Organica

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 49

I totally failed to get any pictures of anything I did tonight. Which was:

1. Four DFB runs on Stalker Girl One, my new buffbot girl / kinetic melee/super reflexes stalker. This was enough to get me to level 19.5... not quite 20. Meanwhile friends were running TFs and trying to get me to join, but damn it, I'm gonna play one new character from level 1 this weekend if it kills me! Which it didn't really, I just missed out on a Synapse and a Manticore, and a couple of Yins, and I don't know what else.

2. Joined a Manticore right after. For this I switched to a level-appropriate character, and selected Barbie Bane, my bane spider. She was level 35 (I think) and she got to level 37 or 38 (I think). We steamrolled every mission, no stealthing, and finished in about an hour. I didn't get the chance to train up after, because an ITF was starting, so next on the agenda was:

3. ITF. Freaky formed this and I knew pretty much everyone on the team. I was going to join with Barbie but she doesn't have Midnighter's access and I was too lazy even to run to Night Ward, so I switched to Eternal Sweeper who was already parked in Cimemora from yesterday. We got eight people and started the TF, and I even leveled in the first mission (I must have been very close to whatever my next level was), but our entire team consisted of several scrappers, two stalkers, one not-very-tanky tank, a warshade, and a blaster. No support at all. And it became very obvious in the first mission that we were going to need support, so we quit and reformed. I switched to Forest Goddess my NA/Water Blast fender, and the tank switched to a kin troller, and off we went again, and thing went much better, although we had no tank/brute so it was pretty easy to steal aggro if you weren't careful. The blaster died like 20 times, I got a lot of use out of my rez. We were also pretty slow, I forget the actual time but it got very late before we finished so we didn't even do the towers. Forest Goddess went from 46 to nearly 49 (about 1/3 bubble shy) and if I hadn't been so tired I could have joined another ITF that Whispy was forming and hit 50, but I was beat.

So that was my evening!

Probably my best story was one of the guys on the DFB runs. He said "Stalker Girl... I think I dated you in college!" Har har. Then when I died on the first run he yelled out, "Claudia! No!" And from then on he called me Claudia. I was wondering if that was the girl he dated in college, but he seems very inclined to say weird random things and call other people odd names too.

One of the others on the DFB asked if anyone had a level 50 yet. Uh... yeah, over 40 of them. He didn't, and then he asked if anyone was still in college yet. Turns out he was in 9th grade, but had been playing the game since age 8 or 9. Seemed like a cool kid though. Several people on the team decided to global-friend everyone, and he was one of them, I saw him later when I was running off to join the ITF. He really loved playing his tanker.

Also there was one person on the team who just had a really cool costume that I completely failed to screen capture, but I could probably remake it as it was mostly mecha pieces with chainmail underneath and a hood and clockwork face or maybe it was a carnie mask face... looked cool though. Isn't it sad when you decide to level up a new alt, and the first thing you do is run across someone else with such a cool looking character that you want to stop and make a completely different alt?

When you say "a superhero MMO on paper" I assume you mean you're just working out how you'd do a new computer hero-based MMO if you were in charge.

But just in case, here's some general advice for anyone creating a pen & paper RPG: make it possible to create a character in your system in about 15 minutes.

Anyone who play the original Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) knows that you could roll up a character very quickly. The system was far from perfect, but it's amazing how useful it is to be able to have someone new join an ongoing campaign, maybe for only the one night, and be able to come up with a character for them on the spot. Also, it's invaluable for the GM in creating all of the NPC's to be able to do that quickly and easily.

I'm not sure how often people play pen & paper RPGs these days, but years ago my group of friends used to play a lot. I had a friend who had designed his own superhero roleplaying game, and one of the great strengths of the game was that you could create a character completely by rolling a few dice. He had charts to tell you what class of powers you had (fire, lighting, illusion, magnetic, whatever) and then charts to select specific powers in that class.

We played Champions a bit too. Champions was an amazing game back then for it's ability to allow you to design your character however you imagined and then find how how to fit that into the rule system, but one thing it wasn't was fast -- it could take 2-3 hours to create a character, with a lot of help from the GM since new players didn't understand the game system well. It was almost impossible for a new player to join on the spur of the moment, and it was a huge amount of work for a GM to construct a game session ahead of time, creating all the background npcs, villains, etc. My friend's home-made system was a bit like AD&D in that it wasn't by any means perfect, but it was quick and dirty and didn't get in the way of a good game session.

But I don't know if people even write their own pen & paper mmo's anymore, it's so easy to adapt universal systems like GURPs to just about anything, as long as you know the system already. But that's just one thing I took away from those years of superhero roleplay gaming: the cooler, more innovative system was not necessarily the better or more practical system.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 48


It's Double Experience Weekend, for the last time ever!

Tonight I started off by doing another villain ouro badge mission. This one was with -- Willy Wheeler I think his name is -- and the Ouro mission actually has you run through all of his short missions, only one of which is a badge mission. But even after I got the badge I wanted to finish all of them because that's the only way to get the 17 merits. Unfortunately, that didn't happen.

First, Zombie and Gems and company were starting up an ITF. I wanted to join that so I parked Mouse back in First Ward and switched to Forest Goddess. We ran a very successful ITF, trounced everything, and I went from level 44 to level 46.5.

After this I attempted to switch to one of my brand new lowbies in order to gain some quick levels via DFB, but this also failed. First, I was blind invited by another person standing at Miss Liberty, then they apparently attached our two-person team to a Magesterium Trial League that was attempting to form in Dark Astoria, then they quit. I didn't realize I was in a league until people started talking in league chat. I quit immediately, and before I could do anything else, Cobalt Avenger told me that we were about to start that Lord Recluse Strike Force that we'd talked about running the night before. So I switched back to Mouse Police, and I had to quit my Ouro TF without finishing and collecting my merits. Boo!




But the dirty secret that I didn't tell my friends was that this was the first time I've ever been on a LRSF. It's virtually the only TF/SF in the game that I'd never done (still haven't done the villain version of the Kahn/5th Column Strike Force either though, probably never will). Once again we had a very good team with all people I've played with for a long time -- Zombie, Gems, Cobalt, Jane, Diviverse, and joe. Zombie used his 2nd account to give us 8 people, and everything went great. I was able to follow people and look like I knew what I was doing. ^_^ I got three badges from this, so I finished the night at 1169.

