7/16/2009
I played Mystery Girl (35 FF/nrg defender) as an SK on an Imperious TF, with a team mix of:
3 scrappers (spines/fire, 2 claws/regen)
3 defenders (FF/rad, FF/nrg, cold/ice)
1 tanker (shield/ice)
1 brute (DB/will)
This was kind of an unconventional team in that we had no proper "healer", and instead we had three people casting +DEF buffs. Most of the melee characters had regen or self-heals, though, so this actually worked fine. The other FF defender had horrible connection problems, so most of the time we only had one set of bubbles and one set of cold shields, but this was still plenty enough DEF. Against the Phalanx computer I had a moment of glory using Force Bubble to push away all the animating robots, which impressed the team for a few seconds until the final wave of robots was able to overwhelm my defense and knock me out. Capped DEF is lovely, but only gets you so far.
Romulus in the final mission was a little worrisome, but between cold debuffs and one of the meleers luring the healing Nictus away, we were able to beat him. Finished in 1hr 32mins for 28 merits (18.26 MPH) and got Mystery Girl to level 37.
After that I did a couple speed respecs organized on Villains of Liberty channel; played Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj) on 1st respec with fortunata, stalker, 2 brutes, getting 15 merits in 11min 40sec (77.14 MPH) and Mayday (50 fortunata) on the 3rd respec with 2 fortunatas, 2 brutes, getting 15 merits in 17min 6sec (52.63 MPH).
Later I played Mystery Girl some more as an SK on a 6-player LEGION team that beat an Infernal AV and a Dominatrix AV. A friend on villain side was complaining that no one would team with him, so I ended up dropping from this team to go duo with him; it seemed to make sense at the time, but in hindsight I fear it might've been rude of me to ditch one team of friends to go team with another friend.
In any case, I played Kashira (23 db/ninj stalker) duoing with a friend playing a Wolf Spider, and we played through Vince Dubrowski's Any Body Will Do story arc, for 2 reward merits, then did some more paper missions which got Kashira to level 25 and my friend to 24, where he could respec into a bane.
Tuesday night, I played April Fool (50 thug/TA mastermind) on a continuation of a Barracuda SF I started last week with Liberty Force SG. Our team was:
2 corruptors (ice/rad and fire/rad)
3 dominators
2 masterminds (thug/TA and robo/FF)
Our team was rather squishy and we suffered two team wipes against Reichsman; or, strictly speaking, to the ambushes that appeared while we were fighting Reichsman. For awhile my team was fixated on the control panels behind these laser grids in the final room, thinking that clicking those control panels was the key to winning the encounter; we couldn't get anyone to them without them dying to the laser panel damage, though. We thought maybe a stalker would have the ability to disarm these somehow, but since villain SF teams don't consider stalkers desirable, I've never actually teamed with a stalker on the BSF so couldn't say for sure.
We eventually resorted to concentrating on the ambushes (only), avoiding aggroing Reichsman until we killed every single 5th Column minion who dared to show its face. We definitely determined that there is an end to those ambushes, eventually; once we got to that point, we were able to face Reichsman alone. He still was ludicrously tough; even with 2 sets of rad debuffs and some TA debuffs, we couldn't seem to kill him. Each time we got him low on health, he would use some power that made him pseudo-phase shift, leaving him "unaffected" by our attacks while he healed up a bunch before that wore off. After going through this cycle a couple times, I was annoyed enough by this guy that I dropped a chem nuke and 2 charges of my shivan shard on him. This seemed to help some, and we eventually dropped him to complete the SF. The results dialog said it took us 97h 21min and we suffered 111 deaths, for 20 merits (0.20 MPH).
Also on Tuesday, I played Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper) through Of Liberty and State, a story arc where you're helping Ms Liberty investigate corruption in the Longbow organization, but then Statesman gets involved and basically tramples her investigation in a high-handed manner. This was actually a pretty cool story, and you get to interact with a lot of the signature heroes and villains of the game, but it also had some plot points I found hard to believe and didn't have much closure at the end (mostly due to being part 1 of a longer epic). I gave it 4 stars.
On Wednesday night, I joined a Barracuda SF forming on the Villains of Liberty channel; the team leader asked me to bring a debuffer, so I played Yuki-Onna (50 ice/cold corruptor). Our team mix was:
1 mastermind (robo/trap)
3 corruptors (elec/therm, ice/cold, ice/kin)
2 brutes (mace/shield, elec/shield)
The thermal corruptor warned she only had an hour to play, and considering the previous painful experience with the BSF, I felt rather dubious about the idea of a 5-player team taking on Reichsman. The team leader assured me that Wednesday's patch had improved things (by "fixing" the MM power to disable his phase shift-like power). I wasn't too sure about this, but was willing to give it a try.
We got to the final showdown with Reichsman just as the thermal's time ran out and she had to go to work (she did tell us up front about this, so can't blame her a bit). We suffered one wipeout against Reichsman and his ambushes, after which we cleared most of the ambushes to make it a little safer. The MM initially reported that his temp power to disable Reichsman's phase shift "wasn't working", but after Reichsman's first phase shift, he never went into phase shift again, which allowed us to beat him even short-handed. I theorize that maybe you can't hit him with the anti-phase-shift power when he's already phase shifted, so probably the power needs to be used as a preventative (i.e., before Reichsman phase shifts).
We finished the BSF in 1hr 26mins and I was pleasantly surprised to find out the merit reward had been increased to 30 merits (20.93 MPH). I think this change was totally justified, the old value was far too few for the effort.
After that, I spent some time on Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) tinkering with writing a new villainous story arc on Mission Architect. My basic premise is that you're an entry-level employee at Crey Industries, and you're working in an office having Dilbert-like adventures, trying to get promoted while dodging frequent raids from superheroes and police.
While doing this, I got a compliment on Spy Girl's name and background story from a passerby in AE building, which was nice. He said I must've gotten the name a really long time ago in order to get such a good name, and I had to admit I had just made the character late last year. I do think someone must've had the name before me and deleted the character or lost the name due to inactivity; someone once tried to tell me that he had teamed with a character named Spy Girl months before my character's creation date.
Finished the night joining a Katie TF with Star Amethyst (31 warshade). My ISP actually died for about 5 minutes right after I agreed to join the team; after internet came back up, I totally expected the TF would've gone forward without me, but they had been nice enough to wait. Our team makeup was:
2 peacebringers
2 emp defenders
2 blasters
1 tanker
1 warshade (me)
Before starting the KTF we beat up an Eochai giant monster for 2 reward merits; this was a pretty lengthy grind, since we had no debuffs to speak of, and this made me nervous about our ability to defeat 10 AVs in a row. We actually seemed okay against the 10 Mary's, if just a little slow. I didn't have any KB protection to speak of, so got knocked around an awful lot by the stormy witches; may need to fix that at some point. I also noticed our ice blaster had a habit of dropping a Blizzard right on the spawn point just prior to each wave, which I thought was a pretty awesome way to reduce the alpha strike.
In any case, we got through the KTF in 43mins, gaining 9 merits (12.56 MPH). This got Star Amethyst to level 32, where I took Quasar (the warshade nova). Though, I'm not sure how excited I am overall about playing a kheldian AT; the whole reason Star Amethyst is a kheldian is because I like the purple color of the warshade powers, and with power colorization coming in I16, I'm very tempted to re-start her as some sort of dark defender with recolored powers.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
7/20/2009
I started off last Thursday playing Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) on a speed Lady Grey TF with a team mix of:
brute
controller
tanker
corruptor
2 scrappers (including me)
fortunata
A teammate complimented me on Blond Justice's name and costume, which was nice. Otherwise the LGTF went by in a flash, finishing in 24min 25sec for 39 merits (95.84 MPH).
I went on to play Star Amethyst (32 warshade) on a Katie Hannon TF. I forgot to write down our team mix, but I think we were blaster heavy. We had a team wipe on Mary #10 but otherwise did fine, finishing in 31mins 21sec for 9 merits (17.22 MPH). This got Star Amethyst to level 33 and I cashed in her reward merits for 14 draws from the level 35-39 recipe reward pool, getting:
2 Dark Watcher (RCHG/END) Wentw=15k each
1 Malaise's Illusions (ACC/CNFS/RCHG) Wentw=500k
1 Unbounded Leap (+stealth) Wentw=5M
1 Scirocco's Dervish (chance for lethal) Wentw=2M
1 Gaussian's Synchronized Fire Control (RCHG/END) Wentw=2M
1 Devastation (ACC/DMG/RCHG) Wentw=2.5M
1 Trap of the Hunter (ACC/INTRDX/RCHG) Wentw=250K
1 Luck of the Gambler (DEF/+7.5% global rchg) Wentw=65M
1 Freebird (+stealth) Wentw=4M
1 Impervium Armor (RES) Wentw=4.5M
1 Analyze Weakness (chance of +tohit) Wentw=1M
1 Kinetic Combat (DMG/END/RCHG) Wentw=20M
1 Performance Shifter (RCHG/ACC) Wentw=160K
This comes to an average of 381.9K influence per merit spent, which is significantly above average. The LotG and the Kinetic Combat were the real prizes of this pull.
At this point I wasn't that excited about warshades, though, and after crafting & stashing the best of these IOs, I ended up transfering Star Amethyst (warshade) to another server and re-rolling a new Star Amethyst on Liberty, this time as a newbie dark miasma/ice blast defender. I figure that come I16, I can re-color all her dark and ice powers some shade of purple (I think both powersets will look really neat when colorized), and still be kind of a controlly damage dealer (which was my play style as a warshade), only with much more buff/debuff, and hopefully more solo capability. Yeah, it's a little weird to say a defender is a better soloer than...well, anything else. But I think in this case it may be true.
The new dark/ice version of Star Amethyst emerged in Atlas Park in the middle of a Rikti invasion; hopping onto a Rikti-fighting team, I was level 4 by the time the invasion was over. From there I ran a few of Azuria's newbie missions to get to level 5. I'm impressed by the DPS output of defender ice blasts at low level; though Tar Patch had something to do with this, I'm sure. We'll see if this keeps up as she levels up.
Went on to play Kashira (25 db/ninj stalker) on a quick Sharkhead SF. Our team was:
3 brutes
2 fortunata
1 bane
1 stalker (me)
This team blitzed through the SF in 28min 5sec (support? who needs support) for 22 merits (47.0 MPH), getting Kashira to level 26, where I took Kuji-In Rin (ninja mez protection).
Went on to run a quick Imperious TF on Indigo Ifrit (50 fire/rad corruptor). I was a little nervous about playing a squishy on a "quick" TF as they always get left behind to get gacked by mobs, but the team leader wanted a "healer" so I volunteered for the job. Our team mix was:
3 corruptors (rad, cold, kin)
2 fortunata
3 scrappers
I really didn't have to do much healing as we were mostly at the defense cap, though we suffered occasional deaths from lucky hits. Finished in 26mins 59sec for 28 merits (62.26 MPH).
After that I was on a quick Lady Grey TF, this time as Mayday (50 fortunata). Our team was:
1 corruptor
1 fortunata (me)
1 dominator
1 blaster
1 tanker
2 scrappers
1 defender
We had no special problems. The team leader asked me to be the "main assist" for blue mitos in the Hamidon mission, and later asked me to solo the generators in the final encounter while the rest of the team fought the AVs; this was kinda cool and both jobs were no problem for my fortunata with her high defense and DPS. VEATs are pretty strong. We finished in 30min 32sec for 39 merits (76.64 MPH).
Went on to play Mayday on a 1st villain respec with a team of:
2 corruptors (cold, kin)
1 dominator
1 fortunata (me)
1 bane
2 brutes
At level 33 I was missing some of my powers (mostly stealth and AoE attacks) but seemed to manage okay. We finished in a ludicrously fast 9min 20sec for 15 merits (96.43 MPH).
After that I played Mega (37 SS/will brute), duoing with a friend playing a brute through the Ghost Widow patron arc. We beat up a mission full of Circle of Thorns, getting Mega to 38, where I took Stamina, for extra endurance recovery on top of the Quick Recovery that I already had.
Finished Thursday night soloing Terrific Woman (14 SS/SR brute) through The Horsemen Chronicles Part 1, which was a lowbie arc where you're trying to foil a Praetorian plot. You don't actually fight any Praetorians except for one custom enemy boss, but that one guy somehow stirs up trouble with lots of other lowbie enemy factions. Each individual mission was interesting with lots of stuff to do in it, and decent dialog; but the overall plot had problems and there were a few plot elements I found hard to believe. I gave it 3 stars.
On Saturday I played Mystery Girl (37 ff/nrg defender) on a 4-player LEGION team running through low 40s missions. We had a team wipe against Antimatter, then beat him on our second try; this ended up getting Mystery Girl to level 38, where I burned her free respec trying to re-build her for maximum ranged DEF. Previously I had tried to slot all her powers with various damage procs, just for fun, so I ended up trying to yank most of those out in order to not lose them.
After that I played Mega (38 SS/will brute), joining a 3-player villain team to help a friend defeat Numina.
Late Saturday night, a friend asked me to come to Pocket D to help her get the Tournament Victor badge. The way this worked is we had 8 players join a Swiss Draw tournament, and we basically "fixed" the result of each tournament, having most players forfeit so that a particular player would win and get the badge. This felt a little cheaty, but I don't think I've ever seen a real PvP tournament, so it's not like you can get this badge in any "legit" way. I participated in this for 3 "tournaments" and got Police Woman the Tournament Victor badge.
On Sunday night, I played Miss Scarlett (9 mace/SR brute on Victory server) as a lackey on a 7-player Demolition Girls team, mostly running through Seer Marino's story arc, then moving to Cap au Diable for a couple missions. Seer Marino's story arc, as always, was packed with Mu Mystics that flatlined my END for about 80% of the time, which was quite annoying, but a helpful teammate kept feeding me blues to keep me going. We probably had two or three team wipes while fighting Arachnos mobs. Nevertheless this got Miss Scarlett to level 14, and I picked up Swift, Focused Senses and Agile. I found that I'm really liking the war mace powerset (the attacks seem to flow pretty naturally and do decent damage), and I'm quite tempted to start a mace character on Liberty sometime. Teammates got into Miss Scarlett's "concept"; every time we found a body bag glowy I would say "I didn't do it!" and someone else would say "It was Miss Scarlett, with the wrench, in the Arachnos base!"
Finished the night soloing through a couple MA story arcs. First I played Mega (38 SS/will brute) through The Consequences of War - Part 1, a high level arc depicting the brutal violence of the Rikti war and sacrifices made by lesser-known heroes that fought in it. The first few missions of this arc were kinda generic Rikti fighting, but the last two missions were particularly compelling, as you and some other heroes make a last stand against a Rikti assault on a hero base. I gave this story arc 4 stars.
After that I played Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper) through The Audition - Part 1, a high level arc where Synapse tries to recruit you to the Freedom Phalanx, only there's, like, tryouts. The author of this arc asked me not to say much about it until I've played Part 2, but I think I can say that I did end up rating it 4 stars.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
7/23/2009
Monday night, I played Strong Woman (33 inv/SS tanker) as a lackey on a 5-player LEGION team running level 44ish missions. Our team was basically me as a tanker, a kinetic, and a bunch of blasters/scrappers/DPS. We did pretty well overall, beating a Bobcat AV, though we did have one wipeout against Nemesis due to snipers and stacked vengeance. Strong Woman got to level 35, where I took Tough, which puts her smash/lethal resist up to a very healthy 80%. I was capped at 90% RES for a little while from a Mystic Fortune buff, but I'm hoping to slot up Tough to have close to 90% RES all the time. At least against smash/lethal, anyway; I remember from my last invuln tank that psi and weird damage types became really common in the low 40s.
After that team broke up, I solo'd my new version of Star Amethyst (5 dark/ice defender) up to level 6 running radio missions in King's Row.
On Tuesday night, I logged in Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) to find that my evil market manipulation has finally made me a billionaire, as her influence total exceeded 1,000,000,000 infl for the first time. I probably had this much inf on all my alts total long ago, but this is the first time I had this much on a single character. I'm not quite sure what I'll do with all this infl yet; I usually don't buy really extravagant stuff off of the market (due to being cheap). I'm sure I'll think of something. Maybe bathe in it like Scrooge McDuck.
A Katie Hannon TF was forming and I joined it with Linda Lightspeed (33 kin/rad defender). We had a team of
3 defenders
1 controller
2 blasters
1 tanker
1 peacebringer
and finished it in a fairly respectable 26min 5sec for 9 merits (20.70 MPH). I have Linda with "xp off" to try and get level 33 recipes, and this gave her enough merits to spend 20 on a reward roll. I got a lemony Edict of the Master, though; can't win 'em all!
