PW's war journal

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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.

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Despite what you say about the support toons being the reason for you doing so well PW, you do really well (even being AR/DEV!), as was pretty clear in the FFA when you did pretty damn well.

Better than me.


Did you do the camera spin when you hit FA? That adds to the damage.

that FFA was fun!

you did great PW

8/26/2008

Last Friday night I started out playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), helping an LBXer with an Ouroboros flashback of the Division: Line story arc, with Enemies Buffed and No Temp Powers as challenge settings. He had been trying to solo it as a blaster but repeatedly got clobbered and so he asked for help. We ended up forming a team of 3 blasters and 1 scrapper and trying the story arc. During the first mission the team leader immediately realized that he had been on Invincible difficulty (which may have contributed to his earlier problems..) and then asked to restart on Heroic difficulty. We did so, then after one mission, the scrapper quit, leaving 3 blasters against a whole story arc full of Rikti. There were a lot of missions that sounded tantalizingly stealthable (clicking glowies and defeating named bosses) but were actually deathtraps due to the high perception of Rikti drones. This resulted in the other two blasters faceplanting, a lot. I managed to avoid dying to this because I had both stealth and Personal Force Field to protect me, though Enemies Buffed plus the native accuracy of Rikti drones meant they were actually able to stun me out of Personal Force Field a few times. Fortunately, a break free and some strategic running away kept me from dying to this. With medicine pool I was also kind-of the healer for our 3 blaster team. It took awhile, but we eventually managed to get through the hordes of Rikti and completed the flashback in 3hrs, getting us the Lionhearted and Limited badges.

Police Woman also crafted a bunch of level 10 Heal IOs for the Medicator badge.

On Sunday afternoon I played Mystery Girl (35 FF/nrg defender) on a 6-player Katie TF; we were a little slow finishing the first mission against the 10 AVs due to lower DPS from the smaller team size. Mystery Girl got nominated as the stealth/TPer for the second mission which went fine; the rest of the TF was pretty straightforward. I didn't get anything good though.

Later Sunday night I played Mercy Beaucoup (26 empathy/ice defender) as an SK on a 4-player Sisterhood team fighting mostly Nemesis. Got to level 27 and added a slot each to Ice Bolt and Ice Blast.

I've also gradually been soloing Thunder Girl (50 will/nrg tanker) through an Ouroboros flashback of the Hero's Hero story arc, trying to complete her set of Praetorians for Portal Jockey. Finally finished this on Sunday night; I was worried I wouldn't have enough DPS solo to do this, but even with the slightly nerfed energy melee it was no problem to defeat all the Praetorians, at least when they spawned as level 50 elite bosses. This got Thunder Girl the Dimensional Warder, Statesman's Pal and Shared Victory badges. After that I went ahead and got the Scholastic and Multidimensional badges also, which gave her the Portal Jockey accolade. This raised Thunder Girl's max HP from 3088 to 3181; not quite the tanker cap of 3212, but getting within striking distance.

On Monday night I did some server hopping, first playing Perfect Woman (38 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle) in a duo with a rad defender, then later in a rather silly 4-tanker team that was nevertheless a lot of fun. Got to level 39 and added all 3 slots to Foot Stomp.

After that I played Kid Valkyrie (50 broadsword/regen scrapper; originally from Liberty, but transferred to Triumph) on an Imperious TF organized by Demolition Girls SG. Our team mix was:

earth/rad controller
dark/regen scrapper (disconnected mission 2, never returned)
broadsword/regen scrapper (me)
stone/fire brute
will/SS tanker
ice/cold corruptor
crab spider
emp defender

This TF started around 1am which was really much later than I should've started a TF, and I was close to falling asleep by the end of the TF. I had a good time hacking up Romans with Whirling Sword and Headsplitter and other heavy hitting broadsword attacks, but our overall team DPS felt pretty low, especially after losing the other scrapper. On the other hand, the +DEF buffs from the cold corruptor and crab spider actually made Kid Valkyrie pretty tough, so I only died once, against Romulus in the final mission. I got to kick off my Revive/Moment of Glory combo -- unfortunately, it wasn't NEARLY as cool as when the real Valkyrie does Revive/Moment of Glory. (The ludicrousness of Valkyrie Revive/Moment of Glorying my villains to death in the RSF is what originally made me start Kid Valkyrie as a bs/regen scrapper.) Anyway, we didn't have any serious problems and managed to finish the ITF in 1hr 44mins. I got an unexciting Chance to Heal recipe as reward, but it was the first time Kid Valkyrie completed the ITF, so she got a handful of badges (Roman, Centurion, Temporal Strife, and a bunch of costume pieces unlocked).

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Last Friday night I started out playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), helping an LBXer with an Ouroboros flashback of the Division: Line story arc, with Enemies Buffed and No Temp Powers as challenge settings. He had been trying to solo it as a blaster but repeatedly got clobbered and so he asked for help. We ended up forming a team of 3 blasters and 1 scrapper and trying the story arc. During the first mission the team leader immediately realized that he had been on Invincible difficulty (which may have contributed to his earlier problems..) and then asked to restart on Heroic difficulty. We did so, then after one mission, the scrapper quit, leaving 3 blasters against a whole story arc full of Rikti. There were a lot of missions that sounded tantalizingly stealthable (clicking glowies and defeating named bosses) but were actually deathtraps due to the high perception of Rikti drones. This resulted in the other two blasters faceplanting, a lot. I managed to avoid dying to this because I had both stealth and Personal Force Field to protect me, though Enemies Buffed plus the native accuracy of Rikti drones meant they were actually able to stun me out of Personal Force Field a few times. Fortunately, a break free and some strategic running away kept me from dying to this. With medicine pool I was also kind-of the healer for our 3 blaster team. It took awhile, but we eventually managed to get through the hordes of Rikti and completed the flashback in 3hrs, getting us the Lionhearted and Limited badges.

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Actually, I only did that arc once before we did it...the first time, when I duo'd with a scrapper, it went a little smoother (I think less deaths than our 3 blaster team) and we only had problems in that one mission with the suicidal hostage.

8/27/2008

Started the evening playing Amethyst Star (25 human-form warshade on Protector), SKing to a 5-player team of Demolition Girls SG running high 30s missions against Crey. On our team were 2 controllers, 2 blasters and me, so we were all pretty squishy (none of those ATs gives a warshade any +RES) and felt it, though one of the controllers was using thermal shields which helped some. We had several scattered deaths and one major wipeout, when we tried to rush into a big lab room and aggroed multiple Paragon Protectors. After that we got a little more careful and started pulling from crowded rooms, which smoothed things out a lot. Amethyst got quite a lot of exp over the several missions we did, leveling up to 28. At 26 I took Unchain Essence, which is a corpse bomb power much like Fallout, only you use dead enemies instead of dead teammates, so I actually got to use it a lot. At 28 I took Inky Aspect, which is apparently a clone of Dark Armor's Oppressive Gloom; haven't tried it against mobs yet, but the graphic is pretty, a sort of hazy magenta/red aura.

After that I jumped back to Liberty to play Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) in the arena kickball event organized by the PvP event committee. They had already done several matches before I arrived. My first match was a 7 vs 7 team fight on the Atlas Park map; I managed to narrowly avoid getting picked last (squeaking in ahead of a tanker) and ended up on a team of 3 controllers, 3 blasters and 1 defender. We had a little procedural trouble because our target caller was a little slow to switch targets when the victim would phase out or evade, and one of the sonic casters had a nasty habit of caging the designated victim, resulting in lots of our attacks simply bouncing off. Our team seemed strong enough to overcome this, though, and we won the match 12 to 3; I got just one of these kills, but it was from my dreaded Full Auto. (No, I didn't do a camera spin.) The other team said one of their blasters had disconnected mid-match, which probably hurt them, too.

A lot of people left after that match, but I went ahead and played a second match. This time I got to be picked last; probably fair, since I do lethal damage and the tanker from the last match had logged. But we had an odd number of players, and consequently due to being picked last, I got to be on a 5 person team fighting a 4 person team, this time on the Perez Park map. We had 2 blasters, 2 controllers, 1 defender; I think the other team had 1 blaster, 2 controllers, 1 defender. During this match we had a very on-the-ball target caller who would very rapidly announce a target change whenever our victim even hinted at evasive action; and several times she'd ruthlessly switch back to an earlier target. I totally think she was timing how long their phase shift would last and would re-target them as soon as it dropped. This worked really well and we won the match, 16 to 5, and I actually got 6 of those kills, just one kill behind the other blaster, which made me feel pretty good.

I finished the evening with yet another late-night Imperious TF on Ruthless difficulty organized on LBx. I really shouldn't start TFs late at night, but it was being led by someone I knew and the team was really good; our team makeup was:

stone/stone brute
fire/thermal corruptor (me)
SS/dark brute
fortunata
archery blaster
ill/rad controller
earth/rad controller
fire blaster

I was playing Paris Holiday, a 36 fire/thermal corruptor. I started off lackeyed to the 50 stone brute, but the team leader asked me to sidekick to the 47 fire blaster; I felt a little guilty at this but I think he was trying to be nice, and I didn't want to say no, and admittedly it was crazy good exp. I felt a little more guilty when one of the controllers said the fire blaster was "bridging" for me, since I'm usually very anti-PLing, but I felt like I was pulling my weight on the team with buffing, blasting and healing, and I didn't want to make a scene so I let it slide. Next time I think I'll insist on SKing to a 50, though.

Anyway, we had pretty sickeningly high DPS, resulting in the Romans mostly vaporizing on contact. We did have a few stray deaths where the team would get split up somehow or when some players would do something especially suicidal, but it mostly went okay. Rezzing people was a bit of a pain, though; I hadn't taken the thermal rez yet (it seems like such a defeatist power...) and only one of the other rads had a rez at all, so deaths would give us an occasional hiccup, especially if it was the controller WITH a rez who died. I probably NEED to take the rez at some point, but when Paris hit 38 I really felt like I needed to take Melt Armor instead. So far, Melt Armor seems an amazing AoE debuff and has a neat "heat wave" looking graphic, so I'm pretty happy with that choice so far. Maybe I'll take the rez at 41; I've never been impressed with the villain patron powers. Anyway, we fairly blazed through the ITF despite the high difficulty and clobbered Romulus in the final mission by simply defeating him 4 times in a row. We finished the TF in 1hr 44mins and I got an icky Sting of the Manticore (Acc/IntRdx/Rng) recipe as reward.

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After that I jumped back to Liberty to play Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) in the arena kickball event organized by the PvP event committee. They had already done several matches before I arrived. My first match was a 7 vs 7 team fight on the Atlas Park map; I managed to narrowly avoid getting picked last (squeaking in ahead of a tanker) and ended up on a team of 3 controllers, 3 blasters and 1 defender. We had a little procedural trouble because our target caller was a little slow to switch targets when the victim would phase out or evade, and one of the sonic casters had a nasty habit of caging the designated victim, resulting in lots of our attacks simply bouncing off. Our team seemed strong enough to overcome this, though, and we won the match 12 to 3; I got just one of these kills, but it was from my dreaded Full Auto. (No, I didn't do a camera spin.) The other team said one of their blasters had disconnected mid-match, which probably hurt them, too.

A lot of people left after that match, but I went ahead and played a second match. This time I got to be picked last; probably fair, since I do lethal damage and the tanker from the last match had logged. But we had an odd number of players, and consequently due to being picked last, I got to be on a 5 person team fighting a 4 person team, this time on the Perez Park map. We had 2 blasters, 2 controllers, 1 defender; I think the other team had 1 blaster, 2 controllers, 1 defender. During this match we had a very on-the-ball target caller who would very rapidly announce a target change whenever our victim even hinted at evasive action; and several times she'd ruthlessly switch back to an earlier target. I totally think she was timing how long their phase shift would last and would re-target them as soon as it dropped. This worked really well and we won the match, 16 to 5, and I actually got 6 of those kills, just one kill behind the other blaster, which made me feel pretty good.

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DAMN YOU HANK!