After that I was planning to play a lowbie again, but Whisper was forming another steamroll ITF and how can I refuse ITF n a DXP weekend? This time I brought Eternal Sweeper, and things did not go quite as smoothly as the other ITF but in the end we were fine, we had a great tank and also no hero's tank who was also very good, and two not very good tanks (well, two tanks working on SO's at least, they weren't so survivable). We finished in an hour. But it made me laugh when people complained that we'd pulled the two AVs in the third mission while taking down the computer. Most ITFs I'm on do this and we're fine, but apparently on a team of four tanks it was a dangerous thing to do. Whatever.



Eternal Sweeper gained almost 4 full levels on this ITF -- from 36 to nearly 40. Nothing to complain about there!

90 Days to t he Apocalypse -- Day 47


There were no Task Forces or Strike Forces for me today, although a lot of friends tried to start different ones and some finally ran a Silver Mantis, and I probably should've joined because I could use the WST helper badge. But anyway, I spent most of my time badging and barely teamed at all.

First were the five defeat badges for Dark Astoria. This took me quite a while and earned a little bit of incarnate experience for me, but eventually I had five shiny new badges for my trouble. Next, I went to Cap Au Diable and killed gremlins until Deathsurge spawned, then talked five friends into joining me to beat him down, which went very quickly. I was surprised that I didn't have this badge already, but it was easy enough to get. Then I stayed to help some of the other people take down the Ghost of the Scapyard for that badge. He was up again less than four minutes later. :P



I finished the evening by running the villains's ouro intro arc, which netted me Jail Bird (explore badge), and then running the four 10-14 level villain badge missions from ouro. One of those got me a gladiator badge as well -- I finished the evening with 1165 badges.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-46.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 46


We're past the halfway point so now it really feels like I'm counting down to the end of the game.

(I've archived all of my Zero to Awesome 2 thread btw -- still haven't started on the original Zero to Awesome thread.)

Tonight was a 2nd night of villain badging. I started by collecting all of the defeat badges in First Ward and Night Ward. Was still working on the last one, Black Knights, when CA and Jane came on. Our plan was to run a Silver Mantis TF and then 5 villain tips for Jane. So that's what we did.

We had 6 people for the Silver Mantis, and that went pretty well, not really too much to say about it except that one mission near the end where you have Paragon Protectors and teleporting Sky Raiders, and it's a defeat all on a 5 level map? Yeah, Devs hate villains.

And the last mission is fun too, Sky Raiders everywhere. But we finished, and we killed Scrapyard Ghost just because he was there, and we ran the five villain tips and did the morality mission -- the one where you blow up Croatoa. That's my favorite, it's fun to blow stuff up.



The plan for tomorrow is to try a LRSF. I need that one, and one other too. I finished the evening with 1153 badges on Mouse.

Things I still need to do for badges: Dark Astoria Defeat Alls, Dark Astoria missions, Ouro villain missions, Ouro First Ward and Night Ward, Finish my patron arc, do a ton of bank heists. I need the explore badges from those but with 2 accounts I can work that out myself. Also I need Caleb, and maybe Deathsurge still?

Then I also need to go hero again for the round trip badge, and I don't have Penny Yin or Admiral Sutter yet either, or most of the incarnate trial badges. Suffice it to say, I have more than enough badges left to get that I can get over 1200 pretty easily.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-45.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 45

Today was badge day. I don't pick my spots for these things well, because we're coming up on a DXP weekend and I might be getting ready for it, but what I wanted to do was earn badges on Mouse Police. I had something like 1117 badges on her. She's villain at the moment, has been for a good long while, and I have nearly every hero-side badge you can get short of Master of badges, and I have all the explore badges and defeat badges you can get redside and in old Praetoria, but I haven't done much in First Ward or Night Ward or for that matter Dark Astoria. I haven't done any villain mission badges through Ouro, I haven't done a lot of the Strike Forces, I've only done one incarnate trial, a BAF. So I have some stuff I can definitely do to up my badge total.

I'm also missing three day job badges, with no progress on them. Nothing I can do about that now; I might be able to squeeze in two of them by Nov 30th, but maybe not. My fault for not working on it harder in the last six months.

So first I went to First Ward and grabbed all the explore and history badges there, and then on to Night Ward for the explore badges in that zone. That pushed my total to 1139. Next I started my patron arc, and I worked my way through the first part to the power pool unlock, which gave me two more badges -- Crab Spider Longfang gladiator badge, and Spider's Kiss.

At this point Cobalt Avenger and Sapphire Jane wanted to do some other badging redside, but with Silver Mantis set to be the WST tomorrow we decided on a Mortimer Kal. We couldn't coax anyone else to join us -- there weren't a lot of people on tonight -- so I logged my second account (you need 4 to start) and then we did the SF with 3 people, which went quite well, finished in 39 minutes.

That was another badge for me -- Prometheus.

After that I helped Jane get the 333 Consortium Guards, then before logging out at the compound in First Ward I killed D.U.S.T. Rangers and got that badge. So I finished the evening at 1143. ^_^

And I guess I can claim to have played one of my level 50's today. ^_^

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 44


Sunday morning I logged on and decided to do a little more PLing. I had in mind getting Earthsinger and Vashti Ahandra to 35, but mostly it's something I can do when there's nothing else to do that's relaxing and doesn't require me to think very much.

I got Earthsinger up to 35, and by that point there was someone in Whisper's channel who was talking about what badges he wanted to get on his main before the end, including Head of the Hydra, which is the explore badge in the Abandoned Sewer Network mission. You only need 4 to start and it was suggested that he could start the mission and then drop down onto the hydra for the badge. Since I had two accounts logged in, I offered to be two of the people needed to start. But by the time we wound up in Atlas Park, it turned out that he had other people and they wanted to run the trial properly. That was cool too, though it took a few minutes to explain why Tiffany Blackheart had quit the team -- I wasn't about to try and play two characters at once on an AST.

