PoliceWoman

[ QUOTE ]
first off, the ill/emp was a he second, damn you trick arrow.

[/ QUOTE ]

Whups! I blame Superior Invis for not getting the gender of the empath right.

Trick arrow is surprisingly cool sometimes, and pretty rare on villain side which adds to the novelty factor.

4/9/2008

On Monday night I played Mystery Girl (24 FF/nrg defender), forming an 8-player pickup team that beat up a few Banished Pantheon missions (completing the Wheel of Destruction story arc) and a few Striga missions for Stephanie Peebles. This went really well and got Mystery Girl to level 25.

Tuesday night I played Astarte (44 grav/emp controller on Protector) on a 8-player team of Demolition Girls SG, mostly doing missions in Peregrine Island. I finally settled on getting Resurrect at level 44 and got to use it a couple times. We had a blaster on the team who insisted on trying to run off and Nova groups of enemies on her own (she argued that the mobs the team fought died too quick for it to be worth Nova'ing), and then seemed surprised when this got her killed. Spent some time trying to persuade her that staying with the group was good for her health, but I'm not sure how much it sunk in. We did kill the psychic Clockwork King, Bobcat and Shadow Hunter as AVs, getting Astarte to level 45. I put her new slots one each into Recovery Aura, Adrenaline Boost and Fortitude, which makes RA and AB 3-slotted for recharge, and Fortitude 4-slotted with 3 recharge and 1 defense.

After that team broke up someone was calling out on LBx for heroes to come pvp him in Recluse's Victory, so I switched to Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) and decided to try my luck in RV. I managed to land a kill on a stray corruptor, before finding the challenger, a super-strength brute with a lot of temp powers (he used the nictus teleport and nictus blast from Dr Shelly's story arc, and phase shift, that I saw) which made him pretty slippery. He got a kill on me, then I ran back and managed to chase him down (he would start TPing away after getting low life) long enough to land a kill on him. Though, truthfully I think I may have KS'd him from a rad/psy defender who was chasing him too. The brute complained in broadcast about my Achilles Heel -RES proc and threatened to switch to his ice/rad corruptor to "give you some of your own medicine". I told him to be sure to come back with an AR corruptor.

After that I ran around looking for more trouble, and a fire/rad/mace corruptor dropped out of the sky and blew me away before I could really stop him. Then I had a lengthy running fight against a stalker which I narrowly won. The original brute came back with an ice/rad corruptor as promised and teamed up with the fire/rad and they double teamed me for one kill, then I rushed the villain duo with some other heroes and landed a kill on the fire/rad.

At that point it seemed like there were an awful lot of heroes and hardly any villains, so I switched to April Fool (50 thug/TA MM) and went back into RV. I promptly lost a 1-vs-4 fight, then joined up with the corruptor pair. A few more villains showed up before long: another MM, a brute and a dominator. Things got pretty hectic after that and I lost track of who killed who, though I'm pretty sure I got a scrapper a couple times and the rad/psy a couple times; there was an ill/emp controller giving us a ton of trouble who I targeted a few times, but she was very slippery and had Phase Shift so I don't think we ever got her. I kept going after her anyway since her healing was wrecking us. The hero side got a lot of various kills, but one that stood out to me was when a fire/nrg blaster dropped in the middle of our huddled-up team and let loose a killer Inferno that dropped practically everybody. The villain team turned the tables and did well for a bit, then the tide shifted as more heroes showed up and they got the upper hand again. At that point the ice/rad corruptor switched from PvPing to complaining on broadcast about the heroes' powersets; I twice tried to say, let's not trash talk, let's just kill them. But he pretty much insisted on throwing a temper tantrum at the ill/emp controller and sonic defender, then logged out. The other villains hadn't participated in this rant, but seemed to be demoralized by this, and so the villains gradually trickled out of RV. I continued the fight for awhile, but after getting Inferno'd once (I still have no idea how to not die to that) and losing a 1-vs-4 fight, I threw in the towel too.

After that, some people conceived the idea to have a melee-only FFA in the arena. This sounded pretty silly, but I decided, what the heck. I started off playing Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper); her melee DEF is at the soft cap from IOs, but I didn't expect to do real well since focused accuracy hurts SR really badly. Also MA isn't so hot at spike damage; I loaded my inspiration tray with reds hoping that would help. No one brought a stalker thankfully (I guess they weren't considered melee) but there were some spines scrappers (who I suppose technically qualify as melee).

The first two matches were on Siege's factory which additionally was bad for Olivia since she doesn't have vertical movement (well, aside from Combat Jumping). Nevertheless it was pretty fun; since everyone was melee, people usually hung out at the ground level exchanging wild swings at each other. The first game I got killed once and didn't kill anyone; the two "winners" each had 1 kill each and everyone else had 0. The second game I got one kill and didn't die, but the winner had 3 kills. I don't think anyone ever truly got a "clean" kill where they clearly did all the damage; it was more like a piranha swarm where once someone got slightly wounded, everyone would turn on them and pound away hoping to steal the kill.

The third game, I switched to Thunder Girl (42 will/nrg tanker) hoping that energy melee's spike damage would give me a better chance. I was worried that willpower might be a weak defense here, but it was actually plenty good since the other players had to stand in melee range to hit me, activating my regen powers; Rise to the Challenge was especially good in the tight furballs of melee people swinging at each other. I think eventually people stopped attacking me, since the squishier scrappers were more attractive targets. My energy attacks did pretty good damage but unfortunately I was never able to land two attacks in a row; Thunder Girl's travel power is hover/fly, which is simply awful in arena. So plenty of times I'd see Energy Transfer take a big chunk out of someone's life, then I'd crawl after them at suppressed fly speed while some scrapper jumped up and scored the kill shot. Ended up with 0 deaths and 0 kills; the winner had 3 kills. It was all very silly, but pretty fun anyhow.

After we finished in arena, I agreed to join a pickup team who had asked me for help while I was waiting for the arena match to start. This was a support-light 7-player pickup team fighting Nemesis automata. This got off to a rocky start as I went left in the first room and a few team members decided to go right, aggroing quite a lot of Nemesis who got hopped up on Vengeance and killed many of my poor squishy teammates; I managed to gather up the 3 or so groups of Nemesis we'd aggroed and the team eventually beat them, after which the rest of the mission went a lot better. After that mission we did a Carnies mission which was uniquely unpleasant because our only support character was a fire/kin controller who didn't have speed boost; I had Quick Recovery but not Stamina, and regularly got drained dry of END from dying Carnies. We eventually managed to get through this. I felt kinda bad for the blasters who couldn't really be effectively healed by the kin, so died a lot; it seemed like they would keep catching stray aggro. I maybe should've urged them to stay back and let me pull things to them in neat clumps.

4/7/2008

I had Friday off from work and so played quite a lot of City of Heroes over the long weekend. So, this is a longish report.

I mostly focused on my newest project, Mystery Girl (4 force field/energy blast defender on Liberty). Started off joining a pickup team running level 6 radio missions in King's Row; the blaster leading the team was on Unyielding difficulty, which seems crazy while on TO enhancements, but it seemed to work and Mystery Girl got to level 8 on that team. After that team broke up she solo'd a bit, got the Negotiator badge from a mission, turned in some Halloween salvage for an extra costume slot (I gave her a black tuxedo jacket over a purple dress, with a purple mask, which I thought looked sort of Golden Agey and neat) and wrote her a background story, in the style of several newspaper clippings about her newbie adventures. I also realized I had horribly screwed up her build at the tender age of 9 (I had mistakenly added slots to Personal Force Field when I meant to add them to Deflection Shield) and so I burned a veteran respec to sort that out. A bad pickup team (several players suicided into mobs, then quit the team) got her to level 10, then a good pickup team (with mad buffs making us invincible) got her to level 14. I slotted DOs, as well as three level 13 or level 14 Explosive Strike: Chance for Smashing Damage IOs, one in each of Power Bolt, Power Blast and Power Burst. These damage procs with their fixed, level-based damage seem fantastic at low levels, easily beating out Damage TOs and DOs, and were part of the reason I went with energy blast. Kinda wish I could find more of the Explosive Strike set to get some set bonuses, but the other recipes in the set seem strangely scarce on the broker.

Mystery Girl led a small-team Positron TF during the day on Friday; team mix was:

FF/nrg defender (me, with PFF and Recall Friend)
fire/kin controller (with Superspeed and a stealth IO)
ill/emp controller (with Recall Friend and Deceive)

Mystery Girl's team prepares to fight Cortex

With 3 support characters we were worried about having low DPS, but all the players seemed experienced and we got to stealth/TP a lot of the TF, which helped considerably. Ironically the illusion controller was the only one who couldn't "stealth" (we were below the level he got either Invis power at). PFF is not really stealth, it just makes me hard to kill; on occasion, the fire controller laughed at the huge numbers of mobs following me around, Keystone Kops style, while I madly tried to lose aggro long enough to Recall Friend our other player. Against the various Defeat All missions near the end we just had to grind through them, though the illusionist's Deceive power helped quite a lot here. In the end we finished the TF in 3hrs 9mins, and Mystery Girl got to level 16.

Mystery Girl also organized a Synapse TF late on Friday night. Team mix was:

FF/nrg defender (me)
stone/nrg tanker
fire/nrg blaster
claw/SR scrapper
dark/dark defender
kin/rad defender
fire/kin controller

We actually started with only 5, but the blaster asked to join 2 minutes after we started the first time, and we agreed to restart, at which point we added the blaster and one of the kins. This TF went extremely smoothly; I felt particularly good as Insulation Shield badly nerfs the clockworks' electric blasts (both the damage and the end drain) and my energy blasts were quite good against clockwork. I got to pseudo-stealth a fair number of missions with PFF. We played fairly late into the night (the kin defender quit the TF fairly late into it; he didn't say, but I'd guess it was the late hour), and so we decided to skip fighting Babbage in the interests of time.

In the last mission I had a lot of trouble stealthing to the Clockwork King's lair, dying a couple times attempting it. A lucky sleep pierced Mystery Girl's PFF the first time, with bad results; then the second time I got to the King's lair but the place was so packed with clockworks that I couldn't really lose aggro. I led the clocks on a merry chase via Teleport, then when I had a bit of a lead I dropped PFF to TP in the stone tanker. The angry clocks buzzed down and killed me again, but after the stone tanker picked up the aggro I was able to awaken and TP in the rest of the team. After that we beat up the Clockwork King pretty easily, finishing the Synapse TF in a total of 3h 26min. Exp smoothing resulted in fairly ludicrous exp, getting Mystery Girl to level 21.

Mystery Girl vs the Clockwork King

Later on Mystery Girl did several pickup teams, mostly in Independence Port and Striga; she completed her cape mission and ultimately finished the weekend at level 24.

Grey Wings (29 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) spent some time on a 6 player team where most were AFK, then solo'd to 30, after which she did a Manticore TF on an 8-player team of Demolition Girls SG. Team mix was:

will/SS tanker
claw/regen scrapper
stone/stone tanker
ill/kin controller
dark/dark defender
archery/fire blaster (me)
emp/psy defender
sonic/sonic defender

This TF went quite smoothly. We did run across Adamastor in Dark Astoria and beat him up for the Keeper of Secrets badge. We finished the TF in 2h 36mins, which got Grey Wings about 95% of the way through level 31; I solo'd for the last few exp, reaching level 32 and getting Rain of Arrows, which I figure will add to her AoE madness.

Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) helped someone with a Malta mission in Peregrine Island, then solo'd a flashback of Kelly Nemmers' story arc, while perma-debuffed and temp powers disallowed. This got her the Calibrator, Rash and Hindered badges. She also knocked out a quick Katie TF; we had a tanker, 4 controllers and 3 blasters and finished in 26 mins, getting her a Mako's Bite Dmg/Rech recipe.

Flamebait (32 fire/thermal corruptor) did the Silver Mantis SF organized on LHO channel. Team mix was:

dark/fire brute
fire/thermal corruptor (me)
nrg/dark brute
necro/FF MM
ice/rad corruptor

Flamebait versus Colonel Duray

We really had no trouble with this SF, aside the team occasionally getting split up during the final mission against the huge Sky Raider helicarrier, and my having a hard time telling when my fire shields wore off of the fire armor brute (my buffs have the same visual as the fire armor toggles, and the icons even stack with them in the team window; I ended up just making sure to sync them with buffs on another team member).

April at the costume contest

April Fool (50 thug/TA MM) attended a villain costume contest sponsored by the Association VG on Friday night. Villain costume contests are quite rare so I really wanted to attend (I actually briefly logged out of the Silver Mantis SF, with permission from the team, in order to go to this). April isn't really a believer in fighting fair, so I tried to surreptitiously drop oil slick arrow on other contestants and otherwise cheat (as much as you can in a costume contest), but despite all that she didn't win. I was going to drop a Warburg nuke on the costume contest to demonstrate what April thought of all this, but I think the contest sponsors actually dropped their own Warburg nukes as "fireworks", after which it seemed redundant to throw in more. I confess that the actual contest winners had some pretty awesome costumes though.

On Saturday there was another villain costume contest (wow!) sponsored by a generous villain who had scored big on a few recent SFs (in fact I think I was actually on a SF where this person won a Luck of the Gambler +def/+global rchg). This contest was based on both costume and biography, and so I sent Indigo Ifrit, who I thought had the better bio than half my villains and a better costume than the other half of my villains.

Indigo Ifrit at the costume contest

The contest organizer liked Indigo's story, telling me "Your bio is both evil and funny" and awarded her the "Most Misunderstood Villain" title and 25M infamy. Although I don't really think Indigo Ifrit is all that misunderstood....people who get wishes from a genie just need to be careful about what they wish for! Anyway, this influx of infamy was very useful, as it let Indigo put some bids up at the Black Market; so far she's gotten one Decimation recipe (a set she's been needing for the global recharge) for 7M infamy.

Played Schadenfreude (42 AR/traps corruptor) on Sunday with an 8 player pickup team in Grandville; we were level 42-45 and fighting level 47 enemies, but we had a good brute leading and we were very corruptor heavy so it mostly went well. We did have one stalker lackey who seemed extremely inept; he claimed to be drunk and would often make bad moves like rushing into mobs first, or forgetting to activate Hide and aggroing extra stuff, and would often end up dead. I almost wonder if he was faking being such a bad player; he thanked us for being tolerant of his antics. Since Schadenfreude is essentially an evil neo-Nazi wench, I felt free to say "Your incompetence is mitigated by your use as vengeance bait." He didn't seem to mind. Anyway, we kidnapped the relatives of that nosy reporter Amanda Vines and had a good old time overall.

4/2/2008

I spent a lot of time last night playing April Fool (50 thug/TA MM). It was her special day, after all. Started off at the Black Market finding that I managed to buy an Unbreakable Constraint: Chance for Smashing Dmg IO, already crafted, for 21M infamy, which seemed like a nice deal. I'm planning on passing that to my traps corruptor for when she gets high enough to slot it.

April clearly needed to do something fairly silly to commemorate her special day. No one seemed to believe that I was holding a costume contest (with millions of influence in prizes!) in Recluse's Victory, but I started to get some traction on LBx channel when I attempted to form a Fusionette TF. I explained that rescuing Fusionette 90 times had given me the Nuclear 90 badge, which unlocked Fusionette as a TF contact; and the Fusionette TF would award the "Fusionette BFF" badge. Since the Fusionette TF was level 40-50, the contact was in Recluse's Victory; and since it was a co-op TF, heroes would have to enter the zone and gather under the Atlas statue before they could get a team invite. Oh yeah, and not to worry about villains you see there, they're there to team. I got a lot of tells expressing interest, but I'm not sure how many people were actually fooled by this, since a lot of heroes showed up at our muster point while Phase Shifted. Some villains also sensed opportunity and showed up to help welcome the heroes, too. I did get to do a little PvP while there; I managed to kill one broadsword scrapper 3 times, though when I broadcast "Fusionette TF team meeting up under Atlas globe" he was like "Fusionette TF? WTF?" so I think he was actually there to PVP, not for the Fusionette TF. Eventually I announced on LBx that the Fusionette TF had filled up and gotten started. A few minutes later, though, I complained that Fusionette had suicided into an AV, causing the Fusionette TF to fail. Anyway, it was all very silly and fun. I hope no one was too miffed about missing out on the Fusionette BFF badge.

After that I joined a 2nd villain respec organized on LHO channel. Our team mix was something like:

fire/kin corruptor
dark armor brute
fire armor brute
stone armor brute
fire/cold corruptor
thug/TA MM (me)

Although this seems like a decent AT mix, this was unfortunately not a very good team. The dark brute was actually the kin corruptor's second box and the whole time either stood AFK at the mission door or was on autofollow doing nothing useful. Since we were exemped to 43, the level 37 cold corruptor LK'd to the level 41 fire brute long enough to hit level 38, then quietly unLK'd to get more exp. The fire brute never spoke and was prone to unannounced, lengthy AFKs. The stone brute was trying, but kept dying during the Defeat all DE mission (apparently Quartz are really bad for stone armor?). After our second team wipe during the DE mission (not even the hard mission of the respec) I threw a temper tantrum because it was obvious that 2 characters hadn't even tried to help during the fight; this guilt tripped the cold corruptor into accepting an LK.

