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Kitsune-chan and Ex-terra continue their march toward the Big Ding. We wrapped up the Praetorian arc last night, defeating Tyrant with … well, I won’t say ease (he hits hard), but without any deaths (in that particular battle). We then stood around with Statesman and posed for many fun pictures.

Alas, I did not bring my HD that has said pix with me, so they will have to wait for another post. And, of course, Tyrant teleports out, so there’s no body to gloat over.

Anyway, we’re at 49.3 at the moment. Despite having gotten a couple of purple uber-IOs, they don’t work until 50, so (since we tend to retire characters at that point) I don’t expect we’ll get a lot from them.

Now, of course, I need to start considering who next to start moving on the March to the Top. Rita and Runt are in their low 40s (and seeing how some of these higher-level opponents can be handled with just two scrappers would be interesting).   Gifted Kid and Special Educator are at 30 (and are Villains, which would add some novelty), And then we have a variety in their teens and twenties. 

We’ll see. For now, glory awaits …

As Kitsune-chan and Ex-Terra have been plowing their way through the second Praetorian arc (finding Statesman), we’ve been doing it on Invulnerable so that we can get the Praetorians as AVs. Results?

Of these guys, Infernal was definitely the hardest — but only in the first Praetorian arc (the one in the temple with all his friends). In the second arc, in the water, he’s not nearly as bad (and since we’d done it once, and not realizing it was an easier setting, we did it the second time as an Elite Boss, and didn’t take a picture). That first time out was the only one of these battles where we died — but we’d taken the portal out, so the rematch worked much better.

Bottom line, we buff the hell up, I send in “the boys” (Phantom Army) to take the Alpha, Margie goes in and just starts spining the hell out of the AV while I throw all my Rad debuffs, and pepper with Blinds, Spectral Terror, and my new epic mind blast. I rarely get hit by anything after the initial attack, my holds and illusions often keep the AV distracted at least, and Margie lets the air out of their tires. So far, it’s worked out great.

Next up — Tyrant. There will be, of course, pictures.

So I played hooky today, after a very long (very fun, but very long) weekend. And, yes, I spent most of the (waking) day playing CoX, because I was just in that kind of “burn some time doing something fun” kind of mood.

And so I need to compliment two players I ran into PUGging during the day.

1. Dr. Bearnard, a large, bear-shaped, lvl 25 Defender on Virtue, who shepherded / supported a band of Lvl 3-4 characters through the Sewers from Atlas, down to the bottom, and up again to Kings Row, offering heals, but, as important, congratulating each character by name when they leveled. And, when we were most of the way back up, teleported the whole crew to the exit. The character was very supportive, polite, and made the Sewers death-march almost pleasant (not to mention profitable), without at all trying to be the boss. Molly Morningway thanks you, Doc.

2. Cut-Up, a lvl 42-or-so Dual-Blades Tank on Freedom, who invited me on to help finish a mish when folks were dropping from the original team because of problems … and, when it turned out to be just him and me, went out of his way to find something we could do (with me down at 39), eventually leading us to do a few of the Midnighter missions. Very hospitable. Miss Crackle gives you a smile and a wink, Cut-Up.

On the flip side, Molly found herself this evening with the rump-end of a group where most folks had to run. She’s managed not to get a bank mish yet, so she didn’t have a travel power and was at 11. And she was given the star.

*sigh*

So, still in Kings Row, she recruited for the mish, got a group of eight, carefully explained how she wanted the mish to go (“Let’s street sweep on our way to the bank, since not everyone has a travel power yet. Yes, we have plenty of time to do that.”) … and ended up running after everyone who was charging at full tilt toward the next goal.

Still managed to survive, get a temp travel power, two side missoins, and enough XP to level to 12. Fortunately, Margie came home about then, and I could duck out.

There’s a reason I never ask for the star …

1 excellent tank leader + 3 blasters + 3 defenders + Invincible = A reddish-purple AVesque XPfest + dinging Miss Crackle up a full level to 39. Yay.

