Obligatory "Back in the Day" Rant in Honor of i18
By
Adelie,
Posted on: 2010-08-10 21:09 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Back in my day Blasters didn't have more defense than Tankers!
end rant..
Whining about everything since 2006.
Ammo switching for Dual Pistols was my idea:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=135484
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Nah, in the really really old days, Forcefields was all the rage. Empathy took over a month or two later, and its reign was long and terrible.
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Originally Posted by nunix
* If you were a defender, you were Empathy - excuse me, I mean a healer - or you did not get teams. At all. "Debuff? Never heard of it, how much can you heal?" "Forcefields? Look, do they.. do they heal me, or something? No? Learn to play, noob! *kick*"
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Having Vengeance and Fallout slotted for recharge means never having to say you're sorry.
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Why do so many the "back in my day" posts talk about the Hollows and how people were Newbs then? That thing came out in I2, which was, what, half a year after release? I mean, I get that every person who joined was a newb once, but why the propensity of the Hollows horror stories and so few of the Perez Park stories? I mean, that used to be where everyone hung out before.
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Originally Posted by Melancton
3) We were Newbs that barely knew how to play. I was playing my first Blaster and had no idea about tactics. It was a success for me just getting to the mission in the Hollows!
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Hey, Sam, you talk about what you know about. |
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Why do so many the "back in my day" posts talk about the Hollows and how people were Newbs then? That thing came out in I2, which was, what, half a year after release? I mean, I get that every person who joined was a newb once, but why the propensity of the Hollows horror stories and so few of the Perez Park stories? I mean, that used to be where everyone hung out before.
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I entered the game in March 2005. I was desperately reading guides in the forums, printing out hard copies of maps (the locations of the stores being VERY valuable information!) and fumbling my way through all manner of things. I went to the Hollows because it was next to Atlas Park and seemed to be the "next" zone to tackle at lvl 5, and I had no other idea of how to do things. I went to the Hollows to team, since that was where most of the heroes seemed to be at that level. I was amazed, for example, to get a Tell asking me if I wanted to join a team from someone I could not physically see. The way I had done it was to go to the Atlas gate in the Hollows and invite anyone I saw who was close in level. So when I would be invited to a team from an Invisible Someone, I would ask how it was that they knew to ask me to join, which must have sounded idiotic to my inviter. Eventually I got a comprehensible answer, and my team formation took a major leap forward!
The few missions my contacts sent me on to Perez Park were nightmares. The "maze" was simply a colossal pain and was incomprehensible to me. The paths were continually blocked by large groups who, even if they were not several levels higher than me, could mez me before I could get past, and then back to the hospital in Atlas I went. There were not any large groups of heroes sweeping the streets, much less working the maze, when I hit PP as a young hero. I therefore avoided Perez Park whenever possible. It was a godsend to get the Pocket D teleporter, since getting OUT of the maze was pretty much as deadly as getting to a mission IN the maze.
For someone entering the game in say, March 2009, hearing me ramble on about the Hollows would likely sound pretty odd, since by that time the usual way newbs conducted their affairs would not include the Hollows so much.
It will be very interesting to see where all the newbs for Going Rogue congregate, since I will be among them.
"How do you know you are on the side of good?" a Paragon citizen asked him. "How can we even know what is 'good'?"
"The Most High has spoken, even with His own blood," Melancton replied. "Surely we know."
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I think maybe because part of being a newb for a couple of years was not knowing you didn't have to take Wincott's missions and go through all the Hollows stuff. That one's almost as prevalent as "don't try to enter the tram at the exit".|
Samuel_Tow is seeing varying levels of newb: Why do so many the "back in my day" posts talk about the Hollows and how people were Newbs then? That thing came out in I2, which was, what, half a year after release? I mean, I get that every person who joined was a newb once, but why the propensity of the Hollows horror stories and so few of the Perez Park stories? I mean, that used to be where everyone hung out before. |
I don't know what back-in-the-day horror stories there are for Perez Park. Wasn't that full of people slaughtering stuff in mass quantities? Not much to have horror about except maybe getting lost in the maze.
Dec out.
Back in the day, Perez Park was the de-facto place to be, thanks to large teams sweeping Hyrda spawns. I don't know why they did that, but apparently it was big earning at the time. Those who weren't prancing around Everett Lake congregated at the Atlas Park gate in Perez Park and just milled about, until some ******* decided it was funny to train approximately 268.7 Hellions on the entrance gate, with the 20 or so heroes scrambling to save their skins.
