Actually, Scirocco's second in command, Ice Mistral, is a valley girl too. In Scirocco's second arc, she gives you a "clue" which is just her ranting, but it is pretty hilarious, too bad I fudged up the screenshot I had of it.

Edit -

Found a bit of her text I had managed to say in the AS chat and therefore saved it in my logs..

Ice Mistral about Scirocco...

So, there's a new patch going live today. Expect to see a lot of the big problems with I7 stuff get fixed.

They need to fix the hugging Lord Recluse Strike Force. I'm glad to know that my first 50 villain will be Saber and nobody will want him on their team to do the SF, despite how capable I am with him. So in order to do the SF as it exists right now, I will need to get Winterkill to 50 as he will be highly desireable being ice/cold. Problem is, as much as I love the new content, it is simply too fresh to me to grind through it again with Winterkill. My plan was to work on my elec brute cause it's been a long time since I did the lower level stuff.

Hopefully they'll fix the game so CoH doesn't always explode on me.

I wish I could say I still liked this game, but I think I'm done with it.

The game had one of the smoothest launches of any MMO ever.. and it has been on a steady decline since issue #3.

Nerf after nerf... horrible bloated client that takes for ever to load. The same 7 or 8 mapsets over and over and over again with nothing really new except an occational reskin for use of a "boss" board.

Boring, reptitive missions and an utter grind from level start to finish.. and to this day there is NO end game content.

It was a worthy effort by Cryptic and the game is fun.. for a while... but lack of loot, economy and skills give you very little to do when you don't feel like running through the same warehouse for the 700th time, counting load screens as you go from zone to zone.

I realized that when they gave me a free weekend to play the issue 7 content and I couldn't even be bothered to try it out that I realized my interest in this game was truly gone. Its sad in a way, but hopefully they'll realize where they did well, where they did poorly, and what they'll have to do for City of Heroes 2 in order to make it as compelling and as viable as World of Warcraft.

So for now, I retire my cape with the wonder that I'll ever come back to the game.

I can't say I blame you much Kal. I'm kind of glad that I had the opportunity to play the game before the I5 nerf and get a feel for it. 2 issues later, the content players really need simply isn't there. I really feel that PVP was added instead of more compelling extras.

Its a shame.

Yeah, I was kind of looking forward to the ability to PVP people but it was never what I wanted, and even though I dismissed the doomsayers who said PVP would ruin PVE content... seems they were right.

The game should have been engineered with PVP in mind from the get go.. not as an after thought. I always thought it would be cool to be able to duel people anywhere you are... even before I played WoW it just seemed cool to be able to challenge someone under Atlas and then go at it.. but then they added the PVP zones.. the auto exemplar stuff and it just turned out very bland and boring.

I used to play Ultima Online when the only option was PVP and those fights could be exciting.. or you could assert your "power" by 'pwning some noobs' or getting your ass kicked by some high level dude. This is just so watered down and it even further went to affect how the powers work against monsters.. suddenly my personal force field bubble is 'too powerful' and has the recharge time quadrupaled because PVPers complained? Well that's all well and good but it sucked for me in a mission. But in the end there's just nothing *else* to do.. I might try it again in the future, but it will be a while I think. Especially with the new WoW expansion coming out in a couple months.

I played WoW for awhile (And drove 1DB nuts when I would pop back in on CoX to talk about it), and while I agree in terms of content WoW has CoX beat I find I prefer CoX for a few reasons:

1) The servers are typically always up, where as the WoW Servers are constantly down. This means I can typically play when I want to play, instead of reworking my habits to fit so I play when the game is actually up and running to play.

2) The ever present "grind" really isn't that obvious unless you're intentionally grinding. Granting because of this my main is only Level 34, but teamplay and those missions really help break up the monotony of grinding. Where as in WoW, my Level 30-something Priest was forced to almost exclusively grind Gnomer. And I HATE Gnomer.

3) The lack of content in CoX works in my favor. I'm honest enough with myself to admit I have an addictive personality (My stacks and stacks of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Magic cards along with three tubs worth of Transformers attest to this), and WoW sucked me in something fierce. If it wasn't for the fact the Gnomer grind was getting to be a pain in the ass, or the fact the recent update would have required more memory than my computer still has left, I might still be caught in the throughs of WoW addiction. As it is, I was able to be annoying enough to pull myself away from the game and realize the symptoms. CoX I can play for a day then walk away from it for a week or two.


