WumpusRat

A suggestion I'd have is for the sheathed weapons is to have an option to hang at the hip rather than on the character's back. The katana is at the hip, which looks nice, but when I went to check my broadsword/shield character her sword was across her back, when it would make much more sense to have it hanging at her hip. Same for the mace, axe, and dual blades. Having a pair of daggers on your back seems really awkward, instead of them at each hip. Being able to pick hip or back for the various weapons, if it's not much work, would be really nice.

Sure. Here's a shot of me using each summon in sequence, back to back. Each one fires off a bit over 4 seconds after the first one does. <edit> Just to make sure, I hopped onto a couple of my other mercenary MMs and they had the same results. About 4 seconds to cast each summon, and not being able to do anything until each one was done, so over 12 seconds of standing still to use all 3 powers. <edit #2> Tried it on the test servers as well, with the same results. 4 seconds to cast each summon, and delaying any other power from activating for those 4 seconds.

After leveling up my new katana brute, I realized that the sounds for katana are kind of meh. Not a big fan of them. I wanted something "meatier" like a sword actually hitting someone, rather than clinking on some metal. I just can't figure out how to actually make a sound mod. I tried the 'create mod' option, but nothing I can try gets it to recognize the 'proper folder/path' when I try to tell it where to start building it. I'm a complete novice at creating mods, so there's probably something simple I'm missing.

You can have the throwing knife as any origin, btw. Just go to the p2w vendor and give up your starting origin power, and re-select the throwing knife. So you can have a magical character who tosses knives at people, for instance. <edit> Funny, Decoy and I said the same thing at the same moment. 🙂

Kind of reposting this from the suggestion forum, since it seems to be an actual bug. The Mercenaries Mastermind set seems to be bugged in terms of the animation time needed to use the Soldiers, Spec-Ops, Commando, and Tactical Upgrade skills. The summons are supposed to be 2.03 seconds, but take 4.5 (approximately) to cast, with the MM being locked into the animation for the entire time. If they're trying to summon all three sets of pets quickly, it takes almost 14 seconds, rather than 6. Similarly, Tactical Upgrade is also supposed to have a 2.03 second animation, but takes 4.5 seconds as well, as it uses the exact same animation for summoning the pets. All the other sets follow the listed cast time for the powers, except for Mercenaries. Hopefully this can be fixed, because it definitely puts a much heavier load on Merc MMs when they're trying to replace and upgrade pets mid-fight. 4.5s for the summon, another 6 seconds for the two upgrades, and then another couple of seconds to re-buff them if you have something like /Thermal, /FF, /Cold, etc. 12-15 seconds spent locked in place to get a single replacement pet back into the fight.

It might be a bug specific to Mercenaries, then. Because from the moment I press the button and the animation starts, I can't do anything else for about 3.5 seconds, not even move. <edit> Actually I just timed it with a stopwatch (I was timing it in my head before). From the moment the power starts until I can move (spamming a movement key to catch it the moment I can) is about 4.5 seconds. <edit #2> In fact, ALL the Mercenary summons have that same 4.5 second animation, rather than the 2.03 it claims they have. I haven't checked the other sets yet, but I'll do that in a minute. But for Mercenaries, summoning and buffing takes 4.5 x 3 (summons), 1.5 (equip), 4.5 (tactical upgrade), or about 20 total seconds. <edit #3> Yep, it's specific to Mercenaries. All the other sets take between 10-12 seconds to summon and fully buff. Mercs take around twice as long, due to the extremely long animations for summoning as well as tactical upgrade. So I suppose this topic should be "Please fix Mercenary summon/buffing times" rather than for all MMs. 🙂

With the changes to how pet resists work, being tied to the 6th level upgrade, it might be a nice QoL change to increase the animation speed of the summon/buffing powers a bit, since it can be a nightmare to try and resummon pets in combat due to the long animations and that base pets (at least for certain sets right now) have zero resists until they're buffed. For instance, on my Merc MM, I was fighting a boss who was capable of nearly one-shotting my tier-1 and 2 pets (energy melee boss), so he was dropping them rapidly. Going through the animation of resummoning, rebuffing (since base pets are more or less just meatshields and nothing else), and getting them back into the fight was taking up so much time I could literally do nothing else. Just stand there summoning/buffing for about 20 seconds. And typically by the time they'd be ready to fight again, a couple of them had died. In situations where you're not running on low difficulty, this can quickly run into a cascade failure of the pets not living long enough to be rebuffed. An example would be the Tactical Upgrade for Mercenaries. The power says it has a 2.03s activation time, but the animation is about 3.5 seconds, or nearly twice as long. Perhaps the animation can be shortened, but the power still takes the same amount of time to affect the pet. That way the mastermind can quickly rebuff and get back to trying to mitigate the incoming damage or use CC, rather than being locked into long animations and doing nothing. It would also help out on teams at the start of the mission if pets need to be summoned and buffed, so the mastermind doesn't end up falling far behind due to spending 15-20 seconds standing around summoning and buffing while the team runs ahead.

