Category: Gameplay

Finally, finally, back into the game yesterday. Did some prelim/placating work with Kitty Shoulder and Kitteniboo, then onto the main action with Amorpha and Psi-clone.
Blasted in parallel through a load of Striga content — including finishing up the Stephanie Peebles arc (Heracles? No prob), finding ourselves having outlevelled Long John, and on to Scary Contact Who Stands In The Middle Of The Cemetary.
Blasted through a couple of those mishes (easy hunts when it’s both of us with the mission), until we hit the Banished Pantheon and the Mausoleum. Amorpha’s version, as she’s managed to pull a level ahead of PC, was a bit spicier, and we ended up both eating mausoleum dirt once in the middle of way too many shamans, husks, and a purple Totem.
But by the time we were done with both our versions of the mish, we’d gotten out of debt, and were both over half-way to the next level.
I’m not sure how we’d do this arc without A’s massive damage, applied selectively around PC’s Group Invis and Deceive (“You are my friend, Mr. Totem, oh, yes, my friend”), but it would be a lot more difficult.
Felt nice.

We’d gotten just started playing some Kazima/Torchielle teaming when Champion decided to take it’s normal 11 p.m. faceplant. Just as well, since I’d already died once, and almost twice (very little mob control, lots of aggro. Need to figure out some better tactics).
So we switched over to Triumph, and ran some with Molly Magpie (my grav controller) and Toxic Wasteland (Margie’s spine scrapper). That was a bit more succesful, and we both dinged (to 5 and 3, respectively) before calling it a night.

Sign of Trouble #1: When you go out to search for an additional team member, at the behest of the others (because your team is too weak to make solid headway against the baddies in the mish), the person you find accepts … and immediately starts up a chat, en route, about World of Warcraft.
Sign of Trouble #2: While you are busy searching, and having told the others that you are doing so (at their behest, mind you), they wander off, encounter bad guys, and run for their lives, past you, screaming for help. You, of course, are busy in search screens, and, since you were resting after the last hellish encounter, had your shields down.
Hilarity ensues.
Somehow, I managed to not get killed. Somehow, the others on the team got killed two or three times.
Trouble, indeed. Though it netted Velvet another bubble of XP.

Finally, finally, finally got back on, after a week of life in Faerie. Nice.
Is it my imagination, or have the graphics been spiffed up? I haven’t been following the boards in depth, either, but I don’t recall seeing anything about that.
Anyhoo, Amorpha and Psi-clone did the rounds, fiddling about with DOs (post-Synapse), and clearing off the last of our non-TI/IP mishes.
Which led to an end-of-story-arc adventure against a warehouse full of gray Clockwork (Leo’s Garage — nice window dressing!) and the two of us taking down an orange Dr Vahzilok and his gray minions.
No sweat.
Interestingly enough, when I completed Dr. Vahz, since it was my mission, I was offered (upon contacting my contact) a selection of DOs, explaining what they all meant. Not seen that before, but nice.
Not sure what level of play I’ll be having this week (I suspect Margie will be hitting the sack early, being the Single Parent, and I’ll be having business dinners each night one time zone away), but I look forward to at least a little bit more than I’ve had over the last week.

Ran Kazima and Torchielle yesterday, while Honeygun sulked …
Did some light running around — cleared out a couple of old missions for Kazima, while we got our duoing up and working. Then Margie suggested we look at helping Dr. Awesome …
Ended up in a big group of 8 on the “find Patient Zero and the cure to the Vahzilok Plague” mish. Everyone was exemped down to 15-18 or so (K was at 15, T was at 16), and …
… lots of purple. A bit of red, but lots and lots and lots of purple. Masses of abominations, eidolons a-plenty. The dangers of 8-man teams.
Good teams, though. Cobalt, Healing Rayne, Granite Rock, the good Dr., a few others. In a battle like that, deaths were inevitable, but Torchielle managed to avoid it (Kazima did not). And there was lots, and lots, and lots of XP.
Kazima went from barely 15 to just into 16 for the evening. Torchy went from a half-a-bar-of-debt into 16 to a bubble short of 17.
Good fun, good play.
I’ve been noodling with ideas of how to do a decent rotation of characters, to make sure our “mains” get most of the exposure, but we get some time in with the others. Trouble is, we already had two pairs of mains. Now it looks like we might end up with three.
Regardless, I plan on keeping an eye out better on the chat lines for groups forming up. Duoing is fun, and our best pasttime, but the social aspect of larger groups and exemp/SK stuff is not to be dismissed.

