PoliceWoman

1/14/2008

Went to a concert Friday night, but afterwards I played Flamebait (10 fire/warmth corruptor on Liberty) for a few missions with the Demolition Girls all-corruptor team, getting to level 12 and buying DOs.

Ran Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) around reading history plaques to collect all the remaining History badges (Historian, Researcher, Alumnus, Digger, Scholar, Ghost Hunter), getting to 447 badges; looking like her future badges will mostly involve IO crafting, flashbacks and/or RV pillboxes.

I also spent some time in Warburg getting nuclear missiles for both Police Woman and for Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper), replenishing their nuke stockpiles for use in future emergencies. Rescuing scientists and getting missiles seems much, much easier as a scrapper than as a squishy.

I heavily played my newest alt, Thunder Girl (started as a 4 will/nrg tanker on Liberty); solo'd to 5, then variously joined or led pickup teams which got her to level 11 over the course of several play sessions, and wrote her a bio and got her the extra costume slot from Halloween salvage.

On Sunday around noon I got a blind invite to a pickup team, which I joined and found out was for a Positron TF. I'm kind of a sucker for pickup teams, and I like TFs, so I thought I'd give it a try. I warned the leader I only had 5 hours to play (since I had company coming over that night), though I figured 5 hours should be plenty even for a long TF like Positron. Our team mix was:

dark/dark defender (leader)
grav/kin controller
peacebringer
sonic/dev blaster
fire/nrg blaster
will/nrg tanker (me)

This seemed a decent mix, but most of us were on the low end of the level range (11-12) except for the sonic/dev blaster at 15 and the peacebringer at 14. The sonic blaster SK'd me so that I'd be as big as possible, but with a 12 dark defender and an 11 kin controller as support, they both needed to hit a level 16-17 mob to heal, so effectively we had no healing. Using training enhancements and SK'd to 14, I wasn't all that durable yet, so I died a lot. The dark was dropping some debuffs, though, and I sometimes ducked behind caltrops dropped by our dev blaster. Anyway, the team made its painful way through the first mission to Defeat Epidural, experiencing assorted deaths and one team wipeout along the way. After the first mission the controller and the sonic blaster both quit, however, and the team leader wanted to restart and reinvite some more people. I was a bit dubious of this, having already invested some time into doing the first mission, but the leader said that she had two defenders wanting to join, and more defenders seemed like it could help out a lot. So we restarted the Positron TF and added more people. Our new team mix was:

dark/dark defender (leader)
peacebringer
fire/nrg blaster
will/nrg tanker (me)
emp/dark defender
rad/rad defender
fire/emp controller
grav/kin controller

Apparently our new recruits were also blind invited into the Positron TF as we had to tell them, oh, we're doing Positron TF. When they asked how long it would take, our team leader told them it should take 1 hour; this seemed pretty wrong to me, so I made sure to say, I really think it takes longer than that. Nevertheless we proceeded. This team mix had a lot more support which made things go really well initially. The emp defender claimed to be a newbie and a refugee from WoW, but even at level 14 he had both Fortitude and Clear Mind and he would cast them frequently which I made sure to praise him for. The rad defender had skipped his heal but he had rad debuffs and would use them in every fight; also really good. The kin controller admittedly got lost on the way to Steel Canyon (somehow traveling to Faultline on the way there) and logged out while we were in the first mission (briefly reappearing around mission #8 to help with one mission before logging out again).

Anyway, the team really clicked for about half the TF, after which the emp and rad defender were both like, hey, you told us this would only take an hour. So they had to log out (doh!). We were left with our dark defender (who had this unfortunate habit of pulling with tar patch; an awesome power, but pulling with it does not really work and drew a lot of aggro to her; at one point she asked, Why am I the one who dies most? I tried to explain that she should let me engage mobs first), a fire/emp controller (who did look like she was trying, but her build was more fire than emp; heal aura and resurrect were her only emp powers), peacebringer, fire blaster (both laid down a lot of good damage so seemed OK at their roles) and me. Things slowed down quite a bit at that point, though we still made progress. When my 5 hours were up, we were on the second to last mission and people were arriving at my house, so I had to go. The team said it would be OK if I left myself online and AFK to try and get the credit for completing the TF, but apparently this is insufficient; I think now you need to at least enter the last mission door or something. So, sadly, I didn't get the TF badge and will have to redo it at some point. I did get Thunder Girl to level 14 so it wasn't a totally wasted effort, and later that night I joined a pretty nice pickup team which got her to level 15.

1/11/2008

Started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) running around reading plaques for history badges. I picked up the Expert, Intellectual and Academic badges; the only plaque really hard to find was the Academic plaque deep in the Abandoned Sewer Network. It wasn't dangerous at level 50, but I entered the sewers from Atlas Park and had to spend some time searching the maze and uncovering the map until I found the right location.

Police Woman went from there to a Rikti War Zone raid, which went very smoothly. I probably have more merits than I really need now, but am still getting progress towards badges for the bombs and the Rikti Master-at-Arms.

After that I switched to Astarte (27 grav/emp controller on Protector) and ran some Croatoa missions with a 7 player team of Demolition Girls SG. Got Astarte to level 28 and I agonized over what power to pick; it was between Stealth, Hasten and Assault, to open Astarte's fourth and final power pool. I ended up picking Assault (I like leadership) but in hindsight I probably should've taken Hasten, since grav/emp has a lot of powers with long recharge that I'd probably like to speed up (Wormhole, Gravity Distortion Field, Fortitude, Recovery Aura).

After that team finished up, I logged on Goshilla (34 sonic/nrg blaster on Liberty), rejoining the Manticore TF that Liberty Force had started last Tuesday; some of the other team members had advanced the TF to the last mission and had kindly left it there until everyone could log back on at the same time to finish. We thoroughly trounced the AV-level Hopkins and completed the TF. Ironically, I got a level 35 Stupefy: Acc/Stun/Rchg recipe as TF reward; I had just recently bought and slotted two of this IO recipe at level 21 for the sake of Stupefy's set IO bonuses. Sadly I'll probably stick with the level 21 IOs just for the sake of having the set bonus at a lower level.

Some of the team members wanted to run the sky raiders (level 24-33) respec trial at that point; since I'd exemp down no matter who I played, I switched back to Police Woman for this trial, to work on her influence badges. Our team mix for the respec trial ended up being:

stone/SS tanker
will/mace tanker
peacebringer
ice/ice blaster
AR/dev blaster (me)
dark/sonic defender

Everyone was at the high end of the trial's level range (32 or 33), and although the peacebringer and the ice blaster had some aggro issues, overall this was pretty straightforward. Once we got to the reactor core we were mostly standing around idling between the waves of Sky Raiders and reminiscing about the first time we did the respec trial and how hard it used to be. I got a level 35 Aegis: End/Rchg/Res recipe as reward; this seemed a little weird to me because playing Police Woman on a TF I would normally get a level 50 recipe. I guess trial rewards work differently?

After that I had an altitis attack and started a newbie will/nrg tanker on Liberty. I had been wanting to start another tanker for awhile, and so I server transfered my bs/regen scrapper (who wasn't getting enough play lately) to Triumph, which gives me a high level alt to hang out with people I know there, and frees up a character slot on Liberty. Skipped getting Isolator (with it being easily available in Ouroboros, it seems silly to do it in Outbreak now) and solo'd my new tanker to level 4.

1/10/2008

Started the night doing some badging with Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster); the HeroStats/Badge-Hunter integration made it a lot easier to see what I was missing. Got a couple of history badges, Disciple and Just Said No to Superadine; these are easy to get but it's tedious hunting down plaques, so I haven't done many of them. The lore on the plaques is actually interesting reading though, and I learned a little about Maiden Justice and Hero Corps. The plaques make it sound like Hero Corps got run out of town on a rail, though; how is it that we have Hero Corps Analysts in nearly every zone anyway?

Switched to Mega (50 SS/elec brute) and did some shopping. I splurged on a level 48 Force Feedback: Chance of Recharge recipe for 6 million infamy; crafted it and slotted it into Mega's Foot Stomp. I did a few missions to try this out; since Foot Stomp is AoE, the chance of recharge fires nearly every time, which seems like it should be great for heavy hitting, slow recharge attacks like Foot Stomp and Knockout Blow. HeroStats was telling me Foot Stomp was recharging for me in around 9-10 seconds, though I think my sample size may have been a little small. Also I was not using Foot Stomp every time it was up (instead, I'd use it only when I could hit 2 or more mobs) which may skew the parsed results.

I played Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper) and joined a 3-player Northern Lights SG team for the Mender Lazarus TF against the 5th Column. Team mix was:

fire/ice blaster
ill/emp controller
MA/SR scrapper (me)

We were on Rugged difficulty and the TF exemped us all down to 39; 39 is a pretty ideal level for Olivia to exemp down to, since I slotted level 40-41 IO sets in all her powers to max out +DEF. We found most of the TF to be pretty easy, until the very last encounter against the 5th Column leaders.

Our battle plan was that I would attack Requiem, Maestro and Vandal (all +1 EBs to us) on their balcony and keep them busy, while the blaster (with controller support) would wipe out the army of minions with AoEs, before switching to help me with the bosses. We also dragged along two EBs, Nosferatu and Burkholder, as helpers. This worked for a little while; I started on Maestro, figuring he probably does sonic buffs and debuffs that are no good for us, and our blaster wiped out the first wave of minions with ease, while the controller hovered around to buff/heal us both. Things spiraled out of control after the EBs started calling for help and additional waves of 5th Column started running into the room to attack us. Pretty soon both my player teammates, along with the NPC allies, were all killed by the hordes of Nazis, right around the time I finished Maestro off. This left me solo against 2 fairly healthy +1 EBs and 20 or 30 angry minions and lieutenants, with more showing up as time went on.

Since I was playing a scrapper, my next action was clear: flip out and kill them all!! I don't have Elude in my build currently (I don't like the END crash), but I punched on the Archmage accolade and started spending inspirations like a drunken sailor, while maintaining a steady barrage of martial arts kicks on Requiem. Vandal and the various minions started mobbing me, and I kept them off balance with an occasional Dragon's Tail. My teammates fed me more inspirations as the fight went on, and more 5th Column showed up too. Once when the mob of Nazis around me got to be too big, I dropped a red Warburg nuke to clear the area temporarily. In this way I ended up finishing off Requiem and Vandal (along with countless 5th Column minions), successfully completing the TF. Wish I had gotten a screen shot! The other players were pretty impressed, and I have to admit I felt pretty darn superheroic.

After that I played Schadenfreude (ironically, my 5th Column villain, a 30 AR/dark corruptor) as a lackey on a 4-player level 41 Liberty Force team. We did a few newspaper missions in Grandville, finishing up with a Founders Falls mayhem mission, getting us the Anarchist explore badge.

