[spoiler]Most missions send you into a building which is a spawned off separate part of the game which only you (and your team) can enter. But there are a few missions that are done out in the open where everyone online in the scene can interact. E.g., the delivery of an item across town while a gang is trying to hunt you down to stop you. As a solo player, being chased by a gang is very dangerous because you can’t take your time to pick them off one by one – they’re all homing in on you at once. And no matter how far you run, they stay chasing you (unlike the random encounter thugs which stop chasing you when you leave their area).
And so, I found that by using super speed, I can out run them and lead them to the local train stop, at which many other hero/players are hanging out. These players have no problems jumping in and taking out the gang that’s chasing you.[/spoiler]
Haven’t had one of those missions yet Moriah. Sounds like fun. Blue Justice made it up to 10 tonight, we had a pretty good team going for a while, until someone attacked those level 14 Lost. That hurt.
So are Frank and Max very tall, or are Justice and Ryle very short?
Also, I was wondering just how much variety the costumes can have. Can you do historical-type outfits, like feudal Japanese or early industrial worker or ancient Greek etc?
Yeah, that sucked. It was my first death in several play sessions. We spent about an hour in Perez Park and saw those Lost something like 5 times, each time backing off. Then we took on a group of Vahzilok next to them, and someone either accidentally or intentionally activated the Lost. Shortly thereafter, everyone except Max Carnage was dead dead dead.
It was a good group, though – Max Carnage, Justice Blues, **Ryle Dup ** and I had Super-Collider, plus we picked up some random folks. Although one of them may have been an idiot.
**Gen. Specific ** was a hoot, though – most in-character dialogue I have yet seen in CoH.
I am really enjoying playing a defender – and next time we start going down, things will be a little bit different, since I picked up Mutation. You go down, then I Mutate you and you come back with full health, full end and a boost. Of course, you only have a short while before the radiation sickness kicks in and you get stunned, so make the most of it.
I’d like to say my brute strength and strategery helped me survive that nasty little encounter with the Lost…but actually it was my powerful leg muscles that helped me run screaming like a girl into the woods when my health dipped to red.
I hate dying just feet away from the bad guys when I’ve got a load of rezes at my disposal. That’s just mean.
Well Max is over 7 ft, and Frank is probably close to 6 ft. Ryle and Blues are no doubt around 5 ft or under.
There are tons of costume options but not a lot of period pieces. You do have some knightly armor styles and some Asian attire. But with some creative combinations and coloring, you can create some incredible simulations. But no capes or long robes! What’s up with that?
In retrospect, what I should have done was to run for it and then start teleporting folks out. I’m not used to Teleport Friend as a combat skill, though. I think I want a recharge reduction on it if I’m going to use it like that, though – it takes about 3 seconds to recharge, which is long enough for someone to fold like a cheap suit when up against that kind of opposition.
It was really too bad we got slaughtered – we had been wading through the lesser enemies with no trouble at all. Even the large packs with a couple of bosses went down before our might. It’s really fun having a balanced team.
IIRC, we had
2 defenders – my rad/rad (Super-Collider) and a ff/mental (Claudius)
1 controller – ice/? (don’t recall who…)
3 tankers (Justice Blues, **Max Carnage ** and The Diciplinarian (sic)
1 scrapper – katana (Stilleto)
2 blasters – **Ryle Dup ** and Gen. Specific
Which makes for a lot of fun. Freeze all of the bad guys, FF on anything big, Irradiate to drop defenses, the tanks wade in and the blasters unload. I run around healing a lot. Crazy busy and the xp flows like water. I started about 9.6 and made 10.5 in 2 hours.
Tried to get on last night but Virtue was slammed. Wound up on Freedom instead.
I’m amazed at how much variety they are able to get out of what is actually a very limited set of mission types. It’s all in the plotting and the presentation I suppose.
I did my first timed mission last night. I had to go to a warehouse in Skulls territory that had been taken over by Clockworks. I was supposed to clear out the Clockworks before the Skulls found out and started a turf war. The warehouse was full of Clockworks and Skulls who were fighting each other.
Also, has anyone gotten an “it’s personal” mission yet? At the end of another Clockwork mission I found a diary from the Clockwork King which said that he was after my character personally because it reminded him of the hero who first defeated him. My contact even said something like I should be careful because the Clockwork King obviously had it in for me. Nice way to “personalize” the game.
And I am still stunned at how well the game is running given that it is only a week after the official launch. Lag is non-existant. The only times I’ve had my connection drop is when I go afk for too long (and I suspect that may be deliberate). I haven’t seen a single hotfix or patch download since installation either. How the heck did these people pull it off?
The only complaint I continue to have is that it is too easy to run into something you can’t handle. Again last night I was just running across town when I apparently got too close to a group of high-level Hellions. I was halfway to red before I even realized I was being attacked and went from full health to the hospital in about 10 seconds. Really annoying.