After that I played Mega (38 SS/will brute) through Superadine Withdrawal Blues, a story arc about a Troll that supposedly has given up Superadine, but in the actual story he seems to be crazy for it. At first you help the Troll steal some drugs, but eventually you get annoyed by him and beat him up. The story was rather thin and not all that funny; I rated it 2 stars.
I then played Mega on an Ice Mistral SF with a team of:
2 corruptors (fire/pain and dark/dark)
2 brutes (elec/fire and SS/will)
1 MM (robo/dark)
We didn't have any serious problems and we cleared a lot of extra stuff for fun and exp. Finished the SF in 1hr 33mins for 25 merits (16.13 MPH), and got Mega to level 39.
Wednesday night, I blitzed through two "quick" LGTFs, first playing Spacegirl (50 mind/rad controller) and then another one playing Mayday (50 fortunata). These are getting pretty routine, and they both finished in right around 24-25 mins for 38 merits each (93 MPH).
After that I spent some time on Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) sneaking around my own story arcs taking screen shots, which I used to construct a couple banner ads for City of Heroes Mission Review site, which was kind enough to use a couple of these banners as "Featured Missions" on their site. Yay for free advertising! 
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
8/3/2009
Between the message board migration and the double exp weekend, I'm woefully behind on journal entries. For the sake of catching up, here's a very terse summary of my activities for the last week.
Screen shots taken from 3 of my story arcs and submitted to CoH Mission Review; Flower Knight Task Force and Celebrity Kidnapping were both selected as "Featured Missions".
To my great good fortune, Teen Phalanx Forever! remains 5-stars with over 500 plays, and Flower Knight Task Force has joined it on the second page of the default search, 5-stars with about 30 plays.
Police Woman (50 AR/dev) helped kill Jurassik, 2 merits.
Spacegirl (50 mind/rad) speed LGTF, 24m 50s, 39 merits.
Mayday (50 fort) speed LGTF, 23m 39s, 39 merits; another speed LGTF, 25m 42s, 39 merits; another speed LGTF, 24m 0s, 39 merits. Spent 400 merits on LotG (DEF/global RCHG) recipes which were crafted and slotted by my brute, Mega.
Indigo Ifrit (50 fire/rad corr) RSF, 33m 23s, Peroxisome HO.
Mega (39 SS/will brute) joined many villain teams; normal ITF, 1hr 43m, 28 merits, got an Armageddon (DMG/END) recipe; teamed during double exp; got the Invader accolade (+70hp); ended at level 48.
Primadonna (43 sonic/kin corr) speed ITF, 31m 36s, 28 merits; teamed during double exp; ended at level 47.
April Fool (50 thug/TA MM), "King of the Hill" organized PvP in Siren's Call; pets plus TA seemed very effective. I got to deliver the line "I'm not psycho, I just have a zest for life!" Was asked to switch to hero side to even out numbers, played Police Woman (50 AR/dev) for a bit, then was asked to switch to villain side to even out numbers again. Played Schadenfreude (49 AR/pain), then Yuki-Onna (50 ice/cold). Some rude PvPers came in on the hero side and were generally disruptive, but nevertheless the night was fun overall. Yuki-Onna got a Fury of the Gladiator (DMG/ACC) PvP recipe drop, valued at about 15M at the Black market.
Blond Justice (50 bs/shield) speed ITF, 42m 33s, 28 merits.
Miss Scarlett (14 mace/SR) 7 player team, ended at level 17.
Yuki-Onna (50 ice/cold corr) LGTF, 28m 5s, 39 merits, got an Unbreakable Constraint (HOLD/RCHG/ACC) recipe.
Schadenfreude (49 AR/pain corr) solo'd mayhem missions for the Invader accolade.
Idealist (44 fire/therm ctrl) Faathim TF, 3hr 16m, 73 merits, ended at level 46.
Star Amethyst (6 dark/ice def) duo'd and solo'd to 10; Positron TF, 4hr 6min, 64 merits; Synapse TF, 3hr 30min, 59 merits including Babbage; ended at level 21.
Alice Slaughter (35 db/will brute) 8 player team, ended at level 36. At a teammate's suggestion, I did the costume missions and used science pack tech to give her a "VERY TALL" and a "very small" costume, and I'm planning on use the "drink formula" costume change emote to simulate Wonderland-inspired size changes.
Fire Emerald (36 fire/fire blaster) teamed up during double exp, ended at level 40.
Strong Woman (35 inv/SS) teamed up during double exp; 2nd hero respec, 1hr 27mins, took the respec; ended at level 38.
TokyoRose (20 son/son corr) teamed up during double exp; ended at level 21.
Arrow Girl (brand new archery/dev blaster; can't believe I got this name) teamed up during double exp; did an AE story arc, ran through Hollows, ran through Faultline; ended at level 21.
Ran the following story arcs and gave the following ratings:
History of Statesman, 4 stars.
The Audition (missions 4-6), 3 stars.
Nuclear in 90 - The Fusionette TF, 5 stars (had run this before, but it's a favorite)
Threefold Rule, 4 stars.
Matchstick Women, 5 stars (cool firefighting mission; well-written ending)
The Next War on Drugs, 5 stars (well-written street-level adventure; cool forensics mission)
Becky and Mandy, 5 stars (author told me my feedback was the first to mention the fun Heathers references)
Captain Dynamic Faces the Great Face, 3 stars.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
8/6/2009
After the madness of double exp weekend, my game playing slowed down a bit. Monday night I mostly solo'd and did some editing of a new MA story arc I'm working on. I mostly finished a villainous mission where you're a research scientist working for Crey Industries and your mission objectives are to defeat a bunch of "escaped experiments" for the sake of research, then knock off a rival scientist, steal his research and publish it as your own.
On Tuesday night, I played a couple speed TFs organized on the o.O channel; the team leader asked me to play a kinetic, so I brought Primadonna (47 sonic/kin corruptor). We did a speed ITF in 23min 34sec and a speed LGTF in 26min 14sec, gaining 67 merits altogether, and getting Primadonna to level 48.
After that I joined an 8-player pickup team that had a couple friends on it, doing mid-40s Praetorian missions. I asked what AT would help most, and my friend said, "Ohh, bring damage", so I played Fire Emerald (40 fire/fire blaster). Upon arriving in the mission I found the team was already really DPS-heavy, with 5 blasters (including me) and a scrapper. This seemed weird, until my friend explained "it would make it too easy if you brought a tanker or defender". Well, we couldn't have it be too easy! So I happily zerged mobs along with the rest of the DPS, and I occasionally drew aggro and died (my fire/fire blaster seems much less survivable than any of my other blasters; but DOES do quite a lot of damage) but overall it worked fine. We beat Bobcat, Shadowhunter, Neuron and Antimatter as AVs, mostly through sheer DPS.
On Wednesday night I solo'd Kyrie Eleison (34 bs/inv scrapper) through most of the Midnighter arc, figuring I'd want to unlock Cimerora by the time she's 35. Along the way, I lucked into a 34 Performance Shifter (chance for END) recipe drop.
I also solo'd Arrow Girl (21 archery/dev blaster) through A Close Encounter, which I had run through before on a team but I wanted to get a better look at it for the sake of my arc review thread. This was a story about first contact with aliens who crashlanded a spaceship and scattered alien artifacts everywhere. I actually liked this arc more on the second try, and gave it 4 stars.
I briefly played Star Amethyst (21 dark/ice defender) to help a team from Liberty's Channel take down Adamastor in Dark Astoria, though another team jumped the gun on attacking the GM and did most of the damage, so our team got 2 merits for the kill, but didn't get badge credit.
Finished the night doing a speed LGTF as Mayday (50 fortunata), collecting another 39 merits in 27min 51sec.
Over the last few days I did a fair bit of market manipulation; the double exp weekend caused a massive whiplash effect on prices at Wentworth's and the Black Market. I'm mostly working on the salvage market, and during double exp, everyone was exping so hard that they dumped salvage on the market for nearly nothing; but after double exp, a lot of people were slotting up new IOs and were desperate to buy salvage of all types. As a result, during double exp I bought a lot of rare salvage for 100K-300K each, that I turned around and sold after double exp for 1M-2M each. Common salvage that I normally would delete to make space was selling for 200K-500K each. I must've made 200M influence and maybe 100M infamy in the last few days, and I'm really a pretty casual dabbler in the market system; I'm sure the hard-core marketers made a killing.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
8/11/2009
Last Thursday, I was playing Fire Emerald (40 fire/fire blaster) and accepted an invite to an 8-player pickup team going after Anti-Matter. This team wasn't terribly good and we had a team wipe against the AV, but we beat him on the second try.
After that mission I excused myself and swapped to Kyrie Eleison (34 bs/inv scrapper) and started my own pickup team, which rapidly filled up to 8 players. We had 2 force fielders and 1 cold defender; we lacked a traditional healer, but with capped defense we easily stomped lots of CoT and other enemies. We only ran into trouble against Devouring Earth, who dealt us two team wipes due to their Quartz (+tohit emanators) overcoming our defense. We got past that though and otherwise did well all night, getting Kyrie to level 36.
Later that night I joined a few speed TF runs. I played Indigo Ifrit (50 fire/rad corruptor) on a speed Lady Grey TF (taking 22min 44sec) and a speed Recluse SF (taking 32min 29sec; got a Lysosome); and Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) on a speed ITF (taking 21min 7sec).
Friday night, I played Strong Woman (39 inv/SS tanker) on a Numina TF, with a team mix of:
2 scrappers (fire/fire and claw/reg)
2 controllers (ill/emp and fire/thermal)
1 defender (cold/ice)
2 tankers (inv/SS and ice/EM)
Our team had a bad habit of getting strung out and separated in the early missions, but it didn't seem to be a big deal. We did suffer a wipeout in the first Eden door mission, where we got overwhelmed by stacked DE emanators. We managed to dust ourselves off though and finish that mission and the rest of the TF, completing it in 1hr 25mins. This got Strong Woman to level 40 and earned her the Task Force Commander accolade.
On Saturday, I found my main character Police Woman (50 AR/dev) had finally sat in Warburg long enough to get the Predator day job. So after some market manipulation (up to 1.25 billion-ish) I moved her to park in Cimerora.
I played Star Amethyst (21 dark/ice defender) for awhile; first duoing radio missions with a tanker friend, then sidekicking to a 5-player team. This got Star Amethyst to 22, where I took Ice Storm for some AoE damage. Later that night, I formed a Sister Psyche TF with a team mix of:
2 defenders (dark/ice, cold/ice)
4 blasters (fire/dev, 2 fire/fire, nrg/dev)
1 scrapper (claw/will)
1 controller (ill/TA)
This was a well-balanced team with lots of DPS, and we breezed through the TF in 1hr 54mins, getting Star Amethyst to level 25. I took Freeze Ray at 24. I've been liking Ice Storm (it works great with Tar Patch) but have been underwhelmed with Freeze Ray so far. I think this is because Star Amethyst already has Fearsome Stare and Howling Twilight, both of which are AoE controls, while Freeze Ray only holds a single target so just doesn't seem as cool by comparison.
I also played Arrow Girl (21 archery/dev blaster) as a sidekick to a 36 tanker for a bit, getting to level 22 (where I took Cloaking Device) and SOs. Later that night I joined a 5-player pickup team doing missions in Striga, which got Arrow Girl to 23. I'm really enjoying playing Arrow Girl so far; I think maybe it's because she has a good name, and as a */dev blaster she plays a lot like my main character.
Also on Saturday night, I joined an all-storm ITF organized on LBX, playing Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender). Our team mix was:
3 defenders (all stormy)
4 controllers (all stormy)
1 corruptor (stormy)
We basically trounced the mobs in the first mission, but in a moment of great irony, we discovered that the immense amount of knockback we were throwing around had caused multiple mobs to get knocked through the geometry, and as a result we weren't able to free Sister Solaris. We were able to kill two mobs that had gotten stuck in walls, but we still couldn't free Sister Solaris (there had to be more mobs that were knocked through the walls entirely or something) and as a result, we had to quit the TF.
We wanted to retry it, though, so we restarted the ITF with the same team - only, we were cautioning each other not to use Hurricane, Tornado, etc. during the first mission. This felt incredibly ironic for an all-stormy team. Once we got through the first mission, though, we felt free to let loose the dogs of storm for the rest of the TF, and we finished in a pretty reasonable 1hr 8mins. I think controller pets were tanking the AVs, or maybe their attacks were just debuffed to nothingness; it was pretty hard to see under all the Lightning Storms and Hurricanes.
On Sunday I picked up the Abiding veteran badge (57 months). I played Star Amethyst some more, sidekicking to a level 36ish LEGION team, which got her to level 27; I finally broke down and took a travel power, Teleport, at level 26. I had been getting by on the Raptor Pack but it just looks so gauche for a magic-origin character to be using that.
That night I played Miss Scarlett (17 mace/SR brute on Victory) on an 8-player Demolition Girls team, lackeyed up to 25 and running door missions for a few hours. This got Scarlett the Soul Taker badge and level 20, where Stamina was a welcome relief; mace/SR had seemed very END expensive, at least the way I had slotted it.
After that team broke up I spent a lot of time working on my newest story arc, which I finally felt was complete enough to publish: Papers and Paychecks (arc 298290), a level 32-45 villain arc where your villain decides to "go legit" and get a real job at a Fortune 500 company. Only the company you work for is Crey Industries, so the job turns out to be a little less "legit" than originally expected. Hijinks ensue.
On Monday I got a detailed review of the Flower Knight TF from one of the leading story arc reviewers on the CoH forums. He highlighted a problem with the final boss of my story arc, who is a renamed Lord Recluse, who, when near death, ends up summoning an army of Bane spiders, who look extremely out-of-theme for my story arc. At least 2 other people had also flagged this as something they thought was a problem, so this finally motivated me to actually start doing something about it.
So on Monday night I tried to make a new custom AV to replace my "Lord Recluse" clone. There was no way I could make a costume that looks just like Lord Recluse (there's just no way to add extra arms), but here's my initial stab at a samurai-themed Recluse:
I may do more costume tweaks eventually; despite being in mostly samurai armor, I thought the purple cape helped make him look a lot more like Lord Recluse than anything else (there's not that many heavily armored guys in purple cloaks in CoH). I started by making him a ninjas/energy assault AV, but in my testing that seemed too easy, so I switched him to ninjas/poison.
I had to delete a custom mob in order to make space for a new custom mob; but I found a way to work around actually losing any characters. I ended up deleting my "Shugenja" (a Japanese spellcaster) custom mob and replacing her with a slightly repainted Mu Mystic. This ended up looking like this:
I actually like how that turned out, as the arc is depicting a feudal Japan-themed alternate universe, so alternate versions of Mu Mystics kind of works.
I played Kyrie Eleison (36 bs/inv scrapper) on a LEGION team for a bit, but for some reason the lag was really bad on Monday night (people and mobs were doing little twitchy mini-teleports on my screen). This was making me dizzy enough that I had to drop from the team; I ended up spending the rest of the night fiddling with Mission Architect edits.
Also on Monday night, I got my first two plays through Papers and Paychecks. Both players seemed to like it. The arc is written with a "player decision" at the end (basically, the player chooses to complete the mission, or fail it), and both players so far chose the "nice" action rather than the "mean" action. It'll be interesting to see how many people choose each path.
Anyway, this afternoon I'm heading out of town for about a week and will have limited internet access; so I won't be on CoH until next week sometime. Will see you all then!
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
8/24/2009
It's been awhile since my last update; I was on vacation (and away from computer) for about a week, then really sick for about a week. But I did get some CoH play in while sick.
Last Monday I played Mega (49 SS/will brute) on a speed RSF organized on 0.o channel with a team of:
2 brutes including me (inv, will)
5 corruptors (a mix of rad and kin)
1 mastermind (dark)
We blitzed through the RSF in 34min 6sec and I got a Peroxisome SHO as reward. After that a friend invited me to an Imperious TF on Invincible difficulty with a team mix of:
2 brutes including me (will, shield)
1 tanker
3 defenders
1 controller
1 blaster
This was a non-speed run where we basically tried to bash everything (on difficulty 5, yet). We ran into trouble rescuing Sister Solaris at the end of mission 1 where the ambushes basically swamped everyone except me; Mega was fairly IO'd out for +lethal defense, and along with her natural lethal resist and regen, I was able to keep on fighting despite everyone else dying, and I rescued Solaris and dragged her to the altar and completed the mission. It was pretty cool. The rest of the TF went pretty well, though with the high difficulty there were a lot more deaths than normal, but we still got through it in 1hr 25mins. This also got Mega to level 50, re-achieving the level she had before I re-rolled her a few months back. I ended up adding some slots to Quick Recovery and Stamina that gave me enough room to slot 2 sets of 3 Performance Shifter, for the extra +HP bonuses; it came to about +56hp altogether, making Mega's total 2303.2hp - nowhere near the cap, but not too bad considering she's mostly slotted for +def.