1/9/2008

Started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) and trying to use HeroStats to sync up my badges with Badge-Hunter. At the advice of the HeroStats developer I looked at my chat tab set up; deleting my Global tab and re-adding all the channels to it, seemed to be enough to get HeroStats to start detecting my badges. I used a settitle.txt bind file to try and automatically detect all badges; this seemed to get about 2/3rds of my badges but also missed a lot. If I manually selected badges by setting them from the Badge dialog window, HeroStats would pick them up that way. So I ended up clicking a lot of badges one-by-one. It seemed like after a certain number of badges were detected, it would stop counting them again, though; I worked around this by periodically uploading badge data to Badge-Hunter and then resetting HeroStats to clear all data. In this way I finally got all my badges (433ish at last count) onto Badge-Hunter, though some of the gladiators and SG badges are "verified" and some are not, because settitle.txt knows how to set these and I don't.

After that I went on roughly one and a half RWZ mother ship raids. During the first raid RWZ was totally full, and I couldn't get in until a slot opened up, so I ended up joining near the tail end. Participated for the full second raid though, and got credit for another bomb and another AV kill. Decided to pass on the third raid (they get tiring after awhile).

I switched to playing Goshilla (33 sonic/nrg blaster) and did door missions with a large Liberty Force team. After an hour or so of door missions we decided to try the Manticore TF. Team mix was:

dual/will scrapper
will/mace tanker
stone/SS tanker
sonic/nrg blaster (me)
peacebringer
dark/sonic defender
mind/sonic controller

Most of the team was level 33 when we started; I had thought that the TF would spawn mobs at the high end of its level range, 35, then apply mission difficulty and team size bonuses on top of that, which would make things very hard. It seemed like we mostly fought level 34-36 mobs though, which wasn't too bad. I did the first part of this TF, getting Goshilla to level 34; I used my 3 new slots to make Dreadful Wail 6-slotted and Stun 5-slotted, and I put Stupefy set IOs in both Screech and Stun, picking up some tasty IO set bonuses (recovery, health, recharge). A nasty lightning storm came into my area in RL though; having had one computer fried by power surges already recently, I decided to call it an early night.

1/8/2008

I started off playing Yuki-Onna (23 ice/cold corruptor) for a few missions as an LK on a 4-person Liberty Force SG team running at level 27-28. The team leader impressed me by correctly identifying my character as a j-horror ghost (but then, his monster character is based on an extremely obscure Bigfoot movie, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised). Got to level 24 and after some thought decided to take Glacial Shield (+DEF to nrg/neg/ranged/AoE and +RES to cold). Most cold corruptors don't take their shields but I really think they are good.

As suggested on the CoH board, I tried connecting HeroStats to CityInfoTerminal instead of Badge-Hunter, but still couldn't validate any of Police Woman's badges, I'm not sure why. Looking at HeroStats more carefully it does not look like it even recognizes the badges being pseudo-earned via settitle, at least for Police Woman. It does work for other characters. Very puzzling. I'm kind of wondering if it's an issue with Vista; I tried setting HeroStats to administrator but it didn't help. [Whoa, just noticed the HeroStats developer actually posted a suggestion for how I can fix this problem, relating to how chat tabs are set up; will have to try this next time.]

After that, I played Spacegirl (34 mind/rad controller) as an SK on a 7-player Sisterhood team running at level 37-39. This team was mostly tanks and blasters with a good empath defender and myself for support, and stomped all over many hapless villains. Also used what I had left of Spacegirl's prize money to pick up a couple IO recipes at Wentworth's, allowing me to complete a set of 5 Decimation (in Levitation) and a set of 5 Positron's Blast (in Terrify) to gain a net +12.5% global recharge.

After that team broke up, I switched to Mega (50 SS/elec brute) and joined a 7-player Liberty Force team running Viridian's story arc; our robot mastermind had painfully undertaken to unlock Viridian (who demands a whole bunch of stuff before he'll talk to you) as a contact. His story arc was remarkably cool, however, and involved rounding up a large number of archvillains to participate in a Management Meeting of Pure Evil. I had to Kick and Foot Stomp into submission Dreck, Countess Crey, Archon Burkholder, Maestro, Vandal, Nosferatu, Arakhn and Requiem, and got a rare look at Tub Ci (who helped us as a high level archery blaster) and the Center (who was a noncombatant NPC that strongly resembles Charles deGaulle). During this story arc I picked up a respec recipe which I put up on the black market (since I have a free respec and 3 earned respecs and 2 or 3 veteran respecs banked, it seemed to make sense); it instantly sold for 18M infamy, a new record for the most expensive thing I've ever sold. The price people are paying for respec recipes seems insanely high to me; I can only surmise that there must be a lot of people out there who are really bad at building characters, and yet have far too much money.

1/7/2008

Played Goshilla (31 sonic/nrg blaster), mostly on teams with Liberty Force SG and some with pickup people (though I found it was really hard to effectively lead a pickup team when you can only communicate in growly noises). Did a variety of normal door missions, mostly against Freakshow or Croatoa beasties, and got to level 33, picking up and 4-slotting Dreadful Wail (the sonic nova). I am more used to Full Auto and Rain of Arrows, which are both very different than the other nova powers, so this took some adjustment. It seems like a great attack though, especially with the stun attached to it. I've slotted it with 2 DMG and 2 RCHG; accuracy seems redundant since I only fire it under Aim/Build Up.

Solo'd some with Schadenfreude (29 AR/dark corruptor), doing missions from contacts in Nerva. Got beat up by Longbow stun grenades a couple times when I forgot to bring break frees; the partial status protection from the new blaster defiance has really been spoiling me and I miss it on corruptors. Did get to level 30 though, and opened the Leadership pool for Assault; I'm working towards Tactics and Vengeance, which I find are invaluable on villain side.

Downloaded HeroStats and tried to set up the automatic badge synchronization with Badge Hunter, but I couldn't get it to really work. For Police Woman it wouldn't work at all, for my scrapper Olivia Q it picked up about half her badges, and I think it got most (but maybe not all) of my controller Spacegirl's badges.

While on Spacegirl, on a lark I joined a costume contest in Atlas Park hosted by Path of the Alchemist SG. They picked six finalists, and I was pleasantly surprised to be picked as the sixth finalist.

Costume contest (finalists and judges)

There were a lot of good costumes (sorry for the small size of screen shot), and the judges debated for a really long time before announcing the winners. Spacegirl actually won! I was pretty thrilled. The first prize was 15M infl and a level 50 Aegis +status resist IO, which seemed ridiculously generous. I felt guilty about accepting so much infl, so I spent about ten minutes on the steps of city hall broadcasting that I'd give infl to any newbie who came up and said "Hi, Spacegirl". This was actually kind of fun and helped assuage my conscience.

1/5/2008

Thursday night I started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) in Recluse's Victory. I mostly got the worst end of things for awhile, but things got better after I teamed up with a MA/SR scrapper. We had several fights against a fairly deadly corruptor duo (I need to get in the habit of looking up, I'm not used to fighting flyers; they could surprise me by attacking from above if I'm not looking, but if I could see them a web grenade helped drop them into the scrapper's lap) and a brute we found to be ridiculously tough (he was willpower and with his resists and high regen, it was really hard for us to hurt him with our smash/lethal damage). I know every powerset I just mentioned in this paragraph is LOL to the minimax PvPers, but we got killed some and we killed them some, so it was a lot of fun.

After that I played Police Woman on an invincible Mender Silos TF with Liberty Force. Team makeup was:

ice/ice blaster
fire/fire blaster
rad/rad defender
inv/SS tanker
dark/dark defender
spine/SR scrapper
FF/elec defender
AR/dev blaster (me)

We had some problems early on with the team getting split up trying to "stealth" objectives, especially for squishies that didn't actually have stealth powers, resulting in several deaths. Things went better after we started staying together as a team. It was pretty cool rescuing some of the signature heroes, but we also kept getting them killed which seemed unfortunate. Someone also commented that it was a little disappointing to find the various Freedom Phalanx members on their knees all the time. At one point my FF defender sidekick and I detoured to save some of the NPC heroes from being killed, but this might've been a bad idea as the rest of the team was just beginning to engage the mission boss, some kind of gigantic mechaspider. We got to the boss in time for the Jade Spider to suddenly transform into a different, psychic version of the Jade Spider; with all the rad and dark debuffs falling off (since Jade Spider 2 was really a different mob) we immediately had a team wipe. After we regrouped we took it down without any further problems though.

After that I played Goshilla (31 sonic/nrg blaster on Liberty) on a mid-sized Liberty Force team, doing a few radio missions and the Talos Island safeguard.

On Friday I was at home sick from work, so of course I played a lot of CoH. Started off playing Schadenfreude (29 AR/dark corruptor on Liberty), soloing paper missions for a bit, then I picked up a fairly cool merc/dark MM as a lackey for a few missions. Duoing was a lot more effective and fun than soloing.

Later I played Rain Dancer (41 storm/archery defender on Liberty) and joined some large pickup teams. The first team it seemed like everyone was pretty timid; although we had 2 scrappers, 2 controllers, a blaster, an empathy defender, and me, no one seemed to want to start fights except for myself and one of the controllers. The other aggressive player seemed to die when he drew aggro, while I could survive an alpha strike (mostly through line of sight tricks and debuffs), so I ended up being "tank" for this team. This was actually sort of fun, though admittedly it only worked because the more passive defender and controller kept me healed and buffed.

After that team broke up, I joined a second pickup team with Rain Dancer. This one had a more conventional mix of tanker, some support and some damage. This team efficiently stomped several radio missions in Peregrine Island before breaking up.

Checking Wentworth's on Police Woman I found I had sold a respec recipe I had found previously for 15M influence. This now is the most expensive item I've ever sold. (I still have lots of respec recipes banked so figured I had better sell it while the price is high.)

Some friends from Demolition Girls SG had decided to start an all-corruptor villain team on Liberty, and villain-side teaming is scarce on our server so I jumped at the opportunity to get in at the ground level. I created Flamebait, a fire/thermal corruptor, and was on a team of 5 to 8 corruptors for most of Friday night. This was fairly sick; thermal and sonic buffs gave us all scrapper-level resistance and a lot of people had picked fire blast so we had a lot of AoE damage going on. Despite the corruptor goodness we still had a fair number of deaths; our first was to a Winter Lord, and some later I think due to overconfidence, because it's really easy to get cocky when you're buffed to the gills and have lots of healing support. At level 4 we left Mercy Island for Pocket D and started doing Baby New Year missions on Rugged. Snaptooth really never had a chance. Also did some Port Oakes radio missions and the Atlas mayhem mission, ending the night at level 10.

1/3/2008

I started the night in Recluse's Victory playing Police Woman, but it looked like the heroes by far outnumbered the villains, so I switched to April Fool (50 thug/TA MM) for RV. The villains were pretty disorganized; I joined a 3-person team, but the leader's main tactic appeared to be Leeroying solo into a big hero team, getting killed, then complaining about being dogpiled on broadcast. My minions and I mugged a couple of heroes who wandered off by themselves, and got killed a couple times also. Despite wandering around separately, the heroes seemed to reinforce each other pretty quickly (if I fought any hero for more than a few seconds, another hero would be sure to show up) but I didn't seem to be getting any support from the villain team at all.

