PW's war journal

I was the stone tanker ,PW. I had inherited the leadership and star on a half formed team. I thought he had another controller and thats why I asked you to bring your blaster. If I had know your Storm defender would have been much welcomed. It was mainly a SG coaltion team.

The team got wiped in the battle against the AVs because all 4 showed up. Mako came quickly then BS showed up. While that was happening GW and Sciro. showed up too. I keep taunting mako and BS and eventaully Sciro. and GW went away.
It was great teaming with you PW.You are are great team player. I have run LGTF with you as well as this. Hopefully we can team again. -----Philly

3/11/2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ QUOTE ]
There should be more nudity in this thread....

[/ QUOTE ]

ROFLMAO I hate to break up such a well written character journal with a seemingly nonsensical reply such as this, but that kid cracks me up to no end... not to mention it's a classic video. However, this is enjoyable reading PW and I look forward to moooar.

3/12/2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

3/14/2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3/17/2008

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

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

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

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

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

April gets kicked around at the bunny hop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thunder Girl steels herself for the next rush against Hamidon

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

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

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

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

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

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

3/20/2008

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

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

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

3/21/2008

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

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

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

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

3/24/2008

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

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

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

Schadenfreude sets up an elaborate death trap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thunder Girl battles Babbage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Police Woman helps enforce the no-fly zone over Grandville

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

3/26/2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3/28/2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3/31/2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4/1/2008

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

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

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

4/2/2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4/7/2008

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

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

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

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

Mystery Girl's team prepares to fight Cortex

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

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

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

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

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

Mystery Girl vs the Clockwork King

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flamebait versus Colonel Duray

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

April at the costume contest

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

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

Indigo Ifrit at the costume contest

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

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

4/9/2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for coming to our silly melee ffa, PW! Glad you had fun.

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

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

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

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


[/ QUOTE ]

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

also, the melee fights were tons of fun. almost as fun as laughing at the ice/rad corr who thinks emping in pvp isn't playing.

thanks for joining us PW.

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

[/ QUOTE ]

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

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

4/11/2008

I started on Wednesday night playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), soloing a flashback of the Envoy of Shadow arc, which exemps me to level 39. I also took the perma-debuffed and no travel powers challenge settings. This isn't the story arc the flashback badge guide recommends taking, since it has EBs in it, but I figured I may as well go for magic salvage while I was at it, so I took the CoT arc.

Police Woman vs the Envoy of Shadow

The generic CoT were no problem even in my debuffed state. The first time I ran into the Envoy (in the cave shown above, as a level 39 EB) I was worried I might not be able to kill him (due to his self heals plus my damage debuff) so I dropped a shivan, and the Envoy went down fast. In the last mission I fought Envoy again on the outdoor map where's he's on a little island, and I thought I'd try fighting him without a shivan. It took a bit longer and I relied heavily on inspirations, but I was still able to take him out even damage debuffed and without the shivan. Finished the flashback in 1hr 54mins and got the Venturesome and Stalled badges.

After that I played Thunder Girl (42 will/nrg tanker) on a large Sisterhood team doing radio missions in Founders Falls. The team already had a tanker though so after the first mission I swapped to play Mystery Girl (25 FF/nrg defender) as a sidekick; this went pretty well and Mystery Girl got to level 26. I picked up the new Repulsion Bomb and so far it's pretty fun. The damage isn't all that much (though I only have 1 slot in it) but it seems pretty fun so far. It's like a defender Foot Stomp; an AoE knockdown, with less damage and longer recharge, but it's ranged and has a chance to stun.

