tpull

Entry 42

I don't know what it is, but I really dig running up the steps to the grandiose music in KR to train up with Blue Steel. I put my two slots in Healing Aura for level 17, because that will be more valuable to the group for the next Task Force we do. It's time to pick a title, and the word ‘startling' seems appropriate, considering what CRM stands for, so that's what I go with. Is it time for me to go get level 20 DOs already? I haven't broken in the 15s yet! I go finish an old mission of mine, and it's full of level 9s! How do the power-levelers gain in time if they have to go back and do these missions anyway? My contact says he's through with me, so maybe once you finish whatever you have open with them, they won't give you anything new, they will send you on to the next contact. I wonder if that tees off the pl'ers, that they still have to go finish these missions, and they don't get any xp for them. I'm about to log off, but Diamond Cut says wait. He simply has to show me his new costume! It looks pretty good, actually. He drags me back to Icon, though, at 2:45 in the morning! It's because I teased him about his hair, heh. He changes it to something better and finally let's me log off to go to bed.

The next morning I get a wake-up call.

"Let's do the task force! Go get lunch."

"Yawn! I have to take a shower first."

"So? Go take a shower. Let's get moving!"

It's like I'm in City of Heroes Boot Camp. "You call that a ray blast? My granny blasts harder than that! Pick it up!"

CRM heads to Skyway and hook up with Diamond Cut. He usually ends up the leader whenever I'm not around, but when I'm playing, he likes to "kick back" and use his Scrapper like a Tank. He's free to plunge ahead and start the fight, and he knows I'll be there to heal him, and I'll be watching the others to ask for adjustments in play as needed. He also wants just a couple of people, but we end up with a grand total of seven.

It is very apparent that this group is different than others I have been with on a Task Force. We are Task Force Rapid Response, and its other members are:
D-Fib, Blaster
Foul Spirit, Scrapper
Azurra, Defender
Light 2406, Blaster
Ariel Moon, Controller

Usually, there are one or two deaths in the very first mission of a TF, as people get to learn to mesh together as a team. And somebody ALWAYS leaves. Instead, there are no deaths for the first mission, and no one drops. Between Diamond Cut and myself and the others, I estimate four of us were playing alts, and three were playing their mains. I had never been on a TF at any level before where there were no deaths on the first mission. Azurra and I over-healed, if anything. I love the fact that I'm still learning little tidbits about the powers. For example, I can't stack a Fortitude buff on the same person, but another healer can cast Fortitude along with me on the same person. I don't know what kind of effect the stacking has, but it's neat to see that one way you can't do it, and another way you can. I hope it actually does act like a double-Fort.

A random sg invite comes in. Really? I'm around level 17-18, and I'm getting a random invite to join an sg? Does this happen to other people a lot? What weirdo goes around inviting people without even speaking first? City of Psychos some days around here, I tell ya...

Diamond is sending me tells about the group. He can't believe how friggin' awesome this is. No deaths, great teamwork... and to think he only wanted a team of four or five. We could have had a no-death bonanza, but we make a boo-boo in the final mission. Foul Spirit is getting impatient, and he goes right to the end where the boss is. We try to accommodate him and run to the end as well, but almost all of us die, including Diamond Cut. I should have known better, but after four-plus hours, we were all getting tired. It really would have taken us less time, though, if we'd just cleared it like we had all the others. I ask Foul spirit to go keep Azurra alive, go to the hospital with Diamond Cut, then have Azurra rez one person and TP us all to her so I can rez the other. Presto! We're back in action. We take care of the rest of the mission with our regular superb capability, and everyone is gushing at then end about how great is all was. I'd have to say that this was my best TF ever so far.

I love the sound of Proton Volley, and I don't think I will ever get tired of it. Hasten and super Speed are good sounds, but after a while, I can see how they start to grate on people. Proton Volley isn't used nearly as much, but it sounds powerful, and the animation is one of my personal best likes in the game. I take a pit-stop in the Science store in IP to sell some enhancements, and I stop to ask a guy about his origin. He's cobbled together a mish-mash of two heroes from different comic universes. He answers my question, and then tells me, "Thanks for reading my origin, I appreciate it." It's little gems like these that help flavor the game, really. I don't know of any other MMORG that has the ability for you to read the origin of other players. Of course, I don't play any other MMORG, so what do I know? But it's hard for me to sympathize with people who complain there is no new content, when I find the content of the players themselves to be fascinating. I've read bio's that were short and sweet, that were gibberish, that were long, almost like boring novels, some that seemed like copyright infringement, and a surprising few that were very novel and fresh. Of course, some are lame, having re-written the history of the game so that one hero single-handedly saved the world form the Rikti. Ptheh! (That's the sound of me spitting...)

I make 6 levels in one day. That's actually the most I've done on a character that was already past level 10. The teaming at this level is a real help to avoid some of the grind, I get the feeling that a lot of the grinding feel of the game usually happens when you play solo, or if you don't enjoy the group you're in. I feel a little guilty about all this time with CRM, because Martial Master is still standing outside ready to solo a boss, and my friends with MM may be missing him, so to speak. But the longer I play CRM, the longer I'll have MM to explore, because he's still at level 48! If I go back to him now, I'll hit 50 in no time. I'm hoping we'll get new content by the time I go back to MM, and I can play him for a while, as opposed to just a couple more levels.

I split off from Diamond Cut (DC) for a while and go to Perez Park to get rid of some very old missions. Upon completion, a player named Neutral gives me a TP out of the Park. I'm so happy when stuff like that happens. Although I have read about incessant requests for pl and kill-stealing complaints on the boards, my experience has been much better than that. I was in the center of the maze that is Perez, and dreading the idea of navigating out yet again, and a simple request gets me an invite and a time-saving TP out of the thicket. That's the type of good-neighbor behavior I wish I saw more of in real life, as well, come to think of it. I'm still impressed with the overall good-will community feeling in the game.

When I team up with DC again, we end up back in Perez anyway. Ugh! If I never have to go there again... I think cave missions are universally despised, so of course when we get a Banished Pantheon cave mission, it's like the Devs were thinking, "How else can I make this frustrating? I know! We'll enshroud the dark caves in mist! Bwah-ha-hah!" The mist is cool, but it doesn't really help me any, you know? I auto-follow DC, let him lead me through the maps/caves. He's better at navigating them than I am, so it works out really well. As the healer, I have to let him lead off anyway. In another mission, I click on a blinkie and accidentally get the Ring of Pain, a temporary power. Doh! I forgot we were at that stage where we were getting Temp powers.

As of 5/20/2005, it looks like the Issue 4 Update changes to Elude are here to stay.
(The change getting rid of perma-Elude is perma )

That makes this guide a little outdated, so I will be working another character up the ranks for an updated guide, one that explores a toggle build, which is what SR has left.

Now let me see how long it takes a non-perma-Elude character to get up to level 50. (gonna need some coffee...)

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Foreshadow is a Korean Hero that is reborn each generation, but who alternates between good and evil. The current incarnation is just beginning to recall and come to terms with the terrible things that his previous self did.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not to split hairs... but shouldn't his name be Flashback then?

:P

[/ QUOTE ]

I would have called him Dirty Double-Crosser

All I got was a misuse notice at work trying to go to the site.

Entry 41

When I level up to 14, I decide to try an experiment. I go to the character transfer tool and copy CRM over to the test server. Will the game be "saved" where I am, and CRM will be leveled up there, or will he still be level 13, the "saved" character from before my current session, since I copied him over before I logged out? I copy him once more when I have logged out. It takes a while to download all of the new stuff, it's been a while since I've been on test. Both of the copies worked! I can test out two powers if I want. My main intention was to at least try Electron Haze, although I'm thinking I will skip it. I don't have a chance to actually do it, though. Everybody and their dog is on the test server trying out all the Issue 4 changes, and I experience lag like I never have before. It takes twenty seconds just to turn my body! Maybe I'll test Electron Haze later. I am excited by the new search options though. The Devs do listen!

Back in the regular game, I take Super Speed. Ahhhhhh. I do so love this travel power. All my alts without it or one of the others feel like Statesman's ugly little stepchildren who travel at the speed of "turtle." Diamond Cut wants to take down Dr. Vahz, and how can I say no to that? We start on Rugged, then after Dr. Vahz, he ups the difficulty to Tenacious. Super Speed turns out to be a great choice for me, since I can try to add a defense debuff and run away real quick to ditch the aggro, yet still draw one or two away from Diamond for a second to give him a little relief. I am so happy to have this faster movement speed again. If the description of travel in WoW is correct, I will probably never play it. Hasten is also a good choice for these two power sets. I like the way my Neutrino Bolt and X-Ray beam recharge with it on.

I find out I can watch the "xp needed to level" numbers go down in the I.D. window. It's amazing what neat things I'm still learning about stuff like that in the game, if I hadn't tried out this long sidekick stint, I never would have thought of trying it. I pull up my calculator and divide the number of xp I need to level up by the average amount of xp I'm gaining, and start announcing how many more Clocks he needs to beat up for me to get to level 16. I'm teasing him the whole time, saying things like, "I don't know why I have you on this team, it's not like you're useful or anything," and: "I'm gonna let you die this time so I can test out my new Rez power. " Since it's only Diamond Cut and I, it is a teensy bit boring on occasion, but not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I actually die a couple times, but I'm still earning more xp even paying off debt than I would playing solo. This is probably as close as I will get to doing a power-level, by hanging around him without the sidekick option on. It's great that they have a system in the game like that, though, so you can still hang with your higher-level friends. This is one of the few areas where I agree with the idea of not grinding through everything, though, with all of your 15-20 other alts, and it's okay to mooch a little off your friends to maintain pace with them, and to get to some of your cooler powers faster. Oooh, I hope I'm not on the slippery-slope to becoming a power-leveler...!

Our last mission for the night is his cape mission. This one can be difficult, but we have almost no problem at all. I wonder if it was toned down. The only way Ultra Meltdown could do it solo was by leveling up while in the mission itself. Then, as soon as we're done, Diamond goes, "Ok, one more." Sigh. He is such an addict. I'm sleeping in until noon tomorrow to make up for this! Now I know why Robin cracked all those jokes alongside Batman, though. Robin was the sidekick, and had more time to type. Er...

