A Trio of Tail-Biting TFs

Doyce and Kate are back on CoX for the moment, so we arranged to do some Task Force fun on Sunday afternoon … which turned into Sunday evening, Sunday night, and, um, just barely into Monday morning.

Since they’d not had a chance to do any Ouroboros TFs, we chose those.

First up, Twilight Son and “Smoke & Mirrors.” This is a Lvl 25-34 TF, so we rolled out the Hostess Heroes, who are in the 29-31 range. Margie and I spent an hour or two on Saturday getting them up to enhanced snuff. Pretty reasonable time, but I was reminded again why I am just not thrilled by tanking. Ho-Ho does a fine job (Invuln/Axe) at it. but I always felt like I was slogging through mud (and I’m not even a Stone Tank). We polished off the Circle pretty darned quick — it’s a short TF.

Next up, Mender Lazarus and “The 5th Column Overthrow.” At 30-39, half the team was under level, so we swapped out servers (to Champion) and toons. Doyce brought in Pummelcite (tank), Kate ran Noelle (controller), I loaded Torchielle (blaster) and Margie played Amorpha (scrapper). Great balance, lots of everything, and plenty of damage-dealing, right?

*sigh*

First, we were at a level to spawn AVs, and Nosferatu took us for-evah. Even Amorpha and Torchy couldn’t pile on the damage fast enough, esp. with his life energy suckage. Yikes. Finally Doyce lit on our going out and loading up on damage inspirations — which, through the goodness of Wentworths, we could do. That let us take him down pretty quickly thereafer.

That was only a grind, though, compared to the trio of AVs at the end. Which would have been probably okay if we’d pulled the crowds (and AVs) back into the hallways behind the scenes (maximizing AoE, minimizing sniping), but … well, that didn’t happen as we maneuvered around and our “allies” suddenly took off to attack. 

Many, many deaths later (which made me glad we were running 50s except Doyce), we won. Whew.

Okay, break time. By the time we got started again, it was around 8:30 or 9, which was our big mistake. But, we said, let’s wrap this up with Mender Silos and “Trading Places.” Which is pretty straightforward most of the way until the final mission, where you run around the annoyingly broken terrain of Sirens Call, and try to (a) rescue the Vindicators and Freedom Phalanx from (b) either some high-level Arachnos troops (pretty straightforward) or various of Lord Recluse’s super-villains (who were spawning as AVs).

We knew we needed some healing, so I traded out Torchy for Psi-clone (Ill/Emp controller), and Doyce switched to Hyperthermian (his 50 tank).

Aaaand …

… we got our asses handed to us by Black Scorpion and Scirocco. Then again by Ghost Widow. We got smart and started freeing heroes who were “only” being held by Arachnos troops. We tried Ghost Widow again with Infernal working with us, and had our asses once more handed to us (Mag 100 Soul Storm for the Win!).

We continued trying, slowly freeing heroes without going up against AVs, except an inadvertent encounter with Silver Mantis, who we beat with three heroes along with us.

The broken terrain made keeping the heroes tied to us difficult. They invariably wandered off, got stuck, or got put on someone other than one of our team (at one point, Back Alley Brawler was on Noelle’s Jack Frost — who ran off whenever he got hit, with BAB running with him; another time, Minx was on Silver Swan (woo-woo!), and so spent the melee back at ranged weapons range, idle).

With our merry band in hand, we managed to take on Black Scorpion again (win!), and Scirocco (win!). That gave us Synapse, Ms Liberty, Manticore, BAB, and Silver Swan to, again, take on Ghost Widow.

Who, again, handed us our asses courtesy of still more Mag 100 Soul Storms. Yikes!

It was midnight by now, and we collectively agreed that we should call it a night and reconvene some other time — set at a lower difficulty level.

An interesting note from the ParagonWiki page on this TF: 

Bug! Though each Vindicator and Freedom Phalanx character is presented as a Hero, his or her Hit Points and attacks are those of a Pet-class ally, regardless of difficulty. Citadel is the only exception to this rule, and he spawned as an Elite Boss.

If (still) true, that might explain a lot. Because I really didn’t feel like the allies were helping us all that much, or even drawing that much fire.  

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It was interesting being back in non-duoing-with-Margie group. We tried some initial voice chat via GTalk, but with four of us that wasn’t really practical, and we didn’t have an actual game chat channel set up. That might have made some things easier all around (including the quick stabbings of keys when an ambush was coming in). It might have also helped deal with just basically different tactical play styles and expectations between the two households (“Wait — where is Doyce going?” “Dave, need a heal — oh, never mind” “Why did Kate just fire that off?” “No, Margie, not yet …”). 

On the other hand, I still had fun, even with the lots of dying bits (one advantage of TFs in the O — the “hospital” is never far from the mission door). And practice makes perfect. Good times.