PW's war journal

11/28/2007

Issue 11 came out today and seems to be a huge hit. An enormous number of new characters have been created (almost all scrappers and tankers to use the new sets) and there were two instances of the Ouroboros zone when I tried it.

I first brought on Police Woman and immediately got awarded the badge that unlocks Ouroboros (presumably due to spending time in RV, completing the Ubelmann arc, doing Portal missions, or a combination of all three) and several costume slot options for the Nemesis, Council and Family style rifles. I briefly checked Wentworths and noted that the new super-rare purple recipes were selling for around 20-60M infl, decided against shopping for anything like that on the first day (though probably there's money to be made here for someone), then ran to Icon to try weapon customization.

The Steel Canyon Icon was packed, probably with people doing the exact same thing, customizing their weapons. I gave Police Woman the "military" style rifle, which most closely resembles the M16M203 that I picture being Police Woman's preferred weapon. This looks kind of small in her hands compared to the ginormous old assault rifle, but is a much more realistic looking gun. After that, nothing would do but for me to run around shooting hapless grey-con mobs in Steel Canyon and Talos, to see the new weapon and the faster AR animations. Burst is noticably faster; not sure I can tell the 0.2 seconds shaved off of the other powers, but I'll take it on faith that it's there. The new Buckshot sound has to go though; whereas before it was a pleasing shotgun blast sound, now it has a puny coughing sound, more like a gun with a silencer.

At that point I decided to try the Ouroboros thing. The badge had come with a temp power that transports you to Ouroboros. Instead of directly teleporting you (like the Pocket D and Base Transporters), it opens up a portal which you have to click on. I'm guessing so this is you can take your friends with you.

[SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]
Ouroboros seems to be set in some Shadow Shard like dimension. The flavor text from the contacts I met was really cool, and hits a lot of the best and brain-boggling memes of time travel -- the contacts act like they know you, then realize you're meeting them for the first time. I'm convinced that Mender Lazarus is intended as a reference to Heinlein's Lazarus Long -- the kilt is a dead giveaway! And I love the introductory missions. I was SO psyched to be fighting 5th Column again! Sure, the Council have almost the exact same weapons and tactics, but the Council feel like moderately lame generic GI Joe type villains, while traveling back in time to fight jackbooted Nazis is pure awesomeness. Also, I went D'OH at the second mission where you fight Contaminated. I spent easily 3 months in Recluse's Victory hunting these guys down 1 at a time to get Isolator. Now you can hunt them down by the score in these missions.
[/SPOILER]

After that I logged in April Fool to try costume options for her too. April Fool is a thugs/TA mastermind, so the costume interface actually allows her to customize three weapons: left pistol, right pistol, and bow. I played with weapon options for a bit, but couldn't decide between the tech-y pistols with glowing laser sights, or simply coloring the regular pistols unnatural neon-green and pink colors to look more like squirt guns. It also wanted to charge me like 2M infamy to change a single costume (April Fool doesn't have costume change tokens banked, unlike Police Woman), so I decided to wait until costume change tokens are awarded before messing with this further.

My SG was starting to log in at this point and the consensus had somehow converged on the brain damaged idea of making new characters based on a theme of heroic monsters. So I created Goshilla, a heroic giant lizard. I once made a villain Goshilla on another server, thinking it would be great fun on mayhem missions, and decided to re-use the idea, as it was the best monster concept I could think of. I had considered making Goshilla some sort of rad defender, but ultimately decided to make a sonic/energy blaster (I just couldn't picture Godzilla being the "healer" for a team; while Godzilla as blapper kinda works). Fire blast might have made sense too, but I liked that all the sonic attacks are emitted from the character's mouth, and sonic blast has some Godzilla-like sound effects. After entering the tutorial, I was immensely gratified to immediately get a tell asking "Are you a radioactive dinosaur?" and being able to reply with, "Yes, yes I am." (Trivia: the name Goshilla is originally from a very, very old Atari game from my misspent youth called Crush, Crumble and Chomp, where you played movie monsters attacking a city.)

Unlike most of my other new characters, I skipped getting the Isolator badge (Contaminated were running scared in Outbreak last night) and just ran through the tutorial and got into Paragon City as quickly as possible. There, Goshilla teamed up with a shovel-wielding zombie, a werewolf wielding a bone, a demon with dual blades, a Frankenstein monster with dual blades, a Bigfoot, a mutated fruit bat, and a hapless human dual blades scrapper that we somehow got as a pickup person. This poor human scrapper, despite being named Silent something, was the only team member who could talk in an intelligible language; the rest of us were making bizarre roaring, shrieking, or grunting sounds. This team was incredibly good cheesy fun and I got Goshilla to level 8 before we broke up for the night.

After that I could no longer resist the impulse to make a dual blades/will power character, so I started Alice Slaughter (an evil, knife-wielding Alice in Wonderland) as a newbie brute on Triumph server. This was actually pretty fun, though I think I enjoyed watching the dual blade animations executed by a knife-wielding little girl in a blue dress and pinafore a little *too* much.

Nice. I also skipped Isolator due to Contaminated being scarce when I rolled my db/wp scrapper Red Heeler.

11/29/2007

I started off playing Amethyst Star, my level 19 warshade on Protector server, where for the past month I've been gradually running a Synapse TF (at the rate of a couple hours a week) with a full team of the Demolition Girls SG. I'm not really a big fan of kheldians (my main character has been level 50 for years, yet Amethyst Star is my highest level kheldian to date) but being on a big team seems to make being a kheldian much nicer due to the synergy bonus from the dark sustenance inherent. The TF finished up this session, defeating Babbage (with considerable outside help) and the Clockwork King. Amethyst gained level 20 (and Stamina!) and got one of the new recipes for TF reward, a level 21 "Dark Watcher's Despair (Recharge/End Reduction)". This is apparently a tohit debuff set recipe. I think warshade blasts actually debuff tohit, so I might be able to make and slot this.

After the TF the team reformed and did a couple more missions. They seemed to believe that on 11/30 everyone would be awarded one costume change token per costume slot (I kind of vaguely remember this was how previous costume change tokens worked) so made a point to unlock the level 20 costume for everyone, and one of the Demo Girls generously gave me a set of Halloween salvage to unlock yet another costume slot. I unlocked costume slots for a few other alts on Liberty to prepare for tomorrow also, and I messed around in the costume interface a bit; I really like the new hairstyles, and plan to use several of them. I particularly like Serrated Sugar, Feisty and Divine.

After the team on Protector broke up, the "monster squad" team on Liberty was just getting started, so I brought on Goshilla (level 9 sonic/energy blaster) and ran through some lowbie missions. At some point a random mind/FF controller started sending us tells asking if he could join our team, and so we invited him; unfortunately, we had established that none of the monsters could really talk, and so I felt a bit guilty that we could only answer his perfectly reasonable queries of "Where's the next mission? What's up now?" with growls, shrieks and roars. That might have scared him off; or maybe he really did "have to gi" in the middle of a mission. Anyway, the monsters mashed their way through a lot of missions and Goshilla got to level 11. I normally suck at playing */nrg blasters, dying repeatedly because I'm used to the more controlly style of */dev blasters, but the fact that nearly everyone else had made a scrapper or tanker (this seems to be the story of I11) allowed me to unleash my sonic blasts while staying very safely behind a wall of meleers. I'm thinking I should take Bonesmasher at level 12, though, so I'll have to integrate more blapping into my playstyle soon.

After the monster team wrapped up, I logged on Spacegirl (level 31 mind/rad controller) and joined a pickup team being led by a level 30 tanker SG-mate for a few missions, and finished up the Alexander Pavlidis story arc to get the Redeemer badge.

12/3/2007

Weekend roundup.

I planned out and executed a free respec for Police Woman (AR/dev), in anticipation of another free respec being awarded next week. Major changes: with the introduction of Ouroboros, I expect to do a lot more exemplaring. Consequently I moved every single enhancement slot to a power I get at level 32 or earlier, so that I can maximally benefit from them; my level 35, 38, 41, 44, 47 and 49 powers are all 1-slotted now. I dropped Sniper Rifle; even with 5xSting of the Manticore it was too slow to use in combat and it's been bad as a pulling power despite the range, due to the knockback. I finally dropped Smoke Grenade; I really used to like this power, but I'm no longer certain it has enough effect to be worth applying any more. To replace these powers I took Maneuvers (putting a LotG +7.5% recharge in it) and Health (currently with a health SO, but I plan to put either a Numina or Miracle unique IO in it, if I ever find one). This gives me all 4 Leadership powers and all 4 Fitness powers, which may be overkill, but they're each pretty nice powers. I moved Vengeance from level 30 to level 35 and moved Taser from level 35 to level 30; since picking Taser up in my previous respec, I've found stacking Beanbag/Taser to be a really good way to control bosses, so wanted it to be earlier. I increased Targeting Drone to 6 slots and Tactics to 5 slots; currently have them loaded with SOs, but planning to get ToHitBuff IO sets to put in them (both were 3-slotted with Cytoskeleton HOs before). Also, another trick I learned was to slot a Celerity: Stealth IO in the default slot of a Prestige Power Sprint; I can now toggle on my prestige power sprint, then immediately turn it off again, to activate stealth for 2 minutes, at no endurance cost and requiring no power picks or enhancement slots (other than the default one I wasn't using anyway).

