More Equal Than Others

Y'know, if y'think non-emp defenders have it hard... I think emp defs have it even worse.

They're empaths. The favored targets of everybody. Some dislike 'em because they promote the idea there's nothing but big green numbers to defender blue shields. Some who are just plain idiots and can't be saved by anyone will still pursue them like rabid dogs for teh healz0r. Even teams who take 'em along pretty much expect and understand only the green number powers and tend to forget about the other buffs. And worse, probably 85% of the empaths themselves forget or never figured out about their other buffs.

Freedom server being what it is, I am quite sad to say that the only defender set that seems to have survived at high levels is the empath set. I seriously haven't met a high level def that was anything else (except one stray bubbler who I never saw again.) Even controller secondaries are emp, except for an odd bubbler or stormie. *boggles*

And boy, are some empaths more equal than others.

This morning, I logged on with the express intention of trying to make 2.5 bars and get to level 47. As it so happens, I got invited to a team with two empaths and a blaster. (Previously, we had a controller /ff for a while, and a scrapper, but they had to leave. Damn but I was god again with Bubbles and the two emp buffs.)

These empaths were pros. Pros, I tell you. The empath leader was 49, I started at 46, and she offered a sk to me which I took, so effectively 48. Our first mission was against 50s and 51s.

Then the next mission I leveled, so I was now 47, my sk fell off, and we were fighting level 52s - what? Carnies and Malta. OMGWTFBBQ. *whimper*

To my amazement, not only was I kept standing on my feet facing +5 mobs, but I could actually hit 'em (for low damage) and still capture aggro (madly taunting, of course, auto-hits are good here).

Why? Fortitude. I think I got double fort'ed all the time. Blaster too, prolly. And we had clear mind running on us too, just in case. Cos of the silly Malta. Luckily I had a hold so I would do the hold sapper thing. But at such a level disparity, my hold evaporated fast, or I would miss - and then my toggles would fall, my end sucked dry and we had a few close encounters...and some squishies died alas.

(Though I have no idea why the defenders insisted on standing so close to us, one def was practically breathing under my armpit and kept eating all the stuns from AoE grenades and rockets. I had to keep running around and turning big Zeus Titans away from them.)

But they sure got me back running real fast. Adrenaline boost to replace end and so on.

Of course I helped out by hitting unstopp when necessary to regain aggro and all. But it was certainly very interesting. I think this was one of the rare times I got serious empath buffage - too often Mr. Healz0rman neglects to buff or tosses a desultory one on a blaster or something. Tanks never seemed to be high on a poor empath's priority list.

Well, these guys knew differently. And there was serious ass-kicking of insanely high Malta and Carnies as a result. Go (real) empaths!

Some day I must give MedicBot more play time. Getting closer now to goal. Level 47 and counting. Oh, I got myself ice blast. I kept staring at RPD, REl and Tough Hide, and just couldn't bring myself to do it. Perhaps another invul tanker for another time.

It makes me giggle to have a ranged weapon on a tank. Of course, not slotted, it doesn't hit for anything significant. My slotted scorch hits for better damage. But as I was busy tormenting level 30 greys in Brickstown with it, I noticed something smart about choosing ice. Ice blast recharges quickly, and has -spd and -recharge on it. HAR. I can now be a Crey cryo tank with an ice pistol! I slowed this wildly running grey to a near standstill, giggling like an idiot with a new toy.

If anything, I'm now going to have a serious problem deciding on my attack chain. Hold? AoE? Heavy single-target damage? Tickle and slow the heck out of something? Flip him over with air sup?

Ah well, it's a good kind of problem. I'm not one to really worry about maximum DPS on a tank, more options the better.

Dimensional Marathon

Whoop. I did it. Out of greed for AVs, I stayed up for about 3 hours longer than I should have. The only good thing I can say about it is that it’s not like EQ or other MMORPGs where such things like raids are habitual. Hee hee. You see, it was all Haard Boyle’s fault. We started at like 7.30pm my time, and went on an AV hunt, through his Praetorian AV missions. I figured this would be the best way to finish up the AVs I needed for Dimensional Warder, for Portal Jockey accolade. Break at 9.00pm, thanks to scheduled maintenance, and that gave me time to eat dinner. (*guilty look*) Then we continued on again until like 3 am.

See, I figured, good teams at level 40+ only come around so often. And when you have a leader who isn’t abusive, yet can make firm decisions, that’s even rarer. And when the leader has a Praetorian AV series of missions AND wants to kill the AVs, rather than farm – that’s even rarer still? And all this in my time zone, no less.

Of course, the actual killing of the AVs was actually quite fast when we got down to it. What caused the massive slowdown was the inclusion of the second tank, Evenflow (one of the ego-filled culprits of Multiple Tanker: Nightmare version) who was at level 49, and out to herd and get to level 50.

Remember way back then, in the scenario I was describing, old Even was one level lower than me? And he still wanted ME to herd? +2/+3 wolves at that? Well, I took a closer look at our builds.

Me, I took the bare minimum of the invul primary, I’m scorning the passives as things I can’t be bothered with after the nerf, and am choosing to live with about 75% resistance to smash/lethal rather than hit the cap. To compensate, I’m becoming a gimpy regen scranker with dull pain and health. If I desperately need to tank, I want to go unstoppable, so as I get slots available, I’m going to put in some more recharges into that so it cycles faster. I’m near-perma-hasten at 5 slots, and might do 6 if slots are free. And I took every damn power in fire secondary for the heck of it, and am going Artic Mastery for hold, ranged power and a snow storm, ie, pretending to be a pseudo-controller too. My philosopy is more of, hit ‘em fast, hit ‘em hard, don’t leave ‘em standing long enough to hurt you. At 16 mobs a spawn, “just as States intends,” I tend to be okay with def/troller support, and playing the game HIS way should protect me from any more hard hitting nerfs.

Even is, of course, the typical herder. He took every power in his primary, moderate amount of secondary powers. Oddly enough, he has hasten, but I never noticed his icon turn on in the team window.

I spent the greater part of the evening fighting off, no, I won’t say jealousy, because it wasn’t that – I didn’t envy him his build, I wouldn’t have wanted it – but rather, the sense of inferiority. Of…my god, will people want to team with me if I can’t do miracles of herding like that tank over there?

I kept telling myself he was even-con. He was. At lvl 49, mobs would be white to him, and I’ve herded my share of whites without too much incident. Even then, sometimes his enormous herd would nickle and dime him to half health, and he would need to chew a respite or get a defender heal. At lvl 46, with mobs +3, stuff would be much harder to cope with for me.

As usual, he had an enormous ego, but this time, because there wasn’t anyone else trying to backseat drive (he was highest tank), we just played along with the bugger. He went herding spawn to spawn, and I mean herding, 5-6 spawns or more easily.

I got massively cheesed off by him because I asked him for a sk. Three times. Each time, he pretended not to hear. But he would respond to other things in teamchat. Tell me, why would you refuse someone a sk, if they ask for it? Is it because he was jealous of my /fire firepower, and didn’t want me to hit his herd like an exposive nova, and prefered that I miss? I dunno. After the third time, I gave up and just resigned myself to missing.

But little things in his behavior slowly opened my eyes.
Kicker number 1. He can herd. But he couldn’t hold aggro. He gathered like 200 mobs in one spot. Great. He whirling hands, and taunted, and then called people over. So far, so good. Then poor Haard Boyled comes over and does his AoE claws thing, and PHWOOMP PHWOOMP PHWOOMP his hp plunges so far down, he hits China as his face buries in the dust. Over and over, the scrapper bit it, our lvl 20 sk’ed up blaster bit it, and assorted squishies bit it.

As earlier on in a prior mission, once evenflow came along, Haard did tell me, “est, ok, now you can be an honorary scrapper,” which both made me raise my eyebrow slightly (is he being nice, or is he dissing me? I chose to pretend he was just being nice) as well as made me shrug (as I can and don’t mind scranking. Though I was perfectly ok and intending on being the domestic scrapper, ie. squishy bodyguard, secondary tank.)…

I didn’t bother taking aggro of assorted 100+ mobs that were +3 to me. I let the squishies bite it from the herd the other tank dragged. After all, if you want to be a cooperative two-man tank working team, you need to involve the other tank and make sure he’s close to the mobs in level so that he can be your secondary support.

Me, I herd what I can hold in terms of aggro. My spillover is a nuisance, but not fatal. That shows a non-tank mindset in evenflow already, rather, all he had is a herder’s mindset.

Eventually, Haard gave up, told evenflow very nicely that he needed to pull smaller spawns, and also told him to sk me up.

THEN I finally got a sk which allowed me to hit stuff and so get some aggro that way. Though I can tell you I kept a hawk eye on this bugger, as I wouldn’t put it past him to just run off and leave me stranded in a bunch of suddenly purple mobs. So I stuck to him like glue.

Even did group by group for a bit. He was probably sulking and wanting to “show” us, see, you want to do it this slowly? Me, I actually enjoyed it, and the groups went down faster than the herd and everyone got to do something without dying.

True enough, once we started fighting Diabolique, and Diabolique did her siphon speed and running around like a wacko thing, you know what Even did? He followed her. Through spawns. Without bothering to kill the spawns. So you can guess what happened, there was about 100 spectre/poltergeist things following us with a very tenuous aggro hold. Me, I was just keeping my hat on and following Even, since near him, I would have the same invinc bonus and be at –1 to the mobs. He pretty much got the whole team wiped. Deliberately? I don’t know, but I would wager so. Why? Because as they were dying, he said, “u glad I was herding now?”

Disgraceful. He’s not a tank. He’s a herder. I know of no other worse term to lump on him.

He eventually pulled so much that he slipped up and fell flat, because he had Diabolique on him too. So once he dropped, then I turned tank, and decided to hit unstopp (not going to tank whatever he pulled without max resists) and gave the others time to pick themselves up and regroup and rez. It was pretty much a wasted effort, I know, the rest were all too dead to bother, and I could have just ran off, no one the wiser. But it was just…a tank instinct. Even if no one is there, I want to hold the line because I am a tank, that’s what I do. I will sit there and tank it for the 3 minutes because that is the limit I5 has given me, but tanks will stand there and take the beating. And I guess I wanted to prove to myself that I was a tank in my own way, rather than a secondary scrapper.

But in the end, his true colors outed himself. The one crowning scenario that was worth staying EVERY minute of the overtime-playing for. The REAL difference between a tank and an xp herder.

