[ QUOTE ]
On Tuesday night, a friend invited me to an Imperious TF organized on LHO. The team leader asked for a tanker, so I played Thunder Girl (47 will/nrg tanker). Team mix was:
ice/rad corruptor
ice/nrg blaster (Camo Fire)
grav/storm controller
MA/DA stalker
dual/regen scrapper
cold/ice defender
will/nrg tanker (me)
emp/sonic defender
[/ QUOTE ]
Fixed that for you
6/24/2008
(Fairly long.)
Friday night, I started off playing Mercy Beaucoup (16 empath/ice defender) as an SK to a couple scrapper friends doing level 24 missions in Faultline. This went pretty well and Mercy got to level 17.
After that, several of us switched to villain side and I ended up playing Primadonna on a 4-player team of mostly LEGION SG. We did a few paper missions and an Independence Port mayhem.
Also on Friday night I ended up playing Lady Arachne (35 wolf spider) on an Imperious TF of mostly Mildly Heroic Evildoers SG. The team mix was:
fortunata
spine/regen scrapper
SS/fire brute
SS/stone brute
ice/rad corruptor
wolf spider (me)
ill/rad controller
empath defender
We had ungodly amounts of AoE damage which allowed us to pretty much power through everything we encountered. I think the fortunata ended up being afk for most of the last mission and ended up getting killed by ambushes, then TP'd around as vengeance bait. Otherwise we had no trouble with the ITF, finishing in 1h 23mins. This got Lady Arachne to level 37, and I got a level 39 Positron's Blast Dam/Acc/End as reward; also found a level 50 Performance Shifter Chance for END recipe as a drop somewhere along the way.
On Saturday I played Fire Marshal (12 fire/mental blaster) as an SK to a 6 player LEGION team doing missions in Faultline. We beat up AV level Nocturne and Captain Castillo, netting a few very low level SO drops which were kind of nice. This got Fire Marshal to 14 and Aid Self; though honestly I haven't enjoyed fire/mental as much as I had hoped. I'm not that excited about the mental powers, and Fire Marshal's character concept has a certain cognitive dissonance (I keep getting comments of "Shouldn't you be putting out fires, not starting them?") which is keeping me from really getting into playing her. May end up rerolling her as something else at some point, though I really like her costume.
A bit later I played Primadonna (28 sonic/kin corruptor) on a Cap au Diable SF organized on Sisterhood channel. Team mix was:
merc/storm MM
2 arachnos soldiers
thug/TA MM
robo/TA MM
nrg/will stalker
rad/therm corruptor
son/kin corruptor (me)
This was more of a "for fun" SF than the normal "farm for recipes" Cap SFs, so we only stealthed a few of the missions and cleared most of the others, including the final mission. As a result this SF ended up taking 1h 30mins, but it was fun. The large number of pets (from 3 MMs) were less of a hassle than normal, I guess because of the pet-pushing features added in I12. After that I solo'd a few missions, getting Primadonna to 29.
I also started a newbie MA/will scrapper to play with a friend who started a newbie sonic/mental blaster, and we duo'd up to level 6.
On Sunday morning I played Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender) on a Imperious TF of Demolition Girls SG. I only had 2hrs to play at the time but they told me it would be fine (I think they really needed people). Having just finished an ITF in 83mins, I figured it was doable. Team mix was:
SS/inv brute
sonic/nrg blaster
robo/FF MM
plant dominator
storm/archery defender (me)
thug/FF MM
thermal corruptor
We actually started with only 6 players, but during the first mission another SG-mate logged in and needed to be invited, so we restarted with 7 players. This made some sense in terms of manpower but ate about 20 minutes off of my 2 hour time limit. We also had some problems working as a team, which caused several deaths during the first mission when the team got split up, and a few more deaths during the third mission against the control computer where half the team was trying to damage the computer and the other half wanted to fight off ambushes instead. I did find out that Rain Dancer's Freezing Rain/Rain of Arrows combo is quite devastating against the big clumps of Romans who like to charge us; I had a lot of fun mowing them down with arrows.
We started the last mission with 15 mins left on my 2hr time limit, so we jumped ahead to try and fight Romulus right away. Our team's tactics were as follows: the blaster was going to pull the nictus that heals away from the fight, while the brute tanked Romulus and we all focused damage on Romulus. This strategy didn't work very well for us; we slowly ground Romulus down while one of the other Nictus AVs summoned a massive swarm of purple Nictus shadows, which ended up beating us all up. I think maybe some players were trying to fight the adds while some were staying on Romulus; the MMs also said their pets got smeared by AoEs very quickly. Our highest DPS person, the blaster, was "off-tanking" the healing Nictus. As a result of all this, our DPS on Romulus was very low, and following this strategy resulted in two team wipes as Romulus lived long enough for the bad guys to kill us all off. After two team wipes, I was about 20 mins over my 2hr time limit, and though I hate to bail on a TF, I had to call it quits at that point.
Later on Sunday night, I played Lady Arachne (37 wolf spider) on a 3 VEAT team of Liberty Force for a couple of missions in St Martial.
After that I played Grey Wings (34 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) for a Katie TF of mostly Demolition Girls SG on Triumph server. We had 3 defenders, 2 scrappers, 1 blaster and 1 controller. The KTF was pretty routine, completing in 27 mins, getting Grey Wings to 35 and getting me a level 35 Miracle: +Recovery recipe. It's tempting to server transfer someone from Triumph to Liberty to bring all these good recipes home!
Finished up Sunday night playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) for a 5-player flashback of the Project Locke story arc organized on Sisterhood channel. Unfortunately after the first mission, the contact, Gordon Stacy, refused to give the next mission in the story arc; instead he acted like the team leader had a full set of missions already. We had people log off and on to juggle who was the team leader, but the contact did the same thing no matter who was leader. Definitely buggy; I know for a fact I had fewer than 3 missions, too, though it shouldn't matter in TF-mode, which the flashbacks are run in. We eventually had to give up on the flashback.
On Monday I wasn't feeling real well so I called in sick. This ended up in me playing CoH a lot instead. 
I started off playing Mystery Girl (34 FF/nrg defender) on a Katie TF organized on LBx; this had 4 defenders, 1 controller, 2 scrappers and 1 blaster. With such heavy support, the TF was a cakewalk, finishing in 24 mins. I got a Force Feedback: Rech/End recipe.
Responding to someone offering to sell a purple recipe on LBx, I ended up having April Fool buy a Hecatomb Dam/End recipe for 25M infamy and an Apocalypse Dam IO for 23M infamy; it was someone I knew who was selling it, and as a result I think he gave me a better price than he normally would have, which made me feel a little guilty. But he wouldn't take the higher price I offered and he seemed happy with the outcome, so I guess it was okay. Haven't slotted either one yet as I think it works better to slot whole sets at a time.
I solo'd Kashira (my newbie ninja/ninja stalker) up to 8 and joined a 3-player team consisting of an arachnos soldier and a dominator. With no real support (soldiers sort of are, but not as much when there's just one, it seems like) we ran into lots of trouble fighting Arachnos minions, suffering two wipeouts which required us to break out of jail cells. Ended up getting Kashira to level 9 anyhow though.
I momentarily started a trick arrow/archery defender, then felt underwhelmed by this and restarted her as a plant/trick arrow controller, which I got to level 3. Not sure whether I like this powerset combination yet or not.
I rebooted my claws/will stalker; still a catgirl, I'm afraid, but I dumped the tiger stripes for leopard print, and wrote up an origin story based on Mesoamerican jaguar cults. Solo'd up to 5, then joined a 3-player pickup team in Port Oakes, where we did an Atlas mayhem followed by a few paper missions. We did suffer one wipeout in the Atlas mayhem as we entered the bank and got hit by a massive Longbow ambush; our thermal corruptor was worried I'd write bad stuff about him for not healing enough, but really there wasn't much he could've done against the number of Longbow that came for us. We had rushed the bank, and I'm thinking this always seems to result in a big ambush; fighting gradually to the bank seems to string the ambushes out a bit. The other player, an Arachnos widow, said her daughter really liked my toon, which was nice. "So your daughter likes bloodthirsty Central American deities?" I asked. "Or...maybe she just likes cats." The corruptor voted for the former, but I suspect the latter is closer to the truth. Between this team and a later team-up with some SisterhoodFriends villains, the Jaguar Goddess got to level 9.
Did a few missions with Mercy Beaucoup (17 emp/ice defender) as an SK to a 3 player team doing level 28 missions in Croatoa. This was with a fire scrapper and another empath defender, and it kind of felt like overkill to have 2 empaths on a 3 player team; I probably would've been better off playing a blaster or second scrapper. I went ahead and fort'd both other players in hopes of helping the other defender blast a little more. Mercy got to level 18 and Recovery Aura.
Played a little more on Triumph as Flying Tiger (9 MA/will scrapper on Triumph); I solo'd to level 10, then got an invitation to join a Frostfire mission. This turned out to be a 5-player team: 2 blasters, an SK'd level 6 dark armor tanker, a warshade and me, a scrapper. No support whatsoever; I didn't run away immediately though because I kinda enjoy Frostfire. The tanker pretty frequently got squished when rushing into big groups of Outcasts, which seemed to make him feel bad since he couldn't tank very effectively; low level tankers are like that, especially against elemental damage which the Outcasts are heavy on. I tried to pass him inspirations and occasionally pull stuff before he could rush it, to try and help. Though we had a number of deaths along the way, we did end up managing to defeat Frostfire, to everyone's relief. This got Flying Tiger to level 11.
After that I spent some time soloing with Thunder Girl (48 will/nrg tanker on Liberty). I'm trying to figure out how to respec her into Tough while still keeping her max HP near the HP cap; did some playing around in Mids, and also resolved that I need to get Portal Jockey. But she doesn't have Maria Jenkins as a contact, and talking to Maria, she just says to go see Levantera. So I ended up soloing all of Levantera's story arc in Rikti War Zone, then called it a night. I don't normally solo with Thunder Girl and I found that I was gasping for END a lot due to having to actually damage everything to death (not normally necessary when you have a team of DPS people along with you). She has Quick Recovery, but this experience made me think I may need to get Stamina back into her build, and/or add more ENDRDX to her various powers, especially if I take Tough which is a bit expensive for a toggle.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
6/25/2008
I got on late, and initially joined a lowbie 8-player Sisterhood team doing a level 5 mission in Atlas Park, playing Kelly Greene, a newbie 3 plant/TA controller; still not sure whether I totally like plant/TA yet. Anyway, we did about half a mission, then the team broke up.
After that I joined a 5-player Demolition Girls team on Protector server for a level 24 mission in Faultline, the one where you blow up three submarines and fight Arbiter Sands. I played Amethyst Star (a 22 human-form warshade on Protector), who I haven't played in many months, but was the right level for the team. We had a thermal controller, a kin controller, a cold defender, a blaster and me; with fire shields, cold shields and speed boost, I could actually sort of tank as a warshade, using Orbiting Death as an aggro-drawing aura. We beat up the EB-level Arbiter Sands and got Amethyst to level 23.