I burned about 40M influence buying and crafting IOs to help support this build, and still have another 40M or so worth of bids outstanding on Wentworths for more stuff I'd like. I've been hoarding this money long enough, I figure it's about time to spend it.

After this respec, I did a level 50 pickup team for awhile (fighting Malta and Carnies), did the Mender Lazarus TF (fighting 5th Column ... yay! I love shooting those guys), and solo'd the Lars story arc in Striga Isle, which I *think* unlocked Ernesto Hess as a TF contact for me, but I'm not absolutely sure. I got a few badges for doing that story arc with no travel powers and no deaths, also; the Lazarus TF tried to do it with no travel powers, no inspirations, a time limit and 5 or less deaths, but we exceeded the death limit (tons of ambushes) and didn't get any badges as a result.

I found Police Woman still mostly plays the same, but I kind of regret dropping Smoke Grenade (there've been a few times I was just standing around waiting for my team to engage a spawn where I could've been lobbing smoke grenades; it's a debuff, even if it's a small one) and I totally grumbled that the Lars story arc from Ouroboros exemped me down to level 29 (I had targeted my build to be optimal when exemped to level 30, Siren's Call level, and my IO set bonuses shut down at level 29 or below).

Spent some time on Triumph server, where my level 13 fire tanker joined a Cavern of Transcendence trial team. Unfortunately, after waiting ~15-20 mins for the team to fill up to 8, the leader suddenly realized that, hey, none of us have this trial unlocked! Grrr. I gave the leader a few more minutes to try and work out a solution for this, before excusing myself; I hate to bail on a team but it was clear that we just weren't getting anywhere.

I played Alice Slaughter, my newbie dual blades/willpower brute, a lot this weekend. I soloed some, joined a pickup team for awhile, and was a lackey on a Demolition Girls villain team for awhile. This was actually a lot of fun, and Alice got from level 3 to level 12 over several play sessions. I really like the dual blade animations and combo system. Still not quite sure what I think of willpower yet; it's neither wowed me nor gotten in my way. Though in fairness, I've taken more attacks than defenses so far, and so haven't seen all the stuff willpower can do yet. Also, I need to practice Lewis Carroll quotations to give Alice a few more silly catch phrases. "Off with their heads!" is her current battlecry.

Played Spacegirl, my mind/rad controller, on a level 29-31 team for awhile, finishing the Kelly Nemmers story arc in Croatoa. Got a couple weird new recipes: Force Feedback (knockback/damage) and a Gaussian's something, and got Spacegirl to level 32 and Mass Confusion (fun!).

Started a grav/kin controller on Protector to duo with my SO who wanted to try (surprise) a dual blades/willpower scrapper for a bit. We got to level 6 just running missions for our first contact.

The Liberty Force monster squad got together and ran some missions where I played Goshilla, the sonic/energy blaster. I did get level 12 and bonesmasher and am now unwisely running in to bonesmash stuff; this has gotten me in trouble a couple times (e.g. running in to melee a ruin mage, who sets off an earthquake to leave me falling down repeatedly while CoT beat on me). Starting to think I should've taken Amplify instead. We were a full team for much of the night, saving citizens and scaring/confusing pickup team members; got the Spelunker badge and completed a King's Row safeguard. One problem we have is that we're really support-light (typically we have something like 3 tankers, 2-3 scrappers, 1-2 blasters, 1 defender) which works most of the time but occasionally gets us stomped flat (mainly if we over-aggro or get hit by ambushes). This might just be typical of I11 teams though, which I'm sure are all very melee-heavy due to the new powersets.

Also after spending all Sunday afternoon Christmas shopping, I started an ice/rad controller on Triumph, a girl in a Santa suit named Mary Christmas. (I was just so amused by this name that I couldn't resist making someone to use it.) Got to level 2. We'll see if the holiday spirit motivates me to play her any further.

12/4/2007

Mostly played Goshilla (12 sonic/nrg blaster) on the Liberty Force monster squad team. We knocked out a King's Row safeguard mission, then kicked off a Positron TF. Our TF lineup was:

will/mace tanker
another will/mace tanker
stone/SS tanker
dual/will scrapper
sonic/nrg blaster (me)
archery/fire blaster
dark/sonic defender

Our fearless leader, the zombie tanker, went the extra mile by starting the Doctor Vahzilok story arc and deliberately acquiring the Vahzilok wasting disease so that he could have swarming flies surrounding him at all times. This also pretty much flatlines your regen and recovery, which sounds horrible, but he really wanted that authentic zombie feeling. He got exemped down from 16 to 15 to do the Positron TF, and apparently the Vahzilok Wasting Disease isn't one of those things that you lose when you exemp down below the level you got it. (I think I'm pretty good about sticking to a character concept, but I definitely couldn't do something like this.)

Despite my earlier misgivings about the light support on our team, we did surprisingly well, making it through the first mission against the Vahzilok without a single death. (I've been on Positron TFs that gave up during that first mission.)

The second mission against the Circle of Thorns was much rougher, partly due to ACC debuffs from the horrible CoT ghosts, partly because of massive ambushes after rescuing each hostage, and partly because one hostage got stuck in an elevator and required several minutes of pushing and pulling to get him out again.

The third mission to defeat all clockwork in a door mission was a piece of cake by comparison, though after that we decided to call it a night and continue next time.

Goshilla got to level 14 and Super Jump during these missions. I also managed to almost persuade the team on an OOC channel that, since we were heroic monsters, we had an obligation to go out and fight Giant Monsters whenever they appear in Paragon City. Our Frankenstein monster managed to shoot this down when he realized that, "You're just saying that because you're playing Godzilla!"

After the monster team broke up, I played my holiday themed character, Mary Christmas (ice/rad controller), for a few missions and a short sewer run, getting her to level 4. Ice control does more damage at that level than I had heard; but I'm using Chilblain and Block of Ice like blast powers, and slotting them for damage, which might not be Standard Operating Procedure for controllers. Also, 4-person sewer teams just don't seem to work; even with heavy support (tanker, 2 controllers, defender), the big groups of zombies would beat us up too badly.

[ QUOTE ]
12/3/2007
Major changes: with the introduction of Ouroboros, I expect to do a lot more exemplaring. Consequently I moved every single enhancement slot to a power I get at level 32 or earlier, so that I can maximally benefit from them; my level 35, 38, 41, 44, 47 and 49 powers are all 1-slotted now.

[/ QUOTE ]

/e slapreact

12/5/2007

Started off the evening playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) and recruiting a team for some Ouroboros stuff. While getting organized, a Synapse TF called for help with Babbage, so we diverted to Skyway. While there, a player I didn't recognize said "OMG it's Police Woman!" which totally made me feel heroic. Thanks!

We helped beat up the giant mecha and then headed back to the Ouroboros zone to start a level 34 story arc in Croatoa given by Kelly Nemmers. I set the mission parameters to be "no travel powers" and "no deaths" and we ran on Tenacious difficulty. Our team was myself (AR/dev blaster) and two friends from the Sisterhood channel (an ill/rad controller and a TA/archery defender), all level 50 but exemped to 34. Level 34 is a pretty nice level to play at since everyone has their tier 9 power from their primary. I had just respec'd Police Woman to move all her slots to low level powers, so I was really operating at full capacity. I like Croatoa in particular because of the magic salvage, and Police Woman was too high level to do any of the Croatoa content when it was originally released, so it was nice to get to do the missions. (I suspect I may end up getting into the "gotta catch em all!" mentality for the story arc souvenirs.)

I really like how the world kind of goes black and white as you enter and leave the time travel missions. It's very minor eye candy but it really gives a good "retro" look & feel.