Since I had one of my old Bot/FF MMs lying around who I hadn't kitted out with set IOs, I went puttering around killing some +1/8 council spawns (no bosses) with her. Her bots are all set up with 2xAcc, 3xDmg, 1xEnd. (30-35th level IOs). After each spawn of Council, the Assault Bot was at around 40% end, drones were at 70-75%, and Protector Bots varied based on which one paused to heal, but generally ended up around 25-30% end. On the plus side, the little repair bot is a serious champion. I ended up respeccing her out of the medicine pool entirely, since I don't need to use aid other on the bots anymore.

Alright. I haven't played for a couple years, just came back to the game a week or so ago, so I'm not aware of the stuff that was hashed out over the course of the beta. But yeah, I was mostly just street-sweeping in PI to test out end drain. I hopped into a council map at +1/8 and with 86% end reduction on the assault bot, 96% on the protector bots, and 75% on the drones, clearing one spawn of them would end up with the assault bot at about 65-70% end, the drones at 90%+, and the protector bots at about 60-70%. I was going to do more testing with running on standard leveling-up slotting (2 Acc, 3 Dmg, 1 End) to see how they fared, but if it's a known issue that the end costs are too high, then I don't really need to test it.

With the changes to the Robotics set for Masterminds, the tier-2 Protector Bots were given several new attacks, to bring them more in line with other tier-2 pets. That's good. The downside is that the endurance costs on a lot of their attacks seem quite high, and they blow through their end pool at an alarming rate. After some testing, you more or less NEED to have 80% or higher end reduction in the Protector Bots to keep them from hemorrhaging their endurance in the first 30 seconds of any given fight. I tested them at 50th level with full IO slots, with 65%, 80% and 95% end reduction, and with 65% their end pool was gone after one fairly short fight (dealing with 2 bosses, 3 lt's, and 6 minions). At 80% they can hold out a little longer, but will still start to run low if the fight drags out for too long. At 95% they were able to deal with 2 bosses and 1 minion by themselves, but they were at half endurance afterwards. I'm going to do some further testing, with various pet configurations, to see how they last in more protracted fights (such as against an EB or AV), but after testing them out for an hour or so it does seem like their end costs might need to be adjusted a bit. The other bots seem pretty fine as far as endurance goes; the drones with 70% end reduction can keep fighting almost endlessly, while the assault bot can last 3-4 minutes of constant attack cycling with 70%. The new attacks on the protector bots seem to be overwhelming their end reduction though.