Mission: Defeat all. Mother Mayhem outdoor city streets map. Mobs, child of anger, child of hate, the works.

As usual, evenflow dashed into the mission without saying a word or waiting for people, and started to do his herding thing.

(He did this every damn mission. He would just let whoever was faster come in, he would herd, and then he would let us kill the mob. And he never fought to punchvoke. He stood there and taunted. Obsolete bugger. :P Once the whole team except for poor Haard and his sk’ed blaster friend was killing through half of the mission before they finally came in. Don’t even know if they missed mission completion xp for that.)

Or at least, he tried. They were level 47s. That made me happy. You know, he actually took one look and just dropped my sk, like that. (What is his problem? If I’m happy with not getting much xp, why do you force the extra xp on me?)

Anyhow, back to my story, he ran into the first spawn, caught all the psi blasts in the face, SCREAMED like a little girl and RAN back to the four of us still waiting at the mission exit zone, with the psionic rings still buzzing around his head.

And then he went ballistic in team chat. R U nutz! theyre PSI i want to get 2 50 2day. im goin 2 die 5 timesor more in this mish. no @#)(&# way. And continued to rant in illegible speak.

Haard told him calmly, Come on, man, don’t worry, I’m also invul, I know, don’t worry, we’ll take it slow, do it group by group. We’re doing AVs for warder badge, ok?

He continued to freak out for about 5 more sentences, working himself into a frenzy. (My imagination was imaging him pissing his pants at seeing psionic enemies.)

Haard was trying to calm him. It’s cool, man, don’t freak. They’re only 47s. We can do it, we’ll take it slow. Ok, if you don’t want, we’ll call you back for the other avs, you can sit this one out, ok?

What did Mr Brave LEETz0r Herder “Tanker” do? Why, he never said anything more to Haard, he just freaked out some more, gave up, and quit the team.

HE QUIT. HE RAN AWAY.

I was seriously in hysterical laughter in my own seat, though I was polite enough to show none of this to the team. As I said, the crowning jewel. I no longer envied Mr Herder for surviving his 200+ herd that he couldn’t control. He was a one-trick pony. Enjoying his godliness under smash/lethal to the extent that he overdevelops his ego, but he wussed out the one moment he met his kryptonite.

So now, it was up to the level 46 tank to tank level 47 psi mobs meant for 8 people and show ‘em how it’s really supposed to be done.

So I did. Sure, I did my share of taunt around corners, hide behind trees (much to Haard’s amusement), not to mention my share of running into the spawn and getting pwn’ed flat by combined psi blasts. But did I die five times? No. I think I died twice at most.

After the second death, Haard said, hang on, let me get a healer. This is why I trust the boyyo as group leader. Granted his speech is as leetz0r as the rest and I’m getting sick and tired of ‘u’ and ‘r’, not to mention his tendency to call defs healers and look for only empaths… but for all those flaws, especially considering this is a Freedom (PLmeh!) server, Haard’s a good guy, doesn’t hold grudges and most importantly, has a phenomenal knack of feeling out his team and putting together a well-balanced group of members.

When evenflow was primary tank, Haard went buffing up the group with damage-dealers, blasters, scrappers, controllers cos instinctively, you know evenflow has nil on damage dealing ability. When I was primary tank, I had ample damage, so he picked up on tank support so I could do my stuff.

We lucked out on an ice/emp ‘troller who didn’t mind healing when necessary. So now I could run into the spawns and trust my support guys to keep me standing as they slicked up the place and pretty much laid waste to mobs that were –1 or –2 to them.

We cleaned up the place for the Defeat All, and went to Mother Mayhem. As usual I had been hoarding purples and oranges, so I ate two mediums of each and went to town on the spawn. After enduring the other spawns with negative defence even, the inspiration boost was really candy, and Mother Mayhem was cake. She died in under two minutes, imo.

And I redeemed myself in my own eyes. The others probably didn’t care, but it really wasn’t about them, was it? It was about me and my perception of me, and my perception of what others thought about me.

It taught me a valuable lesson, even if it was through sleep deprivation. Now, I can write a “What Tanking Means To Me” essay and mean every word. Offhand, it means I don’t run away when the odds are against me. It means I stand there, and I struggle through adversity, and I keep my teammates safe, trusting them to keep me safe also. I will use whatever means I have to hold aggro and separate spawns into the best groups that I feel my team can kill. This is what I do when I am primary tank.

Now when I’m not primary tank and am just a secondary sideliner and effectively granted ‘honourary scrapper’ status, then all bets are off and I will be a self-sufficient bastard worthy of being a blaster, but if you give me the tank’s responsibility, I will hold it with both hands, even if my face is rubbing the dirt at that time. :P

So after evenflow scattered off and we got the psi mission done, we set out to do the other avs in as short a time as possible. I was pushing 2 am, after all. We had an invis’er, our lvl 20 sk’ed blaster cum entertainment was a recall’er, so it was damn doable. Chimera, Siege, Shadowhunter are some I remember. Since we had so much damage, I just told them I’m going unstopp, we just need to kill av in under 3 minutes. And we did.

I got Dimensional Warder at Chimera, but because I am a loyal bugger, I stayed to kill the other two avs I promised I would kill before I finally begged out to go to sleep. I don’t know if they appreciated it, but in the end, it doesn’t matter, right? It’s my own conscience that matters. I did what I felt was right. It’s a good epitaph, for that matter. :)

The Old Wound

Ever notice sometimes how things keep cycling? Maybe there's some amount of truth in what they say: Lessons repeat until they are learned. Or maybe you just recognize or make up patterns in life because that's how our minds work - we're pattern-makers, dreamers, shapers, the works.

This little chatauqua is about small lessons from recent incidents in me life.

I got home late last night. Had to stay back late to finish up work. Stumbled back home after a tiring commute, took a bath, and then plopped myself in front of the computer to play CoH. Yes, we’re talking the cycle of obsession here. I needed to get to level 46. Worked really hard through various missions, and fell short of it by midnight. I stayed up until 1am, telling myself just a lil bit more. Still short, only half a bar left. So finally, I had to go sleep. I jump up at 7am and start playing again to finally hit my dream of level 46 before I dash off to work.

*sigh* I'm torn both ways. In a way, I kind of like the obsession. It's proof that I'm really serious this time about getting to level 50. That I will do what I set out to do, that I'm no quitter. And I tell myself that's it, once I hit 50, that's it, I'll crank down the pace again. I'll putz with a kheldian or two, and then just cool it, go do my other hobbies, take a massive break and play a month or two of serious alt-age before doing another character, or by that time, enjoying CoV. I know this will happen because I have played this game long enough to recognize how I usually play, and I don't have a serious need/urge to get multiple level 50s - been there, done that. (Thank you, RoD.)

At the same point, I have this sinking feeling that my body is not going to be able to take the strain of the mind pushing it. :P

My shiny object syndrome is also showing up and saying that there's lots of other things that you could be doing too. Thing is, is it right because 'variety is the spice of life', or is it wrong because 'you can only achieve what you strive to do'?

If I cool it a few days, I know the current group of level 45-46s will have sped up to level 48-49, out of my level range and have no desire to group with me - which will lead me to having to wait for the next damn group of 30s to get up to 40s and re-establish a new group. (This current group isn't exactly very nice on the coherent talk, but we do have a good mix/balance of ATs, if a shortage on defenders.)

No doubt it's because all those who can speak coherent talk have real lives and work, and never make it into the level 40 range where they have to sit and wait to make teams for AVs. Leaving me to group with a less nice ilk. :P At least they don't impose farming or bridging on me - which is what probably 50% of the Freedom people at this level range like to do.

Dunno. Let's sit on this question for a while.

I got into a 3 man av mission hunt. Not very comfortable, a kin def who was the leader (had a wife chasing after him, or so he said), an ill troller I've met before and me. Got Nightstar and Shadowhunter. And while tanking both was ok, with heavy use of unstoppable and praying that there was enough damage to kill them before my crash *just barely or not*... the kicker was attempting to herd wolves. +3 wolves.

Sighs. You'd think I know enough to protest, but I decided to be suicidal and when the leader suggested I go herd a few groups, I decided to entertain him and try. The first round my hp crashed like a rock, he tried to heal me, which sent one wolf on him and I was taunting that one - then the idiot decided to fulcrum shift (on the entire pack which I had only invinc on). Heh. Jeez. The boulders made him a nice little cairn.

Not good lah. I cannot herd reds. Or rather, I can, but my hp will fall like an avalanche and the only way to keep up is to get a dedicated healz0r to follow me around and boost me and heal other me always. OR, I can unstopp and herd like an I4 tanker for about 3 minutes, before getting pasted, or having a downtime of another 1-2 minutes waiting for the crash.

Lessons: I don't know why but I feel this sense of inferiority when this happens. It's like, why are they asking me to do something that I evidently have trouble doing? Is it because they are used to other tanks who CAN do this? This something that I cannot do? What do the other tanks have, that I don't have? Are they going to scorn me (and perhaps, all or most of tanker-kind) because I am a shitty tank?

Or am I just being overly sensitive and not recognizing that they are the ones without a clue, and have an over-inflated idea of just how strong a tank is these days, in I5? Because maybe they don't play tanks, perhaps? And that their only exposure to one are the herding, stacking, massive exploiters, and not the ordinary run-of-the-mill tank?

Dunno. It's something to think about. Why do I have this reaction of feeling inadequate when being asked to do something not really within my capability? Something to do with real life issues, mebbe? Heh.

Let's end on a brighter note. 30 minutes before maint, Haard Boyled wanted to try out arena for the first time, or so he said. He was 45, I was 45, and he had a 43 ill/emp troller along. We did a 'each man for himself' friendly. These two evidently have no fps background at all, cos they tried to play like PvE.

I don't consider myself a good PvP'er. I know I will get owned by the pros. By the master builds with their little tricks and traps. All I have is a little bit of cunning, and a lot of willingness to run the heck away like a wuss when the odds are not in my favor, and striking when it is. (Damn, I'd prolly make a good CoV Stalker, huh?)

I bought some temp powers just to have emergency stuff. I remembered that Haard was an invul scrapper, so I needed Brawl installed. I looked at my very full power trays and there was virtually no room. Dayum. And there was no extra key on my keyboard nearby (already using z, t, and shift-e already)…So I made the best decision possible, I swapped Scorch (1st early attack) for Brawl. I figured, well, that extra lick of damage is not going to do much in pvp anyhow.