On Thursday night I started off by burning a free respec for Yuki-Onna (43 ice/cold corruptor). I'd been meaning to do this for some time as she had a few powers I really didn't like any more and I wanted to tweak her build to be more viable in PvP. I mainly ended up dumping Hasten/Superspeed (which was great for stealth but not so hot in Grandville; I still want them but I deferred them til the 40s) and Frostworks for CJ/SJ/Acro (all at Bloody Bay and Siren's Call levels). I also dumped Bitter Freeze Ray (which, even at its reduced 2.5 second activation time, still feels too long to cast) for Blizzard (probably not good in PvP except vs Masterminds but I really wanted some AoE damage). Here's the full build:

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

Yuki-Onna: Level 48 Science Corruptor
Primary Power Set: Ice Blast
Secondary Power Set: Cold Domination
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Medicine
Power Pool: Speed
Ancillary Pool: Mace Mastery

Villain Profile:
Level 1: Ice Bolt -- Acc(A), Dmg(3), Decim-Dmg/Rchg:33(3), Dmg(5), Decim-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:33(5), RechRdx(7)
Level 1: Infrigidate -- Acc(A), Acc(13), RechRdx(13), DefDeb(15), LdyGrey-%Dam:33(15), Achilles-ResDeb%:20(17)
Level 2: Ice Blast -- Acc(A), Dmg(7), Decim-Dmg/Rchg:33(9), Dmg(9), Decim-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:33(11), RechRdx(11)
Level 4: Ice Shield -- DefBuff(A), DefBuff(25), DefBuff(27)
Level 6: Combat Jumping -- DefBuff(A)
Level 8: Hurdle -- Jump(A)
Level 10: Aid Other -- IntRdx(A)
Level 12: Swift -- Run(A)
Level 14: Aid Self -- Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx:33(A), IntRdx(17), Dct'dW-Heal/Rchg:33(19), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg:33(19), Heal(21), Dct'dW-Rchg:33(21)
Level 16: Super Jump -- Jump(A)
Level 18: Bitter Ice Blast -- Acc(A), Decim-Dmg/EndRdx:33(23), Decim-Dmg/Rchg:33(23), Dmg(25), Decim-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:33(31), RechRdx(43)
Level 20: Stamina -- EndMod(A), EndMod(40), EndMod(40)
Level 22: Arctic Fog -- EndRdx(A), ResDam(27), ResDam(29), ResDam(29)
Level 24: Acrobatics -- EndRdx(A)
Level 26: Aim -- RechRdx(A), RechRdx(31), RechRdx(33)
Level 28: Glacial Shield -- DefBuff(A), DefBuff(31), DefBuff(40)
Level 30: Benumb -- Acc(A), RechRdx(37), RechRdx(39)
Level 32: Blizzard -- Dmg(A), Dmg(33), Dmg(33), RechRdx(34), RechRdx(34), RechRdx(34)
Level 35: Sleet -- RechRdx(A), LdyGrey-DefDeb/Rchg:41(36), UndDef-DefDeb/Rchg/EndRdx:33(36), RechRdx(36), LdyGrey-%Dam:40(37), UndDef-Rchg:33(37)
Level 38: Heat Loss -- RechRdx(A), RechRdx(39), RechRdx(39)
Level 41: Web Envelope -- Acc(A), EndRdx(42), RechRdx(42), Immob(42), Immob(43), Immob(43)
Level 44: Hasten -- RechRdx(A)
Level 47: Frostwork -- Empty(A)
Level 49: Super Speed -- Empty(A)
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</pre><hr />

I kept both shield powers; I know a lot of ice/colds build purely for solo PvP and don't bother with the ally buffs, but I prefer to team and the shields are just too useful in team PvE not to take.

I'm normally skeptical of nuke powers that drain all your END, but Blizzard is really working for Yuki. The synergy between Sleet (to debuff RES), Blizzard (massive AoE DoT), Heat Loss (more RES debuff and a big END/REC boost) and Scourge is amazing; I can debuff, nuke, pop a blue and then refill my end bar to full.

Anyway, I helped a friend get the Lanista badge by losing a gladiator match to her; I really didn't remember how gladiator matches worked and neither did she so we just arbitrarily started one. Neither of us had actually purchased any gladiators, so as soon as the match began, I instantly lost the game due to not having any gladiators in play. (Neither did the other player, but I think I lost faster due to being the first player to join the match.)

