Zed-F

Re: The Envelope Sylph, being the trusting sort, would immediately head to the location the note specifies. But she would make a few phone calls on the way so that the UNTIL and her usual allies are aware of where she is going and why. Should things go south, backup should not be far away. As far as Soulbarb goes, it'd depend more on context, and specifically on the tone the campaign has taken to date. Normally she's secretive to the point where few people even know she exists, let alone where to leave a package so that she would find it personally. If someone wanted to ask for her help, leaving an unexplained package for her to find and sending her on a goose chase is not how they would be likely to go about it. She'd be highly suspicious and would take all reasonable precautions, including carefully examining the envelope for additional potential clues, making sure backup is on tap and (if at the right part of her career) scrying the area in question to see what is there before she goes anywhere near it.

Re: The Tale of Instant Karma Part 2:

Re: The Tale of Instant Karma Heh, well he has reticles front and back, and reticles for eyes... he's ostensibly supposed to be part machine after all. Kinda reminiscent of the Silicates from Space Above And Beyond in that way, actually.

Re: The Tale of Instant Karma Yeah, Mr. Sword master villain, go ahead and try to get me in here...

Re: The Tale of Instant Karma Getting a little ahead of the story here, but say hello to my new little friend... Why hello, Mr. Power Armour master villain! No, you may not shoot back. You go ahead and keep throwing those Shuriken my way there, Redstone... go ahead and stay at range rather than closing to melee. That suits me just fine!

Re: The Tale of Instant Karma Instant Karma is a Challenge character. The concept -- a badass normal without any of the badassery. He uses conventional guns, i.e. Pure Munitions, and has no Talents or Superstats. That means, among other things: - No passives, defensive or otherwise - No effective means to self-heal short of resting (stim pack on holdout shot is fairly useless) - EDIT: No block enhancer as well - No damage boost from superstats - All characteristics come from equipment, so in total under half what most toons have - Extremely limited variety of moves, since almost all munitions powers are straight-up attacks of one sort or another. Hopefully the result is more tactical play and more use of crafted items/devices. So far I've had some of the former, but not much of the latter. I've gotten him to level 15, and he's approaching the point where he'll be done messing with Viper in Canada (for now) and on his way back to MC.

Part 1 ------

Re: The Golden Apple Sylph knows that decisions like this are out of her league. She gives them to the local UNTIL commander, who she knows to be trustworthy and who at least has got the authority to make official decisions about this sort of thing, and lets her figure out what to do with them. Soulbarb most likely never lets it on that she even found the files to begin with, and instead keeps that little fact a secret. At the very least until she's read them and knows what they contain. She might act on the information contained therein, or disseminate bits of it to those she feels should know, but for most of her career the only person whose judgement she is inclined to trust in this sort of thing is herself.

Re: Abilities Discussion Shockwave is a maintain, not a charge. If clicking on it, you just hold down the mouse button on it. Using the number keys tends to be more reliable, however, I find. Also, you can re-organize which power is where in your bar by opening up the powers window (P) and dragging and dropping your powers in the power tray to whichever slots work best for you.

Re: On the Willful Killing and Maiming of NPCs Here's another option: Option 5: Disappear him. It's a variety of option 2-3, only instead of explicitly killing him in a no-one could have survived that scenario, or maiming him, have the Cobalt Kid be forced by circumstance into doing something or going somewhere extremely dangerous but not necessarily explicitly fatal. He may or may not be changed as a result, but either way, enough clues and/or media coverage can make their way back to convince the PCs that something bad and/or permanent is likely to happen to him if they don't step in to help. Ultimately, the PCs may fail to catch up to Cobalt Kid; he can vanish for a while, and who knows what might have happened to him by the time you feel it might be useful for him to show up again? In the meantime, they find themselves embroiled in the larger situation...

Re: Disappointment

Re: Do PFF and Invulnerability Stack? There is one exception for Defiance + Defensive Combo if you switch builds, but it may be an exploit.

Re: MA/Claws... is there any Hope? Lightning Reflexes is a MA passive, and it's anything but crappola.

Re: Disappointment It would be a lot easier to do justice to the Hero System rules if you were not making a multiplayer game at all, much less an MMO. On the downside, I'd still venture to guess that the market for a computer game that mimics the Hero System rules as closely as possible is not a lot larger than the number of people that are willing to play PnP games using said system in the first place. For a proposition as expensive as computer game development, that's still a very small revenue pool. Best chance of seeing daylight: Labour of love single developer indie title. Skip the feature laundry lists, high production values, and associated costs, and try to gather a following. The game might even make a little money, if it's lucky.

Re: I have faced, the Destroyer.... IIRC Dynamode@Zed-F is at about the right point for the Destroyer Factory missions. Look me up when you're on!

Re: Disappointment If you think that's trolling, you have a very odd definition of the word. If you want to imagine a fantasy world where a MMO that offers everything the Hero System Rules offers exists, go right ahead. I'm just injecting a dose of reality to the discussion for those who might think it's in any way likely to occur. Because I work in software development and have some inkling of what I'm talking about. Plus, I have at least an ounce of business sense. MMOs are already very complicated beasts even with all the limits currently on them. They are accordingly very expensive to make. Further, a large percentage of their client base is the instant gratification sort, who just want to jump in and play and don't care about complex character generation. A superhero MMO is already targeting a relatively small portion of the overall software games market, even trying to make it as accessible as possible, as CO does. So you're talking about adding a hugely complex RPG rules framework (and thus hugely expensive in terms of developer man-hours) to an already very complex game. How many people do you really think want all that complexity? DDO did a partial job of implementing the D&D rules, which is a far more popular game system than Hero and a far less complex one, and it didn't get them very much traction with the MMO market. Trying to develop a MMO that tries to be faithful to the Hero System Rules would be throwing money down a hole. You'd never see that feature pay off, in terms of customers attracted to the game because of it relative to the amount of money sunk into it that could have been spent making the game better in other ways. You'd also be taking a huge risk, because most MMOs fail and an overly targetted MMO like one centered on the Hero System Rules would just be asking to become a casualty. If you can find an MMO developer with a vision to make the world a better place for Hero System fans everywhere and a corporate sugar daddy with a money tree and endless patience, sure it might be possible to make the game. But making it profitable is something else altogether.

