“I haven’t got time for Dull Pain …”

Interesting guide, by the numbers, on Dull Pain under I6 and ED and how to slot it and when it makes sense to be running it all the time and when it makes sense to use it as an emergency. Interesting stuff, esp. since I have a number of heroes that use it.
One fun bit:

The way that you use DP now depends on how you want to deal with the alpha strike. It’s really a simple question. Are you gonna die in the first 5 seconds? If the answer is no, it’s actually more beneficial to take the full brunt of the alpha, and then use DP to recover from it. Now, if you think you will die to the alpha, you should use DP before you rush in to keep you from falling.
With supporting numbers, and drug interactions from slotting, other powers, Accolades, and the like.

Titan Up!

Ended up playing the Woodsman/Eden/Crystal Titan Trial (also here) last night. Loads of fun, helped tremendously by the facts that:

  1. Many of the folks playing had already done it, and so had some idea of the pitfalls (I can’t imagine tackling this thing otherwise).
  2. Solid team of characters. No weak links. Pesides Psi-clone and Amorpha, we had Hyperthermian, Shock.Therapy (Mal version), Kinetica, Hekuba, Puck Bunny, and Noelle Frost. Not much room for improvement there.
  3. DE still aren’t dropping emitters, which made the whole thing a hell of a lot simpler.

he final battle against the Crystal Titan is amazingly short for an AV battle (a good thing, too, since we had only two Ambrosia chits each, and I was busy watching my second one count down to about 5 before CT went down).

2006-01-23_eden.jpg

The Trial itself is a mixed bag. On the plus side, it’s short — 2-3 hours, I’d guess (the timer on the main mission is 4 hours). The set pieces are damned spooky. The story line is pretty cool. The villain is scary.
On the minus side — only a Devouring Earth fanatic (e.g., Amorpha) would not get tired of the critters after taking out the fortieth or fiftieth group of them. There are a few variation — the Lichen, the two Walls — but mostly it’s all DE, and, in point of fact, all rock/crystal DE.
Net? Absolutely worth doing once. Future repeats are dependent on the quality of the team. And it’s worth noting that varying teams might have varying results — we’d have been in more trouble, for example, without a very solid tank, or without a couple of empathy sorts, or without controllers to lock down the Walls and their spawn — and it would have taken even longer without Heroes That Go Boom, let alone, again, everyone being a solid quality player. Indeed, I’ll be interested in seeing how it plays with the next character I bring in, whoever that turns out to be.
It’s a Level 39-41 soiree, so PC/A had to autoexemp down. No XP, thusly, but good evening entertainment, nonetheless. The only hitch all evening was the “at least one person has to be the right level for the TF to start” maybe-bug, which meant digging up a 39-41 — hence Hekuba, vs Li Nakamura.

I think they’ve been reading the CoH boards …

The NY Times on How To Be A Troll. Though, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, there’s a distinction between being a curmudgeon/pill (being contrary because of general anger at the universe or because of ignorance) and being a troll (being contrary to get a rise out of folks).
Still, these sorts of things see to take up about 85% of the bandwidth on the boards, which is one reason I don’t read much except for the Dev repsonses and occasional explicit research into player guides.

1. Use the strongest language possible. Calling names is always effective, and four-letter words show that you mean business.

2. Having a violent opinion of something doesn’t require you to actually try it yourself. After all, plenty of people heatedly object to books they haven’t read or movies they haven’t seen. Heck, you can imagine perfectly well if something is any good.

3. If it’s a positive review that you didn’t like, call the reviewer a “fanboy.” Do not entertain the notion that the product, service, show, movie, book or restaurant might, in fact, be good. Instead, assume that the reviewer has received payment from the reviewee. Work in the word “shill” if possible.
Etc.

And be a villain?

