Ad Astra

Based on my redside experience last night, I really have to agree and cannot stress enough that the trip to snowy Croatoa to defeat Lord Winter et al., seems like something that your average PuG will not be able to accomplish.

What I foresee is that this year, most of my alts will continue to open presents, contributing to the count to spawn a WL, but mainly to accumulate the other stuff you get from that activity (canes & temp powers). Heck, I may even go beat on the WL that spawns.

But I probably won't spend the time to go defeat Lord Winter. That's 15 (?) minutes that I could spend doing something more fun than getting Held & Footstomped.

3 or more PuGs can do it together - I was on a couple of runs blueside that did so - but on some servers getting those 3 together in the same zone consistently will probably not happen. That's just not how we tend to operate in this game.

So that leaves a big amount of dev work to change the event that will go primarily unused, very unfortunate.

I really like the mechanic of the Big Bad summoning helpers, and the need to defeat them before you can go further to defeat the Big Bad. But the mag 100 holds and insta-death Footstomps, etc., stripped all the potential fun right out of the encounter.

My poor level 39 Corrupter died at least 6 times last night while 9 villains (full team + 1) were trying to beat the timer and take Lord Winter down. I was spamming my AoE heal like crazy (when not Held) and we still all had to make multiple trips to the Hospital. 6 deaths in 15 minutes, plus getting held to inactivity, means that I was actually contributing very little damage to take him down, but that was kinda the case for the rest of the team as well - a brute faceplanted loses all built-up Fury.

So I will be opening presents for canes again this year, same as always.....

Just finished 3 runs, two blue, one red.

Blueside -

Run 1 - Level 25 Blaster (Energy/MM). I had read about what to do on the forums, so I just opened presents until a WL spawned (by another team). Raced to the spawn point, got a team invite, killed WL. Hit the present, zoned to snowy Croatoa, nothing spectacular - again, because I got the briefing from the forums. Zoned out using the portal, back to SC no problem.

Run 2 - I ran a level 16 Psi/MM Blaster, SSK on a team led by a lvl 50. Our team was 5-6, there were at least 2-3 other teams in zone on the event. Someone spawned a WL, took him down, zone to snowy Croatoa. Once there, we were able to take down LW to75%, got the dialog about the WG, found the WG & took him down - same at 50% & 25%. After the first run, I was looking for a specific visual clue about the WG and was able to spot him as a silhouette against the background. I was also able to see a visual clue that LW was phased, but it was much more subtle than WG coming in.

We stuck around to test the kick bug, and I was kicked to under the map. LOC 2549.3 -2000.0 1620.6 (after falling, which took me by surprise and was taken down to about 1 HP, unlike falling in Ouro). I started flying towards the Perez Park gate and was popped back into Steel before I got there. Final LOC 4161 0.0 1128.0.

Run 3 - Redside. I started on a level 25 Stalker, but since about half the presents I found were on rooftops in Cap, and the Frostlings run away down to the street, that was no fun, so I switched to a level 39 Corr (Fire/Therm). It was hard to gather a team, so we were not clear whether we needed a full team to spawn the WL. It did finally happen once we had a full team of 8 (almost immediately after getting member #8).

Team makeup - Leader was a lvl 50 Brute. We also had 2 Doms, 3 Corrs, and a second Brute. One Corr was/Kin, I was /Therm, so a few buffs & heals, but not many. This was the same team Killbot is talking about - he was the level 50 Brute Leader.
Taking down WL wasn't a cakewalk, but not too hard.

Once in snowy Croatoa, we had a lot of problems. It seemed like we were almost continually Held and there wasn't anything we had to break that. Domination didn't break it even (per one team mate). I hadn't noticed this as much on the 2 blueside runs because I was running a Blaster who could still blast due to Defiance. Nobody on the redside has that ability, so when the massive Holds went off, our team did ZERO damage for several seconds at a time(and they seemed like minutes). It took us almost 5 minutes before I could even see LW's health bar budge. It was more like 10 minutes before we brought him down far enough to call a WG.

We were all kicked from the zone while fighting that first WG. At least we weren't kicked off the map,we all zoned into Cap just fine.