But yeah, that Full Auto kill is harsh. You think you're safe (I popped Hibernate to save myself) and everyone else's spike was bouncing off of me, but the DoT from FA kept creeping through and killed me.

Great timing on your part, for sure!

9/2/2008

Wednesday night I knocked out a Katie TF while playing Mystery Girl (35 FF/nrg defender) on a team with 2 tankers, 2 defenders, 2 blasters, 1 controller and 1 scrapper. We finished in 34 mins, but I didn't get anything of note.

Then I played Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender) on an Imperious TF organized on the Sisterhood channel. Our team mix was:

MA/SR scrapper
BS/inv scrapper
storm/archery defender (me)
stone/nrg tanker
rad/nrg defender
ice/nrg blaster
archery/mental blaster
kin/dark defender

On this TF the scrappers were very aggressive and would frequently jump into fights before our tanker, which made our tanker a little miffy, but we had enough support that it still worked and seemed to have mad DPS that helped us power our way through the TF, finishing in 1hr 10mins, the fastest time I've ever done an ITF. I got a Stupefy: Chance for Knockdown recipe for my trouble, along with lots of influence.

I spent the weekend at DragonCon where I mostly did role playing games of many different sorts. I variously played a witch hunter in colonial America (only with evil monsters), a samurai/courtier in pseudo-feudal Japan, and a Barsoomian princess hanging out with a time traveling jazz band and paramilitary unit. It was pretty fun.

I stayed home Monday to catch up on CoH. I played Mercy Beaucoup (27 empathy/ice defender) on a Citadel TF organized on LBx; our team mix was:

fire/dev blaster
nrg/nrg blaster
stone/dark tanker
ill/TA controller
emp/ice defender (me)
rad/sonic defender
claw/regen scrapper

Our stone tanker was very aggressive, which I like because it keeps the pace up, but kept me really busy since I was the "healer". The team was very solid and we didn't have any serious trouble, finishing in 1hr 57mins. This got Mercy to level 28, where I took Bitter Ice Blast as a new attack, and I got a Gaussian's Rchg/Endrdx recipe as reward.

I did another Katie TF on Mystery Girl, this time with 3 defenders, 3 controllers, 1 blaster and 1 scrapper. Although we were very safe, our DPS was abysmal and it took 53mins to finish the TF. I got a Call of the Sandman Chance to Heal recipe.

I played Mega (50 SS/elec brute) for awhile; hadn't logged her on in awhile, so I had to go to the tailor to fix all her costumes with skirts, since they were all rotated 90 degrees due to some patch last month. I also crafted and slotted some IOs for her, adding a 4th Performance Shifter IO to Power Sink, making the power +96% endmod, +44% rchg with set bonuses of +5% movement, +1.88% maxhp, +2.5% recovery. I also slotted a 3rd Numina's Convalescence into Health, for another +1.88% maxhp bonus. This brought Mega's maxhp up to 1917.2.

Mega solo'd her way through the Midnight Squad story arc to unlock Cimerora, and joined another Imperious TF organized on the Sisterhood channel. Our team mix was something like:

fire/thermal controller
kin/dark defender
TA/archery defender
ice/SS tanker
sonic/nrg blaster
SS/elec brute (me)
elec blaster
ice/storm controller

We had a good mix of damage and support; the ice tanker was designated lead tanker, which was fine with me. Between double-stacking Rage (from Speed Boost and my Chance for Recharge proc IO) and Fulcrum Shift, Mega was routinely getting around 400-500% damage bonus on the combat monitor, and once spiked up to +640%. This gave her Foot Stomps and Knockout Blows a lot of authority, which was pretty cool. We did have some problems during the first mission, though; as we exited the cave into the outdoor area where the final part of the mission is, the tanker decided to pull all the mobs from the shrine area down onto our heads. I'm guessing this must be an alternate way to finish the mission, but the rest of the team didn't know what was going on. Defeating the mobs pulled onto us resulted in a series of ambushes also triggering on top of us, and before long there were tons of Romans and kheldians everywhere; about half the squishies died in the confusion. The team leader tried to rally us to move up to the shrine area, as she said the ambushes would never stop; most people seemed to be in scrapper-lock (or dead) though and I eventually resorted to using the veteran team TP to pull everyone up there.

We finished the first mission and got through the next two without much trouble. In the final mission we did a simple frontal assault against Romulus to kill him 4 times. We actually managed to drain the Romulus AV dry of END a couple times; I think this was the combined result of Mega's power sink, transference from the kin, and some END drain power from the ice tanker; maybe heat exhaustion from the thermal, too. Not sure it really mattered because we were beating up Romulus anyway, but I thought it was neat. We finished the ITF in 1hr 50mins and along the way I got lucky on salvage drops, finding a Pangean Soil and a Hamidon Goo. Mega also got the Silver Bullet and Slayer badges (from fighting the 5th Column) as well as the standard Temporal Strife and Roman badges from the TF itself. Got some fairly pointless recipe also.

I messed around soloing a claws/ninja stalker on Pinnacle server for a bit (getting from 10 to 11) and playing a MA/will scrapper on Triumph server on a 8 player Demolition Girls SG team doing missions in the Hollows (getting from 13 to 14).

Finished the night playing Miss Molotov (27 fire/fire scrapper on Liberty) on a mostly pickup Moonfire TF led by someone I knew. Our team mix was:

stone/stone tanker
fire/fire scrapper (me)
fire/mental blaster
ice/mental blaster
stone/SS tanker
elec/nrg blaster
dark/dark scrapper
kin/rad defender

Our team was pretty support-light, and we had some problems right off the bat as the stone/stone tanker, who was at the low end of the level range, refused to be SK'd. The stone/SS tanker seemed fairly clueless; he asked to be TP'd to mission doors (having lost his travel power when exemped to 28) and he seemed to get mez'd by the vampires and didn't seem to understand he needed to put his toggles back up again (I ended up spending some time explaining how armor toggles work while the rest of the team jeered at him). As a result, neither of our tankers were much use for the early part of the TF, and it made us play really sloppily. Our fire blaster died a ton (initially I thought maybe he was being an aggro magnet, but I eventually decided it was because our tankers didn't seem to be generating any aggro) and our dark scrapper would get frustrated at the slowness of the tankers to attack stuff and would start fights on his own.

We managed to limp through the first all-vampyre mission in this fashion, but the second, all-werewolf mission was a lot less forgiving, and in short order we suffered two total party wipeouts. Everyone was pretty pissy at this point, and a couple of us insisted that the lowbie tanker get sidekicked, which he finally accepted, and the team leader suggested that we should give up the TF if we had a third party wipeout. We seemed to get our act together at that point and the tankers started to do some actual tanking, though there was a lengthy debate on whether tanking meant to pull stuff or to rush into mobs or both. People were still on edge from the TPW's, and there were some snippy comments exchanged, but we managed to get past that and continue the TF.

One trick the team leader had us do that was new to me was, during the "Rescue Dr Todd" mission, to stealth someone to Dr Todd, rescue her, then have someone at the door do a Team Teleport. For some reason Dr Todd, unlike most other hostages I know, would follow through a Team Teleport, causing the mission to instantly end.

We had a few missions that we stealthed, but some of our stealthers were relying on superspeed alone and got nailed by mobs several times. I pretty much stayed by the door for these missions, pleading that "being on fire makes me pretty unstealthy"; a fire/fire scrapper with blazing aura is just about the least subtle hero I've got. This was a little dull but I figured I'd let the stealthers do their thing. We finally stealthed to Arakhn and beat her up easily, finishing the TF in 2hrs 9mins. Despite all the hijinks, Miss Molotov leveled to 28 (taking Kick in preparation for Tough) and got the Silver Bullet and Honorary Peacebringer badges, along with most of the way through the vampyre badge, and a Kismet dmg/endrdx/rchg recipe as reward.

9/3/2008

Started off Tuesday evening playing Amethyst Star (28 warshade on Protector) as an SK on a 7 player team of Demolition Girls SG. We fought a bunch of Nemesis, Council and Crey. Amethyst got to level 29 (adding a sixth slot to her big attack/hold and third slot to her self heal) and the Doctor's Ally badge from a mission.

I also started a newbie fire/ice blaster on Liberty, for a future elemental-themed team, and solo'd her up to level 4. I've tried making ice/ice blasters before but I never get far on them, since I don't like being forced to take one of Frost Breath, Frozen Fists or Ice Sword at level 4, all of which I hate; with a fire/ice blaster, though, I took Fire Blast, Fireball, Flares and Chilblain by level 4 and like them all so far. A certain someone has been itching for me to mention him by name in this journal, but I usually try to avoid naming names so as not to hurt anyone's feelings, but I figure it is legit to mention that I drew some inspiration from reading Camo Fire's fire/ice blaster guide.

Spent some time on Pinnacle server playing Perfect Woman (39 will/SS tanker) on a 3 player team of Pinnacle League SG. We went into Rikti War Zone to try and do some missions, and for some reason Levantera totally refused to give me any missions, claiming that I had a full load of missions already. I even deleted all my other missions so I had none at all, and she still refused to start me on "Welcome to Vanguard". This kinda sucked because I wasn't able to gain Vanguard merits at all. Weirdly, I had her phone number in my contact list, but nothing in the faction bar. I was able to do 3 missions from the Borea contact, though. I didn't really want to petition this problem, but I may try flashbacking the "Welcome to Vanguard" story arc sometime to see if that fixes things.

Finished the night back on Liberty playing Miss Molotov (28 fire/fire scrapper) on a pickup Terra Volta trial. Our team mix was:

kin/rad defender
will/nrg tanker
elec/ice blaster
archery/dev blaster
fire/fire scrapper (me)
grav/kin controller
invuln/SS tanker

This team had a couple problems; we were very light on support, and our level spread was fairly awkward, with one level 50 (exemped down to 33) and the rest of us in the level 28-31 range. This meant we were fighting level 34-35s and most of us could not be SK'd. We also had the archery blaster quit the trial (without saying anything) in one of the early missions.

We managed to clear our way through missions until we got to the "Save Terra Volta" mission itself, but there our level difference against the Sky Raiders proved just too large an obstacle. We suffered three team wipeouts just trying to clear the first big room with the side rooms where you need to get a key; I think this was mostly due to the level difference and limited support (our kin was level 31 so had a hard time hitting for heals and the rest of us, except for the 33 and his SK, simply had a hard time hitting). After the third wipeout it was quite late at night and we were tired, and we all agreed to abandon the trial and call it a night. Miss Molotov did get to level 29 from all the fighting; and I logged off instead of quitting the trial on the off chance that I could try soloing the respec at a later date.

[ QUOTE ]
I also started a newbie fire/ice blaster on Liberty, for a future elemental-themed team, and solo'd her up to level 4. I've tried making ice/ice blasters before but I never get far on them, since I don't like being forced to take one of Frost Breath, Frozen Fists or Ice Sword at level 4, all of which I hate; with a fire/ice blaster, though, I took Fire Blast, Fireball, Flares and Chilblain by level 4 and like them all so far. A certain someone has been itching for me to mention him by name in this journal, but I usually try to avoid naming names so as not to hurt anyone's feelings, but I figure it is legit to mention that I drew some inspiration from reading Camo Fire's fire/ice blaster guide.

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MY NAME IS FINALLY IN THE WAR JOURNAL!!! BOO YAH!

Anyways, I'm glad I could help.

hey look, it's in the war journal again: lolcamo

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nights_Dawn Hazy is right

9/5/2008

Wednesday night I started off helping a friend transfer about a million influence to an alt of hers, then got her to help transfer a million to an alt of mine. Then I bounced over to Pinnacle server and duoed a lowbie 11 claws/ninja stalker with a 19 corruptor for a bit, getting to level 12 and picking up Ninja Reflexes (a melee defense toggle).

Switched back to Liberty to play Yuki-Onna (47 ice/cold corruptor) on an Imperious TF organized on the Sisterhood channel. Our team mix was:

ice/cold corruptor (me)
fire blaster
AR/kin corruptor
night widow
fire/SS tanker
rad/rad defender
fire/kin corruptor
stone/fire brute

We had a pretty sick amount of DPS and competent players and we simply plowed through the ITF despite being on Unyielding difficulty and losing the brute to linkdeath during mission 2. Finished in 1hr 24mins, getting Yuki to level 48 and gaining an Unbounded Leap +Stealth recipe.

