Ring-a-Ding Ding! – Blog of Heroes

So I’ve managed to reach an entire screen worth of folk to have dinged 50 in Homecoming / City of Heroes, and I should probably share …

**Blood Charade** – Sentinel (Dual Pistols / Ninjitsu) – Modeled after a table-top RPG character of mine. I love the animation on DP.

**Spangled Star** – Sentinel (Energy Blast / Willpower) – First (but not last) hero I did who largely permahovers, to help early on with the EB knockback. Fun toon.

**Prince Shenanigans** – Controller (Illusion / Time) – My “Loki” character. Illusion Control is always a blast, though 1-person confuse has become passe with other mass confuse powers.

**Al McGordo** – Sentinel (Rad / Rad) – I tried variations on this character a dozen times on Live, but the power combo is perfect for the Sentinel type. Also my favorite name.

**Touched by Frost** – Sentinel (Ice / Energy) – I do try to add some diversity to my characters. Also, I love the slow effects of Ice.

**Milady Zebra** – Scrapper (Martial Arts / Regen) – A rebuild of one of my favorite Live characters, and the only one I went to the effort to use Superspeed on. The MA moves look great with hooves.

**Demimondelle** – Blaster (Dark / Time) – I ran this half-ghost pretty continuously 1-50, and it was the first time I’d enjoyed Dark Blast. Another permahover character.

**Player.One** – Corruptor (Dual Pistols / Kinetics) – He thinks he’s playing the most awesome FPS ever, which makes for fun dialog with folk. One of the few Corruptors I’ve run, because it’s crazy management.

**Hunter with No Name** – Sentinel (Beam Rifle / Bio Armor) – My Mandalorian toon. Beam Rifle is a weird set, a ranged set that kinda requires multiple applications, making him less useful except against bosses.

**Miss Crackle** – Sentinel (Electrical / Electrical) – A toon I ran on Live as a (less successful) blaster. She’s actually really short, but hovering helps a lot.

**Torchielle** – Blaster (Fire / Energy Manip) – Another “transfer” from Live, and, like the one there, 50ed duoing with Margie’s Hildegard (Fire Tank). Fire is soooo much fun; I have some variants of her as other toons.

So, yeah, that’s a LOT of Sentinels. There are a few reasons for that:

It’s a great archetype: 80% the blastiness of a blaster, but much higher survivability. There’s an argument they fall off in fun post-50 (see below), but up until then, at least, the trade-off works beautifully.
I like being a ranged toon; it lets me be a bit more tactical, lets me avoid problems with bad PUGs, and lets me help figure out what the hell is going on in new content.
Ranged toons are also a lot more fun during Rikti Mothership Raids (MSR), which happen fairly often and are a great level booster.

That said, I’ve been doing some Blaster stuff as well, and the added range and blastiness is also fun. Variety!

Variety is kind of my watch word on this game, the faster leveling rate (esp. at lower levels) making it easier and more fun to try out new things. I actually have 108 characters built, with maybe a dozen of those rejects. Homecoming enables my alt addiction.

So once I hit 50, then what?

Back on Live, I never did any of the Incarnate content that rolled out very late in the game. I’ve started doing more with my post-50 toons, so when I hit that level:

I consider if I need to respec the character. I’ve actually only done this with a couple of the characters; I’m not so min-maxxy that I need to have a perfectly optimal character.
I start slotting sets (I begin that at 47, when I can buy 49s, which is all I buy for sets, as the incremental boost of a 50 is not worth the significant cost boost). Prior to that, I slot folk with Lvl 25 IOs (starting at 23).
And now I start doing Incarnate stuff, both occasional ITrials, TinPex runs and the like, but also just normal content (PI police missions, high-end TFs, etc.). The Incarnate system is messy and ugly and weird, but I’m getting some folk with their various Incarnate lots opened up and populated.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on. Lots of other up-and-comers (and only a minority of them Sentinels!) that I’ll report on in the future. These toons are all on the Everlasting shard, which where I spend pretty much all of my time.

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