Curious how people run Goldside 1-20

[Apogee]

I run through a lot of Goldside.  I am curious how others run the content.  Do you only play through a single alignment?  Do you work undercover and run all missions, switching sides as you go?  Do you run one arc at a time, or do you run 2 or 3 at once?

[TheOtherTed]

I tried doing all missions on one character, but found out the hard way that you can break mission chains.  At some point you wil encounter a mission to defeat (or otherwise undermine) a quest-giver NPC on "the other side."  Such missions will result in said NPC being removed permanently from your game.

 

That said, if I start Loyalist, I'll typically end up switching to Resistance after the first arc for RP reasons, and it's a toss of a three-sided coin to determine if I go Warden, Crusader, or both.

 

I do have one "pure" Power Loyalist out there, but I don't find the arcs all that engaging.  Feels like it's all about building fame instead of actual power, sort of a bloody version of "America's Got Talent."

 

 

Edited May 20, 2023 by TheOtherTed
the words! The Words!!!

[Skyhawke]

I pick a lane (just did good side Loyalist but switched at the end...couldn't bring myself to kill Kang ) and roll on. I've seen all the arcs so fomo doesn't factor in and there's always Ouroboros for the other badges. I do follow the "cut xp off at certainlevels" trick so I don't miss the choice per zone.

 

[Apogee]

I always run all four arcs (I have to get the 'Agent of Praetoria' badge title), usually siding either Warden or Responsibility.  I do enjoy the undercover plotlines. I tend to run the 3 available arcs concurrently getting each final contact to the morality mission then picking one to switch sides so I can run the fourth arc.  For instance, currently I am running an undercover Loyalist in Imperial City doing the Responsibility, Power, and Warden arcs up to their respective morality missions (McKnight, Sinclair, and Seer 1381 contacts) taking care to complete Dr Steffard's missions before finishing off Kang's final mission.  I will complete one arc as Resistance to open the Crusader arcs then run that up to the morality mission.  At that point I make my choices based upon the original theme of the character, making sure not to lock out an arc due to alignment conflicts.  Sounds more complex than it is.

 

I guess what I am wondering is if most people focus on a single arc at a time or multitask 3 at a time?

[Saeletra]

When doing gold side, I always end up running the Loyalist Power arc. I don't enjoy the sewers and there's just too much of that when going Resistance.

I keep saying I'm going to try the resistance and the Loyalist Responsibility, And then I hit my limit for sewers, ghouls, and clockwork. When I get out of Praetoria I always tell myself "Oh, when I'm 50, I'll go do all the arcs through Ouro!" As of today, I never have! I'll probably get around to it in the future!

 

[Apogee]

6 minutes ago, Saeletra said:

When doing gold side, I always end up running the Loyalist Power arc. I don't enjoy the sewers and there's just too much of that when going Resistance.

I keep saying I'm going to try the resistance and the Loyalist Responsibility, And then I hit my limit for sewers, ghouls, and clockwork. When I get out of Praetoria I always tell myself "Oh, when I'm 50, I'll go do all the arcs through Ouro!" As of today, I never have! I'll probably get around to it in the future!

 

 

I am just the opposite, I love the Praetorian underground, it is one of the things that draws me to Goldside over Blueside.  The only thing worse than a blueside sewer is a blueside cave system.  I'm talking to you, 'layer cake' cave map!  My least favorite mob has to be the Destroyer's Blast Master or the Seers, simply irritating.  Ghouls and Clockwork I can live with.  They are slow, easily bypassed, and have funny defeat animations.

[Saeletra]

The sewers are all very "samey" and Looooooong to me. Ghouls, I have the worst time getting them to leave their dying friends, so I end up having to kill them twice. And Clocks, well, I end up doing a lot of Psi stuff when in Praetoria. Strange how that works, huh?

My first Praetorian was a Psi/Psi Dom. Mostly because I wanted to see if Mother was going to come after me, and if there was going to be a separate arc addressing why my character wasn't in the seer network and "Under Control". Since everyone knows that psi people are half a step away from losing control, and only Mother and her seers can control psi active people. For the good of Praetoria. So Mother tells us. <.<

 

[Techwright]

Back in the OG, whenever I did play Gold side,  I always ran the resistance side, believing it to be the closest to blue side in nature, and always focused on the non-extremist faction within it.  I always exited at 20, and didn't play on.  I might have realized how it didn't really fit either blue or red had I continued on enough to learn about Calvin Scott in his full nature.

