Returning Player Diary

I've avoided the alt bug for a good while, so it was perhaps inevitable that during last night's commute home an idea hit me that demanded to be made:

Dopplegangster!


It is a quirk of fate that many of the better character concepts striking me are for masterminds, an AT I feel little affection for.

I'm fairly sure this one gestated in another forum thread where the subject of those ambushes that TOTALLY IGNORE your henchmen to beat up your poor Mastermind arose. There was a bit of cross-talk on various justifications for this (Arcanaville: Well, wouldn't you?). A while later I was thinking about a mastermind who was visually indistinguishable from his henchmen. And then on the drive home the name popped into my head.

Now in spite of their wide popularity I've never played /thugs, which is kinda odd.

I've played (and deleted) bots, ninjas, mercs & zombies. Wait, I didn't delete my mercs- I liked her concept too much, so I just moved her off to another server. And who knows, someday maybe they'll buff mercs. And I do currently have another zombie MM- came up with a terrific idea & costume and *had* to do it. I don't play him much because I don't want to get frustrated- he's level 15, and at his current rate of progress should hit 20 sometime around the 10th anniversary party.

But no thugs!
I actually had to hit the web for photo reference.
Decided to make him look like the buff thug in the wifebeater with the tattoos, and if he lives long enough he'll have alternate costumes for the various other members of the gang. Or, I could copy something like the Family Capo. Lots of ways to go here.

Anyway.

Made him, logged him in, and given my historic antipathy to the AT decided to just burn him up as high as I could on the DIB/DFB train to defuse the possibility of a 'Frustration Related Event'.

I went for /time as his secondary, mostly because I haven't played it and it looked fun. I love slows, and it seemed to have a lot of slows. /devices is the only one that would've been reasonably thematic, but I already have a few /devices including my mercs MM.
So, Time it was!

Ran two DIBs with some higher level guys & hit level 10.
Not much feel for the character yet. I do really like the 'slow aura', the DoT heal is a little weird, but handy with my henchmen, and the pistol attacks are pretty lame.

Going to get him up to his 20's then try playing the 'real' game.

My little market dalliance seems to be working, so it's time to start taking notes and screenshots.

it is tempting for me to dfb to 22 when I slot IO's and can really do stuff.

But I am finding the content yellowside is good enough that I'm not worried about leveling.

Nethergoat,

Have you done the switch to VIP that you mentioned in your first post, or have you found that 'freemium' status is good enough, given the veteran awards you built up during your previous play?

I've been following the thread, but it's gotten pretty long -- I don't recall a specific moment where you transitioned to a new account type, but I may well have forgotten.

--
Pauper

Ok, two more DIB runs and Dopplegangster is up to level 15.

It's a nice way to skip the low levels if you want- it's fast, but it's not hardcore PL fast. And you get to meet people and do a little teaming, although it's fairly hectic. The design is fun, and not too repetitive as long as you don't sit down with the intent of grinding to 20. It's given me two evenings of entertainment that happily resulted in quite a few more levels than I'd have gotten on my own.

The thugs are whatever- typical MM pets.
But /time...that I'm *really* enjoying. So far it seems kinda like a remix of Empathy with some terrific mitigation blended in. I've got a great debuff (Time Crawl), a weird DoT aura heal that seems about as good as aura heals usually are (Temporal Mending), a cool pbaoe debuff aura (Time's Juncture) that seems to be pretty effective and a really nice ally buff, (Temporal Selection) that juices their recharge, damage & regen- sort of a more offensive-minded Fortitude.

It keeps me interested in the fight, debuffing hard targets & buffing teammates while my dudes blaze away, taking occasional potshots with my pistols.

So far so good- we'll see how he fares when I take him out of the controlled environment of DIB and introduce him to the solo game.

Ok, weirdest TF so far in my weird run of TFs.

Got home from a 4th party late last night and logged in to check my market traps before passing out. Was fiddling with my mind/kin on Triumph when I got a tell from someone who wanted to get a Manticore TF going.

Now I was pretty tired and burned out...but this is a character I'd finally finished re-slotting after my respec rampage, plus I've been wanting to level him for a while now but kept getting caught up in other projects. So...