The story arc went very smoothly. After saving Waylon Crane we easily handled the ambushes, and the mission where we rescued captive Tuatha was greatly simplified by our various stealth powers. We didn't have a true "tank" but phantom army + holds + trick arrow debuffs + full auto seemed to work just fine. We finished the whole story arc in about an hour, with zero deaths. I got the Bow & Arrow temp power, the "Still" badge, and a good chunk of prestige from it. I was hoping this would unlock the Katie Hannon TF contact for me, but I don't think it did; thinking about it, I'm pretty sure Kelly isn't the last contact in Croatoa, but I only saw Gordon Bower and Kelly Nemmers as available Croatoa contacts on the pillar of ice and fire.

I messed around on Triumph server for a bit and got Mary Christmas (ice/rad controller) to level 6 while waiting for the Liberty Force monster squad to log on.

After that I played Goshilla (14 sonic/nrg blaster) to finish up the Positron TF. Our zombie tanker was distraught that his Vahzilok Wasting Disease had faded away overnight; apparently it has a time limit! Who knew? Other than that minor tragedy, we steamrollered the rest of the Positron TF pretty easily. The early missions of Positron TF are really the hardest. Goshilla got to level 15, and I got a fairly pointless fear IO recipe as TF reward; everyone on the team ended up either level 15 or 16 as a result of the TF.

12/7/2007

On Wednesday night I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) on a 7 person Hess TF (mostly Sisterhood & friends). The team leader set the restrictions of "no temp powers, no deaths" but we were a bit overconfident entering the first mission, and somehow we managed to aggro most of the warehouse of Council robots onto us, giving us a total party wipeout right off the bat. I'm not 100% sure how this happened, but I think it was a combination of the scrapper and illusion pets pulling adds onto us, plus the tanker being "bugged" so that none of his powers would fire during this huge fight (requiring him to exit the mission while we were fighting..doh!). This caused us to immediately fail the special TF badge restrictions; aside from that, the rest of the TF went very smoothly and we finished it in about an hour. I got a decent amount of prestige (I'm pushing to reach a 1M prestige total, then want to switch out of SG mode to work on influence badges) and a Malaise's Illusions: Chance for Psi damage recipe (sort of unexciting).

After that I played April Fool (50 thug/TA mastermind), malefactored down to 41 to team up with some characters from her old VG that hadn't been around in awhile. We did a bunch of missions in RWZ, which went pretty well; so well that someone commented that "we never used to do this well before!" Frequent and multiple deaths used to be a feature of our villain nights. Not sure if higher levels or more player experience are responsible, or as someone else suggested, the fact that certain other players weren't present to drag us down. I kind of think it was team size; we were only a 3-4 person team that night, so had smaller spawn sizes.

Thursday night I started off with a lot of badge missions; on hero side, Spacegirl (32 mind/rad controller) got the Corruptor badge with a Sisterhood & friends team. On villain side, Yuki-Onna (19 ice/cold corruptor) joined an LHO team that quickly did the Soultaker, Exterminator, and Bad Luck missions; that was really nice.

After that I spent probably an hour agonizing over respecing Kid Valkyrie (50 broadsword/regen scrapper). I kind of suck at playing a regen scrapper, so I wanted to tweak her build to try and make it better. Kid Valkyrie's old build was focused on increasing max HP; I decided to try and switch this around to focus on maximizing recharge. Consequently I dropped Leaping pool (which I only had combat jumping in) and brought in Leadership pool (with 2 powers I can put a LotG +7.5% recharge in, Leadership pool seems like a win when maximizing recharge). I also respec'd in Moment of Glory; I don't really like the power, but it's another place I can put a LotG +7.5% recharge. I dropped the "Slash" power which really seemed like an extraneous and weak attack, and moved "Whirling Sword" from level 38ish to level 18 (I found that when exemping I really missed having an AoE attack). I also generally moved all her slots down to level 32 and below powers (my current thinking is that I will do a lot of exemping in I11 and beyond). I had some friends on wanting to play the monster team, so I didn't get around to fully slotting or testing the new build, but I wanted to be sure to use up Kid Valkyrie's existing free respec, before a new free respec was awarded the next day.

After that I brought on Goshilla (15 sonic/nrg blaster) and joined the Liberty Force monster squad for a bunch of missions in Faultline. Against all odds we saved the suicidal Doc Delilah from hordes of ambushes. We also picked up two fire/rad controllers who asked to join, and their debuffs/buffs/heals were incredibly helpful, and they seemed like pretty cool people who were not fazed by our monstrous ways. The team had a strong showing and was able to stomp level 20ish mobs at a rapid rate, raking in a lot of exp. We finished up the night by rescuing Mr. Yin, getting Goshilla to level 17.

12/10/2007

Over the weekend I acquired from the auction house two sets of three level 33 Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control IO recipes, as well as a level 14 Rectified Reticle: Increased Perception recipe. I crafted and slotted these IOs in Police Woman's Targeting Drone and Tactics powers, which I had 6-slotted and 5-slotted, respectively, in my I11 build, anticipating acquiring some To Hit Buff IOs. This gave her a fairly noticable +10% move speed (very helpful because Police Woman uses combat jump/sprint for travel) and a tasty +3.76% max HP (pushing Police Woman to the blaster cap of 1606 HP at level 50). I'm hoping the +perception IO will help me see stalkers with stacked Hide/Stealth/+stealth IO, but I'm not sure, because I think there may be some sort of perception cap involved.

I started off actual gameplay with a flashback. Inspired by High Beam's outstanding flashback badging guide (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showf...Number=9765673), I started David Wincott's story arc in the Hollows with Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), setting a 30 minute time limit, No Travel Powers and 1 death allowed. Most people hate the Hollows too much to revisit it, but I actually enjoy the zone and this really is a fast story arc, so it made sense. Exemped to level 15 Police Woman has 3 AR attacks (plus vet powers) and Aid Self, so she could solo the missions pretty well. I was on Tenacious difficulty, which probably was unwise (Heroic would've been better under such a tight time limit) and during the second mission I got worried about the timer ticking down, so I summoned a Shivan which helped me speed through a few groups of Outcasts. This let me finish about 5 minutes early, awarding me the Gold Medal, Refrained and Divided Mastery badges.

After that I got an invite to a level 50 mission team in Peregrine Island, with a group of mostly (I think?) United Healers SG. There were more SKs than mentors when I joined, and so I was initially worried that I had gotten invited to a PLing team, but the sidekicks were SK'd to level 49 and ran into fights to help out, so it felt OK after all. We cleared a few of those enormous outdoor maps that Unai Kemen gives you as missions, facing Council Empire and War Wolves; these are a little repetitive but it did push me over my 1 million prestige goal, allowing me to drop out of SG mode to work on influence badges. (If only Wentworths day trading counted for this! I'd have all the influence badges a dozen times over.)

A bit later I ventured into Siren's Call, intending to test Police Woman's stacked perception from targeting drone, tactics and a +perception IO. Of course I didn't find any stalkers there (maybe their stealth was too good!), instead encountering an nrg/fire brute who was remarkably polite for someone trying to murder me. I don't have a lot of experience fighting brutes and fighting him was very different than facing a stalker (who usually run away as soon as they realize you fight back). I sort of kited him around using web grenade and caltrops to slow his movement while shooting between web grenade applications. We were stalemated for awhile; he would hit me some, I'd kite away and aid self, and I would shoot him some and he'd Healing Flames the health back. The energy melee stuns made me eat a lot of break frees and I felt I needed to turn at least a few toggles on each time (so I could watch for a stalker add), which lost me time; I probably should've been preemptively eating break frees to keep toggles up. There was a nice ledge on a building nearby where I could jump up to, and my web grenades kept him from reaching me; if I were more of a ninja acrobat I might've figured out how to kill him from up there, but as it was I could only shoot him a few times before he broke line of sight, so I needed to bounce back down to the ground level. I finally started gaining on hurting the brute when I saw he had used Healing Flames recently, then I stopped trying to debuff him, instead standing my ground in a caltrops patch shooting at him while he slowly ran toward me, Baywatch-style, through caltrops. He reached me and started hitting me long before I could zero his life bar, but at that point he was just feeding my defiance and so I finished him off before he could really hurt me more. He self-rez'd and made a valiant second attempt on me, but at that point I was too heavily advantaged so was able to drop him again much more quickly. Was a fun fight though.

