The power to end all powers; probably the best in any booster (though the Martial Arts Booster comes close), it's Mission Teleporter!

Click! You're there!

Activate and transport directly to your active mission's entrance! WOOO!

The only downsides are that there's a 2 hour cooldown period after activating so you'll find yourself holding it for a longer trek instead of using it right away. Also, if you forget to select the mission you want, you may end up accidentally transporting to the wrong mission ( think it's the first one in the mission list).

However, there are so many ways to use this power beyond what you'd normally think. For example, now that you can hold 7 missions, what if you grab one in the RWZ near where the mother ship raids begin? Any time a raid starts, you can click that mission and TP directly to it!

You can use this technique for a variety of hard-to-reach places! I set one in RWZ as described above and another Cimerora for the Imperious task forces. Or in the middle of normal TFs, I usually wait for the really out-there mission in a zone that's really hard to get to and use it then (like from Talos to King's Row or Atlas to Dark Astoria).

And of course you can use it as a "Day Job" transporter. Get a mission in the Shadow Shard and hold the power until you're done playing for the day and want to park. Hit the porter and arrive in the SS then log out. Or click the portal from there into Portal Corp for another day job location.

One technique to maximize its use is to run a mission, then switch to an alt and use it again on them. Keep switching to other characters every other mission or so and you can basically teleport to every mission entrance!

Shazel jumping from building to building in the late evening

The lowest level SG missions give you temporary travel powers as a reward. Since they each last 2 hours of USE (not real time), you can keep these for a very long time (as long as you don't leave them on when you're not using them).

The Atlas safeguard (or mayhem) which is available from level 5 to 10 gives you a flight pack as a reward. The KR safeguard (available from level 10 to 15) gives you the jump pack. So you basically get fly or superjump

A few low villains travelling in safety with the Mayhem jetpack

By earning both and using them, you can hold off on getting a real travel power for much longer. Shazel, for example, didn't need any travel power or travel power prerequisite up till level 30. Granted, I'll usually do a Repec so that my characters aren't worthless when Exemping, but the key here is that I get to play with real powers and ignore most pool powers until then.

My base telepads to just about everywhere

Bases can have zone teleporters that lead to pretty much everywhere there is to go in the city. You either need a bunch of people in your SG/VG, have a lot of alternate characters, or be willing to wait for a while before you'll have enough Prestige to build a decent series of telepads, but once you do, it can help travel a LOT

If you need to travel, sometimes going to your base for the teleporters is quicker (especially once you get more Telepads) since there are base entrances in almost every zone in the game. Best of all, there are two different ways to get a teleport power that drops you right in your super-base. One is a Veteran Reward and requires that you have been playing for so long that you probably don't need my advice anyway, and the other can be earned through the new Day Job function of I13. By logging out near a superbase portal, you eventually earn the SG base teleporter power which can be recharged by logging out near a superbase portal again.

A view from inside

Lastly, it's good to carry Awakens (or combine for one) so you can Rez without running back to missions. But if you find yourself dead in a hard to reach zone, being in a Super Group helps with this too since you can go to the base instead of the hospital. If you know the base exit is closer to the mission you just died in that the hospital, it saves travel to go to the base. Better yet, if you're in a zone WITHOUT a hospital (which is no issue for Villains yet), going to the base guarantees you come back out in the same zone instead of showing up in the nearest hospital in a neighboring zone.

Note that even if you don't have a telepad for the zone you died in, just use the normal base exit, it will automatically take you to the zone you were last in.

A casual gamer is the term I came up with to describe people like me who play MMOs, but only activate accounts every few months to as little as once a year. Why would people do this? Well…

Many MMOs have an addictive quality based on never-ending gameplay, fantasy community, and the ability to escape to a virtual world. I have heard of people who have dropped out of school, damaged their friendships and marriages, and even some people who have died due to online gaming. Some consider these games as addictive and destructive to your life as drugs, gambling, or Blitzball so picking up an MMO is something to be considered with caution.