"sure!" I said.

We scrounged around and eventually got it started with 7 players- we had 8, but the last guy didn't meet the level minimum and his high level characters were all red side.

The TF itself was pretty sucky. A lengthy procession of generic door missions punctuated by occasional garganutan street hunts (40 Crey, game? Really? Oh and in Cray's Folly? Grr...). The missions themselves didn't present much challenge, but there were a couple of long slogs to weird places that would have *really* been a PITA before all the travel QOL upgrades we've gotten in the past few years. Faultline? Yeah, they went there. Mission way out in the *** end of IP? Yup!

Anyway, between Oroboros & my pocket D porter it didn't end up being that tedious. side note: it'd been so long since I actually played this guy *he didn't have an oro portal*. I was digging around his power trays for a while going "wth, where is it!" before I figured it out. Someone was kind enough to drop me a portal, I snagged the badge and that was that.

So, generic, sorta irritating gameplay, but with a really fun crew. Team composition was pretty offbeat- we had two tanks (ice & dark), the peacebringer who looks like a giant beetle, an electric controller, a spines scrapper, a fire corrupter and my mind/kin. Between the two controllers pretty much ever spawn started the fight out of endurance and thoroughly confused- we could have used more damage, but what we lacked in speed we made up for in comfort and safety. =P

In light of a recent thread about server populations, my team made some interesting points while shooting the breeze. Apparently by the midway point of our run the only people on the whole server were us and some folk running an ITF- not sure how our leader took that census, but we didn't run into anyone else on our various sojournings, so it sounds about right. But everyone on the team was also a Triumph enthusiast (including me) and even those with characters on other servers still lauded Triumph for being where they had the most fun and found the friendliest players. One guy had played on Protector and spoke about how there's a lot of stuff that goes on there but most of it is run by a semi-underground community that's pretty insular.

One almost universal sentiment that surprised me was that Virtue was viewed as a cesspool of cybering ERP'ers and a tough place to get a team. Not my experience at all, but everybody who had other characters on a high pop server had gone for Freedom.


Anyway, it reinforced my opinion that while small pop servers have their teaming challenges, everyone's there because they like it and are more than happy to lend a hand. About half the team was in my boat- they'd just logged in to fiddle with this or that, but wanted to help out the guy putting the TF together (who it turns out got their TF Commander accolade out of it, so hurrah!). All longtime players, all happy as could be to run a boring TF in the middle of the night to help a guy out.

Okay, two notes this evening.

First, logged in The Almighty Dollar, one of my Crazy 88 alts who I got a sudden hankering to get a few levels in. The last time I logged him in I tried Organica's 'buy el cheapo rare recipes to vendor for a few bucks' trick. I filled up his inventory with insta-buys for 555 and got him a nice nest egg. But here's the thing, I was just going along throwing up 10 bids for 555 and grabbing the wins...but I forgot to cancel the rest.

So I logged in to a "99 Items Bought, 0 Items Sold" message- yep, 99 level 50 rare recipes.

Sigh.

I was tempted to just delete 'em all, but he's still fairly broke so I sold 'em. BARELY worth it, even with the handy /ah command making it so I could basically just claim them & sell them...a long cry from the VERY early days of the market, when I was doing the same thing with level 50 generic recipes in Steel, jumping over the wall to sell them at the Mutant store.

So there was one of those situations going where everyone was looking for DFBs but nobody was running one, so I took the initiative. Invited the 3 folks that were hanging around Ms Liberty, threw out a 'DFB has 4 spots left' and got about 15 tells in the next 30 seconds, invited the first 4 and off we went.

Pretty simple.

The great character from the run was named House Maid, with appropriate outfit. She was one of the ones hanging around Ms Liberty and I thought "heh, cute" and that was it. Until we got in the mish and it turned out she was a Staff scrapper using a broom- MAN it looked great! I had zero interest in Staff before that, but House Maid whipping that broom around and beating *** in the sewers was ridiculously cool.


