Organica

Congrats! Welcome to the club!

Yeah, their AoE damage can hurt.

Yeah, you just need to find the right guys to kill I think to get the side missions.

And it's a pain. On my badge character Mouse Police I ran radio missions and bank missions in PI for several days in order to get all of the badges. :/ But by the end I knew where to find the mission mobs in my sleep.

As I started this on Oct 4, I'm planning to run it through Nov 3.

But as of tonight I'm at 3077 merits. Depending on if my goal was 3,000 merits in a month or 100 a month for 31 days -- 3100 merits total -- I think I've already "won".

In any case, I don't see any problem picking up 23 more merits over the next two days. ^_^ But as for my other goal, I'll need to earn 50 merits tomorrow and Wednesday for Alting, that part of the goal is not quite done yet.

Show up too early, and you may be hanging out in The Abyss with Zombie for an hour. Heh.

I think early on the blueside raids is especially important.

That thread is hilarious. But I'm pretty sure much of the prestige jump he's seeing comes from people who, shall we say, have recently discovered their inner arachnophile. Which actually makes it even more hilarious that he's blaming us for it.

Also, someone sig this: " I for one applaud the Crazy 88s and look forward to having them as our server overlords." - SadronMeldir

I started off Sunday by only earning 85 merits even though it was a weekend day, and then I screwed up my nightly hero merit roll by accidentally rolling for salvage -- again. But as you will notice, the week got much better after that.

Sunday Oct 24
Arcs/TFs: Deathsurge/Eochai/Peregrine Island Explore/Jack in Irons/Hess/Manticore/Freakshow War
Merits: 2/2/5/2/19/32/33 = 85 merits

(screwed up my hero merit roll, rolled low level rare salvage again)

Monday Oct 25
Arcs/TFs: Freakshow War/Hamidon/Hamidon/Manticore/Jack in Irons
Merits: 33/53/53/32/2 = 173 merits

Hero Merit Roll
Numina's Convalescense end/heal/rech
Guassian's Syncronized Fire-Control rech/end reduction
Lockdown chance for +2 mag hold
Positron's Blast dam/acc/end
Force Feedback rech/end

Tuesday Oct 26
Arcs/TFs: Hamidon/Hear and Now/Gordon Bower/Manticore/Hess
Merits: 53/16/16/32/19 = 136 merits

Hero Merit Roll
Numina's Convalescense +ren +recovery
Mako's Bite Chance for Lethal Damage
Gift of the Ancients +7.5% run speed
Devestation acc/dam/rech
Ghost Widow's Embrace acc/hold/rech

(also scored a Miracle +recovery level 28 on a Halloween tip mission)

Wednesday Oct 27
Arcs/TFs: Hamidon/Hamidon/Synapse (no babbage due to banner event)
Merits: 53/53/58 = 164 merits

Hero Merit Roll
Aegis end/rech
Aegis end/rech
Glimpse of the Abyss chance for psionic damage
Luck of the Gambler def/end/rech
Scirocco's Dervice chance for lethal damage

Thursday Oct 28
Arcs/TFs: Croatoa Explore/Skipper LeGrange/Manticore/Hess
Merits: 5/10/32/19 = 66 merits

Hero Merit Roll
Obliteration acc/dam/rech/end
Luck of the Gambler def/end/rech
Unbounded Leap +stealth
Lockdown acc/end/rech/hold
Stupefy acc/stun/rech

Friday Oct 29
Arcs/TFs: Hess/Manticore/Sister Psyche/Citadel/Moonfire
Merits: 19/32/50/40/32 = 173 merits

Hero Merit Roll
Numina's Convalescense +recovery and +regeneration
Sovereign RIght acc/end
Positron's Blast dam/acc/end
Numina's Convaescense heal/rech
Stupefy chance for knockback

Saturday Oct 30
Arcs/TFs: Manticore/Jack in Irons/Hess/Katie/Babbage
Merits: 32/2/19/11/2 = 66 merits

Hero Merit Roll
Numina's Convalescense +recovery and +regeneration
Numina's Convalescense +recovery and +regeneration
Scirocco's Dervis dam/acc/end
Obliteration chance for smashing damage
Aegis +psionic mez resist

(absolutely awesome roll! Caps a week of great rolls. I'm now convinced more than ever that rolling above 30 was the right move to make. 4 Numina uniques this week!)

Weekly total: 793 merits, 113.285 merits/day
27 day total: 2890 merits, 107.03 merits/day

Ick.

I have 40-50 different builds saved for various characters. I wasn't planning to respec all of them right away.

I'm assuming we're not talking about a hero merit roll for 5 recipes yes? Because then you'd need 5 recipe slots open, obviously. ^_^

But I've run into this bug before doing ticket rolls and deleting stuff... not sure what causes it. It's just a big. Zoning fixes it, as Sharker said.

Me and comics: I never read superhero comics growing up. I really didn't read any comics. But when I was in high school, a friend named Greg Wadsworth self-published his own comic called Ismet, somewhat inspired by Cerebus I think. He published seven issues, and I read it of course, and I liked it. And I thought, "I wonder if there's anything else in comics worth reading?"