People refer to this as the golden days of the game, but for me, this was the most miserable, wretched experience I've ever had the utter misfortune to be part of. I guess most people had come from DAOC or EQ or SWG and that's what they "did," but for me, this was not only an alienating, unfriendly experience, but it was also godawful boring. There's nothing I hate more than a senseless mosh pit of effects with no storyline or meaning to it.
That was way back when mission rewards sucked and people were still fighting very high level enemies. I don't know if it was before or after the Purple Patch, as I was hearing people talk about it (a month before I registered on the forums), but that's basically what you did. You got into a large team, headed to a hazard zone and swept the streets, figuratively speaking. Missions were for stupid folk who didn't like experience. Much the the chagrin of many oldies, I'm glad those days are dead and buried. I'd have left this game LONG ago if that's remained the norm.
Perez Park's actual maze isn't very difficult to figure out. The problem was that the game tended to send you there at levels far below the enemies in the forest. Back in the day, just GETTING to the mission was a pain in the ***, as we needed a whole large team simply to fight our way through the spawns. Think the Hollows is bad? People keep saying "You HAD to go through Grendel's Gulch!" No, you very much didn't. You could and can simply go around. You can't go around anything in the Perez Park forest paths, because the paths are narrower than the spawns in them. They're like a cave instance. So we needed all 7-8 people just to punch a hole through to the mission, and heaven help us if the person with Recall Friend died. That, and the fact that the CoT spawned Behemoths at level, like, 7 for some reason, meant that people were deathly afraid of the Fortune Teller mission, which always spawned deep inside the forest.
You don't really get missions in the Perez Park forest these days. You still get the odd one, but never before level 15 or so, and very rarely even then. Most of the time when I get a mission in Perez Park, it's in one of the buildings on the side.
Eh, but there's little point reminiscing about the old days. The game kind of sucked back then.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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I so loved the Hollows stuff when it came out mostly because it gave me an alternate to the very common (at the time) missions in King's Row of beating up x number of CoT in KR.
Maybe it was because I had a lot of magic origins?
At that time, almost the only place the CoT ever appeared were on the rooftops... and only at night. I can't tell you how many fire escapes I spiraled up to get to the roof... hoping that the green glow didn't vanish cause the sun came up while climbing, or that no one else was up there already.
I got good later at combat jumping ledge to ledge to power up to the roof later.
When the Hollows came out it was tough... tough getting to your missions... and tough surviving them ... remember when the Outcast electrical lieutenants used to heal their team?
I do miss taking out my 50 and doing healing runs though the Hollows to keep the younger crowd alive and debt free, or rez them in the zone, so they didn't have to run back from Atlas.
The final line of a post by Sweet_Sarah on Liberty
"Together we entered a city of strangers, we made it a city of friends, and we leave it a City of Heroes."
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I wasn't there, but all the stories have convinced me I'd have felt the same way. I might have found it interesting at first, but really, how many times can you herd whole zones into a garbage can with little risk without it becoming dull as dishwater? I'd have probably quit after a month or two back then.
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Samuel_Tow didn't like it: People refer to this as the golden days of the game, but for me, this was the most miserable, wretched experience I've ever had the utter misfortune to be part of. I guess most people had come from DAOC or EQ or SWG and that's what they "did," but for me, this was not only an alienating, unfriendly experience, but it was also godawful boring. |
Dec out.
Oh I got a good one. How about the infamous 'Clockwork' mission in Perez Park pre-I1? You old timers know which one I'm talking about. You had to kill them all to finish the mission but invariably a few spawned stuck in the ceiling of the office map and back then you couldn't select those nor kill them. So you had to call a GM which took forever. Seriously the first time I did it the GM showed up 45 minutes later and we all just sat around to wait for them. That mission was so bad that even a GM I spoke to once admitted that there was one such employee as they remember being permanently assigned to Perez just to fix this mission.
Or I remember the VERY first time someone made the Kronos Titan spawn in Atlas Park and led him to the heart of Atlas. The sheer volume of corpses littering the zone was priceless heheh
[IMG]http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/2886/coxboardsig.jpg[/IMG][B][SIZE="3"]
The shining world of the seven systems. On the continent of Wild Endeavour. In the mountains of Solace and Solitude there stood the Citadel of the Time Lords. The oldest and most mightiest race in the Universe. Sworn never to interfere. Only watch...[/SIZE][/B]
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Well, also remember, half a year after launch is a lot different than somebody joining for half a year now. Facts like 'Stamina is usually very nice to have; you need to take two other Fitness powers first, though' and 'don't kill debuff anchors' and 'X mob is annoying, kill/mez it first' hadn't had time to become widespread. I didn't know you could slot more than one of an enhancement type for months after joining, so my attacks were all 1 acc/1 dmg/1 recharge/1 endredux/1 defdebuff. My friend's level twenty-something Scrapper had four travel powers and two powers from her primary. And I personally did see a lot more horrible team wipes in the early days of the Hollows than Hydra-sweeping in PP.