On Tuesday, I solo'd Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper) through In Pursuit of Liberty, an AE story arc about the origin story of someone's hero who turns out to be related to Ms. Liberty. It was kind of neat to watch the new hero "grow up", but I thought the plot and background info needed more detail; I gave it 3 stars.
Later I played Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) on a speed Sharkhead SF, which finished in a speedy 31m 29sec; spent the merits on recipes but got junk.
After that I played Fire Emerald (40 fire/fire blaster) on a LEGION team fighting Praetorians, which beat Bobcat, Shadow Hunter, Neuron and Anti-Matter and got Fire Emerald to level 41. While on this team, I was rezzing our controller and suddenly was conspicuously aware that I often take Resuscitate (Medicine Pool rez) on blasters, but avoid taking Resurrect (Empathy rez) on empath characters, which struck me as very weird; a couple teammates said this was probably just because I like to do things that aren't expected. Despite this, at 41 I decided to stay with the "fire" theme for Fire Emerald, selecting Char as a new power, from the fire epic pool.
On Wednesday I played Kyrie Eleison (37 bs/inv scrapper) through The Doctor Returns AE story arc. This was a pretty good arc where you stop Crey from trapping superheroes inside MA missions and replacing them with evil duplicates; I gave it 4 stars.
Anticipating the changes to electric armor, I started a new elec/elec brute named Blackout Girl, who is basically a rerolled version of Millie Volt (my previous elec/inv brute) with a different name. Ran through the tutorial and Kalinda's first story arc, then an AE story arc called Burning of Hearts where you help a thug wreak horrible revenge on his ex-girlfriend and the guy she's now seeing. This was quite black-hearted and evil, but I kinda like that in a villain arc, so I gave it 5 stars.
Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) joined a speed ITF formed on O.o channel which easily blitzed through the TF; but a corruptor went linkdead in the very last mission and the whole team agreed to wait around a bit to give him a chance to log back in and get the rewards. After 9 minutes the team kinda felt we had waited enough, so we completed the TF, with a final time of 35mins 42sec. (Later we found out that this corruptor had suffered a power outage, so wasn't able to get back on until much much later.)
From there, Blond joined a STF formed on LBX channel with a team mix of:
3 controllers (kin, rad, FF)
1 tanker (stone armor)
1 scrapper (bs/shield) (me)
3 blasters (AR, psy, ice)
We got through the early missions OK, but had a partial team wipe fighting Dr. Aeon (I think the tanker forgot to use the special power from the previous mission to debuff him), but some of the support characters kept their cool and TP'd people out of the fight to resurrect them back in, and we eventually overcame him. In the last mission, my game crashed while we were fighting Ghost Widow, so I missed getting the Diplomat badge (for the 4 patron AVs), but I got back in time to help with the Arachnos Flyer and to join the wipeout against Lord Recluse, who I think we jumped while some people weren't quite ready. It took some doing to get the tanker set up with enough support to stay up against Lord Recluse, but we eventually got this right, and then once we dropped the red tower it was pretty easy after that. The FF controller was using Force Bubble to keep Arachnos Repairmen and misc Banes at bay, and after the red tower went down one of the controllers was using the plant control Tree of Life to keep the stony healed, which surprised me because I never thought the regen from that Tree was much to speak of. We finished the STF in 1hr 49mins; I took an HO but don't remember what I got.
Finished Wednesday night making some edits to my latest AE story arc, Papers and Paychecks, based on player feedback.
On Thursday, I played Linda Lightspeed (33 kin/rad defender) through a speed Manticore TF organized on O.o channel. We did it pretty quickly but the game didn't report a time for us. I spent 20 merits to get a fairly worthless Edict of the Master (5% def for pets) recipe.
Ran my newbie brute Blackout Girl through the Nuclear in 90 - The Fusionette TF AE story arc, which I've done before, but I like it for really low level characters, which most story arcs aren't suitable for. This got Blackout Girl to level 7. I also got a compliment on Blackout Girl's biographical story from a random passerby, which was nice.
Also on Thursday I spent some time soloing Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) through Maria Jenkins' story arc, in order to work on the Portal Jockey accolade. Managed to beat Nightstar and Dominatrix while solo, and picked up a tasty Armageddon (RCHG/ACC) recipe while doing so.
After that I played Schadenfreude (49 AR/pain corruptor) on a Recluse SF with a team mix of:
2 brutes
2 MMs
4 corruptors
With this much support we easily finished in 44mins 35sec and I got level 50 and a Centriole SHO for my trouble.
Finished the night playing Star Amethyst (27 dark/ice defender); I formed a Citadel TF with a mix of people from various channels I'm on, ending up with:
2 defenders
2 scrappers
2 tankers
1 controller
1 blaster
This was pretty well balanced and we beat up lots of Council without any serious problems. Finished in 1hr 11mins, getting Star Amethyst to level 29. I took Bitter Ice Blast at level 28, which gives Star Amethyst a pretty good array of attack powers between the 3 ice blasts, ice storm and freeze ray (which I'm getting used to and starting to like). I'm really liking how dark miasma/ice blast works together.
On Friday I played Arrow Girl (23 archery/dev blaster), joining a Sister Psyche TF with a team mix of:
1 tanker (dark armor)
2 scrappers
4 blasters
1 controller (stormy)
This seemed pretty light on support, but wasn't too bad. Had a little drama early on between some exemplared people who wanted to speed through much of the TF, and some people at the low end of the level range who wouldn't SK (despite dying lots) and wanted to clear more for exp; this eventually got worked out, mostly clearing early on and mostly stealthing later on. We did manage to have a team wipe against Devastation, a pretty ordinary Freak boss in one of the train missions, simply due to over-aggroing the large number of groups around him. Finished the TF in 2hrs 43mins, which is a little slow but not too bad. This got Arrow Girl to level 26; I took Fistful of Arrows at 24 for extra AoE, and Aim at 26.
Joined a friend for Numina TF later that day, playing Kyrie Eleison (37 bs/inv scrapper). Our team mix was:
3 scrappers
3 tankers
1 kin controller
Although I didn't form the TF, I got volunteered to be TF leader and to call out where the various hunt missions would be. We were actually really efficient and finished in a speedy 58mins.
Went on to join another Citadel TF, this time with Arrow Girl (26 archery/dev blaster), with a team mix of:
2 blasters
3 scrappers
2 defenders (empathy, kinetics)
We really had no problems getting through it and finished in 1hr 22mins, getting Arrow Girl to level 27.
After that I played Mega (50 SS/will brute) on a speed Lady Grey TF, which blitzed through the TF in 27min 29sec.
Finished the night playing Spacegirl (50 mind/rad controller) on a 3-player Liberty Force SG team running Vanguard story arcs in Rikti War Zone. We managed to twice fail to rescue a Nemesis Defector (between hordes of Fake Nemeses and multiple Nemesis ambushes), but all 3 of us had the same mission and through persistence and patience (and a much more cautious approach on the third attempt) we managed to rescue the silly blue-coated Nemesis guy on the third try.
On Saturday I played Star Amethyst (29 dark/ice defender), forming a 5 player pickup team in Striga Isle, where we did Tobias Hansen's story arc and Lars Hansen's story arc, which got me 14 merits, level 30 (took Aim for new power) and unlocked Ernesto Hess as a TF contact. Started on Croatoa story arcs after that and did a couple missions there before the team broke up.
After that I had about twenty minutes until the Bunny Run event, and I spent that time wracking my brains for a good bunny rabbit name and costume and powersets. It takes me way too long to actually make a character, and by the time I had Police Rabbit (a name I had originally thought was too dumb, but settled on it after I realized I couldn't come up with a good name and character concept for a rabbit character on short notice) in game, I had already missed the bunny run. So I ran over to the finish line anyway, and there were quite a lot of bunnies there, which was pretty funny. (Will try to remember to post a screen shot later.)
After that I brought Star Amethyst back on, and joined a Manticore TF with a team of about half Midnight Fight Club SG and half Paper Street Soap SG (no, I don't know what those mean).
3 blasters
1 scrapper
1 tanker
1 dark/ice defender (me)
1 emp controller
We fought Crey the normal way, clearing most missions with occasional stealthing. We had one early team wipe in mission 1 due to the team splitting up and going different directions, but otherwise seemed to do fine. Finished in 2hrs 17mins, getting Star Amethyst to level 31.
I finished the night helping someone on LBX with a very old Snaptooth mission from the Valentine's Day event. It was all pretty grey (it was a level 29 mission and the owner was in his 40s). I think the mission owner was nervous and asked for help due to the EB; but it proved to be pretty easy for us to handle, and finishing the mission unlocked the Toga costume piece for Star Amethyst.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
8/31/2009
Last Monday I solo'd Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper) through AE story arcs. I first ran through Speeding Through Time, a story about a time-traveling speedster who saves the world; it had a neat story and used time travel in creative ways. I gave it 4 stars.
Then I solo'd through Old Folks Home, a one mission arc where you battle your way through a retirement home full of angry elderly people. This was highly politically incorrect, but had its moments, and I gave it 3 stars.
On Tuesday night I played Kashira (27 db/ninj stalker) on a Sharkhead SF organized on LBX, with a team of
2 dominators
1 brute
3 widows
2 stalkers
In the first mission, we tried to stealth to Barracuda, then freed her, but got wiped out by ambushes. We had to re-do the mission, and on our second try we managed to clear a path to successfully complete it. We had another wipeout in the Shockstorm mission trying to stealth to the end (due to the ambushes that spawn) and yet another wipeout against the Barracuda ambush in the second to last mission (we weren't the type of team that could stand up to an AV with essentially no support). Our persistence finally got us through the SF in 1hr 15mins. Kashira got level 28 while on this SF, and I took Recall Friend in hopes of helping with stealth/TP duties.
After that I played Yuki-Onna (50 ice/cold corruptor) on a couple speed TFs organized on 0.o channel; a 7-player ITF finished in 23min 25sec, and an 8-player RSF finished in 33min 25sec.
Finished the night soloing Mega (50 ss/will brute) through an Ouroboros flashback of Willy Wheeler's There's a Sucker Born Every Minute story arc for 12 merits and the Paragon of Vice badge.
On Wednesday night, my main character Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) earned the Power Seller badge (7000 items sold) as a side effect of various market manipulations. Someone was advertising a PvP event called Warburg tag where you try to kill the event organizer in PvP; this sounded fun so I headed over. I got 3 kills on the event organizer before he told me "only one per account please!" So I switched to attacking the people hunting him, and then eventually just attacking anyone I saw. Apparently he was paying people a 10M infl bounty for each kill (which I actually forgot to collect because I was too busy shooting people). Got 67.9 PvP rep while there (which I think must mean 68 kills?) but I'm sure it's all decayed away by now.
From there I went to a RWZ raid where I picked up my 24th bomb credit (I'll probably get my 25th just in time for them to lower the number needed in I16) and 2 merits for the Master-at-arms.
After that I switched to Blackout Girl (7 elec/elec brute) where I accepted an invite to a 6-player pickup team. Turned out this team was all low level (we were like level 5 to 19) and doing an AE farm which seemed to consist entirely of Crazed and Crey lieutenants (I guess the theme is things that start with Cr?). I tried to stick with this team through one run of the mission for the sake of being polite, but I just couldn't do it; I got bored halfway through and excused myself. This did get Blackout Girl to level 8, though, where I took Thunder Strike, a small melee-range AoE.
After escaping the farm, I briefly signed on with a pickup team that had assembled to take down Deathsurge, which gave Blackout Girl 2 merits and the Surging badge.
I had Friday off, and played CoH a lot. I started by soloing Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) through part of Maria Jenkins' Praetorian story arc, defeating Chimera and Shadow Hunter as EBs.
I also played Blackout Girl (8 elec/elec brute) through Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend, an AE story arc where you steal diamonds and battle Outcasts in order to impress a girl. It had some typos but was a pretty good arc overall, and I gave it 5 stars.
After that I played Star Amethyst (32 dark/ice defender) on a 7-player Katie Hannon TF, with a team mix of:
2 scrappers
3 defenders (rad, dark, sonic)
1 controller (rad)
1 blaster
The large amount of debuffs we had made the first mission quite easy. In the last mission we had a little trouble because Katie started aggroing on random mobs and starting fights, but after we fought and cleared a few groups around her, she finally allowed herself to be led out. Finished in 34min 1sec and got Star Amethyst to level 33.
Level 33 is when I like to cash in the reward merits my alts have built up, and Star Amethyst spent 260 merits on 13 recipe rolls (at the 35-39 range), receiving:
1 Ghost Widow's Embrace (chance for psi) Wentw=125K
2 Numina's Convalescence (END/HEAL/RCHG) Wentw=10M each
1 Touch of Death (ACC/DMG/END) Wentw=10M
2 Luck of the Gambler (DMG/END/RCHG) Wentw=4.1M each
1 Force Feedback (RCHG/END) Wentw=5K
1 Miracle (+recovery) Wentw=70M
1 Impervium Armor (+psi RES) Wentw=3.3M
1 Decimation (ACC/DMG/RCHG) Wentw=3M
1 Glimpse of the Abyss (ACC/FEAR/RCHG) Wentw=500K
1 Edict of the Master (DMG) Wentw=2K
1 Sovereign Right (ACC/END) Wentw=100 (sold for more at vendor)
This was a total yield of 115.132M, or 442.8K infl/merit, which is an extremely good yield. Most of this was due to the Miracle recipe, though I did get several other good recipes as well.
I also burned 1200 tickets on Bronze reward rolls. Bronze recipe rolls mostly yield junk with occasional goodies; the only worthwhile things I got from this were a Doctored Wounds (END/HEAL/RCHG) and a Gaussian's Synchronized Fire Control (TOHITBUFF).
I spent some time crafting IOs for Star Amethyst, slotting a set of 6 Lockdown in her Freeze Ray power, which adds +3.75% ranged DEF (for a total of 17.5% ranged DEF).
After that I played Kyrie Eleison (37 bs/inv scrapper) as an SK on an Imperious TF organized on LB (the successor channel to LBX). Our team was:
1 brute (elec armor)
2 defenders (TA, dark)
2 scrappers
1 corruptor (rad)
1 blaster
1 fortunata
We fought through most stuff and mostly did fine. Though the brute, who was on point, seemed a little depressed that he was dying a lot; truthfully, "tanking" ITFs is pretty hard on meleers due to the cascading DEF debuffs, and I tried to say so. I found my elec armor brute had trouble with these, too; soft capped DEF or 90% RES seems the way to go against Romans. As an invuln scrapper I seemed mostly okay; partly because I had some DEF and decent lethal RES, but mostly because I let the brute go first. The rad corruptor insisted on being SK'd by the lowest mentor, who was 49, which seemed a little greedy, but didn't make a big difference (especially when the 49 ended up hitting 50). We finished in 1hr 2mins; this got Kyrie to level 39.
I crafted a few IOs for Kyrie Eleison, adding two sets of 6 Crushing Impact to her Hack and Disembowel powers, which gives net global bonuses of +14% acc, +10% rchg, +2.5% hp and +5% psi RES.
Later I played Star Amethyst (33 dark/ice defender) through another Katie TF, with
2 tanks
2 controllers
2 defenders
1 scrapper
1 blaster
We blew through it in 27min 20sec. I got 4 merits, because I totally forgot about diminishing returns. The team did go on to kill Jack-in-Irons, though, for another 2 merits.
After that I played Blackout Girl (9 elec/elec brute) on a 5-player lowbie villain team formed on LB channel. Our levels were something like 3, 4, 6, 8, 9. This was too far apart for everyone to get exp; they asked me to malefactor long enough for some people to level up. It seemed a little silly to malefactor down from level 9, but I decided to go along with this, and we got the 3 up to 4 before long. But we died an awful lot, and I eventually came to the conclusion it was a combination of the level spread (the team leader was picking my level 9 missions, and really the two 4s couldn't do much against what we were fighting) and a lack of support types (we had no heals/buffs/debuffs at all). After a couple missions like this, I dropped out of the team.