It was a friendly, so we were chatting around, waiting for more to join if any. And Kitty, the controller, was going, oh no, tanks are very hard to kill. So I said, really? I thought it was a matter of just brawling their toggles off. (Ie. I gave them all the stuff they needed to kill me.) Not to mention, invuls were recently nerfed, apparently for pvp balance too.

Heh. I think it just goes to show that a certain amount of player instinct is essential. I opened a can of whoop-ass on the two of them and got away with a lot. They musta really been casual players, because they just tried to close and engage and hit like fighting mobs.

Checking out the arena forums for fun, I see the latest ‘tactic’ for those guys is to go into whirlwind which has no suppression. My tank build isn’t specially pvp built, but I still sprinted and jousted. It’s just an instinct. :/

Being a friendly, I decided to fight fair at first and go for the scrapper, since 2 on 1 on a non-set-up for pvp controller would be terrible. So I jousted, and poor Haard kept trying to close in on me, and I spammed brawl as fast as possible, while interspersing some incinerates and greater fire swords, and the odd block of ice hold. (Muhaha. That is a really good power for whooping casuals who are NOT expecting it.) Of course, the moment the poor guy’s unyielding fell off, I heard the hold kick in and you got a bunch of free hits in. That leads to him panicking, trying to retreat and so on, and an invul scrapper has unfortunately less hp than an invul tank, so he dropped quite handily. (And I was /fire damage too.)

Scrapper down, turn my attention to Kitty who was also trying to whack me down. Poor squishies, of course, have a serious mez weakness. Drop one block of ice, and oops. Done for. (Which shows you that they were not really serious pvpers because a serious pvper would have a near full rack of break-frees, and my cheesy tactic would have gotten nothing on ‘em.)

They decided to gang on me, which I didn’t mind, and tried the same thing again. I don’t know if they were really brawling. I don’t think so, because my toggles didn’t really fall off. I know Kitty never ran in to brawl. Haard may have been too distracted by his own toggles dropping to. They got one lucky hit on my unyielding in, and I got held by Kitty. I happen to have one break-free in my rack (always keep one for emergencies, and I’m going to stock up on more now that I’m trying to solo sappers), so I hit that, got free, and then hit unstoppable. (Another solo sapper-killing last resort trick I learned.)

Now I have three minutes before I’m paste and doomed, unless I break off and run. So screaming vengeance and dull-paining (it must have been depressing for them to get me down to ¼ hp, and have 974 hp come screaming back up), I knock Haard around until he’s down, and then I run Kitty down also.

They respawn, and I get the heck out of dodge before they come back. :P Ok, so some people can call it cheap. But really, do you wait around knowing unstopp is going to drop? You run the freak off, and people who want to knock you down had better come chase you and pull you down the hard way. I fly off into the trees, drop into some obscure corner of canopy, and then put on stealth suit. :P

Judging by how hard it was to see Kitty before she pulled her PA out (she must have been sup invis, I would guess.), stealth in trees would prolly make me very hard to find, unless someone was patently after my ass and willing to systematically comb through canopy.

As I guessed, Haard and Kitty didn’t have that kind of patience. Not when it was a free for all. They went at each other without my interference, and I had all the time in the world to wait for unstopp to crash, to rest, and to turn toggles back on.

Both of them were at about half health when I came back to find them, and do you think I can resist such tempting targets? Hee. Alexian didn’t call me bloody vicious in the arena for nothing. My favorite thing to strike is two people entangled in fighting each other, and not concentrating on others.

(I would make suuuucch a piss-people-off Stalker. It’s a good thing I don’t really get kicks on making people angry or unhappy. It makes me feel sheepish, actually. I like moral, ethics, fairness and honour. It’s just that in a ‘fight,’ this kind of stuff tends to go out the window if you want to win. Pragmatics and logic says so – which is another thing my mind is pretty good at. And this is where all the bad blood comes in. Outnumbering people, ganging, yadda yadda.)

So yeah, I swooped up on Haard again, knocked him silly and flattened him with greater fire sword, and walloped Kitty also. They come back screaming for blood now, and I have to fight ‘em off without unstopp having recharged. This time I have to use 3 medium green inspirations or more, but they don’t really touch my toggles (I really don’t understand why. Do I have that good defence? I don’t think so. Bloody Invinc.) They get me very close to red, maybe 1/5 hp left, when the match ends. :P

Final score. Me 6, Haard 1 (musta got in one on Kitty) and Kitty 0. And so I stand there without dodging and let them kill me after the match. :P

Actually, blasters are probably good pvp’ers if they know how to play. I can’t dodge their ranged attacks like I can a scrapper’s. And their secondaries can whack my toggles right off. It’s just they have to take the risk of coming up close to the tank and getting held and then squished on. :)

Making Good Time

This close to my goal, I fear I'm a little obsessional. Over the weekend, I just narrowly made it to lvl 45. On Monday, I came home and played CoH to pretty much midnight for 6 hours with a break in between for dinner. I'm now 6 bars closer to lvl 46. I suspect the xp boost of I5 helping a ton here.

I've swapped to Invincible because I've finally gotten tired of big maps with like 4 minions per spawn. Now it's a smaller map with 3 tougher minions, and I have managed to get significant power in my single target attacks now with greater fire sword and incinerate. The big xp numbers make me happy at any rate.

I was feeling a little out of sorts earlier because two of my missions were stuck on AVs - Countess Crey and Anti-Matter, and I was too generally annoyed with the quality of Freedom's players (PLfarmherdbridgementorsit) to bother sifting through them to find an AV team.

I figured that since everyone would be in the same boat, eventually, if I sat LFT long enough, someone would find me to do some AV missions and eventually, one of the teams would get around to clearing my missions. I just had to find -other- things to amuse myself with before that occurred.

Fortunately, I do enjoy street hunting. PI is kinda fun, if crowded with players, for that. And I decided to explore the other zones which lvl 45 broke open for me. I went deeper into the Shard, now that the level 41 Rularuu ignore me. And did a few of General Hammond's missions. Kinda amusingly repetitive though. OMG, our patrols are missing again. 3 men, 8 men...I began to wonder if it was a random number generator going.

And I loved the Chantry music. And the look of the Storm Palace.

Stuff was tough. But I discovered point Sierra, in which there were numerous (now grey, lvl 41) troops of Crey/Nemesis minions interspersed amongst other spawns of Rularuu. I'm having these evil thoughts about the next tank that lands up in the right level range.

Eventually, as I said, I got onto a team. Haard Boyled the scrapper leader came calling again, and we minced through his Clockwork King mission, and then my Anti-Matter mission (yay). Amusingly enough, after that, he had to go off to do something in RL, and the whole team just fragmented and ran away.

Welp, 1 out of 2 ain't bad. I just need to keep my eyes open to getting Countess Crey put away for good. It doesn't help that the silly woman is in Perez, the place all Heroes dread to go. Hrm. Smart of her, actually.

Random Teaming Experiences

Wheeeeeee. And boy, do I mean, RANDOM.

---

Shortly after complaining about "Multiple Tanks: The Nightmare Experience," I chanced to join a Synapse TF with a fire tank as a leader. Go figure, this would be "Multiple Tanks: The PL-Style Dream." :)

Don't get me wrong, it was very enjoyable. We were a group of 50s (ok, I was only 43 or so) auto-exemplaring down to do Synapse. There were a bunch of level 19s or so, some random, and some I think, were alts of 50s who knew each other.

As you can imagine, decked out in SOs and HOs, clockworks meant for a sub-21 team were aboslutely nothing. It was as if we were coated in a conductive, reflective material. The zaps just glided off our backs.

This was also a controller/defender heavy team, so there was even LESSer than less risk. It sort of reminded me of the time we had 3 bubblers stacking force fields for Synapse.

Everyone started off normal, going group to group. The fire tank was a good leader, in that he would provide direction and lead, but he wasn't the sort to go HERDHERDHERDWAITSTOPGO at every opportunity. Not a big ego fella. Big rooms, yes, after a while, he suggested rounding them up, and everyone behaved, more or less. So we meshed together as a good team, and proved that all of us could play like normal people...

And then we started getting fancy. :) Not being one to hog all the glory, after rounding them up for a bit, he then suggested that I go bring back more, while he tanked for the rest of the team.

Face it, this is the Dream if you don't mind shortcuts. The really-piss-off thing about herding is that the stupid tank is off playing sheepdog with himself, prolly wanking off somewhere, and you're just stuck standing around waiting for him to remember you exist and bring back toys to play with. Especially if the moron decides he can herd up the entire floor by himself = lots of downtime.

But if you have TWO tanks, TWO tanks that can cooperate well and coordinate matters, then, one guy can be tank for the group to clear hordes of mobs...(I haven't really met any squishy who is offended by hordes of well-controlled mobs, the scrappers and blasters are all happy to use their AoEs and nova, and defender/controller effects are better went clumped. Key being, well-controlled.)

...And the other tank can keep feeding in a supply of mobs. Like your very own "wave" mission. Cackles.

Everyone is kept busy doing things, there's no 'wait and go to sleep, boooooring' time, and you don't have to run all over except for the tank, and if he doesn't mind, why the hell not?

Especially if you are a fan of maximum efficiency and xp, this is beautiful when it works properly. And it did.

We skipped missions when we could, but the later "defeat alls" we handled this way. We crashed through Synapse in 2.5 hours, leveling up all the 19s this way also.

---

Deciding to take a break on tanking, I log on Rapid Meltdown again. He did the Positron TF, and so got a lvl 17 end redux SO. First time I've been glad to see one in my tray. :) Into Teleport, it went.

As I was mucking around playing, with a LFT flag on, I get a tell. 'hi, do u heal?'

ROFL. Whoop. I am an official defender. I got my first moron tell.

Having not have met hundreds of such morons yet, I remained considerably cool-headed, and decided to do my part for the defender community and "educate" the un-educatable. I explain about having a melee-based heal.

'Oh, sry no offense nuthing gainst kin but we are inneed of a healer'

*blink* I spend a little while deciphering the coded speech. Well, at least he did try to apologize for such a question. Then being masochistic, and feeling in a good temper, I decide to press the issue a little more and insidiously cultivate a speed boost addict. After all, kinetics is actually a damn good heal machine if you slot him out the way I have, 3 recharges 2 heals 1 acc, and I know my transfusion will beat healing aura in big green numbers any day, if you leave out the fact that it can miss, hem.