Second is an idea for (yet another) alt I got on the drive home, a variation on an old character I made back when folk were up in arms about the costume stuff gated behind the vet rewards. So I made Vet Rewards Man, using every vet reward costume thingie I could fit.

This time around I'm rolling

Pay to Win

battle cry: My superpower is MONEY!

So the costume I can handle, but I need ideas for what the penultimate "omg pay to win!" power sets would be. What's the most overpowered thing I can get that you can't have unless you buy it?

Titan Weapons?

Taking suggestions, will post screens once I get it finalized.

Some people rise early to surf or do yoga....I rise early to play CoH.

Logged in The Almighty Dollar intending to pick up some enhancements & get him ready for running missions or teaming or whatever, but....you guessed it, someone was forming a DFB.

I CAN'T RESIST THESE THINGS!

Off we went!

At the tail end my son woke up, toddled over to the computer and climbed up in my lap. He doesn't ask, he just sidles up, butts his head into the gap between the elbow of my mouse hand and my ribcage and then squirms through the resulting space.

He was fascinated by the Hydra heads.

"Dada, WHAT ARE THOSE UGLY THINGS?!?"

When describing game stuff to him I skip context and just give him names, to do with what he pleases.

"Those are Hydra Heads."

"Uh....Dada, what's INSIDE those things?"

"Huh, I'm not sure. Goop?"

"Dada," pointing at a couple of Spawn running around in the water, "I think those CREEPY LITTLE GUYS are inside of them!"

"Say, I think you're right!"


We finished off the Hydras (He loved it when the beams of light started shooting out of them) getting me to level 14, and hopped out.

Predictably, my son wanted to find a cave.

I checked my contacts, saw our old friend Montague Castellana in the list and headed over to Steel to get the Percy Winkley mish, guaranteed to satisfy his CAVE LUST.

So we ran around Oranbega for a bit, checking out all the fascinating torches and glowing green crystals. His favorite power on this guy is either Tesla Cage, which he calls "our Spark friend!", or the one that puts guys to sleep- he LOVED it when they fell asleep and made me wander up close so he could stare at the ZZZzzz's over their heads.
This makes him the only person I've ever met who likes sleep powers. =P


"Hey dada, stop that guy with our SPARK FRIEND!" he exclaimed as one of the cultists tried to scamper away down a corridor. He already has a better grasp of CoH power use than most of the people I've PUG'ed with over the years.

So we rescued Percy, then had to go defeat the last spawn, because they showed up in red on the ever-open mission map.

"Look Dada! More GUYS to zap!"

Finally exited the mish & he made me open the zone map. There was a fire going on, and the pulsing red spot was catnip for him. "Dada, let's go there- maybe it's ANOTHER CAVE!"

"I think it's a fire, but okay!"

Headed over, grabbed an extinguisher and joined the 4-5 other players doing battle with the flames. At one point I was standing by the front door when one of those HUGE waves of Hellions appeared, causing my son to comment

"Uh....dada, I THINK we're in trouble!"

He hasn't quite gotten the whole 'con' system down yet- he equates danger with volume, so sometimes he'll want me to go "look at" a couple of reds or purples, and wants to flee big piles of grays.

"We're okay, don't worry."
I zapped them with my AoE immobilize and one of the other players with a damage aura came over and cleaned them up.

"Hey, is that red girl our friend?"
"Yeah, she's another hero."
"She's HELPING us!"
"Yep! That's what heroes do."

He was disappointed after we put out the fire & everyone went their separate ways. I'd try and run a team with him sometime- I'm sure he'd love to see all the "friends" doing their stuff- but following his lead like I do isn't the safest or most efficient style of gameplay. Plus, I never know when he's going to suddenly decide it's time for us to do something else, or 'visit' another one of my characters.

Maybe in a few months he'll be more predictable.


On game topic, here's how out of it I am-

I ran 5 or 6 DFBs with this guy, and ONLY THIS MORNING did I finally catch on to the fact that his sonic bubbles were AoE. I'd been running around doing everyone individually like in the old days. I thought maybe they'd done something to the duration, because there were a few players it seemed like I *never* had to re-bubble. Then this morning everyone was hanging out inside the missions door, I did one guy and BOOM! EVERYONE was bubbled.