I’ve been mostly off of CoV for a month-plus now, due to Margie’s graphic card going kerflooey (to get all technical with you folks). I logged in briefly to get jingle jets, but that was about it, aside from a couple very short solo dabbles.
And y’know what? Not missing it all that much. I guess I’m just a sappy guy who likes to be a hero, rather than a villain.
Granted, CoV the game has some bits that make it superior to CoH — incrementally, at least. But I’m really not pining away for the sense oppressive gloom and doom and blood and pain and general nastiness.
I’m sure that, once we get back into it, we’ll enjoy it more, esp. if we can do more teaming up with people. But, really, at this point it remains a sideline to me, not the main event.
Call me a sucker for blue skies. I never knew you could get S.A.D. from a computer game …

Weekend review

Friday
Mostly badge and accolade hunting for Psi-clone and Amorpha.
Saturday
Did some PUG work with Big Lungs. I’m not at all happy with the Sonic/Sonic combo — it’s okay, but boring — but I really like the way she looks (more than just the, um, obvious), so I’m loathe to get rid of her without something to replace her powers with instead (Storm Controller?). PC/A bits in the afternoon. Nada in the evening, due ot other commitments.
Sunday:
Morning: Recreated Fr. Frank on Virtue. I’d have done it on Champions, but I really didn’t want to let go of anyone there — neither my sadly-neglected CoV toons, nor my lesser-used CoH alts (incl. Big Lungs, who is surprisingly popular in PUGs).
Ended up with Fr. Frank in a PUG sewer crawl, and levelled to 6 by Noon. Nice to be appreciated. 🙂
Afternoon: Phalanx Prestige Day started off slowly, but ended up with a group of 8 (incl. a couple of Allies) doing the Croatoa TF — which took us 3 hours, rather than the 90 minutes forecast, but was still short. Velvet and P-siren dinged to 31. Velvet had the only death in the TF, I believe, a catastropic endurancde failure leading to complete toggle drop and many, many, many lightning strikes.
Evening: Malta-stomping with PC/A and Hype and Noelle. Ended the evening at 46.4, which is none too shabby.
It was interesting — PC/A have a very careful, refined, controlled set of Malta tactics, which were utterly useless with the rambunctious quartet we ended up in. Lots of thrills, chills, and a few face-plants (and exercise of my Rez) for everyone but me. I need to seriously consider respeccing into Clear Mind — this is the first time I really regretted not having it. That, and carrying a lot of Break Frees.
Fun times.

Accoladia

For whatever reason, Psi-clone and Amorpha did hunting tonight, to support going after two likely Accolades — Freedom Phalanx Reservist (+10% HP) and Vanguard (1/25min secondary effect boost).
Ended up with the FP Reservist for each of us, after some badge hunting and lots of crisscrossing PI searching for Fake Nemesis. Yay.
Vanguard’s basically waiting for a stint in the sewer network for us, hunting down 100 Lost bosses.

Tempting

Character designs seem to hit me out of the blue. So it is with Father Frank, who I haven’t built on Champion yet (would need to drop someone), but on Triumph (my “pilot” server).
A priest, of course. “Old” face, grizzled hair. Used one of the martial arts robes (black) with the dress shirt (black, with a white tie) under it, almost looking like a collar. The effect works pretty well.
I’d be doing it up as a “tough but nice” priest sort of thing, so he’s a Defender with Empathy primary, natch. Secondary — Margie’s immediately thought of Mind Control (Psychic Blast, actually), but to me the answer for any good preacher would be Sonic.
I might actually roll him up on Champion as another soloist. I figure there’s always PUG space for an Empath, right? Though Margie notes the controversy on the Defender boards about how Controller secondaries are actually as strong as Defender primaries, which just doesn’t seem proper to me (and I say that as someone with a Controller with Empathy secondary).

A million influence doesn’t buy what it used to …

After I hit 45, I went broke getting my powers all up to green and white. So I ran the past few days with Psi-clone outside of SG mode, so I was actually getting influence instead of prestige (plus whatever I sold).
So after I dinged 46 last night, I went and sold off my stuff and checked it out …
Wow! 3.7 mil. No problem.
*cough*
Level 45 SOs (which are now yellow to me)? The cheapest (e.g., Fear) are 46K. Accuracy is 108K. Recharge Redux is “only” 100K.
Of course, to get to white, I needed to buy 19 Recharge Redux. Half the account, right there. Throw in some more-expensive Heals and Accuracies, and …
Well, time to try that old /em panhandle command again.

