Your Crowning Moments of Awesome

Well, lets see...

Elltenia, my main, is a TW/WP Scrapper. I have done some outrageous things with her...

Aggroing four monsters up in the northern area of Peregrin Island and not dying, for example. Though admittedly, I didn't have the DPS to kill them.

My absolute best moment though? Tanking Recluse on said Scrapper at the end of a STF... Yeah, that was crazy... and it didn't help when, in the middle of that, the Arachnos Flier spawned again, and we started getting swarmed with enemies as they were dropped in...
Fun times!

There were plenty more... but it was absurd things like that which really stick out in my mind.

Frankly, and not to diminish anyone else...

Just about every moment I've spent in Paragon City.

I've met friends and aquantiences all over the globe.

I've participated in Hami raids and itrials with my community on Champion and other servers I spent my time.

I'm now sending care packages filled with all kinds of expensive goodies to someone I've never met in real life who's stationed in Afghanistan, because he's such a good friend to me and my family.

I and my SG also spent time with both him and his wife (in this game) when they lost one of their daughters (in real life) to cancer.

I was the one to find out, and pass on the news and information, of the passing of one of our SG mates.

I just sent a pair of expensive headphones to someone I never met in another state I've known for over 7 years, but have rarely heard their voice due to a lack of of a good headset (though we've talked on the phone) so no matter where our family goes they can stay in touch with us. (chat programs in other games suck!!!!)

I've recently reached out to a community I just realized I'm going to be losing, even though I've known many of them by name for years, but just lurked because I... 'didn't have the time'. (this isn't so much a crowning achievement, but a promise for the forseeable future).

From moments as intimate as these, to the times I joined a Pug for a LRSF that dropped down to 5 people (before incarnates) that contiuned to push until we did it as a team; to the incarnate raids led by some of the best I've ever met...

The thing is, every positive experience I've had in my life from this game has added to my positive outlook on life... gave me optimism, and gave me hope that not everyone is as rotten as they seem in most cases in real life. I've shared these views (and the game) with my real life family, and many of them have become just as much family to them.

I guess, at the pinnacle of 'moments of awesome' are moments like these when I talk about all the great things I got from this game, and learned the most important is a family that's, in many ways, just as much a part of my family as the people that actually share my life- and the interraction that makes them such. How we all tie together.

My crowning achievement of awesome is the family I made in this game, that will contiune with (or despite) it.

No, that's the point. City of means so many things to so many players!!

That's the point. Nothing I say diminishes anything anyone else experienced here that made their journey worth it. If anything it deepens it.

What we experience here is more than the sum of its parts to each of us, and that's the message. I'm sorry you see it any other way.

Hami Raid, not sure how long ago, but it's been a long time now it seems (a few months after the revamp I'd say). Back then, Virtue used two Scrapper teams, one for the 3 left Yellows, and the other team for the right 3.

Usually the team was split up with 1 Scrapper on the middle Yellow keeping it occupied, and 1 Scrapper on the back one, while the rest of the team spike the first down, and then moved on to the next.

I was assigned to keep the middle left busy with Sunwind, my FM/WP Scrapper, while the spike got to work on the first. The RNG was really with me that day, as I was critting like crazy and not a single Green healed my Yellow. So i killed it really fast (raid buffed of course, with some red insp. going and as said, a ton of RNG luck).

So I said in Teamchat "Assisting Spike Team".
Teamleader then said "I should keep my Yellow busy, since I was assigned to it".
"It's dead" I answered, and helped the spike team take down the first Yellow. I got a lot of comments how uber my Scrapper was. And even though a lot of luck was involved, it really made my day

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Also fond memories when I got the Master of Statesman TF badge on Sunwind, thanks to the awesome 'Master Saturdays' organized by BlazingTiger and a few others. Though we had a lot of failed runs, the teams, the spirit and camaraderie between everyone was just great. No cussing or drama, just everyone sticking together, not everyone having to have the best build, working with what you got, trying to beat the odds, laughing if it failed, getting back up and trying again.

Though this wasn't a crowning moment for me as a single person, it was the best in teams working together I have ever experienced in any MMO I have played. Good times. So I feel it still belongs here.