Man, what a huge improvement!
I'd heard that Speed Boost was AoE so that didn't surprise me on my mind/kin, but I didn't know they'd done it with bubbles too.
Wow!


Aside from that, I'm really liking electric control.
That contagious knockdown power is just about my favorite thing ever- doesn't do a lot of damage, but is super fun and has pretty good recharge. Overall, he's a little bit slow but still fun. I'm not usually one with the patience to solo anything but bigtime damage dealers, but I enjoyed this morning quite a bit.
and Sonic isn't bugging me so far, although it has limited synergy for soloing.

I may get this guy to 15 and then see if DIB's are as addictive as DFB's. =P

AGHK just remembered my favorite thing he said- this is why I need to alt-tab out and write stuff down as it happens, otherwise I forget.

r/e the sound effects of Electric Control:

"Dada, I like this song our Spark Friends are singing!"

Had a nice little run last night after my boy fell asleep. The wife was watching that two part Woody Allen documentary, so I had a solid few hours to myself- time for CoH!

First, one last DFB which got me to level 16.
Then it was off to the science store in Steel to pick up some add DO's- I didn't want to mess around with generics until I could slot 20's, and he only had a couple million from my comical foray into 'vendoring rare IO recipes' territory so I didn't want to overpay for level 15 generics, and I certainly didn't want to craft them myself....so, the store. Three level 15 DOs combined to make one green and didn't really make a dent in my bank account- weird to remember back in the day when you had to scrimp and save and intentionally go into debt and sell all your junk to the right store and rescue everyone you saw just to have enough inf to MAYBE buy enough accuracies for your main attacks.

Now, I can just fill up my tray over and over profligately combining enhancements and not even notice.

So while I'm doing this someone is advertising for a Posi II.
They were still asking around when I finished, so I signed up- I've only ever run the second part once, and even though that team was awful and horribly underpowered (I think we all started out below 20- no red shirt freshman 50's to help us out) it still didn't take us a tremendously long time to get it done.

So the team fills out and off we go.
As an omen of things to come one of our members drops during the first mission and is never seen again.

But the core of the team is pretty badass, so we soldier on. A fire/ss tank, some sort of brute, a couple of masterminds (mercs & bots), my elec/sonic controller and a stone/emp controller.

So we clear out the first mish and it's a breeze. Ditto for the second. Ambushes, adds from dumb MM pets getting carried away, no problem- we're mowing everything in sight without hitting so much as a speed bump. Bubbles, heals, plenty of damage, and even at this early point in his career The Almighty Dollar is pretty great at sapping endurance- I find if I can drop my cages on a big group and then jump in with my aura I can drain a crowd pretty fast, as long as somebody is around to hold the aggro (like a tank and a brute, for instance).

On our way to the third mission, trouble- the guy who started the TF has to bail out. I think he was a rad something.

And then partway through the next mission we lose our mercs MM.

By the time we get to the grand finale, we're down to 5 players. Bitter memories of taking forever to kill Doc V. while waves of zombies swarmed up the walkway welled up from the depths of my subconscious.

But, not to worry! Things actually went pretty well in spite of our depleted numbers. A couple of near-wipes, some deaths (we weren't handling those MM adds as well as earlier), but no total disasters. Plus the tank knew what he was doing, so we followed his lead.

By this time I had that halo that reduces enemy damage resistance and kept it up on him for pretty much the rest of the TF. Between that and Sonic Siphon Doc V went down so fast that we defeated him just as the first wave of zombie ambushers trundled up behind us- didn't even need to fight them, just exited out.

And while all this was going on I had an enlightening chat with Fulmens about using converters for fun and profit- sorry I kept getting distracted, Ful!



So, YET ANOTHER TF under my belt.
The more I think about it the more credit I give to the LFG channel for this.
It keeps you from missing stuff that's about to kick off, and if you have the time you can nearly always catch a team. Evenings I'd previously have spent happily soloing away or playing my own mini-games on the market or messing with my bases I instead spend running whatever short-ish TF is going on.

