Ankylosaur

If memory serves, the updates a few "pages" ago included requiring more powers in AE to give full xp. In my limited experience looking at the differences, this can make the mobs much tougher. (on sets that actually use it - a few broken ones don't still 😕 ) I suspect this was targeting farming, and have to wonder if it really scales down to level 20 well. When it comes to balancing I do rely on the tool for it mostly. It's not easy and why I also don't do a lot of customs at lower levels. At higher levels toons have more mitigation options and more inspirations to handle things that are out of the ordinary so I worry a little less. When things get into teams I've had some real challenges because of stacking. In part it's why I almost always only put defender powers on LTs. That means, when a team is running x8 or whatever, there's less stacking, and it also means they're not too hard to kill if there is some. The other way to do it is just have ratio of a few minion out of a group of several have those powers. Some things I have slowly learned to be cautious of. Poison - stacking debuffs in large groups melt tanks Sonic - see above Aura shielding, like cold or storm stacking or bubblers Flash arrow - everyone being heavily blinded from range is not fun

Here's what my experience was on the free version etc...

And that was the free version. the newer models in general are already better from what I have seen. The fact that it can do role-plays is one of the more mind-blowing use cases - in short that it can come up with relatively good dialog on the fly given context. Try this prompt... Let's do an interactive roleplay. I'm Luke Skywalker of the Resistance. You are Darth Vader of the Empire. We have met on the Death Star and you have just revealed to me that you are my father. I will try to convince you to rejoin the Jedi and the good side of The Force. You will try to convince me to join The Empire and embrace the dark side of The Force. You should be as hard as possible and essentially be uninterested in joining the Jedi or the good side of the force and try to give as many objections as possible. Are you ready to go?

What?

Echoing the above. The “secret” is I try to avoid the unaware text since I know its broken. That’s not to say that I never use it in older missions, or that I forget, or hope that on this map maybe it works, or that in some rare cases I leverage the broken-ness on purpose, but I tend to avoid it.

Added in a couple of storm blast characters, e.g. Polychrome.

So, there was not a way to add animations to the portal door "hack" but, it did occur to me that the Ward from Animus Archanus group would make for a nice magical portal in a similar way. it is more animated, appropriately magical, and hopefully stands out a bit more as a result.

First - super fun to bring back the Prince. Love how you are tying it all into the lore and playing with some lesser used gangs while also updating the post Praetoria Paragon (a path I've spent a lot of time on myself.) Great references and details all around. (In fact I thin the Destroyers may be the ONLY gang from Praetoria proper - meaning not first ward or night ward - that do not make a showing in Paragon) Some things that I am just jotting down along the way. Take em or leave em Overall: super-fun arc that ties right into the lore. Some clever customs and fun details Great stuff!

Here's a tiny and super specific one. On the Nerva - Primeva map, it clearly shows on the map preview, one rescue spot and 4 collection spots, but only supports bosses. In the PI level 50 missions that use it, you do collections. Would be nice to have the map support what it clearly is capabie of. 🙂

Well @TerroirNoir2, I'm working on something else on the same theme. You'll likely have another to look forward to by then. 🙂

What the tiger was supposed to say.... Not sure why he didn't The Shaggy Man uses his love magnet to charm though, and at the point in the story where we are, he has given that to Ozma and she has placed it over the city gates so everyone comes in feeling friendly. I instead decided to tap into his whole "zen" approach and gave him the kinetic melee which is sort of martial artsy. It's a stretch, but what can you do.

@seraphim, thanks for the feedback! Believe it or not - they are spelled Phanfasms in the Oz world. I could make the first and foremost's costume brighter, or maybe give him an animation that calls more attention to him. Jack is a surprise, but that's the Grim Valley where he often shows up. If I make it lower level, 25-34, I would put in the Eochai and some Fir Bolg in M1 for flavor too. I really wish we could get the "newer" portal that swirls, they stand out, but alas those are not in AE. the portal I'm using is a sort of "hack" - its actually a rescue - but that yellow transparent door in Croatoa where everything has a yellow fog to it makes it trick to see... I wonder if I could put an animation on it as a rescue though. hmmm... He should be - I'll double check that. Watching the twitch play through I was not noticing much of the characters speaking - not sure if that is a bug because of so many customs or something, but will check that. in addition to the main characters, M3 is your optional "explore and see how many named folk you can find" mission, where the Hungry Tiger, Allegro and others can be found. Since you have started, I went in and gave the Whimsies some small costume mods to make each individual and each tier of them a little more distinctive, but I don't think you will see those since the arc is in motion - not sure though. If you notice any typos - always appreciate those as its so hard to see them in your own stuff.