After a long dry spell, we’ve finally gotten back into the swing of things with CoH — just in time to head off to California, alas.
Friday night was our Synapse TF for Psi-clone and Amorpha. Went pretty well — minimal character deaths (and most of those from not paying attention), Babbage went down pretty quickly, ditto CK. Ran about 4½ hours, and no real new lessons learned, except that a discussion of tactics beforehand is probably a good idea, and varying those tactics to keep interest up (esp. when each mish has the same foe and, often, the same map) is an even better one.
Saturday we (briefly) played with Amazonite and Truly Unstable. TU’s a hoot to do over the chat boards. And, in one of those “small world” bits, no sooner had I said, “I look forward to meeting you someday” to Liberty Bill, then he swooped past me as I was entering Perez and he was exiting.
(Blink.)
We chatted, then went on, but it was … odd.
Sunday night was for Velvet and P-siren. Did a Sky Raiders mish (Velvet’s), followed by our first Banished Pantheon mish (PS’s). An amusing contrast (and one of the plusses/minuses of running with a science/magic duo).
Margie’s been feeling less thrilled with PS of late, and so we decided to call in some help on a mission, just to give her additional bubbly goodness to try out.
Ended up running with Avocet (exemped down, until things got hot) and Enyxia (who was new to us, though we’d seen her in the coms for a bit). Timed Sky Raiders mish that turned out to be a bit hotter than expected, leading to at least one or two character deaths before we succeeded (Velvet couldn’t quite hold enough aggro, esp. with force fields up and Porters getting past me). Still, fun.

Margie enjoyed playing with another psychic.
Monday night was scheduled to be the Cavern of Transcendence trial — the last gasp attempt. Margie’s been feeling antsy about not running Kazima, and I have … ideas for Honeygun, so we were ready. Margie did all the planning and coordination of folks, we brought in a ringer to clear the troll caves, and …
Damn. One person we thought was 15 was actually 16, skewing the numbers on the TF so that we couldn’t actually run it. Since we started it late, to accomodate one player, it was even later by the time we determined that, and none of the higher-levels had sometihng in the 12-15 range.
So we had to call it a night. I’m seriously uncertain whether it’s going to actually happen; as much as the “Transcendent” badge would be perfect for Kazima, I think Margie wants to run her more. We’ll see.
We decided we needed some success for the evening, so Margie pulled out Amorpha, I Psi-clone, and we headed off to …
Oh. That annoying Skyway mish Amorpha had where the mission door was somewhere below the pavement, but we couldn’t find any sort of flood control tunnel or other method of getting down there. Margie’d done a bunch of searching in the sewers, and we’d even had Doyce/Hang Time come and help. Nada.
So Margie petitioned, and, within about 15 minutes, GM_RICHA appeared, a very polite Police Drone. He met us at the spot, and then he descended down through the pavement to the mission entrance. That made it very clear where the access point was — a drainage entrance multiple blocks away (which is kind of goofy).
The Drone was very nice, asked if we needed any other help, then left.
Old mish. Cleared it with no trouble (fortunately it was a Free Hostage, not Kill All).
Similarly old mish (we just did Synapse, so we’re higher than we were) against the Tsoo for me. Then we decided to do the “Board Train” mish that Amorpha had.
It’s the first of that type we’d done, and we were depositied in Omicron Park (hmmm — wonder where that is on the city map) to break up fights between Warriors and Tsoo. Which is fine, except that we got cocky against the whites/blues, and ran into trouble when we hit the worst group, which was large and had two yellow (and powered) leaders, leaving Amorpha dead.
Hrm.
I rezzed her, and we ended up clearing the rest of the park to get rid of the debt.