I ended up dusting off Lady Arachne (a 47 wolf spider I haven't played in months) and joining an 8 player team of Demolition Girls SG, doing door missions in Grandville. We beat up Agent Indigo and Dr. Aeon and got Lady Arachne to level 48.
On Saturday I played Primadonna (48 sonic/kin corruptor) on a speed ITF that finished in 23min 53sec, getting Primadonna to 49, where I took Acrobatics. I also did some crafting, slotting 6 Positron's Blast into Howl (for +6.25% rchg) and 5 Thunderstrike into Shriek (eventually hoping to get the sixth for the range DEF).
I solo'd Arrow Girl (28 archery/dev blaster) through The Amazing Rat Race, an AE arc starting in a Crey lab for mutant rats which takes you to lots of interesting locations while researching someone's background story; this had a lot of neat ideas but also felt very confusing, so I ended up rating it 3 stars. Arrow Girl also helped take down Babbage in Skyway for 2 reward merits and the Clockstopper badge.
Someone was looking for help with Fake Nemeses in PI, so I logged on Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) and duo'd with him for a bit, getting enough Fakes for the Unveiler badge and the Freedom Phalanx Reserve accolade (+133 HP for Blond). The other guy wasn't as far along on badge progress as I was, so I did another 20ish Fakes for good measure before heading out.
I went from there to playing Indigo Ifrit (50 fire/rad corruptor) on an ITF organized on Sisterhood channel. Our team mix was:
2 brutes
1 tanker (willpower)
1 defender (dark)
2 blasters
1 corruptor (rad)
1 MM (pain)
Though we had a decent amount of support, it seemed like the brutes died a lot, and I got a lot of mileage out of vengeance/fallout/mutation (people noticed I was a little too happy when teammates died, LOL). Despite the occasional deaths we really didn't have any problem clearing the missions, and finished in 1hr 20mins.
Finally on Saturday, I joined a Master of the Recluse SF that was forming on 0.o channel. Out of my laundry list of alts, the team leader asked me to play my pain corruptor -- which surprised me, but apparently high level pain corruptors are not that common. Our team mix was:
2 brutes (elec/shield, SS/stone)
1 crab
5 corruptors (fire/rad, ice/cold, AR/pain, AR/kin)
The shield brute wanted to try starting the MoRSF while dead, hoping to use himself as free vengeance bait for the whole SF. This caused us to instantly fail our first MoRSF attempt, before we could even enter the first mission; apparently, it checks for that!
Our second MoRSF attempt, we started the SF with everyone alive. The leader's instructions were that we should follow the stone brute and stay together. Inside the first mission, though, it seemed like most people peeled off in little clumps to attack chasers; only I and another corruptor were still following the stone brute. Unfortunately, the stone brute started charging into large groups of Longbow, which made following him a lot more hazardous than anticipated. I managed to get killed by Longbow in the process, causing the MoRSF to fail (how embarrassing!). It being the first mission, we decided to restart.
Our third MoRSF attempt went much better. This time the corruptors were told to stay together and away from heavy concentrations of Longbow, and we managed to pull Longbow chasers away from dangerous areas and kill them. Agent Crimson went down pretty easily to us, and a 2-boxed thermal corr was giving us fire shields between missions for an extra safety net. The second mission we mostly did the normal way except the fight against Slinger, where we made sure to pull all the extra minions out of his room before confronting Slinger - then positioning squishies at the back of the room while fighting Slinger himself, farthest from the ambush waves. The third and fourth missions were pretty straightforward for us; even fighting small groups of heroes wasn't too bad, as long as we were careful. I did find that travel in Grandville was kind of a pain for me (Schadenfreude uses Sprint plus the temp fly pack for travel, and MoRSF turns off the temp travel powers) but managed to get around with a lot of running around between the various wards of Grandville.
We started the final mission with great trepidation. Unable to use the normal veng-bait tactic, we candy-popped a lot of purples and oranges as preparation instead, along with our normal corr buffs. We didn't try to pull or anything; instead, the brutes took the Freedom Phalanx head-on while the squishy corruptors formed a support huddle a little ways away, to avoid AoEs; with the crab midway between us to provide VEAT buffs to both. I was nervous about the DEF-based shield brute getting dropped by a lucky shot, so put Painbringer on him and kept him targeted for quick heals. This actually seemed to work, and after a few minutes of careful play, we beat the Freedom Phalanx and earned the Master of the Recluse Strike Force badge. The time was 1hr 11mins.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
9/9/2009
Last week I got the "Mercenary" and "Vanguard Recruit" day jobs on my main character, Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), for hanging out in the Vanguard base.
I played Kashira (28 db/ninj stalker) for a bit, joining a friend on a 5 player pickup team which got her to level 29.
Mayday (50 fortunata) did a speed LGTF in 26min 26sec, which most of the team complained was too slow.
I solo'd Mega (50 SS/will brute) through a story arc called A Falling Angel where you explore an anti-heroine's back story, which links her to the Banished Pantheon and ultimately leads to a dark destiny. This was interesting overall and I gave it 4 stars. A passerby in the AE building complimented Mega's background story, which was nice.
Last Saturday I played Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) on an Imperious TF on difficulty 3; it wasn't exactly a speed run (we cleared most of the stuff that was in our way) but we finished in a fairly speedy 49min 49sec.
After that I played Arrow Girl (29 archery/dev blaster) on a Citadel TF on difficulty 2; I didn't really need the TF badge but figured it would be a nice way to get some exp. Our team was
2 scrappers
1 defender (cold/sonic)
4 controllers (fire/rad, fire/storm, earth/kin, plant/emp)
1 blaster (arrow/dev) (me)
The kinetic disconnected early and didn't come back, while the empath was mostly afk for several missions, then suddenly quit the TF. Despite this we did fine, finishing in 1hr 45mins and getting Arrow Girl to level 30, where I took Explosive Arrow for the sake of more AoE. I finally got around to writing a bio story for Arrow Girl, making her an Olympic archer who hires a talent agent that persuades her to become a superhero for sake of publicity. A friend let Arrow Girl join the tail end of her Midnighter arc, which let me mooch the Lost Savior and Midnight Squad badges.
After that I solo'd Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper) through Pagkagising ng Kaluluwa, a story arc about a Filipino martial arts academy. This was a well-written martial arts epic and I gave it 5 stars.
I had just finished up that story arc when I got a pickup invite to a Statesman TF. I should know better, but I'm a sucker for pickup teams, so I signed on. Our team mix was:
3 defenders (empathy, empathy, rad)
1 tanker (stone/ice)
1 scrapper (MA/SR) (me)
3 blasters
This isn't a bad looking team on paper, but we had a near wipe in mission 1 against Arbiter Sands which immediately made me feel rather dubious about our prospects. We had countless squishy deaths against the Thorn Tree in mission 3, and we had a team wipe (except for me) in mission 4 against Barracuda, of all things. In the final mission we managed to overcome the patron AVs, only to suffer a team wipe against the Arachnos Flyer due to loose aggro beating up all the squishies (the tanker explained "It's too high to taunt" .. doh!). We beat up the flyer and then suffered a wipe against Lord Recluse due to loose aggro causing LR to rush the DPS fighting the red tower; I think maybe we attacked the red tower before the tanker was ready. After that we killed the flyer again and then had six straight team wipes against Lord Recluse. With both empaths healing him the tanker usually survived for about a minute or two, and it seemed like we could not actually drop the red tower in that amount of time; the Arachnos Repairmen were much more annoying than I ever remember them being on previous STFs. It seemed like it was impossible to interrupt their heals.
At one point we had actually dropped the red tower and moved on to work on the yellow tower, but then the red tower respawned (not sure if it was a bug or a repairman somehow rez'd it). I got fairly annoyed by this and I ended up dropping 2 Shivans and a chemical nuke (from Warburg) to try to drop the red tower again, but to no avail. After 2 more wipeouts, the team leader called it quits and the team fell apart. On the bright side, I did get an Absolute Amazement (STUN/RCHG/ACC) purple recipe drop, so it wasn't a complete waste.
A friend asked me if I wanted to try it again, and initially I was like "no way" but later that night I saw another STF forming and ended up being enough of a sucker to hop on board the new STF. This time I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) and our team mix was:
1 tanker (ston/ston)
1 defender (emp/elec)
3 controllers (earth/rad, mind/storm, earth/kin)
2 blasters (AR/dev, sonic/EM)
1 scrapper
The tanker on this team was much more aggressive, tougher and effective at keeping aggro than the stoner on the previous TF team; we easily got through the first four missions (we were lucky enough to find the key mob of mission 4 on the very first Security Chief). In the last mission, the tanker actually tanked all 4 patron AVs simultaneously while we took them down. We did have a team wipe against Lord Recluse (again the team attacked before the tanker was really ready) and a second time the red tower respawned after we dropped it the first time (oddly, this time it wasn't on the proper spawn point for the tower). The repairmen were still a problem until the stormy started using hurricane, which helped. We beat up the red tower again and were then able to take out all the towers and Recluse himself, completing the STF in 1hr 48mins. I got an Enzyme (debuff/END) SHO as reward.
On Sunday I solo'd Blackout Girl (10 elec/elec brute) for a bit, starting a King's Row mayhem during which CoH crashed, then I made it back in game with 2 minutes left on the clock. Managed to break enough city scenery to get more time to finish the mission anyway. I went on to do Shelley Percy's story arc about finding a Nictus and extracting it for study, which got Blackout Girl to level 11.
After that I played Star Amethyst (33 dark/ice defender) on a 7 player team running through Croatoa missions and some other door missions; this finished her story arc with Buck Salinger (unlocking the Katie TF). One curious thing about this team is that we had 3 shield defense characters (scrappers and tanks) and yet none of them took Grant Cover -- which makes sense from a selfish perspective, but if they had all taken Grant Cover, I'm sure they would've hit the defense soft cap (which they definitely weren't at otherwise). With our team so heavily defense based, our one team wipe was against Devouring Earth (due to their quartz). This team got Star Amethyst to level 35, where I took Hover (mostly for convenience while teleporting).
On Monday I played Star Amethyst some more, joining a 7 player LEGION/Sisterhood team; we suffered 2 team wipes against Circle of Thorns, but also got Star Amethyst to level 36. I also helped kill Eochai and Jack-in-Irons for some merits and badges.
Tuesday night I solo'd Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) through Consequences of War, Part 2, a story arc about the Rikti War, and one SG's battle against the Rikti. This was pretty good and I gave it 4 stars. I also joined a badging team from LB channel that ran an 8-player "test AE" mission for the Among Friends badge.
After that I played Spacegirl (50 mind/rad controller), joining a friend's 6-player team doing door missions in RWZ. We beat a Captain WM Dietrich AV, Positron Automaton, Manticore Automaton, Silver Mantis AV. We actually beat that horrible "Get the News Out" mission (that almost always auto-fails when mobs see you and attack the destroyable objects) mostly due to the advice of an experienced illusion controller, and did a "Get the General's Intelligence" mission where a defender teammate had the idea to team TP us all (and the General Bu'dekka NPC) into the mini-fortress inside the mission, letting the Rikti ambushes destroy themselves on the Vanguard/Longbow defenses. While playing, one person complimented Spacegirl on having a cool name and another person said she had a cute costume, which was nice.
We finished the night doing the "Save the World" mission. During this mission I embarrassedly realized I had a blaster teammate on gignore (he was a pickup who was on the team for 2 hours before I realized that -- I thought he was just really quiet!). I couldn't remember exactly why I had him on gignore, but he helped remind me by not following the team, dying more often than Fusionette (seriously, Fusionette lived til the end of the mission, while the player blaster died repeatedly) and, after standing there not attacking while we whittled Nemesis AV down, he volunteered to "show us how it's done" by soloing the last 5% of its life. The tanker was pretty willing to let him try this and tried to disengage; I kept my rad debuffs on because I didn't really want a team wipe over some kind of ego contest. But a Phantasm ended up getting the kill.
On the bright side, though, we did Save the World, and that seemed like a good time to call it a night.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
The repair men are bugged.
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...ight=repairmen
I thought I met a 'PoliceWoman' on a Synapse TF the other night? Was that you? Police Woman does have a nice costume!
Weird, thought I posted this before!
9/14/2009
Last Friday I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) on a pickup Imperious TF on difficulty 5. Our team mix was:
2 blasters (AR/dev, nrg/elec)
1 brute (wp)
1 corruptor (AR/rad)
1 peacebringer
1 warshade
1 tanker (dark/dark)
1 fortunata
This seemed very light on support classes to me, and I said so, but the team leader seemed fine with it and we got started. We were on high difficulty and people were dying like lemmings; I used Vengeance 4 times and Resuscitate 2 times by the end of the first mission. At that point I suggested we lower difficulty, but some of the lower level people on the team were hot to get exp so felt we were doing fine. The team leader compromised by lowering difficulty, but only to level 4. I shrugged and decided to enjoy the feeling of perma-Vengeance. We managed to muddle through this in 1hr 26mins nevertheless.
After that I solo'd Police Woman through The Fracturing of Time, a rather surreal and creepy science fiction AE arc where the genocide of an alien race ends up nearly causing the destruction of the space-time continuum, and I'm only able to stop this by destroying my own psyche in order to become One With Nothingness. It wsa rather nihilistic and depressing (so isn't going to be fun for everyone) but it was also pretty awesome. I gave it 5 stars.
On Saturday I played Kid Valkyrie (50 bs/regen scrapper on Triumph) on an 8-player Moonfire TF organized by Demolition Girls SG; we finished in 1hr 27mins.
I also played Idealist (46 fire/thermal controller) on a Statesman TF organized by a friend as a last hurrah before he started a break from CoH. Our team makeup was:
5 controllers (ill/emp, ice/storm, ill/rad, fire/therm, fire/emp)
1 scrapper (katana/regen)
1 blaster (nrg/nrg)
1 tanker (will/SS)
I felt a little guilty for bringing a 46, but not guilty enough to not do it. (I did ask for an SK though.) I kinda rationalized that the thermal shields would be enough help to more than make up for it. We had some difficulties early on when the tanker and the rad controller would tend to go different ways, which caused an awkward split while fighting Arbiter Sands in mission 1. After that the team leader instructed us to follow the tanker, but the tanker was a little shy about engaging mobs, while the rad was hyper-aggressive, so we de facto ended up following the rad around. Once that was straightened out, things went a bit smoother.
In the final mission we assigned the two empaths to heal the tanker, who would tank Lord Recluse, while the rest of us took down the tower. On our first try, we had something of a bad start as the tanker got flattened by LR almost immediately, but somehow LR didn't come kill us all, and the empaths had enough time to rez the tank back into the fight. (I didn't see what happened exactly, but I'm betting Phantom Army was involved in temporarily keeping LR busy.) We ended up actually defeating LR on our first try (though with several deaths and battle rezzes), finishing the STF in 2hrs 45mins. I got a tasty Cytoskeleton SHO for my trouble, as well as hitting level 48 on Lord Recluse's death.
On Sunday I solo'd Kashira (29 db/ninj stalker) through the Wretch 'Trike Force, an AE story arc where the Wretch tries to get you to help foil a plot against Ghost Widow. This had some fun moments but Wretch being incoherent and dumb, while perfectly in character, caused some problems for the story because he really can't tell you anything meaningful (due to being incoherent and dumb) and he ends up asking you to do some things that create more problems than they solve. I ended up giving this arc 3 stars.
I went on to do a Citadel TF as Adventuress (29 MA/regen scrapper), with a team of
3 controllers (earth/rad, plant/kin, fire/kin)
2 tankers (inv/SS, DA/axe)
1 scrapper (MA/regen) (me)
1 defender (rad/rad)
Two of the controllers were lowbies who died like mayflies but wouldn't take an SK, and we had some trouble "stealthing" missions because, well, no one ACTUALLY had stealth (we had to just run past stuff and hope not to die). Nevertheless this TF is pretty straightforward and despite these problems we finished in 1hr 41mins.
After that I played Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) on a speed ITF. On a 6-player team, we finished in 28mins 22sec.
I started a newbie dark/storm corruptor for fun, and also because I saw some friends had started lowbie villains. I ended up with "Snow Devil" as a name, so I made her an evil blue-skinned demon-looking person with demonic wings. Got her to level 4 before switching to something else.
