I don't know what it is about self-imposed episodic content rationing that seems to work for me, but work it does. Regular readers will know about the Tuesday N00b Club, which basically started out as an attempt to bring some kind of structure to my Guild Wars gaming. Instead of just going mental and ploughing into the game five-plus hours a night, every night until I break something, why not ration it out a bit? This makes my Tuesday nights a thing to look forward to - in some ways a bit like going to an evening class, or a regular drink with friends at the pub.
It also makes life a lot easier in the ever vexing struggle to keep up with friends, progress and levels-wise. It takes a bit of premeditation and self-discipline - pacts and such, which can often run counter to our natural urges as gamers, but on the whole, I've found it to be well worth the effort. We'll be cracking on with Eye of the North soon enough, but more on that tomorrow.
Anyway, as a result, I've started to look at my MMOs a little differently, and often find myself evaluating them for 'N00b Club' suitability, and Cit of Villains, with it's 'Strike Forces' seems a decent candidate too. To be fair, CoV is mostly about a kind of mission-based level-grind, conducted in amiable companionship, and that's okay.
The Strike Forces (CoH: 'Task Forces') however, are a bit different, in that they consist of a story-driven chain of several missions, with perhaps greater, almost raid-like, challenges toward the end of the 'Episode'. For the duration of the endeavor, you must stay in the same group, the Strike Force, although can log out and in again without breaking the group, allowing for multiple sessions at it. There are about five of these, I think, and they have set minimum levels at which you can take part. These SF sets don't come with anywhere near the frequency of the GW Missions, and I expect there will be quite a bit of more usual grinding in between.
Still, our little Supergroup has all passed L15 now, making us eligible for the first one; The Beast Beneath the Mountain, handed out by Virgil Tarikoss, in Cap Au Diable.
Spoiler Warning, etc!
Virgil Tarikoss is a man with ambitions. This is true of most in The Rogue Isles, but he also has a plan, but needs a bit of muscle to get the more physical aspects of it done. Which is where we come in. If we help him, he promises to share untold power with us...
"If you have sought me out, then you must be ambitious. If you have found me, you must be wicked. These aspects combined make you perfect for the tasks I can place before you."
Sounds like us!
Our gang of reprehensible reprobates variously bounced and teleported to the chap and got started, being given the designation 'Strike Force Cerberus' for the duration of the effort. The team consists of a Dark/Dark Stalker (Myself), a Fire/Fire Brute, an Ice/Kinetic Corruptor and a Dark/Dark Corruptor. (Well, as far as I could tell anyway...so much stuff going off at once in close proximity, its hard to tell who just did what sometimes!)
The Stalker is a stealth class, with backstabs and an emphasis on DPS. The Brute is a more frontline kind of tank; better with defense than I am, but still capable of DPS. Both the Corruptors are sort of combined Artillery and Healer classes, capable of powerful long range strikes, some crowd control and some quite decent healing too.
Even now, I still get all anxious about Class Composition in groups - shouldn't we have a Dominator too? (Debuffs/Crowd Control/etc), don't we need a Mastermind? (The pet class in CoV). Its mostly needless worry however, as there is generally so much overlap with the traditional roles, that pretty much any group of any Archetypes can do okay. As was pointed out to me, in CoV its not Tank, Healer, Crowd Control, etc. No, its DPS that can hide, DPS that can take a bit of a beating, DPS that is squishy but can do heals, DPS that can also debuff, and so on. Refreshing, but it'll take a bit of getting used to, frankly.
All set, off we went. There are six missions in the set, and the first, is a question of proving our loyalty, and commitment to Evil, to Virgil. This involves us crashing a Legacy Chain therapy meeting/ritual meet-n-greet, busting the usual number of heads (All Of Them), and stealing their homework. Fairly run of the mill stuff to be honest, and not very different to any number of similar one-off missions for that area and level. Conducted in the "Autumn Colours Office" Tileset, most of the action was quite pleasant, although for an office, the floorplan is eccentric to say the least, and must make life extremely difficult for normal employees during working hours.
The Legacy Chain is a group of crackpot goodly mystics, paladins and samurai, mostly focused on swordplay, and powers of Light. This may sound quite ineffectual, but huge gobbets of...er...light do actually hurt a great deal when flung at you in machine-gun-like succession. It must be my Evil - it makes me allergic to Light or something!
Standard tactics for these groups mostly involve me running, invisible, up to the most powerful member of the group, and then waiting behind him until the bellowing fire-demon Brute charges into the clump and aggros everything, at which point I backstab the leader, engulfing it in a boiling cloud of debuffing darkness and knocking a sizable chunk off it's HP. Meanwhile our Dark Corruptor unleashes a huge amount of writhing black tentacles out of the floor to hold the rest in place, while the Ice Corruptor lets rip with a mini hailstorm. At that point, it's just a matter of me and the Brute flailing about until they're all dead, while the Corruptors alternative nuke, and group-heal in turn. Seems to work well enough for us!
