Working with Teammates

Heh. After spending many sleepless hours trying to get the CoV beta client to download successfully (ain't working still, giving it one more try for the heck of it while I'm out), I decided to take a break and play some games instead.

Black and White 2 is kinda fun, though in my striving to be goody-goody (and because I and my pathetic villagers get owned in combat if I try to be evil and conquer things), it's turning into a 'build your city' sim. Lasted me about 6-8 hours though, before I got tired of it. Back to it another time.

Battlefield 2 looks visually very nice. If only I could find a server that doesn't ping 300-500ms. There was only one 30ms server, which was packed full for ages. Then I wiggled into one slot and played quite enjoyably for about half an hour, before Punkbuster proceeded to kick me out...for not being able to update it - either my firewall was being onery, or they were using an old version of PB. Could be latter, as it was an old version server. I want to patch up to 1.03, but I haven't been able to download the patch for it yet. Frickin' annoying.

Ended up playing DoD: Source for a bit more sense of teamwork, though I have pitifully little FPS skills left, aim is slow, instincts are off, and so on.

I do kinda sorta miss NS, but I don't like the graphics anymore. Can't wait for NS: Source eventually.

After that, I gave up with FPSes and decided to log back into CoH. I wanted to be helpful, I wanted to feel that sense of teammwork, so I decided to play my emp def. Well, bah, NO ONE wanted to pick up teh healz0r. WTF? Here I am, feeling all helpful and healsome, but noooo, no one wanted me. *sighs*

I did hear a broadcast about level 36 DE in Steel Canyon while desultorily shooting blue and white outcasts with my two single-slot attack powers feeling miserable.

So I decided, heck, I will be nice and log on Ragnarl and destroy the DE ambush.

The moment I logged, I had a total of one tell and one blind invite in under 5 seconds. Whoa. Damn but Stone is popular, huh. I decided to be nasty and quit the blind invite team (after saying, "sorry, wrong team," of course) and accept the one who sent me a tell instead.

Mistake, in retrospect. :/

(Oh, I got to the DE site only to find one pathetic Tree of Life remaining, another blaster had shown up and cleared the ambush.)

So why was this damn invite team a mistake?

Well, I wanted to be nice and explained that it had been a long time since I logged Raggy, so I was a bit rusty on his powers. Just to tell everyone what to expect, since I took a while to get there and was spending some time reshuffling powers and adding some new binds ala Invictus style.

(T for taunt rules. Unfortunately, I hit T before I bound it, and lost my Targeting window, and it took me a while to find the menu and mouse way of bringing it back.)

I'm not sure if telling them was a good thing or not, did it decrease their confidence in me? Or were they just a FUCKING SUCKY pickup team in the first place?! :P

1) Main criminal of our tale was a /DA scrapper named Dee. He had NO sense of positioning himself whatsoever. He would constantly rush up in front of me, the tank, and thus kept alerting and alarming the spawns in front. He successfully did TPK on one occassion in a big room of 3-4 CoTs, and had a bunch of near misses. This in a team of 2 empaths, one def, one troller.

2) Our secondary criminal was a Storm defender who had a level 50 stone/stone tank. Goddamn it. You'd think a tank player would understand that a stoner cannot move fast and the only way I can control shit is to keep it near/on my mudpots. Apparently, this fella had tank syndrome, he wanted to be primary tank.

So he would turn on his hurricane and run EVERYWHERE. Especially INTO the clump of CoT the stone tank was surrounded by. (After begging for CM incessantly, of course.) I swear he put knockback into his powers because stuff went flying in more directions than I could rotate my mouse. And he loved his pet Tornado. Out the moment it recharged, it would pick up random Death Mages that I had laboriously walked beside and was aggy holding with mallets, and toss them down the corridor, into secondary spawns, and so on.

You know, I don't deny that a stormer can be a good tank, and he was indeed a master of chaos, and this was a team loaded with seemingly everyone having an energy knockback blast.

So why on earth did you pick up a stone tank, then?

I think the thing that cheesed me off most was when Dee aggro'ed a spawn way up somewhere, the storm dumped everything and knocked everything off the tall stone tower in that high CoT room, I was chasing after everything madly out of breath, and they walked off to go aggy another spawn...While I found one last Death Mage on the ground. Except...this Death Mage still had a Snow Storm anchored on it. WTF.

I thought this was a standard lesson anchor defenders learned. Mob goes out of sight, you fucking TURN YOUR DAMN ANCHOR OFF. What excuse do you have for not knowing that your anchor is still toggled, and that you can't see a mob with a billowing snow storm nearby? At level 30 something?

So anyhow, I decide to stop this Death Mage before it ran off to aggy another spawn, and settled down to mallet it to death and screw the rest of the team because they sure weren't waiting or looking for the tank.

Sure enough, the stormer got himself mezzed and faceplanted, then a bunch of other skulls showed up, a smart emp'er had already found me and was supporting me, and then the scrapper comes dashing to me as if the hounds of hell were after him.

Which they were.

They proceeded to mez and massacre the shit out of the poor emp def before I could taunt 'em all, and then started to pound the crap out of me. +3 CoT is not very tankable, even for a stoner - especially one out of practice, and with dangerously yellow/red enhancements.

*sighs*

Fucking nightmare. They didn't know how to wait for a tank to pull either. They unleashed the second the first mob came around the corner. (I was actually forced into the WAIT HERE BEHIND CORNER, I WILL PULL INTO CORRIDOR role, because of said TPK earlier, we had 3 spawns clumped up together and about 8 Death Mages, and no one waited for the tank to grab aggy. Sighs.) At least my taunt and pull separated the clumps so that we got them in the end.

I dunno. I haven't played a Stormer. I want to, eventually, though. My lil baby Stormer is sitting at level 1, waiting for an Isolator team.

But it seems to me that a clever Stormer -could- work with an immobile tank by pushing mobs to the tank, as I heard in one forums anecdote. And not by making mobs fly all around, away from the tank, out of everyone's control range, only to come back later pissed to gills and ready to pound the stuffing of all the squishies.

You wanna do this, fine. Why the fuck did you invite a tank to the team, then? Please go away and get your CM and tank for the team in your controlled chaos fashion. Leave me alone. *rolls eyes*