So I dropped from the team and set up by myself inside a pillbox with a heavy, and lurked in wait for heroes to show up. My strategy was simple; I'd sic the heavy and the turrets on any hero that came within range, and I'd use trick arrows to slow their movement long enough for them to die. If they attacked me, my thug bodyguards would keep me alive and make them dead.

I caught and killed about 4 heroes who wandered into this trap, until one of them, a fire/nrg blaster, came back for revenge and burned me out of the pillbox. I must have fought him for half a minute, firing debuffs, attacking with heavy/turrets/pets, and resummoning pets, before he got me with fire blasts. Nothing I did seemed to even dent his health bar. I was amazed; I was sure I had thrown enough firepower at him to kill a lone blaster ten times over. After he killed me, I asked what kept him from taking any damage; he told me he had Power Boosted Force of Nature, and also had Fortitude (presumably from a hidden pocket emp, I never saw any emp actually in play). It was a pretty impressive display.

After that I gave up on static defense and took to the streets. I joined a different 3-person villain team; and though I got them to agree that attacking the heroes one at a time wasn't going to work, we still weren't actually able to ever make a coordinated attack and so didn't meet much success. It seemed like even more heroes were entering RV. When I got defeated by a controller holding me and two blasters both casting nova, I decided to give up on RV for the night; didn't seem like much I could do to fight that. Still was kinda fun though.

After that I logged in Spacegirl (34 mind/rad controller) to join a Liberty Force team for a Croatoa TF. Team mix was:

ice/ice blaster
AR/dev blaster
stone/SS tanker
peacebringer
dark/sonic defender
mind/rad controller (me)
will/axe tanker

I normally would play Goshilla (31 sonic/nrg blaster) on this team (it was mixed monsters and nonmonsters) but everyone else except the AR/dev was level 31 on this team, and I felt like we were too light on support characters, so I decided playing a 34 controller over a 31 blaster would be more helpful for the team and less frustrating for me. The bigfoot player did comment that he hoped this team would make Spacegirl think that the monsters were a representative sample of typical earthlings, which I thought was hilarious.

The low level of the team actually proved a huge problem during the Defeat Mary Macomber mission. The AR blaster and I each SK'd one of the tanks, but that left 3 players unSKed at level 31. This was not too bad against the earlier, level 34 waves of witches, but was pretty bad later on when they started spawning at level 36 and level 37. The last three waves of witches we could not handle head-on at all; we got ignominiously routed each time and survivors were forced to flee. The peacebringer and I were both flying, and so were the witches chasing us; the witches were crazy persistent in their pursuit. This left each wave of witches strewn all over the sky at various altitudes ranging from the treetops to the ceiling of the zone. This was kind of good because spread out that way we could defeat them in detail, fighting a smaller chunk of each wave at a time. We got to engage in a lot of fairly cool aerial dogfights as a result. The peacebringer got to use his (normally useless) group flight (which still seemed not that useful as some teammates would kind of randomly fall out of the sky as the power faded), and I got to use Levitation to dramatically drop witches from high altitudes down to hungry monsters on the ground. It was probably the single most inefficient Defeat Mary Macomber I've ever participated in that didn't actually fail the mission. Nevertheless it was pretty fun due to the aerial combat and the unusual tactics we had to resort to!

The next couple missions were pretty easy after that. In the final mission, since the first mission had taken much longer than we expected, we decided to do it the cheap and easy way by stealthing over to save Katie and fly her out. The first player on the scene warned of a Shadow Cyst Crystal that was in the group of mobs next to Katie's prison, and so we were all careful not to aggro it. Naturally as soon as we freed Katie, she immediately launched a full frontal attack on the Shadow Cyst Crystal, forcing us to fight the horrible nictus thing at the same time as ambushes were spawning all around us. Somehow we managed to overcome this without being slaughtered, and then flew Katie to safety.

Despite all the hijinks (or, more likely, because of them), we all agreed it was one of the most memorable Katie TFs we'd ever done.

[ QUOTE ]
No mention of RV.. There's either a conspiracy by the media or some government agency went to great lengths to keep that omission from the public eye...

[/ QUOTE ]

Haha, I did spend about 5 minutes in Recluse's Victory as Police Woman. I picked up a heavy and was assaulting a pillbox when a brute attempted to engage me. I took a few pot shots at him and sic'd my heavy on him. I had LFT on and got a team invite to go to RWZ at this point, so I was disengaging when I noticed the brute had me taunted and a stalker (OK, it was Cherrie Bomb) had faded into view next to me and was entering the AS pose. It was a set up! Luckily, her AS bounced off my PFF. With a team invite pending and being a disciple of the cowardly 3B school of blasting, I bailed out and headed for Atlas Park. Right as I was entering the Longbow base I got a message saying I had defeated the brute; apparently my heavy finished him off. I was nowhere near so I didn't get rep for it though.

1/2/2008

Did the Positron TF on a 3-person team with Astarte (27 grav/emp controller on Protector). Team was:

inv/axe tanker
nrg/fire blaster
grav/emp controller (me)

The tanker was a surprisingly good pickup person and we ran through the TF pretty efficiently, with just one wipeout (I think this was due to aggroing multiple groups of CoT at a bad intersection) and otherwise no trouble. Still broke up the TF over two days since even with 3 players it was pretty long.

Played Mary Christmas (12 ice/rad controller on Triumph) as an SK on a 7-player low 20s team of Demolition Girls SG, getting her to level 14 and Super Jump.

Played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) first on a 4-person pickup team in Rikti War Zone doing a mission called "Get the news out!" where you have to rescue a news reporter (Amanda Vines) and 4 power generators while defeating Silver Mantis. Mobs were guarding the power generators and when they achieved line of sight with players, they would almost insta-kill the power generators; a controller friend on the team said she had failed this mission twice before due to all power generators being destroyed. We managed to solve this by stealthing to Silver Mantis, killing her, then stealthing to Amanda Vines and rescuing her. We got a "mission complete" after completing these two objectives even though we had not engaged the mobs guarding the power generators (though they managed to destroy 2 generators while we were setting up).

Attempted the Mender Lazarus TF, initially with a 3 person team of:

MA/regen scrapper
son/nrg blaster
AR/dev blaster (me)

We were on invincible with 3 deaths and 1 hr time limit, but in the second mission we found we could not beat Nosferatu as a +2 AV; I kicked in a Shivan and a use of Eye of the Magus, and we dropped Nosferatu to about half health. We lasted awhile even with no support, but we couldn't sustain fighting long enough to kill the AV; the shivan drew aggro and was killed, and the regen scrapper eventually ran out of healing clicks and we suffered a team wipe at that point.

After that we decided to restart the TF, lowering mission difficulty and adding some support players, making our team:

MA/regen scrapper
son/nrg blaster
AR/dev blaster (me)
ill/emp controller
inv/SS tanker

We were on heroic with 5 deaths and 2 hr time limit this time. We probably overcompensated for our previous wipeout and could've either lowered difficulty or recruited support players; on heroic, Nosferatu (and all the other 5th leaders) was only an elite boss and pretty easy to defeat. We had some confusion during the last mission when the scrapper blitzed the 5th Column leadership on their little balcony while the tanker rushed an army of minions in the courtyard below them, causing the team to split up while waves of 5th Column started spawning; we had some deaths but we managed to beat them all up anyway. Despite beating the death limit and the time limit, we didn't get any badges for the TF; it looks like the challenge badges are not awarded for the Ouroboros TFs, but only for flashbacks.

The same team then did the Twilight's Son TF. This was pretty fun (though fairly easy with the team we had on heroic) and the story arc was very faithful to the CoH comic book. The Atlas Park costume contest was really cool! In the last mission, our ill/emp had the personal mission of saving Breakneck (the old guy) from being ganked by Baron Zoria (apparently he kills the old guy if no one intervenes), and so she launched a full frontal assault on Zoria immediately after the cut scene, which successfully saved Breakneck's, um, neck.

After that Police Woman got a level 21 Gaussian's Chance for Buildup from Wentworth's for 5M infl, and slotted it in tactics; this was the fifth Gaussian's IO in Tactics, which gave her a +2.5% DMG set bonus. I had read on the CoH forums that the buildup effect is very subtle; it's a text message in one of the healing channels and I think it makes a soft noise (but not 100% sure). There's no animation, so it's hard to see, but 0 activation time buildup may actually be a good thing. I wasn't parsing, but it did autofire every once in awhile, and eyeballing the damage numbers I thought I was getting about +50% damage from it when it fired. Not absolutely sure on that value; it would make it weaker than a real Aim or Build Up, and the fact that it fires randomly rather than during the time of your choice makes it much less useful for burst DPS. But that would average +2.5% DMG overall, plus the +2.5% DMG set bonus, over and above the ED limits, which seems pretty decent for one enhancement slot.

I decided that Police Woman needed a costume specifically for fighting 5th Column on time travel missions; I ended up reworking the 1930s zoot suit costume (which really looked a little too Family for my taste) into a WW2-era WAC costume; didn't take a screenshot, but it's a khaki female army officer's uniform. I had to surf to all sorts of fairly cheesecakey web sites to get a good source image. I couldn't find a rifle option that looks like an M1 Garand, so I stuck with the tommy gun.

After that I played Police Woman on a Lady Grey Task Force with a full team of Liberty Force. Team makeup was:

robo/trap MM
merc/dark MM
ice/ice blaster
archery/nrg blaster
AR/dev blaster (me)
fire/fire dom
spine/SR scrap
dark/dark defender

Quite frankly I didn't think this team would work (with SR scrapper as "tank" and light on support), and I said so, but it actually did just fine. The merc/dark MM helped absorb alpha strikes with bodyguard which was helpful. The only problems we seemed to have was that robots/mercs/fire imps would clog up those very low, narrow Rikti tunnels, and we had a tough time fighting yellow mitos due to having very little melee damage (none of the blasters were actually blappers and I don't think the dom had much melee either; many of us ended up whipping out sands of mu). In the last mission we pulled Honoree and killed him without him getting off Unstoppable (that's twice in a row now for LGTFs I've been on; starting to wonder if he still does it), then we kinda zerg rushed the 4 generators while being mobbed by waves of Rikti. I got a Devastation: Chance to Hold recipe for TF reward, and along the way I had picked up a respec recipe and about 5M influence just from killing stuff.

After that we reconfigured into the Liberty Force monster squad team (where I play Goshilla, 30 sonic/nrg blaster on Liberty) and did Mender Lazarus TF on Unyielding; I probably should've bowed out since it was the third time that day for me, but, well, fighting nazis never really gets old. Our team mix for this was:

stone/SS tanker
peacebringer
sonic/nrg blaster (me)
will/axe tanker
dark/sonic defender
dual/will scrapper
MA/regen scrapper

We didn't seem very focused during this TF and had a lot of trouble staying together as a team, frequently fighting multiple groups of mobs while spread out, resulting in a lot of deaths. Nevertheless we kind of muddled through the whole thing. In the last mission we actually had some good pulls, getting each 5th Column AV separately from the others, but we found the waves of 5th Column they generated to be overpowering; rather than waves of minions, there seemed to be waves of bosses. I think we counted 15 bosses generated in ambushes from one AV. We ended up zerging each AV, killing each AV easily but suffering a total party wipeout after each one due to ambushes. We did win the TF, but the I11 scoreboard dialogue reported we had suffered 41 deaths (ouch!).