Entry 40

New night with CRM, and I try to head for my mission deep in the Hollows. I am invited to a team before I get there, and soon I am the healer for an eight-person team. Yellows, oranges, and reds galore inside the Troll cave, and sometimes it seems like four out of the other seven need some serious healing. Absorb Pain comes in very handy, I use it sparingly, but to great effect. CrazySpoonHead sends me a tell to compliment me on the healing, letting me know he has a level 31 healer as his main. As much as I know of the game and how to spot a good healer, I'm still new at it myself, so that's great feedback for me. It's hard to know if you are objective when it comes to rating yourself, so I wasn't sure exactly how well I was doing, but like the guy said in the movie Roadhouse, "It was a good night, nobody died."

Well, almost nobody. One member drops while I'm healing another, and I'm still stuck in an animation. Grrr. I start passing Lucks to one of the tanks and remembering to pop Fortitude more often, explaining to one newcomer why his head is glowing red. On our way to do my mission, a couple teammates get clobbered real quick, not sure if it was Pumicites or just a group of Trolls. The group is in two separate places, so I stick with two members and make sure they survive, then high-tail it to the rest when all the villains around us are down. Inside the mission, we drop down to five members total. It always seems to be the quiet ones who quit first, you can't remember the first one, he was so quiet. I spot a tank quitting on us without saying a word, but half the team is newcomers, so he may not have known the proper etiquette. All in all, three of the team level up, and a couple add me to the buddy list! Who says pickup teams are bad?

Red Haven/Diamond cut is back in town in real life, and I'm only at 12 and a half. He has absolutely no self control whatsoever. He can't wait 24 hours for me to get to 14, so he logs on and does the task force without me. Which I expected, really. I hope he doesn't expect my healer to try to pace him as he rockets up yet another Scrapper. "Play your Kheld!" I tell him. "I don't wanna play my Kheld," he whines. Whiner! He's my best friend, I can call him names if I want.

I remember I haven't activated Martial Master's Supergroup team colors in a while, and I never tested out how two of my costumes looked with them. My costume with the cape looks cool with it in sg mode. My third costume goes from blue with yellow tiger stripes to orange with black stripes. I have orange hair! Not sure if I look better or not, but I play looking like this for a while, since it's different.

Martial Master does a couple missions solo, since no friends are online, and then patrols PI for a hunt 50 Carnie mission. It's relatively easy, there are lots of heroes around, and it seems like the Carnie spawns are higher than they used to be. I don't know if that's permanent, or just because there are so many people in the area, but I finish it faster than all my other hunt 50 Carnie missions. I am one bubble away from 49, and I now plan to try to solo Vanessa DeVore. I am not normally able to solo an AV, since I don't have Tough, but I'm going to give it the old college try. But later.

I log off for dinner, and Diamond Cut calls me offering to team. He and CRM go on a couple of his missions, and I level to 13 fairly fast. He's a good enough player at this point that sometimes I don't even need to heal him, I can just spam-fire my two attacks. Everything is purple to me, though, so I miss a whole lot. Neither of us die for the whole evening, which is a pleasant change of pace from when my Scrapper was trying to keep up with his Red Haven on tough missions. A healer is one of the best characters to play in a sidekicked mode. If your team is large, you will still have a bunch of stuff to keep track of and to do, but since you are mostly concerned with buffing and healing, you don't have to worry as much about defeat and hospital trips.

CRM gets a new mission solo later, one that introduces the hero to the HeroCorp Field analyst to explain the in-game story behind the mission difficulty slider. I think it works out pretty well. On the way to Perez Park via Galaxy City, I spot a level 2 Scrapper taking on a group of Hellions. The last Hellion leaps over a wall, and the Claws/SR goes after him. I position myself overhead and target him, and as soon as he defeats his opponent, I heal him to full and then carry on. No chance he saw me. Stealth heal-and-run! Perez Park still sucks every time. I think I'd rather risk going past purples all the time in Hollows rather than trying to figure out the wood paths each time with a character. Is there anyone in this game who enjoys that? Anyone?

Gonna be away for most of the week again, so this is a longer post than usual. Enjoy!

Entry 39

Who to log on tonight? Martial Master first, to try to get a group going. Ah, Thorron is on! He's on the tail end of a Hami raid, so I send a tell and he brings Mr Brawler along with him. I also draft SuperJman, a Controller I've seen around PI numerous times, but I've never had the opportunity to team with him. We go to take my revenge on Dreck. With two tanks and fire imps everywhere, it is hard to put into words how easy this mission has suddenly become. There are orange and red cons, at least, but I would have popped Elude and handled them solo. Here, most of them are dead before I can reach them half the time. I hardly activate any powers, and there's no time to even try to use Eagles Claw, I'll be doing 400 points of damage to a corpse by the time it lands, our dps is so huge. I don't think I've ever walked through a mission before this bad, hardly using half my skills and tearing through faster than creased lightning. By unspoken agreement, we all split up at the same time to go look for some of the hostages to complete the mission. I get to use Elude finally, as I tackle groups of eight orange- and red-cons. We draft another pal of the group's, the tank GI Jda, and we all regroup at the location of the final two hostages, take the baddies out, and decide to help SuperJman with his Babbage mission.

We skip to the monster, and I get some tells from a couple players just before we start. One is a fan of my Journal, who says if I wrote a book and had his character in it, he would buy it! That's nice, and I write his name down and make a note to have a couple adventures with him some time. As I type back, the group takes down a small nearby mob, and one of us levels, Mr Brawler I think it is. Then we go to town on Babbage, with a couple of us taking out the crowd of minions buzzing around his feet like fleas. We have only one death, and I pull back, TP him to safety and toss an Awaken right away (hey, that feels almost Defender-like! What am I , a healer?). I jump back into the mix, and he follows in short order, and ... we're done! Not bad at all. Awesome team, but it dissolves after this mission, as usually seems to happen, with needing to go help other friends, dinnertime, our regular time to log, etc. I've added my new teammates to my friends list already, since it was so blatantly obvious that everyone had their act together and each knew his/her respective character inside and out. We may have to draw straws the next time, and kick one of us out of the team just to give the villains half a chance...

An earlier tell sent to me was after a Broadcast looking for the Dreck mission. I told him I had it, and it was followed up with an interrogation, asking me what level was it? What AT? What power sets? After I had answered to his satisfaction, he said he would help me level to 50. By this time, I'm already teamed with Thorron, he took so long to do this. Help me level to 50?!? I'm still trying to stall! I have no idea why there had to be this one-way interview process, but I tell him I'm already in a team and move on. Are there a bunch of 48s out there still asking 50s to pl them or something? Weird. "Help" me level. Hah!

The other tell sent to me tonight was about testing PvP on the Test Server. I ask a couple of questions regarding the Hamidon-Origin (HO) enhancements. HOs are like people's perception of money and sex: everyone thinks there's more out there, and that everybody else is getting a bigger share. That said, a lot of people have spent a lot of time to fill up on HOs. I know I spent a few hours earning the Accolades, and I would definitely not like to have them wiped away in an Issue Update. It's highly possible that adding a PvP feature really changes the mix, so we should not be afraid of adjusting HOs to reflect the change. If a player with SOs can out-damage a player with DOs, though, what's wrong with having HOs?
Rather than getting rid of them, I would just like to see them naturally phased out when new levels are introduced. The Sewer Trial Enhancements only last for a few levels, so the HOs could easily become obsolete as soon as we get 60 levels. Honestly, if the only thing left to do is level 50 Hami raids, I'm going to play my alts, whether it nerfs me for PvP at that level or not. One thing I'm hoping is that the "true" end game content only allows limited "loot." By this I mean when the game caps out at, say, 100 levels (I am sooo greedy!), the Final Origin (FO) prize is limited to between one and 5. If there is only one final prize, this would force one, final choice upon the hero, who has reached the pinnacle of perfection, and he has to choose which power he REALLY wants to improve for the last time. That would really make it special. And real, because there's a genuine choice there that you can't take back, as the enhancement is locked in (then again, you could always decide you have changed your mind, lock a normal Enhancement over your FO, and go on the endgame content again, to put a new FO in a different place... see how easy it is to get around these things?).

If we can out-level HOs (and I would guess this is the direction we're going), then it might encourage players to go do other things besides endless Hami raids. It may be weird that I can go on several missions that are almost identical and come back for more, while yet another Hami raid strikes me as boring and too much downtime, but that's the personal feel for me. That level 50 player might volunteer to Exemplar for a day, helping out a newbie. Or go to Atlas Park and pick a spot where players could ask questions. Or be a Taxibot if you haven't tried it yet. Maybe offer to be a taxi specifically for a hard-to-reach Exploration Badge. All of these things would help foster a greater sense of community, I think, which will be exciting for newer players, and slightly more fulfilling than the 20th Hami raid. Of course, there is always the possibility that Hami raids on the other servers are more fun somehow. I'll have to get a character to 50 on a different server and try it to see if I notice any difference.

After dinner, I have an hour of spare time. I wonder how far CRM can get...? Yeah, let's do it! I am such an addict. I head to the store to buy a bunch of DOs, since I just hit level 12. I can't find a DO for Defense Debuff, and why did I put a second slot in Absorb Pain? Ah well. I'm hoping I can get a team going so I can test out my new enhancements, and my brand new power, Fortitude. I've been on the receiving end of it enough in my alts, I feel good about being able to strengthen others with this character. I leave the store, but I'm hit by two purple Clockwork cogs right away. Quick, back into the store! Here's another fine mess I've gotten myself into. I go out again and run for my life. At my speed, that's painfully slow. I try out my new enhancements on a couple of yellow-Con Trolls, and one runs, like always. I try to avoid the various mobs he runs through, but I don't notice that one of the mobs notices me, and there are ten of them. I don't last long. Stormax comes along and drops me an Awaken, and makes sure I'm all right. One thing about eating dirt so much, I re-affirming that the game is filled with nice people, who are willing to stop and help you out. But now I am not only closer to leveling, but in debt once again.

