Returning Player Diary

Okay, doubled my pleasure last night and took my range softcapped ar/dev through the first episode of SSA 2. Found out something I didn't know from one of the recent blaster discussion threads: Gun Drone's summon time was dropped to 1 second. I doubted that would be enough to make it worth using, but in the interest of fairness I decided to check it out. And also see how Big Payback did running a few 'regular' missions- after finishing off his softcap build I just ran him through a couple of X8 MA maps to see how it worked.

First up, commentary on ar/dev performance & gun drone changes:

One second makes a big difference.
Damage is still lame, it still rushes headlong into melee and gets killed, the duration is still too short (not a big deal until they fix the AI, since it dies every spawn).

BUT, now when it gets destroyed you can just drop another one minus the endless summon animation. This makes it more useful at diverting a bit of aggro & taking the alpha for you (stealth + SS up to spawn, let them blow up drone, pop out another one and go to work).

It still needs help, but it was useful enough that I'll be leaving it in my power tray.

General performance was a mixed bag. It was taking me FOREVER to kill stuff, which I attribute to fighting stuff with high lethal resists. After having blown through a bunch of DA content with my fire/ice, my ar/dev felt like a total slog.

On the plus side, he was ridiculously survivable, lying back behind a patch of caltrops & blazing away. He only had two minor bumps in the road, once when caltrops despawned fighting Atta- he ran up and almost one-shotted me in melee- the other fighting Clamor, who must be a relative of Master Illusionists as I was getting lit up despite my massive defense. But made it through with the help of a full inspiration tray.

I'll be interesting to see how the rumored changes to ranged attacks affect blasters in general and Big Payback in particular.


Now, about the content.

Overall, very enjoyable in spite of my issues with lethal resists. Engaging, well written for the most part, enjoyable characters, nice production values. More so than almost any arc I've played it gave me the sense of being a part of the story, and struck a nice balance between being the protagonist & playing 'fly on the wall' listening in on big developments with the other characters. I particularly liked the contact, Wavelength, and Penny's interactions with the Clockwork King in the first mission.

Really really fun.
Looking forward to checking out the villain side and seeing how they handle it.

Okay, discovered the big problem with Mayhem missions- they're so fun that now my son *only* wants to play Mayhem missions. And when we're out running around the city he constantly wants to stop and "blow up" cars, trucks, bus stops & mailboxes.

THANKS A LOT, PARAGON STUDIOS! =P


My solution has been to keep a villain with a full newspaper mission bar parked at the brokers for instant access. A clumsy workaround, but effective.


Been doing not much exciting this week, just some generic leveling. I have a guy in the range for the First Ward, so I'm going to check that out. I logged in Crafticus, my field crafting tank, to get him a level and found that tanks just *need* teams to be interesting for me...well, non Fire tanks, anyway. Even at a pretty low level he's impervious to most harm, but it takes him a relative eternity to plow through a mission (shield/mace).

Continuing to bank hero/villain merits.

Made a character for the Meme Costume Contest, which I probably won't be able to attend, but I figure I'd at least get a screenshot for this thread out of it so why not.

And a non-game related superhero note, Marvel's The Super Hero Squad Show is by far my favorite superhero teevee show. It showed up on Netflix instant a bit ago, and my son is obsessed. It's definitely aimed at young kids, but it really captures the feel of what I liked about the 'universe' concept and it's 'everything plus the kitchen sink' approach to heroes & villains co-existing has a very City of Heroes feel.

Very fun, when he wants to watch one I often as not sit down with him.

Son fell asleep hard after an afternoon viewing of Madagascar 3 (excellent fun, by far the best of the series) so I ran Scab Factory through an arc I recall as one of my favorites, Oh Wretched Man.

Happily, the writing holds up. The mechanics are a bit vanilla compared to the stuff we've been getting lately, but I'll take a good story told simply over a poor one told spectacularly every time. Cool meeting Ghost Widow, the story mostly sidesteps the 'lacky' problem prevalent in a lot of the older red-side missions, and all in all it was still a winner.