After that I joined a Lady Grey SF as a lackey. Our team mix was:

nrg/sr stalker
mind/nrg dominator
ice/cold corruptor (me)
necro/dark MM
will tanker
fire/kin controller
fire/nrg brute
blaster (I didn't get what her powersets were)

This was a cool team mix since we had 8 characters who were 8 different ATs, which doesn't happen often.

The first mission went pretty well overall, though the fight against the psychic Clockwork King got off to a bad start as the dominator did a Leroy Jenkins-style frontal assault on the Clockwork King and his buddies before half the team arrived on the scene. This resulted in the CWK spraying Psychic Screams around and causing a few deaths before the rest of the team showed up and got things under control again.

In the second mission we took down the first rider no problem, then had some trouble with the 2 Rider group as fire imps aggroed the riders onto us unexpectedly, resulting in a few deaths. We beat up the 3 Rider and 4 Rider groups pretty easily though, with the tanker preferring to charge into the mass of them rather than pulling them apart. I tried to use Heat Loss (along with Sleet and Blizzard) on the Riders when possible, hoping to counter Famine's nasty END drain. They went down really quick.

After the second mission the blaster needed to reboot, and then pretty much vanished until late in the fourth mission (apparently someone else commandeered the computer for a while).

We set out to deliberately fail the third mission, but it took awhile to get Infernia killed, because our team had itchy trigger fingers around Rikti, and consequently we accidentally saved her from death a few times before we finally sent her to her doom. Plus Glacia was way the heck deep in the cave system, and we had to clear quite a lot of the mission anyhow to get to her. We ended up getting her killed too and so we "failed" the mission and moved on.

On the fourth mission we basically zerg rushed various mitos and ultimately Hamidon until he went down, suffering a lot of deaths along the way but eventually getting the job done.

Yuki-Onna watches as the Hamidon explodes

In the final mission the stalker and dom wanted to stealth to the AV at the end, but repeatedly got detected by Rikti drones and exterminated; I think they each died twice, but it only strengthened their determination to get to the end, which they succeeded in doing the third time. Unfortunately since neither of them had any kind of teleport powers, it was somewhat futile, and so the people who did have recall friend TP'd them back to help the rest of us fight our way through.

The final AV fights were actually quite easy, and we utterly squashed both Hro'tohz and the Honoree; I don't think the Honoree even got to do his Unstoppable trick. I'm not sure but I'd like to think our large amount of cold and dark debuffs really helped with this. After the Honoree went down we zerg rushed the various generators, finishing the SF in 2hrs 43mins.

Yuki-Onna got to level 44 in the middle of this SF; I had originally planned on getting back Frostwork at 44, but our tanker was already at the HP cap so I went with Hasten instead.

4/14/2008

On Friday night I started off soloing a Freakshow mission with Schadenfreude (42 AR/traps corruptor), then switched to Mystery Girl (26 FF/nrg defender) to help a team kill the Eochai and Jack in Irons monsters in Croatoa.

After that it was time for the Lady Grey TF race; I logged on Spacegirl (44 mind/rad controller) to join one of the many Sisterhood teams that participated. I was on the way to Rikti War Zone via Atlas Park when I saw someone broadcasting "Costume Contest under Atlas in 1 minute". I figured, hey, I have a minute. So I flew over to the Atlas statue and parked myself at the end of the line of contestants.

Spacegirl in the finals of the costume contest

Spacegirl (top row, 3rd from left in the above picture) actually won the costume contest! Several people said some very nice things about her costume and theme, also, and the contest organizer gave her 4M influence as first prize. Second place was taken by the robed and cowled man (top row, 5th from left) and third place was won by the white tiger striped catboy (top row, farthest left).

That was a really nice start to things. From there I continued on to RWZ, where I mingled with the heroes and villains who had shown up for the LGTF race. The turnout was pretty huge, and snowballed as the word got out; the first RWZ instance actually filled to overflowing.

