Let's see, where to begin first:
Armoured Frosty was taken up to level 9 in preparation for the Ass Clown get together. Showed up, got the SG invite, and we mission'ed and street hunted till I gained two levels.
I must say the guys who showed up turned out strikingly effective. Maybe it's because we actually had to get a couple damage powers and worthwhile stuff to level productively up to 9, and/or had more powers at this stage. And we were all getting very good at handling aggro and controlled chaos, imo. There was only one team wipe in our clockwork mission at the start, and then we were churning through three Clockwork Princes at a time. Especially with a judicious use of detention field on one boss, and two pretending-not-to-be-really tanks who still split up on each boss and punchvoked or 'controlled' stuff. :P
And frankly by the end of it, I was enjoying myself so much, and when our team numbers dropped to the extent it was 3-4 of us street-hunting skulls...two tanks (ok, scranker and wannabe tanktroller) and a fake def? or a blaster, I forget. The non-real tank remarked that punchvoke was actually pretty good. And I replied, yea, if the tank is willing to use it. And then I actually turned a blind eye to my bio and purposefully punched multiple skulls to get them on my rock armored self so I could scrank away happily.
Darn, I can't be as selfish as I pretend. Especially not when my ego is stroked at being a good tank. :P
Oh, may I also add that our SG colors are freaking hilarious.
Here we are, in our eye-sore glory. :)
Quick snapshot, here's the Clockwork Paladin construction I stopped as Bad Punctuation, mentioned a while earlier.
I decided to play Raggy and see what I could do about getting a team going. Took a while, but after I got a few members into the mission and they realized that they weren't getting hurt, suddenly all their friends were asking to join also. :/ It's getting to be weirdly common for some reason.
It makes me a little...I dunno, pissed off isn't the word, but more like a mix of sadly resigned, frustrated and disappointed. We all seem so lazy to form good teams. When I get off my butt to put one together, I yank people off the LFG list and more often than not, stuff meshes quite well as long as I follow three simple rules:
1) As close levels as possible. No more than a 3 level difference without sk'ing. Preferably not.
2) One from each AT if possible. Failing which, crowd control and damage dealer.
3) And the more controllers and defenders you get, the more fun and groovy everything becomes.
Why don't more people do this so that I don't have to? :/ Why is it I can sit forever on the controller unwanted, but I personally snatch them up as soon as they show up on LFG? :P
And I'm still scared of sending tanks invites because I'm in terror that they are a scranker.
Here's a bunch of screenies from I don't even remember what random PuG:
Oh and after that fiasco (no, ok, PuG -challenge-) in spectral terror cave, we just wanted to turn brain off, so I logged Raggy again and we had some good fun with Scout Sniper, the only guy with a pretty good brain on his shoulders in that team. Let it not be said that we weren't spreading goodwill and good vibes from PuG experiences. 2000+ debt, and we wiped it out halfway through a single Tsoo mission. Granted, Raggy was 23 on Tenacious, and you two were like level 20. So I was a semi-pleveller! *cackles* Except I had to rely on someone else to do the damage, hem. So not really pleveling.
And there was teaming on Ochre. Much pain. Quite a lot of trouble to get a team going, a controller doesn't quite inspire the same confidence as a tank, does it? I find that dual controllers are really the best way to work, usually. As long as both can hit the mobs with holds reliably.
But once we got started, things got chugging. There were two tanks who were pretty much like scraptanks who invited me first. One invul, one fire. Then they said they needed more, so I suggested the other controller LFG. Turned out to be earth. Very good combination since the tanks were doing all the damage and we were just holding stuff in place and doing the buff/debuff thing like a def.
In between missions, we lost the earth controller, and so I looked at LFG and sent a tell to a same level grav-like name controller. He was game, so I bugged the tank to invite him. Tank did. Then it so happened that I saw a def pop up, so I sent the tell while I was at it. Bugged again to invite. Tank did, and I think he got lazy and just made me leader. Sent a tell to me to go invite more if possible. Picked up one more scrapper for that all-star AT team.