At that point I noticed Yuki-Onna's SOs were red and so I set about replacing them. IO set recipes are either ludicrously expensive or completely unavailable on red side, so I couldn't use IO sets; I ended up logging in each of my high level villain alts and crafting all the level 50 generic IO recipes I had lying around. I slotted some of these and stashed another dozen or so of these level 50 generic IOs in my personal villain base (requiring me to build a second enhancement storage unit) for future use.

Thursday night I started off playing Primadonna (30 sonic/kin corruptor) on a pickup Cap au Diable SF organized on LBx. Our team mix was:

elec/dark stalker
robo/traps MM
ice/cold corruptor
sonic/kin corruptor (me)
ninja/dark MM

This seemed to go well enough; I got to use Grant Invis a few times to help the other corruptor stealth around. In the last mission our stealthers had trouble tagging the altars, which were pretty close to spawns of demons, so we cleared several of the caves to help out. The final fight against Bat'Zul was kinda iffy as we pulled him into a side cave where the giant demon was clipping with the wall, making it pretty hard for me to hit with Transfusion (or any of my other attacks) but I managed to find an angle where the game would think I still had line of sight, so we finished him off. Didn't get anything special as a recipe, unfortunately.

Later that night, a friend was feeling bummed because he had been kicked off a ITF for being a stormy (I wasn't actually there so I can't say whether it was deserved or not; personally, I think a well played stormy is totally awesome though). So we ended up making an unyielding difficulty LGTF instead (though he did switch to a different character). I played Mega (50 SS/elec brute) because we needed some sort of tanker; I had also considered playing my will/nrg tanker, but in gameplay it feels like Mega is nearly immune to all Rikti damage (due to electric armor plus Tough) while being able to do massive damage with her near-continuous Foot Stomps. Anyway, our team mix was:

rad/rad defender
fire/fire scrapper
cold/ice defender
ice/sonic controller
db/will scrapper
SS/elec brute (me)
sonic/mental blaster
fire? blaster

This team seemed very strong and breezed through most of the LGTF. I mostly was immune to Rikti, but did have a couple instances where enough mez stacked on me to hold Mega through her toggles. I also got dropped taking the alpha strike from Clockwork King and his group of Psychic Clockworks (ouch); I guess I was a bit overconfident in the psy resist from electric. But the rad defender rez'd me pretty quick so we were able to recover from that. Fighting Hamidon was a little messy due to the mitos attacking but we managed to beat him up with just a few stray deaths; I learned a few more tricks about how to get Hamidon and the Rikti to aggro onto each other. Being an unsubtle brute I wasn't that interested in stealthing either the third or the fifth mission, instead leading the team to pound groups of Rikti into submission until we reached the mission objective. The final fight was actually pretty easy, with both the Rikti AV and the Honoree perishing in a matter of seconds, after which I took out all 4 generators without taking much damage (it's kind of nice playing a non-squishy sometimes!). Finished the TF in 1hr 53mins.

9/12/2008

A round up of my activities this week (warning, fairly long):

Last Friday I played a newbie fire/ice blaster (Vathia, an alien girl) on Liberty with a 7 player team of Demolition Girls SG. We had a sort of elemental powers theme going on, with everyone taking elemental-related power sets; I pretty quickly determined this meant we had no healing to speak of (a stormy with no O2 boost was the closest thing to support we had) which drove me to take Aid Other when I hit level 6, which I think helped some. We did radio missions in King's Row, finishing up when Vathia reached level 11. I had a basic attack chain already (the first 3 fire blast powers plus chilblain seemed plenty of attacks even without using veteran attacks) so I got Swift at 8 and Hurdle at 10.

After that I played Paris Holiday, a socialite in prison uniform and 38 fire/thermal corruptor, as an SK on an Imperious TF set to Unyielding difficulty. Our team mix was:

stone/stone brute
3 blasters (one was archery and another fire)
robo/traps MM
fire/thermal corruptor (me)
ice/dark corruptor
ill/kin controller

For some reason we just weren't working together well, with the team frequently getting strung out or having poor aggro control, and all the squishies including myself died a lot. I felt kinda bad about this since I was the nominal "healer" for the team but I just couldn't keep up with the damage we were taking. We had a total wipeout in the third mission against the Phalanx computer, then muddled our way through the rest of the ITF, finishing in 2hrs 1min with about 52 team deaths (ouch). Paris did hit level 40 though.

On Saturday I played Helen Highwater, a seldom-played 12 storm/psy defender on Triumph server, on a Positron TF. Our team mix was:

DB/regen scrapper
storm/psy defender (me)
ill/rad controller
dark/axe tanker
inv/SS tanker
MA/SR scrapper

The controller confused a lot of enemies, which was noticably helpful, and the team was pretty good overall. We did have two team wipeouts in two different Vahzilok missions due to overaggro, but Vahz are qutie nasty, so this isn't too bad for the level we were. Finished the TF in 3hrs 11mins, which is decent time for a 6-player Positron, and Helen got to level 16.

I also played Kid Valkyrie (50 bs/regen scrapper on Triumph), mostly soloing RWZ missions with the goal of gaining merits for the Talsorian broadsword, which I eventually got enough merits to unlock; and it looks very cool. I also slotted a LotG +7.5% recharge in her Hover power (I know Hover isn't really considered a good melee power, but a flying, winged, sword-wielding scrapper just looks awesome) which brought Kid Valkyrie's global recharge from +25% to +32.5% (more with Hasten up) and got her the third set bonus for LotG, +1.13 HPs, raising her max HP from 1636 to 1650.

Played Mercy Beaucoup (28 empathy/ice defender on Liberty) as an SK on a 3-player LEGION SG team fighting Nemesis for a bit, getting her to level 29.

Played April Fool (50 thug/TA MM on Liberty) on a 5 player villain team that took down an AV level Dr. Aeon.

I did an Imperious TF on Triumph, playing Tera Watt (50 ff/elec defender) with Demolition Girls SG; our team mix was

claw/SR scrapper
ice/nrg blaster
AR/dev blaster
archery/elec blaster
FF/elec defender (me)
kin/sonic defender
will/SS tanker
dark/dark defender

This ITF went very smoothly. Against the Phalanx computer, I got to use Force Bubble to push away the hordes of 5th Column robots; not sure if this actually helped since we were so hard to hit anyway, but it sure felt good! Finished that TF in 1hr 40mins, then immediately swung into another Imperious TF on Liberty, playing Paris Holiday (40 fire/thermal corruptor) with Sisterhood; the team for that TF was:

kin/dark defender
db/dark scrapper
inv/nrg tanker
will tanker
spine/dark scrapper
fire/thermal corruptor (me)
fire blaster
robo/dark MM

This ITF was a lot more troubled, squeaking through the first mission then having disagreements over whether to pull or rush the valley of lag in the third mission. I seemed to be drawing mad aggro on this TF, dying often enough that another player commented on how much the Romans seemed to "like" me; maybe I was using Melt Armor too liberally, that actually seemed to draw more aggro than Fireball. We had a lot of deaths through the whole TF; maybe we needed more support, or maybe I'm just bad at being a "healer". Sigh. Ended up finally taking Rise of the Phoenix (the thermal rez) at 41; I had always put it off before since it seemed such a defeatist power, but we seemed to need it. In the final mission, we were quite disorganized fighting Romulus; some people were insisting we should pull away the healing Nictus and somehow this ended up with the tankers fighting the Nictus no one actually tanking Romulus himself, so he went on a squishy-killing rampage. We had two team wipes in this fashion. Our invuln tanker accidentally (really! it was someone I know, not a pickup) left Cimerora causing her to be dropped from the TF and leaving the willpower tanker unSK'd. We tried sniping the Nictus healer with range attacks but the damage just got healed right back up. At that point we gave up on the TF and called it a night. I hate to give up on a TF, but it just wasn't happening for us, so it seemed the right thing to do.

I splurged on another 5 character slots and started a newbie Arachnos widow; I got the name Mayday, which I thought was great for a villain. I gave her a blue and white widow uniform that looks a little on the heroic side, but I like the color contrast and wanted something different than the standard villain colors of black and red. Mostly solo'd and duo'd her up to level 8.

Started a newbie elec/nrg blaster on Pinnacle also, naming her "Perfect Girl" (to be the sidekick of my other Pinnacle alt, Perfect Woman). I joined a 7 player team that did a bunch of King's Row radio missions that rapidly got Perfect Girl to level 9. Not sure how charmed I am with electric blast yet, so I might not stick with this alt.

I did all three villain respecs on Sunday, all with the same team (well, same players, the characters changed) that was mostly drawn from LBX channel. The low level one I played Primadonna (30 sonic/kin corruptor) on a team of 3 MMs, 3 corruptors, 1 crab and 1 brute, which easily smashed the first respec trial in 52mins, getting Primadonna to level 31 and gaining me a very nice level 33 Mako's Bite (Acc/End/Rchg) recipe. I like level 33 recipes, so I should totally do more 1st respecs.

The mid level respec, I played Lady Arachne (43 wolf spider) on a team of 2 doms, 1 crab, 2 brute, 2 MMs, 1 wolf. One of the MMs quit early on and the other was a FF so we actually had no healing to speak of on this trial (aside from Medicine Pool), but we had enough +DEF that it didn't matter. I ended up using Lady Arachne's cloaking device power to stealth/TP the team to the final room of the respec; I was a bit nervous about this because Lady Arachne doesn't have superspeed or a stealth IO to stack with her cloaking device, but this actually worked quite well. This gave me the feeling that maybe bane spider cloaking device is better than dev blaster cloaking device, which City of Data seems to confirm (+50 PvE stealth for the bane spider, +35 PvE stealth for the blaster). Lady Arachne hit level 44 on this respec and got a level 43 Luck of the Gambler (Def/End/Rchg) recipe. This made her high enough to play on the level 44-50 third respec also, on a team of 3 MMs, 1 crab, 1 wolf, 1 brute, 1 kin corr and 1 widow, which I also got to stealth/TP the team on; didn't get anything noteworthy as recipe reward though.

Monday night, I played Perfect Woman (39 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle) and finally figured out why Levantera wouldn't give her the "Welcome to Vanguard" mission. It turns out Perfect Woman still had Montague Castanella's story arc for joining the Midnight Squad still open; although she had unlocked Cimerora and even done the ITF, she had never done the "Talk to Imperious" mission that is the last part of Montague's story arc, and completing that mission let her talk to Levantera and join Vanguard. So apparently the story arcs that unlock Vanguard and the Midnight Squad are mutually exclusive; I had no idea.

I also played Primadonna (31 sonic/kin corr on Liberty) on a Cap au Diable SF with 2 brutes, 2 corrs, stalker and a widow. We had a wipeout in the second mission against the Attack Leader due to aggroing everything in sight around him (which is pretty easy to do in this mission), but otherwise did fine, finishing the SF in 44 mins; I got a Gaussian's (Rech/End) recipe for my trouble.

Did a Lady Grey TF on Invincible difficulty as April Fool (50 thug/TA MM on Liberty). Our team mix was:

kin controller
emp controller
fire/ice tanker
cold defender
thug/TA MM (me)
fire/dark brute
archery blaster
warshade

The LGTF went pretty well except for during the 3rd mission, where the team leader wanted us to find and gank Infernia and Glacia in order to speed past the mission. Our team ended up getting TP'd deep into the mission to clobber the group guarding Infernia, then our stealthers had an awful lot of trouble finding Glacia or something, repeatedly dying while stealthing and running back from the hospital. The nonstealthy part of the team got kind of antsy and started clearing out the deep parts of the mission while the stealthing was going on, then finally after quite a long time one of the stealthers found Glacia really close to the mission door (I swear she must not spawn until after Infernia is found or something) so we were able to get her too. The rest of the LGTF went fine though, and we finished in 2hrs 41mins.

