This was the other thing that I had been curious about ever since they announced this this whole WWD scenario, how they're addresing the timeline problems.
Up until WWD the game never really ran into a problem of having a character you talk to in a low level arc show up in a high level arc. So the game had a couple options for how they could handle the deaths: Treat it like Praetoria in that each character would have a different world view, which they've officially moved over to Paragon proper with the Shining Stars arc. Or they could have it where it just so happens that States is actually quite isolated and like Nocren says, he's still alive in the Tutorial because he isn't dead yet.
But then Penelope Yin grows up, and shit gets all fucked up.
I don't know about you guys, but the amount of characters I have who even heard Yin's name before was pretty fucking low. Delta *certainly* had not gone through the Faultline arc, so I had never fucking met the chick before. But the dialog firmly establishes that I had teamed up with her *at some point* (it never really refers to the Faultline content directly.).
So maybe they have a somewhat Global Timeline in that after a certain period of time, things become canon and current. This is why States is still technically alive right now, but will suddenly not be on the day 23 goes live. There are two downsides to this:
1. Despite the fact that the hero who gets to talk to Adult Yin can't do those first missions w/o Time Travel, they *can* freely travel down to Faultline and see Young Yin hanging out with her Clockwork still. I can let this go, as it seems to be a pretty simple lack of code they can add to have the Yin contact function like the other Disappearing Contacts once SSA#...5? is played.
2. As I believe F_t_M was trying to say, this makes SSA seem sort of silly for anyone trying to play it Post-i23. Luckily, there's an entire zone dedicated strictly to solving these sorts of problems, and thank FUCK they made Oro. It's a god damn convenient way to solve any Continuity problems you run into.
If this is the way they're going to do it, they should add a time-travel arc that has to be done before you start WWD. Maybe the WWD antagonist is fucking up the timeline and making States/Psyche die early, or something, and so you have to go back in time and fight alongside them in some of their pivotal battles to prevent them from being ambushed. That way, a new player might actually care when they get offed in WWD.
Is it really critical to focus on that though? Or the players that have been around til this point?
Until about a month ago, I had *never* done any content involving Statesman directly. But because his mark has been left all over this world, I could infer just how impressive he was. It was one of the things that turned me off DCU actually, since they have Superman fight along side you at the end of the tutorial.
How a new player can't immediately see that opening Splash Screen and not get how important he is, I don't know.
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NocrenLt Futz, Back in ActionNorth CarolinaRegistered Userregular
Don't you also "work with Yin" during the Lady Grey/Warzone stuff?
::shrugs:: Maybe?
...FINE!
::goes to the Wiki:: Oh, look at that.
The end of the Faultline storyline hints that Penelope could have started being trained by heroes such as Aurora Borealis and Sister Psyche.
At her next appearance, during the Lady Grey Task Force, it seems she already has had some of that training.
During the Lady Grey Task Force, Penny has a rank of Hero, though she is actually Boss-class, with the appropiate amount of Hit Points of her level. She has a variety of psychic attacks as well to defend herself with. She will fight the Rikti, but not the Clockwork, and they will ignore her completely.
A more grown-up Penelope Yin appears in the Signature Story Arc Who Will Die Episode 6. Chronically, five years have passed since her last appearance from the Lady Grey Task Force, with her new appearance and clothes reflecting her nature as a heroine, though she has yet to take up any sort of superhero codename.
Now I did some extra digging, because of that "five years" bit nagging at me.
Faultline was revamped in i8, which came out November, 2006.
The LGTF was introduced in i10 which dropped July,2007.
So while the 5 years is close, it's not completely accurate. The character model in the LGTF is the same as in Faultline, so we can assume Real-Time is applied here (going with universal Comic and Media Laws that state time can pass but outfits do not need to necessarily change.)