MMOs aren't like console games. You can't pick one up and 10 minutes later, put it down for the rest of the day. Often, if you don't have at least an hour or two to play, it's not worth even logging in. And for some of the more complex (and rewarding) objectives in the game, you'll need anywhere from 3 to 6 hours of straight gameplay.

Making MMO gaming work while keeping your sanity and maintaining work and family relationships requires some planning. Fortunately, with a little effort, it's not hard.

Managing the Risk

The first decision for a casual gamer to make is what game to play. There are many options, but City of Heroes was a natural choice for many reasons. The level cap was 50 which was clearly attainable without having to play for years. The focus on the game is far more about character development than it is on item collection so with the exception of the Veteran Reward system and slight differences in builds due to IOs, my level 50 is no worse than yours that you've had for years (very little in the way of elitism). You can play the game any way you want (follow story lines, just kill stuff at random for a while, team or solo, go to any location you wish at any time (mostly)). And lastly, the monthly fee of only $15 with free updates is a fantastic deal (especially since now that gives you access to City of Villains for the same price.

Note that the first time you play with a paid account, you have to actually BUY the game. It used to cost around $40 or more, but now (as of 2009.03.14) it's about $20 (if you buy online and download it). Since that comes with a free month of play, it's effectively $5 to buy the game

The second thing to consider was time. To minimize the impact on my other projects, work, and family, I decided to only play during vacations or weeks where I'm away from the family due to work. Though there are several weeks during the year when these conditions occur, only once or twice a year do I get two to three such weeks together where it becomes worth it to activate my account.

Handling Playtime

To make the casual gamer method work for you, first find a month in the year that you know you'll have minimal demands from work, projects, and family. Vacations are good as are business trips if you'll have several in a month or the trips will be long. For example, my wife and kids went to a friend's wedding in another state giving me 10 days of only work to deal with (plenty of spare time to play).

But you can't always have it so lucky as to have a huge chunk of time without the family around so instead, you'll need to plan to play with them around without turning them into The Spurned Spouse and the Neglected Little Ones.

When they're not out of the house:

Make sure that you plan ahead to devote time to projects, family, and work as needed. If you don't pick certain days to play and others to get stuff done, your plants will die, the humane society will collect the pets, your kids will whine (even more than usual), and your back will start to hurt from the various kitchen tools embedded there by your frustrated wife. These events all make gameplay less fun.

Plan ahead to put the game down and deal with real life. For example, maybe the weekend is coming and you promised to take the family somewhere. Pick Saturday morning to go to the zoo and your family will be happy to get out while you can spend a good portion of the rest of the day with the game.

Zoo inspired characters

Note that the zoo is also a good place to get inspiration for new characters.

Never schedule chores, family activities, or other non-game stuff for late in the day if you can avoid it. It can be very frustrating to have that deadline hanging over your head while you play rather than getting the real life out of the way first and having the rest of the day free.

If it can't be avoided, make sure to quit at least a half hour (probably more) before having to leave for whatever it is. Don't put your spouse in the position of having to nag you for help or start walking out the door while you "finish this last mission". You will make your family start to resent the game and they'll be far less likely to leave you alone while you play in the future.

Cryptic and casual gamers

Fortunately, there are several ways that Cryptic supports the casual gamer.

• While your character names become available for use by other players after a month or two (which is another reason to think of really creative names), your characters are never deleted no matter how long you remain in-active.

• The low monthly fee is also a great help. With it you get to play both CoH and CoV as well as get free game updates (called Issues in CoH, expansions in other games).

  This is particularly important for casual gamers since it would be really hard to only get one months worth of play then have to pay additional costs to get the most recent version before activating again.

My CoH Experience

My dad let me play his account when he wasn't using it when I was home for Spring break in 2004. I built a Dark/Storm defender that really wasn't very good, but I was enthralled with CoH style and gameplay. A little over a year later, I realized that there would be a one month gap between my graduation and the time I started my new job. Wow. What would I do with myself for a whole month? Hmm….

