90 Days to the Apocalypse - A Journal

sup bros

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-67.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 67


I haven't taken pictures the last couple of days, and maybe that's because I haven't been doing much that seemed picture-worthy. But tonight I did join a Speed MoKhan assembled by Whisper X and lassy. I would have liked to bring Mouse Police for this, I could use the badge on her, but I wanted to provide the maximum amount of contribution to the cause so I brought Jennie Nova instead. We had tanks and brutes and whatever, support seemed to be in order. In any case we were successful, and finished in just under 28 minutes. ^_^

Earlier in the evening I ran the Dean MacArthur (Hey Mouse Police, high five babe!) and the Leonard arcs from Ouro. I already had Army of Me badge courtesy of Colbalt Avenger, but this got me the Bane of Ajax and Explosive Finale badges, and it was fun. So that takes Mouse up to 1236 badges.

Prior to that I did take a screenshot of her at 1234 badges, because someone said I should. I guess because the numbers line up and that's cool or something. So here is literally the only picture I've taken in two days:



Woo.

I also PL'd Storm Girl Ten up to 18. I'd like to get her to 20 or so, but I stopped after one run to join the speed MoKhan.

And I completed two more Grandpa Anarchy tales, yay!

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 68/69



I did very little Wednesday -- no working on badges, no running task forces. What I did do was spend some more time PLing Storm Girl Ten, up to level 22, which only took one full run of the Council Earth map actually. After that I logged off the 2nd account and trained Storm Girl up, and was planning to slot her with level 25 generic IOs, but at that point someone decided that there were enough people standing around in the Portal Corp courtyard to form a team, and therefore we should all join up and do something.

This is what I'd generally consider a bad idea, but the truth is that there are so few people playing these days that even a bad idea might seem like a good idea. The person who had said this quickly invited everyone else, and then asked what we should do and if there was a 50 who could lead the team. He was 47 and I was only 22, so I didn't care, but I was not expecting much from a team that was formed before we even knew what we wanted to do. However, one of the people was a level 50 who had tip missions to run, and agreed to let us run them as long as she wasn't in charge of the team (she wound up in charge eventually anyway).

Once again I doubted the wisdom of what we were doing when the mission-holder asked if she should change her settings, she was at +4. Of course, right after she said this two people entered the misison and it was therefor already set at +4. I expected the worst, but actually we did really well, which I attribute to a couple of things -- we had support (four corrs and a defender) and we had high-damage tankage (two brutes). The blaster was just extra gravy damage on top of everything. Also, we stuck together, which was pretty key.

And... things continued to go well. I gained two more levels over the course of several missions. That was my evening.

Thursday I did not even log in. I've been participating in NaNoWriMo, and it seemed a good night to spend writing. As of Thursday evening I was at 14,000 words, right on track for where I should be. Contrary to the stated NaNoWriMo goal I am not trying to write a novel, but a series of Grandpa Anarchy short stories -- one a day if possible, and so far I've started 1 every day and have finished 5 of 8 so far. I'm still trying to finish the other three, while starting a new one each day. My ultimate goal when I'm done will be to assemble all of this into a self-published book with maybe some illustrations from a friend -- these are original stories, after all.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-70.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 70


Friday night I drove to Seattle and got a kind of adjustable rolling monitor table thingy... it's the kind of thing they use in hospitals I guess, it can hold a monitor and computer and has a table for the keyboard/mouse, and can raise up to about 5' high. It's kind of ugly, but it was free thanks to my friend. I've kind of wanted a standing height desk or pub table or whatever for a while now, but the theory was that I'd play City of Heroes while standing up, or maybe even while walking a treadmill. Now I'm not sure what I'll do with it, exactly.

I stopped by my comic shop while I was in Seattle and I got back home late. And then I discovered my big mistake... Wednesday night I had planned to log on late, or early Thursday morning, to move Mouse Police to a new Day Job location (hospital in First Ward). She was very close to the badge early Wednesday evening. But not only did I forget to do that, I didn't log in Thursday at all, and logged in late Friday. So now there's no chance I can earn that last day job badge, I started with less than 22 days left in the game. :/ I was bummed about that, because it was completely my own fault.

I didn't actually spend a lot of time playing Friday night, or at least, I can't remember what I actually did. I was able to join an ITF formed by some friends, that much I do remember. I used Eternal Sweeper for this, and I got her to 46 and I think about halfway to 47, and I had fun. ^_^

Other than that, I think I wrote a little bit and went to bed early.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-71.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 71

This morning I decided to see if I could level up Storm Girl Ten to 40. Freaky was planning to run a Doc Q later in the day, and 40 is the minimum level. Before I started, I did a quick PL to get One Divine Hammer from 39.5 to 40, as that was one of my backup plans, to use her. I didn't really think I could manage to get Storm Girl Ten high enough, but I went for it anyway. I've been wanting to play the character, I've never played storm and water blast is still a very fun set.

Anyway... I spent all morning PLing. I got her to about 38.5 by the time Freaky started his TF, but I didn't join. I was feeling ambivalent about it, I was supposed to go do stuff with my friends in Seattle but like usual I wanted to be lazy and goof off and play City of Heroes. I've been looking at the calendar, and I won't be able to play a lot Thanksgiving weekend, and then the next week the game ends Friday night. So this is one of my last big weekends to do stuff.

