Category: Character Design

Because everyone does one!

• 50 – Psi-clone – Ran the Shadow Shard #4 the other day. Barely managed to get in the groove with him, alas, it was so short. Wanted to (once again) buy him one of the new leather jackets, but didn’t get around to it. Not likely to come out again any time soon. He was considering taking a sabbatical, turning over control of the CoJ to some other folks for a while, etc. Then Paragon City blew up.
• 39 – Torchielle – Soooooo close to 40. Wow. Have finally decided on her EPP (I think I decided on Flame, just so I can get Rise of the Phoenix like Hildy has). Still enjoying blowing things up. We’re running on one-step-below-Invincible, which gives us lots of bodies to herd and AoE — and just high enough to get us into trouble once or twice a week (see “Rise of the Phoenix”).
• 32 – Lynn Calodo – Finally, finally dinged 33. I was going to shift her into the CoJ, and still might, depending on what’s going on with the Boomtown Saints (or, actually, if that makes any difference at the moment). I really hit stride with her last night, taking down DE and Council with aplomb.
• 31 – Velvet Jones – Now a member of the CoJ. Forgot I’d bought her garish new boots.
• 28 – Ho Ho – Still an annoying low-damage (but huge knockback) tank (see “Velvet Jones”). I do hope that we see more HH stuff in the coming weeks — she is just not a soloist or even (with a Defender) a duoist.
• 21 – Fazenda – Um … when’s the next Knights Night?
• 16 – Mr. Azure – Margie mentioned that we should promote the Azures to be the new heads of the CoJ. That would have been hilarious. Maybe need to play them sometime, though they do best with an audience.

• 21 – Mister Ravenous – Would like to get back on and play him some more. Maybe tonight? (It will be interesting to see what, if any, dynamic is going on over on the CoV side in reflection of the CoH brouhaha.)
• 17 – Mister Thorne – Almost made him moderator of both forums. That would have been amusing.
• 16 – Eliza Dee – I’ve been feeling more Scrappery than Brutish of late, so more Lynn than Eliza Dee. We’ll see when that changes.
• 10 – Maitre D’mon – If we ever haul out the Devils Food again.

Did the Hostess Heroes last night — a small group, consisting of Ho Ho, Princess Peep, Ring Ding, and Brownie Points (Divinity Chu was on briefly as Margie and I arrived).

I continue to be both frustrated and pleased by Ho Ho as a tank.

On the pleasing side, it’s nice to basically pull aggro off your friends, before they even attract it, and hold it while they carve and blast the bad guys to chutney. When all goes well, Ho Ho sort of calls the tune as to what we’re doing; everyone follows the tank, right? If things go pear-shaped or if the scrappers (cough) go running off on their own and get in trouble, I can usually pull matters back out of the fire.

I think we had one death last night (Peep got a bit too much into the middle of things at the beginning of a melee and went down in a flash). Granted, we did a lot of stale missions, but we also did a number of new ones, with plenty of opportunity for folks to die. They didn’t, and I take at least partial credit for that.

On the the other hand, I’m frustrated by Ho Ho’s inability to be something other than a meat shield. Yes, she can knock folks over with her axe. Yes, she can, given geological periods of time to work in, take down opponents. But by and large, her defining ability is being able to … well … draw and hold aggro without dying quickly.

You see my dilemma.

Honestly speaking? If I were doing the HH again, I wouldn’t roll her up as a tank. At least not Invuln (which I’ve way overdone), but probably not at all. And, also honestly speaking, I’m not going to change. The team needs a tank, I’m not going to PL someone up to 27 any time soon, etc.

Which is not to say by any means that I’m not going to be doing the Monday Munchies thang, nor that I won’t be having fun with Ho Ho. It will just be fun leavened with a bit of frustration. Which, I suppose, is not all that different than it would be whatever the AT I chose. 🙂

Most of our activity over the weekend was with Hildy/Torchy, Nothing earth-shattering — mid-30s slogging through Crey and Rikti and DE for the most part. Many encounters with Paragon protectors of different flavors and colors (note to selves: a +3 PP needs to be approached — or perhaps avoided — with special care or a pocket full of greens or various rez chits).

Spent a couple of partial evenings teamed up with T’Lauro, too, which added a bit of variety to the proceedings — healing and spot blasting/tanking more than made up for the inclusion of various Quantums on adventures, and the player always being a pleasure to have along.

