Author: admin

Hostess Heroes time, with both Ho Ho and Princess Peep dinging to 15.
Did a few KR mishes, then a couple of Perez mishes. The latter of which were both very low level, but we did get a chance — my first time — to fight the Kraken.
Which was, frankly, a bit of a disappointment. Nobody really took any damage, and he was not nearly as impressive-looking as I’d expect.
Still, cool times. Alas, next Monday I am out of town (or, rather, traveling back in town), so likely won’t get on. Which makes me sad, because right now Ho Ho’s one of the slightly more experienced in the group, which is helpful for a tank. Oh, well.
Also need to keybind some witty one-liners for her.

FRIDAY
In the afternoon, Lynn, who I got up to 26 (and the “SOOOOOOOOOOUL DRAIN!”). Need to do some journaling with her
Bopping about with Psi-clone and Amorpha. Ran a couple of AVs (as Elite Bosses) with very little trouble. Then headed over to the Cascade Archepelago for some of A’s missions.
I am hereby announcing plans to respec all my players to Fly, if we plan to spend any time over in that neck of the extradimensional world. Watching Amorpha try to SJ her way between various contacts and the like was frustrating (for her more than for me).
And the kora fruit mission we eventually got? I mean, even if you could still farm them the way you used to, it would still hardly seem worth it for some top-tier Inspirations. Bah.
Back to the AVs (and clearing out all the Infected Scientists and demoic cohorts by Portal Corp).
SATURDAY
Torchielle and Hildegard on Striga. Who can ask for anything more? We both hit 23. Hildy did encounter some debt problems as she gets used to the different level of defenses, but we’re still leaving piles of smoking bodies behind us.
We teamed up late in the evening with Major Rogers, who was a couple of levels above us. Nice to add another person to the mix, even though it made me very aware that we have a pretty fixed MO (no moreso than, I suppose, PC/A) that needs to be flexible for guest stars. And that will need to be flexible in the future for critters we can’t (or don’t want to) just herd-and-fry. Torchy has some alternate flame powers coming up (her snipe and her boom), but when we start facing some of the exotic bad guys, we’re going to need to be more flexible.
Lots of good fun. Think I’m going to add Stealth to her, just to aid in the setup. (I’d add Invis, too, if I could find a power slot. Thinking of Stealth for Lynn, too.)
SUNDAY
In the afternoon, more Torchy/Hildy stuff. No more deaths, two instances of Maestro, and Torchy dinged 24 (and another fire blasty power, yay).
In the evening, we brought on Psi-clone and Amorpha. Did a couple of mundane mishes, then brought in T’lauro and Pizzaz as SKs and took down three AVs (as actual AVs, since that’s what happpens when you have four on a team): Dreck, Bobcat, and Neuron. A few deaths from the melee types, helped by having two Empaths on the team, plus buffs and holds and good stuff like that.
PC/A are about 2.5 pips from 49. Yay!

Been sneaking odd moments to solo with Lynn (she’s just shy of 26 now), and, esp. since hitting Striga, she’s been getting lots of invites for PUGs. And I usually go ahead and take them, as it’s often at hours that there’s not a lot of Alliance folks on.
THE GOOD

• It’s good eats. Lynn tends to play cautiously on her own, which makes overall XP/min relatively low. On a PUG, willingly or unwilingly, it’s usually faster-moving, and overall XP/min goes up (even with debt).
• Scrappers are usually in decent demand. And I’m often the solo scrapper on a team (and more often than not, the only melee character, which can be kinda dangerous but fun).
• Most PUGs are okay. Some seriously suck, but they are balanced by ones that are really cool. And it’s worth noting that PUGs are often only partially that way — a core of players who know each other and who want to flesh out a team.
• Being a manager at work, I prefer to let someone else make the decisions (assuming they make them competently). For that matter, I never organize a PUG myself. Too many decisions, and not getting paid for ’em.
• Things are always different. The line between “practiced comfortable playstyle” in an established team (or duo) and the boredom of “lather, rinse, repeat” is a fuzzy one, and subject to being crossed based on mood. Running with different players adds some variety.
• There’s always the chance of finding someone you’d like to adventure with again. Hasn’t happened to me yet (not helped by cycling through various alts), but you never can tell.

THE BAD

• No RP to speak of, of course.
• It’s a pain when you get brought in as the 2nd or 3rd player and the leader won’t go forward until a full team of 8 is recruited. (Yes, that lowers overall XP/min.) I like large teams, mind you — while it increases the chances of someone doing something horribly team-killing stupid, it also adds to the flexibility of the group.
• Some leaders can’t lead out of a paper bag, which often as not means that decisions of when to go, which passage to take, etc., get made by the least patient or most rash team player.
• Some players … are just stupid. Or inconsiderate. Or both. They’re the ones that everyone’s waiting for to go off and sell between mishes (every time), the ones who run in before buffs/debuffs/mezzes/planning takes place, etc. (every time), etc. A PUG is something like Russian Roulette in terms of getting these.

