Category: Gameplay

Margie and I didn’t spend quite as much time on CoH over the weekend as we’d hoped, but we still took good advantage of the exercise — pushing a couple of our 30s duos into the higher 30s.

We also discovered the joys of “Death from Below,” the introductory trial / Sewer Mission that they’ve added in since Freedom came up.  For about an hour of time (including standing around and waiting for the team to gel), you can easily add several levels of experience to your intro characters, plus get a nice Hydra boost to your accuracy, damage, regeneration, or defense for a couple of weeks of game time.

(It’s not clear how much of the level jump was also due to the double-XP weekends. Okay, well, thinking about it, I’d guess about half of it. 😛 )

It does have a feel very much like the old Sewer Raids (which you can still do if you are so inclined), but somewhat safer and more organized.  It’s also a good intro to various low level mobs.

The DfB missions can be run by any level, though you get exemplared down to level 2 to start with.  They are also re-runnable, so we were able to fairly easily advance a couple of our beginner toons into the low/mid-teens with relative ease.  (Though CoH has added some nice low level material, it’s also nice to be able to advance relatively quickly to Steel Canyon … and, honestly, a “can’t we start off around level 15?” has been a long-time lament from many in the player base).

There are also trainers stationed along the way of the trial, to let you level up as you go if you’re so inclined. Ironically, not all of your leveling will immediately take, since your exemplared level is dependent on the team leader’s leveling, not your own. Thus you can take a new power, have it showed up as grayed out, then have it appear later in the trial. Also, there’s a certain time pressure (aka “everyone’s running pell-mell ahead”), so standing around pondering power choices for too long is a bit impolite.  Do it a couple of times, but save most of it for Ms. Liberty at the end.  Slot in haste, respec at leisure.

One slightly irksome note: While the DfB missions are supposedly doable via the “LFG” functionality they’ve added in (click on the LFG button, join the queue, get automatically added into a mission once 4-8 other folks have joined in), few people seem to be using it, meaning that we were dependent on folks pulling together DfB team, or pulling one together ourself, semi-manually.

How to pull together your own DfB run (since the instructions are not readily apparent):

1. Join the queue, noting that you want to reserve it for your own group.
2. Broadcast/invite people to your team. This may take 30 seconds or 15 minutes depending on competition, time of day, etc.  People can be anywhere, so a lot of folks use the Help message queue for this.
3. When you get 4-8 players, go back to the queue, click on it again, and once everyone on the team accepts, you’ll be teleported in.

It’s not for everyone, but, as I said, it’s a nice, non-tedious way to get past the first several-to-dozen levels in a short period of time … especially during double-XP weekend.

The latest installment in the signature arc, “Who Will Die?” came out this week, and last night Margie and I ran a couple of our 50s (blue) through it.

(The arc is designated for level 40+.  Paragon decided to have the earlier episodes available in the 20s, and then ramp up to the 30s and now 40s.  Which makes it a bit tough to run a low level toon through the whole contiguous story, to be honest.)

The illustration for this ep has a skull-faced Manticore drawing back his bow, and, yes, Manticore does something that will shock, shock, shock you.  Or maybe not, since Manticore is the go-to guy for bad decision-making in the Freedom Phalanx.  (What is it about archers, anyway?)

But here’s the thing — it’s a cool adventure, full of drama and all that, but … it just didn’t click. No spoilers here, but while I could see that there was a connection with the previous eps, I didn’t go, “Ah, of course, there’s the problem.”  The episode and it’s climactic problem just felt sort of pulled out of a hat.

The adventure, at least, is pretty good, with minimal cut-scene constipation as the previous couple of eps had.  It’s centered in Peregrine Island, and was doable by both our duos in about 35-40 minutes.  Travel powers are optional, unless you have problems with the mobs in PI.  The mission sites are all within a reasonably close jog (esp. if you start at the mission-giver).

