In City of Heroes, there are various strange personages you can meet with, either to receive missions, gain story background, or buy/sell items. But there’s one entity you’ll want to take every character to see, and that’s Null the Gull.

Where is Null the Gull?

Seated atop an unmarked truck on the Villain side of Pocket D, Null the Gull is a little seabird who can help you streamline your CoH experience (and make it a lot less annoying to play in groups, too).

The view of the villains’ Mayhem Mission truck and Null the Gull, looking from the center of Pocket D.

There he is, sitting on top of the truck!

IMPORTANT: Make sure you don’t click the truck when you’re trying to interact with Null the Gull! The truck is the beginning of a Mayhem mission, and you may not be able to back out of it once you click.

Here’s a short list of what Null the Gull can do for you:

• Keep Speed buffs and debuffs from affecting you
• Keep you from being affected by Group Fly or Team Teleport
• Choose to always accept or always deny Mystic Fortune instead of having to click in the dialog box every time
• Keep up with your Dimensional Warder Badge progress by learning how many archvillains/elite bosses you have left to defeat.

To preview the dialogues so that you don’t accidentally choose the wrong option, check out the Option Dialogues on the Null the Gull page @ ParagonWiki.

Why Are These Changes Worth Mentioning?

This sounds like a pretty simple list, right? And most of these changes or updates are small, almost insignificant. But you’d be surprised how much these little edits help. For instance:

• Speed Boosts, while greatly increasing your speed, can really mess with how you move your character onscreen–you can end up in the middle of fights you didn’t mean to trigger. Keeping Speed Boost and other speed buffs/debuffs from affecting you helps you play at your chosen tempo, all the time.
• Group Fly and Team Teleport, while they sound nice, can be very annoying for team members who aren’t expecting a teleport, or have their own movement powers they prefer to use. Turning their effects off lets you move at your own pace.
• Auto-accepting or auto-denying Mystic Fortune is a GODSEND. If someone throws cards at you during battle, you no longer have to hunt for the mouse cursor and click on the Accept or Deny button–it just happens, or doesn’t happen. Since I play on a laptop, not having to hunt for the mouse cursor keeps me from having to stop what I’m doing (and risk dying) if someone cards me mid-battle.
• If you don’t keep track of which archvillains/elite bosses you’ve faced so far, your Dimensional Warder badge can be very frustrating to achieve. Null the Gull helps you out with that, helping you remember which ones you’ve faced.

One Small Caveat

The only bad thing about Null? You can’t just make the changes on one character and have that choice affect all your other characters; you must instead take each character to him individually and make the choices. It’s a pain if you want everything to be the same across all characters, but at least there’s the option of going in the first place.

Summary

If you’re a City of Heroes player and have never met Null the Gull, now might be the perfect time to go see him in Pocket D and make your life in Paragon City that much easier. Enjoy this “hidden gem”, fellow CoH players!