We finally finished the DE mission and started on the final mission against the Thorn Tree. The kin corruptor asked for a TP for his 2-box'd brute, which I think was the last straw for the stone brute who simply logged out at that point. The fire brute and the kin corruptor both went AFK for like 20 minutes at this point also; the cold corruptor and I decided to wait on them. Once they got back, we didn't have a way to stealth/TP to the end, so we started clearing CoT. The fire brute either disconnected or went AFK again mid-fight (the kin claimed the fire brute disconnected, but the character never left the game so I'm thinking he was actually AFK). This left 3 active players against CoT spawns intended for a 6 player team. I have a pretty high tolerance for bad teams, but after the other two got killed in the very next room, I had had enough. I started heading for the mission door saying "I don't think this is going to work". I was planning to quit the team, but the kin corruptor beat me to the punch by saying that he wanted to restart the respec. I wasn't really up for another try with the same team; the other players quit the TF to reform another respec trial (except for the AFK fire brute, who I gleefully kicked after inheriting the star). I logged out still in TF mode, thinking I'd try soloing the mission later on.

After that I switched to Astarte (42 grav/emp controller on Protector server) and joined an 8-player team doing Tina McIntyre's Praetorian story arc. We beat up Bobcat and Neuron and Anti-matter (twice) and many, many Praetorians without too much trouble, getting Astarte to level 44. I used my level 43 slots to finish 6-slotting Fireball and Crush, but haven't figured out what power to take at level 44 yet. Probably Resurrect (I regularly team with another empath and I feel a little guilty when she dies and I can't rez her), though some of the other players were urging to to take Tactics (Astarte already has Assault) in order to eventually get Vengeance.

After the team on Protector broke up I returned to April Fool to try and solo the last mission of the respec. I think the mission was spawned for 2 players (since everyone had quit or been kicked from the TF except myself and the stone brute) and I was easily able to clear the way to the final room, and clear all the CoT surrounding the Thorn Tree. 30 vines were spawned for me (seems to vary based on team size) and it was a bit of a struggle to get all those down solo; a couple times I'd be down to 3 vines, then a clump would respawn. I used a shivan to give me a little extra DPS and that seemed to do the trick. I couldn't manage to drop the Thorn Tree, though; I made two separate attempts, during which used 2 warburg nukes, 2 more shivans, the zombie from Loa Bone, some temp Rikti drones and even uncorking my Vial of Bees. On my best attempt I got the Thorn Tree down to about 60% life. I think my major problem was that my pets were so squishy and kept dying to the Thorn Tree's AoE attacks; I could use Demonic and fistfuls of Purple inspirations to protect myself, but my pets would still die, leaving my DPS flatlined. Thugs are high DPS but squishy; probably a Robot MM would've had a better time. I'm pretty sure I could've done it with a brute or a corruptor.

Anyway, after my second attempt I gave up and quit the respec to join a 4-villain Liberty Force team, malefactoring down to 45 to clear debt and earn prestige/infamy. We defeated an AV-level Lord Recluse "in the future" and a few other missions before breaking up.

I also succumbed to rampant altitis and started a newbie force field/energy blast defender (I need a piece of that FREEM action!), and solo'd Azuria's initial missions to get to level 4.

4/1/2008

I started off playing Schadenfreude (41 AR/traps corruptor), finally soloing her cape mission (which spawned at her level of 41). While fiddling around with capes in the tailor I accepted an invite to an 8-player pickup team. This consisted of 4 mentors (at 43, 41, 41 and 40) and 4 lackeys (mostly in the 20s and 30s) and we started on some Freakshow missions as part of the Miss Francine story arc in Grandville. Four of us entered the first mission earlier than the others, and we were waiting for the other players for a few minutes. I killed some time fortifying the zone-in with trip mines and poison gas traps; but my lackey got kinda antsy after awhile and decided to pull. The other two players present were lackeys with no boss present, so (quite reasonably) panicked and fled from the full team spawn of level 45 Freakshow descending upon us. I had a moment of pure awesomeness as I got to solo most of these +4 Freaks, using my huge pile of already-set traps, along with Vengeance off of my hapless lackey. Wish I had gotten a screen shot of that. Anyway, the rest of the team zoned in near the tail end of this fight; we had 3 brutes and 5 corruptors so were actually a very strong team, and we wiped out a couple Freakshow missions with great gusto.

After that team broke up, Schadenfreude duo'd with a Liberty Force dominator for a few missions worth of Longbow, defeating an EB-level Agent Indigo along the way. Got to level 42, and added 3 slots to Maneuvers, which I put +DEF SOs in for now. This raises Schadenfreude's ranged DEF to 30.57 self-buffed. She can still get clocked by range attacks (it's not elude by any means) but it seems to help a lot.

Later on I played Helen Highwater (6 storm/psy defender on Triumph) as an SK on a 7 player team of Demolition Girls SG. I was SK'd up to 40 fighting Nemesis and Arachnos; this was a pretty big level jump, but the team was fairly support-light so I rationalize that my lowbie stormy was more helpful than my 29 blaster would've been. After the other defender and controller had to log, we ended up doing a Founders Falls safeguard and fighting an AV-level Dr. Quatrexin (the scorpionoid villain from Black Scorpion's story arc) with Helen as the only support toon. I locked Snowstorm onto the AV and madly spammed O2 Boost on the tanker, who fortunately was a heavily IO'd will/SS tanker and quite tough. Got Helen to level 10 (taking Freezing Rain and Steamy Mist for powers) and picked up a few generic level 40 recipes that I could pawn for TO and DO money.

3/31/2008

As Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) I helped a 5-player pickup team defeat an AV-level Shadow Hunter.

After that I played Spacegirl (43 mind/rad controller) on an 8-player Sisterhood team doing missions in Rikti War Zone, which got Spacegirl to level 44 and the Mind Over Body power, which is a very pink swirly resist aura.

After that team finished up I played Grey Wings (29 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) on a Hess TF. Team mix was:

dark/rad defender
fire/fire blaster
archery/fire blaster (me)
elec/nrg blaster
sonic/sonic defender

With no melee at all this was a rather unconventional team mix, but our damage output was very high and the defenders kept us from being too squishy. We finished the TF pretty quickly, 57 minutes altogether; Archon Burkholder despite being an AV didn't seem too threatening between rad debuffs on him and sonic buffs on us. One of the other players commented that she thought archery/fire was a pretty unusual build (the second person who has said this to me), since archery does well at range while fire does well in melee. This may be true; I had mostly picked these powersets because I thought having a bow and a flaming sword would be cool. I'm liking the large amount of AoE I've been getting from Fistful of Arrows/Explosive Arrow/Fire Sword Circle, too.

Later I played Police Woman, exemplared to level 37 on a 8-player partly Sisterhood and partly pickup team. Though this team had a good balance of ATs, we actually had a lot of trouble (some deaths, a bit slow to kill stuff) since we were fighting 39s, and the team was level 33 to 37 with most of the players at the lower end of that level spread. Watching combat numbers I did find I had only a 10.71% chance to hit Paragon Protectors in MoG; this 10.71% number seems to come up a lot for me (had the same chance to hit Mako in Elude), it may be my base chance to hit anyone with capped DEF. Not sure whether I need more ACC or more ToHit to overcome this; between IOs and Targeting Drone/Tactics, I should have a lot of both already.

On Saturday I played Flamebait (32 fire/thermal corruptor on Liberty) on a Cap au Diable SF. Team mix was:

dark/cold corruptor
ninj/poison MM
fire/psi dominator
2 fire/thermal corruptors (including me)

It turned out the first 3 characters were all played by the same person, though we didn't find this out for sure until after we asked him two missions into the SF (we could see that only one of those characters was moving at a time). That was kind of awkward; I think I would've felt better knowing something like that at the start of the SF. The 3-boxer did seem to be making an effort to contribute though; he cold shielded us all (plus the pets) and would stealth to objectives and TP us to him. On this SF we were exemp'd to level 20. Flamebait had taken Acrobatics at level 20 and not Stamina, and with no Stamina and an extra toggle, I would run myself out of END pretty often; but on the other hand I did much better against the many earthquake-casting Ruin Mages due to my knockback protection. I think I actually liked having Acrobatics better in this situation. Anyway, we finished the SF in 50 minutes.

Later I played Tera Watt (49 FF/elec defender on Triumph) on a Numina TF. Team mix was:

will/SS tanker
AR/dev blaster
sonic/sonic defender
grav/rad controller
ice/storm controller
FF/elec defender (me)
fire/nrg blaster

Tera has PFF, Invis and Recall Friend, so I spent most missions stealthing to the end of the map and TP'ing the rest of the team there. With both sonic shields and force fields it was pretty difficult for anyone to take damage, also. All this let us move very quickly through the initial door missions. We kinda hit a brick wall during the series of hunts in the middle of the TF, though; the Defeat 20 Vahzilok in Faultline mission came up during daylight, forcing us to wait through the day cycle before we could progress. Then a Rikti invasion in Talos Island stalled our Talos Island hunt (due to despawning all the non-Rikti mobs) for quite some time. This lengthy lull kinda killed my focus for the rest of the TF, but we managed to get through it, easily defeating Jurassik. Finished the TF in 1hr 51mins despite the delays.

After that I played Alice Slaughter (18 dual blade/will brute on Triumph) on a Cap au Diable SF. Team mix was:

ice/rad corruptor
elec/elec brute
necro/dark MM
dual blade/will brute (me)

We had no real trouble on this SF. We did the last mission the "real" way; rather than stealthing all the altars and griefing Bat'Zul onto Infernal, we instead killed Infernal, then cleared the way to each altar and clicked it, then finally killed Bat'Zul through brute force. This took longer but was actually more fun. Finished the SF in 1hr 21mins and got Alice to level 20, taking Quick Recovery.

Sunday I solo'd Mega (50 SS/elec brute on Liberty) through a flashback of the Tavish Bell story arc, mostly to kill time and gather arcane salvage. This took 36mins and I did get an Essence of the Furies out of it. I also noticed that they changed how Force Feedback: Chance of Recharge procs work; Mega has one slotted in Foot Stomp and it goes off a lot. Now this results in a buff appearing in my buff bar that looks like a dark colored rez icon. Examining the buff showed it to be a very sweet +200% recharge buff. This +200% recharge strangely doesn't appear in my Combat Attributes (which stayed at +37.5% recharge whether this buff was on or not), but it was definitely having an effect, because I double-stacked Rage much, much more often than normal, resulting in fairly ludicrous damage bonuses. Seemed to be a big improvement over before, when the slow resist from electric armor caused Mega to only get +80% recharge from this proc.

Later on I played Schadenfreude (40 AR/traps corruptor on Liberty) on the level 34-43 villain respec. Team mix was:

mind/nrg dominator
ninj/SR stalker
nrg/SR stalker
dark/thermal corruptor
AR/traps corruptor (me)

The level spread was a bit awkward as we had 2 level 50s, 2 level 35s and me at level 40. During the trial, the two 50s got malefactored to 43 and needed to sidekick the two level 35s, and I stayed at my native level of 40. While being the lowest level was good exp, it was also really dangerous because most of my best powers are AoE, and with no brute or MM pets I ended up drawing a lot of aggro. I couldn't really not use my cool traps though, so I ran in to plant poison gas traps and hoped my DEF and/or the dominator's controls and the thermal's heals would keep me safe. This mostly worked though I did suffer a couple deaths in the DE cave mission. In the final mission against the Thorn Tree, our team was really struggling to take down vines faster than they respawned. While our team was fully alive we could outpace the vine respawn, but the Thorn Tree started to attack us, and once one or two people died to that, our DPS fell below the vine replacement rate, and eventually the vines were fully respawned. Some of us ran back from the hospital, and once we regrouped we were able to kill off all the vines. I had my doubts about being able to kill an AV with the team mix we had, but one of the stalkers went the extra mile and dropped a nuke and a shivan on the Thorn Tree, and with some trap debuffs on top of that we were able to quickly take the Thorn Tree down. I had high hopes for Ignite here but couldn't find a flat spot to lay a burn patch that would still hit the tree, so ended up mostly laying traps and shooting bullets. Finished the respec in 1hr 32mins; a bit long, but for awhile it seemed in doubt whether we could even finish the trial, so we were happy to win at all.

Finished up playing Schadenfreude on a 3-player Liberty Force villain team, which helped me knock out the stupid level 46 Snake mission that Kalinda had given me, and got Schadenfreude to level 41. I couldn't decide which Patron Pool to take (all of them seem pretty unexciting) so I simply took Vengeance, which all high level villains love having around. (It's self defense, to some degree, too; having Vengeance means not having to be Vengeance-bait.)

3/28/2008

Played Schadenfreude (39 AR/traps corruptor) a lot lately; traps has been surprisingly fun. With Schadenfreude I was a lackey on a 4-player Northern Lights SG team that fought a level 47 Recluse AV in the future. Later I joined an 8-player pickup team that killed Scrapyard & friends, getting the Hammer Down and Strike Buster badges. Then I was on a St Martial SF; team mix was:

robo/TA MM (whoa, there ARE other trick arrow villains!)
AR/traps corruptor (me)
ninj/ninj stalker
robo/poison MM
robo/dark MM

This went fairly well, though I found it to be important to be at the leading edge of the robot army otherwise you wouldn't get to see anything before it was killed. With 3 robot MMs we needed some setup time at the start of each mission (one of the players commented that "it sounds like a machine shop" with all the robots being upgraded) and it was tough getting through a few narrow places in Oranbega, but we managed pretty well. In the final mission we had a few deaths jumping down to Archus, the AV at the end who lives in a cave full of exploding crystals (we skipped clearing this entire huge cave in the interests of time), but managed to eventually get there. Having seen this encounter before, I obsessively laid a huge minefield of trip mines and poison gas traps right around where I expected an ambush to show up. I think maybe I slowed down the first wave of ambushers that showed up after we engaged the AV, but that cleared out all the traps and subsequent waves of ambushers got to appear free and clear. The ambushes eventually wiped us out, though we did get the AV pretty low on life. We had to hospital and make the run down to Archus's cave a second time, with a few more incidental deaths before we were all in the last room again. After that, one of the MMs used TP foe tricks to pick apart the huge group of mobs guarding the AV, allowing us to fight and defeat Archus without quite so many minions around. There were no additional ambushes during the second AV attempt; I guess they run out after awhile. Finished the TF in 3hrs 20mins; Schadenfreude got to level 40 and received a Devastation: Dam/Rech recipe as reward.

I decided Schadenfreude needed a cape for one of her new costumes, so I called Kalinda to try and get the cape mission. Unfortunately I had neglected to actually finish her original story arc that she gave me as a newbie, so she insisted I clear some snakes out of a lab in Mercy Island. Whacking some grey snakes should be no problem, I figured. So I went to the lab and it's full of level 46 Snake assassins. Huh? This is Kalinda's newbie story arc? I wasn't up to clearing a whole map of +6s, so I called Kalinda and dropped the mission. She promptly gave me another Snakes mission, which was also full of level 46s. Argh. My theory is that Snakes must spawn either at level 1-10 or at level 46-50, and I had leveled up enough that it's decided to spawn Snakes at the higher level. I can't solo 46s at level 40, so I went back to St Martial and did some missions for Basse Croupier, getting the Skip Tracer badge, then joined a 6-player pickup team that did some missions in Grandville.

I played Flamebait (32 fire/thermal corruptor) to help a 3-boxer on a Cap au Diable SF. Our team mix was:

thug/poison MM (first 3 characters were all the same player)
stone/will brute
robo/FF MM
fire/thermal corruptor (me)

I helped as much as I could, but the brute ended up doing most of the work, stealthing to mission objectives and taking them out. In the final mission the other player had his FF mastermind use PFF to run and click the various glowies, then attempted to pull Bat'Zul up to fight Infernal up near the entrance. For some reason this pull didn't work out the first time (the gigantic Bat'Zul has the turning radius and maneuverability of a Buick) leaving Infernal dead and Bat'Zul still in the lava; we reset the mission and on our second try we took out both AVs without too much trouble, finishing in 1hr 12mins. I got some forgettable recipe as reward, but the other player insisted on also giving me one of his/her 3 recipes (an Unbounded Jump: +Stealth) for my help, which was certainly nicer than most people who multi-box.

Playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) I did a flashback of Lars Hansen's level 29 story arc on Striga Isle, with perma-debuffed and AT powers only as challenge settings. Finished this in 55mins, giving me the Daredevil and All Business badges. Also did a little IO crafting resulting in the Declining badge (for level 10 debuff/taunt/confuse IOs). I joined a RWZ ship raid to get credit for another bomb, and later I joined an 8-player Demolition Girls team that was running radio missions in Peregrine Island helping a rad defender to hit level 50. We got to fight AV-level Lord Recluse twice in safeguard missions; doesn't this guy have better things to do than rob banks? I did get to hear Lord Recluse say "Police Woman has been a thorn in my side for too long, time to take her out!" which made me smile. The safeguard version of Lord Recluse spawns a bunch of minions just like the Statesman TF version, but thankfully he's not amped up by the WEB device.

Finished up playing Grey Wings (27 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) as a sidekick on an 8-player level 40 team for some missions; got to level 29, though I still haven't figured out what power to take at 28. I'm pretty sure it should be a utility power (she has enough attacks for now), maybe from a new power pool; but not sure which yet. Medicine or Concealment might help her survivability, but the heal gizmo doesn't match her outfit and I'm not sure I want to be perma-transparent. Maybe Hasten or Assault for more DPS.

3/26/2008

I had heard that slotting damage procs in poison trap was insanely good, and so I bought a couple recipes at the Black Market for Schadenfreude (39 AR/traps corruptor): a level 40 Ghost Widow's Embrace: Chance for Psi damage and a level 20 Neuronic Shutdown: Chance for Psi damage, which I crafted and slotted in Poison Trap (along with 3 recharge SOs). This cost me about 10M infamy for the combined costs of recipes, salvage and crafting; I think this was a good price but I can't be sure. I played on a 4-player Northern Lights villain team for a bit, then solo'd some missions in St Martial (including a Brickstown mayhem). The effect of the damage procs seemed subtle to me; it didn't turn Poison Trap into Nova (which some of the hype seemed to imply), and I didn't notice any special effect when the damage procs fired off. But I did occasionally notice a mob that I hadn't touched at all would have a big chunk taken out of their life, sometimes to the point where I could finish them off with one shot. Looking carefully the damage proc shows up in my combat spam sometimes but not always, and a grey "-51" would sometimes show up over the heads of mobs being hit by the proc (unlike the orange numbers that show up when I simply shoot them). It's hard for me to tell just how much the procs are helping, but so far I think I like them.

I played on an 8-player team on Triumph for awhile, doing level 40 missions. Started off playing Grey Wings (27 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) as a SK, and did a safeguard where we defeated an AV-level Ghost Widow. After the safeguard all our defenders and controllers had to log off, at the same time the team leader was setting a "Defeat all Nemesis" mission. With as blappy as Grey Wings is turning out, this sounded really dangerous, so I switched to Tera Watt (49 FF/elec defender, originally on Liberty but transferred to Triumph) and exemped to the same team. With liberal use of force fields the next few Nemesis missions went pretty well, and Tera needed Fake Nemeses for the badge anyway.

Responding to someone's request in LBx, I agreed to do a big influence-for-infamy trade. The other player gave my main villain 143M infamy, and I gave one of his heroes 70M influence in return. This seemed an awfully good deal to me, but the other player had set these terms and seemed happy with the trade. I think maybe he was tired of villain side and was re-focusing on hero side. This is the second player I've run into who was moving assets from red side to blue side; not sure what to make of that. Maybe the villain-side population is declining even further.

Playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) I joined a Katie Hannon TF; this went quickly, lasting only 31 mins. I didn't get the exact powersets of team members, but we had 2 controllers, 3 defenders, 2 scrappers and me as the lone blaster; we had a few stray deaths in the first mission (with the 10 AVs) and the last mission (when redcap ambushes showed up) but nothing too serious. I got a level 50 Mako's Bite Chance for Lethal recipe out of it. I'm thinking I really prefer getting level 30-33 recipes (better for exemping) so I should roll up a hero who I'd permanently park in the low 30s level range for use in Hess and Katie TFs, but I haven't figured out what powersets and character concept I'd want for such a hero yet.

Spent some time trying to form a St Martial SF on villain side as Schadenfreude, but couldn't reach critical mass to start the SF between Comcast dropping my connection twice and a couple recruits deciding to run off to Recluse's Victory to try and kill signature heroes there. After giving up on forming the SF I switched to Police Woman and went to RV on hero side, with the idea that I could wreak revenge on the villains that bailed on my SF team. But it turns out I got there too late; some other heroes had already run the villain team out of town. I did manage to land a kill on a brute (who another blaster very nearly KS'd from me) and a stalker (admittedly not a great accomplishment since he turned out to be AFK), but the hero presence was too strong for it to be really fun.

I switched back to villain side thinking I'd run Yuki-Onna (43 ice/cold corruptor) to RV to fight heroes for a bit, but then I started thinking about how Yuki's build isn't right for PvP (she's very supporty as cold corruptors go, with all 3 cold shields) and I got distracted messing around with Mids Hero Planner trying to work out a decent respec. I never did make it back into RV; I realized that I absolutely needed to get Web Envelope before going to RV, so I needed to finish Black Scorpion's patron story arc in order to unlock the mace mastery pool. So I ended up soloing some dreadful Malta and Scorpionid missions, finally confronting an EB-level Dr Quatrexin, who hits freakishly hard even with all my cold debuffs on him. Quatrexin floored me once, and I had to run back from the hospital. Reloading on inspirations allowed me to defeat him on my second attempt though.

After that I played Astarte (41 grav/emp controller on Protector) on an 8-player team running level 43ish missions. I finally settled on Fireball as my level 41 power; Astarte's been pretty focused on her empathy secondary so far and I felt she needed the extra DPS. I can't believe controllers can take Fireball as their first pick from the fire epic pool; tankers need to take two other powers from their fire epic pool before they can get Fireball! Anyway, we ran a bunch of Nemesis and Praetorian missions and got Astarte to level 42.

I fiddled with my villain base on Liberty for a bit. My villain group has only my own villain alts in it; but, I'd managed to build up about a million and a half prestige simply by playing for a long time. I decided to use this to build more teleporters. I had enough prestige to build a new control room and a new energy room (which originally seemed to be the limiting factor on how many teleporters I could have), but I didn't have enough prestige left after that to actually build a bigger teleportation room. The 3x3 teleporter room I had bought before looked large enough to put a few more teleporters in, but apparently has a hard limitation of only 2 teleporters allowed. Oh well; need more prestige I guess. I did spend some time putting up colorful banners on all the walls. I struck on the idea of putting up one banner for each of my villain alts; I tried to do this by changing my SG's official colors and symbol to match the costume of each character, then putting up a banner, then changing the SG colors to the next alt's colors, putting up a different banner, etc. This seemed to work okay while I was editing the base (I managed to get around 4 sets of 5 differently colored banners onto the walls) but it was a little flaky as sometimes the banners would all transform to be the most recent SG colors/symbols. I'm not sure how base data is stored internally (are the colors and symbol part of the SG? or is a copy kept with each base item?) so I figure there's about a 50/50 chance of my banner colors surviving a server reboot.

I also broke down and bought the CoH Wedding Pack finally. I had originally said I wouldn't do this because I felt that a few costume options and emotes were not enough content for $10. Positron saying that people buying the wedding pack had helped add more content to I12 really changed my mind, though; at that point, I was no longer paying $10 for a few costume pieces; now I was investing in the game's future! It turns out the costume pieces are really quite nice looking, also; none of my characters are wedding-themed, but I'm thinking I can use some of the bits and pieces, with appropriate color changes.

3/24/2008

My work let out early on Friday for some religious holiday, so I got an early start on CoH. I started by playing Schadenfreude (37 AR/traps corruptor) as a lackey on a Lady Grey SF. Our team mix was:

SS/will brute
nrg blaster
fire/traps corruptor
inv/SS tanker
AR/traps corruptor (me)
fire/dark corruptor
dark/dark scrapper
fire blaster

We had a lot of stacked defense; using the combat monitor, I found that if I stood in the right place, with 2 FF Generators, Shadow Fall and my own Maneuvers and Combat Jumping, I could reach 48% range DEF, 43% melee DEF and 49% AoE DEF. The DPS of this team mix was also very high (all the corruptors debuffed RES and everyone was either blasty or melee-y). The first mission went without a hitch; during the second mission, the team wanted to pull the Riders into hallways, which let the trappers lay a lot of traps. The riders died fast. We originally planned to deliberately fail the third mission, but it actually turned out to be easier to just blow everything away and complete the mission. During the fourth mission our brute had to log off, which unfortunately left the fire/traps corruptor without a boss; he volunteered/was volunteered as vengeance bait. We were able to beat Hamidon with 6 players and a corpse, then moved on to the final mission. We planned to pull the AVs into the hall outside the final room, and so the two trappers got set up a huge network of traps.

Schadenfreude sets up an elaborate death trap

This prep time paid off as both Hro'tohz and the Honoree spent a lot of time heaving up their guts, which took some of the fight out of them, and we finished up the SF without a hitch. Schadenfreude got to level 38 (taking Trip Mine) and was close enough to the next level that I solo'd a paper mission to get level 39. I also spent some time shopping at the Black Market, slotting a set of 6 Stupefy in Seeker Drone (for set bonuses of +6.25% global rchg and +3.13% rng DEF) and a set of 5 Miracle in Aid Self (for set bonuses of +2.5% recovery, +1.88% max HP, +1.88% aoe DEF). This gets Schadenfreude to 28.97% rng DEF and 28.97% aoe DEF self-buffed, which I'm pretty happy with.

"You expect me to talk?" "No, Hero 1, I expect you to die!"

After that I played Flamebait (31 fire/thermal corruptor) for a few missions on an 8-player all-corruptor team. We did a mayhem mission in which we beat Luminary, then started on the Crimson Revenant story arc. Got to level 32 and Inferno, which seems fun so far.

Briefly played Helen Highwater (4 storm/psy defender on Triumph) and joined a team fighting a Rikti invasion of King's Row, beating up enough Rikti to get Helen to level 6 and Combat Jumping.

Played Thunder Girl (41 will/nrg tanker) on a 4-player mixed hero/villain team in Rikti War Zone long enough to get to level 42. On Saturday, I ended up respecing at level 42; I had taken Boxing at level 41 but I hate Boxing so much. It has good stats and unlocks Tough, but Boxing's animation and sound effect is so lame (especially compared to the energy melee attacks) that I just can't stand it, and I dislike having powers that I don't ever use. I ended up dropping Boxing and Stamina for Char (to hopefully hold sappers so I won't need Stamina) and Fast Healing (I had skipped this originally, but now I think the extra regen may be valuable for survivability). Thunder Girl's new build is as follows:

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

Thunder Girl: Level 50 Magic Tanker
Primary Power Set: Willpower
Secondary Power Set: Energy Melee
Power Pool: Flight
Power Pool: Fitness
Ancillary Pool: Pyre Mastery

Hero Profile:
Level 1: High Pain Tolerance -- Heal(A), Heal(3), Heal(3), ResDam(5), ResDam(5), ResDam(7)
Level 1: Barrage -- Acc(A)
Level 2: Energy Punch -- T'Death-Acc/Dmg:33(A), T'Death-Dmg/Rchg:33(7), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:33(9), C'ngImp-Dmg/Rchg:33(9), C'ngImp-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:33(11), C'ngImp-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:33(11)
Level 4: Mind Over Body -- TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx:41(A), TtmC'tng-ResDam/Rchg:41(34), TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg:41(34), TtmC'tng-ResDam:41(37)
Level 6: Hover -- Flight(A), Flight(13), Flight(13)
Level 8: Rise to the Challenge -- Heal-I:45(A), Heal-I:45(15), Heal-I:45(15)
Level 10: Taunt -- RechRdx(A)
Level 12: Quick Recovery -- EndMod(A), EndMod(31), EndMod(34)
Level 14: Indomitable Will -- LkGmblr-Rchg+:42(A), LkGmblr-Def/Rchg:41(31), DefBuff(31)
Level 16: Whirling Hands -- M'Strk-Dmg/Rchg:33(A), M'Strk-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx:33(17), M'Strk-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:33(17), Sciroc-Dmg/Rchg:33(19), Sciroc-Acc/Rchg:33(19), Dmg(21)
Level 18: Fly -- Frbd-Fly:31(A), Flight(21), Flight(27)
Level 20: Heightened Senses -- DefBuff(A), DefBuff(29), DefBuff(29)
Level 22: Bone Smasher -- T'Death-Acc/Dmg:33(A), T'Death-Dmg/Rchg:33(23), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:33(23), C'ngImp-Dmg/Rchg:33(25), C'ngImp-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:33(25), C'ngImp-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:33(27)
Level 24: Swift -- Flight(A)
Level 26: Fast Healing -- Heal-I:45(A), Heal-I:45(33)
Level 28: Build Up -- RechRdx(A), RechRdx(40), RechRdx(42)
Level 30: Health -- Heal-I:45(A), Empty(46)
Level 32: Strength of Will -- ResDam(A), ResDam(33), ResDam(33)
Level 35: Energy Transfer -- T'Death-Acc/Dmg:40(A), T'Death-Dmg/Rchg:40(36), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:40(36), C'ngImp-Dmg/Rchg:41(36), C'ngImp-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:41(37), C'ngImp-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:41(37)
Level 38: Total Focus -- T'Death-Acc/Dmg:40(A), T'Death-Dmg/Rchg:40(39), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:40(39), C'ngImp-Dmg/Rchg:41(39), C'ngImp-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:41(40), C'ngImp-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:41(40)
Level 41: Char -- G'Wdw-Acc/Rchg:45(A), G'Wdw-Hold/Rng:45(42), G'Wdw-Acc/Hold/Rchg:44(42), Empty(43), Empty(43), Empty(43)
Level 44: Fire Blast -- Empty(A), Empty(45), Empty(45), Empty(45), Empty(46), Empty(46)
Level 47: Fire Ball -- Empty(A), Empty(48), Empty(48), Empty(48), Empty(50), Empty(50)
Level 49: Stamina -- Empty(A), Empty(50)
------------

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>| Copy &amp; Paste this data chunk into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|MHDz;3865;965;1288;|
&gt;-KE5TMOVS@0O@?(?]!M#T4=2#PIYVZS0IL`:*)-B&gt;%9FQA,A20,GM!B#TVSM#2:0L,XY\7CB)1C,
?A\-O'G3NA*Q7:9O^*V13U-6?Y'-P&gt;?&amp;8[ZN-D-YM(4NU3K=%IA[3ZD7(RXL?15F^UK^$5#&gt;5D-LW;R
U*(=2W*A=25*WZ6A;;'!Y%6XFF4=^E:$25"?7P*L1&amp;?7^3 PENG32ODV^4%4?[P"55W)]*R(QWQNZ!C'
9J.5-2INA?-*MVAD@_*8+$R@FVNQC#Z9_=7E@'$AF$01']"]5COL]RKG[V52-L&lt;\=&gt;KW1;P2;^(48#-
0`"XOL]RCC*G*A;JK-_&gt;8_`PY&amp;,%=?Y+[)BVKK?=N]IEE[X)._#QOB,]#$!.D[71X&amp;0'PRP6LND`V
F^6#JL6C3JMCOO"]UVH*C@&gt;/!":RD0VB!?P(][$6'V!#[D&gt;MQ#1OB.[E&amp;XZC!3;(&gt;ZI-`%?5U"XE/AL
2'#AVA;J6A)8;?P-0I[5C4;QJ`Y5A'`K&gt;2C-$EFF,?*S?+D4\HW5@#T69V)42?!+8%;M;U!F#1@`+37
`DN?9&gt;231PRG6*J_MEG+UB&gt;;2Z\VW3W5`K9(?&amp;?, %MQ'TI`$.]"KL2S26W,#/VP.UC^WC\_=Y@[$Y-M
M%!AOX9JO2_;PGMH9?$BIN5.B&amp;D+,D.-U6X*D)#(8*-CC[-J'^CMP0]9(&gt;LLJ_]HH#_ESZ(YZ&amp;-";;M
S%Q9#,5@RP7.#H;9]CTZ+'FG:JO4HBG0FZ@WMX`%_I#AVO(&lt;1&amp;"#X&lt;RFJ 04ZR7"&amp;IESKVT.+&gt;7O:$
VP%%W391.1+AN)E)XS$P&amp;]:"C28/E4=&amp;!/3L4IR91!V&gt;I+9)8+;;*P4,\&lt;XNA^&amp;CJ4C$XXCQ7I \^B8"
6!TJ5GB5`=D$E*BYY8S)%@-U^$5GMC'BS2TT3!\&lt;-&lt;M#'N"T:FF[ZFM6YR!\9+"2A#[&lt;6$!+%Q&gt;6!K]
&lt;6'A+`L7%E9_[2POK-DUQ3#K?"$A\3)"^%F$\(6$\#,(2&lt;XD)+&amp;$!'C7XB5]F]=-Z_TH-O4O&amp;+TWNR&gt;
99F(Z&gt;EGDCY4,B]SPN[K&lt;7-]7/9P9.#GAO5\R;M'S%#!&lt;&lt;]@L],-W&gt;R8&amp;9\)Q&gt;HA@L_?@S/?P_?8-(H
7WS1P1S=[C,]^3HW&lt;S9P(.&lt;X:I.4O&lt;O:+_3D[UWP.`?VBG)^QX0[&amp;YG1RNC_N707,U^?F_*9$-Z+.K?
JX3%D*7&lt;4P`85$OXK?#*+(B,6+(+=:WVL1JJ17Y`!@W#88X "%ICW$K_B\%B;L7$B-RW(K$BM2*SHG7&amp;
0RM:OSRR8C"(EQ&gt;_`?O%)`L`
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
</pre><hr />

She's actually only 42 but I went ahead and picked powers up to 50 for planning purposes, leaving the slots empty. After respecing, I joined a Synapse TF, which exemped me down to 20, negating all the wonderful set bonuses (sigh!). The team mix was:

fire/dev blaster
will/nrg tanker (me)
inv/SS tanker
spine/dark scrapper
fire/ice blaster
nrg/nrg blaster
elec/nrg blaster
dark/dark defender

Although I thought we might be a little support-light, the one defender we had was pretty on-the-ball, and along with our high damage we actually had no trouble whatsoever against the clockworks. The exp "smoothing" made exp pretty crazy for the 3 level 17 players we had, who I believe all hit 20 or 21. When we fought Babbage it didn't seem like he could really hurt me, but we couldn't really hurt him either, until we got some outside help (including rad debuffs) that let us finally take him down. In the final mission, with high psi resist and high DPS, we easily beat up the Clockwork King. Finished the TF in 2hrs 53mins, and this got Thunder Girl the Task Force Commander accolade, for an extra 5% max HP.

