Organica

So I ran a Citadel tonight. Solo. ^_^ And I had fun!

1 hour 32 minutes. Vandal is a wimp.

Good news: ambush for the I.P. street hunt actually spawned in I.P. Woo, they count!

Bad news: ambush was only 2 guys.

If you have 2 token then you're premium. And as I said, restrictions are based on your reward level, so being free just means you're at 1 token/tier 1 only reward level, really.

Restrictions at tier 2 are only slightly better though. I think it takes to tier 3 before you can use all chat channels for example.

Here's something I noticed last week:

I have free accounts -- never spent anything on them. They have 1 reward token.

I have a formerly VIP account. This is one where I bought at the "try VIP for 1 month for $1.99 (or .99 cents, whatever it was). This account also only has 1 reward token, so the only difference between it and a free account is that instead of 2 characters total, I have something like 14, but all but 2 are locked. But I don't appear to have any extra reward tokens.

What's not clear to me is if starting an account with a GR code and playing for 1 month only would result in me having anything more than the 1 token that even a free account gets.

However, the difference between "free" and "premium" is only a difference in having potentially more reward tokens than 1. You can get that by dropping $5 on the market. But as far as I know there is nothing that the word "premium" actually grants you, it only matters how many reward tokens you have slotted.

I decided last week that my new task would be to run a character from 1 to 50 solely via DfB. I know others have done it, there's nothing novel about doing it, but... it's something I haven't done yet. And, since I have several accounts, why not do it on two characters? Heck, why not 3? Or... more? Six? Seven?

I actually have 8 different accounts. I only pay for two, but at the moment I have a third that's currently VIP, and a couple of the others have tier 3. And actually, a project like this almost helps me justify having all those accounts. Right? Er... right? Well... I said almost.

Okay, so I'm going a bit overboard here... but anyway last Friday I set my plan in motion. I'm going to document each run I make, and see how long it takes me to get these characters to 50 just doing this. Please note that this is not all I'm doing with the game, just something to do in my spare time... at least one run a night if I can, that only take about 15 minutes or so anyway.

But to start it off, I did quite a few runs over the weekend, and spent a great deal of time setting everything up. I placed all of my new DfB characters in my Ala Coracina SG that was my solo SG for Dilithium Flower in July (it helps me keep track of them all):



Each of these characters is from a different account. Some of them are only T1 and can't send tells or talk in broadcast. (My 8th account is a free account that already had both slots filled with characters I liked, which is all that saved me from doing this on 8 characters instead of only 7.)

I originally figured that there wouldn't be much to post about. I mean, I'm doing the same thing over and over. But actually the fun part is the other players that you run into... even standing around in Atlas people watching can be fun, because you see a lot of creativity and people trying out their latest character ideas. I figure I can find something interesting to post here every 4-7 days, maybe. And I figure with 7 characters, it might take me half a year or longer to get them all to 50. I'm not really sure, but I know things slow down a lot at the higher levels.

Hopefully I can find enough to write about to make this exercise interesting. I'm going to post one pic and bio each time I post here, so first up:

Moar Cowbell






I like a character with a bio... even something kinda lame, at least there's something to read when you click on them. So I had fun creating the bios for my seven samurai. I also made sure each bio said something about them fighting only in the sewers.

I made Moar Cowbell for the internet meme costume contest, but i never actually entered. But I happened to like the character a lot, so I tweaked his bio to mention the constant DfB runs, and away I go!

Moar Cowbell is a mace/energy aura brute. He's strong and pretty! (Well, for a bull anyway.)

8/3/12 (Fri) - Moar Cowbell - 1 run, level 7. Darkwave Surfer - 1 run, level 7.

8/4/12 (Sat) - Tokyo Kitten - 1 run, level 7. Darkwave Surfer - run 2-3, level 10, 12. Terran Angel runs 1-2, level 7, 10. Moar Cowbell - runs 2-3, levels 10, 12.

8/5/12 (Sun) - Tokyo Kitten - run 2, leve 10. Blackberry Crush - runs 1-5, levels 7, 10, 12, 14, 16. Moar Cowbell run 4, level 14.

Blackberry Crush was teamed with Carmel Popcorn and Doctor Tators. Consequently the team talked non-stop about food, and people were very hungry by the end of the run.