Okay, here's the build. I'll just type it up since mids is outdated (I don't think it's got the latest patch that changes power levels and such), so I'll just note down what's what. The order of power picks doesn't really matter all that much, and it's easy enough to swap out the travel power and the stealth/infil powers if you want something different. For the pets, I went with all 6 auras (2 per pet) and then 2 parts of each Sovereign Right and Blood Mandate, for the 2-part set bonuses. It's cheap, and does what I want (namely get their acc/dmg/end high enough -- they end up with 91% dmg, 69% acc/end (the soldiers have 90% end), which combined with tactics and supremacy makes their accuracy fine, and they don't blow through all their end too fast). Power (slots): Soldiers (6): Sov Right (res aura), Edict of the Master (def aura), Sov Acc/Dmg/End, Sov Dmg/End, Blood Acc/Dmg/End, Blood Acc/Dmg Spec Op (6): Mark of Sup (end/res aura), Cmd of Master (aoe def aura), Sov Acc/Dmg/End, Sov Dmg/End, Blood Acc/Dmg/End, Blood Acc/Dmg Commando (6): Exped Reinf (res aura), Call to Arms (def aura), Sov Acc/Dmg/End, Sov Dmg/End, Blood Acc/Dmg/End, Blood Acc/Dmg Equip Merc (3): Steadfast Prot (res/def unique), Glad Armor (tp prot/def unique), Resist Serum (3): 3xRecharge Tactical Upgrade (3): Kismet Def/End, Def/End/Rech and Def/Rech for the 3-part bonus (recovery and smash/lethal resist) -- it's a low-level set, but you lose less than 1% defense, so it's not a big deal imo. Repulsion Bolt (4): Decimation Acc/End/Rech, Ruin Acc/End/Rech, Sudden Accel Kb-to-Kd, End Red (it's got a high end cost, so I wanted to get it down a lot plus some acc/rech) Deflection Shield (4): Gift of the Ancients Def/End, Def/Rech, Def, Def/Runspd Insulation Shield (4): Same as Def Shield Dispersion Bubble (6): Full set Red Fortune Repulsion Field (3): 3xEnd Red (such an insanely high end cost -- could have just gone with 2, but opted for 3 to save a little more end, and if you don't want to put lvl 50's in it) Damping Bubble (4): 3xRech, Gift of the Ancients Def/Runspd Health (3): Panacea unique, Numina unique, Miracle unique Stamina (3): 3xPerformance Shifter End, End/Acc, End proc (you could just opt for the proc and 2 EndMod IOs if you prefer or other sets, but I like the +move and health set bonuses) Medicine: Aid Other (4): Preventive Medicine Heal, Heal/End, Heal/Rech, Heal/Rech/End Medicine: Aid Self (4): Same as Other Medicine: Field Medic (1): Rech Leaping: Combat Jumping (1): Luck of the Gambler Def/Global rech Leaping: Super Jump (3): Full set Winter's Gift Leaping: Acrobatics (1): EndRed Leadership: Maneuvers (6): Full set Reactive Defenses Leadership: Assault (1): EndRed Leadership: Tactics (4): Gaussian's Fire-Control To-Hit, To-Hit/End, To-Hit/End/Rech, To-Hit/Rech Concealment: Stealth (2): Shield Wall (TP prot/Resist unique), Luck of the Gambler (Def/Global Rech unique) Concealment: Infiltration (2): Blessing of the Zephyr Move Spd, Move Spd/End -- for the little bit of ranged defense boost Mace Mastery: Scorpion Shield (6): Full set Red Fortune Notes: You don't really need the global recharge for this build, but I wanted it purely to drop the rech of Serum and Damping Bubble a little bit. Could easily shift those slots elsewhere though. Also, why all the +runspeed? I like to run fast. 🙂 Concealment is completely optional, as is whatever movement power you want to take. I opted for Leaping with this build because I like the protection CJ + Acro gives me, though you could easily replace Acrobatics with a -KB/KD IO in another power. My personal defenses end up with 30% ranged/melee/aoe def, 45% to smash/lethal/energy. I was a bit off on the aoe def the pets had -- I think I might have been thinking of a different /FF MM I had made. But it's still high enough to pass soft cap by a lot.

I've actually got a design document for a superheroic MMO doodled up (it's not finished, but it's full of notes I've made over the years). Some things I'd love to see for "CoH-2": * An alignment system that isn't 'fixed'. Everyone starts out a vigilante as a new character, and based on what sorts of choices you make for missions (either by just taking the mission in the first place (such as choosing to rob a bank, or to save someone), or what you decide to do at the end, like a morality mission (do you kill the bad guy, betray the hero/villain, turn them in, etc) would determine if your reputation goes up or down. The higher it is, the more heroic the populace sees you. The lower, the more villainous. You wouldn't just do one mission and suddenly flip from hero to vigilante, or villain to vigilante, etc. It would require a lot of work to 'fall', and the same amount of work to 'redeem yourself' in the eyes of the populace. * A tree-like structure for choosing powers. Instead of just "you have Energy Blast as a powerset, which includes these 9 powers", you could choose "Energy Manipulation", which would open up various power choices, and as you branch out it opens up other ones, both offensive and defensive, etc. Including overlap between various powers. If you chose "Earth Manipulation" as well as "Fire Manipulation", by combining the two you could open up magma/lava-based powers, for instance. Would make it super easy for the devs to come up with new powers, as if it's something a tree doesn't already have but is thematic for one of them, they can just slot it into a tree. Or make it a "combine two powersets to make this power" ability. * Choosing the focus for your powers. DCUO does something like this, which I think it's pretty cool. If you choose, say, "Fire Blast" as a power, it doesn't automatically come from your hands. You could choose to have it come from your hands, or a gun you draw to shoot fire, come from some gauntlets, a staff, shoot flaming arrows, or whatever else you wanted to choose. Unlike DCUO, you could either choose a different one for each power (like if you wanted to be a walking arsenal with a ton of different weapons and tools) or have them all come from the same weapon (like someone who has a highly-configurable sci-fi pistol that can shoot a ton of different effects). * Configurable pets. If you wanted to be a mastermind-type with minions, you could choose how you want to employ them. Do you want to be the sort with just a bunch of faceless goons, who are all roughly equal? Sure, you can do that. Do you want to be the sort who has a bunch of goons and one Big Goon(tm)? You can do that too. Or do you want to just have one Right Hand Man(tm) who assists you in all your heroic/villainous deeds? Sure, you can do that too. Basically you'd have something along the lines of "control points", with the more you invest into any single henchman the more powerful they become. If you had, say, 10 points to spend, something like a tier-1 mastermind pet might cost 1-2, while a tier-3 might cost 5. Or you could make a big powerful minion/sidekick that costs a full 10. * More open world. This one is pretty obvious. Computers these days can handle open worlds without needing to segment everything off into zones. So a huge open city map would be great. And you could zip off to other locations, like the arctic, the moon, the jungles of south america, the african veldt, etc.

