It was the best fight I have had on a team in a long while, Thanks for allowing me to be one of the Tanks to team with you. The pleasure was all mine Rain.
Valor
Quote:
|
by Star Ranger 4 WIN LOSE OR DRAW, WE WILL FIGHT. WE ARE HEROES This is what we DO! |
Decide that this will be another day in which you Walk The Talk.
MA #14724 Operation: Discredit @American Valor
Sentinel Of Liberty SG
2/11/2008
It was double exp weekend and I played a ton; too much to list every single thing, so I'll just go over highlights.
Friday night I played Spacegirl (38 mind/rad controller) on the Lady Grey TF with an 8-player team of Liberty Force SG. Team mix was:
thug/traps MM
MA/ninj stalker
AR/dark corruptor
FF/elec defender
ice/ice blaster
fire/mace tanker
mind/sonic controller
mind/rad controller (me)
This TF was unusual in that we were very low level. At the start, our highest level character was level 47, then we had two 46s and two 45s, and three SKs (including me) who were even lower level. I actually thought TFs usually spawn mobs at the high end of the TF, so we would be doomed because we'd be fighting 51s and 52s, but when we entered the first mission, the mobs were only 47s and 48s. When the highest level character, the defender, leveled to 48, the mobs upgraded to 48s and 49s. I was quite surprised as I thought our team level meant the TF would be an exercise in pain, but our team was really well balanced and with the mobs being comparable in level to us, we easily were able to beat this TF, and all 8 of us got sickening exp for doing so. Spacegirl leveled from 38 to 41 on this TF, picking up Indomitable Will from the Psy epic pool.
I rebooted Schadenfreude, my 5th Column villain, yet again. She was a 33 AR/dark corruptor, but I got kind of bored of that and so I restarted her as a 1 AR/traps corruptor, mostly because I wanted to give traps another try. The first version of Schadenfreude that I made was also an AR/traps corruptor and got to level 41, but I got frustrated with traps at that level so restarted once as a merc/poison MM and then again as a AR/dark corr, before coming full circle to be an AR/traps corr again. Traps has kind of a unique playstyle and so I decided I really do want a representative of this powerset in my "stable" of characters. I did seriously consider making her dark/traps or merc/traps to be a little more powerful, but I ultimately decided that (a) she just needs to have a gun and (b) I hate micromanaging pets. Anyway, double exp weekend was a great time to start a new alt, and I got the newest Schadenfreude up to level 14 with a mix of soloing, pickup teaming, and lackeying to villain SG-mates.
An SG-mate asked for help with the "Defeat Lord Recluse in the Future" mission, and I and several other SG-mates responded. We decided to go with the very silly plan of an all-MM team; normally no one will put up with more than 2 MMs on the same team due to lag issues, but we ended up with 5 MMs and a token stalker. I played April Fool (50 thug/TA MM) and in addition to my regular pets I summoned a snow beast, a rikti drone, a loa bone zombie, and a shivan decimator. I kinda wish I had Gang War and a Vanguard HVAS too, but oh well. The result was pretty spectacular:
5 MMs, 1 stalker and 40 pets vs Lord Recluse
Lord Recluse, despite being an AV and a mastermind himself, never stood a chance.
Wrapped up the weekend on Sunday night playing Goshilla (34 sonic/nrg blaster) on a 4-player Liberty Force monsters team. We battled Jurassik and were able to take him down with only 4 players: a will/mace tanker, a dark/sonic defender, an ice/sonic controller and a sonic/nrg blaster (me). Despite being a giant monster, Jurassik's smashing damage could barely hurt our tanker (protected by sonic shields, dark debuffs and his own res/regen) and our res debuffs from sonic blasts, sonic dispersion and dark simply tore him up, getting us The Solution badge. Ironically, the 3 Jurassik rubbles that spawned after we killed Jurassik were much harder than Jurassik himself, because the Jurassik rubbles spawned at level 40. I was all for letting these despawn, but our tanker was like, I will not run from these stupid rubbles, I'll fight them all night if we have to! So we had to fight them. The 3 level 40 rubbles were more dangerous than the giant monster, but the tanker could still keep up with their smashing damage; unfortunately, we could barely hit them at all since they were +6 to us. I found I could hit them when I did both Aim and Build Up; I didn't do a lot of damage each time, but they didn't regen much either. So we eventually defeated the rubbles after I did three Aim/Build Up/Nova cycles. Did a few missions after that which got Goshilla to level 35, gaining the Howl power.
Misc short takes:
Over the weekend I gained the Ardent (39 month) veteran badge on my account in general.
Yuki-Onna (ice/cold corruptor) leveled from 30 to 35, mostly on pickup teams and once doing a villain respec with Mildly Heroic Evildoers SG. She picked up Snowstorm and Sleet as powers. Snowstorm is okay, I guess; while Sleet is, umm, "leet".
Grey Wings (archery/fire blaster on Triumph) leveled from 5 to 9 on a pickup team, picking up Blazing Arrow and Swift as powers.
Rain Dancer (storm/archery defender) leveled from 44 to 45 doing RWZ missions with Liberty Force SG.
Thunder Girl (will/nrg tanker) leveled from 35 to 36 on a pickup team, gained the Doctor's Ally and Indestructible badges. She spent a lot of time fighting those horrible Nictus crystals and breaking out of a CoT prison.
@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!"
2/12/2008
I started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) and finishing off the flashback of the Talshak the Mystic story arc that I've been working on for awhile now. I had foolishly set challenge settings of "Players debuffed" and "AT powers only", not realizing how hard this story arc really is. Last time I had managed to defeat Atta as an EB under these settings, so I figured the rest of the story arc should be easier, right? Nope. The next mission was a Defeat all villains on an Oranbega map, chock full of CoT ghosts and Minions of Igneous, that mostly could ignore caltrops and resist lethal. The orange-con CoT ghost demons were especially hard, because their ACC debuff stacked with my self-imposed perma-debuff, to the point where I could hardly hit them even with Targeting Drone. I found myself using the Geas of the Kind Ones and Archmage accolades, a lot, and still got defeated once and had to break out of the Oranbega prison. I also restocked inspirations once (Mender Roebuck will still talk to you while you're on a flashback) which helped but I didn't want to do this too often as the mission was deep in the Hollows and moderately dangerous to run back to. Anyway, I eventually managed to clear this horrible mission, then the next mission was a simple run to the Cavern of Trancendance contact, which allowed me to finish the flashback and earn the Headstrong and Vocational flashback badges. (Interestingly, Talshak counted as a level 15 flashback even though I was exemped to level 14 the whole time. I think Flux and Julius the Troll counted as level 15 also; I'm not sure if this is a bug or is intentional.) I also did some IO crafting that scored me the Master Craftsman badge.
After that, I played my newest incarnation of Schadenfreude (14 AR/traps corruptor), as a lackey in a duo to a mastermind SG-mate for a few missions, getting her to level 15.
After that, I formed and led a Numina TF while playing Thunder Girl (36 will/nrg tanker). Although I made a good-faith effort to recruit pickup people, the team ended up being all people I already knew, which worked out fine. The team mix was:
will/nrg tanker (me)
AR/dev blaster
ice/storm controller
katana/regen scrapper
sonic/nrg blaster
The stormy didn't have O2 Blast, so we really had no "healer". Nevertheless we did fine. I've found that willpower's innate resists and regen means that I can get by as long as I have some sort of support (be it buffs, debuffs or controls) and play reasonably intelligently. On the way to one of our missions in Crey's Folly we ran into Jurassik again, and defeated him with the above team. The storm debuffs nerfed Jurassik enough that he would only hit me once in awhile and I'd regen the health back long before he'd hit me again, and the DPS people wore his health down to nothing, getting us all The Solution badge.
Thunder Girl versus Jurassik
The rest of the Numina TF went pretty well. We fought some and stealthed some. When we had to kill assorted villains all over the city, the scrapper had a list of the zones we needed and rapidly dispatched each team member to the various hunting zones in the right order, which made this phase go by very quickly. I had to hunt Vahzilok in Faultline, which is often a bottleneck but thankfully night was falling just as my turn came up (the Vahz only come out at night). There was a tense moment in the second to last mission when a loose Tornado managed to aggro an entire warehouse of bad guys onto us, but we rallied and managed to outfight them all; I think the Tornado pulling may have even sped up the mission. In the final mission we faced Jurassik again, this time in the dreadful multi-story cave room, and beat him again. All-in-all we finished the Numina TF in 1hr 55mins, much quicker than I expected and probably the fastest I've ever done it.
After that I briefly played Grey Wings (9 archery/fire blaster) on Triumph server a little, duoing the Negotiator badge mission with an exemped scrapper.
@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!"
2/13/2008
After the patch I must've spent at least half an hour logging on different alts and looking at the pretty numbers that are displayed for combat stats now. A few key numbers:
- Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), my main, has +22.5% damage and +80% recharge.
- Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper) has 47% melee DEF, 41% range DEF and 37% AoE DEF. I feel better about respecing Elude out.
- April Fool (50 thug/TA MM) has +61.25% recharge.
- Rain Dancer (45 storm/archery defender) has +41.25% recharge (111.25% when hasten is up).
- Spacegirl (41 mind/rad corruptor) has +43.75% recharge (more when AM is up, but I didn't think to measure it).
Yeah, I like +recharge. Doing stuff more often is good.
The new numbers got me motivated to craft some more IO sets for Mega (50 SS/elec brute), and I bought some recipes and salvage from the Black Market. I found I was short 1 Demonic Threat Report; normally a common and cheap salvage, the Black Market was pretty cleaned out of these. I'm well off enough that I don't mind paying a little markup on stuff I need, so I gradually raised my bid; but when I had a 50,000 infamy bid out for a common salvage that I normally destroy or sell for 100, I decided it was too much. No way was I going to pay 100K or more for one! So I farmed magic salvage, playing Mega on a couple missions from a flashback of the Tavish Bell story arc. While doing this I kept Recharge on my combat monitor; I have a Force Feedback %chance of recharge slotted in Foot Stomp, and whenever it proc'd (which was often) my global recharge would pop from 36.25% to 96.25%, a very nice bonus. I also got a little surprised by the Rage drop, which now (mildly) crashes END; I wasn't expecting it so had all my toggles drop (although not fatally, thankfully). I'll need to get used to watching for it so that I can Power Sink my END back each time. After two missions I got my Demonic Threat Report. Of course when I went back to the Black Market, I had also successfully purchased one for 1000 infamy, too; so I ended up with two. Anyway, I ended up slotting a set of 5 Stupefy into Hand Clap (giving +6.25% recharge) and a set of 3 Performance Shifter into Power Sink (giving +1.88% max HP).
After that I played Astarte (34 grav/emp controller) on Protector server on a 7 player Demolition Girls SG team. Astarte got to level 35 and I picked up Absorb Pain, hoping to use this to save teammates from damage spikes; but the perverse nature of the universe immediately caused our team to start dying horribly anyway. In one case the tanker ran into two spawns of CoT but had forgotten to turn any toggles on; and in a couple other cases a blaster would get separated from the group and aggro roamers or ambushes; and there were a few more fights that just seemed to go sour for some reason. I didn't really get a shining moment where I saved everyone with healing, but I did get a lot of practice using Heal Other and Absorb Pain, when I had been a little afraid Absorb Pain might be a power I would only use once in a blue moon.
