PoliceWoman

6/5/2008

Several buy orders at Wentworth's finally executed for me, allowing me to finish crafting 3 sets of 6 Touch of Death, all at level 30-33, for my MA/SR scrapper, Olivia Q. I ended up overwriting some level 40 Touch of Death IOs with the same IO at a lower level, which was kind of wasteful but I didn't want to burn another respec trying to pull them out for re-sale. The net effect of the new slotting now gives her walking around defenses of 42.8% range DEF, 49.7% melee DEF, and 41.1% aoe DEF; most (but not all) of which still works when exemped to 30. Tested this out by running the first Midnight Squad mission, in which the CoT had a really, really hard time hitting Olivia; I could ghetto stealth by just walking by stuff and counting on them not being able to hit me. The hardest part of the mission was finding that darn Percy Winkley hostage, who I must have walked by 2 or 3 times before I noticed him.

After that I joined an Operative Renault (Sharkhead) SF organized on LHO, playing Primadonna (25 sonic/kin corruptor). Our team mix was:

dark/fire brute
fortunata
sonic/kin corruptor (me, LK'd to the brute)
nrg/will stalker
ice/kin corruptor

With 2 kins, we were very speedy but also very squishy. Between my Invis and Grant Invis, and the ice/kin's Recall Friend, we got to stealth the team around most missions. We did have some trouble in the mission to get the coral key, where we stealthed in and grabbed the key, then the team got swamped by ambushers, resulting in a team wipe. We also suffered two team wipes in the Defeat Shockstorm mission; once right at the door as a huge wave of ambushers launched themselves at us, and once a bit later on while fighting too many Longbow at once. One team member was afraid that stealthing past stuff was triggering ambushes, but I ended up successfully stealthing to Shockstorm while the rest of the team was running back from the hospital, then was able to use the veteran team teleport to get everyone there. The rest of the SF went pretty well, though. In the last mission we managed to pull all of Calystix's minions away from him before attacking him, which let us easily trounce him. While fighting the Eye of the Leviathan, near the end of the fight I ingloriously got hit by a huge knockback effect that threw me across the room, leaving me stunned in the middle of some other mobs who beat me up. Ouch! The team finished off the Eye though and we completed the SF with a total time of 2 hours exactly. Primadonna hit level 26 on this SF and trained in Screech.

After the SF I jumped over to Police Woman in Atlas Park, where I sorta hung out as moral support for the Sisterhood SG costume contest that was ongoing. (I had considered joining the arena kickball too, but I wanted to lend support to the Sisterhood event.) I arrived a little late due to my SF running long; there was a big turnout, and it sounded like the mistress of ceremonies had announced some special rules requiring making a new costume, at least half of which should be white (for males) or pink (for females). One of the contestants complained that everyone being the same color made it hard to stand out, which I thought was somewhat valid; and a couple other contestants bitterly complained in broadcast about the judging after the winners were announced, which I thought was rather rude. I ended up using the "Add a note" feature to 1-star some of the more rude people so that I'd remember to avoid them later.

After the costume contest the Sisterhood also ran a bio contest. Originally, the idea was that the judge would announce several topics and key NPCs and people would have to improvise writing a bio for a new character that contained all these story elements, which I thought would be pretty fun and creative. Many players were uneasy at this idea, though, and especially didn't want to change their current bio; as a result, the mistress of ceremonies relented and changed the contest to judge only people's existing bios. I liked the original contest idea so much, though, that I ended up logging off to make a newbie fire/fire scrapper (Miss Molotov) and composed a lengthy origin story describing an early attempt at using her flaming vodka powers. But by the time I fought my way through the tutorial and into Atlas Park, the contest judging was nearly over. Ack! I totally should've skipped the tutorial. Nevertheless, I hung out a bit longer and kibbitzed about whose stories I liked among the finalists. It was still pretty neat.

After that I ended up joining a sewers team; the team leader, a level 5 empath defender, was initially skeptical of a 2 fire/fire scrapper joining, saying "You'll probably draw too much aggro and die". But then she nominated me to take point for the team instead of the 5 bs/will scrapper (I think purely because I got to the sewer first). Scrappers shouldn't show fear, so I agreed and led the way into large groups of sewer monsters; though on occasion, my natural blaster cowardice took over and I used pulling techniques instead of blindly rushing like a real scrapper. I'll have to work on that. Anyway, I managed to lead the team through the sewers from Atlas Park all the way to King's Row, climbing out of the sewers as a level 7. I managed not to die while doing this, though the empath deserves more credit for this accomplishment than I do.

Somewhere along the way we picked up a level 10 controller, as well as a few more 6s and 7s in King's Row, and we ended up trying one of the level 10's radio missions. With only one level 10 and six people level 6-8, we promptly suffered a team wipe against the first spawn we encountered, which was a bunch of level 11s. I said I thought this was too hard for us, but the team seemed determined to continue doing this mission. I really didn't think this would work, so I excused myself from the team, saying I was too low level.

After that I switched to playing Lady Arachne (31 bane spider) on a 4 player Liberty Force team doing missions in Nerva Archipelago. All 4 of us were soldiers; 2 bane, 2 crab. We knocked out a Talos mayhem, which I found particularly memorable because when we entered the bank, we got mobbed by an ambush of around 30 Longbow troopers. Normally this would be death for a villain team, but stacked maneuvers had put us at the DEF cap, which allowed us to mercilessly mow all the longbow down, leaving an impressive pile of red and white uniformed bodies. Lady Arachne got to level 32; the other soldiers on the team who hit 32 took Omega Maneuver and Crowd Control. I took Bayonet instead; I had respec'd out of Bayonet at 24 and been missing it, because I didn't really have enough single target attacks. I've been avoiding the mace powers so far (mostly because I just like guns better, but partly to avoid redraw), but I hear both Build Up and Placate require the mace to be drawn, which will make it tough because those both sound pretty useful.

Also, when Lady Arachne threw her leftover salvage onto the Black Market, I was quite surprised when 2 Alchemical Silver that I put up with a sale price of 1, instantly sold for 60K inf each. That partly makes up for some of the 50K inf Iron and Scientific Theory salvages I've been having to buy lately. Salvage, even common salvage, seems to be going for crazy prices lately.

6/4/2008

I was only on for a short time on Monday night, playing Lady Arachne (30 wolf spider) on a 3-player all VEAT Liberty force team, getting to level 31. Started slotting up Pummel a little bit; not sure whether this is efficient, strictly speaking, but I kinda like that power and use it a lot, so seemed a place to sink some slots.

Tuesday night I started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) on an Imperious TF organized on LBx and LHO channels. Team mix was:

spine/dark scrapper
night widow
AR/dev blaster (me)
grav dominator
fire/kin controller
sonic/thermal corruptor
SS/elec brute
cold/ice defender

Had a real slow start because the corruptor had volunteered to join but didn't have Cimemora unlocked, so some of the villains needed to go help him run through the Midnight Squad arc before we could begin. The night widow and I killed time waiting by obliterating various Romans guarding the big fort; their formations line them up perfectly to be mown down by Full Auto. Once we got started, the brute led the way; he seemed quite survivable against the Romans, though he probably had the edge over the elec brute on my last ITF due to the cold shields, which the defender was vigilant about keeping up. The corruptor was somewhat more lax about keeping shields up, instead focusing on blasting; once in awhile we got fire shield, but mostly not. We finished the first 2 missions without much trouble. I noticed that Beanbag and Taser, which I normally use to stun troublesome enemies (up to boss level), was largely ignored by the Romans due to the Clear Mind they get from the surgeons. Caltrops were still good for keeping them off me, though.

In the third mission, we fought through waves of ambushes in the valleys leading to the final area; there, we dropped down and destroyed the computer console, then the cold defender single-pulled first Requiem, then Romulus down to us. This seemed to work pretty well.

In the final mission we battled our way to Romulus and the Nicti surrounding him. There was some disagreement on the best way to beat this encounter, but the cold defender eventually got his way and he had me pull Romulus down from the steps he starts on. Sometimes Romulus comes alone, he said, but this time Romulus and all 3 Nicti came down to fight us. The brute jumped on Romulus and the defender asked us to target through him to kill the Nicti one at a time. This seemed to make sense, but I found that the defender actually was targeting teammates quite a lot (in order to renew cold shields) and whenever he was doing this, I had no valid target so my DPS dropped to zero. I probably should've just directly targeted the Nictus, but I was afraid of messing something up, so I stuck with the plan. I'm thinking it's better to use a DPS person over a support person as "main assist" to choose targets, though. Anyway, we eventually ground the various Nictus down to nothing, and I got to experience the nasty AOE stun that goes off when each one dies (which I hadn't noticed the last time I did the ITF since the stun just bounced off Thunder Girl, the tanker I was playing then). After the last Nictus fell, Romulus died almost instantly. We had somehow not killed enough Cimemoran traitors, so we had to mop up a few groups of minions in order to complete the TF. Total TF time was 1hr 23min.

After that I played Swordswoman (9 bs/fire scrapper on Protector) with an 8 player team of Demolition Girls SG. We did the Frostfire mission, King's Row mayhem, Spelunker badge mission, and some other stuff, eventually getting Swordswoman to level 14. Hacking stuff was kind of fun, but I'm way too used to following tanks around; I need to work on redeveloping the suicidally insane scrapper mentality. Though it was tempting to take another broadsword attack, instead I tried to stay disciplined and took Combat Jumping at 10, Hurdle at 12 and Swift at 14, in order to travel a little faster and get ready for stamina.

Also, I finally managed to get an additional character slot purchase to carry through to CoH's billing server (all previous attempts had timed out; I assume this server is powered by an aging, asthmatic gerbil running in a hamster wheel). I killed some time trying to make more level 1 hero alts, mostly messing around with costumes but not coming up with anything that really grabs me.

6/2/2008

I played Lady Arachne (23 wolf spider) quite a bit over the weekend, playing on: a 4 player Liberty Force SG team, a bad 5 player pickup team, a good 8 player pickup team, another 4 player Liberty Force team that beat AV-level Barracuda and Calystix, solo'd an Independence Port mayhem for the Tyrannical badge, and a good 8 player Mercenaries Inc SG team. This ultimately got Lady Arachne to level 30. As an Arachnos soldier, I was forced to respec at level 24; I technically became a Bane Spider, but really I kept most of the same powers, only substituting the Bane armor for the Wolf armor (since the Bane armor is strictly better) and dropping a couple powers in order to fit in Stamina (which I had skipped up to that point in favor of trying out more new powers). I actually don't like the look of the Crab legs or the Bane mace, and I really like the Wolf spider gun attacks, so I'm basically now a level 30 Wolf spider with a few Bane powers. This is actually more viable than you might think. Anyway, from 26 to 30 I took Mental Training (amazing!), Surveillance (I love the special effect, which is a big red crosshair locking onto a target, then it debuffs the target horribly), and Wide Area Web Grenade (I thought this would be nice for downing flyers and debuffing recharge, but I've actually not that excited about it so far). I dropped Bayonet in the respec but I'm actually kind of missing it; I've focused heavily on AoE powers and don't have enough single attacks right now.

On Saturday I played Thunder Girl (45 will/nrg tanker) on an Imperious TF organized mostly on the Sisterhood channel. Team mix was:

emp/rad defender
will/nrg tanker (me, as SK to the empath)
dominator (not sure what powers)
night widow
stone armor brute
dark/sonic defender
elec armor brute
fire/fire blaster

This was my first Imperious TF and I really didn't have much idea what I was doing. The team leader had said we needed a tank so I had volunteered to play Thunder Girl, but in fact the stone brute ended up doing most of the tanking by virtue of higher resists (while in granite armor anyway) and knowing what to do / where to go. The Roman mobs seemed to do fairly massive lethal alpha strike damage, with stacking -DEF debuffs. I watched how our various meleers fared against the Romans; the stone brute definitely soaked damage the best, staying in granite the whole time. I mostly did OK against the Romans as a will tanker, but not as well as the granite brute despite having double the HP; I could easily get in over my head, but hitting Strength of Will would usually save me. Hitting purple inspirations (my normal get out of jail free card) really didn't do much due to the massive -DEF debuffs. The night widow and the elec brute seemed to routinely get squished any time they faced a full spawn of Romans. I think it was all about the lethal resists; Thunder Girl has focused on +HP over resists and so her lethal resist is only 40%. I'm wondering if it's worth it to respec into Tough just for this TF; and I'd be a bit afraid to play a DEF based character on this TF.

I really enjoyed the look of the enemies on the TF, especially the mythological monsters like the minotaurs and cyclopses. I can't explain why it is more cool to fight minotaurs in CoH than it is in WoW or EQ or something, but it just is. I was also totally psyched to meet the [SPOILER!!] 5th Column in this TF! Fighting Nazis is the best, and there is something so wrong about giant Nazi robots in the past that it's so right!

We got to the final mission without too much trouble, but I was pretty confused as to what we were doing in the final fight against the Romulus AV and 3 Nictus AVs. The stone brute came up with some tactics; he would tank Romulus and he asked me to taunt the 3 Nictus. The idea was that we would kill Romulus 4 times. So I said OK and started taunting them, but the 3 Nictus and Romulus all ended up in a tight clump and apparently the Nictus were healing Romulus. So they asked me to pull the Nictus away, and I'm like, OK ... I moved around a corner and taunted the 3 Nictus AVs to me. This seemed to stop the healing, but then someone starts yelling "ALL ON ROMULUS!" repeatedly. I ponder this for a moment, then say, "OK" and move over to start hitting Romulus. Then someone else yells, "No, not you Thunder Girl!" Oops! So I move back around my corner and taunt the Nictus back over there. Then Romulus dies and the team is like .. oh ... he didn't rez? I had pulled the Nictus out of line of sight of Romulus, and apparently that was bad because we want them to rez Romulus, which suicides them, and Romulus is easier than a Nictus AV.