Ding-ding-ding

Helped Hyperthermian get up to 50 last night. In the process, Psi-clone and Amorpha hit 46. (Which is a lot easier to do when you’re fighting purples most of the evening). Puck Bunny, Li, Lil Tessa, Shock, and Mal were along for most of the ride, and Sword of Asgard hopped in on the last mish.
No big problems, as far as that goes, except for when we went up against Psychic Babbage. Hype went down three or four times, which usually triggered a few other deaths in the crowd as the critter turned its attention to us. I managed to avoid more than one death — I think A went down twice.
With the volume of XP being generated, though, it was hardly a disaster.

Tracking the changes

Note to self: The “review posts since your last visit” function on the AoC boards is moderately flaky, especially when there’s amount of activity. I’ve spotted (fortunately, by cross-reference) several notes that never showed up in the display only by going out and actually spotting them there. Rrg.

Chit-chat

More PC/A goodness last night, hunting Carnies in PI, clearing Rikti on alternate Earths, and facing down scary-looking-but-pretty-flimsy Praetorian clockwork.
The latter mish was with Puck Bunny, who’s also at 45. PB’s play was erratic as Player-of-PB was being inundated with tells viz The Great Schism. Then, mid-mission, I started getting tells from a fellow leader on the “Champions” global channel, which nearly floored me — haven’t conversed in that channel since, well, it was set up, esp. when Coalition Chat started up.
Anyway, long discussions ensued about what had happened, how things were going, how they could have/should have happened differently, how the future might look, etc. (and in so doing received confirmation of another Lurker here 🙂 ).
(Bottom line, to my mind, is that the principals involved (any or all, but in particular Stateswoman and the FP Leadership) need to make a public statement about the matter — not necessarily an open debate, but a straightforward “Here’s what happened, here’s why, here’s what we intended, here’s what went wrong, here’s where we’d like things to go.” Not defensive, I hope, but straightforward and honest. In absence of that, the only folks talking are either (a) ignorant, or (b) biased, which means that the majority of folks out there who are still rocked back on their heels by all this have only unreliable sources regarding what actually happened and why.)
(Yes, by the bye, I could also make a formal statement viz my own role in this as an SG leader. But I’m not going to put words into others mouths or second-guess motivations without statements to work from — and, honestly, my role here was secondary in key ways. Once the Official Word is given, I’m prepared to chime in as appropriate. If it never is … we’ll see.)
At any rate, after Margie headed to bed, I did a bit more chatting with a couple of leader types, and a player or two, then called it a night (so far as CoH stuff was concerned — I ended up staying up too late getting some other things cleaned up, but that’s a different matter).

Patch update

Well, amidst the other brouhaha, a patch got downloaded last night, bringing over stuff that’s been on Test a while. The full notes are here (no, really, though you might need to F5 to dump the cache if you can’t see them). To my mind, the biggies:

  • Added new temporary attack powers to all low level characters. Which attack a character receives varies according to the Origin of the character. Once a character reaches level 10, the power is used up. Not strictly necessary, but a nice QoL enhancement. Margie went through and tried out all of them as a test. Sound like a fun addition.
    Still think we need an earlier travel power, though …

  • “Glowies” that gave XP and Inf. in missions no longer give XP. The amount of Inf. they give has been doubled. This should reduce farming glowies a goodly piece. Not a big deal, esp. since the mechanic is used only intermittently. Should also avoid hard feelings on the mission.
  • You are no longer allowed to interact with mission objectives while you are untouchable. Which iis a bit different from the original of being unable to do it while stealthed/invis, and that makes a lot of sense.