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Why do so many the "back in my day" posts talk about the Hollows and how people were Newbs then? That thing came out in I2, which was, what, half a year after release? I mean, I get that every person who joined was a newb once, but why the propensity of the Hollows horror stories and so few of the Perez Park stories? I mean, that used to be where everyone hung out before.
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Having Vengeance and Fallout slotted for recharge means never having to say you're sorry.
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Hehehe same here!|
Originally Posted by Kelenar
I didn't know you could slot more than one of an enhancement type for months after joining, so my attacks were all 1 acc/1 dmg/1 recharge/1 endredux/1 defdebuff. My friend's level twenty-something Scrapper had four travel powers and two powers from her primary. And I personally did see a lot more horrible team wipes in the early days of the Hollows than Hydra-sweeping in PP.
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I had one Accuracy, one Damage, one Hold Duration, one Range in Dominate. It wasn't until I went to a friend's also playing CoH that I fixed that. He asked me to open my enhancement screen, laughed a bit then got me some better enhancement slotting.
That and getting Recalled to the top of Atlas globe then dropped, fun times...
Questions about the game, either side? /t @Neuronia or @Neuronium, with your queries!
168760: A Death in the Gish. 3 missions, 1-14. Easy to solo.
Infinity Villains
Champion, Pinnacle, Virtue Heroes
I remember people with Recall friend who would hang out near the Entrance to Atlas Park in the Perez Zone. If you got stuck in the maze, you could broadcast and find someone to join your team to evac all of you.
That, and teams of 1 Empath Healer (Me) and 7 Blasters. Whee for healthbar whack-a-mole!
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True enough. Everything I know about avoiding aggro came from skittering around the Gulch... once I knew it was there, and once I had a printed map to navigate with. |
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Perez Park's actual maze isn't very difficult to figure out. The problem was that the game tended to send you there at levels far below the enemies in the forest. Back in the day, just GETTING to the mission was a pain in the ***, as we needed a whole large team simply to fight our way through the spawns. Think the Hollows is bad? People keep saying "You HAD to go through Grendel's Gulch!" No, you very much didn't. You could and can simply go around.
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Of course, I vividly remember being 63 feet from the mission door on the top of that mountain in the NE when a boulder took me out, and I got to start again. From Atlas. *sigh*
I once tried Hovering across the Gulch. Yeah, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Of course, Travel powers were in a state of flux when I joined. If you took Fly, you would run out of Endurance at some point and drop out of the sky unless you watched out. Fly was an End Hog back then, since changed, and it was slower than it is now, too. I eventually took (and respecced out of) every Travel power in the game, trying to figure out what would work for my poor confused Hero.
Another thing I watched carefully back then was that the mission that granted the Nemesis Staff temp power (oh, how I loved that thing!) would grant it for three real-time consecutive DAYS, not an "in-game" amount of time. I very carefully saved the mission for early Friday evenings on each hero so that I could play the complete weekend with the Staff before it fizzled. This was fortunately changed as well... but I was GRATEFUL to get what I could back then!
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| You can't go around anything in the Perez Park forest paths, because the paths are narrower than the spawns in them. They're like a cave instance. So we needed all 7-8 people just to punch a hole through to the mission, and heaven help us if the person with Recall Friend died. |
I mentioned these same problems with the PP Maze in a long-ago thread and pretty much got told the LRN2PLY bit. My respondent airily dismissed my problems, recalling that running past the mezzing Clocks and CoT was no problem at all "if you had any skill" or some such snide rejoinder. Perhaps some Tanks and/or Scrappers could "run past" the mobs in the maze, but not my pathetic Blaster, who was often solo to boot. I was later frustrated by the fact that once I got to 50, I did not often need Inspirations, much less having that many available, but I could have used 20 BreakFrees alone just getting to any mission in PP as a lvl 7. Of course I was GRATEFUL to get a mission at all back then, Sonny!
"How do you know you are on the side of good?" a Paragon citizen asked him. "How can we even know what is 'good'?"
"The Most High has spoken, even with His own blood," Melancton replied. "Surely we know."