Sure, I can post it when I get home tonight.

After trying out the various attacks for the focus fire buff, I ended up dumping them and just took the new force bolt power instead. -15% resist in one shot feels more impactful than +3% damage per attack, and only costs me one power rather than 2-3. Plus slotting it with a KB-to-KD, I can use it to juggle mobs and keep them on their ass.

Before the update, the mercs set WAS arguably the worst mastermind primary. Largely because the cooldowns were ridiculous, serum was worthless (1000s cooldown, only affected a single pet), and the commando only really had 3 attacks, with the others being on excessively long cooldowns (4m for the rocket launcher, on a pet that can't benefit from recharge reduction, and no way for the MM to control when he uses it). So yes, it was pretty weak in comparison to the other sets. It could still work, but "being workable" and "being good" are two vastly different things. And the reason people don't complain about the thugs set is because while they do a lot of lethal damage, the smashing damage they do is on the bruiser, who is extremely tanky and deals a huge amount of damage. Plus the pyro, for lots of fire damage as well. As for killing things quickly with ninjas? Yes, that's what they do. They churn out an enormous amount of damage, and with /dark debuffing enemies, they can crush things extremely quickly. Their disadvantage was that they had no resists, and very low defense. Which has now been buffed. Ninjas have the most attacks of any pet, with very short cooldowns, and very little animation delay between them (unlike the beast mastery wolves, who suffer from huge animation delays between their attacks, despite low cooldowns). And yes, the repair drone does no damage. However, both the Storm set as well as the PB's photon seekers gain zero benefit from the pet set auras, yet they can still slot them. The repair drone would gain no benefit from attack or damage, but WOULD gain benefits (via assisting the other pets) through the auras. I honestly have no idea why you seem so adamantly opposed to making the various mastermind primary sets have a better level of parity between them. It really feels like you're simply arguing for the sake of arguing at this point. Especially considering the changes that sets have already received. I wonder if you were so opposed to them receiving buffs as well.

I'm not saying "these primaries are garbage and totally useless". Trying to claim I am is wildly hyperbolic. There's a difference between "useless" and "has a disadvantage". For instance, lethal is the single most resisted damage type in the game. Nobody argues that. So the sets (for any AT) that deal purely lethal damage are generally given some advantages in other ways. Be it higher base damage, faster recharging times, etc. I'm also not arguing that all MM primaries can perform well when you're solo. I used to solo stuff on my ninja/trick arrow back on live, when ninjas had basically zero defenses. Was it effective? Not really. It was a massive challenge. But it was still DOABLE, as long as I didn't crank the difficulty up too much. Yes, masterminds are a solid AT. But that doesn't mean one should just wipe their hands and walk away figuring "good enough". Sets, ATs, individual powers, they constantly get tweaked. I'm not asking for MMs to become godmode, because that would be dull. I simply want some parity between the various sets, so it doesn't feel like taking one over another is automatically an advantage. Allowing the various MM sets other than necro, thugs and demons some way to slot in the auras without having to crowbar them into their very limited pet slots isn't asking for that much, IMO. It seems fairly reasonable to me. And it doesn't "make them all the same". It would simply allow the other sets to have some more freedom in slotting without feeling like they're being forced to eat into the effectiveness of their pets to get it, which those other sets are capable of doing. Also, as for the repair bot? It's a pet. It may only have a single function, but it's still a pet. PBs can slot pet sets into their photon seekers, which are also a single-function power. The Storm set can put pet sets into the tornado power, which is just a fire-and-forget roaming dot. Are those fundamentally different? And if so, why?