Preparing for the Lady Grey TF race

I joined one of the Sisterhood &amp; friends teams; our initial team was abusively good, but players were shuffled around a bit to make sure everyone had a decent team. We ended up with a lineup of:

fire/elec blaster
emp/dark defender
mind/rad controller (me)
arch/dev blaster
dual/will scrapper
SS/will brute
elec/elec brute
rad/nrg defender

This was still a pretty ferociously strong team and we steamrollered the first two missions without effort. The rules of the race forbade anyone from failing missions on purpose, so we completed mission 3 the "real way" by freeing all the hostages and defeating the AV. The empath and the electric brute disconnected during the third mission, which slowed us down a bit, but the empath came back in time to help with Hamidon. The brute aggroed the Rikti onto Hami and the mitos and we shot down the mitos with no more than normal amounts of death. On the last mission, we didn't have anyone who could stealth/TP, so we fought our way through the mission to get to the final fight. Hro'tohz was no problem; the Honoree did get off his Unstoppable against us, but we eventually wore him down. Spacegirl's mind attacks still seemed to hit him even when he was in Unstoppable mode, which was nice (though not a whole lot of damage). We finished the TF in 1hr 58mins; I think we came in second on time, which is not too bad considering we were down 1 player and had no stealth capability. Spacegirl got the Superstar badge and level 45 while on this TF; she put her 3 extra slots into Mind over Body, her +RES toggle. She's thematically a good match for fighting Rikti, so raising psi resist made sense to me.

After that I played Flamebait (32 fire/thermal corruptor) for a bit on an 8 player all-corruptor Demolition Girls SG team, LK'd up to to level 39ish missions. Learned from one of the other players how to (sort of) Inferno while kiting. Inferno technically roots you, but with combat jumping you can bounce into a big spawn, then bounce back towards your team; while starting the second bounce if you trigger Inferno just as you leave the ground, the power "locks in" on the targets surrounding you at that moment, but your momentum carries your toon back to your team. The animation finishes as you land (rooting you at that point), causing a huge BOOM as you suddenly nova a group you're no longer near. It took some practice, but one I got the hang of it, I gleefully did it over and over. Got to level 33; naturally, I added 3 slots to Inferno.

On Saturday I played Mystery Girl for a level 24-33 hero side respec trial. Team mix was:

warshade
fire/fire blaster
ill/FF controller
FF/nrg defender (me)
dark/regen scrapper
peacebringer
emp/dark defender
MA/will scrapper

FFs feel awfully good on the Terra Volta respec and we sailed through the trial with no problems; finished in 1hr 2mins. Mystery Girl got to level 27 and took the recipe reward (I wonder if I should've taken the respec since I burned a veteran respec early on...but I still have lots of veteran respecs if I need it) and got a Touch of Death: Dam/End/Rech for my trouble.

Mystery Girl did a little light soloing, but soloing as a FF defender is not that exciting, so I formed a Moonfire TF. Our team mix was:

FF/nrg defender (me)
dark/elec defender
stone/stone tanker
emp/rad defender
2 will/SS tankers
ice/ice blaster
spine/regen scrapper

We had a lot of tankers, and they all seemed pretty happy to be heavily buffed with lots of defender support, which let them run into large spawns of Council without fear. I offered to stealth/TP the team through some of the missions but they were all like, "No! Let's smash everything!" We all had a pretty good time; even clearing all the maps it took us only 1hr 47mins. Mystery Girl got to level 29 (picking up Force Bolt at 28; I was thinking this might be a good way to keep individual mobs knocked down to mitigate their damage) and got the Silver Bullet badge for killing Werewolves. The recipe reward wasn't anything special, but I did get a Respec recipe as a drop; I still didn't really think I needed a respec so I sold the recipe at Wentworths for 25M infl. The spines scrapper also pinned me down and made me take 5M infl as a prize for a message board contest she had meant to award me some time ago.

