Four people, Two TFs, Seven Hours....

How'd your Saturday go? Me, I spent seven hours in the evening on just two task forces.

My Saturday: Did some marketing, then got invited to an ITF. That went well. Right as Rommy is dying for the last time, I see someone advertising a Sister Psy TF. I've only run that once this week, so I ask to join and switch toons. This also goes quite well -- we finish in about 1 hour 20 minutes, I think it was.

Logged off after.

Evening: I log back on. MG asks me if I want to do a 4 person Doctor Quaterfield. Uh... Yes, MG is not afraid of any task force, no matter what others think. Citadel? Manticore? Sister Psyche? Synapse? These are FUN! We ran a Sewer Trail just two weeks ago, and finished with more than 30 minutes to spare! As for shard TFs... MG does not like Justin A. so much, but loves to run the others. Faathim... ran it last week. Sara Moore... ran it the day after Faathim. The infamous Dr. Q? MG is not afraid to run it, although I think I've only joined in maybe twice before. MG would run it solo if there weren't some 4-item simultaneous clicks near the end.

But I know MG can run Dr. Q fast -- fast being a relative term here. So I say, "In half an hour or so, sure."

I bring my electric melee/shield defense scrapper. Lots of AoE is good, there are no AVs here, just a lot of things to kill as quickly as possible. MG has a spines/invul scrapper, and we have a fire blaster and a fire/kin corruptor to round out our four man team.

There's not much to say about a Dr. Q TF. Four people makes the hunts take longer but the missions had fewer enemies, and everyone on the team was capable of stealthing and soloing when needed. We finished in 3 hours 16 minutes, which was the fastest time MG's ever run it.

"We should do a 4 man STF," MG says.

"Sounds like fun," I say. "What do you need?" I mean, MG's the expert, surely my friends know what they're getting into. Right? It'll probably take an hour or so... right?

MG uses the same scrapper, Lucy switches to a dark/dark defender, we talk Dante into joining on an illusion/empath controller... and MG asks if I have a ranged toon, so I bring my fire/fire blaster. This is not a toon I often play, but it's one of my most heavily purpled toons, so I have massive recharge and can pump out a lot of damage.

Off we go!

Things go really well at first. MG can tank AVs with that scrapper. "We could do a 4 man LGTF with this team!" MG exclaims. We're not overpowered on damage though, so each AV fight takes a bit of work to whittle them down.

Finally we reach the last mission. After clearing our way up, MG asks me to use my snipe to pull. "Mako, or anyone except Ghost Widow." So I pull Mako. And Black Scorpion also comes. AND Ghost Widow.

Somehow, MG tanks all three of them while we whittle down Mako first, then BS, and finally we take out Ghost Widow. Awesome! We rock! Four heroes on three AVs!

This is where things start to go wrong. First, Scirocco gives us more problems than the other three AVs combined. MG dies, all of us die at least once I think. But we take him down finally, and it's on to the Flyer. I die more than once again at the Flyer, but we whittle it down to a sliver of health, and then....

It respawns. What? "It respawns every 20 minutes," the others tell me. Oh. Hmmm, never ran an STF where that was an issue before. (But I haven't run STF all that often.)

We decide to ignore the flyer for now and just concentrate on Lord Recluse. But now we have a problem: MG can't really tank him. I sort of assumed they had a plan for this, and they kind of do, but it doesn't sound like they really discussed anything ahead of time. (MG had even spoken of this as a 'trial run' for an eventual 1 or 2 man attempt -- something that it soon became apparent wasn't going to ever happen.)

"Is your PA perma?" MG asks. "Nearly," says Dante. "There's about a second gap." I have a level 50 illusion/rad troller (who I used on the ITF earlier in the day) with excellent recharge time and this sounds even better than what mine has. That's good, right?

"Okay, you try to tank him with PA while we take down the red tower," MG says.

But this fails to work. First of all, the Flyer comes screaming in dropping troops and missiles. Dante goes down, and LR runs all over the place killing people. We give it a couple of more tries, with no better results. Finally we decide we need to take out the Flyer first... but it will respawn again in less than ten minutes.

We try once more, then we wait on the Flyer. We take it down. Okay! Now to try Recluse again!

We try. Over and over. The problem is that Recluse moves so fast... once PA drops, he's across the map before they're summoned again. We try having MG tank him for just a second or two, but he kills MG almost instantly. I try hover sniping the red tower, but that's not enough damage. When I drop low enough to use other attacks, Recluse comes after me.

We die. Over and over and over. We whittle the tower down, then things go wrong and repairmen fix it. Then the Flyer respawns again and we have that to deal with, too. We simply don"t have enough people to deal with everything at once. After many more tries, I'm fully convinced that it's impossible and we probably need to give up, but I'm waiting for the others to reach the same conclusion. It sounds like MG finally does that -- we're talking about giving up.

At this point Dante is convinced that MG just needs to eat some orange inspirations and then can tank LR long enough for Dante to heal and/or summon PA again. He heads off to go buy some. I decide to head to my base to pick up inspirations too... but something weird happens. I go through Ouro to Talos, but when I get there I can't see the land or buildings, just people and cars and the tram. Since I can see the tram, I find the doors and zone to IP, but it's exactly the same there. So I relog, then hit my base, and finally we're all back in the mission.

Dante tries to get MG to take some of the inspirations and try to tank with them, but in the meantime MG has gotten all of LR's attention and found a way to hover tank him. LR is running in a loop... climbing buildings, jumping at MG, then going back to do it again. "I think I got him," MG says. "Try taking out the tower!"

This time I chew inspirations and stand at the base of the tower so that I can hit it with my AoEs -- Burn, Rain of Fire, Fireball, Fire Sword Circle, sometimes Fire Breath or one of my single-target attacks. I do this to kill the repairmen as fast as possible. Burn hasn't been this useful to me since.. what, Issue Four? With Lucy picking them off too and Dante healing and summoning pets, we finally manage to take the red tower down. Woo! The hard part's done!

The next part is nearly as hard though. MG can't keep LR's attention again, but Dante employs his own strategy and finds that HE can tank LR with enough oranges and constant healing. In any case, we get this tower down too.

The others also fall... slowly, with a combination of hover-tanking, PA tanking, etc., and despite the Flyer attacking us most of the time. Dante summons several Amy's, and MG summons several Shivans. I don't have any temp powers on my blaster, since I don't play her that much.

When we finally take down Recluse, it's nearly 2 AM. The final tally as best I can remember: 3 hours 40 minutes, 107 deaths.

But only four people! And the fact that we actually finished it, after being on the verge of quitting, made the whole thing feel very epic indeed.

Would this be the same MG that fills a group faster than you can type, "I'll join"?

And gratz on the 4-man STF!

I was part of a 8-man STF that was worse than that, in terms of deaths. It was something like 250 deaths. The tanker couldn't keep Recluse aggroed, not to mention survive for three seconds when he did manage to aggro him. I don't remember how long it was, though--maybe 3 hours.

Oh, but the topic is how our Saturdays went. Well, I spent the first six or eight hours or so of my Saturday writing up a design plan and doing a task force or two, and then I spent the evening turning part of that plan into a semi-functional GUI. It wasn't standard programming protocol, but eh, it was fun.

Are we supposed to know who MG is?

...and a cup?

Pretty keen story, i like the fact you didn't give up and won in the end