Perma-MoG.
'Nough said.
Disclaimer: The above may be humerous, or at least may be an attempt at humour. Try reading it that way.
Posts are OOC unless noted to be IC, or in an IC thread.
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And don't forget everyone's favorite, Six-Slotted Brawl! Not only did you need to run the Respec Trial badly, but you had trouble succeeding at it because you had lousy attacks, etc. My brother-in-law only four-slotted Brawl, but he had also four-slotted Run. Fortunately for him, the Devs dropped a Free Respec a short time earlier, so when I discovered these problems, I could fix him up. I handed him a Mids print-out with a build for him to follow going forward, and he wound up a very fine lvl 50 hero.|
Originally Posted by Kelenar
I didn't know you could slot more than one of an enhancement type for months after joining, so my attacks were all 1 acc/1 dmg/1 recharge/1 endredux/1 defdebuff.
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I must note in passing that he was an AR Blaster, and EVERY time we had to go to Perez Park later in his career, he would Full Auto any big groups of Hellions he saw. Apparently they picked on him once too often in Atlas Park when he was a lvl 1 newb.
"How do you know you are on the side of good?" a Paragon citizen asked him. "How can we even know what is 'good'?"
"The Most High has spoken, even with His own blood," Melancton replied. "Surely we know."
Back in my day, there was no power customization for Khelds...
...wait.
Oops.
"Alien"
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Originally Posted by Infernus_Hades
The way you play changes your IO slotting..
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76 characters and Twenty-four 50s later, I still love this game.
AlienOne's Human-Form Warshade Guide (Old guide+New guide = 12,000+ views!)
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And back then, Nemesis Staff was a targeted AoE. Mere words cannot express the glory. As soon as I got it, my characters would go to Crey's Folly and just flip out on everything, gaining several levels in the process.
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Originally Posted by Melancton
Another thing I watched carefully back then was that the mission that granted the Nemesis Staff temp power (oh, how I loved that thing!) would grant it for three real-time consecutive DAYS, not an "in-game" amount of time. I very carefully saved the mission for early Friday evenings on each hero so that I could play the complete weekend with the Staff before it fizzled. This was fortunately changed as well... but I was GRATEFUL to get what I could back then!
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Having Vengeance and Fallout slotted for recharge means never having to say you're sorry.
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And this was EVERY MISSION.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Ah, memories. Ok, here's a blast from the past: say you were Illusion/Radiation back at the beginning of time. Three different mechanical changes (toggle ranges, aggro limits, fear mechanics) made this combo slightly different than it is now. This could only have happened to you back then:
1. Lock a rad toggle onto a target in a large spawn. 2. While fighting, deploy Spectral Terror. 3. Watch the ST's fear blast cause a bunch of targets to flee for their lives in all directions. 4. Fail to notice one of them was a toggle anchor. 5. Notice about sixty seconds later when that runner comes back with half the map trailing behind him to on stomp you. |
And there was no Arena.
And if you wanted to be a villain, you made a dark looking costume and wrote up a bio and RP'd it ONLY.
And ED was the name of a horse.
And everyone did the tutorial because it was the fastest way to level 2.
And we memorized the route from the Hospital to the mission for EVERY mission through practical experience.
And we loved it.
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I remember seeing these arguments, actually. At one point, there were perfectly valid, back when Jack expected that OBVIOUSLY we'd be on a team. I remember someone complaining about Tanker performance, detailing what he'd done, only to have Jack post saying "And what was the rest of your team doing?" I laughed at the time, but it's giving me cold chills now.|
Originally Posted by Melancton
LOL LRN2PLY, NOOB!
I mentioned these same problems with the PP Maze in a long-ago thread and pretty much got told the LRN2PLY bit. My respondent airily dismissed my problems, recalling that running past the mezzing Clocks and CoT was no problem at all "if you had any skill" or some such snide rejoinder. Perhaps some Tanks and/or Scrappers could "run past" the mobs in the maze, but not my pathetic Blaster, who was often solo to boot. I was later frustrated by the fact that once I got to 50, I did not often need Inspirations, much less having that many available, but I could have used 20 BreakFrees alone just getting to any mission in PP as a lvl 7. Of course I was GRATEFUL to get a mission at all back then, Sonny! |
I don't know when it happened, but the game just stopped sending you to Perez Park at low levels. I know people still like to complain about the forest maze now, to which I tend to respond with "grow up." Unless you're sent there below level 10, the "maze" is nothing special. Do what everyone does in a maze and hold the left wall (or the right wall, either works as long as you don't switch) and you'll either come out another entrance (where you can go back in and keep on going), loop back out the way you come in (where you need to look for another entrance) or find your mission. The Perez Park forest is not complex enough for this method to fail, and it hasn't failed me yet. As long as you don't miss a side path somewhere, you WILL find your mission.
