When Praetorians Attack!

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.

CoH: WORLD of Heroes

So I’ve not been hanging out in the forums and CoX site all that much of late … so I was a bit startled when I fired up the game this afternoon and …

Hey … what are all those servers?

I thought for a moment I might have been on Test, or else something awful had happened, but, no, Global Server Access has come to CoX. So now everyone can see not just the North American or European servers, but both.

Which means one now has 15 servers to stuff alts onto …

The Europeans take it a bit in the shorts here, since if there are @name conflicts, etc., theirs are the ones that get altered.  But aside from that — it’s pretty cool.  Better news than the “server consolidation” going on over in DCUO, alas (though, on the bright side, that article’s English is hysterical).

(Actually, I’m expecting server consolidation to hit CoX sooner or later — Victory, where we do all our stuff these days, is nigh-on-ghost-towny.)

Cow and Chicken

It always makes Margie laugh when I refer to this new duo as that.

In reality, they are Rhett Bull (Axe/Shield Brute) and Phoenix Reburn (Claws/Fire Brute). Much balls-to-the-walls fun to play.

(Yes, I have been playing a wee bit of CoX. Just not writing about it much, I fear.)

(And, yes, we’re enjoying the Animal Pack.)

CoH Animal Pack

(Hey, look! A live post! Treat it gently kids — you don’t want to scare it off!)

So of course I purchased the new Animal Pack for City of Heroes. NCSoft makes it so seductively easy …

And what did I get for my $10?

Well, I guess I got my $10 worth. It’s neither as lame as I might have feared, nor as cool as it might have been.

The basic costume piece additions — the whole purpose of the upgrade — are okay. Two sizes of cat heads (ferocious, not cuddly), with some variations for tigers, lions, etc., and for patterning and a couple of ear styles and for (optional) sabre-teeth. A new wolf’s head (not the kind of mutant werewolf style previous available) with some variants. Additional tiger striping. Minotaur heads, with three different styles of horns (plus hornless) and four (!) styles of nose rings.

There are bird heads, too — eagle, hawk, vulture. Cue the Egyptian costumes …

They’ve also added cat feet and bird feet for the monstrous feet costume slots, and a minotaur tail and shaggy wolf tail.

What’s there is good, though the heads feel too small in proportion. Of course, the human heads sometimes feel a bit small on normal bodies. The effect is worse with the monstrous lower body, which still looks monstrously large/long compared to the rest of the form. I did a little experimentation, and the minotaur on the huge body doesn’t look bad.

(Apparently in the UK the pronounce minotaur with a long I — my-notaur — as opposed to the short I we use here in the States. Ran across that the other day on TV. Weird.)

Another new costume feature are some animal-specific auras. I didn’t play with the “fleas” aura, but there’s a beastly anger one that you can focus on different body parts (including breath), perpetually or just in combat. You know how bulls have that stereotypical steamy breath? Yeah, you can do that with your minotaur.

There are some nice costume change emotes.

I did not get a chance to play with the beastly running power. I’m hoping it’s as good as the Champs Online one.

So, is it a huge game changer? Nah. I don’t see Paragon (et al.) being overrun by cat girls or minotaurs or wolf-men, though it’s nice that there are now those options for those who want them. I may retrofit a couple of my feline characters to use the new heads, but not in all cases. And there are a lot of other possibilities here — I (or Lady Zebra) would love to see a horse head, for example, and certainly a monkey/gorilla would be used by some.

Good fun. Now if I can carve out some time to play for the next few weeks …

Because occasionally I feel like I should post something other than tweets

Even though there’s not a lot of News or Info or Interesting Stuff to post about.

Um …

Margie and I have been playing CoX (business trips permitting) pretty regularly over the last weeks.  We’ve been mostly running the cohort of 20ishes we grew up through Rogues, playing with new Tip missions vs Evil Duplicate missions vs Plain Ol’ Police Band missions vs etc.

For a guy who hates crafting/auctioning, I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time at Wentworths (etc.) building up bankrolls by Buying Low and Selling High, mostly Special Enhancements and highly rare Invention Salvage.

By the way, the recent addition of a new Salvage tab that requires scrolling over in order to see the Invention tab?  Highly irksome.

So, not much more to tell.  Playing CoX. Having fun.  Booyah.

Viz other games … well, never signed up for DCUO after doing the beta stuff — bright and shiny but annoying non-instanced missions and overly combat-oriented.  Haven’t done any STO in ages, either — it didn’t float Margie’s boat, and ultimately felt too repetitive (though what it was repeating was rather cool).

We’re pretty much a CoX shop these days.  And, for the time we have to spend, that’s not a bad thing.