I love the occasional detail you can see in this game when you get Really Close Up. As in this shot, where Sister Chinook was up against a wall, and so I got close-in enough that, when I did my various icy goodness, I could see both snowflakes and ice crystals forming in the air around me.
Neat.
(That’s Toxic Sister in the background, btw. We call ourselves the Death by DoT Sisters.)

Carey, the Natural (?) Fire/Fire Tanker, as created and run by my Mom last weekend.
And, given the nature of Fire/Fire, a lot more visible in this picture than in any of the in-game action shots.
Mom opined that she thought that might not have been the best of powersets, given the difficulty in seeing what the heck was going on when all the flame armor was up.

Still need to do the Final, Last Gasp Attempt at the Caverns of Transcendence with Kazima and Honeygun.
And it would be nice to try Synapse TF with Amorpha and Psi-clone, too. Unless they’ve levelled past it.
Mood: Withdrawal Pains

Late when I got on last night, after Overly Large But Exceedingly Yummy Project Team Dinner. Margie was likely already in bed, or, failing that, being a polite host to my folks (who, ironically, are in Colorado while I’m in California).
So I figured I’d be soloing, and decided to bring in Velvet (after a disastrous late-night soloing with Torchielle the night before).
Ended up on a pick-up team for a good chunk of the time. Very undisciplined (nobody wanted to coordinate starting the attack, and we just continued rolling down the corridor once it started), but we did okay — and Velvet has the highest survivability for that sort of thing. Biggest problem was running out of endurance. Went up a couple of pips, had some fun, earned a tray-full of DOs, called it a night.

Always kind of interesting doing the CoH stuff while on the road — I can still play with Margie as though I were sitting at home. That’s worth the price of admission right there …
… though, of course, the “throughput” in our communication is ratcheted back to “tell” speed, rather than shouting comments back and forth.
Actually spent most of the Velvet/P-siren evening not teamed at all. Margie ran off to help another Alliance member who needed psychic-damage-dealers, so I ran a Family/Council mish with BD’s Mofo Firefly as my backup.
We actually did okay — the lack of bubbles made me realized how spoiled I was having them all the time (I had to run with more of my defenses toggled up, burning endurance like crazy — next level, Stamina!), but we developed some good tactics around “pull ’em back to the corner, bunch ’em up, ice patch ’em, and watch me whale the tar out of them.” Not always pretty, but it worked.
Also learned to appreciate PS’s psionic attack, which (a) has tremendous range, and (b) pulls very little area aggro. As opposed to Mofo’s lightning or my (heh) taunt.
When we exited the mish, I was only 300xp from level, so MoFo and I tackled the big band of Family and Warriors just outside. Ding! 23 for me.
Ran the second mish with P-siren, though she wasn’t there when we went in … and we quickly gained even more appreciation for bubbles. Once she joined us, we made steady (if sometimes chaotic) progress through the ship — noting that it was a “rescue” mish, not a “kill all,” so, when we could, we bypassed mobs.
After that, I went and trained up, and bought up DOs to 25, so I’m ready to kick some serious butt.
Originally I had planned to drop a slot in Dull Pain and another in Temp Invuln, but I’ve been finding Unyielding so valuable (covers all damage types and resists status effects), I dropped them both in there, making it six-slotted. As noted above, when I hit 24 I jump into the world of Stamina.
We had several instances of the “dead man standing” bug, as well as some odd cases where the other players did this “jog in place” animation, even though they said they weren’t. Weird. I also had some cases where I didn’t get a swing animation with a punch, even though I got the sound effects.
Also discovered that I really, truly, absolutely have to be sure to turn off Super Jump between missions. Yikes! Minus 50% TH is murder.
Picked up the Advisor badge for SKing people — which is cool, but so not Velvet. But I ran across the Vigorous badge while jumping between shops to sell DOs, and that’s pretty Velvet all right, so it replaces Pwnz as my handle.
And, cool beans, the shops in IP (the Science one, at least) sell SOs and sell the extended set of DOs, so I could pick up jump and taunt DOs. Nice.
A very successful evening. And it was nice to be able to do it (part of the time, at least!) with Margie.

