I7 Impressions

After 3 continuous days of running my computer nonstop (*hugs the comp*), I've finally downloaded I7. Thankfully, nothing went wrong with the patch implementation, despite me stopping and starting the download only about 123097983453 times.

Grandville took a bit of loadtime. Which is encouraging me to think about upgrading to 2 gig of RAM. Got to move house this week anyhow, so while I'm unplugging the computer, I may as well open it up and upgrade it some. :P

Nice looking place. I must say the hype made me expect it to be much taller than it really was. I was envisioning something almost reaching or break the ceiling cap. To a flyer, Spider City is nothing. Given all that talk about special 'guards' preventing people from not going where they were supposed to go, it was rather disappointing to see they were confined mostly to high-level turrets on walls, some Arachnos commando-types, and a few random Mu Striker fliers whose patrol pattern was easily predictable and avoided.

I went straight for the top of the place and danced around the empty, unguarded roof with the funky orange pool of dunno-what, didn't find a badge, boggled as to why Lord Recluse would leave his skyscraper top with no guards nor traps, got bored, flew off.

The patron hall and the council is -nice-. After the immense towering statues, I was quite mildly amused to find most of the villains (especially Capt Mako!) shorter than my max height toon. Makes for an interesting RP twist, in a way. Internal storyline-wise, Malentis has always been rather impressed by the tales of Mako's doings, and can't wait to meet him and be his protege. But stories enlarge one's stature, and when they meet face to face, Mal is disconcerted to find Mako seemingly smaller than life. Of course, personality-wise and whether there's a falling out, that'll come with the contact's storyline.

*sighs* Speaking of which, I'm giving up on doing missions on Test until stuff stabilizes. I took Mako's first mission (timed) and took ages on the zone loading as the computer struggled valiantly to get an Arachnos lab tileset going. Luckily, once it loaded, it played pretty smoothly (was on villainous for whatever reason) and easily...until I got to the end boss. And screwed up.

See, lulled into a sense of security by pwning white-con enemies with the pet and an operative I'd rescued, I walked into the boss-rescue 2nd operative spawn AND the end boss spawn without realizing it. Without domination up. Still thinking I could pwn, I let Frosty run wild as I casually started single-target focusing on mini enemies, relying on ice slick to do nasty things to the Longbow Commander boss. Then a detention bubble dropped on me.

No, my first reaction wasn't WTF or OMG... It was more like, "Huh?" (So sue me, it was 3am.) Neat buff bar btw, it reports "Affect by self only, and immobilized." Not sure whether that's always the case or if it's a new quality-of-life tweak. And I -love- the buff timers. I can see it being super useful in unstoppable's case. Does it show on the team as well, I wonder? That'll make bubbling and so on much simpler.

Anyhow, I was wrapped in bemusement. Half hp, in a detention bubble, what would you do but aid self? I was grinning as longbow mobs tried to shoot me and I just sat around aid selfing twice to heal myself. (That's the problem with a single-target attack focused set, and having a self-buff, you narrow in on yourself and forget to see the big picture.)

I forgot to ask the very good question of "Where the heck did the detention bubble come from?"

Turns out either me or the pet had aggro'ed the second spawn with the end boss. Who promptly pwn'ed Frosty, and then started to nail me with not-so-hard hitting attacks (comparatively) but a LOT of them, including well-timed force bolts. Which, of course, not being acrobatics-enabled, kept me juggled in the air unable to aid self or even eat a respite. And I promptly dropped dead.

Grr. Ok, careless. Not seeing an enemy = always gets you dead on a dom. Miffed at dying on villainous, but nevermind, return for revenge...This time, I -know- he's there.

As I load in, the sound begins to loop. The zoning screen doesn't change into the mission map loading screen. Uh oh. Sure enough, CRASH.

Grr. Nevermind, this is a Test server, bound to happen now and then. Start up Test again, watch the updater recheck 2.2 gig of files for a min or two, and try to zone into the mission again. Yep, you guessed it...CRASH.

Grr. Try a second time. CRASH. Grrr. Third time? CRASH.

Ok, the timed mission is screwed. Nevermind. I can't take a newspaper mission to see Mayhem missions, cos I still have an undone one in Nerva. And I refuse to go over there and clear it cos I'm lazy. I'll keep that as an upcoming feature for the real thing on Live.

Let's go test out doms in pvp and see Recluse's Victory!

Jump into the zone (nice place leading to it, imo) and...yep, CRASH.

*mutter grumble* Restart. Luckily, once I log in, it decides to switch zones and start loading the Recluse's Victory map. Zip in. Prepare myself mentally. I'm going to be swarmed by heroes. It's ok. It's like that. Human nature and all. Don't freak out if you get ganged by 10 on 1, cos the current levels dictate it as such...

Quite surprised to see there was an underground bunker safe zone where we could read about all the features of the zone and so on. You click on a blue portal remniscient of a SG base portal to get out into the fight. And the area outside is wisely dotted with sentry drones.

Because there were probably a hundred heroes out there, to our thirty or so villains.

This made it exceedingly difficult to test the dominator changes in pvp to any usable extent. (Anyone care to go a few rounds in the arena with me?) First, I had to wait until some stray heroes got to the edges and 'alone'-ish. And try to hit them with energy blasts. Seeing as most heroes who dare to go to the edges are either phase-shifted, high defence, or scrappers or all three, I didn't manage to hit enough to really see domination build. I got to about half bar quite quickly once though.

Those selfsame bored scrappers were, of course, delighted to try and poke many spines through the dominator chewtoy. Which necessitated me backing away into the safe zone and Arachnos drones to aid self up, not exactly dom building conditions. (Seriously thinking of getting tp. I need a quick way to get out of bad places, like being immob'ed by a spines scrapper, and tp would be fabulous at doing so.)

There were lots of tp foe out cases, and I got hit once by it. Usually, I'm smart enough to stay out of range. Managed to survive this one through other villains distracting, giving me enough time to break free from the immob, make a dash to the drones and aid self up. That is, not to say that I didn't get killed by scrappers. I think two managed to get me. Definitely one did.

I did however manage to get a kill in on the one who killed me. He was tied up with another villain, at low hp, and I ran in and walloped him with total focus. :)

Giving up with the stalemate Alamo situation, I decided to take advantage of my travel power and go sight-seeing. Zip up into the air and fly off, I saw a couple of pillboxes, but there were groups of heroes at them, not exactly lone dominator solo fodder. Found an empty heavy control pad, lurked there surrounded by Arachnos mobs for a bit, heavy didn't respawn, grew bored, moved on.

And then it started. Lagged in the air. Stopped moving totally. Map server disconnect. Kicked off server.

Reconnect, reload at the start of the zone, see that everyone has also lost connection, zip over to pillbox to find it surrounded by firebase-like orange turrets (nasty!) and generally not something one wants to solo. Then the heroes started to log in, and I flew off...

To lag in the air. Stop moving totally. Yep, map server disconnect. Kicked. Repeat. Relog.

Fly around for five seconds...to lag in the air...stop mov...you get the idea...

I endured about 4-5 mapservers before I finally gave it up as a bad idea. My overall first impression is: pretty neat, some cool features that I can't wait to try, balance issues will have to be tested and tweaked later, because LAG and MAPSERVER DISCONNECTS and CRASHES and overally STABILITY needs to be fixed first.

They better be improving it before it hits Live, because I'm so out of CoX for the first week or two if the place keeps crashing as much as it's doing on Test. No wonder they hauled it back to try and fix some show-stopping bugs. Mucho unstabilo.