I explain that melee-based heals are centered around mobs, and are should be fine for tankers and scrappers. I ask the moron whether his team is primarily blasters or scrappers. Half of me is hoping it's all blasters, so I can go putz around with a team who knows what it's doing. (But since I logged on to really test vigilance, I'm also inclined to joining a train wreck.)

'O in that case alright. We r scrapper and tanker.'

He invites me. Oooh, time to forcibly demonstrate the fact that defenders do lots more than heal. To my surprise, there is already a defender on the team. I check powerset. It's a Stormie! Wow, they invited a stormie. So I guess they -can- be flexible-minded. (At least, that's what I thought.)

It's a Vahz mission. The tanker is invul, with RPD and TI. At level 15. Ouch. The scrapper is regen, he has fast healing, quick recov and reconstruction...and assault. Hmm. Heh.

They run around like crazed maniacs once fed speed boost, and hurtle headlong into entire vahz spawns - often promptly dying.

To give them their due, not once did they complain about insufficient healing. The moment they saw the big green 101 hp float over their head, and the first spawn get decimated, the scrapper sent me a tell saying, 'boy am i glad we got u.' *chuckles* So maybe I have now educated a moron to ask for healers and kins. Did my part.

Unfortunately, I think there is only so much you can teach these people. Because the stormie was an eye-opener, and a master of hurricane. She didn't run any other debuffs or anything, and O2 boosted when really urgent, and didn't want a tp from the hospital, but asked constantly for speed boost and asked me to taxi her over to blue steel like a queen, to be waited on hand and foot... (Actually I don't really mind, I made Rapid to be a taxi, otherwise why take recall friend?)

...But for all her flaws, I have now had my eyes opened about hurricane. I've seen one too many stormies use it badly, aggro'ing every freaking thing in sight and running around in the open. I've only heard of one storm who pushed stuff into the tanks aggro radius with it, but in this cramped little warehouse map, one single -3 lvl storm defender (plus end recovery buff and heals from a kinetic to survive the aggro) held off a multitude of vahz and saved a tanker from himself. :P

She was an expert at cornering stuff in perpetual knockdown for the narrow-focused tanker. The other zombie vahz tended to just wander toward her and get pushed back by hurricane, without really spitting. With the two of them crammed together like that, it was an easy matter to sit by them and keep them alive with spammed siphon power and tranfusion, plus regular buff application.

(There was one time a mire shut off her hurricane, and I panicked for about 5 seconds before remembering I had ID. Welp, it was a fairly interesting duo, a stormie and a kin. She ended up being primary tank because it was most effective, but she let the real tanker soak the alpha first.)

Unfortunately, as the saying goes, for both tankers and defenders and all other support classes who care about others on your team - "You cannot save idiots from themselves."

The scrapper died multiple times. Usually as a result of charging the spawn before we even knew he was in it (hooray, the power of speed boost, it speeds up good teams and speeds bad players to the hospital even faster!) And then because he ignored my advice of keeping together and choosing to go fight vahz on that side, while the rest of us were clustered around the tanker. My transfusion is sufficient only to keep one group of people standing, so if I have to distribute it, both meelee'rs might die. They did once or twice, actually, cos I tried to heal the scrapper. :P

Let's see, is vigilance working well? I'm not sure. I didn't run out of end, so it could have been working. Especially in the case of suicidal meelee guys like this. Most I got down to was about half end.

We finished the mission, and then the scrapper and tanker started making excuses and needing to leave. I decided to make my farewells as well, when out of the blue, I get a tell from the scrapper.

"o [name of the storm defender] is gettin on r nerves, so we r going off for a bit. we will b back soon, and will send u a tell then k?"

What? You want me to heal you without the storm defender? The storm defender whose hurricane saved everybody's ass from Vahz? You want me to try and pump you full of green numbers when you charge right into a full spawn without any protection from mobs too busy with hurricane to bother about spitting at you?

Hahahaha. I have done my part to educate a moron that there are other defenders besides empaths who have big green healy numbers. :)

But if you cannot recognize the value of other defender powers when they have been forcibly demonstrated to you (especially after you eat dirt the moment you catch the two defs unawares and unready to hit hurricane and transfusion. Twice.), I am NOT sticking around to share in your debt and get derided for insufficient healing.

I just send him a polite tell, "oh, I'm going off for food also. Catch you later when I get back on." (I'm not getting back on, obviously. *shudders*) :P

But it's a funny story.

Some people never learn. But slowly, if we're patient, we can slowly educate those with potential (have to look with a very forgiving eye here) and just run away, far far away from those who won't learn. Ever.

In the end though, I am still going to take over the world, one speed boost at a time. Just wait till the Knives of Artemis, man, just you wait. *cackles*

Multiple Tankers :(

The frowny face is because this post is about Multiple Tankers in a Team: The Nightmare version.

*rolls eyes* It all begins with a scrapper who asks me if I'm up for a mission, I say "sure." As per normal, he begins recruiting a bunch of people. Unfortunately his tastes are rather eclectic as he picks up another tanker by the name of bombshell13 and such other leetz04 names. Having stocked his team with many scrappers, two tankers, and one blaster, he realizes he lacks support classes and yanks up a 'troller. And of course, everyone needs a defender, so he delves around to come up with a def in their lower twenties.

Surprisingly the def is a rad def, and has RI. Oh ok, that's new, and interesting and good. The 'troller is an /empath, of course, but only has a very weakly slotted healing aura, 300ish at most, and no heal other. Ah. Noted. So now I know I need to be wary, and not assume that I'm going to get huge green numbers... which then implies I must choose my mobs accordingly and ensure I'm fairly close in level to stuff.

He picks the...*drumroll* Clockwork King mission. Oh gods. I'm groaning inside, there's no way he's asking an invul or a fire tank to soak the alpha aggro with THIS kind of defender support? It's just not suitable. A dark, an ff would mitigate stuff, and an empath is a suitable reactive support for psychic damage which tears right through certain tanks, like moi and the fire. I start to check my inspiration bar for 3 good lucks, so I can make it through the alpha, maybe it'll work.

The other tanker meanwhile is bitching that he's done it 13 times and doesn't want to do another CWK. The blaster suddenly realizes he's been given a surprise timed mission.

So the scrapper leader turns around and says, ok, we'll do that first.

Except...the blaster is level 47 and he's on tenacious. (FYI, I'm 43, the scrap leader is 43. The fire tank is 42. There is one lvl 45 scrapper by name of Captain Hood, and the rest are 41s and lower.)

The 45 has sk'ed up the controller to 44, and they tell the 47 to sk up the defender.

I'm like...um...I'm going to need a sk if the mission mobs are lvl 48 and you want me to tank them. They don't say anything.

We walk into the mission, and oh, the mobs are 46s. That means red and purple werewolves. Ok, smash/lethal, but that's some heavy +accuracy there, and no big green numbers to mitigate this kind of hit. (I appreciate debuffs as much as the next person, but when the defender has no time to put it on while the tank is soaking intital alpha, and through the combat that lasts 10 seconds or less, it makes very little difference at that stage.)

The fire tanker takes one look and freaks out. No way I can fight this, I need a sk, he blubbers. (I agree with his sentiment and understand, but he was really whiny, with the usual leetspeak spelling errors, and going about it in completely the wrong way...a name like bombshell13 does not help either.)

Meanwhile, I'm going...ok, it's tankable, but this might hurt, I predict. I don't say anything, but I know this is going to be painful without sufficient def support.

The lvl 45 /invul scrapper is meanwhile acting in a way that suggests we're wusses. He stops one step short of dissing us, going 'its easy' 'see?' and starting to charge into spawns.

Come on, you're level 45, the werewolves are yellow to you. Of course it's doable at that level.

So anyway, I bite the bullet, wade into the first spawn, they are clumped well, invinc does its work, I do my tanky work, and the mobs are mincemeat in under 5 seconds. Captain Hood the tanker in scrapper clothing is crowing all over us, see see, I told u it was ez.

Rolling my eyes, I do the next mob. Sure enough, the defence of invinc this time springs a few leaks and I get multiple 100 hp hits in a row. My hp plunges to 1/4. THIS is the kind of situation I need defender help, and I don't get any. The rad defender hasn't put up a single anchor. He probably doesn't want to even risk taking any aggro. Healing aura cannot do enough, and it's a controller so you know the sporadicness of it. I dull pain. Back up to 3/4 for about two seconds, before the succession of hits whack me down to 1/2 hp and barely holding. (Thank you, 6-slot Health.) The scrappers and blaster finally clean up, I'm still at half hp.

I pause for a few to let my health go back up before the next spawn, and suddenly the team fragments.

Bombshell13 has run off in one direction (after complaining he can't hit bleep!) and is in front of one spawn. He spams 'here'.

Captain Hood, our second tanker-wanna be, has run off in another, and is doing the same thing with the 'here' spamming.

Meanwhile, I'm here, blinking. Now let me see, I appear to be primary tank by virtue of the fact that I seem to be highest level tank here, and how come the two of you aren't even respecting the fact that primary tank leads? (As galling as it was, I let my +1 lvl evil twin lead for entire missions before I realized I was made physically sick by the way he ordered people around for his personal herding glee.)

Anyway, I don't say anything, and just decide I'll follow Captain Hood, cos he's nearer, and tank one or two more spawns. But he suddenly gets impatient with my speed, or lack of it, because he starts charging the spawn by himself (the implication in his words is something like "Here, I'll show you wuss tanks how to do it.")

Now he gets me annoyed. I deliberately walk into the spawn with him, but don't AoE. I let him soak alpha. Mr Two Levels Higher Than Me Wannabe Tanker gets knocked to a sliver of red hp before I relent and AoE to get the attention of the further mobs who haven't yet been attracted by my invinc aura. Giving him time enough to dull pain and recover. This happens about twice, and his behavior still suggests he hasn't gotten it.

So I pre-empt him on the next run and hit the next spawn. No one else in the team is scratched except for me, who finishes off the battle at half hp. Now, I don't know about other people's definitions, but that's tanking. And you should have enough respect to wait for the tank who is soaking it all for you.

But all this subtlety is pretty much lost on these idiots. They are still splitting up in two directions, yelling 'here' at the same time. My patience is rapidly evaporating. I'm not really in a temper, just starting not to want to deal with it anymore.

