City of Alts, Book V

Last night …

1. Spent most of our online time last night as Velvet and P-Siren, since Invuln and Bubbles took it particularly hard from the nerf bat for I5.
   It had been some weeks since we’d done much with the pair. One thing we immediately learned was that most of our mishes were old, old, old — the last activity had been at least one TF, if not more.
   After about an hour of bashing grays (and seeing how much damage they actually did me), Seventy-Six came on with an RFH, so we joined up with him. Sort of. Nobody else answer the call, so only one of us could SK up. Bubbles don’t scale, so it made most sense for PS to be the 28 on a level 46 mission. That said, she soon discovered how the Malta could one-shot her if they spotted her.
   The mish was actually pretty straightforward, even though 76 had set it back up to Invincible. I found I needed to run all my toggles — TI, Unyielding, and Invincible — to keep damage down to an acceptible steady stream. Never touched Dull Pain, though, which was good, I guess.
   “Watch out for ambushes when we get out,” 76 warned. We exited. Looked around. Nada. Beat up on some gray Vahz nearby (the mish was in Steel). Nada. “Well, then …”
   Whoosh. Three Titan battlesuits unleash missiles on 76. We run in. He goes down. I follow fairly quickly.
   Well, heck. I head to hospital. Get out. Look around for 76.
   He’s on his feet — he’s yellow, he’s orange, he’s …
   I get over there in time to see him down already. He goes to hospital this time — and I see the mob of lvl 47-48 Malta making their way across Steel toward him.
   He heads back, we beat up a couple, the rest vanish. Mercifully. It would have been a painful pull back to the Perez gate for the policfe bots; too many people at the close Yellow Line station to be able to risk that.
   Learned what I needed though, and what I suspected, i.e., drop RPD, figure out a way to get Tough. I put together the respec … and learned I’d already taken my free one, so what I had was my TF one, and I really didn’t feel like running to wherever dude is to make it happen. So I shut Velvet down.
   Main disad to the respec, aside from the question of how well it will work (I should be able to get, at this level, to the 90% damage cap with Unyielding, Temp Invuln, and Tough, but just) is that I can’t take Air Superiority, unless I forego Hasten for the future, which I’d rather not. Not enough Power Pools once I get into the (urg) Fighting Pool (to the get the invulnerabilit that Invuln no longer gives me).
   No idea how much Endurance this will all suck, but …

2. The streets were even more full of archers and sonics, and frustrated people trying to come up with more unique names for both (most ignoring the common advice of adding an honoriffic or title — “Lady Longbow,” “Captain Scream” — or a gender designation — “Sonic Blast Man,” “Longbow Lass” — or even a name — “Screaming Sally,” “Bob the Bowman” — to get a unique moniker).
   Meantime, Atlas had to spawn an Atlas 2 because of the traffic, and starting off with a new character was frustrating because both Contaminated and Hellions were being taken out much faster than the game would spawn them.

3. One unexpected bonus of I5 is that it seems to have fixed the in-game e-mail system — or, at least, it freed up some e-mail that had never gotten through.
4. The revised Outbreak is fine, though having to hit an Info kiosk to learn more about enhancements was annoying. Flower Knight is also kind of annoying — either she dives into battle while you’re still going over to the glowy computer, or else she’s in the very last room, and so worthless.
5. Margie rerolled Mrs. Azure to change her from FF to Sonic secondary (still Mind Control primary). I’ll be SKing her up to get her up to the Mister’s level. She quickly discovered that the Controller “Containment” damage boost worked great …
   She also rerolled Star Protector to be an Empathy/Sonic … er, Sonic/Empathy … well, not sure which, but he had both powers, which Margie seemed to be happeier with than the Kinetics/Dark Defender he was before.
   Only problem — with both characters she failed to “empty the pockets” before deleting the old version. Which was costly with Mrs. Azure …
   I decided what-the-hell and went ahead and created Big Lungs on Champion, only slightly tweaking the design. To do that, I had to drop Truly Unstable, who was fun as a character, but I didn’t really care for the Rad/Rad power set. Twelve levels, easy come, easy go.
   Big Lungs and Star Protector did a bit of running around. Lots of screaming, so to speak. Worked well.

6. With the ‘rents in town this weekend, not sure how much CoH we’ll get, but that might be just as well as people get used to I5.
   Certainly I have no intention of going near Croatoa for a while, nor Icon. CC chatter was pretty quiet last night (I waggishly opined that everyone was intimidated by the new CC guidelines); more chatter in the SG channel, but mostly OOC on I5.