"You are under no obligation to save me" - A scrapperlock thread 2.0

In homage to Dech's thread, which I found very enjoyable, I'm going to start another one of these. Now, hopefully with Freedom, a new influx of returning and green heroes joins us in Paragon City. Having said that, I want to make it known that 'Scrapperlock' can be enjoyed by not only Scrappers, but by /any/ AT. If I were to define 'Scrapperlock' I would define it as:
Scrapperlock
skrap-er-lok
1. A moment of complete digital zen with one's character to which any obstacle in game, insurmountable or not, seems like a 'good idea' at the time.

Sadly, the original thread was locked but is still available here:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=188316

Now, let's amuse each other with stories of grand success, miserable failure, ear shattering guffaws and embarrassed chuckles. I'll start off with a non-ITF story:

I'd never truly suffered the full effects of scrapperlock until just a couple of weeks ago after rolling a DM/EA Scrapper. After a couple of runs through the sewers a friend of mine called me over to play through a 0/4 Midnighter's arc. Well, the first mission or two went really well, Me on my lvl16 Scrapper and my friend on her lvl25 Controller. Then we got to the mission with Ms. Suicide herself, Lady Jane. There's one part of the cave, I can't quite remember where on the map, but it's comes to a "T" and at either mouth of the adjoining tunnel sat a mob, along with a third mob no to far off. Well, there's the setup, all we needed was the Catalyst... oh, wait, we had it... in the form of Ms. Suicide. Pretty soon I'm wading in a sea of spooks, wizards and demons and, like a good Sk'd lvl16 scrapper I faceplant to the hordes of nasties around me, but not without taking some with me. Leaving my poor friend with 3 mobs of uglyness to deal with.

So, there left in my tray was this little light blue beacon of hope... a rezzie... I look at the mob, mere feet away and figured 'what the heck' and popped it. Through some miracle of rng luck /none/ of the baddies noticed me while I was drunkenly wobbling off to one side, and as /soon/ as I could, I turned and jumped back into the frey, both green and blue bars near bottom.

Well, it didn't take long for my Controller partner to bottom out and turn into a skull on my team readout. But all I could do was swing...Swing...SWING... Popping every inspiration as it dropped I waded through what seemed like countless dozens of nasty kritters. Everyone of them focused on showing me the business end of a hospital gurney. Somewhere in the fight, my friend popped a wakie, but I just kept swinging. Finally, after a blur of what had to be 15 minutes or more of nonstop wading through fodder the last Circle minion dropped to my fists.

Jane ran to my side and waited... and for a brief moment it all was silent. It wasn't until the 'buh-blip' of team chat going off brought me out of my zen, that my eyes shot to my health and endurance, both of which were near full. It was only then that I looked at chat to see:

"Holycrap... T that was amazing..."

yeah, it was, to say the least. Please, post your stories of Scrapperlock, and take a moment to enjoy he feats of those that have experienced this state.

Thanks for listening,

BT

My favorite Scrapperlock moments are:

1. Whenever I play my Warshade. Too many stories to tell.

2. Going off and soloing mobs of Praetorian robots on my Peacebringer during Tin Mage. This happened recently during Kheldian Fridays, and it felt pretty good.

3. Soloing entire bunkers on Keyes Island with my Arch/Ment, and taking out Warwalkers for temp drops by myself. This has happened more than once, it's my favorite trial to do on my Blaster for all the amazing Scrapperlock opportunities. The last time I did a Keyes on him I tagged and charged 3 terminals single-handedly, all on the same phase.

Can a Defender have scrapperlock?

I was on a TA/Ice defender doing a Moonfire tf with a full group. The tank seemed to be completely unaware of tanking skills and our team was taking major damage. I decided it was a good idea to go berzerk and take the lead. To my suprise, it worked. From then on in, I didn't even pay attention to who was behind me and just went at it solo style. I don't know if I was doing enough damage to consider this true scrapperlock (maybe more tankerlock), but the feeling was about the same.

I've done basically the same thing on a Time/Ice fender in an escort mish that seemed to be stuck on ambush. The whole team left (on the escort) except me and a brute and we killed wave after wave for a good 10 minutes. At one point the brute faceplanted, but I managed to keep going until he popped a rez. The group eventually came back for us only to find us buried under a pile of dead... um, arrested baddies.

I support the re-incarnation of that thread,

A while back I was part of an ITF. We were on the third mission, and were whittling down the computer. Suddenly, a bad case of scrapperlock set in and I remember quietly jumping up to the platform where all of the 5th Column, Requiem, and Rommy waited. Scrapperlock being what it is, I was forced to jump in and engage the entire spawn at once, right there on the platform. The rest was a blur, but I remember a bit of what my teammates said after I came to.