 

As my thread indicated, I'm going back in and choosing to run pure Loyalist this time, just to see how it differs.

[BrandX]

First play through on Gold Side I did with a Stalker and did the Resistance side of things as I out leveled things easily.

 

Second time, I followed a guide to get through all arcs with XP being turned off.

 

However, going to run it a third time, but do the arcs in a different order than they listed, as I believe the story can flow a bit better, but still have to be careful not to kill off NPCs.

[Coyotedancer]

Single alignment only, typically... and almost always solo. It's just annoying to run with a team, I find. Especially a mixed-alignment one. 

[Saeletra]

8 minutes ago, Coyotedancer said:

Single alignment only, typically... and almost always solo. It's just annoying to run with a team, I find. Especially a mixed-alignment one. 

 

That is my main grip about starting in Praetoria. Teaming is odd and weird. And at one point, everybody will have to split off to do their own personal mission. If they want to advance their chosen path through Praetoria.

[ChzBoi]

....I usually do one of these : Switching For Fun!  ...............

[lemming]

I tend to run all four arcs for the badges, but occasionally I'll just run the less morally corrupt ones.

 

Currently looking at Apparations Guide and checking against what @Apogee has mentioned about level limits.  (Dang it, he's so far proving correct! 😉 )

https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Apparition's_Complete_Guide_to_Praetoria

 

So far, level 10 and 15 are the cutoffs, not 7 & 14 as the guide says.  Double checking Neutropolis later today.  So far, looks like the order works, just the level is the issue, though as @Apogee had mentioned, you'll need to walk up to the contacts instead of relying on Marchand or Calvin to intro the first contacts

[Greycat]

I think my answer is "slowly and rarely."

 

Just got one Praetorian out of there. I don't recall if I have any others. I don't think so.

[Apogee]

10 hours ago, Coyotedancer said:

Single alignment only, typically... and almost always solo. It's just annoying to run with a team, I find. Especially a mixed-alignment one. 

 

I wonder how the Bobcat ambush mission would be on a full AoE team 

[Apogee]

10 hours ago, lemming said:

I tend to run all four arcs for the badges, but occasionally I'll just run the less morally corrupt ones.

 

Currently looking at Apparations Guide and checking against what @Apogee has mentioned about level limits.  (Dang it, he's so far proving correct! 😉 )

https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Apparition's_Complete_Guide_to_Praetoria

 

So far, level 10 and 15 are the cutoffs, not 7 & 14 as the guide says.  Double checking Neutropolis later today.  So far, looks like the order works, just the level is the issue, though as @Apogee had mentioned, you'll need to walk up to the contacts instead of relying on Marchand or Calvin to intro the first contacts

 

Thanks Lemming!   I reread Apparition's initial thread on the subject and he was trying to get all of the introduction dialogs from Scott and Marchand, which would require the early level locks.  I think I stopped calling Scott for introductions right after I started his arc by mistake when I was trying to get Crow's number.  Little gotchas like that are annoying.  The Dr. Steffard/Kang conflict makes sense but Scott's mission should not be available at all until after you complete Crow and Helix.

[rolandgrey]

I run Goldside with great ambivalence and a lot of agitation. 

 

On the one hand, I like a lot of the story.  The Praetorians are no longer simply mustache-twirling mirror opposites of the Main Game Heroes.  We've got Redside characters that show up and some of them turn out to be just as monstrous as their Primal counterparts.  We've got Blueside characters who show up that are still heroic.  We've got the Praetorians dealing with a bad situation and struggling desperately to turn it around.  The different arcs demonstrate the difficulty of trying to exist in a world like this and sticking to your ideals.  Go the Power route, and morality never even enters into the conversation.  Instead, you're just tearing your way up the ladder of social clout and popular privilege.  Go the Responsibility route, and you're faced with the everyday corruption of the Praetorians, up to and including helping Praetorian Tilman (Mother Mayhem) to kidnap and brainwash people.  Go the Warden route, and you're trying to help people, but you're constantly stymied by authorities who don't understand (nor can you explain the situation to them) or you're being hampered by your own allies in the Crusaders, who think you're not "hardcore" enough to make a difference.  Finally, you go the Crusader route and you commit war crimes; there's no way to sugarcoat detonating a neutron bomb in Imperial City.

 

I'm not going to go into the weirdness of the morality system.  The highly complex Praetorian side, with convoluted and downright unsettling arcs that can be genuinely thought-provoking boils down to a binary choice once you reach level 20.  Other people have deliberated on this again and again.  I've got nothing new to add to the conversation there.