EDIT: And besides, Nerfs and PvP screw ups aside, my Scrapper can still engage a group of +0 to +2s and mop the floor with them all. Even conning more than two +0s in WoW is suicide.

THat's pretty much how I feel, I signed on tonight for the first time in a month and turned off again within 2 minutes.

It just simpply becomes monotonous after a while and there isn't enough change in the gameplay to keep me interested.

I think I'm done now as well.

Now I've heard good things about WOW but never played. Should I dare enter that?

At last, Isolator is mine! Woohoo!

How long did that take you?

I've been slowly working on it ever since I7 came out, so... near a whole month.

They sure picked some strange things to fix with the latest patch.

I was glancing through Captain Britannia's badges... and "Weatherman" had disappeared. Right at the bottom, there's a badge called "Weathergirl" now. Crazy.

Yeah, in the Patch Notes, they said they "feminized" some badges to match the gender of the character.

I'm just got back in again...

Playing as a Ice/Ice Blaster. The name is The Coldmaker.

Overall Ice Blasters kick ass.... I've been able to take Purples down with just a little bit of trouble....

It was awesome taking on 2 purples without any INSP, and beating them to tell the tale. lol.

Purple whats though?


The first couple of levels only require minimal work to defeat foes, once you get above 10 things get more hitpoints and require much more work to defeat, especially if you are -3 to them and are something like an ice/ice blaster.





I've been having a blast in the 45+ content and now my stalker is at 47. The things I have done are just really cool, and I love the epic nature of CoV and finally being able to act in Operation: DESTINY.

Earlier this week, Saber did some sight seeing...locations such as Steel Canyon, and Saber heard about how low level heroes constantly ask to hang out with higher level heroes in an attempt to rapidly increase their abillities and well....let's just say there is a lot less of that now.


Now, I have a few other screenshots I want to share, just because of how awesome this stuff is. However, I am not adding any comments and be warned, they are spoilerish...but I am not saying how they are.

Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
Screenshot 4
Screenshot 5

Yeah I'm starting to see that. LOL.

It seems like once I hit level 6, the game just up the difficulty on me. lol. I love it.

RYNO

Am I right in saying that the Mek Man in picture 2 is Burkholder's ginormous Mek Man? Has it finally been unleashed in the Destiny arc?

Not exactly. It hasn't been released...many have. Council War and all that...

I'm somewhat disappointed that the fifth damage badge is required for a villain accolade. Deathless wasn't a problem for me, but seeing as how I have yet to get the fourth damage badge on any character of mine...

Oh well. A-farming we will go...

Had an interesting mission. I was playing as Delta Seeker, and got invited to do the mission where you have to take out all the pods that generate Vampyrs. Anyway, we get in there, and there's already another team in there!

Turns out a member of our team was on the other team doing this mission (it was hers) when she up and quit and left. The old team stayed behind and waited for her to come back, but she instead made a new team with her SG and some others (like me!), then reselected the mission and went in. So we ended up in the same instance as the old team.

I though we'd have 13 heroes to go and crack some Vamp heads, but the old team was peaved at the girl that caused the whole thing, so we left.

Is this something that's a bug, or is this something that could be used to get multiple teams on a single mission? Can you imagine doing this on Villains and taking several 7-man teams into the same Mayhem mission?

Not the 1st time I heard of this bug. Though the funniest one I heard was when a Villain Team was bugged and entered a hero team's Frostfire Mission. Of course Villains and Heroes could target each other...

The players were cool with each other though - instead of killing each other they saw the bug for what it was, took a bunch of funny screenshots, /bugged it and the villains left. Then they reported it on the CoH boards (where I learned of it)

Yeah, I've heard of bugs like that, but I think this one's a little different.

Still, though, I'd love to see the villains & heroes in a mission together bug in action

I've encountered a somewhat similar bug once. I was trying to zone to an arena match with Conduit, and instead ended up in some teams Atta mission. Imagine their surprise when I round the corner. hehe Thought it was pretty funny, so I exemped down with them and kicked some butt.

Closest I have been to the bug is when a group of hero players were exiting a mission at the same door my team was at in Striga. During their zoning and then shortly after they conned as enemies...didn't have the heart to attack them, though it would have been hilarious.