On later runs I teamed with Red Shirt Guy, a blaster who charged in first but strangely took 4 runs to meet his first death. I voted at the start to send him in first, and he said, "That's the whole idea!"

8/6/12 (Mon) - Clockwork Vixen, runs 1-5, levels 7, 9, 11, 14, 16.

Clockwork Vixen is a fire/mental blaster. Fire Blast is still one of the best things in the game, and your best DfB blast set no question. Fireball at level 4, Rain of Fire at level 6, Fire Breath at level 8. Call down the firestorm! Plus I got Psychic Scream at level 10, almost everything I do is AoE -- which is only a problem on those badge runs with the Vahzilok AV.

This team was convinced that there were hidden badges that nobody else had ever gotten, so we lured the Hellion AV onto one of his fire wards (which presumably did damage to him, but no extra badge) and then we killed the two hydra heads within 10 seconds of each other. I didn't have the heart to explain why, if there were another badge, people would likely have known about it before the DfB trial was even playable. In the end the leader was still convinced that the Hellion AV had a hidden badge that he hadn't figured out yet.

8/7/12 (Tues) - Terran Angel, run 3, level 12.

Only 1 run tonight. My team included Biermeister, whose battle cry (naturally) was "Trouble is brewing!"

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Bonus Character Name Ideas:

Plasma Spork (I misread a friend's character name of Plasma Spark)
Task Force Dawg (A friend has a "Task Force Dog" who invariably needs to go out halfway through any TF)
Liquid Misery (Was listening to "Only Happy When It Rains" by Garbage. Pour some misery down on me...)
Sleep Blaster I just think it's funny how they continue to blast while asleep.
Bracketless Avenger "He roleplays as someone who doesn't need brackets to talk out of character".

Why did I know this was an Ultimus thread by the title?

(I should say a "modern" Ultimus thread... an "old school" Ultimus thread would be about soloing AVs/GMs, heh.)

Anyway I'm interested in what they do but not really gonna speculate as of yet.

I'm on Virtue nearly 100% of the time these days. Unless you were asking Skifer that question, heh.

Listen to Father Xmas. If you're free to play, you're basically playing the game as it was played in the old days before the invention system, and it was always nearly impossible to earn enough money to afford all of your SOs in the mid-levels (20-30). Then somewhere around level 35-40, you started earning more money than you needed and could buy whatever you wanted (which, back then, basically meant more SOs... you could buy extras and combine them, and be "really tricked out").

It was changed at some point. In the old days you had your patron, and you could never go back and pick a different one, while heroes not only didn't have to run any arc for their epic power pool, they could switch to a different one any time they wanted. So that was the change, you have to run a patron arc to open up the pools, but you can then pick whichever one you want.

I mostly run Ghost Widow or Black Scorpion, no matter what I'm actually going to pick.

As an aside, I did the hero morality mission where you fight your doppleganger the other day, and after she was dead, I noticed that my pets were still attacking something.

My plant/fire doppleganger had managed to summon carrion creepers during the fight. As had I, and I had two pets out (plant pet and my Arachnos toxic spider pet) And... you can't really kill off carrion creepers, it just summons more tentacles until the power is done. So my carrion creepers and my two pets spent the next 2 minutes or so fighting my doppleganger's carrion creepers, in a rather pointless but amusing battle. ^_^

I like the image of pulling Reichsman out of your back pocket and using him as a shield though...

You gotta admit, that would buy you a lot of time to come up with something else.

Can't argue that direct flipping is the simplest way to make influence, especially if you're doing it with several different marketing toons. Put in bids, come back days later, list what you've bought for a good sell price, come back days later, you have money!

I'm with Hopeling on this, and I say that as someone who was converted to the super speed/combat jumping combo a long, long time ago. But sometimes you want to fly, and hover is not the slow, useless power people make it out to be.

If everyone did everything the same way all the time... the world would be a boring place.

Chinese manga 1/2 Prince has a similar setting that crops up very late in the manga, where the characters are basically fighting the game's now self-aware AI, and if they die in game their characters are gone for good and they can't log back in. Which seems like a more realistic scenario, if you accept that the game could develop a true AI.

Also makes me think of the Dreamland Chronicles by William Mark Simmons which was silly fun, and involved a virtual fantasy world run by an organic computer that turned out to think for itself as well (and players get trapped in-game also, of course).