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ITF, fighting up Laghill, seeing the next group full of Elite Bosses. The team hesitated for a moment, and one said "Thats a lot of EBs!". I just said "Yummy..." and charged. She then said "You really are a scrapper". That little comment made my day

Two standout moments for me:

Three perfect pulls of the STF lieutenants using Shuriken on my scrapper.
Tanking a successful MoBarracuda with my PB.

There are more times that I can remember that some character of mine was the last one standing and who managed to survive alone, without retreating, until everyone else got back. Many times there was a huge dose of luck involved, but it still always felt good.

• I remember one time in Talos when my Dark/Dark Defender was probably still in her 20s, maybe early 30s, that I was ambushed in Talos island by a vastly over-sized Family ambush. This was way before IOs, probably well before I6/CoV. For some reason, you occasionally would be ambushed by a spawn much, much larger than made sense for a solo player. (These days that bug would actually be nice.) I fought them and won. I remember it being a touch and go thing, very hard on my blue bar. It happened outside the Magic store in Talos, and so one or two other heroes came by and they only watched from the sidelines. When it was over, people congratulated me on pulling it off. Back then, it was likely much more impressive for a lone defender to win against that much stuff solo.

• I have always been proud of these character descriptions. They have gotten me many comments and compliments through the years. Back before we had Global Names, I can't tell you how many players assumed I was actually female based on Nightfall's bio. For Noir's bio, I had another player actually ask my permission to use it as a springboard for a character with a related backstory.

• I was on a team once with some friends, and I noticed a bunch of foes swarming towards a Controller on the team. We were all knowledgeable players with strong builds, but I recognized that this much stuff (successfully) swarming her was abnormal. I ran over and started firing AoEs to either defeat or aggro critters off of her. She said in team something to the effect of "god, I love playing with observant players".

• I played with a group of players who normally strove to run TFs as fast as possible. Not as in we sat down and planned a team that could do that - to the contrary, we let people bring whatever they wanted. But given what we had, we always tried to run it as fast as we knew how without making use of bugs or the like. I think the best ITF we ever did was 14 minutes and change, the fastest Kahn around 16 minutes, the fastest Lady Grey about 17, the fastest Eden around 10. The fun part about the Eden was that we didn't know that some of the other people who were clocking times like ours were actually using bugs/exploits to do it.

• Pulling Siege and/or Nightstar on my Dark Miasma characters when none of the Tankers or Brutes stepped up.

• Pulling Antimatter to terminals using my Dark/Dark Defender when we didn't have a Tanker or Brute who could survive his aggro.

• Saving pre-I9 Hamidon raids from wipes using Howling Twilight on my Dark Defender. Saving it for real emergencies was something of an intuition art form, because having too many people dead at once risked letting Mitos concentrate fire more on surviving players, which could lead to a kind of cascade raid failure. The raid wouldn't literally fail, but suffering too many defeats would slow it down a lot as people regrouped. My DDD got the 10M HP healed badge before I9 primarily from casting HT at Hamidon raids.

• Soloing yellow Mitos at post-I9 Hamidon raids. Originally I didn't go fight them on my own to showboat - it was an intentional strategy to try and divide the attention of Green mitos among multiple damage targets so that the main melee team could bring down their targets faster. Over time, that became less important, and I got interested in just seeing if I could pull off defeating them on my own as a test of my burst or sustained DPS. I get a kick out of succeeding on ATs or powersets that are not obviously good at it - Stalkers before their recent buffs, Night Widows, etc. I also got a kick out of defeating multiples before the main melee team caught up with me from the other direction,

• Soloing Baphomet as an AV on my MA/Regen Stalker before any of the recent buffs. Because he had Healing Flames, I expected this to be horrifically difficult and so overdosed on temp powers like temps, Warburg Nukes, a Shivan, etc. Result? I killed him in under 60 seconds. My Rage inspirations were still blinking to warn of impending expiry when he went down.

• Soloing Trapdoor at +2 on all my 50s, even the "support" ones. I probably wouldn't have thought a lot of this, but based on forum feedback regarding Trapdoor's difficulty, it was something of an achievement. I even made a movie of doing it on my Dark/Dark/Power Corruptor.

In all the years I've been playing City of Heroes there have been many times when I've thought "Wow! I can't believe we did that!" But there is one that stands out and which happened back in Issue 8, before there were such things as Invention Origin Enhancments.