My one caveat is the TOTALLY POINTLESS AND IRRITATING 'Speak to Bloody Bay Liason' mission that Marino hands out before the story gets rolling. Especially irritating as the whole Wretch saga takes place in Mercy. Happily, I had an autocomplete in my back pocket and was able to get right on with the arc.


My boy woke up just before the final mission, so I put it on hold.

After dinner, he wanted to "visit the Red guy who blows things up" (Scab Factory), and I had to explain that I didn't have a Mayhem Mission ready on him just yet. He wanted to 'visit' him anyway, so we ran the Wretch Rescue mission together.

Things he likes:

The mission map.

He made me keep it open the whole time. When we were uncovering a new part he called it "tunneling".

Wretch.

"Is that our friend? Oh look, he SMASHED that guy! I like him!"

Things he doesn't like:

Mu

He calls them "seatbelt guys" and hates them because they "steal our Insurance bar".


Fortunata

"Dada,I hate that lady!"
"Why?"
"Because she's got a WEIRD HEAD."



Had fun, hit 19, kept the boy entertained for a bit. He would have preferred a Mayhem, or failing that something in a cave (why he likes caves, I do not know, but he loves them- "maybe we can find a cave!" he'll declare hopefully when I take a newspaper mish).

I like the mace/stone combo for brutes.
A bit of an end hog, but lots of smashing fun.

Running SilverRage through Faultline right now, mostly because I just had to get him the Old Fashioned badge, and since I'm in the zone anyway why not hit up Jim Temblor.....


So far so good- still fun, not a whole lot of useless traveling and the 'new' Faultline isn't something I've played absolutely to death anyway so running around the zone qualifies as sightseeing.

I fell into a crevice, which wasn't that deep, had a nice wide, flat bottom, and plenty of walkways leading back up to the surface, which reminded me of doing one of those awful Hunt missions in Old Faultline with my super speed scrapper, zipping into one of those endless, steep crevices, getting stuck while trying to jump-jump-jump my way out and having to be rescued by a pal with TP Friend.

Ah, the 'good' old days!


I was a little confused in the two Fusionette missions- did she get a buff or something? She didn't die once, and I wasn't being particularly solicitous of her wellbeing.

Anyway, finished up Temblors arc & got SilverRage to 20.
I'm still really liking both shield & street justice- I have a feeling he'll eventually join my select crew of 50's. Although I get the feeling I haven't seen him really shine yet- I may need to try and schedule a block of time where I see how it goes on a big team.

Okay, change of pace tonight!

Logged in Scab Factory to check the market after my son went to bed.
Someone was recruiting for a Virgil Tarikoss TF, one of the only red side TFs I've actually run. Knowing it was short, I hopped on board.

We had a fun crew, the leader was an RP'er and everyone else played along, which was entertaining. Had a stalker, some flavor of /kin corrupter, a DB scrapper and a psi dominator.

Scab Factory ended up having the personality of either an up-market Hulk, or a down-market Ben Grimm. Hadn't thought about it much, but that's what came out. I always forget how fun teaming is in this game, I wish I could do it more often.

The TF was nice- not a lot of pointless running around, only one irritating mission (power plant outdoor map full of ghosts- ick), we rolled through it pretty quick until the last mission- not that we were doing a speed run, or even had a plan (we cleared about half the outdoor map before the stalker went scouting for objectives), but the team was just blowing away everything that got in our way. Scabby isn't all that butch, but the combo of buffs & Psi controls let him handle some giant spawns without too much trouble. One faceplant, quickly rectified with the vet rez.

The final mission took us quite a while because we were clearing out all the side tunnels. We were having fun, so it didn't get tedious. At some point we developed a team in-joke about "flaming turkey dinners" that led to much mirth.

Finally got Batty to come out and play and put him down without too much trouble.

Had a blast. Fun team, TF was a good length (i/e it ended before I started getting antsy), and I picked up two levels, ending up at 21. Everyone liked Scabby's costume.

Entertaining night, I need to make more time for teaming.

and a quick note on playing with a restricted gaming schedule:

surveying one of those "what will be in the next issue!" threads and coming across the inevitable "wow there wasn't anything in the last issue" comments, I realized that for the first time in ever the game's content has been able to stay ahead of me.