I was using Trinkets on this because that's who I'd been PLing with. She might not have been my first choice otherwise, since she's a shield scrapper, all defense, but she's very tough anyway. But as it turned out, not tough enough to take on a Hatched Kraken GM alone, or even with 1 other person. I used my Return to Battle power and was up long enough for the other person to get back up before I died again, then I attempted to rez twice more but died instantly. Then I waited to be ported somewhere safe, where I waited several minutes for someone to give me a wakie, finally had someone rez me instead, and this failed because the rest of the team decided to pull the baby kraken over to where we all were, so I died instantly again to its footstomp. I got frustrated at that and just hit hospital and ran all the way back, to choruses of "Where did Trinkets go?" and "We could have given you a wakie!"

It turned out virtually no one else had run the trial recently or at all, so I wound up directing people once we got to the bottom. This was a bit frustrating as well because instructions like, "We need to clear the rikti and then take down the pods. But first we'll need to take out the kraken and the tentacles," lead to people pulling rikti while I was still trying to finish instructions. We also had a lot of people taking pods down to 20% while we were still trying to clear rikti from other pods, and a couple things like:

"Okay, take the pods to 20%."
"Down."
"Is everyone at 20%?"
"Mines already down."
/em sighs. "Take them down then, now!"

All of this, of course, is complicated by having no map or anything interactive to show the health of the pods you'd find in a modern trial, and probably by somewhat disorganized instructions since I hadn't been prepared to be in charge. But we had a good team and finished in plenty of time, and everyone got their badges.

Right after this I joined a redside team to help take down some AV that I'd never heard of -- a part Coralax priest kinda guy. It was a mission with a lot of freakshow. There was no badge involved, at least for the rest of the team, not sure about the mission holder, but it was fun anyway. I used Mouse Police for that. With all the badging discussion I was tempted once again to try and earn a few more badges on Mouse, I have over 1100 and I'm missing a lot of ones that wouldn't be hard for me to get if I worked at it. I kind of want to rework her build once more and try to go for a good defensive build on a regen scrapper one more time, but we'll see. There's only so much time left to do all of the things we'd like to do.



I spent some time after that checking various of my marketing toons that I've ignored for the last month. I have a lot of money lying around on some of them. I also moved a few characters from Virtue that I don't expect to ever play again, which freed me up to move any characters from other servers that I might want to play. I had this idea that there would be several, but mostly there aren't any. I did one major character move -- I have an ice/ice blaster who is one of my earliest characters ever, who was created as Jalia Ice on Pinnacle in early 2004, eventually reached 27, was later transferred to Freedom and became Mouse Police of Freedom and made it to 42 there, and now I've transferred her to Virtue and remade her again as Blaster Girl One, a clone of all of my buffbot girls because I'm still kind of in love with the look and backstory of those characters. I also transformed my recent "Shin Random" and then "Vashi" storm/water blast defender into "Storm Girl Ten". I'd never actually made a storm-based buffbot girl, and I like the parallel with "Storm Force Ten" which amont other things is the title of a Steeleye Span album. Also, I created a "Stalker Girl One" who is kinetic melee/super reflexes. I've never played kinetic melee to 50, I'm not a huge fan of it overall but it's supposed to be amazing on stalkers, and I've only played super reflexes to 50 once. But no guarantees I'll get this character to 50, of course.

I still don't have a "Brute Girl" buffbot. >.>



When I came back later in the day it was once again too late to catch the hero side Sunday Cathedral of Pain Trial, but in time to catch the redside version. That's cool of course, the hero side runs have been going well and they don't have any trouble finding enough people to join, but the redside ones are always a bit iffy. This time around we had three teams of six, which is getting close to the minimum you'd want for one of these things. I brought AE Baby, who is a 50 + 1 fire/kin corruptor and is a huge asset to any team if I do say so myself. And the trial was completed flawlessly, killed the AV on the first round.

I spent a lot of time after this reworking Blaster Girl One's costumes and build, but eventually I joined someone who wanted to take down Lusca. We were contemplating trying to 2-man or 3-man the big octopus, and I decided to switch to someone who had more defense and less endurance issues -- my Blaster Girl One is not fully IO'd yet after the respec -- so I switched to Jennie Nova, my beam rifle/radiation corruptor, always handy in a GM fight. But we eventually had 4 or 5 people and things went pretty well. Right after that we headed to King's Row to stop the building of the Paladin, and then hunted for other GMs, eventually finding the Kraken, and then summoning Adamaster, and then running a late night Posi 1 and 2. In between the two TFs we also put out a fire in Steel Canyon. I stayed on Jennie for all of this -- she didn't have the Posi badge yet either. Jennie is a fun character to play. I've never managed to incarnate her in the way I intended -- she was supposed to be my best answer for all of the Really Hard Way Magisterium Trials that were being run back in June -- but just as with AE Baby, she brings a great deal to any team.







This is the bio of one of the people I was doing all the GM hunts with. ^_^

One of my new big ideas is to try and play all of my level 50 characters once more before the end. This is probably impractical -- I have more than 40 level 50's, so if I wanted to play 1 a day before the end I'd have to start immediately, and I also want to get other characters to 50, and I kind of want to do some badging on Mouse Police. I can't do all of those things so we'll have to see what I can manage and what I can't. But I can at least try to run short missions on each of my level 50's one last time, just for closure I guess.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-43.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 43


At some point I will have to admit that I can't level up all of the alts I have that are less than 50, IO them, and play them enough to justify having accomplished that. But that day is not today, and with Double Experience Weekend coming it's not next week either.

But I do worry that when I'm finally ready to do some good old incarnate trials again, there won't be people around to do them. This weekend has been especially bad -- few people on, not a lot of things happening. I got into an argument with one idiot who wanted to know why nobody was doing anything when it was DXP weekend -- he could not be convinced that DXP wasn't already turned on, he promised that he had "proof" based on how much experience he was getting from whatever mission he was in. I learned a valuable lesson that I should have already known: don't call out idiots in the LFG channel, it's not worth it.

Anyway, today I had to do a lot of printing on an ancient HP Laserjet 4000 printer in my bedroom, and this involves telling it to print 15 pages of something, and then coming back about 20 minutes later when it's finally done so you can give it the next print job. I had to get this thing done by the end of the day, so that meant I had to do something where I could go AFK every 15 or 20 minutes. And there weren't a lot of people online anyway, so what I did was PL three of those alts that I would really like to get to 50, if I can: Barbie Bane, my bane spider, who I took from 30 to 35; Vashti Ahandra, my dual blades scrapper (or maybe she's a brute, I forget) who I took from 26 to 32; and Earthsinger, a fire dom (who happens to have Fieldcrafter -- one of my most recent characters with that badge/item). I took her from 30 to 32, she's got imps now!

