CoX – Rikti madness!

Have had a lot of fun the past week or so with the renewed Rikti invasion stuff — it’s a good periodic “event” for the CoX world.

Mostly played various solos and duos in the high 10s and low 20s — folks with the mobility to get from invasion zone to invasion zone, the power mix to be of use, but low enough to get some appreciable XP impact. Old Saucy Jack, Lady Zebra, Miss Crackle … we even pulled out Fazenda and Araware (hi, Storm Knights!) for a couple of nights, which was fun.

Did some invasions where things went swimmingly — which usually means huge crowds, lag time out the wazoo, lots of bad guys, but enough healers and buffers to make it all a foregone conclusion. Alternately, some of the zones where there weren’t a lot of people worked well, too — the invasion groups are smaller, but with a good PUG (or multiple PUGs) you can usually do okay.

Of course, I’ve also seen invasions go horribly wrong. There’s a sort of death spiral with the things — if enough of the team goes down, then not only do you lose the healing and buffing, but the already-established rate of bad guys coming in have fewer targets — including you — to zero in on. When you start seeing a lot of orange death names, that’s a problem. Of course, nobody’s losing XP — just opportunity loss as you jet back from the hospital (some zones are better for that than others). But as folks rush back in piecemeal, they tend to be dispatched the same way. Regroup and work in from the edges …

It can seem like it would be monotonous, but the mass craziness of the Rikti invasions can be addictive — at least for a while. Wouldn’t want to do it all the time

Thoughts on zones (just from the hero side — didn’t run any villain groups, though we ought to have done one with our MM duo):

• Atlas/Galaxy – Too many low-levels makes this risky, as there’s rarely enough good “support” powers in the area. Plus the bombing zones tend to be a ways away from the core in Atlas.
• Skyway – Easy to get to. Difficult to move around in for bombs, though the big park around Nimble Mynx is a good area to fight in.
• Steel – Easy to get to. Good gather point (Positron), good post-battle stores and Wentworths, but the battle is usually a long ways from the hospital. (Hmmm — wonder if we could talk folks into gathering at the big park by the hospital sometime.)
• Talos – Easy to get to, good gather point with nearby bombing runs, usually big crowds, close hospital, and plenty of selling opportunities. The battles here seem to last forever — not sure if that’s population dependent or not.
• Founders – A very large zone, which disperses folks searching for bombs. No solid consensus on places for folks to gather to battle (university? Williams Square? the train station?)
• PI – Good gather point, but leave quickly post-battle before the local bad guys respawn, unless you’re at a good level.

And that’s enough of that. The event ended last night, but I’m sure it will be back eventually. Good times.