Played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) in Recluse's Victory for awhile, duoing with a tanker who was there working on getting pillboxes. An energy/ninjitsu stalker would occasionally blitz us, hoping to catch us unawares; I was too slippery for him to nail, but he was quite slippery too and I was never able to kill him either. The stalker did manage to gank my tanker partner at one point, though the tanker claimed he was afk at the time.

Did a Katie TF with Mystery Girl (35 ff/nrg defender on Liberty) on a team with 4 defenders, 2 controllers, 1 blaster and 1 tanker. A teammate complimented me on Mystery Girl's costume, which she said was "too cute". I also learned exactly what it meant to "knock" in the first mission (something I hadn't ever done before); apparently you just run up to the door on the hill and witches start pouring out. PFF was handy for that! I was a bit worried our DPS would be too low with this team mix, but it wasn't too bad and we finished in 41 minutes. Got a junky Edict of the Master (Dmg) recipe, but also a nice Magical Conspiracy salvage.

I played Maitresse (35 necro/storm MM on Liberty) on an 8-player villain team doing paper missions in St Martial. We had a couple wipeouts against Malta and one wipeout against Carnies, but overall did okay, getting Maitresse to level 36.

I finished up on Monday burning one of my new character slots to make Samurai-ko, a newbie katana/willpower scrapper on Liberty. I gave her a costume of bright red and gold samurai armor (tried a few different color schemes but this seemed to be the most striking) and she's surprisingly fun, even solo, hacking her way up to level 6.

Tuesday night I spent playing Amethyst Star (29 warshade on Protector) as a sidekick on an 8-player Demolition Girls SG, mostly fighting Crey at around level 37. We were pretty support light (a cold defender with cold shields for support, but no real healing) and I got a lot of practice using the Stygian Circle power to self-heal. Got to level 30, where I took the warshade Cloak of Darkness power, which actually looks rather neat.

Wednesday night, I started playing Police Woman in Recluse's Victory, but I almost immediately got beat up by two different fortunatas that I encountered there. Running from them didn't seem to work and they were pretty easily able to get through PFF (some of those psy abilities just ignore defense); no other heroes were around and I didn't feel like I had much of a shot against them, so I left and joined a 7-player Sisterhood team which was doing radio missions in Peregrine Island to help a defender get to level 50.

After that I switched to Triumph server, first playing Grey Wings (35 archery/fire blaster) on a Katie TF with 1 tanker, 2 defenders, 1 controller, 2 scrappers and 2 blasters, knocking the TF out in 35 minutes. After that I played Alice Slaughter (24 DB/will brute) on a pickup Cap SF; forgot to write down our team composition, but it was an 8-player team. We had a partial team wipe on the mission where you lead a tech to the computer, but I managed to run in to grab the tech and drag him to the objective while under heavy fire. In the final mission, with 8 players we felt like we could fight Infernal and Bat'Zul straight up, and we beat them both. We finished the Cap SF in 1hr 18mins, and I got a level 24 Kismet (Def/End/Rchg) recipe. I went on to have Alice solo the Strikebreaker badge mission before calling it a night.

Thursday night, I played Lady Arachne (44 wolf spider) on an all epic AT Imperious TF organized on LBx. We ended up with a team of:

2 peacebringers
3 warshades
2 wolf spiders
1 fortunata (sort of)

The other wolf spider was pretty cool; like me, he was technically a bane spider but had focused on the wolf spider gun attacks instead of the bane mace attacks, which I think is really a pretty effective team build. The various kheldians alternated between dwarf form for tanking/scrapping and nova for blasting, and the peacebringers got a lot of mileage out of light form for tanking also. Our fortunata had few team buffs; he didn't have maneuvers (so our team +DEF was a little shy of being capped from the 2 other soldiers) or mind link (he claimed he would take it at 49) and was level 45 and wouldn't take an LK, so was fairly useless. Also, the kheldians said they got zippo from Cosmic Balance or Dark Sustenance, because both hero and villain epic ATs don't give them any kind of synergy bonus, which really sucks.

Our team alternated between being really glorious because we could smash everything with ease, and being heavily beat up. I think the difference was mainly play style; if we stuck together we did well due to the +DEF buffs, peacebringer heals and overall kheldian DPS, but if we got strung out we'd quickly get defeated in detail. We did decently in the first two missions, then had a partial wipeout against the Phalanx console (our DPS against this device seemed really low for some reason). In the final mission the kheldians actually did something fairly cool: all of them transformed to nova form and they were able to zap the healer nictus to death from range. But then we jumped into melee with Romulus and the remaining nictus AVs and things got really messy; we had two wipeouts just against them, and at least once I found myself kiting Romulus around hoping one of the tanky kheldians would pull him off of me. We eventually were able to grind Romulus down, though we also suffered a lot of deaths in the process. Finished the ITF in 2hrs 38mins. A lot of people seemed psyched up to do another epic AT ITF sometime in the future; I think I'd do another one, but I do think having another VEAT or two (maybe 4 VEATs, 4 kheldians) would make for a better balance. The VEATs seem more "support" oriented while the kheldians seem better tanks and DPS.

Finished up Thursday creating another new alt on Liberty, Virtual Girl, a tech-based rad/sonic defender that I gave a very TRON-esque costume (a dark costume with lots of glowing electronic highlights). Virtual Girl joined a sewers team which eventually wiped out deep in the sewers, then migrated to King's Row; finished the night at level 8 having picked the rad heal, rad infection, accelerate metabolism, and the first two sonic attacks for powers so far.

9/15/2008

When I logged on Friday night, someone was calling on LBx for villains to come to RV, and I'm a sucker so I brought April Fool (50 thug/TA MM) to try some PvP. No other villains seemed interested in helping, so I found myself solo against various fire blasters (I saw at least 3 but I think only 2 were working as a team). I managed to drop one of these fire blasters who got a little overconfident, but I got defeated at least 3 times. After awhile I decided multiple fire blasters was just too anti-mastermind an environment for April to do well, so I switched to Yuki-Onna (48 ice/cold corruptor) to try my luck with cold debuffs. I did score another kill (with some help from Arachnos NPCs) but then repeatedly got flattened by one particular fire blaster, one of the PvP regulars. She had the DPS to drop me in a split second (I got hit repeatedly by nasty Apocalypse procs) and my cold debuffs didn't really seem to slow her down enough, and any time I actually had the edge against her she'd drop into Hibernate, then escape after Hibernate ended.

Eventually I gave up on RV and Yuki-Onna joined a pickup team in Grandville. My fire blaster opponent (who actually is on my friends list) switched to a thermal corruptor and LK'd to me while we helped the pickup team battle the full roster of the Vindicators. This got Yuki-Onna to level 49.

Later that weekend, my pvp experiences inspired me to respec Yuki-Onna; I dropped Medicine for Leadership (it never felt like I had time to Aid Self while I was being blasted, and not having enough perception seemed a major contributor to heroes getting the drop on me instead of vice versa) and I brought Freeze Ray and Snowstorm into my build (I previously avoided Freeze Ray because I figured everyone would have Clear Mind or break frees, and Snowstorm because it would aggro NPCs, but I'm starting to think I may need them). I dropped Frostwork (too often I'm on a team where the brute or tank is already HP capped) but kept the other two cold shields (despite liking PvP, I like buffing too). I also took all my Decimation IOs out of Ice Bolt and Ice Blast; I had collected 3 Decimation for each of these, but never could find or buy enough Decimation recipes on villain side to make a set of 5 (for the +6.25% recharge bonus) for either one. Instead I slotted 4 Devastation IOs and 2 Thunderstrike IOs into each of Ice Bolt and Ice Blast; this was expensive, but at least more attainable than Decimation sets, gave me decent global DMG and HP bonuses. Good recipes are hard to get on red side, so I left a bunch of powers with empty slots for now (so Yuki is sorta unplayable at the moment), and put a lot of standing bids for desirable recipes on the Black Market in hopes of getting recipes to slot later.

Also on Friday night, I played Vathia (11 fire/ice blaster) with a 6 player team of Demolition Girls SG running missions in King's Row, Skyway City and Perez Park. We played for quite awhile, getting Vathia to 16 (I took Combat Jumping, Aid Self and Build Up for powers) and we picked up the Spelunker badge along the way. I also lucked into finding a level 10 Karma KB protection recipe somewhere, which is really cool; I'm thinking I'll try to slip it into Police Woman's build next time I respec her.

I had Mystery Girl (35 ff/nrg defender) solo her aura mission and I added auras to a couple of her costumes, then did a Katie TF with a 5 controller, 3 defender team. We were very safe but it took 44 minutes; I got a fairly worthless Force Feedback (Rech/End) recipe.

I played Mercy Beaucoup (29 emp/ice defender) on a Moonfire TF which exemped her to level 28. Our team mix was:

dark/dark tanker
plant/thermal controller
emp/rad defender
plant/storm controller
nrg/nrg blaster
ice/fire blaster
emp/ice defender (me)

The other empath was really good and with both of us spamming Fortitude and the thermal using fire shields, we were in really good shape. I had trouble deciding whether to spread Fortitude out, to be on most of the team, or to double Fortitude a few people; I ended up Fortituding the two blasters (giving them double-fort for much of the TF) and the other empath (since, why not, he can blast a little). We had no trouble with the TF and completed it in 1hr 55mins. Mercy got the Silver Bullet badge and a level 29 Luck of the Gambler +7.5% recharge, which is especially wonderful for being so low level (pretty sure the +7.5% recharge is treated like a set bonus when exemping). Haven't slotted it yet, but I'm...hoarding it....

From that TF Mercy went into a Sky Raiders respec, with a team mix of:

fire/nrg blaster
fire/fire blaster
inv/SS tanker
emp/ice defender (me)
peacebringer
AR/dev blaster
emp/nrg defender
ill/emp controller

We pretty easily handled the respec trial in 1hr 15mins and Mercy got to level 30 (taking Absorb Pain as a power) and got a level 34 Decimation (Acc/Dmg/Rchg) recipe, which is not bad at all.

I spent some time on Triumph server this weekend, playing Flying Tiger (15 MA/will scrapper on Triumph server), first on a Synapse TF, then on a Positron TF, both with the Demolition Girls SG. This is really the wrong order to do them in, strictly speaking, but was just the order they happened in.

Synapse had a team of:

TA/archery defender
MA/will scrapper (me)
plant/kin controller
elec/nrg blaster
emp/psy defender
storm/nrg defender

As the only melee I became de facto tanker despite being at the min level for the TF and SK'd up, so I rushed into lots of hordes of clockwork. Being pre-stamina and pre-quick recovery, I was really choking for END, especially with clockworks using electrical attacks to drain END; I ended up begging the stormy to keep O2 Boost on me for the protection against END drain. We did have a wipeout during the first mission due to an unexpected patrol, and the empath disconnected during the second mission and never returned, but we otherwise got through the TF with no problems. We defeated Babbage along the way with the help of some other heroes who showed up. This got Flying Tiger to level 20, and I took Hurdle, Rise to the Challenge and Quick Recovery as powers. (Strictly speaking, I don't need Hurdle since I took Quick Recovery instead of Stamina, but I am just really used to having Swift and Hurdle on all my characters, so I feel debuffed if I don't have them.) I also found a level 20 Steadfast Protection KB protection recipe, which seemed like gravy after the other recipes I'd already gotten that weekend. This was on Triumph server and I had no real use for it there, so I crafted it and threw it on Wentworths hoping to get a big cash influx from selling it.

Flying Tiger also joined a pickup team fighting Banished Pantheon in a mission in Talos Island which got her to 21, then the next day played on a Positron TF with a team mix of:

ice/stone tanker
ice/fire tanker
cold/elec defender
fire/nrg blaster
fire/fire blaster
MA/will scrapper (me)
ice/SS tanker

With 3 ice tankers, I was purely DPS. We had no "healer" per se, but cold shields made us really hard to hit, especially the ice tankers, and my natural regen from willpower kept me going just fine. We did have one wipeout during the Rollister mission due to aggroing multiple groups of CoT, but otherwise sailed through the TF in 3hrs 31mins.