After that I messed around with a respec build for Thunder Girl (48 will/nrg tanker on Liberty). Up to now I've been focusing on raising her max HP, but two runs on the Imperious TF convinced me that I needed more lethal resistance; but, I still wanted to keep Fireball from the epic pool and maintain a high HP total. I ended up burning a free respec towards this goal. The short version is that I dropped Build Up and Total Focus to get Kick and Tough. The long version is as follows:
Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.40
http://www.cohplanner.com/
Thunder Girl: Level 50 Magic Tanker
Primary Power Set: Willpower
Secondary Power Set: Energy Melee
Power Pool: Flight
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Fighting
Ancillary Pool: Pyre Mastery
Hero Profile:
Level 1: High Pain Tolerance -- Heal-I:50(A), Heal-I:50(3), Heal-I:50(3), ResDam-I:50(5), ResDam-I:50(5), ResDam-I:50(7)
Level 1: Barrage -- Empty(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:45(A), TtmC'tng-ResDam/Rchg:45(34), TtmC'tng-ResDam:45(34), TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg:45(37)
Level 6: Hover -- Flight-I:35(A), Flight-I:35(13), Flight-I:35(13)
Level 8: Rise to the Challenge -- EndRdx-I:50(A), Heal-I:50(15), Heal-I:50(15), Heal-I:50(42)
Level 10: Taunt -- RechRdx-I:50(A)
Level 12: Quick Recovery -- P'Shift-EndMod:40(A), P'Shift-EndMod/Rchg:40(31), P'Shift-EndMod/Acc:40(34), EndMod-I:50(43)
Level 14: Indomitable Will -- EndRdx-I:50(A), DefBuff-I:50(31), DefBuff-I:50(31), DefBuff-I:50(46)
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 -- Flight-I:50(A), Flight-I:50(21), Frbd-Fly:50(27)
Level 20: Heightened Senses -- EndRdx-I:50(A), LkGmblr-Def/Rchg:40(29), LkGmblr-Def:40(29), LkGmblr-Rchg+:40(40)
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:50(A), Heal-I:50(33), Heal-I:50(43)
Level 28: Kick -- Empty(A)
Level 30: Tough -- TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx:50(A), TtmC'tng-ResDam/Rchg:50(39), TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg:50(39), TtmC'tng-ResDam:50(40), TtmC'tng-EndRdx:50(40)
Level 32: Strength of Will -- ResDam-I:50(A), ResDam-I:50(33), ResDam-I:50(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: Health -- Heal-I:50(A), Heal-I:50(39)
Level 41: Char -- G'Wdw-Acc/Rchg:45(A), G'Wdw-Hold/Rng:45(42), G'Wdw-Acc/Hold/Rchg:45(42), G'Wdw-EndRdx/Hold:45(43)
Level 44: Fire Blast -- Dev'n-Acc/Dmg:45(A), Dev'n-Dmg/Rchg:45(45), Dev'n-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:45(45), Dev'n-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:50(45), Dmg-I:50(46), Dev'n-Hold%:50(46)
Level 47: Fire Ball -- AirB'st-Acc/Dmg:50(A), AirB'st-Dmg/EndRdx:50(48), AirB'st-Dmg/Rchg:50(48), AirB'st-Dmg/Rng:50(48), Empty(50), Empty(50)
Level 49: Stamina -- Empty(A), Empty(50)
------------
Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Gauntlet
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>| Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build |
|-------------------------------------------------------------------|
|MxDz;1392;680;908;|
|>-JEDTEOTT`4Q\=QTM2QTS1T2[JF;=HTF]O>6`X<:$%(1(J@`@F51&DZ)%8M-W)2T=S|
|X`)Q`XL8)L?,%$%\$.+.+CX`4WC*I4CABV?_?S//,>V_FS92.MRPA[E\4FG7)K;7;U9|
|V:=R#]4*G6<.K63O/(VY=^ZHKCNV$A1(+_5K?D7>FUI7W+<=W6X3WI)]6/DG2EM+<]Z|
|3>ZW(E?]9K2EU['[C?,\N&A:U]VG4:S8W';Z7BRW8ZJ#M@=KQ&AWHV6E/OQ[993M\M=|
|7U9+M79'^MT$)).%[[,!HL$G>B&1!FR*P"D$"X,88@Q'A'IZ\,(CC(AR`WZTV X"4&-H|
|E#%<8>X1(G2$)7R"ZSM%U/0>-@EC,,VQ"ND@P8.]"[#T06@8L">L4OH.CL*:1H_`BY3|
|B2'D2684*:ADK<R)/I!_1-E8/Y,"!$1LP_(BP^)N12-.X;C(NJ<5$.,3\_B"+#@A`QM|
|1,QGY8YVF$<$<X<,[J$<1T0U(4)2XRK)<:7R=,X8_JWAO@)\<=4_#& ./QO7,,'9<4)F|
|@A"!^!,J_@178I(K,<F52'`E$ER)::Y$",)/L7<Q97!*7X%)M@62O'\I1DX=$9@THW9|
|SAHZ!#I8YGA*<RU'>JWE&D9"Q&>N$7Q! A02UZ@8]6ZA1B$:PN+V8)%Y,1R[N,"@,7LR|
|;2=88DA"&+%<Y"6^%45QD?=/S/F[C6I+.5/6"XA)Q#^`CC\BIN_JE`4^$9XSGC!==\C|
|O&2\`EFV6J6_8I,ZZ\9;QAO"9NT5ZS#D.N&RG5CP# X;_/N*7?O'4@Z>7#JAD24;/+G.|
|__6\L_I^C.MXUW=0RGC';V)K%^4.=BO8JF%K#Z6.W=Y[JY]I["PF=`[E/,H%E`<X*&R|
|"F"@62A1E!"6&,HHRAC*),HWR!*7W!YS0!E,`|
|-------------------------------------------------------------------|</pre><hr />
This is the build I ended up with, mostly based on the IOs I already had, plus some I could immediately buy and craft. Long term, I want to slot a couple sets of Numina's Convalescence in Rise to the Challenge and Fast Healing, but they are pricey enough that I wasn't ready to shell out for them just yet. I'm a little bummed to lose Build Up, since it goes so well with Energy Transfer and Fireball, but I couldn't find anything else I was willing to cut, and I felt boosting damage is non-mission-critical for a tanker. Other possible candidates for cutting were Whirling Hands, which I like for both the animation and the AoE damage, or Strength of Will, which has saved my butt several times when things got ugly. I don't really miss Total Focus that much, though; I never really liked the long animation, and taking several fire attacks from her epic pool gives her plenty of attacks. I was a little surprised to settle on Air Burst as the IO set of choice for Fireball; I normally go with Positron's Blast for targeted AoE with no questions asked, but the extra +0.75% health and +0.62% lethal resistance from Air Burst seemed actually worthwhile for a tanker.
After the respec Thunder Girl ended up with 3049 max HP (at level 48) and 71.2% lethal resist, which was about the same for HPs but considerable improvement on resists. I solo'd a few missions in Rikti War Zone and Peregrine Island to test the new build out, and she seemed really survivable (though admittedly soloing usually won't generate enough damage to seriously worry a tank; will need to try tanking for a big team) but she would run dry on END pretty often. I'm planning to get Stamina at 49 in order to alleviate that.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
[ QUOTE ]
I rebooted my claws/will stalker; still a catgirl, I'm afraid, but I dumped the tiger stripes for leopard print, and wrote up an origin story based on Mesoamerican jaguar cults. Solo'd up to 5, then joined a 3-player pickup team in Port Oakes, where we did an Atlas mayhem followed by a few paper missions. We did suffer one wipeout in the Atlas mayhem as we entered the bank and got hit by a massive Longbow ambush; our thermal corruptor was worried I'd write bad stuff about him for not healing enough, but really there wasn't much he could've done against the number of Longbow that came for us. We had rushed the bank, and I'm thinking this always seems to result in a big ambush; fighting gradually to the bank seems to string the ambushes out a bit. The other player, an Arachnos widow, said her daughter really liked my toon, which was nice. "So your daughter likes bloodthirsty Central American deities?" I asked. "Or...maybe she just likes cats." The corruptor voted for the former, but I suspect the latter is closer to the truth. Between this team and a later team-up with some SisterhoodFriends villains, the Jaguar Goddess got to level 9.
[/ QUOTE ]
Since you worded this in a way that makes me sound good, I'll admit that the Thermal Corruptor was me =D Note I didn't have my heals slotted with anything good at the time..was only 8 or 9.
6/26/2008
Started off playing Mystery Girl (34 FF/nrg defender) on a Katie TF organized on LBx. Team was 1 warshade, 2 defenders, 2 controllers, scrapper and 2 blasters. Despite having a good amount of buffing we had a lot of stray deaths, especially against the AVs in the first mission; partly this was due to not having a tank type, but I actually feel a few deaths were my fault due to letting force fields go down right before one of the Mary Macomber & friends spawns (an MMI bug in I12 makes it a lot harder to tell when buffs need to be reapplied by watching the buff icons). Nevertheless we got through the KTF in 40mins getting Mystery Girl to level 35 and rewarding me with a marginal recipe.
I went to Icon to fix Mystery Girl's skirt; she has the bridal skirt, which isn't messed up as obscenely as some of the others, but the pattern on it was all twisted around, making it look weird. Ended up spending infl instead of costume tokens since it was a pretty small change.
After that I switched to Maitresse (26 necro/storm MM) who also had a messed up skirt; she has the miniskirt with slits on the side, and that actually is pretty obscene looking when twisted around, so I went to the tailor and fixed it straightaway.
Playing Maitresse I agreed to help someone on LHO channel get the explore badge from the Steel Canyon mayhem mission. I thought this would be just one person so would be pretty quick, but I found I was on a team of 6 -- one player was 3-boxing and another 2-boxing and they wanted the badge for all of them. This took a little longer but we got the explore badge and robbed the bank, and one of them gave Maitresse 500K infamy for the trouble.
I then joined an Operative Renault (Sharkhead) SF organized on the Sisterhood channel. The team mix was:
crab spider
dark/storm corruptor
thug/dark MM
necro/storm MM (me)
fortunata
With no real melee people, the other stormy and I ran hurricane non-stop. This hugely nerfed most of the things we fought; we caused a little scatter, but I tried to position myself so that I would push mobs either towards the team or into corners, and I could see the corruptor doing the same. Most of the missions went pretty well, though we did have some trouble in the Defeat Shockstorm mission; the entrance area was connected to a walkway with a sharp drop off into a lower room, and some of the team and jumped down there right when a big ambush showed up and attacked us at the door. With the team split up on two different levels of the room, the ambush managed to wipe us out. We were fine after we regrouped though. Shockstorm (a boss) and Barracuda (an AV) went down pretty easily for us.
The last mission against Calystix was particularly messy, though. While clearing a path towards Calystix, we aggroed the AV by mistake, and the AV spawned a lot of adds resulting in several deaths. Once we beat Calystix, the Eye of the Leviathan awoke and we started fighting it; I ran up close hoping snowstorm and hurricane would nerf the Eye into helplessness. But as it got low on life a lot more coralax showed up as adds, causing another wipeout. We regrouped and cleared the adds separately and then attacked the Eye again. When it got low on life we switched to fighting off the adds, hoping to clear them and then turn back to the Eye; but the coralax spawned much faster than we could kill them, and we ended up getting wiped out again. Finally we resolved to clear the coralax again, then focus all damage on the Eye (ignoring adds) in hopes of zerging it out with sheer DPS. This actually worked, and we completed the SF in 2hrs 7mins. Maitresse got to 28 and I picked up Steamy Mist as a new power.
I finished the night playing Flying Tiger (11 MA/will scrapper on Triumph) on a 3 player Demolition Girls team doing level 11 radio missions in Steel Canyon. We were 2 scrappers and a tanker so lacked support and/or finesse, but we sure beat the heck out of everything we met. Got to level 12 (taking Indomitable Will for mez protection) and called it a night.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
6/30/2008
Thursday night, I solo'd a bit with Jaguar Goddess (10 claw/will stalker), before being invited to a 5-player pickup team doing missions in Port Oakes. The dominator on this team was great; his back story was that he was a cultist trying to bring the powers of evil gods into the world, and since Jaguar Goddess is an evil goddess, he was constantly roleplaying a worshipful attitude towards her. I tried to respond in kind by intoning various ominous evil pronouncements, which was great fun. Anyway, we did a King's Row mayhem, which we narrowly finished with 30 seconds left on the clock, and the Steal Outbreak from the Lost mission, on which we suffered a wipeout due to fighting a nasty group that had 3 of those mezzing Lost bosses in it. But after regrouping we were able to complete the mission just fine. Got Jaguar Goddess to level 12 and DOs.