I really wanted to play right away, but had to wait until that month came so I filled the time by studying the game. Based on the advice I found in the City of Heroes forums, my first hero was a Dark Melee/Regen Scrapper since it was listed as an excellent solo play character. Thought I took a few Alts up to level 14 or so, my scrapper was my main who I got up to level 36 by the time the month was over.

Since then, I've had the time to reactivate my account one time during December and February of 2005-2006 where I pushed one of my Alts to level 41 and made several more heroes and a few villains. With one more month of play in Summer 2006, I took my beloved defender, Jordan, to level 50 and started both a PB and a WS.

Of course, now I've been playing for almost 4 years off and on (as of April 09) and I've tried and done a lot. Allow me to share some of it with you and read on

About my guides

Perhaps your story sounds similar to mine. You like the game, but can't play very often and deactivate and reactivate your account every few months.

If you are a casual gamer, or even if you're not, you may find my guides useful for getting the most out of the time you have to play.

It's kind of depressing to find out that the character you've chosen to play has a critical flaw that makes it useless after many hours of play. You can spend some time researching, what AT to play, what kind of powers to take, and which city to start in.

The obvious first choice would be the game manual and it is good to read, but you will get better answers and more complete data online. While there are a wealth of guides and various sites online, forums are where the lifeless, unbathed play-masters reside. In the very essence of the game addict, they spend their nights playing and their days dodging work to help people like you learn about the game in forums.

Actually using forums is out of the realm of this guide, but they all work basically the same way (If you've used one, you shouldn't have any trouble with another). More useful than that is which forums to use. There are many good ones out there, but other than the official forums at http://boards.cityofheroes.com, I hang out at BattleClinic.com.

The official forums

The main City of Heroes forums/boards

The main boards at CoH/V can't be written to unless your account with PlayNC is active. That means that if you're like me and trying to do research before-hand or post information after canceling, you can't (though you can read what's already there or posted by others). The reason, they say, is that they can't keep disgruntled ex-players or juvenile weirdos from being a pain. Their solution, right or wrong was to ban all non-paying members from the forums, even if you previously had an account.

The second isn't really much of an issue anymore. Maybe the playerbase matured, but I don't find too much attitude in the forums like I used to. Moving on…

Problem three is that finding anything useful there is an artform. The search engine is dreadful in that it doesn't point you to relevant posts, but rather to each individuals response in a chain of 4000 responses in a single posting. After you limp away from your vain search, you can try to navigate using the menu system. However, the menu only goes two levels deep so the 30,000 posts for the Blaster at are all lumped together into an impossible 137 pages of topics containing 1300 total topics. Have fun browsing.

These numbers are real as of the day I wrote this part of the guide. Later, they will be larger.

You could just ask every question by starting a new topic, but inevitably, forum pros will insult your family, your honor, and your dog while pointing you to the previous post from two and a half years ago that answers the question.

Other forums

The Battleclinic.com forums

Granted the population of other forums won't be as large so there won't be as much information available and it may not even have a better search function, but there are still several advantages to other forums.

Originally I posted to a site called Gameamp.com (which has since shut down) and the people on the site are by nature, polite, patient, quick to respond, friendly, and very experienced. I posted in the forums for almost a month before playing and had great advice on a large number of topics. I made a point to make many of my new characters on the server that most Gameampers played on so I would have access to teaming with the people in the forums now and then. There's also an in-game chat channel that was started by Gameampers that you can use to ask questions of the forum posters in real time during the game (if anyone happens to be online). I've not once been given grief for posting any question even if it's one that's been asked before.

The Gameamp channel is called "gameamp.com" and is available from any server that you play. If a Gameamper is online, no matter what server or character they're playing on, they will see any messages posted to the channel. There is also an official gameamp SG/VG on the Triumph server (with several others run by Gameamp members on other servers).

Because Gameamp is gone, I spend most of my time in the Battleclinic forums, but the gameamp channel is still active. Because Battleclinic is my new second home, I also watch the Battleclinic.com channel in-game if you want to join and find me.

