Friday afternoon I did a fair amount of work with Torchielle, getting her up a couple of levels as I worked with a pick-up team. Good fun, particularly once I got her travel power, Super Jump. I like her a lot, and would like to play her more.
Saturday and Sunday was, with Margie’s planning for the Cave of Transcendence trial (which is getting a lot of reaction in the SG forums), the beginning of a concerted effort to get Honeygun and Kazima up to speed for that trial, meaning lvl 14-15. Given that we were starting out at 10-11, that means work.
Most of the time, we ended up trioed with BD, in the guise of one of his Bas siblings (either an added Dark scrapper, Ciunas Bas, or a Dark defender, Dubh Bas).
Worked out well, even though we were running mostly endless warehouse mishes (to the point of having some idea where the mobs were going to be), be they Council, Hellions, or Lost. On the bright side, the mishes were all at level, meaning we were going up against white-yellow, with occasional orange, or (in one case) yellow-orange with occasional red (mmmmm, spicy Aberrent Rectors).
Anyway, by the end of the weekend we were in the 13-14 range, and I was busy revising my plans for what Honeygun needs to take, as she levels, over this week (more on which later).
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***Dave Does the Game
Hey, who turned out the lights?!
Hmmmm. Five a.m. is a lot darker in Standard Time than in Daylight Savings Time. Confusingly so (stares at alarm, wonders why it went off, why it was set to…
Annoying Moment of the Weekend: running from the Boomtown gate to a mission on the east side of Steel, running down an alley to cut off an annoying loop of road, running past a mob of purple outcasts in the alley, and dying 175y from the mission entrance.
*sigh* The disadvantage of not remembering what level you are vs the level of some of your other alts.
yep…
Or mine.
“Hey…with stealth on, everybody is leaving me behind. I should turn it off to keep up.”
Thud 239hp, and a death later from a L23 Tsoo Archer.
“Hey…I should keep stealth on to be able to get to the mission alive…screw keeping up with everybody. Hey, look Honeygun is yellow, really yellow, red, and skull. I should recall her so she doesn’t die on the way to the mission.”
Running my first defender was a bit of a huge learning curve. I think that I
The teleport back there was much appreciated.
I don’t know if Stealth would have helped in that alley. It was very narrow, it was a large group of Purples, and I was just kind of stupid. As I said as I ate concrete, “Short cuts make long delays.”
Actually, we’re at a good level with these chars for Steel. We just need to be careful.
You did well with Dubh. The intermittent/conflicted healing reminded me of Psi-clone, with his Empathy secondary (ran across a guide this weekend on Illusion Controller/Empathy pairings, calling it “Defender in Denial”).
I hadn’t realized the healing effect was a 50% chance. Interesting.
As to whether to defend the scrapper or the blaster — tough call (unless you’re the blaster …). Probably need to be running around a lot (as do I). The question is, do you defend the blaster better by healing her, or by healing the scrapper that’s keeping the baddies away from her. Your choice …
Biggest issue with Dubh was good placement of the Tar Pit. I think your soloing experience pushed you toward having it further away than was optimal — it extended past the kill zone back up the corridor too far, making us come back around the corner or charge forward to tackle the baddie caught in it. All a matter of practice (and it’s a fine power, for all that, and I actually missed it when you switched back to Ciunas).
FWIW, btw, you’ve been doing great with running lower-level chars with us (Ciunas is now at our level, but she wasn’t before, and Dubh was SKed). You’ve put up with our pushing the risk envelope, when what seemed like spicy yellows and oranges to us would have been reds and purples. Good show.
Biggest lesson to learn (and Margie assured me I had learned part of it) over the weekend was that, with knockback attacks and Margie as a scrapper, I need HG to maneuver around a lot — to blow folks into walls, and not down the corridor to where their plight was more visible to their comrades, for example. I also was learning to web grenade the high-power mook Margie was on before blasting away with Buck Shot and Slug.
Another lesson — making sure I don’t have another shot charging to go when the reticle swaps to another as-yet-unsuspecting mook down the hall. We drew additional company more than once with that trick …
Ahh, yes. Quite similar to the lessons I learned when I started teaming with you folks. Tanks/Scrappers don’t like it when my Energy Torrent sends their targets flying back ten feet. Either stop using it, or root the foes they’re fighting with Chillblain first.
As for your last lesson learned, consider getting in the habit of hitting Escape when your foe drops. That will untarget him, and hitting Tab will then target the nearest enemy you’re facing, rather than the next one in the target cycle.
I made use of the Esc key more than once. You’re correct that it needs to be a habit.
Knockback is useful when it’s knocking *down* something that can hurt you (“Get away!“) or your friends (which implies either Big Opponents, who knock down and not back, or else maneuvering to shoot them “back” into the adjoining wall). Knocking down someone readying a ranged attack can be good, too. But it’s truly an art — “playing pool, not pinata,” I think someone said.
Margie was as good with the positive feedback (“Excellent knockback! That was great, love!”) as she was with the negative feedback (“David Hill, I am going to break your fingers if you do that again!”). She really gets into that Kazima role …
Amusing moment of the weekend: Searching high and low in the warehouse (in an Unlucky Pete mish, I think) for the last glowy or mob. No luck on either, and I’m getting into that “I hate this part of the game,” only to have BD spot the guy almost completely trapped behind a box, completely hidden except for the random reticle, such that I had to squeeze my way through and blast him several times. Then having Margie note, “That’s where he was last time!”
I like Hover in conjunction with knockback. I think it was Margie who was amused to see me hovering above groups of goons and hammering them into the floor with Energy Torrent.
She doesn’t middle-name you when you misbehave?
I think she was too busy chasing after the goons I knocked back into the sight of their unsuspecting friends.
If you’ve got enough speed (and ceiling room) for that kind of knockback/down, cool. I’ve come to realize that, like scrappers and even tankers (to chase down aggro), blasters have to be ready to move quickly around the battlefield. Which is a bit dodgier for us, because we are squishy.
I think that as long as you watch what you are hitting, it is safer that you think, especially when the mob is already engaged. I find P-Siren can stand in the middle of thing and be pretty much ignored if she targets off of someone else, and she is doing it with a lot less defense than the rest of the team.
A tactic which quickly became a favorite of mine in team-ups is to watch for goons that panic, and to freeze them as soon as they start running. If I can stop them from getting around a corner, it can save us some work chasing after them.
I also started hanging around P-Siren, freezing or knocking back anybody who looked like he was going to attack her, leaving her free to focus on the melee heroes.
As well as having great support!
Huh. And the common myth among blasters is that everyone else exists to keep them alive, so that they can kill the baddies. 🙂
I’ll echo what Margie said. The last few teams I wa s running Psi-clone in, he was able to do his Empathy heals from right in the middle of the melee, with nobody coming after him because all the aggro was on other folk. It’s kind of eerie.
Added pictures from the weekend to the post.