Thunder Girl battles Babbage

After that I switched to Indigo Ifrit (50 fire/rad corruptor) to join a Recluse Strike Force organized on LHO. Our team mix was:

stone/stone brute
rad/kin corruptor
fire/rad corruptor (me)
ice/cold corruptor (no shields)
son/rad corruptor
fire/stone brute
fire/thermal corruptor (had shields but didn't seem to use them)
thug/dark MM

The recent TF changes meant that the old technique of "painting" the first mission with a solo character no longer made sense, so we all went into the first mission to start killing chasers, setting bombs, etc. Although this team seemed very strong on paper, we actually had a lot of trouble in the first mission; we suffered a lot of stray deaths for no really good reason. On top of that, the technician got stuck in a door and we couldn't get him unstuck. We ended up resetting the mission by all logging out. The second time through, we saved rescuing the technician for last and only allowed one person (a stone brute) to lead him (at the slowwwww stone speed) to his objective, which took awhile but worked. After that, things started working a lot better and we got to the final mission pretty quickly. The final fight against the Freedom Phalanx was pretty brutal; despite triple-stacking Vengeance, the heroes managed to flatten about half our team during the initial rush. The rest of us managed to drop Numina and Sister Psyche and were working on rezzing people back in, but unfortunately the main brute disconnected at that point, causing the angry Freedom Phalanx to wipe the rest of us out. After regrouping, however, we finished off the rest of the heroes and completed the SF; our total time was 2h 12m. I normally take a recipe reward for RSF, but enough people were talking about the high price of HOs on villain side that I decided to take the SHO; I lucked out and got a Nucleolus.

On Sunday night I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) on a Statesman TF organized by the Paragon Militia SG. Our team mix was:

2 fire/rad controllers
will/dual blades tanker
AR/dev blaster (me)
nrg/nrg blaster
ill/emp controller
fire/kin controller
fire/nrg blaster

This was a decently strong team and we got through the first couple missions without any problems. We had a few stray deaths during the 3rd and 4th missions against the Thorn Tree and the various other AVs, though in the 4th mission we lucked into finding the key on the second Security Chief we fought. Dr Aeon gave us some trouble though; I think our temp debuff power missed him the first time or something, and he got really angry and killed half our team. The survivors managed to hold out long enough for the rest of us to get rezzed back in though, after which we took him down.

In the final mission, we started off clearing the right side of the road into Grandville, but the empath persuaded us to switch to clearing the left side, claiming that it made for easier pulls from the patron AVs. This seemed to work as the first pull gave us a solo Ghost Widow, then we got Black Scorpion and Scirocco together, then Mako alone. At low life Mako eluded on us, dropping my chance to hit (according to the combat log) to 10.71%, which feels awfully low considering how much +Acc and +ToHit I have. Using Geas of the Kind Ones snapped my chance to hit back up to a healthy 95%, though. Anyway, we beat the patron AVs then dealt with the Arachnos flyer.

Police Woman helps enforce the no-fly zone over Grandville

Against Lord Recluse, I think our team was strong enough to beat him in a straight-up fight, but our tanker dragged Lord Recluse into the sky and got him stuck on geometry, which admittedly made taking down the power towers a lot faster. We finished in 1hr 51mins, and I got a Trap of the Hunter: Chance for Lethal recipe.

3/21/2008

Started off playing Spacegirl (43 mind/rad controller), soloing the very grey Bonefire story arc in order to make room for a new story arc. Then, after forming a 7 player team (mixed pickup people and Sisterhood), I started getting Unyielding-difficulty missions from Tina McIntyre.

We started off fighting the psychic Clockwork King, as a level 45 AV; my team was decently balanced, but was mostly level 41 or sidekicked, so this was fairly challenging. We cleared out some nearby space, then a blaster nova'd away all his minions so we could fight him solo. I'm not sure why, but the King decided he was really afraid of us and started to run away, aggroing another spawn of psychic clockwork and causing us to wipe out. After returning from the hospital we cleared more minions around him, then attacked him a second time, and this time we got him, getting the Emancipator badge and a big fistful of exp and infl. After that Tina McIntyre was willing to give me her story arc, so we cleared several missions from that. These were mostly straightforward missions involving those blue Praetorian robots, though we did have a close mission where we were given a 10 minute time limit to click 4 glowies. All the stealthy people (who couldn't be seen) and the tanky people (who couldn't really be hurt) ran out to find glowies; turns out I was the only person who was non-stealthy and non-tanky so couldn't do much but wait and hope people found the glowies. I think our storm defender found most of them, and a stealthed energy blaster nabbed the last glowy with 52 seconds left on the clock.

After that team broke up I switched to Schadenfreude (36 AR/traps corruptor), joining a 4 villain team doing missions in Grandville, which got her to level 37. I added all my slots to Acid Mortar, which let me slot Acid Mortar with 6 of the Undermined Defenses recipe set, which I got from the Black Market for almost nothing. Not much demand for DefDebuff I guess. It seems like a good set, though, because with 6, Acid Mortar now has 94.1% defdebuff, 94.1% recharge, 62.8% endrdx, and set bonuses of +2% global dmg, +1.8% max END, +7% global acc, +1.5% max HP and +2.5% AoE DEF, which all seem useful. Schadenfreude's AoE defense is now up to 27.2% with FF Generator and toggles up. I also visited the Icon rep in RWZ and made her a couple more jackbooted leather-clad evil wench costumes.

Finished off playing Helen Highwater (a newbie 3 storm/psy defender on Triumph) on a couple solo missions, getting to level 4 and Snow Storm.

3/20/2008

Not a lot to report lately; my SO has gotten back into Everquest 2 so I'm spending part of my time there. I did play Yuki-Onna (42 ice/cold corruptor) on several 4 to 6 player teams of Liberty Force SG, in Grandville and Rikti War Zone; this went basically OK and Yuki got to level 43. I'm pondering respecing Yuki-Onna, though haven't settled on a new build yet. I'm finding Superspeed, though terrific for stacking with Arctic Fog for PvE stealth, really sucks for getting around Grandville; thinking of switching to Super Jump, though I'm reluctant to give up Hasten. I'm also finding I use Bitter Freeze Ray less and less; I originally took BFR over FR because BFR does damage, but now I'm finding that even the shortened animation feels annoyingly slow.

I played Astarte (38 grav/emp controller on Protector) on a 7-player team of Demolition Girls SG, mostly doing Tina McIntyre's story arc. We pretty much destroyed everything that we came in contact with, and with "exp smoothing" this ended up being crazy exp, getting Astarte from 38 to 41 in one night's play. I can't decide what to take at level 41, so haven't trained yet. I'm torn between the various controller epic pools: Fireball would add some nice AoE DPS, Indomitable Will would give partial mez protection, while Power Blast would eventually lead to Power Boost; all of them seem like good options.

I also solo'd Grey Wings (26 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) to 27, and my raging altitis caused me to start an aquatic-themed storm/psy defender on Triumph, who I named Helen Highwater and solo'd to level 3.

3/17/2008

Started off playing Schadenfreude (34 AR/traps corruptor) as an LK on a level 34-43 villain respec. Team mix was:

SS/inv brute
robo/traps MM
ninj/TA MM
necr/dark MM
SS/will brute
nrg/elec brute
ninj/ninj stalker
AR/traps corr (me)

We had no real problems other than having to push and shove our way through the throngs of mastermind pets in the cave maps. Finished in 52 minutes, got Schadenfreude to level 35 and picked up the Ignite power for some extra soloability (also great against AVs).

Later I played April Fool (50 thug/TA MM) in Warburg for the "Wednesday night Thumpin" event. Why this actually happened on Friday night I can't explain.

I started off dueling a MA/SR scrapper. She was very hard to hit and as a villain I wasn't that accurate, nor were my minions, so I could not hit her with enough DPS to actually kill her; however, I have autohit trick arrows that kept her permanently slowed, so I could kite her around without much risk to myself, and I could respawn pets faster than she could kill them, so she couldn't actually kill me. After about 5 minutes of inconclusive fighting we agreed to call it a draw.

April gets kicked around at the bunny hop

After that the event organizer announced a general free-for-all. I had to duck out to St Martial to make a "bunny suit" costume (as required by the event rules). The FFA went really well for me; no one had any buffs to speak of, so I wreaked havoc with my AoE trick arrows. I got a ton of kills before people started ganging up on me. I got a brute to say that he "now hates trick arrow", and a stalker even complained that the place we were fighting (underground in the WEB network) was too advantageous for me. After that the melee spilled outside and onto the hero side beach. I got nailed a couple times by brutes (the fire armor ones are real tough for me; I would've thought my -recharge would hose them more) and there was a fire blaster who was Game Over for me every time Inferno was up (though I made sure to gank her as much as possible between Infernos). It was great fun and April was announced the victor; though this might only be because I followed the organizer's instructions and announced every kill I made, which I don't think everyone did. I did count 18 kills in my log though.

After that April malefactored to a 42 dom SG-mate to help with the Ms Francine story arc (always good for a laugh!). When a Rikti invasion was announced, I switched back to Schadenfreude to fight Rikti (getting the Sentry and Chief badges), then SK'd to the 42 dom for a few more missions, getting Schadenfreude to level 36. I crafted and slotted 5 Detonation and 1 Rchg into Schadenfreude's Full Auto, resulting in the power having +95.6% dmg, +40.1% acc, +24% range, +52.7% recharge, +36.7% endrdx, and a set bonus of +1.88% AoE DEF. I'm kinda going for +DEF for Schadenfreude (instead of the +rchg that Police Woman focused on) to stack with the defense from FF Generator; dropping traps messes up Schadenfreude's attack chain enough that I don't feel she benefits as much from recharge.

After that I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) on a flashback of the Sky Raider Secret story arc, with perma-debuffed and no temp powers as challenge settings. I was exempd to 25 and was able to confirm that the set bonuses from ultra-rare purple IOs still work even when exemped below the level you took the power in (I had been told this but didn't quite believe it; but I have 5 Ragnarok slotted in Full Auto, a level 32 power, and was getting the bonuses from them). Knocked out this flashback in 33 mins and got the Adventurous and Capped badges.

On Saturday I played Schadenfreude on another level 34-43 villain respec. Team mix was:

AR/traps corr (me)
dark/elec brute
ice/rad corr
plant/thorn dom
nrg/rad corr

Our level spread was kinda funky; we had a 35, 36, 36, 39 and a 50. We ended up malefactoring the 39 and the 50 to level 36 so that the trial spawn for a level 36 team. We finished this, but the final mission against the Thorn Tree was really ugly. The brute had run to the final chamber and used veteran Team Teleport to get the rest of the team there, but while clearing the room we caught aggro from the Thorn Tree and all the squishies died; the brute dropped the malefactor (returning to level 39) to survive. Some of us awakened and got nailed by the tree again, then we had to hospital and try and run back. The brute's team teleport power was still down, and we found that squishies couldn't run past the CoT to get back into the fight (we died a couple times trying). The brute lackeyed the ice/rad (the only squishy still in the main room) to 38 and they ended up duoing the rest of the trial while the rest of us were ignominiously trying to fight our way back.

After that, someone was organizing a Lady Grey TF; I asked what AT they could use, and the team leader asked for a tanker. So I played Thunder Girl (40 tanker) as an SK on the Lady Grey TF. Our team mix was:

3 dominators
sonic/dark defender
MA/will scrapper
warshade
elec/elec blaster
will/nrg tanker (me)

This was a really dysfunctional team mix. We had only the sonic defender for support, and no healing at all. The sonic defender was great about keeping sonic buffs and debuffs up, and sonic buffs make Thunder Girl really tough against most normal foes, but we still had some pretty severe issues along the way. The Clockwork King was no problem, but the Riders were quite difficult. I found that Famine would keep draining my END dry, even with Strength of Will up, then after I died the team would usually wipe out. We had 2 team wipes against the 3 Riders and 2 more team wipes against the 4 Riders, relying heavily on Vengeance to win.

We deliberately failed the third mission by getting Infernia and Glacia killed, then had a very costly victory over Hamidon. As tanker I was charged to herd the Rikti into the Hamidon, which I was OK with, but unfortunately since I was an SK, this would frequently put me out of SK range where I was easily killed by the Hamidon. My energy melee attacks were terrific for knocking out mitos in 3 swings, but the mitos would hit back pretty hard, and my resist toggles and sonic buffs did nothing to protect against Hamidon's untyped damage. I lost count of how many times I had to run back from the hospital. Finally we zerg rushed Hamidon, suffering one team wipe in the first rush, then overcoming him in the second rush. It was very painful.

Thunder Girl steels herself for the next rush against Hamidon

The final mission we had someone stealth TP us to the end. We beat the first AV no problem, but the Honoree was a beast. Our DPS really couldn't keep up with his regen and his unstoppable. He must have went unstoppable 5 times. We tried to buff our DPS by having one person be dead and we'd vengeance off of him, but it didn't seem to be enough; one problem we had was that we couldn't rez the person we used vengeance on, so fought with one player down when doing so. I dropped two shivans over the course of this fight, which didn't seem to help either. We eventually made the dead people run to the hospital and get TP'd back into the fight. With the full team present we actually started denting Honoree's life bar; I think one of the dominators must've been doing psi attacks that got through his unstoppable or something, too. Anyway, after a marathon battle we finally wore Honoree down and won the TF. Total time was 4hrs 12mins and Thunder Girl got to level 41.

After that I played Grey Wings (21 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) as an SK on a 6 player pickup team in Croatoa and Brickstown. This went really well and got Grey Wings to level 26; I picked up Aim, Explosive Arrow and Stunning Shot for powers. We also killed Eochai along the way. I also determined that Grey Wings was high enough level that she really needed a background story, so I wrote a moderately cynical/blasphemous origin based on her being a semi-fallen angel trying to redeem herself.

Later I played Yuki-Onna (41 ice/cold corruptor on Liberty) on a 3 villain team doing Black Scorpion's patron missions, getting her to level 42.

On Sunday I solo'd a bit with Mega (50 SS/elec brute), doing a flashback of Tavish Bell's story arc. Soloing the ARCH-A elite boss gave her the Demon Slayer badge.

That night I played Alice Slaughter (16 dual blades/will brute on Triumph), as a lackey on a 6-player team in Grandville for a bit, then soloing Seer Marino's story arc, which got her to level 18. Picked up Vengeful Strike as another attack.

Playing Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender on Liberty) I solo'd a Peregrine Island safeguard to get Maria Jenkins as a contact; then I cleared the very, very grey Bonefire story arc (trying to make room for The Praetorian War) and did a brief flashback to get the Multidimensional badge (all I had to do was enter the mission, exit the mission, to get the badge, then I quit the flashback TF). This is all eventually working towards the Portal Jockey accolade.

3/14/2008

Wednesday night, I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) on a Rikti War Zone raid and got credit for another bombing.