The enemies there are dangerous, and they come in large spawns, but these days, I've not been sent to a mission in the forest at any level where the things will even aggro on me. And with critters taken out of the equation, all that's left is navigation which, again, is not that complicated. Worse come to worst, you can always grab the modded map of Perez Park from VidiotMaps that shows the internal space in the forest. I never needed it, myself. Then again, I never needed a teleport to get up to the Terra Volta reactor complex, so I may be biassed.
So, yeah. Perez Park was very hard to SURVIVE in, but really isn't hard to get around once survival is no longer a concern.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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I remember being on the other side of the gulch in the Hollows... I had levelled in the mish so I was 10 - and debt hurt then... so I said to my team "just gonna try and scoot back and level."
I was really pleased how my lowly defender managed to survive the jaunt back to relative safety. I'd almost got to the Eastgate gate and somebody TP'd me back to the next mission. I was gutted and turned the air blue and quit the team.
Ah, nostalgia's not what it used to be
Thelonious Monk
Oh, this reminds me to post this screeshot.
*clears throat*
Back in the day Icon was a hair cut place:
(Me and a buddy accidentally got under the map in AE when I used shield charge. Guess they never updated this map, lol)
Back in the day...
...Stone tankers using rock armour and rooted looked like they were completely covered in poo, standing in a circle of poo, and stuck in a pool of poo. The couldn't move when they had their status protection (rooted) on. By the way, the armour didn't layer.
...Tankers didn't have gauntlet either. REAL(tm) tankers took teleport and taunt AND the pool taunt!
...Controllers didn't have containment. They brawled and took air superiority and flurry. Or they stood at the tram and cried for teams.
...However, they could summon three Jack Frosts, three Animated Stones, three singularities... and you prayed to dear god you don't end up teaming with more than 2 fire controllers. 
...Howling Twilight rezzed people to 1 hp, Fearsome Stare sent mobs fleeing to the four far corners of the earth (as did all the other fear powers), and tar patch didn't debuff resistance.
...and lots of other silly stuff. Reading this thread made me chuckle at the bad old days.
"Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty." -- Plato
Playing Gods (51106) - Heroic Lvl 5-20
What Rough Beast (255143) - Villainous Lvl 40-50
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I remember the hordes and hordes of Flaming Fire Monkeys attending Fire Controller Superteams. When they would congregate, it was like a Portable Hamidon Raid in terms of lagging my poor computer of the time. |
Originally Posted by Freem
...However, they could summon three Jack Frosts, three Animated Stones, three singularities... and you prayed to dear god you don't end up teaming with more than 2 fire controllers.
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Naturally, the week my first Controller hit 32 and started summoning multiple pets was the week the Nerf Hammer hit and that was that after a few days. But he was an Ice Controller, not a Fire Controller.
So what was the highest number of Imps you old timey Fire Controllers ever got out at once (even if it was for two seconds and then some started keeling over)?
"How do you know you are on the side of good?" a Paragon citizen asked him. "How can we even know what is 'good'?"
"The Most High has spoken, even with His own blood," Melancton replied. "Surely we know."
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Which reminds me, old-style Hamidon raids!|
Originally Posted by Melancton
I remember the hordes and hordes of Flaming Fire Monkeys attending Fire Controller Superteams. When they would congregate, it was like a Portable Hamidon Raid in terms of lagging my poor computer of the time.
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'DESUMMON YOUR PETS, THEY'RE LAGGING THE ZONE.'
'YOU TAKE OFF YOUR CAPE, IT'S LAGGING THE ZONE.'
'I'LL TAKE OFF MY CAPE WHEN ALL THESE STUPID FIRE IMPS ARE GONE. THEY'RE LAGGING THE ZONE!'
'TAKE OFF YOUR CAPE YOU JERK...'
And so on.
Having Vengeance and Fallout slotted for recharge means never having to say you're sorry.
I remember:
Jose Brogan being 'Broken'
The Bonefire arc being incredibly hard because it had a Dammned and Bone Daddy fighting each other in one of the missions.
When Level 5 reapers would spawn in level 1 Vasz missions.
Having to wait months and months to play the last missions of "Ubelmann the Unknown" (and back then the plot made more sense and was cool)
Always remember, we were Heroes.