Some of it's being away for a year and having a pile of stuff to dig through, part of it's my rampant alt-o-holism, but it's also that they're just making more stuff and making it faster than ever before.

I have a character in the middle of the Dark Astoria revamp.
I have a character in the middle of the First Ward arcs.
I have another one doing Night Ward.

The only thing I've made it all the way through is the revamped low level stuff.

There's enough new stuff around that I haven't played or am in the middle of playing that when you throw in occasional things like running a short TF or re-living Faultline, they could come out with a new issue before I've done all the stuff in the old one.

And this is just counting in-game storyline content.
I also, at some point, want to check out the Titan Weapons powerset.
And Beam Rifle.
And staff fighting.
And maybe even, someday, Beast Mastery.


Other than the release of CoV, I can't think of a single year in the history of the game that I could skip and return to find such an abundance of new stuff to do.

While I have my philosophical discontents with the Paragon Market, if it's driving this much development I'm not going to whine about it even a little bit.

Back after a summer hiatus- friends graduated, road trips taken, son entertained I return to the fray.

First, a content note/reminder to myself:
Dear Goat:
Please turn Scab Factory's difficulty back down to baseline, thanks!

While he can certainly handle +0/x3 in general, in the context of a mayhem mission there are some roadblocks, mostly involving ambushes, and my son doesn't respond well to defeats. Especially defeats that land us in jail. Plus taking longer to defeat spawns prevents building up a big bankroll of extra time so he can run around the map on his own blowing stuff up once we complete the main objective.

He weirdly had an intuitive understanding of the jail dynamic-

"Dada, let's break down that door!"

So we did.

Then he said, "dada, do we have a friend here? let's break them out too!"

And this was the first defeat we'd had, first trip to the jail, he had no prior knowledge of the 'Jailbreak' side mission.

"We do! Good idea!"

Took out the wall of guards with some help from inspirations, then broke Stardusk out.

Which led to part 2 of difficulty slider dismay, because of course she got mulched by the first spawn we ran across outside, which bummed the boy out.

"Where did our friend go? Let's go rescue her again!"

I don't like having to explain the limitations of the game world to him, preferring to leave the concept of 'suspension of disbelief' to some future date when he is slightly less full of wonder and infinite possibilities.

So, I'm just going to turn my difficulty back down so we don't end up in jail and I can keep whatever friends we come across alive indefinitely.


Before my short break I logged in one evening and hooked up with pretty much the same crew I ran the Virgil Tarikoss with last week. Asked if I was up for a Silver Mantis, as I'd never run one I said "sure!"

Ran the first mish and everything was white/blue so we made a team decision to bump the difficulty and restart. Unfortunately, the bump was a bit higher than I think most of us expected and we went from white/blue to red/purple.

Still, the first mission went down smooth so we figured we'd go with it.

Unfortunately, we had one team member with a propensity for aggroing additional spawns- while we could deal with one huge red/purple spawn, two generally led to a team wipe. Especially fighting Tsoo...I think one big battle we had there were like 5 sorcerers clumped up on us.

*shudder*

Anyway, it was a slog but I was able to see it through to the end. It was a fun team, everybody had a good attitude and even though the unexpected length blew my bedtime all to heck I'd do it again.

It was pretty generic stuff, except for a fun final battle on that one oil rig map. We had to destroy gun emplacements & fight off hoards of Sky Raiders to lure out the Hero, which we managed okay. Very cinematic, as he finally showed up when we were at the top of the rig, alas aggro managment was again our downfall and a few added spawns led to a wipe.

We reconvened down in the water, I claimed a bunch of Team Inspirations from email & we made ready for a major assault, but the guy had inexplicably flown off to a far corner of the map- our stalker spotted him while doing reconnaissance.

Minus the giant cloud of sky raiders, we made short work of him and his lieutenants.

I have no idea how long the whole thing took us- four hours?
Something completely ridiculous.

On the plus side, Scabby picked up most of 5 levels- a little street sweeping or a newspaper will get him over the hump. And it was a really fun team. Our Bane player had recently returned to the game a couple months after giving away all his stuff & deleting all his characters except for the Bane.