Unfortunately, we were so damn leet we charged into the Boomtown mission and destroyed the box of parts before the scrapper made it there from the Hollows. I think he was also from Japan and a worse zoner than Contrition. Then with "Mission Complete" we started clearing the rest of the enormous floor of Clockwork. (That is such a weird mission, that box of parts one. Shows up on the second floor, and there's like four floors of Clocks. And you have to destroy it asap if you don't want 500 gears after your ass once you see it and it triggers.)
I felt bad about it, and he was kinda clueless about the whole thing, didn't know where the door went and so on, and he didn't react the way I would expect most people would. (Like blow up in a hissy fit, cuss up a blue storm, insult my parentage and quit in a huff.) And continued feeling worse and worse while wondering what to do. And he just hung there in team.
So I finally sent him a tell to apologize and say that I was sorry, and that I'd do a mish or two with him later. The tanks wanted to leave for the night, so they were moving fast and bloodthirsty and what not. And he seemed pretty ok with the whole thing. Musta been a Jap, eh? An American faced with that kind of behavior, inadverdent or not, would have put me on a hit list by now, I suppose.
So ended up with taking him along on a bunch more missions, which Hail also showed up for, with the grav controller who stayed around.
Screenies!
Earth controller on my right, the invul/fire tank in there, the fire tank was also there, but he's short and lost somewhere in the mess of clowns, and I can't figure out who the shorter gal in front of me was. I think an emp/dark with more dark blasts than emp powers. But she was pretty handy with heal other.
I only feel sad about this pic for two reasons. One was the poor locked out slow zoning scrapper. The other was that I didn't get this about 2-3 minutes earlier and only remember to take it after the action.
This was all-star goodness. The grav 'troller and me and the two tanks had learned to mesh pretty well by now through the missions, and an extra rad/rad def was gravy on top. And then we got to that big room. In the screenie we were clearing up after something I almost thought would lead to teamwipe. Everything attacked. They jumped from the railing on top, there was a bunch on the same floor as us, a bunch by those staircases, a bunch from the floor below and so on. The tanks were losing hp like mad even through the bubbles (ok, none of them really protect against energy) and the grav and me were sucking fumes on end trying to alternate holds. I was dancing around trying to save end to rebubble. Holds wore off, clocks aggroed on me, (the only flaw these tanks had was that they had taunt yet never used it. Funky, huh? But they were scraptanks and doing main damage after all. Otherwise they wouldn't have needed controllers.) and not even the grav's well slotted O2 and the rad's healing aura was keeping me going, and so I decided to take off to the stairs near the lifts like a good squishy. The others turned to keeping the tanks alive, and I decided I'd risk it and rested on the stairs. Got back end, ran back, flashfired and caged everything long enough for the tanks to recover, and then momentum shifted and we cleaned up. Good stuff. Edge of the seat stuff.
Finally got to level 20 on Ochre too and celebrated the big obnoxious Dispersion Bubble with many screenies and to Kelizendis' resigned amusement...
Also conveniently and craftily tempted a bored yet lazy Contrition from Talos Island into the Hollows...where we hunted Igneous Bosses for the Volcanic badge. Heh heh, and I got pretty good at cinders lottery and herding iggys after a while, and got to see the pet Fluffy, while Contrition sniper elec blasted them all into 700hp+ oblivion. No screenies alas. But I could do it again some time. T'was hilarious after I got the hang of how to wake them, then lure 'em over to piss more off with fire cages (the only one good effect of them being immune to immob). Think I had about 7-8 Magma Lords going after me, with like 40-50 Pumicites (some awakened by teh fluffy) richocheting like insane white marbles around the Gulch. Not being hurt by them was also extremely good.
Oh and I played a bit more of Particle Fusion. The Buffer Overrun SG was starting to heat up again with lowbies, but I think they're getting less friendly. Too many members and too many inactives (of which I am guiltily one of them, I suppose) so they can't be bothered to cater to some random toon who shows up after 20 or more days and says hi, there a team going?
Interestingly enough, I get a bunch of invites there by turning seek team on. I got into a team faster over LFG than asking over SG. If that isn't warped I dunno what is. Frostfire mission, and the guy actually sent a tell to ask if I was interested. Good stuff, another wild 6 man team where everyone was all there and all star except for the insanely suicidal warshade named Minimee, but that's a story for some other time.
No screenies, oh well.
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