Villainish Drift

It’s the same old blog, but the Twinlet wooed me over with this nifty layout and gushing about the improved backend of Wordpress. So after lusting over the layout and the fact that it has a purple skin (well, more of a fuscha, but the capability to change that) I broke down and said “why not flip it over”. Comments, as they were, are lost in conversion, but that’s alright.

Here we are with the shiny new layout, new rotators, more rotators to follow. It was also pointed out that the last entry was in September of last year. Oops.

After running this gem complete from start to finish, I have to say that it is a lot of fun. Five missions, most with longish maps, and all Rikti to fight through. This was mostly a PuG, but I’ve played with a couple of the teammates before on other alts, so there was a good chance that this wouldn’t suck. and it didn’t, even with one teammate logging in and out for a bit due to power outages, and another dropping after the second mission due to time constraints. From start to finish, it took almost 3 hours to complete.

There weren’t any total wipes, but deaths here and there. Rae was the alt of choice for this beast, and oddly enough the only villain on a team of heroes. It was fun, the group consisting of one tank, one scrapper, one blaster, Mind/FF ‘troller, rad/rad ‘fender, Emp ‘fender, and the lone dom. There was a kin ‘fender, but he was the one who left. And on the base difficulty we were zipping straight through.

I can definitely see where Emps are going to be popular for this as the Rikti now mez frequently and hard. Both Stormy and Rae were being chain mezzed right and left, and this was through the mez/psi IO that has mez protect /and/ 20% duration reducer. Carrying a tray of break frees is now a must for the Rikti content.

All I need to do is run Frost through the initial tutorial arc to unlock merits and then respec her and she should be good to go for this beastie. Same with Radi.

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I spent last night fooling around on CoH and I10, lagginess and all. Storm was the guinea pig, participating in the RWZ zone raid. I finally found where the vents to get bombs are, managed to click a bomb and start on that badge. The nice thing is that the clicking of the bomb counts for team credit. The bad?? The timer is set to once per half hour that anyone on the team can click. And oh, you need 25 bombs for the badge.

The good news is that the zone invasions go by fairly quickly. Two of the three badges for that progress fairly quickly if you have someone who can do lots of AoE DoT. 100 Rikti and 10 EB’s. You seem to get kill credit on the Rikti if you hit them, and as for the EBs? I think they follow the 10% damage for credit rule. I know I didn’t kill any soloing, but the badge progress bar moved, and the next thing I knew I had the badge. The bombs are another story entirely, and will take time to complete.

The Lady Grey Task Force? Lots of fun, especially with the new mapsets.If you have a bad PuG, I can see how this will draw on and on and on. But with a more cohesive team? Two hours on the high end of time.

The RWZ raids seem to be the best way to get Vanguard Merits as they drop with all the Rikti killed on the ship. The bad thing is that you need over 1000 merits for a complete costume and 500 for the “salvage bag”. This isn’t includinf the temp powers that can be gained from merits.

Next up is starting the badgering process on Rae. I dont know the spawn points for the Rogue Isles yet, this will be a learning experience until I do.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about anything ingame.

To summarize – I9 and inventions is out, and it’s slow going on getting those badges on Stormy. I have no clue how many of them I want to get on Rae. I guess work on one of them one at a time, and see how it goes.

Stormy’s one badge away from 400. I mused ingame last night to a friend that I can remember when getting 200 badges was a stretch back before Trailblazer was introduced ingame. Oh, the memories.

Now that things have settled down a bit I will try to update more on this side as well

It’s official. I hate PvP zones to the point where I now refuse to go into em except to collect badges that I need on two alts.

After having the worst experience in Recluse’s Victory, I’m through with PvP zones except for grinding the troll. And even then, I’m not so sure.

The worst experience? Being click stealed while working on badges and being told I was exploiting the game when I said to leave me alone cause I was badge hunting. Um… okay. While the same group that click stole from me was ganking someone else who they thought was a threat to them. Mind you, I’m sure they were doing the same exact thing I was. But it gets better. While I was logging Rae out to switch toons and pull Stormy out of RV, they had a tank buddy gank her. It so happened that where I parked Stormy said tank buddy had moved to. Moved her to the top of the tram and was promptly ganked by one of the asshat stalkers who started this entire mess.

So much for a new zone that might be better than the trash talk that takes place in Siren’s. RV is meaner by far and nastier by spades.

Well, so much for getting Frost from 40-45 post haste. I7 is being patched to Live as I’m writing this. First off, everyone that would likely be playing their 40+ alts will be working on their 40+ villains, myself included. There’re badges to be had on both sides in troves, which means more quality time spent with Stormy badgering, a patron arc to be worked through with Rae *shudder* as well as wading her through EB/AV hell for the 40-50 accomplishment badges. And a severe case of perma-debt with Rae to avoid outlevelling same.