I played Mayday (8 widow on Liberty) on a couple different pickup teams in Port Oakes, clawing her way up to level 11, and also played Virtual Girl (8 rad/sonic defender on Liberty) on a pickup team in the Hollows that got her to level 9.

I solo'd Jaguar Goddess (13 claw/will stalker on Liberty) for a bit, getting the Plague Carrier badge and Super Jump at level 14, then duo'd part of Seer Marino's story arc with a dominator. We had one wipeout after freeing Wretch from confinement and getting mad aggro from angry Arachnos; the bad guys defeated both the player characters, but then Wretch (who is a major butt kicker) beat up ALL the bad guys that ambushed us, all on his own. We had to hospital then run back to lead Wretch out.

9/18/2008

On Monday night I started off playing Grey Wings (35 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) on a Katie Hannon TF with 2 controllers, 2 defenders, 2 scrappers and 2 blasters. We had a good mix of DPS and support and blazed through the TF in 27 minutes; I didn't get anything particularly good as reward though.

I did some IO crafting on Liberty villain side, then switched to Virtual Girl (8 rad/sonic defender on Liberty) to join a pickup team for some missions in King's Row. We had 2 team wipes due to overaggroing multiple large groups of Council, but managed to get past that and to complete an Atlas safeguard. I also wrote her a new bio connecting her to 'The Doctor' (from The Doctor's Ally), which I thought would be a cool back story. Virtual Girl got to level 10, but Comcast was freaking out on me on Monday night and before I was able to train, I totally lost Internet connectivity for the night. I thought it was maybe ripples on the net from Hurricane Ike, but I'm really far from where the hurricane hit, so that's just a guess.

Tuesday night I started playing Perfect Woman (39 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle). Perfect Woman's SG on Pinnacle was undergoing some heavy drama due to one of the SG officers flipping out and trying to kick everyone else out of the SG, and as a result there was a big SG meeting to discuss things. I was really tempted to say, Screw all this drama, I'm taking my ball and going back to my home server. But the other, non-crazy SG officers seemed so earnest about fixing things and moving forward, that I decided to give it a chance.

After that, I switched back to Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) and joined the Arena kickball that was going on. In the first match, I was the only blaster! Despite this, I got picked second to last anyhow (boo!). My team was one blaster (me) and 4 defender/controllers, versus a team of 5 defender/controllers, and I think our higher DPS caused us to win, 6 to 0, of which I got 3 kills. After that, I think half the players immediately switched to a fire blaster alt.

Second round I was on a team of 3 blasters and 3 defender/controllers fighting a 5 person team on the cargo ship map, and we won pretty handily; I forget the exact score, but I managed to get 5 kills.

Third round some joker nominated me to be a team captain, and the other team captain was a PvP fire/nrg blaster, AND he got to pick first, which put me at a big disadvantage to start with. After drafting an empath and one of the other fire blasters, I decided to try and draft all the rads to shut the other team out of debuffs; this sort of worked, because I got all 3 rads (ending up with 3 rads, 2 blasters and an emp) and the other team ended up with none. But it ended up not working out in practice; we played it out on the Steel Canyon map, and the other team, with 3 fire blasters, had far better DPS than us even without any rad debuffs, and so they repeatedly were able to damage spike us out. Lost that match like 15 to 41; I got 3 kills.

Fourth round we did a 7 vs 7 on the Perez Park map, and my team was 3 blasters and 4 support types, but somehow we never quite clicked; lost that match 8 to 35, I got only 1 kill.

Fifth round was down to 4 vs 4 in Steel Canyon. My team was 2 blasters, 2 controllers; unfortunately the other team kept us totally disrupted the whole match and we were never really able to focus fire on anyone, losing that one 5 to 19. Embarrassingly, I didn't get any of the kills, the other blaster (who was quite good) got them all.

Sixth round we had too few to really do a valid kickball draft, so someone just assigned teams in a way she thought fair. This put me on a 3 player team of me (AR/dev blaster), an emp/nothing defender, and a grav/storm controller; our opposition was a fire/nrg blaster, ill/emp controller and ice/rad controller. This did not seem an especially fair matchup to me, but it's my own fault for being an AR blaster and not a fire blaster, so I resolved to try it. We fought 3 vs 3 on the cargo ship map, and I was nominated target caller. Roughly the first half of the match my team was kinda disoriented and not really "with it", getting beat up by the other team, but around the midpoint of the match we got it together and turned the tide. I started to get the hang of relentlessly targeting the enemy emp whenever possible, instantly switching away when she entered hibernate, then switching right back as soon as hibernate ended. The grav/storm actually pinned two of their players in a corner somehow with hurricane and slowed them enough that they couldn't get out before I killed them. We ended up still losing the match, 5 to 7, of which I got 4 kills, but I felt like we were really working together better in the last half of the match. I think my team's empath felt that way too, because she instantly demanded a rematch, with the same teams.

So my seventh round we again were an AR/dev, emp/nothing, grav/storm versus fire/nrg, ill/emp and ice/rad. This time we met on the Perez Park map, and my team was at the top of our game. Something I noticed here was that the grav/storm was actually phasing out the enemy fire blaster about half the time; I think this really helped, plus our own emp was very slippery and able to not die while keeping us alive and buffed. This left me free to keep steady pressure on the enemy emp (who really is a nice person otherwise, but sorry, she had to die here), occasionally switching to the enemy rad when their emp was dead or hibernating. My web grenades plus the grav/storm's various slowdown effects really seemed to be effective here too (what with no kin around). I thought I was keeping the enemy emp down enough that probably people didn't have Clear Mind, so I threw an occasional Beanbag into my attack chain to see if I could stun someone, but I'm not sure if that helped any. In any case, my team won the match 8 to 0 (of which I got 6 kills) which left me utterly amazed. Anyway, kickball was a great time.

After kickball I joined a friend who had just started a new toon on a 6 player Sisterhood team; it was me, my friend and another friend who was 4-boxing the rest of the team (something I could never do - I tried 2-boxing once but I'm really bad at multitasking so I played both toons less than half as good). Police Woman is actually pretty good when exemped to low levels, so I exemped down to level 4 and we did a couple door missions in Atlas Park which got my friend up to level 6.

Finished up on Tuesday night playing Police Woman on a Master of the Statesman TF attempt that was recruiting from LBx. Most of the team seemed to know each other, so it looked like I was just a pickup to fill one of their last two slots. Our team mix was:

sonic/psy defender
claw/regen scrapper
stone/stone tanker
ill/emp controller
fire/kin controller
AR/dev blaster (me)
elec/elec blaster
sonic/dark defender

The team leader invited me to a vent server that most of the team was on, and they all seemed pretty nice. We didn't have a rad, but the sonic defenders were quite effective at buffing/debuffing. The TF went really well up to the treespec; everyone was being pretty paranoid about the tree initially, but while killing vines we were getting respawns and I think we got a bit sloppy rushing to kill vines and one of the defenders got spiked to death by the thorn tree. By that point it was too late to restart and so we pushed on through the rest of the STF, though people got a lot lazier about buffs and aggro control, so we had several more deaths before the TF was done, finishing in 2hrs 14mins and getting me a Stupefy: chance for knockback recipe. (An SHO is probably on-the-average more valuable, but there are lots of recipes I still want and few HOs that I still need.) The team leader did teach me a couple new tricks, though; apparently when you have thorn tree aggro, there is a visual cue in that the ground under your toon becomes prickly-looking, so that can be a warning that you need to go hide. Also, he had me pull the patron AVs in the last mission, using the shoot them/TP the puller trick; he asked me to pull them from a particular spot, due west of the AV-lineup, instead of south towards the team. This theoretically pulls the AV away from the other 3 AVs instead of perpendicularly, so will be more likely to result in a single pull. Using this technique, my first pull was Ghost Widow (solo; we kited her around a bit before immobing and shooting her to death), my second pull was Scirocco/Captain Mako (and Mako either didn't have time to elude or our triple tactics was enough to get past it), and the tanker just grabbed Black Scorpion at the end.

Wednesday night, I started off playing Mayday (11 arachnos widow on Liberty) on a 3-player team with Fallen LEGION SG, doing missions in Cap au Diable and Port Oakes, which got Mayday to level 13. I picked Lunge at level 12; it seems a decent attack so far.

After that I played Kid Valkyrie (50 bs/regen scrapper on Triumph) for half of a RWZ raid, picking up about fifty Vanguard merits. I also bought the Cyborg booster pack and peeked at the various cyborg costumes in the tailor, but haven't used any of the costume pieces yet; I do have a couple tech heroes that totally would use some of them though. Regarding the whole booster pack marketing plan, I personally have no problem with throwing an extra $10 at ncsoft every now and then in return for some relatively minor perks; I get so much enjoyment out of CoH that I feel it is well worth rewarding them. The extra costume pieces are a plus, of course.

Finished up Wednesday night on a pickup Imperious TF. The team leader asked me to play a healer, and I offered to play Paris Holiday (41 fire/thermal corruptor); he asked, does thermal have a heal? "Need a healer" and "does thermal heal?" should have both been warning signs, but I like pickup teams so I went ahead with it anyway. Our team mix was:

necro/dark MM
claw/regen scrapper
plant/thorn dominator
fire/axe tanker
fire blaster
nrg blaster
night widow
fire/therm corr (me)

I started off a bit worried since I wasn't sure that a thermal corruptor plus a dark mastermind was enough support to win the ITF. Our fire blaster disconnected in the first mission and never came back, which hurt our DPS quite a bit. The team did seem to appreciate how much the thermal shields helped them against the Romans; we seemed weak against the negative damage inflicted by the nictus we ran into though. The mastermind had a nicotine fit or something during the second mission and suddenly AFK'd to take a smoke; I tried to warn him that there would be ambushes, but he must've already been gone. Sure enough, the next ambush steamrollered the mastermind; someone cracked, "Wow, smoking really IS bad for your health." Ten minutes later the MM returned, though, and said it had been totally worth it.

Lag in the third mission, with the Valley of Lag Death, was pretty bad even though our tanker pulled the generals down to us; the dom and the night widow both disconnected and reconnected. One was my boss so this actually got me killed in a fight, but I got better. Anyway, with the team down one player already and other players laggy or disconnected, we found it slow going to get through this mission. It was a struggle to break the Phalanx computer (several of us died to robot aggro, including me) but after that the two AVs were no problem.

In the last mission we decided to jump directly to Romulus's courtyard, and after clearing a little space we attacked the AVs. Our initial plan was a simple frontal assault on Romulus. We were down a player and didn't have a ton of debuffs, so our DPS had trouble really denting Romulus. I spammed Heat Exhaustion and Melt Armor and tried to keep Forge on the remaining blaster, the widow and the scrapper; it looked like the MM was dropping dark debuffs on Romulus too. None of my debuffs are perma, and I could see Romulus's health drop when the debuffs are on, then rise again (from healing) when the debuffs were down. I think we must've fought Romulus for 10 minutes before we dropped him the first time. After that we were confident that the next Romulus should be easier to kill; but we see-sawed his health up and down for what must've been 15 minutes. At one point it looked like we got him down to 10% health, but then he clawed his way back up to 100% health again. During this fight I really had to watch my END usage; I needed to maintain buffs on people, keep debuffs on the AV, and still attack to do damage, and we had no END-recovery buffs at all so I was gasping for breath within the first few minutes. I cut back on which powers I was using after awhile; I felt like I absolutely had to keep Heat Exhaustion and Melt Armor on the AV, Forge on my DPSers and Assault toggle on the team if we wanted to kill the AV at all. I decided to slack on buffing Fire Shield (smash/lethal resist) on everyone except the tank, though I kept buffing Plasma Shield for negative resist due to all the stray nictus that were attacking us, and I cut my attack chain down to only Fire Blast/Blaze. I still ran out of END a few times and had to re-activate Assault.

