Category: Gameplay

Had a fair amount of solo time on this weekend, so played with some of my low-level solo characters (I did make one attempt to bring on Lynn, but nobody was around and I just wasn’t feeling in the mood for her solo).

Actually, most of these I don’t really care to run solo — I like getting onto PUGs (for better and for worse) with them. Indeed, of them, only LZ is really solo-friendly.

Honor the Flag – Managed, by hook or by crook, to solo a pip-and-a-half to get her to level in Skyway, including a brief stint assisting some folks in pounding on Babbage. She still runs into Endurance problems, and will until, of course, 20. Sigh. Got invited to and accepted membership on an SG — “The Good Guys,” I think it is. Did some SKing into the New Faultline (I think the real estate interests really need to encourage them to rename that neighborhood — maybe back
to its original pre-invasion name), and earned an SG promotion due to presige gathered. Had fun playing a tank.

Lady Zebra – Trying so hard to get her to 14 and travel powers (SS planned). Ended up invited onto a Frostfire team, which was a hoot — lots of fun, two near-TPKs, and, at one point, the original mission owner, who discoed, came back on with another team and into the same mission instance. Yikes. As usual, the final battle was anticlimactic. Other fun running around Steel, and burned a costume token at Icon to give her actual hooves (which, alas, I can’t stripe).
Most fun solo character, at the moment. Also invited onto a team, “The Freedom Phalanx: Black Ops Division” (I noted to the SG leader it was odd that a black ops group would be advertising via Broadcast). Built customized tell files for her, too.

Fr. Frank – And sometimes an Empathy Defender is a “Healer.” Played in a couple of Hollows PUGs which did not turn out well, though I was able to use my jet pack to bypass Grendal Gulch. In one case, the team leader was a lunatic blaster who liked to charge first into melee range to let fly (hint: don’t torque off the healer in the group too often); in the other, we ended up forging across the Hollows only to have our team leader — and damage-dealer — drop off
for “SG needs,” leaving us pretty much without anything to do. Still having fun, though Built customized tell files for him.

Molly Magpie – Still at only 6. Joined up with a higher level Controller quartet in the Hollows and learned (a) imps are nasty, (b) kill me twice, shame on me, (c) Personal Force Field is very helpful sometimes. I do like her power set (Grav/FF controller), and she’s fun to play and watch.

Logged in Torchy and Hildy for the first evening in a while. After a few weeks of mostly in-your-face gameplay (Rita, obviously, as a scrapper, but Unchained Path as a controller also tends to be right in the thick of things), being the blaster who stands back,waits for the tank to gather folks, then burns them to cinders felt kind of … odd.

On the other hand, seeing all those orange numbers float up was pretty grand.

That was following a quick run with Lady Zebra and a couple of PUGs in the Hollows. The only reason I can give for my survival without any debt was that everyone else was doing a far better job of drawing aggro than I was — which, as LZ’s a scrapper, tells you something about their, um, tactical playstyle.

Did a brief stint of Hostess Heroes last night (some nice new costumy bits included), then Margie and I hopped over onto Rita & Runt.

Which was all good fun, though we learned Damage Mitigation Through Taking Them Down Fast wasn’t always a guaranteed win, and early /Regen may stand up to an orange Damned, but not so much to several yellow Cadavers.

Still, we took full advantage of no-debt 9 and dinged up to 10. Dull Pain will help dull the pain.

One interesting twist to what we’ve been doing is trying to coordinate missions between our pairs, so that we maximize mission/arc credit and move through storylines faster. That’s easier said than done, since the contacts don’t always give the same missions, or the same contacts (and sometimes what looks like the same mission isn’t — we basically had to run the Patchwork Vahz mish twice, even though it was the same mish). Need to learn a bit more, or the tech needs to be a bit more refined.

So I’ve run in the Atlas Safeguard mission with a variety of toons and players in the last week. I’m pleasantly … well, pleased by how they turned out.

The earlier “Protect the Widget from the Bad Guys” missions in CoX were, generally, annoying — an unknown number of enemies, too many targets or too fragile a target or whatever. My fear about stopping the robbers from escaping the bank can be summed up in three words “Fir Bolg” and “Dolmen.”