Anyway Maressa logged on and asked if I'd join a Sutter TF if she could get others to join, and I said sure. So we formed a Sutter and I brought my newly level 38 storm fender Storm Girl Ten. We had 3 fenders and 3 corrs and a stalker and brute... it went really well. Afterwards we ran a Penny Yin, and that also went well, and Storm Girl Ten finished less than 9,000 xp from level 40.





By that point it was Hami time, and I switched to Nina Ballerina for what turned out to be a really smooth hami raid, the best we've had in probably two months maybe. That was cool indeed. Freaky's Doc Q finished up just before we got started, and a few friends like CA logged in just in time to join us too.



I discovered something that I'd never noticed before too... the one MA spin kick move, when hovering, leaves you poised with one foot cocked, which looks really cool. I need to take a few photos of my MA scrappers in that pose. ^_^



Freaky started a second Doc Q after and once again I wasn't sure I wanted to join, because it's a big time commitment and I'd been online all day and avoiding doing things I'd promised to do like work on NaNoWriMo, exercise, or go hang out with my friends. So I was wishy-washy and didn't join once again. But after, Mr. Trilby and Maressa and Kali wanted to do something and I'd said that I needed Ice Mistral SF and two of the treespec badges on Mouse, so we decided to run a treespec. It actually sounded like we were going to run several things, but in the end we ran only the one level 44+ treespec, which as it turned out was the one I already had (I screwed up on that). We ran it slow because some people hadn't done it before, and by the time we were done and I'd failed to earn a new badge, nobody wanted to stick around for anything else, except Kali. That kind of depressed me -- I'd been feeling really good because several friends wanted to help me get some badges on Mouse, and then I pick the wrong treespec, and then everyone leaves after. And I think if I'd earned a badge it wouldn't have bothered me at all that people had to leave, so it was all on me, but it just kind of felt like, "Well, that was a waste, later all".



However another group of people were forming a 24+ treespec in LFG, so I joined them and got the badge for the low level version. Now I just need the middle one. That puts Mouse at 1238 badges -- I'd told Mr. T I thought I had 1239, but I was two off. That was another thing that made me feel like I was, I don't know, kind of scatterbrained or something.

On the plus side, I met a forum person right after the hami raid who has been reading my blog, that was cool. ^_^

Later in the evening I worked up a build for Storm Girl Ten, then logged in to run costume missions and get her to 40 and do a respec... and I found out that while I was offline, my friends had spawned and killed Caleb. So I'm having terrible luck with badges lately.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-72.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 72


Sunday I finished IOing Storm Girl Ten and then joined a random Tina McIntyre mission team. The leader was the Flash. Later his friend the Hulk was leader. I guess nobody cares about what rules they violate these days, I've also seen a lot of overtly sexual names the last few months. Anyway, it was a pretty good team and Storm Girl Ten is turning out to be tons of fun to play. Storm is a great set, lots of low-level AoE, lots of fun powers, and I already knew I liked water blast. The combo works really, really well.

I was on this team about an hour or so I guess before Freaky logged in and announced he was starting another Doctor Q TF. He'd complained on Saturday that I wasn't on either of his Doc Q runs. I've been on a lot of his runs since September and I figured it was good if other people got to do it, I know on virtually every run he does there's someone who's never done it before. But it was nice to know he appreciated having me on the team, sometimes it's hard to know what he's really thinking. I wanted to catch his Sunday run for sure.

I brought Storm Girl Ten for this, and worried that it might have been a mistake. We only had one tank, Freaky, and only a stalker for other melee. Colbalt Avenger brought his beast master Poochie Control (think I got the name right) and later said a couple of times that he wished he'd brought a brute instead. But it all went well in the end, except for the fact that Sun Lover's blaster Cinnamon Girl already had the badge, and that was pretty much his main reason for joining. Kinda made my mistake of the day before seem a little trivial -- at least I didn't spend 3.5 hours on the wrong task force! But we had fun, or as much fun as can be had on a Doc Q, and there was, once again, at least one person who'd never done it before. Storm Girl hit 42.

Colorized storm / water blast is very pretty -- I took a lot of pictures.









I have to say, I've always been wary of playing a storm because I mostly play melee, and it annoys me when I team with people whose only goal appears to be knocking everything away from me. So I'm very wary of using hurricane, tornado, or lightning storm. But Doc Q is filled with ambushes, often when you've just opened a door or come out of an elevator, and our tank was very interested in rushing ahead to try and get things done as fast as possible. So every time I knew an ambush was coming, out would come hurricane and thunderstorm! Controlled chaos, you can learn to love it!

On this picture, notice that the eyeball is sitting within the giant mouth of an Oranbega statue. That really made me blink twice... it was a little surreal looking.



I died at one point at the bottom of a pool, and when I rotated the camera up I noticed (I think for the first time ever) how a view from underwater makes things ripple. You so very rarely actually get to view anything from under water, so you might not have ever noticed this. It actually looked pretty cool.



Maressa wanted to do something after we were done but I was tired after playing for something like 4 1/2 or 5 hours straight, so I took a long break. (But we did take a few minutes to kill off Adamastor -- it's worth the merits!)

I danced while we were waiting for anyone else to join.