Mission two was a bit more unique. The hub of Cap Au Diable, is the raised Aeon City area, home of Dr Aeon. He seems to be something of an Evil Genius type whose principle achievement is somehow providing cheap, clean, reliable and abundant electricity for the entire city. The means of this is unclear, but has something to do with a large network of Orange Pipes snaking across the region, against which the Luddite faction protest vehemently, and violently. 'The Orange Pipes are Evil!' they call out, mostly just before I pummel them into the dust for kicks and giggles...
At the terminus of these pipes, is the PTS, (Power Transfer System), a large factory region up on the hill to the northeast, and this facility has suddenly come under attack by the Circle of Thorns. Our new employer would like to know why.
This mission takes place in a cloned-off sub-instance copy of the actual PTS, out in the city zone, a technique used often and well throughout the game. Our job here was to find the attack force leader and kill him, (mostly out of principle, I think), and also to find, rescue and then grill, the PTS Foreman, to find out what happened here. The region inside the instance was pretty huge compared to most normal missions and absolutely stuffed full of evil Circle Wizards, and their ghostly summoned pets.
Rather than spend all night in that one mission, cleaning it, we used our initiative a bit. I have invisibility, which for all intents and purposes, is unbreakable. I also have Teleporting, and most crucially, Teleport Ally, which swooshes a selected teammate to my location, if on the same map. So while my Evil Henchmen slacked off and had an impromptu dance-party, I ghosted my way around the map, looking for the specific handful of enemies we actually needed to dispatch, out of the hundreds lurking about the place in general.
Took a little while to find, but worked very well indeed. Once one of the targets was located, I'd find a clear bit of ground and summon the rest of the team. Once all reassembled, we'd pick off the targets, and then rinse and repeat for the others. We still managed to accidentally aggro a fair number of extra enemies during the mission, but in all, had to fight far less opponents than a team with no Stealth. Probably cheating, but then we are Evil! Mind you, the mission had open sky, so players with flight could do something similar too, diving on selected enemies from above.
Mission Three was back to the offices of Legacy Chain Intl, this time for another book, and of course, to cull their numbers a bit anyway, since we were there. Our patron requires more notes to hatch his evil plan. Standard beat 'em up...not much to say about it really.
Mission Four was a visit to the Circle of Thorns on their home turf. Virgil now has the power to use his suspiciously familiar looking stone circle portal thingie, and has learnt that Dr Aeon's power plant is in fact not run off geothermal energy, as Aeon thinks, but is actually...er...demon-powered. Deep beneath the mountain (which has giant rock DEMON HORNS on it! Doh!), is a demon, apparently powering the entire city. As power plants go, that has to be quite far out on the 'Unsafe' side of the scale, worse than Coal Combustion, Nuclear Fission, and Sodding Great Microwave Transmitters In Orbit, Pointing Down. What could possibly go wrong?
Virgil's Master Plan for World Domination at this point, seems to be to rebind the slightly unbound demon, Bat'Zul, only this time, under Virgil's control. And presumably ours. I am dubious at this point, but we dial up the gate... er... activate the portal and pay the Circle of Thorns a visit. Seems they too have the same plan, and Virgil wants their plagiarism punished.
The next mission takes place in some very nicely done mystical castle rooms and corridors, all runes and sigils and crystals. Here's "Strike Force SG1" posing in the lobby:
From left to right; The Ice/Kinetic Corruptor; crazed purveyor of AoE Ice-Death! The Dark/Dark Corruptor; mistress of Unpleasant Shrieking Tentacles, The Dark/Dark Stalker (Me), in a rare moment of visibility, purely for the PR shots, and The Fire/Fire Brute, demonstrating his complete disregard for rules by defiantly NOT wearing the Nasty Green and Orange Supergroup uniform colours!
The castle was full of very large and very difficult clumps of angry wizards, which is understandable, given our house-breaking and all. Some of them were of purple difficulty, so once again, I went skulking off to find the chap we were out to hit, and again, teleported the others to the right spot for a decent mugging. "Everybody! Look Casual!" Quite a civilised way to go about things, I think! With their books stolen, and their head librarian no more, the Circle were out of the race. Trouble is, they'd done something strange to the place where the demon was kept, and now Virgil was unable to stargate us directly there. One more job to do before the big showdown.
Mission five saw us being sent off, via the whirly ring, to a high-tech Portal Corporation base, to find and coerce one of their top boffins into finding a way for Virgil to use his ring to get at the demon. Routine enough, but the place was crawling with Longbow, a persistent nemesis. Not so tricky, and only red Boss enemies in our way here. Much red-n-white spandex pummeling later, we got the coordinates and legged it, returning to Virgil.
Our boss now wants us to head into the lair of Bat'Zul. I think the plan is that we're to free the demon, and then beat him into submission (with fists, etc), allowing Virgil to chain him up again, and make us all-powerful demon masters. And then...we can...Take Over The WORLD!
Will the Demon prove to hot to handle? Will the Legacy Chain bring us down and save the world, just in time? Will Virgil turn out to be Actually Not That Trustworthy? Will our own incompetence be the salvation of civilisation? Tune in next week to find out!