A weekend of intense play, with long gaps in-between …
Friday night I crashed early.
Saturday night, I got back home at 8:40 or so, and immediately dove into the Consortium Meet-n-Greet. It was actually trememdous fun, even if it meant standing around and chatting, vs. going out and bopping bad guys. Maybe this RP stuff has something to it …

Since both Margie and I were there (as Psi-clone and Amorpha, of course), we were able to slip out a couple of times and bring in alts — Torchielle, in my case; Star Protector and Kazima in Margie’s.
I was actually kind of pleased to see so many folks come to the party, and to have it last so long. I figured it would go maybe an hour; instead, it was still going strong when I wandered upstairs at midnight.
Lots of RL stuff on Sunday, meaning I didn’t get on until just in time to join in the interview of some applicants to the Alliance (again as Psi-clone). It was interesting being on the “other” side of the interview, as we chitchatted on the Team channel (between the interviewers) all sorts of comments, not to mention how we’d deal if the event became a super-hero battle.
After that, Margie and I took Velvet and P-siren out for the first time in about a week, clearing out Family and Council and Sky Raiders in Port Noble. Fun, even if we did go too late …
Ran across some of the infamous I4 bugs, too, including invisible villains (which were present in I3) (“Sky Raiders? Sky Raiders? Where?! And why are you taking damage?”), and villains that wouldn’t lie down and die when dead (though, interestingly, that seems to be an individual thing; folks for whom Velvet saw it didn’t show that behavior to P-siren, and vice-versa).

Some folks seem to be having problems with the new costume sliders, incurring costs they didn’t expect (immediately upon going into the costuming).
It doesn’t sound consistent, and there are conflicting reports of whether it happened on Test or not, but CuppaJo suggests:

After you make changes to the body sliders (Even if this is a NEW character and you are still in the character creation area) close the physique window before moving on to something else or leaving Icon.

If you go back to Icon do NOT open this window.

Repeat – After making body changes, close the body window, and do not re-open it.

I know this isn

I am amused by the number of people posting who are discovering that they really aren’t having any fun in the Arena or with PvP. Which, I suppose, makes some sense, since the folks who were really burning for that feature probably went onto Test and don’t have anything new to say.
That said, I’m equally amused that I’ve seen several folks complaining about hovering blasters sniping down at them, that somehow this isn’t terribly sporting and they should come down and “face me like a man.”
Heh. Isn’t that the point of having Hover as a blaster? Or of being a blaster in the first place?
Sounds like there’s a fair amount of auto-Taunt that comes with that Hover power …

Hmmm. Lots more Enemy status stuff, it seemed, as we ran into our first big Tsoo group tonight under Ish 4. Yellow Ink Men, Sorcerers, even toggle knock-down by Ancestor Spirits — it was a pretty brutal combat that took out (or drove off) Amorpha, Zazi, and Psi-clone twice, before we called in Avocet for help (thanks, Avo).
It might have been just the concentration — a good dozen or more of those guys, two, three, four sorcerers (more than PC could control), etc. But I got knocked down a lot more, our toggles got knocked down a lot more, and it was all in all a nasty brawl.
Of course, PC also dinged to 21, so that was good. Fully slotted the rest of Group Invis, so the 20 second delay between it going down and my being able to throw it again should be a lot shorter.

Okay, I’ll admit that Psi-clone is a Deceive junky. It’s never-ending fun for him to tweak with the baddies’ brains, especially when it means that they’re busy attacking their friends, or (with Tsoo Sorcerers) actually healing people on your side.
But best thing going yet … started fighting with Sky Raiders tonight. Discovered that when a group is attacked, an Engineer in the group immediately sets up a Force Field generator for a Dispersion bubble.
Except, if Psi-clone turns him first, not only does the guy still do it, but the bubble works on behalf of the heroes — as long as the Engineer stays Deceived. Yeah!
Hey, look, Ma! I’m a Bubbler! By proxy!
(Actually, it’s also kind of funny to see the guy build an FF generator, and then immediately attack it.)