Instead, the crooks here act pretty much like bad guys. I’m sure that, given the chance, they’ll really try to get away (though the truck is stashed across the zone), but faced with heroes blocking the way, the bad guys, naturally, choose to fight their way through.

Similarly, the vandalism events in the city come in series over time, and so are somewhat manageable, and also are trigged by villains seeing heroes, which makes life a bit dicier. Again, it makes the game experience more enjoyable, even if it’s not 100% realistic.

The related side missions — foiling other robberies, plantings of bombs, etc. — are also well structured (and pretty to behold), and provide a decent challenge.

By “decent challenge,” I mean, “Capable of being won, but not without a few tense moments or even deaths.”

Indeed, I’ll go a step further — I think the Safeguard missions are as good as, if not better, than the Mayhem missions. Ideally, I’d love to see a combination of both — I can imagine a “Mayhem” mission for heroes (a smash-and-run raid on an Arachnos base, for example), as well as a “Safeguard” mission on the Villain side (“Longbow is raiding the Arachnos archives!” or even “Other bandits are robbing the bank — the one you’ve got your money laundered into!”).

It’s early in the day, and I haven’t tried any of the Safeguards at higher levels (need to try something with Hildy/Torchy sometime), but I’m pretty pleased by this addition, as well as the Police Band stuff, to the CoH world.

Torchy and Hildy dinged 45 a couple of days ago — and are already well on their way to 46. Having fun, though we ran into an Elite Paragon Protector the other day who was also a Fire blaster — and demonstrated to Torchy that booms hurt on the receiving end.

Our playtime (and blogtime) over the next week-plus will be a bit constrained, I expect — family coming to visit, a small mini-vacation, holidays, etc., all combining to reduce our time at the keyboards. Which, of course, will probably mean we miss the I8 roll-out (or only get a little time with it in the short term). Ah, well.

Hail and well met to both T’lauro and Shock.Therapy, who went along with Hildy and Torchy on the first half of the final push of the first Praetorian arc (Wildcat and Shadowhunter). There’s a reason we don’t duo AVs (dropping to Heroic to make them EBs), but with those two in support, we pulled it off with only a few deaths.

Which put us, when all was said and done, about 2/3 of the way to 45.

A very fun evening. Thanks, guys!

Note to selves: Remember what’s recently been noted about AVs, i.e., Gauntlet doesn’t actually taunt them. I.e., the tank had damn well better use Taunt to keep them off the associated high-damaging squishies …

Got on last night, post-Catan, and did some Hildy/Torchy stuff. Fair number of Storm Knights around, which was nice.

Most stuck to PI and plowed through some nasty adventures. Worst was probably “Rikti portals in the Baphomet dimension” portal mission — largely because those Air Thorn Casters are such annoying bastards (we quickly went from targeting the Big Orange Behemoth Overlords to taking down the Little Yellow ATCs, which helped things quite a bit).

Baphomet itself went down pretty quickly — despite our setting, it was only an Elite Boss. It helped that we had already cleared the map, nuked the portals, and won the mission, so we could have zoned at any time if it got nasty.

Tonight … Hostess Heroes! Huzzah! Ho Ho picked out a brand new tube top, just to celebrate.

So, the Halloween Event (complete with Paragon Times article, no less), and …

Ho hum.

We ran a couple of Hildy/Torchy mission — struggling with Malta, rolling over Crey — and finally got over to PI, the only zone that we could Trick-or-Treat in.

Um …

So, very little gain for the time involved. Really. Click on a door every couple of minutes and get a big Insipration (a fraction of the time) or a trio of whites (or a white and a yellow). Stand around. Rinse. Repeat. And it can’t be mission doors — it has to be non-mission doors. And it has to be in a particular zone. And if your team mate does it, you don’t get a treat. Etc.

Very low value-per-minute there.

After about 40-odd minutes in which Torchy got squat in the way of salvage (i.e., Halloween costume parts), Margie mentioned that she’d harvested a bunch earlier in the day. So we went back to the base, divvied up the goodies, hopped over to Croatoa, chatted with Annah, and …

Okay, fifth costume slot. Cool. Ish. Will be more cool when we get free costume tokens with I8. Meantime …

Okay, I know they don’t want people harvesting and PLing via the Halloween Event. But as it stands, the XP-per-minute is way below (even counting travel time) a normal mission. So why, aside from the dubious fifth costume slot, invest anything in it.

