PoliceWoman

11/5/2008

I spent Monday night mostly soloing as Schadenfreude (50 AR/traps corruptor), getting the explore badge from a Peregrine Island mayhem to get the Invader accolade (+5% max HP) and some more explore and history badges to get the Marshal accolade (+5% max END).

I also started a new alt on a whim, Spy Girl, who I gave a costume in the style of 1960s spy television shows; I used the dated-looking "Honey" hairstyle, a black outfit and go-go boots. I started out wanting her to be a natural origin gun-wielder, but I already have an AR/dev and an AR/traps and even a wolf spider, and making a petless mastermind didn't appeal to me, so Spy Girl ended up being a MA/ninj stalker, which kind of works for the spy concept too, especially with stalker stealth and gimmicky caltrops and smoke bombs. I'll probably buy a stack of Revolver temp power recipes for her, too, at some point. I figured Spy Girl should work for the mercenary Matthew Burke instead of Kalinda, and ran through Burke's story arc and part of Doctor Creed's story arc to get to level 6.

On Tuesday night I played Lady Arachne (46 wolf spider) on an all-VEAT Recluse SF recruiting on LHO and LBx. It took easily an hour for this team to fill up, since level 45-50 VEATs aren't super common, and one person was determined to get several Warburg nukes before we got started. Several of us, including me, also spent some prep time in Bloody Bay getting Shivan Shards. Our team mix ended up being:

5 fortunatas
1 night widow
1 wolf spider (me, lackeyed up to be tougher)
1 crab spider

I'd previously had bad experiences with a couple people on this team on previous SFs, but the concept of an all-villain epic AT RSF was cool enough that I decided to not let that bother me. A bigger problem with this team was its lack of diversity; admittedly this is a side effect of allowing only VEATs, but 5 fortunatas meant nearly all our damage was psi-based and although maneuvers and mind link kept our DEF at the cap, only two of us had any meaningful debuffs (mostly me with venom grenade and surveillance, and an occasional venom grenade from the crab). On future VEAT teams I definitely hope we'll have a few more soldiers and a few less widows. We got through the first mission without too much trouble, but had trouble during the second mission, where the Kronos Titan, which is easy for most RSF teams, was a serious PITA for us to kill. Lady Arachne's surveillance power showed me the reason for this: as a robot, the Kronos Titan had a whopping 60% psi resist! Since it took us like 5 minutes to kill just the Kronos Titan, I pretty much decided our team was doomed to failure, but I don't like quitting from TFs or SFs so I didn't say anything and just kept going. I did decide to Surveillance every AV that I could, though, for the sake of learning what resists they all had.

We beat up the Slinger and the Future Freedom Phalanx without too much trouble, though I did get clocked by the Future heroes pretty early on so only got to surveil Future Numina. The Vindicators fight went pretty smoothly, though a teammate did use a bio nuke to help buff us before the fight.

The final mission against the Freedom Phalanx was the definitely the toughest. We made a series of essentially zerg rushes against them. We didn't have any healing to speak of, but we could easily cap our DEF to everything, so each rush basically meant we would get to attack until the AVs would get enough lucky shots past our defense to kill us. Some of the more foolhardy of us would hit awakens or head to hospital and run back to continue the zerg; this usually did not help, but it was better than laying on the ground. One trick that I and another teammate picked up on was to use lots of orange inspirations (bought from Ouroboros between rushes) to soften the blow from the lucky AV strikes (purples, the normal inspiration of choice, were pointless since our DEF was already capped).

In our first rush, we spawned Shivans and pets and the fortunatas all kicked off mind link and we just ran in shooting. We managed to knock out Numina, then got wiped out while working against Sister Psyche.

Our second rush they asked me to suicide so the team would get vengeance, then we charged in again and knocked out Sister Psyche.

On our third rush, we just did stacked mind links and rushed in again, trying to kill Positron but we wiped out with Positron around 10% life.

On our fourth rush, the crab stayed dead and we got vengeance off of her, then we rushed Positron again, but again we were wiped out with Positron around 10% life. People were getting a bit discouraged since we had two attacks without making any progress. Some people suggested bringing on thermal corruptors to buff the team before fights, but I think I convinced them not to, arguing that would corrupt the purity of the "all-VEAT RSF". We pressed on anyhow; we had already gotten Numina and Sister Psyche, after all, who were really the toughest for us due to having the most support, and especially for having psy resist.

On our fifth rush the fortunatas were screwing around with using Confuse powers, and intermittently they stacked enough confuse to actually make one of the Heroes attack the others. This was very comical to watch, but the confused Heroes did not really stay on one target for very long, the confuse effect itself wouldn't last very long. and the damage they did to each other would rapidly get healed up. However, we decided to jump Positron again when we had him confused. This either helped or we got lucky on this rush, since we dropped Positron on this attack, then wiped out while fighting Citadel.

On our sixth rush we had whittled the heroes down enough that we managed to get Citadel, then Manticore, then Synapse, Back Alley Brawler (who went unstoppable, and interestingly had really high psy resist while unstoppable) and finally Statesman (who also went unstoppable; he actually had low psy resist when unstoppable but we still were not able to drop him through unstoppable because his regen was super high; but he died seconds after his unstoppable ended).

We completed the RSF in 2hrs 25mins, and although 6 zerg rushes to defeat the Freedom Phalanx isn't as good as a more traditionally balanced team, I've certainly been on far, far worse RSFs. Lady Arachne got to level 47 (where I took Combat Jumping for some extra mobility and +DEF), received a level 50 Centriole (which I couldn't actually select as a reward until I trained to level 47; I think this is a new change to the reward dialogue), and got the Mistress of Olympus, Annihilator, Servant of Recluse and Archvillain badges. Plus the Unbroken debt badge.

Surveillance reports for the RSF (I only recorded resists):

Agent Crimson: no resists.
Kronos Titan: resists 30% smashing, 50% lethal, 20% fire, 60% cold, 20% energy, 20% negative, 60% psy, 0% toxic.
Slinger: no resists.
Future Numina: 20% negative, 30% psy.
(Died in mission 2 before I could surveil any other Future Heroes)
Malaise: 20% energy, 30% negative
Swan: 10% negative, 30% psy
Luminary: 20% smashing, 20% energy, 30% psy
Valkyrie: 10% smashing, 30% lethal (when not MoG)
Mynx: no resists
Ms Liberty: 20% smashing, 30% lethal
Numina: 20% negative, 30% psy (and had force field buffs from Sister Psyche)
Sister Psyche: 20% energy, 30% psy
Positron: 20% smashing, 20% lethal, 20% energy
Citadel: no resists
Manticore: no resists
Synapse: no resists
Back Alley Brawler: 25% smash/lethal (when not unstoppable); when unstoppable, 100% smash/lethal and most other damage types, 78% psy (NOTE: BAB's unstoppable helps against psy resist, very unusual!)
Statesman: 50% smash/lethal, 30% fire, 40% energy, 20% negative, 20% psy, 20% toxic (when not unstoppable); when unstoppable, 100% to all damage types except 90% negative, 90% toxic, and 20% psy (Statesman's unstoppable does not help against psy resist)

11/3/2008

On Thursday I mainly played Idealist (22 fire/thermal controller), joining an 8 player pickup team running level 24ish radio missions in Independence Port, then fighting a zombie invasion in Independence Port. On this team I briefly met a katana-wielding Elvis, which was probably the most surreal character concept I'd seen in awhile. Also while fighting zombies, our team initially set up next to Sister Psyche but were disappointed to have no zombies appear near her at all; we eventually figured it was because she's standing right next to the hospital, which is probably a no-zombies-allowed area. Once we moved to the pit where the Hero Corps Analyst is standing nearby, we got plenty of zombies. Idealist got to level 24 on this zone and trained in Power of the Phoenix, the rez power, mostly for lack of a better idea since I'm not normally into rez powers (it's so easy to make awakens now that you can combine inspirations), but I did find it noteworthy that her rez power seems to have higher DPA than her fire control attacks.

I started Friday night playing Paris Holiday (46 fire/thermal corruptor) on a Sisterhood & friends Imperious TF. Our team mix was:

will/db tanker
warshade
cold/ice defender
ill/rad controller
ice/kin corruptor
bane spider
fire/thermal corruptor (me)
ice/dark corruptor

This was a ludicrously powerful team, with both fire & cold shields, fulcrum shift, and rad/dark debuffs. We were unstoppable throughout the TF; even when the Imperious NPC aggroed Romulus and his Nictus AVs onto us by surprise, we simply crushed them. Everyone was pretty psyched with how good a team it was, and we finished in 1hr 29mins, getting Paris to level 47.

After that I played Idealist as an SK on an 8 player Demolition Girls team doing level 32ish Croatoa missions. This went really well and got Idealist to level 28, taking Maneuvers and Forge as power picks. We did have a near-wipeout against multiple Tuatha spawns in one mission, but managed to recover. Idealist also got a random nice compliment from a passerby on her biographical story and costume, which made me happy.

Late on Friday night I played Maitresse (37 necro/storm MM), first helping a pickup team kill giant monsters, defeating Eochai twice (for the Hallow Spirit badge) and Ghost of Scrapyard once (getting the Hammer Down badge). Then she joined a 2nd villain respec, with a team of:

SS/SR brute
necro/storm MM (me)
dark/dark corruptor
stone/stone brute

The respec went pretty effortlessly, finishing in 31 minutes and getting Maitresse a level 43 Mako's Bite (ACC/END/RCHG) recipe. I did a little crafting also, slotting two sets of 5 Thunderstrike in Maitresse's attacks (yeah, I can't resist taking mastermind attacks...I have the need to press buttons during combat) and two sets of 5 Doctored Wounds (for O2 Boost and Life Drain). Later I solo'd some in St Martial to gain contacts there.

On Saturday afternoon I played Perfect Woman (40 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle), doing a Citadel TF with a team of:

2 peacebringers
2 will/SS tankers (including me)
rad/nrg defender
warshade

This was kind of a tedious TF with one Council base after another. The warshade had to call it quits about halfway through, and our DPS was kind of middling, but we ground through the rest of the TF without any problems, finishing in 2hrs 13 mins. I got a Ghost Widow Chance for Psi Damage recipe.

I did a Katie TF on Triumph server, playing Flying Tiger (30 MA/will scrapper on Triumph) as a sidekick. We had 2 tankers, 2 controllers, 2 defenders and 1 scrapper; one controller went linkdead on the 6th Mary and never came back. With a 6 player team it was a little slower but we got through the rest of the AVs and the TF in 46 minutes.

I then did an Imperious TF on Triumph server, playing Kid Valkyrie (50 bs/regen scrapper on Triumph). Our team was:

will/SS tanker
ill/rad controller
ice/kin controller
dark/fire tanker
grav/emp controller
db/regen stalker
bs/regen scrapper (me)
inv brute

This team was quite strong and punched through the ITF without any serious problems. At the end, one of the tankers pulled Romulus down the steps to a corner, then we simply pounded Romulus to death 4 times. Finished in 1hr 28mins and I got a level 50 Gaussian's Fire Control recipe.

Played Schadenfreude (50 AR/traps corruptor) for a bit, completing a flashback of Willy Wheeler's story arc to get the Paragon of Vice badge.

Late Saturday I played Paris Holiday (47 fire/thermal corruptor) on a Lady Grey TF. I was invited by a friend to join this and other than me they all seemed to be part of the same SG coalition. The team mix was:

stone tanker
elec blaster
rad/rad corruptor
bs/inv scrapper
emp defender
dark defender
fire blaster
fire/thermal corruptor (me)

Paris vs Hamidon

This TF went quite well. I did learn a new trick; during the 4 Riders mission, the tanker was asking me to buff him with Thaw to help him resist the recharge debuffs, something I'd never done before. We got through most of the TF effortlessly, and in the last mission we beat up the 2 AVs handily, but then the team wanted to clear the room with the 4 generators in it, which resulted in utter chaos as we were hit by multiple ambushes while we tried to fight our way into the room. We had a semi-wipeout, but managed to rez back into the fight and eventually get the 4 generators, finishing the TF in 1hr 51mins. Paris got to level 49 (training in Superspeed) and got a level 50 Scirocco's Dervish (DMG/ACC/END) recipe as reward.

On Sunday April Fool (50 thug/TA mastermind) helped a 5-player pickup team defeat an Eochai giant monster, then did some trick or treating. Later on Lady Arachne (46 wolf spider) joined a 4 player LEGION team that defeated a Silver Mantis AV, an Eochai giant monster (used Surveillance to discover he has 30% fire resist but not much else), and a Black Scorpion AV (Surveillance; he has 15% resist to all damage types).

Solo'd Miss Molotov (37 fire/fire scrapper) for a bit, completing the Midnight Squad arc to unlock Cimerora and fighting some zombies, getting a Soul Trapped Gem from one of them.

Played Jaguar Goddess (16 claw/will stalker), initially soloing, but then accepting an invitation from a fairly nice brute to duo some missions in Cap au Diable and a Skyway City mayhem. Got to level 17 and found a level 17 Rectified Reticle (+perception) recipe somewhere along the way.

I played Virtual Girl (16 rad/sonic defender) on a Synapse TF organized by the Heroics SG. They all knew each other in real life and just added me to make a team big enough to start the TF. Team mix was:

grav/kin controller
emp/archery defender
inv/SS tanker
rad/sonic defender (me)

We were really well protected with so much support but kinda hurting on DPS. Nevertheless we made forward progress. The controller seemed rather miffed that he wasn't getting XP (since he was exemped down from somewhere in the 30s) and eventually got frustrated and logged off fairly late in the TF. The three of us remaining pushed on, then ran into Babbage.

Virtual Girl encounters Babbage

With rad debuffs and empathy heals and a tanker, we actually were able to keep the tanker alive against Babbage's attacks. But with just 3 of us we couldn't make a dent in Babbage's hit points at all. We called for help and a sonic blaster tried to help us for a bit, but we still weren't making any progress, and eventually the tanker just dragged Babbage to a police drone to get rid of him. We moved on to the last mission, and the Clockwork King was a lot more manageable for us. We finished the TF in 3hrs 46mins, and Virtual Girl got to level 20 (training in Hasten at 18 and Stamina at 20) and got a level 20 Positron's Blast (DMG/ACC/END) recipe as reward.

I finished the weekend answering a call for help on the Sisterhood channel to assist with some giant monsters, joining an 8-player team in Croatoa that beat up the Halloween Eochai, the regular Croatoa Jack in Irons, and the regular Croatoa Eochai, getting Virtual Girl the Hallow Spirit, Giant Killer and Pumpkin Queen badges.

Virtual Girl vs Eochai

Over the weekend I did tons of zombie invasion fighting with all my alts, getting many zombie badges, plus salvage and recipe drops, on various alts. I really enjoy the zombie invasions for some reason, even more than the Rikti invasions; not quite sure why. Also did lots of trick-or-treating just for fun; traps and masterminds both seem great for trick or treating. Maitresse got all 4 zombie badges, Mayday (my fortunata) got 2 zombie badges, April Fool (thug/TA MM) got all 4 zombie badges and the Ostentatious badge for costumes, Schadenfreude got 2 zombie badges and the Fashionable badge, Miss Molotov got 3 zombie badges (her fire sword circle and blazing aura are nice for the invasions), and Mega (my SS/elec brute) got all 4 zombies badges, Clothes Horse and Fashionable.

Schadenfreude prepares for trick or treating; those orphans better give her some candy, dammit!

I've picked all the powers and slots described above (except for the ones she doesn't have yet due to level), but it may be awhile before I get all the IOs in place; I find that IO recipes are a lot harder to come by on villain side. I have about 75% of the IOs needed for the above build, and figure I can work on acquiring the rest; I didn't bother planning for purple recipes since I think it's beyond my resources to get very many of those on villain side.

After respecing I ended up taking Paris on a pickup team Imperious TF. It seemed like this team took forever to fill up; I was the fourth person to join and it must've been nearly an hour before the 8th person joined and we got started. (I killed time at Wentworths and crafting for a bit, then did dishes in RL.) We ended up with the following team lineup:

stone/stone tanker
emp/nrg defender
2 claws/regen scrappers
fire/thermal corruptor (me)
ice blaster
fire blaster
inv/mace tanker

This wasn't a bad mix of characters, though we were a little slow because we had a couple people who were (IMHO) kind of slacking, taking lengthy unannounced AFKs, etc. Nevertheless, we made it through to the last mission without any serious trouble. We handled the final encounter by "sniping" the healer Nictus AV to death; the ice blaster seemed very familiar with this technique and coached us on it. Positioning ourselves at the correct range was important; standing too close meant the healer Nictus would Twilight Grasp to heal off of you (visible due to the debuff icons and dusty special effects), and standing too far would of course put us out of range. The team was saying a 60' range blast was needed, but it felt like my 80' fire blast was only barely long enough range to safely hit. Each heal would negate all progress, but once we got the range down, we were able to gradually plink the healer nictus to death with comparative safety. After the Nictus died, though, Romulus & the other AVs aggroed on us and it turned into a more conventional fight; but with the healing Nictus already dead, it was quite a bit easier. We ended up finishing the ITF in 2hr 18mins; Paris leveled to 46 and got a moderately pointless level 49 Dark Watcher's Despair (RCHG/END) recipe as reward.

Paris could hit the nictus safely at this range

After the ITF I spent some time running Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender) to zombie invasions in Galaxy City and Atlas Park. Spent 25 minutes at these two zombie invasions, net gaining 900K influence, plus filling up her salvage and recipe inventory three times. I think the best recipe I got from this was a level 30 Crushing Impact (ACC/DMG/END).

After the zombie invasions, I was walking around Atlas Park when a level 2 scrapper ran up to Rain Dancer and asked if I would help hunt down some Hellions. This person was a lot more polite than the typical newbie asking for PLing or influence; I was charmed by the thought of a new player just learning the game, so I agreed to help. She asked me how to get to Atlas Park and I explained that we were in a zone called Atlas Park. I asked her to exemplar me (all the way down to level 2, which left me with a grand total of: O2 Boost, Snap Shot and Aimed Arrow) and I followed her around a bit. Either she didn't understand the color coding system or she had the soul of a true scrapper because she launched us at some red-con level 5 Hellions, which we managed to defeat after a frantic scuffle. We successfully completed her "Defeat 5 Hellions in Atlas Park" mission, getting her to level 3, and before we broke up the team she asked me to friend her since she was "buying" her account in a couple days. I guess she was on a trial account; word on the street is that there are a lot of new trial accounts floating around, which I think is great.

After that I briefly logged in Spacegirl (50 mind/rad controller) and went to Warburg to help an illusionist friend test the interaction between Confuse and Spectral Terror while watching our "Real Numbers" combat displays. Wow, the ToHit debuff from Spectral Terror is a lot more than I thought! It generated a -15% ToHit debuff from Terrify and from zero to three additional stacking -15% ToHit debuffs from pulses of Cloak of Fear. I think my friend was trying to enhance the ToHit debuff with IOs somehow, but it didn't seem to be working, and we also found that the illusion pets didn't seem to attack their owner when the owner is confused (I could've sworn this used to happen).

Finished the evening soloing a couple missions with Fire Emerald (19 fire/fire blaster). I'm much more used to soloing as an AR/dev blaster, where I can set up caltrops and use stuns to fight mobs in relative safety; I had mostly played Fire Emerald on teams before, and it was an interesting change of pace playing a blaster whose only mitigation is to kill the mobs before they can kill her. I managed not to die and got the Plague Stopper badge from a Vahzilok mission.

10/30/2008

Monday night, I played Idealist (21 fire/thermal controller), soloing through her cape mission and 2nd costume mission, then SK'd to a 5-player Northern Lights SG team for a couple level 45 missions in Peregrine Island and Brickstown, mostly fighting Malta. I ended up shifting her "shoulder cape" (which I could get at level 1) to be a more normal "full mantle" cape (now unlocked due to the cape mission), and wrote up a background story for her as an escaped test subject from the Revenant Hero Project, to fit with her science origin.

Idealist's story

Tuesday night, I played Idealist a bit more, on a 4-player pickup team that did a door mission against Tsoo, that got her to level 22, where I picked up Fire Cages and started slotting SOs. Idealist also helped a pickup team which was struggling to fight an Eochai GM in Steel Canyon; her fire shields seemed to make the team a lot tougher, but our DPS was kind of low, and we ended up dropping the giant monster after a protracted fight.

I briefly logged on Perfect Woman (40 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle), but her Pinnacle SG was imploding due to most members getting generichero'd for being too obviously copies of published comic book characters. My character was unscathed by this so far (hopefully due to being different enough, but possibly due to being overlooked), but the drama was a bit too much to take, so I went back to Liberty. Ironically, arena PvP was much less stressful than SG drama.

I played Police Woman at the Liberty PvP League match, but several of the more experienced PvPers on her team failed to show, leaving us short-handed and at an experience deficit against a pretty skillful opposing team. Nevertheless we made a valiant effort.

Our first match was ill/emp controller, fire/mental blaster, AR/dev blaster (me), rad/therm corruptor and rad/psy defender versus ill/kin corruptor, 2 fire/nrg blasters, rad/psy defender and emp/nothing defender, on the Outbreak map. It felt like we had some trouble coordinating attacks and we ended up losing 22 to 4.

Since both opposing blasters were fire blast, I offered to switch to a thermal corruptor (for extra fire resists) if it would help, but I think I'm actually glad the (acting) team leader asked me to stay on a blaster, as my corruptor wasn't really built for PvP. Our second match ended up being ill/emp controller, fire/mental blaster, fire/nrg blaster, AR/dev blaster (me), rad/therm corruptor versus rad/sonic defender, emp/nothing defender, rad/psy defender and 2 fire/nrg blasters, on the factory map. This match we did a much better job of focusing fire and got some decent kills; I also tried throwing web grenades at random people between damage spikes for the sake of adding some disruption. We still ended up losing 15 to 8, but it felt like we were improving.