I tried to log in at 4 PM for the Sunday CoP, but for about ten minutes I wasn't able to connect to the DB Server. It turns out that Virtue had completely crashed just before the normal CoP, so the decision was made to cancel it. Instead, Jane and CA wanted to run the first and second treespecs, Jane needed those badges. Mr. Trilby came along again, and I think Divi also. I used my vigilante Tiffany Blackheart for the first run since I had that badge already on Mouse, then switched to Mouse for the second run. That badge puts Mouse at 1239. Both runs went fast -- which is what you'd expect from a small group of veteran friends who really only wanted the badge.

I took another break after that and went and got dinner, but I logged in again later at night and joined a Ragey Cat-formed Sutter TF. This was the opposite of the Doc Q earlier, which had been virtually no melee -- for this, we had a tank, three brutes, a MM, my mace/shield scrapper One Divine Hammer (who, really, plays like a brute) and one corr... and I think another tank to round things out, can't quite remember for sure. Two of the brutes were 22 and 24 though, so the bulk of the tanking was Ragey's tank and the third brute (who was 45) and my level 40 scrapper, whose only real problem right now is endurance. I carried a lot of blues!



Things went well, we finished in about 55 minutes I think, and One Divine Hammer got to 41 and partway to 42. And afterwards several of us stuck around and joined a Whisper-led Lord of Winter raid. Like everything Whisper leads, this was a league operating at the highest level -- she instructed tanks to drag all enemies to where Lord Winter was, and by the time he was at half health we'd already cleared the entire map. Pretty amazing! I didn't really need any of the winter event badges on Mouse, and I'm not concerned with badging on anyone else, but it was fun to run this event one last time. I also did the slolom a few times and got silver and bronze on Storm Girl Ten, and then later managed a gold medal on One Divine Hammer, using only ninja run, which means I had an almost perfect run and hit exactly 50 seconds. You can't go much faster than that without special slotting or outside buffs.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 73/74


Monday I barely logged on to do anything -- I spent most of my time writing, but logged on late in the evening. There were few people no, nothing apparently happening, so I ran two costume missions for Eternal Sweeper and then called it a night.

Tuesday I logged in early enough to join an ITF on Storm Girl Ten. This got her from 42 to 43. But it was something of a disappointment -- it was advertised as a "kill what's in front of you" ITF, but after two missions a couple of the players decided that it was going to be a speed ITF instead, so they rushed everything, ported people to the ends of missions, and the leader said nothing about it. But as soon as Rommy was dead and the ITF was complete she quit, so it seemed she was upset. But when you don't say anything and you're the leader, it's hard to complain about it later. Anyway it was annoying -- set to +0, rushed through the second half, everyone quit as soon as Rommy dropped, no interest in doing the towers. That's not how I like my ITFs to run.



And you know what they say -- if you want something done right, you should do it yourself. Grimrose announced that she'd just hit 35 and was ITF capable, and Ragey Cat (who had been on the other ITF with me and was equally dissatisfied with it) was willing to run another, so I switched to my brute Megami Hime and started up another, a real steamroll ITF run at +1, where you really did kill everything you saw, and the towers after. Whisper and no hero joined too, and we had a lot of fun, and by the time we were done Grimrose's "last 50" had gone from 35 to 39.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-75.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 75


I logged in last night just in time to see Ragey Cat starting up a Sutter TF. I was the first to join. Ragey filled the team, then put my character Storm Girl in charge since I was 43. It turns out to be quite easy to be in charge of a Sutter -- you talk to the contact once to start the TF, and once at the end (optional, of course).

In between we had a pretty fun TF with Ragey's 24 brute and a scrapper being the only tanks of any sort. That meant a lot of healing, but we had a corr and a storm-based MM and everything went well. In fact, Primal Duray died without moving -- he teleported only once, and it was to a spot six inches to the left, pretty much. He was flopping from freezing rain and just died too fast to teleport anywhere else. I've never seen a fight with him go that easy before.



I was curious whether Storm Girl would get a bonus, since I ran a Sutter last Saturday and it hadn't changed to a new WST on Tuesday. The answer? Nope, no bonus, grrr. Left still unanswered is whether I'd have gotten a bonus if it had been more than a week since I last ran a WST Sutter.

Anyway after that Storm Girl was still only about halfway through 43, so I fired up the laptop and did a run through Council earth at +4/8 with Trinkets, and this got Stormy to 44 and 3 bubbles in. A second run would have got her to 45, but I was too tired. But as the days click down, I'm considering whether I want to push several of my mid-40's characters to 50 in this way, or want to try and complete my other goals instead. On Mouse I still need to run one Ouro arc, run an Ice Mistral SF, spawn and kill Caleb, and try to get the arsonist badge in Mayhem missions, then I can turn hero with a week left to get the badge from that. Time's running out to do all of that (and I still need to run DA arcs, First Ward/Night Ward arcs, kill Hamidon Seed, and probably a few newer blueside arcs).

glad to see you are continuing to have epic adventures

it seems there are fewer of us left every day

sadly I will never do a Dr Q (not that I really want to)

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-76.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 76


Last night I logged in and decided to try and push Storm Girl Ten to at least 45, so I fired up the laptop and got her and Trinkets in my Council earth mission ready to go.

Almost immediately, Kali wanted to run a Synapse. This put me in a quandry because realistically I wasn't doing anything very important and would like to join a Synapse, but actually I wanted to get Storm Girl to 45 first. Or at least spend some time running my mission, now that I'd bothered to set it up.