"I literally have like 100k" he said in response to my comment about needing to pick up some fresh IOs. After we finally finished the run I got his global, switched over to one of my marketeers and sent him 200m to get back in the swing.

Now, even team handicapped as I am, I've been on a few PUG TFs that started dragging on, either from too much difficulty or team composition problems or a combination. What usually happens is people get testy, start arguing or blaming everyone else for wipes, and then start dropping like flies.

Not this time!
We lost one player, but that was it- the rest of us stuck it out to the end. And it was a happy, supportive team, especially given the environment (a bunch of early 20's battling a sea of reds & purples from super annoying factions like Tsoo & Sky Raiders).

Also, *everyone* on that team had terrific costumes & great bios. That seems to be a virtue RP thing- I mean I still see some duds, but more often than not the RP crowd puts more effort into their appearance than your average 'casual player'. Most teams I hook up with there's usually one character I think is pretty cool. On this team, *everyone* had a really neat costume that made me think "man, I wish I'd thought of that!"

So, great night even with the massive time overrun & a sleep deprived morning the next day. My boy is up at 7:30 come hell or high water, and dada whining about a task force than went over schedule by 3 hours doesn't carry any weight with him.

Got on a quick (very quick) Posi 1 tonight- was checking Psicop's market slots and someone was looking to fill a couple of slots so I signed on. Everyone else knew what they were doing, and we buzzed through it in less than 45 minutes- karmic payback for my 4 hour Silver Mantis the other day.

He was fun on a team, although rather superfluous- everything was just melting, it was one of those teams where you have to stick with your fast-animating attacks or you end up shooting at corpses.

Picked up a level, got some merits, had fun. Quick, fun TF and went a lot smoother than the first time I ran it, shortly after it was released.

Logged in SilverRage to finish off a level & pick up some enhancements, ran a few missions in Striga. Stephanie Peebles is still tedious- a street hunt followed by "kill all council on a ship", where all of them were robots, followed by a 'clear warehouse of council', once again with robots, and using that weirdo Praetorian aggro where attacking one thing in a warehouse brings the whole map down on your head.

It was pretty lame, so when someone advertised a half-billion CC in Atlas I hit my Wentworths teleporter and gave it a shot.

Note to self: when the judges have costumes that look like something my 3 year old would make fun of, don't waste your time.

I did get a couple of compliments from other contestants who *did* have nice characters, so it wasn't a complete waste of time. Always fun to check out other people's characters, and the chat in /local was fairly amusing.

Much more fun than Striga, anyway.

Another night, another TF!

I'm not sure what's up with my recent roll- I've run more TFs in the past few weeks than in the previous few years combined. I think it's a combo of modern TFs being less than a million hours long (unless you botch the difficulty, heh) and the new LFG channel.

I put it in a window of its own up in the corner and keep an eye on it while I'm marketeering or whatever. Having it show up by default is great- in the old days there were TF channels, but you had to find them and add them, and the only people there were the ones who also found and added it...this is a lot easier and a lot more populated.

So I was hunting up some enhancements for Scab Factory when I saw a call for the Penny Yin TF. Remembering advice from earlier in this thread, I said COUNT ME IN! forgetting I was redside- I'm still thrown by this whole cross-factional chat stuff.

But the guy said he'd wait while I switched out, so I logged and came back in with Crafticus, my Crazy 88 field crafting shield/mace tank.

I really, really like him both in terms of powers and concept/execution, but he's sort of ridiculous to solo- if I turn up his difficulty high enough to present a challenge, it takes him an eternity to clear a mission. If I turn it down to where he can finish a mission in good time, he might as well be fighting grays for all the danger they pose. He's a character that needs a team to be fun.

So, logged him in, sent a tell and off we went.


It was a lot of fun- not too long, missions were interesting and varied without bogging down, and I've always enjoyed fighting freaks. Although I forgot the modern version has Super Stunners, so I kept having these awful end problems and it took me a while to figure out why.

Fun team- mostly controllers & corrupters, plus me and a fire brute. Nothing gave us that much trouble until the finale- we had Clamor about halfway down when a REALLY GIGANTIC Freak ambush showed up and resulted in a team wipe.