After that I played Schadenfreude (15 AR/traps corruptor) as a lackey on a 5-player level 30 Liberty Force SG team. I think they really did speed up exp in the level 13-20 range, because I was LK'd to the highest level team member and we just played normally (nothing PL-ish at all) and I still got to level 19 in short order. I picked up Force Field Generator at level 16 and Flamethrower at level 18.
After that I puttered around a bit in the character creator on Virtue server, trying to make a stalker for the latest set of Liberty Force theme characters: Praetorian (evil duplicate) versions of other SG members. For example, I'm assigned to make an evil version of a scrapper in our SG, while the scrapper's player is making an evil version of Police Woman. I made a dark/regen stalker (to be the evil counterpart of the dark/regen scrapper), but I'm thinking I may re-make her to tweak costume settings a bit to be a more evil looking version of the original heroine's costume.
@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!"
2/16/2008
Been sick lately so haven't updated as often. Here's a quick overview of my CoH activities though:
Schadenfreude (19 AR/trap corruptor) mostly lackeyed to Liberty Force villains, getting to level 25 and picking up Stamina, Poison Gas Trap and Hover. I thought Hover was supposed to help reduce trap animations, but I didn't notice any big improvement, and I ended up using a veteran respec to switch to Combat Jumping instead.
Thunder Girl (37 will/nrg tanker) led a pickup team for a bit, then did all the Valentine's Day missions (getting all 5 Snaptooth rewards) and got to level 38, gaining Total Focus. I also slotted Energy Transfer with 3 Touch of Death (Acc/Dmg, Dmg/Rchg, Dmg/End/Rchg) and 3 Crushing Impact (Dmg/Rchg, Acc/Dmg/Rchg and Dmg/End/Rchg) which gives it a net +99.6% damage, +43.6% accuracy, +96% recharge and +38.8% end reduction, along with +2.63% max HP from set bonuses. Later I played Thunder Girl on a 5-player Sisterhood team that beat up the Envoy of Shadows twice.
I played Yuki-Onna (35 ice/cold corruptor) and helped heroes farm Hellfrosts/hordelings in Valentine's Day missions for a bit. I was kinda hoping this would be an easy way for me to get the Coldhearted badge also (needed for a villain accolade), but surprisingly, progress on this badge seemed incredibly slow. Did this for about an hour before it got too mindnumbing.
Brought April Fool (50 thug/TA mastermind) into Recluse's Victory for a couple sessions of PVP. First visit, I bushwhacked a blaster, then later a controller, then got blown away by an ice blaster who caught me too far from my pets. Left after not being able to find any heroes for awhile. Second visit I mostly fought a rad/psi defender and fire blaster duo. Started off mostly losing but turned things around and started winning once I focused on killing the defender first, and especially after I teamed up with a robot/traps MM.
Playing April I also solo'd the Tavish Bell story arc on Ruthless with no travel powers, no inspirations and no defeats. Managed to solo the fire brute elite boss, Arch-A (though I did have to flee once to respawn pets) and got the Troubleshooter, All for One/One For All, Suspended and Uninspired badges.
April Fool vs Arch-A
April also did a villain respec organized on LHO, which had:
ice/kin corruptor
fir/fire brute
dark/inv brute
SS/stone brute
thug/TA MM (me)
fire/will brute
The corruptor and I both got smeared by the Thorn Tree at the end and so ignominiously were dead for most of the final fight, which the 4 brutes managed to finish without any support.
I brought Spacegirl (42 mind/rad controller) out for several monster fights, helping heroes out with Lusca, Eochai and Jack in irons.
I played Flamebait (19 fire/thermal corruptor) on a 7 corruptor team of Demolition Girls SG, which pretty much steamrolled a bunch of villain missions. We got the Agent of Discord badge from a mission, and attempted Ghost of Scrapyard but were unable to overcome all the adds, though did get Hammerhead from killing his minions. Got Flamebait to level 24, training in Acrobatics, Stamina and Assault.
@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!"
2/18/2008
Played some on Virtue server as several people I know have been spending some time there. Started off playing Mercy Beaucoup (8 emp/sonic defender on Virtue), first on a pickup team, then on a 4-player Northern Lights team, getting to level 11, training in Combat Jumping and completing an Atlas safeguard to get the first fly pack. Even got to do some mild RP; I expositioned about how I hoped to be a hero to inspire Canadians of all ages, while a female archer teammate grumbled cattily about the sleaziness of Mercy's costume (which is basically a Canadian flag painted onto a leotard).
Also on Virtue I played Police Girl (2 AR/nrg blaster on Virtue, a character I had created last year purely as an imaginary Police Woman sidekick to use in the Comic Book Contest) and joined a pickup sewers team, which swiftly raced her up to level 5. One of the other players complimented me on play skill, which was a bit mystifying, because all I did was shoot stuff with feeble my level 2 powers (all of which were attacks) and not get me or my teammates killed. I can only surmise that current standards for pickup blasters must be very low.
On Liberty I played Schadenfreude (25 AR/traps corruptor), first spending some time in Bloody Bay getting the Shivan Shard temp power and the Gunner badge. While gathering meteor samples a fire/rad controller jumped me, but my FF Generator canceled his holds and let me turn around and hold him with a poison gas trap, allowing me to gun the controller down. A bit later I was fighting Shivans (working on the Woman in Black badge) when a controller/blaster duo jumped and quickly killed me. I ran back quickly and found them still hanging around in the same place, and so I jumped them in turn - first paralyzing the controller with poison gas and web grenades, killed her then turned to knock out the blaster. This was actually pretty lucky; I probably shouldn't have been able to pull a 1v2 like this off, but they were a little slow to react to my full frontal traps assault (and there's an expression you won't hear every day).
A bit later Schadenfreude was a lackey on a 4 player level 33-34ish Liberty Force villain team, doing the Carnie contact's story arc in St Martial where you generally sow chaos between villain factions, followed by an unrelated mission where we kidnapped (i.e. knocked out) a hero-level Luminary. Got Schadenfreude to level 27. There was a robo/FF MM on the team and I put Melee DEF and Ranged DEF on the new "Combat Monitor" and between his FFs, my FF Generator, a little from Combat Jumping, and a little more from a dark MM's Shadow Fall, the combat monitor listed my DEF as ranging between a healthy 31% to a fairly sick 56%, depending on how close we were standing to each other (for overlapping defense auras). I picked up Maneuvers at level 26 to try and stack even more defense.
I also played Rain Dancer (45 storm/archery defender) as an SK on a Lady Grey TF organized on the Sisterhood channel. Team mix was:
fire/nrg blaster
storm/archery defender (me)
2 dominators
fire/rad corruptor
bs/regen scrapper
dual/will scrapper
fire/kin controller
This team was a little squishy but seemed to have overpowering DPS; not only did we have 2 scrappers and a blaster, but also two sets of fire imps and fulcrum shift. My normal attack sequence is Freezing Rain, Aim, Rain of Arrows, but quite often I ended up hitting zero or one mobs with my RoA due to everything being killed before the arrows would hit. We didn't have a tanker, so our fire/kin controller heroically tanked for us, which often would get him beat up but mostly worked otherwise. Our team suffered occasional deaths but killed stuff at a ludicrous rate, so it worked out. We did have some trouble with Penelope Yin aggroing onto us in mission 1; no idea why, but the team decided to kill her off - which failed the mission, but we were still able to advance to mission 2. We had no trouble with the Riders or DraGon's mission. Against Hamidon we had some initial trouble focusing our damage on one target, but once we all agreed to assist one person we mopped the mitos up quickly.
Rain Dancer vs the Honoree
In the last mission neither of the AVs gave us any trouble, and I had a little fun using Hurricane to plow through the mobs of Rikti to reach the generators at the end. Rain Dancer got to level 46 and I added 3 slots to Tactics; so far I put 2 Adjusted Targeting IOs in there, giving her a bonus +2% damage.
I also played Police Woman (50 AR/dev) for a bit, soloing a flashback of Penelope Yin's story arc (which had come out long after Police Woman was level 50). I set "enemies buffed" for challenge settings, and on Heroic difficulty, the buffed enemies don't seem too bad. It maybe raises their level by 1, making the mission effectively Rugged. Since I was solo and moving slowly I watched the Combat window more than normal and I found that, against +0 minions and lieutenants, I was 95% chance to hit even with Targeting Drone off and no IO set bonuses (since I was exemped to 19, far below the level of my IOs), which surprised me. Against +1 minions I was also 95% to hit; against +1 lieutenants it started falling off to 87% to hit. It kind of makes me wonder if I'm overslotted for ACC and ToHit, but I can still miss Captain Mako when he's eluding, so I figure I can't be too accurate yet. (Hmm, maybe I need to fight Mako sometime with Real Numbers on.) Anyway, I solo'd this story arc and rescued Mr. Yin pretty easily; I already had the Rescuer badge from joining someone else once, but I did get the Courageous badge for doing a flashback with enemies buffed, which was the last level 15-19 flashback badge I needed.
@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!"
2/19/2008
I started off playing Spacegirl (42 mind/rad controller) on a Numina TF organized on LBx. Team mix was:
MA/inv scrapper
elec/ice blaster
will/SS tanker
will/fire tanker
grav/storm controller
mind/rad controller (me)
ill/rad controller
ill/kin controller
We had a few inexperienced players, one of which had to ask the way to get to Perez Park and Crey's Folly, but seemed to do okay overall. The illusionists sped things up a bit by stealthing the missions that could be stealthed, though we had a couple fatal stealthing accidents, once due to an attack being set on autofire, and once due to a illusion pet not agreeing with the whole stealthing thing. The big bottleneck of the TF was the Defeat 20 Vahzilok in Faultline mission; night was just ending as this mission came up, so we had to wait through a full day cycle before we could finish it. Our balanced team handled fights very well, though, including the final one against Jurassik.
After that, Schadenfreude (27 AR/traps corruptor) started a Steel Canyon mayhem mission and with some alt-swapping and the collusion of an SG-mate I got the Steel Worker badge (needed for an accolade) for both Schadenfreude and Yuki-Onna (35 ice/cold corruptor) and for two of my SG-mate's alts.
Yuki-Onna versus Infernal
After that, I played Yuki-Onna on a 3-player level 35 Liberty Force villain team. We fought hero-level Infernal, who went down pretty easily despite his many Longbow and demonic minions (we had a brute to tank, plus both cold and dark debuffs), then worked through all of Kelly Uqua's story arc.
After that team broke up I played Rain Dancer (46 storm/archery defender) as an SK on an 8-player level 50 Sisterhood hero team doing high difficulty AV missions in Peregrine Island. This was a fairly damage-heavy team with a solid tank and myself and a dark defender for support, and we pretty much trounced all opposition we encountered. We beat up Dominatrix, then shortly after we defeated Marauder, my internet connection went down, which ended the night for me.
@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!"