The individual missions are pretty decent and of good length.  Mobs include Carnies, Malta, Nemmies, Circle of Thorns, and Rularuu troops.  There’s also a pretty decent ally that comes along with you and is only mildly annoying in her over-aggression against the baddies. The final boss in the final mission was not all that big a deal.

Overall, a good mission arc, even if the Big Event at the end felt like it was coming out of left field (and with no sense that you could have done anything about it).

I’ve not been playing much CoX of late — but when we have gotten on, we’ve been having fun with the “Who Will Die?” signature arc tales they’ve been putting out on a monthly basis. The story arc hasn’t been wildly gripping, but the scenarios and set work have been fun.  And they’ve done some great stuff in varying them between how they work for heroes vs. villains.

What’s actually been fun is running them with our full stable of alts.  Different power combinations make for different ways to get through, blast through, eke through the same scenario.  Part of it depends on what level prestige level we’re at going in. Having good stealth make things easier (or not).  Some of our sets are more vulnerable to debuffs than others.

Each scenario takes us about 30 minutes to complete (make it 45 the first time through), so it’s not a huge time sink, which is nice.

Each progressive story has been staged at a minimum 10 levels higher.  That meant our normal Victory stable was short on bodies on the most recent tale … so we’ve started dusting of our Old Stable of folks over on Champion … which gets pretty embarrassing, because the 50s there are all into SOs and don’t have their Inherent Fitness respecced and …

(Psi-Clone and Amorpha still kick ass. Even downgraded to lower levels.)

Got in a little more gameplay last night on the VIP nights for COH:Freedom.  More early impressions …

• Atlas Park sure is prettified.
• The initial mission arcs in Atlas are also nicely crafted (even tying into the Galaxy events, as should be).
• There are a lot of open zone/instance hunt missions (“Hunt 10 Skulls [in this area where they will regen moderately quickly]”).  It has a different feel (not necessarily good) from the traditional hunts for some reason, perhaps because so many others were hunting there, too — largely because the proposed area to hunt is now highlighted on the maps.
• I do like the giant arrow coins over the heads of the contacts, rather than just a colored circle at their feet.  Less realistic, sure, but it does make them easier to see.
• There are several early adventures where you end up split up as individuals on a team (single-person instances, run in parallel).  Which is great, but at present buggy — every time, the mission didn’t give credit to the non-leader on the team, and we had to rerun it.
• In addition to an Icon in Atlas, Ms. Liberty also lets you buy costume tweaks.  It looks like there are 5-6 slots you get through the normal means, and then another 5-6 you can buy (if you are really into costume changes).  This is actually a nice feature, to allow this at such a low level, since  what looked good in the costume maker doesn’t necessarily look good once you’re running around staring at the toon’s butt the whole time.
• It’s still possible to make a lot of money very quickly at Wentworths.  If one is so inclined.

Travel Powers:

Okay, my life is much easier because of two costume packs I already had purchased — Steampunk has a jet pack, and Animal pack has the most excellent Beast Run.  Those become available at lvl 4 — which is the point that the Power Pools become available.

All the Travel Pools now have five powers.  The first 3 come up at lvl 4, which removes that problem, the 3rd of them being the traditional travel powers.  However, there is now a 5th Travel Pool power that comes available at 14 (if you’ve chosen two in the pool already):

• Afterburner (Flight): Increases your fly speed and makes you much more difficult to hit for a time.  However, you can only use self-directed powers while it’s running.  This should be cool.
• Spring Attack (Jump): Heavy damage attack where you land in the middle of a crowd, knocking them down (“boom” for jumpers).  Looking forward to this, too.
• Burnout (Speed): In exchange for a big Endurance hit, you recharge all of your powers.  Not quite as usable as the others, but I can think of a few situations.
• Long Range Teleport (Teleport): Increases TP range, including across zones.

Interestingly, these extra Travel powers counteract the recent trend, where (a) you could get the real Travel power without any prerequisites (besides level) and (b) the Fitness pool became automatic.  Suddenly, I’m eyeing what I’m going to want to take in the way of powers, and when, and realizing I’ll have to compromise.