Then the last straw happens. The two of them go, herd herd herd. Herd 2 groups. Herd more.

Sheesh. WTF?

I tell them, hey, go ahead if you two want to. I'm not going to herd. But you can, if you want. (And I'm not fucking insane enough to want to herd groups of red/purples that I'm barely surviving and using heavy inspirations in the process.)

Mr Fire Tank is sane enough to say, he can't herd. (but he wants me to.)

Mr Tanker Wannabe says 'i will'

I'm smirking to myself, going 'sure' and hoping he'll get egg'ed on.

Fortunately for him, unfortunately for me, the blaster opens his mouth to say 'I don't think that's a good idea.' And damn, but they listen to him. *boggle* Ruined my fun. I don't understand why these people don't have a crystal clear idea how much they can withstand. The blaster did, though.

And he knew which tank knew his business. How did I know? Because the two of them spread out again, and scattered to the winds, bringing the def and troller and other scrappers with them, but there was one person with me. The blaster. :P

So finally I lost my patience entirely, and told the team. "Ok, I'm confused, there are too many 'here's. I think I'm just going to look for the ruptures." Then I fly off by myself, and the blaster comes along also, to hunt.

We find two, and one is by a werewolf spawn. The blaster calls the others, but they're off getting themselves killed at another spawn. I already see two skulls on the team roster. I can't be bothered to see who it is. Probably the sk'ed squishies, poor things.

I'm almost confident the two of us can handle it, he's 47 and a fire blaster after all. So I exchange a mutual look with him, eat a def and resist candy for good luck :P (punpunpun), and run into the spawn to AoE. (It was a deliberate decision, I had dull pain recharged, about 8 greens, and unstopp as a back up in case he didn't help me out.) He does. He blows a fireball or two into the mob, I taunt a straggler or two who thought he was more interesting and maintain the AoE cycle. We're almost done cleaning up by the time the others find their way over. Granted, it cost me a LOT of greens, but I survived and I protected the blaster at the same time.

Rupture is deactivated and I fly off to go hunt down more. In about 3 minutes while they're off doing their split up thing, I get all but one of them. The other one they get after they clean up some other spawn, and the mission ends. Man, glad that was over. Begged out in a hurry, with a good excuse, thanks to impending maintenance.

I hope this incoming maint brings the sonic fix. I don't like 'em shields, I think I've said.

Anyhow, that was the story of one of those DYSFUNCTIONAL pickup teams, when styles collide, and people stop being cooperative, including me.

And if we didn't have three tanker mains in that team, I'll eat my shorts. I'm sure the three of us who butted heads figuratively were all tankers, and used to heading our own teams and having teams fall in "our" way. ie. Wherever we walk, there's an implicit expectation that the team follows.

Except, of course, "our" ways are all different. Mine isn't very imposing, I just like the team to stay in one group and to allow the primary tank (ie. aggro-holder) to go in first. And if the plan changes, to discuss it and communicate. Otherwise, I don't play Mr Boss Man, I just be the silent tank that walks into spawns, and says stuff if he wants to pull or change the expected tactic. If one person wants to lead, fine, we'll follow the guy's lead unless he's utterly nuts and shows he's no clue what he's doing.

My pet peeve? Two extra 'leaders' in the group thinking they can boss it around. That type really pisses me off. Remember the time I pretty much went anal and exploded on certain idiot fire tanks who thought joining the team meant they could suddenly become leader and boss it around? Yep, that's one of my hot buttons. This time, I kept my cool and didn't verbally assault anyone, but TWO of them at once is more than I can tolerate.

When the team splits, it's just totally confusing who to follow. Both were annoying people. There was no lesser of two evils. The team leader didn't say or do anything to clear up the situation. So I followed my own advice and got the mission over with quickly, then got the hell out of the team. :P

Sonic Woes

Heh. I went and played my earth/sonic guy again just for fun. His playstyle is ridiculously different, yet the same as the tanks. He's all about control, but he can handle insane +2 to +4 lts. and boss levels...he just cannot handle a mass group of minions. The complete opposite of lowbie tanks, who are best off massacring big minion groups of blue/greens that can't hurt 'em.

It was really refreshing to go hunt down the -red- areas of galaxy to go after vahz mortificators, eidolons and reapers. It's like suddenly, the light dawns...AHHH, so that's what these regions are FOR. For controllers with containment boost to totally dominate spawns of 1-3 mobs. Lol.

I hit level 6 solo, and was working my way through to level 7, getting bored enough to set the LFT flag on. Unfortunately, no one bit. Duh? Maybe it's the server. Some are not very groupy. So finally when I hit level 7, I gave up and said, fine, time to MAKE my own team, because there was like a lvl 8 tank lfg, and a 7 def lfg, and so on.

Happens the moment I decide and start sending tells, the same people have also decided to group up. There's a little confusion, then we decide to merge teams into one massive team of 7-8. And then we charge through the hollows.

Controllers are ridiculously still effective at things +2 to them. We were killing 8s and 9s. This would normally give me heart attacks as a tank at lvl 7. But plunk down quicksand, stone cages (sidle waaaay back out of firing range) and look for bosses/lts. to lockdown. And this gave the lvl 9 pb lots of room to just fire at will without the irritating knockback, and bang, much things died.

I don't know if it was the looping sound bug or what, but shortly after the first few missions, the two tankers disconnected and never came back, one after the other. On purpose? I dunno. Every time I drop offline, I always come back, so as to show people that I respect the team, and only quit after saying a proper goodbye. There has been one time after I dropped off that I never got a reinvite or a reply after sending a tell to the leader, but welp, that's the leader's choice or he missed both of them or whatever. Point is, you come back even if yer lagged to death, whenever you can get your comp behaving. Bah. I don't know what's with 'em. At least take pride in whatever you can do, even if yer nerfed and feel inadequate.

I think these guys just aren't true tanks. It's true what they say, you can ALWAYS tell a tank in another AT's clothing. They are always leading. :P

I ended up starting fights after the tankers seemed leery of it (which I don't blame 'em, since the spawn size was evil, but in a group with so many defs - had an ff'er and an empath and even-con, I would at least -try- to start the run in...and failing which, I would taunt to a corner, or even say, ok, maybe we should pull, or something...)

Tanks are tactical leaders. Of course you don't have to be a drill sergeant and general all-in-one, and say things like, OK BLASTER PULL NOW, everyone STOP, wait HERE, now GO. That cheeses me off. But a good leader knows how to suggest things in a manner that's not offensive, but persuades people to go do stuff. Things like, "Ok, let's try this. What if the blaster does this, scrapper does yadda yadda, and so on." "Oh, that didn't work so well, how about this method..." "Maaaybe that's not such a good idea, but ok, we'll give it a shot and see?"

Groups are always looking for a leader. Of course leading is difficult much of the time, if you have some weird pickup group that acts like a herd of cats, but it's nice when you can do it unspoken and the people react well together.

Anyhow, my post is entitled Sonic Woes. Let me get to my point. I finally hit lvl 8 with this nice group, and following my build, I picked up Sonic Barrier. *gulp*

I asked everyone if they could stand the animation, they all seemed like they've never heard or seen it before, and wanted it, so I shielded all of them. Oh my god. I just figured it out. The one who suffers the most is the sonic'er.

I tried to suppress extra player fx, but SHIT, I realized, these are MY effects on 7 people, so of course it doesn't suppress. And these were 7 mad people running around shooting stuff, with me as a sleepy player in the NIGHT, with the weird sound effect too...*gurk* *psshew*

Damn, but I was the one who suddenly felt like my brain was going to explode and develop a serious headache if I didn't stop very very soon. I didn't have such a bad reaction the first time on the Posi TF with it, but this time, it was not very nice. Maybe I was concentrating really hard on it or something. So once the mission ended, I had to leave my carefully formed team and beg off due to RL. *sniffs* Oh well, it was midnight and time for bed anyhow.

I'm going to be much happier once the fix for the sonic animation comes in. And I hope the fix WORKS.

Vigilance

You know what really bothers me about vigilance? The players' rabid reactions to it, for all sorts of illogical reasons.

Now, that doesn't mean there are not =logical= reasons why vigilance is even more freaking useless and counterproductive than defiance, so why isn't everyone highlighting those for the developers?

Instead, they use the whiny-toned argument that, noooo, it's a team-only inherent power, it doesn't do anything for the AT solo. Hello. Look at tanks and gauntlet, as well as certain Kheldian inherents like cosmic balance. For all the protests about other ATs being insular, it looks like the defenders are even more inbred and self-focused. Isn't everyone in I5, I suppose? Face it, your inherent is not the only inherent that has a use in a team only. I'm STILL waiting on one of these clever defenders to tell me how gauntlet helps me solo. Since I can run around solo with no toggles on, no attacks, and everyone still hates me since I'm the only guy in their faces anyway.

The true difference is, gauntlet, or rather PUNCHVOKE, helps the tank out in his function in a team. Thus, it is a useful inherent, if not good for the tank himself solo. Vigilance doesn't do that, and that's what people should be protesting, as about 80% are, it's just the irrational 20% that I get really *rolls eyes* about.

Now the second thing everyone seems to have missed...Vigilance isn't fixed in stone, duh.

It went in on Test to be tested, but what they forgot was that the patch needed to come out in a real freaking hurry to fix REAL technical problems with game stability, looping sound crashes, mission crashes (tried the damn rescue 3 Rikti monkeys and got the damn apes caught in a Crey's cone of cold before? UGLY.) and so on.

Of course, in an ideal world, the devs should NOT have allowed vigilance out on the test server to mix with all these fixes anyhow, but come on, this is real life. Some gungho programmer prolly decided to snap off vigilance as an easily programmed thing (mebbe proof of concept) and tossed it into the build to be compiled for the test server, and ping, in it is.

They will change it. I'm quite confident of it. The outcry is ridiculous (both in size, and for certain reasons as well, but luckily, other reasons are valid.) and any idiot can see that extra end is what most defenders don't really need.

Now the interesting thing is, perhaps they don't quite know what defenders really need, and are waiting on someone to toss up a good suggestion for them from the forums.

Mez protection, imo, is too cheesy. It'll just make defs into more tank-mages, right now it's thy only weakness and it should stay that way. Your tanks and controllers should be making sure you don't get mezzed in the first place. And even scrappers and blasters should do enough damage to pull aggy off, normally, with certain exceptions for high aggy powers.

