City Of Heroes / Villians

Get This Party Started

soabirw — Thu, 25 May 2006 20:24:07 +0000

Need to get this going. E-mail me at soabirw@no-homers.org to get an account setup and all that. Alternatively, go here to register. I will adjust your permissions as they come in.

No City of Heroes Love

soabirw — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 20:10:47 +0000

Site is still very dead I see. I was on a big kick when starting up my normal blog, but lost wind when I setup this. I’ll try and work on it more and maybe even play some more. Right now my exhausted evenings are spent with the splended Aeon summon fests of Final Fantasy X. Perty.

Feel free to pick up my slack. Add links, make bull shit posts, etc.

Name Legend

soabirw — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 04:11:59 +0000

Created a Name Legend as you can see on the right. Figure info that is always useful can go there instead of posts that will eventually be pushed off into oblivion. Contributors, feel free to do similar pages.

I have arrived!

hot — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:39:15 +0000

Just a note to all of those who have been giving me a hard time about the website (Soa!) I just wanted to let you know that I have officially begun to add content. . .watch out world, here it comes!

First “Hami” Raid

soabirw — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 16:32:30 +0000

Did my very first Hamidon raid last night. That was very impressive. The leadership and organization was just astounding. I’ve done a lot of big MMO events in various games and I know it’s a real bitch to get everybody to co-operate. Everybody thinks they are the real Pro. We had probably over 50 players there and only one was the “targetter”, everybody else added him to their friends list and then assisted on him. This sounded like it was common procedure, but what amazed me is how the leaders manage to get 50+ people to assist somebody when I can’t convince a group of 5 to assist the God damn tank. All I get is, “Fuck that, let’s just blast’em!”.

Anyhoo, it was a blast. Sick came with, so I had somebody to rant to when the occasional jack ass decided to do his own thing or people just got bored and spammed broadcast with the most inane and mind numbing chatter. Always a pleasure hanging with Sick.

Came away with a Heal and Endurance Reduction HO and 400k in experience debt. But a few of us did some AV runs and I was completely out of debt in an hour or so. All in all a great night. Made me stop regretting and hating Soamend, even if just for a day.

Event Calendar

soabirw — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 17:03:33 +0000

This Hami raid got me thinking of an event calendar. Tried setting up a Google Calendar since I love mine so much, but turns out they don’t have a way to publicily link to it. So right now the options for viewing our event calendar is to use an external app like Sunbird, Firefox (with an extension), or Thunderbird (with an extension). Or anything else that supports our XML or iCal feeds. At some point I may write my own web interface for the XML feed. If anybody has any better suggestions feel free to let me know. If you would like an event added to the calendar just shoot an e-mail off to coh.events@gmail.com. I’ll give any SG member access to add/modify that wants it as well.

Recluse’s Pad

soabirw — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 16:12:42 +0000

No, I’m not talking about my house. A few SGers and Coalition members his the new Recluse alternate dimension last night. I hadn’t done any PvP in CoH until last night. I have loved PvP in every other MMO or any game really. But for CoH it just never appealed to me for some reason. Maybe because I’m always a squishy Empathy Defender or Controller of some sort. But it was a blast. As expected the Heroes spanked the Villians. But that’s to be expected when you have 20-30 year olds fighting 12-14 year olds.

Hopefully the other members will post comments on their good time havings.

CoV Mayhem Missions

hot — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 16:24:47 +0000

The alternative to the dead boring rob bank missions given by contacts after completing 3 newspaper tasks have arrived.

The mayhem missions are a kick to play but require some serious thought to complete. In these missions you are taken to an alternative zone (Kings Row, Atlas Park, etc) to rob a bank. You have to fight your way to the bank, through the bank and into the vault. Then once you have gotten the loot you have to find the hero who has come to stop you and take them out.

The second anyone from your team enters the mission the timer starts. . .nothin like a little pressure to make it interesting! The good news is that you can earn time bonuses for killing cops, parking meters, mailboxes, bus stops, cars, etc. They are a lot of fun but very difficult to complete. However, the developers have decided to reward the victorious with a temporary power if the mission is completed.

Looking forward to doing more of these, soon I have a feeling we will get these down to a science and no more failures. . . .

A Few Words on Masterminds

hot — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 16:59:43 +0000

One of the new changes from I7 is the ability to set your minions to “bodyguard” mode. To set your minions to bodyguard mode you only have to change the setting for your minions to defensive. This comes in very handy for several reasons:

1. When you take damage it is now shared by your minions - You take 2 parts and each of your minions take 1 part.

2. It keeps your minions fairly close for heals, buffs, etc.

However, as Soa pointed out yesterday if you are in the heat of battle and not taking any damage your minions are just standing around looking stupid! In order for your minions to deal any damage either you or one of your minions must be attacked.

The good news is that you can set your minions to different settings by type, so if all of your first tier minions are set to bodyguard then you can set your 2nd tier minions to attack and so on.

The biggest frustration that I have with aggressive minions is that they tend to run all over the place and die way more often. If you try to call them back for heals then they tend to bring the baddies with them so often you spend more time creating new minions and trying to equip them while fending off baddies from all directions.

I have had great times with the defensive “bodyguard” mode when playing solo because either you are being attacked or your minions are so they are killing off baddies right and left but still close enough for heals.

Let me know what your experiences are with this new setting. . .

Arch-Villians

soabirw — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 18:37:26 +0000

I can’t remember if we fought two or three Arch-Villians last night. It’s hard to remember because we fought each one a dozen or so times. With a full, well balanced, group of 8 we couldn’t even put a dent in the first one. Thirty minutes and a lot of debt later he was still at full health. We normally play on Invulnerable, so we set the mission to Heroic and tried again. Still no good. We had to resort to musical toons with a web of side kicking. Eventually we managed to find a group that eventually managed to kill him. Not really a realistic solution for most groups and since I had to log my 33 instead of focusing on getting my 49.8 to 50, I wasn’t too happy about it.

Next Arch-Villian was Inferno. We only has a group of 6 this time, but it was still on Herioc and the mission was old, so the Arch-Villian was only level 48. Once again, after over 30 minutes of beating on him, he wasn’t even sweating. We just had to give this one up while my toon was a RCH (red cunt hair) from leveling.

I guess the only way to make progress now is to just farm existing missions? I sent a petition about it and the response was:

“With the release of Issue 7, Arch Villains/Heroes and Giant Monsters have been adjusted and now ignore threat level damage multipliers for different Archetypes. They have also had their health and regeneration rates increased, as well as the damage they deal.”

Which is kind of a “no shit”. We were already well aware of the changes, point of the petition was to point out they merely went to the other extreme. I can see that they didn’t want people to be able to solo an AV, sure. But this is balancing with a sledge hammer. And frankly, I don’t see the harm in even a two or three man group taking one out. One of the best things about City of Heroes is that it is actually possible to get to 50 with just a buddy. Not required a perfect full group at all times like other MMOs.

If that’s the direction the game is going to go it will make me very sad. Once again the games have to appeal to the “hardcore” crowd. The game isn’t hard enough for those who dedicate 40+ hours a week to it, so the casual players now must suffer. I would really rather not have to quit CoH or MMOs in general, so I sure hope they realize this is a mistake.