After that I switched to Yuki-Onna (40 ice/cold corruptor) as a lackey on a Lady Grey SF. The team mix was:

will tanker
dark armor scrapper
ice/storm controller
fire/rad controller
fire/dark corruptor
ice/cold corruptor (me)
elec blaster
fire blaster

Our fire blaster's power went out during the first mission, leaving him running on batteries for about an hour before vanishing and not returning. First couple missions went fairly well. During the third mission the people leading Glacia and Infernia deliberately suicided into Rikti to cause the mission to fail quickly. Fourth mission the tanker griefed the Rikti onto the yellow mitos and we tore apart Hamidon's remaining mitos amazingly quickly. In the last mission, the people trying to stealth kept repeatedly dying (Rikti drones have good perception), so we partially cleared the way until someone got through and TP'd the rest of the team to the end. The end bosses were no problem; finished in 2hrs 27mins. Yuki got to level 41 and trained in Assault.

After that I played Yuki on a 6 player Liberty Force villain team doing more Scirocco patron missions, defeating Ice Mistral twice and Scirocco once.

Wound up the night starting a fire/dev blaster on Virtue on a lark, getting to level 3.

Thursday night I started off doing some badging with Thunder Girl (40 will/nrg tanker), getting the Pupil and Authority history badges and finally finishing the Atlas Medallion. Then took Thunder Girl to RWZ to join raid, which started off as something of zerg rush with wave after wave of heroes dying storming the mother ship, but got a bit more organized near the end.

After that I switched to Rain Dancer (49 storm/archery defender) for a Statesman TF. Team mix was:

stone/axe tanker
storm/archery defender (me)
dark/inv scrapper
fire/fire blaster
emp/psy defender
2 rad/rad defenders
spine/dark scrapper

First mission was pretty straightforward; saw a new trick, leaving some of the pipes nearest the entrance for last, so that we could set off the ambushes from the top of the ramp. We pretty much stomped the next few missions, except for a few stray deaths fighting Dr Aeon, who seemed to ignore our debuff clicky for the first minute.

The last mission went surprisingly well. We took out the villain patron AVs without much trouble; Rain Dancer hit 50 when Ghost Widow dropped. I had been wanting to hit level 50 doing something cool like the STF; Rain Dancer is now my 9th level 50 character.

Against Lord Recluse, the stone tanker pulled Recluse back behind one of the pillars of the northern building. The tanker was impressively tough; I've been on many STFs where Recluse would mash our tanker flat, but our stone tanker was barely dented by him (I asked him later about this; he had Tough and was also heavily IO'd for survivability, with lots of defense and regen bonuses). This let the rest of us focus on killing the towers without fear of interruption, after which Recluse himself was pretty easy. We finished STF in 1hr 30mins, the fastest I've been on personally.

Spent some time crafting IOs and I put a set of 5 Adjusted Targeting in Rain Dancer's tactics, giving her +2% damage and +5% global recharge. Later I helped defeat Jack in Irons and Eochai in Croatoa, getting the Giant Killer and Pumpkin Queen badges for Rain Dancer.

Police Woman also picked up a Apocalypse Rchg/Acc IO from Wentworths for 25M infl, which is actually a pretty good price considering it was already made (the purple recipes all seem to require crazy rare salvage). Haven't slotted it yet since I need more of the set to make it worthwhile.

Played Schadenfreude (33 AR/traps corruptor) as a lackey on a 5 villain Liberty Force team. I had made the stealth IO I had gotten in an earlier SF and slotted it into a prestige sprint; this helped immensely for getting around in Grandville at low levels. We did one mission in Scirocco's story arc that seemed bugged; a Defeat All foes in base that we cleared 3 times but the mission would never complete, due to enemies falling through geometry. Gave up on that mission and did some others in Ghost Widow's story arc, getting Schadenfreude to level 34.

Finished the night doing a couple missions with Grey Wings (20 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) as a SK on a 5-player mid 20s team in Croatoa.

3/12/2007

Started off playing Thunder Girl (40 will/nrg tanker on Liberty) on a pickup Positron TF. Our team mix was:

stone/SS tanker
will/nrg tanker (me)
2 emp/rad defenders
elec/nrg blaster
fire/kin controller
dark/dark defender

I was worried that this team mix, with 6 tanker or support types and only one blaster (who started at level 10), would make for a very slow Positron TF, but we actually made really good progress. The dark and the kin were both very good about regularly using their DPS-increasing Tar Patch and Siphon Power abilities. I know that a lot of people dislike blasty empaths, and I confess that I was initially disappointed that neither had Fortitude at Positron TF level, but I was actually very glad that both of them had taken a lot of their attack powers and were blasting their little hearts out between heals, because we had plenty of support and needed the DPS.

I initially deferred to the stone tanker to lead the way since she was both team leader and higher (real) level, but it rapidly became clear to me that the stone tanker was having some issues with being exemped to level 15; she didn't have Taunt at that level, and she couldn't run her mez resist toggle without slowing our pace to a crawl (neither empath had clear mind at our level and Vahz, CoT and Clocks all mez to some degree). So I sorta took over tanking (mostly because I could walk to the next fight faster, heheh); Thunder Girl has Taunt, Quick Recovery and most of her resist/regen toggles by level 15, so felt great tanking at 15. I'm continually impressed by how good Willpower is for tankers. On the downside, I had no travel power at 15 so the stony got to TP me to missions a lot, heheh. The stone tanker also helped "stealth" a lot of missions (using the "tanker stealth" inherent, i.e., walking past the bad guys while ignoring their feeble damage) by TPing us to the end boss. Overall it was pretty fast for a Positron TF; we finished in 3hrs 48mins, and the blaster who started at level 10 ended at level 16. Not bad at all.

After that I ran a 5-player mission on Protector server as Astarte (38 grav/emp controller), then switched to Yuki-Onna (40 ice/cold corruptor on Liberty) where I selected Black Scorpion as her patron AV, then did a few 3-player villain missions, helping to defeat AV-level Barracuda.

Later on Thunder Girl solo'd for awhile; I did a few Peregrine Island radio missions and the Founders Falls safeguard to get Tina McIntyre as a contact, then the extremely grey Wheel of Destruction story arc (to make space for Tina's story arc, hopefully), then fought the psychic Clockwork King for the Emancipator badge. Beat him solo without using a shivan, but he was only a +0 Elite Boss so it wasn't that big a deal.

3/11/2008

Started off playing Spacegirl (43 mind/rad controller on Liberty) on a 7-player pickup team that cleared a big outdoor city map full of Carnies; nothing too special.

After that I solo'd a few door missions with Varangian (16 will/mace tanker on Protector) getting to 17. This was pretty slow going because Varangian only has two attacks so far (well, plus veteran powers, origin power and brawl...anyway, it was still slow).

Switched to Schadenfreude (33 AR/traps corruptor on Liberty) for a Cap au Diable SF. Team composition was:

ice/rad corruptor
dark/cold corruptor
ninj/ninj stalker
AR/traps corruptor (me)
thug/poison MM
ice/cold corruptor

This SF was actually not that exciting because the team mostly stealthed missions. The people stealthing seemed to know what they were doing, but with no stealth in Schadenfreude's current build, I really couldn't contribute much, except some occasional firepower if someone TP'd me to the mission objective. Anyway, we got through the SF pretty uneventfully. In the last mission we defeated Infernal by griefing Bat'Zul onto him; the leader wanted to pull Bat'Zul to the mission door, but the giant demon has the turning radius of a Buick so couldn't make it up there, causing us to eventually just rush him and defeat him near the entrance of the big lava cavern. I got the Binder of Beasts badge and a level 33 Celerity: +Stealth recipe, which was really nice; I fully intend to use it to make Schadenfreude a little more sneaky.

After that I played Yuki-Onna (39 ice/cold corruptor on Liberty) on a 4-player Liberty Force villain team mostly doing the Scirocco patron story arc. We beat up the hero-level Malaise, as well as defeating AV-level Ice Mistral twice and AV-level Scirocco once. Got Yuki-Onna to level 40.

3/10/2008

(Warning: Long report.)

Started off playing Varangian (10 will/mace tanker on Protector), forming an 8 player pickup team that first did the Frostfire mission in the Hollows, then began the Faultline story arc, getting to level 16. I took Quick Recovery at 12, then Recall Friend at 14 and Teleport at 16.

Switched to Flamebait (29 fire/thermal corruptor on Liberty) on an 8 corruptor Demolition Girls SG team doing the Crimson Revenant story arc. We got to fight hero-level Mynx, who showed up in an ambush along with a spines Longbow warden and killed 5 of the 8 players right off the bat, including me. Our fleeing survivors led Mynx away from the fallen players, which allowed several of us to Awaken safely and get back into the fight. We then managed to turn the semi-wipeout into a win.

On Saturday I played Thunder Girl (39 will/nrg tanker on Liberty) on an 8 tanker invincible-difficulty Eden trial organized on LBx channel. An all-tanker team is admittedly suboptimal, but I figured it might be fun to try. Our team composition was:

inv/axe tanker
inv/nrg tanker
will/SS tanker
inv/nrg tanker
will/nrg tanker (me)
ice/mace tanker
fire/stone tanker
fire/fire tanker

We cleared the initial DE hunt with no problem, then entered the big door by Woodsman and started jumping down many, many holes.

Thunder Girl jumps down a rabbit hole

Within a few minutes of entering the main mission, the fire/stone tanker disconnected and never returned, leaving us with a 7 tanker, invincible difficulty, timed Eden trial. We practiced fighting against a Quarry, and our DPS was sufficiently bad that a couple players summoned Shivans to speed up fighting this fairly irrelevant giant monster. That seemed bad, but we pressed on, running into our first barrier: the rock wall. The rock wall was very resistant to both smashing and energy damage, and would summon DE ambushes which would in turn summon Cairns that made the rock wall completely immune to damage. We started focusing on taking the cairns out first whenever they appeared, and gradually wore the rock wall down after a lengthy fight.

After breaking through the rock wall we fought random DEs up and down various bridges, collecting Ambrosia for use against the end boss. The team leader originally called for us to get 4 each, but since our DPS seemed kinda low we decided to up this to 5 Ambrosia each. During this phase I had atrociously bad luck getting Ambrosia, getting only 1 drop the whole time; I only ended up with 5 Ambrosia due to the generosity of the other players.

Next we faced the mold wall, which was much like the rock wall except it summoned even nastier DE ambushes, which in turn summoned Swarms from hell. These super-Swarms would put a very nasty recharge debuff on us, which stacked multiple times and also lasted for a really long time. My recharge was floored pretty quickly and I imagine everyone who didn't resist slow suffered the same fate. As a result we couldn't make much headway against the mold wall. Some people summoned shivans or Vanguard heavies, but they didn't seem to help much because they would aggro onto the DE ambushes and couldn't focus fire on the mold wall or anything else.

Heroic battle at the mold wall

After not making progress on the wall for awhile, we switched from hitting the wall to trying to clear the ambushes, but this didn't really work either, as more waves of DE ambushes would show up faster than we could clear them. We were still tankers though, so we stood our ground against ridiculous numbers and lasted a really long time. But eventually, the waves of DE overwhelmed us and we suffered a team wipeout.

The team was pretty demoralized after that and there was talk of giving up, but the ice tanker figured out how to teleport through the mold wall and end up on the other side, and he was able to use the veteran team teleport to get the rest of us through. This was kind of cheating, but none of us really minded at that point. Despite "break through the mold wall" being one of our mission objectives, we found that bypassing it didn't really prevent us from doing the rest of the trial.

We cleared all the DE around a large lake, and rescued some (ineffective) NPC heroes from captivity, before confronting the end boss, the Crystal Titan. We summoned a bunch of Shivans and ate Ambrosia before attacking. The Crystal Titan threw lots of rainbow colored powers; I have no idea what they did, but they were very pretty. It also promptly foot stomped all our temporary pets into oblivion, but the players themselves, being tankers, were immune to being killed this way, so we ended up beating up the Crystal Titan the normal way, with sheer brute force. This got Thunder Girl to level 40, along with the Liberator badge. Total time was 2hrs 44mins.

Against the Crystal Titan

Later in the weekend Thunder Girl fought enough Rikti invasions to gain the Elusive Mind accolade, and also did an invincible-difficulty Moonfire TF organized on LBx. Team composition for Moonfire was:

emp/nrg defender
2 will/nrg tankers (including me)
ill/storm controller
kin/nrg defender
warshade
archery/nrg blaster
spine/will scrapper

This went pretty smoothly overall; only two things I noticed were that the other tanker and I would sometimes go different directions, each taking part of the team with us (I had kind of assumed that I was lead tanker since I was higher level, but it was never really clarified so we had occasional confusion) and we also had a mission fail because we lost the hostage, Dr. Todd (though a couple team members had openly talked about getting her killed to speed the TF up, so I suspect she might've been the victim of a convenient accident). Anyway, got the Honorary Peacebringer, Guide (for SKing), and Silver Bullet badges and made a lot of progress on the vampire badge. I had joined Moonfire TF mostly because it's a fun way to get the werewolf/vampire badges needed for Atlas Medallion. Best of all, I got as recipe reward a level 42 Luck of the Gambler: DEF/+7.5% recharge.

I did some badging on Rain Dancer (49 storm/archery defender on Liberty), getting the last explore and history badges she needed for the Freedom Phalanx Reserve accolade, and also fought a Rikti invasion with Spacegirl (42 mind/rad controller on Liberty), which got her the Elusive Mind accolade and enough exp to hit level 43.

I spent a few hours playing Grey Wings (12 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) as an SK on a 6-player Demolition Girls SG team doing missions in Faultline. The exp curve really seems accelerated in the teens; Grey Wings was SK'd to the highest level player and wasn't really being PL'd at all, but nevertheless quickly got to level 20 on this team. Picked up Fly, Build Up, Health and Stamina as powers.

I also played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) a lot. I traded 25M infl (hero side) to someone on the aforementioned Eden trial for a level 50 Numina's +regen/+rec recipe (villain side); seemed like a good value trade for me, but I haven't figured out what I'll do with the recipe yet. I think my brute already has one and it doesn't seem like an exciting bonus for a mastermind.

I helped a level 50 scrapper who was asking for help with AVs only to find that he needed to beat AV-level Shadow Hunter with only 10 minutes left on the timed mission, and the team he recruited to do this was himself (a regen scrapper) and 4 blasters (including me). We actually managed to pull this off and it only cost us the lives of the scrapper and 2 blasters (not including me - yay for vengeance!).

