Blog of Heroes

Last night was All Cape Mish, All the Time!
Well, twice — once for Psi-clone, once for Amoprha. Puck Bunny accompanied us on both versions, one of which was in the northern islands of Talos, the other of which was in Perez.
The odd thing is, the first version of the mish was the hardest we’ve done — much more powerful Aberrants, more bosses, etc. Well, it was harder from that aspect — it was actually easier doing it with Psi-clone than with Velvet, since I just Deceived the key baddies, and Invised the group, and all went relatively smoothly. When things got hairy, my Phantom Army helped, too. Even the final battle never got desperate.
But, still, the difference in level between the two missions — with no difference in personnel — was odd. Welcome, but odd. (Same mission XP for each — 1000 — though.)
Mission leader? I think PB (at 19) led the first (harder) one, and I (at 20) led the second. And I can’t imagine the site zone in question made any difference.
A puzzlement.

Okay, so this will be old hat to the CoH veterans, but …
I love how , over the course of the game, you have breakthrough moments, tied to real estate (and to missions you are sent on).
You start out as a noobie, wandering around Galaxy and Atlas, with occasional harrying forays into Kings Row and the Hollows.
Then you start finding yourself in Steel Canyon — bustling with activities, stores, and a wide array of foes — and Skyway — drear and difficult to navigate but not to find trolls and clockwork in. Perez Park and Boomtown and Faultline become the hazard zones.
And, as that begins to pale (or grey out), abruptly — and this is where our higher characters are now just getting in — Independence Port and Talos Island and Striga start being the focus. New foes, new geography.
At each stage you start off by running down the middle of the street, then hopping into back yards, then hunting down the red zones and street sweeping. And by that time, you’re ready for the next set of zones.
Fun stuff. Nicely done. Can’t wait to see what’s next.

Got a fair amount of time in yesterday with our top-level alts. Velvet assisted P-Siren on her cape mission, along with Puck Bunny. Interestingly, the final battle in that door mish seems to be at a variable location (rather than in the far south of Talos Island, like it was for Velvet, this one was by the Green Line station in Steel, which was a lot more convenient).
Velvet managed to ding 22 on that outing.
After, we brought in (again to run with Puck Bunny) Psi-clone and Amorpha. Jackie’s Shock.Therapy ran with us for most of the time, though it was all taking place right about when we had to deal with various Kitten meal and bed time issues. Eventually Agent Seven showed up, which made for some nice RP fodder.
Ended up doing two duplicate Tsoo missions (and PC ended up pulling it again for himself as he checked in with contacts after it was all over). The building missions went fairly well, despite a couple of rushing-in-oops-there-goes-the-invis face plants. (Well, the Tsoo in the Cave mish was pretty nasty, but that was largely because we didn’t play it well, and it’s a nasty map, and there were some system problems in the middle that broke up the team, but not completely). PC dinged during the evening as well, but he (like Velvet) is in the late teens/early twenties doldrums, where the Stamina and Haste tracks are chewing up slots from more interesting powers.
Actually, by hitting 20, Psi-clone now qualifies for a new outfit. Should he go for a more formal black business suit to replace his sports coat? Or will the PR department decides that he needs a more “heroic” (Spandex) image? Time will tell.
One interesting development was Margie beginning to consider some new alts to play, and prepping to drop a couple of her old ones to free up slots. As I have business travel coming up next week, I think she’s targeting that period for some quick levelling to come up with new partners for OFFICER and Truly Unstable. I have some thoughts in that direction as well (including dropping one character who’s seen some heavy rotation of late, and possibly rehabilitating another one who’s stagnated). Again, we’ll see …

We had a good gameplay evening last night, running Psi-clone and Amorpha. Got started pretty early, and, around 10:30 or so, finished our last door mission, both of us dinged to 19, both of us ready for bed.
“Wait,” Margie says, as Amorpha phones in to her contact. “Get 15 Outcasts. We can do that right now.”
Well, yeah, it’s only a few minutes, and we’re in the NE corner of Steel Canyon, so there are some nice good-eating Outcasts around us.
About five minutes or so later, we have it all done, and I’m ready to head off to Blyde Square, level up (prolly two slots of recharge into Grant Invis., though, damn, Phantom Armies is fun), when I notice …
“… Hey, what the — timed mission!”
That’s right, finishing a hunt had triggered a timed mish.
Now, we could have just said screw it and gone to bed. But timed missions are usually good eats. Sooooo …
… around 12:30a or so (the frickin’ place was crawling with yellow Outcasts, not to mention a variety of Tsoo and CoT, so even though we passed up a lot of tasty XP, it still took us a while, especially since the “Auctioneer” was kind of well hidden), we wrapped up (and I decided to save the levelling for next outing).
The annoying thing is, for some reason, Amorpha didn’t get the mission complete XP — and it was her mish.
On the other hand, she’d gotten out of debt (after two deaths that evening), and I’d gone up net 6 pips, so …
So …
Soooo … tired …
Glad it’s Friday. Even more glad that Margie has Kitten duty tomorrow morning, and I can sleep in …