On Sunday I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), joining a pickup team doing radio missions in Peregrine Island. This went pretty well for the most part. We had two tankers, however; one "main" tanker who was level 50 and a second, sidekicked 39 invuln tanker. The invuln tanker had a fairly suboptimal power selection (he had Invincibility, Unstoppable and most of the Invuln passive resists; he lacked Unyielding and Temp Invuln) and after he got mezzed once the team started mocking him relentlessly, challenging him to tank stuff when the main tank was afk (which admittedly he was afraid to do because it would paste him) and the like. He had a pretty bad build but I kinda felt sorry for the guy considering how much grief the team was giving him. At one point I noticed he lost SK while fighting a group of level 51 Malta, causing the 39 tanker to instantly faceplant, then someone fired off Vengeance. Both mentor and SK denied dropping the SK link, but this seemed rather un-nice to me, so I excused myself from the team after that mission.

Playing Mystery Girl I solo'd the Defeat Heracles mission; Heracles was a level 24 EB but this wasn't really a big accomplishment since by then he was -5 to Mystery Girl. This wrapped up Stephanie Peebles' story arc, but I didn't get the Wedding Band temp power from it; probably because the mission was so grey by that point. Later that evening I formed a 5-player pickup team that ran through some Striga missions in Lars Hansen's story arc. Fighting vampires got Mystery Girl the Slayer badge, completing her Atlas Medallion accolade, as well as level 30. I thought about taking Repulsion Field, but I figure I'll get Force Bubble at 32 so I took Energy Torrent for some more AoE. I've also decided to slot lots of silly procs in Mystery Girl's attacks, mostly for fun; she now has 3 Devastation: Chance to Hold, 4 Explosive Strike: Chance for Smashing damage, and 1 Positron's Blast: Chance for Energy damage. The effects are pretty random, but kinda fun.

Quite late at night played Mystery Girl on a Katie Hannon TF; this had 1 tanker, 3 defenders, 2 controllers and 2 blasters, and it was pretty straightforward; we finished in 42mins, netting me a level 30 Cacophony: Chance for Energy damage. Damage procs in non-aggro confuse powers seem pretty pointless to me, but them's the breaks. Anyway, I like getting level 33 recipes (for use in Siren's Call), so I had been thinking about trying to keep Mystery Girl in the level 30-33 range to get lots of low level recipes; but even SK'd Mystery Girl got 9/10s of a level doing one Katie run, so I'm not sure I can avoid leveling out of this range if I do Katie TFs. I'll try to get low level recipes while I can, anyhow.

4/15/2008

I started off playing Schadenfreude (42 AR/traps corruptor) on a 7 player pickup team doing level 45 relentless missions in Grandville. We started out fighting level 47 Longbow, which was pretty challenging (our team was level 42 to 45 with some lackeys), but we had a pretty support-heavy team so were strong enough to beat these, getting Schadenfreude to level 43. The next mission with level 48 Arachnos was really hard though, and we suffered three wipeouts, mostly at the hands of hard-hitting +5 Arachnos bosses. Still we managed to get through it, getting quite a lot of exp along the way.

I put 2 of Schadenfreude's level 43 slots into Maneuvers, which allowed me to 6-slot Red Fortune for +2% global damage, +5% global recharge, and raising her self-buffed range defense to 32.96%, which is really nice for letting her set traps while under hostile fire. The other slot went into Poison Gas Trap and is still empty; I plan to eventually put a purple damage proc there.

Switching to hero side I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) exemping down to level 37 to join a 6-player Northern Lights SG team for a Brickstown bank safeguard mission. We defeated a level 41 AV Ice Mistral who was trying to rob the bank.

I solo'd a few Croatoa missions as Mystery Girl (31 FF/nrg defender) hoping to make progress towards unlocking the TF contact; she's about midway through Kelly Nemmers' mission list in the Croatoa contact chain. Invis and PFF helped her get to various hostages to free them easily.

Later Schadenfreude came back on and duoed with a mastermind for awhile, defeating a Silver Mantis EB to get the Party Crasher badge and doing a few more missions before I called it a night.