You see, I was and still am a hopeless badge collector, and would often join any teams hunting the Signature Heroes and Arch-Villains in Recluse's Victory. However, back then there was a rather inconventient bug which made people crash out with no warning. I believe it may have been caused by capes or something like that.

Despite crashing out repeatedly I eventually got all the Signature Arch-Villains on my main hero, a Claws/Super Reflexes Scrapper ... except for one: Scirocco.

Scirocco always eluded me. Whenever he appeared I would inevitably crash out and miss out on the badge as the teams defeated him. Every. Single. Time.

Then one morning, when Recluse's Victory was relatively nice and quiet save for a another hero and Stalker or two, Ghost Widow and Scirocco appeared as I took over the Alpha pillbox.

I saw the two of them standing there, and wondered if it was possible to take down Scirocco solo on my Scrapper. So I lured Ghost Widow into one of the Police Drones near the hero-side base first and then looked at what temp powers I had available: A Cataphract, a Shivan Shard, a Biological Warhead, a Chemical Warhead, and thought to myself "Why not give it a try?"

And this is how it all went ...











(The reason why the screenshots are zoomed out is to make it easier to dodge any sudden PvP attacks.)

Now, due to the use of temporary powers this may not have been such a great feat, but considering how long I'd tried to get the badge for defeating Scirocco, and the nerve-wrecking presence of the Stalkers who could've attacked at any minute, this is was my first Moment of Awesome.

I was playing in the Hollows with my lowbie Ice/Ice blaster, before the revamp, and joined a team doing the Frostfire arc. I believe the mission was the one where you save the cops, but I remember astounding my team as I ran around at lowish health (this was also before Defiance 2.0), staying alive while taking down a large troll mob that had wiped the rest of the team. They couldn't believe that a low damage powerset was surviving so long, especially without inspirations that helped (also the time before being able to convert inspirations). It was such a different experience going from an all damage character like an Energy blaster to one that actually had some mitigation (slow is awesome, I don't care what anyone says :P), but could still dish out enough damage to be fun. I got a lot of good comments the rest of the teaming session. I also think I was the longest-time vet on the team, which helped, but hey.

Living on the edge of death is always fun. I enjoyed my Dark/Dark scrapper for the same reason. He was a challenge to play, and I looked for it often while going through zones from one mission to another. No large mob was safe.

Defeating a zone AV solo, even with all that temp stuff, is a pretty big deal. They're way, way tougher to take down than a standard AV. Pulling it off solo was a pretty big deal before I13. If you did that after I13, you deserve some serious props.

Well, I just added one. In the scope of what some people have done, it's not all that, but it was a first for me. I just soloed two copies of Paladin in KR ... at the same time. I was on my Ice/Dark/Psy Corruptor. I did pretty much feed the first one to my Lore pets, I have Hybrid Assault, and I was using T3 Ageless (Partial Core) to keep myself in endurance and spam debuffs faster. And because Paladin is low-level, he's easier to defeat than a GM with a higher "true" level would be, despite GM scaling.

But it still felt pretty damn epic to me.

And I got a demo recording of it, too.

PS: I guess it might have been worth mentioning earlier that I had soloed Paladin on a Dark/Psi/Psy Defender before Incarnates. I decided to try it after Vigilance was added to Defenders. I then went out to Boomtown and soloed Babbage with the same character.

It was a small thing but one moment that brought a huge smile in my face was one time I was playing with what was at the time my only Tanker. I was fighting Tsoo and surrounded by five or six bad guys when I noticed I was no longer being attacked. I looked and all of the enemies around me had zero or near zero endurance. They had all punched themselves to exhaustion and my green bar had hardly budged.

I immediately made several more Tanks.

Rather than try to remember specific fights, I'll just put that my personal moments were back in the days when my server had a community of people who regularly ran Katies. It always gave me a warm glow when I would join a team and someone would say, "Oh, good. Remidi is here!"

Back in the day when [Rest] was pretty much instant (also the old Hollows) I ran Frostfire on a stone/stone tanker. 2/3 through the whole team died on me (yeah well, I was new to the game) and while they were getting back from the hospital I made my way to Frosti and pummeled him into submission. Had to rest three times to not run out of endu though.