Meanwhile Frosty will be stuck at 40 for the near forseeable future. Trick is on hold until further notice, mostly so I can make a build sheet for her and get advice from the one 50 Trick Arrow DeOffender I know ingame, who, after seeing his do insane things, inspired me to roll one. Oh, and there is Trick Arrow love in I7 too.

Let the insanity begin.

Lowbies have come and gone, highbies have seen some game time, and Hami Raids have been the most frequent in ages. Of course, all of my screenies are at home and me at work, so they’re put off for the time being. (Add to the mix a house move this month, and they’re really on the backburner for a while)

Stormy: She’s added to her collection of Hami-O’s recently due to the increased frequency of raids, a couple in the past couple weeks. The one on Friday, which was an experiment failed and spawned Yellow Death. Though I’m now tempted to get her the Warburg nukes because they looked cool raining down on the purple Jello. Okay, she needs to do em eventually for the badge *ahem* as well as the time badges in both Bloody Bay and Warburg and kill badges in Siren’s Call.

I hate Siren’s Call. That seems to be where the most competitive PvP happens. I’ve been ganked in both BB and Warburg, but if you’re on the move in the latter two zones, you’re safe.

Rae: Rae’s been a busy little lass this weekend. She’s been up late and spending the wee hours of the night chewing through Longbow. Seriously. Picking the “Defeat all Longbow in base” mission in Warburg set to the middle difficulty setting can be churned through in 8-10 minutes. Completing 4 of those missions netted a bar of xp gain. Multiply that by quite a few bars *cough*.

Once I got the missions down to a grind and the ability to call the zone contact, it was a matter of grab next mission and zip along to it. Rinse, lather, repeat. Quite a few times.

It was /fun/ being able to chew through yellow and orange spawns with relative ease while soloing. I don’t think I could have ran through the same missions that quickly with anything other than a MM. A Corruptor, maybe, but definitely a MM. After all Dark’s difficulty is at the middle, and same setting and her and Sarge chew through those missions fairly easily.

But I digress. I’m so sick of looking at Longbow. Those red and white outfits have burned my eyes into oblivion and looking at them any more will make me want to throw things at them.

One thing I noticed though that was kinda interesting on Rae. If you scroll over the xp bar, it says 0/1692900 xp to level and the arbiter says you can gain 0 xp once you train up. This is different from Stormy where her xp bar says 10/10, a token amount for level 50, which can’t be levelled as well. Meaning that the dev’s implemented the 1-50 system into CoV, but it stops at 40 for the time being. Yes, the cap will be raised in the next issue, change whatever bit of code to turn on the xp gain and all the little 40’s will be able to level to 50.

Yes, I was a good little lass and remembered to take a couple screenies of that despite being very tired at the time.

As is their wont, the developers pushed a new patch for CoH/CoV. This coincided with my attempts to put the spiffy new workstation at my desk through its paces, so imagine my surprise when I saw this screen when I went to take ProPaine, my oft-remade fire-themed toon, through his next mission:

So you want me to fight BOSS_NAME of VillainGroup, eh? The VillainGroup turns out to have been Longbow, who aren’t technically villains, depending on how you look at it. No, I don’t know which misnamed boss I defeated. Mind you, it would seem that I got quite lucky; there are reports of getting the “BOSS_NAME bug” and ending up fighting level-41 foes! Yowch.

For the record, by the by, an ATI FireGL V3100 PCI-E is quite an acceptable City of Villains graphics card. It’s not without quirks, however, so if you have anything more gamer-oriented to put into your computer, I recommend that you do so.

I finally broke down and tried to find a suitable second costume for Fury the other day since she’s over 20 and has access to capes, so I figured that she should switch outifts.

Boy was I mistaken when I thought I could find something for her to wear. Sure, I’m pleased that she has the original skirts category grandfathered in, but even with that I couldn’t find a scrap of clothing for her to wear that I was happy with. Not a one.

I’m utterly spoiled by the new outfits in CoV, spoiled by the diversity and the fact that you can come up with something that involves little clothing in certain places and yet looks tastefully done. But unfortunately, on the skirts available in CoV, the belts clip into the skirts. Which means all my girls get pants or bikinis with fishnets and boots. Now if they’d make the capes that start at the waist as an option, I’d be happier.

For those pesky bombs which make no noise (by design mind you ) and the ones that literally blend into the map…

/bind numpad1(or any key of choice. I picked F12 for no real reason.) “targetcustomnext notmypet”

That’s a bind for targetting anything and everything. Just keep hitting the key you bind it to and when it finds the bomb hit “F” to follow.

Need to try the list of commands “/target_custom_next” will give.