4/16/2008

Started off playing Astarte (45 grav/emp controller on Protector) on an 8-player Demolition Girls SG team doing Unai Kemen's missions, closing ruptures and such. Got distracted by a lengthy debate on how Wentworths and the CoH economy worked; a couple of the other players argued that the market was "broken" by farmers "hoarding" all the best recipes. This caused me to go into lecture-mode about how I think economics works (I'm a big believer in free markets), which also caused me to slow down on the rate I was laying down my empathy buffs, but fortunately the team was pretty resilient so it didn't impact our play too much. I think the root cause of one of the other player's problems was that she was looking for a level 30 Mako's Bite Acc/End/Rech, but they never appeared for sale at Wentworths. But I think this recipe only drops from trials, and I don't believe any trial is capable of awarding a level 30 recipe; I think first hero respec can only award level 33-34ish recipes.

After that team broke up I spent some time soloing Mystery Girl (31 FF/nrg defender on Liberty), finishing off Kelly Nemmers' story arc and doing the whole of Buck Salinger's story arc, which unlocked the Katie Hannon TF contact for me. You'd think that soloing a FF defender would be awfully dreary, but it was actually pretty cool; Mystery Girl's ability to use Invisibility and Personal Force Field let me solve missions mostly through stealth and being unkillable. I found that I could click glowies and rescue hostages while still safely in PFF, which trivialized a couple missions, including the one where you click 5 hunks of iron and get ambushed, and at least three that required me to lead hostages out while suffering ambushes. In the final mission in Buck's arc, Save Salamanca, I stealthed to each of the 3 hostages and took out their guards, then led them back to the site of the ritual while in PFF. That started a 15 minute period where regular waves of ambushes would attempt to attack and disrupt the ritual. I cleared the first two waves of red caps with no problem; on the third wave I had an idea, and I cleared all but one red cap minion. I then went into PFF and let the red cap try to beat on my defenses for awhile. No new waves of ambushes spawned after that, I guess because the third wave was still "active". I went afk for a bit and after 12 minutes of this red cap minion ineffectively beating on my PFF, I won the mission.

A bit later Mystery Girl joined a Katie Hannon TF. This team had a tanker, a defender, a controller, 3 scrappers and 2 blasters, and had no trouble completing the TF, finishing in 40mins and getting Mystery Girl to level 32, where I took Force Bubble.

I also spent some time in Icon messing with a couple Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) costumes. I made a formal dress police uniform using the Military dress jacket and pencil skirt (thinking maybe that'll come in handy for the RWZ mission where you're supposed to show up in formal dress to meet with Rikti ambassadors) and re-made a red and white Longbow uniform for use in zone pvp, this time using the new Stealth harness and tactical belt, which look pretty good. I spent a lot of time waffling on which costume pieces should be red and which should be white; I like red for the mask piece and red for the pants piece, but all "real" Longbow uniforms seem to have either red mask/boots/gloves and white pants, or white mask/boots/gloves and red pants. I ended up going with the latter; I like the white boots and gloves but feel the white mask looks a bit pasty.

[ QUOTE ]
A bit later Mystery Girl joined a Katie Hannon TF. This team had a tanker, a defender, a controller, 3 scrappers and 2 blasters, and had no trouble completing the TF, finishing in 40mins and getting Mystery Girl to level 32, where I took Force Bubble.

[/ QUOTE ]

No trouble, but it took 40 minutes on a Katie? That doesn't sound right...

4/17/2008

I started the evening playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster); with a blaster friend, we joined a 7-player pickup team that needed help taking down a level 49 AV Shadow Hunter. This team was pretty damage heavy, with only a single kin controller for support; we had occasional deaths but had tremendous DPS, and consequently we took down Shadow Hunter, then later on both Nightstar and Siege.