Margie and I tend to duo a lot, which is tremendous fun (indeed, it’s a great thing we do together, as opposed to a lot of other hobbies we do in parallel). Here are the combos:

1. Velvet (21) and P-Siren (21) – Tank and Defender. Our “elder statesmen” and Freedom Phalanx toons. Beginning to break into the IP/Talos area.
2. Psi-clone (18) and Amorpha (18) – Controller and Scrapper. Current faves to run together. Co-leaders (as Peppermint Patty and Marcy) of the Consortium.
3. Honeygun (15) and Kazima (15) – Blaster and Scrapper. Perennial favorites at the Cavern of Transcendence. Also fun, though we run into aggro problems (of both our making).
4. Torchielle (15) and TT (13) – Blaster and Tank. This is one where Margie should be doing soloing to get TT up to level (Torchy got a bonus running through the one successful Transcendence trial.)
5. Truly Unstable (9) and Carilian (9) – Defender and Controller. Our slowest group, but still fun to play (and hard to stop).
6. OFFICER (8) and Deep Dark Earth (8) – Scrapper and Controller. A strong pair as well. I enjoyed running them last night.

That leaves Selene (Scrapper 9) and Sister Chinook (Controller 8) as currently “unattached” from my stable, and Hot Shotz (Blaster 10) and K-Two (Scrapper 6) in Margie’s. Which means those are the folks who, when we have a chance, we should be soloing with — or else the slots that, come Issue 4, we’ll be filling with new people.
UPDATE: It’s worth noting that we often add some excitement to our duos by inviting in one of BD’s characters to make it a threesome. Variety is, after all, the spice of life …

After the trial, Margie and I did some “palate-cleansing” by running our lowbies, OFFICER and Deep Dark Earth.
While running about Kings Row (and being discoed every few minutes, dagnabbit), we ran into one of of the “Police Drone” SG. He ran over, greeted us, then gave me 90K influence. Which, for a 7th level toon, is no small sum. (He gave DDE the same, too, which was gracious.)
Ran into another one of them a while later at Atlas Park, but he only said hi.
Dinged up with OFFICER (DDE did, too) to 8, which led me to discover I’d not done a Hero Planner setup for him yet. Pulled out the guide I’ve been using as an inspiration (which feels a bit offense-heavy, but, heck, he is a scrapper), got that set up, and took on another attack. Might do some more with him over this week, though it’s not like I don’t have other active alts that need game time.

Once more into the Caverns, dear friend …
Solid team, this time, on the Cavern of Transcendence trial, and, though we didn’t make it, I felt more irked than crushed about it.

• Liberty Bill and Tanker-belle as the tanks, Kazima as the scrapper. Brave, well-focused, solid aggro-pullers.
• Dubh Bas and Darkness Heals and Darkthorne as the controllers and defenders. Solid support. Excellent heals. Good TP/recall tactics.
• Honeygun and Avocet as blasters. Good pulls and well-targeted blasts.

In point of fact, we did everything pretty well. We had a friend (Hang Time) clear the troll tunnels on the way in. We pulled small groups. We never let the melee spill over into an adjoining mob. We stayed healed up, the mobs were controlled, nearly everything was perfect. And the proof of that was a minimum (two) of deaths, even with the ultimate failure.
(As a point of info, when the time runs out, you get booted back out into the Troll Tunnels, and a nasty read “Mission Failed” sign comes up.)
So, why did we fail? We ran out of time. We had seven obelisks covered, and Dubh was trying to get to the last when the last seconds ticked off.
Why did we take too long?

1. Too many mobs. All but one of the tunnels was occupied, which is something of a crap shoot. But that dragged the whole mission out way too long, especially given the next point.
2. We were — well, not dawdling, but also not snappy in moving from mob to mob in the main cavern. That meant our Endurance was all back up, but it also burned valuable time, especially given the previous point. This wasn’t helped by some excellent single-mob pulls by DH, which was a lot safer but, as it turned out, a lot slower. (The irony was that both LB and HG advised caution and slow-steadiness as we entered the Cavern, given that previous problems have come from going too fast and too rashly.)
3. We were not sufficiently methodical in clearing the caverns — we started with L2, then L1, then R1 — which is where I stayed, so I didn’t get a good sense of where the group went from there. But by the time the last person — Dubh — was trying to get into a tunnel, there was confusion over which tunnel to go into.