And just for the record, I was getting about two levels per Council Earth map run. That's what I always get with an xp booster turned on (at level 30-35). When I ran out, the pace slowed. Not that I needed "proof" that DXP wasn't turned on, but anyway, yeah. Idiot.

In the afternoon Exxxcaliber ran the normal Saturday Hami raid, and I brought Swift Sky along so I could earn a few shards. She's not really the best character for a hami raid -- she's WP, that's good, but she doesn't fly and titan weapons has at least one attack that you can't use while flying. But Zombie always brings his TW brute (who always needs a jetpack) so I guess you work around it. Anyway, I think Exxx was hoping for a lot of powerful incarnates, and Swift Sky wasn't that, but oh well, I did okay and the raid went just fine. I got three shards during the raid and claimed the 4-shard reward, which gave me 12 total, enough to craft my T1 Cardiac alpha. Which I'm afraid still won't solve my rather large endurance issues. We'll see, but I probably need to rework the build somehow. Or not, since she's just fine on a team with support and I probably won't be playing her a whole lot in the final month and a half.

I got two purples while doing all of that PLing too. ^_^ And... I ran out of XP boosters on my secondary account, and I'm almost out of Windfalls too. Bleah.




Here's how easily swayed I am: the original Swift Sky costume, based on the anime picture, had short blonde hair (club hair). Several of her other costumes had the same blonde hair, but my favorite costume (as pictured above) I used the gunslinger hair in black with a blue hair bow. One of the people I teamed with the other night saw me with blonde hair and no bow, and asked, "Swift, where'd your bow go?" So I changed back to the above costume and asked if that was better, and he said yes, he didn't like blondes.

So later I changed all of my costumes to black "gunslinger" hair, and added the bow to most of them. Well, it makes more sense to me if the character looks like the same person no matter the costume, I guess, and it's one way in which I'm stepping away from the original inspiration for the character/costume, which was mostly a direct copy of someone else's idea. It's good for it to evolve a bit. But I do kind of laugh at myself that one simple comment like that made me change several costumes.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-42.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 42

I spent a little time backing up more of my "Zero to Awesome 2" thread. It's a lot of work, but I'm nearly done with that one, then I want to do the original Zero to Awesome thread, and maybe my other market threads -- the 30 random merits in 30 days one at least.

Tonight was giant monster night. I started off running the wall in Cimemora again because nothing was going on -- well, actually my friends were already on a Citadel, which I would have liked to join but I logged in too late. Then Shimmer started up his weekly Friday night Mother Ship Raid. Once upon a time I never joined that because the zone would fill up too quickly, but these days you can join at any point if you want. By the time I hit the zone they were already on the ship and planting bombs. I decided to plant a bomb before asking to join, so seeing that the three left-hand grills were taken care of, I ran to the fourth grill and helped someone take it down. I figured whoever it was was going to plant, and ran to the 5th grill, when Shimmer sent me a direct tell to go back and plant the 4th bomb because they didn't have enough teams. At once Commander! Heh, Shimmer's very sharp, he spotted me and what I was doing instantly, then sent me an invite which I clicked on after the bomb was planted.



The raid was fun. I earned a couple of shards (3 I think) and over 500 vanguard merits, with which I purchased a heavy since they're kind of handy to have. Swift Sky does well on large teams with support. Not so well in long fights with little support, my endurance problems are too great. I need to get my Alpha slot filled and see if that fixes the problem, otherwise I ma need to go back to the drawing board and pick a different epic power pool.

Speaking of which, my bids on the last two pieces for my build filled today -- Apocalypse and Ragnarok, I have a set of 5 of each in fire blast and fireball now.

After the raid nothing else seemed to be happening so I logged for a while and I went to exercise. When I logged back in later, I joined a four-person team to take down the Kraken.



(Most of my pictures from this evening are pretty crappy, sorry!)

Anyway this turned out to be a monster hunting team that had already killed Jack in Irons and Babbage. We headed to Crey's Folly next and took down Jurrasik. Then they were wondering what to do next, and someone said we could summon Adamaster if anyne could afford the recipe, but I'd already bought one while they were typing this. ^_^ 500,000 for a monster summoning recipe, that's chump change for me!



There were only three of us by this point (Whisper X was running a MoUG, so we'd lost one person to that). I used my Vanguard temp robot.

After Adamaster we looked for Jack and Eochai but neither were up, but we found Lusca in Independence Port. We eventually had a full team of 8 to take Lusca down, including an old friend who logged in and sent me a tell, "You really DO long in still!" I basically said, Uh, I log in almost every night, where've you been? Anyway, he admitted he hasn't been on much and must have missed me, and also tried to offer me his cash hoard of some 15 billion since he wasn't planning to do anything with it. But I have billions of my own that I probably won't be able to spend, so I declined. I'm obviously the last person who needs it. But maybe I should have taken it and given it away to other people, or burned it at the Crazy 88 bonfire on October 31st.



I still say Lusca is worth more than two measly merits!



That was my Friday.

That's awesome! I remember that too, in Cap Au Diable I think at the market. Neat!


I played Tiffany just two days ago and a friend commented on the bio, he said it was the only bio he'd ever seen that involved chess. And I still play AE Baby of course, I played her Sunday for the CoP.




90 Day to the Apocalypse -- Day 41


I refuse to admit that I've created any new alts since Swift Sky. Nope, not happening. And the character Shin Random that I created for that "Random Costume Level 1 Steel Canyon run" competition doesn't count. Even though I renamed her and gave her a better costume.

So.... anyway tonight I logged in and there were other people online, but nobody seemed to want to do anything. When I said, "Someone needs to start something!" Freaky just laughed. I decided to go to Cimemora and run the walls, both to see how good at it I was now (better, my endurance problems aren't as bad when I'm doing this at level 50) and to hopefully get a few shards (eventually got 4).

