Author: admin

Huzzah!

Ended up playing the Woodsman/Eden/Crystal Titan Trial (also here) last night. Loads of fun, helped tremendously by the facts that:

1. Many of the folks playing had already done it, and so had some idea of the pitfalls (I can’t imagine tackling this thing otherwise).
2. Solid team of characters. No weak links. Pesides Psi-clone and Amorpha, we had Hyperthermian, Shock.Therapy (Mal version), Kinetica, Hekuba, Puck Bunny, and Noelle Frost. Not much room for improvement there.
3. DE still aren’t dropping emitters, which made the whole thing a hell of a lot simpler.

he final battle against the Crystal Titan is amazingly short for an AV battle (a good thing, too, since we had only two Ambrosia chits each, and I was busy watching my second one count down to about 5 before CT went down).

The Trial itself is a mixed bag. On the plus side, it’s short — 2-3 hours, I’d guess (the timer on the main mission is 4 hours). The set pieces are damned spooky. The story line is pretty cool. The villain is scary.
On the minus side — only a Devouring Earth fanatic (e.g., Amorpha) would not get tired of the critters after taking out the fortieth or fiftieth group of them. There are a few variation — the Lichen, the two Walls — but mostly it’s all DE, and, in point of fact, all rock/crystal DE.
Net? Absolutely worth doing once. Future repeats are dependent on the quality of the team. And it’s worth noting that varying teams might have varying results — we’d have been in more trouble, for example, without a very solid tank, or without a couple of empathy sorts, or without controllers to lock down the Walls and their spawn — and it would have taken even longer without Heroes That Go Boom, let alone, again, everyone being a solid quality player. Indeed, I’ll be interested in seeing how it plays with the next character I bring in, whoever that turns out to be.
It’s a Level 39-41 soiree, so PC/A had to autoexemp down. No XP, thusly, but good evening entertainment, nonetheless. The only hitch all evening was the “at least one person has to be the right level for the TF to start” maybe-bug, which meant digging up a 39-41 — hence Hekuba, vs Li Nakamura.

I’ve been mostly off of CoV for a month-plus now, due to Margie’s graphic card going kerflooey (to get all technical with you folks). I logged in briefly to get jingle jets, but that was about it, aside from a couple very short solo dabbles.
And y’know what? Not missing it all that much. I guess I’m just a sappy guy who likes to be a hero, rather than a villain.
Granted, CoV the game has some bits that make it superior to CoH — incrementally, at least. But I’m really not pining away for the sense oppressive gloom and doom and blood and pain and general nastiness.
I’m sure that, once we get back into it, we’ll enjoy it more, esp. if we can do more teaming up with people. But, really, at this point it remains a sideline to me, not the main event.
Call me a sucker for blue skies. I never knew you could get S.A.D. from a computer game …

Friday
Mostly badge and accolade hunting for Psi-clone and Amorpha.
Saturday
Did some PUG work with Big Lungs. I’m not at all happy with the Sonic/Sonic combo — it’s okay, but boring — but I really like the way she looks (more than just the, um, obvious), so I’m loathe to get rid of her without something to replace her powers with instead (Storm Controller?). PC/A bits in the afternoon. Nada in the evening, due ot other commitments.
Sunday:
Morning: Recreated Fr. Frank on Virtue. I’d have done it on Champions, but I really didn’t want to let go of anyone there — neither my sadly-neglected CoV toons, nor my lesser-used CoH alts (incl. Big Lungs, who is surprisingly popular in PUGs).
Ended up with Fr. Frank in a PUG sewer crawl, and levelled to 6 by Noon. Nice to be appreciated. 🙂
Afternoon: Phalanx Prestige Day started off slowly, but ended up with a group of 8 (incl. a couple of Allies) doing the Croatoa TF — which took us 3 hours, rather than the 90 minutes forecast, but was still short. Velvet and P-siren dinged to 31. Velvet had the only death in the TF, I believe, a catastropic endurancde failure leading to complete toggle drop and many, many, many lightning strikes.
Evening: Malta-stomping with PC/A and Hype and Noelle. Ended the evening at 46.4, which is none too shabby.
It was interesting — PC/A have a very careful, refined, controlled set of Malta tactics, which were utterly useless with the rambunctious quartet we ended up in. Lots of thrills, chills, and a few face-plants (and exercise of my Rez) for everyone but me. I need to seriously consider respeccing into Clear Mind — this is the first time I really regretted not having it. That, and carrying a lot of Break Frees.
Fun times.

For whatever reason, Psi-clone and Amorpha did hunting tonight, to support going after two likely Accolades — Freedom Phalanx Reservist (+10% HP) and Vanguard (1/25min secondary effect boost).
Ended up with the FP Reservist for each of us, after some badge hunting and lots of crisscrossing PI searching for Fake Nemesis. Yay.
Vanguard’s basically waiting for a stint in the sewer network for us, hunting down 100 Lost bosses.

Helped Hyperthermian get up to 50 last night. In the process, Psi-clone and Amorpha hit 46. (Which is a lot easier to do when you’re fighting purples most of the evening). Puck Bunny, Li, Lil Tessa, Shock, and Mal were along for most of the ride, and Sword of Asgard hopped in on the last mish.
No big problems, as far as that goes, except for when we went up against Psychic Babbage. Hype went down three or four times, which usually triggered a few other deaths in the crowd as the critter turned its attention to us. I managed to avoid more than one death — I think A went down twice.
With the volume of XP being generated, though, it was hardly a disaster.