I get invited to a team! I didn't even have my Team Seek on. I head to the Hollows where three people are also hoping to get a tank. They are all level 17, so I'm going to have to be careful. Then I get to be an sk, which makes it a little better. No tank is available, so we head on in. Honestly, there isn't much communication, and I don't know how long the three of them have been together, but it's no walk in the park. Nobody acts all stupid either, though. The key thing lacking (besides any communication), I notice, is that everyone tackles their own opponent, without much regard to anyone else. Sometimes I'm left to fend for myself while the others are busy, and a number of times I fall back to help the last guy in line take out an enemy so we can move in to help the others. I hope my debuffs are contributing.

At a lull in the fighting, someone says good job, and the team leader says, "And great heals." One of my first "great heals!" I got them a couple times at lower levels, but that was months ago when I played CRM. I'm feeling good, and making sure to pop Fortitude on my allies often. We go through a CoT portal into an ambush, but we get through it okay, and I've even managed to get in a couple of strategic but very timely Absorb Pains. As we get close to wrapping it up, things are flowing nicely, and I don't even have to heal anybody, not even myself, on the final mob. It's an hour already, and time to go, but I'm debt-free and feeling good. I haven't even been looking at my experience bar. I know I haven't gained much with CRM, but it's fun to learn how to handle the different powers.

I'm not going to be around this weekend, so you guys get three posts in three days. Woo hoo! This'll have to tide you over until I get back.

Entry 38

Diamond Cut wants to do the Positron TF, which means he's already up to lvl 15. He seems to be under the impression that healers can level up just as fast. I log on anyway as CRM, and try to do some catch-up. Martial Master can't find anyone lft team anyway, everyone seems to be off raiding Hamidon half the time. I'm up to the contact where every other mission has an AV, so I need to wait until I can find a good team to last me for a while. Maybe in a week, when some of the people get bored of Hamidon? I'm not sure how much effect he's having on the availability of others for teams. Somehow, though, I think Diamond is missing the point of me rolling a healer, the whole point is to team a lot, not to spend more time going solo trying to catch up.

I get a yellow-con down to 5 health, and he knocks me out. I can tell I'm going to be here for a while. I hit a sweet spot as I go to King's Row to take out some Hellions, and I complete the other two missions I have going at the same time while I'm indoors. I pump some candy and take out a yellow lieutenant, within an inch of dying. I rescue Atsegine, and I can't help but wonder as she cowers during the fight, if I should really be using my Irradiate that close to her...

I've noticed that a lot of my alts are stuck around 10,11 and 12, is it just me, or is this a kind of hump to get over more than other stages in leveling? A large part of it is just not having a travel power. There is an idea to make the Fitness Pool Inherent, and this idea appeals to me. Getting Swift at level 6 alone is a big help, in my opinion. Hurdle at 8, Health at 14, Stamina at 20, that would free up three more choices for powers, and that would mean just more plain fun!

I have to stop during an indoor mission because Independence Port is spelled wrong. I am so hoping they fixed all the ones I sent in as Martial Master, because no way am I doing it a second time! C'mon, though, one of your own zone names? I note that the Skull is the one selling the Superadine to the Trolls, which settles a debate on the boards about who was selling to whom. The Trolls' body changes are the result of that drug, but I'm sure some Skulls dip into it for -ahem- "quality tests," as well.

Five Skulls come out of nowhere and start attacking, I have no clue if they are after me or the hero right next to me, but we fight side-by-side until they are all on the ground, and his teammate shows up to polish off the last one. Don't know if it was an ambush on me or them (maybe them, since there were so many of them), but I thank them for the help, and they say thank you in return. I love that kind of politeness, and I'm always quick to note it, considering some of the rudeness I've seen in the game. The polite people still have the run of it, thank goodness! The last thing anyone really wants is a bunch of insults hurled at them while trying to play. I wonder if PvP is going to bring out some of this outside the arena or not.

On a whim I hit the search feature, and find over 220 heroes from level 6 to 20 in the game, but restricting it to the lfg feature gives me only five hits, none at my level. Maybe it's just me, but the feature, although I loved its introduction, seems like it's not fulfilling the encouraged teams as much as the Devs might wish. It's definitely hit or miss with me, and for my enjoyment purposes, I'd like to see it "hit" more often. One of my biggest reservations about doing any MMORG was the idea of forced grouping, I never in my life suspected I'd have the opposite problem, where I want to team, but nobody's around. I get a mission deep in the Hollows, and boy is it a mistake to go there. I get 400 yards into the area, and there's already a purple Ruin Mage spotting me. He catches me in rock that a Break Free doesn't help with, and seconds later I'm eating jello in the hospy.

I draft a couple people anyway and hit the streets again. SciMedic is another healer, so we grab a Scrapper, offer a sidekick, and go to town. We tackle two orange-cons and one red-con (to me, SciMedic is already level 12), and we are prepared to run, but I level up right in the middle of it, and suddenly they're cake! Gotta love it when that happens. I play for a little bit more, until I am debt-free, then go to choose a new power. No Super Speed yet, and Proton Volley is not available. Fortitude it is!

Entry 37

It's been about a week since I had time to play, but I must admit it doesn't bother me too much, since I'm on the home stretch to 50. I hit level 48, and wait until my next session to add my three slots, one to Dodge, and two for END reductions on Focused Accuracy (FA), for a total of 3. I'm leaving my SO Accuracy Enhancers where they are for my other slots, since I still whiff sometimes even when FA is on. I'd like to find some area where there are a large number of mobs, and test how well I can do against, say, 20 white-cons, or ten yellow-cons.

The next night, the night when I have trained up, I go on the Dreck Portal mission, and it takes a GM to help me figure out that the map is twice as large as I thought it was. I was running up and down the lower half, not realizing there was only a stretch of water separating me from the rest of the mobs. Dreck is a level 50 AV, so I'm pretty sure I'm going to eat dirt, but I eat all the candy I have, punch Hasten, Practiced Brawler, FA, Conserve Power, and Elude, and charge in. He decks me in one punch. Sigh. When will I ever learn?

Red Haven has made a new character, Katana/Invulnerability. I drag out CRM, my Empathy/Radiation Blast Defender, and go cruising with him. He wants to make a pact, that we only play the characters together so we can level up, but he's broken that word by the next day. He wakes me up in the morning, and he's gone from level 9 to 12 already. I see how he is. And he wants money from me, no less! On the way to our mission, a Clockwork tags me with an electromagnetic field, freezing me just as I enter the warehouse. So I'm frozen inside this static ball of electricity, but for some reason I can still activate my boombox and dance... Speaking of which, let's get some more percussion-heavy stuff in there!

We play for a little while, and at the end I pull an Absorb Pain at precisely the wrong moment, as two orange-cons come piling after me, and down I go. They all head back to him, and I use an Awaken. Whoops, too soon! I work off my debt as my buddy leaves, and get to level 11. I'm torn between getting another heal power and one more offensive power, since I just know I'm gonna be solo again with this guy.

Kisume calls out to Martial Master the next day, begging for me to ask for her help as a Defender. Seems the current team is not so great. Not too bad, but not too great either. Kisume is just an uber-healer, she really knows her role down to a "T." She buffs me up and I run loose, as we blow through the missions at a mind-numbing pace. I almost never hit Elude unless it's an accident, and I drop using Focused Fighting after the first couple fights, because who needs it? I've got increased attributes across the board, I'm running Focused Accuracy non-stop, and any break in her buffs just has me activating Conserve Power; I've turned into a one-man wrecking crew. We go full-tilt to get Kisume to level 50. Ding!

We're running a story arc for the Carnies, and Kis wants to see how it turns out. I hope (yet again) that someday the Devs will let each member of the team read the flavor text from the clues and background, etc. Some of us like to know why we're doing what we're doing. Do the Teen Titans just run around jumping into fights without knowing why? (Well, come to think of it, many of them do, quite a lot. Maybe that's a bad example.) On the way to another mission, the door to the tram looks like it closes on my cape, and I think back to The Incredibles movie ("No capes!").

For the last mission, we bring in Section-8 and a lower-level Scrapper. Section-8 asks how we can enter a door to a building and end up on an outside map. I explain we're on the mental plane, visiting the mind of a villain, and us going through the door was symbolic. Hey, it was a good question! If he'd been able to read the storyline, he would have known (insert repetitive request for us all to be able to read team mission texts here). [Editor's note: this is before I learn we can click on the "i" to read the flavor text (I work overtime as the Editor for this Journal rag, too...)]. I've been part of the two-person team supreme with Kis for an hour or so, and I forget to make the adjustment to a larger team. That happens on occasion. Kisume buffs us and heads out to find the boss, and when she sings out, I speed over there, not realizing I've left my side-kicked Scrapper alone. A few seconds later, Kisume is going to the hospital, and I'm back-pedaling from four red-conning Illusionists. The Scrapper says he doesn't like the team being spread out, and he's quitting. I tell him we're going to stay in one group from now on, but he doesn't stay. He's right, we should have stuck closer together, but I was already into the habit of running around like a wild fox, since Kisume was taking such great care of me. I usually try to be a teensy bit patient with a group if it's my first time out with people myself, but he didn't want to stay, so we enlisted EnOnyx instead, and we made fairly short work of the rest of the mission.

I go solo for one more mission, then Red Haven sends me a tell, he's on as his new Scrapper, Diamond Cut. I join him as CRM and pal around, then stick around Steel Canyon to street hunt. At level 10 and 11, it's more efficient to hunt in street loops than to wander all over the map, wasting all that time running to missions. With Radiation Blast, I can attack often and still queue up a heal for when my buddy's health drops. I team up with Electro Surge, and we steadily increase the difficulty level of our opponents. Two yellow, two orange, one red... A purple! Run! I fall into an almost constant pattern, two attacks, heal, two attacks, heal. I was thinking about ditching Irradiate for a while, but when we tackle a group of eight whites and yellows, it comes in handy! This is a very fun aspect for me, despite the grind each time, is to explore how each power set can handle itself at each level. I will probably be willing to grind more than sit around to power-level anything. Even if it takes more time, I'll still be learning about each character I have, and how well the powers perform. I'm also using the time with my alts to answer Broadcast questions, and help out with advice when asked. Ah, an ambassador's work is never done. Except for when it's one a.m. Yikes! Time to log.

