Returning Player Diary

Time to catch up!

Mostly I haven't been doing anything that interesting, just hoovering up junk to stuff in base storage pending the release of I24,when I plan to reap a profit of positively galactic scale. I have one base storage bin full to the brim with Kistmet + Accs, for example. I'm forgoing my usual parasitic, reactive profiteering for this one time and using a smidgen of forsesight- we'll see how it goes.


As far as playing, I've been totally stuck on Cathode Ray.
This has happened periodically throughout my CoH career, generally with my handful of characters who've made it to 50. Ray is an oddity though, in that he's very clearly a single hard target specialist. Compare with my other 50s:

Paraleghell, fire/ice blaster
Three Mile Isleman, fire/rad controller
NetherGoat, fire/dark corrupter
The Big Payback, ar/dev blaster
1 Armed Man, kat/regen scrapper


1 Armed Man is something of an anomaly, being an extremely old character who was my 'main' back in the days when Instant Healing was a toggle and Regen scrappers bestrode the earth like the Colossus of Rhodes. Having bodily dragged him to level whatever (32?) to get IH, and a bit further to make it perma I had a profoundly negative response to Jack's whole "Don't worry Regen Scrappers!" debacle.

So I basically self-PL'ed him as high as I could before the changes, which I think ended up being level 48, then retired him. That's where he stayed for years until I had a notion to get him to 50 and re-tool him as a PvP character, an idea I abandoned because I just don't like PvP in this game. And I don't enjoy playing him anymore- I played him for however many hours as a fire-and-forget toggle death machine & Jack's "small tweak" turned Regen into a fiddly super active 'click or die!' set.
But he's 50 and he has an okay build, so he still counts.

So, 4 out of 5 are AoE death machines who can farm up a storm.
And then there's Ray. =P

I don't know why I like him so much, but as they say 'resistance is futile'. Something about his concept and the way he plays is really scratching my itch.

Since my last post he's run two TFs, Manticore (gawd AGAIN! I thought he'd already run it, but no that was someone else) and a Sutter last night.

Manticore, everyone already knows my feelings about. If I hadn't decided somewhat arbitrarily to get TF Commander for Ray I wouldn't go near it with a hazmat suit. It went okay, base difficulty, solid team, no big hangups. Not great, but not a nightmare. I took my badge and strode away with no regrets.

Now Sutter........THERE my friends is a real task force!

I've gotten mixed reviews on this one. A lot of hate, a lot of ambivalence, a couple of enthusiastic recommendations. But I was hanging around last night messing with Ray's slotting and several people were looking for a Sutter. It was the weekly strike thingie, which was appealing, and along with x2xp weekend the thought of a 4x EXP-GASM at the end was even more appealing.

So I started one!

Invited the guys who were looking, then sent out a message asking for more volunteers including hopefully someone who had experience with it since I literally knew nothing about it. We picked up one more. Then I made with the marketing:

more adventures in 2xp!

First, generic IOs on my field crafter:

I filled up a couple of Crazy 88's base bins with damage & end redux & endmod that I made for basically nothing- a few k for salvage from long-range patience bids.

The surprise hot seller is level 20 end redux.
I sold an entire tray load for over 1m, and they've been selling as fast as I can list them for 600k to 1m. Impatience for the win!

The other stuff is doing fine, but I overestimated my Endmod price & they're just sitting there.

But generics are all this guy sells, so I'll just let 'em sit.
Generally the post-2XP frenzy, when people pause to take a breath and slot all those new powers 'for real', cleans out whatever I wasn't able to move.

Purple supply has dried up, so it's time to either bump up my price point or wait out the 2xp frenzy. PvP IOs have been selling briskly and I've rebuilt my reserve of converters during the supply slowdown of 2xp.


R/e that Thunderstrike triple I picked up for merits, costing myself 1b in potential converting profits:

Poking around this morning I saw a crafted one had showed up at a weird level, picked it up with my first bid of 10m.

So, yeah- patience IS a virtue, folks! =P

I also grabbed Ray an LotG +rech to stick in Manuevers and was shocked at the price- got one on my first bid of 60m. A paltry SIXTY MILLION for an LotG + rech? What's happening to the world!! At that price I picked up another one for when I have a spare slot for Combat Jumping.


I now have two full sets of Thunderstrikes slotted & Ray is up to 15% ranged defense with Manuevers running. Put out bids on a set of Gaussian's to six-slot Tactics with, which will make my 5th 2.5% Ranged Defense set bonus once I finish off my other two sets of Thunderstrikes.

