Scarlet Shocker

OP hasn't mentioned how s/he likes to play - solo or teamage. It's not super critical to know but can influence choices. For primarily teaming I'd suggest /thermal is a very solid support set - great buffs for your team, and some amazing debuffs for your opponents. Melt Armor is highly underrated IMO and you can get it recharged quite fast in a good build. I'd also recommend /storm and /poison as good solid secondaries with /Trick Arrow almost up there too. /Storm gives you great debuffs, keeps enemies away and generally throws stuff around enough it won't be bothering you too much. /Poison is almost all ST and reasonably melee focused, but is still deadly with some punishing debuffs and ways to reduce even AVs to poodles. /TA is a good all-round set, giving you some reasonable debuffs, good soft-control and is inexpensive in terms of endurance etc For primaries I'd say Dark is by far one of the best in terms of control vs damage giving you goodly amounts of both and has some very useful -to Hit debuffs, whereas Plant is all about damage and holds. It's also excellent but Dark just edges it IMO. Mind is also excellent at control but its damage is slow (A Mind/TA is one of the most painful characters I've ever played. Nothing could touch me but killing anything was a challenge) although a lot of enemies are weak to Psi. Stone is very good at locking stuff down but again, not so much damage. Ultimately, play what feels good and suits your style the best. I would strongly advise against playing FotM builds or following the crowd. In my experience, going left-field has often produced some amazingly fun results. My personally favourite controller builds are my Dark/Poison and my Plant/TA. If I'm ever in a position where I want to get something done those will be my go-to toons, often my first picks over any other ATs or sets. Have many funs and welcome home

That can work spectacularly well, but it can be a colossal failure. Many many years ago a group of friends and I played a long running AD&D campaign. There was this arch-nemesis team that would periodically turn up and invariably kick our butts and take our stuff. Sometimes we'd manage to beat the crap out of them and do better. But it did become tedious although our GM was good and tried not to overdo it but after a while it just stopped being fun so there needs to be a way to control it for the players.

Don't forget, Praetorian civvies are even worse, they can fell an Incarnate hero with just one well aimed rock

I'm talking about the Concealment pool. It seems to be quite effective against most enemies but there is a massive problem with it. Civilian pedestrians wave at me as they walk by! 😱

To be completely serious here for a moment (write it down, doesn't happen that often) it strikes me that it would be a very worthy project to catalogue all the missions, contacts, progression paths etc. It's not something I would do - that would drive me even more loopy than I already am - and there is already a great resource in Ouroboros which I suggest has the bones of 90% of the content. But the ability to pre-plan your journey - to find the content you find personally interesting/rewarding/enjoyable would be an invaluable resource. And, to reiterate, I'm not volunteering.

who's joking?

I had presumed (incorrectly it seems) that you'd guestimated and stuck with that figure rather than rounding up. My methodology was to take your number and round up by 50% since I figured you may be underestimating. So... Ok we might be getting into a philosophical question of "What constitutes a mission?" but I think I want to take some time to figure that out a bit more fully before I commit anything to words on the internet, for fear of looking (even more) stupid

I'd say many more. Probably closer to 7500. There's a lot more high level content I believe

My characters already have an inherent weakness The person behind the keyboard 🤣

I figured as much. It just seems there's a rough correlation of 1:1 mission per merit. I think we'll have a better idea of that ration once you've completed every single mission in the game and calculated how many merits you can actually obtain without repeating content good luck! 🤣

That's a surprisingly high number of missions... I would never have guessed so many at that level of content. I guess you're earning 1.074 merits per mission (give or take) which makes me now consider the ratio of merits to missions over the game generally, a question I'd never even imagined until I read your stuff. Good work.

I have been on lower level farms but as Ukase points out, they are rarely efficient

You are better versed in these arcs than me but I think you've captured a lot of the main issues with them I think we should change their names from Shining Stars to Shooting Stars and put them out of our misery

I always felt like Dillo is missing a d from his name.

Same difference. The origin system worked fine and teaming meant you'd just level through whatever you needed. I don't object to streamlining, but the content just isn't terribly good

There's very little I like about these characters. I must confess I've never run either arc through to completion but "<horb> I am making air sounds at you" seems to be the pinnacle. I get that the OG devs felt they needed to give a bit of new content for newcomers with Freedom but actually the original arcs were not so bad and actually offered more choice whereas these arcs streamline and offer less choice. If I had the choice to punch every single NPC I interact with in the titsicles at the earliest opportunity and then stomp on their face I'd have enjoyed them all a lot more. May have been problematic for a PG16 game though

I must admit I didn't know that either

a mere lad!

A few of us run a "Steady Indom" content session every Saturday that's proving to be enjoyable, rewarding and successful. We'd welcome more folks of course but we almost always get a pretty full team. It's leisurely and I'd describe it as pretty low key but definitely worth doing.

I have also done this. I also have occasionally blamed random team mates for farting in the elevators in building missions, which often raises the hilarity level, albeit only to schoolboy level.

That's good info @Rudra I think you may have misunderstood my op - I was suggesting only one of those "story arcs" should be in the WST per week so it wouldn't need every single one to be in the list every week. Run them in order and if you consider them to be 12, that's almost a quarter of a year to do each one as a WST which should not be game breaking, especially given the way rewards and power creep have been increased since live closed. I take @Psyonico's point but it's not really like running Flashback arcs given that there's a lot of flashback stuff that never gets run unless by completists and/or accolades. But even if his point stood I don't see a problem with it. My goal here is to encourage some good (and important) content to get run more frequently - it will help all players and will possibly enlighten newer players as to our wealth of game lore.

I keed, I keed

Never willingly go through the doo... spandex is remarkably hard to clean after all. Who knew?

/jranger We have all the info we need in the rewards tabs. The last thing you'd need to monitor is different tabs for "oh what junk did I just win now?" and RNG doesn't love me enough to give purples so I don't care about the other stuff. I get what I get and I can throw out the crap when necessary.

there's, what, six(?) WST missions in the entire arc and each has a different contact and they work both blue and red side. They are treated as TFs in reality and they form a good story arc even if some of them are somewhat problematic. They could do well to be added to the WST list, one per week, so that we have a choice to play the arc with the incentive of additional merits - the content gets run, merits get won, what's to cry about? It encourages group play and allows people to learn more lore while enjoying our great game. I can't see any significant downside except that maybe a few more merits get won per week but not enough to be significant to game balance.