Entry 36

Teaming is sort of becoming a way of life. Let me explain: the majority of time in the game is still solo, simply because most of my friends are in different time zones, or if they are online at the same time, they are already involved in other missions. Much of my teaming is with just one or two friends every now and then, since I am very wary of accepting blind invites, unless I'm in a what-the-heck kind of mood. There has been a change in my outlook as the game has progressed, and just having more social interaction while gaming has proven to be very enjoyable. Thus, I noticed I have started keeping a lookout for the Broadcasts and Requests. If someone is close to my level and expressing a desire to team, I will issue an invite.

It usually starts with me solo. What's weird is how picky people are sometimes. I've lost count the number of people who are looking for a team, they accept the invite, and drop very quickly. I'm a good enough leader that I try to make sure each newcomer knows what we're up to as quickly as I can type, so it's not that they're standing around with no communication and decide to leave. But sometimes we tackle AVs, sometimes we do other missions. Many just say no thanks, others say they're tired of debt (they must be having some BAD experience with AV missions!), and still others only want to pl or farm. This strikes me yet again as something that an in-game bulletin board would help. The server-specific forum boards are a poor substitute for team assembling (note to new readers: this is before the new stuff we see coming in Issue 4). If you don't have a numerous enough sg, you've got to do things in the game. This could really help eliminate every complaint about pl teams, farming teams, irritation about joining a group to do missions when all they want to do is street grind, and the biggest of all, help put together more task forces. If I have enough time to do a TF (which is rare), I could put a notice on the bulletin board, have people send tells, with the understanding that as soon as we got enough qualified players, I would issue the invites and we would all assemble in the appropriate zone and begin. Tons of us skip the TFs right now because there seems to be no one around when you want to do one. We could also caveat the missions ahead of time to say if we accept Sidekicks, Exemplars, or if you want an entire team of exactly the same level, because you like to do the Respec that way. I'm also hoping that some day the Exemplar feature will be linked to the NPC for a TF, not to one of the team members.

The latest team I started inadvertently, just inviting one person, but it turns out the mission had an AV, so we whistled up a couple more people. The mission went well, and looking at all the missions besides my own, I noticed that a couple had AV missions of their own. I suggested we clear those off their mission boards, and away we went! I have the greatest sympathy for anyone who still has the Madame of Mystery (MoM) mission, you need at least five people to succeed usually, so I feel an almost solemn duty to help out when we have a team that I think can do it. We take out Countess Crey first, an oldie at this point. A Boss that cons only orange to me, wow! One member gripes about the low xp, even though we all new it was an old mission. When we get to the MoM mish ("C'mon, guys, let's take out your MoM!"), he sees the low xp still and ditches us. The remaining four of us can battle MoM to a standstill, but after five minutes, I draft a fifth person, which is all we need to tip the scales in our favor. But the dropout makes me think about something.

Do people still worry about xp at this level? I'm 47, over half my bubbles filled, and I know there's a limit to what my character can do after he hits 50. This is my favorite character, and I'm almost stalling sometimes when I do stuff to time things in the hope that ten new levels will be released just as I finish my last level-50 Hamidon raid. The rest of the team mentions it for a couple messages, and there is a general consensus that goes like this: "I could care less about xp." It's not that we don't care, but we're having fun talking to each other, learning to jell as a team, and all the stuff that really makes the game enjoyable. The xp is gonna come, regardless. So if people still want to ‘maximize" their xp gain at 47, more power to them, but the people that stayed on the team had a blast, gained more xp on other missions, and were a lot more fun to hang around than people grousing about xp gain. There's a whisper in my head (you're all just jealous because the voices only talk to me!), and it suggests the guy who quit might be one of those power-levelers, whose only object is to hit 50 as fast as possible to complain about lack of content. I'm going to hit it soon enough, I think. Time enough for me to turn traitor and become a grubbing pl'er with one of my alts!

A couple join, a couple leave, and the team is all scrappers. All-scrapper team! Ooooh. I haven't been on one of those since the Numina TF. We actually have one death the whole time, from one of those brain-farts that happens on occasion. She laughs about it as she gets up off the ground. We've got a team with interesting names and personalities to match. Fatal Beauty is flirting with all of the guys and suggesting things, but with teammates with names like Fast Edd and Sharp Blade, there's no way I'm getting in the middle of that! These guys are so good, I'm taking out a Sapper, and before I can even turn around, they've mopped up the rest of the mob. They seem to have the same affliction I do, they make sure to take out all the auto-turrets as well, even though there's no xp for them ("We don't need no stinkin' xp!").

I get the idea that a really cool modification to the game would be if we were actually able to break through the wall on a map. How hard would that be to code? You could have a part of the wall that functions a little like the doors to the 5th cells, or the Wall in the Eden trial, and if you didn't want to come at the villains down the corridor, you could do like they do in the comics and just break through the wall and grab them! That would be awesome!

As half of us log for the night, I realize that I seem to have developed this pick-up team habit. I start out solo, but even if my friends aren't on, I usually end up grabbing people along the way. It's become almost ingrained in me. Sometimes I feel like going solo and I do, but if I'm not in the solo mood, I will see someone looking for a team and snap them up right away, so we can plow through missions, have more mobs to fight (since the Invincible slider feels a little too easy solo right now anyway), and make sure that these guys lft don't go hanging. I feel like I've become an in-game ambassador, dedicated to making sure that anyone near my level who wants to have a good experience will have one.

I'm actually fairly close to 50 now. Those monitoring my sig changes can tell which character I've been playing more recently.

[ QUOTE ]
What do you think?

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, I hadn't thought of that.
It's an interesting idea, I'm just wondering how to monitor things so I can be in an "open" area when I'm about to ding. I've been caught by surprise a couple of times when I forgot I was close to leveling. It might be better to ask who wants to come along when I start the Praetorian story arc, I should level in the first mission or two, I'm guessing. I'm going to try and start it May 21, since real life events will keep me out of town for the next two weekends. I suppose I could open for nominations for anyone level 45-50 who would like to join the fun. In lieu of an autograph, I could hurl insults or wise sayings at you, depending on my whim...

Thoughts? Opinions? Comments?

Entry 35

I have refreshed my memory on how useful Cobra Strike really is. It not only gives me a stun on someone while I work on others, but it gives me less downtime. As I go on these missions, I can Critical Hit a Button Man Buckshot with my Eagles Claw, then use CS to stun the second one while I take him out. Less damage to me, less waiting time before I plunge to the next group, and all without using Elude, so I don't lose time to an END drop. Also, the two recharges I have in Focus Chi is perfect for me. I know a lot of players like to max it out with recharges so they can do double damage more often, but it turns out, I have so much fun with my five attacks, I sometimes forget to punch Focus Chi. It refreshes just enough for me to remember it and work it in. Most of the time, if I stopped to press it yet again, I could have attacked and taken out someone anyway.

My online journal has had a couple affects I hadn't thought of at all. I've gotten four or five in-game tells thanking me for my writing, and of course, asking me to keep it up. It is really cool to get an in-game message for stuff you do elsewhere! I recognize one of them, Fujiko Murakuma, who has been around forever, it seems, and is an excellent player. But it's been so long, I forget if I was Martial Master or Ultra Meltdown when I teamed with Fujiko! The hazards of having so many alts.

I also make new friends because of this. Midnight Rambler was one, just somebody who sent me a tell about how he enjoyed the writing, and poof, another good player for the game! This is lovely for me, seeing as how I tend to have a tough time finding groups every other time I want one. It encourages me to invite people more often and sort of ‘network.'

I still wish the Devs had kept the sound to the blinkies, but I try an experiment and put on some headphones, listen to some music while I play. I figure if I die in the mission, it's a sign I can't sit and chew gum at the same time.

I get a DE mission, head on in. One of the Boulders I attack, I miss him six times out of seven, so I back up and then come in again, and I knock him out in one punch. I'm not sure if there is some kind of random generation in a fight where these occasional great number of misses happens, but if there is, I suspect breaking off the engagement and resuming it again just might reset any auto-random numbers that the computer generates to determine the outcome, sort of like treating each of your melees as isolated events. I have no idea where to go to find confirmation of this. I get a little bored, so I try some herding, and get three groups together attacking me. Whoops, better punch Elude, I'm getting hit a lot! I still have to pop a couple greens, but no big deal. Gave me a little excitement to see my health bar go red for a second, though.

A lost Portal Corp Scientist is stuck behind a bush, running back and forth about two or three feet. I try to Recall Friend on her, but she's an invalid target. Really? But I'm trying to rescue her... Teleport Foe doesn't work either. Cute. Last Resort comes on by Papa Roach and I pump up the volume. I rescue all the scientists, clear the outdoor map, then start running around, jumping off mountain tops and teleporting from peak to peak, just losing myself in the music. I wonder if I'd play better drunk, as some of my friends say they do. Too bad I don't drink, I'll have to ask somebody else to test that out...

That's a very good and timely question, Major T! That calls for a story about Elude-use, and my changing use of it.

SR was painful in many respects, but mostly by comparing it to others I saw throughout the game. In other words, I was willing to live with my debt, but when I teamed with others, they seemd to have more advantages. This includes Invul, Regen, and many Blasters with Nova and similar powers. In larger teams, the enemies died faster than I could get to them with super-speed!

Elude changed all of this. It enabled me to break my mental block of avoiding purple-cons, and willing to test exactly how much I could handle. Before it was even made perma, I used it all the time. I finally had a power that, for a limited time, helped me to feel strong and able to hold my own with the others.

I scaled back my use of it in teams, especially when someone present had Recovery Aura or Speed Boost, etc. partly because most of the time I was with a healer, and it gave the healer something to do. If I went Elude all the time, the healer might get bored, something I can sympathize with when I play CRM. So I would take a look at the team construction and choose whether or not to use Elude.

