Returning Player Diary

I know Snipehunt! He's a Heretic!

(No, really, we're in a chat channel called Heretics. Fun guy. I'll have to talk to him next time I see him about your team.)

I like Moonfire. Well, I like most TFs, I should say, but you can do Moonfire in about 45 minutes if you're going fast, and you get good merits and of course the Slayer and Silver Bullet badges, so if you're at all inclined to get those badges anyway it's much better than street hunting for them.

But on the rescue mission, it helps a lot to have someone stealth to her, free her, and someone else Assemble the Team to the entrance. Otherwise people will let her just die, trying to actually fight your way to her and rescue her is the long and painful way, and she has a tendency to get herself killed even when you're trying to keep her alive.

Another bonus: all missions in same zone, just the fedex to Skyway which can be done quick if your team leader is familiar with the TF.

And one more comment on something that's been a bit of a hot forum topic the last while, DFB/DiB.

I long ago made a conscious decision to just worry about my own fun and not get het up over how other people got their in-game jollies. It's an attitude that's served me well over the years.

I'm sort of sad I missed the introduction of these two trials. It's a bit surprising I didn't feel some sort of disturbance of the Forum as if a million voiced cried out in butthurt and were suddenly...well, I in this case I guess they just kept crying out =P

Anyway, I'm a big fan of both trials 'as is'. I don't think they need a level cap, or to be made more inaccessible in any way. Because I find them to be super useful, especially as I think I've mentioned for my 'support' alts.

Cathode Ray is either 25 or 26 now, about half of that from DFBs & a couple of DiBs, the rest from TFs.

Regular readers of this thread can easily guess which of the two leveling styles I found to be the more repetitive, mind-numbing and dismal overall. =P


I mean, it's nothing I'd want to do from 1-50, but I don't see why it should bother me if some other player does. And I've had more fun with it than with the "real" game content I've run on this particular character....

It's no Zero to Awesome, but I'll take what I can get! =P


Didn't manage to get my Bastion, but picked up all the Rikti badges on the only one of my characters I felt really needed them, my psi/psi blaster Psicops. Was fiddling around with him yesterday when the Rikti hit Steel, logged him in again today, caught another team and finished it off.

Seemed much easier than I remember- probably something to do with leagues- basically everyone in the zone was on my 'team' for today's battle in Founders.


apparently Rikti invasions are one area where my new-ish vid card really shines. At first I was a bit confused by an invasion that didn't arrive with a side of crippling lag and didn't require me to flatline my video settings to participate, but I adapted. My son was along for yesterdays ride and enjoyed it, making this the only other 'large team' event he likes, alongside the DFB.

I was running around chasing bombs answering his questions about the "Ay-lens". He loved spotting the spaceships and telling me where the bombs were falling.
After a while he kept saying "dada, turn around! turn around! OVER THERE!" and I'd turn around, but not see any bombs. "No, LOOK dada, over THERE!" Pointing at the war walls- with the new card the support pillars have a really bright glow, and with my draw distance up I can see them a long way off.

"Those aren't bombs, that's the wall around the city," I noted.
"No, it's BOMB trails! Look!"

I flew over so we could check them out.
When it was clear they were walls, he asked the logical question-
"Dada, why are there walls around the city?"
"Uh...to keep the aliens out."
He looked at my skeptically.
"I guess they don't work very well, do they?"

Then we headed off to the "statue of the big guy" to help fight off the aliens that had flown over the walls.

Fun night last night.

My son was under the weather and passed out about fifteen minutes after I got home- first time that's *ever* happened. Silver lining, MOAR PLAYTIME!


Did my usual marketeering & costume fiddling- on top of my purple converting I'm filling up my base storage with "good stuff" to dump during/after Double XP Weekend, all proceeds to go into the Crazy 88's INFcinerator.

I ran a couple of tips on my fire/plant dom Mant because he was nearly 40 & picked up the level for him. I'm going Mako for his Patron Pool mostly because the shark powers rule, but I guess it's also thematic with Captain Mako Week coming up.

Ended up, as I mostly do lately, on Cathode Ray. He had a couple of slots outstanding after his Moonfire run the other evening so I was puttering around after some Frankenslot IOs while keeping one eye on the LFG channel. Hoping for a Bastion to add to my Crown of Pain composed of all the old TFs, but the first thing that came along was a guy forming a Posi I. I've only run II on this guy, so I signed up.