The third match our lineup was AR/dev blaster (me), rad/psy defender, fire/nrg blaster, rad/thermal corruptor and ill/emp controller versus ice/kin corruptor, ill/emp controller, fire/nrg blaster, grav/storm controller and ice/storm controller, on the Eden map. The two stormies were incredibly disruptive to us, and their tactics seemed to change from bouncing all over the place to kind of turtling up under the protection of hurricane. My team wasn't really sure how to effectively fight a storm team, and we all spent a lot of time debuffed, slowed, held and/or immobilized. The change in tempo resulted in a lower scoring game, but the opposing team was pretty dominant, winning the match 10 to 1.

After the PvP League finished up, I switched to Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender), joining a master illusionist farm. We went inside a big outdoor map full of level 40 Carnies and a tanker pulled master illusionists to a corner, where a fire controller would pin them down with Fire Cages and I and a scrapper would try and chase down the summoned illusionists they spit out. We did this for a little while, getting Rain Dancer from 10% progress to about 60% progress on the badge progress bar before the controller had to log off.

I finished the night playing Schadenfreude (50 AR/traps corruptor) and accepted an invitation to a 7-player pickup Trick-or-Treat team in Grandville. The team was positioned near a warehouse with about 10 doors in a row and clicking on all of them madly. I found that traps were incredibly good against the trick-or-treat mobs, who emerge from their doors in a very predictable location, and mining the area with trip mines and poison gas traps was insanely effective. Schadenfreude's poison gas trap (slotted with 3 damage procs) was especially nasty, going off like a nuke each time she laid one in the center of a group of mobs.

On Wednesday night I started off using a respec for Paris Holiday (45 fire/thermal corruptor), figuring I would make her build a little more PvP oriented in case I actually needed to PvP with her sometime. I ended up working out the following build for her:

Paris Holiday I12 respec: Level 50 Technology Corruptor
Primary Power Set: Fire Blast
Secondary Power Set: Thermal Radiation
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Concealment
Power Pool: Speed
Ancillary Pool: Mace Mastery

Villain Profile:
Level 1: Fire Blast -- Dev'n-Hold%:50(A), Dev'n-Dmg/Rchg:50(17), Dev'n-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:50(19), Dev'n-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:50(19), Thundr-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:50(21), Thundr-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:50(21)
Level 1: Warmth -- Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx:50(A), Dct'dW-Heal/Rchg:50(3), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg:50(3), Dct'dW-Heal:50(5), Dct'dW-Rchg:50(5), Dct'dW-EndRdx/Rchg:50(7)
Level 2: Fire Shield -- TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx:50(A), TtmC'tng-ResDam/Rchg:50(13), TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg:50(13), S'fstPrt-ResDam/EndRdx:30(33), S'fstPrt-ResDam/Def+:30(34), S'fstPrt-ResKB:30(34)
Level 4: Cauterize -- Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx:50(A), Dct'dW-Heal/Rchg:50(7), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg:50(9), Dct'dW-Heal:50(9), Dct'dW-Rchg:50(11), Dct'dW-EndRdx/Rchg:50(11)
Level 6: Fire Ball -- Posi-Acc/Dmg:50(A), Posi-Dmg/EndRdx:50(23), Posi-Dmg/Rchg:50(25), Posi-Dmg/Rng:50(25), Posi-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx:50(27), RechRdx-I:50(27)
Level 8: Swift -- Run-I:50(A)
Level 10: Plasma Shield -- TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx:50(A), TtmC'tng-ResDam/Rchg:50(15), TtmC'tng-ResDam:50(15), ImpSkn-ResDam/EndRdx:30(34), ImpSkn-ResDam/Rchg:30(36), ImpSkn-Status:30(37)
Level 12: Aim -- GSFC-ToHit:50(A), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg:50(17), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg/EndRdx:50(37), GSFC-Rchg/EndRdx:50(37), GSFC-ToHit/EndRdx:50(50)
Level 14: Hurdle -- Jump-I:50(A), Jump-I:50(45)
Level 16: Combat Jumping -- LkGmblr-Rchg+:50(A)
Level 18: Blaze -- Dev'n-Hold%:50(A), Dev'n-Dmg/Rchg:50(29), Dev'n-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:50(29), Dev'n-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:50(31), Thundr-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:50(31), Thundr-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:50(31)
Level 20: Stamina -- P'Shift-EndMod:50(A), P'Shift-EndMod/Acc/Rchg:50(40), P'Shift-EndMod/Acc:50(45), P'Shift-EndMod/Rchg:50(48), P'Shift-End%:50(50)
Level 22: Super Jump -- Jump-I:50(A), Jump-I:50(23)
Level 24: Stealth -- LkGmblr-Rchg+:50(A)
Level 26: Grant Invisibility -- LkGmblr-Rchg+:50(A)
Level 28: Forge -- GSFC-ToHit:50(A), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg:50(43), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg/EndRdx:50(46), GSFC-Rchg/EndRdx:50(46), GSFC-ToHit/EndRdx:50(48)
Level 30: Phase Shift -- RechRdx-I:50(A), RechRdx-I:50(46)
Level 32: Inferno -- M'Strk-Acc/Dmg:50(A), C'ngBlow-Dmg/Rchg:50(33), M'Strk-Dmg/Rchg:50(33), C'ngBlow-Acc/Rchg:50(40), Sciroc-Dmg/Rchg:50(43), M'Strk-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:50(45)
Level 35: Heat Exhaustion -- Acc-I:50(A), Acc-I:50(36), RechRdx-I:50(36), RechRdx-I:50(48)
Level 38: Melt Armor -- UndDef-DefDeb/Rchg:50(A), UndDef-DefDeb/Rchg/EndRdx:50(39), UndDef-Rchg/EndRdx:50(39), UndDef-DefDeb/EndRdx:50(39), UndDef-Rchg:50(40)
Level 41: Web Envelope -- TotHntr-Acc/Rchg:50(A), TotHntr-EndRdx/Immob:50(42), TotHntr-Acc/EndRdx:50(42), TotHntr-Immob/Rng:50(42), TotHntr-Acc/Immob/Rchg:50(43)
Level 44: Thaw -- Range-I:50(A)
Level 47: Hasten -- RechRdx-I:50(A), RechRdx-I:50(50)
Level 49: Super Speed -- Run-I:50(A)
------------
Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Scourge



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10/27/2008

Over the weekend I did some marketeering to acquire a couple more purple IO sets for Police Woman's new build. I sold an Apocalypse (DMG) IO that I wasn't using for 45M (though I only got 42.7M after Wentworth's took their cut), which makes it the new most expensive thing I've ever sold. I bought an Absolute Amazement (STUN/END) recipe for 1.5M influence (a total steal), an Absolute Amazement (STUN) recipe for 9M influence, and a Hecatomb (RCHG/ACC) IO for 35M influence. I ended up replacing the 5 Stupefy I had in Taser with 5 Absolute Amazement (net effect -1.88% max HP, +2.52% fire/cold RES, +3.75% global rchg), and completing my set of 5 Hecatomb in Jump Kick (for another +10% global rchg). This left me still HP capped, raised my fire/cold RES to 14.18% (not bad for having no actual fire/cold resist powers!) and my global recharge is now 102.5%. I had managed to buy all 6 Absolute Amazements but only had places to put 5 of them, so I put the Absolute Amazement (STUN/END) recipe that I had gotten for cheap back on the market; after about a day, I sold it for 15M influence, turning a tidy profit.

Over the weekend, I started chasing zombie invasions with Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender), who I now feel is my best zombie fighter. It kind of makes sense based on her background story, which really aims her towards magical threats; but her powers make her particularly suited to chaotic fights against waves of zombies. Usually people would gather at some location to fight zombies, and I'd try to stand in the middle of them and repeatedly drop Lightning Storm, Freezing Rain, Rain of Arrows and Tornado; between near-nonstop Rains of Arrows and multiple storm pets, I got credit for damaging a lot of zombies. I kind of greedily solo'd (in the middle of a huge mass of heroes) to try and scarf up the most goodies from these fights, and I gained all 4 zombie badges soloing and repeatedly filled my salvage and recipe trays; though once in awhile I would gain enough aggro to get killed doing this. Generally the more accessible, popular zones were better for this, since having more people around helped. Probably my best run doing this was a Atlas Park zombie invasion where I gained 4.4M influence in 15 minutes, plus a full tray of salvage and recipes. Oddly, all the recipe drops from zombies seem to be level 30; not sure why.

Rain Dancer fighting a zombie invasion

On Friday night I played Samurai-ko (13 katana/will scrapper) for a little trick-or-treating with a 3 player team in Steel Canyon, getting her to level 14 and Super Jump; then I switched to Idealist (12 fire/thermal controller) who joined a 7 player Sisterhood &amp; friends team fighting zombie invasions, that got her to level 15 (took Fly at level 14). After that team broke up, Idealist then SK'd to a 6 player Demolition Girls SG team doing Croatoa missions, getting her to level 16 and Health.

Finished Friday night playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) on a 5-player team fighting Malta. This team actually had 3 AR/dev blasters, a trick arrow and a kin; this meant lots of Malta dying to nonstop Full Auto attacks. The other device blasters had worked out a system for simultaneously toe-bombing spawns with trip mines which was pretty effective, too. It was pretty fun.

On Saturday, I played Police Woman on an Imperious TF with LEGION SG. Our team mix was:

mind/emp controller
fire/fire blaster
ill/rad controller
AR/dev blaster (me)
ill/ff controller (but no shields)
ice/kin corruptor
2 stalkers

No conventional tanker or even a scrapper here, but the two illusionists had Phantom Army tank most of the time, which seemed to work. We had a few stray deaths in the first mission from the ambush at the end. I found that Temp Invulnerability, which I had taken in my last respec, improved my survivability against Romans quite a lot. Not being squishy was actually kind of a weird feeling; hopefully it won't make me get too sloppy.

Coming through the valley of lag to discover the 5th Council mecha is always a "wow" feeling for me; here's a picture I took of them:

Police Woman against the 5th Column on the ITF

We got through the next few missions just fine, then had to face down Romulus using Phantom Army to tank the AVs. I wasn't sure if this would work, but it was really quite effective. PA isn't great at positioning the bad guys, though, so we managed to kill the 2nd Romulus out of LOS from the Nictus AVs, so he failed to rez and we had to grind down the remaining Nictus AVs through their high resists. Still succeeded, though, and completed the ITF in 1hr 49mins. I didn't get a good recipe, but I did get about 6M influence.

I also played Lady Arachne (46 wolf spider) briefly to help a team struggling to take down Deathsurge; they had wiped out once against him before and about half their team left right before I joined them, so the team leader recruited a few more, getting us up to 7 people before trying it again. I kinda gathered the first team had no debuff to speak of, but the new, improved team had my venom grenade/surveillance and at least two darks debuffing, which let us drop Deathsurge easily.

Virtual Girl (16 rad/son defender) participated in a costume contest in Atlas Park on a lark, but didn't make the finals; I guess maybe using the circuitry pattern for most of her outfit is a little too obvious a costume.

Saturday evening, I played Idealist (16 fire/therm controller) and recruited a team to do the Synapse TF. Our team mix was:

fire/thermal controller (me)
db/will tanker
TA/archery defender
kin/rad defender (2nd box of the tanker)
ice/rad controller
broadsword/will scrapper
spine/regen scrapper

I'm not a big fan of having people 2-box on a TF, but it was a friend and people seemed excited about having SB, so I said if she could handle both tanking and SB'ing people, it would be okay. The spine scrapper unfortunately was a problem child for me, going AFK for most of a mission early on. One of the other players urged me to kick him from the team; on a regular mission team I totally would've, but kicking someone from a TF is pretty harsh, and the spine scrapper returned for the very last room of the mission, so instead I urged him to stay with the team.

Our trick arrow defender had some kind of crisis at home so had to quit the TF around the 3rd or 4th mission; I hope everything turned out okay for her. The spine scrapper went silently AFK on another mission, and I only noticed when he said he was totally lost and needed a TP (I assume because he fell behind while AFK); I went back to lead him up to where we were, and told him to say something when he goes AFK.

Late in the TF the spine scrapper said "AFK 5 mins for food" and then was gone for an entire mission. While he did say something this time, he was gone probably 20 minutes, and I was fed up with him; I felt like I had given him plenty of slack, and it's really unfair to the rest of the team. So I asked the team if anyone had a problem with me kicking him; everyone basically said it was up to me. I was about to kick our AFK spine scrapper when of course he comes back to keyboard; I thought it would be rude to kick him without at least talking to him, so I told him he had been AFK for 2 entire missions now, and was there any reason he could think of that I shouldn't kick him? His response was, "GEEZ, I had to eat! And I do the most damage of anyone on the team!" This argument didn't really hold much water with me; an AFK person does 0 DPS. I was really looking for more of a "Sorry about that!" or a "I won't do that any more". At this point, though, he asks "How many missions are left?" which actually angered me, so I told him, "I'm kicking you from the second to last mission" and kicked him from the TF. One teammate actually cheered. The spine scrapper sent me a few nasty tells after that, but we moved on. Hopefully he'll be more considerate to his next TF team.

Idealist vs Babbage

Anyway, we moved on to battle the Clockwork Lord and spawned Babbage. We were down to 4 players and a 2nd box, yet we had enough support to stand up to Babbage without dying; however, we didn't have the DPS to really make a dent in the monster's HP. Some people from Sisterhood channel came to reinforce us, and some of the other players on my TF logged on a 2nd and a 3rd box to come help, and we managed to eventually drop Babbage. We went into the last mission and beat the Clockwork King with no problems; I remembered to use Positron's immobilizer device which kept the King held for quite awhile. Finished the TF in 3hrs 42mins, and got Idealist to level 21. I took Plasma Shield at 18 (to help with the clockworks' electrical attacks) and Stamina at 20.

After that I did a Katie TF with Mystery Girl (35 ff/nrg defender). Our team mix was 1 dark defender, 1 ff defender, 1 ff controller, 1 kin controller, 1 scrapper, 1 blaster. With only a 6 player team we were having troubles almost from the very start; it took way, way too long to kill each Mary AV. The scrapper complained he could not actually hit Mary unless she was held (due to hurricane debuffs). Someone else I know started and completed an entire Katie TF in the time between our Mary #2 and our Mary #8. Finally on Mary #10 we had a wipeout, after which the blaster silently logged out, leaving us with 5. Regrouping, we pulled away and killed all of Mary's minions, then fought Mary #10, who was a +4 AV, alone; unfortunately, we could not reduce her health below 100% with what we had. It seemed the team really needed more of...something. More ranged damage from blasters, more +ToHit or -Def from buffers, something. Although I like FFs on Katie TF normally because it mitigates the END drain and helps protect the team, having 2 FFers was probably redundant. Anyway, we ended up quitting the TF as we were unable to defeat the last Mary AV.

Finished up Saturday night playing Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender) on an 8-player Sisterhood and friends team doing Praetorian missions; we killed a Battle Maiden AV before calling it a night.

Sunday afternoon I played Helen Highwater (18 storm/psy defender on Triumph) on a 4-player Demolition Girls SG team doing level 19 missions in Faultline. We beat a Kurse AV with no problems, then emerged into a zombie invasion that gradually wore us down in an epic battle through sheer attrition, eventually leading to a team wipe (though we lasted quite a bit longer than I expected).

Sunday evening I played Perfect Woman (40 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle), leading a 4-player Pinnacle League SG team for some level 40 radio missions in Peregrine Island. We also successfully completed a Founders Falls safeguard.

Later on Sunday evening I participated in a Liberty PvP League practice with Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster). Only a few of my teammates managed to make it to this, so the other team leader kind of arbitrarily reshuffled everyone into teams he thought were roughly fair.

Our first match was 4v4, with a storm defender, mind/emp controller, fire/mental blaster, AR/dev blaster (me) versus fire/nrg blaster, emp/nothing defender, ill/storm controller, and a brute, on the troll caves map. My team wasn't very coordinated; we had one person calling targets but he was also targeted a lot, and our team got split up after a couple deaths and was generally disrupted by the stormy's hurricane and the brute's taunts, and we were pretty solidly crushed 22 to 2.

Our second match was 5v5, with a kin corruptor, fire/mental blaster, fire/nrg blaster, brute, and ill/emp controller versus ill/storm controller, AR/dev blaster (me), emp/nothing defender, fire/nrg blaster and a kin defender. The other blaster was nominated target caller, but he really didn't want to do it and kind of gave up on calling targets after about 2 mins, so we were pretty unfocused. After a few minutes without a target, I tried announcing whatever I was shooting at, in hopes of giving us something to focus on, but I'm not sure if this helped much. Although brutes don't seem to get much respect, the enemy brute's taunting was actually extremely disruptive, making it hard to shoot at what we wanted to. We ended up losing this match 25 to 4.

Third match was 5v5: an earth/emp controller, AR/dev blaster (me), fire/nrg blaster, rad/sonic defender, ill/storm controller, versus fire/nrg blaster, a kin corruptor (I think the brute may have gotten peer pressured into switching to this), a fire/nrg blaster, an emp/nothing defender and ice/rad controller. We first got the monkey cage map which no one wanted to play on, so we reset the match and ended up on the Perez Park map. This team was clicking a lot better and was actually trying to do damage spikes, so we got a good number of kills; though the fire blaster and rad defender were both announcing targets, and the rad defender's voice on ventrilo was so low volume that I couldn't hear him, so I wasn't always on the right target. Nevertheless we won the match 13 to 10.

Fourth match was 5v4, with an earth/emp controller, ice/rad controller, 2 fire/nrg blasters and an ill/storm controller, versus a fire/nrg blaster, AR/dev blaster (me), emp/nothing defender and a kin corruptor, again on the Perez Park map. My team's fire blaster asked me to keep web grenade on the enemy controllers; we did not have anyone calling targets or coordinating fire at all. It didn't seem like this should work, especially against a larger team, but our team was really playing well this match. Web grenade seemed to really hurt the enemy team (which lacked a kin) and any time I web grenaded someone, my team's fire blaster would instantly pounce and kill them. Somehow we won this 23 to 4.

Although I didn't get much practice doing damage spikes, I did get a lot of practice using Phase Shift, which I had just respec'd into a few days ago. I found that Phase Shift really, really helps. It's very quick to activate and I'm sure I dodged at least 5 deaths by using it once I started taking fire. I forgot to use Jump Kick on anyone though.

After practice wrapped up, I played Alice Slaughter (29 db/will brute on Triumph) as a lackey on an 8-player team for a bit, then after that team broke up I joined a Recluse Strike Force that was recruiting for their last slot on LBx channel. At first the team leader asked me to play a thermal, but then something changed his mind and he asked me to play my cold corruptor. Not exactly sure why, I guess they wanted debuffs (they seemed pleasantly surprised to find that I actually had the cold shields). Our team mix was:

elec/stone brute
ice/ice dominator
2 necro/dark masterminds
rad/rad corruptor
mind/nrg dominator
dark/kin corruptor
ice/cold corruptor (me)

I played Yuki-Onna (49 ice/cold corruptor). The kin corruptor was a veteran RSFer and stealth/TP'd the team around in the first Longbow mission, the Malta mission, and the attack on the Vindicators base. We pretty smoothly went through the first 3 missions without a hitch. Facing the Vindicators I managed to get insta-killed by the initial alpha strike from Malaise and Valkyrie; I think these must've been cone attacks since I hadn't done a single attack yet; I suspect I would've been fine if I stood off to one side instead of in the center of the hallway as the brute charged in. And I have to say, Valkyrie is a total cheater, there is no way that "thrown sword" should be a cone attack. Anyway I got rez'd and we eventually finished off the Vindicators, then tackled the Freedom Phalanx in the last mission, using the TP/stacked vengeance trick to give us godmode for the first couple minutes of the fight. Yuki-Onna leveled to 50 from killing Sister Psyche in the last mission, which I think makes her my 14th level 50. Although we had a few stray deaths that got rez'd back in, we managed to beat the Freedom Phalanx in a single attempt, finishing the RSF in 1hr 12mins, which is not a bad time. I got a Peroxisome (DMG/MEZ) SHO as reward; these used to be considered pretty junky, but I'm thinking that it may be useful for my up-and-coming Fortunata someday. This was Yuki's first RSF and she got a fistful of badges from it: Mistress of Olympus, Annihilator, Relentless, Archvillain, Servant of Recluse, and Made. The team leader also thanked me for coming and said that next time he'd ask me to join his SF before opening it up to LBx, which was a really nice thing to say.

I trained Yuki-Onna up to 50, and went ahead and bought and crafted some more IO sets, 5-slotting Enfeebled Operation into her Web Envelope for +3.75% global rchg, 5 slotting Gaussian's Synchronized Fire Control into her Tactics for +2.5% global dmg, and 5-slotting Performance Shifter into Stamina for another +2.5% global damage. This gives her a total of +34.5% global damage (including the buff from Assault) and +20% global recharge.

I finished up Sunday night idly doing some trick-or-treating near Haven House in Grandville with April Fool (50 thug/TA mastermind). Solo trick-or-treating with a mastermind is positively unfair to the mobs; I would click on a door, two or three mobs would come out, and they would get dogpiled by my 6 pets while I debuff them with trick arrows. I was kind of doing this for the badges, but one of the Halloween mobs dropped an Apocalypse (DMG) recipe for me, which was unbelievably lucky and made for a good finish for the weekend.