Since 4 and a half years is certainly long enough time to study and hone your Psychic Skills, we can actually assume that the person experiencing sliding Time Scales is *You*. You can go through the Faultline arc tonight. You can then blast the fuck ahead 20 levels in an hour, go start WWD6, and have those 20 levels actually represent 5 years to your character.
Which I believe was actually someone else theory that the only accurate way to discern Measurement Of Time in this game, is by your levels. It doesn't matter if you were doing AE Farming and got your guy to 50 in a day, you've been around for ages. This, oddly enough, is actually in line with most other Pen&Paper RPGs in relating to XP actually meaning Literal Experiences and that the more you have, the older/wiser you are.
I know, right? The fact that I just had to retcon the fuck out of it's own timeline. I think that put it's into Official Comic Book Teritory. Excelsior to you, Paragon Studios! You've created something so convoluted, only the nerdiest of nerds could unravel it!
Oh that's fucking interesting, I wasn't aware it was a Power Pool. There's quite a few character I have who simply run the fuck out of powers to take, so having another PP is always rad. Do we know anything about the powers in that particular pool?
I'm not sure how much of this is supposed to be known, but Ive seen the set and its interesting. Its got a blast sort of power that is also KD. An Ally buff that absorbs some incoming damage every few seconds. A slower fly that enables a shorter range teleport (both in one power). A power that looks like a weak ally/enemy targeted burn patch, and a long recharge power that grants minimal damage resistance and some mez protection. I haven't seen actual numbers on any of this.
Edit- I'm sure all of this is still up for change.
Looked on test. You can link the power names and see what they do. Arcane Bolt is a 1.32 scale 80' ranged blast, 25% chance for mild knockback, 6 second recharge with 1.67 second cast time.
Enflame looks like it sets people on fire and makes them trail fire which damages people? Hard to say just from the description. Might be that a person just leaves burn patches as they walk.
Mystic Flight is a fly toggle that's slower than Fly, but also gives you a power called Translocation while it's up which doesn't link right but sounds like a teleport.
Rune of Protection is a 10m recharge self-buff click. Gives 16.25% resist to all, knockback protection, and mag 10 mez protection for 1 minute.
Spirit Ward is an ally buff that uses the new Absorption mechanic, dunno what that is or how it works.
I hope they buff the Hybrid support spec a bit, because it's looking a bit weak right now. Basically it's a wide-area Leadership that's got too high an endurance cost to stack with actual Leadership (barring Cardiac alpha, I guess).
The beta forums are reporting that all the hybrid powers burn 0.5 end/second. For comparison, all the Willpower toggles burn 0.1 end/second, except RttC which burns 0.2. So I don't know how much of an "always on" toggle this will be. Well, I do have that /EA brute with essentially infinite endurance, and my WP tanker has quick recovery, stamina, and vigor core slotted up so he'll be fine. Psycho has drain psycho overperma'd...ok I will always be running these and good luck to the rest of you.
The beta forums are reporting that all the hybrid powers burn 0.5 end/second. For comparison, all the Willpower toggles burn 0.1 end/second, except RttC which burns 0.2. So I don't know how much of an "always on" toggle this will be. Well, I do have that /EA brute with essentially infinite endurance, and my WP tanker has quick recovery, stamina, and vigor core slotted up so he'll be fine. Psycho has drain psycho overperma'd...ok I will always be running these and good luck to the rest of you.
Characters I still care about ... Regen scrapper, Elec tanker, Ageless widow, coming EA stalker. Heh.
Yeah, my defender sits on 4.5 end/second in recovery and has t4 cardiac alpha, and vigilance when I team. I will probably be running these all day long as well.
I remember one of the times I quit playing this game (yet still stay subscribed causevetrewards) was I somehow got into a mission arc that gave me this map about 5 times during the course of the arc. After having to go through it YET AGAIN today, I whipped this up real quick.
Scans of the new powersets' tooltips, thanks again to SA though they seemed to have gotten them from somewhere else. Dropping them in the box due to the length.