Luckily for me, there were other people who wanted to join who were busy doing other things too. I set out to destroy my mission, and by the time everyone else was ready, I was one bubble away from 45. I asked for 4 more minutes, and hit 45 in just a few more spawns. Then I switched to playing Storm Girl on my main computer and headed to Skyway.

Our Synapse looked like it would be great -- we had four corruptors and two defenders, plus a brute and a warshade. But one of the corruptors said she had to leave just before we started (leader apparently didn't notice this) and she dropped soon after. Then a second corruptor mysteriously dropped after the first two missions, leaving us with only six. We got one of the largest lab maps twice in a row, and overall it just took a long time. At one point I stealthed to the boss room and then realized that I'd already used my ATT and that Recall Friend wasn't available to me at that level.

Zombie logged in last night -- he's been without power or heat for 11 days. He wanted to form up an ITF, but most of us were still on the Synapse. We managed to get him and Mr. Trilby to help out with Babbage (Mr. T was otherwise completely uninterested in running a Synapse, he apparently regards it as torture). We finished in two hours, which is a bit long as I said. Storm Girl hit level 46.

Right after that Zombie formed his ITF, and this was an even better ITF than the one I'd run the night before. Zombie's ITFs usually are really good. CA joined, and Jane, and Zentry and Ragey and Kali and pretty much a lot of friends. I stayed on Storm Girl for this and hit 47 by the end when we were doing the towers. Huzzah! We were destroying things so thoroughly that in the third mission I flew up to the tops of the two gates with hurricane on and aggro'd all of the guys standing up there and brought them down to the group, and I'm not sure if anyone even noticed that. They all just died really fast.



I asked Zombie if he ever created a Zombie Roaster, because one of the Grandpa Anarchy stories I wrote this week featured a Zombeh Roaster character based largely on Zombie Fryer. But he didn't reply, he was being inundated by greetings and tells probably at the time. Anyway, I probably should just post the story in my blog.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 77


I think one of my goals for the weekend is to get at least three characters to 50. Storm Girl Ten is 47, Eternal Sweeper was 46 before tonight, and Sonic Girl Seven was 45 when the night started. I jumped in Sparks Fly and started up my usual Council earth map and got Sonic Girl up to 48 in two runs (she was nearly 46 already, and I used an XP booster, I have 8 left on my main account).

Then I switched to Eternal Sweeper and joined a Numina that Kali started up, which we completed in 42 minutes. Followed by a Lady Grey TF which we kinda didn't speed but then kinda did for part of it -- some people wanted a kill lots xp kinda run, but at least one person really wanted a speed run, and we didn't make clear which it was before we started. In any case, we finished in an hour, and Eternal Sweeper hit 47. So that's two at 47 and one at 48, I can get all three to 50 by Sunday I'm sure.

Forgot to take any pictures tonight though. After tonight we have 2 weeks left to play... I really need to figure out what I want to accomplish in those two weeks. Aside from leveling several characters I need to document all of my alts that I haven't yet, document my old Zero to Awesome thread still, play SSA 2.3-2.5 on Princess Ozma, play SSA 1.7 on Dilithium Flower (just for the screen shots), do a lot of badging on Mouse still... I probably don't have time for all of it. But I need to jump on the stuff I really want to do right away and do it.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 78


WARNING: There will be SSA 2 spoilers! If you haven't played these arcs yet... well ya got two weeks left!

This morning I did some PLing of Sonic Girl Seven. I pushed her from 47 up to 49.3, within striking distance of 50 on a good Task Force. I haven't played her in ages but I figure I should actually be playing her when she hits 50.

I paused in the middle of that to help CA take out Adamastor in Sharkhead Isles. Afterwards he joined me for my PL session on a plant/nature troller and got about 3 levels or so I think.

Later I decided to do some of the things I've been meaning to do for a while -- starting with running Dilithium Flower through the SSA 1.7 missions so that I could take some pictures of her in space. So here we go:





I got some nice full-sceen pictures too that I won't post here. This post is going to be picture-heavy as is.

After this I ran SSA 2.3 and 2.4 on Princess Ozma, only pausing part way through 2.4 to join the days Hami Raid. (The raid went super smoothly, I used Trinkets for this, my aoe-heavy fire/shield scrapper that I PL with, she's not especially well suited to fighting Hami, but I wanted to bring someone different.)

Anyway I'd run SSA 2.3 and 2.4 before but only as a team member of Pyro, so I wanted to run them solo myself and be the star. I still like the big lab at the end of 2.4, and the big reveal.



I confront Mako (and then beat him up of course).



They really should have just let you kill her...



Fighting godling thingys.



Princess Ozma confronted by Nemesis! Oh noes!


After this, I went straight to Beta and ran SSA 2.5. Now, you may have heard me say before that this game doesn't have enough giant robots -- especially giant robots that move. Everything would be better with giant robots! Crimson's arc? Painful, but you get a giant robot for a reward! Synapse? Also painful, but Babbage is awesome! Sutter? Lots of giant robots! Yay! Hess Task Force? That giant robot needs to walk across Striga attacking people! ITF? It's an awesome task force, but those giant robots need to come alive!