I was thinking about new alts not just because Swift Sky was now 50, but also because I had become confused and thought the Double Experience weekend was this weekend. Hrm. Not that I don't have a lot of other characters I should get to 50 instead of making new ones anyway. But I had fun running around the walls in Cim killing stuff, waiting for something more interesting to happen. I really do like Titan Weapons a lot, once it's properly slotted. It's one of those sets that you really can't appreciate until you fully IO your character, but then it's awesome.

CA said he was standing in Dark Astoria watching tumbleweeds. I said I was watching surgeons fall from the walls in Cimemora. That's because the most fun thing to do with the surgeons is to hit them with the Nemesis Staff and watch them sail out into open air. Zombie came and hung out with me for a while -- I know I was there for more than an hour because we're both serial fortune tellers and we read each other's fortunes at least 3 times. But when I suggested starting an ITF, Zombie said he was sick and wasn't going to stay on long, and nobody else said anything. So eventually Zombie logged, and I logged.

And I didn't go to my third account and use my saved points to buy Titan Weapons and make a third TW toon, because I said I wasn't going to make any other alts after Swift Sky. I admit to nothing!

Later I came back and... I certainly did not log in to my new Titan Weapons/Electric Armor brute on my dark shinobu account, and I didn't immediately join a Death From Below team and get to level 7, and then run the newbie Hellion arc and part of Twinshot's arc. Nope, didn't do any of that. And I don't have any pictures or the name of my new alt because I already told you, I haven't got one.

Then I helped Jane and company take down Jurrasik in Crey's Folly. This was on Swift Sky. I noticed right after that, inexplicably, Swift Sky had a mission in Crey's Folly. This mystified me because I PL'd the toon to 40 and haven't run any solo content on her. but a little investigation revealed that it was the Penny Preston store unlock mission, which I'd clicked on by accident while trying to sell to her a few levels back. So I completed that, and that was my evening.

And the only question is, do I stick with the Atom Smasher, or maybe buy the Excalibur Sword? I mean, hypothetically... for my new alt. If I had one. Swift Sky has the rocket hammer, Megami Hime has Excalibur. I don't like repeating myself, but Excalibur is really cool looking. Of course, I haven't even looked to see if any are still for sale.

And why would I, since I certainly don't have a new TW toon?

I have... 9 solo SG bases on Virtue. And one solo VG base. And I'm in charge of Hero Force Alpha Assault (largely defunct) and Villain Force Rho Ruffians (almost entirely defunct). And I have an inherited solo SG base on Freedom. And a solo SG base on Victory. And one on Justice, and Infinity.

I had 8 different accounts when the announcement came down on 9/1. And... I made another freebie account not long after that, although I may not remember the name/login for it.

Also: I have less than 5,000 posts on the boards, but there have been over 6,000 visits to my profile. I'm not sure what to make of that. Two of the last 10 visits were by Moderator 13 and -Power-. Power was the leader of Hero Force, and has only ever made 3 posts on the boards, and I am now one of only 2 people to ever look at his profile.

I mostly don't pay attention to profiles and stuff though. When we had a rating system I ignored it.

Well, we have the solution to the "It's Too Quiet" thread! At least for one afternoon!

What the Flea said. Even before the change, traffic would be pretty slow in this section in between big news releases. In the old days there was a lot of new stuff to talk about, in the last few years I've noticed that many of the old subjects have just been done to death and people avoid them, and that leaves you with less general conversation topics, except when there's a new announcement and everyone is talking about that.

Now, there's A) nothing new to talk about, and B) very few people left to do the talking.

That's one reason I want to keep doing my 90 Days journal right up to the end... sometimes it feels like just talking about myself and what I did each day must be boring, but on the other hand there's not a lot else on the boards to read, and if someone else were doing something like this I'd probably be reading it. ^_^

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-40.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 40

Tonight before logging in I started to archive my "Zero to Awesome 2" thread. Right now I'm just saving it to a rich text file, but with the ability to edit my posts I can save the original text including photo links, so I should be able to reconstruct it in my blog later fairly easily. I did the first two pages -- it's kind of a time consuming process, but if I do a bit at a time I should get it done in just a few days.

One thing I noticed was that someone had asked why I didn't do things the easy way or take obvious shortcuts, and it occurred to me that, if you follow that kind of thinking to its logical conclusion, you get Swift Sky. PL'd to 40, IO'd with money from my marketing toons and IOs I had in storage. ^_^ I like doing things that way too but it doesn't really demonstrate something that anyone in the game can do. The point of my zero to awesome threads was to show how literally anyone could come up with a great build by level 50, and do it all in one month.

Anyway tonight when I logged in the first teaming opportunity I saw was some global channel friends who were running the last mission of Serpent Drummer's Rikti Warzone Arc. That sounded like some quick experience and not a long time commitment, so I joined up immediately.

Just after getting into the mission someone else was forming an ITF. I would have preferred the ITF, actually, but I didn't think that was a good reason to quit so I said nothing. And, actually, the final mission was really fun. You face Lord of War Hro'Dtohz, an AV, in the same final room that you get on the Lady Gray Task Force. That means it's a big room filled with rikti, so it's a massive kill-fest on a good team, which we were. And then Nemesis shows up so you get a second AV and a lot more people to bash. I had fun. ^_^




Not long after that a friend wanted to run a Penelope Yin TF to help him get his character to 50. I need that for TFC so I agreed. Once we started, we were informed that it was a speed TF and he wanted to finish in 20 minutes. We actually took 24. I'm not a fan of speeding the Yin TF for whatever reason (one reason being that it's not long no matter how you run it), and it seemed odd to suggest a TF because he wanted experience, but then to speed through it. But he hit 50 in the final fight so I guess he knew what he needed, and at least he announced it right at the start. I would have liked more experience but I also just wanted the badge so no worries.

And it turned out that it was a good thing we were speeding it because some other friends were starting up another ITF just as we hit the final room. Yeah, now THAT'S what I wanted! By this point I was 4 bubbles from level 49 and I figured a good run with an xp booster would get me to 50. But I actually forgot about the xp booster until we were partway into the first mission, and I didn't hit 49 until halfway through the 2nd mission, so it was looking iffy whether I really could hit 50 or not.