I solo'd a lot of radio missions in Peregrine Island seeking arcane salvage to help craft the fistful of purple recipes I had purchased recently, and finally got a Prophecy drop that I had been too cheap to buy at Wentworths. (Really, 6 million infl for one salvage item? Way too expensive!) This let me craft a set of 5 Ragnarok, and to slot these I decided to use my free respec so I wouldn't have to delete a set of 5 Positron's Blast that the Ragnaroks would be replacing. Police Woman's respec'd build is now:


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

Police Woman: Level 50 Natural Blaster
Primary Power Set: Assault Rifle
Secondary Power Set: Devices
Power Pool: Medicine
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Leadership
Ancillary Pool: Force Mastery

Hero Profile:
Level 1: Burst <ul type="square">[*] (A) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage: Level 33[*] (5) Devastation - Damage/Recharge: Level 33[*] (5) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge: Level 33[*] (7) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance/Recharge: Level 33[*] (7) HamiO:Centriole Exposure[*] (9) Achilles' Heel - Chance for Res Debuff: Level 20[/list]Level 1: Web Grenade <ul type="square">[*] (A) Gravitational Anchor - Immobilize: Level 50[*] (19) Gravitational Anchor - Immobilize/Recharge: Level 50[*] (21) Gravitational Anchor - Accuracy/Immobilize/Recharge: Level 50[*] (21) Gravitational Anchor - Accuracy/Recharge: Level 50[*] (23) Gravitational Anchor - Immobilize/Endurance: Level 50[*] (23) Gravitational Anchor - Chance for Hold: Level 50[/list]Level 2: Slug <ul type="square">[*] (A) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage: Level 33[*] (9) Devastation - Damage/Recharge: Level 33[*] (11) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge: Level 33[*] (11) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance/Recharge: Level 33[*] (13) HamiO:Centriole Exposure[*] (13) Recharge Reduction IO: Level 50[/list]Level 4: Caltrops <ul type="square">[*] (A) Recharge Reduction IO: Level 50[*] (46) Recharge Reduction IO: Level 50[/list]Level 6: Aid Other <ul type="square">[*] (A) Interrupt Reduction IO: Level 35[*] (25) Miracle - Heal/Endurance: Level 33[*] (25) Miracle - Heal/Endurance/Recharge: Level 33[*] (27) Miracle - Heal/Recharge: Level 33[*] (27) Miracle - Heal: Level 33[/list]Level 8: Buckshot <ul type="square">[*] (A) Positron's Blast - Accuracy/Damage: Level 33[*] (15) Positron's Blast - Damage/Endurance: Level 33[*] (15) Positron's Blast - Damage/Recharge: Level 33[*] (17) Positron's Blast - Damage/Range: Level 33[*] (17) Positron's Blast - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance: Level 33[*] (19) Range IO: Level 50[/list]Level 10: Targeting Drone <ul type="square">[*] (A) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - To Hit Buff: Level 33[*] (33) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - To Hit Buff/Recharge: Level 33[*] (46) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - To Hit Buff/Recharge/Endurance: Level 33[*] (48) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - Recharge/Endurance: Level 33[*] (48) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - To Hit Buff/Endurance: Level 33[*] (50) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - Chance for Build Up: Level 33[/list]Level 12: Combat Jumping <ul type="square">[*] (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed: Level 25[*] (46) Karma - Knockback Protection: Level 30[/list]Level 14: Aid Self <ul type="square">[*] (A) Interrupt Reduction IO: Level 35[*] (29) Doctored Wounds - Heal/Endurance: Level 33[*] (29) Doctored Wounds - Heal/Recharge: Level 33[*] (31) Doctored Wounds - Endurance/Recharge: Level 33[*] (31) Doctored Wounds - Heal/Endurance/Recharge: Level 33[*] (31) Doctored Wounds - Heal: Level 33[/list]Level 16: Hurdle <ul type="square">[*] (A) Jumping IO: Level 35[*] (33) Jumping IO: Level 35[/list]Level 18: Swift <ul type="square">[*] (A) Run Speed IO: Level 35[/list]Level 20: Stamina <ul type="square">[*] (A) Endurance Modification IO: Level 50[*] (45) Endurance Modification IO: Level 50[/list]Level 22: Assault <ul type="square">[*] (A) Endurance Reduction IO: Level 35[/list]Level 24: Tactics <ul type="square">[*] (A) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - To Hit Buff: Level 33[*] (33) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - To Hit Buff/Recharge: Level 33[*] (45) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - To Hit Buff/Recharge/Endurance: Level 33[*] (48) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - Recharge/Endurance: Level 33[*] (50) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - To Hit Buff/Endurance: Level 33[*] (50) Rectified Reticle - Increased Perception: Level 20[/list]Level 26: M30 Grenade <ul type="square">[*] (A) Positron's Blast - Accuracy/Damage: Level 33[*] (34) Positron's Blast - Damage/Endurance: Level 33[*] (34) Positron's Blast - Damage/Recharge: Level 33[*] (34) Positron's Blast - Damage/Range: Level 33[*] (36) Positron's Blast - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance: Level 33[*] (36) Recharge Reduction IO: Level 50[/list]Level 28: Beanbag <ul type="square">[*] (A) Stupefy - Accuracy/Recharge: Level 33[*] (39) Stupefy - Endurance/Stun: Level 33[*] (40) Stupefy - Accuracy/Endurance: Level 33[*] (40) Stupefy - Stun/Range: Level 33[*] (40) Stupefy - Accuracy/Stun/Recharge: Level 33[*] (42) Stupefy - Chance of Knockback: Level 33[/list]Level 30: Taser <ul type="square">[*] (A) Stupefy - Accuracy/Recharge: Level 33[*] (42) Stupefy - Endurance/Stun: Level 33[*] (42) Stupefy - Accuracy/Endurance: Level 33[*] (43) Stupefy - Stun/Range: Level 33[*] (43) Stupefy - Accuracy/Stun/Recharge: Level 33[*] (43) Stupefy - Chance of Knockback: Level 33[/list]Level 32: Full Auto <ul type="square">[*] (A) Ragnarok - Damage: Level 50[*] (36) Ragnarok - Damage/Recharge: Level 50[*] (37) Ragnarok - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge: Level 50[*] (37) Ragnarok - Accuracy/Recharge: Level 50[*] (37) Ragnarok - Damage/Endurance: Level 50[*] (39) Positron's Blast - Chance of Damage(Energy): Level 50[/list]Level 35: Smoke Grenade <ul type="square">[*] (A) Dampened Spirits - To Hit Debuff: Level 41[*] (39) Dampened Spirits - To Hit Debuff/Recharge: Level 41[*] (45) Dampened Spirits - To Hit Debuff/Recharge/Endurance: Level 41[/list]Level 38: Cloaking Device <ul type="square">[*] (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed: Level 40[/list]Level 41: Personal Force Field <ul type="square">[*] (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed: Level 41[/list]Level 44: Vengeance <ul type="square">[*] (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed: Level 49[/list]Level 47: Maneuvers <ul type="square">[*] (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed: Level 50[/list]Level 49: Resuscitate <ul type="square">[*] (A) Interrupt Reduction IO: Level 35[/list]------------
Level 1: Brawl <ul type="square">[*] (A) Empty[/list]Level 1: Sprint <ul type="square">[*] (A) HamiO:Microfilament Exposure[*] (3) HamiO:Microfilament Exposure[*] (3) HamiO:Microfilament Exposure[/list]Level 2: Rest <ul type="square">[*] (A) Empty[/list]Level 1: Defiance



<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>| Copy &amp; Paste this data chunk into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|MHDz;4772;1200;1600;|
&gt;-KEETMOXS80@.\!\A]\"?90I"OQ)0H])&gt;MFG693!$[1/3,R$Q,K2X8D+YI"T&amp;_?(2F1C"/'"GIH@&lt
YT.0WPQG.#$=:R*J&lt;BT;\*:M:E&lt;4O\&lt;_D].2NS%4F9U_+C2C:WT6SJT3&gt;7N:B;F1U&gt;G)1UV*7-[.E&gt;L
QE.Y??@:W;ZV(M*UDT[:U&lt;J4P5LOTBQ5853^V5:@I9U_K["G99JVU[55:@_]8H?#X]B=KA0[4^F!8-&amp;
--=9-G'^&gt;:I(UW,,/S%'48`A0@L?UQF:\O0@2%C:CS'WN9^+5;+U5\&gt;3P:&lt;M= TG&lt;+%2\)4B,WL&gt;P^Q%
ME9Y+NL/LX64&gt;;&gt;4]5P^G,%Z$EF3XK3E8#C`ULW8N/JY$M^5W5ODLXLB6Y=5=[W9E`\@1%.[`4F!/4P
.5M(4#WC,QWGMWIX,&amp;610=%C&amp;T?08;;7;XS,2S$F@& lt;8E%F:_.#)H$J#NIV/Q.2(IX0E+PB4D11^_+"N
#'TB)&amp;+61"MM9G`9,^/(%_&amp;`S7GU$0CT\3ZN4I0!%D&lt;7==-)9#O5D$UFY5)&lt;=@LI&lt;A\5C-R)(#+&amp;#
"YBQ`^!CG"'@-@+PBRFPS.8%?!,;=E;5JJK+X4,_,S1+&amp;-7&amp;2R6O.QT*C/')A(./L$#`&gt;'R4+"R('
LH-FAB;@@.^6HGB2.F`HJ$?CO?8?OD'(H/3%KJZ5T&amp;KOGZ$48`?UMUS-KE0ESS^5D$QEWOU1+E0#6EC
B&lt;C-]A^3@.4M&lt;E.#GG?+&gt;3Y:X="`3'=A7X,)*DO?8X37X:$_5 &lt;+E3]H9A/O[F2NT#$L=0/GKX99=]FY
6/LV8M9Y_%YB&amp;7E;'_)Y!"_0E"&amp;0!_(ZJ-T)?\S:5&gt;(_98T,O*C#'$6&gt;?Y6&amp;G"XKS,**(":[^6NV)5[
]&lt;H=L8B/LX.)8CQ&amp;^1&gt;06.7V3AZRP(O0(X(&amp;(@&amp;D#]8"LZ;N^VWW6:K"R)R[M.128P"V:2EYA2[Y:[0
%'6B24"EYOZ#'&lt;#JVW(%(/9%EXY.$^)#A'3KUL/^F#2(AXU0[#="&amp;$#T#ZH6%/PGRI;\^V6;MM#3&amp;O6
H0&amp;8I&amp;Z4;QEVV;0K-L71X6AI*U,2)FDXYM64@.KUG8#RU9QPD]WO&amp;&amp;/A6S\#T0/&lt;/+A.4F"Y/V_MFMY
6/S^%C&amp;?:J`!N`OH[A:V$87\?\A1)_XW!?Q:E#M'SO(N9L!-`Z+#18DXQ0-Y=G9LUG8APXIWLB.NY&lt;&gt;
MPY4'O,N0`9=XZ@*&lt;X%U&amp;OGP@&lt;\_8^#&lt;TOQ5( BJ_-;9?*7,74F`A(ON&lt;9N%J&gt;"(O&lt;=6RMPC/&amp;8O*4?0
,&gt%.E+&amp;`N9UGHO-F4E:OU?P-J-O94A.U`*VE074]?U65:JI[34`;T+F"K#'0PQ_D'1W'T\=SH_@P3V
31H/4&lt;,]K$W%BWB&amp;B22T&gt;LA8'/8;8!]9ILL3P[F"(;AMXJBS7O)=E+9N^;ZIY+\M;;/8=&gt;_0@+G*FL]
G^UT7PP@)$U%D-P;K^=+&lt;JJTK]&lt;F.C&lt;JX/\]7D**DGG3Y=YGA_/]=G[7X]W$N&lt;!S__I\GA-"`;S^T-$
F,*:&lt;QUP&amp;+,[%`_93+FA[$;4N[9R,^F?A;Y(&gt;^!(&gt;2DMR/6JXG&gt;"AOQA/MAZH8\\L/8#Y$?8C_TRCCU
0Z^7,S\D_?#TY`&gt;EOW%V
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
</pre><hr />

I also have a stealth IO in Prestige Power Surge, but not sure how to show that in Mids Hero Planner. The main change I made was to put 5 Ragnarok into Full Auto (I kept the damage proc from Positron's Blast to give it a little extra kick), and I ditched Health to add back Smoke Grenade (I had dropped this in my last respec and kinda missed it; with the new ToHit debuff IO sets I can even rationalize slotting it for a +dmg bonus). I also tweaked some of the IO bonuses I was getting, lowering +rchg a little (I probably have more than enough now) to raise +dmg and +rngDEF a little. Standing around idle, but with toggles up, I'm now at +87.5% global recharge, +23.5% global damage and +13.35% ranged DEF.

On Sunday night I played Police Woman on a Statesman TF organized on LBx. Our team mix was:

earth/rad controller
ill/rad controller
nrg/nrg blaster
claw/SR scrapper
stone/nrg tanker
fire/nrg blaster
inv/SS tanker
AR/dev blaster (me)

This team was a little support-light and a couple times I wished I had brought a defender instead, but I had been eager to try out my respec'd AR/dev build. We were nowhere close to "Master of STF" as we had occasional deaths throughout the TF, even in the first mission. Nevertheless, we did fine getting through the initial missions. I did learn a new trick, that you can Ouroboros portal out of the second mission set in "Recluse's Victory" (I think the Ouroboros portal is disabled in the "real" Recluse's Victory) instead of having to find the exit portal. The thorn tree and Dr Aeon were easy for us; I think we had expected Aeon to put up more of a fight, but we DPS'd him out pretty quick.

It was the final Grandville mission where it got tough, as it always does in the STF. After clearing our way up the ramp, I volunteered to pull the patron AVs and got both Mako and Black Scorpion on the first pull. For some reason we suffered a partial wipeout from this, maybe loose aggro, maybe because we were focusing fire on Mako (the tougher of the two) first. But one of the tankers got the 2 AVs' attention and kept them busy long enough for us to regroup and return, at which point we dropped first Black Scorpion and then Mako. Watching my combat spam box I found that I had a 10.71% change to hit Mako when he had Elude going, though this number is probably corrupted by the fact that the rads were also debuffing him. I was so focused on watching my "real numbers" combat spam that I totally forgot to pop Geas of the Kind Ones or the 4 big yellow inspirations I had saved for this fight; fortunately, it didn't matter. After that we got Scirocco as a single pull, then Ghost Widow.

I actually thought fighting Ghost Widow would be the point where our team would fail the TF, because we had no one with Clear Mind or anything like that, and our team had 3 melee on it, so her crazy powerful holds and her self-heals would be problems for us. But our stone tanker managed to set it up so that he was taunting her from range while the rest of us shot at her back. I tried to spam web grenade to keep her immob'd and unable to close to melee range; hopefully this helped. Ghost Widow managed to hold/detoggle/kill the stone tanker once, and the invuln tanker once, but they got rez'd back in quickly enough that we were able to keep the fight going and eventually took her down.

Police Woman cites the Arachnos flyer for a moving violation

After that we beat up the Arachnos flyer and went after the big boss, Lord Recluse himself, with his 4 power towers. Our first attempt kind of started spontaneously as some people started attacking the red tower without warning, then the rest of us decided we had better help. Lord Recluse came over to see what the heck we thought we were doing, and we weren't really ready for him, so that didn't end well.

Our second attempt we put a little more thought into it and had the stone tanker and illusion controller keeping Lord Recluse busy, while the rest of us attacked the red tower. This worked for exactly as long as Phantom Army stayed alive, then Recluse smashed our off-tanking team, then came over and wiped out the tower attack team.

After that our team leader tried to get our earth/rad controller to pull Lord Recluse away with rad toggles and use a trick he had heard of to trap Recluse in the Grandville geometry. Our controller was game to try this, but had never done this before and our leader wasn't exactly sure where the right place to put Recluse was, so we did some trial and error resulting in another team wipeout. Maybe two wipeouts, it was kind of a blur.

After that our scrapper wanted to try pulling Lord Recluse. I was deeply skeptical of this (important safety tip: always seek cover whenever a scrapper says, "Hey, lemme try something!") but somehow it actually worked. The scrapper eluded and successfully pulled Recluse up into the sky and over some netting, then slipped through a hole that Recluse couldn't follow her through, and had him pinned there while the rest of the team smashed the power towers. The Arachnos flyer aggroed us while we were doing this, but the stone tanker taunted the flyer off us while we kept attacking the towers. Finally after all the towers were destroyed we jumped up to Lord Recluse and started attacking him, which eventually knocked him out of his stuck position and onto the ground, but without his buff towers we took him out pretty easily. I got the Trendsetter badge (for infl gain) and a Call of the Sandman: Chance of Self-Heal recipe.

3/7/2008

I played Doctor Karma (19 rad/psy defender on Protector) for some radio missions in Talos Island with a 7 player team of Defensive Massacre SG, getting to level 21. Picked up Stamina at level 20 and completed the Steel Canyon costume mission.

A friend from Liberty Force was starting a new dark/dark corruptor on Virtue and invited me to tag along, so I created a 1 elec/elec brute on Virtue to team up. Another friend from Northern Lights SG joined later with a new sonic/cold corruptor. Ran through some missions from Kalinda and Mongoose and got my new brute to level 5.

Playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) I made some bids on rare salvage and began accumulating the stuff I needed to make the various purple Ragnarok recipes I've purchased. I spent several million infl doing this, but just could not justify paying 6M for a Prophecy, so I started soloing radio missions in Peregrine Island in hopes of getting one as a lucky drop. I briefly joined a pickup team to fight an AV-level Diabolique; she always seems to fly away/run away at low life, but hitting her with Web Grenades while she's tangible helped pin her down.

After that I started an Ouroboros flashback in the RWZ, but aborted that to join a RWZ mother ship raid, getting credit for another bomb and a mess of Vanguard merits.

Later I played Schadenfreude (32 AR/traps corruptor on Liberty) as a lackey on a 4 player Liberty Force villain team running level 49 missions. We did some story arc that involved fighting level 51 Snakes on Mercy Island. Unlike the low level snakes, it seemed like these could use bows (which looked pretty cool; the low level ones always threw knives) and could assassin strike. Got Schadenfreude to level 33. I also completed crafting and slotting two sets of 6 Thunderstrike, into Slug and Burst, which gave Schadenfreude +5.0% ranged DEF, stacking nicely with her FF Generator, Combat Jumping and Maneuvers. Real numbers showed her range DEF hovering around +26% from all this; if I stood near the FF Generator of a traps MM on the team, I could get to +46% range DEF and +41% melee DEF, which seemed really good.

3/5/2008

I did a little more tinkering with Astarte's SG base on Protector, building an arcane control item that let me power up two teleporters (though I built 4; two remain unpowered). So far I only have a few zones unlocked, so the teleporters go to boring places like Atlas Park, Steel Canyon and the Hollows.