2/20/2008
Did some server hopping, starting off playing Astarte (35 grav/emp controller on Protector server) with an 8-player team of Demolition Girls SG. The tanker seemed happy to see me join; it looked like the team was recovering from a wipeout when I arrived. We were doing Cadao Kestrel's story arc for two different players and I think we fought the AV-level Envoy of Shadows four times. We had at least two total wipeouts that I remember. Once, we suddenly walked into the Envoy AV who was just standing in a generic hallway with a couple spawns of CoT; he totally surprised us and had killed half the team before we even realized an AV was on us. The second time, we were going through one of the Oranbega portals which led directly into a nasty fight; with the team split up while trickling through this portal, we got defeated in detail. After a few misadventures in this vein we got our act together, however, and started beating up CoT in earnest, and by the end of the night, defeating the Envoy had become routine.
Astarte vs the Envoy of Shadows
After that team broke up, I played Vesta (16 fire/SS tanker on Triumph server), initially soloing but later joining a 4-player pickup team doing level 16ish radio missions in Skyway City. This was a small but competent team, and got Vesta to level 17.
After that I switched back to Liberty server and ran Schadenfreude (27 AR/traps corruptor) around reading plaques to get the Lorekeeper history badge, which unlocked Archmage Tarixus as a contact. I solo'd several of his missions, until he gave me the Soul Taker badge mission (needed for an accolade), which I'm currently sitting on until I see if anyone I know needs it.
A corruptor was calling out on LBx channel for people to come fight him in Recluse's Victory, so I switched to Police Woman (50 AR/dev) and poked around in RV for a bit. I was using the new combat monitor to watch my stealth, perception, damage bonus and range defense, and it was actually pretty instructive. I can reach the perception cap for a blaster (which I knew) but also found I could reach the stealth cap for a blaster (which I hadn't realized; admittedly, this is much less than the stalker stealth cap). So I experimented with playing "like a stalker", or at least my idea of what stalkers do: shadowing possible targets and attacking when they looked vulnerable.
First I saw a mastermind wandering around with an Arachnos heavy; I sent a Longbow heavy to attack him. The MM sent his pets to attack the Longbow heavy, while flying really high to avoid damage; I figured he had to be out of bodyguard mode, so I jumped out at this point and stunned him with Beanbag, dropping him out of the sky (doing some falling damage) and I finished him off with some followup blasts.
After that, I shadowed a brute for a bit before attacking him. A brute is a tough matchup for me since they heavily resist my lethal damage (even more now that unresistable blaster damage has been cut to 10%) and this one was both slippery and aggressive. I kited around him a lot, but he could both hold/knockback me with Knockout Blow and stun me with something else (maybe a temp power?), forcing me to steadily eat break frees. I damaged him some but not quickly enough; he was able to outheal my DPS. I disengaged after I ran out of break frees; he issued some taunts over broadcast, but it helps to be thick-skinned in zone PvP, so I simply agreed that he was pretty scary. Meanwhile, I ran to Atlas Park to refill my inspiration tray. Returning to Recluse's Victory, I found the brute again, catching him while already wounded from fighting Longbow; admittedly, not a "fair" fight, but "fairness" is mythical in zone PvP. Eating some reds gave me enough damage to outpace his regen and I managed to score a kill. To my surprise, he self-rez'd on the spot; I started shooting him again, but he was too slippery to kill a second time. After fighting him a bit longer, I decided to quit while I was ahead. I never did find the original corruptor, but it was fun anyway.
After that, I joined a fairly bad 8-player level 50 pickup team in Peregrine Island, fighting Malta on an outdoor map. We had no tanker; instead, an illusion controller would absorb alpha strikes with Phantom Army. This was pretty leaky and a lot of damage got through to the team, especially from Gunslingers and Sappers (after I realized this, I started targeting these mobs for Beanbag/Taser/single target blasts). We had two SKs who were much too low, a 4 blaster and an 18 defender; the blaster at least was shooting stuff, but the defender seemed to be on autofollow, never attacking or buffing or even running sonic dispersion. When I asked if this person was AFK, another player said it was his second box; no one else seemed to have a problem with this, so I didn't push it. Anyway, I got to use Vengeance and Resuscitate twice on this mission (plus an empath rez'd some people too). After we finished this mission (which was a heroic level 50 mission), another player was saying we should do his invincible level 50 mission next. That seemed like a really 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!"
2/21/2008
It looks like my scribblings have inspired another player to start blogging their adventures: Navar's villain blog. Cool!
I finally started moving on acquiring purple IO recipes for Police Woman (50 AR/dev); previously I hadn't bothered because until recently you lost their bonuses when exemping down, which I do a lot. I decided the best way would be a combination of bidding at Wentworth's and hunting/playing at level 50. I put up a bunch of lowball bids for purple recipes I was interested in, figuring I'll let these bids sit for awhile to see if anyone bites. Patience is a big money saver and money maker at Wentworth's. Despite bidding at the low end, I still ended up committing about 250M infl in bids; and though I'm pretty ludicrously rich (or at least I thought I was), this still was a pretty big bite out of my net worth. By the end of the night I had netted 3 purple recipes, from the Gravitational Anchor (immob) set, for a total cost of 25M influence -- and I suspect I got these at a "good" price. Purple recipes are expensive! I hope they end up being worth it.
I did a couple level 50 Ouroboros flashbacks; following High Beam's flashback badging guide, I did the Strange Case of Benjamin A Decker story arc (set in the Rikti War Zone) twice; once with enemies buffed and no epic powers allowed, and once with myself perma-debuffed and no temp powers allowed. This went fairly quickly (about 20 mins each run) though I think the last mission, which requires you to get 4 glowies without fighting certain key NPCs, would've been hard without stealth. From this I got the Adjuster, Intrepid, Marginalized, Temerarious (is that even a word?) and Demarcated badges. Also, using the Real Numbers feature I could tell that the perma-debuff is a flat -50% DMG modifier across the board; there's also an ACC debuff but I'm not sure how to read the stats it shows for base accuracy. Also a status protection debuff, I think, but being a squishy I didn't even look at that since I have no status protection to lose.
While hanging around in RWZ I saw a mother ship raid being organized, so I joined in. After clearing the pylons we boarded the mother ship itself, and my team got credit for a bomb, edging me a little closer to that badge, and fought an awful lot of Rikti. We killed a lot and we died a lot. I still had "Ranged DEF" on my combat monitor, which was actually pretty helpful; I could use the combat monitor to tell whether I was standing inside someone's dispersion field (not easy to tell from the visuals when 30 players are present fighting 100 rikti) and I was noticably safer when I did so. I got a lot of merits (of which I have plenty already) and I was kinda hoping this would be a place to get purple recipes (since everything you fight here is 50+) but I didn't get a single recipe drop while there, making me wonder whether you can even get recipes on raids (I never really watched for them before).
After that I did some of the Valentine's Day missions on Astarte (36 grav/emp controller on Protector) with two players from Demolition Girls SG, one of which volunteered to play a villain. We did both Ganymede's and Scratch's story arcs, resulting in the Beautiful badge and unlocking DJ Zero as a contact.
After that I played Rain Dancer (47 storm/archery defender), joining a pickup team that was asking for a "healer" on LBx. The LBxites were making fun of their use of the word "healer"; I asked the team leader if he could use a storm defender, and he seemed willing. It was an 8-player team running level 50 invincible missions in Maria Jenkins' story arc, the one with all the Praetorians. Normally teams that ask for a "healer" are bad news, but this team actually really worked well; it had a tanker, two kinetics (apparently kin doesn't count as "healing") and a lot of damage. I mostly focused on dropping Freezing Rain (for the -RES and some mitigation from knockdown) and using O2 Boost to single-target heal people; we had enough damage that by the time I got my bow out to attack, things would usually be dead. This team basically vaporized Chimera, Malaise, and Black Swan, almost like they weren't there. Diabolique dodged us for awhile by flying away (and she's a dirty cheater, because my Snowstorm is supposed to prevent her from flying) but eventually got chased down and defeated. Our last mission, against Siege, was kind of messy because for some reason the team split up into 3 or 4 parts to click the many glowies; this resulted in about half the team getting ganked by killer robots. Once we regrouped, however, we were able to get the remaining generators, then went to the top of the factory and beat up Siege. Rain Dancer hit level 48 on this team (I ended up adding 3 slots to Temp Invulnerability, which now has 1 ENDRDX and 3 RES SOs), and also got the Shrouded badge from hanging out in Diabolique's dimension.
After that I played Yuki-Onna (35 ice/cold corruptor) on a 4-player Liberty Force SG team doing level 36 missions in Johnny Sonata's story arc, getting her to level 36; I added 2 slots to Sleet (which now has a total of 3 RCHG SOs) and one to Glacial Shield (now slotted with 2 DEF SOs).
@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!"
2/22/2008
This is an awesome thread about a little girl who is learning to read by playing City of Heroes: What My Six Year Old Has Learned From CoX. Sister Flame is my new favorite hero!
Five more of my purchase orders at Wentworths for purple recipes executed since my last login; this is kinda good because I got them at the "low" end of their price range, but also kinda bad because the "low end" of their price range still cost me 80M influence. This put 5 of the 6 Gravitational Anchor recipes (all but the hold proc) in my hands, so I went ahead and crafted them, slotting the set into Police Woman's (50 AR/dev) Web Grenade, replacing the level 30 Rooting Grasp set I had in there before. This is the net difference:
Web Grenade (before): 5 Rooting Grasp, 1 Endoplasm HO
power enhancement: immob +98.3%, acc +98.3%, range +13.1%, rchg +39.2%, endrdx +43.5%
set bonuses: +2% immob, +0.75% maxHP, +1% global dmg, +2.5% global rchg
Web Grenade (after): 5 Gravitational Anchor, 1 Endoplasm HO
power enhancement: immob +107.4%, acc +92.4%, rchg +89.9%, endrdx +33.1%
set bonuses: +4% recovery, +2.52% fire&cold RES, +15% global acc, +10% global rchg
I'm kinda unhappy about losing the range enhancement (good for catching runners in PvP) and the +1% global dmg (dropping my global dmg bonus to +21.5%). But the new slotting comes close to the soft cap on recharge (letting me spam web grenade faster and stack immobs faster) and +10% global recharge is just sick. This raises me to +87.5% global recharge, already beating perma-hasten; though I wonder if I'm getting to the stage of diminishing returns on recharge. I certainly would rather have the +1% global damage than the +15% global accuracy, because I'm already insanely accurate. Though it does occur to me that I will keep the +15% global accuracy even when exemped down to level 1, which would be hugely helpful on those (admittedly rare) occasions. Hopefully it will help against Captain Mako and in PvP situations, too. The fire and cold RES bonus is actually kind of nice though, as it stacks with some of my other set IO bonuses to get me up to 8.5% fire and cold RES, an almost meaningful number against the two most popular PvP blast sets.
Anyway, the net cost of this upgrade was 45M for the recipes, 15M for salvage to make them, and 3M to actually craft them, for a total of 63M influence. Was it worth it? Well, I'm not sure, but I hope so. It does motivate me to spend more time playing Police Woman (to acquire more "stuff"), which is a good thing.