On Saturday night I played Goshilla (17 sonic/nrg blaster) on the Liberty Force monster team, and we did the Synapse TF. Our team lineup was:

1 will tanker
1 stone tanker
2 dual/will scrappers
1 dark defender
1 kin controller
1 sonic blaster (me)

The whole TF went pretty smoothly. Goshilla trained up the Amplify (aka Aim) and Stamina powers; despite having a 50 blaster, I've never had one with Aim/Build Up before, and I was pretty impressed by the carnage that occurred any time I used both at once. We managed to defeat Babbage with the help of one dark defender from our SG who came to help; it normally seems to take two teams or so to take down Babbage, but the double-dark-debuff nerfed him into oblivion. I got something fairly pointless for the TF recipe reward. We did some of the Faultline missions later on, and Goshilla ended the weekend at level 21.

Sunday night, I played Alice Slaughter (12 dual/will brute) as a lackey to a Demolition Girls SG team on Triumph server. We mostly fought Arachnos and got hit by a lot of annoying smoke grenades (why is the devices smoke grenade not this good?). I'd read up on Lewis Carroll a little and did my level best to channel the spirit of a deranged British schoolgirl, and by the end I had most of the team making off-color Alice in Wonderland jokes and suggesting to me the best way to hamstring opponents in between tea and cookies. It was excellent depraved fun, and Alice got to level 14 and Super Jump.

[ QUOTE ]
A bit later I ventured into Siren's Call, intending to test Police Woman's stacked perception from targeting drone, tactics and a +perception IO. Of course I didn't find any stalkers there (maybe their stealth was too good!), instead encountering an nrg/fire brute who was remarkably polite for someone trying to murder me. I don't have a lot of experience fighting brutes and fighting him was very different than facing a stalker (who usually run away as soon as they realize you fight back). I sort of kited him around using web grenade and caltrops to slow his movement while shooting between web grenade applications. We were stalemated for awhile; he would hit me some, I'd kite away and aid self, and I would shoot him some and he'd Healing Flames the health back. The energy melee stuns made me eat a lot of break frees and I felt I needed to turn at least a few toggles on each time (so I could watch for a stalker add), which lost me time; I probably should've been preemptively eating break frees to keep toggles up. There was a nice ledge on a building nearby where I could jump up to, and my web grenades kept him from reaching me; if I were more of a ninja acrobat I might've figured out how to kill him from up there, but as it was I could only shoot him a few times before he broke line of sight, so I needed to bounce back down to the ground level. I finally started gaining on hurting the brute when I saw he had used Healing Flames recently, then I stopped trying to debuff him, instead standing my ground in a caltrops patch shooting at him while he slowly ran toward me, Baywatch-style, through caltrops. He reached me and started hitting me long before I could zero his life bar, but at that point he was just feeding my defiance and so I finished him off before he could really hurt me more. He self-rez'd and made a valiant second attempt on me, but at that point I was too heavily advantaged so was able to drop him again much more quickly. Was a fun fight though.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, that was quite a fight. I think I told you during the fight, that was me. I was suprised at how well I did...I was actually on my way to a mission and figure hey, why not try a quick battle. If you didn't have web grenade or caltrops I probably would've done better, but hey, you did pretty good. I feel stupid now since I completely forgot about defiance during that fight...no wonder you took me down so fast towards the end. I was pretty glad I was able to get back up with that temp rez from Steel Canyon safeguard, although it didn't help me much =P

12/11/2007

Spent much of my early evening tweaking Kid Valkyrie's (50 bs/regen scrapper) costumes at Icon, using up all the free costume tokens to incorporate the new hairstyles and new weapon customizations. Then I realized I had colored Kid Valkyrie's sword on some costumes and not on others, so I had to go back in and fine tune color settings. I rather like the "tech" sword (I have it colored gold and blue now, so it looks like a hybrid between a light saber and a chainsaw), but it's very ornate and really only worked with Kid Valkyrie's cybernetic angel costume; I stuck with a basic longsword for the costumes that used normal clothes or spandex.

After that, nothing would do but to go hack some bad guys for justice, so I ran some solo radio missions on invincible. This went very smoothly (I never even missed Slash, the attack I had dropped in my last respec) except for one time where I rushed a level 52 master illusionist boss, then felt the need to reply to a tell I had just gotten. The MI's alpha strike plus attacks from several pets it summoned promptly floored me while I was typing my reply to the tell. If I was paying attention I probably could have popped any of three or four powers or an inspiration and not died. (Did I mention I suck at playing a regen scrapper?) Went back with more focus on the game and easily defeated the MI.

After that, the Liberty Force monster squad gathered to do the Sister Psyche TF. Our team lineup was:

2 will/mace tankers (one tanky, one scranky)
1 stone/ss tanker
1 dual/will scrapper
1 dark miasma/sonic blast defender
1 mind/sonic dispersion controller
1 sonic blast/energy blaster (me)

Our dual wielding Frankenstein had swapped alts and was now playing a mind/sonic controller, previously a non-monstrous character but today re-costumed as a terrific looking mythological siren or harpy. We started the TF with the only limitation being 3 deaths max, which I kinda figured would guarantee a team wipe in the first mission, but surprisingly we had only one death all evening (the product of a miscommunication where we were stealthing a mission, caught aggro while getting the Mission Complete message, and then everyone exited immediately but the defender, doh!). The Freakshow in general seemed to melt under our attacks, probably due to the stacking -res debuffs from dark/sonic dispersion/2x sonic blast; we didn't take much damage in return, and the defender commented he didn't need to heal much. I think this was due to the tankers and scrapper having naturally high regen, plus a lot of +res due to sonic buffs and shadow fall. We finished the night just before the last mission of the TF; some people had logged off before that, so we planned to save the last mission for the next day when everyone could be on. Goshilla (my sonic/nrg blaster) reached level 24 during this; I picked up Hasten at level 22 and am puzzling over what to take at level 24. Maybe Stun or Conserve Power.

In other news it seemed like HOs got really cheap yesterday on hero-side for some reason; I managed to pick up a half dozen or so nucleolus HOs for only 2M infl each. Not sure how long that will last, but check it out if you need them.

12/12/2007

I started off playing Kid Valkyrie (50 broadsword/regen scrapper) duoing a few radio missions in Peregrine Island with my SO, a 34 ice/nrg blaster, as sidekick. This started off well, but we ran into a lot of trouble at the end of one mission where we faced off against a pair of level 52 Carnie bosses with their attendant entourage. These critters were able to stack enough holds and/or END drain to drop my Integration, with bad results for Our Heroes (on my squishy characters I rarely enter a mission without a tray full of break frees, but as a scrapper I was only carrying one). We eventually beat these Carnies but not without incurring considerable debt.

After that experience I decided to get serious and recruited a better balanced team, picking up an excellent ice tanker, an archery blaster, a FF/elec defender sidekick and a mind/emp controller sidekick. FF and fortitude made our ice tanker unhittable, and the buffs and aggro control kept the rest of us very safe; this team steamrollered the next several missions, clearing all our debt and generating good influence/exp.

After that I joined a "Hess-a-thon" organized on the Sisterhood channel which involved running 5 Hess TFs in parallel. Five TF teams were formed (using multiple alts of five players), then each TF was mostly solo'd by one player, then the whole team would do the last mission together and get a recipe as TF reward. This took about 2 hours altogether and got me 5 draws from the TF completion recipe pool; the only noteworthy recipe I got was a Mako's Bite: Dmg/Rech though.

After that I played Goshilla (24 sonic/nrg blaster) and finished the last mission of the Sister Psyche TF, which we had saved from last night. I got some unexciting fear recipe for TF reward. Oh, and despite the fact that we managed to only have 2 deaths with a 3 death limit, we didn't get any badge or other benefit from adding the special restriction. I'm thinking maybe those badges are only awarded for flashbacks and not for regular TFs.

From there the monster squad swung directly into the Moonfire TF in Striga Isle. Our team mix was:

2 will/mace tankers
1 stone/SS tanker
1 dual/will scrapper
1 dark/sonic defender
1 mind/sonic controller
1 sonic/nrg blaster (me)

We were on Unyielding difficulty which made the enemies mostly level 29; this seemed intimidating since our highest level person was level 26 (since we were fresh out of Sister Psyche TF) but we actually had no problem defeating the level 29s. Somehow the monster squad has transmuted from a horribly melee-centric team to a balanced team with good synergy. We stomped a lot of vampires and werewolves, but about half way through, I was just too tired to continue and had to call it a night. I don't like to bail on TFs midway, but I was too tired for it to be effective or fun at that point. Goshilla ended the night midway through level 25.