I’ve got hover but it’s really too slow to be useful except for getting over walls too high to jump. (It says it gives a defensive bonus but it also seems to screw up my to-hit chance as well.) Hopefully once I get flight I can avoid most of those unneccessary fights.
Oh yeah, my LOL moment from last night. Everyone has seen all the building signs and advertisements, right? Last night I happened to notice a sign for what was apparently a restaurant called… City of Gyros.
After all this talk of alternate characters, I finally decided to try something different and made the Theory, a technological tanker with invulnerabilty and super strength. A lot of fun! Very different play experience than my scrapper.
On my first mission, I was given the run-around. My contact (originator of a mission) said take something to person so-and-so. I got to that person and she said, oh wait, there was a mix-up, go over there. I went over there, killed a bunch of clockworks (evil robot gang), but after arresting (i.e. killing) them the clue (next mission hint) said sorry nothing here go to this other place. Finally, I womped a bunch more clockworks and finally the mission was over. It was a lot of fun, and I went from 2 level to just short of 4th level.
I’m seeing more characters running around with adjectives in front of their names lately (i.e The Incredible…The Mighty…). You know, in the small print like “The” is, and not part of the actual character name. How does one warrant an adjective?
During character creation, when you type in your character’s name, there is a small box to the left. It’s a drop down box, you can select “the” at this time.
I figured this out about 10 characters later and now have The Scarlet Siren!
As the in-game censor would say, $!%@!, this game is fun. Only 2 days and it’s easily the best MMOG I’ve seen. I played until 2am last night, about 90 minutes past my “you’re going to be very tired at work tomorrow” deadline.
I created a new Blaster character last night and advanced her to 6th level. I even got sidekicked so I fought at 13th level for a while.
It seems that, as long as the team members remember their roles, nearly any team can be pretty effective. I fought in a team of 3 Blasters/2 Defenders, and a team of 2 Blast/2 Defend/2 Control, and neither one had any real problems (except for the one time when I waded into a crowd of corpse lieutenants and got my arse handed to me. I forgot my role, ya see, which is “Stay back and shoot”.)
Assuming I don’t get caught up in creating and naming a new hero, I should be on as Steppin’ Razor tonight from about 8pm-12 midnight. He’s only lvl 5 right now, so someone might ned to sidekick me. I’ll look you all up when I get online!
Someone mentioned Hover. Depending on what class you play, it’s useful in one other way: Getting you out of the fight and making you harder to hit. My Blaster can’t take a punch, but he can Hover and rain death upon his foes while they try desperately to shoot him or run around under him looking frantic. Though I suspect it’s not very useful if you’re a melee kinda character.
It’s a neat way for low-level characters to go adventuring with their friends, or any high level characters they join with. The Mentor must be level 10 or higher, and invites you to be his sidekick, which means, as long as neither one of you severs the relationship, you will fight as if you were one level less than your Mentor. (I think the rule book might say 1-3, or 1-4 levels lower than the Mentor, but 've seen contradictory info.)
The effect is stopped if you get more than 200 feet away from your Mentor. The game will prompt you with a message like “I’m getting too far away from my mentor!”. The actual Mentor/Sidekick duo link will last until one of you breaks it, even after logging out, or days or weeks later. The Mentor can have only 1 Sidekick at a time, and vice versa.
So while my level-4 Blaster First Daughter was cleaning out Fifth Column bases with level 12-15 heroes, her HP was temporarily boosted to 255, and her attacks were doing big damage to high level foes. Experience accrues pretty normally, I progresses towrds level 5 and 6 at about the same rate I would in any other group.
This was much discussed on the CoH forums during development. The dev team said that they just couldn’t get capes and such to look good (flowing in the wind and such). They made the decision to release without capes, rather than delay release by months while they figured out how to animate flowing cloth well. I’m sure they’re working hard on it for an expansion.
As for that intense battle in Perez Park last night… I didn’t know CoH could bring my Athlon 3200 to it’s knees with intense graphics, but it did… As soon as the next generation of vid cards comes out, I’ve got to replace my GeForce 4 Ti 4200.
I think my level 8 scrapper was a little out of his league with all the big guns in the park. I dunno who opened up on those last baddies that wiped us out, but Max Carnage is so big and easy to spot that I got in the habit of just wading in after him, and when I saw him go in, I went in hell bent for leather. Learned some harsh lessons about level 14 monsters lol.
I’ve gotten Stilleto up to level 9 now. I’m praying for thicker skin and a cooler head in future action of that calibre.
Blue Justice made it up to 10 tonight, we had a pretty good team going for a while, until someone attacked those level 14 Lost. That hurt.
Crazy busy and the xp flows like water. I started about 9.6 and made 10.5 in 2 hours.