Author: Ethic

[City of Heroes] Super Day 6 almost didn’t happen and it was my fault. My wife and kids had plans last night and I expected them home about the time I normally start gaming so I just did a little soloing in CoH. The time they were due back came and went.

I decided to give my wife a call on her cell phone and see how they were doing. I make the call but I hear her cell phone ringing upstairs. I go up there and see she forgot her cell phone.

Well, I know where she went and it was not far away so I figured I would drive out to see if everything was ok. I looked everywhere but could not find my car keys. Figuring she grabbed my keys accidentally, I looked for hers. Nowhere to be seen.

Well, I grabbed a spare set of keys (car and house) and took a drive. Thankfully they were there and all was well, they just lost track of time. And she did have both sets of keys with her.

By the time they got home and we got the kids in bed it was almost the time I normally stop playing. I logged in and found Inhibit. IM’d my brother and he said he would log in for a few missions.

We did two missions and my brother had to log out. Inhibit and I were close to level 8 so we just ran around town taking on groups of greens and blues. We both hit 8 and logged out for the night.

Nothing of note happened, just ordinary game play.

[City of Heroes] Five days in a row, something I’ve never done before. I wonder if my family still loves me.

Anyway, I logged in to find my brother and Inhibit ready to go. We hit the streets and talked to our contacts. My contact sent me from Atlas Park out to King’s Row to see another contact. That contact told me to talk to ANOTHER guy in The Hollows. To get there, we had to go back to Atlas Park and then The Hollows. Really, is it necessary to send us to talk to a guy only to have him send us back? Just tell us to go to The Hollows and be done with it.

The Hollows: what can I say about that zone other than it is a total mess. There is probably some backstory to what happened, but basically it appears the the entire middle of the zone collapsed into a giant sinkhole. Our contact in The Hollows sent us to a building on the ENTIRE OPPOSITE SIDE of the zone. Running there was an experience. We decided to split up. I ran around the sinkhole (which was not easy). I managed to avoid drawing aggro from any of the bad guys (twice my level so I would have no chance) and arrived at the door to our mission. My brother was already there and mentioned he was going to go afk for a smoke.

Inhibit somehow got stuck on a ridge and could not move. He filed a petition. My brother came back and I decided to jump up on a window to insure some safety. My brother saw me do that and joined me on the side of the building. But then he got the bright idea to jump to the next window and then the next. I told him to stay off the roof as there may be bad guys. Too late.

Down he comes from the roof followed by six level 14 guys. The run was on. We both managed to escape and I found a safe spot on the top of a garage to wait for Inhibit to get unstuck. Inhibit tells us that the petition is of no use (not sure if he was answered or if he gave up waiting) but he decided to get a bad guy to aggro and kill him. That worked and eventually he joined us back at the door.

The mission went well, other than my brother pulling a large group on us while Inhibit and I were resting. He is too gung-ho sometimes, hehe.

After that mission we had to go to another door, back on the ENTIRE OPPOSITE SIDE of the zone. We split up again, me taking the chicken way around the hole. Somewhere in the middle of the hole my brother said “holy *#$@” (the game cleans up language for us, how nice of them). He said that if we see an all white body to stay away. It killed him in one shot.

We finished up that mission and then I called it a night. I was tired.

At the end of the night, we were all level 7, or very close to it.

Things of note:

1. Being a fire/fire tank has a few drawbacks. One is that I don’t feel like a tank much yet. I’m still pretty squishy, but it is a lot of fun standing in the middle of a group of bad guys doing damage to them all. The other thing is that the flame visuals are getting on my nerves. A few times during the mission I was too close to a wall and the camera got pushed into my flames so I couldn’t see a thing.

2. To get to King’s Row, we took an elevated train. I mean really, superheroes taking a train?

3. Inhibit says the CoH’s customer service makes WoW’s CS team look good.

4. Either there are a lot less people playing than when the game came out or they changed how they instance zones. I used to have to choose from multiple copies of King’s Row, like King’s Row 1, King’s Row 2, etc. Since I have been playing this time I don’t recall ever having to choose like that which is nice because I don’t know how a team would coordinate that. Perhaps it automatically chooses the instance for a team based on the first person to zone. I don’t know.