Then a few months back I was going to do some missions with the SG, when me and another SG member kept zoning into a seperate instance of the mission repeatedly. Got old so we quit the team since it was not going to let us meet up with everyone else on the team.

Aaaaaaand another fun weekend. I finished up my missions for Tavish Bell, who had sent me to fight Synapse, and one of the fights produced one of the funniest taunts from an NPC I had seen in a long time...




Later on I finally worked on missions from Abyss. Now she's supposedly a hero hunter, and she passed on a job to Saber to do. If I had only known what I was getting into...the arc ended up with Saber invading the Vindicator's base and having to fight 4 members of the Vindicators, two of which will spawn in the same room.

ROTFL!

In other news, Lilith hit 45! Yay, new contacts!

Last night was very good to Pinstripe.

I start the game by logging on in Nerva when I see in Pinnacle Monsters "Caleb just spawned, anyone else need him?" So I immediately set for Thorn Isle, where 2 teams formed to take him down. We start the fight and midway I get a tell from someone asking me if I want to participate in the respec trial.

Needing that, I say "yeah, let me finish with Caleb 1st and I'm there"

A few moments later, Caleb goes down... Badge Earned. Yay

I meet the others and we start the respec trial. This is perhaps my 7th or 8th attempt at the bloody thing and I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever get it done. We go with the 1st indoor mission rather painlessly (only a couple of deaths) then it's onward to the Tree. We work our way to the tree, then the vines... This was the most efficient vine clearing I ever saw: NONE of them had time to regrow. We attack the tree and I see shades of my previous attempts when we keep failing and failing... Until we regroup after the 4th team wipe, decide to each take a trip to the arena to stock up on Break Frees and Lucks (so as not to get hit in the 1st place) and do another attempt. BAM!!!! The tree goes down in less than a minute on that attempt, I grab the glowie... RESPEC TRIAL SUCCESSFUL!!!

We leave and go our seperate ways after congratulating each other. I do some of Crimson Revenant's missions (pitting me against Mynx, which I win) then I start the Back Alley Brawler arc, so I need to go to Sharkhead to grab explosives. I go there and what do I see? The Ghost of Sharkhead. I notice my debt counter's getting low, and people who know my playstyle will know I usually WANT debt, so as not to outlevel content, so I figure that's a good way to bring it back up. I report Ghost in Pinnacle Monsters, then do a Leroy Jenkins- I jump right in. I fireball the mob around him and a couple of is buddies fall, then I see yellow letters across my screan:

"BADGE EARNED"

Turns out that fireball gave me just enough Scrapyarders for the Hammerhead badge.

I bust a gut laughing (get my debt as intended) then proceed to do the remainder of my night, culminating with the defeat of Back Alley Brawler.

As I said... July 4th was Pinstripe's Night.

Okay that made me smile when I saw that in the Regime MOTD this morning

Heh. Probably. Sadly Kal decided to leave without naming a successor so its another.. 20 some days till anyones getting any promotions.

Latest patch broke global stuff, so the AS channel got deleted apparently. I remade it this morning so everyone will have to rejoin.

Nothing like a nice cup of underwater coffee to start your day off right...

Dictator for LIFE!!!!

Man...I've got bugged missions again. This is the 4th time this has happened, and every time I have to wait 4-5 days and then re-try the missions before the instance will successfully load.

BAH!

did it really break stuff? I mean i just had to re-add TPI and pinnaclemonsters to my main chat window tab under edit tabs..

And that sucks about the missions. I just tend to get ones I couldnt possibly complete at my level

I dont care what it says, Aurora an elite boss my ass!

Some global chat channels got plain erased. Allspark vanished and had to be re-made, but PinnacleMonsters somehow got spared.

Maybe someone just recreated it instantly?

Doubtful, since Skyfire and I are still the admins of that channel, and it still has the same MOTD.

Yeah, the bug was completely random in what channels it affected as 'Hami Bound' was still there and I was still a member of it upon logging in, but my other channels I was part of were gone. People on other servers are reporting similar findings with their channels being gone or not.

Anyone else notice any little bugs last night? There were weird delays in my power activations, and sometimes the mobs would react to my attacks before the attack animation even started. Also, once they were defeated, their bodies would almost seem to shudder or jerk around on the ground...