 

What I do have to add, however, is how CRUNCHED the story feels.  There is a lot of content in Praetoria, and even if you stick to one path, you run a risk of missing out on content in that path.  I've had to turn off XP gain in order to finish some arc paths because I tried to do those paths with prior characters only to outlevel the content.  The 1-20 Praetorian content could have EASILY been expanded out to level 25 by the Paragon Devs, maybe even out to level 30.  First Ward and Night Ward could have served as the 30+ and 40+ content as a result (with the events in Night Ward running simultaneous to the arcs The Anti-Matter Collision and A Hero's Epic)...  But I'm gonna get into those a little bit later.

 

The difficulty of Praetoria is significantly ramped up from CoH and CoV.  City of Villains was a significant jump from what you encountered in City of Heroes through the implementation of multiple elite bosses, arch villains and heroes.  They're ubiquitous to Red Side while Blue Side is mostly long arcs.  What did Paragon do with Praetoria after years of "Flavor of the Month" build discussions and lamentations that "the game is too easy?"  They threw HORDES of enemies at us.  The ambush mechanics are horrifically abused, with ambushes dropping in one after another onto the players.  The maps are big, with many, MANY enemies.  Do NOT go into these missions with a changed difficulty setting that's higher than the base +0/X1 or you will get well acquainted with the game's floors.  On top of that, the NPCs are operating on the Architect's logic of enemy construction, rather than how the CoH and CoV enemies were designed, which means we're essentially fighting armies of broken down PCs, but with the boosts attributed to their rank at the same time.  Minions have virtually no boosts, but Lieutenants gain health and resistance bonuses and Bosses gain more; slapping a PC suite of powers onto that makes enemies that are tougher than the game's difficulty settings were designed to account for.  Praetoria is NOT a path for beginners to take.  On top of that, if you are a good enough player to handle the ridiculous onslaught, then you will gain so much experience that you will quickly level out of the content.  It's bizarre Going Rogue was made this way, and it needed a lot of tweaking...  It's serviceable as-is, but it's very pointedly "not fun," and that leaves it a huge turnoff for most players.  Throw in that there are no Task/Strike Forces for Praetorian Side and you're left with not a lot of incentive to go there, either.

 

So, there's been speculation that Praetoria is New Orleans.  The shotgun houses in Neutropolis and general "swamp" feel of the vegetation around the city implies this.  However, the ever present "London Speak" brings to mind England...  Then you go to First Ward and Night Ward.  First Ward has characters talking about "The Gumbo," discussing voodoo, has a Native American contact who is also a mystic...  But the architecture doesn't look like anything out of North America, and certainly not anything that would have stood in the swamps at the mouth of the Mississippi.  Night Ward is supposed to be a dark reflection of First Ward, and is riddled with spooky Bobbies and characters are constantly talking in "London Speak."  (Can you tell that Doctor Who was popular at the time?)  This leads me to think that Praetoria is built on the ruins of New Orleans, but First Ward and Night Ward are what remains of London.  The only way I can square the "London Speak" in Praetoria is a large refugee immigrant population...  Or it's all nonsense and they just used a pastiche of Londoner speak in their writing because they were watching a bunch of BBC at the time, leaving the whole story a confused mess.  At this point, the story really starts to fall apart as your character has to try to save the day despite the utter incompetence of your erstwhile allies and the abrupt stop of assistance from the Resistance (because First Ward and Night Ward's arc writing just assumes you're working for the Resistance now).  Despite having some really good ideas in here, the experience is ultimately disappointing.

[Major_Decoy]

I have a different approach for every character. Most recently I've got a loyalist start who stopped doing the Responsibility arcs when asked to murder someone and is now doing the Warden arcs. I'll see where that leads, but I usually feel pretty good about most of the warden arcs. Then I've got a Resistance start Crusader who is going to find new people to associate with as soon as she's asked to turn seers into bombs. Working as a loyalist is out of the question, so it's probably going to be radio missions up until 20.