One thing about the team -- I was almost the only melee on the team. We had a brute join late, and I was glad for that, but it was a tauntless brute so we were about equal as far as tanking went. We had three nature affinity defenders, a fire/kin controller, a dark controller, and fire/rad corruptor. Needless to say, my willpower scrapper was not only capped for defense but capped for resists and with a nice hit point buffer from NA's absorb buff. I felt pretty darn tough. ^_^

Things went well and we finished off Rommy and cleared the towers... and I was still just a bit over 1 bubble from 50. I took a break, and came back later and ran the walls for a short while and hit 50 that way, then I went to Ouroboros and did my Alpha unlock mission.



Another evening successfully wasted!

One thing I noticed running the wall... Swift Sky still has endurance issues when solo. I'll have to use my Alpha to address that, since I went for the pyro epic pool instead of the one that might help me with my endurance.

I also finally came up with a bio for Swift Sky just last night:

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-39.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 39

It is getting harder and harder to find enough people to do what every it is you want to do in the game. I have to wonder what it's like on other servers, because Virtue remains one of the most populated servers in prime time on the West Coast, and yet I see so few people. The weekend was quite busy, we even did a redside Cathedral of Pain on Sunday, but come Monday and Tuesday it's a ghost town.

Tonight when I logged in I checked the global channel that I'm an Op for -- MG's Taskforces -- and there were three people total including me on. I checked Brickhouse and there were only two people including me. I checked Whisper X, which has always been a much bigger channel that gets a lot of use for iTrials and such, and there were maybe 9 people total on in that one. Some people were trying to form an Apex but there wasn't enough interest, so they decided to wait and see what came up later. In the meantime I saw someone in LFG advertising for a Numina, and I wanted exp on Swift Sky and I need most of the Freedom Phalanx TFs so I joined up.

This went well, we finished in 45 minutes. I was a big worried when most of the team was at half health in a normal battle with Freakshow in the first mission... but things went well from there. Although we didn't have a lot of direction during the hunt sequence, and what little we had was ignored. The leader basically said (at the very start of the TF), "Here's the order: perez, atlas, steel, kr, sky, faultline, bricks, crey, tv, ip, boom, talos, founders, eden. We'll just go in order from the top, I'll do perez, Arrow does atlas, etc." I was the third person on the team so that meant I had Steel, but of course when the time came we had other people who immediately shouted that they were heading for Steel too, and from that point people just went wherever they wanted. Ah well.

Around this time Freaky was trying to form an Apex, and once they had six people they gave up trying to find more and were simply looking for fillers. They still needed one filler so during our hunt phase I logged in my other account on the laptop and joined long enough for them to start. It turned out they did a successful six-man Master of Apex run. ^_^

After our Numi we ran a Manticore with mostly the same people, but with a different person in charge. They set it at +2, but it still went fairly well until the final mission. Here, things kind of unraveled a bit. First, two people ran to the very end of the mission where Hopkins the AV was, then were unable to teleport anyone to them, then died, then rezed, then died again... both eventually just decided to wait while the rest of the team cleared our way all the way to them. How very... helpful.

Then, I was charging ahead trying to lead the rest of the team to the end of the mission as quickly as possible, but the rest of the team kept pausing to kill every single thing they saw. So at one point I found myself with 5 or 6 Paragon Protectors on me, and nobody else helping. Once we got past that, we cleared the middle of a large room, and while I charged into the next hallway, the rest of the team decided to clear the corners and balconies of the large room. So once again I found myself going up against 5 to 6 Paragon Protectors at once, and these were level 38, +3 to me. I did die that time, but hit my Return to Battle and managed to finish them off, with the help of one of the people waiting at the end of the mission who could now see me and decided to actually backtrack and help out.

At the same time, the five people who had failed to follow me had a near full group wipe, which only confirmed for me that my scrapper was tougher than our two brutes. But anyway, we all managed to meet up at the AV in the end. It's not like Hopkins ever gave any team a hard time, ever. I mean EVER.

So yeah... at the very end there, the legend of the PuG reared its ugly head. "You cannot deny the awesomeness of the PuG", one of my global channel friends said. ^_^

But the good news is I got Swift Sky to 48. Less than 2 levels to go! I think I should run a Citadel or Yin tomorrow night...



During the rescue the councilman in King's Row mission, I went to Crey's Folly for the Kill 40 Crey hunt that happens right after. THIS is how you prepare for that! Kind of reminded me of the old days herding enemies into containers with my fire tank.



Oh look, it's the least fearsome AV in the game, with the possible exception of the Hellion in Death From Below. You can tell the fight has just started because he's not held yet, and that happens about five seconds into the fight and then he pretty much stays held for the rest of the fight.

Right after that Jane wanted to do a DFB badge run, and I had my "random" level 1 character that I'd made on Sunday. I'd changed the character's name to Vashi and gave her a better costume, but I probably should have changed it to "Annoying Stormy" or "Clueless Stormy" because that's what she'll be if I ever get her high enough. Anyway on our big badge run we screwed up on the first and hardest badge, by letting a cadaver get killed by a proximity bomb. Right after that people wanted to bail to hopefully join an iTrial (they'd been waiting for enough people to log on so that they could actually run one), but Jane still wanted that badge we'd missed. I switched to Tiffany Blackhearrt on the theory that I'd be more helpful and MA was mostly single target anyway. Other people switched, and before we started most of the other people came back because there STILL wasn't enough interest to form an iTrial yet. We got the badges on the 2nd run, and that was pretty much my evening.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-38.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 38


There weren't a lot of people on tonight. I figured I could join a Khan TF pretty easily (last night that it is WST) but our first attempt drew only three people so we decided to try again later. In the meantime, I went to Ouro and ran "A Madman's Council" which unlocked Hess on Swift Sky. Not long after I was done, Freaky had logged on and was forming a MoKhan. So I joined.

We had at least half the team filled by people from LFG/Help channels, and you never know what you're going to get doing that, especially for a Mo run. But actually it went really well. We had a tank, a brute, three scrappers, two trollers, and a defender -- at least one of them was nature affinity, which has such nice buffs. We pulled Reichs down to one corner and had the brute tank the other four AVs separately, which worked. The NA did that mushroom spores debuff toggle when Reichs was being pulled and he stopped halfway to the tank and went straight for the NA, but we quickly got things under control (that debuff REALLY pisses enemies off though!). In the end we were successful, Master of 5th Column Task Force achieved!