So the ending of the second SSA arc gets a big thumbs up from me. But first! I defended Atlas Park with the Freedom Phalanx, and discovered that Back Alley Brawler is one of the worst aggro-maagnets in the game. He runs across the map to attack everything he sees, it's a wonder he didn't die.



Positron, meanwhile, does virtually nothing but watch.

But then! Final mission! And what do we get? A FREAKING HUGE NEMESIS ROBOT! WOOOOHOOOO!

I took a lot of pictures, I couldn't help it!















I have absolutely no complaints. ^_^

Darn, i really do need to run the SSA2 stuff.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-79.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 79


I had a lot of plans for what I was going to do this weekend. I was going to get three characters to 50. I was going to work on badging for Mouse. I was going to do several other things. What I managed on Saturday was to finish up what I wanted to do with hero-side SSA story arcs, and to work on leveling a bit.

Sunday I started out by working on the leveling thing again. I spent the whole morning powerleveling. I got Storm Girl Ten to level 49, then took Eternal Sweeper to 48. At that point I switched tactics and leveled my never-before-played beast master mind Dog Aggro up to 16 (one run of the Council map). I would have really liked to get Eternal Sweeper to 49 and Dog Aggro to 22, and maybe even get another character up in levels, but there's only so much farming I can stand.

Afterwards I took the time to document every character on my 2nd account that I hadn't already documented. So now I can be assured that my @shinobu valentine account is finished, I have pictures with bios of every character on the account, save for a few seriously throwaway characters only created to hold onto a name here or there. Next step is to do the same for my primary account, and then make sure all of my extra accounts are documented -- which is much easier, all of the extra accounts only have characters on Virtue.

I found this character with a full bio that I'd forgotten all about:



I'd also forgotten about the weird solo super group that he's in: Meat on the Moon - Ranch on Mars. It still makes me laugh. Meat on the Moon was a weird song by acapella group The Bobs, while Ranch on Mars was a goofy metal song by the Galactic Cowboys.

After this I joined a Numina Task Force that Kali was forming. I brought Sonic Girl Seven in the hopes that I could get those last seven bubbles of experience and hit 50. Alas, there's not really a lot of experience to be had on a Numi, so I wound up with only four bubbles.



We formed a Katie Hannon right after that though. Zombie showed up for this one. I hit 50 on about Mary #8 I think. We had a great team, no problems at all.



I spent some time writing after that. I had other things I meant to do, but I didn't get most of them done. Instead I was back by 4:30 PM my time, just in time to join the blue CoP. I was on Storm Girl Ten for this, but things went badly -- we didn't have enough damage and/or enough -regen and/or weren't fast enough taking down the cubes, and the AV would regen in between nearly to full health every time. I had an Envenomed Dagger and I was using it, but it's hard to substitute for serious -regen. We tried to pull back but kept aggroing wave after wave of rularuu. And then several people had to leave for work or just outright quit, and it looked like we were going to fail.

We put out a plea for more people to come help, and three of us switched to /rads... I switched to Jennie Nova, my beam/rad corruptor. .We were down to about 15 minutes to go before we were ready to head back in and try once more -- but this time the AV went down very quickly, in just two rounds. Never underestimate the power of radiation debuffing!

Redside CoP followed, and as is somewhat typical, we had a hard time forming, took a long time to coax enough people to join so that we could make the attempt... and then we destroyed it in just a few minutes. Redside just seems to attract more powerful characters, especially we had a lot of corruptors on the team. (I used AE Baby as usual of course -- very powerful fire/kin corruptor.)

Most of my friends logged after that so I called it an early evening. No badging on Mouse, and no getting a second or third character to 50 today.

I was on that Numina with you, as the Watchmaker - the last one he needed for Task Force Commander. It was a pleasure (and pure luck, that I logged in just as you were forming). And then the redside CoP as Max Thunder.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 80


Last night I documented all charactes on 6 of my 7 "extra" accounts (I have 9 total -- yeah, I know, why?). This isn't as hard as it might sound... none of those accounts have characters anywhere other than Virtue, and several of them are freebie accounts with only 2 character slots. And one of the ones that *does* have 14 or so characters on it has a bunch of identical filler characters that I used to fill out a couple of my solo super groups... I have an entire SG populated by Sonic Girl One, Sonic Girl Two, Sonic Girl Three, Sonic Girl Four, etc. I did not document these characters (who are all locked at the moment in any case).

That said, I still have three accounts (aside from my two main accounts) with 14-16 characters each to document. I left one of them for Tuesday, and then I need to double-check my main account to see that I've done all of the characters on all of the servers there. So far I've documented about 300 different characters, so it's a lot of work.

I logged in late. Someone in the Robokitty channel that I didn't really know well had just returned to the game after basically not playing for a year and a half (he'd been back a few times to run some AE farms, but hadn't really played much). He was upset that his IOs weren't working, but he had nearly 2500 points saved so an IO license was easy to purchase. Of course, he can't do any incarnate trials, and he was very upset to know he'd just come back and only had two weeks to play -- but that's what we're all dealing with.

He decided he wanted to run a speed ITF "for old time's sake" so I joined on Megami Hime. We finished in about 30 minutes, so not a bad run but not a super-speed run, especially since we ran at +2 for the first mission and +1 the rest of the way. I prefer a steamroll ITF, but it's fun to zerg it as long as everyone knows that's the plan ahead of time.