As Police Woman I joined a 6-player level 50 pickup team in the Rikti War Zone, doing Borea's timed missions. Initially, our fire/kin wouldn't speed boost anyone unless directly asked (and I did this a couple times but I hate to constantly nag about buffs) so we started off pretty slow, especially since we had 3 tankers, two of which were stone armor. After a couple missions the kin got somewhat better about buffing SB and even would occasionally use fulcrum shift, so our missions sped up considerably. Borea's missions are a bit repetitive though so I could only do so many of them before needing a change; though I did make sure to stay until one of the tankers, who was 49, got to the magical level 50.
After that I joined a 3-player level 49 Northern Lights team, fighting level 50 werewolves in a Portal mission. All 3 of us were blasters, so this wasn't exactly a balanced team, but we made it work through sheer firepower. If we split up a single spawn's alpha strike between a couple of us, our damage would let us mop up the group of werewolves before they could do much more damage to us. I stunned some with beanbag/taser and healed some with aid other; the other two blasters, both energy, also used knockdown to mitigate some damage. In this way we were able to clear the whole map.
The 3 blaster team broke up after that mission, so I started soloing a flashback of Harvey Maylor's story arc, fighting level 50-51 Carnies. This is kind of a long story arc so isn't good for badging, but I figured it might be good for magic salvage. I didn't really want to fight a Carnie elite boss while heavily handicapped, so I only set No Travel Powers for challenge settings. I cleared a couple missions full of Carnies, until I saw a friend asking for some help on another server, so I switched characters.
My friend was a 12 dark/dark defender on Triumph trying to fight Vahzilok, which were resisting or ignoring most of the things she could do. I brought on Grey Wings (9 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) and SK'd to her to fight the zombies as a duo. I could definitely damage the zombies with my lethal and fire damage; more so than my teammate's dark blast, which seemed heavily resisted. As a result I ended up tanking most of the time, and since we had no mitigation to speak of, I died a lot (which was a bit humbling, but I'm not sure what I could've done better). I did try to pull zombies out of groups as much as possible (this usually works well against Vahzilok) but any time we aggroed a group of 5 or 6 usually spelled trouble. Despite all this, we cleared two missions full of nasty zombies, getting Grey Wings to level 10. I couldn't resist training in Fire Sword Circle; having played a fire melee tanker before, being able to get FSC at level 10 just seemed awesome. I fear it may make Grey Wings an aggro magnet, but the animation and damage are just too pretty.
After that I played Schadenfreude (27 AR/traps corruptor on Liberty) for one mission with Liberty Force villains, after which we agreed to reconvene on Virtue server to kick off our new theme villain group, consisting of Praetorian Earth versions of our SG-mates. I played Spite Siren (1 dark/ninj stalker), the evil version of Night Siren (a 50 dark/regen scrapper on Liberty); meanwhile Night Siren's player had started Gangster Moll, an evil, mafia assassin version of Police Woman. We all had a good laugh at each other's names and costumes. One teammate commented that Spite Siren had an even sluttier costume than the original Night Siren; I protested that Spite Siren was wearing more clothes, but he didn't really buy the idea that chains and a dog collar should count as "more clothes". Anyway, we broke out of prison together and completed Kalinda's story arc, getting to level 6. It was great fun.
@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!"
Wish I coulda joined ya for the flashback last night, but was tied into one of my own.
Proud Member of:
MDK
My 50s:
Agent Alpha (Kin/Rad)
Shirai Ryu (MA/Regen)
Dark Joule (Dark/Elec)
Kid Frag (Ice/Energy)
Shurai Ryu (Fire/Kin)
2/25/2008
This is a long report; I played a lot this weekend.
Playing Yuki-Onna (36 ice/cold corruptor) I was on a Lady Grey SF organized on LHO channel. We were on Relentless difficulty, and the team roster was:
grav/nrg dominator
ice/cold corruptor (me)
merc/dark MM
2 tankers
fire/dark corruptor
fire/kin controller
stone brute
This went pretty well even though the brute disconnected and the other corruptor had to log early. The MM didn't want to summon pets because they caused too much lag for him (yes, really!), so he was of limited help as well. Against Hamidon, the dominator had a particularly good trick: he wormholed the healing mitos into the Rikti, who would kill them. I'd never seen anyone do this before, and in fact I would've assumed mitos were immune to being teleported; but it worked really well.
Displaced Mito vs Rikti
The last fight against the Honoree was a grueling slugathon; the MM died early on in the fight leaving only 5 players versus a very tough AV. But after a lengthy fight we managed to beat him. Yuki-Onna got a lot of exp, ending up at level 38 and gaining the wonderful Heat Loss power. I got a junky TF recipe reward, but really good drops: a Gravitational Anchor Rech/Acc (my second purple recipe drop, both of which have been on villains) and a level 50 Performance Shifter: Chance to gain endurance. Our SF triggered a Rikti invasion in Port Oakes, so I ran Yuki over there to help fight it off.
Later in the weekend I organized and led a St Martial SF as Yuki-Onna, recruiting from LHO channel. Our team mix was:
ice/cold corruptor (me)
thug/dark MM
dark/elec brute
sonic/sonic corr
stone/elec brute
elec/stone brute
This team worked quite well; the stacked cold and sonic buffs made the brutes very hard to hurt. We only had trouble with one mission, a Defeat all Carnies, where we (apparently) cleaned out the map but the mission wouldn't complete. I petitioned, but after waiting about 15 minutes for a GM, we agreed to reset the mission (by all logging out for 5 mins). We had to redo the mission, but it completed correctly the second time and we didn't have any further problems. This got Yuki-Onna to level 39.
On Friday night I played Flamebait (24 fire/therm corruptor) with a 5-player all-corruptor team of Demolition Girls SG. This went pretty well for awhile, getting Flamebait to level 25. Later in the evening a 10 corruptor joined us who demanded that I lackey him (rather than a level 27 player) so that he'd get the best possible exp. This felt too much like PLing to me, but I wasn't team leader and didn't want to make a scene, so I logged off for a bit.
Later I played Schadenfreude (27 AR/traps corruptor) on a Sharkhead SF organized on LBx channel. Our team mix was:
SS/nrg brute
dark/nrg brute
fire/therm corruptor
rad/rad corruptor
fire/dark corruptor
AR/traps corruptor (me)
dark/dark stalker
The stalker was named "Man from Innsmouth" and so I immediately accused him of having "the Innsmouth look" and being a spy for Calystix. This really only makes sense if you know much about the Cthulhu mythos, but several players on the team got the joke, calling the situation "fishy". This SF went pretty well except, ironically, on a Kill X Longbow in Nerva mission, where about half the team got pinned down and killed by a Toxic turret in Agincourt. The poison gas they shoot is nasty! Schadenfreude got to level 29 on this SF, getting the Seeker Drones power at 28. This is my second attempt at a traps corruptor and I'm finding it more fun this time; partly the "Real Numbers" makes the benefit of various traps more obvious now (before, I kinda had to just believe they did something) and partly because I know how to use traps better now.
On Saturday I played Astarte (36 grav/emp controller on Protector) on a Demolition Girls SG team that knocked out the Katie Hannon TF and the Hess TF back-to-back. Our team mix was:
ice/ice tanker
ice/storm controller
fire/nrg blaster
ice/emp controller
nrg/nrg blaster
grav/emp controller (me)
kin/sonic defender (joined for Hess, wasn't on Katie)
We finished both TFs with no trouble.
Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) picked up a couple more purple recipes at Wentworths, an Apocalypse and the last Gravitational Anchor recipe I needed (the hold proc). These seem pretty nice, but cost another 32M infl; these purchases are rapidly depleting my infl reserves. I crafted the Gravitational Anchor IO and slotted it in Web Grenade, deleting an Endoplasm HO in the process; this dropped the power's accuracy from +92.4% to +59.6%, and immob enhancement from +107.4% to +101.9%, but this felt worth it; I have a lot of extra ToHit currently and the power was way over the soft cap on immob anyway. The hold goes off about 25% of the time (a lot more often than I expected) and its special effect is similar to the grav hold. I also bought a level 10 Achilles Heel: Chance for Resist Debuff, which I slotted into Burst, replacing a Recharge IO. This lowered Burst's recharge enhancement from +93.8% to +55.9%, but considering I have +87.5% global recharge right now, this is the difference between 1.42 seconds and 1.64 seconds, which I decided was an acceptable tradeoff in order to get the resist debuff. I figure resist debuff will be especially good for me, since lethal resist is a problem for assault rifle. My new slotting for Burst is 4 Devastation IOs, Centriole HO, Achilles Heel: Chance for Resist Debuff, for a total of dmg +97.5%, acc +55.9%, range +23%, rchg +55.9%, endrdx +15.7%.
As Police Woman I led a 7-player AV-killing team of mostly Sisterhood for awhile, working through Maria Jenkins' story arc. We were pretty blaster heavy, with a willpower tanker and only trick arrow for support, but we nevertheless defeated Mother Mayhem, Malaise, and Shadow Hunter.
Police Woman joined a Cavern of Transcendence Trial for a while; I already have the Transcendent badge, but I wasn't doing anything at the time and I thought it might be a good way to work on Minions of Igneous bosses. It took about half an hour for the team to fill up to 8, then we had one person disconnect in the tunnel network. We entered the mission instance and the team leader stealthed and teleported us all to the locked door at the end of the mission. I think maybe he was unclear on how the trial worked, because the door unlocks only if you click 8 glowies at once. Another team member decided to log out at this point, and it was becoming clear we couldn't actually complete the trial with only 6 players. Then we started aggroing Minions of Igneous.
Uh oh!
Two groups of Igneous, spawned for an 8-player team, swiftly wiped out the rest of the team. Since we had been teleported way deep into the mission, there was nowhere to run. I decided to make a heroic last stand: I used my Archmage accolade, used a lot of purple and green inspirations, and even threw down a Shivan. I survived for about 3 minutes and killed 2 bosses and many minions, but exemped to level 15, I didn't have enough AoE to take this much stuff out, and so I eventually got overrun. Back in the Atlas Park hospital, the team leader wanted to reform the team to make another attempt, but I didn't want to wait around for us to recruit up to 8 players again, so I bowed out.
As Police Woman I joined a Faathim the Kind TF organized on LBx channel. I already had the TF badge, but it seemed like a good way to fight stuff that could drop purple recipes and arcane salvage, and the team leader was someone I knew to be competent. Police Woman doesn't have a travel power, which is not a problem in 95% of the CoH zones, but is pretty bad in the Shadow Shard, so I asked the team leader to make sure there was someone who could recall friend on the team, because I didn't want to slow the team down. We were on Unyielding difficulty, and our team ended up being:
elec/elec blaster
MA/SR scrapper
will/SS tanker
will/fire tanker
TA/archery defender
emp/nrg defender with recall friend
ill/rad controller
AR/dev blaster (me)
This started off great, but early on first the empath defender, then the rad controller, disconnected and did not return. This left us without a TPer, with the TA defender as the only "support" character, and my Aid Other as the only "heal" power left on the team. The willpower tankers mostly were able to regen their own health back, but I did a lot of running around to keep the scrapper, other blaster and defender healed. I did get complimented on my healing ability, which was cool (blasters who pretend to be defenders are a lot more appreciated than defenders who pretend to be blasters) and I was very glad to have Resuscitate on this TF, since the nearest hospital was quite a ways away.