They need a pool set that includes multiple pets. I will not be satisfied until I can roll an MM into Atlas and singlehandedly cause a second instance to spawn.
Yeah, as much as I dislike the idea of an AT that spends the much of the day as a dog/cat/thing, mechanically speaking the powers in that set look really fun.
Psi looks neat, and I do loves me some brutes so that might have to happen. I don't care much for any blast set so...whatever water blast. Primal might be nifty, but Khelds man. Khelds shifted and look how that turned out.
Mostly I'm looking at symbiotic armor and noticing that it's only got a little bit of actual survivability from def and res. Mostly it's a bag of tricks, a lot like ninjitsu which makes me pretty happy. If either of those unlinkable powers give protection from stun and sleep then yeah, I'll be rolling up one of those pretty hard.
Oh also I'll have plenty of time to roll up one of those because dominators are getting fucked over again because fuckers.
Narbus, you're probably the most qualified to help me with this, but can you explain to me wtf the big deal with dominators is anyway?
Every time I've ever tried a Dom, I wind up hating playing it. I hate the fact that it revolves around the AT Power, but that the AT power is apparently only good at 50. Maybe it's just that my playstyle means that I need a character who's useable in their 20s and 30s as well as when they're all Jacked Up.
Psi looks neat, and I do loves me some brutes so that might have to happen. I don't care much for any blast set so...whatever water blast. Primal might be nifty, but Khelds man. Khelds shifted and look how that turned out.
Mostly I'm looking at symbiotic armor and noticing that it's only got a little bit of actual survivability from def and res. Mostly it's a bag of tricks, a lot like ninjitsu which makes me pretty happy. If either of those unlinkable powers give protection from stun and sleep then yeah, I'll be rolling up one of those pretty hard.
Oh also I'll have plenty of time to roll up one of those because dominators are getting fucked over again because fuckers.
Well I believe Symbiotic Armor is supposed to heavily involve this new "Absorption" mechanic that they're adding. Unclear what that is, how it works, or how strong it will be.
I HAD a grav, but he went to the Pocket D in the sky some time back, well before the changes. And I'm leveling up a dark/ but since I have a very, very broken mind/dark right now it's a little hard to enjoy the poor new guy.
WeX: Doms are fun at all levels, they are just incredibly fun at level 50. They control just as well as controllers at all times, but when domination is up they control even better. Plus they get attacks! So they don't have to lock down a spawn and then brawl then to death, desperately trying to hit 32 just so they have some kind of actual damage output. The real issue that at 50 they turn from "pretty awesome guy" into "entirely horrifying unmaker of worlds," and yeah that's a thing. The only character that I've had that took that big a jump is my WP tanker. He went from "pretty solid" to "legally unkillable" once I kitted him out all proper. And hybrid is going to turn him into "dies less than a granite tank," which should be swell.
Okay, I actually get it now.
See when I'm playing the supports, I don't really care about damage (I was trained on The Old Grav after all ) and instead focus more on Pure Support. Hold/Immob/Slows/Heals/Debuffs/Buffs. You know the deal. So I guess a Dom trades some of those for the ability to PewPew? Makes sense.
Doms aren't a support AT, they're a trash-mob tank and blaster replacement in one. You bust out your controls to lock down spawns and then just melt them. The only things they can't handle on their own are things with purple triangles, and some of them can do that as well. At 50 your primary is better than a Controllers and your secondary is pretty decent (or flat-out absurd if you're /Fire).
/fire for doms is pretty silly. I mean it's silly for every class, but on doms it's like 'hmmmm what if, instead of a shitty utility secondary, we gave fire blasters a control primary?"
What primaries do you guys like with dark assault? I am eyeballing mind and plant, or maybe fire/ again
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
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RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
edited April 2012
My experience is with Mind/Fire so there's a bias there, but I think Mind is good with anything.
I am finally starting to enjoy my Earth/Earth dom though, once she got Earthquake.