Also went on a spending spree and six-slotted Overcharge with the Malice of the Corrupter ATO. That's a two-fer for him- terrific ranged defense (3.75) and terrific recharge (8.75). Plus now I don't need to pick up a crummy targeted AoE set.

On the gameplay front I picked up a Yin TF, not because he needed it but because it was the first TF that crossed my chat window. Good team, fast run- 30 minutes.

And then, a moral quandry.

The core of the team was going to go on and run my favorite, Manticore. And it was a really good team- elec brute who could just jump into a spawn and laugh, another beam rifle blaster (which is always a lot of fun- bonus disintegrates all round!) & a good stone controller.

On the one hand, tedious gameplay.
On the other hand, imagine the positively DISGUSTING piles of xp to be earned mowing down all those purple Paragon Protectors.

So, double XP + the guarantee of a solid team won out.

It wasn't fast, but it wasn't slow- finished in about 1:30.
The xp was phenomenal and Ray finished the evening at level 38.


While relaxing on the couch after my strenuous gaming session, I of course came up with the idea for yet another alt- Mr. Ikebana, a Plant controller of some sort. A minimalist costume, white bodysuit with Organic Armor boots colored to look like roots, the off-center Plant chest detail & that one belt that's two coils that don't quite meet in the front, also colored like roots.

Sometimes they happen that way, one minute nothing, the next POOF! an entire character.

So this AM I hit the character creator. Surveying secondaries, I see Force Field and think to myself, "hey, didn't I want to make a FF character for running TFs?" But how to justify it for this particular character? Why, TERRARIUMS of course!

Finished his costume in record time since I already knew what it looked like & hit DFB. Just to be sick I pulled a super pack xp booster out of email and popped it.

Two runs, level 18.
Nice!

I figure I'll get him up to 20 tonight, then enhance him and start playing the "real" game...unless they're a Posi running when I log in. I'm always up for a Posi...

I'll be sure to nose around when I get home!


I'm actually sort of having fun kitting out his build- I usually just use whatever until they hit the cap, then go shopping en masse. This piecemeal approach is keeping me entertained- nice to see little improvements in his performance as I run stuff.

To briefly intrude on Nethergoat's thread, since I am also returning but don't have nearly the commitment to make a whole thread of my own...

Kinda-Returning Player Various Observations
(For reference, the last time I really played the game was shortly after Issue 20, so early/mid 2011. I was popping onto the forums a couple of times a month until about four months ago, though, so I'm not entirely out of the loop. Just, you know. Mostly.)

• Staff fighting seems pretty cool. It doesn't pack enough... heft for my tastes, but after playing Stone Melee, very little does.
• Water Blast is what I've always wanted out of a blast set. It does good damage, it has a gimmick more complicated than 'shoot people and they die' that still manages to be unobtrusive, and it has enough toys to give it a decent survival. Also the graphics are dead sexy.
• I no longer know how everything works, and that terrifies me. Like, I logged into a level 14 character last night, and I didn't immediately know where to go for missions.
• ... on the flipside, even though it's been a year or two since I played a Stalker seriously, my Stalker keybinds (T for Placate, V for Assassin's Strike) are still ingrained into my brain.
• Having an official LFG channel is flippin' sweet.
• No more ability to check name availability from the character select screen? I miss that. Not that it worked right 2/3 of the time.
• Logging into a lowbie to find 45 million inf in sales that you queued up a year ago is a nice surprise!
• DFB is kinda boring, but really? I just want levels 1-12 over as quickly as possible. It's good for that.
• First DFB: Got killed by one of those bubble things around the Hydra, team laughed at me. They spent pretty much the entire run assuming everybody knew how everything worked. (*battle starts* "Oh, hey, let's go for the badge!" "What exactly does that entail?!") Even once I knew about them, I kept getting caught by the bubble. But I never noticed Battle Maiden's blue patch, either. I have zero situational awareness.
• On the tray of a brand new level 1 character, I have a power that summons a little Well guy? Who is just a tiny golden Rularuu. 'kay.
• Bio Armor sounds fantastic. I've wanted a melee/debuff AT for a while, but this'll work too. I actually intended to come back for Bio Armor, but then I heard it was a double XP weekend, so. Might as well get a month or so of head start.
• After reading the description of the Hybrid abilities twice, I'm still a little uncertain exactly how they work. Although the Incarnate grind was part of what made me get bored in the first place, so I'm not sure if I intend to try for them either way.
• After being away for so long, the game kinda gives me motion sickness. Which is weird, since I haven't exactly taken a break from gaming. You'd think that the ten billion hours I've logged playing a Scout in TF2 would've inured me to that.
• Do MM pets still need to be babysat in order to keep them from charging into melee? I'm tempted to pull my lowbie Bots/ MM out to find out, but I'm not sure if I need the stress.
• I completely forgot about the change to make Assassin Strike usable in normal fights until I'd spent two hours playing a Stalker. That's pretty great.
• I really should check the market and figure out where prices have moved. It's looking like I'll have three or four alts to IO out.
• I can hit level 2 before all the 'ITEM UNLOCKED' messages finish processing.
• Some of the new auras are pretty cool. I didn't notice all that many new costume sets. There are a few nice new female hairs and hats, though.
• The way the 'Next' arrow just disappears if you've picked a costume piece you don't own on the character creation screen is disorienting. It took me like 30 seconds to figure out what was going on.
• GIVE ME GALAXY CITY BACK ATLAS IS DUMB. >:(
• I don't like Time Manipulation's looks, but I may give it a shot just for an AR/Time Corruptor Akemi Homura homage.
• Poison got buffed? Huh, that's nifty. I might have to play it again. My Thugs/Poison was fun, but... that was a Thugs/Poison. I have to imagine it works way differently as a Corruptor set.
• Wait, power proliferation! Most of which I don't care about, but War Mace Scrappers and /Fire Defenders? Aww yeah.
• I was mad about the Dark Astoria revamp, since I loved it as a fun place to grind through zombies on a fire or lethal damage character. And then I found out it still exists as an echo and imokaywiththis.jpg. I can't tell if the new DA is geared toward Incarnate characters, though.
• Whoawhoawhoawait. The Dream Doctor is a DA contact. Now I have to do it.

