Blog of Heroes

It was going to be a Psi-clone/Amorpha duo night, to finish up the Sands of Mooooooo, but we ended up getting invited onto a team with Liberty Bill, Malcalypse, Seventy-Six, Kessa, Kinetica, Shock.Therapy, etc. (composition varied over time) that was doing some higher-level content, including some Portal Corp. adventures and a big Carnie hunt.
Whew! The first PC adventure was pretty straightforward and unthreatening, zapping Proteans off in some forest. The Carnies adventure was an outside map timed mish, and we dawdled a bit much early on — the final few minutes were a non-stop dash and blast and punch and …
Well, that one failed, and there could only have been some hapless Carny lurking somewhere. Frustrating.
The third adventure was fighting Inferno through the Portal. The final battle was the huge, bloody affair — engage the bad guys plus destroy the portal plus take down Inferno. The AV was tossing around 1000-hp-plus axe blows, and I think everyone in the group died at least once during the battle. Amorpha went down four or five times, one-shotted (she also had been on the magic portal, the main attacker of it, and went down when it exploded). I got tagged by a couple of folks once and went down. Folks were popping tabs of all colors, including rezzes.
Everyone ended up in debt. I’m about 9k, and Margie’s, um, about 48k.
As to tactics during that final, bloody melee — yeesh. Shock was doing the main high number healing, but there was too much for her, esp. with rezzing and tping bodies out of the battle zone. I threw up Assault, occasionally pulled up Phantom Army, and just concentrated on my Empathy secondary, practically as fast as stuff came up.
Glad I was there — and glad everyone was there, because everyone contributed at the end.
By end of night, PC had gotten up to about 5.5 pips into 29. Amorpha was at over 7, but all the rest of hers were brown.
Good, exhausting stuff.
Now, if Katherine had slept in beyond 6:30a, it would have been a nearly perfect evening.

Psi-clone and P-siren ran the Terra Volta Respec Trial last night. Started late (9:30), but it only ran about two hours.
The team pretty much rocked. Once we knew each others’ capabilities and tricks, there was no question. Three Scrappers, two Defenders (Agent Seven on Empathy with me as spot backup, P-siren on Bubbles), a Blaster, and a Controller.
The nice thing was, though we didn’t feel regimented, we all had pretty decent discipline, and there were no running-off-and-causing-deaths errors I might have expected. Indeed, no deaths at all. Professional.
Group Invis once again showed it’s Da Bomb, and its application worked with with the various other bubbles and buffs from the Defenders. For the actual reactor protection, Phantom Army was also pretty handy. Deceive was good vs. Sky Raider engineers (and the team was pretty good about respecting that), but there weren’t a lot of those.
I ended up — aside from the Invis and PA and Empathy stuff, just doing a lot of singleton controls, my specialty. Worked pretty well, actually. A bit of jack-of-all-trades, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
I even got to bop folks with the Sands of Mu.
First try-out of the new auto-exemp system. The interesting thing about it is that auto-exemped team members can, themselves, SK someone within the team. That means that your teams are a lot more likely to be closely packed in level rather than scattered across the TF/Trial range.
For us, that also meant not a lot of XP. Most of the bad guys conned green and white to me (SKed to 33), with a fair number of blues and occasional yellows. That contributed to the low body count, too, no doubt.
Biggest drama of the night was Margie’s system once again deciding to do a full Norton AV scan at 10:30p or so, right in the middle of the frelling reactor defense. She was so frustrated she cycled the power on the damned thing and got back in after about 10 minutes of keyboard pounding. Memo to self …
Anyway, all went well. Psi-clone dinged up to 29, and I think PS dinged to 28. Velvet hasn’t done the Respec trial yet, so that’s on her docket.
And what’s the respec plan? Frankly, I’m not sure. PC actually still has his free respec from May. Fact is, looking at his powers, there’s not one in there that he doesn’t use, and only one bubble he seriously regrets. The only thing I wish he had — see Sands of Mu, above — was a permanent decent melee power. I suspect he’ll go for Air Superiority, given that he already flies, but I don’t really see a power I’d be willing to skip so far to get it, so I may go for it next rather than Tactics.
Fun night, to which was added, pre-Trial, running around and getting plaques for the “Intellectual” badge, which I think will be what stays up for him for a while (unless I get ambitious and go for the Authority badge).
UPDATE: Agent Seven’s assessment here. Personnel notes (hee!):

Psi-Clone: Graham Thorne. Entrpeneur, venture capitalist. Mental as well as support abilities. Leader of Consortium of Justice but willing to dirty hands when the need arises. Sound tactical skills, but verbose tendencies.

Personal Note: Check with Flag Waver concerning 401K status.

P-Siren: Accent denotes possible Ukranian lineage. Remember to check Phalanx files regarding citizenship status. Abilities include protective energy fields as well as mental capabilities. Competent work…..little chatter….solid team member. Adequate.
Fun.