That's caused by lag.

Really? Damn, never noticed it before when I wasn't in a large team. I was just soloing last night, wonder what caused the lag?

Is lag the result of a poorly performing computer, or does it have to do with the server side? Or both?

It depends... could be your connection, your computer, the server... any number of things can affect it.

Normally I'm not one to ridicule people for taking or not taking powers as I have done things with power choices other people may view as stupid. But when it comes to key powers in the set, why would you want to skip them? Or better yet, take great powers but never use them?

I mean last night, for the first time in weeks I get on a team with my stalker. On the team is two corruptors, a /kin and a /rad...both of which are normally great against AV's and heroes. Rad is a debuff powerhouse with rad infection, lingering rad and enervating field....yet the /rad only has lingering radiation. LR is great and all with its -regen component, but even then, -regen doesn't mean jive if you can't hit the thing or do any sort of reasonable damage before the effects wear off.

Then there is AM, why would you not want to spam this whenever it is up? It's a great buff... and /rads get one of the best damn AoE holds in the game with EM Pulse...if you've got 15+ Longbow around you, why not fire off the 30 second hold?



Then there is the lost art of pulling, I swear...why do people struggle so much with this tactic?

Pulling seems to be "so passé, dude." Most teams I'm on that know how to do it don't care to do it because it isn't challenging enough (though, I will admit these are the teams I've seen that just walk through invincible Carnie or Malta missions like a hot knife through butter).

On other teams pulling seems to be a lost art. Players are just too impatient to pull now. My biggest problems with pulling on a team are the trigger-happy players.

If I'm pulling, they won't get out of line of sight, and then, without moving but still standing where they were, they will attack the group just after I snipe. Of course, the group then turns on that player, standing right where they were, which the scrapper thinks means jump in, which then aggros the entire room.

If someone else is pulling, they will snipe, then just stand there, and wonder why all the foes are just firing away at them. Repeat scrapper jump in above.

So, from now on, I just wait. My rule is (especially if I'm playing a tank), if you aggro it first, you deal with it. Anyone who runs ahead of my tanks and aggros a room will get no assistance from me. Unless it was truly an error, or that player wanted to run in first and asked, etc.

I think we're now running into the age of CoH where the great players (I don't consider myself one of them, btw) have moved on, and the skill of the new playerbase isn't as good, or they just aren't being coached well enough. Unfortunately, most of them don't want constructive criticism. They just want to have fun.

I've never encountered a team that didn't want to pull because it was not challenging enough. Most of my experience comes from players that I guess simply do not understand the concept and mechanics of pulling.

Most of the time I offer to pull, and I've done it on almost every character I have (which is pretty funny to see a stalker pulling)...and I end up becoming the team puller. Though it absolutely drives me batjive insane when I say I will pull and tell the team to back up, or go around a corner to break line of sight....and they all just stand around doing nothing. Then I waste even more time telling them to move and why they need to.


I wouldn't say the good players have moved on, I would say that players and groups are becoming more exclusive and cliqueish...especially in light of the new SG system and prestige.

That, and lets face it, in Solo you really don't have to bother with Pulling. It's why I find spreading the MMO experience out works so well. In CoH, I understood Pulling but I never really grasped its fully effectiveness until I started playing WoW, where Pulling was the matter of life and death.

Truthfully, in a game where you can con 12+ Even Level Mobs and more than likely not need to be healed to make it through them, Pulling just seems so unnecessary.

Actually, I find myself pulling a lot while solo. There are some times (especially with a melee character) when you just don't want to aggro more than one spawn if there are two or more close together. Usually this happens when the spawns each have a particularly annoying mob in them such as Longbow Spec-Ops or Malta Sappers.

Also, good news for villains! Positron says he's going to lower the badge requirement for Born in Battle to Unbreakable (instead of Nigh Indestructable) in a future patch. Yay!

Speaking of bad teamwork, I ended up teaming last night on virtue with my level 9 Ill/Rad Controller, and extremely basic team concepts were lost on them, namely making sure the floor is clear before moving up to the next level. The team got split 3 times because of that, and each time it ended up with people getting face-planted. Fortunately, I avoided death, but I had to bail em out a few times.

When I got hit with the sound-loop crash for the first time in months, I decided not to return. I was that aggravated by the experience.