I got pretty used to using the air geyser transportation system in the Storm Palace, something I had always avoided before. The flyers had the best time of it, but before long I found I could beat the SJers to the mission door; with max stealth I caught very little aggro while traveling, and using combat jumping gave me good control while geyser hopping. For the final mission we had to use the geyser system to travel all the way to the "death star" at the heart of the Storm Palace. Lanaru the Mad is a really ferocious AV and I was not at all sure that we could beat him with the team we had left. I don't mind dying, but I really did not want to have to make 20 geyser hops to get back to the mission, so for the final fight I broke out both a Shivan and a Vanguard HVAS to help fight Lanaru. And it's a good thing, too; as we engaged him, Lanaru immediately opened up with a hurricane, which interrupts Aid Other, so it came down to a straight DPS vs DPS zergfest. Both tankers and the scrapper died fighting Lanaru, leaving only the 3 squishies alive, and so I don't doubt we were seconds from a wipeout when Lanaru dropped.
The end of Lanaru the Mad
It was certainly one of the more dramatic TF finishes I've seen. The whole TF took 5hrs 9mins, and I got the Visionary badge (for Rularuu Overseers) and about 9M infl.
On Sunday I played Spacegirl (42 mind/rad controller) on a Manticore TF organized on LBx. The team was:
spine/dark scrapper
fire tanker
ice/ice blaster
will/axe tanker
mind/rad controller (me)
AR/dev blaster
ill/rad controller
We had trouble in the first mission with the two tankers going in different directions, splitting up the team and resulting in a few deaths. The scrapper, who was team leader, decreed the will tanker (who was higher level) to be the lead tanker and so we started following him. The illusion controller was logged out for the first mission, but came back during the second mission and some drama resulted because he repeatedly went in a different direction than the lead tanker, and seemed annoyed that the team didn't follow him. We tried talking this out but before long the illusionist and the will tanker were getting really snippy with each other (I think they knew each other in RL) and ultimately the team leader kicked the illusion controller from the TF to keep the peace. This left me as the only support character on the team, which kept me scrambling to confuse, sleep, hold, TK, debuff, buff and heal. Spacegirl's current build is very control-heavy though so I felt pretty good about doing all these things. We mostly did well the rest of the TF, though we did have one mission where the players sent to stealth to the end got wiped out and the non-stealthy part of the team had to come rescue them. In the final mission, the AV Hopkins added into a fight we had started nearby, and I think I put rad debuffs on him before any tanker really had a lock on the AV, so I got myself killed. But someone handed me an awaken and I was able to get back into the fight in time to help debuff him again. Finishing the TF was really good for Spacegirl, as it completed her Task Force Commander accolade and she got a level 42 Luck of the Gambler: +7.5% recharge recipe as reward.
Later on Sunday afternoon I started a new peacebringer alt to join a Sentai (some sort of Japanimation) themed SG that a friend was forming on Virtue server. I'm not really a big fan of Kheldians, but I thought the graphics for their powers really look right for a science fictiony anime character, and I talked about this long enough that I got another player to roll up a new warshade. We duo'd for one mission in Atlas Park, and I have to say peacebringer/warshade is probably one of the least synergistic duos imaginable. We both uttered a lot of cheesy anime dialogue; my favorite exchange was when I said, "These 'Council' are rated by local authorities as 'Threat Level 3'...that must be really dangerous!" The warshade swiftly riposted with, "Maybe, but 'Threat Level 1' enemies are probably even more dangerous!" We got to level 3, and it was pretty fun.
That night I played Spite Siren (6 dark/ninj stalker on Virtue) on a 7-player Liberty Force team. This was our "Praetorian" themed team where each player was playing an evil version of some other player's main character. It was pretty cool to be on a big team of characters who were recognizably alternate versions of the Liberty heroes, only with an evil spin. I kinda groaned at evil Police Woman's solid gold assault rifle and dialogue lifted straight from Mae West, but I probably earned it for making Spite Siren (the evil version of that player's main) both a catgirl and a former Skulls Girlfriend. We knocked out a bunch of radio missions and mayhems in Port Oakes and Cap au Diable, getting to level 12 and DOs.
@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!"
[ QUOTE ]
Later I played Schadenfreude (27 AR/traps corruptor) on a Sharkhead SF organized on LBx channel. Our team mix was:
SS/nrg brute
dark/nrg brute
fire/therm corruptor
rad/rad corruptor
fire/dark corruptor
AR/traps corruptor (me)
dark/dark stalker
The stalker was named "Man from Innsmouth" and so I immediately accused him of having "the Innsmouth look" and being a spy for Calystix. This really only makes sense if you know much about the Cthulhu mythos, but several players on the team got the joke, calling the situation "fishy". This SF went pretty well except, ironically, on a Kill X Longbow in Nerva mission, where about half the team got pinned down and killed by a Toxic turret in Agincourt. The poison gas they shoot is nasty! Schadenfreude got to level 29 on this SF, getting the Seeker Drones power at 28. This is my second attempt at a traps corruptor and I'm finding it more fun this time; partly the "Real Numbers" makes the benefit of various traps more obvious now (before, I kinda had to just believe they did something) and partly because I know how to use traps better now.
[/ QUOTE ]
Hey! I was that Fire/Dark Corr thanks for letting the little lvl 25er on the team.
2/26/2008
Spacegirl (42 mind/rad controller) was an SK on a large level 46-49ish team fighting AVs in Maria Jenkins' story arc. The team was very rad heavy, and at times I had 4 AMs stacked on me; someone commented they hadn't had that much AM since the old Hamidon raids. This team took down Malaise, Battle Maiden, Siege, Nightstar and Marauder, getting Spacegirl the Shady and Agent badges along the way. Spacegirl also got a purple Unbreakable Constraint recipe that dropped from the Battle Maiden mission; another player also got a purple recipe on the same mission. This is my third purple recipe drop ever, and my first on the hero side. Spacegirl was only 42 and the mob that dropped the recipe was only 47, so that definitely confirms that it's not necessary to be 50 or fight level 50 mobs to get purple recipes; I'd guess that a level 47 mob is either the low end of what can drop a purple recipe, or close to it.
Thunder Girl (39 will/nrg tanker) joined a large level 39 team fighting its way through Cadao Kestrel's story arc, defeating the Envoy of Shadows twice.
Starlight Falcon (3 peacebringer on Virtue) briefly duo'd with a 3 kin defender, doing a couple of the newbie peacebringer story arc missions against Council and Vahzilok. Got to level 4 and picked up some kind of pseudo-dull pain power.
After that I played April Fool (50 thug/TA MM) on a 3-player level 50 team of Liberty Force SG, mostly fighting Heroes and AVs. We fought and defeated Agent Indigo, Agent Crimson, Calystix, Captain Mako, Valkyrie, Luminary, Ms Liberty and Mynx. For about half that time we had a thug/traps MM on the team; with stacking +DEF from multiple enforcers, maneuvers and a FF generator, all the pets had elude level defense (Real Numbers feature showed around +56% DEF to all) which was pretty nice. They still seemed to die a lot, probably because we were fighting AVs. The Calystix/Captain Mako cave mission was particularly neat; in addition to having 4 AVs, it was full of elite boss "fonts of power" that kept blasting us with psionic tornadoes, and lots and lots of waterspouts that would pick up and fling both players and pets every which way. This was simultaneously really annoying and really cool.
@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!"
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Later I played Schadenfreude (27 AR/traps corruptor) on a Sharkhead SF organized on LBx channel. Our team mix was:
SS/nrg brute
dark/nrg brute
fire/therm corruptor
rad/rad corruptor
fire/dark corruptor
AR/traps corruptor (me)
dark/dark stalker
The stalker was named "Man from Innsmouth" and so I immediately accused him of having "the Innsmouth look" and being a spy for Calystix. This really only makes sense if you know much about the Cthulhu mythos, but several players on the team got the joke, calling the situation "fishy". This SF went pretty well except, ironically, on a Kill X Longbow in Nerva mission, where about half the team got pinned down and killed by a Toxic turret in Agincourt. The poison gas they shoot is nasty! Schadenfreude got to level 29 on this SF, getting the Seeker Drones power at 28. This is my second attempt at a traps corruptor and I'm finding it more fun this time; partly the "Real Numbers" makes the benefit of various traps more obvious now (before, I kinda had to just believe they did something) and partly because I know how to use traps better now.
[/ QUOTE ]
Hey! I was that Fire/Dark Corr thanks for letting the little lvl 25er on the team.
[/ QUOTE ]
And I was the Dark/Dark Stalker, once again, great team PW (I really enjoyed Schadenfreude's backstory)
"Well, there's going to be some light music and a short note of apology saying, 'The universe ended last week, we're really sorry, we don't know what you're doing here, didn't you get the message?'"- Steve Moffat
2/27/2008
I played Astarte (36 grav/emp controller on Protector) on an 8-player team of Demolition Girls SG, running a lot of CoT missions from Cadao Kestrel. We pretty easily beat up the Envoy of Shadows twice, getting Astarte to level 37. I put 1 more slot in Singularity (I've only 3-slotted him so far, because I'm really not sure how to use a controller pet effectively; the more controllable MM pets kinda spoiled me) and 2 more slots in Absorb Pain (bringing it up to 5 slots, which may be overkill but it let me put a fifth Doctored Wounds IO set into it, giving me another precious +5% global RCHG and +4% global healing). I also put a third Trap of the Hunter IO into Astarte's grav immobilize, giving her a +1.88% HP bonus.
After that I solo'd a bit with Schadenfreude (29 AR/traps corruptor on Liberty), completing the Soul Taker badge mission (needed for an accolade) from Archmage Taraxus, then lackeyed on a 5-player team of Liberty Force SG doing missions at level 38. I got Schadenfreude to level 30 and had really wanted to take Stealth (sometimes teams want to run past mobs to get to the end boss or objective, which can be painful for a lackeyed squishy) but I already had picked four power pools (Fitness, Leaping, Medicine and Leadership) and wasn't willing to give any of them up. I suppose Stealth probably wouldn't work that well with a FF Generator following me around anyway. So I ended up picking up Tactics at 30.
@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!"
There should be more nudity in this thread....
2/29/2008
My SO re-installed CoH recently and wanted to play on Protector server, so I dusted off a 12 rad/psy defender over there by the name of Doctor Karma. We hooked up with an 8-player all-defender/controller team run by a SG called Defensive Massacre, which went really well due to stacked AM, force fields, and debuffs. Got to level 19 over two nights.
I played Yuki-Onna (39 ice/cold corruptor on Liberty) on a 3 player villain team of Liberty Force SG, doing a Brickstown mayhem mission and several Carnies missions in the Jezebel Jones story arc. An SG-mate playing an ice/rad corruptor had recently slotted one Devastation: Chance to Hold in each attack. The graphics made it pretty clear which holds were from his procs (tesla cage graphic) and which were from ice blast (block of ice graphic), and it looked like his just normally attacking seemed to result in a lot of things getting held. I may have to try that slotting sometime; most of my range attackers currently use the Decimation IO set for the +rchg.