As I set my mission slider higher, I realized that only slotting Focused Fighting with one slot the entire time made it only marginally-useful at these higher levels, but sometimes it was enough. I started to experiment with not using Elude while solo, and sometimes not even using Focused Fighting. The major issue of course, is downtime. Would I have less downtime waiting to heal my wounds, or less downtime recovering END when Elude wore off? This is one of the issues that should have more weight in the Dev testing, in my opinion. Travel powers, END recovery, all of these tools that have proven valuable is all centered around the idea of reducing downtime so we can be active and doing something fun. Not that we need to be permanently on the go, but the first question on every Dev's lips should be, "If we incorporate this change, what will it do to their downtime?"

As might grow obvious as I post my adventures at these higher levels (coming soon!), you could probably pick out from my descriptions the point where I start using Elude more as a panic button, saving it for bosses and AVs, or purple-cons only. In teams I only pop off Elude if I am the Tank-substitute, and only if a healer or force fielder is not in the house (I love bubbles!).

Solo, I always try to see how far I can go without it now, and often use Focused Fighting, which is still only one-slotted, to this day, so I obviously did not prepare for an alternate ability to use toggles solo-style. Although my build in unconventional, because I built that way from day one, before the issue update that changed Elude. I had always front-loaded my offense first.

With the introduction of PvP and the porposed changes, this is more "important" than ever before, even for those who will not participate in PvP, because the current direction look slike the Devs are not going to be able to fully separate PvE from PvP power changes (or they have chosen not to).

My expectation was that I would only be able to survive the arena using Elude at the higher levels, as the rest of the defenses for SR are usually not enough, and the fact that most of the PvP-lovers are going to have anywhere from 1 to 40 more HOs than I do. There are at least three different ways to take out an SR, one of which is just slotting accuracy. I have no hard data firsthand, because I have been too busy playing the actual game, or posting on the boards, or doing stuff in real life, to go to the Test Server.

Entry 34

As soon as I log on, a friend sees me and invites me to a Hamidon raid. I've never even been to the Hive before! I decide this is an experience I can't pass up. I'm basically running blind, but I get close to the center, right next to a couple heroes. Somehow, the enemy still sees me and takes me out, but not the people around me. Someone comes by to rez me, but it turns out there were still a couple bad guys nearby, and they take me out immediately, then they take out my would-be rescuer! Great. Next, I join with a teleporter, and end up in a group of myself, another two scrappers, a tank, and a defender. I have to auto-fly after the team leader under her Group Fly power. Talk about crowded! I lose count of how many heroes are here. I spot a great number of people I have met since the game started, including a couple others still on my friends list (even though that can be awkward sometimes, if I say hi to someone whom I haven't teamed with in over six months!). I remember reading an old tactic of Blasters shooting for hours at Mitochondria with their attacks all slotted for range, but things are different now. Everyone jumps in, trying to take the Mitos out one at a time. I'm fairly useless here, overall. I can't really remain aloft and attack at the same time. I manage to get one kick in against a Mito, and am rewarded with instant death. Three strikes! The team leader offers me to be a sidekick. It quickly becomes apparent that I am just along for the ride. Tankers can draw aggro, Blasters can blast away, controllers and Defender can Hold, buff, De-Buff, Heal, etc., but Scrappers do not have a big role to play. The only way I could make a difference is if I could fly on my own, and it's a little too late in my build to go revisit that, not just for a raid, anyway.

I suppose it makes sense, in a way. Scrappers are the best suited, by design, to solo the game, so the better opportunity for others to play a greater role in the Hamidon content doesn't seem too unfair. But for an end game, I always thought there should be a role for everybody, regardless. I'm hoping that eventually, smaller groups will be able to take Hamidon on, because right now it's just a big pile-on. A smaller group of 20 to 40 would have to be smarter, more careful, and each would of necessity have a bigger role. Unless Hami spawns faster, or there are multiple Hive zones for different groups to go to, I don't think this will change anytime soon. Everyone seems content to farm him continuously until they have filled out their enhancement slots. I'm pretty sure I have don't enough patience to do something like that 50+ more times, not when my participation is so limited that I'm basically a watching bystander. That's part of the reason I can't stand around to power-level. I play the game to DO something, not to stand around. It's just not very hero-like. I'm hoping that the Devs will introduce higher levels by next year, and the ability for us to earn higher Enhancements that will make the Hamidon-Origin Enhancements (or HOs, as they are amusingly called), obsolete. I've got a wish to participate in the PvP, just for the experience, but from what I can tell, I might not have a fair chance against opponents loaded up with HOs (I'm sorry, but that sentence even reads funny. "Hey! He's got seven HOs! I only have one HO! No fair!"). I have no clue what the endgame for other MMORGs is like, but this one is personally un-fulfilling for me. Maybe I would enjoy it more with any other Archetype?

Someone invites me to a level 44 Respec, but there is not much communication as I head over to the Rikti Crash site. I draft a healer friend of mine as the leadership keeps switching between two people. One wants to draft more than the five people we have, the other instructs everyone to go set their mission slider difficulty level lower. I explain that the mission difficulty will be set by the owner of the mission, the rest is irrelevant. He asks again for everyone to reset their slider. I have no clue how people get to level 44 like this. I explain this is a waste of time, and my friend and I quit. He sends me a tell, saying they're ready to go. No thanks. Then he tries to say I wasted his time. Now at this point, I could go on a multi-message rage telling him exactly how many things he has done wrong, but I decide to be polite. I say, "I can't have wasted your time, you never even started the TF. Please have a nice day, I'm going to do something different while I play. thanks"

Then I get together with Tallrick, and he and Kisume and I go to town on the bad guys! We hit four or five missions, both Kisume and I with our sliders set on Invincible. We make toast of anything and everything in our path. At this point, I'm starting to think the Devs need to put more work into this, from this standpoint: Invincible can be more challenging on a solo level, but what about a true "Group Invincible" mission? So when two or more people team up with Invincible as a chosen group setting or something, the mission can be even more challenging. I may be asking for too much, because not only am I a Scrapper, but I'm also Super Reflexes, so I'm very used to not even getting hit these days. Maybe I shouldn't ask for harder things to do until I've gotten to level 30 or 40 with a different Archetype. As things stand, however, level 47 is a new plateau for my character, and I don't think I'm going to die normally (unless I go on more Hami raids!).

I vote we wait until they finish building the first hotel orbiting the Earth, and we hold it there. That gives us time to plan...

Entry 33

New night, same city! I Board Train to rescue ghosts, of all things. I've set my slider to Invincible, but I'm getting almost all yellows. The Boss is a red Master Illusionist, which is challenging, but not deathly-so. I've got Respites! I see an Iron Strongman walking along the limb of a tree before he leaps onto the side of a hill. If he can do it, so can I! I spend a few minutes trying it, and the Strongman comes back down. Never mind, I suck at this. I can't even hop a tree over the wall in Perez. I bag it and knock out the Strongman. Sure, he can climb a tree, but I'm not the one who's going to prison...

I'm still getting blind invites. What is up with that? If it's a familiar name that's one thing, but really, if you're not LFG, how many people above level 40 still do the equivalent of cold-calling people in the game? If I have to go off the Team Seek menu to find people, I always try to chat to them and ask for help, or see if they're interested in what I'm doing. Unless I'm in a whimsical moment, does anybody at level 47 actually expect me to just join their team out of the blue?

I come out of the mission and chat for a few minutes with a friend, then nature calls, so I go away from keyboard (afk). My next mission I accept is a hunt 50 - no, it's 65(!)- Carnies. I'm just at the entrance to the Sky City tram. I come back from my bio break and I'm face-down! At the tram! The damage report says at least one Harlequin and Illusionist ganged up on me. How the police drones didn't catch them as they approached, I'll never know. I use an Awaken, and as soon as I wake up, they're back. Held, hit, and down. Two Harlequins and an Illusionist, and I think they took out a nearby hero too. Gah! Not the most auspicious start for being so new to level 47. I'm used to ambushes almost immediately, this one took a few minutes before it started. Is this a change in the programming, or did it just take a little extra time for them to reach me at the tram? Anyway, it sucks to be me. They try to get me outside the hospital too, but the drones get them this time. Figures. Just when I was ready to extract my revenge! This is actually only the second time I have ever experienced an afk death. I'd like to say it'll be the last, but when nature calls... well, you know. (Except for the power gamers, who wear catheters.)

I work off almost all of my debt in one mission, a Board Train DE mission. I finally get orange-cons, but they're all Boulders, with a handful of red-conning Granites. They can't stand up to my smashing damage at all. My SR luck runs out at the weirdest, most unpredictable times. I've popped a Defense Inspiration, but my Elude just wore off. Despite all my defenses, two little yellow-conning Rubbles get off two shots each on me in a row, the last one even as he's dropping to the dirt. No where near enough damage to take me out, but it's odd to see the little buggers actually connecting to me, even if they are yellow cons. I'm also missing a lot. I blame it all on the Rubbles. They're so short, my kicks are going over their heads from habit. Yeah, that's the reason. Now why am I missing the house-size Granites...?

I get a tell later that is done right, asking if I'd like to take out a 47 AV, but it comes right at midnight my time, and I made a rule to log by then (can't be late for work!). Which sort of stinks, because I enjoy helping people out with AVs, but that's life. I know some people make excuses and brush people off, but if I had the time to do a TF or an AV, I'm nowhere near bored of them yet. If I'm out of time, though, I have to say I'm out of time.

Don't worry about derailments, Captain Neem, this is an interactive forum, so all comments are welcome. If I think we get too derailed I just go back to my journal entries only, and not comment on anything else.