Highlights of this build are that it puts me at the blaster HP cap, gives me +88.75% global recharge, +12% global damage, and +11.65% inherent fire/cold resist (which I hope will help against typical PvP blasters). Things I'm less thrilled about are that it drops my perception from the perception cap to a measly 900, so I'll have a lot more trouble with stalkers in zone PvP, and I only have 4 places to put LotG IOs now, so I had to drop one. I dropped Buckshot because it was too short range to be effective in arena; still undecided as to how much I will miss it in PvE. I'm hoping my high global recharge will make dropping one attack not as noticable.

I'm planning on filling the empty slots in Jump Kick with more Hecatomb IOs, and eventually replacing the Taser slots with a set of Absolute Amazement. It was moderately expensive to switch to this build; I had to delete some IOs respecing to this, and then I spent 15M infl on the Performance Shifter (Chance for END) recipe, 30M infl each on two Hecatomb recipes, and 10M infl each on four Absolute Amazement recipes (not yet crafted or slotted), plus a few more million influence on salvage components and crafting.

So after spending ~120M influence, I was feeling a little cash poor so on Thursday night I ran through two Katie TFs with Police Woman. The first one was 6 controllers and 2 blasters, finishing in 30 minutes and netting me a Devastation (DMG/END) and an Unbounded Leap (Stealth) recipe. The second was 4 defenders, 1 controller, 2 blasters, 1 warshade, took 41 minutes (we had one defender who was a bit confused and didn't seem to understand it was a TF and quit after the second mission; also our first Katie rescuer managed to die rescuing her and needed to be reinforced), and netted me a Mu Vestment, a Scirocco's Dervish (DMG/RCHG), and a Sting of the Manticore recipe. For the second TF I recorded how much infl I made from just killing stuff and mission completion, and it looks like I gained 1.84M influence for doing a Katie TF at level 50; so roughly 2.69M infl/hr. By comparison, clearing Cimerora walls seems to be about 3.2M infl/hr (though, is also more boring and doesn't give you Pool C recipes).

After the two KTFs I played Idealist (my newbie level 9 fire/thermal controller), joining a 7-player Sisterhood team that mostly fought zombie invasions and did trick or treating. Trick or treat mobs seemed to spawn very high for us (we fought 15s, 16s and even 17s when our team was mostly around level 12) and we had two team wipeouts fighting big spawns of high level mobs, and with my heals slotted with training enhancements I found it very hard to keep people alive. Nevertheless we beat up a lot of Halloween critters and got Idealist to level 12.

Idealist trick or treating with Sisterhood &amp; friends

At level 10 I took Hurdle and at level 12 I took Hover. Then I realized it was stupid to take Hurdle if I plan to Fly, so at level 12 I burned a veteran respec to rearrange my powers and slots, dropping Hurdle for Flashfires, which seems a neat soft control power.

Finished up Thursday night playing Police Woman again, answering various distress calls, which felt heroic. I first responded to a zombie invasion in Founder's Falls, joining a 4 player pickup team to fight off the zombies.

Police Woman fights zombies in Founders Falls

Then I answered a request for help on the Sisterhood channel against the Eochai GM in Talos Island. Joining an 8 player team, we killed 3 Eochais before spawning and defeating Jack in Irons, which got everyone the badge, after which we called it a night.

10/24/2008

I started Tuesday night playing Schadenfreude (50 AR/traps corruptor) on a 7 player LEGION team about to fight the Vindicators, who were all level 53 Heroes. The team leader seemed happy to get a trapper and I did feel the traps (especially poison gas trap with multiple damage procs) were pretty effective here. We beat Valkyrie (twice), Luminary, Mynx (who seemed to have unusually high regen against us) and Ms Liberty.

Schadenfreude vs Ms Liberty

After battling the Vindicators, the team broke up and I switched to Kashira (13 ninj/ninj stalker) and duoed with a friend playing another stalker for a bit. We ran through Peter Themari's story arc to turn a newbie heroine, Pyriss, to the dark side; and we both commented on seeing the Devoured Pyriss a few days earlier. This got Kashira to level 14, where I took Hurdle.

Kashira extracts Pyriss

At that point it was time for my team's Liberty PvP League match. Our team had 7 people show up initially, and the opposing team only 6, so I volunteered to sit out the first match, which ended up being a 6v6 match on the cargo ship, and my team won it 12 to 5.

We had another blaster show up after the first match, which gave us 8 players to the opposing team's 6. The team leader decided to switch me and the new blaster for the original two blasters, so I got to play during the second match, which was a 6 vs 6 on the factory match. The opposing team swapped both corruptors in their starting lineup out for hero alts.

Team Shad just before a match begins

Our lineup was:

2 ill/emp controllers
rad/psy defender
fire/mm blaster
kin/sonic defender
AR/dev blaster (me)

The opposing team had:

grav/kin controller
emp/dark defender
sonic/nrg blaster
ice/nrg blaster
rad/psy defender
emp/archery defender

The target caller cautioned us to stay on the outside of the factory and so most of the fighting was on the streets. I had started with an inspiration load of mostly reds with a few greens, hoping to boost the damage of my attacks, but I think this was a mistake as I felt like I got attacked and killed quite a lot; I felt particularly bad about one death that occurred with 2 seconds left on the clock, which caused the other team to narrowly edge us out on score, their 11 kills to our 10 kills (of which I was credited only 1).

Our third match the team leader swapped out blasters again, so I almost didn't get to play, but the opposing team had another person show up and our team had one person leave, so we were able to do a 7v7 on the Outbreak map.

Our lineup was:

rad/psy defender
psy/nrg blaster
fire/MM blaster
AR/dev blaster (me)
kin/sonic defender
2 ill/emp controllers

The opposing team was:

rad/psy defender
grav/kin controller
emp/arch defender
emp/dark defender
ice/nrg blaster
sonic/nrg blaster
fire/nrg? blaster

This rapidly turned into a big furball in the center of the Outbreak map. Although our team gave a good accounting of ourselves, the opposing team was really on the ball this game and had multiple, instant-death level damage spikes against us, which allowed no time for heals, inspirations or phasing. We ended up losing that match 19 to 12 (of which I was credited 6; getting half with 3 blasters on the team is more than I expected, but this may be because Full Auto is damage-over-time).

After the matches I tried to do a little After Action Review and asked my team what we thought we thought happened and what we could've done better. Ideas tossed around were: the opposing team had a lot of DPS; the opposing team was doing deadly damage spikes; and phase shift is really needed to avoid dying in arena. After thinking about this some, I really focused on the phase shift idea. My normal "turtle up" power is Personal Force Field, which works pretty well in PvP zones (except against Fortunatas, grr) but did not seem nearly as helpful in arena, where I got killed once through PFF and my own team killed an enemy blaster once through PFF (we switched away from any target who Phase Shifted or Hibernated, but stayed on the person who used PFF). In pre-game the experienced arena players discussed target priorities and although everyone was pretty polite about powersets and builds, they were also very pragmatic about identifying opponents who had low max HP, who didn't have phase shift, and/or who didn't have the standard PvP travel powers (Superspeed/Superjump) as "easy kills". I resolved to work on being harder to kill.

After the PvP matches I spent some time playing April Fool (50 thug/TA mastermind) as a malefactor to a 3-player Liberty Force SG team of relatively new villain alts running level 10 missions in Port Oakes, finishing with a King's Row mayhem; then I finished the night playing Flying Tiger (29 MA/will scrapper on Triumph) in a duo with a storm defender, first doing radio missions in Talos Island, then working through Kelly Nemmers' story arc in Croatoa. This got Flying Tiger to level 30, where I took Confront (or whatever the MA taunt is called), thinking this would be helpful for pulling and pseudo-tanking. So far I'm pretty underwhelmed by single-target-taunt; sure, it's nice for pulling, but an AoE taunt would be a lot nicer for keeping aggro. Wondering if I should've taken Provoke instead...or something else entirely.

Over the course of Wednesday and Thursday I worked out a respec for Police Woman to try and improve her arena ability. I decided I absolutely had to work Phase Shift in, which meant dropping a power pool to take Concealment pool. I reluctantly dropped Leadership pool to take Concealment; I love Leadership pool, but I needed to drop something, and it felt important to keep my other three, which are Fitness for stamina and movement, Leaping for combat jumping (movement), and Medicine (not quite as helpful in arena but I can't do without it in PvE). The net changes were that I dropped Maneuvers, Assault, Tactics, Vengeance, Buckshot (too short range), Smoke Grenade (not as helpful as I had hoped) and Cloaking Device (redundant with stealth); I added Stealth, Grant Invis, Phase Shift, Temp Invulnerability, Force of Nature, Jump Kick, Acrobatics. Police Woman has always been a "non-superpowered" character in my mind, so I try to avoid taking powers that are too obviously super, and admittedly Phase Shift and Force of Nature are pushing this line; but I really wanted to improve my arena performance, so I decided to rationalize taking these as extensions of her cloaking device and personal force field devices. I still refused to take Super Jump though (super travel feels way too super); instead I took the fairly silly but fun Jump Kick to unlock Acrobatics. I'm sure I'll get a lot of scorn for having Jump Kick in my build, but I figure I'll load it up with Hecatomb IOs for the set bonuses. My build now looks like this:

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.4006
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Police Woman I12b: Level 50 Natural Blaster
Primary Power Set: Assault Rifle
Secondary Power Set: Devices
Power Pool: Medicine
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Concealment
Ancillary Pool: Force Mastery

Hero Profile:
Level 1: Burst -- Dev'n-Acc/Dmg:33(A), HO:Centri(3), Dev'n-Dmg/Rchg:33(3), Dev'n-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:33(5), Dev'n-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:33(5), Achilles-ResDeb%:10(7)
Level 1: Web Grenade -- GravAnch-Immob:50(A), GravAnch-Immob/Rchg:50(7), GravAnch-Acc/Immob/Rchg:50(9), GravAnch-Acc/Rchg:50(9), GravAnch-Hold%:50(11)
Level 2: Slug -- HO:Centri(A), Apoc-Dmg/Rchg:50(11), Apoc-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:50(13), Apoc-Acc/Rchg:50(13), Apoc-Dmg/EndRdx:50(15), Apoc-Dam%:50(15)
Level 4: Caltrops -- RechRdx-I:50(A)
Level 6: Aid Other -- Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx:33(A), Dct'dW-EndRdx/Rchg:31(17), Dct'dW-Heal/Rchg:30(17), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg:30(19), Dct'dW-Heal:30(19), IntRdx-I:50(21)
Level 8: M30 Grenade -- Posi-Acc/Dmg:33(A), Posi-Dmg/EndRdx:33(21), Posi-Dmg/Rchg:32(23), Posi-Dmg/Rng:33(23), Posi-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx:33(25), RechRdx-I:50(25)
Level 10: Targeting Drone -- GSFC-ToHit:33(A), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg:33(27), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg/EndRdx:33(27), Rec'dRet-Pcptn:14(29), GSFC-ToHit/EndRdx:33(29), GSFC-Build%:21(31)
Level 12: Combat Jumping -- LkGmblr-Rchg+:25(A), Krma-ResKB:30(31)
Level 14: Aid Self -- Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx:33(A), Dct'dW-EndRdx/Rchg:33(31), Dct'dW-Heal/Rchg:30(33), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg:33(33), Dct'dW-Heal:32(33), IntRdx-I:50(34)
Level 16: Swift -- Run-I:50(A)
Level 18: Hurdle -- Jump-I:50(A), Jump-I:50(34)
Level 20: Stamina -- P'Shift-EndMod:33(A), P'Shift-EndMod/Rchg:30(34), P'Shift-EndMod/Acc/Rchg:33(36), P'Shift-EndMod/Acc:33(36), P'Shift-End%:31(36)
Level 22: Stealth -- LkGmblr-Rchg+:29(A)
Level 24: Beanbag -- Stpfy-Acc/Rchg:33(A), Stpfy-EndRdx/Stun:33(37), Stpfy-Acc/EndRdx:33(37), Stpfy-Stun/Rng:33(37), Stpfy-Acc/Stun/Rchg:33(39)
Level 26: Taser -- Stpfy-Acc/Rchg:30(A), Stpfy-EndRdx/Stun:33(39), Stpfy-Acc/EndRdx:33(39), Stpfy-Stun/Rng:33(40), Stpfy-Acc/Stun/Rchg:30(40)
Level 28: Grant Invisibility -- LkGmblr-Rchg+:40(A)
Level 30: Phase Shift -- RechRdx-I:50(A), RechRdx-I:50(40)
Level 32: Full Auto -- Ragnrk-Dmg:50(A), Ragnrk-Dmg/Rchg:50(42), Ragnrk-Acc/Dmg/Rchg:50(42), Ragnrk-Acc/Rchg:50(42), Ragnrk-Dmg/EndRdx:50(43), Posi-Dam%:41(43)
Level 35: Jump Kick -- Hectmb-Dmg:50(A), Hectmb-Dmg/Rchg:50(43), Empty(45), Empty(45), Hectmb-Dam%:50(45)
Level 38: Acrobatics -- EndRdx-I:50(A)
Level 41: Personal Force Field -- LkGmblr-Rchg+:41(A)
Level 44: Temp Invulnerability -- TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx:50(A), TtmC'tng-ResDam/Rchg:50(46), TtmC'tng-EndRdx:50(46), TtmC'tng-ResDam:50(46)
Level 47: Force of Nature -- Aegis-ResDam/Rchg:50(A), TtmC'tng-ResDam/Rchg:50(48), Aegis-EndRdx/Rchg:50(48), TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg:50(48), TtmC'tng-ResDam:50(50)
Level 49: Resuscitate -- RechRdx-I:50(A)
------------
Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Sprint -- HO:Micro(A), HO:Micro(50), HO:Micro(50)
Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Defiance



<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>| Copy &amp; Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build |
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10/21/2008

Last Wednesday night I started off playing Perfect Woman (40 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle). Some of her Pinnacle League SG-mates on Pinnacle wanted to screw around in arena PvP, and I was initially pretty doubtful about doing this as a tanker, but it ended up being fairly fun. We had a couple free for alls where theoretically people were "dueling" but they often got out of hand and turned into, well, a free for all; then we had a 3 vs 3 match on the Perez Park map. My team was 2 will/SS tankers and a rad corruptor, and we were facing 2 scrappers and another will/SS tanker (originally they had a 4th player, a rad defender, but he must have disconnected earlier). With so much lolmelee it quickly became a slugging contest, but my team had rad debuffs and taunt to keep the opponents off of our corruptor, which gave us the win. It was silly but fun.

After that I played Mayday (32 fortunata on Liberty) on an 8 player LEGION SG team doing someone's Mako patron arc. We managed to beat a Calystix AV and a Captain Mako AV, before finishing with a Founders Falls mayhem mission where we had a huge battle at the Founders Falls explore badge as Longbow and police converged on our position, resulting in a semi-wipeout. Still got the badge and to level 33, however.

Finished Wednesday briefly playing Helen Highwater (16 storm/psy defender on Triumph) as a sidekick on a 7-player team fighting level 45s.

Thursday night, I spent a little time soloing with Mary Megawatt (18 elec/will brute on Pinnacle), doing paper missions in Cap au Diable to get to level 19 before getting invited to team on Liberty.

I switched to playing Paris Holiday (44 fire/thermal corruptor on Liberty) and joined a 6-player team doing missions in Grandville. One of my teammates told me he thought my character concept (spoiled socialite sent to prison, gets broken out of jail by Arachnos) was incredibly funny, which made me glad. We beat up a Dr Quatrexin AV which unlocked Black Scorpion's patron pool for Paris, as well as awarding her a free respec; I still need to figure out how I want to respec in the web grenade powers. We also beat a Citadel AV, a Founders Falls mayhem and did a Westin Phipps story arc.

After that team broke up, Paris briefly helped a pickup team fight Deathsurge in Cap au Diable. Our team was 4 brutes, 1 stalker, 1 dominator and me, and so as the lone support person I was really busy healing everyone and debuffing the AV, but this worked out okay. It seemed to me that the thermal debuffs had a pretty noticable effect whenever they were on, and we were able to kill Deathsurge and get the badge.

Later on, Paris joined a 3 player Liberty Force SG team which did a few missions in St Martial, defeated the rather sad-looking Devoured Pyriss, and got Paris to level 45.

I also played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) and messed around in Recluse's Victory for a bit; initially jousting inconclusively with a brute/stalker pair, before managing to get each of them once. My high perception let me spot a stalker about to assassinate a hapless controller, and I managed to interrupt the AS and kill the stalker; this got me a "Thanks, Police Woman!" from the controller, which made me feel really heroic. A bit later a pair of stalkers managed to kill me with a double assassin strike, though, and when a fortunata showed up I ended up mostly running away (I still have not figured out how to beat these) and eventually exiting the zone.

Finished up Thursday night playing Miss Molotov (37 fire/fire scrapper on Liberty), at first soloing but then agreeing to join a 5 player pickup team doing radio missions in Brickstown. This pickup team made the classic mistake of doing the highest level player's mission on Invincible difficulty, and our initial tanker was low level compared to the enemies and not very good at attracting aggro, resulting in the team wiping out against the first group of bad guys. One of the other players volunteered to swap to her own tanker, who was slightly higher level and noticably more skillful, and this let us get through a mission successfully. But in the second mission, the newer tanker disconnected early on; we waited about 10 minutes for her to return (no one really wanted to press our luck by fighting on without her), then I decided I needed to call it a night. I normally don't like to quit a team mid-mission, but it was late and we pretty clearly weren't making any progress.

Friday night I got on rather late, and I started off playing Police Woman in RV some more, dodging stalkers and landing a few kills, before switching to play Maitresse (36 necro/storm MM on Liberty) to solo her way through the Midnighter story arc, unlocking Cimerora and hitting level 37.

I also did a Katie TF with Mystery Girl (35 ff/nrg defender on Liberty), with a team of 2 scrappers, 2 peacebringers, 1 controller, 2 defenders and 1 tanker. This went a little slow, getting through it in 47 mins; I picked up a Mu Vestment and a Call of the Sandman: Chance to Heal recipe.

Didn't play Saturday, but on Sunday night I logged on Police Woman and began running into zombie apocalypse attacks. This was surprisingly fun! There's something just cool about having zombies pull themselves out of the earth and lumber towards you while you rain automatic fire down on them. Full Auto is just about the perfect attack to deal with waves of zombies. My first zombie attack was in Firebase Zulu, which made it a little extra surreal.

Gahh! Zombie attack!
Eat hot lead, zombie scum!

Over the course of Sunday and Monday night I managed to get all four zombie badges that I know of: Safety in Numbers, Glimpsed the Abyss, Apocalypse Survivor and Evil's Resident. Although there's not a lot of further material benefit to killing zombies, but I plan to keep fighting them, just because they're fun.

I did a little solo trick-or-treating with Samurai-ko (12 katana/will scrapper on Liberty), getting her to level 13, then switched to Alice Slaughter (28 db/will brute on Triumph) to join an 8 player Demolition Girls team as a lackey on level 45ish missions. This team was pretty low on support (1 traps corruptor and a couple widows with offensive buffs but no defensive buffs) so was a bit dangerous, but we managed to take down a Jack-in-Irons GM and a hero-level Swan (though we did suffer one team wipe against her), getting Alice to level 29.

Late Sunday night, on a lark I started a newbie fire/thermal controller on Liberty; managed to get the name "Idealist", which I thought was a good heroic name, and I gave her a patriotic looking red white and blue costume (the fire effects actually look quite nice with this color scheme). I emerged from Outbreak just as a zombie invasion of Atlas Park was beginning. While training up to level 2 I saw a bunch of people announce "LFT for zombies", and so I thought, what the heck...I started inviting people and in no time I had an 8 player zombie team. I got a level 50 to SK me so that my unslotted Warmth would actually heal a decent amount and we fought zombies for several minutes. By the time the zombie invasion finished, Idealist was very nearly level 5 and had gotten 2 badges for zombie fighting. I solo'd a few missions to get some contacts, then joined a 6 player pickup team doing missions in King's Row that got her a fly pack from an Atlas safeguard, and enough exp to hit level 8. I continued playing Idealist on Monday night, joining an 8 player Sisterhood (and some pickup people) team doing more missions in King's Row that got her to level 9. So far, Idealist has taken the following powers: Char, Warmth, Ring of Fire, Thermal Shield, Cauterize, Swift.

I took a break to watch Heroes, then came back on to join a Liberty PvP League practice. My first match was a 7 vs 7 match on the Outbreak map; I played Police Woman (AR/dev blaster) and my team was something like, 1 kin, 1 rad, 1 emp, 1 therm, 2 blasters, 1 brute. I think the opposing team had 2 storms, 2 emps, 1 blaster, 1 cold?, 1 scrapper. I joined the team's ventrilo server, and one of the more experienced PvPers was trying to teach us how to do damage spikes; a concept that I was vaguely aware of as a casual PvPer, but didn't have much practice doing. This seemed to involve calling a target, then having the DPS people all confirm they have acquired the target, then a countdown occurring at the end of which everyone was supposed to attack at the same time. Attacking before the countdown completed was frowned on because it would give the opposing team advance warning and allow them to evade or heal. I don't think I did especially good at this, at least initially; I had a lot of trouble with enemy stormies swooping in to debuff my range with hurricane, and our attacks didn't seem to put much of a dent in the targets, though they also had a lot of healing support. Over the course of the first match we had two team members disconnect, and were generally getting the worst of it (I think we had yet to kill anyone and had suffered a few deaths), before the teams agreed to reset the match due to the disconnects.