On Thursday night I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) in some of the arena PvP that was happening. First I was in an 18-player free for all, 10 minute time limit, in the graveyard map (the one Black Swan is always on). I started next to a dominator and began fighting him, resulting in me foolishly burning nearly all my break frees in the first few minutes, which was very painful in the later part of the match, in which I got ganked quite a lot. The field was weirdly tank-heavy, but it was pretty pointless to even shoot at a tanker. I shot at a lot of squishies instead, but of course KSing was rampant in this format; I ended the match with just 1 kill.
Second match, I was in a team vs team match. Teams were kinda whomever was standing around at the time the match started so didn't seem very even to me; I was on a 6 player team with 3 blasters and 3 tankers, and the opposing team was 7 players with 3 blasters, 2 tankers, 1 brute and 1 stalker. With no support characters whatsoever, the fight was brutally lethal for the blasters. My team wasn't very coordinated; one of the tankers on my team said she'd call targets, but was pretty slow about it and most of the early match I didn't know who I was supposed to shoot at. Consequently, I gave on waiting for her to announce a target and just shot at whomever I thought best; I did spam a few "I'm fighting Soandso" messages into team chat hoping people would decide to shoot at my target. Nevertheless, our team got soundly thrashed in this match (I think the opposing score was at least triple ours), though on the bright side, I had the most kills on my team with 3. Also, my previous fears that I had too much accuracy (due to slotting accuracy + IO set bonuses with accuracy + targeting drone + tactics) were alleviated; I found that I couldn't reliably hit a person hiding in a PFF. Will need to work on that.
Later that night I joined a Lady Grey TF organized on LBx channel by a 49 tanker friend who was planning to ding level 50 on the TF. The team mix was:
will/nrg tanker
fire/fire tanker
fire/ice blaster
fire/kin controller
rad/rad defender
AR/dev blaster (me)
emp/archery defender
peacebringer (later replaced by sonic/nrg blaster)
We started the TF on Rugged difficulty, but the peacebringer went linkdead about 3 times during the first mission before not returning. We probably could've done this with 7, but so many people had wanted to do this TF that we decided to restart and add an 8th player, the sonic blaster. I had also agitated for higher difficulty, and the second time we started the TF we were on Invincible difficulty.
The new team had very good DPS and we stomped the Clockwork King and the 4 Riders with ease. The will/nrg tanker hit level 50 during the first mission. We fought partway through the "rescue psychics" mission, but sort of shortcutted it by getting Infernia and Glacia killed, causing the mission to technically fail. We had some random deaths at the hands of mitos, but destroyed the Hamidon without too much difficulty. The two Rikti AVs at the end of the last mission fell pretty easily to us too; I don't think the usual rikti ambushes spawned behind us, I dunno why. I kinda zerg rushed the generators at the end (popping archmage and some purples to be safe) and we finished the TF. We had a solid team and it was a pretty quick run, 1hr 50mins; I got a fairly worthless Malaise's Illusions recipe, but picked up 6.5M infl along the way.
@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!"
[ QUOTE ]
I started next to a dominator and began fighting him, resulting in me foolishly burning nearly all my break frees in the first few minutes, which was very painful in the later part of the match, in which I got ganked quite a lot.
[/ QUOTE ]
That dominator (Zorgh) was me. Good fights Police Woman! 
3/3/2008
I started off Friday playing Amethyst Star (22 warshade on Protector) duoing with a dark defender against Council missions in Striga.
Later that night I played Flamebait (25 fire/thermal corruptor on Liberty) on a Demolition Girls SG 8-corruptor team. Using the real numbers feature I could see that our team had +120% overall DMG due to 8 stacked Assaults - sick! We did missions in Sharkhead Isle, including the Independence Port mayhem (getting the Tyrannical badge) and we had a rematch with Ghost of Scrapyard, who defeated us a few levels ago but went down hard this time (getting the Hammer Down badge). We did have one wipeout when we overaggroed about 3 spawns of Family and multiple Family bosses stacked enough holds to punch through the mez protection we had from sonic dispersion. Otherwise we did really well. Flamebait got to level 29, picking up Fire Breath at 26 and Forge at 28. I started trying to buy a few IO recipes for Flamebait at the Black Market, getting bits and pieces of the Thunderstrike set, but not enough to add up to any significant set bonus.
On Saturday I played Astarte (37 grav/emp controller on Protector) and sidekicked my SO's 5 blaster to knock out "Defeat Snaptooth" (leftover from Valentine's Day) twice, to unlock the toga and sandals costume options. We got wiped out twice by the red cap ambushes but came back to defeat the EB each time; then I ran out and made a toga & sandals costume, which really looks good on Astarte. I also bought and slotted some set IOs into Astarte's single target hold and AoE hold. I previously had the single target hold slotted something like 1 ACC, 2 HOLD, 1 DMG, 2 RCHG and the AOE hold slotted something like 2 ACC, 1 HOLD, 3 RCHG. Now both are slotted with 6 Essence of Curare, which gives +83.7% ACC, +83.7% HOLD, +13.5% RANGE, +40.4% RCHG, +44.9% ENDRDX for the power, and set bonuses of (counting the set twice) +3% global hold, +3.75% range DEF. I lose a fair bit of recharge on both powers, but the duration and accuracy of both go up a lot and I'm thinking range DEF is going to be worth working on. Astarte also spent some time messing with her little base on Protector, trying to set up a teleporter room; building the teleporters was no problem, but I found I needed more prestige to buy power plants and control units to run everything. Will have to work on that.
I messed around with some more newbie alts on other servers, getting a will/mace tanker on Protector to level 5, and a zombie/poison MM on Virtue to level 6.
I helped a couple times against AVs; played April Fool (50 thug/TA MM on Liberty) on a 5 player Liberty Force SG team that took down Lord Recluse AV, and played Schadenfreude (30 AR/traps corr on Liberty) on a 4 player Liberty Force team that took down hero-level Infernal and a succubus AV I hadn't encountered before by the name of Lilitu, which got Schadenfreude to level 31.
I played Spite Siren (12 dark/ninj stalker on Virtue) on a Liberty Force team that added enough pickup people to get to 8 players. Even got to engage in some light roleplaying; apparently you really can just randomly run into RPers on Virtue server. We did the Skyway mayhem (though with a huge pickup team, this was something of a zergfest as we battled enormous Longbow and PPD ambushes, then repeatedly had to break out of jail) and the Paragon of Vice badge mission. Spite Siren got to level 17, picking up Build Up at 14 and Hurdle at 16; still running on CJ and temp powers for travel, I'm finding a stalker's build to be extremely tight.
On Sunday I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) on part of a flashback through RWZ, setting No Travel Powers and No Inspirations. No travel powers is no big deal for Police Woman, but no inspirations got me killed once as I (overconfidently) attacked a group of Rikti, focusing on the boss, but the mesmerist lieutenant started dropping holds on me. No inspirations = no break frees, doh! After that I started being more careful to take out mezzers first.
Not directly CoH-related, but on Sunday night some Liberty Force SG-mates wanted to try a game of multiplayer Civ4. We thought it would be about TF length, like 5 hours, but it actually dragged much much longer, to around 9 hours. I got randomly assigned the Greek empire and built up pretty quickly; I think I got Gunpowder first, and I attempted to exploit this by launching a Grenadier-and-Musketmen invasion of the lightly defended American Empire to my south. I razed one city, but then got locked in a stalemate at the next city, which was strongly defended (the player was our regular tanker and had swiftly shifted into a very defensive game). I didn't have enough firepower to take the city by storm so I parked a large stack of soldiers next to it, waiting for some cannons I had built to come reinforce. Admittedly, the real breakthrough in this war occurred when the American player got wife aggro and had to drop out, giving control to a wacky computer AI who thought the human player was a wimp for not attacking the Greek army on the open battle field. A few years later the American Empire was no more, having been assimilated into Southern Greece. I spent the next several hundred years playing catch-up on technology (which I had fallen far behind on during my war), but with double the land area to play with, I actually caught up pretty well. Near the end of the game the rad defender controlling the Arabs to my north decided to make his move, dropping nukes over most of my empire and giving my countryside a healthy radioactive glow. His English scrapper sidekick decided to throw some nukes at me for good measure, too. This all did massive property damage, but my conventional forces, cowering in fallout shelters, mostly survived and were able to beat back their follow-up invasion, and start pushing slowly northwards. Everyone called it quits at this point since it was far, far too late at night. We all kinda thought our infighting had ultimately thrown the game to one of the computer AIs who was quietly building a spaceship.
@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!"
3/4/2008
I started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty), finishing off a level 50 RWZ flashback under the No Travel Powers and No Inspirations challenge settings, which earned me the Suspended and Uninspired badges.
Checking Wentworth's, I found I had purchased a Ragnarok [purple targeted AoE] DMG recipe for 25M infl. This sounds expensive but was actually a good price for this recipe; the rest of the bid history was in the 30M to 40M range, and I had only gotten this price by leaving a standing bid at the auction house for a week and a half. I've now purchased four Ragnarok recipes and one Ragnarok IO for a total of 110M infl (ouch), and a set of 5 is enough to unlock a tasty +10 global recharge bonus. I now need to gather a lot of pricy rare salvage to actually make the recipes; I'm torn between trying to farm it (saving money) or simply outright buying it (saving time). I'm also not certain whether I want to end up slotting 5 Ragnarok into my best AoE power (Full Auto, which would probably most improve my overall DPS, but would only help when I'm at level 32+), my lowest level AoE power (Buckshot, which would let me keep the purple set bonuses as low as level 8) or my weakest AoE power (M30 Grenade, which would let me make a kinda so-so power into a pretty good one). I'll probably want to also burn a respec before slotting the Ragnarok set, to pull out and save the IOs in whichever power I decide to put Ragnarok in; all 3 powers currently have 5 Positron Blast slotted, and they were expensive enough to build that I don't want to simply overwrite them.
I spent some time on Protector playing Varangian (5 will/mace tanker), a new alt I created last weekend. I did enough radio missions in King's Row to get the Atlas Park safeguard and the raptor pack, then moved to the Hollows where I formed and led a pretty good 8 player pickup team that eventually took down Frostfire. Got to level 10 in this way.
After that I switched back to Liberty and played Rain Dancer (48 storm/archery defender) on a 5 player mixed hero/villain Liberty Force team doing missions in RWZ. We defeated several AVs, including Capt WM Dietrich, the Manticore and Positron Nemesis Automata, Hro'tohz and Nemesis himself (during the "Save the World" mission). We fought so many Nemesis that Rain Dancer got the Unveiler badge, along with level 49, where I picked Vengeance as Rain Dancer's final power.
I finished the night playing Grey Wings (10 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) for a couple missions on a 5 player team doing level 12ish missions in Atlas Park and Steel Canyon. Teamed with my first tanker on this character, which was really nice as it let me unleash a lot of AoE attacks without fear; I spent most fights dancing between medium range for Fistful of Arrows and point blank range for Fire Sword Circle. Grey Wings got to level 12 on this team; I didn't train yet, but I'm planning on getting Hover (with her codename and costume, she pretty much needs to be a flyer).
@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!"
3/5/2008
I did a little more tinkering with Astarte's SG base on Protector, building an arcane control item that let me power up two teleporters (though I built 4; two remain unpowered). So far I only have a few zones unlocked, so the teleporters go to boring places like Atlas Park, Steel Canyon and the Hollows.
