Monday 5 March 2007

Pic of the day: Reboundancy the Dark Regenerating Scrapper, in front of one of Portal Corp's doorways to a different dimension. More super than ever!

CoH level 50

You will always remember your first time... well, unless you were really drunk, which I wasn't when my first City of Heroes character finally reached 50. This happened approximately 3 years after the day I first sat down in front of my computer and stepped into the wonderful world of Paragon City, where YOU can be a hero. Or at least I can, even if it is only in an amazingly detailed and lifelike imaginary city of the very near future.

Admittedly the first weeks were in a closed beta test. Not only could we not write about it until later, but after the test was over, our characters were wiped out. So I had to start from scratch. And I did that. And then I started new characters, ever new characters, on different servers, with different costumes and different combinations of powers. And I started over, and over and over again. I did not delete the old characters, but just let them pile up, because we had 11 servers and 8 slots in each, plus I spent some time on the European servers as well.

Last winter I actually got a character past 40 of the 50 possible levels. This was a very team-oriented character, a defender, and what inspired me to stick with him for so long was the supergroup (Steel Justice) which was quite fun and played a lot together. But then fate struck: Du to the botched move, I was without Internet access for two months. When I returned, my old friends had moved on to other characters, and I soon abandoned Magus the dark defender.

Ironically, it is another Dark character who finally reached 50. Ironic, because I have a healthy distaste for dark magic in all other games, not to mention real life. I never got it to work in Master of Magic, for instance, but repeatedly succeeded with white magic. Then again, Dark does not really have the same religious connotations in City of Heroes. Rather it is a kind of flexible energy that has the side effect of reducing the accuracy of your opponents, as if their target was hidden in shadows or smoke. Defenders can use it to hide in, and even for healing, but scrappers can either use it to take less damage or to inflict damage on an opponent, with the added benefit of reducing their accuracy so they hit you less often.

Reboundancy is a Dark/Regen scrapper, so only his attacks are powered with Dark energy. (Not to be confused with the dark energy of cosmology, which supposedly powers the expansion of the universe.) Regenerating scrappers don't have any protection against taking damage, but they heal amazingly fast. This lends itself to a very unique play style with a focus on hit and run and hit again tactics but with almost no downtime.

But again, it was probably the company I kept that made me stick with this one character for so long. He was a member of Paladins of the Night, a supergroup for Dark-powered characters that was recruited almost exclusively from LiveJournal users. Yes, I do have a LiveJournal or two or three, in addition to the Chaos Node here. The LiveJournal CoH community consists mostly of "altoholics" like myself, who make lots of alternate characters. They also have a great sense of humor, and there are more women than among gamers in general. All in all it is a fun bunch to hang out with. We have our own global channel in the game, so even when I am not teaming with any of them, I can still follow their banter. It is of course even better when we can team up, since most of them are experienced players who know how to play their characters and what other characters can or cannot do.

Actually I only played together with them occasionally. Scrappers are generally easy to solo, and regenerating scrappers most of all. Dark attacks are pretty efficient... the power set lacks the area attacks and ranged attacks of spines but each attack does fairly good damage and partially blinds the opponent. I also filled in the attack chain with Air Superiority, a knockdown attack. With this it is possible to hold many opponents on their back all the time so they cannot hit you, always useful against bosses.

***

The late 30es levels could be hard for people who solo most of the time, because you risk running out of missions and have to hunt criminals on the streets. Luckily this problem was just recently solved when I reached that part of my career. Er, of Reboundancy's career, of course. The eight free expansion, "To Protect and Serve", gave all heroes a police radio from which they can pick any of three available mission whenever they have some free time. These missions are of moderate size and tailored to your level and reputation. After a set number of these (I think it is 5) you get a larger mission, to protect a bank from a robbery by a major villain and his henchmen. To divert police attention from the robbery, the archvillain also engages a large number of vandals that attack public property and chase the populace around. At the same time there are a couple cases of arson, a weapon deal, a jailbreak... this is quite a bit more of a job, but it is also quite rewarding, both in experience point and in that you get a temporary power for stopping the robbery and another for ... the weapon deal, I think? Or was it the jailbreak? It is also voluntary. You can turn it down, but the chance will not come back until you have done 5 more of the smaller missions.

One of my fellow LJ'ers once said that the endgame begins at 40. This is a pretty good description. Once you get to Peregrine Island and the contact Tina MacIntyre, a good kind of weird opens up. Portal Corp has dimensional gates into many alternate histories, some really far out and others disturbingly similar to our own. Or at least to Paragon City's own, which is itself an alternate reality to ours. Worlds where the Nazis are in power, worlds where the good guys are bad and the bad guys are good, worlds where only robots are left alive... the usual superhero fantasy worlds. And you get to go there and do heroic stuff, and a storyline unfolds. Nifty. This happens at the same time as a shift in your superpowers. Until your late 30es, you get a new power every even level and two enhancement slots every odd level. But now you get three new enhancement slots two levels out of three. This has the effect of making your existing powers stronger rather than branching out into new ones. And it soon begins to be noticeable. In short, I started to feel more "super" than I had since the game was new.

Ironically, the last levels went by faster than any since my toon was a teen. There is a reason for this, of course, and it is the same as when I played Dark Age of Camelot: I began joining level 50 teams. These typically fight level 52 enemies, and they tend to do so pretty quickly. The experience points keep raining down in torrents. Theoretically you can start joining level 50 teams as early as 42, possibly 41 although that would require careful balancing of the team. Of course, at 42 you are not very useful, and I did not join up until a couple levels later. But one use of the 42 is to power-level a younger character.

City of Heroes has a system called "sidekicking", in which any much lower-level character can join up with one higher-level and function as if his level was 1 below his mentor. So at 42 I can sidekick a newbie up to level 41, and with the right team he would get enormous amounts of experience points and influence point (the latter being the closest we heroes come to a currency). This form of power- leveling a younger character is called "bridging" and the person who sidekicks him is called a "bridge"... that is, a bridge between the level 50 players who do most or all of the hard work, and the supplicant being leveled up. Some think this is ethically dubious. I think so only if it is done for money (as it sometimes is). If someone want to power up a member of their supergroup so they can have a stronger team, more power to them. Of course, this would be a mistake if the lower- level character is played by a newbie. He would have a character with many powers and abilities after a while, but no idea how to play him in practice. But after three years, most of us have played most archetypes and power sets, and have played together with the rest.

Personally I prefer joining in, though. In the beginning I had to be careful since everything was deep purple to me. If I got the attention of the enemy, I would not survive long. But I could still assist the higher-level characters, pounding on the same enemies and adding a little damage. As I got closer and closer to 50, my contribution became more and more useful. And then suddenly, in the middle of chasing down a large crowd of villains together with some fire controllers, I was level 50 too. I did not even notice in time to get a screenshot.

There is still fun to be had; I am probably not halfway through my multiverse story lines, and sometimes I sidekick a younger character to boldly go where they haven't gone before. But there is also a vague feeling that this particular character has "won" the game, and I tend now to play other characters most of the time. When I'm not playing The Sims 2, that is. When I am playing at all, that is, which isn't all of the time, no matter what it may look like. ^_^;