Guides

There's a large number of guides online and many of them are very good. I built my Dark/Regen scrapper based on the guide in the Main Forums (though it's sadly outdated now). Everything on this site counts as a guide as well. Finding them can be hard, but search engines will help as will people in the forums (who can point you to good guides that they've used). Guides often provide the most complete information on a topic and are my favorite, but can become outdated as more current issues become available.

Online References

Paragon Wiki

There are a lot of good online references, but the best I know of is Paragon Wiki. It has a massive amount of information that grows all the time.

This part is useful before your first time playing, but especially in between play sessions. For example, for the month prior to playing again, I can re-plot out powers and enhancements to compensate for new rules or additional levels that I know I'll get on my lower characters. It gives me a bit of a game plan for what to do when my account goes active again.

Mids Hero Planner

Mid's Hero Planner

There's a small learning curve, but wow! The amount of info it gives you is awesome. Check out this pic for Jordan's build. She has massive defenses and I can see how I'm going to use my invention sets to buff her max HP and damage potential.

I don't know how you'd even manage to plan out a character anymore without a robust planner like this unless you planned to ignore invention enhancements entirely (which would be a bad idea).

Suckerpunch's Online Planner

Suckerpunch's Online Build Planner

The primary advantage to this version is that as changes and improvements are made, they're instantly applied and you can access it from anywhere. If your work doesn't allow software installs, this could be a huge advantage.

Here are a bunch of really good binds that I use all the time. They should be useful no matter what type of character you use

A Warshade slapping a Void. Whee! (Video: 1.8Mb)

/bind [ em smack /bind ] em slap

This lets you hit [ and ] one after another to do a Three Stooges-esque slap back and forth across someone's face (or butt if your character is short and theirs is tall).

/bind f5 "em welcome$$team <color #ffffff><bgcolor #000000>Welcome!"

Used to welcome a new member to a team. I said it so often, I put it on a bind. For any bind that involves speaking, I make sure the color values match the chat bubble colors I chose before. Note that it's actually easier to chose these first and match the chat bubble to IT rather than the other way around.

/bind f6 "em clap$$local <color white><bgcolor yellow>Gratz!"

Tired of typing "gratz" in the middle of battle when someone dings? Now it's just one button and includes an emote and custom colors. Note that the emote does not affect your fighting so go ahead and do it in battle

/bind f7 "em point$$local <color #ffffff><bgcolor #000000>Bring it!$$team <color blackgt;<bgcolor green>Ready!"

Here all I've done is add an emote (other than the default thumbsup) and some local text that theoretically will match the character of the hero/villain I'm playing at the time. I tried just replacing the "Ready" text, but it confused people so I put custom text in local instead.

/bind f8 "local <color #ffffff><bgcolor #000000>Ick! It's a $target"

Pointing out an enemy with my 'Ick' bind

The goal here is to point out to the team that there's an enemy of particular importance. Either that or something interesting or useful. Here are some examples:

• Ick! It's a Void Slayer!
• Ick! It's a Hostage
• Ick! It's a Superdine Case

/bind enter "afk Whoah! I gotta think about this$$startchat"

This is that cool bind you've probably seen others do that puts a little bubble with text over their head when they're typing. The way it works is that instead of clicking on the chat window to talk, just hit the enter button. This will put you afk with your custom message while you type. Then just hit enter again to say whatever you wanted to say.

SPECIAL MACRO!!

I actually use a Seek Bind for this now as it works much better, but I'll leave this section here for those who find it useful

/macro seek "target_name ich"

The SEEK macro lights up a captive for me

This very important scouting macro must be a macro because you need to change it often and changing a macro is easily done by right-clicking it and selecting edit (much easier than binds). The way this works is it will ONLY target anything on the screen with the letters in their name that match what you put in. For this example "ich", only characters/enemies with names like "Micheal", "Michelle", etc. will be targeted.