[Coyotedancer]

9 hours ago, rolandgrey said:

So, there's been speculation that Praetoria is New Orleans.  The shotgun houses in Neutropolis and general "swamp" feel of the vegetation around the city implies this.  However, the ever present "London Speak" brings to mind England...  Then you go to First Ward and Night Ward.  First Ward has characters talking about "The Gumbo," discussing voodoo, has a Native American contact who is also a mystic...  But the architecture doesn't look like anything out of North America, and certainly not anything that would have stood in the swamps at the mouth of the Mississippi.  Night Ward is supposed to be a dark reflection of First Ward, and is riddled with spooky Bobbies and characters are constantly talking in "London Speak."  (Can you tell that Doctor Who was popular at the time?)  This leads me to think that Praetoria is built on the ruins of New Orleans, but First Ward and Night Ward are what remains of London.  The only way I can square the "London Speak" in Praetoria is a large refugee immigrant population...  Or it's all nonsense and they just used a pastiche of Londoner speak in their writing because they were watching a bunch of BBC at the time, leaving the whole story a confused mess.  At this point, the story really starts to fall apart as your character has to try to save the day despite the utter incompetence of your erstwhile allies and the abrupt stop of assistance from the Resistance (because First Ward and Night Ward's arc writing just assumes you're working for the Resistance now).  Despite having some really good ideas in here, the experience is ultimately disappointing.

 

 

Gulf Coast, definitely... But not necessarily Nola, so much as an alternate-world reflection of, say, Galveston or Biloxi. 

 

As for First Ward (and Night Ward's -) British influence... I read that as more of a nod to Bermuda and the Caribbean than London. Night Ward's stronger ties being a reflection of the colonial past, in particular.

 

Call it making up for giving the Primal world's version of Bermuda (The Rogue Isles-) a French colonial history instead. 😝

 

 

 

 

Edited May 21, 2023 by Coyotedancer

[Darmian]

1 hour ago, Coyotedancer said:

Call it making up for giving the Primal world's version of Bermuda (The Rogue Isles-) a French colonial history instead. 😝

I suppose it makes up LOL, kinda sorta, since RI is nowhere near Bermuda.

[Coyotedancer]

5 hours ago, Darmian said:

I suppose it makes up LOL, kinda sorta, since RI is nowhere near Bermuda.

 

Yeah... Paragon City in Rhode Island is a fair distance from the Caribbean or the Gulf Coast, but I don't think they ever said Praetoria was supposed to be a geographical match for Paragon City.

[Darmian]

6 minutes ago, Coyotedancer said:

 

Yeah... Paragon City in Rhode Island is a fair distance from the Caribbean or the Gulf Coast, but I don't think they ever said Praetoria was supposed to be a geographical match for Paragon City.

No, Shroud City was though, and it got nuked.

[Zhym]

I suspect that the reason it's so easy to outlevel Praetorian content is that leveling was much, much slower on Live.  So I think it was probably possible back then to go through Praetoria and get "all" the content for a single set of morality choices.  You couldn't, say, do all the Warden and Power and Responsibility and Crusader arcs in each of the three zones without pausing XP, but that wasn't really the design; the idea was to create replayability by setting up choices that would give players different experiences each time they played through.  Of course, that didn't account for the fact that many of us are completists who want to be able to run everything with a single character. 

 

In answer to the question at the top of the thread, I've done it multiple ways.  I've had characters level past content, usually because I'm not paying attention to my XP.  Those characters never seem to get the full Praetorian experience.  I've also had one or two characters go the slow route through Praetoria, doing everything and pausing XP.  But my default in Praetoria is to take the middle road, swapping between Warden and Responsibility.

Also, as a practical matter, stealth helps a lot in Praetoria.  It's not perfect—some mobs cheerfully ignore stealth—but it does cut down the amount of time that has to be spent fighting Ghouls in really big maps.

[Apogee]

49 minutes ago, Zhym said:

Also, as a practical matter, stealth helps a lot in Praetoria.  It's not perfect—some mobs cheerfully ignore stealth—but it does cut down the amount of time that has to be spent fighting Ghouls in really big maps.

 

You can also simply run past the ghouls (or anything else) as the mobs have a very short leash.  You may catch a stray rock, or at worst a PPD jump debuff.  On maps where you don't have to defeat all, or especially on the big ambush in Bobcat's arc, speed is just as effective as stealth (more so on that Bobcat mission as stealth is useless there)

[Psi-bolt]

Curious from people who have a lot of experience in this area, but how do the undercover instructions work?  I'll get the message to reach out to Marchand or Calvin and no matter what whether I call or try to walk up to them, there's no interaction. 

 

On the OP's topic, I usually pick an initial route and then decide morality based on what I would want the character to do.  For example, the Stalker I recently built wouldn't side with Chief Interrogator Washington, and so went to the Resistance, but I followed the Responsibility arcs after that away as a Resistance member.  At the end, I wound up doing a lot of Responsibility and Warden stuff, no Powers and no Crusader.  I'm thinking about doing the same thing but going full crazy as a Crusader.