Fun, fun, fun.
It's close to the 'perfect' TF in my eyes- neat maps, challenging but varied enemies, minimal travel that makes thematic sense, and a terrific finale saving Atlas Park from an ocean of CoT plus your own shadowy doppleganger.

We had a super tough team and just plowed through everything up to the final mission. One brute, a solid stalker, a dark defender, a mind/earth controller, a blaster and one corrupter besides me. Stuff was just melting. You know we were stacked when one of our guys triggered the Atlas ambushes after a few of us said NOBODY TOUCH THE DOORS and it didn't cause a team wipe- we only lost half and were able to clear it out and get everyone back without any trips to the hospital.

But the down side of such a tough squad was, well, our Dopplegangers were *also* tough. Our first go resulted in a team wipe, even though we were on the same page about taking out the controllers first. We managed to take out one of them before wiping, so that was something anyway. =P

Second go, we *all* targeted through the stalker and made a better job of it. I got killed by an AS coming on the heels of some ranged damage, but popped my vet rez and didn't miss a beat- ate a couple of purples and started fighting on the move so he couldn't tag me again. Not sure what his deal was, but that dude followed me all over the room. Thank goodness he was slowed up by some status effects or it might have gotten messy.

Picked up a level, had a blast...great TF, will run again.

Most of the team wanted to keep on through part II, but I had to take a dinner break and bowed out.


Came back later to choose a power (decided on Hasten) & caught on with a level 30-ish mish team in Bricks. Picked up another level running newspapers on a fun team with the difficulty cranked, which meant my secondary actually got a bit of use. It's been so bad I'm thinking of tossing a slot of Recharge into Enervating Field just so I can re-apply it after my anchor dies but before the rest of the spawn is vaporized.

There was another Beamer on the squad so it was Disintegrate all 'round- it's such a jolly feeling, seeing all those Spreading Disintegration notices floating skyward.

Picked up another level, and after the team fell apart I joined a Rikti squad in Skyway peopled with some RP'ers. I got in the swing and battled aliens in character for a while, which was really fun. There weren't enough of us to spawn any heavys, but I did get the Sentry badge, or whatever the 'kill 100 invaders' one is.


Ray is pushing 30 now and about ready to start slotting IO sets- I'm thinking some ranged defense would go a long way with him. Hopefully the Water Blast furor has died down a bit and I can pick up some ranged damage sets without breaking the bank.

Not that it matters, I guess, as I logged in this AM to three sold purples... =P

I agree that DfB is more fun than a lot of the other content. If you have not done it in awhile, it is just a fast moving group fighting a variety of foes with some semi-interesting AV fights.

I don't like DiB as much and I'm not sure why. Others seem to agree as it is done much less than DfB even by higher levels. Could be that CoT are a much bigger pain.

the final battle in posi 1 is toughest if you have controllers. They have higher mezz resist than you do. So they can hold you, and you can't hold them.

I really like that fight as you can be very tactical - pull, focus fire, etc - or just run in and hope for the best.

It was changed at some point. In the old days you had your patron, and you could never go back and pick a different one, while heroes not only didn't have to run any arc for their epic power pool, they could switch to a different one any time they wanted. So that was the change, you have to run a patron arc to open up the pools, but you can then pick whichever one you want.

I mostly run Ghost Widow or Black Scorpion, no matter what I'm actually going to pick.

It's one of the more awesome changes made while we were away. That and getting into them at 35.

Okay, got my Bastion/Citadel run in tonight and BOY was it a doozy!

Full report on the morrow....right now I need to sleep, perchance to dream of endless caves brimming with Council.

putting up screens from last night's run.

most of our team, FINALLY at the last mission.



our dance party in IP, killing time waiting for our street hunt for FORTY council to commence.


Vandal well on his way to The Hell of Boring Task Force AVs



details later.

Okay!
Back, time for the writeup.


Bastion/Citadel TF, the next thorn in what I will henceforth refer to as The Crown of Pain task forces, those tired old sacks of lame maps, boring game types and repetitive enemies necessary to get the Task Force Commander accolade.

I was under the impression you had to run the Shard TFs for this one, but one of last nights teammates disabused me of the notion. So, I'm going to pick it up for Cathode Ray & use that as the inspiration to polish off the remaining dud TFs for my review thread.


