Sailboat

For that purpose, some kind of stealth ability and recall friend really helps.

Oooh, someone let a Deadly Ripper loose in Mercy Island! Open a window or something!

Man, I could swear I saw a thread about this exact issue a while back, and my (weak) recollection is that the player eventually DID get the item unmade or reversed. I just rooted around searching for it, but I'm not even sure what search terms to use. Anybody else remember that?

Aha, here it is -- not quite the same thing, the player wanted the crafted Incarnate power deleted.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...62#post3695562

Freeform power choices only work when there's an involved, committed, thoughtful game master closely supervising character design and desigining the adventures to fit.

That's what the tabletop version of that other game used to rely on. Sure, some GMs weren't very good -- and those campaigns weren't very good either. But that game's rules system was explicitly predicated on a GM being present and participating.

That cannot be done in an MMO. It's just not economically feasible to hire one dedicated GM for every team playing on a given night.

Without that, the idea degenerates into munchkinism more or less immediately.

Well, we tried most of the suggestions in the thread, all at the same time.

And it worked.

Several of us ran BB for Shivans the night beforehand, and two of us even got Warburg nukes. I bought a bunch of Backup Radios and Envenomed Daggers, ginned up a few thousand Architect Tickets to buy the salvage, and e-mailed the recipes and salvage around to the group.

But the biggest factor was the one nobody suggested because it's not supposed to be possible: add more team members to an already-in-progress Task Force.

I'd forgotten two other friends had originally joined the TF. They hadn't been present for last week's adventures, which ended with our frustration against Romulus. But they returned this week, adding a Fire/Stone Melee Tanker and a Traps/AR Defender to our strength.

So, when we finally got back to the final fight, we discussed splitting the attention of the nicti from Romulus with the two Tankers, pulling to the grass, and keeping the squishies at range during the battle. We talked about the importance of distributing the buffs and debuffs for best effect. We bought inspirations.

And then the Tankers pulled the bad guys onto the grass while we, at the last moment, summoned Shivans and PPD Hardsuits and hit Call to Justice and Build Up and ate our skittles like crazy, and we opened the ENTIRE can of whoop*ss on Rommy. And we threw in a few Envenomed Daggers for good measure. And Benumb and Acid Mortar and so on. And this time his health immediately started to drop visibly.

So we poured it on and won the day.

I think we mostly concentrated on Romulus, but the second and subsequent beatdowns went a lot faster, so we felt that, in a lucky turn of events, the first nictus to be absorbed was the Healing nctus, which helped a lot.

Thanks for the advice and kibbitzing! I'd like to hog the credit for my preparing radios and salvage for everyone (I even had spares which came in handy when the two forgotten players returned), but in reality it seems more likely that adding two entire superheroes was the most important addition to our strength.

We came in the rocket car!

I admit I did raise an eyebrow at the "Trainers=Icon" change.

I actually like traveling, and I like all 4 travel powers too. I do have my limits though. What bothers me most is the needless "go see a Security Chief or I won't give you any missions" issue, more because the idea seems pointless than because of the travel itself.

What's wrong with the Shadow Shard is not JUST the distances AND the fact that, if you use the geysers exactly right, many of them still do not work right, BUT ALSO that a large fraction of the enemies there completely negate defense-based builds, both the inherently defense-centered powersets and builds made to take advantage of IO defense bonuses. The combination of "hard to get to, long distances, major feature never worked right, AND a substantial portion of builds are often totally neutralized" is pretty daunting. Oh, and add in "really long TFs too."

I wonder if "Impatience Creep" is already claimed on certain servers....

Are you using the new "NCSoft Launcher" to start the game? As of August 4, the old "updater" shortcut won't work. See here.

I've undertaken a "social" ITF with a couple of friends -- this team is not particularly min/maxed and just played for fun. Without planning it, we happen to be a Hero Pentad -- Blaster, Controller, Defender, Scrapper, Tanker.

We motored through the last mission and got to Romulus and his nicti, and found ourselves unable to take him down. Instead, he quickly cuts us down every time, perhaps with his autohit pulse attack. We have not stayed alive long enough to see if we're making inroads into his life bar, so it's hard to say if we have "enough" damage.

I myself have participated in the ITF many times, but usually we've either split the spawn between two taunting Tanks, or just powered through with mass damage, so I never learned the finer points of bringing down Rommy.

We'll try again this week.

Questions:

1) Is it possible to kill off the nicti first? I get the impression that Romulus himself has to go down (multiple times) -- at least that's how I remember seeing it done -- instead of shearing him of his nicti, but I'm not really sure. It does seem we cannot "pull" the nicti until we target and pull Romulus himself. Since we lack a second taunter, the odds of forcibly splitting him from the nicti are iffy at best.

2) Is there anything else tactically we should be doing in order to defeat him? We've tried asking the ranged squishies to stand way back, but to date it hasn't worked -- something is shooting them.

3) What else can we do (without leaving/breaking the Task Force) to beef up? We're all heroes, not a mixed-faction team, so we can leave the zone. Here's what I've come up with:

• Buy Backup Radios in the auction house
• Buy Evenomed Daggers in the auction house
• Run Bloody Bay for Shivans
• Run Warburg for Nukes
• I'm not sure if our little SG has an Empowerment Station yet

We're not worried about "purist" considerations like "no Shivans." In fact, we don't really even need to succeed; it's just that there are some less-experienced players in this group who have not run through an ITF yet and I don't want them to feel frustrated. I plan to try to gin up some of the items on the bulleted list above before we play next.

Any suggestions are welcomed.

Remember, the point of the game is to play the character. You're already leveling at a pace that takes you up a level every 10 missions, which means you're rapidly moving through content.

You'll go much faster if you team. You'll go faster still if you park the character for a while, let patrol experience accumulate, and play an alt. You'll even go a little faster than that if you park in a Police Station and get the day job that gives a small bonus to mission completion xp.

They have recently added a lot of things to do at 50...but the pre-50 content still dwarfs all that. Plus, if you like leveling, remember you won't do ANY leveling at 50.

I have a tree-based superheroine called Raintree who is an Earth/Rad Controller. She uses her own roots to heave soil and stones and entangle enemies, and she uses plant pheromones and allergens to weaken and debuff her enemies, and she heals and resurrects her friends with the life that runs through the forest itself.

She wouldn't dream of being a Plant Controller -- she's protecting plants, not exposing them to danger.

Maybe Miss Thystle protects plants by punching people.

One thing to consider -- most of the crashing nukes are PBAoEs, and as far as I know, the popular crashless ones are ranged (Assault Rifle and Rain of Arrows). I'm not sure about the Dual Pistols crashless nuke...I think it's PBAoE, but it also seems to be less popular, going by the forums at least.

A crashless PBAoE nuke with reduced damage might mean exposing yourself to a lot of danger and still not killing the spawn -- sort of a poor compromise.