Scarlet Shocker

Why are thugs not gangsters? Because then they'd be gangsters, not thugs. We have the Family and we don't need those as pets. MM pets should be very different from in game enema groups

Bubbles might consider himself lucky!

There's a Captain Nemo joke in there somewhere

Snarky's new girlfriend (helps that she's mute)

You have to wander into the streets of fire to find them

Snarky dropped his map book in the bath again!

It's been a while since I looked but so far as I remember there's only two controls: In set or out of set. I could be missing something. But whenever I did try crafting out of set I got junk and used up converters at an unsustainable rate.

David Wincott. He's the start and finish of the zone, effectively. Meg Mason also offers repeatable Hollows missions but you will outlevel the zone just doing regular content so you will almost certainly need to turn off XP

Play the game and (re)discover for yourself If you struggle, pray to St Joan. She's the patron saint of Arcs. If you want engaging story lines start with the Hollows and run it from David Wincott through to Atta. Faultline is also very good, being one of the first "Hazard zone revamps" If you want to explore engaging stories try Goldshide* - there are 4 real paths you can take there and all are rewarding but it would be remiss of me to neglect the caveat that the content is typically tougher than you have have experienced previously Enjoy! */em Connery

That's never worked for me and if I try and convert stuff I just get a dogpile

That's genuinely never worked for me

I hope the colander still works. It'd be a strain to have both things fail at once

Proteus was a mutant antagonist in X-Men during the award winning Chris Claremont/John Byrne era who was able to alter reality. So that's probably gonna fall by the wayside fairly quickly. You could do something based around Selkies, which are aquatic (water powers) akin to merfolk who can change shape, as suggestion. There are plenty of other options but that one caught my imagination

certainly some great inspirations for Icon outfits.

Play first, build later. If the toon doesn't grab me it gets dumped. No point in building something I don't like. So I'll wait until I'm sure I'll be keeping it before building something in Mids. I've recently started building "adequate" stuff because that's good enough and not too expensive. If I share builds on line they are never good enough and people dump on them when the reality is they are ok to play in most scenarios. I'm not one of those who has billions of inf oozing from every orifice as some seem to do here so I have to ration my spend a bit too. But it mostly works for me and I've yet to find a character fails having built it to a reasonable standard. Then again I'm not soloing all the things on +27x53 so good enough works well enough

It's hard to deny that some content is very poorly written in this game, just as some is outstanding. But that is part of the joy of the game - it's quirkiness and inconsistencies. Repeatable missions such as these are meant to be cheap and throwaway, more to achieve a quick end rather than to be studied and digested with joy. I think rather than change anything simply accept that it is what it is and don't fret about it.

I consider him a Goldside simply because that's where he's first encountered. I know you can get him red side only if you don't begin your career in Praetoria but he's fundamentally still the same contact. A team of us ran him on our regular weekend sessions on Indom and even with a team it was challenging, as you might expect given his origins.

slightly disingenuous given how difficult it can be to get a team even when the server load is relatively high.

I don't know wht experience the OP has but it's important to reiterate that goldside missions are significantly more difficult than blue or red ones. This arc (bear in mind I'm working from memory) is one of the toughest so unsurprising that he is proving to be a cantankerous curmudgeonly bastard with a big stick. If I get my arse handed to me repeatedly I tend to seek assistance or swap to a different character until I can get help. I find it demoralizing to meet repeated defeats and it can kill the game's enjoyment for me, so I would advise to try recruiting some help for this one rather than persevere against insuperable odds.

Lexico mihi videtur insufficiens ad usus diei

I don't think you can say it's "good" or "bad" I think we can be very positive that we have our game after all this time and trauma which we don't need to revisit here. Like any game ever, people go to "the new" so we got a huge resurgence of numbers on the official announcement and then that's tailed off. Hopefully over time the fact that many more people know the game lives means that the mean number of "hard core" / devoted players will increase a bit but I doubt it will be massive. But now the game has "official" blessing we're likely to see many more people return for new content and shinies. Personally I'm pretty glad to see where the game is now. It seems to be reasonably healthy and importantly, meeting its costs. Even more importantly, we are blessed with a dedicated team of developers who love the game, respect its legacy and history and serve it very well in terms of the content and additions they deliver. They clearly think long and hard about what makes the final cut and personally I'm pretty impressed overall with what they have delivered. They love this game and that shows. Given the above, I think we're set for another decade or so. People will come and go but that's natural. Long live City of Heroes!

If Snarky wore that he'd look dead stylish

A Bridge

You'll find out next time you go into a pub and order an Indigo Papa Alpha

If it's carbonated, it's not IPA. just sayin'