Here's hoping Engineria is not trapped in a Möbius strip.

@SeraphimKensai and @CraterLabs Looking forward to the feedback! Definitely had to make some concessions, but eager to see if it generally works even if sadly there is no Gump either... (Sadly there is a general lack of flying couch options in the costume creator. 😉 ) Certainly it would have been a bit easier if you could have just brought some of Billina's eggs. 🙂

Made some tweaks after a Twitch run I watched: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1796009524 The custom Cabal characters no longer have paralyzing bolt (with its -100% end regen ) I renamed the Emerald City Guard from things like Emerald Private to City Guard Private. Fixed a few typos I noticed. My Nome LTs were fire control/thermal and earth control/thermal. Decided to make them more offensive and changed them to fire blast/thermal seismic blast/thermal. Made the Nomes a little taller mainly because I want to make the the costumes easier to see. 🙂 Some general answers to questions from the twitch ply through

Design decisions Was fairly pleased with my pretty simple story that builds off of Oz lore and things that were left open. Of course there are already a million adaptations, but mostly I was just worried I might not come up with something original all - so yeah - pleased I did. I picked and chose which characters I could work in based on powers and story fit. No Toto of course. Sadly, I could not work in Billina, (she's awesome) and I purposely avoided Santa Claus (cause - ridiculous). The biggest limitation was file size - at about 42% I can't open any arc without timing out of the mapserver. I have many characters I made but could not fit in sitting a "Ozites-holding-group." There I have more munchkins, gillikins, quadlings, and winkies along with a few other variants of the enemy mobs that I just could not fit in and still open the file. So if you see a group and wonder why all the minions look the same, well there are a few mobs I had to go simple on (meaning only one minion) to save space. I even went so far as to shorten some character descriptions to free up some space - every word counts! There are several more signature characters I may work in some day, but they were not critical to the story. One place I could save some space is using the OOB Cabal, but then I would have had to make this cap at level 34. Still pondering that though. One mechanic decision I made, was to make the allies EBs for survivability, since it seems like groups might play these. But always concerned that might make it all a bit easy. To combat that, it meant I also made lots of signature folk into AVs. That's in contrast to what I did In Adventures in Wonderland, for example, where I made most people Bosses, with fewer EBs and AVs. I may do that here eventually depending on feedback. Very eager for feedback - let me know what you love and or hate and any feelings in between. And typos - if you see some (and I am sure there are some) let me know and I will polish those right up.

Digging back into the public domain, I'm pleased to share Adventures in Oz! A fairly straightforward romp, it is all about the customs and the plot. In terms of CoH, it is integrated into the place most like Oz, Croatoa. In terms of Oz stories, it picks up after book six in the Oz books, which is to say it uses many characters and plot points beyond those in the first book, but you don't need to know them. Was interesting to dive into the Oz world (which I have never really done before) and the recent Marvel comics were a great help here to make it easy to read, and fan wikis easy to research. Hope you enjoy! I am very open to feedback and plan to further refine it as I get some.

