Champion was seriously laggy again last night, so Margie and I (after dinging up with Truly Unstable and Carilian) went over to Triumph to develop a few alts.
First off, Mr. Thebes (“They call me Mister Thebes!”), my stone/stone tanker, alongside Fallen Twice, Margie’s spine/dark scrapper. (Margie’s decided that spine powers are really cool — except for the visual.)
Then, for something completely different, my Flamelle, a fire/fire tanker, and Margie’s Cat Toy, a kinetic/dark blaster.
Feelin’ elemental last night …
And then Margie wandered off, saying something about wanting to bring in a character she’d done up on Triumph earlier, so Flamelle stood there for a bit, watching the traffic, taking some pics, and then this really annoying blue and grey troll came over and started ogling her and hitting on her, and jumping up and down to get her attention, and Flamelle started getting all snarky (because, well, she may be a demon, but she’s got standards, dammit), and …
“Hey! Is that your character?”
Margie’s still giggling about that one.
Category: Character Design
Phantom Menaces
Psi-clone levelled up Sunday night. His current track was to go up in Fitness aiming for Stamina, but looking at how the gameplay had gone with Amorpha, his Endurance was really not a huge issue.
Which left him gleefully free, as inspired by Rose.Red on the Synapse TF, to take Phantom Armies.
Can’t wait to play with them.
DING!
Velvet hit 20 this afternoon. She and P-Siren were hanging around, waiting for the rec center groundbreaking to gel, and eventually ended up at Velvet’s favorite lvl 18-19 hangout, near the Boomtown gate at the north end of Steel Canyon. Velvet hit 20, P-Siren hit 19, and I discovered that Serge at Icon won’t even bother talking to you if you have a full mission plate.
(Velvet is seriously jonesing, so to speak, for a cape. I think she’ll consider herself to have “arrived” if she has one. Even if it’s kind of silly.)
Oh, she took Swift, on the all-too-slow path toward Stamina at 24 (will likely take Hurdle at 22 to compliment the Super Jump).
P-Siren will get a chance to do some catch-up in level tonight during the Cave of Transcendence trial, assuming that Margie’s disco problems this afternoon don’t come back to haunt her.
Honeygun – Natural AR/DEV Blaster
This is the first of a series of posts I’ll be doing on my various alts. The idea is to (a) garner discussion (“That trick will never work!”), and (b) possibly inform. Be advised that, as guides, these posts are “informed to the point of where I know things now,” as opposed to Wisdom Handed Down from Level 50. Let the reader beware.
It’s only in the last couple of weeks that I’ve started seriously considering character planning. Something I used to pooh-pooh a bit as something that only CoH geeks got into, I now realize that (within certain bounds of reason) it just makes good sense.
I track my characters using the CoH Planner. There are a number of similar programs out there; this is the first one I found that worked, though the interface is a scosh idiosyncratic. It’s remarkably powerful, though, if you want to have it calculate resistances and endurance drains for your powers as enhanced and toggled (which requires you do a fair amount of bookkeeping to note all your enhancements). As a basic character mapper, though, it works just fine. The stats below are from one of its export formats.
So, let’s start with my current leading lady, Honeygun, specced to level 20 (currently at 13):
Takin’ ‘er out for a spin
Ran Velvet around with P-Siren (and BD’s Puck Bunny) last night. Endless string of Hollows mishes (mostly), which will end (in two mishes for Margie) with the Chamber of Transcendence, or so we believe.
Biggest problem was that the endless, endless hordes of Trolls were all conning green and grey (with a very occasional blue, and, once or twice, a white). Which not only was boring, but which made creeping up to 19 with Velvet excruciating.
On the other hand, it did give me a chance to play with different toggles on her — what to use as a default, balancing damage resistance vs. endurance cost (so … must … get … Stamina …). And, ultimately, we became pretty good at looking at the victory conditions carefully, and just doing them, not clearing the caverns. No need to arrest a few hundred trolls (for an hour) when all you need to do is take down Atta and his two guards (and find a clue or two). And since many of them would ignore us (grey) unless we whomped on them, and those who wouldn’t ignore me couldn’t do much through bubbles and Unyielding, that wasn’t that huge a deal to do.
