Blog of Heroes

We’d gotten just started playing some Kazima/Torchielle teaming when Champion decided to take it’s normal 11 p.m. faceplant. Just as well, since I’d already died once, and almost twice (very little mob control, lots of aggro. Need to figure out some better tactics).
So we switched over to Triumph, and ran some with Molly Magpie (my grav controller) and Toxic Wasteland (Margie’s spine scrapper). That was a bit more succesful, and we both dinged (to 5 and 3, respectively) before calling it a night.

Sign of Trouble #1: When you go out to search for an additional team member, at the behest of the others (because your team is too weak to make solid headway against the baddies in the mish), the person you find accepts … and immediately starts up a chat, en route, about World of Warcraft.
Sign of Trouble #2: While you are busy searching, and having told the others that you are doing so (at their behest, mind you), they wander off, encounter bad guys, and run for their lives, past you, screaming for help. You, of course, are busy in search screens, and, since you were resting after the last hellish encounter, had your shields down.
Hilarity ensues.
Somehow, I managed to not get killed. Somehow, the others on the team got killed two or three times.
Trouble, indeed. Though it netted Velvet another bubble of XP.

Finally, finally, finally got back on, after a week of life in Faerie. Nice.
Is it my imagination, or have the graphics been spiffed up? I haven’t been following the boards in depth, either, but I don’t recall seeing anything about that.
Anyhoo, Amorpha and Psi-clone did the rounds, fiddling about with DOs (post-Synapse), and clearing off the last of our non-TI/IP mishes.
Which led to an end-of-story-arc adventure against a warehouse full of gray Clockwork (Leo’s Garage — nice window dressing!) and the two of us taking down an orange Dr Vahzilok and his gray minions.
No sweat.
Interestingly enough, when I completed Dr. Vahz, since it was my mission, I was offered (upon contacting my contact) a selection of DOs, explaining what they all meant. Not seen that before, but nice.
Not sure what level of play I’ll be having this week (I suspect Margie will be hitting the sack early, being the Single Parent, and I’ll be having business dinners each night one time zone away), but I look forward to at least a little bit more than I’ve had over the last week.

Ran Kazima and Torchielle yesterday, while Honeygun sulked …
Did some light running around — cleared out a couple of old missions for Kazima, while we got our duoing up and working. Then Margie suggested we look at helping Dr. Awesome …
Ended up in a big group of 8 on the “find Patient Zero and the cure to the Vahzilok Plague” mish. Everyone was exemped down to 15-18 or so (K was at 15, T was at 16), and …
… lots of purple. A bit of red, but lots and lots and lots of purple. Masses of abominations, eidolons a-plenty. The dangers of 8-man teams.
Good teams, though. Cobalt, Healing Rayne, Granite Rock, the good Dr., a few others. In a battle like that, deaths were inevitable, but Torchielle managed to avoid it (Kazima did not). And there was lots, and lots, and lots of XP.
Kazima went from barely 15 to just into 16 for the evening. Torchy went from a half-a-bar-of-debt into 16 to a bubble short of 17.
Good fun, good play.
I’ve been noodling with ideas of how to do a decent rotation of characters, to make sure our “mains” get most of the exposure, but we get some time in with the others. Trouble is, we already had two pairs of mains. Now it looks like we might end up with three.
Regardless, I plan on keeping an eye out better on the chat lines for groups forming up. Duoing is fun, and our best pasttime, but the social aspect of larger groups and exemp/SK stuff is not to be dismissed.

After a long dry spell, we’ve finally gotten back into the swing of things with CoH — just in time to head off to California, alas.
Friday night was our Synapse TF for Psi-clone and Amorpha. Went pretty well — minimal character deaths (and most of those from not paying attention), Babbage went down pretty quickly, ditto CK. Ran about 4½ hours, and no real new lessons learned, except that a discussion of tactics beforehand is probably a good idea, and varying those tactics to keep interest up (esp. when each mish has the same foe and, often, the same map) is an even better one.
Saturday we (briefly) played with Amazonite and Truly Unstable. TU’s a hoot to do over the chat boards. And, in one of those “small world” bits, no sooner had I said, “I look forward to meeting you someday” to Liberty Bill, then he swooped past me as I was entering Perez and he was exiting.
(Blink.)
We chatted, then went on, but it was … odd.
Sunday night was for Velvet and P-siren. Did a Sky Raiders mish (Velvet’s), followed by our first Banished Pantheon mish (PS’s). An amusing contrast (and one of the plusses/minuses of running with a science/magic duo).
Margie’s been feeling less thrilled with PS of late, and so we decided to call in some help on a mission, just to give her additional bubbly goodness to try out.
Ended up running with Avocet (exemped down, until things got hot) and Enyxia (who was new to us, though we’d seen her in the coms for a bit). Timed Sky Raiders mish that turned out to be a bit hotter than expected, leading to at least one or two character deaths before we succeeded (Velvet couldn’t quite hold enough aggro, esp. with force fields up and Porters getting past me). Still, fun.