I just want to counter-argue everyone saying to never slot hover for defense: if you fly, and you're trying to softcap your defense, and you're within 1% or 2% of the cap, and your other defensive powers are already maxed, then by all means slot hover for extra defense.

People forget that 1% defense is a very big thing when you're close to the cap.

Generally speaking, if my character needs to fly, I'll probably pick up Weave, Manuevers, Fly/Hover, and Hasten. I like taking hasten nearly every time, but you can run Combat Jumping and Hover/Weave/Manuevers all at once if you want. ^_^

I like Moonfire. Well, I like most TFs, I should say, but you can do Moonfire in about 45 minutes if you're going fast, and you get good merits and of course the Slayer and Silver Bullet badges, so if you're at all inclined to get those badges anyway it's much better than street hunting for them.

But on the rescue mission, it helps a lot to have someone stealth to her, free her, and someone else Assemble the Team to the entrance. Otherwise people will let her just die, trying to actually fight your way to her and rescue her is the long and painful way, and she has a tendency to get herself killed even when you're trying to keep her alive.

Another bonus: all missions in same zone, just the fedex to Skyway which can be done quick if your team leader is familiar with the TF.

Think about this for a minute:

1. Babbage spawns before the final mission of a fairly long Task Force.

2. The Kronos Titan spawns about 9 missions into Crimson's Project: World Wide Red arc. Which is full of Malta, of course.

3. These ambushes will spawn on the first person to exit the mission, or otherwise appear somewhere outside the mission.

4. If you have someone on the task force or World Wide Red ouro arc log out at some other place in the game, then have everyone else quit the team instead of leaving the mission just before the ambush (it's hard to get people to remember to do this, mind you) then when that last other person logs in, the ambush spawns on them wherever they are.

I had a friend who spent a couple of weeks setting up massive Kronos Titan/Babbage multiple-spawn ambushes. This meant he and several of us were running most of a Synapse Task Force or a Malta-filled World Wide Red ouroboros arc, over and over, and then quitting without any reward.

Now don't you appreciate your own Synapse experience more?

Granted, multiple Kronos Titans and Babbages at once is pretty neat. But man is that a lot of work to set up.

It's nice for a bit of extra defense if you like flying in combat. I generally prefer combat jumping + super speed for travel, but on toons that have to fly, I'll use Hover for the extra defense. I only 3 slot it if I really have nothing better to do with the slots though.

I'll be interested to see what you manage. ^_^

For me, the fact that I'm documenting everything I do is one of the ways I motivate myself to keep working on the same project. Otherwise I have lots of projects and I don't always stay focused on the same ones for even a few days in a row. So I hope to see you keep at it!

Although I guess if you're posting 2 weeks after the fact, you've already kept at it for 2 weeks, hehe.

Aftermath/Wrapup 2

And now for an accounting of what I have at this point, aside from a fully IO'd level 50 dom and a fully functioning base:

I have just over 500 million on me, despite dropping 1.2 billion on the base.



I have quite a bit of stuff for sale at the moment -- some probably listed too high, but I'll leave it all for now and see if it sells.



I have 432 reward merits and the hero merit I just earned tonight. I have 7 converters. I have the 818 vanguard merits I earned the other day -- haven't spent them yet. (Oh, hey, earned 2 more on a tip mission!) I have 15 shards which probably means I should have my Tier 2 Alpha soon and I have a catalyst into the bargain.

As for what's in my base? I have 74 IOs/ATOs. I crafted anything slightly interesting while leveling and dropped it in here, so I certainly have a lot of semi-junk, but you never know what might come in useful in the future and I can add more storage bins. But some of the stuff in here can be sold at a later point too:















As you can see, a base full of junk!

And that's it!

As for what I might do next... I kind of want to take a Praetorian to 50 without leaving Praetoria, and I also kind of want to run a toon to 50 in Death from Below with a build specifically designed around that concept... just because. I do have a "Sewer Ratty" scrapper around somewhere who was supposed to get to 50 all on old-school sewer runs, or maybe with the occasional abandoned sewer run, heh. But after DfB came about, that no longer seemed like such a difficult goal.

Anyway I don't think those are things I'd write about, but they're on my list of possible future goals.