It's an interesting change of pace for this inveterate soloist.


/edit
also, forgot about a costume contest I hung around for after finishing the TF. 10m prize, but always good people watching so I logged in Mach 7 (one of my favorite costumes) and toddled over to Atlas. I must say, the general quality of entrant on Virtue is LIGHT YEARS better than the 'average' entrant on Freedom. A lot of people showed up, and only a couple of them were total eyesores. I saw a bunch, like more than five or six, that I thought had better costumes than me, which rarely happens. A lot of terrific characters that had obviously had a ton of time invested in them.

My favorite wasn't a tremendously complicated outfit, but conceptually it was hilarious- the Killer Carrot. Orange with tall, spikey green hair obviously. Great bio too- I tried to get a screenshot, but don't know if I remembered my UI toggle correctly. If I did I'll post it here. We didn't win, but it was a very entertaining way to spend 20 minutes.

I hadn't run a DFB in awhile since I'd been doing Praetoria.

started a new character and did a dfb - it was fun. The basics of the game are great, and as long as you change enemies every 10 minutes it doesn't get very old

another night, another TF!
This time it was a Posi one on The Almighty Dollar, who took them in reverse order.

was doing some market fiddling on him trying to get him enhanced when the call went out. I had the free time, so I signed right up.

The leader was having some recruiting problems so we ended up starting with 5, which almost immediately dropped to 4 inside the first mission when the tank had to disconnect due to a lightning storm.

So it was me, a kin defender, a beast MM & a staff brute. A fun group, and we stomped the whole thing flat- running with fewer people made it more enjoyable, for me at least. The xp wasn't crazy, but the spawns were large but manageable and we were able to weather the various ambushes in style.

We had a couple of touch and go moments where we were bailed out by my AoE hold- the very definition of an OH **** power. One big ambush came at us up a staircase, and then at the end inside City Hall one of the MM's wolves (geez, I'm starting to develop a stereotype about masterminds!) pulled another spawn while we were clearing out the one to the left of the door. Laid the hold down and we were able to get organized enough to survive.

Fun TF, fun team, went fast, picked up a level.
Can't ask for much more than that.


Also got in a DIB finally, on Burn Rate my fire/fire blaster- fun in the vein of the DFBs, and I greatly enjoyed being able to run around in a populated Bloody Bay for a bit- reminded me of right after it launched and you could find big random groups of players running around harassing each other.

Fun spawn fights and a cool boss battle.
The team leader bemused me before the finale, saying

"Wait. We need a tank."

"Uh, why?" I asked. "We've got two controllers & three corrupters."

"We need a tank."

She couldn't be talked out of this weird preoccupation, so eventually the rest of us said we'd take our chances and moved in on the baddies.

Who went reasonably quietly, of course.
I personally had a great time, going full bore with all my big hitters. Never got touched.

People have some weird ideas.

Hahahahahaha "We need a tank." That's like saying "we need a h34l0r." Old habits die hard, my Goaty friend.

Case in point: I like to use PinnBadges (our global channel for kooks) first for TF group forming, then the LFG channel, which is a godsend. Wanted to do a Manticore TF last night on my 34 SS/Inv Brute en route to Task Force Commander, and only got three or four responses from the PB channel.

So, I took to LFG, and filled up in a hurry. Most were out of the zone, so it's a "wonder what AT it is until they hit Bricks" situation...and it was AWESOME.

2 Brutes, 2 Tanks, and 3 Blasters. We mowed EVERYTHING, and not a buff, debuff or heal in the bunch. I was even set to +2, and we had no problems; between ghosting the available missions and the Team Transport, we finished the whole TF in just over an hour.

The QoL improvements impress me more and more, pretty much on a daily basis.

That, and I reserved two amazing Water Blast names today, so I'm pretty stoked about that for next month when I get my next VIP points: Downspout and Affluent Stream.

Quote:

Originally Posted by EarthWyrm But I do understand that there is an internet rule that any bad idea must be presented by someone at least twice a year to remind everyone who hasn't already read every previous thread on the topic precisely why the idea is bad.