This was actually my 99th badge on Swift Sky, although I hit 100 and 101 at the same time (the WST helper one, and the one for 100 badges too). I don't think I have MoKhan on any other toon -- I've tried for it a few times but overall I'm not a big one for Mo badges. So it amused me even more that Swift Sky has it with so few badges overall.

Then we took down Seed of Hamidon in First Ward with a 6 man team. Again, something I've never done, and a fun badge to add to Swift Sky's small but increasingly distinguished collection!

I hit 47 on the Khan, which allowed me to slot hami-O's (Cytoskeletons in three defense powers). Yay!

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-37.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 37


I slept in this morning and missed the Justine Augustine Task Force that Freaky ran. I'm not sure if I'm disappointed, or relieved. I logged in about 9 AM PST and figured they had already started and were probably in the middle of it, so when a random ITF advertised looking for people I decided to join. Right away I was worried, because I didn't know anyone, there were only two level 50s on the team (non-incarnates) and a lot of lower levels, and they were talking about running at +1 and maybe bumping it up higher if it was too easy. I sensed great danger ahead.

I was on Swift Sky and of course had to run to Night Ward to gain access to the Midnighter's Club. I mean, all I've done on that character was sit in a Council Earth mission and then run a few TFs. Other people on the team also needed to do the same thing, and weren't as fast about it as I was, so we were still waiting on people to get to Cimemora when Freaky advertised the forming of a Faathim the Kind TF.

Well, I immediately dismissed myself from the ITF which had not yet started, and joined the Faathim. Saved me from pain and torment, I have no doubts! ^_^

The thing about Faathim the Kind is that he doesn't have a phone. At all. Ever. Even after you've spent 2+ hours bouncing around The Chantry and Storm Palace, saving his bacon and defeating Lanaruu the Mad, he won't talk to you. All of the latter missions are in Storm Palace (except the one or two that happen back in Paragon) so the leader is left running back to the center of The Chantry to talk to the idiot, and then back to Storm Palace, ad nauseum. And you can bet we waited for him to go back one last time just so we could properly complete the TF after it was over.



We finished in 2 hours 12 minutes... but it felt a lot longer. One of our teammates got a migrane and had to quit. Anyway I tried to get a good shot of the end fight but Lanaruu is so tall and fighting his feet doesn't make for a great picture... I did my best.

I got one picture which I thought was cool enough that I left it in full screen mode. (Since it's pretty large I'm just going to link to it):

http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/c...fullscreen.jpg

Can't see that much but I thought it looked cool.

After this TF I had only 90 badges on Swift Sky, including 3 of 4 shard TF badges. That appealed to me a great deal so I had to capture it:





(These pictures were taken with me ninja jumping up and down on the hill in Talos Island, with the camera pointed straight up, lol.)

In the evening I logged in just in time to join the weekly redside Cathedral of Pain Trail. I showed up at just the right time -- after the instructions were finished, just before the actual start. I brought AE Baby of course, my go-to villainess. We whipped through the whole thing in about 8 minutes, no second takes, no miscues, defeated the AV without a respawn of the cubes. Cake!



Right after that we started up a speed Khan (pictured above), and the leader stressed that, if you were a rogue, you could NOT use Ouro or go to a co-op zone like RWZ because it WOULD kick you from the team.

Of course, the reason you'd want to use Ouro is that the second-to-last mission is in Peregrine Island (all the others are "board train" missions) and you need to be in that mission to get the temp power to use on Reichsman. But these days there's the tunnel system, and there's one right below the tram in Founder's, and it goes straight to PI. Problem solved, right?

Well... mostly. Once you exit that mission, the final mission is another "board train" missions, and most people naturally head to Ouroboros to do it. Our leader was a rogue, so he had to hoof it to the other end of the island where the boat and tunnel portal await. Only someone on the team suggested that there was a tunnel portal near the arena, which is much closer. Except... that portal doesn't go anywhere but to Dark Astoria. Which is a co-op zone. Which means... our leader got kicked from the team.

So we finished the AV fight, then we ran again so that our leader could get to the end. It's a fast TF if you speed it, 20-30 minutes. I think the second time around we hit 22 minutes. On the first run I was using Swift Sky who was by then 45 and made it to 46 by the end; for the second run I went with Megami Hime, who is my titan weapons/willpower brute. Much different from a titan weapons/willpower scrapper! Well, I have taunt for one thing... plus it's not a giant hammer, it's a sword! These things are important!



I think what I really like about the above picture is the giant robot on one side blazing away, and the little leprechaun on the other side scheming and doing nothing of course, but he's right there in the foreground. You can see Megami Hime swinging the excaliber sword too.



For the end of the evening a friend ran a Hess TF, mostly with people grabbed from the Looking For Group and Help channels. Several of them had never done it before, and it's a fun task force so they had fun and that's all good. ^_^ Swift Sky is very close to 47 now, I had a very productive weekend with her!

Two nights a week? That's impressive. I think Virtue has been down to once every Saturday for a while, but there apparently wasn't one yesterday....

I think there are a couple of the villain-side Strike Forces that I've never done... never done a LRSF at least, which seems improbable for as much as I play but it's true. I've probably done most of the otheres at least once or twice but I don't know most of them well enough to remember for sure.

Other than that, I've done just about everything. I haven't done a MoM of DD incarnate trial yet though.

Glad people find it entertaining. ^_^

I almost forgot to add... Freaky ran another Doc Q in the afternoon, since some people that wanted to run it missed his early AM run. I really don't know how many people have ever run two complete Doctor Quaterfield TFs in the same day, let alone with a Sara Moore and (I believe) a Khan TF sandwiched in between them. Man's hardcore. ^_^

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-36.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 36


Well today I sure made up for a full week of not playing.

I logged in early in the morning and did some stuff with my scrapper Swift Sky. It wasn't long before Freaky was advertising the start of his Doctor Quaterfield Task Force. Well if you're gonna do it, might as well start early. ^_^

Aside from some costume missions, this was going to be my first run at anything with Swift Sky, apart from a lot of door sitting while my main account killed stuff. I was worried about endurance so I bought a bunch of inspirations on the market and I used a endurance drain resist empowerment buff just before we started. Which... rularuu don't really drain endurance, not sure if that was any help at all. Also crafted an envenomed dagger and a recovery serum temp power, that was more likely to help. But really, we had a kin on the team so I didn't have too many endurance issues.