After that we did the aura mission for most of our team members, which got Goshilla to level 31; before calling it a night I headed to Icon and gave Goshilla a healthy green radioactive aura.

12/30/2007

I had Friday off from work and played a lot of CoH.

Played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) on a flashback of Julius the Troll's story arc in the Hollows (I really like the Hollows for some reason). This exemped me down to 14, and I also set "no travel powers", "no inspirations" and "5 deaths limit". I suffered 3 of my allowed deaths trying to Stop Trolls from damming the Red River; the outdoor spawns of trolls are pretty large and include bosses, and I didn't feel like I could pull because if I got them out of the river area, they wouldn't count towards my "Defeat 10 trolls in Red River" tally. I was hunting right under Julius's bridge; I probably needed to work out a way I could pull them to a safer part of the river. Finished the rest of the story arc without incident, gaining the Troubleshooter, Shared Victory, Shut Down and Unimaginative badges.

Played Mary Christmas (12 ice/rad defender on Triumph) teamed up with Demolition Girls for a mission, then switched to Indigo Ifrit (50 fire/rad corruptor on Liberty) for a Lord Recluse Strike Force organized on LHO. Team makeup was:

SS/inv brute
nrg/inv brute
son/rad corr
rad/rad corr
2 fire/rad corrs (of which I was one)
nrg/kin corr
robo/traps MM

With 4 rad corruptors we pretty much stomped the RSF. We did have plenty of deaths so it wouldn't have qualified for the Master badge, but never had a complete wipeout. Got a Trap of the Hunter chance for lethal recipe. I also bought a couple Positron's Blast and a Time/Space Manipulation recipe from the Black Market for Indigo Ifrit, giving her an extra +18% ACC and +1.5% max HP in set bonuses.

After that I played Tera Watt (49 FF/elec defender; originally on Liberty, but transferred to Triumph) on a Hess TF on Triumph server with Demolition Girls SG. Team mix was:

ice/ice blaster
AR/dev blaster
fire/axe tanker
dark/SR scrapper
ff/elec defender (me)
[ill/rad controller] (2nd box of the ice blaster, was on to start the TF and to debuff the AV at the end, otherwise stayed logged off)

We only had my force fields for support for most of the TF, but that seemed to be plenty. Tera Watt has invis/PFF/recall friend so was able to stealth several missions to speed things up. Got a pointless recipe reward; did a few level 50 missions after that and got the Sensation badge.

After that I did a Lady Grey strike force with Mega (49 SS/nrg brute on Liberty). Team mix was:

rad/rad corr
mind/kin controller
2 regen scrappers
kin defender
emp defender
SS/elec brute (me)
elec blaster

Mega: 8 foot tall angry female

Upon joining I immediately got a "I've never seen a brute in a green miniskirt before." Heheh.

As the least squishy player I had the "tanker" role, which was pretty fun; the normal Rikti can't really hurt Mega through her electric armor, so I could heedlessly rush into large groups of aliens and foot stomp them into oblivion. This caused me to greatly underestimate the Clockwork King, though, whose alpha strike floored me almost instantly despite having some psi resist.

Our team had a lot of trouble with the 4 Riders mission also; for some reason I seemed to get easily feared by the riders and then was unable to do anything until I died. It usually took awhile to die as they still had to pound through my resistance; I assume our defenders must've also been stunned or feared or something. Had a couple team wipeouts against the 3 Rider and the 4 Rider rooms.

No problem with Dra'Gon's mission, and in fact Infernia and Glacia were BOTH just one room from the entrance, the closest I've ever seen them to the door. For the Hamidon mission, the leader had a neat trick I hadn't seen before; he had me taunt the Rikti into the goo, and the Rikti and mitos would fight it out. The mitos killed all the Rikti and the Rikti got one of the mitos. That simplified things considerably.

The final mission we pulled and killed the Honoree surprisingly easily; he never even got to use his Unstoppable (or whatever it is) power. Moving into the last room and taking out the 4 generators was actually harder, as things got really hectic as we got spread out moving around the room and aggroed everything in sight. We managed to get all 4 generators, but suffered a wipeout while trying to fight off the army of Rikti. I did get Mega to level 50 on this SF, though, making my eighth 50 (an SG-mate asked and I had to think and count).

After that I played Police Woman on an 8-person pickup team doing Praetorians, and we beat up Infernal, Chimera and Shadow Hunter.

That was it for Friday. On Saturday I played Police Woman on a Croatoa TF. Team makeup was:

stone tanker
fire tanker
2 empathy defenders
elec/elec blaster
AR/dev blaster (me)

We actually had a tough time with the mission with 10 Mary Macomber AVs. The defenders seemed pretty good, but with only 6 players and no debuffs it took a really long time to kill each AV, especially the later, higher level ones. The tankers complained of END drain from the witches' electric attacks, which we really had no answer for except the occasional RA. Had a team wipeout on the 10th AV, partly because they spawned right on top of us (maybe if we were more disciplined about moving away from the spawn point each time we could've avoided this) but after regrouping we managed to take out the last Mary. The rest of the TF was pretty straightforward.

After that I played Yuki-Onna (20 ice/cold corruptor on Liberty) on a Silver Mantis SF. Team makeup was:

2 robot MMs (one traps, one dark)
thug/TA MM
ice/kin corr
ice/cold corr (me)
rad/rad corr
fire/rad corr
mind/nrg dom

We had a lot of buffing and debuffing going on this team and consequently steamrollered most of the enemies; the team leader even raised difficulty (to Ruthless) after the first mission. We did have one partial wipeout when about half the team went up an elevator while the other half team stayed on the previous floor fighting mobs; I think this was mostly a coordination problem because we didn't have an official "tank" to follow. We had some trouble on the Sky Raiders base due to the abundance of Toxic Gas turrets, resulting in many deaths and at least one team wipe. I never noticed this as a problem before; I think this is probably because we were all squishies and so easily got perma-held by the poison gas; maybe some brutes would've easily solved this. Nevertheless we persisted and eventually overcame the base defenses and beat up Colonel Duray. Yuki being at the bottom end of the level range, I got mad exp on this; after one of the MMs commented that it was like PLing, I felt guilty and demanded an LK. I was actually able to hit and kill stuff and buff ice shields even at the lower level, and the MM said he really didn't care, but I stuck with the LK anyway, for the sake of my conscience. Still got from level 20 to level 23, picking up the Arctic Fog power and slotting SOs.

12/28/2007

I had the day off so I spent way too much time on CoH.

Burned 5 or 6 free costume change tokens on Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) messing around in Icon, giving her my best attempt at a retro "Untouchables" look and a "Wild West" look, for use when time traveling. Not totally sure whether I like how these costumes turned out, which is why I used up a lot of costume change tokens fine tuning. Also solo'd a Peregrine Island safeguard, getting the Interceptor badge for busting weapons deals.

Prohibition-era Police Woman

Ran a couple Baby New Year missions with Schadenfreude (29 AR/dark corruptor on Liberty) to unlock the santa boots and gloves costume pieces; not sure whether I will use them, but figure it's good to unlock things. I used a shivan each time to wipe the floor with the Snaptooth EB; I probably should be able to do without a shivan but I was on Ruthless difficulty and didn't want to chance it. I also duo'd a few missions with a dominator friend; this worked really well, as her holds would let me use Ignite a lot more effectively, while my debuffs would amp up her damage.

Played Yuki-Onna (20 ice/cold corruptor on Liberty) on a Cap au Diable SF. Team lineup was:

spines/SR stalker
nrg/nrg brute
dark/elec brute
ice/cold corruptor (me)
fire/dark corruptor

The fire/dark corruptor logged off unexpectedly for the first 3 missions to pick up someone in RL; the rest of the team went ahead without him. We were mostly OK as my ice shield on top of SR or energy aura gave a lot of stacking defense, but we did have a team wipeout on the PTS map when we aggroed ~3 groups around the main boss. The fire/dark corruptor rejoined the SF just in time to argue with the dark/elec brute for running Shadow Fall, preventing us from leading a hostage to a mission objective; ambushes were incoming so I think the corruptor didn't want to drop his defenses. This argument ended up getting resolved when the corruptor got killed by an ambush, turning off Shadow Fall long enough for the hostage to get led to the objective.

On the final mission we had some drama because the fire/dark corruptor wanted to "paint" the mission (have the rest of us log off and then let him stealth through the mission to set all the spawns for 1 player) but the dark/elec brute did not want to let this corruptor get the star, for fear of getting kicked off the team in retaliation for the earlier argument. Since I had no stealth power yet I kept my mouth shut and asked the actual team leader (the stalker - not sure why he didn't just paint the mission himself) what he wanted to do. We ended up compromising by having the dark/elec brute paint the mission. This wasn't perfect but got the SF done. The I11 end-SF dialogue claimed we finished in 1hr 5mins and 0 deaths, which didn't seem right; felt longer (though maybe due to the drama) and we definitely had some deaths.

Played Spacegirl (33 mind/rad controller on Liberty) running a 4-5 person level 31-34 hero team of mostly Sisterhood & friends. We were a little damage heavy/support light, but this went mostly well, except for a partial team wipe at a tricky ugly hallway intersection where we aggro'd multiple spawns of CoT. Most players leveled; Spacegirl got to level 34 and I put all 3 slots into attacks. (Well, controls, strictly speaking. But they're like attacks!)

Later I played Astarte (26 grav/emp controller on Protector) on a 6 player team of Demolition Girls SG. We ran through Tobias Hansen's entire story arc in Striga Isle. The mission order seems a little randomized in this story arc so we re-did several of them so that everyone could finish the story arc. This got Astarte to level 27, and I reslotted with level 30 SOs. I had gotten Wormhole at level 26 and had been trying it out; it seems like it has some good potential as an AoE control so I put both my two level 27 slots in it.

12/27/2007

On Sunday night I spent some time playing Alice Slaughter (15 dual/will brute on Triumph) as a lackey to some Demolition Girls SG villains. We fought Ghost Widow as an AV and I was very disappointed that the Undead-Slaying Axe doesn't work on Ghost Widow. (It really should!) Did a few more missions fighting Carnies which got Alice to level 16 and Rise to the Challenge, which I haven't gotten to try much yet but I hear is really good.

Spacegirl: teenager from outer space

Wednesday night I played Spacegirl (33 mind/rad controller on Liberty) and formed a team which was about half Liberty Force and half pickup players. Somehow ended up with a very support heavy-team, with 1 tanker, 3 controllers (rad/sonic/kin), 1 defender (FF) which made us totally invulnerable to damage but kinda so-so on damage; containment and sonic and rad debuffs pumped our damage up a little. We were running through the Rogue Robots story arc, which reduced the psy damage from our 2 mind controllers and 1 illusion controller quite a bit. We were glad to pick up a low 20s sonic blaster later on as an SK to help deal damage. Still, being unkillable, we inexorably wrecked all the robots that crossed our path.

