Alt Indecision

Kinda funny, actually. I managed to make one designated 'main' / badge whore for both sides of the equation, and fixated on them to the extent that I get them leveled to their max levels. And now...I'm...waffling.

Can't decide which alt to play now. I played Geandakin the stalker for a bit, and then he got a bit tiring. He's ok, he just takes a while to get from place to place - I'm making shameless use of free jetpack powers, hanging on to the Goldbrickers' one since my jingle jet disappeared. I'm working him towards teleport, I'm glad I chose tp foe after all. While recall friend would work great in tfs, I get more use solo out of tp foe. Both have their good points in pvp. So he's about lvl 18, 19, and trying to plod to 20 and teleport.

Still worried about lack of stamina. Problem is, if I drop powers to take stamina, I won't need it anymore because of the powers I dropped. If I take the powers, I need stamina to use them well. Hahaha. I still have no clue how all those stalkers are running around with one attack, one cone and AS, and getting by. I've been making heavy use of 2 attacks, the cone, AS, and placate, and buildup to get a decent chain I can level with. To stay standing in one place, I need the regen powers - but it's costly on end now. Perhaps end redux SOs would help this...Perhaps.

Then I went into a hero-side frenzy. Invictus was fun to play again for a bit, did some TFs, some tanking, and some monkey farming. It is so broken, but hell, I've learned something about exploits. As long as it's not blatantly bugged, ie. the room dupe-ing, selling bug, the devs will just fix it eventually, and it's up to one's individual sense of morals whether one wants to take advantage of it now.

See: Wolf herding. Winterlord PLing. Dreck mission farming. And in RoD, pleveling with xp mobs like the centaur of ToD, the wisp of mist from the staff of visions, unsoweiter.

And in this case, I actually enjoy herding and blowing stuff up by myself. So I just put on a CD and ran around for an hour or two. I'll be going back to the Crash Site once they fix it.

Autumn Tempest was next. Had considerably more success with the WS this time around. I suspect it's thanks to 40 levels of squishy dom-hood. Managed to grind up to my hold, and I am sooo thrilled with it. Die, all you nasty voids who keep blowing me up.

I had such a weeeird PUG team on him. One SG mate (pb) was in a team, so two of us (ws and scrap) joined him. The leader was a PB whom I've teamed with before, and found relatively stable and smart, though he had a sad tendency to call defenders healers. It's a durn common habit in Freedom, so I paid it little mind. But then, he invited an interesting ill/something 'troller. I can't remember what her secondary was, because she never used it anyhow. Hell, it became blindingly obvious that she didn't use her primary either. :)

SG mates called attention to the fact that she was PL'ed. I hadn't noticed it at first, but then we peered closely at the build and realized that she was level 18 and did not have blind or flash. Lol. A controller with zero holds. She didn't even know how to place PA properly, she kept putting it 10 feet in front of the mobs so that they would aggro and spread out. Her team contribution consisted of having PA running around and vainly trying to spam deceive.

We had zero tanks with us, so our poor spine scrapper was alpha striker absorber for +3 mobs, and you can guess just how much aggro he could hold for 3 nova-form kheldians plus one fire blaster. Ie. near-zero. This truly drove the non-SG pb leader nuts because he kept dying, and very soon, the classic "we need a healer" words came out.

So he invited a level 20 empath. (Note the rest of us were lvl 17-18, mobs were like 20-21.) Mr Empath turned out to be a control freak. STAY NEAR ME FOR HEALS. Do not run away as I cannot heal you. Please pull by shooting off one ranged blast and then getting out of line of sight. You were shooting all over the place, you need to focus fire so that we can kill them. He had impeccable typing skills, capitals, grammar, everything, he just reminded me of one of THOSE tanks who needed to drive the whole damn spaceship by himself.

Amazingly, he managed to drive me to neaaar breaking point. Something I haven't come close to in a good long while. It all started with one of -those- sewer rooms, where there's spawns left and right and in front of you. As usual, my squidy squishy cowardly self is hanging near the back and targeting the spawn crowded around the scrapper, so I didn't actually see what happened. Things just started going pear-shaped because someone hit a second spawn, and the scrapper who was holding near the corner suddenly had a void hunter come around as part of the first spawn (aieee!) and then Pzshot, there's a QUANTUM in the second spawn that was aggro'ed!

Obviously, the unlucky kheldian who had aggro dropped dead in one or two shots. Happened to be my SGmate pb. The other two of us naturally whizzed backward and took cover. Meanwhile, the emp is standing near to the scrapper, howling "Stand close to me for heals! I cannot heal you if you are far away" and other newbie-handbook variations thereof. He either could type really fast or had it bound or something.

Well, NO ONE was engaging the loose Quantum gunner. I'm sure anyone who has ever seen kheldians and void aggro would know what would happen if we ran up near to the emp. PSZHOT, PZSHOT at most and voila, rez practice. So both of us stood happily where we were, not shooting or anything. The moment the team focused on the quantum, we were both in squid and blowing it to heck. Of course, they happened to focus on it last, so we were standing around for a bit.