So, since there will be a next time — everyone was unanimous on that, though grimly exultant that our failure had not been disastrous (as the last one was), what were the lessons learned?

1. Pick up the pace a little in the main cavern. Once a mob is cleared, make sure of heals and then move right on to the next. We had sufficient strength that, even if some folks had been forced to drop mid-battle from endurance, it wouldn’t have been critical.
2. Strength in numbers. The side tunnels will, over time, repop. To avoid that, we left folks in tunnels as we went along, which weakened the group each time. In the one success we had, that was okay, because we had only half the tunnels occupied. This time it was a disaster. So, next time, quickly move en masse to clear the tunnels, then move to occupy them; the TPers and Tanks rove to help anyone whose tunnels have repopped.
3. Orderliness. We did well sweeping up one side and back to clear the main cavern, but we were less organized in clearing the tunnels. So, decided on a direction (L4-L1, R1-R4) to sweep the caverns, assign someone to each, and then move in.

I’m not sure any of this is fool-proof, especially if we have that many occupied tunnels and they repop quickly. But it’s the best I can think of to avoid what hung us up last time.
Again, it’s interesting. After the previous failure, HG (and I) had a sense of just being crushed, that we’d blown it, that we never wanted to see the Caverns again unless we really had to. It was more stubbornness that dragged us back for one last (and it was to be the last) try.
This time — between working on a good team, and withdrawing in good order, it felt more like a setback than a retreat. “Better beaten than bitter,” as Avo put it, and “Live and learn, and we did both,” as HG said. So we’ll be going back.
And this time, we’ll win.

UPDATE: Inserted thumbnail pics. Click to see full-size.
Ran the Task Force last night — starting at 7:30p and running muuuuuuch later. Various notes follow:

1. We had a tight, fit team. One crunchy — a tank — plus two blasters, a controller, and a defender. Both the good blend of ATs and the good people behind them made it a successful outing.
2. The plot line focuses on the machinations (so to speak) of the Clockwork King, and many, many, many missions against clockworks. I am officially sick fo the critters, though the payoff set piece of the CK’s lair was excellently creepy.
3. Velvet Jones, the tank, was in her glory most of the time — untouchable, taunting, keeping the mobs under control and pounding away at them. Most fun was, as the balloon went up in each encounter, unleashing a taunt and drawing everyone’s aggro — and lightning bolts. “It tickles.”
   And, in fact, it did. Between Invulnerability powers and Bubbles, not to mention support of the others, Velvet took very little damage, almost never going below 75% HP.
   Much fun. She even got to wear her cape for part of the evening, before various jealous comments prompted her to put it away for a while.

4. The blaster contingent was made up of Avocet and Boulder Dude’s MoFo Firefly. Good blasting was had thereby. Avocet’s Energy knockback was minimal, and his AoE attacks were perfect for wiping out Gears from fallen big clanks. MoFo did well, too, though his Electricity blasts occasionally confused me (OMG, there are clockworks behind me!).
   Both are Ice secondaries, which made for additional Controlling of the mobs.

5. Margie’s P-Siren was one of the unsung stars. While her psionic blasts were effective, but slow, her Bubbles were one of our lynchpin powers. While they were up, Velvet, at least, was in hog heaven. When they were down, it was more problematic. Indeed, the one time Velvet got in real trouble was when we were independently hunting clockworks, and an ambush found her. Had to SJ away at the last second, which, alas, left MoFo, who was coming to the rescue, to bear the brunt of their fury.
   As it was most of the time, though, I was able to leave down almost all my toggles but Unyielding. As long as the bubbles were up, all was cool.
   (And as long as I was running HeroStats, I could see exactly when the bubbles were going down …)
   It’s worth noting that Margie’s organizing the TF was pretty spiffy as well.

6. Doyce’s Rose.Red was the utility player as Controller. His Group Invis was up most of the time, and really helped our defense and attack planning. It also let him scout ahead on mishes that only required limited accomplishments; coupled with Recall Friend, he could sneak up to where hostages or the final bosses were, teleport us in, and we could finish the mish in a quarter of the time of slogging through the whole thing.
   As an Illusion Controller, though, he did an even more useful job in using Deceive to cut down on the enemy numbers, and Phantom Army to add to our strength.
   And his tactical abilities and previous experience on the TF were pretty handy, too.