After that team broke up I did some ski runs with my main character, Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty). After at least a dozen attempts down the ski slope I finally just eked in a "Speed Demon" badge with a downslope time of 24 seconds (with no outside buffs; I did use Sprint, CJ, Hurdle and Swift though). My experience was that Speed Boost seemed to actually make it harder to steer; almost always I lost time due to missing gates and having to go back for them. I found it helped to move the chase camera very close to my character, to steer using mouse-look, and to have a decent idea of where and which way to jump during the course.

After that I solo'd a couple missions with Kid Valkyrie (50 bs/regen scrapper on Liberty); nothing too exciting, did a safeguard (which I actually failed because I was meleeing the named bank robber while some unnamed minion ran for the exit, sigh) and a radio mission.

[Thanks for all the kind words! I'm glad people are enjoying my CoH ramblings. I really like CoH.]

12/23/2007

Started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) exemped down to 15 to duo some Faultline missions with a SG-mate playing an ice/ice blaster. This went pretty well; we were able to easily handle the elite boss versions of Kurse and Nocturne.

Switched to join a Sister Psyche TF on Protector server with the Demolition Girls SG; team makeup was:

fire blaster
nrg blaster
ice tanker
ice/storm controller
grav/emp controller (me)
kin defender
claw/regen scrapper

This was a strong team and the TF went very smoothly, finishing in just under 3hrs with 0 deaths. Astarte (my grav/emp controller on Protector) went from level 24 to 25 during this TF, and got a Malaise's Illusions recipe (bleh). After that the team on Protector also defeated a Winter Lord and did 2 repetitions of the last Faultline mission where you fight Nocturne, Captain Castillo and Arbiter Sands.

After that I went back to Liberty, playing Yuki-Onna (19 ice/cold corruptor) and teaming up with the aforementioned ice/ice blaster SG-mate (now up to 17) to duo the Baby New Year missions. With our ice and cold powers we slowed the EB Snaptooth to a crawl, easily wrecking him 4 times to get all the holiday mission badges. Yuki-Onna also got to level 20 and Stamina doing these Baby New Year missions.

Rain Dancer

After that I played Rain Dancer (41 storm/archery defender) and joined an 8 person pickup team being led by someone from the Sisterhood channel. Despite having 3 empathy characters, I noticed none of them were buffing Fortitude (though all of them had it in their build), and as a result it seemed like our invuln tanker was a little afraid to engage the big 8-person spawns of Crey and Nemesis. This meant our team moved very slowly because the tanker was somewhat intimidated and at times wanted to wait for Unstoppable to recharge before pulling the next spawn. (I was tempted to offer to tank as a storm defender but decided this would just make the tanker feel bad. There were a few times where I had to unleash the full force of stormy chaos to help out though.) I'm not really sure why people don't use their good powers, but I tried to, as tactfully as possible, hint that someone should keep Fortitude on the tanker at all times. After about 3 or 5 gradually less tactful hints from me, some or all of the empaths started buffing the tanker and even some of the other players; this made our tanker godlike and much harder to kill, and commensurately braver about pulling or rushing big spawns; I think this made things more fun and better exp for the whole team. Did a few missions with this team before calling it a night.

12/22/2007

I picked up a new graphics card, a GeForce 8600 GT (costing $125 with a $25 mail-in rebate), today to fix the frame rate problems I experienced last night. After installing it, I found it was a huge improvement over the integrated GeForce 6150 SE; on "minimal" graphics I went from 22fps to 80fps, on "recommended" graphics I went from 5fps to 50fps (with intermittent drops to 30fps when doing something graphics intensive, like traveling fast or just existing in Grandville).

Someone on Arena channel was calling for people to come to Recluse's Victory, and I thought that would be a great way to test my system performance with the new card, so I ran into RV as Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster). There were maybe 5 heroes and 5 villains roaming around; the heroes didn't seem to want to team up, so I just ran around solo for a bit, web grenading and shooting any villains I could catch; a bit later an empath controller started buffing me and teamed up for awhile, which helped a lot too. Serious PVPers don't respect assault rifle, so I made a point of trying to finish people off with Full Auto whenever possible. It's actually pretty good DOT damage, just leaves me vulnerable to attack during the animation; villains low on life almost always are running FROM me and not TO me, though, so unless they had a buddy ready to rush me, this wasn't too bad. I actually missed the old Defiance during this encounter, there were lots of times old Defiance would've gave me the burst DPS I needed to kill someone. I tried to stay as slippery as possible, dropping caltrops and popping Personal Force Field to escape. There were several stalkers there and I found that with Targeting Drone + Tactics + Perception IO, it seemed like I could see them just barely as they got into melee range with me; outside of melee range they were invisible. If I had any toggle dropped due to someone landing a stun on me, I couldn't see them either. I think I was about even on kills vs deaths, though I forgot to keep an accurate count; I started at 0 reputation and left with 12 though. There was one regen stalker I kept tangling with and never could quite finish off; I could slow him down enough to fight most of the time, but I just didn't have the DPS to kill him. Maybe if I had a teammate with some DPS or -regen, or slammed a bunch of reds. Anyway, it was pretty fun and the new graphics card worked beautifully.

After that I logged on Schadenfreude (29 AR/dark corruptor) and did some missions in Nerva. While there I helped a brute I didn't know with Agent Bell, an elite boss in Kelly Uqua's story arc.

Then I switched to April Fool (50 thug/TA mastermind) to help a SG-mate with Zenflower, an AV-level hippie hero surrounded by Devouring Earth. We then ran a flashback of Regent Korol's story arc with a 4 player team (fire dom, stalker, robo/traps MM, and me as a thug/TA MM), with no temp powers, 3 deaths and a 30 minute time limit. We were exemped down to 45 and fighting level 47s. We got pretty badly beat up while fighting Arachnos critters (not sure why we were doing so badly; a brute and/or corruptor maybe would've helped), with one total team wipeout and assorted individual deaths, causing us to fail the 3 death limit, and just doing the story arc took 1hr 7mins, so we didn't make the 30 min deadline. But we did get the Limited badge for the no temp powers thing.

12/21/2007

Well, turns out the power outage fried my computer, despite my computer being on a battery backup and surge suppressor. So this journal entry is mostly about computer problems and only a little about CoH.

I took the computer to a local Micro Center store where they told me they thought the motherboard was fried. The technician said I was almost certainly the victim of a power surge that came through the Ethernet cable and not through the power cable. Urgh. I hadn't realized the cable connection could be a source of power surges, but this made sense. I knew someone once who had his computer fried through phone lines connected to his modem. Anyway, they could replace the motherboard, but not with exactly the same one, which would mean I'd pay for parts, labor, and they'd have to reformat my hard drive. Since my computer is almost 3 years old now, I decided it probably made more sense to just buy a new one.

I've already spent an awful lot of money this month (on Christmas and vet bills for my cat) so I went kinda cheap on the new computer; I may regret this later, but I figured, as long as it's better than what I was using it should be OK, right? My dead computer was 2.4GHz with a GeForce 5600 video card and 1GB of RAM. The new computer is dual core 2.8GHz with an "integrated" GeForce 6150SE and 3GB of RAM. Unfortunately they would not sell me WinXP and so I got stuck with Windows Vista. The machine's list price was $699 but they seemed REALLY motivated to sell (I hear this holiday season has been slow for many retailers) and the unit I bought was an "opened box" that someone returned (though they assured me nothing was wrong with it) and I ended up paying $675 plus tax, and got the machine plus a 3 year extended warranty (I normally NEVER buy these things because I think they're scams; I told the salesman I would only buy it if the total cost was under the computer's list price, and the salesman actually gave me a big enough discount to make it happen) and a $50 rebate certificate. I had been expecting to drop $1200-1500 on a new computer, so was pretty happy to get a new one for so cheap. I could've gotten a better computer if I special ordered it, but I'm such an addict that I really wanted to have a computer right away; a mail order during this time of year would probably take weeks to arrive, leaving me offline, frustrated and suffering from gaming withdrawal. My SO got caught up in the spirit of things and also bought a new computer, though a somewhat better and more expensive one than the one I bought.

Anyway, I took the new computer home and got it set up. I can see Windows Vista is going to take some getting used to; it has a lot of flashy UI stuff that is neat to look at, but not sure I really care about. I have a lot of factory-installed spyware extolling the virtues of the computer's manufacturer (HP) and trying to get me to sign up for AOL, ebay, and other stuff; annoying, but I plan to delete it all when I get some time. I registered the bare minimum of stuff and got to installing CoH. CoH and Vista didn't like each other very much, but there is a pretty helpful thread about how to make them work together here: ( http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat....0&fpart=all ). To make a long story short, I needed to download new video drivers, change some of the command line arguments for CoH, and change some of the OS properties of CoH to tell Vista to shut off some of the more fancy stuff and be a little more like WinXP while running CoH.

After all this, I was able to actually play CoH! But, the frame rate was really, really poor; just running around in typical CoH zones, at 1280x1024 resolution on the "recommended" graphics settings for CoH, I would get a pretty steady 5fps. I could run around CoH but it was painful to do so; I assume CoV and Rikti mother ship raids would be even worse. This was significantly worse than my old, 3 year old computer that had less than half the CPU and one third the RAM of the new computer. Very disappointing. Initially I blamed Vista, but I was able to install CoH on my SO's more expensive new computer (which also uses Vista, but has a GeForce 8500 video card) and CoH runs fine on that (around 25fps on the same 1280x1024 resolution and recommended graphics settings). I did a little web research and I found a lot of people had problems with the GeForce 6150SE and the most common response they got to their plaintive pleas for help was, "That card sucks, get a real graphics card that supports DX10." So I'm thinking my next move is to buy a better graphics card.

Anyway, I was determined to play CoH and I found that if I lowered the graphics settings to the "minimum", I could get 22fps. This was fairly playable but looked pretty crappy, but it did let me log in my level 14 dual/will brute on Triumph and take out some aggression by stabbing the hapless denizens of King's Row, getting Alice Slaughter to 15.

After that I switched to Schadenfreude (level 29 AR/dark corruptor on Liberty) and solo'd a few missions. On the normal graphics settings her black leather jacket and thigh-high boots look awesome, but on the minimum graphics settings she looks like she was painted in watercolor by a kindergartener. Arrgh. For that, many NPCs had to die by flamethrower. I experimented a bit with Ignite, Tar Patch and Petrifying Gaze. Police Woman doesn't have Ignite because it seems really unpolicelike to throw napalm on people you're trying to arrest, but Ignite does massive damage if you can get the bad guy to hold still long enough to take it. Petrifying Gaze holds them for a little while, but the hold duration seems pretty low; they get out of the hold before the Ignite patch fully kills them. Tar Patch seems to do a good job of slowing them long enough to take a decent amount of damage. I've put one Slow enhancement SO in Tar Patch so far (in addition to 3 Recharges); next time I get some more slots, I'll probably put more Slow SOs there, and/or some Hold SOs in Petrifying Gaze (currently only 1 ACC SO in it).