Good stuff so far.  A very nice issue.

I’ve had near-zilcho time to take advantage of the VIP Head Start to City of Heroes I21 / Freedom / new-shiny-coolness. So some very few notes on it:

1. The new character creator is very nice. There are some bugs in how easy it is to browse through stuff, and there are still odd disconnects where it’s not clear why an option is or isn’t available for certain classes of costume parts.  But the overall looks is nice, and the mere fact that you can check and reserve your name while just starting off your character is truly awesome.
2. Splash screens, illustration style, and updated character creator music are all pretty spiffy.
3. The new Galaxy intro is fun, exercises basic combat skills and is overall a Good Thing — certainly more heroic than slugging Infected.  My main problem is that it is way too reminiscent of the intro setting for Champions Online — you’re in a city, devastated by an ongoing alien invasion, with voices telling you which way to go and what to do.  I was just waiting for someone to tell me to “Launch the Ironclad Defense!”
4. That said, the “morality mission” part of the intro is a bit … lame.
5. There’s now an Icon in the very attractively redressed Atlas Park.  Hurrah!
6. No email before level 10?  That’s weird.

And that’s about all I’ve done (thanks to a malfunctioning client that hadn’t been keeping me patched).  But I’m looking forward to more.

So Margie and I play CoH off and on fairly regularly, rotating through a variety of duos. This week we shook things up a bit, though, and had our daughter, Katherine, play as well.

I’ve been eyeballing the F2P option coming up in City of Heroes for a bit, thinking that would let Kay play at will, rather than waiting until one or the other of us is off. But as we looked at the options, we realized that a purely F2P setup was going to place just too many limitations — including not being able to join a supergroup. We realize there will be some limits, but we didn’t want Katherine to feel too gimped.

So we went ahead over the weekend and opened up an account for her and got her set up in it, and then spent most of Sunday running a new trio through Praetoria (or least through ten levels of it) — Margie with a broadsword scrapper, me with a grav/rad controller, and Kay with a ninja/bubbles mastermind.

Fun times, though Katherine was having some performance problems with her machine that I need to check out, as well as just her having to deal with the learning curve (and the kibbitzing from the parents). It was kind of cool having a third member of the party, too.

One thing that stood out, though, was her lack of veteran award status, and how much that shapes our early game — e.g., getting full travel powers at 6 (vs prerequisited powers at 14), Nemmy staff / Blackwand / Sands of Mu options, etc. Plus we have some costume packs we’ve purchased — Mystic, Mutant, Beast, and now Steampunk — that provide some added bonuses (travel powers, in particular).

Fortunately for the travel power glitch, we can also do Assemble the Team. 🙂

The plan is to maintain her account for a few months, then switch over to F2P when Freedom comes out. That will give her some extra benefits. Or, if playing with her becomes a new norm, we might maintain her as a VIP account. We’ll see.

For the 7th anniversary of CoH, they are running some special Praetorian invasion events for a few weeks. Margie and I hopped on this evening for a couple of hours for the one on Champion.

I got on first, running Torchielle (figuring a blaster would be a worthy addition to an attack from Praetorian Earth), with Margie later jumping on as Amorpha. And, it quickly became clear that the biggest danger to Primal Earth from a Praetorian invasion was a disruption of the time continuum, leading to things moving ever and ever slower …

Yeah, the lag was pretty awful.

After most of the invasion was done, I swapped out to Psi-clone, figuring he deserved some massive SO drops like Torchy had been getting.  Unfortunately, the event sort of dragged out to a close, with large intervals of nothing happening leading people to think it was all over.  Still, I got some action in with him, too.

And, when all was said and done, I realized I’d missed both those characters — and that both needed some serious attention, as they’re still all-SO, still unrebuilt after veteran travel powers and inherent Fitness.

And, yeah, that means some money, which, fortunately, I can send in bushel-baskets-full from some other characters I’ve actually been paying attention to.

Not looking forward to respeccing Level 50 characters, but it really needs to be done.