Friday night, I did a Faathim the Kind TF as Spacegirl (46 mind/rad controller) which was made up of mostly Sisterhood with some pickup people. Team mix was:
bs/SR scrapper
dm/inv scrapper
mind/FF controller
mind/rad controller (me)
archery/nrg blaster
inv/SS tanker
emp/dark defender
MA/SR scrapper
We got off to a rocky start, having 2 partial team wipes due to aggroing multiple groups of Rularuu. I died a lot, as I drew a lot of aggro by using rad debuffs, and I haven't played a rad emission character in awhile, so maybe my timing on debuffs is a little off; I always want to open up with AoE debuffs straight away, but after some practice I managed to control my aggro a bit better, I think. The tanker also complained of getting detention fielded a lot, and our FF controller didn't have any of the ally buffs, so we were pretty squishy. Also our MA/SR scrapper went linkdead early on and never returned, leaving us fighting 8-player spawns with 7 players.
Anyway, after the first couple missions I think we started working together better, though we did suffer another partial wipeout due to the team inadvertantly splitting up while fighting the Malta guarding the Key of Destruction. We also took out Baphomet, getting the Demon Slayer badge, and I got the Unyielding badge for clearing debt (um, yay?).
In the final fight against Lanaru the Mad, the AV immediately flattened half the team, including me, almost immediately with some horrific AoE; the rest of the team fought him down to 10% life, then we wiped out. I think we maybe needed better control on how we aggro'd him. After we rez'd and regrouped, we took him out just fine though. Finished the TF in 4hrs 3mins.
On Saturday, I started off playing Miss Molotov (12 fire/fire scrapper) as an SK on a 7 player Sisterhood team running level 24 missions in Independence Port and Talos Island. My bio (basically a funny story of one of her first adventures) got a lot of laughs which was fun. Our team was very support-heavy and I was the only melee, so I got to rush in attacking mobs and sorta-tank them. Got to level 15, taking Super Jump at 14.
After that I played Mercy Beaucoup (18 emp/ice defender) as an SK on an 8-player team of mixed LEGION and pickup people, running level 36 missions in Brickstown. This went pretty well overall; though, it felt to me like I was pulling most of the weight on support (between buffing Fortitude and healing) while our kin and other empath would occasionally throw out a buff or heal, but not with any regularity. When the team did a Dark Astoria mission (which Mercy couldn't enter due to the min level of 21) and I switched to Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) to exemp down, it seemed like we had a lot more deaths, until we adjusted playstyle to match the different lineup. I didn't mind exemping, but both the other support people left the team right after that mission, so it made sense to bring Mercy back as an SK for the next mission. Did a couple more missions in Founders Falls and ended with Mercy at level 20. I normally would take Stamina at 20, but Mercy doesn't seem to have END problems (especially since getting Recovery Aura) so I decided to take Clear Mind instead.
Finished Saturday night playing Lady Arachne (38 bane spider). I ended up choosing Build Up for her level 38 power, though I find that it always causes her to draw a bane spider mace, then put it away and redraw her gun (looking silly and burning valuable build up time), which I'm not very happy with. Still, considering she has 3 AoE attacks, Build Up seems like it should be great. Played on a 3-player Liberty Force team, all Arachnos soldiers, and we beat up an AV level Silver Mantis and AV level Black Scorpion. Ran into some Night Widows too, and getting blinded by their smoke grenades made me kind of wish I had taken the Tactics clone from the Wolf spider powersets instead.
On Sunday I joined a random 8-player pickup team as Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) doing level 50 missions in Peregrine Island, fighting mostly Malta. When the team leader left, I ended up inheriting the star, so I recruited some more people and we did some radio missions in Peregrine Island. We had a well balanced team of good players, and we thoroughly trounced the bad guys in these missions, so much so that the team demanded I raise my difficulty setting (though I was on Unyielding already, so could only make it one step harder). Our defender wanted to do his outdoor Freakshow map (clearing all the mobs but not clicking the glowies, so that he could save it) and our tanker demonstrated a very nice technique of having the tank jump to the far side of each mob, causing all the bad guys to turn to face away from the team (thus avoiding cone AoEs). My own tanking is a bit more haphazard, so I'll have to remember that trick.
Took a break for a few hours, then came back and fought a building fire in Steel Canyon with a team of 3; also managed to buy a Prophecy from Wentworths (to help craft a purple recipe) for only 1.1M infl, which is the lowest price I've seen in months. Between Cimerora and some salvage drop changes, arcane rare salvage seems much more affordable now; meanwhile, tech rare salvage has gone from nearly worthless to fairly valuable. A friend suggested that the nerf to the Family farm was responsible for this. Both these trends seem like a good thing for the health of the in-game economy.
Playing Kashira (9 ninja/ninja stalker) I managed to solo a level 9 elite boss, Lt Blechley (from the Council's Vampyre story arc) which I felt pretty lucky to pull off. I also played Thunder Girl (48 will/nrg tanker) and duo'd a few timed Cimerora missions with a blaster sidekick; this seemed to work pretty well and I'm quite pleased with how much Tough is helping against the Romans, though her END use is still awfully high.
Finished the night playing Lady Arachne (38 bane spider) as a lackey on a team of Liberty Force villains (5 Arachnos soldiers and 1 mastermind; also picked up a traps corruptor for a short time) doing level 43ish missions in Grandville. We beat up a Hero-level Positron and a Hero-level Valkyrie, getting Lady Arachne to level 39.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
7/2/2008
On Monday night I played Action Figure (level 5 MA/will scrapper) on a 4-player Sisterhood team doing radio missions in King's Row. On one mission against Hellions we had a partial team wipe when we aggroed a couple groups including Damned bosses, causing our two squishies to die and only myself and another scrapper still fighting. The other scrapper leveled up during the fight, though, which made her uber enough to beat up enough more Hellions that we rez'd the two dead teammates through sheer exp. Got to level 8 on this team, picking up Combat Jumping and Crane Kick.
Tuesday night I logged in and read the LBx MOTD advertising level 4 PvP (and only level 4, no exemping down) in the arena. I rushed to make a new character and level her up to 4; I chose a dark/dark defender, which the common wisdom considers pretty bad in PvP, but I figured Dark Blast and Gloom do a lot of damage, and I hoped to leverage this with Tar Patch's -RES debuff. Tar Patch is usually not very good in PvP because people can just leave it, but with no travel powers at 4, I was thinking it would be pretty effective, especially in a big FFA where it could hit multiple people. I ended up with the powers Dark Blast, Gloom, Tar Patch and Darkest Night. I decided not to take Twilight Grasp (the heal) since I figured a long animation heal would not be very good in a big free for all (dying and rezzing to full health seemed the better strategy) and I didn't take Moonbeam because I dislike how long it takes to cast snipe powers.
I hopped onto a sewers team for a few groups of mobs to get to level 4, then headed to Pocket D to try and join up, but by the time I got there everything must've been wrapped up as there were no arena matches going or getting ready to go that I could see. I ended up dueling with another latecomer instead, an earth/rad controller; her powers were the earth immob, earth hold, radiant aura and accelerate metabolism. Her hold totally wrecked me; I was hoping the -ACC debuffs from dark blast and darkest night would make me unhittable (was around -30% or so ToHit), but she could pretty regularly land both immobs and holds on me; we agreed this was probably due to the I12 accuracy buff for newbies. My dark blasts had higher DPS than her earth control (though containment was painful) but the fact that she could heal herself and I couldn't was really bad for me; I managed to outsmart myself by not taking the dark heal, which is bigger than the rad heal and probably would've made a big difference. Our first match we did inspirationless, which made her hold very dominant; she won 6-1, and I think my one kill was due to managing to run her out of END. For our second match we loaded up on inspirations and I took 8 Break Frees (all you can hold at level 4) but I still got held and beat up a lot, and most of the time if I got her down on life she would manage to hold me then run away long enough to heal. She won the second one 6-2, at which point I conceded she probably should always win that matchup. I'll try a different AT next time.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
7/7/2008
Wednesday night, I started off fighting fires in Steel Canyon with Police Woman (50 AR/dev) and a team of heroes that got up to 5 players before we defeated the fire.
After that I switched to Jaguar Goddess (12 claw/will stalker) to team up with someone from the Sisterhood channel who was street sweeping groups of enemies in Cap au Diable; the other player was 3-boxing three masterminds, which was very effective but a little dull, since I would get to stab one mob, then the triple horde of pets would swarm everything else. So after about half an hour I swapped out to do something else.
That ended up being an Imperious TF organized on LBx channel. The team leader asked for a healer, and the closest I had to this description is my stormy, Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender). Our team mix was:
fire/kin controller
fire/fire blaster
crab spider
bane spider
storm/archery defender (me)
rad/psy defender
fire/nrg blaster
stone/fire tanker
After I joined I noticed they already had a rad and a kin and high DEF from the VEATs, so not sure they really needed a healer, but I happily tossed O2 boost around in between hurling freezing rain and lightning storms. The stone tanker was quite skilled; he was into herding, though, which was OK I guess. The blasters, however, were highly suicidal and would occasionally run off to Inferno their own personal group of mobs, which sometimes they survived and sometimes they didn't (which I decided was Not My Fault). Anyway, we had no serious issues and ended up completing the TF in 1hr 37mins.
On Thursday, I did a Katie Hannon TF with Mystery Girl (35 FF/nrg defender). Our team mix was 2 controllers, 3 blasters, and 3 defenders. This sounds good on paper, but without a tanker or something similar we had trouble soaking alpha strikes, causing us to nearly wipe out on Mary #10. Also, one of the blasters quit the TF after the first mission. We still completed the TF, but it took 44mins altogether.
Later on I played Primadonna (29 sonic/kin corruptor) on a 4-villain Northern Lights team fighting level 32s. We went against Romulus the warshade and a bunch of Longbow, and suffered two wipeouts due to aggroing multiple groups of Longbow. After a couple missions our team mix had shifted so that we had 3 players with a weird level spread: a 32 stalker SKing a 22 brute, and me as a corruptor at 29, and we were fighting level 35 Rikti. This was a recipe for disaster as I couldn't hit the +6 Rikti with Transfusion at all, resulting in us all getting beat up several times. The brute switched to a 22 merc/FF mastermind, who still needed SKing, but the added defense let us make forward progress.
After that I played Mega (50 SS/elec brute) to help a rad/therm corruptor friend complete the Midnight Squad story arc. It turns out Mega got credit for unlocking Cimerora even though they weren't working on her missions, just for being present, I guess. Also had a Pangean Soil fall in her lap while on this story arc, which was nice.
On Friday, Mystery Girl did another Katie Hannon TF with 2 blasters, 2 defenders, 2 controllers, 1 scrapper and 1 tank. This was a well balanced team that completed the KTF in 26 minutes. I got a level 35 Miracle +Recovery recipe, definitely one of the better prizes. I went ahead and crafted it, still trying to decide which of my alts will end up slotting it.
After that, Lady Arachne (39 bane spider) joined an Imperious TF organized on the Sisterhood channel. Team mix was:
peacebringer
crab spider
bane spider (me, with mostly gun AoEs instead of mace melee)
bs/SR scrapper
bs/regen scrapper
fire/rad controller
emp defender
robo/trap MM
The VEATs and the MM's FF Generator capped our DEF while close together, which was nice. The peacebringer and the empath were having all sorts of connectivity problems Friday night, though, repeatedly going linkdead; it sounded pretty widespread, from what I was hearing on global chat channels, though fortunately I wasn't directly affected myself. Also we were on the first mission near the end when we found that we were unable to free Sister Solaris; for some reason she got stuck and could not be moved to the final goal. We waited for a little while and ended up quitting the team and restarting the TF. The empath gave up on the TF after repeated disconnects, and was replaced by an AR blaster. After that things went pretty well, up to the last mission.
In the last mission we promptly got wiped out by the initial ambush somehow, which I think took some of us by surprise so we didn't react very effectively. Then when we were clearing the trash near the AVs in preparation for fighting Romulus, one of the mobs with a rad toggle on it managed to run away and aggro Romulus and the 3 Nictus AVs onto us, unexpectedly. We quickly went into AV-fighting mode and managed to defeat Romulus once, but then all the Nictus ghost adds overwhelmed us, resulting in another wipeout. After regrouping, though, we managed to defeat the rest of the AVs, completing the TF in 2hrs 13mins. The TF was really good to Lady Arachne, who got to level 41 (took the Tactics-lookalike power) and found a Pangean Soil and Essence of the Furies.