I played Astarte (37 grav/emp controller on Protector) on a 7-player team of Demolition Girls SG, fighting mostly CoT (fighting Envoy of Shadows two or three more times) and some Carnies. At one point one of the players said she had only recently discovered the Green Line train and felt like a newbie for not knowing about it before, which triggered us all to reveal our own "stupid newbie" stories. My own personal newbie story was that I used to kill grey-con bad guys that I saw mugging civilians...because the people needed help! Consequently, it would take me forever to get to a door mission, much to the dismay of my teammates. Anyway, on this team Astarte hit level 38 and trained in Adrenaline Boost. This is the highest I've ever gotten an empathy character so I wasn't quite sure how to use AB; it looks like I can only put it on one person, and not all that often. So far I've been putting it on blasters right after they unleash inferno or nova, to "heal their blue bar".

After that I switched to Schadenfreude (31 AR/traps corruptor on Liberty), playing for a bit on a 4-player team of Liberty Force SG doing missions in St Martial, then after that broke up I solo'd a Talos Island mayhem in order to get to level 32 and Full Auto (yay!). I'm getting better at using Seeker Drones to absorb alpha strikes for me, considerably improving my survivability. I also started shopping for IOs at the Black Market, buying a few Thunderstrike IO recipes for Burst and Slug, reasoning that the +range DEF from Thunderstrike would have good synergy with Schadenfreude's Force Field Generator.

3/4/2008

I started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty), finishing off a level 50 RWZ flashback under the No Travel Powers and No Inspirations challenge settings, which earned me the Suspended and Uninspired badges.

Checking Wentworth's, I found I had purchased a Ragnarok [purple targeted AoE] DMG recipe for 25M infl. This sounds expensive but was actually a good price for this recipe; the rest of the bid history was in the 30M to 40M range, and I had only gotten this price by leaving a standing bid at the auction house for a week and a half. I've now purchased four Ragnarok recipes and one Ragnarok IO for a total of 110M infl (ouch), and a set of 5 is enough to unlock a tasty +10 global recharge bonus. I now need to gather a lot of pricy rare salvage to actually make the recipes; I'm torn between trying to farm it (saving money) or simply outright buying it (saving time). I'm also not certain whether I want to end up slotting 5 Ragnarok into my best AoE power (Full Auto, which would probably most improve my overall DPS, but would only help when I'm at level 32+), my lowest level AoE power (Buckshot, which would let me keep the purple set bonuses as low as level 8) or my weakest AoE power (M30 Grenade, which would let me make a kinda so-so power into a pretty good one). I'll probably want to also burn a respec before slotting the Ragnarok set, to pull out and save the IOs in whichever power I decide to put Ragnarok in; all 3 powers currently have 5 Positron Blast slotted, and they were expensive enough to build that I don't want to simply overwrite them.

I spent some time on Protector playing Varangian (5 will/mace tanker), a new alt I created last weekend. I did enough radio missions in King's Row to get the Atlas Park safeguard and the raptor pack, then moved to the Hollows where I formed and led a pretty good 8 player pickup team that eventually took down Frostfire. Got to level 10 in this way.

After that I switched back to Liberty and played Rain Dancer (48 storm/archery defender) on a 5 player mixed hero/villain Liberty Force team doing missions in RWZ. We defeated several AVs, including Capt WM Dietrich, the Manticore and Positron Nemesis Automata, Hro'tohz and Nemesis himself (during the "Save the World" mission). We fought so many Nemesis that Rain Dancer got the Unveiler badge, along with level 49, where I picked Vengeance as Rain Dancer's final power.

I finished the night playing Grey Wings (10 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) for a couple missions on a 5 player team doing level 12ish missions in Atlas Park and Steel Canyon. Teamed with my first tanker on this character, which was really nice as it let me unleash a lot of AoE attacks without fear; I spent most fights dancing between medium range for Fistful of Arrows and point blank range for Fire Sword Circle. Grey Wings got to level 12 on this team; I didn't train yet, but I'm planning on getting Hover (with her codename and costume, she pretty much needs to be a flyer).

3/3/2008

I started off Friday playing Amethyst Star (22 warshade on Protector) duoing with a dark defender against Council missions in Striga.

Later that night I played Flamebait (25 fire/thermal corruptor on Liberty) on a Demolition Girls SG 8-corruptor team. Using the real numbers feature I could see that our team had +120% overall DMG due to 8 stacked Assaults - sick! We did missions in Sharkhead Isle, including the Independence Port mayhem (getting the Tyrannical badge) and we had a rematch with Ghost of Scrapyard, who defeated us a few levels ago but went down hard this time (getting the Hammer Down badge). We did have one wipeout when we overaggroed about 3 spawns of Family and multiple Family bosses stacked enough holds to punch through the mez protection we had from sonic dispersion. Otherwise we did really well. Flamebait got to level 29, picking up Fire Breath at 26 and Forge at 28. I started trying to buy a few IO recipes for Flamebait at the Black Market, getting bits and pieces of the Thunderstrike set, but not enough to add up to any significant set bonus.

On Saturday I played Astarte (37 grav/emp controller on Protector) and sidekicked my SO's 5 blaster to knock out "Defeat Snaptooth" (leftover from Valentine's Day) twice, to unlock the toga and sandals costume options. We got wiped out twice by the red cap ambushes but came back to defeat the EB each time; then I ran out and made a toga &amp; sandals costume, which really looks good on Astarte. I also bought and slotted some set IOs into Astarte's single target hold and AoE hold. I previously had the single target hold slotted something like 1 ACC, 2 HOLD, 1 DMG, 2 RCHG and the AOE hold slotted something like 2 ACC, 1 HOLD, 3 RCHG. Now both are slotted with 6 Essence of Curare, which gives +83.7% ACC, +83.7% HOLD, +13.5% RANGE, +40.4% RCHG, +44.9% ENDRDX for the power, and set bonuses of (counting the set twice) +3% global hold, +3.75% range DEF. I lose a fair bit of recharge on both powers, but the duration and accuracy of both go up a lot and I'm thinking range DEF is going to be worth working on. Astarte also spent some time messing with her little base on Protector, trying to set up a teleporter room; building the teleporters was no problem, but I found I needed more prestige to buy power plants and control units to run everything. Will have to work on that.

I messed around with some more newbie alts on other servers, getting a will/mace tanker on Protector to level 5, and a zombie/poison MM on Virtue to level 6.

I helped a couple times against AVs; played April Fool (50 thug/TA MM on Liberty) on a 5 player Liberty Force SG team that took down Lord Recluse AV, and played Schadenfreude (30 AR/traps corr on Liberty) on a 4 player Liberty Force team that took down hero-level Infernal and a succubus AV I hadn't encountered before by the name of Lilitu, which got Schadenfreude to level 31.

I played Spite Siren (12 dark/ninj stalker on Virtue) on a Liberty Force team that added enough pickup people to get to 8 players. Even got to engage in some light roleplaying; apparently you really can just randomly run into RPers on Virtue server. We did the Skyway mayhem (though with a huge pickup team, this was something of a zergfest as we battled enormous Longbow and PPD ambushes, then repeatedly had to break out of jail) and the Paragon of Vice badge mission. Spite Siren got to level 17, picking up Build Up at 14 and Hurdle at 16; still running on CJ and temp powers for travel, I'm finding a stalker's build to be extremely tight.

On Sunday I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) on part of a flashback through RWZ, setting No Travel Powers and No Inspirations. No travel powers is no big deal for Police Woman, but no inspirations got me killed once as I (overconfidently) attacked a group of Rikti, focusing on the boss, but the mesmerist lieutenant started dropping holds on me. No inspirations = no break frees, doh! After that I started being more careful to take out mezzers first.

Not directly CoH-related, but on Sunday night some Liberty Force SG-mates wanted to try a game of multiplayer Civ4. We thought it would be about TF length, like 5 hours, but it actually dragged much much longer, to around 9 hours. I got randomly assigned the Greek empire and built up pretty quickly; I think I got Gunpowder first, and I attempted to exploit this by launching a Grenadier-and-Musketmen invasion of the lightly defended American Empire to my south. I razed one city, but then got locked in a stalemate at the next city, which was strongly defended (the player was our regular tanker and had swiftly shifted into a very defensive game). I didn't have enough firepower to take the city by storm so I parked a large stack of soldiers next to it, waiting for some cannons I had built to come reinforce. Admittedly, the real breakthrough in this war occurred when the American player got wife aggro and had to drop out, giving control to a wacky computer AI who thought the human player was a wimp for not attacking the Greek army on the open battle field. A few years later the American Empire was no more, having been assimilated into Southern Greece. I spent the next several hundred years playing catch-up on technology (which I had fallen far behind on during my war), but with double the land area to play with, I actually caught up pretty well. Near the end of the game the rad defender controlling the Arabs to my north decided to make his move, dropping nukes over most of my empire and giving my countryside a healthy radioactive glow. His English scrapper sidekick decided to throw some nukes at me for good measure, too. This all did massive property damage, but my conventional forces, cowering in fallout shelters, mostly survived and were able to beat back their follow-up invasion, and start pushing slowly northwards. Everyone called it quits at this point since it was far, far too late at night. We all kinda thought our infighting had ultimately thrown the game to one of the computer AIs who was quietly building a spaceship.

2/29/2008

My SO re-installed CoH recently and wanted to play on Protector server, so I dusted off a 12 rad/psy defender over there by the name of Doctor Karma. We hooked up with an 8-player all-defender/controller team run by a SG called Defensive Massacre, which went really well due to stacked AM, force fields, and debuffs. Got to level 19 over two nights.

I played Yuki-Onna (39 ice/cold corruptor on Liberty) on a 3 player villain team of Liberty Force SG, doing a Brickstown mayhem mission and several Carnies missions in the Jezebel Jones story arc. An SG-mate playing an ice/rad corruptor had recently slotted one Devastation: Chance to Hold in each attack. The graphics made it pretty clear which holds were from his procs (tesla cage graphic) and which were from ice blast (block of ice graphic), and it looked like his just normally attacking seemed to result in a lot of things getting held. I may have to try that slotting sometime; most of my range attackers currently use the Decimation IO set for the +rchg.

On Thursday night I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) in some of the arena PvP that was happening. First I was in an 18-player free for all, 10 minute time limit, in the graveyard map (the one Black Swan is always on). I started next to a dominator and began fighting him, resulting in me foolishly burning nearly all my break frees in the first few minutes, which was very painful in the later part of the match, in which I got ganked quite a lot. The field was weirdly tank-heavy, but it was pretty pointless to even shoot at a tanker. I shot at a lot of squishies instead, but of course KSing was rampant in this format; I ended the match with just 1 kill.

Second match, I was in a team vs team match. Teams were kinda whomever was standing around at the time the match started so didn't seem very even to me; I was on a 6 player team with 3 blasters and 3 tankers, and the opposing team was 7 players with 3 blasters, 2 tankers, 1 brute and 1 stalker. With no support characters whatsoever, the fight was brutally lethal for the blasters. My team wasn't very coordinated; one of the tankers on my team said she'd call targets, but was pretty slow about it and most of the early match I didn't know who I was supposed to shoot at. Consequently, I gave on waiting for her to announce a target and just shot at whomever I thought best; I did spam a few "I'm fighting Soandso" messages into team chat hoping people would decide to shoot at my target. Nevertheless, our team got soundly thrashed in this match (I think the opposing score was at least triple ours), though on the bright side, I had the most kills on my team with 3. Also, my previous fears that I had too much accuracy (due to slotting accuracy + IO set bonuses with accuracy + targeting drone + tactics) were alleviated; I found that I couldn't reliably hit a person hiding in a PFF. Will need to work on that.

Later that night I joined a Lady Grey TF organized on LBx channel by a 49 tanker friend who was planning to ding level 50 on the TF. The team mix was:

will/nrg tanker
fire/fire tanker
fire/ice blaster
fire/kin controller
rad/rad defender
AR/dev blaster (me)
emp/archery defender
peacebringer (later replaced by sonic/nrg blaster)

We started the TF on Rugged difficulty, but the peacebringer went linkdead about 3 times during the first mission before not returning. We probably could've done this with 7, but so many people had wanted to do this TF that we decided to restart and add an 8th player, the sonic blaster. I had also agitated for higher difficulty, and the second time we started the TF we were on Invincible difficulty.

The new team had very good DPS and we stomped the Clockwork King and the 4 Riders with ease. The will/nrg tanker hit level 50 during the first mission. We fought partway through the "rescue psychics" mission, but sort of shortcutted it by getting Infernia and Glacia killed, causing the mission to technically fail. We had some random deaths at the hands of mitos, but destroyed the Hamidon without too much difficulty. The two Rikti AVs at the end of the last mission fell pretty easily to us too; I don't think the usual rikti ambushes spawned behind us, I dunno why. I kinda zerg rushed the generators at the end (popping archmage and some purples to be safe) and we finished the TF. We had a solid team and it was a pretty quick run, 1hr 50mins; I got a fairly worthless Malaise's Illusions recipe, but picked up 6.5M infl along the way.

2/27/2008

I played Astarte (36 grav/emp controller on Protector) on an 8-player team of Demolition Girls SG, running a lot of CoT missions from Cadao Kestrel. We pretty easily beat up the Envoy of Shadows twice, getting Astarte to level 37. I put 1 more slot in Singularity (I've only 3-slotted him so far, because I'm really not sure how to use a controller pet effectively; the more controllable MM pets kinda spoiled me) and 2 more slots in Absorb Pain (bringing it up to 5 slots, which may be overkill but it let me put a fifth Doctored Wounds IO set into it, giving me another precious +5% global RCHG and +4% global healing). I also put a third Trap of the Hunter IO into Astarte's grav immobilize, giving her a +1.88% HP bonus.

After that I solo'd a bit with Schadenfreude (29 AR/traps corruptor on Liberty), completing the Soul Taker badge mission (needed for an accolade) from Archmage Taraxus, then lackeyed on a 5-player team of Liberty Force SG doing missions at level 38. I got Schadenfreude to level 30 and had really wanted to take Stealth (sometimes teams want to run past mobs to get to the end boss or objective, which can be painful for a lackeyed squishy) but I already had picked four power pools (Fitness, Leaping, Medicine and Leadership) and wasn't willing to give any of them up. I suppose Stealth probably wouldn't work that well with a FF Generator following me around anyway. So I ended up picking up Tactics at 30.

2/26/2008

Spacegirl (42 mind/rad controller) was an SK on a large level 46-49ish team fighting AVs in Maria Jenkins' story arc. The team was very rad heavy, and at times I had 4 AMs stacked on me; someone commented they hadn't had that much AM since the old Hamidon raids. This team took down Malaise, Battle Maiden, Siege, Nightstar and Marauder, getting Spacegirl the Shady and Agent badges along the way. Spacegirl also got a purple Unbreakable Constraint recipe that dropped from the Battle Maiden mission; another player also got a purple recipe on the same mission. This is my third purple recipe drop ever, and my first on the hero side. Spacegirl was only 42 and the mob that dropped the recipe was only 47, so that definitely confirms that it's not necessary to be 50 or fight level 50 mobs to get purple recipes; I'd guess that a level 47 mob is either the low end of what can drop a purple recipe, or close to it.

Thunder Girl (39 will/nrg tanker) joined a large level 39 team fighting its way through Cadao Kestrel's story arc, defeating the Envoy of Shadows twice.

Starlight Falcon (3 peacebringer on Virtue) briefly duo'd with a 3 kin defender, doing a couple of the newbie peacebringer story arc missions against Council and Vahzilok. Got to level 4 and picked up some kind of pseudo-dull pain power.

After that I played April Fool (50 thug/TA MM) on a 3-player level 50 team of Liberty Force SG, mostly fighting Heroes and AVs. We fought and defeated Agent Indigo, Agent Crimson, Calystix, Captain Mako, Valkyrie, Luminary, Ms Liberty and Mynx. For about half that time we had a thug/traps MM on the team; with stacking +DEF from multiple enforcers, maneuvers and a FF generator, all the pets had elude level defense (Real Numbers feature showed around +56% DEF to all) which was pretty nice. They still seemed to die a lot, probably because we were fighting AVs. The Calystix/Captain Mako cave mission was particularly neat; in addition to having 4 AVs, it was full of elite boss "fonts of power" that kept blasting us with psionic tornadoes, and lots and lots of waterspouts that would pick up and fling both players and pets every which way. This was simultaneously really annoying and really cool.

2/25/2008

This is a long report; I played a lot this weekend.

Playing Yuki-Onna (36 ice/cold corruptor) I was on a Lady Grey SF organized on LHO channel. We were on Relentless difficulty, and the team roster was:

grav/nrg dominator
ice/cold corruptor (me)
merc/dark MM
2 tankers
fire/dark corruptor
fire/kin controller
stone brute

This went pretty well even though the brute disconnected and the other corruptor had to log early. The MM didn't want to summon pets because they caused too much lag for him (yes, really!), so he was of limited help as well. Against Hamidon, the dominator had a particularly good trick: he wormholed the healing mitos into the Rikti, who would kill them. I'd never seen anyone do this before, and in fact I would've assumed mitos were immune to being teleported; but it worked really well.

