Blog of Heroes

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).