On Saturday I did yet another ITF with Sisterhood, this time as Spacegirl (47 mind/rad controller). Team mix was:
fire/kin controller
ill/kin controller
mind/rad controller (me)
bs/regen scrapper
emp/elec defender
spine/dark scrapper
stone/nrg tanker
crab spider
I was thinking the big ambushes would be easy fodder for Spacegirl's Mass Confusion and Mass Hypnosis AoE controls, but it wasn't anywhere near that easy; it seems the Romans have some inherent mez resist and/or are getting Clear Mind from the copious numbers of surgeons they have. I could confuse the surgeons and bosses and stuff, but it was quite a bit harder than for typical mobs. Resisted AoE controls, plus aggro from my anchored rad debuffs, caused me to draw a lot of fire, resulting in several KO's; though it seemed like all the squishies were having problems with this, and both the empath and I got to rez a lot of teammates. Nevertheless, we powered through the ITF in 1hr 52mins, with a few stray deaths but no serious wipeouts. Spacegirl got to level 48 and received an Unbounded Leap: +Stealth recipe as TF reward.
Later on Saturday, a friend asked me to help debuff an AV he was about to fight. I exemped Rain Dancer (storm is also great for debuffs) down to 42 to help fight Nosferatu, and our team rapidly grew from 3 players to 8 players, mostly LEGION and Sisterhood. We beat up Nosferatu and Nemesis, both as AVs. One scrapper noticed me using Hurricane to push scattered mobs into a tighter group and exclaimed "Rain Dancer is using knockback for the power of good!" which made me happy. I really like the stormy powerset!
After that, I did another Katie TF with Mystery Girl. The team was 1 blaster, 2 scrappers, 1 warshade, 2 defenders, 1 controller, 1 tanker, and had no problems finishing it in 28 mins. Didn't get anything memorable though.
Finished Saturday night playing Maitresse (28 necro/storm MM; did I mention I liked storm?) on a 7-player villain team of Sisterhood and some pickup people. Got to level 29.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
7/8/2008
Started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) in Recluse's Victory for some light skirmishing with villains. Fought a brute and corruptor for a bit, then a corruptor and a MM for a bit; I mostly got the worst of this, managing to kill the brute once but dying several times, mostly from getting crushed by heavies. I saw a couple other blasters buzzing around taking potshots at the villains also, but we weren't really organized and since I was just messing around I didn't try to team up.
A scrapper on Sisterhood channel asked for help with an AV, however, so I switched to Thunder Girl (48 will/nrg tanker) and she and two scrappers managed to beat down a level 50 Chimera AV without any support toons at all. I did burn some orange inspirations and Strength of Will to keep Thunder Girl's lethal resist really high; Chimera seemed to do a little toxic damage that leaked through, but between regen and a few green inspirations, we managed to outlast Chimera in a fairly lengthy fight.
After a short break, I came back to play Police Woman on a 6 player Sisterhood team, exemped down to 37 to fight level 40 Rikti on the Midnight Squad story arc. This mostly went well, though I seemed to draw a lot of fire, I guess from using Full Auto pretty freely. A Shadow Cyst Crystal gave us a little trouble which caused me to punch Eye of the Magus and some other inspirations, but we managed to beat it.
I also got invited to a new chat channel, Ryu's Lounge, which seems to have a lot of nice people on it. They invited me and some other Sisterhood characters to an Imperious TF. The team leader asked for a rad, so I switched to Spacegirl (48 mind/rad controller). Our team mix was:
kin/rad defender
grav/kin controller
claw/SR scrapper
dark/fire tanker
ice/ice blaster
emp/elec defender
mind/rad controller (me)
ill/emp controller
This TF started around midnight, which is later than I normally like to start TFs, but it had a lot of fun players on it, so I went ahead anyway. Our DPS with the above class mix was a little low, and after a second ITF with Spacegirl, I definitely feel that Romans are more resistant than normal to controls, but we still managed to get through the TF without any serious difficulties. In the final encounter against Romulus, we focused all firepower on Romulus himself; I don't think we did anything special to stop the healing Nictus AV, and as a result it took quite a while to repeatedly pound Romulus down while he was being healed, but we eventually were able to do it. We finished the TF in 2hrs 8mins. I was pretty tired by the end, but Spacegirl reached level 49 (haven't decided what power to take yet) and got a very nice level 50 Luck of the Gambler +7.5% recharge for her trouble. This is the second one that has dropped for her, making her the luckiest of my alts by far.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
lol Ryus lounge
/gignore @username is the best feature of this game. It's also probably the least used feature.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Nights_Dawn
Hazy is right
|
7/10/2008
On Tuesday I started off playing Dreamwind (20 storm/psy defender on Protector) with an 8 player team of Demolition Girls running missions in Croatoa. I found that the combination of Dreamwind's rapidly-beating insect wings with thermal shields and steamy mist effects, resulted in a strobe-like effect that actually made me dizzy to look at. After a few missions, this bothered me enough that I switched to another character, Amethyst Star (23 warshade on Protector). You'd think that a warshade's powers have a lot of graphical effects too (what with orbiting death and many purple shields) but this was actually less bothersome to me. Anyway, did a few more missions before taking a break.
Later that night I played Thunder Girl (48 will/nrg tanker on Liberty) and joined a 4-player pickup team that was farming high level Banished Pantheon masks in a Portal Corp mission. Normally I'm against farming, but badging is different, in my opinion. We cleared the whole outdoor map of Banished Pantheon twice, getting Thunder Girl to level 49 and her badge progress bar to about 50% (started at maybe 5-10%), before the team broke up. At level 49 I took Stamina, which felt like a very ironic pick for a final power, but seemed to make sense; her END drain has gone up since picking up Tough, Fireblast and Fireball, all of which she didn't have until fairly high level.
After that team broke up, Thunder Girl accepted an invitation to another pickup team, a well-balanced 8-player team doing Praetorian AV missions. We had a pretty strong team and were able to stomp Malaise, Siege, Mother Mayhem, Black Swan and Diabolique. One of the players commented that "Watching Thunder Girl and Black Swan go at it was pretty hot" which was kind of cool and yet kind of dirty at the same time.
I started off Wednesday night messing around in the character creator trying to make a newbie fire/fire blaster, thinking I might try and team up with a friend who had started a new alt, but I took too long thinking of a name, designing a costume, etc., and he logged off before I got into the tutorial.
Instead I played Kashira (9 ninja/ninja stalker on Liberty), duoing several missions with a friend's claw/regen stalker. We did the Radio's missions in Port Oakes, successfully getting the Plague Carrier badge and assassinating many bosses and stuff. The other stalker was higher level and regen besides, so I let her start most fights and "tank" for our duo. It seemed to make sense to start most fights with a double-assassin-strike (on the same mob if there was a boss, on different ones otherwise) and scrap our way through anything that was left. This worked pretty well and Kashira got to level 10, training in Build Up.
After the stalkers split up I played Thunder Girl again, joining a pickup team fighting Praetorian AVs. Several Sisterhood players joined up as well. This was the first night after several energy melee nerfs went in; most noticable was the animation change to Energy Transfer, which is much longer now. I thought this wouldn't really bother me that much, and on paper Energy Transfer still has a huge DPA; but in actual gameplay I found the new animation very annoying and disruptive to my attack chain. I ended up moving Energy Transfer out of the "most commonly used attacks" and moved Fireblast into its place for general purpose use. In retrospect it is very odd that I found the new animation so long and annoying; by comparison, I love Eagle's Claw, which has both a longer animation and a lower damage value than the nerfed Energy Transfer. Maybe part of it is because Eagle's Claw looks amazingly cool, while Energy Transfer's new animation (I believe the same as Bitter Freeze Ray?) is kind of underwhelming. Heck, I even like Barrage's animation, which is too slow and too little damage, but at least looks decent. Seriously thinking about respecing ET out, but I don't want to do anything too hasty just yet.
Anyway, this team was decent and we beat up Mother Mayhem, Battle Maiden and Dominatrix, and Thunder Girl hit level 50 right as we completed the mission to defeat Dominatrix. Thunder Girl is now my 10th level 50 character to date. Haven't trained up yet but will probably slot up Stamina a little, and maybe the passive regen powers like Fast Healing and Health.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
7/14/2008
Started the weekend playing a newbie fire/fire blaster, Fire Emerald, on Liberty. I joined an 8-player sewers team which rapidly raced her up to level 5; we had a kheldian on our team, though, which gave us the unexpected joy of running into a Nictus crystal deep in the sewers at level 5. This resulted in a team wipe which caused us to hospital and break up. Later on I solo'd a little bit to get to level 6. So far I've taken Flares, Ring of Fire, Fireblast, Fireball, and Swift.
After that I solo'd a little as Jaguar Goddess (12 claw/will stalker), running through Shelly Percy's Midas story arc to get to level 13.
On Saturday night there was a level 4 PvP event announced on Protector server, and I figured, what the heck, I can get a character to level 4 pretty quick. After getting thoroughly chain-held by a controller while playing a dark/dark defender at the last Liberty level 4 PvP, I decided I'd play a blaster in order to ignore mezzes through sheer Defiance. And so Parapsychic, the level 4 psy/fire blaster was born! For my level 4 powers, I took Psionic Dart, Ring of Fire, Telekinetic Blast, Mental Blast, with my 2 slots from level 3 in Telekinetic Blast and loaded with mighty TOs of the recharge variety. This actually worked really well; the low level psy blast powers are really quite good and the -rchg and knockback was real nice. I took Ring of Fire because it was the most damaging level 1 secondary power (according to the numbers), but its short range was sometimes a drawback.
My first game was a 4-way free for all including me, an elec blaster, a rad/nrg defender, and a MA scrapper. The match was set in the monkey cage and it was very bloody, seemed to be all about someone getting hurt and then everyone trying to pounce on the wounded and/or killsteal the others. With a strong attack chain and TK blast for spike damage, I did really well in this format, scoring 18 kills during the 10 minute match; the next highest person got 9.
After that was a 5 vs 5 team match in Perez Park which was fairly hectic, but I think I had 2 blasters and 3 support on my team, and we coordinated fire, so we did quite well, winning the match. I got 15 kills along the way. I tuned in to the internet radio station that was broadcasting coverage of this event, which was kinda cool as the DJ was PvPing along side us, and announcing results over the air. (Well, over the net.)
Next was a 16 player FFA set in the Steel Canyon map, and I managed to killsteal my way to the top, claiming 14 kills and winning; though it was a close thing, the next person had 13 kills.
Next was a four way team match, with four teams of 4 players each, set in the Eden cave. This was crazy but lots of fun. This map was so big that a lot of time was spent after death running back to where the action was. On my team were me, 2 defenders and a dominator; we did okay but were a little light on DPS. At the end of the match the top team had 30 kills and our team had 21 kills (so we were second..I think..). I personally got 10 of our team's kills; it really feels like blaster DPS is very high at this level relative to other players, especially with the new defiance.
My last match was a 5 vs 5 team match; the person officially running the event had logged, but someone else started a match and he kinda rigged the teams in his favor, reassigning players and teams. Though I don't really know Protector server well, by that point I had a pretty good idea of which players knew what they were doing, and most of them (including me) ended up on the same team. We fought on Siege's factory map, and it was something of a rout, 35 to 21.
Anyway, after things broke up on Protector I went back to Liberty, logging in Action Figure and running over to the Independence Port Icon store to tweak her costume. She has kind of an olive drab, GI Joe look going on, but a friend told me that her face and hairstyle looked just like someone else's character we know, so I decided to change it around, making her a bit darker skinned and giving her a red beret. Another friend invited me to team, and we did some radio missions in King's Row, starting with a small team but eventually growing to 6 players and completing a King's Row safeguard. Got Action Figure to level 11. I think I took Swift at level 10; I'm so used to having that power that any character without Swift feels horribly slow.