Displaced Mito vs Rikti

The last fight against the Honoree was a grueling slugathon; the MM died early on in the fight leaving only 5 players versus a very tough AV. But after a lengthy fight we managed to beat him. Yuki-Onna got a lot of exp, ending up at level 38 and gaining the wonderful Heat Loss power. I got a junky TF recipe reward, but really good drops: a Gravitational Anchor Rech/Acc (my second purple recipe drop, both of which have been on villains) and a level 50 Performance Shifter: Chance to gain endurance. Our SF triggered a Rikti invasion in Port Oakes, so I ran Yuki over there to help fight it off.

Later in the weekend I organized and led a St Martial SF as Yuki-Onna, recruiting from LHO channel. Our team mix was:

ice/cold corruptor (me)
thug/dark MM
dark/elec brute
sonic/sonic corr
stone/elec brute
elec/stone brute

This team worked quite well; the stacked cold and sonic buffs made the brutes very hard to hurt. We only had trouble with one mission, a Defeat all Carnies, where we (apparently) cleaned out the map but the mission wouldn't complete. I petitioned, but after waiting about 15 minutes for a GM, we agreed to reset the mission (by all logging out for 5 mins). We had to redo the mission, but it completed correctly the second time and we didn't have any further problems. This got Yuki-Onna to level 39.

On Friday night I played Flamebait (24 fire/therm corruptor) with a 5-player all-corruptor team of Demolition Girls SG. This went pretty well for awhile, getting Flamebait to level 25. Later in the evening a 10 corruptor joined us who demanded that I lackey him (rather than a level 27 player) so that he'd get the best possible exp. This felt too much like PLing to me, but I wasn't team leader and didn't want to make a scene, so I logged off for a bit.

Later I played Schadenfreude (27 AR/traps corruptor) on a Sharkhead SF organized on LBx channel. Our team mix was:

SS/nrg brute
dark/nrg brute
fire/therm corruptor
rad/rad corruptor
fire/dark corruptor
AR/traps corruptor (me)
dark/dark stalker

The stalker was named "Man from Innsmouth" and so I immediately accused him of having "the Innsmouth look" and being a spy for Calystix. This really only makes sense if you know much about the Cthulhu mythos, but several players on the team got the joke, calling the situation "fishy". This SF went pretty well except, ironically, on a Kill X Longbow in Nerva mission, where about half the team got pinned down and killed by a Toxic turret in Agincourt. The poison gas they shoot is nasty! Schadenfreude got to level 29 on this SF, getting the Seeker Drones power at 28. This is my second attempt at a traps corruptor and I'm finding it more fun this time; partly the "Real Numbers" makes the benefit of various traps more obvious now (before, I kinda had to just believe they did something) and partly because I know how to use traps better now.

On Saturday I played Astarte (36 grav/emp controller on Protector) on a Demolition Girls SG team that knocked out the Katie Hannon TF and the Hess TF back-to-back. Our team mix was:

ice/ice tanker
ice/storm controller
fire/nrg blaster
ice/emp controller
nrg/nrg blaster
grav/emp controller (me)
kin/sonic defender (joined for Hess, wasn't on Katie)

We finished both TFs with no trouble.

Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) picked up a couple more purple recipes at Wentworths, an Apocalypse and the last Gravitational Anchor recipe I needed (the hold proc). These seem pretty nice, but cost another 32M infl; these purchases are rapidly depleting my infl reserves. I crafted the Gravitational Anchor IO and slotted it in Web Grenade, deleting an Endoplasm HO in the process; this dropped the power's accuracy from +92.4% to +59.6%, and immob enhancement from +107.4% to +101.9%, but this felt worth it; I have a lot of extra ToHit currently and the power was way over the soft cap on immob anyway. The hold goes off about 25% of the time (a lot more often than I expected) and its special effect is similar to the grav hold. I also bought a level 10 Achilles Heel: Chance for Resist Debuff, which I slotted into Burst, replacing a Recharge IO. This lowered Burst's recharge enhancement from +93.8% to +55.9%, but considering I have +87.5% global recharge right now, this is the difference between 1.42 seconds and 1.64 seconds, which I decided was an acceptable tradeoff in order to get the resist debuff. I figure resist debuff will be especially good for me, since lethal resist is a problem for assault rifle. My new slotting for Burst is 4 Devastation IOs, Centriole HO, Achilles Heel: Chance for Resist Debuff, for a total of dmg +97.5%, acc +55.9%, range +23%, rchg +55.9%, endrdx +15.7%.

As Police Woman I led a 7-player AV-killing team of mostly Sisterhood for awhile, working through Maria Jenkins' story arc. We were pretty blaster heavy, with a willpower tanker and only trick arrow for support, but we nevertheless defeated Mother Mayhem, Malaise, and Shadow Hunter.

Police Woman joined a Cavern of Transcendence Trial for a while; I already have the Transcendent badge, but I wasn't doing anything at the time and I thought it might be a good way to work on Minions of Igneous bosses. It took about half an hour for the team to fill up to 8, then we had one person disconnect in the tunnel network. We entered the mission instance and the team leader stealthed and teleported us all to the locked door at the end of the mission. I think maybe he was unclear on how the trial worked, because the door unlocks only if you click 8 glowies at once. Another team member decided to log out at this point, and it was becoming clear we couldn't actually complete the trial with only 6 players. Then we started aggroing Minions of Igneous.

Uh oh!

Two groups of Igneous, spawned for an 8-player team, swiftly wiped out the rest of the team. Since we had been teleported way deep into the mission, there was nowhere to run. I decided to make a heroic last stand: I used my Archmage accolade, used a lot of purple and green inspirations, and even threw down a Shivan. I survived for about 3 minutes and killed 2 bosses and many minions, but exemped to level 15, I didn't have enough AoE to take this much stuff out, and so I eventually got overrun. Back in the Atlas Park hospital, the team leader wanted to reform the team to make another attempt, but I didn't want to wait around for us to recruit up to 8 players again, so I bowed out.

As Police Woman I joined a Faathim the Kind TF organized on LBx channel. I already had the TF badge, but it seemed like a good way to fight stuff that could drop purple recipes and arcane salvage, and the team leader was someone I knew to be competent. Police Woman doesn't have a travel power, which is not a problem in 95% of the CoH zones, but is pretty bad in the Shadow Shard, so I asked the team leader to make sure there was someone who could recall friend on the team, because I didn't want to slow the team down. We were on Unyielding difficulty, and our team ended up being:

elec/elec blaster
MA/SR scrapper
will/SS tanker
will/fire tanker
TA/archery defender
emp/nrg defender with recall friend
ill/rad controller
AR/dev blaster (me)

This started off great, but early on first the empath defender, then the rad controller, disconnected and did not return. This left us without a TPer, with the TA defender as the only "support" character, and my Aid Other as the only "heal" power left on the team. The willpower tankers mostly were able to regen their own health back, but I did a lot of running around to keep the scrapper, other blaster and defender healed. I did get complimented on my healing ability, which was cool (blasters who pretend to be defenders are a lot more appreciated than defenders who pretend to be blasters) and I was very glad to have Resuscitate on this TF, since the nearest hospital was quite a ways away.

I got pretty used to using the air geyser transportation system in the Storm Palace, something I had always avoided before. The flyers had the best time of it, but before long I found I could beat the SJers to the mission door; with max stealth I caught very little aggro while traveling, and using combat jumping gave me good control while geyser hopping. For the final mission we had to use the geyser system to travel all the way to the "death star" at the heart of the Storm Palace. Lanaru the Mad is a really ferocious AV and I was not at all sure that we could beat him with the team we had left. I don't mind dying, but I really did not want to have to make 20 geyser hops to get back to the mission, so for the final fight I broke out both a Shivan and a Vanguard HVAS to help fight Lanaru. And it's a good thing, too; as we engaged him, Lanaru immediately opened up with a hurricane, which interrupts Aid Other, so it came down to a straight DPS vs DPS zergfest. Both tankers and the scrapper died fighting Lanaru, leaving only the 3 squishies alive, and so I don't doubt we were seconds from a wipeout when Lanaru dropped.

The end of Lanaru the Mad

It was certainly one of the more dramatic TF finishes I've seen. The whole TF took 5hrs 9mins, and I got the Visionary badge (for Rularuu Overseers) and about 9M infl.

On Sunday I played Spacegirl (42 mind/rad controller) on a Manticore TF organized on LBx. The team was:

spine/dark scrapper
fire tanker
ice/ice blaster
will/axe tanker
mind/rad controller (me)
AR/dev blaster
ill/rad controller

We had trouble in the first mission with the two tankers going in different directions, splitting up the team and resulting in a few deaths. The scrapper, who was team leader, decreed the will tanker (who was higher level) to be the lead tanker and so we started following him. The illusion controller was logged out for the first mission, but came back during the second mission and some drama resulted because he repeatedly went in a different direction than the lead tanker, and seemed annoyed that the team didn't follow him. We tried talking this out but before long the illusionist and the will tanker were getting really snippy with each other (I think they knew each other in RL) and ultimately the team leader kicked the illusion controller from the TF to keep the peace. This left me as the only support character on the team, which kept me scrambling to confuse, sleep, hold, TK, debuff, buff and heal. Spacegirl's current build is very control-heavy though so I felt pretty good about doing all these things. We mostly did well the rest of the TF, though we did have one mission where the players sent to stealth to the end got wiped out and the non-stealthy part of the team had to come rescue them. In the final mission, the AV Hopkins added into a fight we had started nearby, and I think I put rad debuffs on him before any tanker really had a lock on the AV, so I got myself killed. But someone handed me an awaken and I was able to get back into the fight in time to help debuff him again. Finishing the TF was really good for Spacegirl, as it completed her Task Force Commander accolade and she got a level 42 Luck of the Gambler: +7.5% recharge recipe as reward.

Later on Sunday afternoon I started a new peacebringer alt to join a Sentai (some sort of Japanimation) themed SG that a friend was forming on Virtue server. I'm not really a big fan of Kheldians, but I thought the graphics for their powers really look right for a science fictiony anime character, and I talked about this long enough that I got another player to roll up a new warshade. We duo'd for one mission in Atlas Park, and I have to say peacebringer/warshade is probably one of the least synergistic duos imaginable. We both uttered a lot of cheesy anime dialogue; my favorite exchange was when I said, "These 'Council' are rated by local authorities as 'Threat Level 3'...that must be really dangerous!" The warshade swiftly riposted with, "Maybe, but 'Threat Level 1' enemies are probably even more dangerous!" We got to level 3, and it was pretty fun.

That night I played Spite Siren (6 dark/ninj stalker on Virtue) on a 7-player Liberty Force team. This was our "Praetorian" themed team where each player was playing an evil version of some other player's main character. It was pretty cool to be on a big team of characters who were recognizably alternate versions of the Liberty heroes, only with an evil spin. I kinda groaned at evil Police Woman's solid gold assault rifle and dialogue lifted straight from Mae West, but I probably earned it for making Spite Siren (the evil version of that player's main) both a catgirl and a former Skulls Girlfriend. We knocked out a bunch of radio missions and mayhems in Port Oakes and Cap au Diable, getting to level 12 and DOs.

2/22/2008

This is an awesome thread about a little girl who is learning to read by playing City of Heroes: What My Six Year Old Has Learned From CoX. Sister Flame is my new favorite hero!

Five more of my purchase orders at Wentworths for purple recipes executed since my last login; this is kinda good because I got them at the "low" end of their price range, but also kinda bad because the "low end" of their price range still cost me 80M influence. This put 5 of the 6 Gravitational Anchor recipes (all but the hold proc) in my hands, so I went ahead and crafted them, slotting the set into Police Woman's (50 AR/dev) Web Grenade, replacing the level 30 Rooting Grasp set I had in there before. This is the net difference:

Web Grenade (before): 5 Rooting Grasp, 1 Endoplasm HO
power enhancement: immob +98.3%, acc +98.3%, range +13.1%, rchg +39.2%, endrdx +43.5%
set bonuses: +2% immob, +0.75% maxHP, +1% global dmg, +2.5% global rchg

Web Grenade (after): 5 Gravitational Anchor, 1 Endoplasm HO
power enhancement: immob +107.4%, acc +92.4%, rchg +89.9%, endrdx +33.1%
set bonuses: +4% recovery, +2.52% fire&amp;cold RES, +15% global acc, +10% global rchg

I'm kinda unhappy about losing the range enhancement (good for catching runners in PvP) and the +1% global dmg (dropping my global dmg bonus to +21.5%). But the new slotting comes close to the soft cap on recharge (letting me spam web grenade faster and stack immobs faster) and +10% global recharge is just sick. This raises me to +87.5% global recharge, already beating perma-hasten; though I wonder if I'm getting to the stage of diminishing returns on recharge. I certainly would rather have the +1% global damage than the +15% global accuracy, because I'm already insanely accurate. Though it does occur to me that I will keep the +15% global accuracy even when exemped down to level 1, which would be hugely helpful on those (admittedly rare) occasions. Hopefully it will help against Captain Mako and in PvP situations, too. The fire and cold RES bonus is actually kind of nice though, as it stacks with some of my other set IO bonuses to get me up to 8.5% fire and cold RES, an almost meaningful number against the two most popular PvP blast sets.

Anyway, the net cost of this upgrade was 45M for the recipes, 15M for salvage to make them, and 3M to actually craft them, for a total of 63M influence. Was it worth it? Well, I'm not sure, but I hope so. It does motivate me to spend more time playing Police Woman (to acquire more "stuff"), which is a good thing.

As Police Woman I joined a 6-player level 50 pickup team in the Rikti War Zone, doing Borea's timed missions. Initially, our fire/kin wouldn't speed boost anyone unless directly asked (and I did this a couple times but I hate to constantly nag about buffs) so we started off pretty slow, especially since we had 3 tankers, two of which were stone armor. After a couple missions the kin got somewhat better about buffing SB and even would occasionally use fulcrum shift, so our missions sped up considerably. Borea's missions are a bit repetitive though so I could only do so many of them before needing a change; though I did make sure to stay until one of the tankers, who was 49, got to the magical level 50.

After that I joined a 3-player level 49 Northern Lights team, fighting level 50 werewolves in a Portal mission. All 3 of us were blasters, so this wasn't exactly a balanced team, but we made it work through sheer firepower. If we split up a single spawn's alpha strike between a couple of us, our damage would let us mop up the group of werewolves before they could do much more damage to us. I stunned some with beanbag/taser and healed some with aid other; the other two blasters, both energy, also used knockdown to mitigate some damage. In this way we were able to clear the whole map.

The 3 blaster team broke up after that mission, so I started soloing a flashback of Harvey Maylor's story arc, fighting level 50-51 Carnies. This is kind of a long story arc so isn't good for badging, but I figured it might be good for magic salvage. I didn't really want to fight a Carnie elite boss while heavily handicapped, so I only set No Travel Powers for challenge settings. I cleared a couple missions full of Carnies, until I saw a friend asking for some help on another server, so I switched characters.

My friend was a 12 dark/dark defender on Triumph trying to fight Vahzilok, which were resisting or ignoring most of the things she could do. I brought on Grey Wings (9 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) and SK'd to her to fight the zombies as a duo. I could definitely damage the zombies with my lethal and fire damage; more so than my teammate's dark blast, which seemed heavily resisted. As a result I ended up tanking most of the time, and since we had no mitigation to speak of, I died a lot (which was a bit humbling, but I'm not sure what I could've done better). I did try to pull zombies out of groups as much as possible (this usually works well against Vahzilok) but any time we aggroed a group of 5 or 6 usually spelled trouble. Despite all this, we cleared two missions full of nasty zombies, getting Grey Wings to level 10. I couldn't resist training in Fire Sword Circle; having played a fire melee tanker before, being able to get FSC at level 10 just seemed awesome. I fear it may make Grey Wings an aggro magnet, but the animation and damage are just too pretty.

After that I played Schadenfreude (27 AR/traps corruptor on Liberty) for one mission with Liberty Force villains, after which we agreed to reconvene on Virtue server to kick off our new theme villain group, consisting of Praetorian Earth versions of our SG-mates. I played Spite Siren (1 dark/ninj stalker), the evil version of Night Siren (a 50 dark/regen scrapper on Liberty); meanwhile Night Siren's player had started Gangster Moll, an evil, mafia assassin version of Police Woman. We all had a good laugh at each other's names and costumes. One teammate commented that Spite Siren had an even sluttier costume than the original Night Siren; I protested that Spite Siren was wearing more clothes, but he didn't really buy the idea that chains and a dog collar should count as "more clothes". Anyway, we broke out of prison together and completed Kalinda's story arc, getting to level 6. It was great fun.