And I don't know if it's an intentional change or not, but I stayed put after everyone else hospitaled and the masses of ambushers wandered off. After the coast was clear I popped Return to Battle and hit Gather the Team once everyone was back on the map, and we made short work of Clamor without having to wrestle with 500 freaks.

Which is sort of the same thing that happened on the Silver Mantis TF, where the AV scooted off to a far corner of the map after our team wipe.

No complaints here- if it's on purpose it's a nice improvement over the old days of screwing up, then having this impossible spawn to contend with on further attempts.

Anyway, fun night. I enjoyed the modified Terra Volta battle, and it was neat experiencing Independence Port as the setting for something entertaining.

My favorite teammate was the fellow who did the recruiting, an Earth dominator who created a REALLY COOL homage to a certain emerald cosmic gladiator. He had his powers set to crystal, and a lot of them really looked like they'd come right out of a power ring.

Happily, nobody on the team was one of those report-happy types who equate narcing on players with "protecting the game", so we had a fun run.


Picked up one level and most of another in 45 minutes of play. I wasn't able to follow much of the story, as everyone else seemed famliar with the TF and we were barreling along at high speed. But it was fun and short, so I'll run it again & pay more attention next time.


It was interesting being the tank.
It is, along with stalkers, my least-played AT. I have my fire tank, of course, but he's different. Crafticus is more of a traditional tank- super tough, not real efficient at defeating stuff. So I mostly just ran around, jumping into spawns and keeping the aggro, bashing stuff when I had the end to spare.

I enjoyed it- we had an ar/dev corrupter and somebody with a fire primary, so there was plenty of AoE going on. Being primarily an AoE player on the blasting side I know how much fun it is when you can just unload everything and not worry about getting buried- I got a vicarious kick every time one of them dropped a big AoE and the numbers started popping.

Anyway, fun night. Thanks LFG channel, and thanks game designers for making TFs tired parents can run between dinner and bedtime!

Logged in last night to finish off a level for Scab Factory and ended up running another Virgil TF.

*shrug*

I was going to run a few tips before bed, saw a guy advertising for Virgil, ran a mission and when I came out he still had 4 slots left. Figuring it'd be about an hour and get me better xp than solo tips, I signed up. 5 players must be the tipping point, because as soon as he said "three slots left" we filled up in about ten seconds.

Enjoyable team- we had a /kin, so I didn't have to mess around with turning Rooted off and on. Thank goodness, because my lag was horrible. Characters I remember- a cool bots/beam rifle mastermind with a terrific costume blending in some retro SF elements with other stuff (and who used a jet board for a travel power- theme all the way!), Claws scrapper, Elec dominator, ar corrupter, and an elec/elec blaster who was really good at sapping + our kin and me.

A couple of my teammates knew the TF well, a couple were total wildcards- our /kin in particular really liked super-speed sightseeing around maps and probably ran into a big spawn and was instantly killed six or seven times.

But we were a strong crew & hadn't pushed the difficulty so we finished up in about an hour (as predicted) in spite of some speed bumps.

Got Scabbie his level and most of the next.
I ought to check out his merits, the way he's been piling up the TFs he may actually have a stack to do something with.

It's been quiet on the actual gameplay front this week. We've been having a hitting problem with my son & our response is a "no teevee/no videogames" ban after each outburst. Which is working, but every bump in the road cuts down on my potential CoH time.

Another thread inspired me to log in MANT, my plant/fire dom, to reacquaint myself. Alas, he was yet another victim of RESPEC FEVER- a couple of his attacks were patchily frankenslotted with generics and mismatched set pieces, most were empty.

So I've been slowly slotting him up on the fly while running occasional missions with the slider lower than usual. For some reason (probably related to the Crazy 88's) he only had 25m on him, which was *almost* enough to get him fully frankenslotted without having to exercise too much patience...but not quite.

Interesting note for marketeers/build enthusiasts:

by far his largest expense was salvage.
I didn't spend over 1m on any of the recipes, but reliably high prices on rare salvage & the general updraft on the prices of many Uncommons devoured most of his bankroll.