@Redcap

Doctor Delaware (robotics/traps MM) was level 49, closing on 50, while I was finishing up the Project: Destiny story arc. Needed the help of one of my friends to do the final mission (Lord Recluse is a nasty nasty,) and when it was over, I was *just* shy of hitting the level. ARRGH!

But! The contact told me to go talk to Lord Recluse himself, so that I could tell him about how I kicked his butt in the future. That conversation triggered the end of the arc, which gave me the story completion XP bonus, which gave me a very satisfying DING.

Might be the best timing I've had for a level. Certainly for hitting 50.

Getting the kill shot on Reichsman with the Touch of the Nictus proc in Transfusion.

Running DA with my Energy/Traps Corruptor, having completely forgotten that I set AVs to spawn when playing with a friend the day before, and still managing to solo Tub Ci.

I have two that come to mind.

Back in 2005 when COV came out, I was on Protector running my Bots/Dark MM Space Cadet. This was back before AVs would become EBs solo. It was also back before you could transfer money between servers, let alone between heroes and villains. My MM had only a few Sos, and no one I knew who played at the time were playing on Protector.

And I had to fight Aurora Borealis as a full class hero ... I.E. AV status.

So I took a deep breath, entered the mish .. and BEAT her!

That was the first time in game that I had ever SOLOed anything at the AV level.

I finished, exited the mission and was about to boast of my accomplishment in Broadcast, and then shut up because I didn't want to help spur a MM nerfing.

My second time some friends and I were on Guardian fighting Black Swan (I think). I was on my IL/Kin Controller Simon McCoy. Everyone else died and it was just me and Swan.

And I was holding my own.

"Go Simon go!" One of them shouted.

I was way too busy because I knew as soon as I missed a heal I was a goner, but I said aloud to myself, "For gosh sakes you had time to hospital and get back here!"

After what felt like an eternity, they rezzed and helped me finish her off.

There have been so many that, unfortunately, have slipped out of memory - no matter how awesome they were at the time - "final stands" against whole rooms and so on, even the ones that ultimately failed but bought time for the rest of the team. Two I can name, though: one from back in '04, and one just this last weekend.

Getting Hover, and taking (slowly) to the skies for the first time.

Taking a character who was level 26 when the announcement came down, and who'd been sitting there since, and (with the help of double-XP) getting him 15 levels on Saturday and another 4 on Sunday. I probably could have made it an even 20, but I had other stuff to do. No farming, just teaming for tips, radios, and a Moonfire WST... and I had a blast the whole time.

What jumps to mind is...

1) Getting MoSTF with my BS/Regen scrapper, who has been sporting the same plain SO build since... Issue 5 or so. Pushing through every piece of content with her has to count too, keeping up with the Joneses with an old school SO build (including incarnate content!) is very satisfying.

2) Ending up as the "tank" against Rommy in the ITF with my Martial Arts/Energy Armor stalker. Same stalker that made it through the RWZ Challenge, too. So. Awesome.

3) Anything and everything I ever did with Actin: http://www.walkiry.com/CoH/ . Solo ITF, double RWZ challenge, over-the-cap x8+4 ambush pileup in the Dark Watcher Arc's end mission, 7 AVs at once (before incarnate powers, I remember breaking the sanity of a few people in the Scrapper forum at the time with this ), the works. She became my most badass character after the initial Rikti invasion release, when she performed less than admirably with a plain IOs/SOs old build at level 35-ish at the time (I had come back from a break and hadn't really looked into the Invention System yet). I really, really got into character with her after the dust settled and I picked the pieces of my ego back. Backstory, character development, weeks of taking the Invention IO system apart...

...

*Sigh*, this is actually depressing me now. I'm going to miss Actin and her crazy antics. And I'm going to miss the rest of my squad too. So many new characters I haven't had a chance to play.

In no particular order:

Levelling Scarlet to 50 with 3 full teams in the map - this was before leagues had ever been thought of. You could invite somebody to the team, they'd quit and form a 2nd team. That would have been back in 2006 I think.

Soloing the ITF on my Huntsman

Three Man Statesman TF

The "Be Vewy Vewy Quiet, We're Hunting... Cows" Thread in the old EU forums.

2 Man LGTF

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk