Week in Review

Tabletop
Played a little Spirit of the Century this last weekend. It wasn’t the session I’d dreamed up for the game I had to abort last week, since that would have been totally inappropriate for the group we’d assembled, but it was still fun. We had…
Mongols
Mob Mooks
Mysterious Vanishing Zeppelins
Mushrooms, Giant
Mushrooms, Glowing
A lost civilization of cannibals (sorry, ran out of M’s)
… and a whole lot of fire.
Best of all, the most “turtle-up” player got drawn right into the middle of the story, which I think both startled and pleased him. He habitually makes people who are kind of distant from everyone else he’s working with, and hard to socket in, and with very little work on my part (and thanks to a great idea from Randy) he was right in the middle of the whole story. It was ABOUT him, really, which was cool.
I think the best part was when he rescued the starlet of his favorite Radio program — Esperanza Kittredge — and she threw her arms around his neck and said ‘get me out of here!’
And… see… he has this Aspect about how he loves this radio show…
And he has this OTHER aspect of “No one touches the Master of Shinanju!”
So I held up a Fate point and said “She’s sobbing into your shoulder, and her voice is even more amazing than it is on the radio, but No One Touches the Master of Shinanju…”
And he could either take the Fate point and shove her rudely away, or
let her cling and instead pay ME a Fate point (and it’s not like he had a ton at that point).
Does he comfort his idol, or stick with the hard line, elite attitude?
Bang, baby. 🙂
And he thought about it a bit, and paid me the point, and let her cling to him as he carried them away from the giant burning mushroom on the rope ladder dangling from the escaping zeppelin.
It was cool.
MMO stuff after the cut.
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WoW
So after a month and more off from playing online stuff, I got back on and leveled Grezzk six times in like two weeks.
Y’hear that, CoH? Levels 54 to 60 in two weeks. See, you don’t have to gimp leveling if you have something for people to do when they GET there. ((I kid, because I think they’re actually heading in a directions with CoH that will provide something almost like end game content.))
Anyway, that was two weeks ago. Since then, Grezzk dinged four more times (Y’hear that, Co–oh, nevermind) to 64. In short, Grezzk and Tusker the Super Boar are tearing through the Outlands like a lawnmower through wet tissue paper. Regular missions? Pshaw. “Take along a friend” missions? We have Tusker! Her’s our best friend! Take along two friends? Well, we’ll wait till Lee’s on for that… but still, Tissue Paper!
We also got our riding skill high enough for an elite ground mount, and picked up the white Frost Wolf from the Alterac Valley PvP battleground, which took a little more PvP action to earn the right to and got us to Revered with that faction to boot, which brought with it other nice benefits. So we’re tearing around on a white wolf with a speed just bit faster to fly in CoH. Good stuff.
And lordy, the butt we’re kicking. I’m keeping my eyes on some of the best hunters I know, and working on getting my numbers to pull up into somewhere around their neighborhood when I hit 70. I dunno, but I feel like I’m on track.
Now I just need to find that Firefly non-combat pet…
Aside from Grezzk, I’ve got a PvP-realm paladin I’m playing a little, and Kayti, who’s a lot of fun, but right now, we’re focusing on the orc and the pig.
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CoH
Hang Time (and Hang-time, the tank)
Logged on Hangtime to mess with inventions a bit, but that’s it. Did the Positron TF with Hang-time the tank, Hushman the 2nd, and the Deep Freeze Debutante (Lil’ Noelle). Dinged 3 levels and got flight, plus I’m very close to 16 and Whirling Fists.
I think the best part of the TF was…
1. Well, playing with Hushman/Lee again. I leveled up the original Hangtime with Hushman, and it was great to put those two characters together again, plus Lee’s a hell of a player, natch.
2. After some struggles in the first two missions, we all got on Ventrillo and things got a LOT easier in terms of know what we were doing, and when, and to whom. Dying pretty much stopped (except for one bad mission for HT). Really need to get other folks to download the (free!) vent software for some TF ease and happiness — MAN it makes things easier, and the Push-to-talk functionality means (a) no lag and (b) no one has to hear me swear at the screen as I play. 🙂
3. THEY CHANGED THE TF! There’s an Elite Boss/AV at the end! Awesome!
4. They updated Defense ages ago, but MAN I can’t believe how nice it makes Force Field. Damn that’s a useful set. Damage prevention FTW.