Despite all this confusion, we eventually managed to beat the Nictus AVs down. TF time was 1h 47m, and Thunder Girl got level 46 and the Temporal Strife badge. I also immediately ran to Icon and gave Thunder Girl a 'Roman' costume for fun. It was really a cool TF.

Later I played Primadonna (20 sonic/kin corruptor) as a lackey on an 8-player LEGION team (7 VEATs and me) doing level 45ish missions in Grandville, beating up an AV level Dr Quatrexin along the way. This got Primadonna to level 25. I ended up burning Primadonna's free respec, dropping Hasten and Stamina for Howl and Siren's Song for some AoE and control; I didn't have enough attacks before, and found that I don't really use Hasten that much. I did keep Swift and Hurdle so I could take Stamina again soon though. On Sunday I joined a Cap SF with Primadonna; our team mix was:

fire/elec dom
son/kin corr (me)
widow
robot/TA MM
db/ninj stalker

This was a little awkward as we had no brute and only transfusion for healing, and we suffered a lot of deaths early on til we got the hang of things. But we got through to the last mission; someone stealthed the altars while we killed Infernal, then we fought Bat'Zul separately. We had trouble pulling him to a good place and suffered one wipeout against him, then killed Bat'Zul on the second try. Total time was 57 minutes. I got a level 25 Trap of the Hunter damage proc, which the dominator immediately asked to buy off me for his fire cages; he gave me 400K infamy, good for him (it's a bit under market price) but I've teamed with him before and would've given it to him for nothing.

I did end up buying a set of 5 level 23 Call of the Sandman for Primadonna, slotting them into Siren's Song for set bonuses of +1.88% max HP, +2.25% max END and +6.25% global RCHG. Level 23 is lower than I normally go for IOs, but I'm planning to optimize Primadonna for Cap au Diable SFs which malefactor to level 20.

Also on Sunday I played Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender) on a 6-player pickup team that defeated AV-level Nightstar and Dominatrix. Fighting AVs with Rain Dancer is really rather fun because she can unleash all her stormy goodness (hurricane, tornado, multiple lightning storms) on an AV without fear of knockback.

Did a Sister Psyche TF organized on LBX playing Mystery Girl (33 FF/nrg defender); the team had actually just started but hadn't entered the first mission yet, so restarted the TF to let me join, which was nice. Our team mix was:

fire/fire tanker
archery/nrg blaster
dark/dark tanker
ff/nrg defender (me)
fire/kin controller
ill/therm controller (2nd box of fire/kin)

Both the illusionist and Mystery Girl had invis, allowing us to speed through the stealthable missions. We were quite safe with force fields and thermal shields, but our overall DPS was very low, making the Defeat All missions something of a grind. We suffered multiple linkdeaths during the TF, which also slowed things down; the blaster, fire tanker and I all disconnected at various different times. We agreed to delay finishing the last mission for about 15 minutes hoping for the fire tanker to come back from linkdeath, but she never did. Ended up finishing the TF in 3h 5m.

Playing April Fool (50 thug/TA MM) I solo'd my way through the villainous story arc to join the Midnight Squad, which seems quite a bit shorter than the hero side version. Then I joined a 6 player Liberty Force villain team to defeat Lord Recluse AV in the future; I got a SG badge called Scorpion's Surprise, which I had never heard of before, but is apparently earned by defeating Recluse 5 times in SG mode. We then went on to defeat a Hero-level Ms Liberty, followed by the Vindicators mission where we beat Hero-level Mynx, Valkyrie, Luminary and Ms Liberty again.

After that I played Maitresse (21 zombie/storm MM) on a 5 player Liberty Force team, which was 4 VEATs and me. We had an ugly wipeout against CoTs in the wedding cake shaped room; apparently Behemoth Masters have much better DEF than before, a change apparently aimed at high end farmers but which made them extremely formidable to fight at our level. When I had it up, Freezing Rain seemed to drop their DEF to hittable numbers, though. Things went better after we finished the CoT and moved on to fight Longbow and Freaks and stuff. Got Maitresse to level 23; I burned her free respec to yank out the extra slots I had accidentally put in Gale, and upgraded all her enhancements to SOs. I took Snowstorm at level 22, a power I normally avoid due to the amount of aggro it draws, but I figure it should be manageable between stacked VEAT DEF, bodyguard mode, and the natural -RCHG debuff of Snowstorm.

5/30/2008

Played only a little last night, as company stayed late, causing me to miss an Imperious TF I had originally signed up for. I killed some time trying to burn free respecs on alts I wanted to tweak powers on, since free respecs would be refreshed the next day.

Started off trying to figure out a respec for Mega (50 SS/elec brute). I wanted to drop Handclap, which I had taken in her 40s for lack of anything better, but has been incredibly annoying every time I've used it. Unfortunately I could not find another power that I wanted to replace it with; I considered Jab (I have every other SS power), Resuscitate (I already had Aid Self, so it was just one more power pick) or Weave (already had Tough). But I felt like I had enough attacks, Resuscitate's utility doesn't seem that exciting between Mega mostly being a soloer and the fact you can turn 3 inspirations into an awaken now, and Weave felt like it would be an END drain for minimal +DEF gain (Mega has very little other DEF to stack with). I also realized I had a set of 5 Stupefy IOs in Handclap, which gives +1.88% HP and +6.25% global RCHG, which I was loathe to give up. I ended up grudgingly deciding not to respec Handclap out after all. But maybe I won't ever use it.

After that I worked out a respec for Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper). Olivia basically has capped DEF to melee and close to the cap against ranged and AoE, but she only has these at level 38+ due to her IO sets being mostly level 40 and 41. But Olivia is my alt of choice for soloing on Hess TFs, so I decided it would be worthwhile to downgrade her IOs to around level 30 to 33, so as to get the IO set bonuses even exemped to 30. I ended up spending ~20M infl intentionally nerfing my character by replacing higher level IOs with lower level IOs, and I still haven't gotten all the Touch of Death and Miracle recipes that I'll ultimately need for this. It's worth noting that common salvage, even tech salvage, is ludicrously expensive right now; I spent 50K each for circuit boards that I normally delete when they get dropped on my character. I assume this is a second order market effect from I12, which caused a lot of people to start new alts who now need IOs crafted.

I made a couple minor tweaks to Olivia's build other than changing recipe levels; I also dropped Air Superiority for Thunder Kick (ultimately Air Superiority is probably the better attack due to its knockdown, but the martial arts attacks just look a lot more elegant to me) and stole enough slots from other powers to 6-slot Focus Chi, which I put a set of 6 Gaussian's in, giving a nice +2.5% bonus to melee/ranged/AoE DEF stacking with all of Olivia's other defense. Not sure if this expenditure of time, infl and effort will ultimately be worth it, but I'm still working at it for now.

After that I solo'd a little bit on villain side, doing a Steel Canyon mayhem with Lady Arachne (23 wolf spider).

5/29/2008

I started the night playing Fire Marshal (9 fire/mental blaster) on a 4-player Liberty Force SG team doing missions in the Hollows, culminating in the Frostfire mission. We got to see the new Frostfire cut scene, which we all agreed was a little underwhelming compared to the hype. Got Fire Marshal to level 12; so far I haven't been all that enthused about mental manipulation, but it's probably my own fault since I've taken none of the powers but the level 1 one so far. So far I have Fire Blast, Subdue, Fireball, Flares, Aid Other, Hurdle, Swift and Combat Jumping. I probably should've taken some more mental powers by now, but I haven't done so because whenever I feel like taking an attack, there always seems to be a fire attack that's better. (Flares is admittedly borderline though.)

Switched to villain side and played Primadonna (19 sonic/kin corruptor) on a 4-player Liberty Force SG team doing missions in Sharkhead Isle. We were 2 crab spiders, 1 wolf spider and a corruptor (me), but this really didn't work well, contradicting my earlier opinion that having a little corruptor support helps VEATs a lot. Only 2 of them had taken Tactical Training: Maneuvers, which meant a lot of damage leaked through to us; and all 3 of them were ranged attackers (until the wolf respec'd into bane spider, anyway), so healing them with kinetics was pretty hard. Getting to level 20 and gaining Speed Boost didn't seem to help that much; we killed a lot of stuff but died a lot too, and after 3 wipeouts I got frustrated and switched to Lady Arachne (21 wolf spider). Even though Lady Arachne only has Aid Other for healing, the third Tactical Training: Maneuvers brought our overall DEF to 42%, which considerably reduced the amount of healing we actually needed. Things went a lot more smoothly after that and Lady Arachne got to level 23. I picked up the Bayonet power at level 22; I've been training with the idea of trying out all the powers I can, then fixing any mistakes with the free respec at level 24. Running in and using Pummel/Bayonet to melee mobs down with her gun is actually kind of cool looking, though I'll need to do some number crunching to decide whether it's actually effective.

Anyway, I'm thinking I need to amend my earlier rule; a touch of support from a corruptor or MM seems to help all-VEAT teams that are already DEF capped. VEAT teams that aren't yet DEF capped definitely benefit more from another VEAT with Tactical Training: Maneuvers.

5/28/2008

Played a lot since my last update; here's a few of the highlights.

I've been playing villains pretty heavily, and I'm finding the all-VEAT teams, despite their high +DEF values from stacked tactical training, seem to be greatly helped by having one support character with a little healing capability to patch heal the damage that inevitably leaks through. As a result, in this time I got Lady Arachne (wolf spider) from level 18 to level 21, whereas Maitresse (necro/storm MM) got from level 9 to level 21, and Primadonna (sonic/kin corruptor) from level 1 (I restarted with a better costume; came up with a Phantom of the Opera-inspired tuxedo and half-mask costume that I really like) to level 19, all on mid to large teams of Arachnos soldiers and widows. Lady Arachne did manage to get the Soul Taker badge while on a LEGION SG team, also; but for the most part I was playing my newbie corruptor and MM more, since they seemed to add more to an all-VEAT team than a third or fourth wolf spider did.

Playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) I recruited a 3-player pickup team and did the story arc to join the Midnight Squad and unlock Cimemora. This went well and we even kept the suicidal Lady Jane alive long enough to finish her mission; forewarned, I had stayed near her the whole time, Aid Other'ing her when needed and trying to pre-emptively attack things before she would. I got a Prophecy drop along the way, though I'm sure prices on arcane salvage must be in free fall since I12 came out. The tanker I had recruited was immensely helpful in guiding us to various clickies to click in the Midnight Squad base to get a history badge. Ended up getting the Midnight Club Member, Midnight Squad, and Midnighter Archivist badges. Haven't tried the Imperious TF yet, but Cimemora definitely looks like a neat place.

I also unlocked the Midnight Club for Thunder Girl (45 will/nrg tanker); I especially wanted this for her, because I had written the Midnight Club into her origin story way back when I created her. Ran through the story arc with a 6 player team of Liberty Force SG. This time we lost Lady Jane when we turned to fight an ambush and she Leeroy'd into the mobs ahead of us. Otherwise got through OK though.

A friend was trying to find villains to fight in Warburg, so I ran Yuki-Onna (45 ice/cold corruptor) into Warburg for some light PvP. I normally PvP with my AR/dev blaster or thug/TA mastermind (stop laughing, you!) and I found not having a Web Grenade or Entangle Arrow to stop runners to be moderately frustrating; I guess everyone else has that problem all the time, though. Speed debuffs from ice and cold seemed to help some, though; maybe I should get Snowstorm (not currently in her build because it draws a lot of aggro) too. Did get a good number of kills anyway, though, especially after I teamed up with an nrg/regen stalker. It kinda felt like it was us 2 against 6 heroes; I guess the heroes might've been fighting each other when there are no villains around, but it seemed that we villains immediately drew aggro from all heroes any time we made an appearance. We did a decent job of coordinating our alpha strikes on the same person, though, so managed to blitz a good number of heroes to death with hit-and-run tactics.

I finally left after the heroes played a dirty trick on me; a mouthy bs/regen (or maybe bs/will?) scrapper had been trash talking my stalker partner after winning a staged one-on-one "duel" between them. I challenged the scrapper to duel one-on-one with me, which he agreed to. I was merrily kiting him around when his fire blaster partner jumped in and blew me away. This was kind of an unsatisfactory end to a duel, so I offered to rematch with the scrapper; he agreed and we fought again, and while I was fighting, the fire blaster showed up again and nuked me again. They were clearly teamed up, and neither the scrapper nor the blaster seemed to think there was anything wrong with this in a "one-on-one duel" at all. This made me pretty angry though since I had purposely stayed away when the scrapper was "duelling" my stalker partner. I ended up calling them bad sports and left the zone; I normally am fairly thick-skinned about PvP, and I tried to remind myself that PvP zones are anything goes, but I still left pretty steamed. Oh well!

Got my mind off of things by forming a pickup team on villain side with Primadonna which got her to 16, then a bit later I played Thunder Girl some more with an 8 player team, mixed pickups and Sisterhood, fighting Malta and Carnies.

On Monday I played Apparat Chick (14 SS/will brute on Victory) with a couple RL friends; I was lackeyed to level 18 and we did a level 19 Skyway mayhem on relentless difficulty, which was way too hard for our abilities, and we got repeatedly busted by the PPD. We broke out of jail several times before time finally ran out. I did get Apparat Chick to level 15 though.