Anyway, after 15 minutes of fighting the second Romulus, Romulus was back to full health, and we were close to despair. At that point the blaster suggested we try and pull Romulus away from the nictus AVs to avoid heals. I've heard this tactic suggested before on previous ITF teams but I've always been skeptical of it, but most of my other teams apparently had more DPS and/or more debuff so it wasn't necessary. The tanker started slowly moving away from Romulus and did successfully separate Romulus from the remaining Nictus AVs; and within 2 minutes of us doing that, the second Romulus dropped. Someone else said "We should've done that a LONG time ago!" and everyone agreed. We wiped out the remaining Romuluses and then killed off a lot of minions to complete the TF. Total TF time was 2hrs 48mins. Paris Holiday got to 42 and received a level 43 Luck of the Gambler +7.5% recharge as reward (yay! it's so hard to get those on villain side). I think the Night Widow also got a LoTG +7.5% recharge, making it a really lucky TF overall.

[ QUOTE ]
9/18/2008

Finished up on Tuesday night playing Police Woman on a Master of the Statesman TF attempt that was recruiting from LBx. Most of the team seemed to know each other, so it looked like I was just a pickup to fill one of their last two slots. Our team mix was:

sonic/psy defender
claw/regen scrapper
stone/stone tanker (Project 311 Laseracid's tank)
ill/emp controller
fire/kin controller
AR/dev blaster (me)
elec/elec blaster
sonic/dark defender

The team leader invited me to a vent server that most of the team was on, and they all seemed pretty nice. We didn't have a rad, but the sonic defenders were quite effective at buffing/debuffing. The TF went really well up to the treespec; everyone was being pretty paranoid about the tree initially, but while killing vines we were getting respawns and I think we got a bit sloppy rushing to kill vines and one of the defenders got spiked to death by the thorn tree. By that point it was too late to restart and so we pushed on through the rest of the STF, though people got a lot lazier about buffs and aggro control, so we had several more deaths before the TF was done, finishing in 2hrs 14mins and getting me a Stupefy: chance for knockback recipe. (An SHO is probably on-the-average more valuable, but there are lots of recipes I still want and few HOs that I still need.) The team leader did teach me a couple new tricks, though; apparently when you have thorn tree aggro, there is a visual cue in that the ground under your toon becomes prickly-looking, so that can be a warning that you need to go hide. Also, he had me pull the patron AVs in the last mission, using the shoot them/TP the puller trick; he asked me to pull them from a particular spot, due west of the AV-lineup, instead of south towards the team. This theoretically pulls the AV away from the other 3 AVs instead of perpendicularly, so will be more likely to result in a single pull. Using this technique, my first pull was Ghost Widow (solo; we kited her around a bit before immobing and shooting her to death), my second pull was Scirocco/Captain Mako (and Mako either didn't have time to elude or our triple tactics was enough to get past it), and the tanker just grabbed Black Scorpion at the end.



[/ QUOTE ]

Its was a Fun TF PW you did Good I was the tank on that TF. Thanks for joining us on it.

[ QUOTE ]
Third round some joker nominated me to be a team captain

[/ QUOTE ]

Hey, I'm no joker!


And I picked you because I knew you knew what was up. You think pretty lowly of yourself for being AR/Dev, but for one of the most lolful combos for blasters to have, you pull it off amazingly well PW. The shouts of "DAH! WEBNADED!" were only overshadowed by the shouts of "DAH! GLUE ARROWED!" during the matches.

You're the Ford Fiesta in the Indy 500, and you're still placing top 10. Speaks volumes for how well you do.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Third round some joker nominated me to be a team captain

[/ QUOTE ]

Hey, I'm no joker!


And I picked you because I knew you knew what was up. You think pretty lowly of yourself for being AR/Dev, but for one of the most lolful combos for blasters to have, you pull it off amazingly well PW. The shouts of "DAH! WEBNADED!" were only overshadowed by the shouts of "DAH! GLUE ARROWED!" during the matches.

You're the Ford Fiesta in the Indy 500, and you're still placing top 10. Speaks volumes for how well you do.

[/ QUOTE ]

Watch out everyone...budo's kindness usually turns into hostility at a later point.

9/22/2008

I played Mayday (13 widow) a lot on Thursday, Friday and Sunday, joining LEGION SG teams three times, and forming and leading one pickup villain team of my own; these all went pretty well. Most of these teams were very healer-light but had good +DEF from stacked maneuvers from VEATs and the occasional Force Field Generator from a trapper. This got Mayday up to level 20, and I picked up Spin, Tactical Training: Assault, Hurdle and Stamina for powers.

I did a Katie TF on Triumph server with Grey Wings (35 archery/fire blaster); the team was 2 controllers, 2 blasters, 1 tanker, 1 defender and 1 peacebringer. We had some trouble with END drain from the witches in the first mission but got through the TF in 47 mins; didn't get anything special from it though. Later in the weekend I also played Grey Wings on a Hess TF with Demolition Girls SG, with 3 scrappers, 1 blaster, a dark defender, and 2 controllers; we pretty easily finished that in 55 minutes.

I experimented a bit with farming the Romans guarding the walls in Cimerora, which I had heard could be lucrative. I tried this with both Mega (50 SS/elec brute) and Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper). Mega has 68% lethal RES from her elec armor + tough and still took fairly life threatening damage from the huge alpha strike the Romans could put out, though I was able to mitigate the damage with both Foot Stomp, and, interestingly, Power Sink (Mega was able to completely drain Roman minions of END with this power, which took a lot of fight out of them). Olivia Q has capped melee DEF and close to the cap on range DEF from IO sets and was not really threatened by the Romans at all, which mostly missed her; I was worried that stacked -DEF from their attacks would drag her down, but she seemed quite resistant to defense debuffs, probably from her SR passives. This is the exact opposite of what I would've expected; I thought the RES character would be fine and the DEF character would be struggling to stay alive. On the other hand, Mega did much, much more damage to the Romans and was able to kill them a lot faster than Olivia could. Even though Olivia had two AoEs (Dragon's Tail and Energy Torrent), Mega's Foot Stomp attacks did a lot more damage; this is partly because Mega is slotted for recharge and Olivia is slotted for defense, and partly because Mega's rage-o-meter was maxed out most of the time due to the nonstop attacks. I found that the combination of greater danger plus greater DPS made it more fun to fight Romans with Mega than with Olivia. I forgot to measure how much inf I got doing this, but Mega did pick up a Pangean Soil and both got a decent amount of level 50 generic recipes that are easily converted to cash.

Also on Thursday, I ended up applying to the PPD Hardsuit contest; I wrote a bit of text explaining why budgeting extra protection for our police officers (specifically, Police Woman) against superpowered criminals would be a good thing, but alas, I didn't win or even come close.

On Friday night I participated in the first couple runs of Steele Magnolia's 100 Times the Victor event, playing Mercy Beaucoup (30 emp/ice defender). The first run was 1 tanker, 3 defenders, 1 blaster, 1 controller, 1 scrapper, 1 warshade, and completed in 34 mins; the second run was the same except the scrapper switched to a second blaster. The second run had one wipeout on one of the last Mary AVs but still finished in 37 mins. I didn't get anything significant as recipe rewards, but Mercy did level up to 32, where I took Adrenaline Boost. I didn't have the focus needed to do ten Katie TFs in a row, so I bowed out after the second one to do something else; I think that team did go on to finish all ten TFs, much later that night.

I ended up switching to Parapsychic (4 psy/fire blaster) on Protector server to join the Level 4 PvP event there. Another player complimented me on Parapsychic's costume (a red and black raver outfit), which was nice. I had missed the first couple matches, but the first one I played was a 17-player free for all on the Steel Canyon map. This was mostly a killsteal-fest, on which I got 7 kills, but the winner came in with 15 kills.

My second match was a team-vs-team game; but instead of kickball, the event organizer assigned teams. This ended up with a fairly lopsided 6-vs-7 match, with me on the team of 6 with only a dark defender for support, while the team of 7 had 2 rads (including Liberty's top PvPer) and lots of damage. We fought on the Outbreak map, and my team put in a valiant effort and I tried to call for people to focus fire on the enemy rads as much as possible. But the enemy team was really with it, and after the first couple minutes they secured a solid hold on the center of the map, defeating my team in detail as we each respawned and rushed them in ones and twos. I tried calling for our team to regroup, but it just wasn't happening. We ended up losing 68 to 9, though I did get 5 of those 9 kills. Unfortunately some of my team members were rather bad sports about this, complaining bitterly about the team assignments before logging off.

We did do a third match, though, with the people who were remaining; this ended up being a 7 player FFA on the cargo ship map, and I did manage to win this with 18 kills (second place got 16). Blasters and corruptors seemed to dominate the level 4 FFAs, at least from what I've seen so far; defiance and scourge both are really good for that format.

Finished Friday night playing Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender on Liberty) on a 6-player team of Sisterhood with some pickup people running level 50 missions in Peregrine Island. We swept clean a map of high level Banished Pantheon, giving me pretty nice progress towards the BP mask badge; I also got a Prophecy drop along the way.

On Saturday I solo'd Jaguar Goddess (14 claws/will stalker) through a King's Row mayhem and some newspaper missions that got her to level 15.

I also helped a friend move 2 Coercive Persuasion purple recipes from one alt to another, and in return she helped me move a Luck of the Gambler +7.5% rchg and a few other recipes from one of my alts to Police Woman. I had a Coercive Persuasion (Confuse/Rchg/Acc) recipe just lying around that I had not ever gotten around to making (my controller has been idling at level 49 since I want her to hit level 50 while doing an STF or something equally dramatic) so I decided to just give that to her as well, since they're so much better if you have more of the set.

I crafted a lot of level 35 IOs for use by Mercy Beaucoup (who had just hit 32), and as a result Police Woman ended up getting the Arms Dealer, Sniper, Major General and Walks the Earth crafting badges.

On Sunday I played Mercy Beaucoup on another Katie TF, with 4 defenders, 2 blasters and 2 controllers. This team was extremely disciplined and stayed tightly together during the first mission, benefiting from many buffs and mowing down Mary Macomber and her cohorts. Finished that one in 36 minutes, getting Mercy to level 33 and receiving a Neuronic Shutdown Chance for Psi damage recipe as reward; haven't quite figured out what to do with that but I'm sure I must have some character that would use it.

Late on Sunday night I played Virtual Girl (10 rad/sonic defender) on a Positron TF organized on LBx. Our team mix was:

fire/mental blaster
rad/sonic defender (me)
MA/SR scrapper
arch/nrg blaster
fire/nrg blaster

One of the blasters complimented me on Virtual Girl's bio (I wrote a story connecting her with Crey and the mysterious Doctor), which was nice. I was a bit worried about being the only support character on this team, but the other players were pretty good and our high DPS served us really well, letting us breeze through the many Defeat All missions; and a couple people had Superspeed and veteran Team Teleport, letting us stealth the missions that could be stealthed. We did have one wipeout during the Rollister mission when an ambush caught us while the team was strung out, but otherwise the TF went really well, finishing in only 2hrs 55mins, which is really fast for a Positron TF. This got Virtual Girl to level 16, and I took Combat Jumping, Super Jump and Hurdle at 12, 14 and 16, as well as upgrading to DO enhancements.

9/26/2008

Tuesday night I played Amethyst Star (31 human-form warshade on Protector) with an 8-player team of Demolition Girls SG; we did a lot of missions and got Amethyst to level 33, which let me take and 4-slot the Quasar power. I'm finding that Mire - Quasar - pop a blue - Stygian Circle is a pretty amazing combo that effectively lets me build up, nova, then completely refill my health and end.

After that I played Perfect Woman (39 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle) for one mission in Crey's Folly with a 6-player pickup team; it looked like the dps players were in the process of getting themselves killed when I entered the mission, but after I jumped in and started tanking and leading into fights, things went a lot better. Nothing really wrong with the team, but the sole defender wanted to log after the first mission, so the team fell apart like pickup teams sometimes do.

I finished Tuesday night making a newbie elec melee/willpower brute on Pinnacle and duo'd with a robo/dark MM up to level 7.