That was pretty much all I did last night. Jane wanted to hunt heroes in Recluse's Victory -- like me with Mouse Police, she wants to turn hero again in the next few days -- but nobody else was interested. Instead we joined a MoDD that Whisper was running, but we were among the first to join and it was 30 or 40 minutes later when they were still trying to fill the last two slots that I decided I needed to log off and get some exercise in and writing done before I went to bed.

On the NaNoWriMo front, I completed two Grandpa Anarchy stories on Sunday and two on Monday. ^_^

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-91.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 81


I played too much last night. I stayed up too late, I skipped exercising, I didn't do very much writing for NaNoWriMo. I think I'm coming down with a cold, so I really felt the effects of all of that in the morning.

But what I did do was earn two badges on Mouse Police -- two of the last I need to get redside. These were badges 1240 and 1241. Time is running out for me to return to hero status and earn the badge for remaining a hero for seven days. Also, there are a few heroside arcs and things I've yet to run (I think). So last night was redside arc night for Mouse.

I started off with five newspaper missions, and then the mayhem. I did the arson right away and then tried to reset the mission a couple of times -- and while it was possible to reset the mission, it would reset everything *except* the arson. Sigh. Anyway, I completed the robbery and got Efficiency Expert Pither as a contact. Although Badge Hunter is down and this makes it difficult for me to know which badges I'm missing, I remembered that I still didn't have one of the mission badges. This, it turns out, is because you have to run all of Pither's missions to get the badge, and you can't run them through Ouro. But they're 45-50 missions so it just meant getting the contact.

The missions are short but there's quite a few -- 6 missions and also a 3 mission arc that isn't needed for the badge, but you have to do things in whatever order he gives them to you. When I was done I had my Efficiency Expert badge, and wanted to work on the arson badge. After that firsts mayhem I was still only 3 out of 10 arsons for the badge.

Let me just say, these badges are especially nasty. Not because doing the arson is hard, but because you need to do it ten times, and it only counts for one person on a team. If a team of six friends all wanted the badge, that's 60 mayhems they'd have to run. That's a really stupid, mean, vindictive way to set up a badge.

The good news, of course, is that your hypothetical team of six need only run five newspaper missions to have six mayhems lined up. And it finally occurred to me that if I really wanted the badge, then I needed to log in my 2nd account and double the number of mayhems I could run every five newspapers. So, Sqiddy Kitty to the rescue! I just had to make sure Squiddy was in every mission beore I did anything -- and I was only running "kill boss" and "steal object" missions, since I could stealth to the end of those. But it was still an awful lot of work.

I got my Firebug badge around 10 PM, by which point I was tired and should have gone to bed. But I also want to be ready to turn hero, and I don't want to count on getting the chance to do that on Thanksgiving, or trying to do it Friday when my window of time needed to earn the week-long badge is very narrow. So I travelled to Peregrine Island -- where I'd robbed the bank 8 times already the same night -- and I ran five hero tip missions.

And THEN I parked Mouse back at the hospital in First Ward, where if I'm lucky I'll be at about 90% or 95% of the day job badge when the servers shut down.

I still need Caleb... and Ice Mistral... and the heroes in RV. If I'm lucky, I can spawn Caleb Wednesday, and just forget about the other badges and turn hero. Oh, and I don't have MoLRSF, but I never count on getting Mo badges, so that doesn't bother me. But I wish I'd run Ice Mistral at some point.

I also documented all the characters on my last "extra" account... which took less time than you might think, since it's currently not a VIP account so a lot of them are locked. I just took pictures from the login screen -- no bio.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-82.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 82


So last night I wasted more than two hours trying to get Caleb to spawn.

I did this solo, and it turned out that I wasn't able to do that, even when I switched from Mouse Police to AE Baby. I figured at the very least that a fire/kin corr with massive damage and massive recharge and incarnate powers could pull it off solo, and I would swear that I killed many more than the hundred needed during the day to get him to spawn, but I gt no message that he ever spawned. I suppose I should have formed a league to do it, but my friends were all busy running TFs and I thought that if I could spawn him first and find him, I could get people to join quick enough to kill him. Which probably wouldn't have worked either.

Anyway all of this kind of depressed me. I pretty much ran out of time to get the few redside badges that I didn't already have. I went and exercised, then came back and ran Mouse through five hero tip missions and the morality mission, and turned hero. This netted me three badges immediately, pushing my total to 1244. I still haven't killed Maelstrom either, so another round of hero tips with the "Destroy the Bomb Triggers" mission is in order. I think there's a badge for confirming hero status that I never got too. And then a badge for remaining hero for a week.

Other than that, I need to run the Twinshot arcs and maybe a couple of the newer hero arcs, and then all of First Ward/Night Ward/Dark Astoria. There are still a bunch of incarnate trial badges I don't have too.

And I want to run Sister Flame's Disco Troll AE arc again, one last time. ^_^ I need to get Storm Girl Ten and Eternal Sweeper to 50... 3 levels between them. I don't think I'll get anyone else to 50 in the next week.

I might be on late tonight, not sure. Travelling to my parents in an hour or so.