I also started a new fire/mental blaster on Liberty; I must have tried fifty fire-related names (mostly taken..there are a lot of fire related characters already) before I finally got one that I could live with: and so Fire Marshal was born! I'm not sure why Fire Marshal starts fires instead of putting them out; I was just glad to have a name and a concept. I started off with a red lab coat and the tall military cap in red, which felt kinda so-so as a costume, but a SG-mate said he saw someone do a pretty good fireman's hat using the samurai helmet options, and so after leveling up a bit I made the run to Icon in IP to retailor her costume to match some reference photos I found on the web. Anyway, got Fire Marshal up to level 9, mostly playing with other Liberty Force SG members who also started newbie heroes. So far I've only taken fire blast powers and some pool powers, and only have the base power from the secondary, so I don't have much of a feel for what mental manipulation is like so far.

Tuesday night I started a newbie hero on Protector to team up with some friends from Demolition Girls SG; I was lucky enough to get the name Swordswoman, and so I made her a broadsword/fire scrapper, giving her a pseudo-medieval swordsperson in leather armor look. That's been pretty fun so far, and wielding a broadsword does feel more smoothly flowing than before. And one shotting hellions with Hack just never gets old. Ran with a pickup sewers team to level 6, then joined the Demolition Girls team for Kings Row radio missions, reaching level 9. The level up inspiration boost seems huge at low levels; my 7-player sewer team had no "healer" or support character at all (1 tanker, 1 pb, 3 scrappers, 2 blasters) and yet we were able to overrun large spawns in the sewers by sheer force of DPS, using only the level-ups for healing and rezzing.

5/22/2008

I started off playing Lady Arachne (11 wolf spider on Liberty), joining an 8-player LEGION SG team doing missions in Cap au Diable and Port Oakes. We were all villain epic ATs except for one earth dominator, and the stacked Tactical Training: Maneuvers was just sick; my overall DEF hovered between 35% and 65% all night. Surprisingly, it was still possible for people to die despite this high level of DEF; I guess bosses have a better chance of hitting, and when we do get hit, we generally got hit hard. Though the soldiers do have some small about of RES to soften those hits. I tried to patch heal as much as I could with 2-slotted Aid Other. Offensively we were very strong though; I had initially thought Long Burst was a pretty lame attack since its damage values were so low, but with several team members opening with Venom Grenade for debuff, using Assault for buff, and then unloading Long Burst.... well, stuff was dying really fast.

I also took a level 50 Celerity: Stealth IO that I had crafted awhile back out of my VG base and put it up for sale on the Black Market, priced to move. Sold it for 4M infamy, which is a pretty bad price for me (and good for whomever bought it) considering the high price in the last 5 sales was 9M, but I needed some quick cash for DOs, and didn't want to slow down the team by arranging an infamy transfer from an alt, so I didn't mind too much. Anyway, our team did a bunch of radio missions and both the King's Row and Skyway mayhems. Got Lady Arachne to level 18. I think I picked up Hurdle at 12, Aid Self at 14, Tactical: Assault at 16, and Venom Grenade at 18. I kind of blew off getting a travel power, since I easily expect to reach level 24 and the forced respec before my temp fly pack and temp jump pack run out.

After that team broke up, I joined some friends starting newbie heroes on Triumph. I played Flying Tiger (4 MA/will scrapper on Triumph) who I had created a few nights ago, joining an 8-player Demolition Girls SG team; by the time I joined them, they had already reached level 6-7 after maybe half an hour in the sewers and were on the way to King's Row. We did a few radio missions and the Atlas safeguard. We had two cold/* defenders and so I got doubly-ice-shielded, making me nearly invincible (for a level 4..) and giving me a total scrapper-lock mentality as I rushed multiple purple Lost bosses and kicked them in the head. Got Flying Tiger to level 9, picking up Combat Jumping at 6 and Crane Kick at 8.

With all the villain teams reaching the soft cap on team DEF due to VEAT powers, I had the idea to start a sonic/kin corruptor; I've always had trouble playing kins before due to their relative squishiness, and I figure no one is starting them right now (since they're not shiny and new) and she could be both helpful for and be helped by the many soldiers and widows getting started. I managed to get the name Primadonna, which I really like for a sonic, though I'm not that excited about the costume I came up with so far; was shooting for an opera singer look, but ended up looking like a pretty mundane-looking person in a dress. I might try switching to the tuxedo look. Got out of the tutorial and solo'd Kalinda's first mission, getting her to level 2.

After that I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) and found the Midnight Squad contact in the Steel Canyon university, and did his first mission, rescuing some hapless kid. Seemed a pretty straightforward mission; the mission completed as soon as I freed him from his captors, I didn't even have to lead the hostage to the door.

5/21/2008

Issue 12 came out and I rushed home early to try it out. I found I had 5 "free" extra slots (the 2 that everyone gets, and 3 for veteran badges) and have so far claimed 3 of them on Liberty. I like the "last time you logged in this character" data that shows up on the login screen now, too. I started making new alts, and this was so engrossing that I ended up spending the whole night on villain side.

The first character I created was Lady Arachne, an Arachnos soldier. Arachnos soldiers have guns and leadership-style buffs, so sounded exactly like the sort of character I like to play (already on my roster are an AR/dev blaster, AR/traps corruptor, and thug/TA MM, all with guns and leadership). Costume selection for Arachnos soldiers seems pretty darn limited; there were very few options to choose from, aside from changing colors around. I tried switching colors around a bit, but ultimately decided to stick with basic black for everything. The Arachnos soldiers strongly remind me of the COBRA thugs that GI Joe used to fight, so I planned to pattern my soldier around that look. I was worried that black/black would be excessively common, but once I got into Mercy Island, it actually seemed like everyone else decided to change their colors around, and almost nobody was using a simple black/black color scheme, so this worked out OK. The most striking color combination I saw someone using was an "arctic spider" who had done his suit in pure white and ice blue.

I was barely out of the character generator when a friend, also playing an Arachnos soldier, invited me to team up. Our duo rapidly snowballed into an 8-player team of mostly Fallen LEGION VG. We were something like 3 soldiers, 3 widows and 2 earth dominators. We ran through the initial "get on the list" VEAT mission, then did about half of Kalinda's story arc, and we pretty much abused everything we ran into; the VEATs, both soldiers and widows, seem great at low level. The inherent regen and recovery bonus seemed very noticable; we didn't really have a "healer" (unless you count me taking Aid Other at level 6), but we didn't really seem to need one. Once we hit level 5 we got another VEAT-specific mission, then drifted over to Port Oakes and did some radio missions there, eventually completing an Atlas mayhem for the jetpack. Got to level 10 before I decided to change gears and try making another alt.

Next I made Maitresse, a necro/storm mastermind, patterned around being a voodoo priestess. This isn't a common combination, but some people whose opinion I respect spoke highly of these powersets, and I love storm in general, so I thought I'd give it a try. I teamed up with friends on a 6-player team of Liberty Force SG; everyone was a soldier or widow except me as the storm MM. We were playing a bit fast and loose and I found I had to nonstop spam O2 Boost to heal people who got in trouble. I also managed to screw up training to level 5; I was in a hurry to get to the next mission and accidentally put 2 slots in Gale when I meant to put them in O2 Boost. With only TOs available this wasn't immediately awful, but I'll have to respec those out before long. Though speaking of Gale, I found that I frequently actually wanted to cast Gale, to reduce enemies' DPS by knocking them back; on previous stormies I've played, it had never seemed a good idea to cast Gale. Anyway, we managed to get through our Mercy Island missions and do a few in Port Oakes, getting Maitresse to level 9. By that time our team was level 8-10 and I wanted to switch back to my level 10 soldier.

Switching back to Lady Arachne, we did the level 10 VEAT mini-story-arc. My teammates seemed a little nervous at me switching, since I had been the only "healer" on the team with my O2 Boost spam; but I think that we actually took less damage after I switched, due to stacking Tactical Training: Maneuvers. Before long we had 3 soldiers with Tactical Training: Maneuvers, which gave the whole team +30% DEF to everything. This seemed really powerful! I was actually pretty pleased to get my AR/traps corruptor to +31% range DEF due to FF Generator and many IO set bonuses; now my level 10 soldier had +37% range DEF, +30% melee/AoE DEF, and her powers weren't even slotted with anything. I almost think this is too powerful, but in fairness, we'd probably have similar results if we had two or three corruptors/defenders with some combination of force fields, sonic shields, steamy mist and shadow fall. A teammate observed that stacking VEATs in a team is really good; whereas stacking the heroic epic ATs was totally awful. I really like this.

Anyway, doing our level 10 VEAT story arc unlocked a second costume slot, this one a "regular" one instead of a Wolf Spider one, though haven't gotten around to making a second costume yet. Finished up the night at level 11.

5/20/2008

I started off Friday night playing Flamebait (33 fire/thermal corruptor on Liberty) as a lackey on an 8-player team of Demolition Girls SG, and did two high 30s missions in St Martial. After that finished up, I briefly played Apparat Chick (6 SS/will brute on Victory), duoing with a 4 brute for a few missions in Mercy Island, that got her to level 7.

Playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) I joined a friend who was on a 7-player level 50 pickup team doing high level CoT missions. It seemed like we had pretty weak aggro control despite having 2 tanks on the team, and as a result I found myself constantly trying to Aid Self between ticks of Gloom DoTs. Not a big deal really, it just required some adjustment in play style.

Later that weekend I played Schadenfreude (47 AR/traps neo-fascist corruptor on Liberty) on a Recluse Strike Force organized by Fallen LEGION VG. Our team mix was:

fire/rad corruptor
ice/kin corruptor
DB/will brute
dark/dark corruptor
AR/traps corruptor (me)
thug/traps MM
SS/dark brute
stone/elec brute

Originally the fire/rad was playing a rad/son corruptor but when we realized no one on the team actually had finished the story arc that lets you start the RSF, he volunteered to switch to an alt who could start the SF. Although we had a couple first-time RSFers on the team, things went very smoothly; we cleared a lot of enemies that veteran RSFers usually stealth past, but it was fun and it got the job done. We lucked out in the first mission when we found the technician was in the same building as the computer we needed to lead him to, so we avoided having pathing problems with him. Kronos, Slinger, the future Freedom Phalanx and the Vindicators all fell to us pretty easily.

Against the Freedom Phalanx in the last mission, we sacrificed a villain for vengeance and made an initial rush that took down Numina and did a little damage to Sister Psyche before we got wiped out. This didn't seem a great start, but in our second rush we managed to clear all the remaining heroes. Total time was 1hr 39mins. This was the first time I'd completed the RSF with Schadenfreude, and the final fight against the heroes was the first time I actually had my FF Generator outright destroyed by stray damage, requiring me to resummon it a few times. Schadenfreude did get to level 48 and got a very nice Nucleolus SHO as reward. I put her extra slots in Web Grenade and Tactics; Web Grenade is now 6 slotted for Trap of the Hunter, giving another +3.13 ranged DEF. This raises her standing-around ranged DEF to a fairly respectable 36.19%.

On Saturday night I played Yuki-Onna (44 ice/cold corruptor and J-Horror ghost on Liberty) as a lackey on a 3-player Liberty Force team doing level 50 villain missions. We were all ice blast corruptors (2 ice/cold and 1 ice/rad) and everything we met (enemies, friends, the surrounding terrain) got encased in ice, hit by blizzards, and/or covered in snow. The three of us pretty easily handled an AV-level Ghost Widow, normally a pretty tough opponent, but who got horribly nerfed by our stacked debuffs.

On Sunday afternoon I played Schadenfreude on a 6-player Fallen LEGION team doing level 49 missions in Rikti War Zone. This went pretty well, but we broke up after awhile.

Sunday night I played Apparat Chick (7 will/SS Communist brute on Victory) on a 4-player team with RL friends. We had a brute (me), corruptor, dominator and mastermind, and this team seemed a lot more balanced and successful than some of our previous team ups; though some of this was because our mastermind stopped insisting on doing Relentless difficulty while we were on TO enhancements. A few hours of play got Apparat Chick to level 14; I picked up Knockout Blow at 8 (it's amazing that brutes get this at such a low level), the willpower mez protection power at 10, Air Superiority at 12 and finally Fly at 14.

Later that night I played Yuki-Onna (44 ice/cold corruptor on Liberty) again on a 5-player Liberty Force villain team. We finished someone's story arc up, defeating an EB level Lord Recluse in the future, and later beat up an AV-level Sunstorm. Yuki-Onna got to level 45 as a result.

Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) joined a Katie TF with 1 tanker, 2 controllers and 5 blasters. I thought we'd have ridiculous DPS with 5 blasters, but the TF actually didn't seem any faster than normal. We had a few deaths fighting Mary #10, but otherwise it was pretty routine, finishing in 31 mins.

I solo'd with Thunder Girl (44 will/nrg tanker and teen heroine on Liberty) for a bit, doing Tina McIntyre's story arc and managing to solo an EB level Anti-Matter. This got Thunder Girl to level 45. On Monday night I played Thunder Girl again, this time joining a 3-tanker team hunting Fake Nemeses in Peregrine Island for the Unveiler badge. The team leader got his Unveiler badge much earlier than the rest of us, but insisted on staying with the team until everyone had gotten the badge. He had some kind of pattern of moving between spawns that he insisted caused more Fake Nemeses to spawn; I don't really understand how the trick worked, but we certainly seemed to find a lot of Fakes. After we all got the badge, I went off to find all the Exploration and History badges needed to get the Freedom Phalanx Reserve accolade, which gave Thunder Girl a healthy +10% max HP (182 HPs as a level 45 tanker); increasing max HPs seems terrific for willpower tankers, who rely on their regen.