5. Holds. Hush has one in his Psionic set, plus a “Time Out Bubble” for the truly pesky, and DFD has a Ice-based hold as well. It really made things easier.
So we had Crowd Control (Holds, tank), Damage, and Damage Mitigation… what else do you really need? Nuthin’, that’s what. Good run.
Hyperthermian
Got him on for a bit, put some new invention stuff into his armors for the same protection and much better endurance efficiency. dialed his difficulty to 4, which is just about perfect, and tore through a couple missions like tissue paper. I’d been struggling with playing him solo for a bit, and the inventions plus the playstyle shift made him fun fun fun again.
Pummelcite
I play lots of tanks, and they are all fun (not that the first three characters I’ve talked about are tanks — there’s a reason), but none of them, and I mean NONE of them say “TANK!” like Pummelcite. I’ve done some tweaking on his powers with the Invention System, gotten Granite armor dressed out, and the long and short version of it is that Lukacs is flat-out unkillable. With the possible (and I mean only possible, he’s got good protection even there) exception of having 17 psi-wielding high levels attacking him, I just don’t think he can be brought down. Period. The flipside of that is that he can’t fight (or do anything else) very fast when wearing that mush solid stone, but… damn. I mean… DAMN.
(I’ll stop now, cuz Kate has to be sick of hearing me say that.)
Started up the Rikti War Zone with him and Noelle Frost. Good stuff.
Strategist
Started the Riki War Zone content with Strat. It’s like he’s come home to the kind of place he was always meant to be: non-powered people in good body armor, taking on alien invaders in a war zone. Strat just creeps around behind the attacks and takes them out while they’re talking about taking out a gun nest. Ninja-style FTW.
Epitaph
Did his cape mission (finally, 14 levels after it became available), which… I dunno. You can get capes now at level one, so will this mission be removed from the game now? I’m trying to get through missions with him a little at a time, so that get can get to the Rikti War Zone, because it makes a lot of sense for him, but honestly I’m still having a lot of problems working through his missions quickly. Humanform Kheldians try to do all three jobs (Control, Damage, Healing) at once, and as a result they sort of suck at all of them equally.
Also, if I’m being honest, I just don’t enjoy being logged into this guy very much. Too much baggage from the bad ol’ days.
Kethos
Got him on, dialed the setting on missions to 4 instead of 5, and had a lot better luck with him, though it’s not perfect. Despite having two Area Effect endurance-drains, he continues to have fairly notable endurance problems, which I could probably deal with by dialing down the missions a notch, but I don’t want to do that.
Bear Claws
Finished up all the Croatoa content except for the Katie Hannon Task Force.
Markov Chain
Ran an eight-person TF with Slip and got through the last big story arc in the first half of Nerva, which got us both to 30. Still struggling with this character, who tends to run hot and cold — either I’ve got a great system for taking guys down with almost no damage to myself, or I can’t fight my way out of a paper bag — and it’s anyone’s guess which it will be on a given night. Right now, he’s all single-target with (to me) frustratingly slow attacks, and while I can switch to mostly AoEs at level 32, I don’t know if I WANT to, because teaming up with Shadowslip (who can literally Vanish off the bad guys’ aggro meters), the last thing I need is more aggro.
Dolmen
Not that, with HT, Hype, Pummelcite, and Kethos, I need another tank/brute, but I still wouldn’t mind getting Dolmen up to where he could team up with Shadowslip instead of Markov. 😛
Hmm. Maybe Slip and Kethos need to meet, once the server-transfers are online. They’re the same level now…
Aeric
Haven’t played him in a bit. Like the character and the powerset a bunch, but we kind of stalled out on the Faultline content.
Mister Brightside
Haven’t played him in ages, more’s the pity. He’s always on the list, but always seems to lose out to someone else. 🙂
…
In short, I have too many characters.