As Arrow Girl (30 archery/dev blaster) I helped take down Kraken in Perez Park, for 2 reward merits; then joined a Katie TF with:
2 tankers
1 scrapper
2 blasters
2 defenders (rad, empathy)
1 controller (rad)
...which finished in 38min 54sec and got Arrow Girl to level 32, where I took Rain of Arrows, which I think is the power that is the main reason to take archery.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
9/21/2009
Last Monday I played Arrow Girl (32 archery/dev blaster) on an 8-player team doing Croatoa missions with some friends and some pickup people. A teammate praised her Rain of Arrows power ("a nuke with no end crash") which was nice. On the mission where you rescue Walter Daschle and lead him out, we tried using team TP to get him to the mission door; this works on a lot of missions, but didn't for Walter Daschle, and we had to run him out the normal way. This team got Arrow Girl to level 33. To celebrate I spent all 180 of her reward merits on random TF recipe rolls, receiving:
1 Aegis (END/RCHG) Wentw=100K
1 Aegis (END/RCHG/RES) Wentw=500K
1 Dark Watcher's (RCHG/END) Wentw=25K
1 Devastation (DMG/RCHG) Wentw=3M
1 Expedient Reinforcement (+Res Aura) Wentw=2M
1 Gift of the Ancients (RES) Wentw=3.3M
1 Miracle (+recovery) Wentw=60M
1 Numina's (+recovery/+regen) Wentw=42M
1 Scirocco's (chance of lethal) Wentw=1.2M
Total value: 112.125M infl, or 622K infl/merit. This was a VERY good recipe draw, more than double the normal yield for random rolls; mostly due to hitting the jackpot and getting both a Miracle AND a Numina's.
On Tuesday night, I16 was released and the first thing I did upon logging in was mess with power colorization, changing all of Star Amethyst's (dark/ice) powers to be various shades of purple. I tried making her ice and dark powers match up, but ice blast can only be pastel colors, so ended up a shade of lavender. And while I could make dark miasma a lavender color, it looked dreadful, so I settled on a deep purple instead.
I also changed all of Indigo Ifrit's (fire/rad) powers; initially I chose a very dark blue/purple which looked very villainous, but teammates seemed to think this was too ugly, so I tried switching to a brighter shade of blue.
I decided Thunder Girl (50 will/nrg tanker) absolutely needed to be an elec melee character, so I rerolled her as an elec/SR scrapper. Thought about will/elec tanker, but I'm finding that I enjoy scrappers more than tankers; and I'm liking the idea of SR for high DEF and high DEF debuff resist. With the new Thunder Girl, I almost immediately hooked up with an 8 player LB team that ran door missions and the Atlas safeguard, quickly getting Thunder Girl to level 9.
Logging in Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), my main character and main badger, I found the I16 badge changes caused me to immediately be awarded:
Back From the Future (100 pillboxes; formerly 1000 pillboxes)
Fabricator (2000 inventions; formerly 10,000 inventions)
Demolitionist (10 bombs in RWZ; formerly 25 bombs)
Imprisoned (60mins mez; formerly 10hrs mez)
Confined (3hrs mez; formerly 20hrs mez)
Caged (6hrs mez; formerly 40hrs mez)
Popular (250M infl earned; formerly 1B infl earned)
While soloing on Star Amethyst (36 dark/ice defender), a team invited me to do a MoITF; but they didn't want the character I was on, instead asking me to bring a 50 debuffer. So I switched to Indigo Ifrit (50 fire/rad corruptor). But it turned out the team had two different players each running 2 characters, with the extra characters basically on autofollow. This sounded like a recipe for failure and frustration, and it irked me that I was asked to switch to a more useful character when two others were bringing dead weight, so before we started I excused myself to go back to soloing.
I got Star Amethyst to level 37 soloing missions in RWZ, then got another MoITF invite. This was a much more optimized group, on which I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) and we basically did a "speed" ITF only with no dying, finishing in 33mins 1sec for the Master of the Imperious TF badge.
Wednesday night, I solo'd Police Woman through a story arc called Dr. Sigler and the Chronojumper, where you help out a scientist testing a time travel machine. You start off trying to fix a relatively minor problem that occurred in the past, but unforeseen implications of your "fix" cascade into the present time, and so you're sent back in time to fix the side effects of your first time trip. There's a butterfly effect that spirals out of control, as each of your fixes causes the timeline to be more and more messed up. It's a really nicely done time travel story with a lot of detail; I rated it 5 stars.
Jello Shooters Radio (KJSR), an Internet radio station, does a weekly show where they review various AE story arcs "on the air". On Thursday night, they did a review of my Teen Phalanx Forever! story arc. The two reviewers were really positive about the story arc, laughing at all the jokes; one of them said it was "Definitely 5 stars!" and the other said "5 stars, I wish I could give it more!" It was pretty cool!
Also on Thursday night, I played Mayday (50 fortunata) on another speed MoITF; we finished the ITF in 36min 24sec, but failed the "Mo" part due to one squishy dying on mission 2 to an exploding nictus crystal.
Played Alice Slaughter (36 db/will brute on Triumph) for awhile, with an 8 player Demolition Girls SG team. We were doing someone's Mako patron arc and were a little light on support characters, so had a wipeout against some sort of magic "fonts" of power that smeared us with psychic blasts, and another against Mako himself, though we eventually took him down.
On Friday night, I played Star Amethyst (37 dark/ice defender) on a 5-player team mostly fighting Nemesis. Then I switched to Indigo Ifrit (50 fire/rad corruptor) for a Master of the Recluse SF attempt, with a team mix of:
2 brutes (elec/stone, SS/inv)
2 fortunata
3 corruptors (AR/kin, fire/cold, fire/rad)
1 MM (ninj/dark)
This actually went really well; we had tons of buff/debuff and the VEATs helped keep the squishies at high defense. We had a tense moment when one of the corruptors went linkdead during the final fight against the Freedom Phalanx, and had to stall out our damage while fighting Statesman for about 5 mins waiting for her to get back in the game; but we managed to stay alive long enough for her to return, and so we won the MoRSF with a time of 1hr 1mins. I got a Nucleolus SHO as reward.
I spent some time soloing Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper), working on getting the useful accolade powers. Atlas Medallion was no problem; I had all the kill badges already, just needed to run around clicking plaques. For Portal Jockey, I decided to solo my way through the rest of Maria Jenkins' Praetorian arc. This took awhile, but I solo'd (as elite bosses) Nightstar, Siege, Bobcat, Neuron, Battle Maiden, Black Swan, Mother Mayhem, Malaise, Diabolique, Infernal, Dominatrix, and Marauder. My badge progress bar shows I only need one AV to finish Dimensional Warder; this has to be either Anti-Matter or Chimera. I'm thinking I probably killed Chimera earlier in Maria's story arc, so it's gotta be Anti-Matter that I'm missing.
After that I played Samurai-ko (40 katana/will scrapper) on a Synapse TF, with a team of:
2 scrappers (kat/wp, spine/elec)
3 controllers (2 mind/cold, 1 fire/cold)
1 tanker (shield/mace)
1 warshade
1 defender (emp/archery)
We had a false start; though we had a mix of lowbies and high level characters, a 16 controller was leader initially. This caused us ALL to be exemp'd down to 16, but the TF spawned level 22 clockworks for us. Although we could hack our way through these, it took way too long. So we aborted the first mission and restarted the TF; I got nominated as new leader, and this caused us all to be exemped to 20 (or SK'd to 19). This went much better. I seemed to be playing more aggressively than the tanker or other scrapper, so ended up leading the way into most fights. We had no serious problems until we fought Babbage, who we needed to get some outside help to take down; once a rad defender arrived, though, Babbage went down quickly. Finished the TF in 2hrs 19mins; Samurai-ko leveled to 41 (it's REALLY nice to gain exp even while exemp'd) and took Tough.
On Sunday I tinkered with acquiring some IOs for Star Amethyst (37 dark/ice defender), slotting 3 Touch of the Nictus into her Twilight Grasp power, for +1.88% max HP and +9% acc; and 4 Positron's Blast into her Ice Storm power, for another +9% acc. Then I joined a speed Imperious TF; this wasn't quite as speedy as the regular speed ITFs because it was a 7 player team where 6 of the players were actually squishies, so we ended up dying a lot. Nevertheless we managed to finish it in 40min 17sec.
That same team went on to do a Lady Grey TF; I switched to Mega (50 SS/will brute) for that, and we finished in 40min 9sec. I went on to Cap au Diable to fight the Rikti invasion that resulted, and got enough Rikti bombs to get Mega the Elusive Mind accolade.
I finished the night playing Thunder Girl (11 elec/SR scrapper) on a 4 player Liberty Force SG team doing missions in Faultline and Skyway, which got her to level 16. I took Combat Jumping, Health and Dodge as powers; since I had the safeguard fly pack, I've been putting off getting a "real" travel power until later.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
9/23/2009
On Monday night, I played Spacegirl (50 mind/rad controller) on a Lady Grey TF with a team mix of:
2 brutes
1 stalker
1 blaster
1 defender (cold/sonic)
2 controllers (mind/rad, grav/rad)
1 corruptor (?/dark)
My colorizing of Spacegirl's powers earned me comments of "Rad should not be pink!" and "That's just wrong!" from a couple of teammates. Nevertheless I think I'm going to persist with wielding pink radiation at least for a little longer. This TF was a bit zergtastic with a lot of deaths, but we still managed to finish in 1hr 5mins.
After that I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) on an AE arc called Splintered Shields, an investigation into internal corruption in Longbow. This was well-written with interesting characters; I gave it 5 stars.
I also started a newbie rad/psy defender, who I gave light blue radiation instead. Joined up with an 8-player sewers team in Atlas Park. Some much higher level players joined the sewers team, but since the team leader was level 4, they got exemped down by the SSK feature -- but were still getting exp in the sewers! This was actually kind of neat. This team got my newbie defender to level 8.
Tuesday night, I started off playing Thunder Girl (16 elec/SR scrapper) on a Positron TF with a team mix of:
1 tanker (ice/nrg)
4 scrappers (elec/elec, elec/SR, elec/shield, elec/regen)
1 blaster (nrg/nrg)
1 defender (traps/AR)
1 controller (grav/rad)
Electric melee scrappers seem to be really popular right now, due to being new and shiny in I16. Only the controller had healing ability; I do think the traps defender was helping (with acid mortar and FF Gen), but it was a subtle sort of contribution. The controller soon got very annoyed by how utterly crazy the scrappers on the team were (often aggroing extra mobs and such); I had started off being pretty aggressive (I do believe scrappers should be hyperaggressive in order to be effective) but dialed it back a bit after awhile, following rather than charging. The other scrappers mostly stayed aggressive. We had our share of deaths (I managed to suffer only one, due to getting mez'd by a Ruin Mage; I've been procrastinating horribly on picking up Practiced Brawler, my mez defense) but managed to make it through the TF in 2hrs 43mins for the new reward of 66 merits. This also got Thunder Girl to level 20 (I picked up Chain Induction at 18 and Stamina at 20) and I have to say that getting exp while exemped on a TF is really nice.
I went on to duo with the elec/regen scrapper for some of Stephanie Peebles' missions in Striga Isle. We fought a lot of Council robots, which normally are hard for my scrappers due to lethal resist, but seemed pretty easy for us; thinking they might be vulnerable to energy damage? This ended up getting Thunder Girl to level 22, where I took Quickness.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
<.<
>.>
-.-
o.o
hello?
10/12/2009
Been awhile since my last update; I've admittedly been slacking. Partly this is because I'm starting to feel like my journal entries have a certain sameness about them; so, in an effort to mix things up, this entry will be in a different format, mostly screenshots with some captions.
This is my db/ninja stalker battling Captain Mako at the end of Inhuman Resources - Inevitable Evolution at Work, a story arc (#298132) that a Virtue VG uses for recruiting new players. It didn't seem like a very villainous VG (most of the time they're beating up Arachnos) but it was a pretty well-written arc and I gave it 5 stars; which maybe was a little overly generous, but I enjoyed the final fight.
This is a screen shot from A Warrior's Journey - The Flower Knight Task Force (arc #260284) which I took as part of my submission to the First Annual Architect Awards contest. I really thought this screen shot came out nicely; I especially like the color of the sky and the leafy trees in the background, that make it look almost like an Asian painting.
This is my dark/ice defender fighting Lusca with a team of 8. This team beat up Kraken, Adamastor, the monsters in Croatoa, and finally ended up facing Lusca. I was the only defender/controller/debuffer/buffer of any sort on our team, which made it quite painful (until one of the other players eventually brought a dual-boxed rad to help). I found I needed to keep chomping Lucks to stay alive and spam Twilight Grasp to debuff the tentacle's regen; if I did that, we could usually wear a tentacle down to 0 life. After a long battle (including 2 wipeouts) we managed to take Lusca down.
This is Police Woman (my main character, an AR/dev blaster) teaming up with an NPC scrapper to fight a robot mastermind at the end of In Pursuit of Liberty, an AE story arc (#221702) about the origin of the db scrapper I'm teamed up with there. It's fun seeing the NPC sword girl grow up over the course of the arc, but there were a lot of plot problems, so I ended up rating it 3 stars.
This is Helen Highwater (my storm/psy defender on Triumph server) rescuing a hostage from Banished Pantheon in Dark Astoria in D Minor, a horror-themed story arc (#41565) set in Dark Astoria. Helen is an aquatic themed hero so I tried to recolor her storm powers to be a deep blue, to look like water. Although parts of this story were confusing and didn't make sense, this was actually a really creepy story arc that did a great job of setting up an atmosphere of horror. I gave it 4 stars.
During double XP weekend, my elec/SR scrapper led a pickup team for several hours and got enough levels to take Lightning Rod. I love this power -- the bolt of lightning, the huge KABOOM, and all the mobs taking huge damage and falling down. I love it!
This is me finding an amazing bargain on Wentworth's, by total luck. I was shopping for Dam/Rech PBAOE recipes (planning to frankenslot Lightning Rod for max damage and recharge) and noticed a Fury of the Gladiator: Dam/Rech for sale. I placed a lowball bid just to try it; I was quite surprised to actually get it for 100K! PVP recipes usually sell for 10M to 500M infl.
This is Psychic Woman (a newbie rad/psy defender) leading a pickup team (with some friends) against Silver Mantis in a bank safeguard mission. I made her costume and all her powers a sky blue color which I really like. Double XP was really good to Psychic Woman, getting her from level 8 to level 24.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
10/14/2009
I played a lot during double exp weekend; too much to list everything, so I'll just summarize:
Thunder Girl (elec/SR scrapper) from level 31 to level 38. Took Lightning Rod, Evasion, and Hover; kinda regretting taking Hover, but didn't have any good ideas for a level 38 power. (Planning to soft cap DEF so Elude didn't seem like a great choice.)
Psychic Woman (rad/psy defender) from level 8 to level 24. Took all the basic rad powers, Stamina & prereqs, Hover and Fly. I really like the sky blue color I made all her rad and psy powers.
Lady Autumn (plant/emp controller) from newly created to level 21. I've been meaning to make a plant controller for some time, and with power colorization I thought making her plant powers Autumn colors would be a good character theme.
Arrow Girl (archery/dev blaster) from level 34 to level 37.
Primadonna (sonic/kin corruptor) from level 49 to level 50, dinging 50 during a Recluse SF during the final fight with the Freedom Phalanx. I like hitting 50 doing something dramatic. Got a Centriole though.
On Tuesday night I started off playing Psychic Woman (24 rad/psy defender), recruiting and leading a pickup team through some of Stephanie Peebles' missions on Striga Isle. Most of these missions seemed to involve fighting Council on a cargo ship. We had a couple early wipeouts due to overaggroing multiple groups of Council (my little rad heal couldn't keep up with the incoming DPS) but after picking up a FF defender and a traps defender we hit the defense cap and everything went much more smoothly. This team ran for a couple hours and got Psychic Woman to level 26 before we broke up.
I solo'd Thunder Girl (38 elec/SR scrapper) partway through an AE story arc A Surprise Fit for a Baron. I found it a little weird that it's a heroic arc, but the first mission has you beat up Paragon Police to kidnap a diplomat from a foreign country (described as a "rogue nation"). I'm about halfway through it, and I think the story is trying to cast me as a Jack Bauer style "above the law" counter-terrorism agent; but politics aside, it seems a pretty decent story so far.