THE UGLY

• Team leaders who stand around excessively trying to find an Empathy Defender usually do so because they know they’re going to need one.
• I feel an odd commitment to a team, even if it’s strangers. Which makes pulling out of a disastrous one sometimes difficult … though a trip to the hospital is always a good excuse.

The good outweighs the other stuff, for the moment. I’d rather team up with Alliance folks, but depending on the “kindness of strangers” isn’t a bad approach right now.

Puck Bunny dinged 50 last night in an all-star Psychic Babbage (a fine coincidence of initials there) mission.
(And let me say three things: (1) never seen Babbage drop so fast, (2) it was great that Margie was able to get home just in time for the festivities to start, and(3) it was a fine personal moment having Psi-clone team-Deceive Babbage.)
So, on to the photos:

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Puck dings 50. She was about 40K under the level when we started, but we were able to get here there after the third or fourth mob. There should be several shots of this — I noticed more than one hero sitting out the actual melee in order to point their cameras.

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Multiple teams here, of course, formed by starting a team then sending folks into the mission and dropping there. I was personally privileged to be on the “main” (PB) team, but everyone had a blast.
L-R: Justice Stryke, Unknown Badge, Seventy-Six, Sword of Asgard, Kessa, Puck Bunny (yay!), Hyperthermian, Psi-clone, Noelle Frost, Malcalpyse, Avocet, ShockTherapy, Stateswoman, Li Nakamura, Amorpha.
All of which reminded me of: And there came a day unlike any other, when Earth’s Mightiest Heroes were united against a common threat! On that day The Avengers were born – to fight foes that no single hero could withstand!
I mean, frankly, there’s no threat I wouldn’t stack this 15 up against. Bring on the Rikti Invasion II!

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Focus on Puck, looking forward to … the future? A vacation? FP Tribuneship? A tall, frosty Molson?

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A bit of post-ding hi-jinx. She deserves it.

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Great fun, PB (and BD): thanks for the invite. Hopefully we can get Amorpha and Psi-clone up to there in the not-too-distant future.

The Hostess Heroes Frostfireapalooza last night (we ran through Frosty at least four times) left Princess Peep and Ho Ho less than a pip from 14. So, much contact running and ka-thunking later, we went to be way too late but travel powers (flight and super-jump, respectively). Glee!
Managed to have a pretty solid group last night of 7 or 8 most of the time, even with a few people off and away. Beginning to face some stresses of level differences — at the top, we’re now 14 (going on 15), whereas at the bottom we’re just about 10. That can be gotten somewhat around with SKing (though the travel power thing is going to be a bitch), but it also means that, short of RSKing, the lower-level characters don’t really have missions to offer up (we ended up running some gray/green stuff more than once), and the higher-level ones aren’t always running their arcs through, further limiting mission choice (as I discovered when someone stuck me with the star toward the end of the evening).
It also means new characters are going to need to be run in parallel or in replacement.
And, at the upper levels, we’ve finally come close to running out of Hollows mishes, unless we want to drive toward the Cavern Trial — not something I’d recommend with this particular group.
At any rate, lots of fun. Glad my meeting didn’t run too late.

Margie went to bed early last night, so I focused on Lynn, finally dinging her her to 25 — which, I’m startled to find, is halfway to 50. Huh.
She’s doing quite effectively solo, hip-deep in Striga content (she just graduated to the dude who hangs in the graveyard). I’ve gotten pretty good at hit-and-run tactics for the various hunt missions that come up — get in, take down a few, SJ out before the rest of the eight or nine take me down. It feels kind of slow, but it’s also better than racing back from the hospital.
Siphon Life is my friend.

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After snarking about the lack of notification about Phalanx Prestige Days, the next one came up yesterday, nicely publicized by Sword and all, and I …
… missed it.
First off, I’d forgotten it was, effectively, a mid-afternoon exercise in this time zone (it’s scheduled starting at 4 p.m. EST). Secondly, I spent from about 2 to 6:30p doing “homework” — a job assignment due Friday that Just Didn’t Happen. That was on top of the five status phone calls over the course of the day (starting at 6 a.m.). Rrg.
Oh, well. There’s always next time. Esp. now that I’m paying attention.
Really need to schedule a CoJ get-together.

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Speaking of soloing, Margie’s got Blue Point up to 34. Yikes. She’s going to ding 50 before any of our other toons, if we don’t get our act together.