If I have to rely on defenders to do my job, by hell, you guys are going to rely on me to do my job. That's (forced) 'teamwork' in the new I5, right? *smirks* Or you can hire a controller and continue to diss tanks, it's ok, funny I still have teams - as do every single defender, they're still wanted and needed. So enough with the 'oh, my char is not needed in a team, woe is me' arguments already.

Ideally, the defender inherent should be something that allows them to do their job even better. For now, the one I'm leaning in favor of is the one where the strengths of their buffs/debuffs/heals increase as their -own- hp decrease - cept I'm not sure if they have the code to do that yet. This, of course, will not be always on, unlike scrapper/tank/troller inherents, but more like blasters'. And if a team is going well, then the boost isn't needed. But if stuff is going south, a good defender should be in a thick of things eating a lot of damage while trying to save his teammates, so why not be heroic, buffs stronger as you get weaker, and maybe sacrifice self for good of team. That's heroic, ain't it?

Dunno. There may be other options that I'm not seeing or thinking of yet. But it's an interesting thought exercise anyhow.

Just please...stop it with the nonsensical arguments, it doesn't help your stand, and makes it sound as if you don't know anything - ie. devs more likely to dismiss everything outright.

High Level Havoc

Woot. After TF weekend, I managed to get on two very good teams in the 41+ range.

The first team was headed by a scrapper (so unnatural, huh, a scrapper who likes teaming) and we eventually picked up moi, a blaster (ice), one more scrapper, 2 controllers and 2 defenders. Hilariously, nearly all the def support was emp, except for one /storm 'troller. Later on he had to leave, and our crazy leader picked up...yep, you guessed it, healer number 3. :P Maybe it's just something about the Freedom residents.

They were good empaths though, constantly buffing and so on, not just reacting. And I think people are now starting to figure out what level a tank needs to be, to be functional. (And so am I.) I was 42, the rest were 41 and lower. I sk'ed up a 39 who asked for one, and we went running 41 missions (which, even when set to Invincible for certain crazy people who like them that way = maximum of yellow minions to me.)

Which makes me one very happy tank.

I also heavily slotted health up for level 42, which may have had some tangible benefit, as I felt a little more survivable generally. We also cherry picked the first few missions, Nemesis, not Carnies, which of course, makes me a happy camper too. I suppose it helped that our scrapper leader was also /invul, and liked to fire off unstoppable now and then, so I think he had a crystal clear idea of what his semi-sturdier counterpart could stand.

We had such a good time in our first few missions and so little need for the empaths to fire off any big heals that we started talking about AVs. The controller had an Envoy of Shadows in Perez to do, and so had another teammate. And I decided to open my mouth and ask about the psychic clockwork king. (3 empaths + 1 invul = possibly survivable?)

Turns out we had a whole plethora of clockwork king missions, so off to PI. We did the bastard four times in a row. Lol. Very good team composition for him, even granting the fact that we probably had no freaking psi mitigation whatsoever.

We had it down to a science by the time we were done. We flew over to him, skipping everything except the spawn closest to him. There was almost always one there, so I demonstrated my precision spawn separation tool known as taunt, and went behind a tree, and voila, spawn separated and destroyed.

It figures the two controllers were illusion controllers, of course, and the team had seen me tank before, so I had no worries about what they thought about me by requesting phantom army dumped down in front of the clockwork king before I went in. I was NOT going eat psychic wail or whatever the CK has as an opener with other options in the team.

Sure enough, this was rather dramatically demonstrated when our scrap leader lost control of his keyboard, and hit the wrong button and SUPERJUMPED into the CK spawn and then out to bash into the war wall diagonally away from us. Pssssheeew, went the Clockwork King and his hp went from green to half down into red (and I was thinking, wow, was that the wail, is that it?), then it plunged again to a sliver of red as he whacked into the wall.

Ouch. Surprisingly he survived. Maybe cos the CK lost interest once he got out of sight, and our empaths were fast enough to superspeed around and pick him back up again. But no, I would not like to eat that as a prelude to tanking. I -have- avoided his wail once solo before, by swallowing three Good Lucks, so that might be a option if necessary to face him in the future, without a better solution.

So anyway, after the army went in, I dashed in and around to turn the CK away from everyone. (Just natural tanky precaution) and proceeded to tank the 348 hp hits from there, with lotsa help from dull pain and the empaths. And as I said, this was a really nice team composition because we had pretty much four holds available. Two proper ones from the controllers, freeze ray from the ice blaster and my block of ice semi-occasionally. So Mr Big Bad Clockwork spent all of his down arrow time in a pretty, flashing, ice cube. Very satisfactory.

After that, we cleaned up a timed Oranbega mission to rescue 12 oranbegans - and boy, was I ever glad I took block of ice. Cos it was a Malta mission. Welp, at least it wasn't CoT. This was the first time I was pretty much facing and tanking Malta for a team though, so the first spawn I jumped into was pretty much a leap of faith as to my survival - though the guns did suggest a certain amount of smash/lethal, so couldn't be that bad... I hoped.

Of course, I'm not dumb. I have seen sappers before, if not tanked an entire Malta spawn before, and I took block of ice precisely for these buggers. So select the Sapper, hit my nice 'z' bind, phoomf, he ice cubes, and I run in to combust, firesword everything and whack him in specific with greater fire sword. Meanwhile, our friendly scrapper has rechristened himself the Sapper Slapper and helps me out in dismembering, so normally before I can even get to the greater sword, Mr Sapper guy is down.

Worked beautifully. And I must say it is VERY functional to have a hold as a tank, since I can still intitate contact, hold intitial aggy and disable something I don't want bothering me. And I really like the ice cube animation, so clear when something is held for sure. It prevents me from ever taking fireball, but nevermind, I have fire sword circle, why do I want fireball. Heh. :)

But I love block of ice. And I like how I can help a lone controller to stack holds and lockdown a boss. It's sooo pretty. It's additional control and my function as a tank has always been about aggy hold, crowd control, and damage in different measures.

In fact, I just took a second look at the Artic Mastery line, and I'm now starting to be enthused about the other skills in it. Instead of taking something crummy like resist elements or tough hide (which really isn't worth speaking of, these days), if I grabbed something like chillblain, that would be an immob to help me lockdown stuff AROUND me, and I wouldn't have to wait for a controller to do it, lol. And I wouldn't get so frantic about survivability in the face of knockback. And I'm sure it has tons of aggy potential - as numerous lowbie controllers can attest from the hospital bed.

Snow storm looks cool. I think I want it. And the other thing is a ranged ice blast, which well, sounds nice, but won't really be useful in my function. And I want to take incinerate too. Conveniently, I have 3 more skills available.

44, 47 and 49, I believe. Just in case snow storm makes stuff run, and it probably will, the immob sounds a better choice and will need to come before it anyhow. Question is, incinerate before or after? :P

I think before. I need boss killing help, my minion kill rate is very good already.

Oh wait, damn, on rereading, chillblain is probably the single target immob only. *Snap* Grumbles. I guess I gotta take the blast after all.

Anyhow, back to our story:

In our second team, I got a weird tell out of nowhere to help with an Infernal mission. I was like, um, ok, I don't mind, but just gotta tell you, I dunno how much help I'm gonna be. (I think it's a measure of their desperation and the lack of high level tanks being played that they didn't mind at all, were perfectly receptive and helpful when I said first time with Infernal and gave all kinds of advice on what to do.)

So Mr Level 42 Tank With 1.8 bars to go finds himself a mission with a bunch of 49s, 48s and one 47. Our semi-insane 49 controller (mind/emp) asks the level 47 to sk me.

I speak up and go WHOA there, can I get a 49 sk please. She offers it to me, and I take it. Fairly dumb idea, she was a cruddy mentor, always forever hanging back and giving me near heart attacks since I would walk up ahead and get yanked short by the leash, normally about ten steps before the next spawn. Anyhow, it was a good idea to GET the 49 sk though.

Why? Team comprises of her the controller, me the tank, uno scrapper, uno human-form peacebringer and four blasters. Oh dear. Try as we might, we couldn't find ANY defenders. Oh well. *gulp*

The infernal mission belongs to a level 48, we go in. The damn controller is a slow zoner. I zone in, I stay utterly still, trying to look invisible. The bloody behemoths actually come strolling up, past a buncha blasters and choose to zap me. *sigh* Ow. 5 seconds later, the purple mobs stop being purple as the controller finally makes it to the party. Oh good, they are blue/white now. They are killed.

Then she says, Oh no, these are too low. Reset reset. Set it to invincible! Everyone get out!

*mumbles* I thought you just wanted some help with Infernal, now I see you want xp also, how did I get talked into this. *mumbles*

Back in and now all the behemoths are orange. Fuck. Of course, she sees yellow and goes, yay.

Now I'm really fucking glad I didn't take the first sidekick to level 46, while the mobs are level 50. At least at lvl 48, they're still only orange minions. Fire damage, and me with no resist elements. Nevermind, I have a /empath. You don't take an emp sec and buff it out the way you have without accepting the healz0r role, right? I sure hope so anyhow.

I run into the spawn and suck it up. While they are alpha striking, I'm down to half hp and I have to trigger dull pain to survive it as they finish. Now I'm weaponless in terms of hp and have to rely on the /empath who doesn't quite seem to realize how paper thin Invul now is, when facing non-smash/lethal. At 1/4 of my hp left, dropping to orange health, she offers me some healing aura for 300ish hp. Sigh. I'm left sitting there, mouse over the inspiration bar (some day I need to make an inspiration bind, but I'm lazy) wondering how long I can hold out - to show the controller I really need your damn regular support - without resorting to respites. Finally she figures out that she needs to use heal other and I get a 734 hp boost that manages to pull me out of the danger zone and back to 3/4 hp left.

I survive the rest of the spawns like this with really scary, sporadic healing. As you can guess, my aggro holding ability while distracted, on oranges, is pretty damn poor. If I got 50-60% of the mobs' attention, I think I was doing good already. Fortunately, the four blasters were nova crazy, loved to coordinate novas and didn't mind faceplanting without apportioning blame. Well, they did. They blew away mobs very fast, so I didn't have to suffer through too much, and ate some of the recoil and sometimes they went down. Oh well. That's I5 for you.

Fortunately, this happened right after the new patch, so I am collecting orange inspirations steadily, and a nice blaster is feeding me some too. I hoard 'em all, along with the purples. I have in mind a use for them all, you know when.