I switched from soloing to play Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) on a Dr Kahn TF mostly organized on the Sisterhood channel. Our team mix was:
3 blasters
1 scrapper
2 controllers (ill/emp, fire/rad)
1 tanker (will/SS)
1 defender (emp/psy)
I was the last person to join this team (someone else actually went to bed and gave me his spot, which I said he didn't have to do, but apparently the lure of bed was strong) but somehow got handed the star, since the person who organized the team was only level 45 and we thought the TF would spawn at level 50.
The TF got off to an inauspicious start as we almost immediately had a team wipe to the first AV, Schadenfreude (who totally stole my alt's name!). I think we just weren't prepared for the DPS from the AV and the 5th Council surrounding him; after we hospitaled and came back, we pulled him a little more carefully and beat him up without further problems.
The rest of the TF went basically fine though. The final fight against Reichsman was something of a tedious grind, though everyone laughed at my "Pokemon" explanation for how the Reichsman fight works. ("I choose YOU, Countess Crey!") I spent some time using Surveillance to snoop on Reichsman's stats; he starts with over 200,000 HP and has like 40-60% resists to everything, and occasionally goes Unstoppable to raise his resists to 99%. We thought the special dimensional weapon was supposed to lower his resists, but I couldn't see any effect on my Surveillance watch; nevertheless we all shot him with the weird weapon whenever he went Unstoppable, because it made us feel better. I called on the DPS to kill each AV as it was released from its Pokeball. After a protracted fight, we won the TF in 1hr 35mins for 20 merits, which feels rather low reward for the effort. I did get the Column Breaker badge, though, which is badge number 601 for Police Woman.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
10/19/2009
Last Wednesday I played Lady Autumn (25 plant/emp controller) on a Sister Psyche TF with a team mix of:
2 controllers (plant/emp, fire/kin)
2 defenders (emp/psy, kin/psy)
2 scrappers
1 tanker
1 blaster
We had no serious problems, finishing in 2h 33mins and getting Lady Autumn to 26, where I took Carrion Creepers, which I really like so far.
On Thursday I played Schadenfreude (50 AR/pain corruptor) on a Recluse SF with a team of:
1 brute (dark/dark)
2 MMs (robo/FF, nec/dark)
1 fortunata
4 corruptors (AR/pain, fire/rad, fire/cold, dark/kin)
This went pretty smoothly and finished in 51mins 13sec; I got a nice Microfilament SHO as reward, and a Fortunata Hypnosis (SLEEP/RCHG) as a drop.
After that I played Thunder Girl (38 elec/SR scrapper) through the rest of A Surprise Fit for a Baron, a counterterrorist operation where eventually the big bad guy sells out the rest of his Villain Group as a distraction while he attacks a diplomatic summit. This was a pretty decent story, though I still had issues with having to fight police and kidnap someone (as a hero) in the first mission; I ended up giving it 4 stars.
I spent most of Friday night working on a new story arc, Talos Vice, where you help Detective Croquette bust drug dealers. It's a pretty obvious homage to Miami Vice, only ported to the City of Heroes universe, so you're fighting Trolls and Family. I had a fun time recoloring a bunch of standard mobs to have pink, white or pastel outfits for the Miami Vice look, and trying to make all the briefings and clues and stuff look like movie or TV scripts. So far no one else has actually tried it, but *I* am enjoying it, playing my own alts through it repeatedly.
On Saturday I accepted an invite to a pickup Master Dr. Kahn TF, playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster). Our team mix was:
2 blasters
1 def (emp/?)
2 controllers (?/kin, ?/FF)
2 scrappers
1 tanker (inv/SS)
This TF was painfully slow as everyone wanted to be really, really careful. Plus occasionally they would AFK or go linkdead and we'd have to wait until everyone was back. Some people wanted to "defeat all" even when not strictly necessary "just to be safe", but fortunately we didn't end up doing that. I actually thought we would not be able to defeat Reichsman since we lacked any debuff except the kinetic's, so unfortunately I didn't have a very positive attitude about all this. Ironically, I ended up being the first person to die, in the fight against Reichsman, from his lightning AoEs; the first one stunned me and dropped me to low life (I found it takes more than 1 break free to shake this stun) and then another AoE while I was still stunned ended up killing me. I kinda wish I had brought more break frees, or I had stayed nearer the empath (who had Healing Aura on auto, she was the type who thought that was the best way) or .. something. We ended up having 8 deaths total before the TF was done, but I still kinda felt bad about being the first to die. We did manage to grind Reichsman down eventually, though, despite the lack of debuffs (maybe he resists those anyway), finishing in 2hrs 3mins.
I went on to play Thunder Girl (38 elec/SR scrapper) on a 3 player Liberty Force team running Vanguard missions in Rikti War Zone, which got her to level 39; then on Sunday I played TokyoRose (23 sonic/sonic corruptor) on a 6 player pickup team running radio missions in Grandville, which got her to level 25.
Also on Sunday, I played Psychic Woman (26 rad/psy defender) through Sky King's Ransom, a short story where you pursue and arrest a Sky Raiders boss. This had good writing and some neat extra touches in each mission; I would've liked a little more explanation of the Sky Raiders' motivations and why we need to beat this particular Sky Raider up, but overall this was pretty good and I gave it 4 stars.
After that I ended up on a Sister Psyche TF with Psychic Woman, with a team mix of:
2 controllers (ice/therm, ill/cold)
2 defenders (rad/psy, emp/AR)
2 scrappers
1 warshade
1 tanker (inv/?)
This was a well balanced team and the TF went really smoothly. We finished in 1hr 50mins, getting Psychic Woman to level 27.
Finished the night playing Blackout Girl (23 elec/elec brute) on a 3-player LEGION SG team doing the Westin Phipps story arc, and then helping one of the villains finish his cape mission. This got Blackout Girl to 24, where I took Lightning Reflexes.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
10/23/2009
On Monday night I played Kashira (29 db/ninj stalker) through Backwards Day, an arc where you interact with Diviner Maros, who has somehow gotten his timestream flipped so that he experiences things in the opposite order from the player, and you end up helping him. This arc started really confusing, but by the end, everything neatly fell into place like a carefully crafted puzzle box. I think you will only like this arc if you are into time travel stories, but if you do like those, it's quite good at it. I gave it 5 stars.
After that I played April Fool (50 thug/TA MM) on a Recluse SF with a team of:
4 corruptors (dark/kin, 2 fire/rad, ice/cold)
2 brutes (*/inv, */dark)
1 MM (thug/TA) (me)
1 bane
This went pretty well, though I died a couple more times than I'd like to, and not having stealth was kind of a pain at times. Finished in 36min 21sec and got a Lysosome SHO.
On Tuesday night, the Halloween event started, and I played Thunder Girl (39 elec/SR scrapper) on a Halloween banner raid. It seems like the way this works is that four banners are spread across a city zone, and Halloween monsters start spawning at each one. You can't make any progress at all, until someone is fighting the monsters at every banner. Once there are people fighting at every banner, there's a progress bar that slowly moves to the right, and when it finishes, the banners "become vulnerable". Usually the whole zone then converges on one banner at a time, trying to destroy it. If all four banners are destroyed, then a giant monster is spawned, that you have to find. You get a badge for each banner you drop, and another badge for the giant monster (though your team has to do at least 10% damage I think); then another badge for collecting the whole set. There's a timer that ends the Halloween event in that particular zone, so there's time pressure to actually complete the various tasks.
After the banner raid, Thunder Girl went on to RWZ to join a mother ship raid, then played through a story arc called The Most Important Thing, which is about a teen heroine and a mad scientist and the extreme lengths they each would go to in order to protect their respective families. This story had a great ending, but I felt it had problems with characterization and time travel logic, and some instances where it exceeded my suspension of disbelief, so I ended up giving it 3 stars. I wrote a review for it on the MA forum; I didn't think I was that negative about it, but the author took it pretty hard and was talking about deleting the arc, which I tried to discourage her from doing (I was mortified that I had made someone feel that bad about their story). Ultimately, however, the most persuasive argument for not deleting it was that it got nominated for the Mission Architect Awards at Hero-Con. Life is ironic like that, sometimes.
On Wednesday night, Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), my main character, finally accumulated enough time at the Vaults to get the Banker day job badge, and the Security Chief accolade. I then participated in two Halloween banner raids where I picked up all 5 new badges: Hell Hath No Fury, Dark Fiend, Terror, Monster Masher, Monstrous, Hell and Back. This puts my badge count at 609.
I also started playing Arrow Girl (36 archery/dev blaster) on a story arc called Captain Skylark Shadowfancy and the Tomorrownauts of Today; I'm only partway through, but so far it seems to be a fun retro sci-fi adventure.
Thursday night, I played Mega (50 SS/will brute) on a couple red-side Halloween banner raids; with low villain population, we had trouble making much headway against the various banners. The one time we dropped the four banners, the final giant monster never spawned, we weren't quite sure why; someone petitioned and a GM showed up to poke around for a bit, but not sure anything came of it. I did participate in an Eochai kill that got me the Hallow Spirit badge and 2 merits, though.
After that I spent endless time fiddling with my newest story arc, Talos Vice. I can't decide if I want the level range to be 15-20, 20-20, 5-20, or what. The main mobs in it are Trolls and Family, and I started with it published at level 15-20, but then I thought, hey, Trolls and Family go down to level 5, so no need to be so exclusive. So I lowered the level range to 10-20, and tuned down the final big bad guy from "hard" thugs to "standard" thugs. But then I got to thinking, hey, Talos Island is a level 20+ zone ... so I should really make it a level 20+ arc. But Trolls max out at 20, so that caused me to make the arc level 20-20. Now I'm thinking, having only one level for the arc seems awfully exclusive ... so I may open it back up to 10-20 or 12-20 or something after all.
Finally, my story arc Teen Phalanx Forever! got nominated for Best Hero Arc in the Architect Awards for Hero-Con. I'm quite psyched about this. Some nice people even started a thread about this, which was awfully nice! Thanks! A lot of good arcs were nominated, so the competition for the award is quite tough, but I'm still pretty hopeful.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
10/27/2009
Last Friday I started off playing Thunder Girl (39 elec/SR scrapper) in a duo for some Mission Architect story arcs. We did Forget the Rose, Send Me the Thorns, which was a fun comedy about an amorous CoT mage and saving the world (I gave it 5 stars), Redoubt Operations Part 2, which was a science fiction adventure that didn't really grab me (I gave it 3 stars), and PUG Hell which was a comedy about pickup teams, but struck me as not being especially funny (2 stars). This got Thunder Girl to level 40.
On Saturday, I played Lt. Mary Sue (9 emp/AR defender on Triumph) on a 5-player team of Mission Architect enthusiasts, doing more story arcs. We played Ctrl-Alt-Reset, which was a fun time travel adventure (4 stars); Invasion of the Samurai Vampiresses from Outer Space, which was a hilarious send-up of B-movie films (5 stars); and Cutthroat Competition, a black comedy about helping the Facemaker against the Circle of Thorns; this was my second play-through the arc, and the first play-through I really liked it, it seemed rather more tedious on this play-through (I think at least one mission was broken by recent patches and used the wrong map), so I only gave it 3 stars. This got Lt. Mary Sue to level 15.
I also duo'd Blackout Girl (24 elec/elec brute) through a Steel Canyon mayhem to get to level 25, and played Thunder Girl on a semi-speedy Imperious TF (kin controller, brute, 2 scrappers, fort, some kind of corr) that finished in 39min 54sec.
On Sunday I solo'd Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) through Tina MacIntyre's story arc; at the very end I killed Neuron, the last AV she needed for the Dimensional Warder badge, getting Blond the Portal Jockey accolade (+66HP +5END) as well as 43 reward merits.
Did some Halloween stuff, with Police Woman (50 AR/dev) fighting a zombie invasion, and Thunder Girl joining a Halloween banner raid team to get all the event badges. Thunder Girl went on to join a Sara Moore TF with a team mix of:
2 tankers (shd/axe, inv/SS)
2 controllers (ill/rad, fire/kin)
2 scrappers (elec/SR, spine/regen)
2 blasters
Except for the tankers, we were all pretty squishy against Nemesis and Rularuu; despite being nearly soft-capped, Thunder Girl got clobbered by Vengeance and Overseers. Nevertheless we finished in 2hrs 5mins for 64 merits, and Thunder Girl got credit for about 50 Fake Nemeses along the way.
This got Thunder Girl to level 41, at which point I burned 140 merits on random recipe rolls, receiving:
Entropic Chaos (DMG/END/RCHG) Wentw=555K
Lockdown (ACC/END/RCHG/HOLD) Wentw=500K
Touch of Lady Grey (RCHG/END) Wentw=50K
Scirocco's Dervish (chance of lethal) Wentw=1.5M
Lockdown (chance of +2 mag) Wentw=3M
Mako's Bite (chance of lethal) Wentw=505K
Devastation (chance to hold) Wentw=500K
This is a yield of 47K/merit, which is pretty awful, but I've had some good draws in the past, so it's okay.
After that I joined a Statesman TF; the team leader asked for "someone with slows", so I tried playing Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender). Our team was 2 tankers, 4 defenders, and 2 controllers, and the leader ran it as a "speed STF", something I hadn't seen before. The first two missions were pretty normal, but against the villain respec we immediately attacked the vines (ignoring CoT) and in the Cap au Diable mission we killed only Security Chiefs and ignored ambushes (I tried to use hurricane to prevent the ambushes from harrassing us too much; eventually they gave up once we got fairly deep into the AeonCorp building). In the final mission we outright charged the patron AVs, defeating them all at once; then one tanker off-tanked the Arachnos flyer while the other tanker tanked Lord Recluse, and the rest of us destroyed the yellow tower first (an unusual choice), then the red and the green towers. We left the blue tower up (another unusual tactic) and went after Lord Recluse at that point. This strategy seemed moderately suicidal, but it actually worked, and we finished in 45min 46sec. I got a Centriole.
Finished the night soloing Thunder Girl through The Null Earth Saga: A Reflected Web, a story about an alternate version of Arachnos invading Earth from another dimension; it's not bad but I felt it needed more details (I gave it 3 stars).
On Monday night, I played Thunder Girl on a pickup team that did the Founders Falls safeguard, then went on to duo some radio missions with an old friend playing a PvP blaster. She was a very aggressive player who had difficulty set on +2 x5 (the highest I've ever seen a blaster play at) but we were able to handle it, and with fire and elec AoEs we tore up the bad guys at an incredible rate. We even defeated Ghost Widow in a Peregrine Island SG. This got Thunder Girl to level 43, and the Slayer badge (we fought a lot of Council).
After that I played Mega (50 SS/will brute) on some speed TFs organized on 0.o, knocking out a Lady Grey TF in 24min 25sec and an Imperious TF in 22min 7sec. Most of the same team switched to hero side for a speed Statesman TF, on which I played Idealist (48 fire/thermal controller). This team was 3 controllers, 2 defenders, 2 tankers and a scrapper, and knocked out the STF in 44mins exactly. I got a tasty Ribosome SHO as reward, and going to Wentworth's, found that I had sold the Cytoskeleton SHO that Idealist got on her last STF for a smooth 100M infl.
Later on Monday I did some Trick-or-Treating with Sisterhood SG, which got Star Amethyst (40 dark/ice defender) to level 41, and many of the ToT and Halloween banner badges for several of my hero alts.
From the HeroCon front, I didn't end up winning an award, but it was cool to be nominated anyway. Ironically, The Most Important Thing, the arc that I had given a 3-star review to and ended up trying to persuade the author not to delete, ended up winning the category that my arc was competing in. This demonstrates the essential irony that is fundamental to the universe; but on the bright side, I'm pretty sure the author won't delete that arc now.
In other news, a player who sometimes plays on Liberty has started a Mission Architect Player Awards contest, defining his own award categories and promising in-game prizes. If you're interested in story-oriented Mission Architect, the nominees include a lot of good story arcs that are worth trying out, and voting is open to all players. No, you don't have to vote for mine.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
11/4/2009
Last Thursday I solo'd Thunder Girl (44 elec/SR scrapper) through a bunch of radio missions involving Council, which eventually got her enough Council War Wolves and Vampires to get the Atlas Medallion accolade.
After that I played Strong Woman (40 inv/SS tanker) on an Imperious TF organized on Sisterhood channel. Our team mix was:
3 tankers
3 scrappers
1 defender
1 bane
Once I joined the team and realized we had 3 tankers, I offered to switch to something else, but the team leader wanted to just start the TF, so that's what we did. With a tanker/scrapper heavy team, we were a little slow but took very little damage. Finished the ITF in 1hr 20mins.
