Coded blue.

Saturday 3 July 2004

Screenshot CoH

Pic of the day: Screenshot from City of Heroes. Make your own caption. ^^*

CoH: Force fields

I had been playing my tanker, "Winterlord", longer than any of my other characters, either in beta or in the finished game. (In so far as /City of Heroes/ or any online game can be called finished.) Around level 19 or so, he took part in a task force in Skyway, the 15-20 city zone. That's how this story began.

(This is not quite exact, but roughly the first zones are like this: Atlas Park and Galaxy City, suitable for newbies from levels 2-6. (Level 1 is the training level.) Kings Row, levels 6-10. Steel Canyon, levels 10-15 but with some tougher stuff to the north. Skyway, 15-20. These are the civilized zones. There are also hazard zones completely overrun by villains, where you hardly see civilians at all, and no shops or hospitals: Perez Park starts at level 7, Boomtown at level 11, and I don't remember the next, only been there once. My next contacts are mostly on Talos Island, so I guess that's 20-25, but I don't really know yet. You see, I put my tanker on hold for a while after that task force.

***

The task force is a special feature of CoH. It is basically a team that stays together through a series of interconnected missions. Each such task is at least 10 missions long, so it typically lasts from 4 to 10 hours, depending on the size of the team and how it is composed. A small, well organized team can easily do the job in half the time of a large, unwieldy team.

The Skyway task force is given by Synapse, one of the Surviving Eight. They use their experience in fighting villains, to guide new heroes. That's the theory anyway; actually they are NPCs with a rather limited artificial intelligence, just enough that you can replay the task force without getting exactly the same places as last time. The basic structure of the task force is fixed though. In the case of Synapse, it is all about clockworks, the electric robots that harry the city.

During most of the missions, in fact until the final mission, we had a defender on our team who created force fields. These are visible as bubbles around each player, and make an annoying whining musical sound. At this level, there were two types of bubbles available: One "deflection" field, which protects against impact damage, and one "insulation" shield that protects against energy and temperature damage. Together, these two bubbles made us pretty much immune to the attacks of the clockworks, which use electricity as well as hitting you with their metal parts.

***

After this convincing demonstration, I decided to make my own bubble boy. Since I had already used all the character slots on the Protector server, I created Brian Fieldman on the Justice server (where Peppermint is). It is also the most populated server, but not by much; I never had a problem with lag at the times I played there.

Brian is patterned on the superheroine "MM" by Al Schroeder, my good cosmic triplet. There is a slight irony since Brian is also the name of Al's son, but in this case I choose the name because Americans tend to spell diphthongs wierdly, such as "Tolkein". So, "brain" becomes "Brian". Fieldman of course refers to the force fields.

Well, force field defenders suck when you try to play them alone. They have no self heal, like several other defender types have, and they cannot cast their regular bubbles on themselves. If they could, they would be really good. But they can only cast a bubble that stops ca 95% of all attacks on them, but 100% of their own attacks. It is basically a traveling power ... this was the first character which could safely walk through the level 6 bandit infested areas where the level 2 indoors missions are located. But you are really vulnerable when fighting.

Once you get your two primary shields, however, there is no reason why you should go around fighting. Others will do it for you, gladly. This seems to vary from server to server, but on Justice bubble blowers are very popular. I think I teamed up with just as many fellow bubble defenders as I did healers. Bubbles from two defenders stack, that is to say that an attack that goes through one of them will still meet the other. So with two force field defenders, you are essentially invulnerable to anything near your own level.

It was OK, and I got to level 14 pretty much as fast as I have done with any character of mine. That's cool, because I wanted to try out Super Jump. It is pretty fun, and with my self bubble I don't need to look out for villains where I land ... they will not have much chance to hit me before I am off again. Even if I hit, the bubble absorbs most of the damage. So it is ideal with Super Jump. (With Flight this is not an issue, as you don't need to land before you want to. I still think I enjoy Flight the most, but just barely.)

I am not sure I will continue to play Fieldman, though. I just don't feel as much "me" as I do with a tanker. This is ironic, since I am not such a robust person in real life. But in games I have played, from Daggerfall to DAoC, I have ended up playing the magic-enhanced close-up fighter. And I must admit, it felt good to come back in the virtual body of the reasonably invulnerable Winterlord after days of bubble blowing.

I am tempted to activate my second account, though, and play a bubble defender as a "buff bot". A character that only trails along and enhances the main character. I cannot think of any better character type for that in CoH than the Force Field Defender.


Yesterday <-- This month --> Tomorrow?
One year ago: Big squishy backside day
Two years ago: Word completion
Three years ago: GoType Pro
Four years ago: One of those days
Five years ago: Starting to like hugs

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