Suggested strategies

Lessons learned:

  1. Anyone may ambush. Even, say, Carnies. And unlike usual encounters, where you can set up and be ready and have some “frighteningly effective” scrapper to draw enemy fire, in an ambush they come right after your sorry squishy ass, Healing Aura and Green Chiclets notwithstanding.
    (Yes, that means Psi-clone is that much slowed on his march to 50, dagnabbit.)

  2. If you’re going to join a PUG, it’s better to be the highest level person rather than the lowest level person. Especially if it means most of the bad guys are blues and whites, with an occasional yellow. Good eats, heroic stances, and not much chance of face planting even when everyone else is trending orange and running away (or just out of a bad melee and charging forward to the next rather than resting first).
    (Yes, late night — later than I really wanted, but couldn’t quit the team in mid-Frostfire — fun with Amethyst Crown, who dinged 14 — in time to get a travel power to replace the soon-to-be-out-of-gas jingle jet.)

Vicious

“University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” — Henry Kissinger
I don’t know what it is that makes political infighting so nasty in social groups, except for how Dr. Kissinger puts it.
Regardless, nasty and vicious is what we ended up with in the big Alliance Schism of 2006.
I’m certainly pleased to see some folks out on their asses, don’t get me wrong. Other folks I’m sorry to see go, and some of the groups that were booted could have remained so far as I was concerned.
The whole thing was executed horribly (though, to be fair, I’m unsure what triggered the actual timing, unless it was Bill spilling the beans), and it could have been framed and spun a lot better (and, evidently, was intended to be). But, bottom line, “freedom of association” (as well as “he who pays the piper calls the tunes”) meant that if the Phalanx leadership wanted to get rid of some groups, that was their prerogative. And, on balance, I’d rather be with the ones left than the ones kicked out. There are exceptions, on both sides, but if the line is drawn, I know which side I want to be on..
Evil clique? Whatever. I’d expect a truly evil clique to be better organized. And spend less time agonizing over this stuff. And have cool t-shirts.
I’m not a confrontational kind of guy. I would likely never have taken a step like this, and would never, ever have done it as it was done. There are people I’ll miss, people I’m sorry have left, and others who, if I won’t exactly miss, I wouldn’t have minded if they were still around.
On the other hand, there are some folks whose nattering in CC will not be missed by me at all.
And all that said — I’m not going to lose a lot of sleep over it tonight.

You were always on my mind …

Margie called from the office. “I need to ask you some questions. I have the blaster menu here.”
Cool! I was thinking about throwing together an electrical blaster (Cracklepop? Prairie Storm? Sturmy Drang?), and was thinking about what powers they have. Never run one before, at least not for a long time, so I had a few questions if she could look them up for me …
At least, those were my thoughts, but … wait … could she access CoH from work? “What?”
“I have the last year menu here.”
Oh. She was talking about food planning for the party Saturday.
*sigh*
I think she was laughing at me, not with me, when I told her.

Live and direct!

2006-01-12_aaronkate-mauler.jpgWith Kate and Aaron, two of our regular CoX co-players, visiting, it was no doubt inevitable that we would end up in some sort of mass CoX play session. And so we did, running around and bopping AVs after hours. We were over at the Testerfolks, and we had Kate, Jackie, Margie and myself out at the breakfast table, while Doyce, Stan and Aaron were in the office.
It was kind of interesting being able to just chit-chat en masse during play, to give verbal “Gather for Invis” commands to the team, and, of course, to see how folks play “in person.” Not much RP, but …
Gameplay-wise, it was not all that much of a challenge, a couple of rote face plants aside. With the players spread from 44 to 50, we could SK/RSK as fit the person whose mish it was, and we basically rolled through the missions — Hype doing his juggernaut imitation, Amorpha and Kin doing massive damage, Puck and Noelle and PC locking them down, and Shock keeping us alive. Good times.
Of the not-yet-50 crowd, Amorpha‘s about half a pip from 45, and Psi-clone‘s around 2 pips, with similar proximity for Puck Bunny to 46 and slightly more for Hyperthermian to 50. And, since I expect we’ll see at least one more repeat over the weekend, I suspect we’ll get a good chance to all ding by then.