You're not really refuting anything I said, when you're only using ninjas as your example. Ninjas don't NEED any other bonuses beyond damage/accuracy/endurance reduction to make them effective, and you can accomplish that with 4 slots, leaving 2 in each power for auras. That's what I said about pets being "nothing beyond damage platforms". The problem comes when you have pets that have multiple functionality, such as the protector bots, assault bot, or you want to put in debuff procs like AH in pets like the mercs or wolves, etc. Then it becomes extremely difficult to slot those things in without a significant blow to their overall effectiveness. Requiring certain mastermind sets to drop down to 4 slots (effectively) per pet power if they want to have all 6 auras means that those pets become one-trick ponies. You can't have the protector bots be good at providing defense AND dealing decent damage, for instance. They can only do one of the two. If you want to get rid of the knockback on your assault bot, so it doesn't just kick people out of the fire patches it creates (which is the majority of its damage) then you're going to only be able to 3-slot the pet, if you want 2 auras and the KB-to-KD proc as well. If you want the AH proc in your mecenaries, that drops them to 3 slots. Etc. Saying "you can build them however you want" is true to a limited extent. Sure, I could also build a defender who doesn't take any of my primary powers beyond the ones I'm absolutely forced to take, too. Or I could build a mastermind who only takes the attack powers and ignores the pets entirely. Can I do it? Sure. Is it effective? No. The issue is that there are certain mastermind sets that have a significant bonus over the other sets, due to the "mule power" allowing for the auras to be put into them. Ninjas (the only one you seem to be arguing for) can get away with putting all 6 auras in and just building nothing but A/D/E on the pets, and they'll still be effective, as all they do is damage. Mercs can do it too if you just ignore the AH proc, but but that proc is incredibly useful for them, so with the current setup you have to decide if you want to just tank your tier-1 pets' damage and slot it, or tank your other pets' damage and shove 3 auras onto one of them instead. If you're adamantly opposed to "making everything inherent", then the sets that suffer from slotting drawbacks need to be tweaked a bit. Primarily robotics, beast mastery, and mercenaries. An easy fix for robotics would be allowing the repair drone to have pet sets slotted into it, since it's an actual pet now. Sure, they wouldn't really DO anything for it, since it's just a repair platform, but it would give the robotics set a place to toss in some auras, which it desperately needs considering the multi-role nature of all the other pets. That leaves beast mastery and mercenaries, which still need some tweaking. The changes to mercenaries was an improvement, but they could still use a bit more fine-tuning. Beast mastery and mercenaries don't really have a logical spot to allow for the pet sets to be dumped in, unfortunately. I still wish that they'd just swap out serum and the medic from the tier-1 in mercs and make the 18th level power the medic, and add another soldier to tier-1. Give the serum ability to the medic, along with aid other, stimulant, and a sidearm for some moderate damage, with the serum ability being triggerable by the mastermind, rather than going off the AI. But since that's not likely, allowing the 'recharge-focused pet' sets to be placed in serum would work, even if they don't do anything for the power beyond the recharge. It would at least allow for 2 of the auras to be slotted in there, freeing up space on the pets themselves. I suppose I just don't understand why you seem so adamantly opposed to making all the mastermind primaries equally appealing. Right now some of them simply aren't that great, and are eclipsed by other sets. Robotics in particular has always suffered from low damage that the tier-2's were too much of a multi-role pet to do much more than become one-trick ponies, due to the aura slotting drawbacks of the set, and the fact that you pretty much NEED to slot the KB-to-KD onto the assault bot to keep it from nerfing its own damage due to knockback. I haven't fully explored robotics with the new patch yet, but it's on my list of things to do. Masterminds have always been my favorite class, even back on live. Back then I had around 20 50th level masterminds of various flavors, and on Homecoming I've got about 40 of them, though only a few are 50th level yet, as I keep jumping around between various characters. But certain sets ARE weaker than others, for various reasons. And one of the big ones is the aura slotting.