I didn't care much for my Beam Rifle/Time corruptor. I found it overly busy to buff, debuff, and try to shoot stuff at the same time.

I did find /Time to be very strong on my Beasts Mastermind, however. I assume Demons, Bots, Thugs, Mercenaries, etc. would be similarly strong with /Time.

Okay, last night I had the Two Face coin flip-side to my 'perfect' Sutter run.

Ugh!

Happily, with a good experience under my belt I know not to blame the TF, but my team. This is the only TF I've ever had to quit, which I felt really bad about, but it had dragged on for almost 3 hours, two players representing most of our DPS had already bailed and our "leader" was one of those super annoying scatterbrains who *thinks* they know what they're doing when nothing could be further from the truth.

Example, in the two AV with exploding ghouls fight, the leader runs *right* past Riptide and attacks the one at the top of the stairs. Yeah. So now we have TWO aggro'ed AVs to contend with, along with waves of bombs. There were also many, many instances of said leader jumping ahead of where sanity would compel most players to at least pause, but we mostly muddled through until that last fight.

So we have 6 players left. At least a couple of my teammates have made some highly questionable build choices- the /traps doesn't have caltrops, which came up during the ghoul mission. "drop some caltrops on those stairs" "Oh....I skipped that one."

sigh.

And our bots/beam MM *hadn't taken Disintigrate*.

*boggle*

So, in spite of being tough defensively (I was on Almighty Dollar, my elec/sonic controller) we just couldn't kill stuff that fast. Or in the case of the final AVs, *at all*.

After about the third team wipe, with my wife demanding I come sit with her like I'd promised I would an hour and a half ago, staring at a wall of Sky Raiders & an AV that was fully healed from our previous attempt, I pulled the rip cord and bailed out.

I don't feel good about it, but that team would have had a rough time clearing the mish if everyone was a really, really good player on really well built characters- we were anything but, and I include myself in that description. I don't play Dollar much, and I haven't paid any attention to his build beyond "oh that power looks cool...huh, I guess I need a couple of slots here..." Which usually gets camouflaged on a team, but this was a rare instance where *everyone else* was just as haphazard and uninformed as I was.

It didn't help that I eventually figured out the team leader had their difficulty bumped. While the person who formed the team was set to base difficulty, they swiched with someone higher level before forming the TF, and they (predictably) had jacked it up.

Again, maybe not a problem on a good team, but disaster for this one.


Anyway, it was a mess. I lost count of our casualties. I died at least 3 times due to our "leader" deciding they were done with a spawn and taking off for the next one with enemies still standing. "Uh hey, where are you going, this purple jump bot is still feeling pretty spry!"
*splat*


On the plus side, I picked up several levels. It wasn't efficient, but at least it was 2xp and thus not a complete waste of time.