Ended up, with various schedules up in the air, running a trio of Storm Knights for the day — Fazenda, Araware, and Doyce on Pummelcite, looking for a TF to do.
Started with Synapse — but quickly learned that Pummy was actually a level two high. “No way I like this TF enough to spend 4 hours not getting XP,” he opined. We stuck with it long enough to get F/A levelled to 20, then …
… hopped over to Sister Psyche. Found a couple of starters (it takes 5), but either the level of one of them, ro the inherent nature of the TF, meant that everything in the mish was +3, +4, or higher. When Pummy had died four times or so, Araware a couple, and Fazenda once — and the bad guys very little at all — we decided to bag it.
Ended up doing various missios in Striga. The “shared mission credit” fix not being in CoH yet (feh!), we did a lot of the same thing, including something like four or boat missions in a row. Which made finally getting a warehouse or two a great relief.
Lots of fun, at any rate, and F/A are well over halfway through 21.
I like Striga. It’s a great zone with some fun story. I just wish there was a store and/or a trainer there.

As we’ve been discussing for eons, trying to shuffle together some of our alts, we’ve had a Long Term Plan to get Torchielle and Hildegard running together. After I noticed the other day that Hildegard was actually within a level of Torchielle — 21 and 22 respectively — so we gave it a whirl last night.
Worked like a freaking champ. Fire tanker locked ’em down, fire blaster burned ’em up. She’d gather up a couple of mobs of white all around her. I’d pop Build Up, then Fire Breath, and …
… she’d pout I hadn’t left anyone for her to hit.
Only off onte to the evening was discovering that I’ve had so little gameplay on Torchy that I’d never imploemented my I6 respec on her (still has Haste 6-slotted). I did so late in the game, and was much happier with the limited results test afterwards.
Those two are definitely a pair to watch.

… we signed on Lynn and Hildegard and seriously bopped on Council in Striga. Felt good.
Working on getting Hildy up to Torchielle’s level, to provide another solid duo (tank+blaster). Lynn’s too much fun as a soloist to tie her down in a group, but having Hildy draw all the aggro in the clusters we encountered (and hold up to it, even though she was two levels behind) was very nice.
Half a pip from 24 on Lynn (which is her Dark Consumption level).

So we sign on as Psi-clone and Amorpha.
So I run across Puck Bunny by accident, and she tells me she’s on her way to a Hami raid. Never done one, but sounded like one of those Experiences One Must Have. I invite myself along.
I lose PB on the way there, and am told which direction to go from the gate. Which, it turns out, is the wrong direction. I’m not teamed, because I know nothing about the whole Hami situation and am either waiting for an invite or waiting to get some clue as to what to do.
Amorpha makes it into the Hive, and is engaged in action, and starts to give me directions of where to go, at which point I get similar directions from PB (who had died and was heading back to the zone) correcting the earlier mistake. (Well, heck, mistakes happen, and I made a few navigational errors myself tonight).
Following instructions, I run across the whole Hami amoeba complex thingie. There are people around, but not sure what’s going on and I come in closer …
… and am one-shotted. Swell.
Fly back from the FF hospital (after first heading in the opposite direction — my aforementioned navigatoin error). On the way, Amorpha (also a neophyte at this) is telling me that there’s some sort of organization to the mass mayhem, and there’s some sort of Illusion Controller group that has a specific role to play. So even though PB finally invites me onto team, I then drop and get onto the Illusion Controller team.
Which was, let me tell you, a laugh a minute, hovering over Hami, dropping Phantom Armies, and listening to banal netchatter.
For, oh, about an hour.
(In retrospect, should have stuck with PB. Or joined the Empathy team and done healing down in the action.)
Got to listen to lots of action for Amorpha. She’s having a tense, exciting time — along with about 11K XP per Mito that goes down (which is about 11K more XP than I’m getting per Mito).
Finally, the Mitos are all down, and things start to get interesting. Big strategic maneuvers. Orders. Counter-orders. Wave attacks of certain ATs.
But we’re reaching the climax. I begin to earn fractional XP as I spam Blinds onto Hami along with similar Hold attacks from other Controllers. Which fractional XP is better than the zilcho XP I was getting earlier. But at least I’ll get big bucks when Hami goes down now, not to mention a Hami-O, right?
Tension mounts. Holds are spammed. Hami’s HP drop. Lag increases. Tensoin mounts some more. Things are just about …
… locked. Frozen. Slowed, halting then …. nothing.
Fucking. Discoed.
Takes about 5 interminable minutes (with Amorpha giving me an HP countdown) for my machine to decide it’s lost its connection, and cycle back to the login screen for CoH. Quickly login to come back to everyone chattering about what Hami-O they got and what they’ll trade for and whew, wasn’t that exciting?
So … 1 death and three hours of my life, in exchange for, oh, about 25 XP.
Frelling swell.