I started Wednesday night playing Kid Valkyrie (50 bs/regen scrapper on Triumph) and joining a RWZ raid on Triumph server. This raid was cleverly gathering forces just barely in range of the first pylon they wanted to kill, so periodically a new player would arrive at the gathering point with pylon aggro and the pylon would attack the raid and kill a few of the raiders; the raid leader would yell at the people who drew aggro onto the raid but I really think we simply needed to be mustering somewhere safer. I couldn't help but notice we had very, very few support characters at the raid and I mentioned this to the raid leader, but she still had us push on and begin attacking pylons with about 2 and a half teams. I saw we had deaths even against the pylons; based on that I figured attacking the mother ship itself was doomed to failure, so at that point I decided to drop out of the raid and do something less likely to be frustrating.

So I switched to playing Primadonna (31 sonic/kin corruptor on Liberty) and joined a Cap SF that was forming. We had 2 kin corruptors (including me), a traps corruptor, a brute, a widow, 2 stalkers and a mastermind. This team went pretty well, although we did have one team wipe on the mission where you lead a technician to a computer, from a big Longbow ambush that overran us. Finished the TF in 1hr 6mins, though I didn't get anything noteworthy.

After that I solo'd with Mega (50 SS/elec brute on Liberty) a little bit, bashing Romans on the walls of Cimerora for money (gained about 1.1M infamy and a Hamidon Goo), then played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) with a level 50 Sisterhood team for several missions (gained about 2.3M influence).

I also peeked in on Wentworths on Triumph server and found that Flying Tiger (my level 21 MA/will scrapper there) had successfully sold her level 20 knockback protection IO for 20M influence, which should cover her expenses for awhile.

Finished up Wednesday night playing Miss Molotov (29 fire/fire scrapper on Liberty), soloing missions in Croatoa to hit level 30 where I took Consume, since she seems to be an END hog. Right after she hit 30 there was a Katie TF recruiting, so I figured, what the heck, I'll join. We ended up starting with a 7-player team of 1 tanker, 1 thermal controller, 1 kin controller, 1 blaster, 1 scrapper (me), 1 emp defender and 1 peacebringer.

This Katie TF was plagued with problems; we were short 1 player of a full team, most of the team members were on the lower end of the 30-34 level range, and our blaster (who was also my mentor since she was at the max level) repeatedly went linkdead during the first mission against the 10 AVs. None of the support characters were really debuffy and the witches totally debuffed our ToHit with Hurricane and Lightning Cloud and stole all our END with elec attacks so our DPS was abysmal. We had a wipeout on Mary #9 and another wipeout on Mary #10, then we tried Mary #10 again and fought her for about 20 minutes before finally bringing her down. After Mary #10, though, the rest of the TF was pretty easy, so we finished the TF in 1hr 31mins, getting Miss Molotov to level 31; I got a level 34 Scirocco's Dervish Chance for Lethal recipe as reward.

Thursday night I played Mayday (20 blood widow on Liberty) on a 5-player LEGION SG team doing missions on Sharkhead Island. We did an Independence Port mayhem where we got to fight and defeat a Hero-level Aurora Borealis, then a whole bunch of Freakshow missions. We had 2 wipeouts from overaggroing too many Freaks, but overall did pretty well, til we ran into a Barracuda AV. Barracuda gave us a first team wipe because we simply ran into her by surprise, and unprepared, we got clobbered. Our second try against Barracuda we had our rad corruptor try to pull her with an anchored debuff; but Barracuda's alpha strike took out our rad, then she mopped up the rest of us. Third try we rushed her instead of pulling, which let the rad live long enough to land debuffs, and so we actually took her out. Mayday got to level 22 and took Foresight, which actually seems a very nice power (even more stacking +DEF). A friend also mentioned to me that he thought Mayday the Arachnos Widow was a reference to some Marvel character named Spider-Girl, who I had never heard of but is also sometimes called Mayday; it was an interesting coincidence...hope I don't get generic'd for that. It's pretty hard not to have a spider-themed costume as an Arachnos soldier.

Finished Thursday night playing a Lady Grey TF; the team leader asked for debuffs, so I played Yuki-Onna (49 ice/cold corruptor on Liberty). Our team mix was:

2 scrappers (one regen, one willpower)
stone tanker
ice/cold corruptor (me)
ill/emp controller
ice blaster
fire blaster
TA/archery defender

The team leader ran this as quick LGTF, stealthing everything possible. I actually thought it'd be quite hard to stealth a lot of the LGTF due to the high perception of Rikti Drones (I've seen lots of people die to drones trying to stealth missions in this), but this actually seemed to work well; the illusionist seemed particularly good at stealthing around. First mission, we got TP'd to Penelope Yin, freed her, then someone suicided her into mobs to intentionally fail the mission. Second mission the team got TP'd to each of the sets of Riders and annihilated each in turn; I tried to use Heat Loss to counteract Famine's END drain, and I think this helped, though our debuffs and high DPS also meant that Famine was very quickly vaporized each time. Third mission was also stealthed and intentionally failed by killing Infernia and Glacia; fourth mission we did pretty normally; fifth mission we got stealth/TP'd to the end room and easily took out Hro'tohz. Then we took out the 4 generators rather than fighting the Honoree. I asked why we were doing this, and apparently it was because the empath was AFK; since taking out generators spawns ambushes, I wondered if this meant we were purposely trying to get her killed, but I guess it was because we wanted the empath around during the last AV fight. Anyway things got really chaotic as Rikti ambushes started swarming in, and at some point our empath returned and someone pulled Honoree and we killed him while dodging the various other Rikti. Finished the TF in 1hr 11mins, which seemed very fast for a LGTF; I got a junky Sovereign Right: Acc/End recipe as reward. This was also my first run with Yuki-Onna after her last respec; she seems to burn a lot more END than before, probably because I added two Leadership toggles to her build and her attacks only get about 15% ENDRDX from the 4 Devastation/2 Thunderstrike slotting I put in them. I kinda like the powers she has now though, and did not miss Medicine Pool (which I dropped for Leadership Pool) as much as I thought I would.

10/1/2008

Over the last few days I played Miss Molotov (31 fire/fire scrapper) on three more Katie TFs; a friend who runs KTFs a lot kept inviting me to them. They all went very smoothly (mostly support heavy with times ranging from 26mins to 32mins); didn't get any super recpie drops but Miss Molotov did get to level 33, taking Tough as her level 32 power. I could've taken the tier 9 fire melee power, Greater Fire Sword, but I felt like Miss Molotov had enough attacks already, so decided to shore up her resists.

I also spent a lot of time playing Mayday (22 blood widow), doing some soloing and a lot of teaming with the Fallen LEGION villain group, getting Mayday to 27. We had some pickup people and a friend on this team explained to me his rules of screening out pickup people based on how crappy their name was; his rules were

1. No one whose name starts with xX and ends with Xx.
2. No one whose name is in ALL CAPS.
3. No one whose name is L33T for no good reason (being Freakshow themed counted as a good reason)
4. No one whose name is the same as the name of their powerset.

Personally, I always try to pick a cool name for a character (I mean, you have to live with this name for 50 levels) and am prejudiced against inviting pickup players who I think have dumb names, so I thought this tirade was worth sharing.

As a VEAT, at 24 Mayday had to do a forced respec, and I respec'd her into a Fortunata, picking the following powers:

Fortunata Training: TK Blast, Subdue, Dominate
Teamwork: CTefense, TT:Maneuvers, TT:Assault, Foresight
Fortunata Teamwork: Mind Link
Fitness: Swift, Hurdle, Stamina
Leaping: Combat Jumping
Medicine: Aid Other, Aid Self

I basically dropped all the claws attacks in favor of psy attacks; I only took 3 psy attacks, none of which are AoE, and was worried this might not be enough, but so far it feels like plenty. I managed to squeeze in Medicine Pool to give myself some self healing, because I usually end up on high +DEF teams with little or no healing, so I wanted a way to patch up damage that leaks through. I still haven't taken a travel power, because I still have the fly pack and jump pack from the early mayhem missions. I took Indomitable Will at 26 to get some mez protect also; having high DEF made this not as critical but I figure I need it sooner or later.

I spent most of Friday night playing Vathia (16 fire/ice blaster), leading a team of Demolition Girls SG with some pickup people, that got up to 8 players in size for a bit. Ran through a variety of missions in Steel Canyon, Skyway and Faultline, and in particular we defeated Kurse and Nocturne as AVs in Faultline. This got Vathia to level 21, allowing me to pick up the Blaze and Stamina powers.

On Saturday I spent some time playing Maitresse (36 necro/storm MM) in Rikti War Zone, duoing with an empath defender there. This was fairly fun, though I have to say it is really weird to be a mastermind who has Adrenaline Boost, Recovery Aura and Fortitude buffs.

Saturday night there was a big level 4 PvP event on Protector server, organized by the PvP Event Committee. I played Parapsychic (level 4 psy/fire blaster on Protector) throughout. The event opened up with a 37 player free-for-all set in, fittingly enough, Atlas Park. This was a chaotic mass melee; anyone who got wounded would swiftly get finished off by hordes of players hoping to steal the kill. It was pretty fun though, and I ended the 20 minute match with 28 kills, putting me in 4th place; the first place person had 39 kills.

After that the format switched to a 1-on-1 duel format. I saw several players switching alts; apparently level 4 PvP is serious enough business that some players have one alt for FFA and one for dueling! Perhaps this was smart though. The matches seemed totally randomized, I don't think it was Swiss style matchups or anything.

My first duel was against an ill/rad controller; he had Spectral Wounds, Blind, Radiant Aura and Radiation Infection. We fought on the Cargo Ship. I seemed to usually have the initiative on him and could narrowly kill him before he killed me; Defiance was a huge help in letting me shoot despite being held, since inspirations were forbidden. Radiation Infection made it very hard for me to hit him, I had to rely on an initial alpha strike before he got RI on me (it didn't seem feasible to run out of RI range) then shoot at him while debuffed until I got lucky and killed him. Each time I killed him, though, he would leave me wounded enough that he could kill me after I respawned, since I had no way to heal up. As a result we alternated killing each other until time ran out, which left us with a 4 to 4 draw.

My second duel was against a mind/elec dominator, also on the Cargo ship. He would hold me a lot but I would just kill him while held; without the debuff and self-heal that the controller had, the dominator was a lot easier for me to kill repeatedly. I won that match 13 to 6.

My third duel was against a FF/sonic defender on the office map; she had Personal Force Field, Force Bolt, Shriek and Scream, and her strategy seemed to be to stay in PFF while I ineffectively fired attacks at her. She even told me she was talking on vent to other players about other duels while sitting in PFF. This seemed kinda boring and I'm not sure why someone would choose this strategy (her bio was "I'm planning on using PFF to sleepwalk through the PvP event") but I guess it's valid. However, at one point I had nearly emptied my END bar shooting uselessly at her, and so she got cocky and popped out of PFF to try and shoot at me with sonic blasts. I managed to kill her while PFF was down, then I spent the rest of the match hiding from her (though, she didn't really try, since she raised PFF again and hid inside it), and so I won that match 1 to 0.

My fourth duel was against a sonic/cold corruptor on the monkey cage map. He had Scream, Shriek, Infrigidate and Snowstorm, and I spent about 90% of the duel with my movement speed and recharge floored from Infrigidate and Snowstorm. This was unbelievably painful. However, I channeled my hatred for being debuffed into blasting him repeatedly; and since he couldn't heal, with enough patience and determination I was able to kill him. He also could kill me with his sonic blasts, but I think I was debuffing his recharge some with my psy blasts too. And even when one of us was about to die we were determined to blast the other person to reduce their health so we could finish them off after respawning. Anyway, this was a grueling battle of attrition that, ironically, ended up as a 6 to 6 draw.

After four matches the tournament organizers cut to a single elimination round; wins were 3 points and draws were 1 point, so with 2 wins and 2 draws I had 8 points, which wasn't enough to advance to the semifinals. I tried to find out what build the semifinalists were; and of the four semifinalists, three were ice/rad controllers and one was a blaster (not sure which powersets). I didn't face any ice/rad controllers but from all indications, they must be very strong, even at level 4.