For level 24 I ended up getting the "Stun" power, which I like so far (I've stunned several mobs that have aggro'd on me already), but I wonder if I should've gotten Conserve Power instead since I'm regularly draining my END to 0 just blasting away during a fight. I'll probably add more slots to my 1-slotted Stamina or put some ENDRDX in my blasts first; all my blasts are currently slotted with 1ACC, 2RCHG and 3DMG which is very END intensive. And I'm thinking I want Screech at level 26 so I can stack stuns on a boss.

The new defiance patch went in before this game session and I did notice Goshilla was generating buff icons from blasting. I spent some time watching my combat log, but between the defiance +DMG buffs, the +12% blaster damage buff, the sonic and dark -RES debuffs, and the fact that we were fighting +4s and +5s to me, the damage my blasts did seemed almost totally random, and would probably require differential equations (or a parser at any rate) to do a decent DPS analysis.

12/13/2007

I had an especially good day at Wentworth's, raking in about 30M influence selling various HOs, recipes and crafted IOs. Did some window shopping but didn't buy anything; things I actually want (some of the ToHitBuff IO recipes and of course the LotG +7.5% recharge recipe) seem to be either unavailable or unreasonably high priced.

Playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) exemp'd down to level 27, I duo'd with a dual/will scrapper through the IP safeguard and a few radio missions. The new defiance felt like a *noticable* DPS increase, and it seemed I could easily stack several +DMG buffs just from my normal attack chain, even at level 27 where I only have +2.5% RCHG from IO set bonuses. I did get held or stunned a few times and was still able to fire Burst and Slug; that was very cool. I still hit a break free about half the time, though, because you can't self-heal while mezzed; but sometimes it was safe enough to just keep shooting and wait out the hold. Overall the new defiance felt like a pretty big buff, and I can see why people call it blaster fury; I was almost dismayed to have to interrupt my attack chain to Aid Other my partner since it would cause the defiance buffs to wind down.

Switched to Goshilla (25 sonic/nrg blaster) and teamed up with some other Liberty Force monsters and a dual/will scrapper from the Sisterhood channel for some level 28ish radio missions. Interestingly, I got the Honorary Peacebringer badge as soon as I logged in; the team finished Moonfire TF last night and even though I was logged off at the time, I got the badge (though not the recipe reward). Not sure if all TFs work that way. We did a few more radio missions (getting Goshilla to 26, where I picked up Screech as a power) and defended Talos Island against a lengthy Rikti invasion (where we got the Sentry badge). Goshilla seems to build up blaster fury slower than Police Woman did, which was unexpected since Goshilla has Hasten and Police Woman doesn't, and also I thought Shriek/Scream recharged faster than Burst/Slug. I'm thinking the +DMG from defiance and -RES from sonic blast is going to be a pretty good combination though.

12/14/2007

Spent a good half-hour in the Facemaker making a new costume for April Fool (50 thug/TA MM), my clown princess of crime (to steal a tagline). The new "jester" set is very fun. Rather than using the Jester set for every slot, I did a little mix & matching (with some help from my SO, who adamantly insisted I needed red leather thigh high boots) and came out with a pretty nice looking outfit in black, white and red; something of a cross between the Joker card in a pack of playing cards, and Harley Quinn from DC comics. I also gave her pistols with red laser sights, and a compound bow with a red laser sight; since if you can't mount frickin' laser beams on your weapons, what's the point, really?

At that point, I pretty much had to go rob the bank in Peregrine Island while wearing the new costume. I was solo (well, if any MM with 6 pets can truly be considered "solo") so this was pretty straightforward. I also had fun attacking the Carnies (guarding side missions) in clown-vs-clown combat.

After that, I bounced over to Protector server and played Amethyst Star (20 warshade) for some Faultline missions with a 7 to 8 person team of Demolition Girls SG. [Apparently there is someone whose global is @Amethyst Star out there, too; purely coincidence, that's not the same person as me.] This went pretty well, though we were a bit support-light, which I think resulted in our one team wipeout, against an AV version of Nocturne. We got her on the next try though, and beat up probably 3 more AVs without incident; AVs in the low 20s don't have many HPs so are still pretty vulnerable to being burned down (we had 3 blasters, who seemed to be enjoying the new defiance buffs).

Amethyst Star got to 22 (SO-level, but I haven't gone shopping for them yet) and I called it an early night (had a lot of late nights lately).

12/17/2007

Played CoH a lot over the weekend.

Started off playing Vesta (13 fire/SS tanker on Triumph) and joining a pickup Positron TF. Team makeup was:

fire/nrg blaster
son/dev blaster
fire/SS tanker (me)
stone/fire tanker
dual/will scrapper
emp/arch defender
fire/rad controller

This started a little slowly, but after the sonic blaster and the stone tanker dropped out of the TF, leaving us with a 5-person "pentad", the TF sped up and smoothed out considerably. I've noticed that attrition seems very common in the lower level TFs; but unlike a STF or LGTF which can become hopeless after losing a couple key players, losing a couple team members on a low level TF can actually help make the TF easier! We finished the rest of the TF pretty efficiently, with Vesta ending up at level 16. Still not sure if I'm really happy with the name "Vesta"; when I made her, I was just pushing names of fire deities into the character generator until it gave me one. But haven't come up with a better one yet.

Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) purchased a level 25 Luck of the Gambler +7.5% recharge recipe from Wentworth's for 40M infl. This is now officially the most expensive thing I've ever bought in-game; but I made a LOT of influence at Wentworth's recently, and it's actually not too outrageous a price (there was a 115M purchase in the sales history) considering it is a very low level recipe that lets me keep the bonus when exemped all the way down to level 22. It cost another 3M to buy salvage to make the IO, and I slotted it into Combat Jumping, making it the fifth and last LotG +7.5% I can slot for Police Woman. (Now on to slotting them into alts, LOL!) This gives her +81% recharge at level 50, +58.5% recharge at level 41, and +44.75% recharge at level 30. (Most of my LotG +7.5% recharges are level 49-50 and slotted into 1-slotted defense powers that I took at high levels like Vengeance, Personal Force Field, etc.) I joined a level 50 pickup team that took down Neuron; the extra recharge seems to really help stack the new defiance buffs.

Played Mary Christmas (8 ice/rad controller on Triumph) for a bit, mostly joining pickup teams in King's Row and the Hollows; got to level 11. I ran into another newbie named Yuletide Carol and got a good laugh. I'm not sure why, but holiday themed characters really seem funny to me.

On Saturday I logged on Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper on Liberty) and did a flashback of Tina McIntyre's story arc, the Praetorian War; I set a 5 death limit and no travel powers. Olivia has been 1 Praetorian away from Portal Jockey for some time. I had been too lazy to track which Praetorians I had actually killed on each alt; but, since I had finished the level 45-50 Praetorian story arc from Maria Jenkins already, I figured my missing Praetorian HAD to be in Tina's story arc. So I spent most of the afternoon kicking around giant Praetorian clockworks. In between missions, whenever it was dark, I would log on Kid Valkyrie (50 bs/regen scrapper on Liberty) to kill Banished Pantheon masks in Talos Island. In this way, after about 4 game nights, Kid Valkyrie got the Banisher and Archmage badges, and about midway through the flashback TF, Olivia defeated Bobcat (the evil Mynx) to get Dimensional Warder and Portal Jockey. Was kinda tedious work, but the accolade bonuses are really quite nice. I also got a lot of pickup team invites while soloing on Olivia Q; I was kinda sad that I had to refuse them all because the flashback had put me in Task Force mode. Teaming is generally more fun than soloing, so it's too bad there's not a good way to set aside a flashback to go team for a bit, then come back to it later. I finished Tina's story arc in 5hrs 13mins with no deaths (though the time was a bit longer than strictly necessary since I kept swapping characters to kill masks), getting Olivia the Shared Victory and Stemmed badges.

On Sunday I started off playing Spacegirl (32 mind/rad controller on Liberty) and ran missions in Croatoa, doing Buck Salinger's story arc to unlock the Katie Hannon TF. I had started off with just me and an SG-mate but things sort of snowballed and before long we were a full 8-person pickup team (some SKs and some exemplars; had some pickup people, some liberty force and some Sisterhood) beating up weird magical critters. I had some issues herding all the team members around; usually it's enough for me to say "Let's follow the tanker" and people will do it, but on this team it was pretty common for us to have two or even three clumps of team members off fighting different spawns. I can usually say "We're spread out, let's regroup" and players will do it, but I did have a 48 blaster (exemped down to our level) who was determined to scout ahead by himself for hostages. I really would not mind this behavior too much, except that he was not very stealthy (was only using superspeed for stealth) and so would frequently draw aggro and die while "scouting", which would prompt some of the team members to want to go rescue him. I said several times in team chat that we don't need to scout, to stick with the team, to stay with the tanker, etc., to no avail. A couple other team members made some biting comments about running off and getting killed also. In all honesty, I should have kicked him from the team, but I was feeling softhearted and just put up with it.