I think you have a legitimate point, and I do understand that frustration. No one is trying to pretend they didn't goof, too. If you'll permit an observation coming from a first-timer, it does appear to me that some of the nerf-dread (Man, is that a fun phrase! Sounds like the name of my next character...) is self-inflicted. Meaning, of the attempts that the Devs have made at balancing so far, the result has been like a deer hearing a strange noise in the woods. The Scrappers and some others all have their ears cocked to check and make sure nobody is pointing a gun in their direction. Which is understandable, but it has perhaps made some of the community a little too skittish, and they are panicking about non-existent nerfs and reading too much ill-intent into the Devs' plans. To the point that they are inventing and posting things from their own nightmares that the Devs have never even considered. And you really shouldn't be giving them any additional ideas... heh

It is my opinion that if they calm down a teensy bit and let things unfold, the changes will not be as drastic as they fear. That is my hope anyway. If people would make an attempt to not be so afraid of what might happen to their beloved characters in the future, they might have more time and ability to enjoy what they get out of the characters now. I certainly sympathize with someone who has played a character for eight or nine months only to have it changed on him. I even feel a slight twinge of jealousy that I was dying with my SR Scrapper while Blasters were "broken" and "uber," or Regens were unstoppable, since that's always fun for a day! I must also admit that I am crossing my fingers in the hope they don't make certain changes which I have heard them talk about. But I'm having so much fun with other aspects of the game, and I've seen quite a few good changes in the pipeline, I don't dwell on those things. It could just be that since this is my first MMORG, I'm still in some kind of honeymoon phase. Which is kinda cool, because from what I hear, a honeymoon doesn't normally last for ten months...

We know for certain that the Devs read these forums more than others do in most other games, and there has been a very vocal crowd, some of whom have been very eloquent in explaining why a particular set does not need to be nerf pounded again (I am really liking these terms for some reason). With the recent mistake, hopefully this will be exactly what the doctor has ordered, and they will be evaluating much more closely the true effects of their changes. I suppose I am calling for constant vigilance to defend what is partly your game now, but in a manner that is friendly and cooperative with the people who are working hard to not only bring us the game, but are working nonstop to try to make it more enjoyable for us as well. I am enjoying this entire experience very much, and want to see the whole "family" get along, even during disagreements. So by all means, don't accept unjustified nerfs lying down, but try to be nice about it while you're doing it. I know I've already had to eat too many of my own words in life so far, I'm making my own effort to make them "sweeter" as I go these days... just in case.

Special MMORG Commentary

I have never done a rant before, and I think to have a complete MMORG experience, I should be at least try it once. So here goes:

/ranton

One thing I have noticed about my experience is that the message boards themselves have become a large part of the experience, and not just because of the journal itself. You basically get an experience out of whatever you put in, so the more and better things you do on the boards, the better your experience will be, and it might even spillover into your enjoyment of the game. My original plans were to only comment on the game itself, and confine my comments to that aspect of my experience, but I have found that the boards are related, and worthy of mention. One thing in particular grabbed my attention, when Issue 4 was being tested. Statesman came out and declared that a bug disabled the damage combat modifiers in one of their testing branches, throwing everything out of whack. Board members caught the mistake from a posted video capture, and notified the Devs. The Devs checked, realized the players were right and there was a bug, and Statesman immediately issued an apology for the slip-up and thanked the community, and put a hold on changes until he was sure they had them right. This is the right and responsible thing to do in real life, in every workplace, in every situation. One, if you're wrong, admit it and move on. Two, if something is not working right, check it and recheck it until you are confident that it is a good product. Nobody is happy when a mistake is made, but we should be very happy they fixed it. I know when somebody messes up my day, I'm going to have much more respect if they make things right with me. Too many people will shrug and walk away or actually make things worse.

So imagine my surprise to see people posting that the Devs screwed everything up, that they don't know their own game, and criticizing them left and right. The thing is, they came right out and admitted they weren't playing the same game because of the bugged data. Let me say this: if I have son and he makes a mistake, am I going to respect him for coming to me and allow him to set things right, or am I going to lord it over him that he was wrong, when he already knows it? With that attitude, all I would guarantee is that my son covers up his mistakes and never talks to me about anything important ever again. People are human and they make mistakes. I've been to a KFC, and they told me they were out of original recipe chicken. I've worked at a theatre where the assistant manager forgot to order enough popcorn or soda, and I had to tell people we didn't have Coke, and we didn't have popcorn!?! Thankfully, not at the same time. It happens. As unbelievable as it seems. I've seen far worse, for less excuse. I've given a parking validation stub to a parking attendant so I wouldn't have to pay an extra parking fee, and he tried to charge me anyway, until I pointed out it was marked properly, he just had to turn it over and look at it. His entire purpose in life, is entire reason for being paid, was sitting there and looking for the mark, and he missed even that. People mess up. When I do it, I apologize and blame it on my mind by saying, "Sorry, I just had a brain fart." I've even messed up on simple things, and people have been incredulous that I missed it, partly because I'm usually pretty good at that sort of thing. Sometimes everyone misses the same thing. It's not right to yell at them for that. Are you perfect?

I suspect the main source for this poor behavior is impatience with getting an update to the game. An upgrade that the company includes with your subscription and does not charge you for, as other game companies often do. This is short-sighted. In a choice between having their pie now and having it be rotten, they instead are told they will be given fresh pie in a couple more days, and they throw a tantrum. The mistake only got to the Test Server, and didn't even make it as far as the Training Room. Sometimes the best things in the world happen because of a mistake. In this case, the best thing happened for the CoH gaming community that tested the changes, and kept alert in an interaction with the Devs. The players were able to point out a bug that the Devs had missed. Do you have any idea how huge that is? Any idea how much more willing everyone on the Dev team will be to listen to the next person who chimes in and says, "Hey, I've tested this and something doesn't seem right..."? They are going to share more information with us in the future, and listen to us, their customers, which is exactly how a prospering company is supposed to behave. We are practically guaranteed to have a greater say in the development of this game we love, and have earned the respect and appreciation of the company, and when was the last time you saw that kind of attitude from Microsoft or IBM, or a politician, or even your own parents, maybe?

To those that say you were presented with a rosy picture of constant updates that work perfectly and you are upset that you are not getting that... I'm new to this entire environment, but I'm old enough to know things never turn out that way in any environment, especially with a new product. Optimistic people always present you with their dreams and what they want and hope to have happen, but you're the one who decides if you're going to be pissed if reality turns out different from your expectations. Life is much happier when you simply accept that reality will not always conform to what you expect, and if you accept what comes your way without artificially adding a negative emotion to the event, everything will be better and happier for all involved, including yourself.

I'm not a mindless brown-noser fanboy who thinks the Devs are infallible. I'm someone who thinks people were working with skewed data, which skewed the discussion, which should not be a source of anger when the truth was finally revealed. I'm someone who thinks if you can't screw up in a test environment specifically designed for the purpose of testing things out, where in the world can you screw up? I'm someone who enjoys the game, looks forward to the expansions when they actually come out, does other things with my time if I feel the game is not where I want it to be to keep playing currently, and infinitely prefers for something to be done right the first time than to be handed a pile of crap. This mistake was spotted and fixed, and was not handed to us live, or even on Test. The vast majority of the community, from what I have seen, feels the same way, and my request for others to take it easy and try not to be so upset is restricted to a very small number, and I am happy about that. I am actually proud to be a part of this community, something I did not expect to happen. I appreciate the honesty of people who admit when they are wrong, and I am grateful for people who clean up after their own mess, as I already handle enough crap in my life. I thank you for this game, I thank you for your constant hard work, I forgive your for your mistakes, I hope people will be gracious enough to forgive me for mine, and I thank the community here for their fellowship.

/rantoff

We now return you to your regularly scheduled journal.

Entry 32

The next Carnie mission has me boarding a train to save six people, and the first two look like twin bald men. One of them talks about how his parents made him angry and he felt all this rage... the guy looks 42! I'm prancing around without Elude, wondering if the game is broke. I stop to check my mission slider level - yup, still on unyielding. Do I need to put it one notch higher now? I'm still relatively lousy at finding things on a map, so these board train missions have me clearing almost the whole map before I can find the sixth hostage. I get overconfident from all of this easy stuff, and ignore my health when it gets low. Dirt nap! Serves me right, how hard can it be to pop a stupid green Respite anyway? This is actually part of the SR scrapper mentality, and it fits me well, since I'm from Las Vegas. We COULD pop a Respite... but let's see what the percentages say on whether we get hit again or not, shall we? I can't tell you how many times I could have saved myself with an inspiration, but I kept on going, just to see how good my reflexes were. I probably won't tempt fate like this with any other character, but hey, that's what Super Reflexes are there for in the first place! And the occasional death keeps me humble, too. I may flirt like crazy, but at least I don't run around boasting about how uber I am. If I haven't gotten knocked out in two levels, though, there's a danger of that, so I was about due, by my way of thinking.

As a matter of fact, I am so bad with this, I decide to use my one Awaken to come up for air, even though there are two Carnies left, and one of them has not moved from where she has been standing, feet spread apart right above me (ah, the view...). I wake up disoriented, hit the ‘S' button to stumble awkwardly backward, and take my chances as the two Carnies sometimes hit me, but more often miss. Then I hit Hasten, Conserve Power, and Elude, and kick their tails in three seconds. Now that's a super hero!

The final citizen is also a bald man like the other five before him, and he is the last place on the map (I know they're always in the last place you look, because after you find them, you're not looking anymore, but this was literally the last place left on the map!).

SoupNazi is still online, it's like he never logs! We end up in the same place at the same time, and Soup asks if there's room for him. Considering there are no other teammates, sure! We get a Banished Pantheon mission. I'm groaning about all the time I wasted in Dark Astoria working on the spirit badge, afraid we'd never get more missions involving them again. Soup knows his way around the game, so I defer to him, and he teaches me how to herd. I'd read about tanks herding, and thought you needed a good Taunt, but Soup says I can do it with SR. Who says an old dog can't learn new tricks? He's a Defender with Kinetics, and Siphon Power and Speed Boost alone make us virtually invincible. We clean the clock of every zombie, skeleton, spirit, what have you, and make it look easy. If this keeps up, I'm definitely going to have to move up my mission difficulty slider, because we are literally too good at this together. It's after 2:00 a.m., and I absolutely have to log! Lemme check... yup, the game is still addictive!