I don’t know if it’s coincidence or something that just “happens” around this time, but an inordinate number of missions we had over the weekend were timed. No particular problems fulfilling them, but it was a bit annoying to have to go to a particular adventure on a given schedule, or to have to leave a contact uncontacted because the next mish is a timed and one alread has a timer ticking.

By the end of the weekend, we’d both dinged 37. Trying to decide with Torchy whether to go with Fire or Electricity as her Epic Power Pool — either work for her story. Also toying whether to bump some power in order to take Recall Friend, since she now has Invis — which doesn’t explicitly work with her backstory, but which could be made to do so.

A bit after signing on last night, Hildy and Torchy accepted the call into a Kessa mission along with Zazi and T’Lauro. It was the “find the workers and the goo” Rikti mission, and it was all conning around 38. Which was fine, except that H/T are at 35, and there was only one SK slot.

Margie took that, and played the Woefully Underpowered Tanker, still surprisingly survivable. Most of the stuff was conning orange-red-purple to me, even SKed up by Zazi. Things went along smoothly for a bit with Kessa and Torchy alternating booms, but we discovered that if anything went wrong (e.g., two close mobs getting pulled in, or multiple portals opening, or other nastiness), it was a road straight to pavement chewing.

Eventually we realized we were going a bit slowly, and started to hunt for the victims. That still led to problems, as not everyone was stealthy, the Rikti have some high perceptions, and so every now and then someone would all of a sudden go orange-red-yellow-orange-black as they got a bit too close to the wrong group. Even with an added tank (Tankerbabe), we were still struggling and going down too easily.

As time was finally beginning to get low, Kessa called in various Alliance types to lend a hand, though they seemed to spend more time in RP and street fighting than, y’know, actually searching for the last victim?

With five minutes or so to go, Kessa called for everyone to ground on the rooftops (so to speak), while she unRSKed back up to 50 and did a run through of the city, trying to find the last guy (and possibly dragging serious aggro with her, which presumably is why everyone was to ground. We watched her sprint around the map, and with about 20 seconds left — “Found him.”

Everyone raced over, attacking as they arrived, but it was, alas, even with a boom (possibly unSKed), too late, and the mission failed.

Bleah

A couple of notes:

1. I don’t boom that often when duoing, since it leaves Hildy alone to clean up any survivors. It was interesting using it more as a tactic. It was also interesting that it remains far less effective than I’d hoped, even buffed (though the relative level probably played a role here).
2. Invis. is a mixed blessing of a power (and, again, one that I haven’t gotten much use of since I took it at 35). On the one hand, it helped with scouting out the city (I spotted at least three of the workers and the drum). On the other hand, it’s still not proof against Rikti Drones, it sucks Endurance like a Hummer sucks gasoline, and it can seriously frell your attack plans if you forget that you have it (vs. Stealth) on. “Why can’t I boom?”

End of the day, Hildy leveled to 36 (during a double-boom attack), and I’m about a quarter pip from it and (despite two deaths) no debt. So all in all, not bad, and a good chance to play with others.

Double XP Weekend turned out to be less of a CoX-fest than I’d expected.  Part of it was just fatigue.  Part of it was feeling like I just had to be out there maxxing my XP generation every moment, and resenting that feeling.  Part of it was just other things to do.

At any rate, my actual gameplay was no more (and somewhat less, in fact) than other weekends. 

We did get Torchy and Hildy up to 35, a power level, which was nice,  I’m torn between Electricity and Fire for my Epic Pools, and I don’t have a lot of stuff in the sub-Epics that I’m eagerly looking forward to — some nice-to’s, but no must-haves.

Margie got Blue Point to 49 (yow), and pushed her new solo alt, Last Ice Dragon, to 14 (I need to get LID onto my list at the left).

We briefly played with Cetus and Lunulata, getting them both up to 9, with the intent of then pairing them off with Christmas Present and Al McGordo, but that didn’t go very far.  Fact is, it still a slog going through the sub-14 levels, and I just didn’t have the patience for it.  That, and I’m finding the squids less than thrilling (though it’s hard to judge an AT by just a few levels).

Eliza Dee has been starting and aborting the same Vaz mission, oh, four times now.  I really need to spend some time with her.  And with Lynn, who has similarly started and aborted the same CoT mission a similar number of times.  Frustrating.

