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. :)