Author: admin

I was a bit frustrated that, between Vestry meeting and Vacation prep, I didn’t get a chance to get on to play last night.
But it sounds like it might have been a … frustrating experience, regardless.

Finally brought Velvet and P-Siren back online for a lengthy bit — Saturday’s Phalanx Prestige Day (something it might be fun to look at for the Consortia).
Overall? Pretty happy. It’s the first time I’ve done much of anything with VJ post-I5, let alone I6 (and ED), and even with all my resistances down to 3 actual Resist SOs, I was pleased with how resistant to most baddies she was.
Indeed, the only real problem I had was with — hell, I forget his name, big Praetorian running with Freaks. I ended up going toe-to-toe with him whilst the others were cleaning up Freaks, and ended up going down too quickly — and then, insanely, hit the “Go back to Base” button, which meant that the mission finished just as I was back at the Portal … Rrg.
Outside of that, and a bit of creakiness remembering the particulars of Taunting and how to draw folks’ attention and good stuff like that, it all went smooth as silk. Fun times.

Al McGordo and Christmas Present. Ran them from Levels 6 to 8 in a couple of hours. They work well together.

So, having a Fly power with various lowbie characters has certainly been —
— fun.
Enough so, that it makes me think that the big “Travel Power at 14” is a mistake. Sure, maybe don’t make it automatic from Level 1 (though it was fun hovering around Breakout), but …
… well, heck, super-heroes fly. They leap. They run really fast. Being forced to jog through the world for over a quarter of your career (level-wise) is, frankly, mundane, not fantastic.
I seriously think the devs ought to think about travel powers at a much lower level, by 10 at the latest, and without prerequisites (at least for the first one).
Meantime, enjoying the flight …

I’ve not quit CoX or anything like that. But I’m on the road, didn’t do too much of note Monday night, discovered the room broadband was out Tuesday night, and may face the same situation tonight.
I expect the rest of the month is going to be sketchy — we should have 1 or 2 CoH-capable machines with us out in Faerie over the holidays, but the nature of that place is such that I don’t expect to be doing a lot of gameplay. But, I could be wrong. We’ll see …

Margie voiced to me last night something that I’ve been slowly mulling over.
We’re getting close. Psi-clone and Amorpha are at 42 and on our way to 50.
Granted, there’s still a huge amount (of content and XP needed) between those levels — but, still, it feels like we’ve swung onto the glide path.
I’m already beginning to think about what will happen with Psi-clone after that. And the Consortium. And what alts I’ll start focusing on instead. (And, it occurs to me, whether I want to try a Kheldian. Well, duh.) And stuff like that.
Of course, the coming holidays is going to frell up our steady march to the sea here, but I definitely see that gleaming Hero of the City badge lurking there on the horizon. To mix my metaphors.

Option Paralysis is a phenominon that occurs when there are too many choices. In theory, you’d think that having a lot of choices would let you make an optimal decision, but in practice that often doesn’t happen because of indecision, because making the “best” choice begins to outweigh making a “satisfactory” choice, etc.
Like, last night. Amorpha and Psi-clone against some Carnies. No sweat. Under control.
Then we ended up in one of my least favorite maps (large room, couch set in one corner, cubes in another corner, glass-walled meeting room and coffee area on the opposite wall, lots of pillers). We started in, standard strategies —
— and things began to go all pear-shaped —
— and things began hitting me. Like hitting me for 90-100 points. Then 100-200 points. Then —
— Carnies running around all over —
— big freakin’ weightlifter in my face and girls throwing stuff —
And option paralysis set in. Any number of things I could have done. Crey freezing pistol would have been good to lock down the strongman. Call in Phred, or Phred’s Army. Bug out. Hit the phase ring. Hit the wedding ring. Pop various shield chicklets (since I was out of greens). Try —
Well, you see the problem. Any number of good things. And while I tried to decide I kept getting hit and trying to heal myself and eventually ended up chewing on carpet that tasted vaguely of stale cotton candy and popcorn.
*sigh*
Margie was extremely apologetic, as though it were her fault for not taking out the entire room. But it was really my fault.
Need to work on some of those stratgies. Maybe having three trays of powers and temp powers isn’t such a good idea …

So I’ve done RP stuff on CoH before — usually just staying in character, or maybe applicant interviews, or occasional chit-chat centered around missions. But last night I actually dove/was dragged into a major RP thread.
Insidious.
I think I’ve kept away from a lot of serious RP in CoX because (a) a lot of the RP I see in CoX drips of melodrama and romance novel class writing, (b) I like to feel I’m getting my money’s worth from the game, not from a chat client, and (c) I tend to duo with Margie and, in fact, prefer to game with her, which limits my availability for such things.
There’s also the concern about imposing my plots on others, or vice-versa. I’ve seen that done, badly, too many times in my months on CoX.
That all said, it was fun. Psi-clone got yanked into Midnite Tempest‘s storyline, and it turned into something a lot more elaborate (in terms of how it intersects his own tale) than I’d anticipated. I have no idea the extent to which it will go beyond an hour or two of chat last night (and, to be honest, I’m not sure I want it to go much further (see a-c, above), but if I helped p.MT along with things in her story, I’m happy to have done so.
At the very least, it was kind of keen to be able to use the CoJ base as a backdrop (a couple of rooms worth, in fact).

In response to a request from Puck Bunny, Psi-Clone and Amorpha joined a team with her, Kinetica, Noelle Frost, and Shock.Therapy — with, for a while, Agent Seven and Kessa, too — to take on first Anti-Matter, then Marauder, then various and sundry Carnies.
Not bad. It’s a fun group to play with (even if Noelle was all angsty over the Kid Galahad thang). We had a few deaths (Anti-Matter was the toughest, by far, abetted tactically by some “I’m feeling suicidal” roleplay and a bit of Level 50ness), but ultimately prevailed, and both PC and A. dinged to 42. Huzzah.
Ran off to do some scheduled RP with Midnite Tempest, only to be interrupted by a critical call from work. Alas.