Returning Player Diary

have you made an AE arc for him yet?

Not a lot of game time the past while, mostly just futzing around with costumes & nosing around the market getting my feel back.

I was able to run Scab Factory through the second part of the Graves arc, which was entertaining. Once more pointing out the divide between red & blue, I felt sort of bad about pummeling Twinshot & company, and the whole lone wolf thing got a bit, er, lonely. Still, excellent writing on its merits and some genuinely amusing bits (I liked Dollface's 'evil scheme' quite a bit).

But *heroic* missions are just more satisfying to me. Red side it seems like writers have to work harder (trying to make you feel important in an Arachnos-dominated world) to less effect- even when they succeed admirably, as in this arc, you're still all alone with every hand turned against you, other than your secret patron who is doubtlessly manipulating you for their own ends.

Envisioning a race between blue & redside content, hero missions get like a 50 yard head in a 100 yard dash. Being the good guy is just an easier sell than being the bad guy, especially in the action-driven world of an MMO.

I was a CoV only player for a good while (from its launch until shortly after the introduction of inventions) and I enjoyed it quite a bit, but found myself paying even less attention to the story than usual. Not that anything was wrong with the structure- top to bottom it was much better than pretty much anything hero side had to offer at the time. But I had more fun just being a generic bad guy in a generic environment, putting the hurt on people for generic bad guy reasons.

Anyway, the current focus on blue side & co-op content is smart. It's easier, serves more players, and I find it more satisfying than even really well done 'pure villain' content.


Poking around through my stable last night, I have an inordinate number of characters with empty slots. I must have gone on a respec binge before my hiatus for some reason. Sort of irritating logging in to run a quick mish or two, wondering WTH is wrong with the character after a quick face plant, then finding they have nothing slotted.

On the plus side, it's keeping me focused on my new crop of lowbie alts, which are keeping the new content front and center.


So far Street Justice is about my favorite thing in the whole Freedom verse. It's a struggle not to just log in SilverRage whenever I have a few spare minutes. Poor Lizardroid has been mostly abandoned- not that there's anything wrong with electric melee....it's just not Street Justice.

I also have my eye on Titan Weapons- I may pick it up after the next dump of VIPoints. I may even re-roll Scab Factory to check them out- I'm a bit surprised by how much I like Mace, but NEW SHINY is always hard for me to resist.

Well, getting my son to bed last night was a long, drawn out process in spite of (or because of?) the fact that he was completely exhausted from a day at the beach. So my play time was not as luxurious as expected.

did my now de rigueur 'log in old characters, check enhancements, update costume' routine for 20-odd minutes, then switched over to Scab Factory for some leveling before bed.

I went poking around the stack of weird powers and stuff I'd claimed from email when I made him- I'm pretty headlong with new characters, I don't usually even bother claiming the vet attacks unless I find I need them.

Noticed he had a big stack of XP boosters, so I thought I'd pop one and run some radio mishs, get him to 12 quick & slot some DOs, as I'd reached the point where having a mix of training drops and empty slots for enhancements was getting annoying. Found another power called Inner Inspiration, or something like that- said it'd generate big inspirations every 30 minutes? Nice! Added it to my tray & popped it off- two medium defenses and a large Accuracy.

Cool!

Pulled up /ah and insta-sold it for 200k.

If it reliably spits out big inspirations that's a terrific bump to lowbie earning power.

Checked Scabby's bank account- he's up around 2m, from nothing other than selling drops & flipping some generic IOs. Not bad for level 11.

Off to radio land!

Yes, they're repetitive and kinda lame, but I've run literally every contact mission in CoH dozens of times and have no inclination to revisit any of them- even the arcs I remember fondly (Wretch, Dr Aeon) grow tiresome on the 5,000th run-through. Radios are quick, reliable, and not tremendously annoying provided you can avoid the dreaded trifecta

More of not much going on.

Running SilverRage through the second half of the Twinshot arc, if I get a chance tonight I'm going to burn one of my XP Boosters and see if he can hit 20.