[City of Heroes] Four days in a row. I didn’t have a good feeling when I logged in last night but I saw my brother was on and in a mission – solo. I asked him if he had seen Inhibit and he said that he was on earlier. So I kind of hung around for a while, not doing too much.

My brother remembered that Inhibit was online but with a new character. He had to try to remember the name. Finally he did and I sent Inhibit a “heya”. “HEYA” comes back and then silence. I add his new character to my friends list and see he is in a mission too. Waited a little while and was starting to think about calling it a night.

My brother says that he is going to log for a while, at the same time Inhibit asks if we are going to group up tonight. My brother decides to stay for a mission or two but he wants to go to bed soon and I felt about the same.

We did four missions in like 45 minutes and then my brother had to logout. Since my brother was a level up on us, Inhibit and I decided to do another mission or two. By the end of that we had all hit level 6.

Things of note:

1. Some guy ran up to me and opened a trade window. 10,000 influence. I said thanks and he said he likes to help “noobs” out. I took note of him being level 11. I assume he has a higher level character somewhere, but what is there to say I didn’t too? Oh well, free influence is free influence.

2. DarkNinja186 came up to me and made a joke about my name (which is actually very much a proper super hero name unlike this guy). He comes back and makes the same joke later. I certainly hope that the other 185 DarkNinjas are funnier than you buddy. But seriously, can’t people put a tiny bit of effort into their character names? And run it through a spell checker next time while you are at it, EvelDistroiyr77.

[City of Heroes] Last night was reroll night. We all logged into the game and started chatting some. My brother (scrapper) did not like the choices he made and wanted to start over since we were still rather low level. Inhibit and I thought that the two of us (controller and defender) did not make a very good duo for the times when my brother was not playing. So we all rerolled.

I now have a fire/fire tanker, my brother went with a ma/regen scrapper and Inhibit has an empathy/radiation defender. So far it seems like a much more solid group.

Still, three nights in a row we all managed to log in. That must be some kind of record.

[City of Heroes] Our static group has completed day two of the grand plan. We spent about 2 hours each night for the last two nights. Day one left us at level 4 and day two left us at level 6. Actually, my brother is level 7 because he did some solo crime fighting before I got online.

Mostly there is no plan during fights as we are still trying to get comfortable with our powers and when to use them. Nobody has died yet but we came close a few times in the Hollows last night when we took on groups of 10 or 12 bad guys at once. Having the defender heals has helped a lot as well as my group heal to fill in the gaps.

Only problem so far is that when I hit level 6 I took the wrong power. I made two templates for my character; one solo and one group. I looked at the solo sheet last night instead of the group sheet. So now I need to change the order of my level 8 and 10 powers to get back on track. I will be back to where I should be by level 10 so it was not too big of a mistake.

One of the largest problems I have had to deal with when playing MMORPGs is that I do not have a lot of free time to play. This causes the people I know and prefer to group with to out-level me pretty soon and then it becomes game over soon after. Truth be told, if I can’t group with them, I’d rather go solo.

When we start a new game it is fun, we play together, everything is great. Two weeks later my brother is double or triple my level and my friends are usually twice my level. Hello solo city.

I have tried, with not much success, to encourage them to make a 2nd character that they would play only when I am online. A static group of sorts. Sounds good at first but before I know it everyone is doing a quest that takes 3 hours and they are 30 minutes into it. Sorry bro, maybe we can hook up tomorrow night.

Well, last night I tried this once again, this time in City of Heroes. Inhibit is cool about it as he solos most of the time anyway so it is easy to leave a mission. He rolled up a second character to participate in this project.

My brother is attempting to toss a wrench into the works by professing a need to only play one character. He figures that he will just get exemplared down to one of us so we can still do this. I figure he will be 30 minutes into a 3 hour task force mission soon enough. If not that, the exemplar process may not work as we think it will.

So, I am expecting this to be just a duo team most of the time with just me and Inhibit. If so, I will be quite happy as we have been doing this over the last week and it was going well. If my brother is available, we will add him in somehow. If nobody else is on, I will play my solo character.

I hope it lasts for a while as last night’s session was a lot of fun.

Our group consists of an empathy/dark defender (Inhibit’s character), a dark/dark scrapper (my brother’s character) and an illusion/kenetics controller (mine). We’ll see how it goes.