12/20/2007

I started off playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), exemped down to 14 to finish off the flashback of the Flux story arc. I was solo on Tenacious difficulty, with No Temp Powers and No Enhancements. Got through the "Defeat gang leaders and crews" mission without any trouble, then easily did the "Defeat 10 Outcasts" mission, then started "Defeat Frostfire". With no Micros in Sprint and no Swift or Hurdle at all, I had only unslotted CJ for travel powers, but one trick that helped me get around Hollows a little faster was to use the Ouroboros Portal after each mission, then click the Pillar to get back to Flux.

I mostly stealthed the Frostfire mission. I found I was able to shoot the first altar from range without drawing aggro from its guards, then ran by most of the Outcasts to get deeper into the mission. I didn't have stealth powers and my stealth IO didn't work due to "No Enhancements", but the Outcasts had really slow reaction times; most did not aggro on me, some took a shot or two but not for any serious damage. I did have to slug it out with Keystone; his stone armor heavily mitigated my unslotted AR attacks, so this fight took a really long time, but my caltrops mostly kept me safe while I slowly reduced his HPs.

Finally I reached Frostfire himself, who was a level 14 elite boss standing with a cluster of minions just inside the final room in the near right corner. I managed to single pull most of his minions, but finally ended up having to fight Frostfire with one lieutenant. Frostfire immediately summoned a handful of fire imps and a Jack Frost to help out; as a fire AND ice controller, Frostfire is pretty nasty for an EB. With temp powers disabled, I couldn't call a Shivan or drop a nuke; but I still had a level 50's huge inspiration tray, so I immediately slammed a Strength of Will, two Purples and an Orange inspiration. The recent accolade change also let me use Eye of the Magus to feel extra safe. Even with this level of protection, however, Frostfire and his pets was able to do enough damage that I had to click some Greens to keep going. Anyway, I shot him up, but with no stamina and unslotted attacks I ran out of END pretty quickly. Using Geas of the Kind Ones gave me enough +recovery that I could finish Frostfire off. The fight lasted long enough that I had to click a few more purples when the first batch ran out.

Finishing the flashback gave me the story arc souvenir, along with the Proportional Supremacy, Curtailed and Debilitated badges.

After that I joined a monster squad team with Goshilla (28 sonic/nrg blaster); tonight our team had a much better balance between damage and support, and we easily cleaned up the same Croatoa missions that were giving us a hard time last night, getting Goshilla to level 29. A power outage in my neighborhood forced me to call it an early night though.

12/19/2007

Saw the movie Enchanted last night, which was a wonderful, wonderful film. To make this somewhat on topic, here's:

WHAT IF: Enchanted happened in City of Heroes?

SCENE 1: The arcane-themed Andalasia SG base

Prince Edward (a BS/regen scrapper): Hey, I helped out this newbie empath in the Hollows against some trolls. She's pretty cool. I invited her to the SG.
Evil Queen (an ill/rad controller): Dude, don't invite random pickups to my SG.
Prince Edward: But she's HOT!
Evil Queen: Dude, she's probably a guy in RL! I am, you know! And look at her crappy build! I don't think there even IS such a thing as cute animal/empathy controller!
Prince Edward: You're a guy in RL?!
*Evil Queen has kicked Princess Giselle from the Super Group*

SCENE 2: The streets of Grandville

Princess Giselle: Level 13 cute animal/empathy controller LFT! I'm a good healer!
Plucky Kid Sidekick: Dad, we should totally invite her to team!
Normal Guy (a Lawyer, the villain epic AT): Kid, I don't PL random strangers. She's probably still on DOs. She should go somewhere level appropriate! And how'd a controller get here anyway? Shouldn't she be blue-side?
Plucky Kid Sidekick: But look at her awesome costume! C'mon! Let's give her a chance!
Normal Guy: Aww, man! If she autofollows me spamming heal aura, though, I'm totally kicking her.

SCENE 3: Cage match in the Arena

Normal Guy: Heal plz!
Princess Giselle: Ohhh, I'm dead.
Normal Guy: Here's an awaken. Get up, dammit! Heal plz!!
Evil Queen: You fool! Now I shall pwn you!
*Evil Queen starts stacking holds and rad debuffs on Normal Guy*
Normal Guy: Crap! Controllers are too overpowered in PvP!
Princess Giselle: I'll save you!
*Princess Giselle knockbacks Evil Queen through a hole in the zone geometry*
*Evil Queen falls through the bottom of the world*
Evil Queen: Damn exploits!

And then they all lived happily ever after. THE END.

-------------------------

Police Woman flashes back to fighting Trolls

In actual City of Heroes, I started off soloing a flashback story arc with Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster). I initially was going to follow the flashback badging guide and do David Wincott's story arc with no enhancements and no temp powers, but then decided, why not mix it up a little? So I started Flux's story arc with no enhancements and no temp powers. I wasn't sure how bad "no enhancements" would be, but figured at level 14 my enhancements are probably pretty nerfed anyway, so hoped it wouldn't hurt that much. I did notice a significant damage decrease, but the new defiance helped boost my damage a bit. */dev actually helped me a lot here; I suspect most heroes have serious accuracy issues with no enhancements, but Targeting Drone's +ToHit kept my accuracy pretty good. I cleared the first mission (ironically, rescuing police officers from Trolls) without too much trouble, though it was slow going. Got pretty decent influence doing this too. Some SGmates came on and I decided to swap to another character to team up (setting aside the flashback for later). Although one thing I am worried about is how I'll defeat Frostfire with no enhancements and no temp powers; I had forgotten he was an elite boss now. I still have a big inspiration tray and now I can use Archmage at level 14, so it *should* be doable.

I logged on Goshilla (28 sonic/nrg blaster) and joined the monster team for some missions in Croatoa; we were shorthanded tonight with only a 4-person team (stone/SS tanker, dual/will scrapper, peacebringer, son/nrg blaster). Though normally our team does pretty well, with no support characters we were getting badly beat up, failing the mission to save Waylon Crane (he was killed by an ambush) and suffering multiple deaths in the process of rescuing Tuatha monsters from Cabal witches. I decided to switch to Rain Dancer (41 storm/archery defender) and exemp down for the next mission, to give us some support. Between the storm debuffs and O2 boost it felt to me like the next mission worked a lot better.

Schadenfreude: 5th Column terrorist

After that we switched to villain side and I played Schadenfreude (28 AR/dark corruptor) for a few 4-person (AR/dark corr, mind dom, robo/FF MM, thug/trap MM) missions, mostly in Sharkhead. This team seemed to steamroller enemies very effectively. We did the Soul Taker badge mission and finished one of Operative Kirkland's story arcs, getting Schadenfreude to level 29 before I called it a night.

12/18/2007

The Winter event began today and so the first thing I did was log on Mary Christmas (11 ice/rad controller on Triumph), equipped her with earmuffs at Icon, then joined a team that ran the Baby New Year mission five times to get all the badges. This team had the map spawned at level 29, then a level 50 blaster actually did the mission. This was very fast and efficient for getting the badges, but was kinda dull since as a level 11 I couldn't really do anything to help. I did get to level 12 from the mission completion exp, and picked up Ice Slick; still need to go shop for DOs though.

After that I resolved I'd do something more active, so I logged on Rain Dancer (41 storm/archery defender on Liberty) and formed a team to do the Baby New Year mission for exp, inviting a 41 blaster and a mid 20s tanker who I SK'd. We cleared a path through the tundra, fought past the red caps and defeated Snaptooth. I found that pinning Snaptooth against a wall with Hurricane, then dropping Lightning Storm and Tornado on him, pretty much hosed him, locking him in repeated knockdowns.

Unfortunately while trying to lead Baby New Year out of the cave, he got stuck while exiting the cave and seemed to run away under the map. I sent in a petition and searched both inside the cave and out for Baby New Year, but to no avail. So I suggested we reset the mission and try again. The tanker didn't really want to do this, though, because he was getting too much exp (he explained he was trying not to outlevel his friends), so instead the team broke up without completing the mission.

Goshilla
Radioactive lizard that crawled from the waters near Terra Volta

After that I brought on Goshilla (27 sonic/nrg blaster on Liberty) and finished the Citadel TF with the Liberty Force monster squad. One of the peacebringers had solo'd all but the last mission before we got on, so all we had to do is knock out Vandal and the TF was complete. After the mission, one of the other monsters opened an Ouroboros portal to get out of Dark Astoria, so I jumped in and got the Chrononaut badge to unlock the Ouroboros portal for Goshilla.

Then the monster squad went to Pocket D to partake in some winter festivities. I tried one run down the ski slope, performing an atrociously bad 54 second ski run (I missed 3 gates and had to loop around to hit them again). Then we attempted the Baby New Year mission twice. The monsters hit the ice on the frozen lake with fairly comedic results, skating around near helplessly while jousting with snowmen; I was glad I was a blaster and able to use range attacks instead.

Monsters on Ice

We had a few deaths due to ice follies, bad baby pathing and general redcap orneryness, but we succeeded with the first mission. The second mission, Baby New Year again became stuck while trying to exit the cave and could not be found, forcing us to abandon the mission. Our zombie tanker had a theory that stealth aura powers (like Shadow Fall and Steamy Mist) somehow bug out Baby New Year even if they are later turned off; seems weird, but it fits the data so far.

After that we relocated to Croatoa and did Kelly Nemmers' first hunt mission, before calling it a night.

12/17/2007

Played CoH a lot over the weekend.

Started off playing Vesta (13 fire/SS tanker on Triumph) and joining a pickup Positron TF. Team makeup was:

fire/nrg blaster
son/dev blaster
fire/SS tanker (me)
stone/fire tanker
dual/will scrapper
emp/arch defender
fire/rad controller

This started a little slowly, but after the sonic blaster and the stone tanker dropped out of the TF, leaving us with a 5-person "pentad", the TF sped up and smoothed out considerably. I've noticed that attrition seems very common in the lower level TFs; but unlike a STF or LGTF which can become hopeless after losing a couple key players, losing a couple team members on a low level TF can actually help make the TF easier! We finished the rest of the TF pretty efficiently, with Vesta ending up at level 16. Still not sure if I'm really happy with the name "Vesta"; when I made her, I was just pushing names of fire deities into the character generator until it gave me one. But haven't come up with a better one yet.

Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty) purchased a level 25 Luck of the Gambler +7.5% recharge recipe from Wentworth's for 40M infl. This is now officially the most expensive thing I've ever bought in-game; but I made a LOT of influence at Wentworth's recently, and it's actually not too outrageous a price (there was a 115M purchase in the sales history) considering it is a very low level recipe that lets me keep the bonus when exemped all the way down to level 22. It cost another 3M to buy salvage to make the IO, and I slotted it into Combat Jumping, making it the fifth and last LotG +7.5% I can slot for Police Woman. (Now on to slotting them into alts, LOL!) This gives her +81% recharge at level 50, +58.5% recharge at level 41, and +44.75% recharge at level 30. (Most of my LotG +7.5% recharges are level 49-50 and slotted into 1-slotted defense powers that I took at high levels like Vengeance, Personal Force Field, etc.) I joined a level 50 pickup team that took down Neuron; the extra recharge seems to really help stack the new defiance buffs.

Played Mary Christmas (8 ice/rad controller on Triumph) for a bit, mostly joining pickup teams in King's Row and the Hollows; got to level 11. I ran into another newbie named Yuletide Carol and got a good laugh. I'm not sure why, but holiday themed characters really seem funny to me.

On Saturday I logged on Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper on Liberty) and did a flashback of Tina McIntyre's story arc, the Praetorian War; I set a 5 death limit and no travel powers. Olivia has been 1 Praetorian away from Portal Jockey for some time. I had been too lazy to track which Praetorians I had actually killed on each alt; but, since I had finished the level 45-50 Praetorian story arc from Maria Jenkins already, I figured my missing Praetorian HAD to be in Tina's story arc. So I spent most of the afternoon kicking around giant Praetorian clockworks. In between missions, whenever it was dark, I would log on Kid Valkyrie (50 bs/regen scrapper on Liberty) to kill Banished Pantheon masks in Talos Island. In this way, after about 4 game nights, Kid Valkyrie got the Banisher and Archmage badges, and about midway through the flashback TF, Olivia defeated Bobcat (the evil Mynx) to get Dimensional Warder and Portal Jockey. Was kinda tedious work, but the accolade bonuses are really quite nice. I also got a lot of pickup team invites while soloing on Olivia Q; I was kinda sad that I had to refuse them all because the flashback had put me in Task Force mode. Teaming is generally more fun than soloing, so it's too bad there's not a good way to set aside a flashback to go team for a bit, then come back to it later. I finished Tina's story arc in 5hrs 13mins with no deaths (though the time was a bit longer than strictly necessary since I kept swapping characters to kill masks), getting Olivia the Shared Victory and Stemmed badges.

On Sunday I started off playing Spacegirl (32 mind/rad controller on Liberty) and ran missions in Croatoa, doing Buck Salinger's story arc to unlock the Katie Hannon TF. I had started off with just me and an SG-mate but things sort of snowballed and before long we were a full 8-person pickup team (some SKs and some exemplars; had some pickup people, some liberty force and some Sisterhood) beating up weird magical critters. I had some issues herding all the team members around; usually it's enough for me to say "Let's follow the tanker" and people will do it, but on this team it was pretty common for us to have two or even three clumps of team members off fighting different spawns. I can usually say "We're spread out, let's regroup" and players will do it, but I did have a 48 blaster (exemped down to our level) who was determined to scout ahead by himself for hostages. I really would not mind this behavior too much, except that he was not very stealthy (was only using superspeed for stealth) and so would frequently draw aggro and die while "scouting", which would prompt some of the team members to want to go rescue him. I said several times in team chat that we don't need to scout, to stick with the team, to stay with the tanker, etc., to no avail. A couple other team members made some biting comments about running off and getting killed also. In all honesty, I should have kicked him from the team, but I was feeling softhearted and just put up with it.

Despite these difficulties we managed to get through Buck Salinger's whole story arc, after which a few team members needed to call it a day. After that, though, the blaster had somehow got it into his head that my saying "I'm working on unlocking the Katie TF" meant that I *intended* to run the Katie TF as soon as I had it unlocked, and was going to be miffed if we didn't run the Katie TF ASAP. I like the Katie TF, so I went ahead and asked the team if everyone was OK with doing the Katie TF. This didn't go over well, with some people sending me private tells saying they would quit the team if the alternative was to do a TF with our blaster. The emp and kin had recently quit (leaving me as lone support toon against 10 AVs expected in Katie's first mission), our blaster was urging me to invite MORE blasters and scrappers to fill up the team, and I was basically facing mutiny from the other players; under these circumstances, I ruled that we would pass on the TF and instead do more door missions. I told the blaster as tactfully as possible that I would understand if he wanted to quit over this, and he did. We went on to do three or four Devouring Earth missions in the main part of Paragon City, which went pretty well (especially after we picked up some more support characters) and Spacegirl reached level 33 before the team broke up. Oh, I also got the Cap Buster badge and a Deific Weapon salvage drop while in Croatoa; love that arcane salvage!

Later that evening I played Alice Slaughter (14 dual/will brute on Triumph) for a few missions as a lackey on a 6 person Demolition Girls SG team. We mostly fought Arachnos and had all sorts of trouble with Night Widows, who repeatedly dropped smoke grenades on us that utterly blinded us. We didn't have any perception buffs at all (except some yellow inspirations) so the near nonstop blindness was pretty devastating; I think we had 2 team wipeouts. Still managed to get through 2 or 3 missions. Perception is usually only a big deal in PvP, and so I had previously been iffy about Heightened Senses as a power, but now I think Alice needs to take it as soon as it opens up.

After that I played Goshilla (26 sonic/nrg blaster on Liberty), joining up with the Liberty Force monster squad to start the Citadel TF. Our team makeup was:

will/mace tanker
stone/SS tanker
mind/sonic controller
dual/will scrapper
sonic/nrg blaster (me)
dark/sonic defender
peacebringer

While on the way to the first mission in Independence Port, our controller spotted Lusca in the harbor. Being a giant, radioactive Japanese movie monster, I immediately said "It's a giant monster! We should fight it!" To my great surprise, the team agreed to attack the giant octopus. This started off pretty well, especially once we got the will/mace tanker to turn the tentacle to face away from us (the tentacles seem to do narrow cone AOEs). The sonic shields were really nice with their +toxic and our will/mace tanker commented that he was tanking better than his main (a 50 invuln/SS tank) could've, due to willpower's +regen.

Things got really ugly after the first couple tentacles were taken down; once three or more tentacles were aggroed on us at once, we pretty steadily lost personnel (err, monsterrel? who knows) but pressing on despite these losses, we wiped out all the tentacles and finally started in on Lusca's head. The head didn't seem to fight back but it had a RIDICULOUS amount of HPs and very high regen, so we were sawing at its stupid HPs for probably 20 mins. The dark defender was applying -regen with heals and Howling Twilight which is probably the only reason we were even able to make headway against Lusca's huge regen rate.

But in the end we did it, and all got the Devilfish badge. I know an ill/rad on Liberty has solo'd Lusca, but considering we are level 26-30 toons without IO sets, temp powers or rad, defeating Lusca with one team felt pretty good. (After we killed Lusca the team leader said "I thought we'd all die once against the first tentacle, realize it wasn't doable, then move on.")

An SG-mate had logged on during the Lusca fight and so we went back to Talos and reformed the TF to add her (a second peacebringer). We had kinda blown the 5 death limit initially set on the TF by suffering around 10 deaths fighting Lusca. While doing this we saw 2 Ghost ships in Talos, but, since they aren't really monsters, I didn't demand that we fight them. (At that point there was some dispute among the team as to whether ghosts count as monsters. They did not seem a worthy opponent to a Japanese movie monster to me, though.)

So we finally proceeded with the Citadel TF and there was much carnage among the Council. We got about halfway through the TF before calling it a night, deciding to finish off the TF the next day. I got Goshilla to level 27 and reslotted her powers with level 30 SOs, turning the enhancements green once more.

12/14/2007

Spent a good half-hour in the Facemaker making a new costume for April Fool (50 thug/TA MM), my clown princess of crime (to steal a tagline). The new "jester" set is very fun. Rather than using the Jester set for every slot, I did a little mix & matching (with some help from my SO, who adamantly insisted I needed red leather thigh high boots) and came out with a pretty nice looking outfit in black, white and red; something of a cross between the Joker card in a pack of playing cards, and Harley Quinn from DC comics. I also gave her pistols with red laser sights, and a compound bow with a red laser sight; since if you can't mount frickin' laser beams on your weapons, what's the point, really?

At that point, I pretty much had to go rob the bank in Peregrine Island while wearing the new costume. I was solo (well, if any MM with 6 pets can truly be considered "solo") so this was pretty straightforward. I also had fun attacking the Carnies (guarding side missions) in clown-vs-clown combat.

After that, I bounced over to Protector server and played Amethyst Star (20 warshade) for some Faultline missions with a 7 to 8 person team of Demolition Girls SG. [Apparently there is someone whose global is @Amethyst Star out there, too; purely coincidence, that's not the same person as me.] This went pretty well, though we were a bit support-light, which I think resulted in our one team wipeout, against an AV version of Nocturne. We got her on the next try though, and beat up probably 3 more AVs without incident; AVs in the low 20s don't have many HPs so are still pretty vulnerable to being burned down (we had 3 blasters, who seemed to be enjoying the new defiance buffs).

Amethyst Star got to 22 (SO-level, but I haven't gone shopping for them yet) and I called it an early night (had a lot of late nights lately).

12/13/2007

I had an especially good day at Wentworth's, raking in about 30M influence selling various HOs, recipes and crafted IOs. Did some window shopping but didn't buy anything; things I actually want (some of the ToHitBuff IO recipes and of course the LotG +7.5% recharge recipe) seem to be either unavailable or unreasonably high priced.

Playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) exemp'd down to level 27, I duo'd with a dual/will scrapper through the IP safeguard and a few radio missions. The new defiance felt like a *noticable* DPS increase, and it seemed I could easily stack several +DMG buffs just from my normal attack chain, even at level 27 where I only have +2.5% RCHG from IO set bonuses. I did get held or stunned a few times and was still able to fire Burst and Slug; that was very cool. I still hit a break free about half the time, though, because you can't self-heal while mezzed; but sometimes it was safe enough to just keep shooting and wait out the hold. Overall the new defiance felt like a pretty big buff, and I can see why people call it blaster fury; I was almost dismayed to have to interrupt my attack chain to Aid Other my partner since it would cause the defiance buffs to wind down.

Switched to Goshilla (25 sonic/nrg blaster) and teamed up with some other Liberty Force monsters and a dual/will scrapper from the Sisterhood channel for some level 28ish radio missions. Interestingly, I got the Honorary Peacebringer badge as soon as I logged in; the team finished Moonfire TF last night and even though I was logged off at the time, I got the badge (though not the recipe reward). Not sure if all TFs work that way. We did a few more radio missions (getting Goshilla to 26, where I picked up Screech as a power) and defended Talos Island against a lengthy Rikti invasion (where we got the Sentry badge). Goshilla seems to build up blaster fury slower than Police Woman did, which was unexpected since Goshilla has Hasten and Police Woman doesn't, and also I thought Shriek/Scream recharged faster than Burst/Slug. I'm thinking the +DMG from defiance and -RES from sonic blast is going to be a pretty good combination though.