"Wait, did someone kill the AVs?"
"It was Lockdown Artist."
...
"Nobody should be able to [kill those 2 AVs] that casually."

Well now this thread might need to be locked...looks like you're trying to defy a mods decision to close the topic by bringing up the previous thread in the OP and naming it the same thing.

My fondest scrapperlock memory goes way, way back. I was playing my MA/SR scrapper, still getting used to the sheer survivability of perma-elude at level 42, and sidekicked on a level 47 team doing some +3 Council mission. At one point, I got a bit separated from the team and was fighting a completely different spawn, but +4 Council wasn't too bad, so I decided to just clean up the spawn I was in and then rejoin the team.

Then my mentor d/ced.

Ok, so now I'm facing +8s. Not good, even for perma-elude. But for some reason I decided to see if I could at least defeat a minion or two before hightailing it out of there. At +8, it took forever just to defeat one Lt. Which is when I realized I was still alive. Taking the occasional hit that was yanking over half my health, but still alive. So I decided to just keep going. And going. And going.

I think about fifteen minutes later the group backtracked to where I was and saw me still fighting the same spawn of a couple bosses, some Lts and a few minions. I had managed to take down one boss, an Lt, and a few minions in that time and was still going at them. For a while I think they just watched me, taking bets on whether I would eventually fold, and then finally a couple of my team mates decided to put the Council out of their misery.

Needless to say, this particular team was full of people who knew me, and knew I was completely insane. I wasn't holding up a bunch of total strangers. Even though I didn't die, and most of them didn't die (to me) and eventually my team vaporized my targets anyway, I still consider that one of my most intense scrapperlock moments. Also, I've never hit so many targets with so many dragon tails so many times before or since. It was like trying to defeat a room full of invincible weebles.

You guys are awesome. Except for Leo. Not sure what his problem is.

Anyway, I really wish I had a story to tell, but nothing comes to mind right now.

I'm glad to see I got an upgraded thread with more stories, though. These are amusing.

One of my fondest memories of CoH is from an old(late 2005-ish) TV Respec trial on Freedom server when I was leveling up my first Tanker, an Inv/SS. Back in those early days of the Respec trial, I saw about 90% of them fail. I had gotten used to lying faceplanted as the reactor blew up with a feeling of utter helplessness. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, I kept at it.

We were doing the 2nd Respec with the Freakshow, this was of course pre-rep, so the main problem with the trial was the probability of overlapping waves.

We were doing pretty good, we must have made it to about the 7th or 8th wave when suddenly our core support and squishy characters took massive AoE and faceplanted, leaving myself and a Scrapper. It wasn't too long before the Scrapper joined the fallen, and I realized it was just me against 3-4 full groups of +3 Freaks. We were about to fail...again.

I remembered the importance of the Reactor Core, and watched as it nearly hit zero, then healed it with my temp power belt until it was back to full. Taunting and Footstomping I managed to kill quite a few Freaks and keep the others off the Core, but they just...kept...coming.

Eventually there must have been about 50-60 +3 and +4 Freaks, splitting their attention between the Reactor and me. My health kept dipping near zero, and Dull Pain kept coming back in the nick of time. I would taunt and run back for my red bubble, run back to heal the Core, and attack until I was forced to run for cover again. It continued like this for about 15 minutes until I ran over to heal the Core, which was at 25% falling fast, and realized I had just run out of charges on my belt!

Like a bat out of hell I ran to the control room, hoping there was still a belt temp there...and with good fortune, there was. I clicked on it, got about half-way through and was interrupted by a Juicer...the hordes were right on my heels! I popped my remaining insps and had enough defense/sheer luck to pick up the last belt. As I got back to the Reactor, it couldn't have had more than 2% left as I healed it, my team cheering me on in chat, and I was finally able to finish the remaining Freaks(within about five minutes).

Nothing else I've ever done in this game has compared to that moment. No story or explanation can do justice to that feeling of glory, of having the weight of the world dropped on your shoulders, falling to your knee, then standing back up again just to spite gravity.

There was one time, when I was pushing buttons to create some "random" numbers that were then checked against some other numbers which were then modified based on some yet other numbers. My numbers were favorable for an extended period of time. I'm awesome.

Anybody else got a sprinkler? I want to help rain on a perfectly fun parade, too!


Anyhoo:

My favorite scrapperlock moment actually didn't involve a scrapper at all. A friend and were playing a Kinetics Defender duo. We'd stack the team with damage dealers and be off. This particular evening, we were inviting anybody that wanted to join, and this included my favoritest Tank ever:

"I don't pull. Pulling wastes time. Just keep up."