On Friday night I joined a Master of the Dr Kahn TF organized on Sisterhood channel. The team leader asked me to bring a debuffer, so I played Spacegirl (50 mind/rad controller). Our team mix was:
4 scrappers (one dark armor, 3 regen)
2 controllers (ill/rad, mind/rad)
1 defender (kin/rad)
1 tanker (inv/SS)
This TF went very smoothly. Of note: in the mission where you meet Invincible Reichsman, the team leader asked the squishies just to zone out and let the tanker and scrappers knock out the various portals, to reduce the risk of Invincible Reichsman 1-shotting a squishy. A miscommunication caused a couple of us (including me) to think we were done with that mission and could zone into the next one -- but boarding the train deposited us in front of Invincible Reichsman. Fortunately we were able to zone out again before dying.
In the final mission, the team leader asked everyone to stay back from Reichsman except for the tanker; even the scrappers, who weren't allowed to melee Reichsman at all (for fear of his nasty AoE). Instead the scrappers and one rad were directed to pounce each of the pokemon AVs as they emerged, killing them quickly; while the tanker kept Reichsman busy, and the other rad kept debuffs on Reichsman. This looked a little boring for the scrappers, but was very safe and eventually won us the MoDrKTF badge. Total TF time was 56min 48sec.
After that I played Mega (50 SS/will brute) on a speed Lady Grey TF (29min 6sec) and a speed Imperious TF (24min 55sec); then Thunder Girl solo'd the psychic Clockwork King (as an EB) for the Emancipator badge, and did another speed Imperious TF (22min 48sec). Finished the night playing Mayday (50 fortunata) on a speed Lady Grey TF (23min 31sec).
On Saturday, Thunder Girl joined up with a group that beat up a Halloween Jack-in-Irons and fought a zombie apocalypse.
I also played Arrow Girl (36 archery/dev blaster) on an Imperious TF. This team had lots of TF regulars, and the team leader made a crude comment (too explicit to repeat here) about how awesome the team was; I made an (unprintable) joke in reply that made everyone boo. (I guess you had to be there.) Anyway, this got Arrow Girl to level 38. I coudn't figure out what power I wanted at 38; not sure whether Gun Drone is worth it.
After that I played Kyrie Eleison (39 bs/inv scrapper) on a Positron TF with a team mix of:
3 controllers (rad, fire/kin, ill/cold)
2 tankers (stone/elec, fire/fire)
2 scrappers
1 blaster (ice/ice)
We had a wipe in the Rollister mission when the team got split up (I was following the stony tanker ... everyone else went a different way) and another wipe against Dr Morben due to getting split up. Otherwise the TF went fine, finishing in 1hr 57mins. This got Kyrie to level 40 (yay for exp while exemping) and the Task Force Commander accolade.
After that I played Mega (SS/will brute) for a Deadly Apocalypse in Cap au Diable, where I got all 5 badges; this was nice, because it can be hard to get enough villains to do this event on red side.
I played Star Amethyst (42 dark/ice defender) on an Imperious TF with a team of:
1 peacebringer
2 defenders (rad/*, dark/ice)
1 blaster
1 scrapper
1 controller
1 brute
1 corruptor
I had joined because the rad defender, a friend of mine, asked me to; but this was really more of a pickup TF. On the first mission we had a team wipe at the altar where two Nictus cyst crystals had spawned near Sister Solaris. Neither the brute nor the scrapper seemed to really want to tank, and so the rad defender and I (as dark defender) ended up doing most of the tanking. This sorta-worked. I ended up pulling all the generals and AVs in mission 3 using teleport-and-run tactics. This worked for the generals and EBs, but got me KO'd when I tried it on Romulus and Requiem. They still came down when I pulled them, they just made sure to kill me before turning to the rest of the team. Anyway, despite these antics we made it through the ITF in 1hr 32mins, getting Star Amethyst to level 43.
I went on to play Star Amethyst on a Sisterhood team where we beat up psychic Clockwork King AV twice, Bobcat AV once, and did the Doctor's Ally badge mission. This got Star Amethyst to level 44.
Later on Saturday, I burned a free respec for Mega (50 SS/will brute), trying to move slots and IOs around to increase her defense. This is the build I'm working towards (I have most of it, still missing a couple IOs though):
Villain Plan by Mids' Villain Designer 1.601
http://www.cohplanner.com/
Mega I16: Level 50 Mutation Brute
Primary Power Set: Super Strength
Secondary Power Set: Willpower
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Fighting
Power Pool: Presence
Villain Profile:
------------
Level 1: Punch KntkC'bat-Acc/Dmg(A), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx(3), KntkC'bat-Dmg/Rchg(3), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(5), P'ngS'Fest-Acc/Dmg(5), P'ngS'Fest-Dmg/Rchg(7)
Level 1: High Pain Tolerance Numna-Heal/EndRdx(A), Numna-Heal/Rchg(7), Numna-Heal(9), ResDam-I(9), ResDam-I(29), S'fstPrt-ResDam/Def+(29)
Level 2: Haymaker KntkC'bat-Acc/Dmg(A), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx(11), KntkC'bat-Dmg/Rchg(11), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(13), P'ngS'Fest-Acc/Dmg(13), P'ngS'Fest-Dmg/Rchg(15)
Level 4: Fast Healing Mrcl-Heal/EndRdx(A), Mrcl-Heal/Rchg(15), Mrcl-Heal(17), Mrcl-Rcvry+(17)
Level 6: Swift Run-I(A)
Level 8: Knockout Blow KntkC'bat-Acc/Dmg(A), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx(19), KntkC'bat-Dmg/Rchg(19), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(21), Mocking-Acc/Rchg(21), Hectmb-Dmg/Rchg(23)
Level 10: Indomitable Will LkGmblr-Rchg+(A)
Level 12: Combat Jumping LkGmblr-Rchg+(A)
Level 14: Hurdle Jump-I(A)
Level 16: Rise to the Challenge Numna-Heal/EndRdx(A), Numna-Heal/Rchg(23), Numna-Heal(25), Numna-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg(43)
Level 18: Rage HO:Membr(A), HO:Membr(27), HO:Membr(27)
Level 20: Quick Recovery P'Shift-EndMod(A), P'Shift-EndMod/Rchg(25), P'Shift-EndMod/Acc(31), P'Shift-End%(43)
Level 22: Mind Over Body RctvArm-ResDam/EndRdx(A), RctvArm-ResDam/Rchg(33), RctvArm-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(33), RctvArm-ResDam(50)
Level 24: Super Jump Jump-I(A)
Level 26: Hurl Apoc-Dmg(A), Apoc-Dmg/Rchg(34), Apoc-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(34), Apoc-Acc/Rchg(34), Apoc-Dam%(36)
Level 28: Heightened Senses LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(A), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(31), LkGmblr-Def(31), LkGmblr-Rchg+(33)
Level 30: Stamina P'Shift-EndMod(A), P'Shift-EndMod/Rchg(42), P'Shift-EndMod/Acc(43)
Level 32: Foot Stomp Erad-Dmg(A), Erad-Acc/Rchg(39), Erad-Dmg/Rchg(40), Erad-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(40), Sciroc-Dmg/Rchg(40), Sciroc-Acc/Rchg(42)
Level 35: Taunt Mocking-Taunt(A), Mocking-Taunt/Rchg(36), Mocking-Taunt/Rchg/Rng(36), Mocking-Acc/Rchg(37), Mocking-Taunt/Rng(37), Mocking-Rchg(37)
Level 38: Kick KntkC'bat-Acc/Dmg(A), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx(39), KntkC'bat-Dmg/Rchg(39), KntkC'bat-Knock%(42)
Level 41: Tough RctvArm-ResDam/EndRdx(A), RctvArm-ResDam/Rchg(46), RctvArm-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(46), RctvArm-ResDam(46)
Level 44: Weave LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(A), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(45), LkGmblr-Def(45), LkGmblr-Rchg+(45)
Level 47: Provoke Mocking-Taunt(A), Mocking-Taunt/Rchg(48), Mocking-Taunt/Rchg/Rng(48), Mocking-Acc/Rchg(48), Mocking-Taunt/Rng(50), Mocking-Rchg(50)
Level 49: Health Numna-Regen/Rcvry+(A)
------------
This gives Mega standing-around stats of:
Lethal res 52.13%
Lethal def 37.39%
Neg def 31.91%
Fire def 32.54%
Global Rchg 45%
Regen 1.71%/sec (no enemies in range)
....which I thought was not bad at all. I'm not at the cap for resists, defense, regen or max HP, but I have a good amount of each of those, giving Mega layered protection that I think works really well.
I did end up buying a Hecatomb (DMG/RCHG) recipe from the Black Market for 200M infamy, which I think is the most expensive thing I've ever bought. But it seemed a good deal relative to the other prices I saw. I also spent 1800 AE tickets on 3 Silver recipe rolls and got an insanely good draw of:
1 Luck of the Gambler (DEF) Black Market=25M
1 Luck of the Gambler (DEF/END) Black Market=25M
1 Numina's Convalescence (HEAL) Black Market=50M
That's a yield of 55K per ticket, which is crazy good. I didn't sell these, though, as I figure I can actually use them.
On Sunday I played Blackout Girl (25 elec/elec brute) on a 3 player LEGION team running door missions in St Martial; then, a little later, I played Snow Devil (13 dark/storm corr) on a 4 player LEGION team running door missions in Sharkhead, which got Snow Devil to level 15.
Star Amethyst joined another pickup Imperious TF, this time with:
3 tankers
1 stalker
1 scrapper
1 brute
1 defender (me)
I was a little worried about being the lone support character on the team, but the other characters were mostly pretty tough; they took some damage but it wasn't too much to handle. The team was kinda slow but steady and we finished the TF with no problems (didn't catch the time though).
Later Sunday I played April Fool (50 thug/TA MM) on a Deadly Apocalypse event, getting all the Halloween badges.
On Monday night I played Schadenfreude (50 AR/pain corruptor) on a speed Recluse SF. We had some unexpected deaths fighting the Vindicators and Freedom Phalanx due to very spiky incoming damage; couldn't figure out what was up with that. It kept me busy trying to spam heals on people though. Finished in 36mins 9sec and got an Enzyme SHO.
Schadenfreude went on to do a Deadly Apocalypse event in Cap au Diable, picking up the 5 new badges.
After that, I played Thunder Girl on a speed Imperious TF, finishing in 27min 44sec; of note, I got a Numina's Convalescence (HEAL) recipe as a random drop during the TF.
Tuesday night, I played Dreamwind (33 storm/psy defender on Triumph) with a 7-player team of Demolition Girls SG, running through Sabrina's Tale, the "arc of the year" from HeroCon. I initially groaned at the whole undead romance thing, but ultimately it was a pretty neat story with good writing. I gave it 5 stars.
In preparation for a fire-themed team that the Sisterhood SG is starting, I created a new alt: Pyre Woman, a newbie fire/SS tanker. Emerging from the character creator into Atlas Park, I found myself immediately in a Deadly Apocalypse. Joining up with a banner team, I beat up Halloween Eochai and all the banners and the Greater Aspect. This got Pyre Woman to level 3 with all 5 badges from Halloween banners, and 4 reward merits. Seemed like a good start!
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
11/6/2009
On Wednesday night I played Pyre Woman (3 fire/SS tanker) with the Sisterhood fire-themed team. Turnout for this was much bigger than I expected; about 20 players met up behind City Hall. We formed up into 3 teams just in time for a zombie apocalypse to hit Atlas Park. Waves and waves of zombies assaulted us all, and I was really pleased I had taken Blazing Aura (an AOE damage aura) as one of my earliest powers.
After the zombie apocalypse got burned down, we did a bunch of door missions in Atlas Park and King's Row, also doing the Atlas and KR safeguard. I felt surprisingly tanky for a low level character; I was the only tanker on the team and was able to survive taking alpha strikes. Though truthfully this has a lot more to do with the fire/emp and fire/thermal controllers that were on our team, than anything else. I also managed to avoid the END problems plaguing the rest of the team by the simple expedient of...not taking many attack powers. My attack chain so far is: Taunt-Jab-Brawl-Jab-Brawl. Blazing Aura is most of my damage, and with lots of fire scrappers and fire blasters, our team wasn't hurting for DPS. Our team ran for about 3 hours and ultimately got Pyre Woman to level 12 and DOs.
Thursday night, a friend invited me to a Master of the Dr Kahn TF. I was asked to play a debuffer, so I switched to Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender). Our team was:
2 tankers (stone/?, inv/?)
3 defenders (TA/archery, storm/archery, dark/dark)
1 controller (fire/rad)
2 blasters (fire/nrg, nrg/nrg)
We pretty quickly failed the MoDKTF as a squishy died to loose aggro while fighting the AV in the first mission. We decided to quit and try again. Despite the fact that it was the dark defender who died, the trick arrow defender wasn't really into TA that night and decided to switch to a kin/rad defender. The second try went very smoothly, and Reichsman died surprisingly fast (normally his massive HPs makes it a tedious grind), probably due to the massive amount of debuffs. Finished in 35min 5sec and got the MoDKTF badge.
After that, I was soloing a bit in an AE story arc when another friend asked me to join a Statesman TF. I was initially asked to bring a kin or an emp, but I don't have either of these high enough to do STF, so they said, fine, bring damage. So I played Thunder Girl (45 elec/SR scrapper) on a team of:
3 scrappers
1 tanker (stone/nrg)
3 controllers (2 rad, 1 kin)
1 blaster
We did fine until the final mission. Our initial strategy was to simply rush the 4 patron AVs and beat them in a mass melee; but we had a team wipe doing this, after which we switched to clearing the area near the patron AVs and pulling them one or two at a time, which worked better. Against Lord Recluse, we pretty quickly destroyed the red tower, but after that our tanker somehow died against LR and we had a team wipe. After regrouping, we killed the yellow tower and the tanker died again (no idea how this was possible with both red and yellow towers down; the tanker said LR was still hitting for 1500s) and we had another team wipe. Even with all the towers down, Lord Recluse still seemed to be doing freakish amounts of damage. It took a really long time for us to kill him, too; though it didn't help that one of the rads went AFK during the LR fight and never came back. (Not sure what was up with that.) Despite everything we managed to beat Lord Recluse and complete the STF in 1hr 30mins. Thunder Girl hit level 46; this is the first time I've finished a STF while below level 47, and as a result I couldn't take an SHO reward. I got 37 merits, which isn't as bad as I thought.
Finished the night doing some marketeering and crafting, slotting 3 Performance Shifter IOs into Thunder Girl's Stamina power, for a +1.88% max HP bonus.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
11/10/2009
Last Saturday I played Lt. Mary Sue (16 emp/AR defender on Triumph) on a team of Mission Architect fans doing AE story arcs. I joined the team during the tail end of an arc whose name I didn't catch, then played through Old Dog, New Tricks, which was the origin story of a police dog that gets mutated into a superhero. This was a cute idea but the story didn't really grab me; I rated it 3 stars.
After that I played Thunder Girl (46 elec/SR scrapper on Liberty) on a speed LGTF (took 23min 56sec) and Yuki-Onna (50 ice/cold corruptor) on a speed RSF (was a little messy with more deaths than normal; took 32min 10sec, got a Nucleolus).
After that I played Pyre Woman (12 fire/SS tanker) on an 8-player Sisterhood SG fire-themed team, doing missions in the Hollows. I think I crowded out the tanker who was on the team before I joined; she was mostly trying to pull, while I was aggressively jumping into mobs and taunting them onto me (with 2 thermal controllers, my lethal resist was at the 90% cap, so I was fearless). In hindsight, this was probably rude of me 
especially as the other tanker left the team soon after. In any case, we ran through the Defeat Atta mission, which is a huge tunnel map full of Trolls that got everyone multiple levels. Pyre Woman finished that mission at level 16.
Later on, Star Amethyst (44 dark/ice defender) was messing with costumes at the Founders Falls icon; I came up with a new one I rather liked, with jet black skin and purple ornamentation; I was trying for an "exotic energy being" sort of look. While at the tailor, I got invited to the Founders Falls hero respec (the one with Freakshow) with a team of
1 tanker (will/?)
2 scrappers (?/shield, ?/regen)
2 defenders (rad/?, dark/ice)
This was relatively straightforward and we finished in 1hr 14mins; I took the respec for the sake of the badge. This also got Star Amethyst to level 45. While on this respec, someone recognized my global and remembered PvPing regularly against Police Woman in Siren's Call, years ago. He told me that I was the only AR/dev blaster he respected, because I "didn't rely on TP foe and trip mines" (this was one of the main "cheesy" things dev blasters did back then). That was really nice.