Happily, I recalled I still had a few odds and ends from Super Packs that I hadn't claimed yet- I pulled in a few off-brand ATOs (kheldian, Soldier of Arachnos) and insta-sold them for enough to finish his build.

He's still a lot of fun- I'd mostly stopped playing him after the last big change to Domination, which ne needed a respect to leverage. Apparently I did the respec, but then forgot to slot him out. =P

Got him up to level 40 over the course of the week, and will probably make him my default 'high level' guy to work on. I don't have a dom at 50 and he's my favorite of several I play, so it's time to tame my alt-itis and power on through with him.

My other 'main' this week was Scab Factory, who is a sort of perfect storm. Super fun to play, two sets I'm unfamiliar with so leveling is free of the foot-tapping yeah yeah yeah, let's hurry up and get to the GOOD powers! aspect, and one of those characters who I'm just completely satisfied with conceptually.
He's up to 27, mostly on the strength of running task forces as chronicled in this thread.

I did manage to run one terrific story arc, Vincent Ross'. Really enjoyable, in spite of 'starring' some really annoying factions- Legacy Chain & Wyvern aren't too bad on this guy but those Slag Golems are just a huge PITA.

But fun story, plenty of meat there for people who dig the lore side of the game, and several missions with terrific game mechanics- the Blood Crystal itself is a great, eerie artifact- the first time I ran into it I sat up straight and said "what the HELL is that!" I thought maybe my video card was going wonky on me. Very neat.

And the mission where you have to GO INSIDE the thing was fantastic, again in spite of those dang Slag Golems. I have to admit really liking these sorts of "fight off waves of attackers while the timer runs" missions- I forgot to turn my difficulty down, and +0/x3 was just about perfect on this arc. It was always close fought, I burned a lot of inspirations and died a couple of times, but had a great time doing it.

I'm saving the finale for tonight or tomorrow night, whichever affords me some uninterrupted time to pay them close attention.

Highly recommended arc, very fun.

The only other character I did anything with aside from marketeering was my ar/dev blaster The Big Payback. I'm running him through a bunch of random stuff at +0/X6 so I'll have a good feel for how he plays now and can compare and contrast after the I24 changes.

He's growing on me just slightly. Gun Drone in particular is better than I've been giving it credit for. Making it insta-cast was a major buff- the AI is still garbage, the damage is still insignificant, the duration is still too short, but the ability to just throw one out whenever you want is a useful PANIC BUTTON. It still needs a buff IMO, but now it has more utility than just being a set mule, which is a major improvement.

oh yes, saw a guy in one of the globals on Freedom with a name that gave me a chuckle:

DontNerfMeBro


I'm assuming he was some sort of ss/fire brute..

another terrific name spotted outside a mission door in Talos, guy kitted out in the new VIP Mecha set:

Star Freem


I LOL'ed.

I have a little market experiment going, which I'll document and post in the market forum if it ends up being interesting.

Not much else going on- finished Frankenslotting my plant/fire Dom and sort of accidentally took him into Recluse's Victory this morning. Was in the Grandville 'city hall' this morning when my son woke up, toddled out and climbed into my lap. I was looking over the Villain patrons, trying to make some sort of rational decision about the best fit for MANT, but my son chose for me- "OOOH, go talk to that SHARK guy! I like him!"

Okay, Captain Mako it is!

I let him wander around a bit, and we ended up in a room with a gigantic glowing portal- anyone expecting him not to run up and click it is doomed to disappointment.

So we ran around a bit- I picked up a heavy, which he loved. In his book the only thing more fun than having a "friend" running around with us is being in a disguise. He was disappointed we couldn't *also* get one of the Longbow robots, but ah well.

The spawns were pretty lame- usually just one yellow Nullifier. Not that I've spent a ton of time there, but I seem to remember slightly better hunting.

Son's new favorite power in the game is Carrion Creepers, which he calls "our ribbon friends". He is also a huge fan of our pet- "Hey Dada, THAT venus flytrap can WALK! Make it BITE some guys!"

I have a Mayhem mission all lined up for the next time he wants to "visit our guys".....Carrion Creepers + flytrap + Mayhem should blow his mind.