I played Astarte (37 grav/emp controller on Protector) on a 7-player team of Demolition Girls SG, fighting mostly CoT (fighting Envoy of Shadows two or three more times) and some Carnies. At one point one of the players said she had only recently discovered the Green Line train and felt like a newbie for not knowing about it before, which triggered us all to reveal our own "stupid newbie" stories. My own personal newbie story was that I used to kill grey-con bad guys that I saw mugging civilians...because the people needed help! Consequently, it would take me forever to get to a door mission, much to the dismay of my teammates. Anyway, on this team Astarte hit level 38 and trained in Adrenaline Boost. This is the highest I've ever gotten an empathy character so I wasn't quite sure how to use AB; it looks like I can only put it on one person, and not all that often. So far I've been putting it on blasters right after they unleash inferno or nova, to "heal their blue bar".
After that I switched to Schadenfreude (31 AR/traps corruptor on Liberty), playing for a bit on a 4-player team of Liberty Force SG doing missions in St Martial, then after that broke up I solo'd a Talos Island mayhem in order to get to level 32 and Full Auto (yay!). I'm getting better at using Seeker Drones to absorb alpha strikes for me, considerably improving my survivability. I also started shopping for IOs at the Black Market, buying a few Thunderstrike IO recipes for Burst and Slug, reasoning that the +range DEF from Thunderstrike would have good synergy with Schadenfreude's Force Field Generator.
@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!"
3/7/2008
I played Doctor Karma (19 rad/psy defender on Protector) for some radio missions in Talos Island with a 7 player team of Defensive Massacre SG, getting to level 21. Picked up Stamina at level 20 and completed the Steel Canyon costume mission.
A friend from Liberty Force was starting a new dark/dark corruptor on Virtue and invited me to tag along, so I created a 1 elec/elec brute on Virtue to team up. Another friend from Northern Lights SG joined later with a new sonic/cold corruptor. Ran through some missions from Kalinda and Mongoose and got my new brute to level 5.
Playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) I made some bids on rare salvage and began accumulating the stuff I needed to make the various purple Ragnarok recipes I've purchased. I spent several million infl doing this, but just could not justify paying 6M for a Prophecy, so I started soloing radio missions in Peregrine Island in hopes of getting one as a lucky drop. I briefly joined a pickup team to fight an AV-level Diabolique; she always seems to fly away/run away at low life, but hitting her with Web Grenades while she's tangible helped pin her down.
After that I started an Ouroboros flashback in the RWZ, but aborted that to join a RWZ mother ship raid, getting credit for another bomb and a mess of Vanguard merits.
Later I played Schadenfreude (32 AR/traps corruptor on Liberty) as a lackey on a 4 player Liberty Force villain team running level 49 missions. We did some story arc that involved fighting level 51 Snakes on Mercy Island. Unlike the low level snakes, it seemed like these could use bows (which looked pretty cool; the low level ones always threw knives) and could assassin strike. Got Schadenfreude to level 33. I also completed crafting and slotting two sets of 6 Thunderstrike, into Slug and Burst, which gave Schadenfreude +5.0% ranged DEF, stacking nicely with her FF Generator, Combat Jumping and Maneuvers. Real numbers showed her range DEF hovering around +26% from all this; if I stood near the FF Generator of a traps MM on the team, I could get to +46% range DEF and +41% melee DEF, which seemed really good.
@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!"
3/10/2008
(Warning: Long report.)
Started off playing Varangian (10 will/mace tanker on Protector), forming an 8 player pickup team that first did the Frostfire mission in the Hollows, then began the Faultline story arc, getting to level 16. I took Quick Recovery at 12, then Recall Friend at 14 and Teleport at 16.
Switched to Flamebait (29 fire/thermal corruptor on Liberty) on an 8 corruptor Demolition Girls SG team doing the Crimson Revenant story arc. We got to fight hero-level Mynx, who showed up in an ambush along with a spines Longbow warden and killed 5 of the 8 players right off the bat, including me. Our fleeing survivors led Mynx away from the fallen players, which allowed several of us to Awaken safely and get back into the fight. We then managed to turn the semi-wipeout into a win.
On Saturday I played Thunder Girl (39 will/nrg tanker on Liberty) on an 8 tanker invincible-difficulty Eden trial organized on LBx channel. An all-tanker team is admittedly suboptimal, but I figured it might be fun to try. Our team composition was:
inv/axe tanker
inv/nrg tanker
will/SS tanker
inv/nrg tanker
will/nrg tanker (me)
ice/mace tanker
fire/stone tanker
fire/fire tanker
We cleared the initial DE hunt with no problem, then entered the big door by Woodsman and started jumping down many, many holes.
Thunder Girl jumps down a rabbit hole
Within a few minutes of entering the main mission, the fire/stone tanker disconnected and never returned, leaving us with a 7 tanker, invincible difficulty, timed Eden trial. We practiced fighting against a Quarry, and our DPS was sufficiently bad that a couple players summoned Shivans to speed up fighting this fairly irrelevant giant monster. That seemed bad, but we pressed on, running into our first barrier: the rock wall. The rock wall was very resistant to both smashing and energy damage, and would summon DE ambushes which would in turn summon Cairns that made the rock wall completely immune to damage. We started focusing on taking the cairns out first whenever they appeared, and gradually wore the rock wall down after a lengthy fight.
After breaking through the rock wall we fought random DEs up and down various bridges, collecting Ambrosia for use against the end boss. The team leader originally called for us to get 4 each, but since our DPS seemed kinda low we decided to up this to 5 Ambrosia each. During this phase I had atrociously bad luck getting Ambrosia, getting only 1 drop the whole time; I only ended up with 5 Ambrosia due to the generosity of the other players.
Next we faced the mold wall, which was much like the rock wall except it summoned even nastier DE ambushes, which in turn summoned Swarms from hell. These super-Swarms would put a very nasty recharge debuff on us, which stacked multiple times and also lasted for a really long time. My recharge was floored pretty quickly and I imagine everyone who didn't resist slow suffered the same fate. As a result we couldn't make much headway against the mold wall. Some people summoned shivans or Vanguard heavies, but they didn't seem to help much because they would aggro onto the DE ambushes and couldn't focus fire on the mold wall or anything else.
Heroic battle at the mold wall
After not making progress on the wall for awhile, we switched from hitting the wall to trying to clear the ambushes, but this didn't really work either, as more waves of DE ambushes would show up faster than we could clear them. We were still tankers though, so we stood our ground against ridiculous numbers and lasted a really long time. But eventually, the waves of DE overwhelmed us and we suffered a team wipeout.
The team was pretty demoralized after that and there was talk of giving up, but the ice tanker figured out how to teleport through the mold wall and end up on the other side, and he was able to use the veteran team teleport to get the rest of us through. This was kind of cheating, but none of us really minded at that point. Despite "break through the mold wall" being one of our mission objectives, we found that bypassing it didn't really prevent us from doing the rest of the trial.
We cleared all the DE around a large lake, and rescued some (ineffective) NPC heroes from captivity, before confronting the end boss, the Crystal Titan. We summoned a bunch of Shivans and ate Ambrosia before attacking. The Crystal Titan threw lots of rainbow colored powers; I have no idea what they did, but they were very pretty. It also promptly foot stomped all our temporary pets into oblivion, but the players themselves, being tankers, were immune to being killed this way, so we ended up beating up the Crystal Titan the normal way, with sheer brute force. This got Thunder Girl to level 40, along with the Liberator badge. Total time was 2hrs 44mins.
Against the Crystal Titan
Later in the weekend Thunder Girl fought enough Rikti invasions to gain the Elusive Mind accolade, and also did an invincible-difficulty Moonfire TF organized on LBx. Team composition for Moonfire was:
emp/nrg defender
2 will/nrg tankers (including me)
ill/storm controller
kin/nrg defender
warshade
archery/nrg blaster
spine/will scrapper
This went pretty smoothly overall; only two things I noticed were that the other tanker and I would sometimes go different directions, each taking part of the team with us (I had kind of assumed that I was lead tanker since I was higher level, but it was never really clarified so we had occasional confusion) and we also had a mission fail because we lost the hostage, Dr. Todd (though a couple team members had openly talked about getting her killed to speed the TF up, so I suspect she might've been the victim of a convenient accident). Anyway, got the Honorary Peacebringer, Guide (for SKing), and Silver Bullet badges and made a lot of progress on the vampire badge. I had joined Moonfire TF mostly because it's a fun way to get the werewolf/vampire badges needed for Atlas Medallion. Best of all, I got as recipe reward a level 42 Luck of the Gambler: DEF/+7.5% recharge.
I did some badging on Rain Dancer (49 storm/archery defender on Liberty), getting the last explore and history badges she needed for the Freedom Phalanx Reserve accolade, and also fought a Rikti invasion with Spacegirl (42 mind/rad controller on Liberty), which got her the Elusive Mind accolade and enough exp to hit level 43.
I spent a few hours playing Grey Wings (12 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) as an SK on a 6-player Demolition Girls SG team doing missions in Faultline. The exp curve really seems accelerated in the teens; Grey Wings was SK'd to the highest level player and wasn't really being PL'd at all, but nevertheless quickly got to level 20 on this team. Picked up Fly, Build Up, Health and Stamina as powers.
I also played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) a lot. I traded 25M infl (hero side) to someone on the aforementioned Eden trial for a level 50 Numina's +regen/+rec recipe (villain side); seemed like a good value trade for me, but I haven't figured out what I'll do with the recipe yet. I think my brute already has one and it doesn't seem like an exciting bonus for a mastermind.
I helped a level 50 scrapper who was asking for help with AVs only to find that he needed to beat AV-level Shadow Hunter with only 10 minutes left on the timed mission, and the team he recruited to do this was himself (a regen scrapper) and 4 blasters (including me). We actually managed to pull this off and it only cost us the lives of the scrapper and 2 blasters (not including me - yay for vengeance!).