Initially this only lead me to becoming a big fan of Elfquest, and later I followed Cerebus as well. But after I graduated from high school I moved to a new town. I was a D&D gamer, but the group of friends I met in my new town played a Superhero RPG that one of them had created himself. (He wasn't fond of the couple of hero rpgs on the market at the time). I wasn't into superheroes, but I liked gaming so I wound up playing heroes quite a bit over the next few years, and even getting into hero comics a bit, although I gravitated more to the alternative/independent titles like Grimjack, Nexus, Badger.

When CoH was coming out, I was only mildly interested in it. I'd tried several online games by that point, but after several years in EQ I hadn't found one that really grabbed me. At the time I was actually playing Toontown, lol. I had made some good friends in the game; there were any number of adults that played the game, usually people who had kids which is how they'd discovered the game to start with. A bunch of them were kind of bored of it and for some reason latched onto City of Heroes as the cool new thing they wanted to do. Mostly these people weren't even the people in the game I considered close friends, but I kind of knew them, and when the game came out I picked it up that week.

I played for a bit over a year. I was really addicted, but about the time that CoV was ready to come out, I stopped. At the time I was convinced that I'd shaken off my MMO habit forever, and that I'd never go back. But more than a year later a friend in SL tried talking me into coming back. I said no, but then I got curious and installed the game again....

Dunno if that was the best or worst decision I ever made. My friend stopped playing almost immediately after that, but I'm still here!

Level 50 IOs are for sellin'!

That's all. ^_^

7 hours to go.

Oh wait, I miscalculated! Only 6 hours 12 minutes to go, woo hoo!

I never run the same TF twice on the same character. ^_^ I wants me merits!

Monday I ran Hamidon on Organica, then on Nina Ballerina.
Tuesday I ran Hamidon on Mouse Police.
Wednesday I ran Hamidon on Mouse Police and then Nina Ballerina.

My main reason for rotating those three is that they are regen or willpower scrappers, and they can fly. I have also done Hami on two other scrappers, two different tanks and a blaster... never a defender or troller or any other AT. As a tank I know how to taunt yellow mitos, that's about it. ^_^

I could run 20 ITFs in a row and never use the same character. >.>

Person in my SG last night was telling me she had more than 75 level 50s. There's always someone to make me feel like I'm not really as addicted to the game as I think.

Very simple answers:

Pay attention to how much recipes and salvage go for. Sometimes the sale price is high, sometimes the sale price is low. Buy low, sell high.

If there's lots for sale and few bidding, prices should be low. If there's few for sale and lots bidding, prices will be high. If there are none for sale, and you have one to sell, you can probably sell it for a lot.

Put in a lowball bid and leave it overnight. See if it fills. Relist it for higher. This is called flipping.

Now look at a recipe versus the crafted version of the same recipe. In many cases the difference is in the millions. Calculate your crafting costs -- in many cases you can make a lot of money by crafting the recipe and then listing it for sale.

Sell your drops. Run AE missions and buy stuff to sell with tickets. Use merits/a-merits to buy things to sell.

The big tricks are learning the specifics: what sells well, how much you should list so that your stuff sells fast but for a good profit, etc. And, of course, BE PATIENT. List stuff, put in your bids, come back and check on it tomorrow or the next day.

I'll get a little more specific: Mako's Bite, Scirocco's Dervish, many of the recipes are dirt cheap (can be had for a few thousand each) but the crafted versions still sell for 5-10 million depending on the recipe. That's just two examples, mind you, but you can put in a bid for a stack of 10, put in bids for the salvage, and craft a day or two later and list them. If the going price is about 8 million, try listing for, say, slightly over 6 million. There are usually tons of them for sale so you can't list too high, but there's definitely some money to be made. But these are more "small time" or "low level" craft and sell opportunities, but it's the sort of thing that can help you learn without risking too much money.

2 hami raids tonight blueside, we pushed through at 50% both times. ^_^

That's a bit like gambling I think. Faster raid or much longer raid if you fail! I like it.

(Long Story Time)

Sunday I only earned 85 merits. This worried me as the weekends are my best time to rack up extra merits, to cover those days during the week when I fail to reach my goal of 100 a day. Plus I'm on a static team that runs Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7-10 PM, so that limits my ability to earn merits on those days. Worse, I dramatically screwed up my hero merit roll for a second time Sunday by clicking on "roll for low level rare salvage" instead of for recipes. I was very bummed.

So for Monday I went hami raiding, for the first time in a couple of months. Two blueside raids -- 106 merits, in a little over 2 hours all told. I had run through a Freakshow War arc early in the morning, so that put me at 139 merits on the day already. Life was good! Got in 30 minutes of exercise, and then we ran a Manticore TF before joining our static team. I felt great -- 171 merits on the evening! Of course, only 32 of those were on Alting (locked at level 33), so that left me some 14 merits short of 50 for Tuesday's merit conversion/roll. But my Monday roll was pretty good, so I was mostly able to forget my Sunday disaster.