If pets are nothing but damage-platforms, then using 4 enhancements in order to maximize their output along with having 2 auras per pet is fairly doable. However, it becomes a major problem when you want to do anything ELSE. For instance, do you want to slot the Achilles Heel proc in your mercs? Well, you're going to have to give up a bunch of effectiveness, then, since you're going to have to drop at least one damage mod (since you only have 4 slots) in order to do it, meaning they'll do less damage overall, which makes the proc work out to roughly the same amount of damage anyway. Do you want to put the Sudden Accel KB to KD proc on your assault bot? Same problem. Want to add some defensive bonuses to your protector bots? Yep, you lose out on damage with them as well. Or their ability to repair. Etc. The problem is that there are 3 mastermind sets that have a "mule power", and the rest don't. The ones that don't are far harder to maximize in order to get the same level of effectiveness out of them, and coupled with a lot of them doing smash or lethal damage (mercs, beasts, ninjas) they're already at something of a disadvantage to start with. The lack of a mule power just puts them further behind. Personally, I'd like to see the aura IOs from the sets just gotten rid of entirely, and merged into Supremacy. Make it so that you're not REQUIRED to get those aura IOs, which would allow for far greater flexibility in building masterminds, and would create a great deal more parity between the primary sets. You could have it something like this: Level 6: +10 resists Level 12: +5 defense Level 18: +5 AoE defense Level 24: +10 resists Level 30: +5 defense Level 36: +10 resists Level 42: +5 AoE defense

I'm leveling a merc/ff character right now. She's up to 23rd so far, and doing pretty well. My build with her on test was doing extremely well, running around killing groups of mobs on +2/8 without any trouble at all, though it was fairly slow simply because of the lack of high-damage aoe. I'd probably just run on like +1/6 or +0/8 or so to move along at a decent pace. With the full build, my mercs will be at around 43% melee def, 55% ranged def, 65% aoe def, 65% smash/lethal resist, and 30-40% to other resists.

Ninja/Trick Arrow Mastermind. I had one on live, because I thought it would be fun to be an archer ninja commanding other ninjas. It's incredibly painful and slow to level. No heal, no real boosts to keep your ultra-squishy pets alive, they just get roflstomped while you try and desperately mitigate things with your arrows.

I replaced mine with the banshee screams, and they're nicer. It's a pity you can't change them on a per-character basis though. I'd love to have a character who uses really heavy-bass "wub wub wub" for sonics, and another with banshee wails.

I have so many alts that I can always hop on someone else to team with friends. 🙂

I usually just pick whatever alignment I think best suits the character. Which usually ends up being vigilante or rogue for most of them, with a few pure villains and pure heroes sprinkled in. 🙂

Yeah, the Arachnos guys have "an army behind them", but at the same time, you're told early on that it's basically survival of the fittest. If a squad of Arachnos flunkies pick a fight with you and get curb-stomped, you won't get punished for it. The Arachnos guys should know that too. So mouthing off to the walking nuclear meltdown, the girl who fires lasers from her eyes that can melt a tank, or the guy that can pick up and juggle cars would seem like a Really Dumb Idea(tm). The main thing I dislike (or, well, outright hate) is the forced dialogue choices. Especially when it comes to Hardcase. He literally threatens to kill you to your face. And your ONLY option is to just meekly knuckle under. "Oh gosh, sorry sir, please don't hurt me! <sob sob>" It's pitiful, and it makes me never want to do that arc.

The only thing I didn't (and still don't) like about redside is that the contacts generally treat you like you're nothing more than a hired goon. They don't show you much, if any, respect, talk down to you, and generally consider you to be just some random thug off the street that they can boss around. That irks me, especially once you're up into the 30+ range, and you can literally level a city block without breaking a sweat. Yet some random lieutenant in Arachnos is sneering and talking down to you, or worse, there's a contact in St. Martial (I think it's Hardcase?) who literally threatens your life, and your only dialogue option is to meekly back down. What the hell. Other than that, redside is by far my favorite. I just wish there were contacts that treated you with respect, fear, and/or awe. The only one who does that I can think of off the top of my head is Dean McArthur in Sharkhead, who actually wants to be on your good side and help you out, rather than using you for his own ends. You could crush him like a bug and he knows it.