I didn't complete any stories in the last two days but I spent Thursday morning finishing up a story called "Dig My Grave" which is partially inspired by Doctor Vahzilok.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-83.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 83


I didn't get to play much on Turkey Day. I wrote in the morning, then drove 2 1/2 hours to my parent's house. Here I'm stuck on my laptop and my Dad's crappy modem so gameplay isn't so great, and I'm busy doing other things as well (I did more writing in the evening, finished two short Grandpa Anarchy stories yesterday).

But I did get time to log in in the evening. I played Eternal Sweeper solo, and I ran through Sister Flame's "Sibling Rivalry" AE arc. I wanted to run through that one more time. It's fun. The story itself is not especially compelling, it involves a couple of side missions that don't directly relate to the main story, but actually the villains in the two side missions are what I love about the arc. You get to fight Fudor the disco-loving troll, and his band of disco trolls, with names like "Smooth Operator", "Raging Fro" and "Boogie Buster". Clicking on them to read the descriptions is half the fun.

I want to write a Grandpa Anarchy story that does homage to them, so today's story is titled "Solar Sister and the Disco Trolls of Doom". I'm not really going to use any of the plot or anything else from her AE arc though, or even CoH-style trolls, but they're going to be trolls that love disco, and their leader is going to be named Four Door, and they're going to invade a dance club called Under the Bridge, and there's going to be a disco dance-off competition, because I remember that Sister Flame wanted a dance competition to decide the outcome of the fight with the trolls, if only the game had allowed for that sort of thing.

One thing that was kind of depressing was that some of my friends were forming an Ice Mistral SF when I logged on (which I wanted to get on Mouse Police, too late now since she's a hero) and they even tried to spawn Caleb while they were waiting for everyone to join for the strike force (and Caleb was the other thing I had wanted to do on Mouse Police). I didn't hear if they actually spawned and defeated Caleb though, and I wouldn't have been able to join them on my laptop and be at all able to contribute anyway. It was just bugging me because those were t he two things I really wanted to do that I'd failed to do, and a day after turning hero, there's friends of mine doing both of them.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...-day-8485.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 84/85

I didn't actually play on Friday, at all. I was still at my parent's house and the laptop experience is pretty lackluster.

Saturday I headed home early so that I could participate in the final Saturday Hami raid on Virtue. Got home about 2:40, logged in, people were already in the Hive. By the time 3:00 PM rolled around the Hive was nearly full -- then it was full, and we had a Hive 2 with people waiting for a second raid. That hasn't happened in... well, maybe not in all of 2012, I can't remember.

I joined on Nina Ballerina. We were really melee heavy so I considered switching, but I've done most of my Hami raids with Nina and I wanted to use her. Zombie picked Zombie Fryer for the same reasons. In any case, once the zone filled it would have been difficult to switch without missing out on the first raid completely.

Mr. Trilby missed out on the first raid... he and several others were waiting in Hive 2. Our full-zne raid went so well that we did a 75% push, only clearing once after the initial clear. Or is that a 50% push? We killed hami through the 50% and 25% mito spawns anyway, and did it very easily. Then we gathered in Hive 2, and with fewer people -- about 35 or 40 this time -- we did it all again, and again did the push through two mito spawns. We rocked! ^_^

Afterwards people wanted to take group photos, and Zombie stayed behind drumming. Hami is one of his favorite things and this was probably the last one on Virtue... Exxxcalibur said he'd try to run one on Friday though.





After, I switched to Storm Girl Ten. Two of my remaining goals are to get Storm Girl Ten and Eternal Sweeper to 50... and maybe One Divine Hammer as well. Storm Girl was 49 but needed a respec since I'd misplaced one of my slots. I headed to AP33 and started my respec. Halfway through, I lost connection to the server. I logged back in -- luckily it remembered where I'd been, and finished. Then I clicked "all done" and the game crashed on me. :/

I logged back in and did the whole thing again, this time successfully. I was thinking, 'Do I really need afterburner? it's mostly good for running shard TFs, and I'll never run another of those." But of course, does not taking it make a difference? Nope. So I just stuck with my build. And as soon as I was done, I saw Freaky advertising for a Faathim the Kind TF, so I joined. ^_^



Since Megajoule is a forum poster, I have to mention that we were on the same team again. I took a picture of V E R B to prove it!

It was a good thing I brought my fender too. The entire team was melee -- three tanks, a brute or two, a scrapper -- no stalker though. I was the only non-melee until our last member joined, a corr, but they quit after just a few missions. I spent a lot of time healing with my little O2 boost!



As it happens, Faathim is one of the best TFs to have afterburner, because near the end you do a tour of Storm Palace touching stones to prove you were there. Or something. In any case, I was useful!

Oh, Storm Girl Ten hit 50 too. Pretty early on in fact. I was able to slot the full set of Ragnarok that I was carrying around. ^_^



Right after this I joined a group of friends who wanted to run Halloween tip missions. I had one saved up on Mouse -- I didn't need the badge, but I was happy to help others. Sunlover and Grimrose wanted all of the badges, and Evi too I think. She had the mission on one character, and Ragey Cat had it saved on several. We ran four straight Halloween tips and got all of those badges for a couple of people.