Amorpha dinged to 29 last night — which is, suddenly, astonishingly (to me, at least) close to the golden level of 30.
Good Lord. I remember when Level 30s were like demi-gods. And here we are, just about there. Psi-clone is about two pips from 29. Velvet and P-siren are down at 27.
Next thing you know, we’ll be taking casual saunters about Peregrine Island or something.
Also inducted one of my first “outsiders” into the Consortium last night. Went well, and it’s kind of nice to see it taking on people beyond just our circle of friends and the occasional Alliance alt.
In the course of last night’s adventures — which went way too late, largely due to our inability to say no to a timed mish — PC picked up the Sands of Ur, or something like that, which basically gives him Shadow Maul for four (calendar) days. Which was, frankly way too much freakin’ fun (PC’s inability to do more than Brawl feebly being an ongoing sore point for me — yes, I know, I’m not meant to be a damage-dealing crunchy, but being able to do a bit more than I can now would be awfully nice).
And, my, haven’t those Circle of Thorns types suddenly grown? Yikes.
That also opened up a third power tray for me. I now have five temporary powers lurking about — wedding ring, wolf whistle, cryo armor, electromagnetic grenades, and now the sands for a few days — since I tend to hoard the things (I tend to forget them in combat, and when I remember them, I tend to not want to use them in case I “really” need them next encounter).
We finished up the Striga Council arc, which would have been far more impressive had we not already (with both pairs of mains) run the Hess TF. But it was still nice to clear it, and move on.
I was a bit shocked to see on Margie’s contact/origin/level cheat sheet that we actually are beginning to outlevel the contacts in IP, and already have the ones in Talos. Which is a shame, because Talos is a great place to hang — between the close proximity of the shops to each other and the train station, and the trainer just down the stairs from the station as well, it’s sort of the people-watching Picadilly Circus of Paragon, and if I park a character there, I almost certainly will run into an Alliance member in the following fifteen minutes.
But we continue to improve. And, with the temp power burning a hole in my pocket (“only three days left!”), we’ll probably be doing a lot of focus on PC and A over the next few evenings.

Did the Hess TF again this weekend, as organized by Avocet, and participating, this time, Velvet and P-siren. Along for the ride were Aerobolt, Granite Rock, Fixette, WillO’Wisp, and Lunar Lupun.
Initial organization with these things was chaotic, as folks couldn’t make it, folks dropped, the SK/Exemp questions nagged, the lack of scrappers concerned, etc. (Yes, Avo, it’s often an hour before TFs actually take off, though 30 minutes is usually a more common lag.)
Once we got going, though, and got used to each others’ capabilities, it went remarkably smoothly — despite the fact that everything was purple to both PS and me, PS couldn’t actually hit anything for damage, and I barely could. On the upside, PS’s bubbles were a key defense (despite everyone running away when it was time to reapply), and I was able to draw fire briefly with taunts (without being able to further hit well, it was hard to hold the aggro).


The upside to all of this was that both of us dinged twice — and that was from just into 25 for Velvet and dinging on the TF completion. And we all got out before the Giant Robot blew up. Spiffy.
(Our tactics in the Robot Chamber — just stay on the first level and draw everyone down to us — worked great. We probably should have jumped to the bottom sooner, but by the time we drew Archon Burkholder to us, we were able to pretty effectively gang up on him and take him down.)
Good group, overall, and much fun. Wasn’t up to doing Bastion (a *real* slog) after that, as most of the group did. Went off to Talos, and made some serious investments in SOs.
And, yes, the Velvet respec seemed to work well. I ran with full defense most of the time, and only had End problems when I forgot to drop Super Jump before entering the mish.
And I got KO Blow, which actually did do some damage to the mobs, so I didn’t feel completely useless.


UPDATE: After dinner and some other mishing, ended up running Truly Unstable with Fallen Twice. Duoing with two Defenders is an interesting challenge, but between Margie’s kinetic mojo and my radiation buddies, we did pretty well.
And playing TU on the coms is always a lot of fun.

Velvet and Amorpha ended up being picked up to run in a Malta warehouse mish. Kinetica, Shock Therapy, Malcalypse, and Puck Bunny were all along for the ride.
First time out with Velvet’s new build, and between all the support powers and my being 3-4 levels below the baddies, it’s difficult to tell how I did with it.
But I had fun, I got some complements, I got some laughs, I got some +6 SOs and a lot of XP, so what the hell. 🙂

Consider this an open planning spot for the Hess (Burkholder’s Bane) TF that Avocet is coordinating this Sunday.
On board are:
– Velvet Jones, Inv/SS Tank (25 – or will be by then)
– P-siren, FF/Psi Def (25)
Velvet’s more than willing to do the tanky stuff, but at 25 she’s going to be entry level for the TF, unless SKed up.

“Interesting ritual, James. Very creative. Now PUT ME DOWN!”

Ten hours — with breaks — of task forces against the Council: Hess TF and Citadel (Bastion) TF. Started at about 1 p.m., finished the the second up around 11 p.m. or so. Took a dinner break, Kitten break, etc., inside, but pretty much took up our Saturday.
On the other hand, dinged Psi-clone and Amorpha two levels. On Hess, we were joined by Hyperion, Synoptic, Shock.Therapy, and Leroy Jones. On Bastion, we were again led by Hype and Syn, along with Kinetica (exemped down, dropped midway through), Puck Bunny, and Shock.Therapy (who also dropped midway through).
Biggest goof: during the climactic battle in Hess, not firing up a couple of the cool temp powers (Wedding Ring, Cryo Armor, Wolf Whistles, Electromagnetic Grenades) while we were being cut to shreds. Died three times in that final scene, including staggering out the emergency hatch, dead.
The two TFs are similar enough (and Hess is probably the better one) that it was a shame to run them back to back that way — sort of ended up feeling “Oh, no, not another Council mission/map/mob again” — but it was good people, good fun, and, as noted, good experience.
Might give our alts a bit more time at bat this coming week, though.

After staying up way too late last night, we managed to ding Psi-clone to 26. He also picked up the “Slayer” badge for all the Vampyri he’s done in. Woo-hoo.
Also, in afternoon play, dinged Sister Chinook to 11 and Lynn Calodo to 5.