First four Praetorians defeated in the Tina MacIntyre arc. Huzzah!

I love ragdoll physics.

So I’m horribly, horribly behind in all my I14 pre-release info review. 

Instead, Margie and I have been grinding along on various PI arcs, in particular the first Tina McIntyre Praetorian gig. Unlike previous duos, we decided we really wanted to see if we could take on the AVs as AVs, rather than as Elite Bosses.

We tried duoing some AVs with Psi-clone and Amorpha, but just couldn’t get the DPS up high enough (which, with Amorpha, was saying something). But with Kitsune and Ex-Terra, in particular with Kitsune’s /Rad bits, we thought we might stand a chance.

Two things we learned.

1. Running into a room to confront an AV without prepping yourself first is an excellent way to experience Paragon City’s fine health care system.

2. We can, indeed, duo AVs. Not without difficulty and occasional death, but between irradiating the snot out of them, distracting them with phantoms, and and with Ex-Terra’s spine slowing and damage, plus some careful Endurance management, we managed to take down the four AVs (AntiMatter (twice), Neuron, Bobcat, Shadowhunter) in that arc. Yay.

Big XP, too, natch.

I’m taking souvenir pix of the baddies.

By Sunday night we were well into level 45. Good fun.

After about a week and a half of not feeling the CoX urge, Margie and I spent several hours this weekend doing two of our higher-level characters, Kitsune-chan and Ex-Terra, dinging them up to 43 and securely into the lower end of Peregrine Island.

Kitsune’s an Illusion Controller, but unlike my first 50, Psi-clone, she’s Ill/Rad, rather than Ill/Emp. The difference in play style is interesting. With PC my job was (aside from providing controllerish stuff with Phred the Phantasm and Scary Sam and the Boys) to keep Amorpha on her feet. Lots of buffs and heals, and let her do the heavy lifting.

Kitsune, on the other hand, only rarely fires off heals, since she has just the one. Instead, her job is to debuff the biggest boss on the board and then control the mobs while Ex-Terra spine-AoEs the snot out of them. It’s an effective combo — more of a team effort than PC/Amorpha, as both of us are AoEing the heck out of the baddies. Indeed, by the time I get around to actually doing any attacks, the baddy minons are usually down to a sliver. Aside from simple goofs, we seem pretty unstoppable at Unyielding (which provides more mobs, if not quite as high level as Invincible); I’m tempted as we get into the final story arcs to bump to Invincible and see how effective we are duoing vs AVs.

As Margie notes, there’s a reason that /Rad controllers are so in demand in PUGs.

Fun times.

Imagine if the defection of a member of your SG could not only dissolve your entire super-group, but leave all of Paragon open to effective attack by Lord Recluse and the Rikti combined. That’s sort of analogous to what’s going on over at Eve Online.

Something Awful’s Eve Online wing, GoonSwarm, has claimed what will likely go down in internet history as its greatest victory. It was an event described in a Metafilter headline thus: “It’s as if Apple dissolved Microsoft“.

That’s an incredibly accurate diagnosis of the events of last week. Thanks to a brutal betrayal of trust by an Eve player, the Something Awful superpower has used the game’s strange organisational mechanisms to take their arch-rival’s name away from them. Band Of Brothers (BoB), once the most feared of alliances, is now gone for good. The Goon victory wasn’t a great battle, nor a tremendous war brought to an end. Instead it was an inspired defector that led to the dissolution of one of Eve‘s most significant brands. It was a classic instance of underhand warfare tactics from the real world: sabotage by a traitor, trashing vital infrastructure, and leaving the gates of the fortress unlocked.

So what does it all mean? And how did it all come to pass? What it means is that upwards of several million man hours of work have been instantly obliterated, and a relatively peaceful region of Eve Online has been plunged into fresh war. The equivalent real-world costs are almost incalculable, given the sheer number of factors involved, and the thousands of people who have contributed to BoB. But it’s safe to say that we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in virtual investment put at risk.

Sounds both amazingly fascinating and a huge reason why I will never play that game …