I haven't been able to take much part in the Nemesis invasion, but my son LOVES it. Hanging out by the arena in Port Oakes with Scab Factory guys started appearing out of the blue and the drones were zapping them- he couldn't get enough of it. He's decided the Arachnos drones are called "octopus megatroids", and now every time he sees me log in he wants to go watch the "octopus megatroids ZAP guys!"

I tried getting away from the drones to fight some invaders, but as a lowbie I couldn't kill fast enough and they were threatening to overwhelm me so I hopped back to safety. In any case my son preferred watching them get disintegrated by the drones to fighting them hand to hand.

Hoping to get some extended playtime this evening.

Running a CoT mission a ton of ghosts with Night Bee with son on lap.
I'll turn the commentary over to him.

"I didn't know we were BLAPPING! Let's go blap that guy!"
For some reason he called Short Circuit "blap".
No, he's never heard me talk about blappers or blapping.
I was taken aback.

"Let's die him so he never gets alive again!"

On seeing his first Spectral Demon Lord:
"I saw a weird FLAPPY guy flapping in there!"

On the efficacy of the Acid Mortar:
"I guess our shooter is the blapper....it pounces him in the bup!"

"dada, I think that flappy guy was a GHOST."

"Let's go see if those guys are still hanging out and being MAD."

"See, I was right, he was just a piece of cake! That was a JOKE I was talking about!""

on the web grenade:
"throw some more GOOP at him, please!"

upon a defeat:
"uh...we need to go to the HOST-UH-BUL."

after cleaning out a spawn of mages and archers:
"now they're just a peice of JUNK!"

a few more:

Running Hammond's arc, which is quite fun and about which more later.

inside the bank, we get to the vault.
"Let's smash it and make a LOUD NOISE so guys come and we fight them!"

when the door is at half health & goes BOOM he says

"SEE! I TOLD YOU!"

We crush the door and gremlins come,

"LOOK dada! More ghosties! I think those ghosties are made out of ELECTRICITY!"

After we finished he wanted to go back to the cave we'd cleared out last night- my efforts to explain the whole idea of "missions" and how you can't go back to one you've finished didn't go over very well.

While flying around (flight is by FAR his favorite power in the game) we ended up outside the university in Cap. Something made him super excited.

"WAIT! DADA, LOOK! OVER THERE!"

"What? what is it?"

He pointed Night Bee at the thing in the middle of the square.

"LOOK! That sculpture looks like PAC MAN!"

And waddaya know, it kinda does!

and, a direct message from my son:

how is flying more fun than super leap?

Did you get around to Dr. Graves' final arc yet? Looking forward to your report on that one...

okay, best laid plans and all that.

meant to hit Graves' arc with Scab Factory, ended up running the first episode of the villain SSA with Night Bee instead. Logged her in to check on a few bids, noticed she was close to leveling but didn't have any interesting contacts in her bar, then thought "Say, wait a minute!"

Overall, I had a blast. Really fun, I think I liked it more than the hero edition on the strength of the final mission. The maps and gameplay were basically a repeat, but I didn't mind. The storyline was different and that kept it fresh. And the final mission, with getting to steal Synapse's powers & lay the smackdown on a parade of heroes and all, was great.

Five stars, would play again.

Son wanted to check out Lightning Bee before bed, but he was really tired and acting nuts so I told him we'd 'visit' her in the morning after breakfast.

Another evening of random gamplay on assorted characters.
One thing I can say for the limitations of Freemium, the lack of slots prevented my alt-itis and general gaming ADD from kicking in too hard.

So last night I did my usual nosing around the market, fussed with a couple of costumes & made a new character with the design parameter of patterned tights only. Nosing around the 'post your best costumes here' thread the other day was, as always, partly inspiring (so much awesome!) and partly depressing (too many options, aieeeeeeeeeee!) so I went back to basics for my heroic dark/dark dominator Plasma Noir. I'll try and remember to post a screen tonight, really happy with how he turned out. I did cheat a *tiny bit* by giving him one of the Celestial floating neck things- it was gonna be a cape, but I was browsing around and it just looked so cool on him....


Finally got around to actually playing the game! and rolled through the first 3/4ths of Bane Spider Reuben's arc with Night Bee.