NOW, if you're paying attention, you'll realize you can also write things like "target_name captive" for "find captive" missions, "target_name eton" for "find Detonator" missions, and "target_name quip" for "protect Lab Equipment" missions. Anyone who's played a lot (which you should have by now if you have a Kheldian), knows how frustrating it is to find certain targets sometimes. This macro helps A LOT! And when the target changes or you have a different mission, just change the macro.

Note: I put this particular macro in my Nova tray because flying around is generally the best way to look around for stuff.

Contacts can be listed from your main menu at the top

The first thing you'll do once you enter the game is be introduced to your first contact. Contacts are your non-player characters (NPC's) that are listed in your contacts menu (which is on your navigation bar). They give you missions and lead you through the various story plots in the game.

Here are my tips for making the most out of your contacts:

Story lines

Most contacts will offer you a choice of missions to take. One will usually follow a story line while the other is just to keep you busy. ALWAYS take the story line mission. Completing a story arc will give you experience and enhancement bonuses and can bring you into battles with special enemies such as Arch-Villains.

Note that the story mission can be any type of mission (mission types explained later), the key is to read the description and determine which option sounds like it continues the plot. Even if you make the wrong choice, you can usually still take the mission as long as you don't out-level the contact before you finish the arc.

Not all contacts will give you story arcs and it can be hard to tell. But as of issue 7?, contacts with story arcs have a small "book" icon next to them making it very clear that you should keep talking to them!

Maximize your contacts

Though you could finish all the missions for one contact at a time, you will spend a lot of time running around and see less of the game. Granted, you could just Roll another character and see some of what you missed that way, but if you're a casual gamer trying to maximize your time, you'll complete as many story arcs as you can in one run.

Note that with Flashbacks, you can replay many missions you missed the first time through.

Keep as many active missions from different contacts as you can which at the time of this writing is three seven. In doing this, you will often get compatible missions. Here are some examples:

• Your contacts give you two to three missions in the same zone.
• You have a mission to "kill 10 Hellions" and a door mission full of Hellions.
• You have two missions at the same time to kill "10 Hellions" and "15 Hellions" in which each kill will count for both missions.
• Your zone 1 contact keeps giving missions in zone 2, and zone 2 contact gives you mission for zone 1 so, though you have to travel, it's not as much of a waste.

Don't out-Level your contacts

Every contact has a level range. If you try to contact one contact when you're too low, they'll say that you must be a certain security level (level) before you can take any of their missions. If you gain enough levels and pass their range, they'll thank you for your help, but say that you've cleared them of missions (which won't be true, but they won't let you take any missions just the same). The trick is to not out-level your contact before you've completed their story arc.

Don't walk when you can call

Most contacts will give you their "cell" number after a few missions. As soon as they do, start calling them instead of running all the way back to saves valuable time. To "call", open the contacts menu and press the CALL button next to the info for that contact. If there is no CALL button, you haven't done enough missions for them yet.

Pick your referrals carefully

When you have done a certain amount of missions for a contact, they will either introduce you to a new contact or give you a choice between a few different people. Choosing a referral is an important way to control your travel through the story plots in the game.

Unless you have a reason to pick otherwise, alway choose ones that match your type so that when they offer you enhancements, they're the kind you can use. For example, I chose to be of magic nature during character creation (as opposed to technology, mutation, etc). By sticking with missions and contacts of a more magical nature, I will get enhancements that I can use. This becomes important later when you begin to get dual origin and single origin enhancements.

The only reason to choose otherwise is avoid enemy types you don't like or story plots you've followed before.

Of course, now that there's IOs, you might disregard this advice entirely. It's up to you.

Special Cases

As of issue 13, the mission objectives generally match one or more of the following:

• Find crate/box/equipment

  

  Gotta find that study!

  These are easy if you have stealth powers. You just run around, find the Glowies and click on them. You can also hear the glowies from a decent distance away and with good speakers or headphones can tell its direction and distance very well with practice.

