{"id":371,"date":"2005-12-03T20:29:58","date_gmt":"2005-12-04T02:29:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp\/2005\/12\/sublime-and-ridiculous\/"},"modified":"2005-12-03T20:29:58","modified_gmt":"2005-12-04T02:29:58","slug":"sublime-and-ridiculous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/2005\/12\/sublime-and-ridiculous.html","title":{"rendered":"Sublime and ridiculous"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hard to beat the study in contrasts of Friday night vs Saturday afternoon\/evening.
\n\"2005-12-02_koago.jpg\"Friday we were running the Transcendence Trial with the Storm Knights, bringing in Araware <\/strong>and Fazenda<\/strong>. Doyce (Pummelcite) was organizing it all, and it went off like clockwork.
\nAnd just about as interestingly.
\nJackie 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.
\nI 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.<\/strong>
\nThe 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.
\nIt’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 —
\n— which brings us to Saturday. The Virgil Tarikoss Strike Force, the first (15-20) SF in CoV, as hosted by the Consortium of Injustice.
\n(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.)
\n\"2005-12-03_demon.jpg\"The roster for the SF was Mister Thorne<\/strong>, Undone<\/strong>, 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.
\nStrike 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.
\nWe 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.
\nThings 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.
\nWorse, 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).
\nThe 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.
\nInfernal was actually a lot worse than the final opponent, who was powerful, but who went down far more easily.
\nHell 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.
\nAnd we made it.
\nBravo.
\nNow, let’s never do that <\/em>again, either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hard to beat the study in contrasts of Friday night vs Saturday afternoon\/evening. Friday 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 … Continue reading “Sublime and ridiculous”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":352,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gameplay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/352"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}