Blog of Heroes

Got a late start last night, since Margie and Katherine had to do some evening-time shopping for the latter related to our upcoming trip.

1. Soloed a bit with Lynn. She was still on Heroic, and I was getting some pretty blue-white missions, so I bumped up to Rugged — and started a new arc of missions (Croatoan witches) that took me down twice in ten minutes.
   Hrm. Rejiggered back to Heroic until I catch up a bit. Half-way to 31.

2. Post-Kitten-bedtime, we hopped on with Hildy and Torchy, also in Croatoa. More, analogous Witch trouble, as those crazy broads refuse to herd well. Still, few worries.
   Midway through that mish, got a @tell, so hopped over to …

3. CoV and Mister Ravenous and Charity. Kinda crazy fun — three brutes on a team of six or seven tends to guarantee things will be a bit chaotic (I didn’t envy Margie in her buffy/healy role, let alone our being kinda rusty with these character, which meant hitting the right powers was more conscious than it should have been).
   Played a while (too long a while), then hit the sack. Charity dinged to 16. Should (may) do more with those two. In our copious free time …

Managed, with all the foofoorah last evening, to get Cetus and Lunulata up to 6th level, which means Squid Nova form.
Spent the next couple of adventures running around doing double-Squid action. No real threats (yet) to our relative squishihood, and it was fascinating to actually see them in action.

Didn’t actually play all that much, but some at least.

1. A bit of hopping around/soloing/PUGging with Lynn.
2. Created new Kheldian pair, Cetus and Lunulata (me/PB and Margie/WS, respectively). The intent is to get them up to 8-9, then pair them off with Al McGordo and Christmas Present. The character stories have not quite gelled in my head yet, but should be fun to play with.
3. Did the first Shadow Shard TF, starting … what, Thursday? … and ending last evening. Like most of the SSTFs, this one was kind of annoying. I mean, some eerieness with the Rularuu, but also a lot of seemingly pointless running around between the Shard and Founders and Bricks, a lot of repetitive missions, and a climax that was sort of anti-climactic.
   Solid team of 50s, though — Psi-clone, Amorpha, Hang Time, Noelle Frost, Sword of Asgard, Leroy Jones — along with a 44 — War Bones. The most interesting thing about it all was artificial: the team composition kept changing over time, which meant tactics and strengths and weaknesses kept changing, too.
   That we were mostly 50s, and thus didn’t have to worry (annoyance factor aside) about death/debt or missing out on XP meant that our tactics shifted subtly (or not-so-), too.

After all that time playing PC, it will be odd shifting back to Ho Ho tonight.

Knights Night last night. Margie and I got on a bit late, and between east coasters dropping off and serious performance problems for some people (blamed on the I7 pre-downloads), didn’t go very long en masse. Still ended up with Fazenda and Araware running something late with (at the end) Noelle, which was fun, given both her devil-may-care attitude and the always-welcome contributions of a Controller.
Both F and A are halfway to level, which is nice. We should give them more playtime. Though I need to rebuild some of her macros, since at least one of them went away when I respecced her for Fly.
(Note to self: really need to do something like this for the Consortium. Really do.)
After that, Psi-clone briefly helped start up the Shadow Shard TF (#1) that Doyce is organizing. Ran around with the crew for a while, and was shocked to discover that I was the Team Healer; there’s usually one or another full Empathy Defender running around in this group, but last night they had to make do with just me — which led to a sort of Zen “Stand in the middle of battle, watch the team health bars, spam heals and buffs at anyone having trouble, toss in an occasional Blind as opportunity presents.”
Nice to pull Psi-clone out to do something, though. After having been running Fazenda, I was astonished by how fast he flew. And, really, even taken down to 41 or whatever the TF auto-exemps to, not much in the way of powers were grayed out — Regen Aura, Psionic Tornado (bleah), an Accolade or so. Not bad.

Between a sinus infection and Mr. Momness, I decided to take the day off (which still meant getting up early enough to get Kitten to the bus). So I took the opportunity to finish getting Lynn up to 30, which was a lot of PUGgy fun.
And what faboo power did I get at this juncture? Oooooh … gotta be … Hurdle! Woot! A life-changing power!
(Actually, needed it — it will synergize with Super-Jump, and will give me a vertical movement if I’m running low on Endurance and needing to leave Combat Jump off.)
And, by the bye, she seems to have the most Prestige contribution of anyone in the Boomtown Saints at the moment …

As I pined away this evening, with pangs of separation from Margie (on a business trip) wracking my decrepit frame …
I managed to get Honor up to 15, and Lynn up to 29. Ironically, both ended up on PUGs that ended up unable to finish a Mission from Hell (which garnered both massive XP and a single death each). Synchronicity.
Re Honor: Being able to fly over the Hollows is a thing of joy.
Re Lynn: I find it more than a little disturbing that she’s almost at 30.

An interesting battle on why Boss Battles in a video game are the make-or-break of the game itself.

It’s partly because a boss battle is the most mythopoeic part of gaming. An adventure game, after all, typically puts you on some dread quest in which the foes get bigger and nastier until you face one final, hellish climactic baddie. This is a pure apocalyptic narrative — the same story line that has obsessed the West for millennia, from the Bible to Das Kapital to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Boss battles make games seem cosmic.
But personally, I think the allure is much more straightforward than that, and also, in its own way, more complex. We love boss battles because they represent game design at its purest and trickiest.

Thinking of the CoX, the bosses/monsters/AVs are the classic finales of adventures — TFs, arcs, the final big Praetorian missions. Where they work is when there’s something to make them interesting. A single AV alone in a room provides one of three choices: you can grind them down, you can be ground down, or you get into a stand-off. All three are not all that interesting in and of themselves, because CoX tactics are, in most cases, a matter of what powers the participants have and how they slot them (and, with less impact, how they employ them). So you go in with a plan and it either works or it doesn’t.
The “good” AVs are the ones where it’s not that simple. Infernal is the classic example — how do you balance the gate, the demons in the room already, and Infernal himself? Who keeps the AV busy while other folks shut things down while other folks keep the team alive? It’s a skin-of-the-teeth battle, much of the time, with enough variables that tactics spell the difference between disaster and success.
The end of the first CoV Strike Force has some variability, too — two AVs, with a variety of interesting tactics that can be employed (many of which have to do with getting them to fight each other) to maximize advantages or minimize weaknesses.
The “bad” AV battles, though, are the villain who stands there and either dukes it out with you or goes down hard. There might be a surprise (a massive attack last ditch nuke by the AV that knocks some of the party out, suddenly changing the balance), but too many of the AV battles are grinds, settled before the first punch is thrown.
The “bad” AV missions can be a useful climax to a long story, but too often they’re disappointing. That’s because, really, there aren’t a lot of strong active tactics that take place in most battles — the decisions have already been made, the powers chosen, and the only question is whether variables of luck, or a sudden mapserv, will take the decision out of the players’ hands. The player mix can spell a huge difference — but that’s already decided by the time the battle rolls around.
Interesting.