I solo'd a lot of radio missions in Peregrine Island seeking arcane salvage to help craft the fistful of purple recipes I had purchased recently, and finally got a Prophecy drop that I had been too cheap to buy at Wentworths. (Really, 6 million infl for one salvage item? Way too expensive!) This let me craft a set of 5 Ragnarok, and to slot these I decided to use my free respec so I wouldn't have to delete a set of 5 Positron's Blast that the Ragnaroks would be replacing. Police Woman's respec'd build is now:
Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.30
http://www.honourableunited.org.uk/mhd.php
Police Woman: Level 50 Natural Blaster
Primary Power Set: Assault Rifle
Secondary Power Set: Devices
Power Pool: Medicine
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Leadership
Ancillary Pool: Force Mastery
Hero Profile:
Level 1: Burst <ul type="square">[*] (A) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage: Level 33[*] (5) Devastation - Damage/Recharge: Level 33[*] (5) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge: Level 33[*] (7) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance/Recharge: Level 33[*] (7) HamiO:Centriole Exposure[*] (9) Achilles' Heel - Chance for Res Debuff: Level 20[/list]Level 1: Web Grenade <ul type="square">[*] (A) Gravitational Anchor - Immobilize: Level 50[*] (19) Gravitational Anchor - Immobilize/Recharge: Level 50[*] (21) Gravitational Anchor - Accuracy/Immobilize/Recharge: Level 50[*] (21) Gravitational Anchor - Accuracy/Recharge: Level 50[*] (23) Gravitational Anchor - Immobilize/Endurance: Level 50[*] (23) Gravitational Anchor - Chance for Hold: Level 50[/list]Level 2: Slug <ul type="square">[*] (A) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage: Level 33[*] (9) Devastation - Damage/Recharge: Level 33[*] (11) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge: Level 33[*] (11) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance/Recharge: Level 33[*] (13) HamiO:Centriole Exposure[*] (13) Recharge Reduction IO: Level 50[/list]Level 4: Caltrops <ul type="square">[*] (A) Recharge Reduction IO: Level 50[*] (46) Recharge Reduction IO: Level 50[/list]Level 6: Aid Other <ul type="square">[*] (A) Interrupt Reduction IO: Level 35[*] (25) Miracle - Heal/Endurance: Level 33[*] (25) Miracle - Heal/Endurance/Recharge: Level 33[*] (27) Miracle - Heal/Recharge: Level 33[*] (27) Miracle - Heal: Level 33[/list]Level 8: Buckshot <ul type="square">[*] (A) Positron's Blast - Accuracy/Damage: Level 33[*] (15) Positron's Blast - Damage/Endurance: Level 33[*] (15) Positron's Blast - Damage/Recharge: Level 33[*] (17) Positron's Blast - Damage/Range: Level 33[*] (17) Positron's Blast - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance: Level 33[*] (19) Range IO: Level 50[/list]Level 10: Targeting Drone <ul type="square">[*] (A) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - To Hit Buff: Level 33[*] (33) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - To Hit Buff/Recharge: Level 33[*] (46) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - To Hit Buff/Recharge/Endurance: Level 33[*] (48) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - Recharge/Endurance: Level 33[*] (48) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - To Hit Buff/Endurance: Level 33[*] (50) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - Chance for Build Up: Level 33[/list]Level 12: Combat Jumping <ul type="square">[*] (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed: Level 25[*] (46) Karma - Knockback Protection: Level 30[/list]Level 14: Aid Self <ul type="square">[*] (A) Interrupt Reduction IO: Level 35[*] (29) Doctored Wounds - Heal/Endurance: Level 33[*] (29) Doctored Wounds - Heal/Recharge: Level 33[*] (31) Doctored Wounds - Endurance/Recharge: Level 33[*] (31) Doctored Wounds - Heal/Endurance/Recharge: Level 33[*] (31) Doctored Wounds - Heal: Level 33[/list]Level 16: Hurdle <ul type="square">[*] (A) Jumping IO: Level 35[*] (33) Jumping IO: Level 35[/list]Level 18: Swift <ul type="square">[*] (A) Run Speed IO: Level 35[/list]Level 20: Stamina <ul type="square">[*] (A) Endurance Modification IO: Level 50[*] (45) Endurance Modification IO: Level 50[/list]Level 22: Assault <ul type="square">[*] (A) Endurance Reduction IO: Level 35[/list]Level 24: Tactics <ul type="square">[*] (A) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - To Hit Buff: Level 33[*] (33) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - To Hit Buff/Recharge: Level 33[*] (45) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - To Hit Buff/Recharge/Endurance: Level 33[*] (48) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - Recharge/Endurance: Level 33[*] (50) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - To Hit Buff/Endurance: Level 33[*] (50) Rectified Reticle - Increased Perception: Level 20[/list]Level 26: M30 Grenade <ul type="square">[*] (A) Positron's Blast - Accuracy/Damage: Level 33[*] (34) Positron's Blast - Damage/Endurance: Level 33[*] (34) Positron's Blast - Damage/Recharge: Level 33[*] (34) Positron's Blast - Damage/Range: Level 33[*] (36) Positron's Blast - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance: Level 33[*] (36) Recharge Reduction IO: Level 50[/list]Level 28: Beanbag <ul type="square">[*] (A) Stupefy - Accuracy/Recharge: Level 33[*] (39) Stupefy - Endurance/Stun: Level 33[*] (40) Stupefy - Accuracy/Endurance: Level 33[*] (40) Stupefy - Stun/Range: Level 33[*] (40) Stupefy - Accuracy/Stun/Recharge: Level 33[*] (42) Stupefy - Chance of Knockback: Level 33[/list]Level 30: Taser <ul type="square">[*] (A) Stupefy - Accuracy/Recharge: Level 33[*] (42) Stupefy - Endurance/Stun: Level 33[*] (42) Stupefy - Accuracy/Endurance: Level 33[*] (43) Stupefy - Stun/Range: Level 33[*] (43) Stupefy - Accuracy/Stun/Recharge: Level 33[*] (43) Stupefy - Chance of Knockback: Level 33[/list]Level 32: Full Auto <ul type="square">[*] (A) Ragnarok - Damage: Level 50[*] (36) Ragnarok - Damage/Recharge: Level 50[*] (37) Ragnarok - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge: Level 50[*] (37) Ragnarok - Accuracy/Recharge: Level 50[*] (37) Ragnarok - Damage/Endurance: Level 50[*] (39) Positron's Blast - Chance of Damage(Energy): Level 50[/list]Level 35: Smoke Grenade <ul type="square">[*] (A) Dampened Spirits - To Hit Debuff: Level 41[*] (39) Dampened Spirits - To Hit Debuff/Recharge: Level 41[*] (45) Dampened Spirits - To Hit Debuff/Recharge/Endurance: Level 41[/list]Level 38: Cloaking Device <ul type="square">[*] (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed: Level 40[/list]Level 41: Personal Force Field <ul type="square">[*] (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed: Level 41[/list]Level 44: Vengeance <ul type="square">[*] (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed: Level 49[/list]Level 47: Maneuvers <ul type="square">[*] (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed: Level 50[/list]Level 49: Resuscitate <ul type="square">[*] (A) Interrupt Reduction IO: Level 35[/list]------------
Level 1: Brawl <ul type="square">[*] (A) Empty[/list]Level 1: Sprint <ul type="square">[*] (A) HamiO:Microfilament Exposure[*] (3) HamiO:Microfilament Exposure[*] (3) HamiO:Microfilament Exposure[/list]Level 2: Rest <ul type="square">[*] (A) Empty[/list]Level 1: Defiance
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>| Copy & Paste this data chunk into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build |
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</pre><hr />
I also have a stealth IO in Prestige Power Surge, but not sure how to show that in Mids Hero Planner. The main change I made was to put 5 Ragnarok into Full Auto (I kept the damage proc from Positron's Blast to give it a little extra kick), and I ditched Health to add back Smoke Grenade (I had dropped this in my last respec and kinda missed it; with the new ToHit debuff IO sets I can even rationalize slotting it for a +dmg bonus). I also tweaked some of the IO bonuses I was getting, lowering +rchg a little (I probably have more than enough now) to raise +dmg and +rngDEF a little. Standing around idle, but with toggles up, I'm now at +87.5% global recharge, +23.5% global damage and +13.35% ranged DEF.
On Sunday night I played Police Woman on a Statesman TF organized on LBx. Our team mix was:
earth/rad controller
ill/rad controller
nrg/nrg blaster
claw/SR scrapper
stone/nrg tanker
fire/nrg blaster
inv/SS tanker
AR/dev blaster (me)
This team was a little support-light and a couple times I wished I had brought a defender instead, but I had been eager to try out my respec'd AR/dev build. We were nowhere close to "Master of STF" as we had occasional deaths throughout the TF, even in the first mission. Nevertheless, we did fine getting through the initial missions. I did learn a new trick, that you can Ouroboros portal out of the second mission set in "Recluse's Victory" (I think the Ouroboros portal is disabled in the "real" Recluse's Victory) instead of having to find the exit portal. The thorn tree and Dr Aeon were easy for us; I think we had expected Aeon to put up more of a fight, but we DPS'd him out pretty quick.
It was the final Grandville mission where it got tough, as it always does in the STF. After clearing our way up the ramp, I volunteered to pull the patron AVs and got both Mako and Black Scorpion on the first pull. For some reason we suffered a partial wipeout from this, maybe loose aggro, maybe because we were focusing fire on Mako (the tougher of the two) first. But one of the tankers got the 2 AVs' attention and kept them busy long enough for us to regroup and return, at which point we dropped first Black Scorpion and then Mako. Watching my combat spam box I found that I had a 10.71% change to hit Mako when he had Elude going, though this number is probably corrupted by the fact that the rads were also debuffing him. I was so focused on watching my "real numbers" combat spam that I totally forgot to pop Geas of the Kind Ones or the 4 big yellow inspirations I had saved for this fight; fortunately, it didn't matter. After that we got Scirocco as a single pull, then Ghost Widow.
I actually thought fighting Ghost Widow would be the point where our team would fail the TF, because we had no one with Clear Mind or anything like that, and our team had 3 melee on it, so her crazy powerful holds and her self-heals would be problems for us. But our stone tanker managed to set it up so that he was taunting her from range while the rest of us shot at her back. I tried to spam web grenade to keep her immob'd and unable to close to melee range; hopefully this helped. Ghost Widow managed to hold/detoggle/kill the stone tanker once, and the invuln tanker once, but they got rez'd back in quickly enough that we were able to keep the fight going and eventually took her down.
Police Woman cites the Arachnos flyer for a moving violation
After that we beat up the Arachnos flyer and went after the big boss, Lord Recluse himself, with his 4 power towers. Our first attempt kind of started spontaneously as some people started attacking the red tower without warning, then the rest of us decided we had better help. Lord Recluse came over to see what the heck we thought we were doing, and we weren't really ready for him, so that didn't end well.
Our second attempt we put a little more thought into it and had the stone tanker and illusion controller keeping Lord Recluse busy, while the rest of us attacked the red tower. This worked for exactly as long as Phantom Army stayed alive, then Recluse smashed our off-tanking team, then came over and wiped out the tower attack team.
After that our team leader tried to get our earth/rad controller to pull Lord Recluse away with rad toggles and use a trick he had heard of to trap Recluse in the Grandville geometry. Our controller was game to try this, but had never done this before and our leader wasn't exactly sure where the right place to put Recluse was, so we did some trial and error resulting in another team wipeout. Maybe two wipeouts, it was kind of a blur.
After that our scrapper wanted to try pulling Lord Recluse. I was deeply skeptical of this (important safety tip: always seek cover whenever a scrapper says, "Hey, lemme try something!") but somehow it actually worked. The scrapper eluded and successfully pulled Recluse up into the sky and over some netting, then slipped through a hole that Recluse couldn't follow her through, and had him pinned there while the rest of the team smashed the power towers. The Arachnos flyer aggroed us while we were doing this, but the stone tanker taunted the flyer off us while we kept attacking the towers. Finally after all the towers were destroyed we jumped up to Lord Recluse and started attacking him, which eventually knocked him out of his stuck position and onto the ground, but without his buff towers we took him out pretty easily. I got the Trendsetter badge (for infl gain) and a Call of the Sandman: Chance of Self-Heal recipe.
@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!"
Lmao