Week in Review

Marginally frustrating week, in that I keep trying to get some games going, and the combination of everyone’s schedules and the holidays continues to confound my efforts.
Said frustration was countered by a couple fun sessions of CoH, which hasn’t happened in awhile.

Earlier in the week: Ran a couple missions with Pummelcite and Noelle — got sidetracked on doing up ‘fifth slot’ costumes, which we decided to do up as halloween costumes based on other members of the Knights. Noelle did Kessa and Pummelcite did… heh. I’ll post up a picture, soon. 🙂
Logged on Bear Claws and did the Halloween ‘content’, getting enough costume pieces for four or five people.
Ran a couple missions with Ginger in our Halloween costumes (the Hostess Heroes as member of the Freedom Phalanx! I did Manticore and Ginger did a positively inspired Swan. 🙂
Logged in Hang-time (the tank version of Hang Time) and teamed up with the DeepFreeze Debutante (Noelle Frost as an ice/ice blaster). I’ve had Hang-tank floating around on my toons list for a couple months now, but the recent rush of “alt-versions of your old toons” has actually given me a reason to play him some more. I like the Invul/Energy build, and it fits the powers that HT has as a blaster at level 50.
Friday: potential gaming cancelled. Randy and I ordered pizza, caught Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica, and talked game-stuff.
Saturday: Logged on Bear to grab one or two more costume pieces. Logged on Markov Chain to do a little Trick or Treating as well (which, at roughly the same level as Bear, was considerably more of a hassle, but not fatally so), and picked up at least three of everything.
Sunday: Visited my FLGS (Friendly Local Gaming Store) with Kaylee, chatted with Big Daddy, and picked up Settlers of Catan and Bang (plus Dodge City) and eyed Memoir ’44 with longing. Went over to the Consortium (after being totally unable to find two of the three RPGs I wanted to pitch) and played two games of Catan. Unsurprisingly, did not win :). I ended up with pretty much the same result as always: being unwilling to sacrifice access to the more agrarian terrains in favor of heartless mountains, I didn’t have the stone quarries I needed for a strong end game — the result is a strong beginning and middle game, the Longest Road card, and about 70% of the points needed to win… then a stall out. Ahh well: still fun. Also: the NYC people play with Cities & Knights and the “Ships” additions, and it’s very interesting playing WITHOUT them (Resource Cards are replaced in Cities and Knights, so I had no experience with them at all, and the multple islands of the Expanded game really changes the gameplay a lot).
Once home, teamed up Hang-time for a couple hours and got him to level 8 and Bone Smasher.
Two very frustrating things:
1. The rearranged powersets for tanks means you can’t get Taunt before level 10. For me, a dyed-in-the-tights Tank, that’s really frustrating, especially teamed up with blasters.
2. Tanks effectively have no “Archetype” power anymore: Gauntlet no longer does anything at all in the way of group aggro management, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it doesn’t do any kind of special taunting at all, even of your designated target. Invul’s group taunt is a heartbreaking 10 levels away, and I’m not even sure it works as advertised anymore.
Unrelated thing: I know the Halloween event ends tomorrow night, but can you still go and trade in your costume pieces after that deadline? Anyone know?