He would run in, Taunt, get double Fulcrumed and then outrageous buttkicking would commence. He'd even "taunt" the Blasters for not wading in too, or for bothering with stragglers. It was missions after mission of Speed Boosted insanity. Good times.

My second hero and first scrapper was Dark/SR, I didn't know how accuracy worked, didn't know what softcap was and thought IO were something I might be able to afford in a few months. All I knew was that I could heal by hitting things and that if I hit stuff it found it harder to hit me. Therefore when in the middle of a multi layer cave something I didn't even notice killed the tank and the rest of the team followed I came to the obvious conclusion that the best way to survive was to hit everything. Some time later there was nothing left to hit. I decided to keep her.

Just logged on to get Ephram Sha's delicious threads and was instantly roped into a TF-a-thon. STF, RSF, ITF on a fortunata, staff/elec scrapper, and the fortunata again respectively. Ate every AV alpha I could, ran off to solo a lane, er, path, on the ITF finale (I wasn't too far behind the other seven!), incurred not a single death. Oh yeah, and that RSF was completed with only my scrapper and a peacebringer for taunty melee. Two hours to steamroll the lot of em. Must be a Saturday morning.

Of course, a shoutout to the Brickhouse, I think six of us were on all three of those.

I am going to share the first time I experienced scrapperlock...

My first toon ever was/is a claws/regen scrapper. I loved it early because I felt nearly invincible at times. However, I can still recall, doing radio missions with an arachnos villain in IP with a PuG.

At the time it was the old difficulty system, and I had it turned all the way up, so it was something akin to +2/X2 +/-. We had a fire tank in the group and it seems like a controller or defender. Either way, there were 3 of us...

So we get inside a warehouse map, and the first room has 2 good sized mobs, the fire tank runs in to grab aggro and has them all bottled up in a corner, and I am working from the backside of the mob. Suddenly the tank and the other guy drop in the middle of the fray, so I had just hit DP and clicked IH as all the crab spiders turned to give me their ever so undivided attention.

I would say it was probably something on the order of 5 minutes as I was mowing through them with Spin, Follow Up, Focus and Slash, but it could have been longer, it felt like such a short time. As I was wading through and soaking up damage, dropping arachnos, I finally got to the fortunata in the group and killed her off as the last of the minions fell to another spin. I looked up without realizing I had paid no attention to my health or end bar the entire time, and was purely amazed. The tank said something to the effect of "Holy Cow!" and it was a pure zen moment. That began my love affair with melee toons.

Twice have I suffered from Scrapperlock and emerged ultimately victorious. Most of the time I just die. Both of these were funny as hell to me though:

First one was right after Dual Blades had come out. I was on a DB/Invul Brute and somewhere in the 20s. I was invited to join a very cool-sounding SG and there was a team of SG members running together. Fighting Council, we got jumped by multiple mobs and everyone else died. Everyone told me to run but I refused, saying that "I would not leave while I had teammates down" or close to it. The dead at my feet fed me insps as I fought on and defeated the spawn. I was highly praised and promoted on the spot...right before I accidentally hit me self-destruct button and blew up. Oops...

Second time was on my Fire/Fire/Fire Blaster. I'd just gotten used to RotP and loved it. I loved it so much I slotted it and took to diving into spawns I had NO business tackling. While on a team with a timid Tank I'd leap in, AoE everything in sight, tell the Tank to stand on my head on Taunt like hell. Everyone closed in, I'd RotP and then start blasting again.

By the end of one story arc I'd gotten several Debt, Damage and Death badges and had a great time. Was voted 'Most likely to die for the team'.

Now if I can just figure out how to do all that and live I'll be dangerous lol!

i've pretty much experienced scrapperlock with every AT at one time or another, usually due to necessity when most of the team was wiped, but my favorite is still the time i was on a Sister Psyche TF shortly after Claws and Super Reflexes were buffed. Of course i had immediately created a Claws/SR Scrapper, and i was making my way through all the TFs and Trials in order as i reached the appropriate level ranges.

So we were on the second train mission that has the city map full of large groups of Freaks. We were fighting our way through a group near the entrance someone launched an AoE into a nearby spawn and then ran into a third spawn trying to avoid the retaliation. Very quickly all of the team but the Tanker and my Scrapper dropped as Freaks kept rushing in. Shortly after that the Tanker dropped with teammates typing "Run!" At that point Scrapperlock had set in so i just shrugged and kept chewing through the Freak hordes. A teammate on the ground kept passing me inspirations as most of the team was heading back from the hospital, and between that and my own drops i kept grinding away. By the time the team had regrouped all the Freaks in that area had been defeated. After some chatter about how impressive the fight was we continued on and eventually finished.

For me Scrapperlock usually sets in when i see a teammate in trouble and go to help them. Rarely do i go off looking for trouble all alone.