Despite these difficulties we managed to get through Buck Salinger's whole story arc, after which a few team members needed to call it a day. After that, though, the blaster had somehow got it into his head that my saying "I'm working on unlocking the Katie TF" meant that I *intended* to run the Katie TF as soon as I had it unlocked, and was going to be miffed if we didn't run the Katie TF ASAP. I like the Katie TF, so I went ahead and asked the team if everyone was OK with doing the Katie TF. This didn't go over well, with some people sending me private tells saying they would quit the team if the alternative was to do a TF with our blaster. The emp and kin had recently quit (leaving me as lone support toon against 10 AVs expected in Katie's first mission), our blaster was urging me to invite MORE blasters and scrappers to fill up the team, and I was basically facing mutiny from the other players; under these circumstances, I ruled that we would pass on the TF and instead do more door missions. I told the blaster as tactfully as possible that I would understand if he wanted to quit over this, and he did. We went on to do three or four Devouring Earth missions in the main part of Paragon City, which went pretty well (especially after we picked up some more support characters) and Spacegirl reached level 33 before the team broke up. Oh, I also got the Cap Buster badge and a Deific Weapon salvage drop while in Croatoa; love that arcane salvage!

Later that evening I played Alice Slaughter (14 dual/will brute on Triumph) for a few missions as a lackey on a 6 person Demolition Girls SG team. We mostly fought Arachnos and had all sorts of trouble with Night Widows, who repeatedly dropped smoke grenades on us that utterly blinded us. We didn't have any perception buffs at all (except some yellow inspirations) so the near nonstop blindness was pretty devastating; I think we had 2 team wipeouts. Still managed to get through 2 or 3 missions. Perception is usually only a big deal in PvP, and so I had previously been iffy about Heightened Senses as a power, but now I think Alice needs to take it as soon as it opens up.

After that I played Goshilla (26 sonic/nrg blaster on Liberty), joining up with the Liberty Force monster squad to start the Citadel TF. Our team makeup was:

will/mace tanker
stone/SS tanker
mind/sonic controller
dual/will scrapper
sonic/nrg blaster (me)
dark/sonic defender
peacebringer

While on the way to the first mission in Independence Port, our controller spotted Lusca in the harbor. Being a giant, radioactive Japanese movie monster, I immediately said "It's a giant monster! We should fight it!" To my great surprise, the team agreed to attack the giant octopus. This started off pretty well, especially once we got the will/mace tanker to turn the tentacle to face away from us (the tentacles seem to do narrow cone AOEs). The sonic shields were really nice with their +toxic and our will/mace tanker commented that he was tanking better than his main (a 50 invuln/SS tank) could've, due to willpower's +regen.

Things got really ugly after the first couple tentacles were taken down; once three or more tentacles were aggroed on us at once, we pretty steadily lost personnel (err, monsterrel? who knows) but pressing on despite these losses, we wiped out all the tentacles and finally started in on Lusca's head. The head didn't seem to fight back but it had a RIDICULOUS amount of HPs and very high regen, so we were sawing at its stupid HPs for probably 20 mins. The dark defender was applying -regen with heals and Howling Twilight which is probably the only reason we were even able to make headway against Lusca's huge regen rate.

But in the end we did it, and all got the Devilfish badge. I know an ill/rad on Liberty has solo'd Lusca, but considering we are level 26-30 toons without IO sets, temp powers or rad, defeating Lusca with one team felt pretty good. (After we killed Lusca the team leader said "I thought we'd all die once against the first tentacle, realize it wasn't doable, then move on.")

An SG-mate had logged on during the Lusca fight and so we went back to Talos and reformed the TF to add her (a second peacebringer). We had kinda blown the 5 death limit initially set on the TF by suffering around 10 deaths fighting Lusca. While doing this we saw 2 Ghost ships in Talos, but, since they aren't really monsters, I didn't demand that we fight them. (At that point there was some dispute among the team as to whether ghosts count as monsters. They did not seem a worthy opponent to a Japanese movie monster to me, though.)

So we finally proceeded with the Citadel TF and there was much carnage among the Council. We got about halfway through the TF before calling it a night, deciding to finish off the TF the next day. I got Goshilla to level 27 and reslotted her powers with level 30 SOs, turning the enhancements green once more.

[ QUOTE ]
At that point there was some dispute among the team as to whether ghosts count as monsters.

[/ QUOTE ]

Now this is food for thought. Ghost Widow is certainly no monster, but Scrapyard is a Giant Monster ghost. The ghost of the Moraine is an enigma in the first place, since it's strange to think of unliving, constructed objects leaving ghosts behind. Let us hope the future won't be haunted by the ghosts of HDTVs, Moen faucets and Roombas.

12/18/2007

The Winter event began today and so the first thing I did was log on Mary Christmas (11 ice/rad controller on Triumph), equipped her with earmuffs at Icon, then joined a team that ran the Baby New Year mission five times to get all the badges. This team had the map spawned at level 29, then a level 50 blaster actually did the mission. This was very fast and efficient for getting the badges, but was kinda dull since as a level 11 I couldn't really do anything to help. I did get to level 12 from the mission completion exp, and picked up Ice Slick; still need to go shop for DOs though.

After that I resolved I'd do something more active, so I logged on Rain Dancer (41 storm/archery defender on Liberty) and formed a team to do the Baby New Year mission for exp, inviting a 41 blaster and a mid 20s tanker who I SK'd. We cleared a path through the tundra, fought past the red caps and defeated Snaptooth. I found that pinning Snaptooth against a wall with Hurricane, then dropping Lightning Storm and Tornado on him, pretty much hosed him, locking him in repeated knockdowns.

Unfortunately while trying to lead Baby New Year out of the cave, he got stuck while exiting the cave and seemed to run away under the map. I sent in a petition and searched both inside the cave and out for Baby New Year, but to no avail. So I suggested we reset the mission and try again. The tanker didn't really want to do this, though, because he was getting too much exp (he explained he was trying not to outlevel his friends), so instead the team broke up without completing the mission.

Goshilla
Radioactive lizard that crawled from the waters near Terra Volta

After that I brought on Goshilla (27 sonic/nrg blaster on Liberty) and finished the Citadel TF with the Liberty Force monster squad. One of the peacebringers had solo'd all but the last mission before we got on, so all we had to do is knock out Vandal and the TF was complete. After the mission, one of the other monsters opened an Ouroboros portal to get out of Dark Astoria, so I jumped in and got the Chrononaut badge to unlock the Ouroboros portal for Goshilla.

Then the monster squad went to Pocket D to partake in some winter festivities. I tried one run down the ski slope, performing an atrociously bad 54 second ski run (I missed 3 gates and had to loop around to hit them again). Then we attempted the Baby New Year mission twice. The monsters hit the ice on the frozen lake with fairly comedic results, skating around near helplessly while jousting with snowmen; I was glad I was a blaster and able to use range attacks instead.

Monsters on Ice

We had a few deaths due to ice follies, bad baby pathing and general redcap orneryness, but we succeeded with the first mission. The second mission, Baby New Year again became stuck while trying to exit the cave and could not be found, forcing us to abandon the mission. Our zombie tanker had a theory that stealth aura powers (like Shadow Fall and Steamy Mist) somehow bug out Baby New Year even if they are later turned off; seems weird, but it fits the data so far.

After that we relocated to Croatoa and did Kelly Nemmers' first hunt mission, before calling it a night.

Great posts!!!. Very interesting to read and entertaining. Keep it up, please I am enjoying them a lot------Philly

12/19/2007

Saw the movie Enchanted last night, which was a wonderful, wonderful film. To make this somewhat on topic, here's:

WHAT IF: Enchanted happened in City of Heroes?

SCENE 1: The arcane-themed Andalasia SG base

Prince Edward (a BS/regen scrapper): Hey, I helped out this newbie empath in the Hollows against some trolls. She's pretty cool. I invited her to the SG.
Evil Queen (an ill/rad controller): Dude, don't invite random pickups to my SG.
Prince Edward: But she's HOT!
Evil Queen: Dude, she's probably a guy in RL! I am, you know! And look at her crappy build! I don't think there even IS such a thing as cute animal/empathy controller!
Prince Edward: You're a guy in RL?!
*Evil Queen has kicked Princess Giselle from the Super Group*

SCENE 2: The streets of Grandville

Princess Giselle: Level 13 cute animal/empathy controller LFT! I'm a good healer!
Plucky Kid Sidekick: Dad, we should totally invite her to team!
Normal Guy (a Lawyer, the villain epic AT): Kid, I don't PL random strangers. She's probably still on DOs. She should go somewhere level appropriate! And how'd a controller get here anyway? Shouldn't she be blue-side?
Plucky Kid Sidekick: But look at her awesome costume! C'mon! Let's give her a chance!
Normal Guy: Aww, man! If she autofollows me spamming heal aura, though, I'm totally kicking her.