Overall comments - blueside it was fine. Not enough explanations, but we could get teams to do what needed to be done. The presents seemed a bit sparse and a couple of locations I remembered from last year didn't have a present every time I flew by (but maybe I was beaten to them).

Redside - it will be very difficult for villains to complete this for a couple of reasons:

1 - lower populations will make it harder to get the 2-3 teams required to complete all the tasks.

2 - the massive mag holds will paralyze teams with almost no one able to continue to do damage during the holds - no Defiance, no Clear Mind (question - does CM break these holds? I wasn't on a team with an Emp to see). Even the level 50 Brute was routinely getting held. Once Held, we died quickly.

I doubt I will even do this event more than once on my badging Villain - and only because she is the Fire/Therm Corr I tested with. Presents on rooftops mean that my meleers will not be hunting them. This particular Corr has a couple of tools that *might* help accomplish bringing LW down.

We need lots & lots more explanations about what people are to do. It was not intuitive why the big present didn't do anything right away when clicked - I can see folks wandering off before they can zone. We lost the dialog about summoning the Guardians, and many missed the fact that LW had phased and wasn't taking damage because of all the flashing and noise involved in any GM fight. The Northern Lights were another wrinkle (I still don't completely understand what's the deal with them) we couldn't handle redside - someone must have know what to do blueside because I didn't notice them as much there.

Rename Lord Winter, please? While typing this up, I was having trouble keeping my abbreviations straight, it's very confusing. Someone on Test tonight suggested "Fimbulwinter" which is a great idea. (Thanks Muiramir).

Those are first impressions. I'm sure that I will recall other details after reading what others have to say.

OP -

FYI, your choice of color for your text is horrible on the reddish CoV background.

Please consider using a different color - light green, yellow, & orange work out pretty well on both the blue & red backgrounds.

My Katana/Regen Scrapper is Magic origin - her sword is a magical construct/artifact.

My AR/Dev Blaster is Mutant origin - she uses an Assault Rifle, but her "super" powers are her ability to Fly and take more damage than the average person on the streets.

As most are saying, origin is a hook to base your bio on, not something inherent in a particular powerset.

As for the themed Boosters - all of my characters can blow themselves up (via "Self Destruct" from the Tech booster), but the reason/mechanic of what is happening in each case is different based on what I dreamed up for the character.

Any chance of a Thursday or Friday night?

Saturday & Sunday nights are harder for me to get to, but I would really like to finally take part in a Hami Raid after nearly 5 years in the game.

Wait, guys, let's back up a minute. Looking at OP's Reg Date here - he might be asking how to get on the Test Server, not how to get into a specific Beta.

We have some specific ways we refer to things because we have been here so long, but new people have been known to use a term that we have assigned a certain meianing to in a way we would never think of using it.

OP - if you are asking how to get on the Test Server in order to check out the various patches they are testing from time to time and to play around with your character's build - here's the thread you want:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/annou...php?f=576&a=16

You need to check in the forum for the Training Room/Test Server, which is where I got this link.

OTOH, Fleeting is right - asking to get into Closed Betas is likely the best way *NOT* to get asked.

Didn't they already test the 2009 Winter stuffs last Thursday on the Test Server?

It's late to try to devise anything new for 2009 at this point since it's likely to start in less than a month's time - development time is much farther out than that.

I wasn't able to test it, but, yes, they made several changes going by what was posted on the boards.

I did end up trying to lead some of the Banner events - usually when it was pretty apparent only a couple of people knew how they worked and I had studied up on the mechanics.

More often, though, I poked someone else to do it - telling the Leader to "call it", etc. Of course, there were also those times when I ended up forming the Banner team because no one else would do it. But for me, that was a very low investment of my time, since I never took that team beyond the zone we were in at the time.

Ya know, I started to go thru this list closely to answer some of the things that GH didn't mention - then I realized that the list itself has so many duplications of requests (internally, as in repeated things, including the entire first 2 divisions) that it became too difficult.

I also began to realize that the OP was unaware of some other things that had already been given in Issue 13 (such as Invention Salvage storage shared by the SG and separate bin permissions based on SG rank) or that removal of the base raid pathing and our new stacking techniques had already solved (such as floating TP beacons out from the walls).

I have to applaud OP's efforts in trying to get the list for us, but this isn't the list I want to Devs to keep as our "wishlist", sorry.