While Margie was pushing a new scrapper through her paces yesterday afternoon (possibly as a partner for Sister Chinook), I was busy letting Velvet stretch her legs.
Ended up in a pick-up team, which gets a definite C+ — nobody on the team was stupid, but nobody was very disciplined (no “Ready,” no planning/coord). The roster kept changing, too — I was on for about 4 hours with them, I think, and only two others were constants; the rest came and went. The Team Leader didn’t have any hesitation about simply inviting more folks in, and we were running at 8 members (with all the villain pop implications of that) most of the time.
Funniest moment was our second door mish, which turned out to be Lost in Steel Canyon. First hallway, blue-white. Piece of cake, and someone complained as to whether we could do a real mission next time, in a difficult zone, for decent XP.
Shortly after that, we had our hats handed to us. Pull too many high-level orange-red Lost, and the team is goin’ down, clown.
I’m rather proud that Velvet managed, despite a mediocre Healer, to avoid dying, despite, oh, three or four near-total-party-kills in that particular “low-XP” mission. I kept a good eye on my HP, as well as that of others, and didn’t hesitate to pound F6 and advance to the rear.
Discovered the fun of range-taunting. Get a controller that has an area slow/knockdown sort of power. He sets that up. Velvet stands at the edge and just taunts, drawing all fire from those who are in it or are still on the far side. This lets the blasters (of which we had several) to their thing without taking big hits from the nasty ranged weapons.
It works great — if you have a decent healer.
Eventually we cleared that mish, and moved back to IP, a Sky Raiders mish. Started out yellow-white, progressed to yellow-orange (and another NTPK, as we all managed to attack a big cluster of them in an open office atrium from multiple sides — which meant they had us surrounded, not the other way around), and eventually ran into a room that was full of red-purples for me — and I was the highest in the group.
It was getting to be Kitten dinner time by then, a couple of others had left, and I didn’t see how we were getting any further. So I departed as well.
Managed, mostly through that “low” Steel mission, to rack up about 6 pips for Velvet’s march to 23.
I considered, afterwards, if I should have called on some friends pr SG companions (incl. higher level ones) to lend a hand. Honestly, though, I didn’t feel good enough about the team to put other folks in that kind of danger. But something to consider next time.

Tackled Dr. Vahzilok last night with a large group. Much fun. Different play for Psi-clone, who got to be more of a supportive controller than team leader (which was kind of nice, even if the sewers are absolutely ruining his good clothes).
That, in turn, was an extension of the next chapter of the Skyway Rec Center thread, which involved a very fun “discover the body” bit, in which I enjoyed playing Velvet.
Big groups in both cases, which was a refreshing change, if a bit difficult to manage. Since they were all good players, though, it worked out nicely. P-Siren dinged up during the adventure, and PC went up multiple bubbles.

Last night was All Cape Mish, All the Time!
Well, twice — once for Psi-clone, once for Amoprha. Puck Bunny accompanied us on both versions, one of which was in the northern islands of Talos, the other of which was in Perez.
The odd thing is, the first version of the mish was the hardest we’ve done — much more powerful Aberrants, more bosses, etc. Well, it was harder from that aspect — it was actually easier doing it with Psi-clone than with Velvet, since I just Deceived the key baddies, and Invised the group, and all went relatively smoothly. When things got hairy, my Phantom Army helped, too. Even the final battle never got desperate.
But, still, the difference in level between the two missions — with no difference in personnel — was odd. Welcome, but odd. (Same mission XP for each — 1000 — though.)
Mission leader? I think PB (at 19) led the first (harder) one, and I (at 20) led the second. And I can’t imagine the site zone in question made any difference.
A puzzlement.