I finally get a wolf mission! It's all yellows, no orange-conning wolves at all. No friends online, nobody looking for a team, so I go do a famed wolf mission solo. Bwah-ha-hah! It's kind of easy, but the wolves are fun to look at, and their howls and belches are great. I get xp as I exit the mission, and just happen to level up to 47 while the screen is taking me from the mission to a Portal room. I miss the animation

I take Focused Accuracy (FA) and test it out, and since I detest missing, it seems this power is tailor-made for me. I'm not sure if I'll take out the Accuracy Enhancements from my attacks or not. I get an invite from someone who needs help with Anti-Matter, so I get SoupNazi, and we go hand him his butt. He actually commits suicide in front of us, which puzzles me for a second, because I've never seen that before. Next, I get another timed wolf mission, and the four of us tear it up, splitting into groups of two, it's so easy. That's it, I go change my settings to Invincible!
I take a Malta mission next, jump into a group of nine red Maltas, I have Focused Accuracy and Focus Chi on, go into an Eagles Claw, and... miss! Ah well, so FA isn't perfect!

I'm hunting Maltas, but I stop to see if I can take out a level 49 Fake Nemesis without Elude on. It works, but I chase a Colonel near a group of Possessed Scientists. I drop the Colonel, whose Vengeance affects the scientists, and when I run at them, they perma-hold me. I'm dead meat before I can activate either Practiced Brawler or Elude. Guess I shouldn't have charged in on them after all. A group takes them down while I'm napping, because I stopped to accept a group invite. The team that took out the scientists also invites me. I haven't had Team Seek on all night, but I've got invites coming out my ears now! Must be the magic level 47.

I reach the location of the team, and one of the members isn't there yet. "What are you doing?" He asks. "Taking out the Nemesis AV." I chime in, "Actually, I'm just standing around right now, dancing to imaginary music." Any excuse to drag out the emotes! We take out a level 50 "Nemesis?" with very little problem. Then, I gotta log for dinner.

Outside of Journal Commentary

Hey HexEnder, any writer will tell you that praise never gets old! Just ask VickiVee (makes up for the thousands of rejection notices we always get when submitting our work). We need continual positive reinforcement to keep our self-esteem from crumbling! Some wanna-be writers, like me, actually never submit work to be published in a professional environment, because they are not sure they can handle the amount of rejection that comes with the job. It's sort of like being the shy guy who loses out in the bar, because the guy who's a dog is willing to ask a hundred chicks if she'll make out with him, and he's perfectly content to keep going after being told no 99 times, and even slapped in the face more than once. The shy guy is not going to be able to work up enough nerve to ask more than once or twice before he goes away, dejected, convinced he will never succeed. (I think I may have just inadvertantly written that to be a successful writer, you need to be a dog and willing to sleep with anybody...)

Keep in mind that these are ideas I wrote down months back; I am not revising them as I go, I am presenting my story as it happened. So my thoughts are "dated" thoughts that represent what I was thinking at the time, and will not normally mention current events. In the case of the search feature, I've posted suggestions in other places on the boards about this idea before, but I've seen it mirrored by several others, so it's not like I can take any special credit for its implementation. Logging into the Test Server though, you have living proof that the Devs do indeed read the boards and take into account our ideas, and listen to the suggestons of players on how to improve the game. It's also highly possible that they were already examinig the search feature and how to improve it on their own, but I suspect they designed it and turned it loose, and it was comments on the boards over time that got them to thinking about it again. Just as someone else should always "proof" your work for spelling errors, because as the originator you love your work and may not see the errors, game developers can fall into the trap of designing something good and not examining it further, not realizing or noticing that it could actually be great, unless someone else steps in to point out a new possiblity to them.

I think I may have written down in a later account my observation of that search feature when I took one of my characters onto the test server, but that's several posts away still. Keep reading! And keep showering me with praise, my ego is not big enough yet. I can still fit my head through the double entry doors at work...

Here's a longer post than usual, someone let me know if it's too long to read in one sitting. I'm posting more often now, so hopefully those of you who are always impatient for the next segment are a little more satiated (stop calling my house at night asking for the next installment!).

Entry 31

The next mission for Martial Master takes place in a Carnie dance club. It's so cool I hang out for a while after the mission is complete! Hmm, I could have used some dance partners on this one. I haven't upgraded enhancements in a while, so I head to the store to experiment. Usually I just plug things in, but this time, I take my time. I learn a new thing - you can combine similar enhancements in the top tray. Granted, I think it tells you that you can somewhere on the screen, but who stops to read these days anyway?

Nemesis himself kicks my butt with my current build, so I head back to the store and forget the experiments, I go all-out on enhancements. Next time I try him on, things will be different! I also try a neat trick that's just pain fun. I have five damage enhancements in my Enhancement Inventory tray, and I click on one from my Eagles Claw. It comes down into the addition bar. Next, I click on a Damage Enhancement from the Inventory tray, but I don't click ‘Combine!' Instead, I click on the next Damage Enhancement in my Inventory Tray, and the next, and the next. It makes a funny sound (the normal sound it makes when loading into the addition slot, but interrupted by the beginning of another), while all the red enhancements are marching up and down from the addition bar to the Enhancement tray, back and forth, reminiscent of a Marx Brothers movie! The previous Enhancement goes back to its place on the enhancement Inventory tray automatically, and I make my Enhancements dance! When I get it going fast enough, it sounds like crickets chirping. I don't know if I have described this well enough, but I was like a cat playing with yarn all of a sudden. I can't wait to try it with a full tray of ten enhancements next.

I can't find anyone looking for a group, so I log off for the evening.

The next time I can play, I immediately I send a request asking for anyone near level 46, if they want to take on the Nemesis AV. I get a tell from Fire Shot, who tells me he loves my thread on the message boards. I'm famous! But not famous enough to attract any takers for the AV (Fire Shot was a little too far down in level at the time, I'm assuming). I run off for Perez Park instead, to take out Knight Blue 1-0.

This has been the biggest problem in the game, really. I need a team to clear the mission, but it doesn't do me much good to find a bunch of lower-level heroes, and that's all that shows up on my screen. Often, I resort to sending polite tells to others; their LFG button is not on, but many of them understand the help needed with AVs, and half the time people will stop and help you out for one mission. No luck tonight. I just hope I don't have to carry this one around as long as I carried Madame of Mystery and Anti-Matter. I've finally grown to enjoy teaming as much as - if not more than - solo play, but there's no one available to team. It happens a ton. I'm not sure if people are just isolating themselves at the upper levels to "who you know," or if there are simply not enough people on the servers during the time of day when I play. I'm hoping when I go back to my alts I can hook each one of them up with an sg that has two or three people who play fairly constantly. I'm not a power gamer by any means, but I usually play two or three times a week, and my regular Friends list for MM is dark more often than lit up with the blue showing somebody's online.

In the mission, I teleport over to a Sapper and launch an attack. It looks really cool as I hit him with an Eagles Claw and then a Crane Kick, because I'm still floating, due to the temporary hover effect from a TP. I even end up one level lower as the hover effect wears off. Elude isn't being used as much, but I usually kick it on when I get near a Sapper. Irritating little buggers. My next mission from Crimson talks about Nemesis meeting with Malta, and some of Nemesis' soldiers thinking he is dead. That would have been a lot more fun if I could have found a team to take out Nemesis in my other mission first. I would have had personal intel that the bad guys didn't know for a change, and it wouldn't have come to me from my contacts.

The next night, I find someone near my level, but he's tired of debt, so he doesn't want to do an AV. He quits immediately. I'm guessing he's had some bad experiences, because half the time I don't die on AV missions. It's Saturday night, a medium load on Freedom server, so I put out my request again. No bites at all. I think I can safely say that there is a problem getting teams together. Considering most of the other MMORGs out there seem geared towards team play, I have enjoyed this opportunity the most, since I need the ability to casual play. I will never be a power gamer, and for four nights in a row, I've been on the lookout for teaming opportunities (yeah, I'm on four nights in a row, but for a very small amount of time! So I'm not a power gamer. I'm not!). But carrying a mission around for weeks at a time, with no people willing to help out, as I did for Anti-Matter and M. of Mystery, leads me to believe that we need a re-working of the team seek function. Maybe a separate menu area that serves as an in-game bulletin board, so that people who want to team, but don't want to do kora or wolf-farming missions will know ahead of time what type of group they are joining. I know I could easily set up a "Team Needed" each time, listing an AV mish, plus other missions for after. Other players would be able to find task forces and respec trial allies. As it is, I am left with a little frustration, just hoping to find a team someday in the next couple weeks. I decide to test how long it takes to find a team. I put on my Team Seek at 9:20 p.m., waiting to see how long until somebody bites. A red-conning level 48 Nemesis Colonel whittles my health down while I'm tackling his minions, so I actually punch Elude up... and I nail him in one shot form a Critical Hit Eagles Claw. Go figure. And shouldn't "Eagles" have an apostrophe in it? Shouldn't it be "Eagle's Claw?" Or is my attack imitating multiple eagles somehow?

I do some grinding in PI for a while, and it's pleasant. I've got an arrest 50 Carnie mission, but I keep running across orange and red Fake Nemesis and gunslingers, and it's hard to pass them up. A blue-conning Ring Mistress disappears before I can get there in one of the area "respawns" that seems to happen quite a bit, I'm not sure about the frequency of it. They are replaced by about 8 grey Rikti. Ptheh! While running around, I jump into the middle of a bunch of garbage cans and get stuck. I have to teleport to get out of the garbage. Sigh. The interesting ways of this game are simultaneously weird and amusing. I finish the mission in a leisurely fashion, then immediately go back to the contact. Another arrest 50 mission. Gah! Another tromp around PI, back to the contact, it's almost 11:00 p.m., and... another arrest 50 Carnies! PI gets more and more crowded, but not a single team invite. I check the find Team button a couple more times, no luck. My next mission gives me a purple Nemesis and a purple Malta, who send me to the hospital. Now I have two missions I need help to finish. I log out about 12:45 a.m., without having a team the whole night.