After that, Star Amethyst did a speed LGTF (finished in 24min 7sec), then Thunder Girl did a speed ITF (took 21min 49sec) which got her to level 47. At level 47 I was able to slot a level 50 Numina's IO that I had lucked into as a drop earlier on, giving Thunder Girl a set of 3 Numina's in Health for an extra +1.88% max HP. I went ahead and slotted a few Luck of the Gambler (DEF/END) IOs into Agile, Dodge and Lucky; I already had the LotG (DEF/+global rchg) in these passives, so this gave me three sets of 2 LotG for a net +30% regen.
I then finished soloing Kashira (29 db/ninj stalker) through An Arachnos Slumber Party, an AE arc with an interesting concept (you're invited to a slumber party held by a bunch of female Arachnos minions) but I felt the plot needed a lot of work; I gave it 2 stars. After finishing the arc, I joined a pickup villain team doing Halloween stuff, and we killed Eochai (two or three times), Ghost of Scrapyard, and fought off a Zombie invasion; this got Kashira to level 30.
On Sunday, I played Psychic Woman (27 rad/psy defender) on a 7-player LEGION/Sisterhood team running Croatoa missions, which got Psychic Woman to level 28. After that, I joined the Sisterhood Sunday Event; the Sisterhood SG had decided to run through my Teen Phalanx Forever! story arc, which was totally awesome. We had 15 players altogether, and ran two through the story arc. I was nervous that a lot of the fun stuff (in clues and briefings) might get missed on a big team, but a lot of people seemed to like the story, so I was pretty happy. This got Psychic Woman to level 29.
Later on I played Thunder Girl on a pickup Manticore TF, with a team of:
3 scrappers
2 defenders (both emp/*)
2 controllers (*/kin, */cold)
1 tanker
This TF was buggy as all heck. Almost right away we started running into level 40 Paragon Elite Protectors, which were +5 to us (exemped down to 35 for the TF). The cold controller immediately quit after running into these; we could kill the level 40 PPs, but he felt it would take too long for him.
After finishing the first mission (a Defeat All), we talked to Manticore and immediately got THE SAME mission - another Defeat All Crey at the very same door. This was pretty weird, but we decided to go ahead and do it. After clearing the whole map (including more level 40 PPs), we completed the mission a second time; talking to Manticore again gave us the same Defeat All Crey mission, though. At this point it seemed pretty futile and most of us quit (including me).
Later on Sunday night, I played Blackout Girl (27 elec/elec brute) on a red side Trick-or-Treat team in Grandville. This team was pretty light on support (mostly brutes and stalkers) and I found I died a lot; I ended up having to turn off my AoE damage aura to reduce the aggro I was generating. Nevertheless this got Blackout Girl to level 28, where I took Energize, the new electric armor heal. I've only tried it a little, but it seems really nice so far; a decent sized heal followed by a period of regeneration.
Finished the night playing Mega (50 SS/will brute) on a 1st villain respec. Our team was 4 brutes, all various flavors of superstrength. Despite having no support characters whatsoever, we blitzed through the respec in 11min 43sec with no problems. (I think all 4 brutes were loaded with IO set bonuses, so it was very hard for any of the enemies to significantly hurt us.)
Monday night was pretty exciting as I got the City Traveler badge (60 months veteran reward). This lets me take travel powers at level 6 without any prerequisite; I haven't used this yet, but I'm thinking I may respec some alts to take advantage of this benefit. Police Woman also idled in Cimerora long enough to get the Cimeroran badge and the Time Lord accolade.
I played Thunder Girl (47 elec/SR) through another speed ITF; one of our controllers went linkdead in the last mission, though, so the team agreed to wait until he got back before finishing the TF, so that he would get merits. We still finished in 29mins 3sec.
After that I joined a pickup team doing the Hess TF; the leader seemed knowledgeable but some of the team members hadn't done it before, which led to some confusion in the last mission as several team members were trying to rush the giant robot while the leader was pulling Archon Burkholder. Despite this we still finished in a fairly decent 33min 40sec; this got Thunder Girl to level 48.
In other news, the results of the Mission Architect Player Choice Awards were announced; two of my arcs, Teen Phalanx Forever! and Celebrity Kidnapping, both won in their categories. Celebrity Kidnapping was a bit of a surprise as I totally thought another arc, Forget the Rose, Send me the Thorns (which is awesome, btw) was going to walk away with it. Another of my arcs, A Warrior's Journey - The Flower Knight Task Force took second place in its category. This was a really strong showing and I was quite happy with it.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
11/12/2009
On Tuesday night, the sponsor of the Player Choice Awards tracked me down and tried to give me the prize money for it, which was 50 million influence for winning two categories. I am insanely rich, though (well...in-game, anyway), and I knew this prize money was coming out of his own pocket, so I didn't really feel right about taking it. He was obviously going to be disappointed if I didn't take something, though, so I took 10M and asked him to use the other 40M for a future MA contest; I suggested perhaps "Best New Author".
After that I ran off and helped with banners in Atlas Park. As Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), I already had the badges, but I was in Atlas Park just as it was starting, so I thought, what the heck. I did get 2 merits for dropping the Greater Aspect, and a compliment on Police Woman's costume from someone who saw me at Wentworth's.
After that I switched to Thunder Girl (48 elec/SR scrapper) to join a 3rd hero respec (the one with Rikti). This was a full team but light on support (just one kin controller) but we did fine anyway. The final mission defending the reactor against the Rikti was a bit dreary; with our very high DPS we obliterated each wave of Rikti in seconds, then were left to wait several minutes for the next wave. While waiting around our poor kin's grandparent kicked him off the computer, so he ended up having to log off and didn't get to finish the trial. We ended up finishing in 1hr 9mins.
With the new City Traveler ability, I decided to go ahead and use Thunder Girl's new respec to drop hover; so now she has Combat Jumping and Fly for travel powers. This is the build I have planned for her, though I'm missing almost all the high end stuff (the number of slots in each power is right, but the purple recipes are all wishful thinking - currently have SOs sitting in those slots as placeholders):
Thunder Girl I16: Level 50 Magic Scrapper
Primary Power Set: Electrical Melee
Secondary Power Set: Super Reflexes
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Flight
Power Pool: Fighting
Ancillary Pool: Blaze Mastery
Hero Profile:
------------
Level 1: Charged Brawl T'Death-Acc/Dmg(A), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx(3), T'Death-Dmg/Rchg(3), T'Death-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(5), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(5), T'Death-Dam%(7)
Level 1: Focused Fighting LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(A), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(7), LkGmblr-Def(9), LkGmblr-Rchg+(19)
Level 2: Focused Senses LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(A), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(9), LkGmblr-Def(11), LkGmblr-Rchg+(19)
Level 4: Agile LkGmblr-Def/Rchg(A), LkGmblr-Def(11), LkGmblr-Rchg+(13)
Level 6: Swift Run-I(A)
Level 8: Thunder Strike Oblit-Dmg(A), Oblit-Acc/Rchg(13), Oblit-Dmg/Rchg(15), Oblit-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(15), Oblit-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(17), Oblit-%Dam(17)
Level 10: Practiced Brawler RechRdx-I(A)
Level 12: Combat Jumping DefBuff-I(A)
Level 14: Health Numna-Heal/Rchg(A), Numna-Heal(21), Numna-Regen/Rcvry+(21)
Level 16: Fly Zephyr-Travel(A), Zephyr-Travel/EndRdx(23), HO:Micro(23)
Level 18: Chain Induction Hectmb-Dmg(A), Hectmb-Dmg/Rchg(25), Hectmb-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(25), Hectmb-Acc/Rchg(27), Hectmb-Dmg/EndRdx(27), Hectmb-Dam%(29)
Level 20: Stamina P'Shift-EndMod(A), P'Shift-EndMod/Rchg(29), P'Shift-End%(31), P'Shift-EndMod/Acc(39), P'Shift-EndMod/Acc/Rchg(42), P'Shift-Acc/Rchg(50)
Level 22: Quickness Run-I(A)
Level 24: Dodge LkGmblr-Def/Rchg(A), LkGmblr-Def(31), LkGmblr-Rchg+(31)
Level 26: Build Up HO:Membr(A), HO:Membr(33), HO:Membr(33)
Level 28: Kick HO:Nucle(A)
Level 30: Tough Aegis-ResDam/EndRdx(A), Aegis-ResDam/Rchg(33), Aegis-EndRdx/Rchg(34), Aegis-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(40), Aegis-ResDam(40), S'fstPrt-ResDam/Def+(42)
Level 32: Lightning Rod C'ngBlow-Dmg/Rchg(A), M'Strk-Dmg/Rchg(34), Erad-Dmg/Rchg(34), Erad-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(36), Erad-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(36), Erad-%Dam(36)
Level 35: Evasion LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(A), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(37), LkGmblr-Def(37), LkGmblr-Rchg+(37)
Level 38: Weave RedFtn-Def/EndRdx(A), RedFtn-Def/Rchg(39), RedFtn-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(39), RedFtn-Def(40), RedFtn-EndRdx/Rchg(42), RedFtn-EndRdx(43)
Level 41: Char BasGaze-Acc/Hold(A), BasGaze-Acc/Rchg(43), BasGaze-Rchg/Hold(43), BasGaze-EndRdx/Rchg/Hold(46)
Level 44: Fire Blast Apoc-Dmg(A), Apoc-Dmg/Rchg(45), Apoc-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(45), Apoc-Acc/Rchg(45), Apoc-Dmg/EndRdx(46), Apoc-Dam%(46)
Level 47: Fire Ball Ragnrk-Dmg(A), Ragnrk-Dmg/Rchg(48), Ragnrk-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(48), Ragnrk-Acc/Rchg(48), Ragnrk-Dmg/EndRdx(50), Ragnrk-Knock%(50)
Level 49: Lucky DefBuff-I(A)
I ended up dropping leadership pool and picking up fighting pool (for tough and weave). I also lost one of my single target attacks, Havoc Punch, but I'm trying to get enough recharge to make my single-target attack chain Charged Brawl/Chain Induction/Charged Brawl/Fire Blast. In return I got to fit Fireball into my build, which makes the trade seem well worth it.
My melee and range defense are both soft capped right now, but my AoE defense is still kinda poor (down to 26%, partly because I'm missing some of the IO sets for +AoE DEF, partly because I pushed Lucky to level 49). Still, I'm liking this new build a lot so far, and I'm especially enjoying the amount of AoE carnage that Build Up/Lightning Rod/Fire Ball/Thunder Strike puts out.
On Wednesday night I played Pyre Woman (16 fire/SS tanker) on a Sisterhood fire team for a few missions, getting to level 17 before the team broke up. After that I tinkered with my old Axis and Allies story arc a bit. I've been trying to replace custom mobs with recolored standard mobs, to reduce the file space the arc is using, in order to make room to add some more stuff to the arc to make it more cool. After playing with that a bit and doing a little testing, I called it an early night (been doing overtime at RL work, which has been keeping me tired).
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
7/13/2009
Samurai-ko also got a costume compliment from a passerby in the AE building; her outfit was basically a bright red and gold suit of samurai armor.
Teamed up with a friend for the first few levels in Mercy Island, then spent some time as a lackey on a Demo Girls SG team on Victory, which got Miss Scarlett up to level 9.
WN is right, I did in fact play through Death to Disco! again just before the July 4 holiday. I thought it was improved from the first time I played it, and ended up submitting an updated review with slightly higher rating on CoH Mission Review.
Friday night, I played April Fool (50 thug/TA mastermind) on a Barracuda SF with a Liberty Force SG team. Our team make up was:
2 corruptors (both rad, I think)
3 dominators
2 masterminds (thug/TA and robo/FF)
We got through most of it but stalled on the final encounter with Reichsman, where we suffered two team wipes before deciding to take a break (theoretically we might resume at some later date). Even with decent debuffs we couldn't seem to put enough of a dent in Reichsman's HP; partly because we were short handed (only 7 players) and partly because we simply couldn't survive the aggro from the mad ambushes (since we were mostly squishy).
On Saturday I spent a lot of time playing Samurai-ko (40 katana/will scrapper), gradually polishing up the samurai epic story arc that I've been working on for some time. I eventually published this arc as A Warrior's Journey - The Flower Knight Task Force, a level 45-50 heroic arc that I labeled "Challenging, Save the World, Magic". It kind of ended up being a remix of the Legend of the Five Rings game, the Last Samurai movie, and the Statesman TF. I rather like how it turned out, but possibly due to being targeted towards a very tiny niche of players, no one has played it at all so far. Or possibly this is because of the "Warning: AVs!" that I stuck on it; I'm still not sure if it's too hard. (I was able to solo it on Samurai-ko, but it wasn't easy.) Regardless, even if no one plays it, I like it.
I played Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) on a speed ITF, with a team mix of:
3 corruptors (?/cold, ?/therm, ?/kin)
3 scrappers (spine/will, bs/shield, MA/regen)
1 brute (SS/SR)
1 blaster (AR/nrg)
We blitzed through the ITF in 23mins 40sec for 28 merits (70.99 MPH) and I also got a very sweet Hecatomb (RCHG/ACC) recipe as a drop.
A stalker friend was asking for help against an EB-level Lord Recluse, which he was having trouble soloing, and I joined him with Schadenfreude (49 AR/pain corruptor). Our first try resulted in me catching aggro and dying, followed by him dying; our second try, we were joined by an AR/rad corruptor and Lord Recluse gave up and died almost instantly, causing the stalker to remark, "rad really is god in this game". We went on to play a few missions, including a Peregrine Island mayhem.
I took a break for a bit, then after I got back I played TokyoRose (19 sonic/sonic corruptor) on a Cap au Diable SF, with a team of:
4 corruptors (elec/kin, 2 sonic/sonics, fire/pain)
1 dominator (grav/elec)
2 brutes (elec/shield, db/nrg)
We did the SF the normal way, clearing most missions rather than stealthing; this went pretty well and we finished in 1hr 47mins for 12 merits (6.73 MPH), getting TokyoRose to level 20 and Stamina, which was really helpful because Disruption Field (the sonic hula hoop buff) is such an expensive toggle to keep going.
Learned a trick over LBX for how to use Ouroboros to quickly get to RWZ or Cimerora; just start a flashback of one of the arcs based there, then teleport to the contact and quit the arc.
I joined another Barracuda SF on Saturday night, this time on Yuki-Onna (50 ice/cold corruptor) with a mostly LEGION team of
4 corruptors (fire/rad, dark/rad, sonic/kin, ice/cold)
1 brute (SS/dark)
1 crab
2 dominators (fire/psi, mind/psi)
Everything went fine til the final fight with Reichsman, which was lengthy and gruelling. Our team was indecisive over whether we should focus damage on fighting the AV or fighting the adds; I think we finally overcame the encounter when the dominators mostly dedicated themselves to controlling the ambushes while the rest of us DPS'd Reichsman down. We finished in 1hr 44mins for 20 merits (11.54 MPH) and it was my lucky weekend for purple drops, as I got an Armageddon (DMG/END) recipe.
I spent some time crafting IOs for Yuki after that, slotting 2 sets of 5 Positron's Blast into her Ice Storm and Blizzard powers, for +18% global ACC and +13% global RCHG. Her total global RCHG is now up to 35.45%.
On Sunday, I solo'd Kashira (25 db/ninj stalker) through Warrior's Three, a story arc where you help a Mu Mystic fight off an incursion of Warriors who were trying to steal magical artifacts from the Rogue Isles. The arc was missing on details, had weird pacing and some plot problems; I ended up rating it 2 stars.
My main character, Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) got the Clubber day job badge from being logged off in Pocket D for a really long time. I checked on my Wentworth investments (I'm getting really close to a billion infl, but am not quite there) before moving to Warburg to park for my next day job.
I started a newbie mace/SR brute on Victory, with the name of Miss Scarlett; I gave her a red "dinner dress" (as a teammate described it) and a big wrench as a weapon. Her background, of course, is that "Miss Scarlett did it in the conservatory with the wrench." And now she's on the run from the law.
Finished the night running a speed ITF; the team leader asked for a debuffer, so I played Yuki-Onna (50 ice/cold corruptor). Our team was:
3 tankers
3 corruptors (*/kin, */rad, ice/cold)
1 brute
1 scrapper
We blew through the ITF in 27min 22sec for 28 merits (61.39 MPH).
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"