Sounds of silence

I’ve not quit CoX or anything like that. But I’m on the road, didn’t do too much of note Monday night, discovered the room broadband was out Tuesday night, and may face the same situation tonight.
I expect the rest of the month is going to be sketchy — we should have 1 or 2 CoH-capable machines with us out in Faerie over the holidays, but the nature of that place is such that I don’t expect to be doing a lot of gameplay. But, I could be wrong. We’ll see …

Raggedy Amy

raggedy amy.jpgA new alt for me to solo around with. My first (effectively) Stalker — MA/SR.
My original design for her was inspired by the “DeeDees” on Batman Beyond (who were, themselves, sort of Raggedy Ann-inspired), but a few things got in my way …
… like no simple belt (a perennial bitch for me).
… like no “rosy cheek” makeup.
… like no “go-go girl” hat.
So I eventually looked up some Raggedy Ann pics, and ended up with something different.
She’s fun, she’s crazy, and she’s my last open slot on Champion.l

“I’m getting short, man!”

Margie voiced to me last night something that I’ve been slowly mulling over.
We’re getting close. Psi-clone and Amorpha are at 42 and on our way to 50.
Granted, there’s still a huge amount (of content and XP needed) between those levels — but, still, it feels like we’ve swung onto the glide path.
I’m already beginning to think about what will happen with Psi-clone after that. And the Consortium. And what alts I’ll start focusing on instead. (And, it occurs to me, whether I want to try a Kheldian. Well, duh.) And stuff like that.
Of course, the coming holidays is going to frell up our steady march to the sea here, but I definitely see that gleaming Hero of the City badge lurking there on the horizon. To mix my metaphors.

All I’m asking is for a little Respec

Finally got around to respeccing Velvet to I6. We haven’t been playing V/PS in, like, forever — Margie’s still got a serious mad-on regarding FF, and Velvet’s got that crazy Croatoa “don’t let them get through the mystical doorway” mish that we fumbled.
Need to do something about that. I’m feeling a yen. And there’s a bunch of 30-39 action that we missed with PC/A, and nobody else is in position to get to that any time soon.
The Respec went okay, at any rate. I may need to go back and plug some further EndReds into her defenses, and I haven’t actually had a chance to play her, but I’m thinking she’ll be all right.

Option Paralysis

Option Paralysis is a phenominon that occurs when there are too many choices. In theory, you’d think that having a lot of choices would let you make an optimal decision, but in practice that often doesn’t happen because of indecision, because making the “best” choice begins to outweigh making a “satisfactory” choice, etc.
Like, last night. Amorpha and Psi-clone against some Carnies. No sweat. Under control.
Then we ended up in one of my least favorite maps (large room, couch set in one corner, cubes in another corner, glass-walled meeting room and coffee area on the opposite wall, lots of pillers). We started in, standard strategies —
— and things began to go all pear-shaped —
— and things began hitting me. Like hitting me for 90-100 points. Then 100-200 points. Then —
— Carnies running around all over —
— big freakin’ weightlifter in my face and girls throwing stuff —
And option paralysis set in. Any number of things I could have done. Crey freezing pistol would have been good to lock down the strongman. Call in Phred, or Phred’s Army. Bug out. Hit the phase ring. Hit the wedding ring. Pop various shield chicklets (since I was out of greens). Try —
Well, you see the problem. Any number of good things. And while I tried to decide I kept getting hit and trying to heal myself and eventually ended up chewing on carpet that tasted vaguely of stale cotton candy and popcorn.
*sigh*
Margie was extremely apologetic, as though it were her fault for not taking out the entire room. But it was really my fault.
Need to work on some of those stratgies. Maybe having three trays of powers and temp powers isn’t such a good idea …