I spent most of Sunday on Triumph server, starting off playing Grey Wings (35 archery/fire blaster...it works better than it sounds, really) on a Citadel TF organized by Demolition Girls SG. Team mix was:
rad/rad defender
plant/thermal controller
psy/mental blaster
stone/fire tanker
cold/dark defender
sonic/nrg blaster
archery/fire blaster (me)
We blazed through Citadel TF with no deaths; the thermal and cold shields made even the most suicidal blaster survivable. We also made really good time, 2hrs 2mins; I got a sorta-bleh Chance for Recharge recipe as reward.
Later that night I played Alice Slaughter (22 dual blade/will brute on Triumph) as a lackey on a 6 player team of Demolition Girls SG villains. We were doing a mission where you track down Back Alley Brawler on some kind of Longbow battleship, and we kinda kamikazed past the ship's exterior defenses to get in the door to the inside. This was trickier for the lackeys and squishies, some of whom died trying to get in. Once in, we battled lots of Longbow. Our team was 4 VEATs, a brute (me) and a dark/traps corruptor; with stacked defense, all the minions, lieutenants and even bosses were pretty easy; the Hero-level Back Alley Brawler was another matter, though, as he still had a decent chance to hit, and he hits hard. I taunted him onto me anyway. I really like how the dual blades taunt looks; Alice looks quite wicked calling things out by pointing her kitchen knives at things. Unfortunately though we had capped DEF we had no real source of healing, so I ended up burning all my inspirations before finally getting floored by BAB, then the team finished him off. Alice got to level 23, though.
Finished the night playing Spacegirl (49 mind/rad controller) on a 7-player team organized on Ryu's Lounge, beating up Carnies and Arachnos in radio missions in Peregrine Island. Got a decent amount of exp, into the last 10% of level 49; thinking I'll try to have her hit level 50 doing something dramatic, maybe a TF or against Tyrant.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
7/15/2008
Started off playing Fire Emerald (6 fire/fire blaster), soloing a few missions to get to 7, then joining an 8-player pickup team doing the Frostfire mission. The team was relatively well balanced (tank, 3 damage, 4 support) but had a wide level spread which meant some people were facing fairly dangerous opponents. Most of our healing was kinetic-based so I pretty quickly learned to stay in melee range if I wanted heals, but another of our blasters never figured this out and died a lot due to instinctively moving away from mobs that were hurting him. Our tanker had a pretty realistic idea of his durability at level 10 (i.e.: not much) and so was pretty careful not to rush into suicidal fights, and I tried to help this out by occasionally pulling; though one of our controllers had a bad habit of AoE immobilizing during a pull, which tended to have bad results, and we suffered one team wipe against Keystone as a result. Still, we made it up to Frostfire; the illusion controller somehow managed to deceive the elite boss into attacking his buddies, and we were able to mop them all up quickly. The team broke up after that, but left Fire Emerald at level 9, and I solo'd a little more to hit level 10. I took Combat Jumping at 8 and Fire Sword Circle at 10 (and I'm still amazed that blasters can take Fire Sword Circle so early). I also wrote Fire Emerald (who is science origin) a lengthy science fictiony background story about a doomed NASA expedition discovering alien artifacts.
After that I joined an Imperious TF, on Rugged difficulty, being organized on the Sisterhood channel. The team leader asked for a healer, but I don't really have any "healer" characters that have Cimerora unlocked, so I played Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender). Our team mix was:
fire/nrg blaster
ice/kin controller
bs/inv scrapper
fire/mental blaster
fire/SS tanker
kat/regen scrapper
storm/archery defender (me)
cold/ice defender
We started at almost the same time as another ITF being organized on LBx, and so we decided to make it a "race", for which I actually think a stormy is better than a pure healer. It did not actually feel like we needed that much healing, though our nonstop freezing rain and sleet seemed to both mitigate damage and made them die faster. My occasional O2 blast seemed enough to keep people up for the most part, barring a few nasty damage spikes. I ran hurricane a lot more than I normally do, especially on a team with scrappers; the enemies on this TF seem mostly resistant to being pushed. I even uncorked an occasional Tornado in some of the more confined caves.
We took a few small shortcuts to help our speed on the race; during the first mission, after rescuing the last generic sybil, we skipped ahead to the final encounter. During the second mission, we tried to leave several nictus crystals alive til the end, then we'd simultaneously destroy them all and exit. We found it was easy for us to accidentally overdamage and kill these crystals though, so we only had 4 crystals survive to the end of the mission. In due time we reached Romulus and killed him 4 times straight. Learned a new trick; moving out of line of sight (i.e. behind a wall) when Romulus dies causes the massive AoE stun from his self-rez to miss you. Anyway, we blazed through this in 1hr 4mins. We finished before the other TF team, and I think this is actually the fastest one I've ever completed. I got a fairly marginal Pacing of the Turtle recipe for my trouble.
After that I played a little on Pinnacle server, where Perfect Woman's (24 will/SS tanker) supergroup seems to be a little more active. Solo'd a couple missions, then exemped down to join a 6-player Pinnacle League SG team doing level 18 Faultline missions, defeating an AV-level Nocturne along the way.
Finished the night trying to solo the Midnight Squad story arc with Flamebait (35 fire/thermal corruptor on Liberty), figuring I should probably have an actual "healer" with Cimerora unlocked. I'm pretty used to playing Flamebait on a team of 5 to 8 corruptors, though, and so my ability to solo with her was terrible. I think I died twice to a succubus boss, then once to a CoT mage boss, before I was able to complete the first mission and called it a night.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
7/18/2008
Tuesday night I mostly played Perfect Woman (24 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle). Her SG on Pinnacle, the Pinnacle League, had a meeting; it had become a lot more active lately so there were actually 17 players there. The SG is thematically based on DC heroes and so it was kinda cool to meet some of these people and see their costumes. After the meeting we split up into several teams based on approximate level, and so I ended up being the leader for an 8-player mid 20s Pinnacle League team doing missions in Croatoa. Notable stuff: a level 2 sidekick managed to run from Atlas Park, through Steel Canyon, to our mission in Croatoa without dying (we weren't PLing him but did want to include him on a team). We started off with a grueling battle against Croatoa witches where we got pounded by snowstorm, hurricane, lightning storm and electric blasts; the debuffs and END drain were pretty killer, but we eventually managed to slog our way through that and move on to missions against Fir Bolg and Tuatha that were a lot easier, though I did have to keep trying to save a near suicidal scrapper with severe scrapper lock issues. Got to level 25 before the team broke up.
After that I switched to Lady Arachne (41 bane spider on Liberty) and joined a 7 player Liberty Force SG team of mostly VEATs; we had 5 VEATs and 2 corruptors. I think all our VEATs were either banes or crabs, we don't have any regular widow type VEATs for some reason; but between the VEATs and corruptors we laid down massive debuff and damage and thoroughly stomped a Silver Mantis AV and a Ghost Widow AV. We were actually able to outpace Ghost Widow's self heal even with lots of pets in melee range of her. This team got Lady Arachne to level 42.
On Wednesday night I started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) on a 5-player firefighting team that put out a fire in Steel Canyon. After that I switched to Primadonna (29 sonic/kin corruptor on Liberty) for an Operative Renault (Sharkhead) SF; team mix was:
robo/trap MM
thug/dark MM
fortunata
night widow
ice/kin corruptor
sonic/kin corruptor (me)
I started off kind of annoyed at the ice/kin because I ended up SB'ing the rest of the team, but would have to repeatedly ask him to SB me; one of my pet peeves about teams with multiple kins is that the extra ones invariably slack on buffs. During the second mission the ice/kin and his sidekick split off from the rest of the team and got themselves killed, which didn't help my opinion. In the mission to Defeat Shockstorm, we got slammed by a couple ambushes; I tried stealthing to Shockstorm several times, but it really looked to me like the ambushes are actually triggered by passing certain hidden tripwires in the mission, and they aggro onto the person who crosses it first even if they're stealthed. I was pretty quick to spot those ambushes and run away so they didn't smash me. The team beat back the first two ambushes, then wiped out to a large group of Longbow which I think had two empathy wardens in it.
While running back from the hospital, both the night widow and the ice/kin quit the SF without saying anything. The remaining 4 of us talked about quitting but agreed to press on. Getting back to the mission, it seemed we had defeated all the ambushes and I was then able to stealth to Shockstorm and TP the team over to beat him. Primadonna hit level 30 and I was totally thinking I wanted to take Amplify, but at the last moment I decided to get Increase Density instead, to help with the massive knockback that occurs during the last mission of the SF. I think this actually did help keep the other teammates from being blown around quite so much, though I still got KB'd all over the place. We were eventually able to bring down Calystix and the Eye, though, finishing in 2hrs 38mins. I got a Tempest: Chance of Endurance Drain recipe, which I totally thought was a booby prize but the last Black Market sale was for 5M infamy, so I threw it on the Black Market for that and hoped for the best.
Thursday night, I did a Katie TF as Mystery Girl (35 FF/nrg defender on Liberty). We were on Rugged difficulty and had a team of 2 tankers, peacebringer, 3 defenders, scrapper and blaster. Our DPS seemed very low and it took us quite awhile to get through the first mission and its 10 Mary Macombers; at one point the blaster couldn't hold it any more and had to go to the bathroom while fighting one of the AVs, and our progress on damaging her visibly stopped while he was AFK. Anyway, we eventually got through the TF in 55mins; longer than average, and I got an unexciting recipe, but I got mad amounts of rare salvage along the way, finding a Mu Vestment, Essence of the Furies and a Prophecy.
After that I solo'd with Flamebait (35 fire/thermal corruptor on Liberty). Had a bit more luck than last time and managed to finish the Midnight Squad story arc, unlocking Cimerora and reaching level 36.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
7/21/2008
Anticipating the double exp weekend, I took Friday off from work and played all day. Well, all day after the initial downtime that caused double exp to go active, anyway.
I started playing Maitresse (29 necro/storm MM on Liberty) and joined an 8-player pickup team led by an SR brute and doing low 30s missions in St. Martial. Aside from one wipeout against Council vampires (due to the team getting a little too spread out) this went really well and got Maitresse to level 32. I picked Dark Blast as my level 30 power (an attack, because I'm a bad mastermind that needs to have buttons to push; I get fidgety if the pets do everything) and Dark Empowerment (the second pet buff) at level 32.
After being on that team for several hours, I switched to hero side, playing Perfect Woman (25 willpower/superstrength tanker on Pinnacle) joining a 7-player Pinnacle League team. This team was very melee heavy (3 tankers, 3 scrappers, 1 rad defender) but we managed to do a bunch of Talos radio missions. We did suffer one wipeout against Circle of Thorns when the team got strung out going up an elevator and some people immediately attacked the CoT on the new level, while others were still looking for the elevator to go up and join them. Otherwise we did fairly well and Perfect Woman got to level 27, taking Kick at level 26, in preparation for getting Tough. I know Boxing is technically a better DPA attack than Kick, but I really hate the animation and wimpy sound that Boxing makes.
After that team broke up I switched back to Liberty and played Mercy Beaucoup (20 empathy/ice defender on Liberty) on a pickup Sister Psyche TF. Our team mix was:
elec/ice blaster
psy/mental blaster
emp/ice defender (me)
2 will/SS tankers
elec/nrg blaster
katana/regen scrapper
grav/emp controller (only heal aura and rez for emp powers)
We had some really novice players on this team, including the leader himself who had started the TF on Rugged difficulty but did not realize that the TF was actually more than one mission, so had to be nudged into getting the next mission from Sister Psyche several times. One of our tankers had very poor power selection, having skipped quick recovery and his mez protect toggle, and I needed to repeatedly remind him to turn his armors back on each time he got mez'd. One of our players didn't understand how to board a train mission, instead wandering across IP and Brickstown until we got him to come to a train station. At one point the team leader wanted us to clear the huge "Defeat Punkadelic" outdoor map for exp, which nearly sparked a revolt. Our regen scrapper was both more experienced and more aggressive than either of our tankers, so I kept Fortitude on him and the scrapper tanked most of the TF.