After this, the emp decides to give us a textbook lecture for 3-4 long lines on how one should stand close to the healer and within range of his single-target heal so he can save us. I'm grinding my teeth, thinking to myself that no one, NO ONE, in the group has screamed HEAL ME PLZ to him, and that none of us were asking to be healed when we backed off. Anyhow, I make a joke of it and say, "Yep. You'll excuse us kheldians please when we run screaming around the corner because of a quantum or void."

He returns with another textbook lecture on how there's three of us and that our focus fire would kill the void instantly. (Um. 1) One kheldian dropped dead instantly. 2) Tell me which is the brave, self-sacrificial soul who would take the first shot? Not me, certainly. But then, I understand aggro. 3) Voids have energy resist - at least to negative energy they certainly do, my shots do jack shit to them.)

Anyhow, I shut up and just let him go on, because I don't have breath to waste on these fellows. He then comments that we were all over the place and should be focusing on one spawn at a time. Good grief. He hasn't even been here for a mission and he's directing us. We mashed through our previous mission as a pretty functional team, before we lost a scrapper and an ff defender, necessitating the pathetic controller replacement and him. We endure this one-sided general's tactica manifesto for about five more spawns before I finally lose it and tell him off: Do you hear anyone here asking you to healhealplz? Please do us the same courtesy.

He's quiet after that. Jeez. It reminded me of a pre-emptive strike on people yelling at defenders to heal. I know people then proceed to tell the tanks to "taunt" and blasters to "go blast," and fair enough, they started it first if they asked you to heal. But no one said anything or even expected him to heal. In all defence, he was a very good emp, and he heal'ed other me so often, I was more christmas-tree like than purple. That said, I actually didn't need the heal at times, I'm used to running around with a half full bar of hp on all chars these days - the tank does it, the dom does it, and now the WS does it.

Naturally the team breaks up after that. It's a helluva big relief to us anyhow. We end up in an all-TT team with that one pb, and we take a train mission. The pb leaves after a while, and then it's all pure SG goodness. Amazingly, it's such a difference. The spine scrap goes in, spine bursts, then we unleash AoE hell. We're all sitting with about 3/4 hp to spare and the spawn is deader than dead. Rinse and repeat. Quaff inspirations as necessary. No 'healers' required.

Ah well. PUGs. :) Anyhow, that's the story of the guy who came really close to breaking my Zen calm and informal amusement at pickup teams. I still can't believe this level 20 emp thinks he has a chance of rescuing two squid-form kheldians with quantums aiming at them with his heals. We all witnessed just how effective he was at rescuing the first pb, after all. :P Hell, that kind of damage gives my tank a heart attack. I know if I don't leap over everything and punch the void in the face, the second shot means a dead kheld. No one asked him to save us from that kind of damage, but he went and took it upon himself. Sheesh. :P

Then I got into the tanky mood again, and decided to make an ice/em. It was a forum post that drove me to it. That it was sad that new players didn’t have ‘good tank’ examples for them to follow, that they had no clue how to play with a tank and would just shoot randomly, because all the old tanks weren’t playing tanks anymore. Well, I’m no old tank, nor do I consider myself an exceedingly good tank, but I sure can hold aggro and survive well enough, so, why not? I also wanted to see how hard it was to level a tank now that the attacks had been shifted down. Enter Boreal, a future pvp-slanted tank.

Lowbie leveling is much easier now with three attacks. Only tricky thing was deciding in which order to go get primary powers. Since dull pain does so well for the invul, I went for hoarfrost to increase big bag of hp first. At level 8, I initially intended wet ice for status protect, but I got invited to a team and there were warshades in it. So I apologized for the lack of aggro control as yet, and did the punchvoke thing. I think I did a fairly good job with it, given what I had to work with, only lost one or two minions, and tennis’ed the rest back and forth. But it wasn’t as good as it could have been. So the moment I hit level 8, I made my decision and took CE. Sure enough, after that, it was excellanto on the aggro hold, just harsher on the end bar, is all.

Of course, I stupidly had to team up again, and go after CoT missions and Frostfire before level 10 and wet ice, so my status protect hole was made pathetically evident. :P But nevermind, he’s 10 now, he can go get wet ice, and then open up travel power and fitness. Should be fine, but I can’t tank forever.

Now I’m getting the (insane) itch to play defenders and corruptors. Unfortunately, my rad/dark corr doesn’t seem to appeal to me too much, I should just bite the bullet and work through it until I get more fun stuff. I want an FOTM ice/kin corr somewhere. Maybe I’ll make Guardian a casual pvp server, I hear there’s quite a bunch of people there in the pvp scene. I might just jump around some lowbie defs and get myself into a bunch of ‘r u healz0r’ pickups...

Badge-whore.com is up. Done by the same peeps running vidiotmaps. To my surprise, I just realized today that the guy behind vidiotmaps is in my SG. Hahaha. It's so fun to be in a SG like that. It's funny how I end up gravitating to these sorts of organizations. And I now have this new desire to go count badges for my mains and bring them running around to get more badges to add to badge count.

I'm horrible. I have such altitis. :P