Oh, well. Plenty of fun chatter on the CC last night, which was nice.

Hildy and Torchy continue to churn through 41, navigating PI with relative aplomb (though on the one AV mish we’ve had to date — Psychic Clockwork King — we dropped the difficulty to get him to an Elite Boss … and he still, um, cleaned our clocks the first time we attacked him).

We’re dying in more or less even numbers. Torchy might be dropping a bit more than Hildy — Hildy’s on the front line, but Torchy’s awfully squishy, and if we get taken from multiple sides, I usually kiss pavement pretty quickly. It’s hard to say, though, as Hildy has Rise of the Phoenix, so even when she goes down, she gets back up again shortly (usually, though not always, before the remaining mobs carve me into chutney, and usually, though not always, successfully enough to finish taking them down).

I did end up making a mad sprint through other-dimensional Oranbega last night, various Malta troops and a Herc-class Titan on my tail (yes, looking back down a long tunnel and seeing that wonderful spiral of rockets heading your way is a wonderful last sight to carry off with you).

Malta are probably the worst opponents we’re facing now. Nemmies are annoyingly long-ranged in their attacks, but rarely a huge threat. Rikti are just more grunts to churn through. But Malta are pretty problematic, especially the Sappers, which can take either of us to Useless pretty quickly — either of which is usually lethal for me, since as soon as Hildy’s armor drops, even for a moment, everyone’s attention gets turned to the Big Flaming Damage Dealer across the room.

Fortunately, at 41, we both ended up with a Hold — which is does decently to take down the Sapper if we’re lucky, and which (if we do it together) can hold a boss-level (which is a nice way to deal with Paragon Protectors before they go all invulnerable on us). The alternative, which is also effective, is for me to snipe the damned Sapper, which (if I buff up) will usually one-shot him without drawing aggro from the whole room.

I do like the Malta group, for a variety of reasons (not least of which is the hi-larious mission dialog from Indigo and Crimson), but they’re probably dealing us 80% of our deaths right now, and continue to refine our tactics (and add Accuracies to our holds) seems an imperative.

Wrapped up the Steven Sheridan / Rikti / “Organ Grinders” arc last night — only slightly stale, as we both dinged 41 while doing it. That let both Torchy and Hildy get their first Epic Power. Torchy’s in the Flame Mastery, and Hildy’s into the Ice Mastery, but we both ended up with a single-person hold, which gives us a lot more tactical flexibility (though I still ended up dying at least once, swarmed with Rikti). Good stuff.

I actually played CoH tonight!

No, really, it’s amazing to me that it’s amazing to me that I actually played CoH. Probably the first time in at least a week. Did some fun missions with Hildy and Torchy (about half-way to 41), all that kinda good stuff. But … yeah.

Fun. But I remember when it was noteworthy when I night passed that I didn’t play CoH.

So, Margie’s soloist character, Blue Point (running on Pinnacle), is 30K away from dinging 50 — and will do it as soon as she calls her contact.

Question is: Where’s the best place you can think of, outside of a mission, for a Level 50 Photo Op?

Submit your answers in the comments!

Two big missions last night, when all was said and done, for Torchy and Hildy.

First, wrapped up the Where Are All Those Paragon Protectors Coming From story arc for Torchy (complete with commemorative SO can’t use yet). We had things pretty well figured out against those guys, though Hildy still gets into orange/red for longer than I’m comfortable with.

I do very much like the final redressed lab with all the soon-to-be-PPs up in rooftop tubes, though it loses a bit of its uniqueness now that Arachnos is doing the same sort of fx. I remember it creeping me out when first I saw it, and it still is eerie.

Then off to a Rikti timed train mish (find the 8 people and a barrel of goo). Did fine, and earned big points clearing the map. Invis was helpful for scouting, even with all the Drones. I ended up like a quarter pip off of 40, and Margie was even closer.

Actually, started up the evening (not knowing how things were going to be on the Villain side) running a stale mission solo with Mister Thorne. Yeah, really not liking Masterminds solo. YMMV.