The Fourth Shadow Shard plans for this afternoon were aborted by missing some of the planned players, including the Tank.  We dropped back and punted and, instead, ran the Moonfire TF with the Hostess Heroes.

(In the picture, L-R:  Ginger Snap, Princess Peep, Ring Ding, Moonfire, Ho Ho, Bear Claws, Brownie Points, Twinkie Kid)

Let me just say that I remain astonished that these “joke” characters have gotten all the way up to the 25-26 range. 

That said, the TF was okay — a lot of Council and Vampyri and a blend of hunts and door mishes.  Nothing too exciting.  I was very pleased at how Ho Ho did — no deaths, even with a lot of deaths around her (and a lot of folks who seemed to think “scrapper” meant “run in first and draw all the aggro”). 

Dinged to 26 on the mish (as did Princess Peep).  Kind of a blah level:  Tough Hide for me, Hasten for her.  That said, just waiting for 28:  Whirling Axe.  AoE, baby!

As part of “Villains Night,” we gathered up at the Praetorian base and chose up teams (high-level/low-level) to run the Virgil Tarikoss SF. The low-level (18 and below) team was Mister Ravenous, Charity at Home, Venenata, Ghost Maiden, Barbarity, Lord Malificus.
7:00p – Ostensible start time.
7:30p – Actually rolled from the base.
7:45p – Low-level team TPK in a room full of purples on the first mission. “Let’s try dropping everyone from Malicious to Villainous.” And lessons learned: stick together, stay near the healers, concentrate fire, pull minions.
8:15p – Get rolling again, with Atomyc Furie now on the team for more heals. Many purples. Some reds. More purples. Still more purples. One TPK. Two TPK. And, “Let’s do something else.
So we ran a couple of missions, revelled in facing yellows and whites, etc.
MR did ding up to 18, huzzah — and Health, which can’t hurt, though so dying for Stamina it isn’t even funny. Ran some of the melees with one of my two armors down, just for the endurance. Actually replaced a damage in each of my attacks with an EndRed. Let’s see how that works.

Velvet and P-siren really haven’t done much since we hit 30 with them and did various the various TFs at that level. One reason was that I was just getting really tired of the slow DoT for Velvet, the other was disdain with the Bubbler issues of PS (esp. when duoing with a tank).
So Margie took it into her head that Ho Ho and Princess Peep really need to pick up the Wedding Ring at Striga before we outlevel the missions. So Saturday was Striga Day.
Thought we were going to die.
Not literally. I mean, on Heroic, it was all blues, and Ho Ho was tough enough to stand up to anything the Family and Council dished out, and with Peep’s debuffs, they didn’t stand a chance, unless we died of low-DoT boredom. Peep’s radiation did slow, steady damage, and Ho Ho’s axe did slow, ponderous damage. And …
Oh, for a blaster. Or a scrapper.
The Wedding Band is worth it (eventually). But it really reminded me of how Peep and Ho Ho are definitely team builds, and assume someone other than the two of them will be around to actually, oh, do some damage.