Finished up Monday night playing Alice Slaughter (a 20 DB/will brute and Wonderland refugee on Triumph). I lackeyed on 5 player Demolition Girls SG team doing level 33 missions in St Martial, which eventually got Alice to level 22. Hadn't played Alice in awhile, so getting back into dual blade combos took some time; I like the dual blade animations, but her dagger attacks feel like they do a lot less damage than the punches of my SS brutes. I like her look, though, so I'm not ready to give it up yet. Haven't trained to 22 yet, but probably going to get Heightened Senses.

5/16/2008

On Tuesday night I started off playing Astarte (46 grav/emp controller on Protector) with a 5-player Demolition Girls SG team doing level 49 radio missions in Peregrine Island. This went pretty well and was good exp; I think the four other players all hit level 50 while on this team and I made considerable progress towards 47.

After that team broke up I switched to Schadenfreude (45 AR/traps corruptor on Liberty) and was browsing the Black Market when a MM I had teamed with before invited me to join a Recluse SF she was forming. The team filled up with recruits from LBx and our team mix ended up:

robo/TA MM
2 AR/traps corruptors (including me)
ice/dark corruptor
necro/dark MM
thug/poison MM
dark/thermal corr
SS/stone brute

With no */rad or */kin corruptors, this was an unconventional team mix, and I don't think the team leader had ever done the RSF. I wasn't sure we'd be able to complete the SF but I figured it would be fun to try anyway. I lackeyed to the other AR/traps corruptor, who turned out to be someone I knew (but who had renamed her character so it took awhile to figure out) and found that double FF Generators and double poison traps was really pretty awesome. At one point I vengeance'd off our hapless thermal and got my range DEF up to 80%. We had a lot of stray deaths, which I think was from people running around by themselves without a clear idea of what they were trying to do, but after some lengthy hijinks, we did end up defeating Crimson and clearing all the mission objectives except escorting the lab tech to the computer. Unfortunately, the tech became buggy while going through a tower door and began running through solid obstacles and not following anyone. We poked at him a bit and waited a bit hoping for a GM, but eventually people got tired of waiting and began to quit the team in order to do other stuff. From chatter on LBx it sounded like a GM showed up shortly after most of us quit ... ahh, the irony.

On Wednesday night I played Chartreuse (7 rad/rad corruptor on Victory) with a team of 4 RL friends. We mostly did paper missions in Port Oakes, and the team leader insisted on doing level 10 missions set at Relentless difficulty, for the sake of challenge. (Yeah, my RL friend can be a bonehead sometimes.) We had a fairly balanced team, with a db/will brute, rad/rad corruptor, ice/dark corruptor and a zombie/traps MM, but fighting +4s and +5s with TOs, even with rad, dark and traps debuffs, was a pretty tall order. We died a lot but also got a lot of exp; Chartreuse got up to level 10, picking Accelerate Metabolism and Enervating Field for her new powers.

Later that night I played Schadenfreude (45 AR/traps corruptor on Liberty) on a Liberty Force SG team doing the Lady Grey Strike Force. Our team mix was very villain heavy:

fire/ice dominator
dual/will brute
mind/psi dominator
AR/traps corruptor (me)
ice/rad corruptor
spine/dark scrapper
elec/dark brute
merc/dark MM

Although our team was relatively low level (only the scrapper was level 50, with most of the rest 45-49; I ended up lackeyed to a 48) we really didn't have much problem with the TF. We blew through the first 2 missions easily, and purposely failed mission 3 by getting Glacia and Infernia killed. Mission 4 was a bit of a confused mess as we zerg rushed the various mitos, but we got through it. The last mission we dispensed with stealthing and just cleared our way to the end room. Our ice/rad disconnected and didn't come back, which seemed worrisome, but we pulled the AVs and still found them pretty manageable even with 7 and only the */dark MM for healing. One brute volunteered to eat a bunch of inspirations and take out the generators in the back of the room, while the rest of the team took out the generators in the front. This all worked out well and we finished in 3hrs 2mins; I got a Celerity: Stealth recipe, as well as leveling up to 47 along the way. I was indecisive on what power to take, waffling between Assault, Health, Super Jump (I still haven't gotten around to getting a travel power for Schadenfreude .. it hasn't been too crippling) or some kind of patron power (I haven't picked a patron either). I ended up settling on Beanbag, hoping to maybe stack stuns with Seeker Drones.

Thursday night I started off playing April Fool (50 thug/TA MM on Liberty) and messed around in Recluse's Victory, killing time more than anything else. Took out some pillboxes and bushwhacked a hapless scrapper.

My significant other had been painfully agonizing over costume and name for a newbie dominator on Victory, so I decided to make a newbie SS/will brute to team up. We duo'd Burke the Mercenary's missions for awhile, getting up to level 6. We also participated in a costume contest that some level 50s were holding (I forgot to get the name of their VG, but they seemed to be doing promotional stuff to recruit for their VG). There were only about half a dozen participants, so our odds looked pretty good. My SO won first place and 4M infamy for a dominatrix with black armored bustier, fishnets and lavender belt and shoulder cape, a costume carefully composed over half an hour in the character creator. Ironically, I won second place and 2M infamy with my character (Apparat Chick, the brute from Soviet Russia), who I had given a simple red leotard with gold hammer & sickle and stars, spending maybe 2 minutes on. Third place went to a gun girl in a black bikini. The competition wasn't that fierce, admittedly. Still, gaining millions of infamy on a server where I have no high level alts is pretty nice.

After that I played Perfect Woman (23 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle) as an SK on a Pinnacle League SG team doing level 32 Croatoa missions. The Pinnacle League SG has been hit hard, as several characters had gotten generichero'd, and everyone else seemed a bit demoralized. I'm hoping my character is sufficiently different in name and appearance to avoid the nerf bat, but we'll see. We did several of the later Croatoa story arc missions, culminating in the Save Salamanca mission, which we rather anticlimactically completed by defeating all but 1 red cap from an ambush, then the controller kept that last minion perma-confused for 15 minutes in order to run out the clock. Perfect Woman got up to level 24 and picked up Fast Healing; sort of a boring auto power, but I'm hoping a little extra regen will improve her durability.

Finished the night playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) as an exemplar on a 6-player Sisterhood team doing level 23 radio missions in Talos Island. I wasn't really after anything in particular, it was just fun to hang out and shoot stuff. Did that for a few missions before calling it a night.

5/13/2008

I started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), joining an 8-player pickup team that defeated Marauder AV on the Agent badge mission (though I already had the badge). It looked like we were doing a lot of Praetorians so asked to switch to Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender) who needs them for Portal Jockey. We fought a lot more Praetorian AVs after that. We did have some trouble with Black Swan due to stealth issues; with steamy mist/superspeed for "perfect" stealth, I had moved right next to Black Swan to admire her really rather cool outfit. Unfortunately, my (unstealthy) scrapper sidekick, not realizing where I was, superjumped right next to me. Black Swan and her horde of shadows promptly pounced on my sidekick and killed him, and clipped me and another stealthed player with AoEs that revealed us, so Black Swan proceeded to kill us too. So much for "perfect" stealth! Anyway, we res'd up from this embarrassing incident and once the team was ready for a fight, we were able to defeat Black Swan easily. We ended up defeating Diabolique, Black Swan, Battle Maiden, Nightstar, Siege and Dominatrix; all the other AV fights went a lot smoother.

After that I spent a little time perusing the Black Market for Yuki-Onna (44 ice/cold corruptor), buying recipes that completed a set of 5 Doctored Wounds for her Aid Self (giving +5% global recharge) and got a good price on 3 Decimation: Acc/Dmg recipes which I still need to craft and slot.

I also played Grey Wings (33 archery/fire blaster on Triumph server) on a Katie Hannon TF; team mix was 6 defenders, 1 scrapper and 1 blaster. No tanker kinda scared me after the last Katie TF I was on, especially since Grey Wings tends to be an aggro magnet, but if you aren't safe with 6 defenders on your team, when ARE you safe, really? We beat all 10 Mary Macombers without much trouble; the timing was spaced just right so that I could Aim/Build Up/Rain of Arrows against every single ambush, which wreaked havoc against the hapless witches, and so felt pretty awesome. The last mission got a little crazy; since I could fly and do damage, the team leader volunteered me to go rescue Katie. I said no problem, and flew over, but it turns out one of the empath defenders was already there before me and trying to free Katie. He had cleverly summoned an Amy Jonsson to help break the stone obelisks, but Amy had a mind of her own and Leeroy'd into some nearby Red Caps. I broke Katie free of the stones, but by then Amy had aggro'd 3 spawns of Red Caps onto us, and so Katie decided to aggro them right back. I yelled for help on the team channel and slammed a bunch of inspirations to stay alive against the hordes of Red Caps. We managed to outfight the hordes of Red Caps, especially after some more team members arrived as reinforcements, then fly Katie safely out. TF time was 32 minutes, and I got a nice level 34 Decimation: Acc/End/Rech recipe as reward.

5/12/2008

On Friday, I got the Fervent (42 month veteran) badge and the Assemble the Team temp power. I'd been looking forward to getting this power, but haven't actually used it so far; though it seems like it should be incredibly useful for stealthing TF missions.

I started off playing Flamebait (33 fire/thermal corruptor) as a lackey on an 8-corruptor Demolition Girls team, which did a few level 42 missions without much trouble.

After that team broke up, I logged on Schadenfreude (45 AR/traps corruptor) and trained up to level 45, slotting up Web Grenade with a set of 4 Trap of the Hunter (yes, people actually use that!), netting her +1.88% max HP and +9% global ACC in set bonuses.

On Saturday I started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) and joined a pickup team attempting to tackle Lusca in Independence Port. The team leader spent some time recruiting people, eventually getting us up to 7 players (an emp, a kin, 2 tanks, 1 scrapper, 2 blasters) before we launched our assault on Lusca. We found that we could do damage, but we weren't really equipped to take Lusca's return fire; kin is not so good at protecting and the emp really looked like she was trying, but couldn't keep up with the damage we were taking. We eventually zerged down one of the tentacles, though it required a few people to hospital and run back, and some people died multiple times. After the first tentacle went down, people seemed to lose heart and quit the team; once we fell to 5 players I figured we were below critical mass for this to really work, so I dropped out as well. (I did hear people recruiting for Lusca on LBX later on, hopefully they eventually got him.)

After that I played Police Woman on a Katie Hannon TF, with a team of 3 controllers, 3 blasters, a peacebringer and a defender. The peacebringer was tanking for us in white dwarf form; this worked OK for the first 8 Mary Macombers. We had some loose aggro hurt the squishies on Mary #9; this was just a prelude to Mary #10, though, who showed up with lots of high level witches and quickly defeated a few of our squishies, which cascaded into a total party wipeout. After regrouping, we managed to beat Mary #10 and complete the first mission. We had a couple linkdeaths that slowed things down after that, but one of them came back in time for the last mission, and we ultimately finished the TF in 36mins. I got a Ghost Widow: Acc/Hold/Rchg recipe for my reward.

After that, I switched to April Fool (50 thug/TA MM) and solo'd a Tavish Bell flashback, something I sometimes do for arcane salvage. This time I figured I may as well get a badge out of it too, so I also set "enemies buffed" as a challenge setting. The mobs didn't seem that much tougher, though I did have to uncork a Shivan on the ARCH-A elite boss at the end of the story arc; ARCH-A's AoE fire attacks were brutal against my hapless pets. Ended up getting a Pangean Soil and the Intrepid badge.

On Saturday night I played Police Woman on an 8-player Sisterhood team running level 50 missions; while fighting Malta I haplessly got ganked by one of those annoying Gunslinger bosses that teleports into the back ranks. Grr. After we finished the Malta mission, we started to do Praetorian AVs, and I switched to playing Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender) in order to work on the Portal Jockey badge. We ended up defeating AV-level Mother Mayhem, Black Swan, Siege and Infernal.

A bit later I played Thunder Girl (44 will/nrg tanker) on a different 8-player Sisterhood team running level 46 missions; with this team we defeated AV-level Bobcat and Shadow Hunter.

I also started a MA/will scrapper on Triumph server, an Asian-looking kung fu girl draped in a Taiwanese flag, kind of on a lark. (I know I12 is coming soon with new powersets, but I can't seem to stop making more alts...) Got her to level 4.

On Sunday I participated in a "Hess-a-thon" on Liberty server; I got invited on the Sisterhood channel, but it was really organized on the hessathon channel, to which I briefly subscribed. (I'll be glad when the channel limit goes up to 10.) This looked like a logistical nightmare for the organizer; we had 10 actual players, several of which were 2-boxing, and we formed 8 separate Hess TF teams with different sets of alts. It used to be that each TF could be solo'd by one person, but since task force missions now spawn for the total number of players on the TF even if they are logged out, the new idea was to have each TF be duo'd by one DPS person and one support person.

For my active character, I played Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper); my designated partner was an empath defender, but unluckily she had to drop out suddenly, so I ended up solo against a spawn intended for an 8-person team. Olivia normally has maxed defenses, but her IO sets are all level 40 to 41 and consequently she had none of her IO bonuses while exemped to 30 for the Hess TF. I decided to try it anyway. It was pretty hard from the point Olivia opened the door to the first mission; it seemed like she immediately aggroed 6 bosses and a dozen or two minions and lieutenants. I started burning inspirations like mad, and liberally used Eye of the Magus and my Wedding Band power. There was a lot of heavy fighting and I came close to dying plenty of times. It was a relief to finally fight my way to the "trap" at the end of the first mission; at least the trap had a fairly fixed set of robot spawns, which was more manageable than the 8-person spawns I encountered up to that point.