Margie enjoyed playing with another psychic.
Monday night was scheduled to be the Cavern of Transcendence trial — the last gasp attempt. Margie’s been feeling antsy about not running Kazima, and I have … ideas for Honeygun, so we were ready. Margie did all the planning and coordination of folks, we brought in a ringer to clear the troll caves, and …
Damn. One person we thought was 15 was actually 16, skewing the numbers on the TF so that we couldn’t actually run it. Since we started it late, to accomodate one player, it was even later by the time we determined that, and none of the higher-levels had sometihng in the 12-15 range.
So we had to call it a night. I’m seriously uncertain whether it’s going to actually happen; as much as the “Transcendent” badge would be perfect for Kazima, I think Margie wants to run her more. We’ll see.
We decided we needed some success for the evening, so Margie pulled out Amorpha, I Psi-clone, and we headed off to …
Oh. That annoying Skyway mish Amorpha had where the mission door was somewhere below the pavement, but we couldn’t find any sort of flood control tunnel or other method of getting down there. Margie’d done a bunch of searching in the sewers, and we’d even had Doyce/Hang Time come and help. Nada.
So Margie petitioned, and, within about 15 minutes, GM_RICHA appeared, a very polite Police Drone. He met us at the spot, and then he descended down through the pavement to the mission entrance. That made it very clear where the access point was — a drainage entrance multiple blocks away (which is kind of goofy).
The Drone was very nice, asked if we needed any other help, then left.
Old mish. Cleared it with no trouble (fortunately it was a Free Hostage, not Kill All).
Similarly old mish (we just did Synapse, so we’re higher than we were) against the Tsoo for me. Then we decided to do the “Board Train” mish that Amorpha had.
It’s the first of that type we’d done, and we were depositied in Omicron Park (hmmm — wonder where that is on the city map) to break up fights between Warriors and Tsoo. Which is fine, except that we got cocky against the whites/blues, and ran into trouble when we hit the worst group, which was large and had two yellow (and powered) leaders, leaving Amorpha dead.
Hrm.
I rezzed her, and we ended up clearing the rest of the park to get rid of the debt.

I love the occasional detail you can see in this game when you get Really Close Up. As in this shot, where Sister Chinook was up against a wall, and so I got close-in enough that, when I did my various icy goodness, I could see both snowflakes and ice crystals forming in the air around me.
Neat.
(That’s Toxic Sister in the background, btw. We call ourselves the Death by DoT Sisters.)

Carey, the Natural (?) Fire/Fire Tanker, as created and run by my Mom last weekend.
And, given the nature of Fire/Fire, a lot more visible in this picture than in any of the in-game action shots.
Mom opined that she thought that might not have been the best of powersets, given the difficulty in seeing what the heck was going on when all the flame armor was up.

Still need to do the Final, Last Gasp Attempt at the Caverns of Transcendence with Kazima and Honeygun.
And it would be nice to try Synapse TF with Amorpha and Psi-clone, too. Unless they’ve levelled past it.
Mood: Withdrawal Pains

Late when I got on last night, after Overly Large But Exceedingly Yummy Project Team Dinner. Margie was likely already in bed, or, failing that, being a polite host to my folks (who, ironically, are in Colorado while I’m in California).
So I figured I’d be soloing, and decided to bring in Velvet (after a disastrous late-night soloing with Torchielle the night before).
Ended up on a pick-up team for a good chunk of the time. Very undisciplined (nobody wanted to coordinate starting the attack, and we just continued rolling down the corridor once it started), but we did okay — and Velvet has the highest survivability for that sort of thing. Biggest problem was running out of endurance. Went up a couple of pips, had some fun, earned a tray-full of DOs, called it a night.