Deep in the heart of RP

So I’ve done RP stuff on CoH before — usually just staying in character, or maybe applicant interviews, or occasional chit-chat centered around missions. But last night I actually dove/was dragged into a major RP thread.
Insidious.
I think I’ve kept away from a lot of serious RP in CoX because (a) a lot of the RP I see in CoX drips of melodrama and romance novel class writing, (b) I like to feel I’m getting my money’s worth from the game, not from a chat client, and (c) I tend to duo with Margie and, in fact, prefer to game with her, which limits my availability for such things.
There’s also the concern about imposing my plots on others, or vice-versa. I’ve seen that done, badly, too many times in my months on CoX.
That all said, it was fun. Psi-clone got yanked into Midnite Tempest‘s storyline, and it turned into something a lot more elaborate (in terms of how it intersects his own tale) than I’d anticipated. I have no idea the extent to which it will go beyond an hour or two of chat last night (and, to be honest, I’m not sure I want it to go much further (see a-c, above), but if I helped p.MT along with things in her story, I’m happy to have done so.
At the very least, it was kind of keen to be able to use the CoJ base as a backdrop (a couple of rooms worth, in fact).

Gotta jet!

A jet pack? A jet pack?
Yes, that’s what Miss Liberty is gifting everyone with this month (as of last night, in fact). And what Black Scorpion is stealing for all of his cronies, too.
The jet pack should automatically show up when you sign in — but be warned that (a) a bug has been reported that it will vanish again when you sign out (so don’t rush out there right away), and (b) I have no idea how long it will last.
This is, supposedly, on the “beginning” of fun holiday stuff.
Should be handiest for lowbie characters. Not sure that Al will trust such a contraption, though the Elizas will leap at the opportunity.

Teamed

2005-12-06_down.jpgIn response to a request from Puck Bunny, Psi-Clone and Amorpha joined a team with her, Kinetica, Noelle Frost, and Shock.Therapy — with, for a while, Agent Seven and Kessa, too — to take on first Anti-Matter, then Marauder, then various and sundry Carnies.
Not bad. It’s a fun group to play with (even if Noelle was all angsty over the Kid Galahad thang). We had a few deaths (Anti-Matter was the toughest, by far, abetted tactically by some “I’m feeling suicidal” roleplay and a bit of Level 50ness), but ultimately prevailed, and both PC and A. dinged to 42. Huzzah.
Ran off to do some scheduled RP with Midnite Tempest, only to be interrupted by a critical call from work. Alas.

Map improvements

I notice that the stores in CoV say “Tech Store,” “Mutation Store,” etc., rather than just “Store.”
I also noticed that if there’s a stack of icons on the map, hovering over them causes them to temporarily expand outward (like you had a magnifying glass) so you can see (or target) what’s there; it works both on city maps and on mission maps. It’s a little weird, but a decent solution.
Looking forward to both of these hitting CoH (the former, at least, hadn’t last time I looked).