Added: Seeds of Confusion paired with a damage secondary should be pretty much a party now that I think about it. So yeah, Plant would be good.
So I was browsing the SA thread because One Thread About An Ancient MMO apparently isn't enough, and they brought up something that relates to my old topic of Recluse Is A Bitch First off the quote:
He's actually being made out to be sort of a punk lately. Don't read this next part unless you've played Bellatrona's arc on beta or don't mind having an awesome moment spoiled for you.
Recluse queues up for the Magisterium trial with literally every Arachnos AV and shows up right outside Cole's tower during Emperor Cole's personal story mission. It's ridiculous. It's Recluse, Red Widow, all 4 patrons, all 4 patron lackeys, Dr. Aeon, Viridian, Shadow Spider, 2 Arachnos Flyers, and I'm pretty sure Arbiter Sands, Daos, and Hawk were somewhere in the mess. All them and probably around 100 or so Banes, Crabs, Forts, etc., all set to rape Cole. And you play as Cole, and just absolutely wreck their shit with Zeus lightning and eye beams and one shot everyone but Recluse. They all end up teleporting out and you don't even take a hit from them. It's terrific.
This is of course, exactly wtf happens at the end of WWD7 and seems to tie in with the beginning of the new Villain-Side SSA. I'm calling an end to Arachnos by the end of the year.
Posts
Up until WWD the game never really ran into a problem of having a character you talk to in a low level arc show up in a high level arc. So the game had a couple options for how they could handle the deaths: Treat it like Praetoria in that each character would have a different world view, which they've officially moved over to Paragon proper with the Shining Stars arc. Or they could have it where it just so happens that States is actually quite isolated and like Nocren says, he's still alive in the Tutorial because he isn't dead yet.
But then Penelope Yin grows up, and shit gets all fucked up.
I don't know about you guys, but the amount of characters I have who even heard Yin's name before was pretty fucking low. Delta *certainly* had not gone through the Faultline arc, so I had never fucking met the chick before. But the dialog firmly establishes that I had teamed up with her *at some point* (it never really refers to the Faultline content directly.).
So maybe they have a somewhat Global Timeline in that after a certain period of time, things become canon and current. This is why States is still technically alive right now, but will suddenly not be on the day 23 goes live. There are two downsides to this:
1. Despite the fact that the hero who gets to talk to Adult Yin can't do those first missions w/o Time Travel, they *can* freely travel down to Faultline and see Young Yin hanging out with her Clockwork still. I can let this go, as it seems to be a pretty simple lack of code they can add to have the Yin contact function like the other Disappearing Contacts once SSA#...5? is played.
2. As I believe F_t_M was trying to say, this makes SSA seem sort of silly for anyone trying to play it Post-i23. Luckily, there's an entire zone dedicated strictly to solving these sorts of problems, and thank FUCK they made Oro. It's a god damn convenient way to solve any Continuity problems you run into.
Until about a month ago, I had *never* done any content involving Statesman directly. But because his mark has been left all over this world, I could infer just how impressive he was. It was one of the things that turned me off DCU actually, since they have Superman fight along side you at the end of the tutorial.
How a new player can't immediately see that opening Splash Screen and not get how important he is, I don't know.
...FINE!
::goes to the Wiki:: Oh, look at that.
Now I did some extra digging, because of that "five years" bit nagging at me.
Faultline was revamped in i8, which came out November, 2006.
The LGTF was introduced in i10 which dropped July,2007.
So while the 5 years is close, it's not completely accurate. The character model in the LGTF is the same as in Faultline, so we can assume Real-Time is applied here (going with universal Comic and Media Laws that state time can pass but outfits do not need to necessarily change.)
Since 4 and a half years is certainly long enough time to study and hone your Psychic Skills, we can actually assume that the person experiencing sliding Time Scales is *You*. You can go through the Faultline arc tonight. You can then blast the fuck ahead 20 levels in an hour, go start WWD6, and have those 20 levels actually represent 5 years to your character.