The second mission I ran past the first floor mobs, trusting on super reflexes to dodge any aggro, then on the lower level quickly moved to the generators. I managed to take out all 6 generators, attracting the attention of a regiment of Council that ultimately managed to defeat me. By this time some of the faster Hess-a-thon teams were already done with their part of the TF and were able to switch to help the slower teams; a scrapper soon joined me and found the scientist we were looking for. Clearing the various radar stations after that was no problem, and then after that a couple defenders joined us, making the rest of the TF easy.

After all the TF teams got to the final mission, we all swapped alts to complete the final mission of each TF together. There were 8 teams, but I only had 6 alts so wasn't on every team. I did get two Devastation: Dmg/Rchg recipes (these seem valuable), a Time & Space Manipulation: +Stealth, a Gift of the Ancients: Defense, another Ghost Widow: Acc/Hold/Rchg, and a worthless Executioner's Contract: Dmg/Rchg. The whole exercise took about 2.5hrs.

Later on Sunday night I played Perfect Woman (22 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle) as an SK on an 8-player Pinnacle League team doing a level 28 "Stop 30 Fir Bolg from reaching door" mission. Interestingly, we got a Nictus crystal on this mission, and so we had a bunch of Nictus shadows rush us along with the Fir Bolg; a strike team of heroes had to go take out the Nictus crystal to prevent it from spawning any more. Then we mostly waited for Fir Bolg to show up, along with the heroes occasionally aggroing on nearby spawns of Fir Bolg between attacks. This took a really long time, but we had a storm controller doing a good job acting as goalie, and only 2 mobs actually escaped. Perfect Woman got to level 23; I added her 2 slots to Knockout Blow, slotting them with damage SOs.

5/9/2008

Started off playing Grey Wings (32 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) for a pickup Katie Hannon TF. Team mix was 2 */rad controllers, 1 TA defender, 3 blasters, 1 scrapper and 1 tank. With high DPS and lots of debuffing, we obliterated the groups of witches in the first mission with novas and rains of arrows. We had a few stray deaths due to loose aggro, but overall we ended up powering through the TF in 24 mins, getting Grey Wings to 33.

After that I played Perfect Woman (22 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle) on a 6-player Pinnacle League SG team doing low 20s Striga missions. We had a good mix of support and DPS and had no trouble battling legions of Council. As a sorta-regen tanker I especially liked the sonic buffs I was getting from one of the controllers, which noticably increased my durability (+RES on me) and DPS (-RES on enemies).

After that team broke up I switched to Schadenfreude (44 AR/traps corruptor on Liberty) and joined a late night pickup Lady Grey SF as a lackey. Team mix was:

earth/rad controller
ice/emp controller
DB/will scrapper
grav/fire dominator
storm/elec defender
ice blaster
AR/traps corruptor (me)
robo/TA mastermind

This team had a lot of support and damage but was fairly squishy, with only 1 scrapper as meleer. The first mission went pretty well, right up to fighting the psychic Clockwork King, who took out the scrapper and blaster in his alpha strike. Vengeance and some combat rezzing turned the battle around, though. During the second mission the scrapper pleaded exhaustion (we had gotten off to a pretty late start) and quit the TF, leaving us with 7 squishies and no melee.

We tried to deliberately fail the third mission but somehow managed to fail at failing it; maybe we were confused, but we got Glacia killed, then killed Dra'Gon, then ended up deciding we had cleared enough of the mission (having rescued all the hostages) that we may as well lead Infernia out and get full credit for the mission. Naturally Infernia took this opportunity to get stuck in an elevator. We petitioned for a GM and spent some time waiting for a GM, moving team members to different positions, and poking at the elevators; eventually we got the right combination of people on the right floors and entered the right elevator at the right time and shook Infernia loose, and were finally able to complete the mission.

The fourth mission against the Hamidon I thought we were screwed due to having no melee for the yellow mitos, but the team leader insisted we could damage them with ranged attacks. I tried shooting at them with AR blasts and it seemed to be true, to a point; it felt like I was damaging them (I didn't definitely verify from my combat log, but their life bars were going down)...to a point anyway. Once they were at a sliver of life, it seemed like my blasts would bounce off; I think they got finished off by people with Air Superiority or Sands of Mu. We had to zerg these yellows several times to actually take them out, making a few hospital runs, but we eventually got them despite having no melee. The grav dominator wormhole'd out several of the green mitos where we easily took them out, and the blues were no problem for us, so we managed to defeat the Hamidon.

In the last mission, a couple people volunteered to stealth to the end room and TP the team there, but they ran afoul of Rikti drones and so we had to clear the way by brute force. This took awhile, and with the late start coupled with delays rescuing Infernia and fighting yellow mitos, it was really late and everyone was pretty exhausted. Once we got to the last room, though, we easily beat Hro'tohz and the Honoree (who went down too fast to use his Unstoppable). After that we made a final zerg rush to take out the 4 generators, with Rikti pouring in from all directions. I popped a few purples to keep stray bullets off me and consequently was able to help shoot up all 4 generators, then punch out of the mission; several of the other squishies were not so fortunate, though, and died in the zerg rush and general chaos. All told we finished the TF in 3hrs 31mins. Schadenfreude got to level 45 (haven't decided where to put the slots yet) and got a nice Celerity: Stealth recipe as TF reward.

5/8/2008

I started off playing Doctor Debt (4 robot/poison MM on Victory server), soloing a few missions in Mercy Island to get to 5, then joining a 4-player team of RL friends to do some paper missions in Port Oakes as well as two Atlas Park mayhems. I thought my teammates would be relieved to not have the jive-talking bell-bottomed Chartreuse (rad/rad corruptor) around, but actually they missed the AM! Oh well! Doctor Debt, a rogue economist who has turned to a life of crime, was initially going to be a necro MM with zombies named after dead presidents (to go with the money theme), but at the last moment I had changed to robots, and I didn't think the dead president names worked as well for them. So now I have robots named Inflation and High Interest. One of the other players (a financial analyst in real life) suggested my next robot should be named Consumer Price Index; we'll see if it allows a name that long. Anyway, got Doctor Debt to level 9, picking up Equip Robot and Recall Friend as powers. I still kinda regret taking Weaken over one of the Pulse Rifle attacks, since Weaken (which reduces a mob's damage output) hasn't seemed really needed against any of the things we've fought so far; Envenom (which reduces a mob's resistance) seems very useful though.

After that I played Perfect Woman (21 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle), soloing her cape and 2nd costume slot missions, then spent half an hour in the tailor trying to make a new costume, which ultimately ended up very similar to her original costume, only with a white cape and some minor color tweaking. I then joined a 7-player Pinnacle League SG team doing radio missions in Talos Island. Our level spread was very disparate, with most people around level 20-23 and one scrapper at level 25, and we were doing the level 25's missions. We got through one of these missions pretty well, but then our only support character, a 23 storm controller, logged off, while our level 25 had managed to level to 26. This left us with 3 scrappers, 1 tanker (me), 1 blaster and 1 peacebringer, all level 20-22 except for one 26 scrapper, fighting level 27s with no support. The 26 scrapper SK'd me so that I could tank better, but this left our level 20 person unable to get exp. I went to a contact and loaded my inspiration tray with Lucks before entering the mission, and tried to pull things carefully.

This might have worked, but what was deep purple to most of the team was white/yellow to our 26 scrapper, who would happily run headlong into double spawns of enemies; the rest of the team would follow him and we'd end up with way too much aggro. After one team wipe I asked the team to always let me get first aggro, since the mission was so dangerous; I carefully phrased this so as not to point fingers and generate drama. After I said that, the low 20s seemed happy to hide behind me, and even the 26 scrapper was well-behaved for a few minutes. Eventually his innate scrapper nature regained control, though, and he resumed Leeroying into enemy mobs. I didn't feel up to pitching a fit, so I just dealt with it and we sorta muddled through the rest of the mission. Perfect got to level 22, picking up Heightened Senses, and I upgraded all her enhancements to level 25 SOs.

After that I played Schadenfreude (44 AR/traps corruptor on Liberty), soloing a Defeat All Rikti mission in Nerva Archipelago. The most startling thing about this mission was talking to my contact at the end, when Ambassador Kur'rect started quoting the A-Team (only reworded into the Rikti syntax). That was pretty weird!

5/7/2008

Monday night I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) and joined a pickup team doing level 50 invincible missions in Peregrine Island. Our team started out as an ice tanker, 4 blasters and 2 kinetics; a mix that has pro's and con's. On the up side, the kins totally buffed the heck out of our offense, and if I boldly ran into melee range, I could frequently get boosted to the 400% damage cap. On the down side, we really had very little defense to speak of, and I ended up resurrecting the tanker three times (yay medicine pool!). One of our missions was on the insane asylum map, which I think is a really neat looking map with all the hospital decor, but it was full of crazies doing psy-typed damage which seemed to hurt our tanker badly. We did manage to knock out both Malaise and Mother Mayhem as AVs; DPS was definitely not a problem.

After that I played Perfect Woman (18 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle) on a 7-player Pinnacle League team doing the Synapse TF. Our team mix was:

grav/rad controller
mind/storm controller
will/SS tanker (me)
claw/regen scrapper
inv/mace tanker
peacebringer
FF/rad defender

This team beat up clockworks quite efficiently. We were a little support-heavy and could've used more damage, but in general we did fine. Some of the squishies did attempt to stealth some missions, but this didn't go well since they didn't actually have any stealth powers; after a few deaths from this, we ended up just clearing to Big Bertha and Long Tom by brute force instead, skipping groups of clocks that weren't directly in the way.

There was a bit of drama when the FF defender went AFK in the middle of a mission and never returned; after we finished that mission we couldn't get the next one, since the defender was still inside. Several team members clamored for the leader, a Hal Jordan-lookalike grav/rad controller, to kick him. The leader gave the defender a few more minutes to come back (understandable since kicking someone from a TF isn't usually nice), then reluctantly kicked him from the TF. I don't think we really had any choice, but the leader seemed to feel horribly guilty for having to do this. I tried to cheer him up by telling him that, hey, it wasn't like he had murdered his entire SG (something Hal Jordan did in the comic books; though, they got better), which got a laugh.

Anyway, we moved on from there, skipping Babbage in the interests of time, and took down the Clockwork King without any trouble. We completed the TF in 3hrs 38mins, and I got a rather underwhelming Debilitative Action: Chance of Disorient recipe as reward. Perfect Woman did reach level 21, picking up and slotting Knockout Blow.

On Tuesday night I started off playing Perfect Woman, soloing some of her old grey missions (rescuing Fusionette and saving the King's Row bank), then switched to Mystery Girl (33 FF/nrg defender on Liberty) to team up with an 8-player Sisterhood team running the Moonfire TF. Our team mix was:

will/DB tanker
MA/regen scrapper
DM/regen scrapper
peacebringer
FF/nrg defender (me)
spine/DA scrapper
nrg/nrg blaster
fire/kin controller

The TF ran quite well; the only problem I noticed is that the scrappers, heavily buffed with SB and force fields, tended to get overconfident and would wander off on their own attempting to solo spawns intended for the 8-person team. This sometimes worked out well for them and sometimes didn't. In any case, we beat up lots of Council and eventually an AV-level Arakhn, completing the TF in 1hr 33mins. I got an Entropic Chaos: Dam/End/Rech recipe for my trouble.

After that, my raging altitis caused me to start a newbie robo/poison MM on Victory, who I solo'd up to level 4. So far I've taken Summon Battle Drone and the first 3 poison powers; I keep thinking poison should be fun, because I like debuffing, but have yet to stick with a poisoner for very long yet. I kinda wonder if I should've taken one of the laser rifle powers instead of one of the poison debuffs; the common wisdom on the forums is that the robot MM attacks are awful, but I just like shooting stuff.

5/5/2008

I started off Sunday playing Thunder Girl (43 will/nrg tanker on Liberty); I had gotten level 43 awhile ago but hadn't trained up yet, since I wasn't sure where to put the slots. After much agonizing and asking people advice, I finally decided to put all 3 slots into Build-Up. I had previously had 3 Recharge SOs in Build Up and replaced them with a full set of 6 Gaussian's Synchronized Fire Control. This cost maybe 8 or 10 million influence to round up the recipes and salvage to craft them, and the full set gives tasty set IO bonuses of +5% movement, +1.88% max HP, +2.5% recovery, +2.5% global DMG, and +2.5% to each of Melee, Ranged and AoE DEF. In actual gameplay, however, I was a bit disappointed with this result as the full set of 6 Gaussians only gives about the same recharge as 2 Rchg SOs, so I didn't get to Build Up as often. Additionally I had thought the +2.5% melee/ranged/AoE DEF would be a good defensive bonus against everything, but in fact this is positional defense and consequently does not stack at all with Thunder Girl's defense toggle, Heightened Senses, which gives defense based on damage type. Doh! I'm seriously considering deleting one of the Gaussian's recipes (probably the ToHit/EndRdx one, which seems the least useful) and replacing it with a generic Rchg IO.

To test these changes I rounded up a low to mid 40s 8-player team, about half Sisterhood and half pickup, for door missions in Peregrine Island. We did a bunch of missions; probably our best moment was defeating Anti-Matter on a level 45 player's Invincible Praetorian mission, and our worst moment was on a Nemesis mission where we suffered heavy losses among our squishies due to withering AoE fire from snipers and their friends. Thunder Girl hit level 44 on this team and picked up Fire Blast as a new power.