  Be careful though because while you're messing with a crate or computer, enemies that are very close will still notice you. A few tips for dealing with this is to hold, confuse, or distract nearby enemies with a pet until you're done and then run away. If you do use a pet, be sure to dismiss it before running to the next area or he'll bring Aggro with him.

  Note that later missions are a lot trickier with their objectives. This particular example just says to find the study, but it also had several desks that needed to be protected.

• Destroy crates/boxes/equipment

  

  To complete this mission, I also have to destroy the altar

  You must find and destroy some in-animate thing(s). These are not the same as glowies because they don't glow and they don't make noise. You must actually target all crate-looking things and hope it's the one you want. If it is, you will see a life bar like any other enemy and you whack on it until it explodes or is otherwise destroyed. These can be a total pain to locate and enemies are usually stacked around the object making these missions not much faster than a "kill all".

  Missions like this are a good time to use my Seek Bind

• Protect crates/boxes/equipment

  

  Some guys hanging around a desk.
  
  

  Where are they going?Back to destroy that desk of course...
  

  You must find and save some in-animate thing(s) from destruction in some cases, the enemy is standing around the thing and won't attack it until you come close and in others, when you get near the thing, it will trigger waves of attacks from enemies who will head straight for the target unless you get their attention.

  This is a newer mission element and makes things more interesting, but is still a little buggy as of issue 6. Sometimes the waves don't show up for a long time and you leave to see what you missed only to find that they snuck by you somehow and destroyed the thing anyway.

  In other cases, the enemies are unholy-focused on the object no matter what you do preventing you from completing your objective. These missions can be frustrating for that reasons so beware.

  In Croatoa, the last mission in the arc by Skipper is to protect a henge or such, but the enemies completely ignore you most times making it nearly impossible to beat alone. I almost always hold my mission completion for this mission because of it.

• Kill leader and crew

  

  Nuons are weak! Ha ha ha!

  You will go to a warehouse/cave/lab and have to find and destroy the leader and the people closest to him. The leader is usually in the furthest place from the entrance (highest floor, deepest cave, furthest room) and they will almost always talk when you get near them which causes his name to appear in your global chat box (which should match the name listed in the mission goal). Even if they don't talk (as they often don't in the later levels), you can point at each enemy with the mouse and it will show their name (or use a Seek Bind if you know their name).

  Sometimes it just says "kill leader" in the mission goal and doesn't give you a special named enemy to look for (usually in later levels). You can try to guess which one it is or if you're lucky, they'll have a special (non-generic) name, but the simplest thing to do is sneak or just run to the end of the mission (if you're tough enough) and start clearing it from the back (since the boss is usually at the very back).

  If you've killed the leader and the mission hasn't ended, first check to see if there was another mission task you hadn't completed yet then start clearing the mission from the location of the leader. Usually it's because you missed one of "his men" and as soon as you kill them, the mission will end.

  There's a newer feature that is supposed to show you the final objective(s) for the mission if you've completed most of the others. I would guess this is to reduce the number of requests for help they get from someone who lost track of a Runner or such.

• Rescue Hostages

  

  Rescue 3 generic NPCs

  You will be told how many hostages to find and they're pretty easy to spot by the behavior of the enemies standing in front of the hostage. There are always between two and three and they act in a "we have a hostage" kind of way. You will pick up on this very quickly.

  

  In this case, the hostages have names

  These can be good because you only have to rescue the hostages, but depending on the density of the enemies and the difficulty of finding some of those danged hostages, this kind will often become a "Kill all". This is because you will sometimes not be able to extract the hostages without attracting the other enemies or because there's a hostage hidden so well, that if you don't kill everything, you'll never be able to keep track of where you've been and where you haven't.

• Escort/Kidnap Hostages

  This is the same as a hostage mission except that once you save them, you have to actually lead them to the mission exit. This really sucks because you not only have to go all the way back to the beginning, but you get ambushed a few times on the way.