SCENE 3: Cage match in the Arena

Normal Guy: Heal plz!
Princess Giselle: Ohhh, I'm dead.
Normal Guy: Here's an awaken. Get up, dammit! Heal plz!!
Evil Queen: You fool! Now I shall pwn you!
*Evil Queen starts stacking holds and rad debuffs on Normal Guy*
Normal Guy: Crap! Controllers are too overpowered in PvP!
Princess Giselle: I'll save you!
*Princess Giselle knockbacks Evil Queen through a hole in the zone geometry*
*Evil Queen falls through the bottom of the world*
Evil Queen: Damn exploits!

And then they all lived happily ever after. THE END.

-------------------------

Police Woman flashes back to fighting Trolls

In actual City of Heroes, I started off soloing a flashback story arc with Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster). I initially was going to follow the flashback badging guide and do David Wincott's story arc with no enhancements and no temp powers, but then decided, why not mix it up a little? So I started Flux's story arc with no enhancements and no temp powers. I wasn't sure how bad "no enhancements" would be, but figured at level 14 my enhancements are probably pretty nerfed anyway, so hoped it wouldn't hurt that much. I did notice a significant damage decrease, but the new defiance helped boost my damage a bit. */dev actually helped me a lot here; I suspect most heroes have serious accuracy issues with no enhancements, but Targeting Drone's +ToHit kept my accuracy pretty good. I cleared the first mission (ironically, rescuing police officers from Trolls) without too much trouble, though it was slow going. Got pretty decent influence doing this too. Some SGmates came on and I decided to swap to another character to team up (setting aside the flashback for later). Although one thing I am worried about is how I'll defeat Frostfire with no enhancements and no temp powers; I had forgotten he was an elite boss now. I still have a big inspiration tray and now I can use Archmage at level 14, so it *should* be doable.

I logged on Goshilla (28 sonic/nrg blaster) and joined the monster team for some missions in Croatoa; we were shorthanded tonight with only a 4-person team (stone/SS tanker, dual/will scrapper, peacebringer, son/nrg blaster). Though normally our team does pretty well, with no support characters we were getting badly beat up, failing the mission to save Waylon Crane (he was killed by an ambush) and suffering multiple deaths in the process of rescuing Tuatha monsters from Cabal witches. I decided to switch to Rain Dancer (41 storm/archery defender) and exemp down for the next mission, to give us some support. Between the storm debuffs and O2 boost it felt to me like the next mission worked a lot better.

Schadenfreude: 5th Column terrorist

After that we switched to villain side and I played Schadenfreude (28 AR/dark corruptor) for a few 4-person (AR/dark corr, mind dom, robo/FF MM, thug/trap MM) missions, mostly in Sharkhead. This team seemed to steamroller enemies very effectively. We did the Soul Taker badge mission and finished one of Operative Kirkland's story arcs, getting Schadenfreude to level 29 before I called it a night.

12/20/2007

I started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), exemped down to 14 to finish off the flashback of the Flux story arc. I was solo on Tenacious difficulty, with No Temp Powers and No Enhancements. Got through the "Defeat gang leaders and crews" mission without any trouble, then easily did the "Defeat 10 Outcasts" mission, then started "Defeat Frostfire". With no Micros in Sprint and no Swift or Hurdle at all, I had only unslotted CJ for travel powers, but one trick that helped me get around Hollows a little faster was to use the Ouroboros Portal after each mission, then click the Pillar to get back to Flux.

I mostly stealthed the Frostfire mission. I found I was able to shoot the first altar from range without drawing aggro from its guards, then ran by most of the Outcasts to get deeper into the mission. I didn't have stealth powers and my stealth IO didn't work due to "No Enhancements", but the Outcasts had really slow reaction times; most did not aggro on me, some took a shot or two but not for any serious damage. I did have to slug it out with Keystone; his stone armor heavily mitigated my unslotted AR attacks, so this fight took a really long time, but my caltrops mostly kept me safe while I slowly reduced his HPs.

Finally I reached Frostfire himself, who was a level 14 elite boss standing with a cluster of minions just inside the final room in the near right corner. I managed to single pull most of his minions, but finally ended up having to fight Frostfire with one lieutenant. Frostfire immediately summoned a handful of fire imps and a Jack Frost to help out; as a fire AND ice controller, Frostfire is pretty nasty for an EB. With temp powers disabled, I couldn't call a Shivan or drop a nuke; but I still had a level 50's huge inspiration tray, so I immediately slammed a Strength of Will, two Purples and an Orange inspiration. The recent accolade change also let me use Eye of the Magus to feel extra safe. Even with this level of protection, however, Frostfire and his pets was able to do enough damage that I had to click some Greens to keep going. Anyway, I shot him up, but with no stamina and unslotted attacks I ran out of END pretty quickly. Using Geas of the Kind Ones gave me enough +recovery that I could finish Frostfire off. The fight lasted long enough that I had to click a few more purples when the first batch ran out.

Finishing the flashback gave me the story arc souvenir, along with the Proportional Supremacy, Curtailed and Debilitated badges.

After that I joined a monster squad team with Goshilla (28 sonic/nrg blaster); tonight our team had a much better balance between damage and support, and we easily cleaned up the same Croatoa missions that were giving us a hard time last night, getting Goshilla to level 29. A power outage in my neighborhood forced me to call it an early night though.

12/21/2007

Well, turns out the power outage fried my computer, despite my computer being on a battery backup and surge suppressor. So this journal entry is mostly about computer problems and only a little about CoH.

I took the computer to a local Micro Center store where they told me they thought the motherboard was fried. The technician said I was almost certainly the victim of a power surge that came through the Ethernet cable and not through the power cable. Urgh. I hadn't realized the cable connection could be a source of power surges, but this made sense. I knew someone once who had his computer fried through phone lines connected to his modem. Anyway, they could replace the motherboard, but not with exactly the same one, which would mean I'd pay for parts, labor, and they'd have to reformat my hard drive. Since my computer is almost 3 years old now, I decided it probably made more sense to just buy a new one.

I've already spent an awful lot of money this month (on Christmas and vet bills for my cat) so I went kinda cheap on the new computer; I may regret this later, but I figured, as long as it's better than what I was using it should be OK, right? My dead computer was 2.4GHz with a GeForce 5600 video card and 1GB of RAM. The new computer is dual core 2.8GHz with an "integrated" GeForce 6150SE and 3GB of RAM. Unfortunately they would not sell me WinXP and so I got stuck with Windows Vista. The machine's list price was $699 but they seemed REALLY motivated to sell (I hear this holiday season has been slow for many retailers) and the unit I bought was an "opened box" that someone returned (though they assured me nothing was wrong with it) and I ended up paying $675 plus tax, and got the machine plus a 3 year extended warranty (I normally NEVER buy these things because I think they're scams; I told the salesman I would only buy it if the total cost was under the computer's list price, and the salesman actually gave me a big enough discount to make it happen) and a $50 rebate certificate. I had been expecting to drop $1200-1500 on a new computer, so was pretty happy to get a new one for so cheap. I could've gotten a better computer if I special ordered it, but I'm such an addict that I really wanted to have a computer right away; a mail order during this time of year would probably take weeks to arrive, leaving me offline, frustrated and suffering from gaming withdrawal. My SO got caught up in the spirit of things and also bought a new computer, though a somewhat better and more expensive one than the one I bought.

Anyway, I took the new computer home and got it set up. I can see Windows Vista is going to take some getting used to; it has a lot of flashy UI stuff that is neat to look at, but not sure I really care about. I have a lot of factory-installed spyware extolling the virtues of the computer's manufacturer (HP) and trying to get me to sign up for AOL, ebay, and other stuff; annoying, but I plan to delete it all when I get some time. I registered the bare minimum of stuff and got to installing CoH. CoH and Vista didn't like each other very much, but there is a pretty helpful thread about how to make them work together here: ( http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat....0&fpart=all ). To make a long story short, I needed to download new video drivers, change some of the command line arguments for CoH, and change some of the OS properties of CoH to tell Vista to shut off some of the more fancy stuff and be a little more like WinXP while running CoH.