Doc Q was Doc Q. We finished in 3 hours 22 minutes. I had fun -- I think everyone did. We had a good team, and we made good use of team transports and such.



Since there's not much to say about the task force other than it's very long, I took several pictures.





Swift Sky did very well. I kind of knew she would -- Willpower is the right set to use against Rularuu. Defense based sets are pretty screwed, those guys shred defense.

One thing that amused me was the end of the Task Force, I got the message "You have earned your first merits...." Probably not many people have recieved 122 merits for their first ever merit reward. ^_^

It's hard to get good pictures when you're in the middle of an 8-man Task Force, and concentrating on things other than setting up a good photo opportunity. When I joined Freaky's Sara Moore Task Force after a bit of a break, I spent the time while we were forming killing stuff in the Cascade Archipelago and taking better pictures of my character. In between I'd run my Founder's Falls costume mission and designed a new costume, which I kinda liked.









We finished the Sara Moore in 1 hour 28 minutes. It felt very fast after the Doc Q! I had fun on this one as well!

Afterwards Jane wanted to run a Posi 1 & 2, spurred in part by the knowledge that my new character didn't have any of the Freedom Phalanyx TF badges, and in part because she had a level 11 toon to play. ^_^ We couldn't get anyone else but Cobalt Avenger to join us, so we ran both TFs with just three people. Finished both in just over 30 minutes! I think I got a very good picture of me vs. Doc Vahz... I was the only melee so it was easy to get a clear shot:



But that wasn't all! I spent probably two hours on a special costume contest/event. You had to make a level 1 character -- couldn't be higher -- and use the random button on the costume. Then you made your way to the hospital in Steel Canyon, and we did a run around the outer road of Steel Canyon using just sprint.

On the first run I was a bit confused about the course. I think a lot of people were. I cut across the grass North of the hospital, which I later realized was a shortcut. I also took a shortcut down by the yellow line tram (SE corner) and didn't realize it. At that point I was following the guy who was the apparent winner the first time, but we went around the inside of the tram rather than follow the road that goes around the outside of it, so that was a bit of a shortcut too. Although by that point we were so far ahead of everyone else it might not have mattered.

But! The leader just ahead of me was a stalker who had turned on his stealth, without realizing that was against the rules. So we ran again.

On the second run I'm not exactly sure what happened. The entire group of people were in a pack ahead of me, and then a guy was way behind them named Eletri-kin Tank I think it was, and then I was way behind him. Along the route you were supposed to stop if you saw anyone who was high level and might be a costume contest judge, so after I'd stopped a couple of times I couldn't even see the main pack anymore, just Eletri-kin way ahead of me. I followed him around and this time I know for certain I took the correct route the entire way. I was confused what had happened to all the people ahead of us, we never caught up to any of them, but when we reached the finish line, it turned out that we were the only two to make it there. So I came in second place again. Everyone else died, I guess, and started over -- it was quite a few minutes before third place showed up (the guy who had won the original race by inadvertently cheating). Two others made it all the way around.

This is one of those things -- I always made fun of people who couldn't cross The Hollows without dying back in the old days. It never seemed all that tough to me. And this was like that, I didn't die on either run, I got zapped once each time (once by a guy who'd chased Eletri-kin out into the street, so I couldn't avoid him). But most people found it really difficult to avoid dying, so I don't know why I'm good at that.

My friends won 3rd and 2nd place in the costume contest though. ^_^ Now we all have money on toons that are level 1 and can't e-mail yet. I reminded them to not just go and delete them!

Right after that, I joined a Khan TF. This turned into a Mo Khan attempt that was foiled by a single death when our MM who was stealthing to the final room was seen and killed. I thought, well, they can't see ME! since I was on my widow Miss Shinobu, who has superspeed. I headed off down the corridor, and most of them couldn't see me, but for some reason on the same corner where the MM died, one of them did see me. Grrr. But at least I didn't die, and we trounced Reichsman in very short order.



This is the kind of shot you normally get in an AV battle on an 8-man team, especially when it's a level 50 task force. It's kind of a cool shot in its own way I suppose, but you can't see details. That's my widow in the middle doing a spin attack.

And that was my big Saturday.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 35


I didn't do that much on Friday night. There weren't many people online and I logged in late I think. Freaky was planning to run all of the shard TFs for the weekend, so I decided what I really wanted to do was get Swift Sky from level 38 to 40. And... that's what I did. That's all I did, in fact -- just like I've done for the other 38 levels, I PL'd my new scrapper up two more levels.

At the moment though, Swift Sky has a nearly complete IO build, aside from the things I can't even slot yet. She's at nearly 40% smashing/lethal defense, and that's on a Willpower toon. She has a few endurance problems still, those need fixed, but that's Titan Weapons for you. But all in all I'm pleased with the character, and not at all disappointed in myself for having PL'd all the way to 40. I've played Titan Weapons on a brute, and I have a dozen or more Willpower melee toons by now. I know exactly what I want for this character and how to build her and play her.

I did some work finishing up her build, so that I'm completely ready for a shard TF Saturday. And that was it. I've had a cold so I decided to call it an early night.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-34.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 34

Tonight was the first time I've actually played in a week. I was at a convention last weekend, and since coming back I've logged in twice but haven't actually done much of anything. Usually I've been logging in too late and there wasn't anything going on, or I didn't want to start anything. Amazing how skipping a few days can completely break you of the habit of wanting to log in at all.

That, and I've been busy playing games on my iPad. :/

Anyway tonight I logged in and joined a speed Khan with friends, followed by a speed Lady Gray TF. All in all only about an hour of gaming, probably less actually, but it was fun. Seven of us posed in front of the giant portal in the end room of the LGTF, but the pictures didn't come out so good for me. Still, here's the best one:



From left to right: Jennie Nova (me), Jane's fender (Olivia O'Conner I think), Zombie Broiler, Lord Jubei (Freaky), ah... Gems tank I think, joe's brute, and Ceeyou Someday (Cobalt Avenger).

Not pictured: Skippylabs hit exit early.

Apparently I can't log in to the main boards to post this there right now. So it goes. (posted to my blog a couple of days ago.)

I've played both to 50. I like both, but I might side with everyone else and say Street Justice is more visceral and slightly more fun.

But I do like the flashy staff moves too.