  There's no way to tell ahead of time if a rescue mission will require an escort or not. You just have to save them and see. But keep in mind that ANY Radio mission that includes the word "Rescue" in the title is an escort mission (same for Villain kidnap missions)

  The only good thing about escorting is that sometimes the NPC will help! For example, the fortuneteller mission used to be a simple rescue and is now an escort, but she uses powers to fight with you on the way. It makes the mission much more interesting than it used to be (though sometimes the NPC dies and you fail so be careful).

• "Kill (arrest) all" missions

  

  Mass destruction! Whee!

  These are the "if it moves, kill it" kind of mission and are about the most aggravating when you're trying to get through quickly for a mission bonus. If you're playing a squishy character type, this can take a while (though changes to inherent powers for controllers and defenders and the advanced difficulty control has helped).

  To make the most of it, form a quick team. You will be able to move quicker and get better experience by bringing along more people. This is particularly important if you're trying to get it done in a hurry. For example, if dinner is starting and you suddenly find that you took timed kill all mission, you better get some help if you want to finish it without drawing family aggro

  Note that in "kill all" missions, most other mission tasks don't matter anymore. This is because if you kill everything, you'll have rescued everyone, found all glowies, defeated all "leaders", and protected or destroyed any objects.

  If you find that you're having trouble getting through missions with any kind of speed, try lowering your Mission Difficulty (Noteriety)

• Simultaneous Action

  There are very few missions like this, but they require a certain number of team members to complete. The goal is to find the glowies, but you and your team have to touch them at the same time. The story is usually something like having to disarm two bombs at the same time or hacking into a computer system using three terminals at the same time.

  The key thing to note here is that you MUST have teammates with you (or a second account it.

Special Topics

Timed Missions

Time is running out... One hour and 9 minutes remaining.

Timed missions are a real pain because you can't walk away from them and finish later (which busy people with real lives might have to do now and then). They're really not a problem as long as you don't have to suddenly deal with a family issue (like the kid just wet their pants or the wife is burning the kitchen to the ground).

For example, there was one time I didn't realize I had a two part mission. At the end of the first one, a second timed mission began automatically. I finished a different mission that had been waiting and checked for the next one and saw that I only had 8 minutes left to finish the second part of the first mission that I didn't know I had.

Oh, hell no!

Even then, because I had stealth powers, I was able to get to the mission and finish it in time. The challenge comes later when the time limits get smaller and the mission gets tougher. For example, in the figure here, you see wolves. Lots of them. As a defender, there's no way I can take that many alone.

As it was, only with the help of a higher level tank who worked really fast was I able to complete the mission (barely) in time.

Also keep in mind that the timer runs from the time you accept the mission. If you discover you need to form a team, the time will keep running.

Train missions

To get to these missions, you go to any train in any zone and click on it like you were going to go to a different zone and your mission will be listed there. You will be taken to a small section of a normal city zone which is walled off with a blue force field where you will do your mission (which can have any combination of the objectives above).

This is hard as heck because a warehouse/lab/cave mission is very linear and well mapped, but in these missions, stuff is even harder to find. I've circled around for long periods of time trying to find that last glowie or the the last enemy in a "kill all". These missions are easy to Sneak, but can take a really long time.

On the other hand, one advantage to a train mission is the lack of travel time. If you put together a team, they can go to the nearest train rather than come to your zone. When you've finished the mission, everyone goes back to the zone they came from which helps them resume where they left off if they don't want to stay with the team after completing the misison.

Even better, you can access train missions from Ouroboros

Police Band Missions

A police scanner is one of your contacts now.

To be able to do these, you need to get a scanner. Once you have it, you can just listen to the scanner to get a mission. The missions are random, but you get to choose from three possible options (so you can skip those annoying rescue missions for example).

There's no story plot to these, but once you've done three to five in a zone, you'll get a Safeguard mission. The best parts of this is that the missions are always in the same zone and you never have to run to a contact for them. They're also easy to drop for the same reason.

Replace radio with newspaper and Safeguard with Mayhem for Villains, but it works the exact same way.