Always kind of interesting doing the CoH stuff while on the road — I can still play with Margie as though I were sitting at home. That’s worth the price of admission right there …
… though, of course, the “throughput” in our communication is ratcheted back to “tell” speed, rather than shouting comments back and forth.
Actually spent most of the Velvet/P-siren evening not teamed at all. Margie ran off to help another Alliance member who needed psychic-damage-dealers, so I ran a Family/Council mish with BD’s Mofo Firefly as my backup.
We actually did okay — the lack of bubbles made me realized how spoiled I was having them all the time (I had to run with more of my defenses toggled up, burning endurance like crazy — next level, Stamina!), but we developed some good tactics around “pull ’em back to the corner, bunch ’em up, ice patch ’em, and watch me whale the tar out of them.” Not always pretty, but it worked.
Also learned to appreciate PS’s psionic attack, which (a) has tremendous range, and (b) pulls very little area aggro. As opposed to Mofo’s lightning or my (heh) taunt.
When we exited the mish, I was only 300xp from level, so MoFo and I tackled the big band of Family and Warriors just outside. Ding! 23 for me.
Ran the second mish with P-siren, though she wasn’t there when we went in … and we quickly gained even more appreciation for bubbles. Once she joined us, we made steady (if sometimes chaotic) progress through the ship — noting that it was a “rescue” mish, not a “kill all,” so, when we could, we bypassed mobs.
After that, I went and trained up, and bought up DOs to 25, so I’m ready to kick some serious butt.
Originally I had planned to drop a slot in Dull Pain and another in Temp Invuln, but I’ve been finding Unyielding so valuable (covers all damage types and resists status effects), I dropped them both in there, making it six-slotted. As noted above, when I hit 24 I jump into the world of Stamina.
We had several instances of the “dead man standing” bug, as well as some odd cases where the other players did this “jog in place” animation, even though they said they weren’t. Weird. I also had some cases where I didn’t get a swing animation with a punch, even though I got the sound effects.
Also discovered that I really, truly, absolutely have to be sure to turn off Super Jump between missions. Yikes! Minus 50% TH is murder.
Picked up the Advisor badge for SKing people — which is cool, but so not Velvet. But I ran across the Vigorous badge while jumping between shops to sell DOs, and that’s pretty Velvet all right, so it replaces Pwnz as my handle.
And, cool beans, the shops in IP (the Science one, at least) sell SOs and sell the extended set of DOs, so I could pick up jump and taunt DOs. Nice.
A very successful evening. And it was nice to be able to do it (part of the time, at least!) with Margie.

A weekend of intense play, with long gaps in-between …
Friday night I crashed early.
Saturday night, I got back home at 8:40 or so, and immediately dove into the Consortium Meet-n-Greet. It was actually trememdous fun, even if it meant standing around and chatting, vs. going out and bopping bad guys. Maybe this RP stuff has something to it …

Since both Margie and I were there (as Psi-clone and Amorpha, of course), we were able to slip out a couple of times and bring in alts — Torchielle, in my case; Star Protector and Kazima in Margie’s.
I was actually kind of pleased to see so many folks come to the party, and to have it last so long. I figured it would go maybe an hour; instead, it was still going strong when I wandered upstairs at midnight.
Lots of RL stuff on Sunday, meaning I didn’t get on until just in time to join in the interview of some applicants to the Alliance (again as Psi-clone). It was interesting being on the “other” side of the interview, as we chitchatted on the Team channel (between the interviewers) all sorts of comments, not to mention how we’d deal if the event became a super-hero battle.
After that, Margie and I took Velvet and P-siren out for the first time in about a week, clearing out Family and Council and Sky Raiders in Port Noble. Fun, even if we did go too late …
Ran across some of the infamous I4 bugs, too, including invisible villains (which were present in I3) (“Sky Raiders? Sky Raiders? Where?! And why are you taking damage?”), and villains that wouldn’t lie down and die when dead (though, interestingly, that seems to be an individual thing; folks for whom Velvet saw it didn’t show that behavior to P-siren, and vice-versa).

Some folks seem to be having problems with the new costume sliders, incurring costs they didn’t expect (immediately upon going into the costuming).
It doesn’t sound consistent, and there are conflicting reports of whether it happened on Test or not, but CuppaJo suggests:

After you make changes to the body sliders (Even if this is a NEW character and you are still in the character creation area) close the physique window before moving on to something else or leaving Icon.

If you go back to Icon do NOT open this window.

Repeat – After making body changes, close the body window, and do not re-open it.

I know this isn

I am amused by the number of people posting who are discovering that they really aren’t having any fun in the Arena or with PvP. Which, I suppose, makes some sense, since the folks who were really burning for that feature probably went onto Test and don’t have anything new to say.
That said, I’m equally amused that I’ve seen several folks complaining about hovering blasters sniping down at them, that somehow this isn’t terribly sporting and they should come down and “face me like a man.”
Heh. Isn’t that the point of having Hover as a blaster? Or of being a blaster in the first place?
Sounds like there’s a fair amount of auto-Taunt that comes with that Hover power …