Great stuff, really fun. Loved all the villains hanging around the warehouse in the first episode, I went around getting all of their dialog before heading through the door to chat with Zukor. This strikes me as a terrific way to go about delivering a wordy/story mission that still has replay value. Replaying Twinshot's stuff I find myself madly clicking through dialog trees to get to the action. Replaying this one, I can just head straight to the guy I need to talk to and ignore all the other villains.
Neatly done.

I'd run this mission before with a brute, I think it was my stone/fire, and the brawl at the end was ROUGH. Went down, had to pop the vet reward rez, burned almost a whole tray of inspirations....a real knock down drag out affair.

With Night Bee, things went *much* smoother- thank you, /traps!
Dropped caltrops, plopped down Acid Mortar then laid into him with my electric zaps while he scurried around. Managed to get his end completely drained after a bit (I have Short Circuit slotted with endmod) and that was all she wrote, aside from having to convert some inspirations to blues so I didn't run out myself.

The next mish was Stomp Arachnos, not particularly good or bad- a throwback to the old days.

Next up was Infiltrate Longbow. Went to the mish, hoppped in...and suddenly I was a cool metallic night widow?

Gotta save this one for my son, who loves "disguises" more than anything else besides flying up to the 'roof' of the map then detoggling and falling all the way back down.

Logged out and hit the sack.

Finished that mish this morning- pretty fun, in spite of my innate distaste for longbow. The ambushes at the end were *perfectly* balanced- tough enough to make me worry, not so tough I faceplanted. Burned all my inspirations, made it out the end with a bit of health left. Very satisfying, and let my son run around the (now empty) map until he'd had his fill of our disguise.

He's always disappointed when we leave a mission and go back to 'normal'....I have a feeling he's going to completely flip out over the Halloween event.

Had to head out for work, intend to finish it up this evening and hopefully finally get around to Graves' arc.

only made it to about page 8 so you may have mentioned this or had it mentioned
but in one of the earlier posts you mentioned how the old perez park (and similar) missions could get stuck in your list since you couldn't drop them , but it might be worthwhile to note you can now hold more then 3 missions at a time

and with the ability to teliport to a contact you have not been introduced to yet can make getting to a new zone even easier , warp to a contact in that zone and while there talk to whatever person your mission was to speak to

why can't I delete this?

silly forums.


anyway, post incoming....hit 'post' by mistake.

Dr Graves- Hearts of Darkness: Price of Victory

Okay, finally got around to the rest of Graves.

Overall, terrific stuff.
I'd rank the writing a notch above the excellent Twinshot arcs just for the degree of difficulty, walking that villain tightrope. Gotta be evil, but not too evil or you lose your player, can't be too much of a lacky or you lose your player, etc etc. Authoring Villain missions have challenges above and beyond the general requirement of involving story and interesting characters.

It neatly wove in famous/infamous landmarks of old timey levelling (particularly liked the mission in the middle of the Luddite hunting grounds by the ferry in Cap- many's the lap I ran around those warehouses to avoid running the same ol' same ol' Cap contacts again), introduced you to game features in a nicely immersive way *and* provided engaging gameplay.

On this first go-round the latter episodes seem more re-playable than Twinshot- it is dialog/interaction heavy compared to much of the game's content, but the dialog isn't as intrinsic to enjoying the storyline as it was with Twinshot.


Anyway!

So, going after my 'fellow' villains was fun. The missions were well designed, not repetitive and held my interest. The character dialog is terrific, Zephyr in particular. Crosscut's mission was appropriately vile & the way it played into his remaining 'loyal' during the confrontation with Graves was a neat twist.

As a longtime CoV-only player, I really liked the chat with Boris the Russian.

The finale of this arc was strong- the villain double-cross during the ambush of Graves, followed by the revelation that Dollface was actually a huge alien threat was actually surprising and very fun to play through.

The Sirocco deus ex machina didn't bother me, Dollface was set up as enough of a menace that it seemed reasonable my lowbie self would need some help. It also neatly foreshadowed the idea of villain patrons at the higher levels.

Once again, didn't mind jogging back to actually speak with Graves in person- it was story appropriate.


With both Twinshot & Graves, I find myself hoping the devs add to their storylines in the future- I want to spend more time with all those characters, which isn't something I can say about very much content in this game.