Which I believe was actually someone else theory that the only accurate way to discern Measurement Of Time in this game, is by your levels. It doesn't matter if you were doing AE Farming and got your guy to 50 in a day, you've been around for ages. This, oddly enough, is actually in line with most other Pen&Paper RPGs in relating to XP actually meaning Literal Experiences and that the more you have, the older/wiser you are.
Holy *Shit* did I nerd the fuck out. Sorry guys.
are you saying
the rubber band timeline of a super-hero game is complicated, full of retcons, and difficult to make logical sense of?
my god, it's just like the comics
Let's Play Final Fantasy 'II' (Ch10 - 5/17/10)
Edit- I'm sure all of this is still up for change.
Enflame looks like it sets people on fire and makes them trail fire which damages people? Hard to say just from the description. Might be that a person just leaves burn patches as they walk.
Mystic Flight is a fly toggle that's slower than Fly, but also gives you a power called Translocation while it's up which doesn't link right but sounds like a teleport.
Rune of Protection is a 10m recharge self-buff click. Gives 16.25% resist to all, knockback protection, and mag 10 mez protection for 1 minute.
Spirit Ward is an ally buff that uses the new Absorption mechanic, dunno what that is or how it works.
Characters I still care about ... Regen scrapper, Elec tanker, Ageless widow, coming EA stalker. Heh.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Let's Play Final Fantasy 'II' (Ch10 - 5/17/10)
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Wii U NNID: MegaSpooky
i always said an avenue they could use for sets that don't warrant full power sets was the pools but apparently they're finally following up on that
here's hoping they make them customizable
Mostly I'm looking at symbiotic armor and noticing that it's only got a little bit of actual survivability from def and res. Mostly it's a bag of tricks, a lot like ninjitsu which makes me pretty happy. If either of those unlinkable powers give protection from stun and sleep then yeah, I'll be rolling up one of those pretty hard.
Oh also I'll have plenty of time to roll up one of those because dominators are getting fucked over again because fuckers.
Every time I've ever tried a Dom, I wind up hating playing it. I hate the fact that it revolves around the AT Power, but that the AT power is apparently only good at 50. Maybe it's just that my playstyle means that I need a character who's useable in their 20s and 30s as well as when they're all Jacked Up.
Well I believe Symbiotic Armor is supposed to heavily involve this new "Absorption" mechanic that they're adding. Unclear what that is, how it works, or how strong it will be.
Oh, did you finish leveling a revamped Grav and various Darks?
EDIT - or were you one of those poor fools that HAD a Grav?
WeX: Doms are fun at all levels, they are just incredibly fun at level 50. They control just as well as controllers at all times, but when domination is up they control even better. Plus they get attacks! So they don't have to lock down a spawn and then brawl then to death, desperately trying to hit 32 just so they have some kind of actual damage output. The real issue that at 50 they turn from "pretty awesome guy" into "entirely horrifying unmaker of worlds," and yeah that's a thing. The only character that I've had that took that big a jump is my WP tanker. He went from "pretty solid" to "legally unkillable" once I kitted him out all proper. And hybrid is going to turn him into "dies less than a granite tank," which should be swell.
See when I'm playing the supports, I don't really care about damage (I was trained on The Old Grav after all ) and instead focus more on Pure Support. Hold/Immob/Slows/Heals/Debuffs/Buffs. You know the deal. So I guess a Dom trades some of those for the ability to PewPew? Makes sense.
What primaries do you guys like with dark assault? I am eyeballing mind and plant, or maybe fire/ again
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I am finally starting to enjoy my Earth/Earth dom though, once she got Earthquake.
Added: Seeds of Confusion paired with a damage secondary should be pretty much a party now that I think about it. So yeah, Plant would be good.
This is of course, exactly wtf happens at the end of WWD7 and seems to tie in with the beginning of the new Villain-Side SSA. I'm calling an end to Arachnos by the end of the year.