Later Sunday night I played Perfect Woman (16 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle); I came in during a Rikti invasion of Steel Canyon, and so I joined a random team of heroes defusing bombs and fighting Rikti. After that I joined a fairly bad pickup team in Steel Canyon, then excused myself from that team to join an 8-player Pinnacle League SG team doing missions in Faultline.

Our first mission was to rescue Fusionette, and one of the team members, a hero from the future, complained that his historical documents suggested that Fusionette was extremely stupid. I picture Perfect Woman as something of a feminist, so I defended Fusionette, arguing that she was not stupid, but merely...willful. During the mission, though, our Batman-lookalike scrapper decided to get sneaky, stealthing ahead of the team to free Fusionette by himself. Unfortunately, Fusionette promptly kamikaze'd into the nearest mob while the rest of us were still far away, resulting in a mission failure. Our futuristic hero reaffirmed his belief that Fusionette was stupid. Anyway, we did a few more Faultline missions after that, even beating an AV-level Arbiter Sands (though we suffered one wipeout before beating him), which got Perfect Woman to level 18; I picked up Taunt at 16 and Swift at 18 (with Quick Recovery I may not need Stamina, but I'm so used to having Swift that I feel too slow without it).

5/4/2008

Sorry for the lack of updates lately; real life has been busy and I haven't had as much time to write. But, I've still been on.

Last Tuesday night I played Astarte (45 grav/emp controller on Protector) with a 7 player team of Demolition Girls SG doing various missions in Peregrine Island. Got the Multidimensional badge while fighting hydra, and hit level 46; I 6-slotted Fortitude, which is probably overkill, but it let me put a set of 6 Red Fortune in it, which gave me an extra +5% global recharge and +2.5% ranged DEF. This raises Astarte's overall range DEF to 12.88%, which is pretty helpful and lets me dodge some mezzes.

I got really into playing Perfect Woman (7 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle), mostly because of the theme SG she joined which has been fairly active. We are still probably all destined to be generichero'd, but it's nevertheless pretty good (if geeky) fun to play on a team of characters that all look like people you know from comics. On Wednesday I SK'd to a small Pinnacle League team running level 12 missions in the Hollows and Steel Canyon, and fought a Rikti invasion, getting to level 10. Hitting level 8 and getting Rise to the Challenge was a large increase to Perfect Woman's survivability, though by level 10 with 3 toggles (RttC, MoB and IWill) she was gasping for END every fight.

Thursday I was on a decently balanced 8-player team that beat Frostfire in the Hollows, but then after Frostfire went down some people logged off, leaving us a 6 player team made up of 3 tankers and 3 scrappers. We struggled to do a Steel Canyon radio mission but mostly got beat up due to lack of support; we kinda had a moment of illumination as we realized the DC animated universe is apparently very tank and scrapper heavy, and it motivated our Lobo and Huntress lookalikes (both scrappers) to reroll as Martian Manhunter and Zatanna lookalikes (both controllers). After that team broke up, I sidekicked to a level 22 duo of Superman and Batman street hunting in Talos Island; with 2 tankers and a scrapper we actually had trouble taking out groups of Tsoo, which often had 2 or 3 sorcerors that kept teleporting around and healing, and I did have a bad moment once when fighting 4 of the level 22 Tsoo while my scrapper mentor went to the hospital, leaving me facing 4 +11s (darn you, Batman, you crazed loner!). On the bright side I quickly got back into SK range by going to the hospital too. Despite these hijinks, I did get to level 12 and got Quick Recovery, which made my END problems all better.

Police Woman had picked up 10 or 20 million infl on Liberty via market sales of crafted IOs, and through the wonder of the market I sent 3 million of this cross-server over to Perfect Woman. I spent about 200K of this on level 15 DOs and 1M on Halloween salvage for an additional costume slot, which probably says something about my priorities. I made Perfect Woman a mousy secretary-looking "secret ID" costume to use while not on missions.

I played Perfect Woman some more on Saturday, teaming up for a bit, then running a Positron TF with a team mix of:

will/SS tanker (me)
grav/rad controller
mind/emp controller
MA/SR scrapper
mind/storm controller

We actually started with only the first 4, but when our Zatanna lookalike logged in during our first mission we agreed to restart to include her. This controller heavy team was a total turnaround from the melee-only team we had had earlier; this left our DPS a little on the low side, but the extra support made the TF go pretty smoothly. We only had trouble with one mission, a Defeat all Clockwork mission where we couldn't find the last clockwork despite searching the mission thoroughly; probably got knocked through a wall. The team wanted me to petition for a GM to help, but I was pretty reluctant to do this; I mean, how smart is it to call a GM when your team looks like Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter and Zatanna? The other players were all like, don't worry, we'll change into our secret IDs! And damned if they didn't all have a "secret ID" costume, too. It was pretty funny. (Yeah, I guess we were all total nerds.) Nevertheless I persuaded the team to reset the mission by logging off/logging on, then re-clearing it; I think this ended up being faster and more fun than waiting for a GM anyway. Overall we finished the TF in 3hrs 36mins, which is not bad for Positron, and Perfect Woman got to level 16.

4/29/2008

Met up with some RL friends on Victory server to play newbie villains. I played Chartreuse (2 rad/rad corruptor), jive-talking bell-bottomed mistress of neon green mojo. I had made the mistake of showing my character idea to one of the other players and he had promptly rerolled from generic villainous electric brute to a Shaft-esque corruptor with an Afro. I actually found it to be pretty hard to translate all my dialogue into jive before saying it (the syntax is pretty alien to me; I had to read up on "African-American Vernacular English" on Wikipedia), but was rewarded with one of the non-blaxploitation characters commenting "OK, now we can NEVER team up with anyone else with these characters." We had a 4 player team of 1 MM and 3 corruptors and whomped many Snakes in Mercy Island, finishing off Kalinda's story arc twice and getting everyone to level 7.

After that I switched to Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) and was browsing through Wentworth's when I got an invitation to a 6-player pickup team doing level 52ish Carnies missions. It was a pretty good team and we beat up lots of Carnies. I finally got to see my Force Feedback: chance of +recharge proc working; it pretty regularly boosted my global recharge from 87% to 187%, which seemed pretty nice, but it did seem to need Buckshot to hit something (shooting a phased out illusionist never triggered the proc). A passerby sent me a few tells saying nice things about my journal (thanks!!) and we chatted about game stuff for a bit.

I inherited the star when the team leader called it a night, and I invited a bunch of Sisterhood players as well as pickup people to fill the team up. We did some Praetorian missions, defeating Nightstar, Chimera and Shadow Hunter AVs, and one of these got our pickup 49 empath defender to level 50. The team finished up fighting a Rikti invasion in Peregrine Island.

After that I played Perfect Woman (5 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle), teaming up for a few King's Row missions with a level 3 blaster who was a Booster Gold lookalike. Got to level 7. Perfect is still pretty fragile (she has no self heal and I had taken Mind Over Body instead of Fast Healing, which might have been a mistake) but getting Air Superiority at 6 helped keep dangerous mobs knocked down, and I'm figuring her regen will get much better once she can get Rise to the Challenge at level 8. I also got really paranoid about being generichero'd, so I made a run to the IP tailor to tweak my costume to be much less of a copyright violation.

4/28/2008

Started off Friday night playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster). I got a random compliment on my costume while standing at Wentworths (well, I'm going to pretend that "Arrest me any time, baby!" is meant as a compliment, anyhow). I bought a Force Feedback: Chance for Recharge recipe for relatively cheap (2.5M infl) and slotted it into Buckshot, and sold a Impervious Skin +status resist IO for about 5M infl (I had ended up with a huge surplus of these when trying to buy 2 of these for my storm defender by leaving a low standing bid for this recipe at about 8 different levels of recipe, hoping to get two for cheap; I came back later to discover I had bought like 6 of them). After finishing up with market stuff, I settled down to play.

Myself and others on SisterhoodFriends channel have been trying to be more active about starting group activities, so I found myself trying to form an Ouroboros flashback team at the same time someone else was forming a Positron TF. The Positron TF was getting more interest, so I disbanded my 2 person team and we both jumped on the Positron bandwagon. Our team mix ended up being:

ice/rad controller
ill/rad controller
fire/kin controller
AR/dev blaster
elec/nrg blaster
will/axe tanker
TA/archery defender
DB/regen scrapper

This was a good AT mix and we were at the upper end of the level range for Positron (most were exemped with a few at level 14). Consequently we did really well. I already had the TF badge but did this for fun and infl; it was also interesting to see which of my IO bonuses still worked at level 15. Both purple sets I have slotted still worked, and the Grav Anchor: chance to hold, Achilles Heel: Chance for Res debuff and Gaussian: Chance for build up procs all worked, but I was disappointed to find that the Force Feedback: chance of recharge proc I had just purchased didn't do anything at all while exemped down, nor did my Karma: Knockback protection IO.

Anyway we tore through the Positron TF only having trouble once, when the team split up 4 and 4 fighting different spawns during the last mission and got wiped out as a result. Still finished in 2hrs 51min which is very good time for Positron.

On Saturday night I played Thunder Girl (43 will/nrg tanker) on a 7 player Sisterhood team doing an assortment of door missions. This went pretty well for awhile, but started to go downhill a bit as people we knew went to bed and got replaced by pickup people, ultimately reaching critical mass of pickuppyness when we got routed by Nemesis soldiers and snipers. It eventually became obvious that our empath had left heal aura on autofire and was AFK far away from us (maybe he was on autofollow and got stuck on something) and when he finally idled out, our team leader volunteered to switch to her lowbie empath defender (Debbie Debt, a name that I find hilarious no matter how many times I see it) and SK to us. Despite her name, she was a million times better empath, passing out RA and Fort and healing people who needed it. We immediately did much better, finishing off the rest of the Nemesis without further incident.

Sunday afternoon I played Grey Wings (32 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) on a 5 player Demolition Girls team doing missions in Croatoa. I had a great time dropping Rain of Arrows and Fire Sword Circle on hapless mobs, with a few other archery AoEs sprinkled in; Grey Wings seems to do insane AoE damage, though is relatively defenseless. The team was defender-heavy so it worked out okay. Among the missions we completed was Grey Wings' "Rescue Waylon McCrane" mission, which ironically awarded her the Bow and Arrow temp power...probably the most underwhelming temp power possible for an archery blaster.

I also indulged in a bit of altitis, creating Chartreuse, bell-bottomed disco queen of all things neon green (a rad/rad corruptor on Victory to team with some RL friends who recently reactivated CoV accounts) and Perfect Woman, a pastiche of Wonder Woman (a will/SS tanker on Pinnacle to team with a Justice League Unlimited theme team being formed there). I got Chartreuse to level 2 and Perfect Woman to level 5.

It's probably only a matter of time before all the Pinnacle characters get generichero'd, but I'm a sucker for the JLU theme. I got to team with a level 11 Red Tornado lookalike and a level 6 Superman lookalike; the only way we could arrange things to let everyone get exp was for Red Tornado to SK me to 10, while the Superman player had to fight level 11s. "Superman can handle +5s, right?" said Red. This basically meant that we were PLing Superman, which was a very weird feeling indeed!

4/23/2008

Sorry for the lack of updates lately, work has been busy.

I acquired and slotted two sets of 4 Devastation in Mystery Girl's (32 FF/nrg defender) single target blasts, giving her set bonuses of +6% overall DMG, +4.5% max HP and +24% regen, all of which seemed very nice. Mystery Girl also did two Katie Hannon TFs. The first had a peacebringer, defender (me), tanker, 3 controllers, blaster and a warshade and finished in 27 minutes; the second had a controller, 2 tankers, 2 blasters and 3 defenders (including me) and finished in 33 minutes. Didn't get anything noteworthy as recipe reward, but did get to level 33. At level 33 it seems like I am getting level 34 recipe rewards, not sure why; I had been hoping to stay low enough level to keep getting level 30-33 recipes (for use in Siren's Call) but it seems the exp from the Katie TFs will make leveling up unavoidable. Even loading up on debt before a TF doesn't slow things down significantly. Not sure what I'll do about this yet; I may just give in and let Mystery Girl level up to around level 35 to 40, and get level 35-40 recipes that will at least be usable in Warburg.

I played Schadenfreude (43 AR/traps corruptor) on a couple large pickup teams that went pretty well, defeating Sunstorm (an AV-level kheldian) and a hero-level Woodsman, and getting her to level 44. I still can't settle on a patron pool for Schadenfreude (Black Scorpion is tempting for the +DEF shield, but I think that shield is smash/lethal/energy and won't stack well with all the ranged DEF bonuses I have), so I ended up taking Resuscitate, which I'm sure will be handy.

Playing Spacegirl (45 mind/rad controller) I joined an 8 player Sisterhood team doing Maria Jenkins' story arc. We fought and defeated many Praetorian AVs, including Infernal, Dominatrix, Chimera, Shadow Hunter, Nightstar, Siege, Bobcat, Neuron and Battle Maiden. I also was lucky enough to get a Pangean Soil and a purple Fortunata Hypnosis: Sleep/Rech/Acc recipe drop, and got to level 46. I put some extra slots in Radiation Infection, allowing me to slot a set of 5 Dampened Spirits, giving set bonuses of +2% global DMG, +1.8% max END and +5% global RCHG. We also spent an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with an ArcherBot theme song, much to his dismay; my contribution was to set his name and powersets to the Wonder Woman TV show theme song.

With Mega (50 SS/elec brute) I solo'd a flashback of Tavish Bell's story arc once hoping for arcane salvage but didn't get anything special.