Despite all these hijinks, I actually had a lot of fun. I try to be more patient with newbies (because newbies are good for the game) and we had a lot of fun joking around while on the TF too. However, between general n00bishness and losing 3 of our 7 players over the course of the TF (one tanker quit halfway through, one blaster quit near the end, and the controller said he needed to "reboot" but never came back), this TF took a really, really long time. In the end we had a blaster, a scrapper, a tanker and an empath defender fighting AV-level Clamor; we weren't really sure we could do it with 4 players since we had no debuffs to speak of, but we actually managed to damage her out without any problems. Total TF time was 5hrs 25mins. Mercy got to level 26, taking Acrobatics at 22, Ice Storm at 24 and Hasten at 26. I normally avoid Ice Storm on my ice blast characters, focusing on single target attacks for DPS, but on my defender, I thought of Ice Storm as being an AoE -rchg debuff with a side effect of doing a little damage. Seemed to be nice though!
After that I played Maitresse again, this time as a lackey on a 7-player LEGION villain team. We didn't have a brute, and I got really cocky and started using my stormyness to pretend to be a tanker, taking alpha strikes and herding mobs together with hurricane, for the VEATs and stalkers to chew up. This actually worked pretty well, or maybe the team was just humoring me. Maitresse got to level 33 on that team.
When the villain team broke up, I ended up getting dragged along to join a 7-player LEGION hero team, playing Miss Molotov (15 fire/fire scrapper on Liberty) as an SK to an 8-player level 44 team. This team was ridiculously scrapper heavy, including 6 scrappers, a sonic defender, and a 2-boxed rad controller. Scrappers with sonic shields are pretty tough though so this went just fine. The only time we had trouble was when we managed to overaggro too many groups of enemies and suffered a partial wipeout; but with a team of scrappers, this is pretty normal. As a sidekick Miss Molotov leveled up crazily fast, hitting level 20 on this team and taking Plasma Shield, Fire Sword Circle and Stamina for powers.
Finished up on Friday night playing Lady Arachne (42 wolf spider on Liberty) on a 5-player all Arachnos Spider team in Rikti War Zone, reaching level 43.
On Saturday I played Perfect Woman some more on Pinnacle, starting off just duoing with a scrapper but eventually building up to an 8-person team doing mostly Croatoa missions. This went well for several hours, getting Perfect Woman to level 30 (picked up Tough at level 28 and Rage at level 30), but tanking is pretty tiring for me and some of my team members were being rude to other people which made me cranky, so I took a break and returned to Liberty.
There I played Miss Molotov some more, joining a 4-player pickup team doing a mission in Perez Park. Our team mix was 2 peacebringers, a blaster, and me as scrapper. Having to tank as a fire scrapper with no support at all made me pretty uneasy, so after finishing the first mission (which did get Miss Molotov to 21) I excused myself and switched to another character.
I played Maitresse some more, joining a 7-player LEGION team doing radio missions in St Martial. We did a Talos mayhem and got to beat up a Hero-level Mynx that tried to stop us from robbing the bank.
Saturday night, I went with friends to see the new Batman movie, the Dark Knight, on a huge IMAX theatre about half an hour from my house; we had bought tickets about a week early, but by that time all the earliest showings were sold out and so the best we could get was a 10:20pm Saturday showing. The newspaper actually reported that the IMAX theatre's projector had overheated for several showings on Friday and a lot of people were understandably angry that they didn't get to see their movie; I was hoping this wouldn't happen to us as it would be pretty annoying. We ended up arriving at the movie theatre an hour early to try and get good seats, and despite buying tickets in advance, we ended up waiting in line for that extra hour and still got only fair-middling seats; though the stadium seating in an IMAX theatre still makes even marginal seats not too bad. Technical difficulties delayed the movie starting for even longer (we all figured they were trying to let the camera cool down from the last showing to avoid a debacle) but finally the movie got started a little after 11pm.
But the wait was worth it. We got to see the Watchmen trailer on the IMAX and it was...ridiculously hi-def and immensely huge and really cool looking. They made Nite Owl (aka Blue Beetle) actually look cool, which I wouldn't have believed possible. The opening scene of The Dark Knight was impressively realistic on the IMAX, and the movie itself was really great. Christian Bale wasn't bad, but Heath Ledger was simply amazing. The Joker was really quite scary AND funny at the same time, and I simply loved all his psychologically-messed-up villain schemes, which were all calculated to turn people against each other and mess with their heads; much cooler than the typical smash-and-grab. I was surprised at how grim the movie was, but it really worked for me. The projector didn't break down so I got to enjoy the whole movie; it was pretty long, and I ended up leaving the theatre at 2am, but amazingly there was another showing after ours, and a long line of people waiting to get in. It was pretty cool.
Back to CoH, on Sunday I was only on a little bit, between sleeping in due to the late movie, having RL stuff to do, and generally being a little tired from so much CoH. But I did play some lowbies on Triumph for a little bit with the Demolition Girls SG, getting Flying Tiger (12 MA/will scrapper) to level 13 and Helen Highwater (10 storm/psy defender) to level 12, and played Perfect Woman on a Pinnacle League team to get to level 31.
Total for the weekend: 27 levels on various characters. Whew! I'm sure other people did a lot more, but that still felt like a lot. It was fun though!
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
7/22/2008
Started off playing Thunder Girl (50 will/nrg tanker); while hanging out at Wentworth's I got invited to an 8-player pickup team fighting its way through a level 50ish Malta story arc. I was the second tanker to join the team so I tried to let the first tanker be the "lead" tank, but the other tanker wasn't that aggressive so I found myself sometimes getting impatient and either jumping in or pulling, taking the alpha strike. I did need to set up a hotkey to target sappers and zap them with my epic hold, though. One of the other players really admired Thunder Girl's costume (mostly the Roman armor with some other pieces mixed in, in patriotic colors), calling it "badass", which was nice. Another player commiserated about the ugly new Energy Transfer animation; I agree Energy Transfer was way too good before, but I don't much like the current animation, I'm hoping the ET animation coming in the next patch is better looking.
At one point one of the two empaths on our team said he felt there was no use for a second empath on the team (since we were doing really well) and asked to switch to a scrapper alt. While he was switching characters, the natural irony of the universe slammed us as we over-aggroed several groups of Malta and wiped out. Those stun grenades are nasty! They managed to stack enough disorients on Thunder Girl to detoggle her, and I rarely keep break frees on non-squishy alts, so that actually proved lethal. Oh well!
After several missions with that team, I switched to playing Perfect Woman (31 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle), tanking for a 6-player team doing radio missions in Founders Falls. Then when that team broke up, I switched back to Liberty and played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) on an Imperious TF organized on LBx. This TF team took awhile to fill up (I think there was some confusion over whose friend would get to come and who would get left out), but we ended up with a team mix of:
crab spider
stone/dark tanker
ice/rad controller
mind/rad controller
dual/will stalker
AR/dev blaster (me)
merc/poison MM
SS/fire brute
We had some problems early on with the team splitting up and fighting different groups as some people followed the tanker and some followed the brute, but once we got that straightened out we totally beat up everything we met. Assault rifle has a bad reputation on the forums but I find its many AoEs with a high rate of fire to be really effective against the Romans, who tend to appear in large, non-lethal-resistant groups that clump together, making it a joy to repeatedly unleash Full Auto on them.
We had a few stray deaths but no serious trouble getting through the TF. In the final encounter we dispensed with tactics and after clearing the nearby mobs, we simply attacked Romulus head-on. Our DPS and debuffs were sufficient to allow us to completely ignore the heals and extra mobs coming from the Nictus AVs, and we dropped Romulus 4 times to complete the TF in 1hr 29mins. I got an unexciting Force Feedback: Rchg/End recipe, the Roman badge (which I guess didn't exist the last time I did the ITF with Police Woman), and around 3 million influence from defeating various foes.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
7/28/2008
Sorry for the lack of updates lately, work has been busy. But I've still been on CoH a lot.
Last Tuesday night I played Primadonna (30 sonic/kin corruptor on Liberty) on a Cap au Diable SF; our team mix was 1 stalker, 1 dominator, 3 corruptors (2 kin, 1 rad). We had 2 wipeouts on the mission where you capture the portal technician; I think this was because we rushed to the tech to kidnap him, but he was embedded deep in a big room that was chock full of Longbow. We eventually got past that and then in the final mission we tried pulling Bat'Zul up to fight Infernal several times, but they just weren't cooperating, and the team eventually just moved up rather than pulling, and beat the AVs up.
After the SF I switched to playing Perfect Woman (31 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle) and sidekicked an AR blaster, duoing our way through the Midnighter story arc on Unyielding. Didn't have any real support but on 2-player missions we did fine, even keeping the crazy Lady Jane from suiciding, and we were able to unlock the Midnight Squad zone for both of us. Got to level 32 and took Health, as a stepping stone to Stamina; Perfect Woman already has Quick Recovery, but the Tough power seems to drink a lot of her END. The extra lethal resist has felt worth it, though.
On Wednesday night I started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty); responding to a fire alarm in Steel Canyon, I formed a quick firefighting team that ended up finally getting Police Woman the Fire Chief badge, the last of the firefighting badges.
After that I joined an Imperious TF as April Fool (50 thug/TA MM on Liberty) with several people I knew on it. The team mix was:
fire blaster
broadsword scrapper
fire/will scrapper
spine/regen scrapper
thug/TA MM (me)
stone tanker
SS/dark brute
rad defender
This team got through the TF pretty smoothly overall. We did have a near-wipeout against the Phalanx computer; the awakening robots gave us more trouble than usual for some reason, not sure why. In the final mission we all piled on Romulus except for the tanker who tried to pull the healer Nictus AV away while remaining in line of sight so that it would suicide. This strategy seemed to work fine and we finished the TF in 1hr 44mins.
After that I switched to Maitresse (34 necro/storm MM on Liberty) and duo'd with a thug/dark MM friend for several missions. The two of us managed to beat Silver Mantis, Barracuda, Positron and Valkyrie (all at the elite boss level though). We had a few deaths due to heinous Longbow stun grenades, but did end up getting Maitresse to level 35, where I took Tornado.
Thursday night I got on late and solo'd Police Woman a little bit, starting a solo level 45 flashback of the Division Line story arc (with players debuffed and no travel powers), which seems to be all about Rikti. Got through some of this on Thursday, then a little more on Friday night when a friend invited me to join an Imperious TF. I decided that would be more fun than soloing, so I quit my flashback and joined his ITF team; unfortunately the team had miscounted and managed to promise invites to 9 players. Although I was already in Cimerora and on the team at that point, I decided to be nice and volunteered to quit so the 9th person wouldn't get left out.
So instead I joined up with a 5-player Sisterhood team doing level 48 missions in Peregrine Island. Since Police Woman is level 50, I got to really shred the enemies with Full Auto and other AOEs, which was pretty fun. We did several missions and beat up an AV-level Chimera.
Later on, someone was calling on arena chat that they were doing melee-only PvP free for alls, which sounded fun. I decided to try playing Mega (50 ss/elec brute on Liberty), and ran over to Pocket D but the FFA had already started. A cold/ice defender there challenged me to a duel, which I knew was probably an auto-loss for me as a brute, but I wasn't doing anything anyway so I agreed to fight. We ended up in the Perez Park map and the cold defender pretty soundly thrashed me with his slows and debuffs; Snowstorm prevented me from using Aid Self. I came close to dropping him at one point but he was able to kite away and the -movement on me prevented me from pursuing; I do have Hurl for ranged attack, but the immense -rchg on me meant I couldn't use it very often. After 3 defeats I threw in the towel. I was getting ready to challenge him to fight my ice/cold corruptor instead, but then the melee FFA finished a round and was about to start another, so I excused myself and joined the melee fight instead.