For Tuesday I wanted to join a redside hami raid. I'd never done that. I have a 50 brute, but I always figured she wasn't ideal for hami raids. But I now have three level 50 vigilantes including Mouse Police, my best hami raid toon (katana/regen). I also wanted to earn merits on Alting of course, and get in some exercise, and be ready for another static team run at 7 PM. Hami raids usually start early and go quickly, so no problem, right? It's only one raid, and I'll have time for maybe two TFs before 7:00!

Only... redside raids are nothing like blueside raids. The Abyss doesn't fill up quickly, and people don't start 2 hours earlier than the official schedule. When I arrived at 3:30 PM there were only 4 people. It was going to be a long wait.

Time for plan B! Using my 2nd (slow) computer and my 2nd account, I logged in Alting, hit Ouroboros, and headed to Striga to run through the Hear and Now arc. 16 merits, last two missions are quite stealthable, though there's a kill all before that and an annoying hunt in the Bog where every group is 8-10 enemies and at least your level if not higher, and often there's a vampire boss. I keep checking on Mouse, but nothing's happening very fast there. I work through the entire Hear and Now arc, park Alting (now with over 50 merits) in Ouroboros and pay full attention to the Abyss, where teams are finally starting to form. That's one problem solved. Success!

The Hami raid starts at about 5:30 PM. Things go really fast after that though -- yellow mitos are being obliterated almost instantly! So much damage! Is this how redside hami raids always work? After one mito bloom, they call for a push at 50%. Blueside raids often fight through the last mito bloom at 25%, but I've never been on one that tried it at 50%. But I knew they'd done it before, so I wasn't worried.

Things go horribly wrong. It almost works, but the push fails. Once we pull back, I find out we now have a double mito spawn. I had no idea that was even possible. It's not quite like the epic mito spawns of ye Olden Days, but it's no longer an easy raid. People are short of EoEs too -- the monster hunt had only lasted for about 8 monster kills before hami spawned.

We buff up, run in, kill a few yellow mitos, and then everyone evacs after 1 minute has elapsed. Port corpses out, rez, rinse and repeat. After 4 or 5 of these runs all of the yellows are down, and then it's just a doubly-long session of blue mito and green mito killing. By the time hami goes down, it's about 6:40 PM.

So much for my 1 hour hami raid followed by some TF's plan. Now I'll be late for the static team at 7 PM. This annoys me -- I want to run arcs with the team so that I get credit and merits. But exercise is important, I'm not going to skip that. I'm also looking at the prospect of starting Wednesday night at nearly zero merits on Alting. First though, I log Alting for my daily merit conversion and roll, and get my first really good news of the night. One of the recipes that comes up on my roll is a Numina's unique!

I only spend 20 minutes on the treadmill, but something is better than nothing, as they say. By then it's just a little after 7:00. I'm only a little late, so far as I know.

On Monday we'd finished the first hunt and mission of Gordon Bower's Croatoa arc. A second hunt was next. I figure I'll log in just slightly late, do my hunt real quick, and join the team before the end of the following misison. But when I log in, there's a zombie invasion in Croatoa. Grrr. No hunt for you! At this point I'm thinking, "Why does the world hate me so?" But as it happened, the static team hadn't even formed yet.

I complete my hunt. I wait. I decide to trick or treat a little. I get two of the costumes I want the most -- the harlequin one, and malta gunslinger (absolutely required as I'm dual pistols). I also get a tip. Hmmm... I should have time to run that, right?

I zerg the Halloween mission, pick the rare recipe option, and am rewarded with a level 28 Miracle unique! Wait -- Numina and Miracle uniques in the same night? RNG loves meh!

Right after that our static team forms. We finished the Bower arc, which is 16 merits, and much of the following arc (Skipper LeGrange). We decide to stop at that point. It's 10 PM. MG wants to run a Hessicore though. Hmmm... get to bed early, or get my 50 merits for Alting for tomorrow night's roll? I stayed up late, of course. ^_^

So that's 171 merits on Monday, 136 merits on Tuesday, and a Numina and Miracle unique dropped into my lap. I'm not sure I could have asked for things to go any better than that! ^_^

Heh. Running with MG is very similar, although I like to imagine I'm not one of the weak links. But the TFs we ran last night, I found that more than half the team could stealth and recall friend as well as MG or I... and they already knew where all the static mission doors were... making me feel just a bit less essential, lol. Darn people for learning how to zerg TFs properly!

Yeah, there's something to be said for running in a full group vs. running solo. I wouldn't want to be running the Freakshow War 3-4 times a night. Even when my SG runs Hess and Manti nearly every night, it's not that bad, and we often run other TFs -- we did Sara Moore this weekend. ^_^ I'd like to get more people to run Ouro arcs in a large group but not many people in my SG grasp that the difference between an Ouro arc and most TFs is not all that great.

I keep forgetting about those. And yeah, on Virtue they can complete one in 30 minutes, which is just about the fastest route to 53 merits I know of. I haven't actually been on a raid in several months but I assume they're still running them pretty quickly. I'll have to remember to join that tonight. ^_^

Announcement (and trailer) from main page

Trailer here, if you want to skip the article

The leaf aura and cape are sooooo going to be added to one of Organica's costumes.