Shopping at Wentworths with Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender) I bought and crafted two sets of 5 Impervious Skin, which I slotted into her Steamy Mist and Temp Invulnerability. This gives nice set bonuses of +3% max HP and +10% global RCHG, but disappointingly 5 Impervious Skin only gives +36.6% resistance (less than two RES SOs) so I am not sure how thrilled I am with the result.

Some time ago I had server-transferred the previous version of Schadenfreude, a 32 AR/dark corruptor, from Liberty to Triumph before re-re-making Schadenfreude as an AR/traps corruptor. I spent some time playing this character on Triumph; Schadenfreude was already taken as a name on Triumph server (yes, REALLY! it IS a word, you know!) so I renamed her Viva la Revolution, reworking her background story and costume to be a gun-toting Marxist Cuban freedom fighter fomenting unrest in the Rogue Isles. Cap au Diable SFs seem very common on Triumph server, and 32 is a good level to get recipes at (IMHO) so I did 5 "quick" Cap SFs with Viva over the last few days. These had 4 to 7 villains on them and all took between 40 and 52 minutes to complete. Didn't get anything really cool; though I haven't yet worked out how I'd get any good recipes from there to my main villains on Liberty, anyway.

I also did a Katie Hannon TF on Triumph playing Kid Valkyrie (50 bs/regen scrapper). Team was tanker, 3 defenders, 2 blasters, scrapper (me) and warshade and we finished in 29 minutes. Didn't get a good recipe, though Kid Valkyrie had actually never done the Katie TF before, so I got the TF badge and the witch slaying badge at least.

Finally I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) on a 7-player Sisterhood team that fought an AV-level Dreck and cleared his map full of Freakshow to boot. We had 2 archery defenders and me on the team, which meant every single spawn of Freakshow got to eat 1 Full Auto and 2 Rains of Arrows; that seemed pretty ferocious, though their lethal resist blunted it a little. I didn't really need to kill Freakshow, but it was fun and good company.

4/17/2008

I started the evening playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster); with a blaster friend, we joined a 7-player pickup team that needed help taking down a level 49 AV Shadow Hunter. This team was pretty damage heavy, with only a single kin controller for support; we had occasional deaths but had tremendous DPS, and consequently we took down Shadow Hunter, then later on both Nightstar and Siege.

The tanker who had formed the team hit level 50 on this team, then needed to log (along with some of the other team member), and I ended up inheriting the star. The remaining team members wanted to keep going so I recruited more pickup people to fill the team up; managed to pick up an empath and a rad that balanced out the support/DPS ratio on the team, along with several more blasters and scrappers. Never did find another tanker, so we had a regen scrapper, then later a willpower scrapper, sorta-tanking for us. Met a lot of interesting people; a Freddy Kruger lookalike claws scrapper who told us a story about facing an angry bear with a 357 magnum in RL (this sounded farfetched to our regen scrapper, but the claws scrapper claimed to live in Alaska; maybe that happens a lot there) and there were a pair of female archery/energy blasters who seemed to specialize in synchronized Aim/Build Up/Rain of Arrows, which totally melted anything that was caught in their twin AoEs. We did door missions in Peregrine Island, a mix of radio missions, Portal Corp missions and warehouses of Carnies. I managed to score a Pangean Soil from an extra-dimensional werewolf. Good stuff.

After that team broke up I joined a Lady Grey Strike Force being organized on LBx. I had asked what the team needed, and the leader said "anything 50" (apparently due to SK/mentor issues), and so I brought April Fool (50 thug/TA mastermind). Our team mix was:

mind/kin controller
fire/stone brute
empathy/nothing defender
grav/storm controller
2 fire blasters
elec blaster
thug/TA MM (me)

This SF started off incredibly slowly. In the first mission, one fire blaster immediately went AFK at the entrance for about 20 minutes, and since he was SKing the other fire blaster, our DPS was greatly reduced. The brute started off moving very cautiously, checking to make sure people were ready before attacking and frequently trying to pull Rikti from busy intersections; well-meaning, maybe, but the resulting pace was much slower than the pace I'm used to. The empath outright demanded that the kin controller keep perma-ID on him, for fear of mez, and threatened to quit the team if he ever got mezzed. April is a troublemaker at heart, so she tried to talk the other team members into TPing the AFK blaster into mobs of Rikti to help absorb alpha strikes (but no one would go for it) and told the empath that ID doesn't protect against sleep, so he should demand the storm controller keep O2 Boost on him, too (this earned me a "No CM for you!" from the empath, LOL).

We picked up the pace a bit after the 50 fire blaster got back from AFK (I told him that the rest of the team wanted to kick him, but April barely talked them out of it), raising our DPS a lot, and the brute got more courageous after she saw it wasn't instant death. We managed to wrap up the first two missions before too long, even overcoming surprise aggro from the 2-Rider spawn (OK, OK, I think one of my pets pulled them...oops!). The empath apologized for being rude earlier and revealed that apparently most of the team (minus me) had failed/aborted a very ugly LGTF run just before restarting with me, and one of the prime causes was that squishies got mezzed and killed a lot; this explained why the empath was obsessing over keeping CM on people and getting ID for himself, and why the brute was so gun shy when we started. I told him it was OK, and not to ever take anything April says too seriously.

We agreed to fail the third mission by ganking Infernia and Glacia, but not everyone was clear on the concept so some team members ended up helping Infernia and Glacia fight three or four mobs of Rikti, before we finally managed to grief these hapless heroines to death. On the fourth mission one of the fire blasters tried to TP foe mitos out of the goo and into the Rikti, which didn't work (I'm not sure why; I've seen it work before), while the electric blaster tried to sneak up on blue mitos and assassinate them with aim/build up/zapp (which did work, with a little help from my pets). We eventually cleared all the mitos and pasted Hamidon himself.

In the final mission, a couple of the heroes tried to stealth to the end twice, but got spotted by Rikti drones and killed both times. The team ended up fighting most of the way there instead; once we got about 3/4s of the way to the end, though, the stealthers were able to sneak the rest of the way through and TP us past the last bit. We actually killed Hro'tohz and the Honoree relatively easily, but things got really ugly going after the generators while huge ambushes swarmed around us. While taking out the first three generators, the whole team got wiped out, except April herself. I didn't want to have to walk back there again, so I launched a 1-mastermind zerg rush against the fourth and final generator, while under heavy fire from Rikti ambushes. This was actually kind of dangerous since focusing fire on the generator takes me out of bodyguard mode, but I slammed a lot of inspirations and kicked off the Demonic accolade to keep me alive while my pets tore down the last generator. My dead teammates cheered as I knocked out the last generator to finish the TF and punched the "exit" button as soon as I could. Total TF time was 2hrs 42mins, and it was actually pretty fun.

4/16/2008

Started off playing Astarte (45 grav/emp controller on Protector) on an 8-player Demolition Girls SG team doing Unai Kemen's missions, closing ruptures and such. Got distracted by a lengthy debate on how Wentworths and the CoH economy worked; a couple of the other players argued that the market was "broken" by farmers "hoarding" all the best recipes. This caused me to go into lecture-mode about how I think economics works (I'm a big believer in free markets), which also caused me to slow down on the rate I was laying down my empathy buffs, but fortunately the team was pretty resilient so it didn't impact our play too much. I think the root cause of one of the other player's problems was that she was looking for a level 30 Mako's Bite Acc/End/Rech, but they never appeared for sale at Wentworths. But I think this recipe only drops from trials, and I don't believe any trial is capable of awarding a level 30 recipe; I think first hero respec can only award level 33-34ish recipes.

After that team broke up I spent some time soloing Mystery Girl (31 FF/nrg defender on Liberty), finishing off Kelly Nemmers' story arc and doing the whole of Buck Salinger's story arc, which unlocked the Katie Hannon TF contact for me. You'd think that soloing a FF defender would be awfully dreary, but it was actually pretty cool; Mystery Girl's ability to use Invisibility and Personal Force Field let me solve missions mostly through stealth and being unkillable. I found that I could click glowies and rescue hostages while still safely in PFF, which trivialized a couple missions, including the one where you click 5 hunks of iron and get ambushed, and at least three that required me to lead hostages out while suffering ambushes. In the final mission in Buck's arc, Save Salamanca, I stealthed to each of the 3 hostages and took out their guards, then led them back to the site of the ritual while in PFF. That started a 15 minute period where regular waves of ambushes would attempt to attack and disrupt the ritual. I cleared the first two waves of red caps with no problem; on the third wave I had an idea, and I cleared all but one red cap minion. I then went into PFF and let the red cap try to beat on my defenses for awhile. No new waves of ambushes spawned after that, I guess because the third wave was still "active". I went afk for a bit and after 12 minutes of this red cap minion ineffectively beating on my PFF, I won the mission.

A bit later Mystery Girl joined a Katie Hannon TF. This team had a tanker, a defender, a controller, 3 scrappers and 2 blasters, and had no trouble completing the TF, finishing in 40mins and getting Mystery Girl to level 32, where I took Force Bubble.

I also spent some time in Icon messing with a couple Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) costumes. I made a formal dress police uniform using the Military dress jacket and pencil skirt (thinking maybe that'll come in handy for the RWZ mission where you're supposed to show up in formal dress to meet with Rikti ambassadors) and re-made a red and white Longbow uniform for use in zone pvp, this time using the new Stealth harness and tactical belt, which look pretty good. I spent a lot of time waffling on which costume pieces should be red and which should be white; I like red for the mask piece and red for the pants piece, but all "real" Longbow uniforms seem to have either red mask/boots/gloves and white pants, or white mask/boots/gloves and red pants. I ended up going with the latter; I like the white boots and gloves but feel the white mask looks a bit pasty.

4/15/2008

I started off playing Schadenfreude (42 AR/traps corruptor) on a 7 player pickup team doing level 45 relentless missions in Grandville. We started out fighting level 47 Longbow, which was pretty challenging (our team was level 42 to 45 with some lackeys), but we had a pretty support-heavy team so were strong enough to beat these, getting Schadenfreude to level 43. The next mission with level 48 Arachnos was really hard though, and we suffered three wipeouts, mostly at the hands of hard-hitting +5 Arachnos bosses. Still we managed to get through it, getting quite a lot of exp along the way.

I put 2 of Schadenfreude's level 43 slots into Maneuvers, which allowed me to 6-slot Red Fortune for +2% global damage, +5% global recharge, and raising her self-buffed range defense to 32.96%, which is really nice for letting her set traps while under hostile fire. The other slot went into Poison Gas Trap and is still empty; I plan to eventually put a purple damage proc there.

Switching to hero side I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) exemping down to level 37 to join a 6-player Northern Lights SG team for a Brickstown bank safeguard mission. We defeated a level 41 AV Ice Mistral who was trying to rob the bank.

I solo'd a few Croatoa missions as Mystery Girl (31 FF/nrg defender) hoping to make progress towards unlocking the TF contact; she's about midway through Kelly Nemmers' mission list in the Croatoa contact chain. Invis and PFF helped her get to various hostages to free them easily.

Later Schadenfreude came back on and duoed with a mastermind for awhile, defeating a Silver Mantis EB to get the Party Crasher badge and doing a few more missions before I called it a night.

4/14/2008

On Friday night I started off soloing a Freakshow mission with Schadenfreude (42 AR/traps corruptor), then switched to Mystery Girl (26 FF/nrg defender) to help a team kill the Eochai and Jack in Irons monsters in Croatoa.

After that it was time for the Lady Grey TF race; I logged on Spacegirl (44 mind/rad controller) to join one of the many Sisterhood teams that participated. I was on the way to Rikti War Zone via Atlas Park when I saw someone broadcasting "Costume Contest under Atlas in 1 minute". I figured, hey, I have a minute. So I flew over to the Atlas statue and parked myself at the end of the line of contestants.

Spacegirl in the finals of the costume contest

Spacegirl (top row, 3rd from left in the above picture) actually won the costume contest! Several people said some very nice things about her costume and theme, also, and the contest organizer gave her 4M influence as first prize. Second place was taken by the robed and cowled man (top row, 5th from left) and third place was won by the white tiger striped catboy (top row, farthest left).

That was a really nice start to things. From there I continued on to RWZ, where I mingled with the heroes and villains who had shown up for the LGTF race. The turnout was pretty huge, and snowballed as the word got out; the first RWZ instance actually filled to overflowing.

Preparing for the Lady Grey TF race

I joined one of the Sisterhood & friends teams; our initial team was abusively good, but players were shuffled around a bit to make sure everyone had a decent team. We ended up with a lineup of:

fire/elec blaster
emp/dark defender
mind/rad controller (me)
arch/dev blaster
dual/will scrapper
SS/will brute
elec/elec brute
rad/nrg defender

This was still a pretty ferociously strong team and we steamrollered the first two missions without effort. The rules of the race forbade anyone from failing missions on purpose, so we completed mission 3 the "real way" by freeing all the hostages and defeating the AV. The empath and the electric brute disconnected during the third mission, which slowed us down a bit, but the empath came back in time to help with Hamidon. The brute aggroed the Rikti onto Hami and the mitos and we shot down the mitos with no more than normal amounts of death. On the last mission, we didn't have anyone who could stealth/TP, so we fought our way through the mission to get to the final fight. Hro'tohz was no problem; the Honoree did get off his Unstoppable against us, but we eventually wore him down. Spacegirl's mind attacks still seemed to hit him even when he was in Unstoppable mode, which was nice (though not a whole lot of damage). We finished the TF in 1hr 58mins; I think we came in second on time, which is not too bad considering we were down 1 player and had no stealth capability. Spacegirl got the Superstar badge and level 45 while on this TF; she put her 3 extra slots into Mind over Body, her +RES toggle. She's thematically a good match for fighting Rikti, so raising psi resist made sense to me.

After that I played Flamebait (32 fire/thermal corruptor) for a bit on an 8 player all-corruptor Demolition Girls SG team, LK'd up to to level 39ish missions. Learned from one of the other players how to (sort of) Inferno while kiting. Inferno technically roots you, but with combat jumping you can bounce into a big spawn, then bounce back towards your team; while starting the second bounce if you trigger Inferno just as you leave the ground, the power "locks in" on the targets surrounding you at that moment, but your momentum carries your toon back to your team. The animation finishes as you land (rooting you at that point), causing a huge BOOM as you suddenly nova a group you're no longer near. It took some practice, but one I got the hang of it, I gleefully did it over and over. Got to level 33; naturally, I added 3 slots to Inferno.

On Saturday I played Mystery Girl for a level 24-33 hero side respec trial. Team mix was:

warshade
fire/fire blaster
ill/FF controller
FF/nrg defender (me)
dark/regen scrapper
peacebringer
emp/dark defender
MA/will scrapper

FFs feel awfully good on the Terra Volta respec and we sailed through the trial with no problems; finished in 1hr 2mins. Mystery Girl got to level 27 and took the recipe reward (I wonder if I should've taken the respec since I burned a veteran respec early on...but I still have lots of veteran respecs if I need it) and got a Touch of Death: Dam/End/Rech for my trouble.

Mystery Girl did a little light soloing, but soloing as a FF defender is not that exciting, so I formed a Moonfire TF. Our team mix was:

FF/nrg defender (me)
dark/elec defender
stone/stone tanker
emp/rad defender
2 will/SS tankers
ice/ice blaster
spine/regen scrapper

We had a lot of tankers, and they all seemed pretty happy to be heavily buffed with lots of defender support, which let them run into large spawns of Council without fear. I offered to stealth/TP the team through some of the missions but they were all like, "No! Let's smash everything!" We all had a pretty good time; even clearing all the maps it took us only 1hr 47mins. Mystery Girl got to level 29 (picking up Force Bolt at 28; I was thinking this might be a good way to keep individual mobs knocked down to mitigate their damage) and got the Silver Bullet badge for killing Werewolves. The recipe reward wasn't anything special, but I did get a Respec recipe as a drop; I still didn't really think I needed a respec so I sold the recipe at Wentworths for 25M infl. The spines scrapper also pinned me down and made me take 5M infl as a prize for a message board contest she had meant to award me some time ago.

On Sunday I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), joining a pickup team doing radio missions in Peregrine Island. This went pretty well for the most part. We had two tankers, however; one "main" tanker who was level 50 and a second, sidekicked 39 invuln tanker. The invuln tanker had a fairly suboptimal power selection (he had Invincibility, Unstoppable and most of the Invuln passive resists; he lacked Unyielding and Temp Invuln) and after he got mezzed once the team started mocking him relentlessly, challenging him to tank stuff when the main tank was afk (which admittedly he was afraid to do because it would paste him) and the like. He had a pretty bad build but I kinda felt sorry for the guy considering how much grief the team was giving him. At one point I noticed he lost SK while fighting a group of level 51 Malta, causing the 39 tanker to instantly faceplant, then someone fired off Vengeance. Both mentor and SK denied dropping the SK link, but this seemed rather un-nice to me, so I excused myself from the team after that mission.

Playing Mystery Girl I solo'd the Defeat Heracles mission; Heracles was a level 24 EB but this wasn't really a big accomplishment since by then he was -5 to Mystery Girl. This wrapped up Stephanie Peebles' story arc, but I didn't get the Wedding Band temp power from it; probably because the mission was so grey by that point. Later that evening I formed a 5-player pickup team that ran through some Striga missions in Lars Hansen's story arc. Fighting vampires got Mystery Girl the Slayer badge, completing her Atlas Medallion accolade, as well as level 30. I thought about taking Repulsion Field, but I figure I'll get Force Bubble at 32 so I took Energy Torrent for some more AoE. I've also decided to slot lots of silly procs in Mystery Girl's attacks, mostly for fun; she now has 3 Devastation: Chance to Hold, 4 Explosive Strike: Chance for Smashing damage, and 1 Positron's Blast: Chance for Energy damage. The effects are pretty random, but kinda fun.

Quite late at night played Mystery Girl on a Katie Hannon TF; this had 1 tanker, 3 defenders, 2 controllers and 2 blasters, and it was pretty straightforward; we finished in 42mins, netting me a level 30 Cacophony: Chance for Energy damage. Damage procs in non-aggro confuse powers seem pretty pointless to me, but them's the breaks. Anyway, I like getting level 33 recipes (for use in Siren's Call), so I had been thinking about trying to keep Mystery Girl in the level 30-33 range to get lots of low level recipes; but even SK'd Mystery Girl got 9/10s of a level doing one Katie run, so I'm not sure I can avoid leveling out of this range if I do Katie TFs. I'll try to get low level recipes while I can, anyhow.

4/11/2008

I started on Wednesday night playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), soloing a flashback of the Envoy of Shadow arc, which exemps me to level 39. I also took the perma-debuffed and no travel powers challenge settings. This isn't the story arc the flashback badge guide recommends taking, since it has EBs in it, but I figured I may as well go for magic salvage while I was at it, so I took the CoT arc.

Police Woman vs the Envoy of Shadow

The generic CoT were no problem even in my debuffed state. The first time I ran into the Envoy (in the cave shown above, as a level 39 EB) I was worried I might not be able to kill him (due to his self heals plus my damage debuff) so I dropped a shivan, and the Envoy went down fast. In the last mission I fought Envoy again on the outdoor map where's he's on a little island, and I thought I'd try fighting him without a shivan. It took a bit longer and I relied heavily on inspirations, but I was still able to take him out even damage debuffed and without the shivan. Finished the flashback in 1hr 54mins and got the Venturesome and Stalled badges.

After that I played Thunder Girl (42 will/nrg tanker) on a large Sisterhood team doing radio missions in Founders Falls. The team already had a tanker though so after the first mission I swapped to play Mystery Girl (25 FF/nrg defender) as a sidekick; this went pretty well and Mystery Girl got to level 26. I picked up the new Repulsion Bomb and so far it's pretty fun. The damage isn't all that much (though I only have 1 slot in it) but it seems pretty fun so far. It's like a defender Foot Stomp; an AoE knockdown, with less damage and longer recharge, but it's ranged and has a chance to stun.

On Thursday night I started off by burning a free respec for Yuki-Onna (43 ice/cold corruptor). I'd been meaning to do this for some time as she had a few powers I really didn't like any more and I wanted to tweak her build to be more viable in PvP. I mainly ended up dumping Hasten/Superspeed (which was great for stealth but not so hot in Grandville; I still want them but I deferred them til the 40s) and Frostworks for CJ/SJ/Acro (all at Bloody Bay and Siren's Call levels). I also dumped Bitter Freeze Ray (which, even at its reduced 2.5 second activation time, still feels too long to cast) for Blizzard (probably not good in PvP except vs Masterminds but I really wanted some AoE damage). Here's the full build:

Villain Plan by Mids' Villain Designer 1.30
http://www.honourableunited.org.uk/mhd.php

Yuki-Onna: Level 48 Science Corruptor
Primary Power Set: Ice Blast
Secondary Power Set: Cold Domination
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Medicine
Power Pool: Speed
Ancillary Pool: Mace Mastery

Villain Profile:
Level 1: Ice Bolt -- Acc(A), Dmg(3), Decim-Dmg/Rchg:33(3), Dmg(5), Decim-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:33(5), RechRdx(7)
Level 1: Infrigidate -- Acc(A), Acc(13), RechRdx(13), DefDeb(15), LdyGrey-%Dam:33(15), Achilles-ResDeb%:20(17)
Level 2: Ice Blast -- Acc(A), Dmg(7), Decim-Dmg/Rchg:33(9), Dmg(9), Decim-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:33(11), RechRdx(11)
Level 4: Ice Shield -- DefBuff(A), DefBuff(25), DefBuff(27)
Level 6: Combat Jumping -- DefBuff(A)
Level 8: Hurdle -- Jump(A)
Level 10: Aid Other -- IntRdx(A)
Level 12: Swift -- Run(A)
Level 14: Aid Self -- Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx:33(A), IntRdx(17), Dct'dW-Heal/Rchg:33(19), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg:33(19), Heal(21), Dct'dW-Rchg:33(21)
Level 16: Super Jump -- Jump(A)
Level 18: Bitter Ice Blast -- Acc(A), Decim-Dmg/EndRdx:33(23), Decim-Dmg/Rchg:33(23), Dmg(25), Decim-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:33(31), RechRdx(43)
Level 20: Stamina -- EndMod(A), EndMod(40), EndMod(40)
Level 22: Arctic Fog -- EndRdx(A), ResDam(27), ResDam(29), ResDam(29)
Level 24: Acrobatics -- EndRdx(A)
Level 26: Aim -- RechRdx(A), RechRdx(31), RechRdx(33)
Level 28: Glacial Shield -- DefBuff(A), DefBuff(31), DefBuff(40)
Level 30: Benumb -- Acc(A), RechRdx(37), RechRdx(39)
Level 32: Blizzard -- Dmg(A), Dmg(33), Dmg(33), RechRdx(34), RechRdx(34), RechRdx(34)
Level 35: Sleet -- RechRdx(A), LdyGrey-DefDeb/Rchg:41(36), UndDef-DefDeb/Rchg/EndRdx:33(36), RechRdx(36), LdyGrey-%Dam:40(37), UndDef-Rchg:33(37)
Level 38: Heat Loss -- RechRdx(A), RechRdx(39), RechRdx(39)
Level 41: Web Envelope -- Acc(A), EndRdx(42), RechRdx(42), Immob(42), Immob(43), Immob(43)
Level 44: Hasten -- RechRdx(A)
Level 47: Frostwork -- Empty(A)
Level 49: Super Speed -- Empty(A)
------------

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>| Copy &amp; Paste this data chunk into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build |
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</pre><hr />

I kept both shield powers; I know a lot of ice/colds build purely for solo PvP and don't bother with the ally buffs, but I prefer to team and the shields are just too useful in team PvE not to take.

I'm normally skeptical of nuke powers that drain all your END, but Blizzard is really working for Yuki. The synergy between Sleet (to debuff RES), Blizzard (massive AoE DoT), Heat Loss (more RES debuff and a big END/REC boost) and Scourge is amazing; I can debuff, nuke, pop a blue and then refill my end bar to full.

Anyway, I helped a friend get the Lanista badge by losing a gladiator match to her; I really didn't remember how gladiator matches worked and neither did she so we just arbitrarily started one. Neither of us had actually purchased any gladiators, so as soon as the match began, I instantly lost the game due to not having any gladiators in play. (Neither did the other player, but I think I lost faster due to being the first player to join the match.)

After that I joined a Lady Grey SF as a lackey. Our team mix was:

nrg/sr stalker
mind/nrg dominator
ice/cold corruptor (me)
necro/dark MM
will tanker
fire/kin controller
fire/nrg brute
blaster (I didn't get what her powersets were)

This was a cool team mix since we had 8 characters who were 8 different ATs, which doesn't happen often.

The first mission went pretty well overall, though the fight against the psychic Clockwork King got off to a bad start as the dominator did a Leroy Jenkins-style frontal assault on the Clockwork King and his buddies before half the team arrived on the scene. This resulted in the CWK spraying Psychic Screams around and causing a few deaths before the rest of the team showed up and got things under control again.

In the second mission we took down the first rider no problem, then had some trouble with the 2 Rider group as fire imps aggroed the riders onto us unexpectedly, resulting in a few deaths. We beat up the 3 Rider and 4 Rider groups pretty easily though, with the tanker preferring to charge into the mass of them rather than pulling them apart. I tried to use Heat Loss (along with Sleet and Blizzard) on the Riders when possible, hoping to counter Famine's nasty END drain. They went down really quick.

After the second mission the blaster needed to reboot, and then pretty much vanished until late in the fourth mission (apparently someone else commandeered the computer for a while).

We set out to deliberately fail the third mission, but it took awhile to get Infernia killed, because our team had itchy trigger fingers around Rikti, and consequently we accidentally saved her from death a few times before we finally sent her to her doom. Plus Glacia was way the heck deep in the cave system, and we had to clear quite a lot of the mission anyhow to get to her. We ended up getting her killed too and so we "failed" the mission and moved on.

On the fourth mission we basically zerg rushed various mitos and ultimately Hamidon until he went down, suffering a lot of deaths along the way but eventually getting the job done.

Yuki-Onna watches as the Hamidon explodes

In the final mission the stalker and dom wanted to stealth to the AV at the end, but repeatedly got detected by Rikti drones and exterminated; I think they each died twice, but it only strengthened their determination to get to the end, which they succeeded in doing the third time. Unfortunately since neither of them had any kind of teleport powers, it was somewhat futile, and so the people who did have recall friend TP'd them back to help the rest of us fight our way through.

The final AV fights were actually quite easy, and we utterly squashed both Hro'tohz and the Honoree; I don't think the Honoree even got to do his Unstoppable trick. I'm not sure but I'd like to think our large amount of cold and dark debuffs really helped with this. After the Honoree went down we zerg rushed the various generators, finishing the SF in 2hrs 43mins.

Yuki-Onna got to level 44 in the middle of this SF; I had originally planned on getting back Frostwork at 44, but our tanker was already at the HP cap so I went with Hasten instead.