I'm done running +diff TFs with PUGs.
I'm checking the leader's diff every time now, and if it's bumped I'm walking.

You had a Mastermind with a Beam Rifle secondary?



As for PUG TFs...I actually can count the times I've had *successful* Sutter runs (speaking primarily of the Duray fight) on the number of fingers it takes to piss people off.

So, there's that...but usually things wind up okay in the end.

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.

Weeeeeeeell, the Bots/ powerset's attacks are beam rifle-styled, same laser-gun type of thing...perhaps that's what you were thinking?

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.

To the best of my knowledge you can bump it up or down (but not to -1) between missions and it will apply to the next mission so long as no one hasn't already entered it, and I believe it's been that way for more than 2 years now. I'm not aware of any recent changes, but I may not be an expert.

Two more tips:

1. If a lower level team member enters the mission first, this can sometimes cause the spawns that generate near the entrance to spawn at a lower level (appropriate to the person who entered). Spawns should be normal further into the mission. I run a lot of TFs and see this happen fairly regularly, but it usually freaks out or confuses someone on the team. (I can't say why it happens exactly or if it always happens in certain situations or what.)

2. There's a bug you may run into (I think it happens when someone has quit the TF at some point part way through) where a mission repeats. It will keep repeating. The fix for this, outside of calling support, is to have the leader log off and back on. You'll still have to do the mission again (which is no help on a TF like Sutter I suppose with its very long mission sequences), but it should move on to the next mission afterwards. (This one is very hard to convince people of -- teams confronted with the problem tend to want to keep doing the mission over and over and/or just disband in frustration.)

Another bug that annoys me is if someone quits the TF, that usually makes it impossible for the leader to call it in at the end. You'll be told, "I need to talk to your leader," even if you have the star.

On that one super duper fun Sutter, we had a problem where the contact refused to admit we'd completed the previous mission- the leader had to log out and the player who got the star had to talk to the contact, then the guy who had been leading logged back on.

smh



Okay!
Enough about my misadventures running task forces, time to give the readers what they really want- stories about my son! =P


Here's some of the stuff we've done over the past week or so:

1: Run across every inch of monorail track in Steel Canyon...VERY SLOWLY.
He would get really mad when we'd fall off, so I ended up using nothing but Sprint.

2: Defeated every wannabe purse snatcher in both Atlas Park & Steel Canyon. Also, if they know what's good for them the Circle of Thorns will stay the heck away from Gimry Ridge!

"Dada look, that guy's pulling on her PURSE! Let's stop him!"
"Oh no, what are those pointy guys doing to that lady!"

Which is just an expression of my own inner dialogue- I have *always* felt a twinge at ignoring street crime, however high level the character is. So while it does make navigating to a tip mission in a low level zone more time consuming, I don't really mind it.

3: Wandered around Croatoa endlessly looking for his new favorite thing in the game, "pumpkins disguised as TREES!"

Well, his favorite until Eochai wandered past, anyway.

"DADA, DADA LOOK AT THE GIANT PUMPKIN GUY!"
"Oh wow, he's really big!"
"Let's got look at him!"
"Well, we can't get *too* close."
"Why not? He isn't our friend?"
"No, afraid not."
"Can we bonk him, then?"
"He's too mean for us to bonk- do you want to get some friends to help us?"
"YEAH!"

So I threw a flare out into the LFG channel and darned if I didn't get a whole team's worth of interest!

My son was super excited by this, and made me go look up close at all of our "friends" as they arrived.

"What HIS name! What's he do? Is he going to HELP us?"

When the full squad was assembled we went on the attack, although I was little more than a remote-controlled camera for my son.

"Get closer! Look at his FACE! What's on that side of him? Now back up!"

Thanks to toggle debuffs I still like to think I pulled my weight, but I didn't bring much offense to the table. =P

Got the badges, saw some cool characters, and it was yet another demonstration of the efficacy of the LFG channel.



I don't know why I didn't think of Croatoa earlier- Halloween is by far his favorite holiday. His only disappointment was that Ray was too high level to aggro the "pumpkin trees", but I did fine a workaround- if I punched a Tuatha and dragged it over, the 'trees' would come alive to fight their mortal enemy.

But the next time I get someone around Croatoa level, I'm heading over to run the story arcs- I think he'd get a kick out of them.

I wonder what he'll think of the sound effects from the Ghosts' attacks...gives me a nosebleed just thinking about it.

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.