Sunday night, I log on around 6:30 p.m., figuring maybe a different time will yield better results. I don't know if that's the case, but I hit jackpot! Two friends, SoupNazi and Lady Quasar are both online. Midnight Rambler sends me a tell from nowhere, saying he likes the thread I write, so he gets an invite, ‘natch. Sir Jabin gets an invite from the LFT menu, and someone else asks for me to invite Nocturnia. Hot dog! We go after Nemesis again, and what a difference it makes! Nothing slows us down, we've got two people who can Nova, and the mission is over so fast I'm dizzy.

We are joined by others, Ms. Moxie and AmaDlogi, and go on to tackle another mission. It's an old one, too easy for us, so Lady Quasar goes out to change it to Invincible. Gah! We have a few deaths this time. We start mixing up a couple strategies, with SoupNazi pulling sometimes, other times I grab aggro to give cover for a Nova. Fun! I teleport through an awkward doorway and start taking on a small mob, and I catch Midnight Rambler out of the corner of my eye, wading into another group. It has a purple boss, and he's down in seconds! Poor guy, he's MA/SR like me, but he's doing a toggle build, no Elude. SoupNazi can't believe it, one of his first questions is why he doesn't have Elude. Midnight Rambler may get it on Respec. After the times he got taken out and I didn't, he might have already done it. But everybody played well. There were a couple times I got to experience what I read off the boards from other SR scrappers, as I'm plugging away, and realize I'm actually the only one left standing, and everyone else is telling me to run away before it's too late. Sometimes it was a Warhulk exploding, others it was from a boss out of our sight drawing aggro on one of us. This has been the first time in a while I've been on a full team of eight, and it was a blast. Most of us log out for dinner after three missions.

I'm enjoying MM's adventures so much I can't stay away. I log back on after dinner, with a load of laundry in the washer and one in the dryer. SoupNazi is (still?) on! I decide to go solo for a little while, since we did such a big team-up earlier. I take on the Carnies, watching with glee as my Crane Kick sends one of them flying off the stairs. That never gets old! I try to only do that when I'm solo, though (some people don't like the Knockback effect on teams). Another one tries to run away and jump down to freedom, but I know better than to auto-follow. I use my Super Speed to get ahead of her just as she jumps, and I Storm Kick her into unconsciousness. I'm just congratulating myself on my superior skills, when I mis-time my jump and get stuck in-between two chairs...

[ QUOTE ]
A little suggestion for your writing times, if you stick Elude on Auto-Fire, you might have a better chance of being standing when you come back.

[/ QUOTE ]

But... that would require a little planning and thought. I don't do that sort of thing! I will just start doing what all aspiring writers do, and hang out by the train, talking out loud to myself...

What's bad, Major_T, is when I think I'm safe, and I have accepted a new mission, and I stop to type. I go back to the game, and I'm face-down! Gah! Writing is so hazardous to your health after all. I proved all my teachers wrong!

Entry 30


It's been five days since I've been able to log on, so if I want to make my one-bubble-a-day goal, I've got to make up some time tonight! Rikti missions always give a lot of xp, so I enjoy them. The red-conning Chief Soldiers sometimes can hit me for substantial amounts of damage, which make it more of a risk to me than usual. Once, a Mentalist gets me before I can click on Practiced Brawler, and he chain holds me. Wow, this hasn't happened in over six months! My defenses are good enough that they whittle me down to about 10 hit points, no joke, until the chain sleeps wear off and I hit PB, then Elude, then about three heal inspirations! Then I kick their butts, ‘natch. I find it hilarious that an unconscious super hero can be asleep on his feet, yet still dodge attacks from half a dozen enemies. Talk about giving you an ego complex...

This mission has Rikti Magus in it, and I find one of them dancing with an Advanced Drone! Seems like some civilizations have just as many confusions about their - shall we call it orientation? - as we do. Very amusing. I wish I had a way to record a video of it, the Rikti can really cut a rug. Maybe when I get a new computer.

On my way to sell, there are a couple of guys with health in the red being chased by a purple Warhulk. I ask the highest level one, a 47 blaster, if he needs help, and he actually stops to ask what I am before he accepts. But he says sure, and I hit Elude and polish off the Warhulk quickly. I run into less of that on the streets nowadays, but whenever I see it, I think of Spider-Man swinging by on his webs, and noticing another hero in trouble. Sometimes, a little tune goes off in my head, "Here I come, to save the daaay..."

So Crey's Folly is a Nemesis mission, but something hits me for the very first time, even though I have the Fake badge already: doesn't the Nemesis Staff look like a big electronic lollipop? I know I can't be the first person to make the observation, but this was the first time I actually slowed down to observe it closely. With Elude on, I actually have time to stop and smell the roses, so to speak. I've got a new trick to get to Crey's Folly now that we have Striga Isle. If I'm coming right out of Peregrine Island, I'll head into Striga, since it's so close, turn right around and exit Striga to Independence Port. The tram is close there, and I hop it to Brickstown.

I actually get knocked out by a chain-held Rikti attack, and figure I better put my PB back on auto-fire again. The mission completion xp alone gets me out of debt, since it is the completion of a story line. Then I get to the end of the Council/Nemesis storyline, and come face-to-face with Nosferatu. It's a stalemate, as he can't hurt me much, but he regenerates too fast for me to take him out. He casts Tenebrous Tentacles on me, but with my Practiced Brawler, I can actually run away still. It looks kind of cool, but I'm taking damage! I look for a team, but there's only one level 47 guy lft. It usually ends up this way, and I send tells to others near our level who aren't LFT, and explain what's up. The people are so cool, I have six join me to come help me out. When they get to the mish, I teleport them to the elevator right below Nosferatu, and it takes some of them a while to arrive. By the time I teleport the last one there and go up, four of them are already whomping on Nosferatu. He falls down before I even get there, with two of our team still down below. I joke-complain about not even getting a hit in that time, to a couple of laughs. I manage to thank them for the help just a second before the team disintegrates and they all quit. I appreciate the help with the AV, but it seems like nobody wants to hang and do missions anymore.

Something weird happens on the next mission. I run and jump at a Zeus-class Titan, and I stay in the air. It's like I'm standing on an invisible platform. I take a couple of screen shots, just because it looks so interesting. I fill in five bubbles tonight, and level to 46. I level inside a mission, which is how I try to plan it each time. When I was doing the cape mission, I forget if it was with MM or with Ultra Meltdown, I kept failing, whether I had someone with me or not. But when I went in solo, and leveled up while in it, it was suddenly much easier! Enough for me to save the time capsule before all the villains pounded it into mush again, anyway. So ever since, if I notice I'm getting close, I head for an indoor mission. When it hits, huzzah!

Since I'm in King's Row, I head over to Blue Steel to train up. I love the music for that part of the neighborhood, and I like the grandiose design of the steps leading up to him. (It could be because the Paragon City Police Department is right there too, but I doubt it). The coin behind him says "Birthplace of Tomorrow, 1823." I train up and put a slot in Dodge, and two slots in Focus Chi, so I can add a couple of to-hit buffs. I had it that way once before a Respec, and it really made a difference. I try to run one more mission, but a Rikti Mentalist freezes me a split second before my PB goes off, and four others send me to the hospital. Before I log... jello!

Entry 29

There seem to be plateaus in the game. For instance, I hit level 45, and it is like there is a qualitative difference in the "upgrade" of my ability to fight, versus, say training up from 42 to 43 or 43 to 44. As weird as it is to believe, the missions that have been set on Unyielding (since they introduced the slider) now seem almost as easy as the original default indoor missions I was sleep-walking through in the beginning. I didn't even add in enhancements to the three new slots that I earned right away. I used to have to run Elude constantly, and now I only run it about half the time. I even took Practiced Brawler off auto-fire, since I usually end up with one Resolve or Break Free available when I need it. Plus, my defenses are so high, most of those attacks don't even connect. The few times I've been thrown on the ground from Knockback are actually less than the interruptions that PB gave me when I had it on auto! These are just a few of the mild changes that I'm taking note of as I progress. Auto-fire PB was very useful for the longest time, but in this stage, it is actually less useful.


For level 45, I have put one slot for Defense into Agile, a second Recharge into Focus Chi, and a sixth Recharge into Conserve Power. I was going to leave that at 5, but since I have a toggle-drop Elude thing going on, CP is the perfect balance to it. In intense fighting situations, when Elude wears off, I can punch CP quickly, hit Elude again if I need to, and keep on fighting.

Cobra Strike has also come back in a big way. It is turning out to be useful against Rularru bosses, and against virtually everyone else, now that I am not running Elude so much. It used to be the attack I would lead off with every time, against Mages, Tsoo Sorcerors, etc. Then it hardly seemed worth the time to have it. Now it's saved my butt against the Rularru a number of times. I've also started a little game of always making sure I have at least one blank Inspiration slot, so I can maximize my use of them.

I'm doing a Council mission, and I have to find 9 crates. I run through an air circulation type place just to get rid of the black on the map, and one of the crates is there, as well as a desk with intelligence that gives me the alternate mission completion, with one crate left I no longer need to find. I don't know how the Devs have programmed this, but they're sneaky! Sometimes these are a pain to find, but you start to develop a sixth sense after a while. I'm certainly not going to break any records for the time it takes to level a character, because I tend to stop and write some of the journal as I go now, when I'm solo. I also tend to explore most of the map, beat every villain I can find whether the mission is a ‘complete all' or not, and various other small things that eat up the time, like my Inspiration game. I may go faster with my alts later, but I am still having a blast experiencing as much as I can.

My tendency to stop and type can be interesting as well. I exit the Council mission, and am typing as I hear my character get ambushed by a couple Council members. Fun! Excuse me while I take care of them...

Thanks guys. I'm gonna have to play around with that tonight. I don't like to hit Shift+, but I'm running out of free keys!

PvP already seems to be bringing out some passion doesn't it? Hopefully most of it will get ironed out on Test. I'm too busy playing my blaster right now to go on Test, but all the ruckus about SR has made me curious to see how my main character might perform, since I only have one HO. (That's right, only one HO for me! I'm a one-HO man!)