Before you know it, we get to Infernal's room. Interesting room. We clear the first spawn midway through the pews, but two blasters faceplant because of the pre-room chat where people were telling each other to murder the altar first, before I ask about the spawn in the middle and whether we clear it first. Of course, those two jokers missed the part where everyone else agrees we clear it first, so they tried to nova the portal Infernal is standing in front of with the expected results. :P

Spawn cleared, now they say, they wanna take down the altar. No one is quite sure what the tank is supposed to do, so I decide that I'll hold Infernal's attention and as many of the other demons' as I can. No one objects. Okie doke. Chomp chomp chomp, 2 medium oranges, 1 small orange go down, along with about 3 mediums lucks. (I always like to mix defence and damage resist after all.) Then I charge over, drag demons, taunt infernal and try to move them to one side of the portal.

Trigger-happy blasters have, of course, already started their kamikaze attack. Literally. Either there's a placebo effect or the mix of inspirations do really work, because I was actually feeling quite confident in suriving for those 30 seconds of gathering.

Unfortunately for the other squishies, when we are talking about 30-40 demons plus one Infernal, there is only so much aggro a focused-in-on-self-survival /fire tank can hold. I combust and fire sword circle at my usual pace, but when you're hitting 14 at a time, that means quite a lot of spillover. And they've all decided to nova. So I see one skull appear on the team bar after another. Then the controller bites it also.

Surviving now are the scrapper who has triggered MoG, me who has triggered unstoppable once my purple/orange insps ran out and started taking too much damage, and the PB who, I think, hit quantum fly to get the hell out of dodge and recover before heading back for a bit. Between the two or three of us, we get the portal from about half hp down to about 1/4 to 1/5 hp down.

The scrapper and pb have retreated, and I'm feeling like I should just go out with a bang, cos there's a mix of feelings. I am surviving this onslaught, but I am surviving it just like an I4 tank because of one thing, unstoppable, without it, I am nothing and would have been paste long ago. I am happy in the center of the inferno, and I'm struggling with my glorious attempts on the portal, but I also know that this will only last 3 minutes, and there is guilt that all the squishies have already fallen. So I decide I'm not going to run and just let unstopp crash, but I also trigger the rest of my lucks and keep my respites to see.

Unstopp goes down, the portal's still got 8000 hp left, but as I back off in reaction, I'm amazingly not hit in the seconds it takes to chomp a few respites and get my toggles back on. But of course, now that I'm back in normal mode, instinct is kicking in to say, ok, retreat NOW, boyyo, and I do. I run back away, warning the last two survivors to back off further, and we run away from the demons out of their chase zone.

We regroup. Let our big powers recharge again. But now the portal is 8000 hp left, and thankfully not healing. Now we see the way. At least, I now see the way.

I let them know I'm doing the same thing, but I'm gonna do it with unstoppable once it recharges, and you guys can focus on the portal.

Round 2: It happens, and now I can focus on proper-aggy holding as I stop worrying about survival for 3 minutes. Of course they still eat some aggy, and two blasters faceplant in the process, but the portal is blown to hell, and they start nova'ing the heck out of the remaining demons as I keep Infernal on me.

Once the demons are dead, focus fire on Infernal and his hp steadily goes down down down.

An interesting story from this is that my unstoppable crashes just as Infernal is at a sliver of hp left, and I drop dead as he hits me, because I didn't run but concentrated on doing my aggy holding job.

Five seconds later as the blasters pound at a panicking Infernal starting his run away through the pews, he drops dead before he reaches the middle of the room.

Heh. Well, I guess that's heroism, huh?

It was certainly an interesting first experience at Infernal.

Next time, I have ideas for making it safer, should we be in the same predicament of insufficient defenders. I'm gonna run unstopp, hit a timer for 2 min 45 seconds, run around and get all/most aggy, then the team unleashes at the portal. Just before unstopp drops, the team gets out, and I get the hell out and we run.

Repeat until altar dies, then same for Infernal. I think it's doable like this, with such tactics. But of course, that requires a team that's willing to cooperate and listen. :) Bit like a cavern of transcendence trial, I guess.

Changing Roles and TF Weekend

Woot. I've missed this. Took some leave off this weekend, enabling me to haunt the CoH world at US times, and people seem to be on the TF roll again.

Got an invite on Invictus for a Numina TF, and auto-exemp meant that I could fall off the team with the looping sound bug and still not sweat it. Not to mention, that means I come in at level 38, and all the mobs are blue and white. Cackles. Oh, too sweet. I relieved the old tankity tank days again, when one didn't have to worry about dying at all, just charge right in, badaboom, it was sweet. And funny, but you didn't hear any squishies complaining either.

Of course, there had to be one of those spawn bugs, and we nearly hurtled headlong into some level 41 spawns. I know I aggro'ed the first mob at the front, he spun a ball lightning at me, so I quickly turtled back to a corner, waiting on them to come back to me, while passing the news along. Unfortunately, another teammate wasn't as fast-reacting and he dashed right into the path of the slowly chasing mobs, causing a string-out, the defs to rush to him, me to quit my corner and try to salvage the situation...We had about 3 exemplars, and the rest were like 35-37, I think. So yep, we had a near general wipe. We did take out more than half the spawn, though.

Good teams, as they say, never whine or quit. So we came back from the hospital, prepared ourselves for round 2, and since only half the spawn was left, voila. Cleared. And the rest of the weirdly spawning 41s was handled in a more cautious manner as we altered our playstyles.

Good team. Good TF.

And I knew I was pushing it on Invictus when things were starting to look too boring. Toggles on, run around, cower behind crates screaming like a pansy, cackle when all of them fall for it, build-up, combust, fire sword circle, combust, fire sword here and there, repeat. The pattern was getting too ingrained.

Time to go back to altholic roots for a while.

I swapped over to Rapid Meltdown, the crazy lizard kinetic/rad def, and before I had even time to check my enhancements (I'm rich, I'm rich, I have 1 mil infl from an infl swap), I got two tells, one for a TF and one for a team.

Being more than slightly insane, I decide to pick the TF since it was sent first and I had time (not to mention, haven't done TFs in forever), and sent a polite tell back to the team guy that I was already booked for a TF.

Of course, it is Positron, here I am at level 15, we have one or two more lvl 14-15s, and a buncha 13s and a level 12 fire tank. Oh dear. And the 'leader' says, we need 8 for this TF. And proceeds to go looking for more.

(Oh <bleep!>)

Now I don't know what ungodly number they've switched Positron's limit to. I intend to go check today. But the old limit was 3. I can't imagine it's more than 5. I try to suggest some sense, and go, um, you know the mobs are going to be level 16, right? In an 8 man team, that might add +2 to the level.

(Alas, I made one calculation error. More on this later.)

Anyway, they ignored me, and got more in, but smartly, they pulled in more defs. They got an empath (some empath he was, he had heal aura, resurrect, and fortitude :P tho the rez came in real handy) and I forgot who else, some other AT or could have been one more empath, even.

So I looked at the team composition, one tank, one scrapper, 2 blasters, and like 4 defs. One sonic, one kin (yours truly) and two empaths. Lacking controllers, but nevermind, looks quite heavily buff stacked.

And so we begin. We hit boomtown, into the sewers and into a sea of orange Vahz. Oh gods. Yep, they were level 16-17. (And here's my calculation error, I forgot they lowered the level limit to 15, and not 16. So the highest would be 15 + 2.)

As usual, the lowbie fire tank was really leery of facing so much toxic spit, and was cowering behind. No taunt, so unable to pull or contribute any kind of tactical splitting up. The regen scrapper was game, but that was a LOT of spit. And you know how pulling Vahz goes.

I was distinctly reminded of teh Posi TF the Ass Clowns did. A lot of faceplanting, a lot of not-giving up, as we slowly plowed our way through. 3-4 spawns in and many deaths and rezzes later, we came up with a system - I was the only tp'er (unfortunately no invis), so I tp'ed the corpses back, and our dysfunctional empath rezz'ed them. Our second empath dropped off the team shortly after the 1st-2nd spawn, I guess he gave up. Our sonic def finally remembered he had buffs, and we got our resists only after the 3rd spawn - meanwhile I had been speedboosting them all and ID'ing some. Of course, the headache causing animations don't quite help, and I was forced to suppress player FX and go into 1st person for fear of doing some brain damage. Our grant invis blaster also dropped off, d/c'ed, unfortunately before I had put two and two together, and realized we could skip through to Epi.

We decided to try and skip what we could. We avoided spawns. Hilariously, all four of us made it through by hugging the left wall, I told them in team also what to do, and our fire tank just dashed around, having a blonde moment, right into Vahz on the right, and proceeded to die. So she gave up, quitting the TF for good.

We were down to 5 men, facing spawns set for 7-8, and amazingly we didn't give up. Being a little more buff on the damage factor than the Ass Clowns, we killed when we had to clear a path, and we hit Epidural! And he was back down to level 15! (Not to mention, the struggle through the rest of the Vahz had triggered like 3 levels from different people already.) So....Banzai! Poor bugger died so fast he didn't know what hit him.

The scrapper, the blaster, the other two defs and me. Oh we were good. As the missions went on, we really started to gel with each other. The scrapper started to trust the pace of transfusion and healing aura, we clumped up together (with the exception of the blaster, figures he couldn't get rid of instinct, he was always the first to run away around a corner) and we dealt rapid death.

Clocks were nothing. We didn't blink at 3 red Clockwork Prince bosses, they all went down. As usual, as we got more and more comfortable, I started to irradiate more, and did some pseudo-tanking with my crummy hp and transfusion, since the scrapper wasn't very good at handling aggro, just a one mob at a time killer.

Our next Ass Clown look-alike was the CoT mission. Oh gods, they've made it even more evil. We had to go rescue some workers, and it seemed really bugged. We rescued "the last worker!" twice. We were hoping to skip through, and there was a lot of miscues and getting pwned by ruin mages, and a lot of splatters on the sidewalk, but amazingly, as I said, we stuck it out. We hosp'ed, we came back, we got rezz'ed, we tp'ed in steps up 4 freaking floors of CoT, only trying to kill what couldn't be avoided. In the end, I think we killed nearly everything in the damn worker's path anyway. I managed to train them to say 'zzz' when mezzed, so I could hit them with ID, and it worked kinda well for the most part.