The tanker who had formed the team hit level 50 on this team, then needed to log (along with some of the other team member), and I ended up inheriting the star. The remaining team members wanted to keep going so I recruited more pickup people to fill the team up; managed to pick up an empath and a rad that balanced out the support/DPS ratio on the team, along with several more blasters and scrappers. Never did find another tanker, so we had a regen scrapper, then later a willpower scrapper, sorta-tanking for us. Met a lot of interesting people; a Freddy Kruger lookalike claws scrapper who told us a story about facing an angry bear with a 357 magnum in RL (this sounded farfetched to our regen scrapper, but the claws scrapper claimed to live in Alaska; maybe that happens a lot there) and there were a pair of female archery/energy blasters who seemed to specialize in synchronized Aim/Build Up/Rain of Arrows, which totally melted anything that was caught in their twin AoEs. We did door missions in Peregrine Island, a mix of radio missions, Portal Corp missions and warehouses of Carnies. I managed to score a Pangean Soil from an extra-dimensional werewolf. Good stuff.

After that team broke up I joined a Lady Grey Strike Force being organized on LBx. I had asked what the team needed, and the leader said "anything 50" (apparently due to SK/mentor issues), and so I brought April Fool (50 thug/TA mastermind). Our team mix was:

mind/kin controller
fire/stone brute
empathy/nothing defender
grav/storm controller
2 fire blasters
elec blaster
thug/TA MM (me)

This SF started off incredibly slowly. In the first mission, one fire blaster immediately went AFK at the entrance for about 20 minutes, and since he was SKing the other fire blaster, our DPS was greatly reduced. The brute started off moving very cautiously, checking to make sure people were ready before attacking and frequently trying to pull Rikti from busy intersections; well-meaning, maybe, but the resulting pace was much slower than the pace I'm used to. The empath outright demanded that the kin controller keep perma-ID on him, for fear of mez, and threatened to quit the team if he ever got mezzed. April is a troublemaker at heart, so she tried to talk the other team members into TPing the AFK blaster into mobs of Rikti to help absorb alpha strikes (but no one would go for it) and told the empath that ID doesn't protect against sleep, so he should demand the storm controller keep O2 Boost on him, too (this earned me a "No CM for you!" from the empath, LOL).

We picked up the pace a bit after the 50 fire blaster got back from AFK (I told him that the rest of the team wanted to kick him, but April barely talked them out of it), raising our DPS a lot, and the brute got more courageous after she saw it wasn't instant death. We managed to wrap up the first two missions before too long, even overcoming surprise aggro from the 2-Rider spawn (OK, OK, I think one of my pets pulled them...oops!). The empath apologized for being rude earlier and revealed that apparently most of the team (minus me) had failed/aborted a very ugly LGTF run just before restarting with me, and one of the prime causes was that squishies got mezzed and killed a lot; this explained why the empath was obsessing over keeping CM on people and getting ID for himself, and why the brute was so gun shy when we started. I told him it was OK, and not to ever take anything April says too seriously.

We agreed to fail the third mission by ganking Infernia and Glacia, but not everyone was clear on the concept so some team members ended up helping Infernia and Glacia fight three or four mobs of Rikti, before we finally managed to grief these hapless heroines to death. On the fourth mission one of the fire blasters tried to TP foe mitos out of the goo and into the Rikti, which didn't work (I'm not sure why; I've seen it work before), while the electric blaster tried to sneak up on blue mitos and assassinate them with aim/build up/zapp (which did work, with a little help from my pets). We eventually cleared all the mitos and pasted Hamidon himself.

In the final mission, a couple of the heroes tried to stealth to the end twice, but got spotted by Rikti drones and killed both times. The team ended up fighting most of the way there instead; once we got about 3/4s of the way to the end, though, the stealthers were able to sneak the rest of the way through and TP us past the last bit. We actually killed Hro'tohz and the Honoree relatively easily, but things got really ugly going after the generators while huge ambushes swarmed around us. While taking out the first three generators, the whole team got wiped out, except April herself. I didn't want to have to walk back there again, so I launched a 1-mastermind zerg rush against the fourth and final generator, while under heavy fire from Rikti ambushes. This was actually kind of dangerous since focusing fire on the generator takes me out of bodyguard mode, but I slammed a lot of inspirations and kicked off the Demonic accolade to keep me alive while my pets tore down the last generator. My dead teammates cheered as I knocked out the last generator to finish the TF and punched the "exit" button as soon as I could. Total TF time was 2hrs 42mins, and it was actually pretty fun.