One of our disconnects came back pretty quickly, but the other one never did reappear, so we did a 6 vs 6 match on the Perez Park map. This went a bit better; I feel like I got a little better at the spiking thing, though the stormies were still a huge headache. The tempo of these matches felt very different than kickball or zone pvp matches I've done, where usually everyone just shoots as fast as they can; trying to time the damage spikes meant there were relatively fewer attack opportunities that were farther apart, so it felt slower paced, but I can see the theory behind it, which seems to be to knock someone out faster than the opponents can heal or phase shift. Anyway, we still lost this, but it was closer, 3 to 5. I was credited with 2 of the kills, but the way we were doing it, it was much more of a team thing.

After the PvP practice broke up, I went on to play Police Woman in Cimerora, at first duoing with another AR/dev blaster to clear the walls, then a little later recruiting a 6-player team from Sisterhood channel to run level 50 Cimerora missions to shoot up lots of Romans. Our team was 3 blasters, a stalker, a tanker and a sonic controller; I think all of us blasters had medicine pool, though, so we were fine on healing. We pretty handily beat up most everything we ran into; we did fail one mission due to getting a hostage killed by an ambush, but otherwise were quite successful and the sub-50 players felt they got lots of exp.

10/15/2008

I started the night playing Primadonna (31 sonic/kin corruptor) on a Cap au Diable SF. Our team mix was:

MA/will stalker
ninj/ninj stalker
dark/fire brute
SS/stone brute
sonic/kin corruptor (me)

I was the last person to join and with four melee on the team, they seemed pretty happy to get a kinetic. The ninja and the fire brute died a lot (the stalker from being low level and unLKd and the fire brute from either carelessness or overconfidence; he claimed he was working on debt badges) but speed boost and grant invis helped speed things along pretty well. Our last mission was a bit messy; the fire brute wanted to kill Infernal while the others were stealthing altars, so we killed the hero, then pulled Bat'Zul into the entrance hallway and kinda zerg rushed him. I found it to be tricky to heal with Transfusion against Bat'Zul, because Bat'Zul is so big that people can melee him from far enough away that they don't get hit by Transfusion, and of course the AV is also firing off PBAOEs that make it dangerous to stand too close. A couple of us died fighting Bat'Zul, including me, and had to run back from the hospital, but we were eventually able to beat him up, finishing the SF in 49 minutes.

After that I participated in the Gimps against the World arena PvP event. While Police Woman (my AR/dev blaster) theoretically qualifies to play in this event, I figured the spirit of the game was to play something weaker than your main character (and besides which I didn't want to confess to gimpiness), so I played April Fool (50 thug/TA MM). Though, when one of the brutes there recognized me from fighting in Warburg, I was a little worried that I hadn't picked a gimpy enough toon for this; this feeling was quickly dispelled in the actual arena fights, though, where I died a ton. One thing I noticed that annoyed me to NO end is that masterminds apparently can't summon pets while under the "Only affecting self" condition after respawning, which made each death a HUGE timeout as I had to wait for "Only affecting self" to end, THEN summon pets. I didn't bother buffing pets because it took too much time; not sure whether this was the right call or not.

The format was multi-team battle royale, and the first match was 6 teams of 3 set on the lab map; I was on a team with an elec blaster, a warshade, and me. As a mastermind with 6 pets on a small map with 15 enemy heroes, April apparently presented a pretty big target, and it felt like people were after me nonstop. Okay, so maybe the annoying debuff arrows drew some aggro too. I found it very dangerous to ever drop out of bodyguard to focus fire my pets on anyone. It was pretty chaotic, but fun. I did manage to squeak out 2 kills. My team overall got 11 kills and the top team got 20 kills, over half of which were by an archery blaster in the hands of a very skilled PvPer.

The second match was teams of 2 set on the Outbreak map; I was teamed up with a spines scrapper. This was another small map with most of the fighting being in the empty lot in the middle. That archery blaster was hovering above the fray, dropping nonstop Rain of Arrows on our heads, racking up tons of kills. Her AoE damage is of course is just horrible for a MM, so I tried going after her with some entangle and glue arrows, but she was very slippery and ran away long enough for me to get distracted by other random heroes who were blitzing me on the ground. I died a ton here too (more than once I respawned with none of my pet abilities recharged yet, which is pretty darn bad) but I did manage to get 4 kills. My team got 8 kills total, which made us the 2nd place team; the winning team got 18.

The third match was teams of 2 set on the Eden trial map; I got teamed up with a peacebringer. This was a bigger map with a lot more running around, with occasional furballs of combat developing; the more spread out map led to lower intensity fighting, and I ended the match with 3 kills, as did my partner, giving our team 6 kills, making us the 2nd place team; the winning team narrowly beat us with 7.

After the PvP event wrapped up, I played Perfect Woman (39 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle) for a few radio missions in Brickstown, duoing with another will/SS tanker as a sidekick. Since both of us were tankers, the mobs from a 2 player mission were basically unable to injure us, and our rage helped keep our DPS at least somewhat respectable. Did 4 or 5 missions which got Perfect Woman to level 40.

After that I solo'd with Samurai-ko (11 katana/will scrapper on Liberty), growing her network of contacts a bit before accepting a pickup team invite. This put me as a sidekick on a 5 player pickup team doing the Skyway safeguard at level 19. Doing a bank mission with a mid-sized pickup team is usually suicide, but this team actually seemed competent and we saved the bank and did a bunch of side missions and vandals, which got Samurai-ko to level 12, though by then I was too tired to buy DOs or decide on a new power, so I put that off for later.

10/14/2008

I started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), clearing the walls of Cimerora for fun and profit. I spent about half an hour doing this before I got bored with it; in that time I got 1.6M influence, a Pangean Soil (valued at 1.2M influence) and a Rocket Boots recipe (valued at 0.6M influence), so a total of 3.4M influence in half an hour. Not bad.

After that I wandered into Recluse's Victory to work on my pillboxes badge, but got attacked by villains almost immediately after entering the zone. I managed to narrowly beat a mind dominator, then jousted with a mastermind/stalker pair for a bit before killing the mastermind by pulling him into a pillbox I had taken control of and gunning him down with turrets. His stalker partner resorted to the classic next stage of zone PvP, i.e., complaining on broadcast. Considering this stalker had just TP Foe'd me for an Assassin's Strike 3 times in a row (though I avoided dying to this by bunny hopping away), I couldn't believe that he had the temerity to complain about my methods, and I started to type a snarky retort. This was a bad move, however, as while I was doing this the stalker slipped up next to me and killed me. I came back out of the hospital shooting, though, and managed to slow his running away long enough for me to land some good shots to kill him; he complained that I was PvPing with a heavy, but I told him, you just died to full auto.

I managed to kill a fire/rad corruptor that came at me after that, but then I hit a brick wall when I encountered a fortunata, who completely wrecked me. I'm not quite sure how, but she attacked me while I was sitting in a friendly pillbox with a heavy nearby, and shrugged off the damage from all the turrets and the heavy while shooting psy damage at me; I don't know of a power that lets you do that, maybe accolades and inspirations were involved. She eventually did enough damage to me that I had to run, then killed me twice in rather lopsided fights. I think I maybe damaged her once enough to make her phase shift, but overall she was pretty dominant. So far it seems like fortunatas totally school me (I've lost all 3 fights I've had with fortunatas); their high damage attacks with status effects are quite nasty, and can cut through my PFF with untyped psy damage, and it doesn't seem like they take that much damage from me for some reason. One of the reasons I'm leveling up a fortunata is to figure out what they actually do, which is a bit of a mystery to me. In any case, after a couple fights it seemed clear I wasn't going to be able to beat this fortunata, so I congratulated her and I left the zone.

After that I played Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender) on a 7 player LEGION and Sisterhood team doing Praetorian missions. We had a fairly suicidal regen scrapper along who let me use Vengeance frequently; I pretty quickly got over feeling guilty for his deaths since they were so obviously self-inflicted (charging into big spawns ahead of the tanker, attacking new spawns while not in line of sight with the team, etc.). We fought several AVs and with two stormies and an illusionist on the team, the battlefield was pretty cluttered with lightning storms, tornadoes, phantasms and illusory armies! Our illusionist claimed her phantasm had self-confidence issues so I should mention him here; I guess I can say that the phantasm seemed confident enough to pull an AV onto us before either of the melee could aggro him. It was chaotic and fun. We beat up Nightstar, Siege and Bobcat AVs before the team broke up.

Rain Dancer went to RWZ after that and spent some merits unlocking the Talsorian Bow, so I fiddled around with costumes for a bit. I tried giving her a costume with a Talsorian Bow (with the glowing light sabre like effect), but coloring it black/black, to see if I could have an invisible bow that looked like a distortion in the air. I'm not quite sure if I like how it turned out, it looks kinda more like a smog bow (I totally should've screen shotted it, I guess)...I might try this for a bit, and if it doesn't grow on me I'll change to a glowing white bow or a regular wood one.

Finished the night doing a pickup Lady Grey TF as Lady Arachne (45 wolf spider). Team mix was:

crab spider
brute
bane spider (me)
elec blaster
fire blaster
fire/regen scrapper
?/rad controller
night widow

The team leader didn't care if people wanted to be unSK'd, but I asked to be lackeyed up to 49 for the sake of doing better damage. This team was kind of an odd mix, but between the various VEAT maneuvers auras we were defense capped if we stayed together, and as a result the first mission went pretty routinely. The second mission for some reason we decided to split into three subteams - a few people ran ahead to stealth the mission, a few people (including me) started clearing from the entrance, and one person was AFK at the entrance. Since this team really gets a lot of synergy from staying together, splitting up like this was moderately disastrous, with both the non-AFK teams eventually getting wiped out in separate rooms. The stealth team did manage to take out the first two Riders before dying though. After recovering from this, we got our act together again and TP'd everyone to the third Rider room and finished the rest of the mission uneventfully.

The third mission was stealth failed, getting both Infernia and Glacia killed in order to advance past it, and the fourth mission against Hamidon was handled pretty efficiently, with Rikti being trained onto Hamidon and all of us assisting the scrapper to take out mitos one by one.

In the final mission someone stealthed to the end and TP'd the team to the final room, where we pretty easily smashed the Rikti AV, then defeated the Honoree after a slightly longer fight in which he got to use his unstoppable power. I was able to Surveillance the Honoree to figure out what was going on, and it looks like he normally has 50% resistance, but when he was Unstoppable (this word actually appeared in my surveillance window) his resists went up to: Smash/Lethal 100%, Fire/Cold 75%, Energy 90%, Negative 60%. I forgot to write down his Psy and Toxic resist, which is unfortunate because I think he's actually weak to those while Unstoppable; none of my other (lethal) attacks hurt him, but it felt like my (toxic) Venom Grenade was actually doing good damage. Anyway, we killed him and the 4 generators to complete the LGTF in 1hr 28mins; I got a junky Sovereign Right recipe reward, but did hit level 46 as well.

10/13/2008

Thursday night, I started off playing Miss Molotov (34 fire/fire scrapper) as an SK on a Sisterhood team doing a Freakshow respec. Our team mix was:

fire/ss tanker
dark/dark defender (2nd box of the tanker)
AR/dev blaster
fire/fire scrapper (me)

We had mad AoE damage and easily completed the trial in 1hr 10mins, getting Miss Molotov to 35.

I played Mary Megawatt (15 elec/will brute on Pinnacle) for a few hours as a lackey to a 5-player Pinnacle League SG team doing missions in Sharkhead Isle, getting the Strikebreaker badge from a mission and hitting level 18. Mary took Fly at 16 and Rise to the Challenge at 18.

April Fool (50 thugs/TA MM on Liberty) bought a Decimation (DMG/ENDRDX/RCHG) recipe from the Black Market for 9M infamy, and I decided to replenish infamy by hanging out in Recluse's Victory for a bit. I killed a few pillboxes but then got beat up a couple times by a hero team (I like my mastermind but still seem to auto-lose to fire blasters, especially if they Inferno). I decided to switch to Paris Holiday (43 fire/thermal corruptor) and headed back into RV where I teamed up with a night widow to fight heroes. It's very rare to see support villains in RV, but I really thought my buffs and heals helped my teammate a lot; my fire blasts did not seem that effective, but I tried to drop an occasional Melt Armor or Heat Exhaustion on the hero players, especially their defender. We couldn't get any other villains to team up, but just having a duo improved our kill-to-death ratio immensely over having multiple solo villains.

After that team broke up, Paris went on to RWZ and did a Lady Grey TF. Our team mix was:

fire/kin controller
crab
fire/dark corruptor
fire/regen scrapper
night widow
mind/nrg dominator
fire/therm corruptor (me)
spine/will scrapper

The night widow was 46 and wanted to stay unSK'd, but despite this we had extremely high DPS from the rest of the team, so we powered through the LGTF in short order. We stealthed and intentionally failed the third mission (getting Infernia and Glacia killed) and in the final mission we easily vaporized the two Rikti AVs at the end, finishing the TF in 1hr 45mins. This got Paris to level 44, though I haven't trained yet; I'm thinking I want the web grenade patron power (I really felt the lack of a way to stop runners in RV), but I need to unlock Black Scorpion's patron pool to do that.

On Friday night, I started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) with a Sisterhood/LEGION team that eventually got up to 8 players; they were mostly 46s and some SKs but we got a 50 tanker eventually and started working on one of Police Woman's story arcs, that culminated in a battle with the Nemesis? AV.

After defeating Nemesis? the team broke up and I switched to playing Vathia (24 fire/ice blaster) on an 8-player Demolition Girls SG team. She hadn't trained to 24 yet and I picked up Ice Patch, which I had high hopes for, but I found to be a lot harder to use than the ice controller Ice Slick; since it is PBAOE and not targeted AOE, Vathia has to jump into melee to Ice Patch beneath the mobs, and the activation time feels fairly long. Will have to work out the kinks. Anyway, this team was very blasty, with 5 blasters and not a lot of support, but it seemed to work okay. I quietly picked up a couple timed Defeat All Sky Raiders missions without saying anything, because, frankly, 75 minutes allows far too much time to do them. The team leader noticed I had 2 timed missions when both of them had ticked down to 45 minutes left, which made for a much more exciting race against the clock. We finished one timed Sky Raider mission with 22 minutes left, then the second timed mission we just barely completed with 9 seconds left on the clock, and we were really struggling to make it to and kill that last spawn.

We also did a bunch of Faultline story missions, taking down an Arbiter Sands AV in a messy DPS fight, and blowing up a bunch of submarines, which I always think is really fun. This got Vathia to level 26.

Vathia vs submarine

After that team broke up, I did one round of kickball as Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster). I ended up on a team of 5 (me as blaster, 3 controllers, 1 defender) versus a team of 6 (fire blaster, tanker, 3 controllers, 1 defender), fighting in Atlas Park. As sole DPS person I got nominated target caller, and I tried to lock onto one of the enemy empaths at all times, switching when they phase shifted; however, in this match I really felt I suffered from my lack of burst DPS. The enemy team had 2 empaths and 2 stormies and I found it to be nearly impossible to cut through that much healing and debuff support; at one point the stormies actually managed to double-hurricane me, debuffing my range to 0, which was pretty horrible. Although my team also had 2 empaths (it was a support-crazy match) the enemy fire blaster seemed to have much less trouble scoring kills. It was a fairly frustrating match and my team ended up losing 2 to 9.

On Saturday I spent some time working on IO sets for Mayday (30 fortunata). I struck upon a blend of two sets for range attacks; 4 Devastation (ACC/DMG, ACC/DMG/RCHG, ACC/DMG/ENDRDX/RCHG, Chance to Hold) and 2 Maelstrom's Fury (DMG/ENDRDX, DMG/ENDRDX/RCHG) gave a range attack +92% damage, +56.1% accuracy, +73.6% recharge, +33.7% endrdx, and set bonuses of +12% regen, +2.25% maxhp, +3% damage, and +3% run speed. I liked how this added up, so I ended up slotting both TK Blast and Subdue with this combination, figuring that the hold proc plus her Dominate attack would make her very controlly. Mayday solo'd in Sharkhead for awhile to unlock some contacts, then did some missions on an 8 player LEGION SG team, then joined a 6-player pickup team that defeated Infernal as a Hero, which ended up getting her to level 31.

Police Woman crafted a handful of level 10 IOs for a friend's alt, who had bought all the ingredients for them but found she couldn't actually use the crafting system at level 7. Then I spent some time learning how to solo the walls of Cimerora for infl and salvage as a blaster. This actually worked a lot better than I expected; I had only tried this with scrappers and brutes before, and I thought my squishy blaster might have trouble. With cloaking device and a stealth IO, I stealth right next to each line of Cimeroran traitors, then pop a couple reds and let loose with Full Auto, whose cone was perfectly aligned to wipe out each spawn. This first attack would take out nearly all of each spawn, and this seemed to negate most of their alpha strike. I'd take a little damage while mopping up any that were missed or had more HPs due to being lieutenants. It was just dangerous enough to be interesting, and I may end up doing this more, to work on influence badges and to rake in more arcane salvage.

I played Mercy Beaucoup (34 emp/ice defender) for a bit, slotting a set of 5 Decimation in her Ice Blast for set bonuses of +1.13% maxhp and +6.25% recharge. She did a Katie TF with a team of 4 controllers, 2 defenders, 1 warshade and 1 blaster. The blaster seemed pretty out of it, getting lost on the way to missions in Croatoa (I can't explain how this is possible) and being generally confused, but we still managed to finish in 31 minutes, which scored me a level 34 Impervium Armor (RES) recipe.

Later that night I did a Citadel TF on Triumph, playing Flying Tiger (28 MA/will scrapper on Triumph). Our team mix was:

sonic blaster
plant/kin controller
storm/nrg defender
fire/elec blaster
MA/will scrapper
rad/rad defender

This went pretty smoothly, and after a procession of one Council in underground base mission after another, we finished in 1hr 46mins. This got Flying Tiger to level 29 and I received a level 30 Entropic Chaos (DMG/END/RCHG) recipe as reward.

Flying Tiger vs Vandal

On Sunday I played Miss Molotov (35 fire/fire scrapper on Liberty) some more, this time on an 8 player team of LEGION SG with some Sisterhood. We started off with radio missions in Brickstown, and eventually did a Brickstown safeguard where we took down an Ice Mistral AV. Then we moved to Peregrine Island, where we beat the psychic Clockwork King. The team finished doing a mission to rescue freedom fighters from an alternate dimension ruled by Nemesis; we did pretty well in this mission until people wanted to go, so we sped things up by trying to stealth the remaining hostages, which resulted in several deaths due to snipers and SK range issues.

Miss Molotov also got an honorable mention in the PERC Liberty Biography Contest, which is kind of cool, but admittedly it was only a field of 6 contestants, some of which had put in completely joke submissions. Here's Miss Molotov's bio, for what it's worth:

Miss Molotov's story


Sunday night I played Alice Slaughter (24 DB/will brute on Triumph) as a lackey on an 8 player Demolition Girls SG team doing level 44 missions. This team had no support or healing to speak of (well, 3 VEATs but only one had team buffs, and 2 dominators who sort of have some mitigation), and as the only brute I tried tanking, with often fatal results.

Alice vs Positron

Nevertheless we managed to muddle our way through a bunch of Nerva and Grandville missions, taking down an Ice Mistral AV, a Scirocco AV, a Positron Hero (twice), a Valkyrie hero, a Black Scorpion AV, and a Luminary hero. Some of these battles were fairly bloody though, and against Luminary in particular, my lack of energy resist caused me to die three times (using awakens to get back up) before we took her down. It was still pretty fun, though, and Alice got to level 28, training in Tough at 26 and Sweeping Strike at 28. Sweeping Strike gives her the final piece of the Attack Vitals combo, which I started doing a lot in addition to the Weaken combo, but I can't really tell yet how much effect Attack Vitals is having.

Alice vs Valkyrie

10/9/2008

Police Woman bought a couple expensive purple recipes recently, picking up an Apocalypse (DMG) from Wentworth's for 38M, and a Hecatomb (DMG) from a player who was advertising it for sale on LBx for 35M. While this sounds like a lot of infl, I actually thought these were good prices to pay for them. Aside from bargain hunting, though, I'm not quite sure what I will do with these recipes yet. Police Woman already has 5 Apocalypse and a level 50++ Centriole slotted in Slug; I could replace the Centriole with an Apocalypse (DMG), but I would lose 20% range and get maybe 1% damage and +5% psi defense, which seems like a bad trade. As for the Hecatomb, it theoretically ought to be awesome, but my high level melee toons on Liberty already have their melee attacks slotted with IO sets that I'm reluctant to break up; my MA/SR scrapper has 6 Touch of Death in each attack (for the +HP, +DMG and +meleeDEF), while my will/nrg tanker has 3 Touch of Death and 3 Crushing Impact in each attack (for +HP and more +HP). Hecatomb's set bonuses are mostly +ACC and +RCHG which I am not sure I like as much as +HP. So I'm not sure what I'll do with that recipe yet. I suppose I could re-sell it for a profit, but purple recipes are so scarce that it feels almost a waste to do that.

On Tuesday, Miss Molotov (33 fire/fire scrapper) did a Katie TF with a team of 4 controllers, 1 blaster, 2 defenders and 1 scrapper. This was pretty routine, finishing in 32 minutes and getting Miss Molotov to 34; I got lucky on the recipe drop, though, receiving a level 34 Numina's Convalescence (+regen/+rec), which was very exciting. I know I want to slot this on one of my heroes, but I haven't quite figured out which one yet. I also slotted two sets of 4 Mako's Bite into Miss Molotov's Cremate and Incinerate powers, getting her global bonuses of +3% max HP and +6% damage; however, one of the Mako's Bite I slotted was the proc, and this left the actual damage enhancement in the Cremate power at a rather anemic 80%, which I'm not sure I'm happy about.