After like 20 deaths and umpteen spawns (of some horrendous yellow to red level and purple ruin mages) we finally made it to Rollister by a suicide charge. Had to happen 3 times before I made it through without getting pwn'ed by a ruin mage's earth cage. And he was white-yellow. Groan. He died quickly. VERY quickly. We were all hating, by then. Then on the damn top steps was the SECOND 'last worker' to be rescued. *faints* We tried the suicide charge out again, and the only survivors were me and the scrapper. And we still had more unkilled mobs to go through.

So the scrapper volunteered to try and superspeed him through. Speed boosted, ID'ed for luck, and wished him well. Hung around the vators and watched him dash past and through. Down through the vators and slowly, steadily, though hp dropped now and then, he made it out and into Skyway City. Oops. (I think he didn't realize that zoning out would prolly unstick the worker.) Wait. Silence. No triumphant music, no end.

Crud. So we were like, damn, where's the stupid worker. I had to go creep down 2-3 elevators, found him on the second floor, told the team, and he decided to go follow me. Great. So it was now my turn to go take him out. Glided through second floor okay, hit vator right into a spawn of spectres. Aaaaah, and me with no siphon speed on. Sprint like crazy, and pray real hard. Half my hp is gone, but I've finally put enough space in between them and me to go 'ow ow ow' Meanwhile the scrapper's going, 'Yea, first step is a doozy.' Ha ha. :P It -was- funny. And team-bonding, I guess. And finally, we rescued the last worker. Woot.

As I said, we grew a LOT tighter in the course of that TF, methinks. Like a blessing from the sky, our d/c'ed blaster came back, the one with Grant Invis, right in time for the spate of Defeat Boss missions. He had only half an hour before he had to leave for work, but hell, we were going to use as much of him as we could. We ran right through and skipped through 4 missions in half an hour or so. :P 10 mins each one tops. He had to leave just as we got the delivery mishes. Our sonic def had to log also, and then we were four.

As usual the Azuria delivery bugged, so the errand running scrapper had to relog, passing leadership to the blaster, who was a little lost by what was happening. We took more time getting him clued in and sending him to Posi, than running to AP and KR.

Down to Perez and the race, between me and the superspeeding scrapper. Won the first cos he didn't realize the kiosk was in the inside wall, but he was a tree-jumper (damn!) so he made it right into Perez and we were neck-to-neck when I got zapped by a green Tesla and caged and he got the second and third. :P

The others had been up for like 33 hours so the remaining defeat all mishes pretty much passed in a blur for everyone, but we were a frickin' machine by then, and everyone but the scrapper had hit level 16 (and so were all exemp'ed to 15) and the scrap was 15, for 4-man spawns, so we sliced and diced and shot full of arrows and boom'ed through everything.

All for what? Influence and a badge. But we were all badge whores, and were after it for the badge, and by having walked through hell and back, oh yeah, we got it. Hoody freakin' hoo!

Positron TF is really evil. But man, does it separate the men from the boys. :)

Made three really good friends now, and it was certainly a change from the tank to be in the support buff/healer role. One always needs to walk miles in other's shoes before one can say anything, after all. And I do think it makes me a better player by experiencing -every- AT and learning how to play it well.

I want to play Ochre a little more, but he needs influence bad. Means I have to engineer some kind of influence swap, and see whether Raggy has enough to fund him first, which means I have to play Raggy. Urgh.

But before them, the blaster. Man I haven't played a blaster in forever. I've not even tried defiance. Vesuvius it is. :)

Future Looks

Heh. I've been industriously trying to stick to one character and work him up to level 50, but my 'shiny object' syndrome is really testing my determination and resolve. :)

After seeing that pathetic excuse for a stone/fire, I decided to go to the newly revised CoH planner to make my own. Tricky. Very tricky. I wanted a teleport build, obviously, and stoners need hasten, oh so much. End drain is also harsh on stoners, imo - hence stamina. Ragnarl 'proved' to me the importance of the different armors, despite the common schools of thought and even despite the I5 nerfage, and Invictus is a walking advertisement for the droolability of /fire damage. I can't figure out which order to take the powers. :P

And today, for some ineffable reason, I decided that it had been a LOOONG time since I checked out gamespot. And wow, I saw a preview of CoV. Then I went to the CoH boards and realized that it just came out today and it was like -the- news of the decade. Heh. I may not be in the beta, but my intuitive sense of stuff is scary.

The AT descriptions of the villain classes look really good. The big hulking scrapper/tanker role is combined into one giant melee warrior function - which should make naysayers who don't believe that a subset of us can think defence and aggro control first happy. Anyhow, these are villains, they won't be so nice as to try and protect their teammates, they'll just kill kill kill. :)

The scrapper function is combined with the fantasy rogue/thief hide in shadows and backstab, which isn't very heroic but certainly fits the evil villain much more. This will make rogue/thief players very very happy. I am so going to make an evil alter ego of my demonic thiefie Geandakin one of these stalkers. *MUHAHAHA* I just hope they allow identical hero/villain names, since I already have a DM/DA scrap that's him too. :) Else, I'll just have to use something lame, like a period or a Mr. or something. :P

Blasters should be happier with corruptors, since now they get the buff secondary to go with their blast primary. Masterminds are like the pet summoners, and controllers get to hold and blast. I think they'll certainly be interesting to play.

Alas, I forsee a GREAT amount of wailing and weeping and gnashing from the hero side of things. Because it seems like Zeb Cook has been reading all the suggestions/ideas on the CoH boards and incorporated them into CoV to make a more 'appealing' villain AT. So all the heroes are going to really steamed at these villains who get all the offense and killing power the players really wanted for their precious heroes. Not to mention great whines about equality and so on. :P

Having been promptly sucked into the NFL season, I can only equate this to people's mindset. A lot of people just focus on the offense. It's exciting, it's flashy, ooh, look at the score keep going up and the points rack up. Even in Capture the Flag games, it's all about 'chiong'ing (ie. charging) into the enemy base, shooting frenetically, and trying to steal the flag. And that's if the guy can actually think of the team. Otherwise, it's rack up a high kill count for himself as a sniper or something. A lot of people try and master scout and medic classes cos those are the ones who can get the flag the best and the glory...After all, you just need to beat the defenders just one time to win.

On the flip side of it, the defense never gets much glory or recognition, but they have the toughest job of all. They have to keep doing their job, getting up one more time to face down the opposition, to hold their ground and frustrate the attackers. And all they have to do is slip up just one time, make one mistake...and it's all over. The opposing team scores, the audience hates them, and yet, they have to grit their teeth, forget the fact and play on and do it again and again to stop more points coming on the board, because if they get depressed, that's it, it's really over for good. And all they can do is do their job, and trust that their OWN offense can score one over the other side. Except for brief, stellar moments of glory where the situation moves in their favour and they get the chance to shine and capture the flag, or score that defensive touchdown.

It's hard to be a defensive player. It's not for everyone. Sure, it's not easy being a good offense person either, but it's even tougher being a good defender who can pressurize the opponents, frustrate and cause mistakes and keep on going.

I'm not sure why, but I happen to have this sort of mindset. I think it has to do with introversion and not liking the glorious spotlight alot. I identify with the linemen of a football team. They're there, they're huge, they're way up in front, but they fade into the background and aren't really commentated on much. But it's because they are up there, doing their jobs, taking the hits, beating their man, holding back the charge of the oncoming team that buys time for everyone else to get the glory. They are the first line. If they don't do their jobs, that really screws up everybody else, boom, there goes your plans. You have no time, you get yourself flattened by the incoming guys. Mebbe that's why and how I like playing tanks.

And heavy weapon guys. :) Although they weren't very terribly versatile.

An engineer and his pet sentry gun had a really special defensive relationship though. *croons* Now I'm sure I doubt one man and his gun can stand up to a coordinated clan team offense, but I sure could pick off one-man casual server wanna-be flag stealers. I was always happy camping in like one freaking tiny room of the entire map, normally just in front of the flag, or in a strategic location of map control. Most people would die from ADD overdose staring at those same four walls. Me, I would race to get my tactical control points up, sentry gun, dispenser bomb, and mah trusty shotgun - locked and cocked. And wait. And hop about. And wait.

In comes the first unsuspecting offender. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat! Whoops, didn't see that gun, didya? *cackles*

In comes another, now forewarned. Blipblipboomboom, he tries to shoot and grenade the gun, I let it go up and pump him full of lead. Splat, down he goes. Tra-lala, race back to supply, pick up munitions, build gun again, different location. Repeat ad nauseam.

Except I never did get nauseated. I liked being in control of the location. I liked making people fight on my turf. And hell, I loved stopping people from getting my flag. Over and over again. Even when you're expecting me to be here. And my gun to be there, but whoops, the dispenser got you. :P Yer not getting your points, yer going down! Over and over.

Sure I got beat. Now and then. The triumphant guy would run off with the flag. I'd try to chase for a bit, but if not, I'd go back to my post, brush it off, and set everything up again to stop the next run. Because if I wasn't there, then my team would just get flag-raped over and over. No one else cared enough to defend. Odd, ain't it?

Same with CoH and CoV, no doubt. A lot of heroes are going to forget that the point of being a superhero is to defend those who cannot defend themselves. So, of course our powersets have a bit more focus on defending, on crowd control. That's what heroes do.

I do hope that the designers do have an image like this in mind and are able to tweak design such. A Hero team working in unison should be slightly more powerful than a Villain team. Sorta like the all-defender superteam or pentad teams. But villains soloing selfishly oughta be slightly more powerful than a hero acting vigilante. Who knows, only time will tell.

I like the game concept. I like CoH enough to stick with it, so CoV should also be equally good crack. And there's hero-clix to suck me in, even further. I'll let those concerned with play balance, equality, yadda yadda, worry about it. Once I get my level 50, I'm going to just switch to whichever alt and pri/sec I find most fun at that current moment.

Oh, and I also took a look at Auto Assault. It's been pushed back to 2006, but it does look very good still. I'm leaning more towards Biomeks now, for the story background as well as the transforming mech vehicle. But I still find muties fascinating in a shamanistic, DE sense. I hope they'll allow more than one character or I may end up with two accounts or something. Har.

I'm just glad I still have no interest in World of Warcraft or other such 'popular' mmorpgs. Otherwise I would have no more money left. I refuse to go look at them or check them out. I'll stick with NCsoft for now, and keep an eye on some interesting singleplayer types coming out in the near future - like Dragonshard, the Dawn of War expansion, Black or White 2...

(Oooh, lookie over there. Shiny...)