After all this, I was able to actually play CoH! But, the frame rate was really, really poor; just running around in typical CoH zones, at 1280x1024 resolution on the "recommended" graphics settings for CoH, I would get a pretty steady 5fps. I could run around CoH but it was painful to do so; I assume CoV and Rikti mother ship raids would be even worse. This was significantly worse than my old, 3 year old computer that had less than half the CPU and one third the RAM of the new computer. Very disappointing. Initially I blamed Vista, but I was able to install CoH on my SO's more expensive new computer (which also uses Vista, but has a GeForce 8500 video card) and CoH runs fine on that (around 25fps on the same 1280x1024 resolution and recommended graphics settings). I did a little web research and I found a lot of people had problems with the GeForce 6150SE and the most common response they got to their plaintive pleas for help was, "That card sucks, get a real graphics card that supports DX10." So I'm thinking my next move is to buy a better graphics card.

Anyway, I was determined to play CoH and I found that if I lowered the graphics settings to the "minimum", I could get 22fps. This was fairly playable but looked pretty crappy, but it did let me log in my level 14 dual/will brute on Triumph and take out some aggression by stabbing the hapless denizens of King's Row, getting Alice Slaughter to 15.

After that I switched to Schadenfreude (level 29 AR/dark corruptor on Liberty) and solo'd a few missions. On the normal graphics settings her black leather jacket and thigh-high boots look awesome, but on the minimum graphics settings she looks like she was painted in watercolor by a kindergartener. Arrgh. For that, many NPCs had to die by flamethrower. I experimented a bit with Ignite, Tar Patch and Petrifying Gaze. Police Woman doesn't have Ignite because it seems really unpolicelike to throw napalm on people you're trying to arrest, but Ignite does massive damage if you can get the bad guy to hold still long enough to take it. Petrifying Gaze holds them for a little while, but the hold duration seems pretty low; they get out of the hold before the Ignite patch fully kills them. Tar Patch seems to do a good job of slowing them long enough to take a decent amount of damage. I've put one Slow enhancement SO in Tar Patch so far (in addition to 3 Recharges); next time I get some more slots, I'll probably put more Slow SOs there, and/or some Hold SOs in Petrifying Gaze (currently only 1 ACC SO in it).

12/22/2007

I picked up a new graphics card, a GeForce 8600 GT (costing $125 with a $25 mail-in rebate), today to fix the frame rate problems I experienced last night. After installing it, I found it was a huge improvement over the integrated GeForce 6150 SE; on "minimal" graphics I went from 22fps to 80fps, on "recommended" graphics I went from 5fps to 50fps (with intermittent drops to 30fps when doing something graphics intensive, like traveling fast or just existing in Grandville).

Someone on Arena channel was calling for people to come to Recluse's Victory, and I thought that would be a great way to test my system performance with the new card, so I ran into RV as Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster). There were maybe 5 heroes and 5 villains roaming around; the heroes didn't seem to want to team up, so I just ran around solo for a bit, web grenading and shooting any villains I could catch; a bit later an empath controller started buffing me and teamed up for awhile, which helped a lot too. Serious PVPers don't respect assault rifle, so I made a point of trying to finish people off with Full Auto whenever possible. It's actually pretty good DOT damage, just leaves me vulnerable to attack during the animation; villains low on life almost always are running FROM me and not TO me, though, so unless they had a buddy ready to rush me, this wasn't too bad. I actually missed the old Defiance during this encounter, there were lots of times old Defiance would've gave me the burst DPS I needed to kill someone. I tried to stay as slippery as possible, dropping caltrops and popping Personal Force Field to escape. There were several stalkers there and I found that with Targeting Drone + Tactics + Perception IO, it seemed like I could see them just barely as they got into melee range with me; outside of melee range they were invisible. If I had any toggle dropped due to someone landing a stun on me, I couldn't see them either. I think I was about even on kills vs deaths, though I forgot to keep an accurate count; I started at 0 reputation and left with 12 though. There was one regen stalker I kept tangling with and never could quite finish off; I could slow him down enough to fight most of the time, but I just didn't have the DPS to kill him. Maybe if I had a teammate with some DPS or -regen, or slammed a bunch of reds. Anyway, it was pretty fun and the new graphics card worked beautifully.

After that I logged on Schadenfreude (29 AR/dark corruptor) and did some missions in Nerva. While there I helped a brute I didn't know with Agent Bell, an elite boss in Kelly Uqua's story arc.

Then I switched to April Fool (50 thug/TA mastermind) to help a SG-mate with Zenflower, an AV-level hippie hero surrounded by Devouring Earth. We then ran a flashback of Regent Korol's story arc with a 4 player team (fire dom, stalker, robo/traps MM, and me as a thug/TA MM), with no temp powers, 3 deaths and a 30 minute time limit. We were exemped down to 45 and fighting level 47s. We got pretty badly beat up while fighting Arachnos critters (not sure why we were doing so badly; a brute and/or corruptor maybe would've helped), with one total team wipeout and assorted individual deaths, causing us to fail the 3 death limit, and just doing the story arc took 1hr 7mins, so we didn't make the 30 min deadline. But we did get the Limited badge for the no temp powers thing.

[ QUOTE ]
12/22/2007

I picked up a new graphics card, a GeForce 8600 GT (costing $125 with a $25 mail-in rebate), today to fix the frame rate problems I experienced last night. After installing it, I found it was a huge improvement over the integrated GeForce 6150 SE; on "minimal" graphics I went from 22fps to 80fps, on "recommended" graphics I went from 5fps to 50fps (with intermittent drops to 30fps when doing something graphics intensive, like traveling fast or just existing in Grandville).

Someone on Arena channel was calling for people to come to Recluse's Victory, and I thought that would be a great way to test my system performance with the new card, so I ran into RV as Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster). There were maybe 5 heroes and 5 villains roaming around; the heroes didn't seem to want to team up, so I just ran around solo for a bit, web grenading and shooting any villains I could catch; a bit later an empath controller started buffing me and teamed up for awhile, which helped a lot too. Serious PVPers don't respect assault rifle, so I made a point of trying to finish people off with Full Auto whenever possible. It's actually pretty good DOT damage, just leaves me vulnerable to attack during the animation; villains low on life almost always are running FROM me and not TO me, though, so unless they had a buddy ready to rush me, this wasn't too bad. I actually missed the old Defiance during this encounter, there were lots of times old Defiance would've gave me the burst DPS I needed to kill someone. I tried to stay as slippery as possible, dropping caltrops and popping Personal Force Field to escape. There were several stalkers there and I found that with Targeting Drone + Tactics + Perception IO, it seemed like I could see them just barely as they got into melee range with me; outside of melee range they were invisible. If I had any toggle dropped due to someone landing a stun on me, I couldn't see them either. I think I was about even on kills vs deaths, though I forgot to keep an accurate count; I started at 0 reputation and left with 12 though. There was one regen stalker I kept tangling with and never could quite finish off; I could slow him down enough to fight most of the time, but I just didn't have the DPS to kill him. Maybe if I had a teammate with some DPS or -regen, or slammed a bunch of reds. Anyway, it was pretty fun and the new graphics card worked beautifully.

After that I logged on Schadenfreude (29 AR/dark corruptor) and did some missions in Nerva. While there I helped a brute I didn't know with Agent Bell, an elite boss in Kelly Uqua's story arc.

Then I switched to April Fool (50 thug/TA mastermind) to help a SG-mate with Zenflower, an AV-level hippie hero surrounded by Devouring Earth. We then ran a flashback of Regent Korol's story arc with a 4 player team (fire dom, stalker, robo/traps MM, and me as a thug/TA MM), with no temp powers, 3 deaths and a 30 minute time limit. We were exemped down to 45 and fighting level 47s. We got pretty badly beat up while fighting Arachnos critters (not sure why we were doing so badly; a brute and/or corruptor maybe would've helped), with one total team wipeout and assorted individual deaths, causing us to fail the 3 death limit, and just doing the story arc took 1hr 7mins, so we didn't make the 30 min deadline. But we did get the Limited badge for the no temp powers thing.

[/ QUOTE ]

I was that emp troller and the Stalker was Grrrrrrrrrrr.

Good fun

Caltrops.. Cute trick in the Pillbox..

* sneaks in thread *

Hi PW it's Crusher. Still one of my favorite toons. Keep writting Im still reading LOL.

*closes door behind him*
CC