I did a few Praetorian missions, playing Spacegirl (50 mind/rad controller) as an exemplar on a 7-player mid 40s team of LEGION SG. This went pretty well, and we defeated AV-level Bobcat and Shadow Hunter before the team broke up.

I played Amethyst Star (33 warshade on Protector) for a few missions as an SK on a level 42 Demolition Girls SG team doing Malta missions on Protector; got to level 34 in short order, but when both our controllers logged for the night, leaving our team with 1 tanker, 3 blasters, 1 scrapper and 1 warshade going into a high difficulty Malta mission, I decided it would be a good idea to change to a support character. So I switched to Astarte (46 grav/emp controller on Protector) and exemped for a few more missions, which seemed to go well.

Finished up Tuesday night playing Mary Megawatt (13 elec/will brute on Pinnacle) for a few missions with a 3-player Pinnacle League team, which got Mary to level 15. I picked Hover at 14 with the intention of getting Fly at 16.

I spent most of Wednesday night on Triumph server, first playing Grey Wings (35 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) as an SK on a 6 player team doing missions in Peregrine Island. Our first mission was against the psychic Clockwork King, and on our team we had a cold defender, sonic defender, 3 blasters and an SR scrapper. With no tank, no healer and sonic not actually protecting against psy, I thought we would totally get smeared, but this team actually took out Clockwork King very quickly due to sheer DPS; we took some damage but no one died. I still was a bit uneasy with playing a blaster on this team, though, so after one mission I switched to playing Flying Tiger (25 MA/will scrapper on Triumph), and as a willpower scrapper, the cold and sonic buffs made her fairly godlike. The team went on to beat Anti-Matter AV, another psychic Clockwork King AV and the Bile AV, all of which got Flying Tiger to level 28. I took Dragon's Tail at 26 for some AoE damage, and Heightened Senses at 28.

I finished Wednesday night playing Mega (50 SS/elec brute on Liberty), soloing in Siren's Call. Mega is not really a PvP character, but I wanted the Siren's Call badge for the accolade, so spent some time there. No heroes were there whatsoever, but that was OK as it let me beat up Warriors and Tsoo for magic salvage, and I was lucky enough to pick up a Deific Weapon and Soul Trapped Gem which I had needed to make a Devastation: Chance to Hold recipe, but was too cheap to buy off of the Black Market.

Here's a screen shot of Mayday's strike force fighting the Eye of the Leviathan from the air, that I thought looked cool:

Mayday vs the Eye of the Leviathan

10/7/2008

Did some crafting over the last few days. Thunder Girl (50 will/nrg tanker) crafted a set of 4 Numina's Convalescence and slotted them into Rise to the Challenge. This cost about 20M influence (Numina's is a fairly desirable recipe, so this felt like a pretty good price for a set of 4) and gave Thunder Girl set bonuses of +12% regen and +1.88% max HP, which raised her max HP from 3181.9 to 3212.7, putting her at the tanker HP cap.

On villain side, Yuki-Onna (49 ice/cold corruptor) crafted a set of 3 Ghost Widow's Embrace and slotted them into Freeze Ray, which raised her max HP from 1281.4 to 1301.4.

Last Thursday, Mercy Beaucoup (33 emp/ice defender) did a Katie TF with a team of 3 controllers, 2 defenders, 2 blasters and a tanker, finishing in 38 minutes and getting her level 34 and an Enchanted Impervium drop.

On Friday, Primadonna (31 sonic/kin corruptor) did a Cap SF with a team of 2 bane spiders, a thug/TA MM, a nrg/will brute and a sonic/kin corr (me). On the mission where you kidnap a tech and lead him to a computer, the massive longbow ambushes wiped our team out, then we suffered another wipeout after recovering when we tried charging them; after recovering again, we gradually pulled small pieces of the humongous Longbow ambush (which was really 3 waves of ambushes that stacked up) to the nearby elevators and defeated them in detail. In the final mission, since I had invis, I ended up being the one to stealth to the various altars and clicking them or sometimes teleporting or guiding the rest of the team to help clear the mobs guarding the altar. We trained Bat'Zul onto Infernal, then killed them both. The team leader declared me MVP of the SF for my Speed Boost, Grant Invis, Invis and heals, and the other team members agreed, which was really nice of them.

Friday night I played Vathia (21 fire/ice blaster) with a 7 player team of Demolition Girls SG, mostly doing door missions in Striga Isle; we went through Stephanie Peebles' entire story arc, which got Vathia the Wedding Band power, along with enough exp to hit level 24. At level 22 I took Super Jump (I had been relying on temp travel powers until then); hadn't decided what power to take at 24 yet.

After that team broke up I played Mayday (27 fortunata) on a pickup Sharkhead SF. Our team mix was:

fire/fire dominator
ninj/storm mastermind
merc/trap mastermind (disconnected 1st mission, never returned)
robo/FF mastermind
elec/ninj stalker
fire/fire brute (disconnected midway through SF, didn't return)
fortunata (me)
SS/inv brute

We had quite a lot of deaths the first mission, I think because we were fighting 8-person enemy spawns and had very limited healing (I had Aid Other and the storm mastermind occasionally threw in an O2 boost). We kinda got our act together after that, getting better about using all the team +DEF we had, so did a lot better in later missions, though we did suffer a team wipeout in the mission where Barracuda AV shows up in an ambush.

In the last mission we got to see a whole roomful of Coralax worshipping Calystix, which I don't remember seeing them do before; it's just an emote, I know, but having dozens of them doing at once was pretty visually impressive. We were able to take Calystix down pretty easily, but then suffered a wipeout against the Eye of the Leviathan and the hordes of ambushers. After we regrouped, one of the team members had the ingenious idea of everyone using the temp fly packs to hover near the top of the cavern. By doing this, we were still able to shoot the Eye with range attacks, but were well out of reach of the hordes of angry Coralax swarming around on the ground. This actually worked! We were able to take down the Eye AV with relative safety, suffering an occasional attack from the Eye itself but avoiding the Coralax. Finished the SF in 2hrs 30mins, getting Mayday to level 28 and receiving a level 30 Entropic Chaos (dmg/end/rchg) recipe as reward.

On Saturday I played Mary Megawatt (11 elec/will brute on Pinnacle) with 4 player team of Pinnacle League SG doing missions in Cap au Diable. All 3 other players were stalkers. Our brute and 3 stalkers team totally didn't work, and we suffered 3 team wipes fighting Circle of Thorns before we gave up to do something else.

After that team broke up, I switched to Perfect Woman (39 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle) and did a Manticore TF with a 7 player team of Pinnacle League SG. Our team mix was:

3 will/SS tankers (including me)
2 MA/SR scrappers
1 DB/will scrapper
1 ill/kin controller

Yes, Pinnacle League SG is way too melee heavy. This was a slow and kinda dreary TF; with 3 tankers, and also 2 of the scrappers were at the low end of 30-35 and did not take an SK, and no fulcrum shift or AOE to speak of, our DPS was pretty abysmal. We did manage to stealth a lot of missions which helped, though, and so we managed to get through the TF in 1hr 48mins.

After that, someone was asking on LBx for people to PvP with him in Recluse's Victory, so I switched to Yuki-Onna (49 ice/cold corruptor), and joined up with a couple other villains. We fairly wrecked the rad/psy defender we found there initially, but then he switched to a fire blaster and one of the villains decided to switch to an empath to help the hero out. Teams eventually settled on fire blaster + grav/emp controller versus stalker, cold corruptor and a bane spider. This seemed a lot more even and both sides got lots of kills and lots of deaths. It was some good fun.

Later on Saturday I did an Imperious TF as Paris Holiday (42 fire/thermal corruptor). Our team mix was:

ill/kin controller
grav/sonic controller
inv tanker
fire/thermal corruptor (me)
3 fire blasters
1 elec blaster

Early on, I got rather miffed at the kin who (it seemed to me) refused to SB anyone, and consequently I decided not to buff him, either. I felt guilty later on when I found that the kin actually didn't have SB (I couldn't see his powers since I was a villain) because he was built for soloing, so I started buffing him again at that point.

In our first mission, at the final encounter the team decided to attack the altar from the back side rather than from the front, which seemed a neat idea, since maybe that would avoid some of the ambushes. We still ended up suffering a partial wipeout, though, not quite sure why - maybe we got too strung out as the ambushes hit. We got through the next few missions with no problem, though.

In the final mission we had a false start against the final encounter, when the heroic but dimwitted Imperious decided to rush Romulus and aggro him and the Nictus AVs onto our team. We suffered a semi-wipeout, but after recovering from that, we decided on the simple approach of blasting Romulus with DPS, reasoning that 4 blasters and some debuffs should be more than enough DPS to overcome the healing Nictus. This worked just fine and we finished the TF in 1hr 48mins.

Later that weekend, I played Mayday some more, joining a 7 player Fallen LEGION SG team doing door missions in St Martial, which got Mayday to level 30, where I finally took Super Jump as a travel power. (The temp travel powers really make me put off getting real travel powers.)

I also solo'd Mega (50 SS/elec brute) some, fighting Romans for money and Marcone Consiglieres for a badge. There's a nice spot in the northeast part of St Martial where Marcone Consiglieres are very common, which let Mega get the Gangbuster badge and the High Pain Threshold accolade. This raised Mega's max HP from 1917.2 to 2067.1, a noticable jump.

I spent some time here and there over the weekend soloing Kashira (a 13 ninj/ninj stalker); stalkers seem great at soloing but I'm finding that stealthing every mission doesn't seem like very good exp and gets dull pretty quickly (or at least it feels that way to me).

Finally, on Monday night I played Mystery Girl (35 ff/nrg defender) on an 8-player pickup team that did a Crey mission that got her the Doctor's Ally badge.

[ QUOTE ]
Not an L5R player, are you, by any chance? For the longest time, I got the strangest looks because @Samuraiko is my global

[/ QUOTE ]

Haha, guilty as charged! I do like L5R. Sorry to borrow your name, it just seemed like a great katana scrapper name.

10/2/2008

Took a few screenshots for today's journal entry. Here's a screenshot of Spacegirl successfully using Mesmerize on Scirocco in the STF (happened in the last journal entry):

Spacegirl vs Scirocco

I started Wednesday night playing Mary Megawatt (an 8 elec/will brute on Pinnacle) on a 3 player villain team of Pinnacle League SG. An ice/cold corruptor on the team kept cold shield on Mary, which helped her survivability a lot (she only had High Pain Threshold and Fast Healing as defenses so far). We did a few missions in Cap au Diable and Port Oakes that got her to level 10, where I took Indomitable Will.

After that team broke up I switched to playing Kid Valkyrie (50 broadsword/regen scrapper on Triumph) and joined a Rikti War Zone raid that was in progress. This raid was well organized and had a lot of people on it (I think we got up to 5 teams at one point); I stayed for two runs against the mother ship and scored about 400 Vanguard merits, which was pretty nice for one evening's work considering it took me many days to get 100 merits just soloing. I haven't spent these merits yet; I'm kinda torn between blowing all these merits on the Vanguard costumes or on the salvage capacity increase.

Kid Valkyrie at the RWZ raid

I finished the evening playing Samurai-ko (a newbie 9 katana/will scrapper on Liberty), joining a 4 player pickup team doing radio missions in King's Row. Puzzlingly, the other team members kept saying into team chat stuff like "Keep your hands to yourself!" and "I'm not EVEN going to comment on that" for no reason I could discern. Finally I realized by looking at people's global names that I had our tanker on gignore (which was kind of embarrassing to realize after having done 3 missions with him). I can't even remember why; though based on the team chat I could see, there was probably cause. I took the tanker off of gignore for the sake of team communications, which seemed fine; he didn't say anything particularly rude after that, though perhaps my mentioning I had to take him off ignore had a sobering effect.

Anyway, I got Samurai-ko to level 11, taking Swift at 10; I know I don't really need this for Stamina since a will scrapper can get Quick Recovery, but I'm just used to having the extra movement from Swift and Hurdle, and any alt who doesn't have these feels debuffed to me. I also got an idea to write a silly bio for her; the PERC bio contest inspired me to start taking screen shots of my characters and their biographical story, and you can see Samurai-ko's here:

Samurai-ko's bio

10/1/2008

Over the last few days I played Miss Molotov (31 fire/fire scrapper) on three more Katie TFs; a friend who runs KTFs a lot kept inviting me to them. They all went very smoothly (mostly support heavy with times ranging from 26mins to 32mins); didn't get any super recpie drops but Miss Molotov did get to level 33, taking Tough as her level 32 power. I could've taken the tier 9 fire melee power, Greater Fire Sword, but I felt like Miss Molotov had enough attacks already, so decided to shore up her resists.

I also spent a lot of time playing Mayday (22 blood widow), doing some soloing and a lot of teaming with the Fallen LEGION villain group, getting Mayday to 27. We had some pickup people and a friend on this team explained to me his rules of screening out pickup people based on how crappy their name was; his rules were

1. No one whose name starts with xX and ends with Xx.
2. No one whose name is in ALL CAPS.
3. No one whose name is L33T for no good reason (being Freakshow themed counted as a good reason)
4. No one whose name is the same as the name of their powerset.

Personally, I always try to pick a cool name for a character (I mean, you have to live with this name for 50 levels) and am prejudiced against inviting pickup players who I think have dumb names, so I thought this tirade was worth sharing.

As a VEAT, at 24 Mayday had to do a forced respec, and I respec'd her into a Fortunata, picking the following powers:

Fortunata Training: TK Blast, Subdue, Dominate
Teamwork: CTefense, TT:Maneuvers, TT:Assault, Foresight
Fortunata Teamwork: Mind Link
Fitness: Swift, Hurdle, Stamina
Leaping: Combat Jumping
Medicine: Aid Other, Aid Self

I basically dropped all the claws attacks in favor of psy attacks; I only took 3 psy attacks, none of which are AoE, and was worried this might not be enough, but so far it feels like plenty. I managed to squeeze in Medicine Pool to give myself some self healing, because I usually end up on high +DEF teams with little or no healing, so I wanted a way to patch up damage that leaks through. I still haven't taken a travel power, because I still have the fly pack and jump pack from the early mayhem missions. I took Indomitable Will at 26 to get some mez protect also; having high DEF made this not as critical but I figure I need it sooner or later.

I spent most of Friday night playing Vathia (16 fire/ice blaster), leading a team of Demolition Girls SG with some pickup people, that got up to 8 players in size for a bit. Ran through a variety of missions in Steel Canyon, Skyway and Faultline, and in particular we defeated Kurse and Nocturne as AVs in Faultline. This got Vathia to level 21, allowing me to pick up the Blaze and Stamina powers.

On Saturday I spent some time playing Maitresse (36 necro/storm MM) in Rikti War Zone, duoing with an empath defender there. This was fairly fun, though I have to say it is really weird to be a mastermind who has Adrenaline Boost, Recovery Aura and Fortitude buffs.

Saturday night there was a big level 4 PvP event on Protector server, organized by the PvP Event Committee. I played Parapsychic (level 4 psy/fire blaster on Protector) throughout. The event opened up with a 37 player free-for-all set in, fittingly enough, Atlas Park. This was a chaotic mass melee; anyone who got wounded would swiftly get finished off by hordes of players hoping to steal the kill. It was pretty fun though, and I ended the 20 minute match with 28 kills, putting me in 4th place; the first place person had 39 kills.

After that the format switched to a 1-on-1 duel format. I saw several players switching alts; apparently level 4 PvP is serious enough business that some players have one alt for FFA and one for dueling! Perhaps this was smart though. The matches seemed totally randomized, I don't think it was Swiss style matchups or anything.

My first duel was against an ill/rad controller; he had Spectral Wounds, Blind, Radiant Aura and Radiation Infection. We fought on the Cargo Ship. I seemed to usually have the initiative on him and could narrowly kill him before he killed me; Defiance was a huge help in letting me shoot despite being held, since inspirations were forbidden. Radiation Infection made it very hard for me to hit him, I had to rely on an initial alpha strike before he got RI on me (it didn't seem feasible to run out of RI range) then shoot at him while debuffed until I got lucky and killed him. Each time I killed him, though, he would leave me wounded enough that he could kill me after I respawned, since I had no way to heal up. As a result we alternated killing each other until time ran out, which left us with a 4 to 4 draw.

My second duel was against a mind/elec dominator, also on the Cargo ship. He would hold me a lot but I would just kill him while held; without the debuff and self-heal that the controller had, the dominator was a lot easier for me to kill repeatedly. I won that match 13 to 6.

My third duel was against a FF/sonic defender on the office map; she had Personal Force Field, Force Bolt, Shriek and Scream, and her strategy seemed to be to stay in PFF while I ineffectively fired attacks at her. She even told me she was talking on vent to other players about other duels while sitting in PFF. This seemed kinda boring and I'm not sure why someone would choose this strategy (her bio was "I'm planning on using PFF to sleepwalk through the PvP event") but I guess it's valid. However, at one point I had nearly emptied my END bar shooting uselessly at her, and so she got cocky and popped out of PFF to try and shoot at me with sonic blasts. I managed to kill her while PFF was down, then I spent the rest of the match hiding from her (though, she didn't really try, since she raised PFF again and hid inside it), and so I won that match 1 to 0.

My fourth duel was against a sonic/cold corruptor on the monkey cage map. He had Scream, Shriek, Infrigidate and Snowstorm, and I spent about 90% of the duel with my movement speed and recharge floored from Infrigidate and Snowstorm. This was unbelievably painful. However, I channeled my hatred for being debuffed into blasting him repeatedly; and since he couldn't heal, with enough patience and determination I was able to kill him. He also could kill me with his sonic blasts, but I think I was debuffing his recharge some with my psy blasts too. And even when one of us was about to die we were determined to blast the other person to reduce their health so we could finish them off after respawning. Anyway, this was a grueling battle of attrition that, ironically, ended up as a 6 to 6 draw.

After four matches the tournament organizers cut to a single elimination round; wins were 3 points and draws were 1 point, so with 2 wins and 2 draws I had 8 points, which wasn't enough to advance to the semifinals. I tried to find out what build the semifinalists were; and of the four semifinalists, three were ice/rad controllers and one was a blaster (not sure which powersets). I didn't face any ice/rad controllers but from all indications, they must be very strong, even at level 4.

I did a bunch of farming the Cimerora walls with Mega (50 SS/elec brute); I'm normally totally against farming, but for some reason I find this to actually be fun to do. Part of this is probably because the Romans are actually fairly dangerous to Mega, so I have to keep alert and strategically pop inspirations to avoid dying; if I could sleepwalk through killing them, I'd probably find it less fun; though even with that, I found I could really only do it for about 10 to 20 minutes at a time before wanting to do something else. Even so I made about 4.5M infamy doing this and picked up 6 rare salvage, over a cumulative total of maybe an hour.

Mega also pitched in to help a 7-player Fallen LEGION villain team battle Lord Recluse as an AV and Statesman as a Hero, as the last part of the VEAT story arc. Statesman in particular was a real pain to fight. The team had lots of VEATs and a FF mastermind which kept our +DEF really high, but we had no debuffs to speak of, and as a result we found we could not kill Statesman quickly enough. Each time he got low on life, he would activate some power that made him immune to damage, then heal back up. I tanked Statesman for probably 10 minutes while we tried to bash away at him with little effect; unfortunately Statesman generates these lightning bolt AoEs that wiped out many of the squishier members of the team. Eventually, several team members decided to switch to rad, dark and kin corruptors to help debuff, while the rest of us kept Statesman busy; once a couple of these corruptors arrived on the scene, though, Statesman went down soon after.

After that we wanted a rematch, and we brought back one of the VEATs to do his instance of the Statesman mission. I switched to Lady Arachne (45 wolf spider) to add some debuffs too, and we had 2 darks and 1 rad for this attempt. This time Statesman dropped after like 30 seconds of fighting, leading one team member to say, "Wow, our previous team must've really sucked!" Which I'm not sure I agree with; capped DEF is pretty nice too. But yeah, debuffs are incredibly powerful.

Monday night I did a Sister Psyche TF on Triumph server, playing Flying Tiger (21 MA/will scrapper). Our team mix was:

psy/mental blaster
MA/SR scrapper
katana/will scrapper
fire/elec blaster
storm/nrg defender
stone/stone tanker
kin/elec defender
MA/will scrapper (me)

This was pretty melee heavy and DPS heavy, but it actually worked really well, as the team would descend on bad guys like a school of ravenous piranhas and rip them apart. Flying Tiger has "My kung fu is the best!" as her battlecry, which immediately caused the MA/SR scrapper to argue that HIS kung fu was the best. We debated this for some time, but considering Flying Tiger died 0 times and the MA/SR scrapper died like 5 times during this TF, I think it was proven that Flying Tiger's technique was superior. Anyway, our high DPS let us finish the TF pretty quickly, in 2hrs 22mins, getting Flying Tiger to level 25, and I got a level 25 Performance Shifter END/ACC recipe.

On Tuesday night, I did a Master of the Statesman TF attempt, mostly Sisterhood and friends, playing Spacegirl (49 mind/rad controller on Liberty). Our team mix was:

mind/FF controller
mind/rad controller (me)
kin/rad defender
bs/regen scrapper
ice/fire blaster
kat/SR scrapper
peacebringer
inv/SS tanker

I hadn't played Spacegirl in awhile, leaving her at 49, because I wanted her to hit level 50 doing something dramatic, and the STF certainly qualified. The team leader was advertising this as a Master of the Statesman TF, but considering we didn't have anywhere close to an optimal team, I didn't really expect we would succeed. We did a lot better than I expected, though, sailing through the first two missions easily, and even succeeding at the third mission against the Thorn Tree, which every MoSTF I've ever been on has failed at. I think we had better positioning against the Tree than my previous attempts, keeping the team very close together and mostly behind the Tree for most of the vine clearing; I did catch tree aggro at one point, though, and quickly hid behind a rock.