I was just barely in time to join the melee fight and as a result totally forgot to restock my inspirations, which made me a bit ineffective. We ran around pounding each other in the Lab map which was great fun. There were about 10 meleers running around bashing each other; I decided to avoid the stone tanker and mostly focus on the squishier scrappers, but these tactics rapidly devolved into just plain targeting anyone who seemed low on life and/or who was attacking me. With the small map the FFA was mostly a clump of angry meleers swinging away at each other in the center, which let me use Foot Stomp to good effect. I tried Hand Clap also, but since everyone had mez protection this was even more useless than normal. There was a fire melee scrapper who seemed especially dangerous to me; with elec armor and tough, Mega resists smash, lethal and energy pretty well, but fire is a weakness, and fire scrappers are high DPS to begin with. I got pounced and dropped several times by the packs of bloodthirsty meleers; I finished the fight with 1 kill, which was a multi-way tie for sixth place, while the top scorer was a scrapper with 8 kills.
We did another round of melee FFA after that and this time I made sure to load up on inspirations. I decided to say to hell with being defensive, and I loaded up with 20 reds. We ended up with a 10-player FFA on a Striga Isle-looking map; this was a lot more open than the lab so we had a lot of superjumping going on. I chomped my reds 3 at a time to give my attacks some authority; my Knockout Blow really did get to knockout a few heroes as a result, and I even dropped some runners with amped-up Hurl attacks. The offensive strategy paid off, and I won that FFA with 8 kills, with the second place finisher having 5 kills.
On Saturday I played Perfect Woman (32 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle) on a 6-player pickup team; we did a CoT mission that gave me the Origin of Power badge, which is something I'd never done before but now I need to look into for my various badgers. Also beat up Adamastor as a giant monster in Dark Astoria for the Keeper of Secrets badge, and did some Croatoa missions that got Perfect Woman the Bane of Danaan badge and to level 33.
After that I played Miss Molotov (21 fire/fire scrapper on Liberty), first as a sidekick on a 6-player team doing level 38 missions in Founders Falls and Brickstown, then later as a sidekick on a 4-player team doing low 40s missions in Peregrine Island. This got her to level 23 (taking Acrobatics at 22 to give her knockback protection) and got her the Multidimensional badge from a portal mission to the hydra dimension.
I also started a new dark/dark defender on Pinnacle server, eventually getting to level 8. Successfully solo'd an Atlas safeguard, then later did a King's Row safeguard with a 6-player Pinnacle League SG team that went badly. During the King's Row safeguard, the owner of the mission was loading slowly, and another player decided to run ahead to the bank and use her veteran team TP to move the whole team to the bank. Unfortunately she forgot she had used veteran team TP earlier on, and as a result was solo and got steamrollered by the escaping bank robbers. By the time the mission owner actually zoned in, the robbers were well on the way to their getaway car. The mission owner and I ran over to the escape vehicle to try and stop them, but the rest of the team was scattered all over the map by that point and the two of us got clobbered by the robbers, then they got to the escape vehicle and the mission ended. I think the moral here is to stay together as a team, especially on big safeguard/mayhem missions.
Later that night I played Schadenfreude (48 AR/traps corruptor on Liberty) on a Lady Grey TF of mostly Liberty Force SG with some friends and pickup people. Our team mix was:
rad/dark defender
kin/elec defender
AR/traps corruptor (me)
sonic/nrg blaster
elec/elec blaster
DB/will brute
night widow
emp/psi defender
Despite being on Invincible difficulty with several people starting the TF at level 47-48 and two sidekicks, this team utterly crushed all opposition. As a traps corruptor I was frequently toe-bombing Poison Gas Traps right behind the brute when the kin would fire off Fulcrum Shift, and the empath often threw Fortitude my way (not sure why but I wasn't complaining!) which made me feel like I was doing a lot of damage. Between stacked leadership, fortitude and FF Generator we were nearly unhittable too. We had great support and great damage and the Rikti just plain evaporated on contact. Finished the TF in 2 hours exactly and got Schadenfreude to level 50. I believe she is now my 11th level 50 character. (Yeah, I guess I play a lot.)
Schadenfreude was actually the first villain I created after CoV came out, but several of my teammates commented on how many times I had restarted her. I had originally made her an AR/traps corruptor, then at level 41 I decided that traps secondary really sucked, so I rerolled her as a merc/poison mastermind. Around level 20 I decided I really hated single-target debuffing everything I met with poison debuffs, and rerolled her again as an AR/dark corruptor. Around level 33 I decided I really liked traps after all, so I rerolled her yet again as an AR/traps corruptor. That incarnation finally made it to level 50. At level 49 I took Assault (giving her all 4 leadership powers) and at level 50 I got an Unbreakable Constraint: Chance for Smashing Damage out of my base storage and slotted it in Poison Gas Trap, which is now slotted with 3 recharge and 3 damage procs.
On Sunday I played Grey Wings (35 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) on a Katie Hannon TF. We had a 7-player team of Demolition Girls SG, including a tanker, 2 blasters, 2 scrappers, plant/thermal controller and a rad defender. We had about 2.5 team wipeouts against the tenth Mary Macomber AV; I think the first two were chiefly due to the witches' electric attacks stealing all our END. The tanker got detoggled from END drain and I know that at least twice I would Aim/Build Up/then turn out to be out of END before I could do my next attack. (On Liberty I normally do KTF with a FF defender nowadays, which pretty much immunizes the team from END drain so I haven't seen this in awhile.) The last half wipeout occurred when a scrapper decided to help pull a few minions away from Mary and kill them off separately, before the rest of the team got there. The witches stayed together, though, and ironically the end result was that the witches effectively pulled a few of the heroes away from our group and killed them off separately!
Anyway, we finally got through the first mission and the rest of the TF was pretty straightforward. We did run into Sally, which got Grey Wings the Believer badge. The TF finished in 51 minutes, which was long, but it was worth it because I got a level 35 Numina's +regen/+recovery recipe. One of the people I play with regularly on Triumph said that I needed to be banned because my last 3 KTFs, I had gotten a LotG +7.5% rchg, a Miracle +rec, and now a Numina's +regen/+rec .... Admittedly terrific luck; I'm never this lucky on Liberty KTFs! With Liberty being my preferred server, I don't have nearly as much use for awesome recipes on Triumph, but this same friend did agree to trade me an Apocalypse DMG/RCHG/ACC on Liberty villain side for my Miracle +REC on Triumph hero side, which seemed like a good deal for both of us.
Later on Sunday night I played Perfect Woman (33 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle) some more, duoing some Croatoa missions with a lower level will/SS tanker as sidekick. With two tankers we were pretty hard for the Red Caps to hurt, but beating them up was a pretty slow grind. Did maybe 3 missions before calling it a night.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
[ QUOTE ]
7/21/2008
I started playing Maitresse (29 necro/storm MM on Liberty) and joined an 8-player pickup team led by an SR brute and doing low 30s missions in St. Martial. Aside from one wipeout against Council vampires (due to the team getting a little too spread out) this went really well and got Maitresse to level 32. I picked Dark Blast as my level 30 power (an attack, because I'm a bad mastermind that needs to have buttons to push; I get fidgety if the pets do everything) and Dark Empowerment (the second pet buff) at level 32.
[/ QUOTE ]
The bestest SR brute ever!
I was cleaning out my screenshots folder and thought I'd post a few of the better ones just for fun.
April Fool versus Lord Recluse
Faathim on Ice
Police Woman versus the Arachnos Flyer
Police Woman versus the Envoy of Shadows
Schadenfreude likes to be prepared before pulling an AV
Spacegirl confronts Lanaru the Mad
Thunder Girl versus Babbage
Thunder Girl versus the Clockwork King
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
thats totally my yellow wolfe in the "Schadenfreude likes to be prepared before pulling an AV" pic
/gignore @username is the best feature of this game. It's also probably the least used feature.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Nights_Dawn
Hazy is right
|
[ QUOTE ]
7/28/2008After that I joined an Imperious TF as April Fool (50 thug/TA MM on Liberty) with several people I knew on it. The team mix was:
fire blaster
broadsword scrapper
fire/will scrapper
spine/regen scrapper
thug/TA MM (me)
stone tanker
SS/dark brute
rad defender
This team got through the TF pretty smoothly overall. We did have a near-wipeout against the Phalanx computer; the awakening robots gave us more trouble than usual for some reason, not sure why. In the final mission we all piled on Romulus except for the tanker who tried to pull the healer Nictus AV away while remaining in line of sight so that it would suicide. This strategy seemed to work fine and we finished the TF in 1hr 44mins.
[/ QUOTE ]
If this is the ITF I'm thinking of, I'm a Fire/Ice Blaster...NOT a Fire Blaster. So 
Anyways...that was quite a good TF
[ QUOTE ]
If this is the ITF I'm thinking of, I'm a Fire/Ice Blaster...NOT a Fire Blaster. So
Anyways...that was quite a good TF
[/ QUOTE ]
Sorry, on those coed TFs villains aren't able to see the powers that heroes have in the Info screen (and vice versa), so sometimes I can't tell what someone's secondary powerset is.
It WAS a very good TF team though.
And regarding the yellow wolf, he did help set up a lot of the traps in that screenshot too. I really like the look of the ridiculously elaborate maze of death traps.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
7/31/2008
On Monday night I started off playing Perfect Woman (33 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle) as an SK on a 6-person team of Pinnacle League SG fighting level 42 Praetorians. We managed to defeat an AV-level Antimatter before the team broke up. After that I duo'd with an earth/rad controller for a bit, doing my level 33ish missions in Croatoa; our combined tanker/controller DPS was pretty low, though, so this was something of a grind.
After that I switched back to Liberty and played Fire Emerald (10 fire/fire blaster on Liberty) and got invited to join a 7-player team of the "Strykeforce" coalition, which is apparently a joint project between a couple SGs to work on lowbie alts. We were doing level 12ish missions and had a kinetics healer, and so I tried to make myself stay in melee range for heals, but as a fire/fire blaster I also drew a lot of aggro, so I was walking a fine line between great DPS and death. I got myself killed from overaggro at least twice before getting the hang of it. Nevertheless we finished several missions, including a King's Row safeguard, and got Fire Emerald to level 12, where I took Hurdle.
Finished up Monday night playing Alice Slaughter (23 DB/will brute on Triumph) as a lackey on a large level 41 team of Demolition Girls SG. We were doing the Recapture Miss Francine mission, and ran into Hero-level Luminary, who we defeated only after much loss of life on our part. But the captured hostage, Miss Francine, wouldn't follow us; she still acted like there was a Longbow or something guarding her. We searched the whole mission thinking there must've been a runner or something, but never found anything; maybe someone got knocked through a wall. Ended up restarting the whole mission, defeating Luminary again (only much more cleanly this time), and after that Miss Francine gave up and followed us out, letting us finish the mission. Got Alice to level 24, but not sure what power to take yet.
Tuesday night, I did a lot of server hopping, starting off playing Perfect Woman on Pinnacle again, first exemping to a 6-player team of level 28s doing missions in Independence Port, then later sidekicking to a 5-player team of level 43s in Peregrine Island. This went well enough and got Perfect Woman to level 34.
After that I played Amethyst Star (23 warshade on Protector) as an SK on a 8 player team of Demolition Girls SG doing level 32 missions in Croatoa. We beat up a lot of Redcaps and got Amethyst to level 25; I took Hasten as her level 24 power. One of my teammates asked me how I managed to survive as a human-form warshade, since she had tried making one and apparently died a lot. I said that joining large, good teams was probably the biggest help; on that team I got to hide behind a tanker as I jumped into the middle of big groups of mobs to use Orbiting Death and Umbral blasts, all the while benefiting from huge Dark Sustenance bonuses from my teammates. The other player said she had trouble soloing; I kinda think kheldians are meant to be on big teams, though.