Hildy and Torchy headed back to Croatoa, back to a level (30+) to take Buck’s missions — the first of which was one of those awful Faerie Fort maps, rescuing prisoners. We dragged along Ciunas Bas, SKed up, and finally managed to clear the map (after a few Hildy and a few more CB face-plants).
Interestingly, I’ve drawn the parallel between H/T and Psi-clone/Amorpha, with the basic difference that the “controller” in H/T is actually the one in the middle of the melee (Hildy), while the killing machine is, rather than a scrapper, the blaster in the back ranks.
One other difference that occurred to me yesterday afternoon is that with PC/A, if things went pear-shaped and Amorpha went down, PC had both the control and the healing to take a few moments to ponder the best course (run in an rez? duke it out? turn tail and come back later?). With Torchy, though, there’s no question — she’s horribly squishy, has no self-healing besides chicklets; generally speaking, when Hildy goes down, Torchy is hightailing it out of there.
(That, in turn, is a bit more difficult now that she’s a Flyer rather than a SJer, as speed suppression on Fly is a lot more noticeable, and can spell crucial seconds in bailing out. On the other hand, while SJ can get you behind things, and faster, it can also drag you into trouble; Fly lets you just Get Away.)
I do need to figure out a way to make Torchy marginally less squishy.
Anyhoo, both of us dinged to 31, huzzah. CB managed to end up out of debt, and with a bunch of high DOs in her tray, so it was, hopefully, a worthwhile outing. The soiree was incredibly rich, drop-wise, and I ended up with an entire tray full of SOs (and having gotten rid of several DOs along the way, and not counting the couple of SOs I could use).
It was also neat to see more than two CoJ folks on at a time. Almost had 4, but T’lauro signed out before Hildy signed in.
Earlier in the evening, was running around with Lynn doing CoT mishes. Bleah. I really hate those maps, and inevitably miss a side passage or a mob behind a wall or something. Lynn’s got a mad-on at the CoT, though, because of a hostage she couldn’t find, who turned out then to be dead. Making her cranky.
On the other hand, before the tunnels, she had a Hunt Council mish over in Bricks, and she just kicked ass. I mean, groups of seven or eight reds, or a couple of purple with red escorts. Not without a couple of white knuckles, but still, impressive enough to make me wonder if I need to ratchet up her reputation more. I tend to be conservative on these things (or cowardly, if you prefer), but maybe that’s not as necessary with her.

Once I got back to the ol’ homestead last evening, it was time for more Torchielle and Hildegard.  In this case, we were wrapping up the Freakolympics story arc, which was fun.

I find the combo of Hildy’s crowd control plus my damage magnitude to be a lot of fun.  It’s a reshuffling of the Psi-clone/Amorpha stuff.  Hildy, like Psi-clone, does the holding and protecting (as a tank), while Torchy does the damage-dealing that Amorpha does.  The only difference is who’s in the bad guys’ faces.

Almost up to 32.  Wow.

And, meantime, respecced Torchy to take Fly rather than Super-Jump.  Fit it into her story, too.  And made some minor changes to her costume. Fun.

Hostess Heroes last night cleaned Klamor Maestro’s clock. Despite his being an AV (and thus currently regenning 11x as fast as he used to), we didn’t have much problem. Hell, the stupid ‘fan boys” were a bigger irritant.
In the pic we have (front) Ho Ho, Brownie Points, Twinkie Kid; (back) Bear Claws, Princess Peep, Ginger Snap, Ring Ding. Oh, and in the middle, Klamor Maestro having his noisy head handed to him.
Ho Ho and Princess Peep both dinged 25. Halfway (numerically) to 50. Yikes.
It’s a bit funny. I enjoy playing Ho Ho — doing the tank thang with a big team and all. But there was something kind of exhilerating about first building her, and having practically any option. Doing a regular big team is spoiling me — makes me want to do more of it, but with different ATs. Another blaster. A different controller. A claws scrapper. Endless possibilities …

It almost defies belief that Hildy and Torchy are at 31.
Or, for that matter, that Lynn is at the same level, and only a couple of pips from 32.
I remember Lynn struggling with Council in Steel. I remember Torchy being stuck at 22 or so for the longest time.
It’s also weird to think that both are about to supplant Velvet as my second-highest character.
And plenty of folks in the wings, waiting to take over …

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On that note, I started playing a new alt (ha!), Chained Path, She’s a Mind/Kin controller, something I picked up after reading a very cool Controller guide that Margie had printed (URL to follow some time).
So far so good with her — the control with her is pretty awesome, and I like the look and story of the character.
Was my first time since the I7 neighborhood redesign running around Atlas, though. A couple of notes:

1. Seemed to be a lot fewer mobs of mooks around the edges of the Green Zone.
2. The mobs are of more varying sizes, and, in some cases, made it very difficult to get from Point A to Point B without engaging in combat>
3. I was surprised that my third mish (a chain from the first, talk to someone for the second, who sends you off to the third) was way the hell off in the Red Zone of AP. Like, “Gah! Purples! Lots of Purple mobs!” far. I ended up doing a lot of roof-crawling.
4. There’s a lot of nice, new, funny dialog both there and in Galaxy. There are also some fun groups (like a Tourist taking pictures of a couple of Longbow agents). (And wouldn’t it be cool if civilians interacted more with you — running up and asking to take a picture, coming over and telling you about some Hellions causing trouble, etc?)

CP is designed for soloing. We’ll see how long my interest is maintained.