I did a bunch of farming the Cimerora walls with Mega (50 SS/elec brute); I'm normally totally against farming, but for some reason I find this to actually be fun to do. Part of this is probably because the Romans are actually fairly dangerous to Mega, so I have to keep alert and strategically pop inspirations to avoid dying; if I could sleepwalk through killing them, I'd probably find it less fun; though even with that, I found I could really only do it for about 10 to 20 minutes at a time before wanting to do something else. Even so I made about 4.5M infamy doing this and picked up 6 rare salvage, over a cumulative total of maybe an hour.

Mega also pitched in to help a 7-player Fallen LEGION villain team battle Lord Recluse as an AV and Statesman as a Hero, as the last part of the VEAT story arc. Statesman in particular was a real pain to fight. The team had lots of VEATs and a FF mastermind which kept our +DEF really high, but we had no debuffs to speak of, and as a result we found we could not kill Statesman quickly enough. Each time he got low on life, he would activate some power that made him immune to damage, then heal back up. I tanked Statesman for probably 10 minutes while we tried to bash away at him with little effect; unfortunately Statesman generates these lightning bolt AoEs that wiped out many of the squishier members of the team. Eventually, several team members decided to switch to rad, dark and kin corruptors to help debuff, while the rest of us kept Statesman busy; once a couple of these corruptors arrived on the scene, though, Statesman went down soon after.

After that we wanted a rematch, and we brought back one of the VEATs to do his instance of the Statesman mission. I switched to Lady Arachne (45 wolf spider) to add some debuffs too, and we had 2 darks and 1 rad for this attempt. This time Statesman dropped after like 30 seconds of fighting, leading one team member to say, "Wow, our previous team must've really sucked!" Which I'm not sure I agree with; capped DEF is pretty nice too. But yeah, debuffs are incredibly powerful.

Monday night I did a Sister Psyche TF on Triumph server, playing Flying Tiger (21 MA/will scrapper). Our team mix was:

psy/mental blaster
MA/SR scrapper
katana/will scrapper
fire/elec blaster
storm/nrg defender
stone/stone tanker
kin/elec defender
MA/will scrapper (me)

This was pretty melee heavy and DPS heavy, but it actually worked really well, as the team would descend on bad guys like a school of ravenous piranhas and rip them apart. Flying Tiger has "My kung fu is the best!" as her battlecry, which immediately caused the MA/SR scrapper to argue that HIS kung fu was the best. We debated this for some time, but considering Flying Tiger died 0 times and the MA/SR scrapper died like 5 times during this TF, I think it was proven that Flying Tiger's technique was superior. Anyway, our high DPS let us finish the TF pretty quickly, in 2hrs 22mins, getting Flying Tiger to level 25, and I got a level 25 Performance Shifter END/ACC recipe.

On Tuesday night, I did a Master of the Statesman TF attempt, mostly Sisterhood and friends, playing Spacegirl (49 mind/rad controller on Liberty). Our team mix was:

mind/FF controller
mind/rad controller (me)
kin/rad defender
bs/regen scrapper
ice/fire blaster
kat/SR scrapper
peacebringer
inv/SS tanker

I hadn't played Spacegirl in awhile, leaving her at 49, because I wanted her to hit level 50 doing something dramatic, and the STF certainly qualified. The team leader was advertising this as a Master of the Statesman TF, but considering we didn't have anywhere close to an optimal team, I didn't really expect we would succeed. We did a lot better than I expected, though, sailing through the first two missions easily, and even succeeding at the third mission against the Thorn Tree, which every MoSTF I've ever been on has failed at. I think we had better positioning against the Tree than my previous attempts, keeping the team very close together and mostly behind the Tree for most of the vine clearing; I did catch tree aggro at one point, though, and quickly hid behind a rock.

The fourth mission we were lucky to find the right Security Chief with the key relatively quickly, and beat up the various junior AVs pretty handily. When we fought Dr. Aeon, however, we had some sort of aggro issues and Dr. Aeon quickly smacked down several of the squishies before we got him back under control; I'm not absolutely sure, but I think we might've been incorrectly attacking one of the decoy Dr. Aeon EBs at first, which let the real Dr. Aeon AV tear up our back ranks. It happened pretty quickly so I'm not absolutely certain though.

Anyway, we recovered from that and moved on to the final mission, where I learned a new trick: apparently the patron AVs are vulnerable to sleep, of all things. Our first pull from the patron AVs we got both Ghost Widow and Scirocco, and I was able to reliably sleep Scirocco, which I found pretty unbelievable (I took some screen shots, will post one later). The kin spammed ID to keep Ghost Widow from mezzing our tank and we were able to clear all the patron AVs with no problems; I'm not sure Mako even got to use his elude power.

We went on to fight the Arachnos flyer, but mid-fight the flyer and all its minions suddenly despawned and respawned somewhere else (I guess it's on a timer to do that). We ran it down and killed it anyhow, then moved on to fight Lord Recluse.

Our team leader, the mind/FF, wanted to try tanking Lord Recluse, as he had a very tanky build; we had nothing to lose at that point so we let him. This totally didn't work, as Recluse was able to kill him through his force fields, though the controller claimed a moral victory for not insta-dying. (He's totally crazy, but he tries new things that are outside-the-box, which I think is really cool.) Next we had our invuln tanker tank Recluse, but we got to a bad start; no one was healing our tanker and I wasn't quick enough to debuff, so our tanker dropped and we had a team wipe. On our next try, though, I made sure to put RI on Lord Recluse right off the bat, then hovered near our tanker using Radiant Aura to keep his health topped off, pausing occasionally to drop EF on the control towers that the rest of the team was attacking. This worked a lot better and we were able to beat up all the towers and finally Lord Recluse. The team leader also wanted me to try using sleep on Lord Recluse, since all the AVs in this TF seem vulnerable to it; I found that while the yellow tower was up, it was almost impossible to hit Lord Recluse (combat spam said I had a 9% chance to hit). It did seem like if I hit him, it would momentarily sleep him -- but, while the green tower was up, the sleep would instantly break. This made sense because the green tower is feeding Lord Recluse heals. Not sure if we can exploit this info in some way, but it was good to know.

Anyway, we finished the STF in 1hr 45mins, and I got a Lysosome SHO as reward. Spacegirl hit level 50, which I think makes my 13th level 50, although she is my first level 50 controller.

I finished up on Tuesday night soloing a little with Kashira (12 ninj/ninj stalker); I accepted an invite to a 5 player pickup team and we did a mission that got Kashira to level 13, but then several team members (VEATs who had just unlocked their second costume) wanted to go to the tailor and spend a lengthy amount of time there, so I ended up dropping out, soloing a little, then logging off.

10/2/2008

Took a few screenshots for today's journal entry. Here's a screenshot of Spacegirl successfully using Mesmerize on Scirocco in the STF (happened in the last journal entry):

Spacegirl vs Scirocco

I started Wednesday night playing Mary Megawatt (an 8 elec/will brute on Pinnacle) on a 3 player villain team of Pinnacle League SG. An ice/cold corruptor on the team kept cold shield on Mary, which helped her survivability a lot (she only had High Pain Threshold and Fast Healing as defenses so far). We did a few missions in Cap au Diable and Port Oakes that got her to level 10, where I took Indomitable Will.

After that team broke up I switched to playing Kid Valkyrie (50 broadsword/regen scrapper on Triumph) and joined a Rikti War Zone raid that was in progress. This raid was well organized and had a lot of people on it (I think we got up to 5 teams at one point); I stayed for two runs against the mother ship and scored about 400 Vanguard merits, which was pretty nice for one evening's work considering it took me many days to get 100 merits just soloing. I haven't spent these merits yet; I'm kinda torn between blowing all these merits on the Vanguard costumes or on the salvage capacity increase.

Kid Valkyrie at the RWZ raid

I finished the evening playing Samurai-ko (a newbie 9 katana/will scrapper on Liberty), joining a 4 player pickup team doing radio missions in King's Row. Puzzlingly, the other team members kept saying into team chat stuff like "Keep your hands to yourself!" and "I'm not EVEN going to comment on that" for no reason I could discern. Finally I realized by looking at people's global names that I had our tanker on gignore (which was kind of embarrassing to realize after having done 3 missions with him). I can't even remember why; though based on the team chat I could see, there was probably cause. I took the tanker off of gignore for the sake of team communications, which seemed fine; he didn't say anything particularly rude after that, though perhaps my mentioning I had to take him off ignore had a sobering effect.

Anyway, I got Samurai-ko to level 11, taking Swift at 10; I know I don't really need this for Stamina since a will scrapper can get Quick Recovery, but I'm just used to having the extra movement from Swift and Hurdle, and any alt who doesn't have these feels debuffed to me. I also got an idea to write a silly bio for her; the PERC bio contest inspired me to start taking screen shots of my characters and their biographical story, and you can see Samurai-ko's here:

Samurai-ko's bio

[ QUOTE ]
10/2/2008

Took a few screenshots for today's journal entry. Here's a screenshot of Spacegirl successfully using Mesmerize on Scirocco in the STF (happened in the last journal entry):

Spacegirl vs Scirocco

I started Wednesday night playing Mary Megawatt (an 8 elec/will brute on Pinnacle) on a 3 player villain team of Pinnacle League SG. An ice/cold corruptor on the team kept cold shield on Mary, which helped her survivability a lot (she only had High Pain Threshold and Fast Healing as defenses so far). We did a few missions in Cap au Diable and Port Oakes that got her to level 10, where I took Indomitable Will.

After that team broke up I switched to playing Kid Valkyrie (50 broadsword/regen scrapper on Triumph) and joined a Rikti War Zone raid that was in progress. This raid was well organized and had a lot of people on it (I think we got up to 5 teams at one point); I stayed for two runs against the mother ship and scored about 400 Vanguard merits, which was pretty nice for one evening's work considering it took me many days to get 100 merits just soloing. I haven't spent these merits yet; I'm kinda torn between blowing all these merits on the Vanguard costumes or on the salvage capacity increase.

Kid Valkyrie at the RWZ raid

I finished the evening playing Samurai-ko (a newbie 9 katana/will scrapper on Liberty), joining a 4 player pickup team doing radio missions in King's Row. Puzzlingly, the other team members kept saying into team chat stuff like "Keep your hands to yourself!" and "I'm not EVEN going to comment on that" for no reason I could discern. Finally I realized by looking at people's global names that I had our tanker on gignore (which was kind of embarrassing to realize after having done 3 missions with him). I can't even remember why; though based on the team chat I could see, there was probably cause. I took the tanker off of gignore for the sake of team communications, which seemed fine; he didn't say anything particularly rude after that, though perhaps my mentioning I had to take him off ignore had a sobering effect.

Anyway, I got Samurai-ko to level 11, taking Swift at 10; I know I don't really need this for Stamina since a will scrapper can get Quick Recovery, but I'm just used to having the extra movement from Swift and Hurdle, and any alt who doesn't have these feels debuffed to me. I also got an idea to write a silly bio for her; the PERC bio contest inspired me to start taking screen shots of my characters and their biographical story, and you can see Samurai-ko's here:

Samurai-ko's bio


[/ QUOTE ]

*grins*

Not an L5R player, are you, by any chance? For the longest time, I got the strangest looks because @Samuraiko is my global (and its myriad variants depending on the forums I'm on), and it's primarily a LEGEND OF THE FIVE RINGS reference.



Go forth and kick tail, "little samurai".

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

[ QUOTE ]
Not an L5R player, are you, by any chance? For the longest time, I got the strangest looks because @Samuraiko is my global

[/ QUOTE ]

Haha, guilty as charged! I do like L5R. Sorry to borrow your name, it just seemed like a great katana scrapper name.

Not at all! It is a great name for a katana-scrapper, so go for it!

(Had two memorable L5R RPG characters - one was a Crane Daidoji bodyguard, the other a Crab Kuni Witch Hunter.)

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Sure PW, dont even bother to mention the Katie we did together..