Later that night, someone was remarking on LBx that there were only n00bs in Sirens Call, so I switched to Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) and went to Sirens Call to see if I could help those poor n00bs out. I didn't see any newbie PvPers (maybe they were driven out of the zone already) but did encounter 2 stalkers who seemed pretty happy to see a new victim. I managed to avoid being killed by these 2 stalkers but didn't have enough punch to take either one out, except for once when I managed to lure one of them into chasing me into a platoon of Longbow, where he got swiftly "arrested" by a hail of bullets. After that I think one stalker gave up and an ill/emp controller friend of mine came to Sirens to help me, which made it very difficult for the remaining stalker; he ended up besieged in the villain base, and would periodically sally out to attempt to AS one of us. I usually could see him, but I couldn't hit him even with Targeting Drone/Tactics/Fortitude and misc ACC set bonuses, which makes me think he was zoning out and popping Elude or fistfuls of purples before rushing us. We ended up stalemated for awhile, even after another fire/dev blaster joined us. Didn't seem like much would change, so we left the zone to try something else.
My controller friend switched to an ice/ice blaster and we decided to duo a flashback of "A Hero's Hero" on a lark. On Tenacious difficulty, all the signature Praetorians were Elite Bosses, but were still a pretty good fight for 2 blasters. Against EBs I played more like a defender or corruptor (using aid other/aid self) while the ice blaster played more like a tanker or scrapper (even using the ice aggro aura, Chilling Embrace), and this worked well enough to let us defeat the whole Praetorian lineup: Chimera, Shadow Hunter (who I wasn't sure we'd be able to beat due to his regen), Siege, Mynx, Neuron, Battle Maiden (some of her minions had +perception, which I hadn't known before), Malaise, Mother Mayhem, Diabolique, Infernal, Dominatrix, Maurader and finally Tyrant. Finished the whole story arc in 2hrs 29mins and I got a purple recipe drop, a Coercive Persuasion (Confuse/Rchg/Acc); it was pretty late by that point, but it was also quite fun.
On Wednesday night, I started off playing Police Woman and solo'd a flashback of the Origin of Power story arc. I set "AT powers only" as a challenge setting, thinking I might be able to get an easy flashback badge since the Origin of Power story arc is mostly just visiting contacts. Turns out I didn't get the challenge setting badge for this arc (I guess it would be too easy to get them that way), but I did get the Origin of Power badge.
After that I played Mystery Girl (35 FF/nrg defender) on a pickup Katie Hannon TF, with 2 controllers, 3 blasters, 2 defenders and 1 tanker. We were a little slow and finished this in 45 mins; I got a Deific Weapon and a level 35 Decimation (Acc/End/Rchg) recipe.
Then I switched to Mercy Beaucoup (26 emp/ice defender) and joined a Sisterhood team doing the Sky Raiders hero respec trial. Our team makeup was:
stone/ss tanker
peacebringer
cold/ice defender
emp/ice defender
warshade
nrg/nrg blaster
katana/regen scrapper
This went pretty straightforwardly. The Sky Raiders couldn't really hurt our stone tanker, especially with cold shields, so it didn't seem necessary to Fortitude him; I ended up keeping it on the warshade and blaster (for damage) and the defender (since she was shielding the rest of us, I thought she could use some +def too). Finished in 1hr 7mins and I took a recipe reward, getting a level 33 Decimation (Acc/Dmg/Rchg). I like Decimation as an IO set so getting two Decimations in one night seemed good to me.
I briefly played Phantom Woman, my newbie 8 dark/dark defender on Pinnacle, joining an 8-player pickup team doing radio missions in King's Row. This team initially had problems with overaggroing several mobs and getting clobbered, but eventually started using tactics and working as a team. Got to level 9.
Finished the night playing Police Woman on a Unyielding-difficulty Imperious TF organized on LBx. Team mix was:
stone/stone brute
emp/dark defender
2 AR/dev blasters (including me)
fire/dark corruptor
2 MA/regen scrappers
earth/kin controller
This seemed like a really good team on paper but we actually had quite a lot of trouble. In the first mission the brute herded most of a room together, but half the team died from various loose boss aggro as a result. In the second mission, we had team wipe against the groups guarding a couple shadow cyst crystals; I think the brute didn't get any healing and after he fell, things went downhill fast. I managed to run away and team TP the bodies and the surviving scrapper some distance away, but I think I didn't run far away enough and some of them came after us while we were rezzing the fallen. We had a lot of other stray deaths that seemed unnecessary. I kinda feel like our empath was the problem; I know it's easy to blame the healer when stuff goes wrong, but he seldom buffed and didn't seem quick to heal people who got hurt. I also saw the other blaster occasionally stealth into mobs and set trip mines or time bombs that seemed to draw mad aggro to him, which probably didn't help.
It got to the point where I felt like I was buffing Vengeance more often than our defender was buffing Fortitude; I vented about this a little on a private channel, and a friend suggested that I talk to him about tactics instead of just grumbling. This seemed a valid point, and I suggested to the empath that he try and keep Fortitude on people to make them less squishy; the defender seemed very receptive to this and admitted he was more of a red-side player so could use tips on how to play on blue side, making me feel totally guilty about complaining about him. Anyway, he did start buffing Fort and AB more after that, which seemed to help.
We ended up having another team wipeout in the next mission, while fighting the Phalanx computer; after enough of the Phalanx robots woke up, the massive number of missiles hitting us was simply too much, and we all dropped except for the stone brute, who in an incredible display of endurance spent about a minute beating down the remaining 10% of the Phalanx computer's life bar, while under heavy fire from the mob of Phalanx robots. We all cheered when the brute finally destroyed the computer and all the robots fell down.
In the final mission, against Romulus and the 4 Nictus AVs, our team leader initially wanted us to focus damage on the Nictus AV that healed; but after shooting at this Nictus for awhile without really reducing its life bar significantly (mostly because it kept healing itself) he called for us to switch to Romulus. We dropped the first Romulus, but then suffered another team wipe against the second Romulus, after which the stone brute started kiting Romulus around while the scattered survivors tried to awaken/rez the rest of the team back into the fight. Once we got reorganized, we were able to kill Romulus the remaining 3 more times without further incident. At the start of the TF, the team leader had set a 2hr time limit and a 5 death limit; we narrowly beat the time limit, finishing in 1hr 59mins, and, umm, just barely missed the death limit with 85 deaths (ouch). I got a decent amount of influence, and a level 50 Trap of the Hunter: Chance for Lethal recipe as TF reward.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
8/22/2008
Haven't updated in awhile (life has been very busy), so doing a quick overview of recent activities to try and catch up to the present.
Global chat channels have been completely hosed for me for most of this month, ever since the last major patch. They keep dropping out of my UI tabs and I have to go in and manually re-add them, and as a result I frequently miss chat messages. I've dropped several chat channels trying to get back down to 5 chat channels, since someone told me that might help, but so far it doesn't seem to. It's very annoying and actually makes it less fun to play, since networking on global chat channels is one of the main ways I find people to play with. Nevertheless, I've been playing anyway.
Miss Molotov (23 fire/fire scrapper on Liberty) was part of a very smooth 8-player Sister Psyche TF that took 2hrs 25mins and got her to level 26; later on she also did an 8-player Citadel TF (as a sidekick) that got her to level 27. She got a Devastation Chance to Hold recipe as reward.
Fire Emerald (14 fire/fire blaster on Liberty) was on a 4-player Positron TF organized by Sisterhood players. We had no stealth but we had good DPS and managed to finish in 2hrs 7mins, which is the fastest I've ever done the Positron TF.
Maitresse (35 necro/storm MM on Liberty) did an Ice Mistral SF that got her to level 36, and Perfect Woman (35 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle) did a Numina TF that got her to 37, then was a sidekick on an Imperious TF that got her to level 38. Perfect Woman also kinda saved the bacon of a Pinnacle League SG team that was fighting Lusca and losing; I demonstrated to them how to taunt the squid tentacles to face away from the team, which reduced casualties considerably.
Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) bought an Apocalypse DAM/RCHG/ACC IO from Wentworths for 45M influence; while this is the most I've ever paid for anything, this felt like a good price since the last few had sold for 60M. This let me slot a set of 5 Apocalypse into Slug (everything but the pure damage one) for set bonuses of +16% regen, +3% health (overkill since I was already at the HP cap for blasters), +4% global damage (yummy; I think this gave me a total of +23% global damage) and +10% global recharge (putting me to +96% global recharge which is getting me seriously into diminishing returns). I ended up deleting the 4 Devastation IOs I had in Slug before, to make room for the Apocalypse IOs; this probably cost me around 20M influence or so that I could've recouped, but it just didn't feel worthwhile to burn a respec to unslot stuff and re-sell it (maybe I'm just lazy). I actually have the sixth Apocalypse (the pure damage one) but so far I haven't slotted it into Slug; I currently have a level 50++ Centriole HO in the sixth slot and the extra range actually seems more helpful than a +5% psi defense set bonus and a miniscule damage increase. The Slug power itself is now at 99.7% damage (already hitting the soft cap), 59.6% accuracy, 23% range (from that Centriole), 89.9% recharge, 33.1% endrdx.
Police Woman tried a Master of the Statesman TF with an 8-player team of Sisterhood, but we were kinda careless during the villain respec mission and the NPC villain team clobbered one of our squishy controllers. We restarted, but then during our second try the Thorn Tree in the villain respec nailed our hapless controller again. At that point we didn't feel like restarting again, so we pushed through to the end of the STF; no MoSTF badge, but I did get lucky and have a Hecatomb Chance for Negative Energy Damage recipe drop for me.
I also got the "Eternal" badge (I think this is for 45 months of veteran rewards?) and then noticed I was really close to 500 badges, so spent some time buying generic IO recipes and crafting them, which pushed Police Woman up to 501 badges.
Police Woman also participated in an arena PvP kickball event. Despite being well-known as an AR/dev I managed to avoid being picked last for teams (kheldians get even less respect than AR blasters). I played in two matches where we had a 3-way team battle and was on the winning team each time; I got a decent number of kills in each of these matches, but the support characters on these teams probably deserve most of the credit for making this work. I also was in a FFA match where I finished solidly in the middle with 6 kills (I think the winner had 11 or so). I confess I cackled with glee each time I killed someone with Full Auto, which is widely panned as one of the worst PvP attacks ever.
Finally, I played Tera Watt (49 FF/elec defender on Triumph) on an Imperious TF, partly Demolition Girls SG and partly pickup, which got her to level 50. She is now my 12th level 50 character. Yeah, I play too much.
I also went to GENCON, a gaming convention, earlier this month; getting ready to go to that is part of why I haven't had time to update the war journal much lately. The MMORPG companies were there in force, and while there I saw demos for Champions Online and Warhammer Online. Another CoH friend who was there was pretty enthused about Champions, but it looked awfully cartoony to me (I know, that's a weird complaint to have about a comic book game) so I'm still not totally sold on it. Warhammer had pretty graphics but didn't seem obviously different from all the other games; but my SO was enthralled by the Warhammer demo, so I may end up having to try that when it comes out.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"
6/20/2008
RL stuff kept me offline until fairly late the last two nights, resulting in me mostly soloing.
Wednesday night, I solo'd Kashira (a new 5 ninja/ninjitsu stalker) on a few newspaper missions in Port Oakes, then completed the Atlas mayhem for the jetpack and level 6, where I took Assassin's Strike.
I ended up deleting my claws/willpower stalker; she started off a tiger-striped catgirl, and I decided I really didn't like being orange and stripy. I tried making a leopard-print catgirl instead, but couldn't get a costume and name combination that I could live with. But I kind of want to try a claws stalker, so I'll probably try again later.
After that I solo'd Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper) for a radio mission; martial arts does feel a bit more snappy, which is nice. The recent buffs are making scrappers and stalkers more attractive to play again.
Thursday night I played Lady Arachne (35 wolf spider) and solo'd through the villain Midnight Squad arc, then switched to Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender) and solo'd through the hero-side Midnight Squad arc. For Rain Dancer's mission to link up with Lady Jane, I managed to outsmart Lady Jane's suicidal tendencies by stealthing past her (using steamy mist/superspeed) and killing all the enemies between her starting position and the chest in the last room. Only then did I go back and rescue Lady Jane from her captors, after which I was able to lead her to the final objective without incident.
@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"