs before I outleveled them. Now I can just toggle off xp instead & run everything in a level band before moving on. Good times! 👍

Yes, blue side will send you all over the place. Part of this is the legacy of CoH at launch having 2 zones - plus a hazard zone or 2 - per level band: Level 10-19 Skyway City, Steel Canyon, Boomtown Level 20-29 Talos, Independence Port, Terra Volta Level 30-39 Brickstown, Founder's Fall, Crey's Folly, Eden The contacts would send you to contacts & mission doors within the level band across zones indiscriminately, in addition to often sending you to lower level zones as well. Things got a bit better at level 40+, where the contacts were basically all in Peregrine Island, but that didn't stop most of them from sending you back to lower level zones quite often. But with experience & all of the tools available to get around these days, it isn't as much of a hardship as it was back in the old days, when we had to walk (or superspeed, jump, fly, or teleport) uphill to our missions - both ways! And know which zones (& parts of zones) the un-unified Green & Yellow Lines serviced! You kids have it so easy these days. Oh, and get off my lawn! 😠

One fun side effect of the Rikti invasions this past week - our group failed a Master of Ms. Liberty Task Force attempt. For the mission in Peregrine Island, everyone zoned into the Portal Corps lawn, heading to the building with the portal to the mission. Except we zoned in just as a Rikti Invasion was rolling & found ourselves right in the middle of a league fighting about a bazillion Rikti. Most of us laughed at the bad timing, but one team member got zapped by the drop ship before he could get under cover. MoMLTF - FAILED! 😲 We disbanded, reformed, & restarted & got the badge easily. All in a day's work heroes. 😎

Unless you think sonic is purple & white & recolor it accordingly. 😉

Yeah, I was getting a lot of this on my Sonic/Sonic Defender this weekend. Really? A big bad Elite Boss runs away from a wimpy hover-blasting scream machine? It is as if that they didn't like Sound Byte's singing. Everyone is a critic these days! 😝

This gave me a flashback to when I was like 4 years old & the 60's Batman show (in primetime twice a week - Same Bat Time! Same Bat Channel!) was the favorite show of my older brother Mark & I. We would attach towels around our necks, secured by safety pins, & bounce around the furniture of the house playing that the floor was lava - until Mom would yell at us to stop. My brother's towel was blue because he was Batman! (since he was older) while mine was yellow for Robin. We would put the safety pins in our mouths & use them as Bat-rebreathers when we pretended that the villains had tried to gas us. Good times! 😎 I may be the only person alive who ever idolized Robin growing up. Comics creators added kid sidekicks so that children would have someone near their own age to identify with, in addition to the adult hero. But let's face it, almost every kid identified with the adult hero instead. Except me - I was perfectly happy to play Robin. Holy hand grenades Batman! 😁 In a sense, when playing CoH, we are all empowering our inner 4 yo to play hero again. I'm okay with that. 👍

Thanks Grouchy! Point by point you outlined what I wanted to explain, but didn't find the time. Thanks for taking the time to drop that huge information dump. 👍

Don't know what you are seeing, but the most common error made on this is not making sure that the file reads the "PLAYERNAME, welcome to City of Heroes" (or whatever the exact verbiage is) before the bindsfile starts logging the badges. Without that welcome line in the datalog file, the program won't know how to identify your character & then apply the badges logged to it.. The problem I had was that I logged into the character, then turned on datalogging, then ran the bindsfile - & got an error message. If I had turned on datalogging first, THEN logged into the character & ran the bindsfile, everything would have been okay. With datalogging activated before logging in, the datalog file will have the welcome line in it from the start & will have no problems identifying the character & properly recognzing the badges from the bindsfile. I don't know if this is the issue for you, but I wanted to explain this, since it seems to happen to a good number of users their first time.

You can run the Ouroboros initiation arc from Pilgrim via Ouroboros Flashback in order to farm the Contaminated you need for the badge. It is listed in the Level 50 section.

Agreed. The animation looked a bit silly on my Dark/Ninjitsu Stalker, when I was looking for some AoE help before Shadow Maul got fixed. But it looks awesome on my Inv/SS Tanker! 😎

So if you already have selected a power from an Epic Pool, you can't select a power from a Patron Pool as well. You will have to choose one or another.

This. Running a MoITF yesterday, I was impressed that Cross Punch was actually doing slightly more damage than Haymaker, & noticeably more than Footstomp. For a power set without a lot of damaging AoEs, this looks like a very good power pick. 👍

Monocle, top hat, spats, & cane optional - but highly recommended! 😎

I feel you. But I was able to work through the process & get my main's badges on the site - albeit after some anguish & frustration. Feel free to PM me @Mister Mass & I would be happy to lend you assistance - & hopefully spare you some of that anguish & frustration. 🙂

So you are suggesting that the title should be "Squatter"? 😲 Or for the Oklahomans in our midst - "Sooner" 😉 I've been a'watching a whole passel of Westerns recently, so I'm a mite partial to "Claimjumper" 😛