The fourth mission we were lucky to find the right Security Chief with the key relatively quickly, and beat up the various junior AVs pretty handily. When we fought Dr. Aeon, however, we had some sort of aggro issues and Dr. Aeon quickly smacked down several of the squishies before we got him back under control; I'm not absolutely sure, but I think we might've been incorrectly attacking one of the decoy Dr. Aeon EBs at first, which let the real Dr. Aeon AV tear up our back ranks. It happened pretty quickly so I'm not absolutely certain though.

Anyway, we recovered from that and moved on to the final mission, where I learned a new trick: apparently the patron AVs are vulnerable to sleep, of all things. Our first pull from the patron AVs we got both Ghost Widow and Scirocco, and I was able to reliably sleep Scirocco, which I found pretty unbelievable (I took some screen shots, will post one later). The kin spammed ID to keep Ghost Widow from mezzing our tank and we were able to clear all the patron AVs with no problems; I'm not sure Mako even got to use his elude power.

We went on to fight the Arachnos flyer, but mid-fight the flyer and all its minions suddenly despawned and respawned somewhere else (I guess it's on a timer to do that). We ran it down and killed it anyhow, then moved on to fight Lord Recluse.

Our team leader, the mind/FF, wanted to try tanking Lord Recluse, as he had a very tanky build; we had nothing to lose at that point so we let him. This totally didn't work, as Recluse was able to kill him through his force fields, though the controller claimed a moral victory for not insta-dying. (He's totally crazy, but he tries new things that are outside-the-box, which I think is really cool.) Next we had our invuln tanker tank Recluse, but we got to a bad start; no one was healing our tanker and I wasn't quick enough to debuff, so our tanker dropped and we had a team wipe. On our next try, though, I made sure to put RI on Lord Recluse right off the bat, then hovered near our tanker using Radiant Aura to keep his health topped off, pausing occasionally to drop EF on the control towers that the rest of the team was attacking. This worked a lot better and we were able to beat up all the towers and finally Lord Recluse. The team leader also wanted me to try using sleep on Lord Recluse, since all the AVs in this TF seem vulnerable to it; I found that while the yellow tower was up, it was almost impossible to hit Lord Recluse (combat spam said I had a 9% chance to hit). It did seem like if I hit him, it would momentarily sleep him -- but, while the green tower was up, the sleep would instantly break. This made sense because the green tower is feeding Lord Recluse heals. Not sure if we can exploit this info in some way, but it was good to know.

Anyway, we finished the STF in 1hr 45mins, and I got a Lysosome SHO as reward. Spacegirl hit level 50, which I think makes my 13th level 50, although she is my first level 50 controller.

I finished up on Tuesday night soloing a little with Kashira (12 ninj/ninj stalker); I accepted an invite to a 5 player pickup team and we did a mission that got Kashira to level 13, but then several team members (VEATs who had just unlocked their second costume) wanted to go to the tailor and spend a lengthy amount of time there, so I ended up dropping out, soloing a little, then logging off.

9/26/2008

Tuesday night I played Amethyst Star (31 human-form warshade on Protector) with an 8-player team of Demolition Girls SG; we did a lot of missions and got Amethyst to level 33, which let me take and 4-slot the Quasar power. I'm finding that Mire - Quasar - pop a blue - Stygian Circle is a pretty amazing combo that effectively lets me build up, nova, then completely refill my health and end.

After that I played Perfect Woman (39 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle) for one mission in Crey's Folly with a 6-player pickup team; it looked like the dps players were in the process of getting themselves killed when I entered the mission, but after I jumped in and started tanking and leading into fights, things went a lot better. Nothing really wrong with the team, but the sole defender wanted to log after the first mission, so the team fell apart like pickup teams sometimes do.

I finished Tuesday night making a newbie elec melee/willpower brute on Pinnacle and duo'd with a robo/dark MM up to level 7.

I started Wednesday night playing Kid Valkyrie (50 bs/regen scrapper on Triumph) and joining a RWZ raid on Triumph server. This raid was cleverly gathering forces just barely in range of the first pylon they wanted to kill, so periodically a new player would arrive at the gathering point with pylon aggro and the pylon would attack the raid and kill a few of the raiders; the raid leader would yell at the people who drew aggro onto the raid but I really think we simply needed to be mustering somewhere safer. I couldn't help but notice we had very, very few support characters at the raid and I mentioned this to the raid leader, but she still had us push on and begin attacking pylons with about 2 and a half teams. I saw we had deaths even against the pylons; based on that I figured attacking the mother ship itself was doomed to failure, so at that point I decided to drop out of the raid and do something less likely to be frustrating.

So I switched to playing Primadonna (31 sonic/kin corruptor on Liberty) and joined a Cap SF that was forming. We had 2 kin corruptors (including me), a traps corruptor, a brute, a widow, 2 stalkers and a mastermind. This team went pretty well, although we did have one team wipe on the mission where you lead a technician to a computer, from a big Longbow ambush that overran us. Finished the TF in 1hr 6mins, though I didn't get anything noteworthy.

After that I solo'd with Mega (50 SS/elec brute on Liberty) a little bit, bashing Romans on the walls of Cimerora for money (gained about 1.1M infamy and a Hamidon Goo), then played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) with a level 50 Sisterhood team for several missions (gained about 2.3M influence).

I also peeked in on Wentworths on Triumph server and found that Flying Tiger (my level 21 MA/will scrapper there) had successfully sold her level 20 knockback protection IO for 20M influence, which should cover her expenses for awhile.

Finished up Wednesday night playing Miss Molotov (29 fire/fire scrapper on Liberty), soloing missions in Croatoa to hit level 30 where I took Consume, since she seems to be an END hog. Right after she hit 30 there was a Katie TF recruiting, so I figured, what the heck, I'll join. We ended up starting with a 7-player team of 1 tanker, 1 thermal controller, 1 kin controller, 1 blaster, 1 scrapper (me), 1 emp defender and 1 peacebringer.

This Katie TF was plagued with problems; we were short 1 player of a full team, most of the team members were on the lower end of the 30-34 level range, and our blaster (who was also my mentor since she was at the max level) repeatedly went linkdead during the first mission against the 10 AVs. None of the support characters were really debuffy and the witches totally debuffed our ToHit with Hurricane and Lightning Cloud and stole all our END with elec attacks so our DPS was abysmal. We had a wipeout on Mary #9 and another wipeout on Mary #10, then we tried Mary #10 again and fought her for about 20 minutes before finally bringing her down. After Mary #10, though, the rest of the TF was pretty easy, so we finished the TF in 1hr 31mins, getting Miss Molotov to level 31; I got a level 34 Scirocco's Dervish Chance for Lethal recipe as reward.

Thursday night I played Mayday (20 blood widow on Liberty) on a 5-player LEGION SG team doing missions on Sharkhead Island. We did an Independence Port mayhem where we got to fight and defeat a Hero-level Aurora Borealis, then a whole bunch of Freakshow missions. We had 2 wipeouts from overaggroing too many Freaks, but overall did pretty well, til we ran into a Barracuda AV. Barracuda gave us a first team wipe because we simply ran into her by surprise, and unprepared, we got clobbered. Our second try against Barracuda we had our rad corruptor try to pull her with an anchored debuff; but Barracuda's alpha strike took out our rad, then she mopped up the rest of us. Third try we rushed her instead of pulling, which let the rad live long enough to land debuffs, and so we actually took her out. Mayday got to level 22 and took Foresight, which actually seems a very nice power (even more stacking +DEF). A friend also mentioned to me that he thought Mayday the Arachnos Widow was a reference to some Marvel character named Spider-Girl, who I had never heard of but is also sometimes called Mayday; it was an interesting coincidence...hope I don't get generic'd for that. It's pretty hard not to have a spider-themed costume as an Arachnos soldier.

Finished Thursday night playing a Lady Grey TF; the team leader asked for debuffs, so I played Yuki-Onna (49 ice/cold corruptor on Liberty). Our team mix was:

2 scrappers (one regen, one willpower)
stone tanker
ice/cold corruptor (me)
ill/emp controller
ice blaster
fire blaster
TA/archery defender

The team leader ran this as quick LGTF, stealthing everything possible. I actually thought it'd be quite hard to stealth a lot of the LGTF due to the high perception of Rikti Drones (I've seen lots of people die to drones trying to stealth missions in this), but this actually seemed to work well; the illusionist seemed particularly good at stealthing around. First mission, we got TP'd to Penelope Yin, freed her, then someone suicided her into mobs to intentionally fail the mission. Second mission the team got TP'd to each of the sets of Riders and annihilated each in turn; I tried to use Heat Loss to counteract Famine's END drain, and I think this helped, though our debuffs and high DPS also meant that Famine was very quickly vaporized each time. Third mission was also stealthed and intentionally failed by killing Infernia and Glacia; fourth mission we did pretty normally; fifth mission we got stealth/TP'd to the end room and easily took out Hro'tohz. Then we took out the 4 generators rather than fighting the Honoree. I asked why we were doing this, and apparently it was because the empath was AFK; since taking out generators spawns ambushes, I wondered if this meant we were purposely trying to get her killed, but I guess it was because we wanted the empath around during the last AV fight. Anyway things got really chaotic as Rikti ambushes started swarming in, and at some point our empath returned and someone pulled Honoree and we killed him while dodging the various other Rikti. Finished the TF in 1hr 11mins, which seemed very fast for a LGTF; I got a junky Sovereign Right: Acc/End recipe as reward. This was also my first run with Yuki-Onna after her last respec; she seems to burn a lot more END than before, probably because I added two Leadership toggles to her build and her attacks only get about 15% ENDRDX from the 4 Devastation/2 Thunderstrike slotting I put in them. I kinda like the powers she has now though, and did not miss Medicine Pool (which I dropped for Leadership Pool) as much as I thought I would.

9/22/2008

I played Mayday (13 widow) a lot on Thursday, Friday and Sunday, joining LEGION SG teams three times, and forming and leading one pickup villain team of my own; these all went pretty well. Most of these teams were very healer-light but had good +DEF from stacked maneuvers from VEATs and the occasional Force Field Generator from a trapper. This got Mayday up to level 20, and I picked up Spin, Tactical Training: Assault, Hurdle and Stamina for powers.

I did a Katie TF on Triumph server with Grey Wings (35 archery/fire blaster); the team was 2 controllers, 2 blasters, 1 tanker, 1 defender and 1 peacebringer. We had some trouble with END drain from the witches in the first mission but got through the TF in 47 mins; didn't get anything special from it though. Later in the weekend I also played Grey Wings on a Hess TF with Demolition Girls SG, with 3 scrappers, 1 blaster, a dark defender, and 2 controllers; we pretty easily finished that in 55 minutes.

I experimented a bit with farming the Romans guarding the walls in Cimerora, which I had heard could be lucrative. I tried this with both Mega (50 SS/elec brute) and Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper). Mega has 68% lethal RES from her elec armor + tough and still took fairly life threatening damage from the huge alpha strike the Romans could put out, though I was able to mitigate the damage with both Foot Stomp, and, interestingly, Power Sink (Mega was able to completely drain Roman minions of END with this power, which took a lot of fight out of them). Olivia Q has capped melee DEF and close to the cap on range DEF from IO sets and was not really threatened by the Romans at all, which mostly missed her; I was worried that stacked -DEF from their attacks would drag her down, but she seemed quite resistant to defense debuffs, probably from her SR passives. This is the exact opposite of what I would've expected; I thought the RES character would be fine and the DEF character would be struggling to stay alive. On the other hand, Mega did much, much more damage to the Romans and was able to kill them a lot faster than Olivia could. Even though Olivia had two AoEs (Dragon's Tail and Energy Torrent), Mega's Foot Stomp attacks did a lot more damage; this is partly because Mega is slotted for recharge and Olivia is slotted for defense, and partly because Mega's rage-o-meter was maxed out most of the time due to the nonstop attacks. I found that the combination of greater danger plus greater DPS made it more fun to fight Romans with Mega than with Olivia. I forgot to measure how much inf I got doing this, but Mega did pick up a Pangean Soil and both got a decent amount of level 50 generic recipes that are easily converted to cash.

Also on Thursday, I ended up applying to the PPD Hardsuit contest; I wrote a bit of text explaining why budgeting extra protection for our police officers (specifically, Police Woman) against superpowered criminals would be a good thing, but alas, I didn't win or even come close.

On Friday night I participated in the first couple runs of Steele Magnolia's 100 Times the Victor event, playing Mercy Beaucoup (30 emp/ice defender). The first run was 1 tanker, 3 defenders, 1 blaster, 1 controller, 1 scrapper, 1 warshade, and completed in 34 mins; the second run was the same except the scrapper switched to a second blaster. The second run had one wipeout on one of the last Mary AVs but still finished in 37 mins. I didn't get anything significant as recipe rewards, but Mercy did level up to 32, where I took Adrenaline Boost. I didn't have the focus needed to do ten Katie TFs in a row, so I bowed out after the second one to do something else; I think that team did go on to finish all ten TFs, much later that night.

I ended up switching to Parapsychic (4 psy/fire blaster) on Protector server to join the Level 4 PvP event there. Another player complimented me on Parapsychic's costume (a red and black raver outfit), which was nice. I had missed the first couple matches, but the first one I played was a 17-player free for all on the Steel Canyon map. This was mostly a killsteal-fest, on which I got 7 kills, but the winner came in with 15 kills.

My second match was a team-vs-team game; but instead of kickball, the event organizer assigned teams. This ended up with a fairly lopsided 6-vs-7 match, with me on the team of 6 with only a dark defender for support, while the team of 7 had 2 rads (including Liberty's top PvPer) and lots of damage. We fought on the Outbreak map, and my team put in a valiant effort and I tried to call for people to focus fire on the enemy rads as much as possible. But the enemy team was really with it, and after the first couple minutes they secured a solid hold on the center of the map, defeating my team in detail as we each respawned and rushed them in ones and twos. I tried calling for our team to regroup, but it just wasn't happening. We ended up losing 68 to 9, though I did get 5 of those 9 kills. Unfortunately some of my team members were rather bad sports about this, complaining bitterly about the team assignments before logging off.

We did do a third match, though, with the people who were remaining; this ended up being a 7 player FFA on the cargo ship map, and I did manage to win this with 18 kills (second place got 16). Blasters and corruptors seemed to dominate the level 4 FFAs, at least from what I've seen so far; defiance and scourge both are really good for that format.

Finished Friday night playing Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender on Liberty) on a 6-player team of Sisterhood with some pickup people running level 50 missions in Peregrine Island. We swept clean a map of high level Banished Pantheon, giving me pretty nice progress towards the BP mask badge; I also got a Prophecy drop along the way.

On Saturday I solo'd Jaguar Goddess (14 claws/will stalker) through a King's Row mayhem and some newspaper missions that got her to level 15.

I also helped a friend move 2 Coercive Persuasion purple recipes from one alt to another, and in return she helped me move a Luck of the Gambler +7.5% rchg and a few other recipes from one of my alts to Police Woman. I had a Coercive Persuasion (Confuse/Rchg/Acc) recipe just lying around that I had not ever gotten around to making (my controller has been idling at level 49 since I want her to hit level 50 while doing an STF or something equally dramatic) so I decided to just give that to her as well, since they're so much better if you have more of the set.

I crafted a lot of level 35 IOs for use by Mercy Beaucoup (who had just hit 32), and as a result Police Woman ended up getting the Arms Dealer, Sniper, Major General and Walks the Earth crafting badges.

On Sunday I played Mercy Beaucoup on another Katie TF, with 4 defenders, 2 blasters and 2 controllers. This team was extremely disciplined and stayed tightly together during the first mission, benefiting from many buffs and mowing down Mary Macomber and her cohorts. Finished that one in 36 minutes, getting Mercy to level 33 and receiving a Neuronic Shutdown Chance for Psi damage recipe as reward; haven't quite figured out what to do with that but I'm sure I must have some character that would use it.

Late on Sunday night I played Virtual Girl (10 rad/sonic defender) on a Positron TF organized on LBx. Our team mix was:

fire/mental blaster
rad/sonic defender (me)
MA/SR scrapper
arch/nrg blaster
fire/nrg blaster

One of the blasters complimented me on Virtual Girl's bio (I wrote a story connecting her with Crey and the mysterious Doctor), which was nice. I was a bit worried about being the only support character on this team, but the other players were pretty good and our high DPS served us really well, letting us breeze through the many Defeat All missions; and a couple people had Superspeed and veteran Team Teleport, letting us stealth the missions that could be stealthed. We did have one wipeout during the Rollister mission when an ambush caught us while the team was strung out, but otherwise the TF went really well, finishing in only 2hrs 55mins, which is really fast for a Positron TF. This got Virtual Girl to level 16, and I took Combat Jumping, Super Jump and Hurdle at 12, 14 and 16, as well as upgrading to DO enhancements.

9/18/2008

On Monday night I started off playing Grey Wings (35 archery/fire blaster on Triumph) on a Katie Hannon TF with 2 controllers, 2 defenders, 2 scrappers and 2 blasters. We had a good mix of DPS and support and blazed through the TF in 27 minutes; I didn't get anything particularly good as reward though.

I did some IO crafting on Liberty villain side, then switched to Virtual Girl (8 rad/sonic defender on Liberty) to join a pickup team for some missions in King's Row. We had 2 team wipes due to overaggroing multiple large groups of Council, but managed to get past that and to complete an Atlas safeguard. I also wrote her a new bio connecting her to 'The Doctor' (from The Doctor's Ally), which I thought would be a cool back story. Virtual Girl got to level 10, but Comcast was freaking out on me on Monday night and before I was able to train, I totally lost Internet connectivity for the night. I thought it was maybe ripples on the net from Hurricane Ike, but I'm really far from where the hurricane hit, so that's just a guess.

Tuesday night I started playing Perfect Woman (39 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle). Perfect Woman's SG on Pinnacle was undergoing some heavy drama due to one of the SG officers flipping out and trying to kick everyone else out of the SG, and as a result there was a big SG meeting to discuss things. I was really tempted to say, Screw all this drama, I'm taking my ball and going back to my home server. But the other, non-crazy SG officers seemed so earnest about fixing things and moving forward, that I decided to give it a chance.

After that, I switched back to Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) and joined the Arena kickball that was going on. In the first match, I was the only blaster! Despite this, I got picked second to last anyhow (boo!). My team was one blaster (me) and 4 defender/controllers, versus a team of 5 defender/controllers, and I think our higher DPS caused us to win, 6 to 0, of which I got 3 kills. After that, I think half the players immediately switched to a fire blaster alt.

Second round I was on a team of 3 blasters and 3 defender/controllers fighting a 5 person team on the cargo ship map, and we won pretty handily; I forget the exact score, but I managed to get 5 kills.

Third round some joker nominated me to be a team captain, and the other team captain was a PvP fire/nrg blaster, AND he got to pick first, which put me at a big disadvantage to start with. After drafting an empath and one of the other fire blasters, I decided to try and draft all the rads to shut the other team out of debuffs; this sort of worked, because I got all 3 rads (ending up with 3 rads, 2 blasters and an emp) and the other team ended up with none. But it ended up not working out in practice; we played it out on the Steel Canyon map, and the other team, with 3 fire blasters, had far better DPS than us even without any rad debuffs, and so they repeatedly were able to damage spike us out. Lost that match like 15 to 41; I got 3 kills.

Fourth round we did a 7 vs 7 on the Perez Park map, and my team was 3 blasters and 4 support types, but somehow we never quite clicked; lost that match 8 to 35, I got only 1 kill.

Fifth round was down to 4 vs 4 in Steel Canyon. My team was 2 blasters, 2 controllers; unfortunately the other team kept us totally disrupted the whole match and we were never really able to focus fire on anyone, losing that one 5 to 19. Embarrassingly, I didn't get any of the kills, the other blaster (who was quite good) got them all.

Sixth round we had too few to really do a valid kickball draft, so someone just assigned teams in a way she thought fair. This put me on a 3 player team of me (AR/dev blaster), an emp/nothing defender, and a grav/storm controller; our opposition was a fire/nrg blaster, ill/emp controller and ice/rad controller. This did not seem an especially fair matchup to me, but it's my own fault for being an AR blaster and not a fire blaster, so I resolved to try it. We fought 3 vs 3 on the cargo ship map, and I was nominated target caller. Roughly the first half of the match my team was kinda disoriented and not really "with it", getting beat up by the other team, but around the midpoint of the match we got it together and turned the tide. I started to get the hang of relentlessly targeting the enemy emp whenever possible, instantly switching away when she entered hibernate, then switching right back as soon as hibernate ended. The grav/storm actually pinned two of their players in a corner somehow with hurricane and slowed them enough that they couldn't get out before I killed them. We ended up still losing the match, 5 to 7, of which I got 4 kills, but I felt like we were really working together better in the last half of the match. I think my team's empath felt that way too, because she instantly demanded a rematch, with the same teams.