I was doing some marketeering last night when I saw a call go out for a Citadel TF. I quickly swapped out to Cathode Ray & secured an invite. Unsurprisingly it took a while to get going- for a good bit it was just me and the guy who invited me. I took the opportunity to mess with his enhancements.

Eventually, we got our 8 and got rolling.

It was an odd team, as you can see in one of the screens above. A swarm of corrupters, a blaster, a couple of brutes with a token controller & scrapper. I think both our brutes were SR and neither was particularly suited to holding aggro and with our relative lack of control we had more than our share of dicey situations. Plus, for some reason after an easy peasy first mission full of whites, yellows and the occasional orange, the rest of the TF was reds and purples as far as the eye could see.

Nothing we couldn't handle, but we had to be at our best to avoid problems- being beset by all the usual problems afflicting PUGs, we weren't at our best all that often.

Even so, I had fun. Sometimes a weird team that struggles a bit is more entertaining than a steamroller, and this was one of those times.

The TF itself was much as I remembered- an endless procession of old time Council lair maps filled with lots and lots of Council. The maps were super annoying for this particular team- lots of spawns up on walkways, lots of narrow room entrys clogged with foe. We'd definitely have had an easier time of it with another controller or a traditional tank to gather up the spawns. We had a lot of trouble with adds.


So, seen through the evolving prism of my Crown of Pain TF Ranking System, Bastion earned the following demerits:

Kill Alls: 5.
Bonus demerit for the first two having the *exact same mission door* way out by Terra Volta in IP.

Street Hunts: 1, but it was for 40 Council that had to be in IP, so I'm awarding an extra demerit for annoyance. And in our particular case three was a Deadly Apocalypse going on. Thus the Dance Party screen up above, as we waited for the dumb thing to time out so we could get on with our TF.

fedex/talk mission: 1. run to steel, talk to guy who gives you mission in Skyway.

Travel/Zoning: 2. Took place mostly in Talos & IP, but the missions were all out in the boonies and there were a few annoying detours.

Monotony: Full marks.
The entire TF took place on basically the same map, and several missions used the *exact same layout*. And while Defeat X and Minions is an improvement on 'kill all', in this particular case X and his Minions were *always* in either that terrible multi-level blue water room, or the 'HQ' room with all the little bunkers surrounding the central space.


So: super boring, super repetitive, and pretty long, as we were having to actually *battle* our way through high level spawns.

Pluses: Fun team, and I'll never have to run it again. =P

Goat, while I understand your pain, isn't 'battling through to the very end and defeating the big-bad' basically the whole point of being a hero? Especially on a Task Force?

At the same time, it would be nice to see all of the original TFs cleaned-up and tightened-up. Fewer missions, better maps, how about a Patrol that actually Finds something? Like a semi-static ambush-spawn at one of the beacons? Spawns around the phone-box and despawns if/when the beacon is tagged, so it's possible to stealth it. Or maybe it turns into a running battle of fresh ambushes? Something that makes you say, "Holy Carp! Everybody Come Here! We've got a problem." instead of, "Gah! Another Patrol. Somebody stick a fresh battery in the Super Speeder and hand him a Red Bull, we'll wait here."

Actually, 'tightening up TFs' might be a great thread on the Suggestions forum. You could list them out, along with your pros & cons, highlighting areas that could be improved. Yeah, more work for the Goat.

Be Well!
Fireheart

"OMG Finally" sums up many of the post TF completion reactions in my CoH career.

I might take you up on that, Org! =)


To cleanse the palate, this evening I ran a Penny Yin with a bunch of cool folk.
Wiped the whole thing out in about 30 minutes, had a great time.

Oro'ed back to Talos in time for a Rikti invasion, so the guy advertising for that Lady Gray earlier must have wrapped it up.

But it was a really weird one- we chased bombs for a while, but the invasion proper on Bunker Hill went on and on and ON and ON and OOOON.

I was about three nuggets short of a level when it started, GRATZ'ed, and got another couple of nuggets before.......MAPSERVE!

And not just any mapserve.
Logged back in and zone chat featured comments like these:

So I ran a Citadel tonight. Solo. ^_^ And I had fun!

1 hour 32 minutes. Vandal is a wimp.

Good news: ambush for the I.P. street hunt actually spawned in I.P. Woo, they count!

Bad news: ambush was only 2 guys.