Category: City of Heroes/Villains

Did you see the City of Villains trailer back in the day? See it again for the first time, in l33t. Because you know this is how half the people on your server would be playing that scenario. (Check the DM of the Rings link to the right for how D&D players would do Lord of the Rings.)

How about a different take on it entirely? In Korea, it is “City of Hero.” Just the one? I don’t know any Korean; maybe they pluralize like in Japanese. Anyway, here is the City of Hero promo video (labeled CoV for some reason). WISDOM appears very infrequently in the English-language version, but I imagine they show up a lot in City of Hero. Note that the American hero spends the entire fight immobilized and helpless while Korean mages and martial artists destroy undead by the score. Does the target audience feel pandered to?

: Zubon

Dark side, new healer. Having seen the villainous versions of heroes sprouting, I made my own. A Corruptor, I thought, could be the best of all possible things. You get the support that I love from Defenders but the damage that Frosta brought me. As it turns out, all their numbers are fairly lousy, but it sounds nice in the abstract.

De-Frosta. Give her Thermal Radiation so that she has fire. Frosta was blue and white, so we want red and black here, and black gives us Dark Blast. This will be a different sort of healer, one with a little more kick, but with the extra damage prevention that Dark Blast provides. On the whole, a useful but not terribly fun character.

Continue reading Character Contemplations 4: De-Frosta (Dark Blast/Thermal Radiation Corruptor)

City of Heroes Issue 11 will have over 70 new badges. I have already apologized to my wife, who will miss me.

You can set the name of any badge as your title. Now you can proclaim to all that you are Anemic or Inhibited. Are you a Lemming? Have a fondness for Singled Out or Missionary? (“Temerarious” means “rashly daring.” Way to pull out the thesaurus, guys.)

: Zubon

Most of us have had bad experiences with pickup groups. My supergroup’s unintentional habit is giving pickup groupmates really terrifying (but rewarding) experiences.

We got our first level-capped characters back before ED, before aggro and target caps. Back then, you herded an entire map and blew it up at once. We knew we were doing it right when everyone simultaneously got graphics error pop-ups because the game could not register that many explosions. We still do this to the extent that we can, fighting as much of the map as possible at once. It saves us the bother of running around, and we win consistently.

When you join our group, we don’t say much. We are all on Teamspeak. We might give you a bit of warning, but we don’t really think about it. We’re used to this. You will be told “stay here,” and off runs someone to pull.

And then someone else. And maybe another. And then someone snipes from the group. And by “pull,” we mean “pull an entire group,” not pull one target. Amidst the ghostly silence, people come bouncing back, followed by an angry horde of werewolves, robots, and fascist vampires. They are following our pullers, so if you peek your head around that corner, they are all heading straight at your face, shooting plasma bolts. Welcome to the team!

: Zubon

We have been playing on Justice lately, because one of our guildmates on Pinnacle has level-capped all his hero slots. Justice is our secondary server, where we try new things or just need the extra slots.

We have visited Justice for evenings in the past, and our current group has survivors from previous expeditions. We spent a week messing with a batch of Kinetics and Radiation Defenders and Controllers, giving us my Controller and Bert’s Defender (both Radiation). Jon’s dragon comes from Fiery Aura Tanker day. We have done several runs with AoE melee characters, and Ham has kept his Scrapper going for this. Adam is the odd man out, focusing on his Warshade, for the simple reason that he had not played one before.

The team works well. We have two sets of rad debuff toggles, which always hit so it does not matter that we are lagging on levels. Jon insists that he is not a Tanker, because fire tanks are squishy, but he does a good enough job of keeping enemies grouped up and off us. Adam and Ham lead the rain of AE damage, with the rest of us contributing as we can. Everyone has some sort of self heal, Bert and I can AE heal, and we have three rezes for the inevitable faceplants.

One fun hobby is multi-herding. Enter the mission and find a good corner, one where the enemies will pile up if they follow you. Send the tank to taunt enemies far down the hall, aggroing everything he can on the way back. Send each of the rads down branching corridors, using the debuff toggles to aggro more chains of enemies. Get around that corner quickly. We now have three times the aggro cap worth of enemies coming for us. That keeps us occupied for a couple of minutes, after which we can finish clearing the map. This scares the heck out of anyone who is not used to teaming with us.

: Zubon