Re: Disappointment It might be possible to create a MMO with all the complexity of the Hero System rules, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Would it be a cost-effective way of spending your development dollars, which are necessarily limited in number? Would you have a large enough target market that would welcome that level of complexity in character generation? No, on both counts. It might be possible, but it's extremely doubtful that it could be profitable.

Re: Best of the Best That's Ego Storm, it has a maximum of 5 targets per pulse. Like all maintained attacks, if there are more than 5 targets and one target dies partway through the maintain, the AoE will retarget whatever's in its area to keep hitting 5 live enemies rather than continuing to kill the dead one; this is part of what makes high DPS maintained AoEs and summoned damage effects so quick to bring down packs of enemies, as compared to charged attacks which generally waste the extra damage. Ego Storm a very effective PBAoE, but you do have to be mobile and get close to use it. It can put out some pretty impressive damage numbers to go with the hold too, especially if stacking some +Ego damage buffs such as TK Eruption and Shadow Form.

Re: Best of the Best Force Shield+Sheath is nice if you need energy. If what you're looking for is mitigation, however, the linger effects on both Energy Shield+Laser Knight and Ebon Void+Voracious Darkness are superior. As far as best ranged AoE goes, I'm going to have to disagree with Orbital Cannon. Sure it's nice as far as it goes, but if you don't have INT superstatted it's really not all that. I'd suggest Conflagration is superior; it will wipe out whole packs of henchmen and seriously maul villains on a full maintain, but you don't have to wait 30s to do it again, and against tougher targets you can tap an advantaged fireball first to debuff enemy fire resist first for even more damage. Yes it costs a lot of energy, but there are a lot more ways around that than there are around Orbital Cannon's recharge time. With a decent build, you can do a full maintain of Conflag three times as often as an INT-superstatted Orbital Cannon, and four times as often as a non-INT-superstatted Orbital Cannon. With a really optimized build, you can run it even more than that. Sonic Device as the best self-buff? Uh, no. Not even close. Circle of Primal Dominion has that distinction hands down. No other skill in the game will let one character essentially get the full benefit of 2 defensive passives at the same time.

Re: The Incredible Shrinking Species Yeah, and it's not like tampering with the entire race couldn't have side effects. Not to mention that most of the inhabitants of the planet didn't ask to be shrunk. This idea of Ray's is an abortion from the start. Soulbarb is no techie, but is a capable investigator. She'll either figure out how to stop the satellite or alert someone who can. Then she'll investigate to find out what, if anything, would make the normally conscientious Ray pull a stunt like this. It's got just enough upside to blind him to the downside if he did really make the move from hero to anti-hero (Well Intentioned Extremist), but it might have been precipitated by another party. Sylph is no techie either, but is all about giving people a chance to mend their ways before resorting to force. She will earnestly try to talk Ray out of his plan. She's not really that great a debater, so while she will have logic on her side, she's unlikely to be able to convince him that this is a bad idea. Nevertheless, he's likely to let enough information slip during the course of the debate that she'll be able to figure out a means to stop the satellite.

Re: Takofanes, where is he? They are staggered, with 30 minute timers you can likely run around to whichever one is currently active and not be waiting around too much. Not to mention the timers run differently in different instances of MC, so if you need a particular one of them it shouldn't be hard to find an instance where the wait isn't too long. Also, the most efficient way to do it would seem to be to run around collecting quests first by defeating the open mission bosses as they spawn in sequence, and then once you have them all available go do the crypts at your own speed. Of course having all the quests active at once will occupy almost all of your quest log so you may need to clear your plate first. Bear in mind that the event lasts several days; the In Memoriam perk isn't something you're supposed to be able to do in a couple easy hours. That said, the quests are shareable, so if you don't care about getting the boss-kill perks and just want In Memoriam, you can get the quests shared from anyone that has them. I have a couple toons with all the quests available, even though they haven't defeated the open mission bosses yet. (I do plan on defeating all the open mission bosses at some point with at least one of my characters, but probably not more than one.) As far as finding the locations goes, they aren't too difficult to find, and if you're missing some you can always ask in Zone chat, usually there will be someone accommodating. They show up as tiny pink dots on intersections in your map, as well, but these are really easy to overlook.

Re: Question time... There's also some new missions that were just introduced with Bloodmoon. They are from 18-21 but can potentially get you enough XP to bump you up a level so you can see more quests.

Re: Official Hero Boards Super Team And Chat Channel! Lag problems today making it impossible to add ppl to the SG -- or at least extremely slow. Best to join the Hero Board Chat channel, though, so you can ask if there are any officers online and if so give them a reminder.

Re: Anybody else having problems? Yup, not working well this evening, was fine this morning and early afternoon. Hopefully they'll be able to fix it for tomorrow.

Re: Floodgate?! Hopefully if they are drawing inspiration from European Enemies, they will at least make an effort to make sure the end result is more sensible than many of the European Enemies villains were. At least we don't have to worry about them using the writeups.