Sublime and ridiculous

Hard to beat the study in contrasts of Friday night vs Saturday afternoon/evening.
2005-12-02_koago.jpgFriday we were running the Transcendence Trial with the Storm Knights, bringing in Araware and Fazenda. Doyce (Pummelcite) was organizing it all, and it went off like clockwork.
And just about as interestingly.
Jackie had a character to teleport us through the Troll Tunnels, then Invis/Tport us into position at the obelisks. Touch, glow, and then tport past the central chamber up to where Koago was waiting. Wham, bam, XP ma’am.
I think it took us 30 minutes. Maybe 45. It went flawlessly, save for a single instance when Pummelcite ran too far out of a side tunnel and aggroed some baddies and I ended up taking a lava nap. That was in the second go-thru, when we brought in Mr. and Mrs. Azure.
The irony is, it went so perfectly it didn’t feel all that satisfying. Fazenda, though only two or three pips from 16, didn’t level. Mr. A. did, but only afterwards in the Troll Tunnels (Pummelcite was just short, too, so we did a little hunting). But there was very little challenge, very little suspence or feeling of danger. It was like shooting Koago in a barrel.
It’s hard to complain about success, and God knows I’ve been in enough Transcendence Trials that failed to not want to repeat that experience, either. But somewhere in the middle, struggling against all odds to succeed —
— which brings us to Saturday. The Virgil Tarikoss Strike Force, the first (15-20) SF in CoV, as hosted by the Consortium of Injustice.
(And let me just say I’m really jazzed by how the CoI has “taken off” — we’ve been seeing several characters at any given time running in the SG, and we were at around a dozen when I signed on this afternoon. Great group.)
2005-12-03_demon.jpgThe roster for the SF was Mister Thorne, Undone, Zot, Shadowslip, Alpha-Omega, Mastadon Rex, and Livid. Seven is a lot for a TF, but we all wanted to do it, so, what the heck. We also had some odd level problems — half the group was RSKed down to 20, and they were SKing the other half up to 19. We were stuck with a rotating lowbie who would not be SKed.
Strike Force “StrikeForceName” (how inspirational) had problems from the start. We were going up against, constantly, from my perspective, reds and purples, with occasional orange minions.
We died. And died. And died some more. The Light Brigade had nothing on us. We beat a path through the ether between the Cap hospital and VT’s portal. It was … brutal. I was in debt for almost the entire TF, though I still managed to level to 16. It took us six, painful, agonizing, multiple-deathed hours.
Things got worse when Livid’s compute problems finally booted the player/character mid-way through. Livid’s connectivity had been a real bear for most of the game (which made me, as her sidekick, more than a bit vulnerable). When Livid finally vanished, it meant that we were really imbalanced, and two of the low-levels were perma-gimped.
Worse, I had inadvertently left myself at the middle reputation level, which didn’t help things any (though it’s still, I think, a nasty, nasty slog).
The final mish, against first Infernal and then the ultimate bad guy, was no worse or better than anything else, except that there was only a single bad guy who was killing us in droves, rather than a horde of purples and reds.
Infernal was actually a lot worse than the final opponent, who was powerful, but who went down far more easily.
Hell of a group of players, though. Whether gimped or taking grievous damage or getting slammed to the hospital again and again, everyone hung in there. Nobody suggested we quit. Everyone (except those technically incapable of doing so) made it through to the end. We were a Band of Brothers, Normandy Beach-style. No weak links, nobody who was constantly messing up or causing us problems. It was just a bloody, bloody slog.
And we made it.
Bravo.
Now, let’s never do that again, either.

One of our contacts is missing!

Holy crap! David Wincott’s moved!
He’s now standing directly outside fence entrance to the Hollows, rather than being off to the side in the sandbag redoubt.
Not earthshattering, but …
I signed in on Katherine’s laptop, now that I’ve bumped it up to 1Gb RAM — graphics are fuzzy but decent — and brought in Al McGordo, trotted over to say hi to David … and he wasn’t there.
HE WASN’T THERE.
It was like the tram had gone missing or something. Three “Troll Task Force” members, but no Wincott. Was he off looking for his boy?
I looked around, and spotted him several feet away at his new position.
Weird. Not sure why they did it (were folks having problems finding him?).
Weird. And unsettling. What next — Ms Liberty joining the dancers under the Atlas statue?

Henchmen are Not Pets

Which is the lesson I need to learn. I need to start, with Mister Thorne, playing with the Boys as extensions of myself — being more directive about where they go, stay, etc.
Phred the Phantasm is simple. He follows. He shoots. (Follow-Aggressive is, I think, the MM combo here).
The Boys are not. I need to control them, and I even need to consider how to control them separately. And I need to be willing to sacrifice one (since they can be resummoned relatively quickly) for a worthy (scouting, aggro, etc.) cause.
Of course, that makes doing all that other stuff I do (debuffs, heals) a bit more complicated, too.
Some resources I’m reviewing.