So my seventh round we again were an AR/dev, emp/nothing, grav/storm versus fire/nrg, ill/emp and ice/rad. This time we met on the Perez Park map, and my team was at the top of our game. Something I noticed here was that the grav/storm was actually phasing out the enemy fire blaster about half the time; I think this really helped, plus our own emp was very slippery and able to not die while keeping us alive and buffed. This left me free to keep steady pressure on the enemy emp (who really is a nice person otherwise, but sorry, she had to die here), occasionally switching to the enemy rad when their emp was dead or hibernating. My web grenades plus the grav/storm's various slowdown effects really seemed to be effective here too (what with no kin around). I thought I was keeping the enemy emp down enough that probably people didn't have Clear Mind, so I threw an occasional Beanbag into my attack chain to see if I could stun someone, but I'm not sure if that helped any. In any case, my team won the match 8 to 0 (of which I got 6 kills) which left me utterly amazed. Anyway, kickball was a great time.

After kickball I joined a friend who had just started a new toon on a 6 player Sisterhood team; it was me, my friend and another friend who was 4-boxing the rest of the team (something I could never do - I tried 2-boxing once but I'm really bad at multitasking so I played both toons less than half as good). Police Woman is actually pretty good when exemped to low levels, so I exemped down to level 4 and we did a couple door missions in Atlas Park which got my friend up to level 6.

Finished up on Tuesday night playing Police Woman on a Master of the Statesman TF attempt that was recruiting from LBx. Most of the team seemed to know each other, so it looked like I was just a pickup to fill one of their last two slots. Our team mix was:

sonic/psy defender
claw/regen scrapper
stone/stone tanker
ill/emp controller
fire/kin controller
AR/dev blaster (me)
elec/elec blaster
sonic/dark defender

The team leader invited me to a vent server that most of the team was on, and they all seemed pretty nice. We didn't have a rad, but the sonic defenders were quite effective at buffing/debuffing. The TF went really well up to the treespec; everyone was being pretty paranoid about the tree initially, but while killing vines we were getting respawns and I think we got a bit sloppy rushing to kill vines and one of the defenders got spiked to death by the thorn tree. By that point it was too late to restart and so we pushed on through the rest of the STF, though people got a lot lazier about buffs and aggro control, so we had several more deaths before the TF was done, finishing in 2hrs 14mins and getting me a Stupefy: chance for knockback recipe. (An SHO is probably on-the-average more valuable, but there are lots of recipes I still want and few HOs that I still need.) The team leader did teach me a couple new tricks, though; apparently when you have thorn tree aggro, there is a visual cue in that the ground under your toon becomes prickly-looking, so that can be a warning that you need to go hide. Also, he had me pull the patron AVs in the last mission, using the shoot them/TP the puller trick; he asked me to pull them from a particular spot, due west of the AV-lineup, instead of south towards the team. This theoretically pulls the AV away from the other 3 AVs instead of perpendicularly, so will be more likely to result in a single pull. Using this technique, my first pull was Ghost Widow (solo; we kited her around a bit before immobing and shooting her to death), my second pull was Scirocco/Captain Mako (and Mako either didn't have time to elude or our triple tactics was enough to get past it), and the tanker just grabbed Black Scorpion at the end.

Wednesday night, I started off playing Mayday (11 arachnos widow on Liberty) on a 3-player team with Fallen LEGION SG, doing missions in Cap au Diable and Port Oakes, which got Mayday to level 13. I picked Lunge at level 12; it seems a decent attack so far.

After that I played Kid Valkyrie (50 bs/regen scrapper on Triumph) for half of a RWZ raid, picking up about fifty Vanguard merits. I also bought the Cyborg booster pack and peeked at the various cyborg costumes in the tailor, but haven't used any of the costume pieces yet; I do have a couple tech heroes that totally would use some of them though. Regarding the whole booster pack marketing plan, I personally have no problem with throwing an extra $10 at ncsoft every now and then in return for some relatively minor perks; I get so much enjoyment out of CoH that I feel it is well worth rewarding them. The extra costume pieces are a plus, of course.

Finished up Wednesday night on a pickup Imperious TF. The team leader asked me to play a healer, and I offered to play Paris Holiday (41 fire/thermal corruptor); he asked, does thermal have a heal? "Need a healer" and "does thermal heal?" should have both been warning signs, but I like pickup teams so I went ahead with it anyway. Our team mix was:

necro/dark MM
claw/regen scrapper
plant/thorn dominator
fire/axe tanker
fire blaster
nrg blaster
night widow
fire/therm corr (me)

I started off a bit worried since I wasn't sure that a thermal corruptor plus a dark mastermind was enough support to win the ITF. Our fire blaster disconnected in the first mission and never came back, which hurt our DPS quite a bit. The team did seem to appreciate how much the thermal shields helped them against the Romans; we seemed weak against the negative damage inflicted by the nictus we ran into though. The mastermind had a nicotine fit or something during the second mission and suddenly AFK'd to take a smoke; I tried to warn him that there would be ambushes, but he must've already been gone. Sure enough, the next ambush steamrollered the mastermind; someone cracked, "Wow, smoking really IS bad for your health." Ten minutes later the MM returned, though, and said it had been totally worth it.

Lag in the third mission, with the Valley of Lag Death, was pretty bad even though our tanker pulled the generals down to us; the dom and the night widow both disconnected and reconnected. One was my boss so this actually got me killed in a fight, but I got better. Anyway, with the team down one player already and other players laggy or disconnected, we found it slow going to get through this mission. It was a struggle to break the Phalanx computer (several of us died to robot aggro, including me) but after that the two AVs were no problem.

In the last mission we decided to jump directly to Romulus's courtyard, and after clearing a little space we attacked the AVs. Our initial plan was a simple frontal assault on Romulus. We were down a player and didn't have a ton of debuffs, so our DPS had trouble really denting Romulus. I spammed Heat Exhaustion and Melt Armor and tried to keep Forge on the remaining blaster, the widow and the scrapper; it looked like the MM was dropping dark debuffs on Romulus too. None of my debuffs are perma, and I could see Romulus's health drop when the debuffs are on, then rise again (from healing) when the debuffs were down. I think we must've fought Romulus for 10 minutes before we dropped him the first time. After that we were confident that the next Romulus should be easier to kill; but we see-sawed his health up and down for what must've been 15 minutes. At one point it looked like we got him down to 10% health, but then he clawed his way back up to 100% health again. During this fight I really had to watch my END usage; I needed to maintain buffs on people, keep debuffs on the AV, and still attack to do damage, and we had no END-recovery buffs at all so I was gasping for breath within the first few minutes. I cut back on which powers I was using after awhile; I felt like I absolutely had to keep Heat Exhaustion and Melt Armor on the AV, Forge on my DPSers and Assault toggle on the team if we wanted to kill the AV at all. I decided to slack on buffing Fire Shield (smash/lethal resist) on everyone except the tank, though I kept buffing Plasma Shield for negative resist due to all the stray nictus that were attacking us, and I cut my attack chain down to only Fire Blast/Blaze. I still ran out of END a few times and had to re-activate Assault.

Anyway, after 15 minutes of fighting the second Romulus, Romulus was back to full health, and we were close to despair. At that point the blaster suggested we try and pull Romulus away from the nictus AVs to avoid heals. I've heard this tactic suggested before on previous ITF teams but I've always been skeptical of it, but most of my other teams apparently had more DPS and/or more debuff so it wasn't necessary. The tanker started slowly moving away from Romulus and did successfully separate Romulus from the remaining Nictus AVs; and within 2 minutes of us doing that, the second Romulus dropped. Someone else said "We should've done that a LONG time ago!" and everyone agreed. We wiped out the remaining Romuluses and then killed off a lot of minions to complete the TF. Total TF time was 2hrs 48mins. Paris Holiday got to 42 and received a level 43 Luck of the Gambler +7.5% recharge as reward (yay! it's so hard to get those on villain side). I think the Night Widow also got a LoTG +7.5% recharge, making it a really lucky TF overall.

9/15/2008

When I logged on Friday night, someone was calling on LBx for villains to come to RV, and I'm a sucker so I brought April Fool (50 thug/TA MM) to try some PvP. No other villains seemed interested in helping, so I found myself solo against various fire blasters (I saw at least 3 but I think only 2 were working as a team). I managed to drop one of these fire blasters who got a little overconfident, but I got defeated at least 3 times. After awhile I decided multiple fire blasters was just too anti-mastermind an environment for April to do well, so I switched to Yuki-Onna (48 ice/cold corruptor) to try my luck with cold debuffs. I did score another kill (with some help from Arachnos NPCs) but then repeatedly got flattened by one particular fire blaster, one of the PvP regulars. She had the DPS to drop me in a split second (I got hit repeatedly by nasty Apocalypse procs) and my cold debuffs didn't really seem to slow her down enough, and any time I actually had the edge against her she'd drop into Hibernate, then escape after Hibernate ended.

Eventually I gave up on RV and Yuki-Onna joined a pickup team in Grandville. My fire blaster opponent (who actually is on my friends list) switched to a thermal corruptor and LK'd to me while we helped the pickup team battle the full roster of the Vindicators. This got Yuki-Onna to level 49.

Later that weekend, my pvp experiences inspired me to respec Yuki-Onna; I dropped Medicine for Leadership (it never felt like I had time to Aid Self while I was being blasted, and not having enough perception seemed a major contributor to heroes getting the drop on me instead of vice versa) and I brought Freeze Ray and Snowstorm into my build (I previously avoided Freeze Ray because I figured everyone would have Clear Mind or break frees, and Snowstorm because it would aggro NPCs, but I'm starting to think I may need them). I dropped Frostwork (too often I'm on a team where the brute or tank is already HP capped) but kept the other two cold shields (despite liking PvP, I like buffing too). I also took all my Decimation IOs out of Ice Bolt and Ice Blast; I had collected 3 Decimation for each of these, but never could find or buy enough Decimation recipes on villain side to make a set of 5 (for the +6.25% recharge bonus) for either one. Instead I slotted 4 Devastation IOs and 2 Thunderstrike IOs into each of Ice Bolt and Ice Blast; this was expensive, but at least more attainable than Decimation sets, gave me decent global DMG and HP bonuses. Good recipes are hard to get on red side, so I left a bunch of powers with empty slots for now (so Yuki is sorta unplayable at the moment), and put a lot of standing bids for desirable recipes on the Black Market in hopes of getting recipes to slot later.

Also on Friday night, I played Vathia (11 fire/ice blaster) with a 6 player team of Demolition Girls SG running missions in King's Row, Skyway City and Perez Park. We played for quite awhile, getting Vathia to 16 (I took Combat Jumping, Aid Self and Build Up for powers) and we picked up the Spelunker badge along the way. I also lucked into finding a level 10 Karma KB protection recipe somewhere, which is really cool; I'm thinking I'll try to slip it into Police Woman's build next time I respec her.

I had Mystery Girl (35 ff/nrg defender) solo her aura mission and I added auras to a couple of her costumes, then did a Katie TF with a 5 controller, 3 defender team. We were very safe but it took 44 minutes; I got a fairly worthless Force Feedback (Rech/End) recipe.

I played Mercy Beaucoup (29 emp/ice defender) on a Moonfire TF which exemped her to level 28. Our team mix was:

dark/dark tanker
plant/thermal controller
emp/rad defender
plant/storm controller
nrg/nrg blaster
ice/fire blaster
emp/ice defender (me)

The other empath was really good and with both of us spamming Fortitude and the thermal using fire shields, we were in really good shape. I had trouble deciding whether to spread Fortitude out, to be on most of the team, or to double Fortitude a few people; I ended up Fortituding the two blasters (giving them double-fort for much of the TF) and the other empath (since, why not, he can blast a little). We had no trouble with the TF and completed it in 1hr 55mins. Mercy got the Silver Bullet badge and a level 29 Luck of the Gambler +7.5% recharge, which is especially wonderful for being so low level (pretty sure the +7.5% recharge is treated like a set bonus when exemping). Haven't slotted it yet, but I'm...hoarding it....

From that TF Mercy went into a Sky Raiders respec, with a team mix of:

fire/nrg blaster
fire/fire blaster
inv/SS tanker
emp/ice defender (me)
peacebringer
AR/dev blaster
emp/nrg defender
ill/emp controller

We pretty easily handled the respec trial in 1hr 15mins and Mercy got to level 30 (taking Absorb Pain as a power) and got a level 34 Decimation (Acc/Dmg/Rchg) recipe, which is not bad at all.

I spent some time on Triumph server this weekend, playing Flying Tiger (15 MA/will scrapper on Triumph server), first on a Synapse TF, then on a Positron TF, both with the Demolition Girls SG. This is really the wrong order to do them in, strictly speaking, but was just the order they happened in.

Synapse had a team of:

TA/archery defender
MA/will scrapper (me)
plant/kin controller
elec/nrg blaster
emp/psy defender
storm/nrg defender

As the only melee I became de facto tanker despite being at the min level for the TF and SK'd up, so I rushed into lots of hordes of clockwork. Being pre-stamina and pre-quick recovery, I was really choking for END, especially with clockworks using electrical attacks to drain END; I ended up begging the stormy to keep O2 Boost on me for the protection against END drain. We did have a wipeout during the first mission due to an unexpected patrol, and the empath disconnected during the second mission and never returned, but we otherwise got through the TF with no problems. We defeated Babbage along the way with the help of some other heroes who showed up. This got Flying Tiger to level 20, and I took Hurdle, Rise to the Challenge and Quick Recovery as powers. (Strictly speaking, I don't need Hurdle since I took Quick Recovery instead of Stamina, but I am just really used to having Swift and Hurdle on all my characters, so I feel debuffed if I don't have them.) I also found a level 20 Steadfast Protection KB protection recipe, which seemed like gravy after the other recipes I'd already gotten that weekend. This was on Triumph server and I had no real use for it there, so I crafted it and threw it on Wentworths hoping to get a big cash influx from selling it.

Flying Tiger also joined a pickup team fighting Banished Pantheon in a mission in Talos Island which got her to 21, then the next day played on a Positron TF with a team mix of:

ice/stone tanker
ice/fire tanker
cold/elec defender
fire/nrg blaster
fire/fire blaster
MA/will scrapper (me)
ice/SS tanker

With 3 ice tankers, I was purely DPS. We had no "healer" per se, but cold shields made us really hard to hit, especially the ice tankers, and my natural regen from willpower kept me going just fine. We did have one wipeout during the Rollister mission due to aggroing multiple groups of CoT, but otherwise sailed through the TF in 3hrs 31mins.

I played Mayday (8 widow on Liberty) on a couple different pickup teams in Port Oakes, clawing her way up to level 11, and also played Virtual Girl (8 rad/sonic defender on Liberty) on a pickup team in the Hollows that got her to level 9.

I solo'd Jaguar Goddess (13 claw/will stalker on Liberty) for a bit, getting the Plague Carrier badge and Super Jump at level 14, then duo'd part of Seer Marino's story arc with a dominator. We had one wipeout after freeing Wretch from confinement and getting mad aggro from angry Arachnos; the bad guys defeated both the player characters, but then Wretch (who is a major butt kicker) beat up ALL the bad guys that ambushed us, all on his own. We had to hospital then run back to lead Wretch out.

9/12/2008

A round up of my activities this week (warning, fairly long):

Last Friday I played a newbie fire/ice blaster (Vathia, an alien girl) on Liberty with a 7 player team of Demolition Girls SG. We had a sort of elemental powers theme going on, with everyone taking elemental-related power sets; I pretty quickly determined this meant we had no healing to speak of (a stormy with no O2 boost was the closest thing to support we had) which drove me to take Aid Other when I hit level 6, which I think helped some. We did radio missions in King's Row, finishing up when Vathia reached level 11. I had a basic attack chain already (the first 3 fire blast powers plus chilblain seemed plenty of attacks even without using veteran attacks) so I got Swift at 8 and Hurdle at 10.

After that I played Paris Holiday, a socialite in prison uniform and 38 fire/thermal corruptor, as an SK on an Imperious TF set to Unyielding difficulty. Our team mix was:

stone/stone brute
3 blasters (one was archery and another fire)
robo/traps MM
fire/thermal corruptor (me)
ice/dark corruptor
ill/kin controller

For some reason we just weren't working together well, with the team frequently getting strung out or having poor aggro control, and all the squishies including myself died a lot. I felt kinda bad about this since I was the nominal "healer" for the team but I just couldn't keep up with the damage we were taking. We had a total wipeout in the third mission against the Phalanx computer, then muddled our way through the rest of the ITF, finishing in 2hrs 1min with about 52 team deaths (ouch). Paris did hit level 40 though.

On Saturday I played Helen Highwater, a seldom-played 12 storm/psy defender on Triumph server, on a Positron TF. Our team mix was:

DB/regen scrapper
storm/psy defender (me)
ill/rad controller
dark/axe tanker
inv/SS tanker
MA/SR scrapper

The controller confused a lot of enemies, which was noticably helpful, and the team was pretty good overall. We did have two team wipeouts in two different Vahzilok missions due to overaggro, but Vahz are qutie nasty, so this isn't too bad for the level we were. Finished the TF in 3hrs 11mins, which is decent time for a 6-player Positron, and Helen got to level 16.

I also played Kid Valkyrie (50 bs/regen scrapper on Triumph), mostly soloing RWZ missions with the goal of gaining merits for the Talsorian broadsword, which I eventually got enough merits to unlock; and it looks very cool. I also slotted a LotG +7.5% recharge in her Hover power (I know Hover isn't really considered a good melee power, but a flying, winged, sword-wielding scrapper just looks awesome) which brought Kid Valkyrie's global recharge from +25% to +32.5% (more with Hasten up) and got her the third set bonus for LotG, +1.13 HPs, raising her max HP from 1636 to 1650.

Played Mercy Beaucoup (28 empathy/ice defender on Liberty) as an SK on a 3-player LEGION SG team fighting Nemesis for a bit, getting her to level 29.

Played April Fool (50 thug/TA MM on Liberty) on a 5 player villain team that took down an AV level Dr. Aeon.

I did an Imperious TF on Triumph, playing Tera Watt (50 ff/elec defender) with Demolition Girls SG; our team mix was

claw/SR scrapper
ice/nrg blaster
AR/dev blaster
archery/elec blaster
FF/elec defender (me)
kin/sonic defender
will/SS tanker
dark/dark defender

This ITF went very smoothly. Against the Phalanx computer, I got to use Force Bubble to push away the hordes of 5th Column robots; not sure if this actually helped since we were so hard to hit anyway, but it sure felt good! Finished that TF in 1hr 40mins, then immediately swung into another Imperious TF on Liberty, playing Paris Holiday (40 fire/thermal corruptor) with Sisterhood; the team for that TF was:

kin/dark defender
db/dark scrapper
inv/nrg tanker
will tanker
spine/dark scrapper
fire/thermal corruptor (me)
fire blaster
robo/dark MM

This ITF was a lot more troubled, squeaking through the first mission then having disagreements over whether to pull or rush the valley of lag in the third mission. I seemed to be drawing mad aggro on this TF, dying often enough that another player commented on how much the Romans seemed to "like" me; maybe I was using Melt Armor too liberally, that actually seemed to draw more aggro than Fireball. We had a lot of deaths through the whole TF; maybe we needed more support, or maybe I'm just bad at being a "healer". Sigh. Ended up finally taking Rise of the Phoenix (the thermal rez) at 41; I had always put it off before since it seemed such a defeatist power, but we seemed to need it. In the final mission, we were quite disorganized fighting Romulus; some people were insisting we should pull away the healing Nictus and somehow this ended up with the tankers fighting the Nictus no one actually tanking Romulus himself, so he went on a squishy-killing rampage. We had two team wipes in this fashion. Our invuln tanker accidentally (really! it was someone I know, not a pickup) left Cimerora causing her to be dropped from the TF and leaving the willpower tanker unSK'd. We tried sniping the Nictus healer with range attacks but the damage just got healed right back up. At that point we gave up on the TF and called it a night. I hate to give up on a TF, but it just wasn't happening for us, so it seemed the right thing to do.

I splurged on another 5 character slots and started a newbie Arachnos widow; I got the name Mayday, which I thought was great for a villain. I gave her a blue and white widow uniform that looks a little on the heroic side, but I like the color contrast and wanted something different than the standard villain colors of black and red. Mostly solo'd and duo'd her up to level 8.

Started a newbie elec/nrg blaster on Pinnacle also, naming her "Perfect Girl" (to be the sidekick of my other Pinnacle alt, Perfect Woman). I joined a 7 player team that did a bunch of King's Row radio missions that rapidly got Perfect Girl to level 9. Not sure how charmed I am with electric blast yet, so I might not stick with this alt.

I did all three villain respecs on Sunday, all with the same team (well, same players, the characters changed) that was mostly drawn from LBX channel. The low level one I played Primadonna (30 sonic/kin corruptor) on a team of 3 MMs, 3 corruptors, 1 crab and 1 brute, which easily smashed the first respec trial in 52mins, getting Primadonna to level 31 and gaining me a very nice level 33 Mako's Bite (Acc/End/Rchg) recipe. I like level 33 recipes, so I should totally do more 1st respecs.

The mid level respec, I played Lady Arachne (43 wolf spider) on a team of 2 doms, 1 crab, 2 brute, 2 MMs, 1 wolf. One of the MMs quit early on and the other was a FF so we actually had no healing to speak of on this trial (aside from Medicine Pool), but we had enough +DEF that it didn't matter. I ended up using Lady Arachne's cloaking device power to stealth/TP the team to the final room of the respec; I was a bit nervous about this because Lady Arachne doesn't have superspeed or a stealth IO to stack with her cloaking device, but this actually worked quite well. This gave me the feeling that maybe bane spider cloaking device is better than dev blaster cloaking device, which City of Data seems to confirm (+50 PvE stealth for the bane spider, +35 PvE stealth for the blaster). Lady Arachne hit level 44 on this respec and got a level 43 Luck of the Gambler (Def/End/Rchg) recipe. This made her high enough to play on the level 44-50 third respec also, on a team of 3 MMs, 1 crab, 1 wolf, 1 brute, 1 kin corr and 1 widow, which I also got to stealth/TP the team on; didn't get anything noteworthy as recipe reward though.