Not sure completely why they all conned so low. The mishes were new (though the trial may be old). Annoying. They were PS’s mishes, so I may break out of that assignment chain with Velvet (who was getting the same stuff from good ol’ Talshak the Mystic) after the next one.
Anyway, Velvet dinged to 19, P-Siren to 18. Good stuff.
Man and Wife
I’ve seen some “common theme” groups on Champion, but not many. So the idea of a husband-and-wife team (players and characters) is not beyond the pale, but it’s not common.
Margie’s experessed an idea behind a storm controller. Since that means we’d need a crunchy, I’ll probably go for a scrapper (controllers meaning less need for aggro accumulation that a tank would provide). I’m currently thinking of Katana/Invuln combo (maybe with this build) would be fun.
So make it an Oriental/Storm motif. Mr. and Mrs. Stormdragon, or something like that. Make ’em shortish in identical ninja outfits (greyish, with cyan magical highlights), so that folks get us mixed up. Magical origin (magical amulet of some sort of Storm/War god, metaphysics of marriage, powers split between us, etc.). Could be fun.
(Margie and I haven’t discussed the the details, so no ideas are by any means settled.)
Of course, the last thing I need is another active alt to run …
End of an era
I dropped one of my oldest alts yesterday, Snipehunter (NRG/NRG blaster). While I liked the costume, the power set wasn’t sending me, and I just wasn’t getting the “buzz” of excitement from playing him — and, thus, wasn’t. I never even inducted him into the Consortium. Enjoy your retirement, guy.
In his place, O F F I C E R (Optimize For Fighting, Integrated Combat-Engineered Robot, or something like that), a MA/SR Scrapper. He first came to “consciousness” in an alley in the “Outbreak” neighborhood, and just started in on fighting crime. Lots of robotic goodness (even if he keeps being sent after Clockwork …), and the MA power is fun. He’s my current lowest level character, and I’ll be running him with Margie’s Deep Dark Earth controller once I get a bit higher in level.
Margie and I are toying around with a matching “husband and wife” team. That bodes ill for a couple of the remaining underplayed characters (working on the assumption that we want to keep them on Champion).
Characters in my brain
Character thoughts:
- I have several other power combos I’d like to try. I’d like to play with some of the other Controller and Blaster types. Hell, I’d like to play with some of the other Defender types. I should probably try a Scrapper again. I think I have all the Tanky goodness in Velvet that I need for now.
- As much as I want to gen more characters, I am constrained by (a) not enough time to run the fine characters I already have, and (b) no slots available. Well, the latter I could work around. I’d probably drop Snipehunter and Selene, or I could go to an additional server (though I’d rather not).
But the time thing is already an issue. I feel the need to keep advancing Velvet. I really want to do more with Torchielle (and get her into an SG). I want to advance Psi-clone, too. And I’m having fun with Honeygun (and running her with Margie’s Kazima). The other two — Truly Unstable and Sister Chinook — can stay where they are until I get back to them, but I really want to keep the others fresh and moving. - I want to do an anime-style cat girl, with ears and tail. Actually, I was thinking of doing a character of that sort using Katherine as the model. I just haven’t decided on the archetype (kinetic controller?).
Return of the Native
Finally played Selene the Claws/Regen Scrapper again, after about a two week hiatus, working with Margie’s bubbler P-Siren. Had the most fun with Selene I’ve had in a while, which makes me think she’d definitely a team player, not a soloist. Just a thought.
City of Heroes – My Cast
So what’s a game of City of Heroes if you can’t show off your characters? I tend to rotate through these guys, which keeps me from getting any one person up to a higher level very quickly, but also keeps things more varied for me. I’ll usually play one through a mission or up to a level before going on to the next.