Watching a recent play through on Twitch, I saw that the Lab Tech minions of my Langston labs mob were melting tanks. They're just minions with just a couple of basic sonic attacks and Aid Self - but - in large numbers with taunt, all that sonic appeared to be devastating. Sooo, I started to think a bit on what I could do to diversify them. I already had an absurd number of minions because I wanted them to look unique while having the same power sets. Instead I diversified the power sets in a way that was super obvious in hindsight. The whole Glitters story about the Gold Brickers was started before there were any Gold Brickers above level 20. Langston Labs was there in part to justify the fact that my custom Gold Brickers used sonic attacks from their mouths instead of from their trademarked guns. Well all that has changed since the introduction of higher level Gold Brickers - I'm not using customs. Also Langston Labs' role has expanded to be repurposing and developing all sorts of weapons tech. At one point I had a custom ConDev mob representing that tech use - but I expunged them. Then some lingering custom gold brickers used some of that tech - but I moved on from that approach. Also the new Gold Brickers introduced even more new tech in the Smelters and AU, and now, I've updated Langston Labs to be using it. So obvious... AU Techs and Physicists wear Aeon Gloves and use energy blast (Like AU Brickers) Smelter Techs and Chemists wear Banded Robotic Gloves and accessories and use Fire Blast and LTs/ Bosses get Thermal (Like Smelters) Xeno Techs and Xenologists get Rikti rifles (and maintain their Rad emissions like Rikti from some story stuff in 4.1) Beam Techs and Genetecists get Beam Rifles (stand ins for Praetorian tech like the high-level Family and Mooks use) Simple!

The other thing is that GMs may already scale to the level of the player. They do in the "real" game world after all. Because of that, I was never sure what the GM level even really meant except to say that it has attacks that in the original game higher levels would be better able to mitigate. For example, I think the Cap Au Diable demon, DeathSurge, is level 20. Facing him in a level 54 map does not make him a gray pushover, I don't believe.

It also got me thinking about other ways to accomplish this and I came up with rushing players at the door... The Rush Set a map to empty so no mobs will spawn automatically. Populate the map with bosses also set to empty AND set the bosses to flee for the door when they have no mobs. Alignment choices Now if they are set as allies, they could look like people fleeing hysterically. But if they are enemies? Well that seems pretty unkind...

So I realized, as I shared in another post, that a BIG. boon for me would to be able to have the game continue to ping the map server while you are opening an AE file. If my AE files get too big, mainly because I have too many custom groups, then the game times out with the map server and I disconnect. This means for practical purposes, I can only have arcs that are at about 40% of the allowed file size.

When the homecoming devs setup architect, they generously expanded the file size to what 'feels" like about 4x the size of live. I say that because on live I had a few that were pushing the limits that were around 25% on Homecoming. With all that extra freedom, I'd love to use that space, but practically, I can't. If it gets too large, opening the file disconnects me. It seems like the game stops pinging the map server while trying to open the file. So my max is somewhere around 41 or 42% I think. I'm currently working on an arc with loads of customs. My workaround is to manually move extra customs into a holding group that is not used by the arc. That way the files are smaller but it's tedious. I can move them all back while I have the file up just before I publish, but I won't be able to open the arc again of course. So just curious - does anyone else encounter this? What's your your "practical" max file size percentage?

I feel like there is an occasional map with people on it who run when they encounter baddies. OK, one map? The Skyway Tram map has citizens on it and they flee when they encounter your bad guys. Mostly they stroll around despite the obvious dangers of doing that pretty much anywhere in Paragon City.

+ 1 To just about everything above. Boss Alignment Change I would think the Boss surrender thing would be pretty easy as you can already set a “Flees at %” trigger on bosses, and for escorts you have the “Betrays” trigger to change their alignment with a special dialog on betrayal. Stitch those together and betray in reverse, and let the clue appear when that happens and Voila! Says someone who doesn’t know how to code. 🙂 More Powersets One other thing I would like see are the missing power sets. Like: /Nature, /BIo Armor, Rad Melee, etc & the Kheldian sets for mob variety. Even with the new “use any power you want but the mob gives no XP” feature, those are unavailable. Kheldian Powersets For Kheldians, kind of like how FF is a unique tweaked set different from in game since it has Aid Self, if the Kheldian sets are just a special limited set of abilities that fit into the 9 powers for primary/secondary, that would be great by me. I'd put the Kheldian attacks under Dominator sets since the "Assault" sets have a nice mix of melee and range in one powerset. I would think "Peacebringer Assault" and "Warshade Assault" would too, but might make sense under scrappers instead to have the armors together with it. And the fact the armor secondary sets would have no status protection seems like no big deal as no one really uses status on mobs anyway.