Monday night, I played Perfect Woman (39 will/SS tanker on Pinnacle) and finally figured out why Levantera wouldn't give her the "Welcome to Vanguard" mission. It turns out Perfect Woman still had Montague Castanella's story arc for joining the Midnight Squad still open; although she had unlocked Cimerora and even done the ITF, she had never done the "Talk to Imperious" mission that is the last part of Montague's story arc, and completing that mission let her talk to Levantera and join Vanguard. So apparently the story arcs that unlock Vanguard and the Midnight Squad are mutually exclusive; I had no idea.

I also played Primadonna (31 sonic/kin corr on Liberty) on a Cap au Diable SF with 2 brutes, 2 corrs, stalker and a widow. We had a wipeout in the second mission against the Attack Leader due to aggroing everything in sight around him (which is pretty easy to do in this mission), but otherwise did fine, finishing the SF in 44 mins; I got a Gaussian's (Rech/End) recipe for my trouble.

Did a Lady Grey TF on Invincible difficulty as April Fool (50 thug/TA MM on Liberty). Our team mix was:

kin controller
emp controller
fire/ice tanker
cold defender
thug/TA MM (me)
fire/dark brute
archery blaster
warshade

The LGTF went pretty well except for during the 3rd mission, where the team leader wanted us to find and gank Infernia and Glacia in order to speed past the mission. Our team ended up getting TP'd deep into the mission to clobber the group guarding Infernia, then our stealthers had an awful lot of trouble finding Glacia or something, repeatedly dying while stealthing and running back from the hospital. The nonstealthy part of the team got kind of antsy and started clearing out the deep parts of the mission while the stealthing was going on, then finally after quite a long time one of the stealthers found Glacia really close to the mission door (I swear she must not spawn until after Infernia is found or something) so we were able to get her too. The rest of the LGTF went fine though, and we finished in 2hrs 41mins.

Played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) in Recluse's Victory for awhile, duoing with a tanker who was there working on getting pillboxes. An energy/ninjitsu stalker would occasionally blitz us, hoping to catch us unawares; I was too slippery for him to nail, but he was quite slippery too and I was never able to kill him either. The stalker did manage to gank my tanker partner at one point, though the tanker claimed he was afk at the time.

Did a Katie TF with Mystery Girl (35 ff/nrg defender on Liberty) on a team with 4 defenders, 2 controllers, 1 blaster and 1 tanker. A teammate complimented me on Mystery Girl's costume, which she said was "too cute". I also learned exactly what it meant to "knock" in the first mission (something I hadn't ever done before); apparently you just run up to the door on the hill and witches start pouring out. PFF was handy for that! I was a bit worried our DPS would be too low with this team mix, but it wasn't too bad and we finished in 41 minutes. Got a junky Edict of the Master (Dmg) recipe, but also a nice Magical Conspiracy salvage.

I played Maitresse (35 necro/storm MM on Liberty) on an 8-player villain team doing paper missions in St Martial. We had a couple wipeouts against Malta and one wipeout against Carnies, but overall did okay, getting Maitresse to level 36.

I finished up on Monday burning one of my new character slots to make Samurai-ko, a newbie katana/willpower scrapper on Liberty. I gave her a costume of bright red and gold samurai armor (tried a few different color schemes but this seemed to be the most striking) and she's surprisingly fun, even solo, hacking her way up to level 6.

Tuesday night I spent playing Amethyst Star (29 warshade on Protector) as a sidekick on an 8-player Demolition Girls SG, mostly fighting Crey at around level 37. We were pretty support light (a cold defender with cold shields for support, but no real healing) and I got a lot of practice using the Stygian Circle power to self-heal. Got to level 30, where I took the warshade Cloak of Darkness power, which actually looks rather neat.

Wednesday night, I started playing Police Woman in Recluse's Victory, but I almost immediately got beat up by two different fortunatas that I encountered there. Running from them didn't seem to work and they were pretty easily able to get through PFF (some of those psy abilities just ignore defense); no other heroes were around and I didn't feel like I had much of a shot against them, so I left and joined a 7-player Sisterhood team which was doing radio missions in Peregrine Island to help a defender get to level 50.

After that I switched to Triumph server, first playing Grey Wings (35 archery/fire blaster) on a Katie TF with 1 tanker, 2 defenders, 1 controller, 2 scrappers and 2 blasters, knocking the TF out in 35 minutes. After that I played Alice Slaughter (24 DB/will brute) on a pickup Cap SF; forgot to write down our team composition, but it was an 8-player team. We had a partial team wipe on the mission where you lead a tech to the computer, but I managed to run in to grab the tech and drag him to the objective while under heavy fire. In the final mission, with 8 players we felt like we could fight Infernal and Bat'Zul straight up, and we beat them both. We finished the Cap SF in 1hr 18mins, and I got a level 24 Kismet (Def/End/Rchg) recipe. I went on to have Alice solo the Strikebreaker badge mission before calling it a night.

Thursday night, I played Lady Arachne (44 wolf spider) on an all epic AT Imperious TF organized on LBx. We ended up with a team of:

2 peacebringers
3 warshades
2 wolf spiders
1 fortunata (sort of)

The other wolf spider was pretty cool; like me, he was technically a bane spider but had focused on the wolf spider gun attacks instead of the bane mace attacks, which I think is really a pretty effective team build. The various kheldians alternated between dwarf form for tanking/scrapping and nova for blasting, and the peacebringers got a lot of mileage out of light form for tanking also. Our fortunata had few team buffs; he didn't have maneuvers (so our team +DEF was a little shy of being capped from the 2 other soldiers) or mind link (he claimed he would take it at 49) and was level 45 and wouldn't take an LK, so was fairly useless. Also, the kheldians said they got zippo from Cosmic Balance or Dark Sustenance, because both hero and villain epic ATs don't give them any kind of synergy bonus, which really sucks.

Our team alternated between being really glorious because we could smash everything with ease, and being heavily beat up. I think the difference was mainly play style; if we stuck together we did well due to the +DEF buffs, peacebringer heals and overall kheldian DPS, but if we got strung out we'd quickly get defeated in detail. We did decently in the first two missions, then had a partial wipeout against the Phalanx console (our DPS against this device seemed really low for some reason). In the final mission the kheldians actually did something fairly cool: all of them transformed to nova form and they were able to zap the healer nictus to death from range. But then we jumped into melee with Romulus and the remaining nictus AVs and things got really messy; we had two wipeouts just against them, and at least once I found myself kiting Romulus around hoping one of the tanky kheldians would pull him off of me. We eventually were able to grind Romulus down, though we also suffered a lot of deaths in the process. Finished the ITF in 2hrs 38mins. A lot of people seemed psyched up to do another epic AT ITF sometime in the future; I think I'd do another one, but I do think having another VEAT or two (maybe 4 VEATs, 4 kheldians) would make for a better balance. The VEATs seem more "support" oriented while the kheldians seem better tanks and DPS.

Finished up Thursday creating another new alt on Liberty, Virtual Girl, a tech-based rad/sonic defender that I gave a very TRON-esque costume (a dark costume with lots of glowing electronic highlights). Virtual Girl joined a sewers team which eventually wiped out deep in the sewers, then migrated to King's Row; finished the night at level 8 having picked the rad heal, rad infection, accelerate metabolism, and the first two sonic attacks for powers so far.

9/5/2008

Wednesday night I started off helping a friend transfer about a million influence to an alt of hers, then got her to help transfer a million to an alt of mine. Then I bounced over to Pinnacle server and duoed a lowbie 11 claws/ninja stalker with a 19 corruptor for a bit, getting to level 12 and picking up Ninja Reflexes (a melee defense toggle).

Switched back to Liberty to play Yuki-Onna (47 ice/cold corruptor) on an Imperious TF organized on the Sisterhood channel. Our team mix was:

ice/cold corruptor (me)
fire blaster
AR/kin corruptor
night widow
fire/SS tanker
rad/rad defender
fire/kin corruptor
stone/fire brute

We had a pretty sick amount of DPS and competent players and we simply plowed through the ITF despite being on Unyielding difficulty and losing the brute to linkdeath during mission 2. Finished in 1hr 24mins, getting Yuki to level 48 and gaining an Unbounded Leap +Stealth recipe.

At that point I noticed Yuki-Onna's SOs were red and so I set about replacing them. IO set recipes are either ludicrously expensive or completely unavailable on red side, so I couldn't use IO sets; I ended up logging in each of my high level villain alts and crafting all the level 50 generic IO recipes I had lying around. I slotted some of these and stashed another dozen or so of these level 50 generic IOs in my personal villain base (requiring me to build a second enhancement storage unit) for future use.

Thursday night I started off playing Primadonna (30 sonic/kin corruptor) on a pickup Cap au Diable SF organized on LBx. Our team mix was:

elec/dark stalker
robo/traps MM
ice/cold corruptor
sonic/kin corruptor (me)
ninja/dark MM

This seemed to go well enough; I got to use Grant Invis a few times to help the other corruptor stealth around. In the last mission our stealthers had trouble tagging the altars, which were pretty close to spawns of demons, so we cleared several of the caves to help out. The final fight against Bat'Zul was kinda iffy as we pulled him into a side cave where the giant demon was clipping with the wall, making it pretty hard for me to hit with Transfusion (or any of my other attacks) but I managed to find an angle where the game would think I still had line of sight, so we finished him off. Didn't get anything special as a recipe, unfortunately.

Later that night, a friend was feeling bummed because he had been kicked off a ITF for being a stormy (I wasn't actually there so I can't say whether it was deserved or not; personally, I think a well played stormy is totally awesome though). So we ended up making an unyielding difficulty LGTF instead (though he did switch to a different character). I played Mega (50 SS/elec brute) because we needed some sort of tanker; I had also considered playing my will/nrg tanker, but in gameplay it feels like Mega is nearly immune to all Rikti damage (due to electric armor plus Tough) while being able to do massive damage with her near-continuous Foot Stomps. Anyway, our team mix was:

rad/rad defender
fire/fire scrapper
cold/ice defender
ice/sonic controller
db/will scrapper
SS/elec brute (me)
sonic/mental blaster
fire? blaster

This team seemed very strong and breezed through most of the LGTF. I mostly was immune to Rikti, but did have a couple instances where enough mez stacked on me to hold Mega through her toggles. I also got dropped taking the alpha strike from Clockwork King and his group of Psychic Clockworks (ouch); I guess I was a bit overconfident in the psy resist from electric. But the rad defender rez'd me pretty quick so we were able to recover from that. Fighting Hamidon was a little messy due to the mitos attacking but we managed to beat him up with just a few stray deaths; I learned a few more tricks about how to get Hamidon and the Rikti to aggro onto each other. Being an unsubtle brute I wasn't that interested in stealthing either the third or the fifth mission, instead leading the team to pound groups of Rikti into submission until we reached the mission objective. The final fight was actually pretty easy, with both the Rikti AV and the Honoree perishing in a matter of seconds, after which I took out all 4 generators without taking much damage (it's kind of nice playing a non-squishy sometimes!). Finished the TF in 1hr 53mins.

9/3/2008

Started off Tuesday evening playing Amethyst Star (28 warshade on Protector) as an SK on a 7 player team of Demolition Girls SG. We fought a bunch of Nemesis, Council and Crey. Amethyst got to level 29 (adding a sixth slot to her big attack/hold and third slot to her self heal) and the Doctor's Ally badge from a mission.

I also started a newbie fire/ice blaster on Liberty, for a future elemental-themed team, and solo'd her up to level 4. I've tried making ice/ice blasters before but I never get far on them, since I don't like being forced to take one of Frost Breath, Frozen Fists or Ice Sword at level 4, all of which I hate; with a fire/ice blaster, though, I took Fire Blast, Fireball, Flares and Chilblain by level 4 and like them all so far. A certain someone has been itching for me to mention him by name in this journal, but I usually try to avoid naming names so as not to hurt anyone's feelings, but I figure it is legit to mention that I drew some inspiration from reading Camo Fire's fire/ice blaster guide.

Spent some time on Pinnacle server playing Perfect Woman (39 will/SS tanker) on a 3 player team of Pinnacle League SG. We went into Rikti War Zone to try and do some missions, and for some reason Levantera totally refused to give me any missions, claiming that I had a full load of missions already. I even deleted all my other missions so I had none at all, and she still refused to start me on "Welcome to Vanguard". This kinda sucked because I wasn't able to gain Vanguard merits at all. Weirdly, I had her phone number in my contact list, but nothing in the faction bar. I was able to do 3 missions from the Borea contact, though. I didn't really want to petition this problem, but I may try flashbacking the "Welcome to Vanguard" story arc sometime to see if that fixes things.

Finished the night back on Liberty playing Miss Molotov (28 fire/fire scrapper) on a pickup Terra Volta trial. Our team mix was:

kin/rad defender
will/nrg tanker
elec/ice blaster
archery/dev blaster
fire/fire scrapper (me)
grav/kin controller
invuln/SS tanker

This team had a couple problems; we were very light on support, and our level spread was fairly awkward, with one level 50 (exemped down to 33) and the rest of us in the level 28-31 range. This meant we were fighting level 34-35s and most of us could not be SK'd. We also had the archery blaster quit the trial (without saying anything) in one of the early missions.

We managed to clear our way through missions until we got to the "Save Terra Volta" mission itself, but there our level difference against the Sky Raiders proved just too large an obstacle. We suffered three team wipeouts just trying to clear the first big room with the side rooms where you need to get a key; I think this was mostly due to the level difference and limited support (our kin was level 31 so had a hard time hitting for heals and the rest of us, except for the 33 and his SK, simply had a hard time hitting). After the third wipeout it was quite late at night and we were tired, and we all agreed to abandon the trial and call it a night. Miss Molotov did get to level 29 from all the fighting; and I logged off instead of quitting the trial on the off chance that I could try soloing the respec at a later date.

9/2/2008

Wednesday night I knocked out a Katie TF while playing Mystery Girl (35 FF/nrg defender) on a team with 2 tankers, 2 defenders, 2 blasters, 1 controller and 1 scrapper. We finished in 34 mins, but I didn't get anything of note.

Then I played Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender) on an Imperious TF organized on the Sisterhood channel. Our team mix was:

MA/SR scrapper
BS/inv scrapper
storm/archery defender (me)
stone/nrg tanker
rad/nrg defender
ice/nrg blaster
archery/mental blaster
kin/dark defender

On this TF the scrappers were very aggressive and would frequently jump into fights before our tanker, which made our tanker a little miffy, but we had enough support that it still worked and seemed to have mad DPS that helped us power our way through the TF, finishing in 1hr 10mins, the fastest time I've ever done an ITF. I got a Stupefy: Chance for Knockdown recipe for my trouble, along with lots of influence.

I spent the weekend at DragonCon where I mostly did role playing games of many different sorts. I variously played a witch hunter in colonial America (only with evil monsters), a samurai/courtier in pseudo-feudal Japan, and a Barsoomian princess hanging out with a time traveling jazz band and paramilitary unit. It was pretty fun.

I stayed home Monday to catch up on CoH. I played Mercy Beaucoup (27 empathy/ice defender) on a Citadel TF organized on LBx; our team mix was:

fire/dev blaster
nrg/nrg blaster
stone/dark tanker
ill/TA controller
emp/ice defender (me)
rad/sonic defender
claw/regen scrapper

Our stone tanker was very aggressive, which I like because it keeps the pace up, but kept me really busy since I was the "healer". The team was very solid and we didn't have any serious trouble, finishing in 1hr 57mins. This got Mercy to level 28, where I took Bitter Ice Blast as a new attack, and I got a Gaussian's Rchg/Endrdx recipe as reward.

I did another Katie TF on Mystery Girl, this time with 3 defenders, 3 controllers, 1 blaster and 1 scrapper. Although we were very safe, our DPS was abysmal and it took 53mins to finish the TF. I got a Call of the Sandman Chance to Heal recipe.

I played Mega (50 SS/elec brute) for awhile; hadn't logged her on in awhile, so I had to go to the tailor to fix all her costumes with skirts, since they were all rotated 90 degrees due to some patch last month. I also crafted and slotted some IOs for her, adding a 4th Performance Shifter IO to Power Sink, making the power +96% endmod, +44% rchg with set bonuses of +5% movement, +1.88% maxhp, +2.5% recovery. I also slotted a 3rd Numina's Convalescence into Health, for another +1.88% maxhp bonus. This brought Mega's maxhp up to 1917.2.

Mega solo'd her way through the Midnight Squad story arc to unlock Cimerora, and joined another Imperious TF organized on the Sisterhood channel. Our team mix was something like:

fire/thermal controller
kin/dark defender
TA/archery defender
ice/SS tanker
sonic/nrg blaster
SS/elec brute (me)
elec blaster
ice/storm controller

We had a good mix of damage and support; the ice tanker was designated lead tanker, which was fine with me. Between double-stacking Rage (from Speed Boost and my Chance for Recharge proc IO) and Fulcrum Shift, Mega was routinely getting around 400-500% damage bonus on the combat monitor, and once spiked up to +640%. This gave her Foot Stomps and Knockout Blows a lot of authority, which was pretty cool. We did have some problems during the first mission, though; as we exited the cave into the outdoor area where the final part of the mission is, the tanker decided to pull all the mobs from the shrine area down onto our heads. I'm guessing this must be an alternate way to finish the mission, but the rest of the team didn't know what was going on. Defeating the mobs pulled onto us resulted in a series of ambushes also triggering on top of us, and before long there were tons of Romans and kheldians everywhere; about half the squishies died in the confusion. The team leader tried to rally us to move up to the shrine area, as she said the ambushes would never stop; most people seemed to be in scrapper-lock (or dead) though and I eventually resorted to using the veteran team TP to pull everyone up there.

We finished the first mission and got through the next two without much trouble. In the final mission we did a simple frontal assault against Romulus to kill him 4 times. We actually managed to drain the Romulus AV dry of END a couple times; I think this was the combined result of Mega's power sink, transference from the kin, and some END drain power from the ice tanker; maybe heat exhaustion from the thermal, too. Not sure it really mattered because we were beating up Romulus anyway, but I thought it was neat. We finished the ITF in 1hr 50mins and along the way I got lucky on salvage drops, finding a Pangean Soil and a Hamidon Goo. Mega also got the Silver Bullet and Slayer badges (from fighting the 5th Column) as well as the standard Temporal Strife and Roman badges from the TF itself. Got some fairly pointless recipe also.

I messed around soloing a claws/ninja stalker on Pinnacle server for a bit (getting from 10 to 11) and playing a MA/will scrapper on Triumph server on a 8 player Demolition Girls SG team doing missions in the Hollows (getting from 13 to 14).

Finished the night playing Miss Molotov (27 fire/fire scrapper on Liberty) on a mostly pickup Moonfire TF led by someone I knew. Our team mix was:

stone/stone tanker
fire/fire scrapper (me)
fire/mental blaster
ice/mental blaster
stone/SS tanker
elec/nrg blaster
dark/dark scrapper
kin/rad defender

Our team was pretty support-light, and we had some problems right off the bat as the stone/stone tanker, who was at the low end of the level range, refused to be SK'd. The stone/SS tanker seemed fairly clueless; he asked to be TP'd to mission doors (having lost his travel power when exemped to 28) and he seemed to get mez'd by the vampires and didn't seem to understand he needed to put his toggles back up again (I ended up spending some time explaining how armor toggles work while the rest of the team jeered at him). As a result, neither of our tankers were much use for the early part of the TF, and it made us play really sloppily. Our fire blaster died a ton (initially I thought maybe he was being an aggro magnet, but I eventually decided it was because our tankers didn't seem to be generating any aggro) and our dark scrapper would get frustrated at the slowness of the tankers to attack stuff and would start fights on his own.

We managed to limp through the first all-vampyre mission in this fashion, but the second, all-werewolf mission was a lot less forgiving, and in short order we suffered two total party wipeouts. Everyone was pretty pissy at this point, and a couple of us insisted that the lowbie tanker get sidekicked, which he finally accepted, and the team leader suggested that we should give up the TF if we had a third party wipeout. We seemed to get our act together at that point and the tankers started to do some actual tanking, though there was a lengthy debate on whether tanking meant to pull stuff or to rush into mobs or both. People were still on edge from the TPW's, and there were some snippy comments exchanged, but we managed to get past that and continue the TF.

One trick the team leader had us do that was new to me was, during the "Rescue Dr Todd" mission, to stealth someone to Dr Todd, rescue her, then have someone at the door do a Team Teleport. For some reason Dr Todd, unlike most other hostages I know, would follow through a Team Teleport, causing the mission to instantly end.

We had a few missions that we stealthed, but some of our stealthers were relying on superspeed alone and got nailed by mobs several times. I pretty much stayed by the door for these missions, pleading that "being on fire makes me pretty unstealthy"; a fire/fire scrapper with blazing aura is just about the least subtle hero I've got. This was a little dull but I figured I'd let the stealthers do their thing. We finally stealthed to Arakhn and beat her up easily, finishing the TF in 2hrs 9mins. Despite all the hijinks, Miss Molotov leveled to 28 (taking Kick in preparation for Tough) and got the Silver Bullet and Honorary Peacebringer badges, along with most of the way through the vampyre badge, and a Kismet dmg/endrdx/rchg recipe as reward.