12/12/2007

I started off playing Kid Valkyrie (50 broadsword/regen scrapper) duoing a few radio missions in Peregrine Island with my SO, a 34 ice/nrg blaster, as sidekick. This started off well, but we ran into a lot of trouble at the end of one mission where we faced off against a pair of level 52 Carnie bosses with their attendant entourage. These critters were able to stack enough holds and/or END drain to drop my Integration, with bad results for Our Heroes (on my squishy characters I rarely enter a mission without a tray full of break frees, but as a scrapper I was only carrying one). We eventually beat these Carnies but not without incurring considerable debt.

After that experience I decided to get serious and recruited a better balanced team, picking up an excellent ice tanker, an archery blaster, a FF/elec defender sidekick and a mind/emp controller sidekick. FF and fortitude made our ice tanker unhittable, and the buffs and aggro control kept the rest of us very safe; this team steamrollered the next several missions, clearing all our debt and generating good influence/exp.

After that I joined a "Hess-a-thon" organized on the Sisterhood channel which involved running 5 Hess TFs in parallel. Five TF teams were formed (using multiple alts of five players), then each TF was mostly solo'd by one player, then the whole team would do the last mission together and get a recipe as TF reward. This took about 2 hours altogether and got me 5 draws from the TF completion recipe pool; the only noteworthy recipe I got was a Mako's Bite: Dmg/Rech though.

After that I played Goshilla (24 sonic/nrg blaster) and finished the last mission of the Sister Psyche TF, which we had saved from last night. I got some unexciting fear recipe for TF reward. Oh, and despite the fact that we managed to only have 2 deaths with a 3 death limit, we didn't get any badge or other benefit from adding the special restriction. I'm thinking maybe those badges are only awarded for flashbacks and not for regular TFs.

From there the monster squad swung directly into the Moonfire TF in Striga Isle. Our team mix was:

2 will/mace tankers
1 stone/SS tanker
1 dual/will scrapper
1 dark/sonic defender
1 mind/sonic controller
1 sonic/nrg blaster (me)

We were on Unyielding difficulty which made the enemies mostly level 29; this seemed intimidating since our highest level person was level 26 (since we were fresh out of Sister Psyche TF) but we actually had no problem defeating the level 29s. Somehow the monster squad has transmuted from a horribly melee-centric team to a balanced team with good synergy. We stomped a lot of vampires and werewolves, but about half way through, I was just too tired to continue and had to call it a night. I don't like to bail on TFs midway, but I was too tired for it to be effective or fun at that point. Goshilla ended the night midway through level 25.

For level 24 I ended up getting the "Stun" power, which I like so far (I've stunned several mobs that have aggro'd on me already), but I wonder if I should've gotten Conserve Power instead since I'm regularly draining my END to 0 just blasting away during a fight. I'll probably add more slots to my 1-slotted Stamina or put some ENDRDX in my blasts first; all my blasts are currently slotted with 1ACC, 2RCHG and 3DMG which is very END intensive. And I'm thinking I want Screech at level 26 so I can stack stuns on a boss.

The new defiance patch went in before this game session and I did notice Goshilla was generating buff icons from blasting. I spent some time watching my combat log, but between the defiance +DMG buffs, the +12% blaster damage buff, the sonic and dark -RES debuffs, and the fact that we were fighting +4s and +5s to me, the damage my blasts did seemed almost totally random, and would probably require differential equations (or a parser at any rate) to do a decent DPS analysis.

12/11/2007

Spent much of my early evening tweaking Kid Valkyrie's (50 bs/regen scrapper) costumes at Icon, using up all the free costume tokens to incorporate the new hairstyles and new weapon customizations. Then I realized I had colored Kid Valkyrie's sword on some costumes and not on others, so I had to go back in and fine tune color settings. I rather like the "tech" sword (I have it colored gold and blue now, so it looks like a hybrid between a light saber and a chainsaw), but it's very ornate and really only worked with Kid Valkyrie's cybernetic angel costume; I stuck with a basic longsword for the costumes that used normal clothes or spandex.

After that, nothing would do but to go hack some bad guys for justice, so I ran some solo radio missions on invincible. This went very smoothly (I never even missed Slash, the attack I had dropped in my last respec) except for one time where I rushed a level 52 master illusionist boss, then felt the need to reply to a tell I had just gotten. The MI's alpha strike plus attacks from several pets it summoned promptly floored me while I was typing my reply to the tell. If I was paying attention I probably could have popped any of three or four powers or an inspiration and not died. (Did I mention I suck at playing a regen scrapper?) Went back with more focus on the game and easily defeated the MI.

After that, the Liberty Force monster squad gathered to do the Sister Psyche TF. Our team lineup was:

2 will/mace tankers (one tanky, one scranky)
1 stone/ss tanker
1 dual/will scrapper
1 dark miasma/sonic blast defender
1 mind/sonic dispersion controller
1 sonic blast/energy blaster (me)

Our dual wielding Frankenstein had swapped alts and was now playing a mind/sonic controller, previously a non-monstrous character but today re-costumed as a terrific looking mythological siren or harpy. We started the TF with the only limitation being 3 deaths max, which I kinda figured would guarantee a team wipe in the first mission, but surprisingly we had only one death all evening (the product of a miscommunication where we were stealthing a mission, caught aggro while getting the Mission Complete message, and then everyone exited immediately but the defender, doh!). The Freakshow in general seemed to melt under our attacks, probably due to the stacking -res debuffs from dark/sonic dispersion/2x sonic blast; we didn't take much damage in return, and the defender commented he didn't need to heal much. I think this was due to the tankers and scrapper having naturally high regen, plus a lot of +res due to sonic buffs and shadow fall. We finished the night just before the last mission of the TF; some people had logged off before that, so we planned to save the last mission for the next day when everyone could be on. Goshilla (my sonic/nrg blaster) reached level 24 during this; I picked up Hasten at level 22 and am puzzling over what to take at level 24. Maybe Stun or Conserve Power.

In other news it seemed like HOs got really cheap yesterday on hero-side for some reason; I managed to pick up a half dozen or so nucleolus HOs for only 2M infl each. Not sure how long that will last, but check it out if you need them.

12/10/2007

Over the weekend I acquired from the auction house two sets of three level 33 Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control IO recipes, as well as a level 14 Rectified Reticle: Increased Perception recipe. I crafted and slotted these IOs in Police Woman's Targeting Drone and Tactics powers, which I had 6-slotted and 5-slotted, respectively, in my I11 build, anticipating acquiring some To Hit Buff IOs. This gave her a fairly noticable +10% move speed (very helpful because Police Woman uses combat jump/sprint for travel) and a tasty +3.76% max HP (pushing Police Woman to the blaster cap of 1606 HP at level 50). I'm hoping the +perception IO will help me see stalkers with stacked Hide/Stealth/+stealth IO, but I'm not sure, because I think there may be some sort of perception cap involved.

I started off actual gameplay with a flashback. Inspired by High Beam's outstanding flashback badging guide (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showf...Number=9765673), I started David Wincott's story arc in the Hollows with Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), setting a 30 minute time limit, No Travel Powers and 1 death allowed. Most people hate the Hollows too much to revisit it, but I actually enjoy the zone and this really is a fast story arc, so it made sense. Exemped to level 15 Police Woman has 3 AR attacks (plus vet powers) and Aid Self, so she could solo the missions pretty well. I was on Tenacious difficulty, which probably was unwise (Heroic would've been better under such a tight time limit) and during the second mission I got worried about the timer ticking down, so I summoned a Shivan which helped me speed through a few groups of Outcasts. This let me finish about 5 minutes early, awarding me the Gold Medal, Refrained and Divided Mastery badges.

After that I got an invite to a level 50 mission team in Peregrine Island, with a group of mostly (I think?) United Healers SG. There were more SKs than mentors when I joined, and so I was initially worried that I had gotten invited to a PLing team, but the sidekicks were SK'd to level 49 and ran into fights to help out, so it felt OK after all. We cleared a few of those enormous outdoor maps that Unai Kemen gives you as missions, facing Council Empire and War Wolves; these are a little repetitive but it did push me over my 1 million prestige goal, allowing me to drop out of SG mode to work on influence badges. (If only Wentworths day trading counted for this! I'd have all the influence badges a dozen times over.)

A bit later I ventured into Siren's Call, intending to test Police Woman's stacked perception from targeting drone, tactics and a +perception IO. Of course I didn't find any stalkers there (maybe their stealth was too good!), instead encountering an nrg/fire brute who was remarkably polite for someone trying to murder me. I don't have a lot of experience fighting brutes and fighting him was very different than facing a stalker (who usually run away as soon as they realize you fight back). I sort of kited him around using web grenade and caltrops to slow his movement while shooting between web grenade applications. We were stalemated for awhile; he would hit me some, I'd kite away and aid self, and I would shoot him some and he'd Healing Flames the health back. The energy melee stuns made me eat a lot of break frees and I felt I needed to turn at least a few toggles on each time (so I could watch for a stalker add), which lost me time; I probably should've been preemptively eating break frees to keep toggles up. There was a nice ledge on a building nearby where I could jump up to, and my web grenades kept him from reaching me; if I were more of a ninja acrobat I might've figured out how to kill him from up there, but as it was I could only shoot him a few times before he broke line of sight, so I needed to bounce back down to the ground level. I finally started gaining on hurting the brute when I saw he had used Healing Flames recently, then I stopped trying to debuff him, instead standing my ground in a caltrops patch shooting at him while he slowly ran toward me, Baywatch-style, through caltrops. He reached me and started hitting me long before I could zero his life bar, but at that point he was just feeding my defiance and so I finished him off before he could really hurt me more. He self-rez'd and made a valiant second attempt on me, but at that point I was too heavily advantaged so was able to drop him again much more quickly. Was a fun fight though.

On Saturday night I played Goshilla (17 sonic/nrg blaster) on the Liberty Force monster team, and we did the Synapse TF. Our team lineup was:

1 will tanker
1 stone tanker
2 dual/will scrappers
1 dark defender
1 kin controller
1 sonic blaster (me)

The whole TF went pretty smoothly. Goshilla trained up the Amplify (aka Aim) and Stamina powers; despite having a 50 blaster, I've never had one with Aim/Build Up before, and I was pretty impressed by the carnage that occurred any time I used both at once. We managed to defeat Babbage with the help of one dark defender from our SG who came to help; it normally seems to take two teams or so to take down Babbage, but the double-dark-debuff nerfed him into oblivion. I got something fairly pointless for the TF recipe reward. We did some of the Faultline missions later on, and Goshilla ended the weekend at level 21.

Sunday night, I played Alice Slaughter (12 dual/will brute) as a lackey to a Demolition Girls SG team on Triumph server. We mostly fought Arachnos and got hit by a lot of annoying smoke grenades (why is the devices smoke grenade not this good?). I'd read up on Lewis Carroll a little and did my level best to channel the spirit of a deranged British schoolgirl, and by the end I had most of the team making off-color Alice in Wonderland jokes and suggesting to me the best way to hamstring opponents in between tea and cookies. It was excellent depraved fun, and Alice got to level 14 and Super Jump.