7. I have no idea how folks do the mission in 6 hours, as some report, let alone the 2½ that others claim. We didn’t race madcap from spot to spot, but neither did we dawdle. We took a couple of levelling and selling breaks, and Margie had one in-mish 15 minute Symantec-induced problem, but generally speaking we moved swiftly and skipped killing all mobs unless the mission demanded it.
   We met at 7:30p, we started at about 8p, and finished a bit after 3a. That makes for 7 hours.
   I refuse to believe anything under 5.

8. TFs are XP-heavy, and this was no exception. Velvet went up 17-odd pips; since she was just barely at 20, that raised her to 21 and most of the way to 22. W00t.
   That came in handy against the baddies; the initial mobs looked an even mix of yellow and white, with orange bosses; changing that down to white-blue with yellow bosses (with the exception of Babbage and the Clockwork King) made the missions a lot easier. And still good eats.

9. Ah, Babbage. Hovering outside one mission, we tackled him head-on. Problem is, even though we managed to knock him down to between 1/3 and 1/2 XP, that took pretty much all the Endurance in the group. Velvet was basically the aggro magnet for him, but eventually she was reduced to watching her End and hitting only when it wouldn’t knock down all her toggles. Eep!
   The battle was also complicated by his running around periodically and so dragging us through mobs of Lost and Trolls, both of which pursued.
   We would probably have ground him down, eventually, but we got kind of tired after a while. A couple of other heroes had spotted us, and, with our permission, launched into the fray, sealing Babbage’s fate. Still great XP, all told.

10. The only deaths that occured were both MoFo’s. The first came when he came racing to Velvet’s “rescue” when she’d been ambushed by clockwork and had dropped down to orange. I was bugging out, but MoFo arrived just in time to get them all on him. By the time Velvet got there, he was toast.
    And, during the Babbage battle, he drew a bunch of fire from trolls. Damn.
    Aside from that, no deaths in-mish, which is pretty impressive.

11. Especially because we couldn’t see. Between shady warehouses, group invis, various auras and bonus effects, and bubbles (double-bubbles plus the big bubble), it was like trying to run around in a pea soup fog.
    Not that I should complain, because all of those effects were affecting the baddies more than me. But sometimes it was sure confusing …

12. The last battle with the CK was almost anticlimactic. He’s tough, but not on a par with Babbage. He just has a lot more friends (which we had to both carefully clear out first and use a gadget we’d received to help keep him from summoning more).
    The initial plan was to super-buff Velvet and let her do a tank pull back to where the rest were all standing (the idea being that she could take a licking and keep running for her life, so to speak). After all that prep just outside of the CK’s lair (“See that? That’s his arm there.”) it turned out that it wasn’t the CK’s lair yet.
    The actual battle with the CK was a lot less, ah, planned — we had the ground selected, but the actual pull back to it was, um, less organized (involving a couple of characters, not the tank, and mad-oh-crap-I’m-orange dashes back to the others).
    Wham, bam, thank you for helping us rid the city of the Clockwork King, ma’am.

Great fun. Went longer than I’d expected (Doyce pointed out that, had we started at 5, we could have wrapped by Midnight. Of course, we’d have had to take 45 minutes or so in the middle to put down Kitten, so …), but I still felt excited and eager by the time it was all over.
Good team. Good experience. Makes me want to do it over again with the next tier of alts in my stable …

Pulled out Psi-clone to play with last night, after I’d gotten as far as I could on taxes — first time in a while that he and Amorpha had been out on patrol.
Rrg. PC takes a very careful hand — much different from Velvet (a tank) or even Torchielle and Honeygun (blasters). As an illusion controller, his touch is more subtle — the strategic selection of Deceive, the big gun of Blind, the polish-off of Spectral Wounds. And, oh, yeah, forgot I had Group Invis. Little thing, that.
And, oh, yeah, forgot I was a freakin’ empath, so I had heal abilities. Which came in really handy when I finally did remember.
Yeesh.
Our duo ran around a bit, then BD’s MoFo Firefly invited us in on a fun Tsoo door mish (Sorcerers are fun to Deceive, since they put all their healing and buffs into our side of the combat). I bailed out of the team after the mish was over to go to bed — and instead worked on implementing the Fly/Hover keybind set for PC. I’ll see how it goes; I’ve had a distrust and inherent dislike of multi-file keybinds, but this one looks like it should work pretty well.