Following this we decided to get some of the arena PvP badges for those who needed it -- and Mouse needed those. This was a lot of work, but it was a very impressive collection of characters we had doing this. There was Whisper X's Diana X, Colbolt Avenger, Jane's Lamera Lang, Ragey Cat, Evi, Grimrose, and Skippylabs. I think nearly every character had over 1000 badges already, and some -- most notably Skippy's Screamrr -- had nearly every badge possible. Screamrr had only two badges left to get -- Pentad Victor and Tournament Victor. We got those, and Screamrr had 1390 badges and was officially done forever!



I hadn't been down where the monkey pit fighting is in Pocket D in years. It's actually a very cool looking place, with windows on all sides open to the void, kind of like the carriage portion at the bottom of a zeppelin or something.



For Pentad Victor you need 10 people in a two-team match. We overbalanced things, 7 people on one team, 3 on the other, and let the 3 die. Then we did it again making sure that the three who died were on the large team this time. That gave everyone the badge.

For Tournament Victor, you need a swiss draw match of 8 people that pits 4 matches of one on one, then two matches of one on one, then a final match of one on one. We'd do that with a designated winner, so everyone who fought that person would die, and everyone who wasn't fighting that person would quit. Then after three rounds the designaated winner got the badge, and we'd set it all up again for the next person. This took a very long time, but eventually everyone had their badge.





Colbolt was very ruthless and killed a defenseless Mouse Police! I yelled help, police brutality! and I'm being suppressed! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!"

I got my revenge on some of the people that killed me... but I didn't get to kill CA. :/

The last badge we did was Arena Survivalist, which is a 3 person free-for-all, and the one that survives gets the badge. That was easier to set up. Once I got that badge, I also had Arena All-Star, so that's 4 badges for Mouse Police, which put me at 1248. Only two from my goal!



At the end of the night we ran a quick Eden. I used One Divine Hammer for this. Not a lot of experience in it, but it's a fun trial with some of the coolest maps in the game, and there were a couple of people on the team that still weren't very familiar with it so we had fun.

That wasn't actually the end of the night for some people, they were planning to run something else, but it was late for me so I logged for the night.


I'm extremely grateful for all of the people on Virtue who have stuck with the game these past three months. Exxxcalibur with his hami raids, Mr. Trilby, Zombie Fryer, Colbolt Avenger, Sapphire Jane, Ragey Cat, Melissa, Skippylabs, Dale-Man, Megajoule, Freakyliciousss, Whisper X, more people than I can possibly name. I had a lot of friends who quit either immediately or within the first two weeks after the announcement, but I've had lifetime's worth of fun in these last three months. I have no idea what I plan to do next -- really, I'm going to try and write more and exercise more and not immediately start playing another MMO. I still have a Second Life account, which is the absolute opposite of an MMO really, and I've barely logged in more than six times in the last two years but I still have friends there, so I may hang out there a bit. But I don't regret anything, and I'm very glad I've continued to play for the last three months that this game has existed.

Also of note: I finished "Solar Sister and the Disco Trolls of Doom" last night. In the end it doesn't really have anything to do with Sister Flame or the Sibling Rivalry arc, but it has a disco troll named Four Door and a disco dance competition!

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-86.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 86


I had plans yesterday to try and PL One Divine Hammer closer to 50 and to actually get Eternal Sweeper to 50, but those didn't materialize.

Thwe first thing I did was to check on my main account to see who I had left to document. It turns out I have a bunch of servers full of characters that I haven't documented still --Liberty, Champion, Protector, Infinity, Guardian, Justice, and Freedom. I did a couple of the others Sunday morning just to narrow the list to the above. I'm going to have to do at least one server a day every evening to make sure everyone is done.

Then I logged in and started setting up to PL, but Freaky was running a Sarah Moore and couldn't find an 8th, even someone to fill so they could start. So I switched to One Divine Hammer and joined, since it's only 40+. I didn't really take any pictures, but there's not that much to see about a Sara More. I'm surprised I didn't get the AV though.

Later in the day was the final Cathedral of Pain runs by Feaky and Pyro's Total PWNAGE super group and Jane and CA's villain group Stars Haven. Both runs went off perfectly! And it was photo day on Virtue, so we paused for a photo after each CoP, and in between we had a Brickhouse Chat photo session in Rikti War Zone organized by Maressa.



(Blue Side CoP)



(Brickhouse Chat photo. I used Sparks Fly, one of my most-played characters.)





(Redside CoP photo)

Afterwards CA and Jane ran a Numina and I joined, again on One Divine Hammer, who finished the evening at level 43.5. CA was using Jungle Kitteh, who I'd PL'd a bit last week and who earned Task Force Commander. I'd promised to help them out today since they had wanted to run this Saturday. We had a pretty good run, but were interrupted by rikti raids of course.

The last thing I did that evening was run Mouse through five hero tips including the "Unstable Trigger" one in which you face off with Maelstrom. This earned me another badge. Surprising really that I'd never got that one before, but that puts me at 1249.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 87


I spent about 1 1/2 hours on Monday just documenting old characters. I have just a few left to do now -- Freedom on my main account, and then a few scattered characters, mostly on Virtue. I need to document my 1st Zero to Awesome thread next.

In-game I logged in long enough to say hello to people and to run Mouse Police through five tip missions and confirm hero alignment. I thought this would lead to a badge I didn't already have, but it didn't. After that it was past 8 PM, and I wanted to get some writing done as well so I called it a night and logged off. So I didn't get very much done last night... well, technically documenting about 40-50 characters was getting something done. ^_^