Swing your partners

Got both Mister Thorne and Undone up to 15 last night, so we’re good to go for the Strike Force this weekend.
Came, ironically, to the conclusion that the pairing isn’t working terribly well, gameplay-wise. “The Boys” (my soldiers) are range-based. Undone needs to be up close and personal. I get stuck in-between, with a very limited-range heal, and not much defense, and, if I’m being most effective, running back and forth between Undone on the front lines and my Boys further back.
Result? While it works okay to set up a “Tar Patch on the Corner” counter-ambush for the bad guys, Undone’s facing increasing difficulties surviving after her alpha strike on the baddies to get back to said corner. I can send the Boys forward to initiate the attack, but that lets the enemy choose the ground. Or I can start things off with a debuff, and draw all the fire myself. None of these succeeds joyfully.
Plus I’m beginning to recall one of the reasons I dropped Taste of Honey — the Dark secondary is just glacially slow. Needing to hit people to heal is annoying, too.
(And I need to do some more reading on effective control of the Boys — way too many times that I direct them at a target, and then, when they’re done, they just put their hands in their pockets and wait for my command to shoot the next bloody bad guy, okay?)
So here’s the current thought, after the Strikeforce — leave MT/U as they are for a bit, and focus on Eliza Dee (the Champions version) and Mistress Bacchante. Get them up to 15 (or wherever we are after the SF). Then swap. Send the Brawler with the Stalker. Send the Dominator with the Mastermind. See how that works.
A long-term plan, but it should work. Unfortunately, ED(C) is far enough advanced that the same problem I had with ED(V) — a delay in travel power to 16 because I took Bonecrusher instead of Air Superiority — may turn out to happen there, too. We’ll see. I might be able to make it work.
The unfortunate part of all this is that we’ve not been spending much, if any, time on our Virtue Villains, and Mister Ravenous and Charity at Home have been sadly neglected. Of course, the Elitists haven’t been all that active, as a group, either, so it’s not like we’re letting the Home Team down.
We’ll get back to them. Eventually. It’s hard to keep a good (or Bad) alt down.

A palpable hit

Lots of ongoing discussion on the CoH boards about the “streak breaker” system. While a randomize to-hit system could lead to (in a perfectly randomized world) an endless chain of misses in the finite universe of, say, a battle, the streak breaker in the CoH/CoV code forces a hit to happen (for you) after X number of misses, X being determined by the lowest percent to-hit in your attack chain.
Bottom line, if you are going up against an even-level minion opponent, with no enhancements (i.e., 75% TH on each attack)), you cannot miss more than 3 times. On the fourth time you will hit, regardless of what you might have rolled.
Which is still awfully frustrating, but does actually give you an edge over the straight TH percentages.
It’s actually kind of fascinating stuff. Look in this thread for a more detailed explanation of how it works, and the different to-hit/max-misses ranks.

Yay Team!

2005-11-29_portal.jpgBD needed help with a PB mission (the Psychic Clockwork King), so Psi-clone and Amorpha joined Puck Bunny, Noelle Frost, Shock.Therapy, and Kinetica (the latter 50s exemplared down to our 41-42 level) at Portal Corp.
A pretty fun mission. There were three controllers, a bushel of pets, one defender, one blaster, one scrapper. That meant Amorpha took point. Invis. from me kept us relatively stealthy going between groups, and we have very little trouble with them (except for Kinetica, who was prone to being killed by anyone she failed to nuke). Between Shock and myself, folks stayed buffed and healed. Pretty straightforward. The PCK went down in just a few minutes.
After we cleared the rest of the map and headed back, Noelle had to leave, so we headed on to a Crey mish that PB had. Things were a bit dicier there — a massive number of Crey tanks, and a good sprinkling of Paragon Protectors. The groups were large enough, and close enough together, that we ran into problems, including Kin going down a few times, my going down at least once, and a TPK when we inadvertently aggroed a veritable flock of Crey tanks.
I probably shouldn’t have brought out Phred, in retrospect — some good added firepower, but he triggered melees before we were ready more than once. My bad (and probably the most egregious tactical blundering of the evening).
Still, ended the mish out of debt and the evening a couple of pips higher than I’d been, so it was all good. And it was good to team up, too. I love duoing with Margie (she’s an excellent player and partner), and soloing can be some fun, but there’s enjoyment in team-ups that I’ve missed of late — more chaos, more voices, more chances for things to go wrong and for things to go right. And when it’s all good players (like the team we were on), it’s even more fun.
I’m looking forward to the TF this weekend, and there’s another team mission that Araware and Fazenda might be going on shortly, too. Should be fun.