Note: This article is a rewrite from my previous post on mmorpg.com, but because I am on this “Memorable Moments” kick, I wanted to share it here.
My regular gaming group has been playing City of Heroes since Beta. Many of these guys were comics fans, but not heavy computer gamers, and only a few had played an MMO. Nonetheless, CoX struck a chord with them and they have become what I would consider hardcore gamers, multi-boxing and forming uber farm teams that steamroll mobs and missions to keep the XP flowing like water. Teaming with them is great XP and it is fun… for a while, but at some point, you realize you are missing the game. Of course, these guys have already seen it all, and done it all, or don’t care to do it, because it isn’t good enough XP. Unfortunately, having closed and opened my CoX account more times than I can count over the past 5 years, I have seen and done very little and so when I return to CoX, I would really like to experience some of the actual game outside of purple, 8-man, Council spawns.
To experience the rest of the game, I created a new character on the heavily populated Freedom server and decided that I would level to 50 in pick-up groups with only the occassional interlude of soloing. Thus a new Plant/Storm controller, Song of Land and Sky, was born. Yes, the name is fruity… horribly so. Unfortunately, naming a new character on Freedom is like being in a bar at closing time, you take what you can get… or go home alone and end up making a scrapper named xxG.O.K.Uxx. Faced with those two choices, I downed one more beer, stuck with the hippie nature goddess and dug deep into the name barrel.
After a few solo runs and some PUGs in the Hollows (which everyone hates, but honestly, I love), I had Song up to level 16 and she was quite effective. One night, after someone’s last mission was completed and the team had broken up, I was standing around, deciding whether to solo one or two more missions, or head to bed, I received that fateful tell that all defenders and controllers get in their careers.
“Can you heal? We need another healer.”
I sadly replied that I did not in fact, heal, but instead brought confusion and holds to the table. I figured this would kill the conversation, but surprisingly I got another tell:
“That might work. We are fighting CoT.” And along came the invite.
I should have been wary. See, excepts in very specific circumstances, I feel that most teams in CoX don’t need healers. In fact, in most cases, if you have a defender or controller on your team and you relegate them to healing duty, you are likely making them less useful to your cause than if you allowed them to unleash their full slate of buffs, debuffs and holds. Healing can be useful in CoX, but more often, it is the security blanket of the barely competent. Now remember, this guy indicated his team needed another healer. Not a healer, but another one.
It’s amazing how a single word in a sentence can conjure up whole scenarios. I started picturing scrappers charging headlong into hordes of purples, crazed fire blasters firing Rain of Aggro… I mean Rain of Fire on the second spawn, “just in case.” I saw tanks with crappy defenses and defenders without buffs. Oh and team wipes. I saw lots and lots of team wipes…
Sign me up!!!! This was just the kind of epic PUG train wreck I was looking for! I accepted, greeted the team and headed straight to the mission door.
Once in, we were faced with a gaggle of level 19 purple CoT. The first few battles went… ok. Slow, but steady and we didn’t get into too much trouble. However, the first room we came to, we were faced with three Ruin Mages and their minions. Before anyone could say anything about a plan, the tank (obviously heady with success) charged into the middle of the room, aggroed all three Mages and they just pummeled him flat without giving any of us time to react.
When the bad guys turned to face the rest of us, I moved to block the doorway and fired my Seeds of Confusion, hoping to buy us a little time to flee. Success!!! Ok… let me rephrase that… Moral Victory!!! The seeds missed everyone and I bought the team a whole 0.3 seconds with my graceful death flop to the concrete. In what had to be less than 10 seconds, everyone was at the hospital heading back to the mission.
You know it is going to be a long night when you find yourself thinking how convenient it is that the hospital is less than 300 yards from the door.
Now, the tank is talking about finding another healer and though I usually try to stay off the soapbox, I felt the need to point out that healing wouldn’t have helped much in that room. No healer of our level would have had time to even click the heal button, let alone keep up with that onslaught.
We decided to pull.
Generally, I am not a fan of the corner pull in CoX. It’s dull and there are a lot of folks who are so used to pull tactics from other games, that they do it out of habit without realizing that CoX is supposed to be about big, messy, noisy battles where you blast a dozen foes while getting knocked 100 ft. into the next spawn. So once a team has established that they can kill whatever enemy they are fighting, I always advocate against the corner pull. In this case, our team was not going to be able to take the level of foe we were fighting, and so discretion was called for.
The first few pulls go well. The tank draws some aggro, a few of the CoT peel off and he drags them around the corner where the rest of us pounce. Unfortunately, pulling also takes a little bit of discipline and people inevitably get antsy. So once the immediate threat of death is over, “corner” pulling degrades into “hallway” pulling, degrades into “at the door of the room” pulling, degrades into “I will go with you pulling”. At some point, our dark defender was essentially following the tank into the room while he pulled, which was fine until he forgot that he had his enemy-debuffing heal power on autofire.
So the tank and defender wander into the room, the defender debuffs a random enemy, he panics, runs into another group, while tab-targetting a third group. The tank is oblivious and he is bringing us a fourth group. And you end up eating lunch in a hospital bed… but at least there’s Jello!
We head back and surprisingly, we’ve learned our lesson. The non-pullers stay back somewhat and we have a couple good pulls and start slogging through the room pull by pull. Hey, debt’s gone… time to make more!
This team-wipe was absolutely my fault. We had mostly cleared one of the rooms and had charged the last group. Everyone is pretty comfortable now and the tank is grabbing their attention, the defender is debuffing and healing, the blasters and scrappers are blasting and scrapping. I am spamming confuse and holds and when my paltry endurance bar allows, I fire an extra attack. It is tough, but we are doing well.
Suddenly, I see a flash of red in the corner of my screen. It seems we have an add or perhaps a runner. No worries, I figure, I can take care of him. So I dash after him, around the corner and am instantly gutted by the dozen or so of his buddies sitting there just out of sight. I turn to get out of there, but I don’t react in time. The enemies see me and aggro to me, kill me and then proceed to roll up the rest of the team.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to get bloodstains out of Lycra? But at least there’s Jello!
Ok, lesson learned… no need to be the hero… or at least use some stealth when doing stupid crap.
A few more battles and we have our collective stuff together. The fights are still tough, but we are in a groove and are moving from group to group. We cap a couple more groups and head into the next hallway. I am following the tank closely when we walk through a doorway and stumble into the annual CoT National Convention (held in a sewer near you). Obviously, there was a memo circulated that said there would be doughnuts at this meeting because I think every CoT in the game was in attendance. Strangely enough, this doesn’t cause another team wipe. We pull the CoT through the door and the controllers manage to get the fight under control. As the enemy comes through, they are held, confused, debuffed and subsequently slaughtered. The doorway is clear; we are still standing…
And that’s when the dozen or so Unbound Nictus start pouring through…
Not a Kheldian in sight, but somehow, we spawn a Crystal. And while we were valiantly fighting the CoT, what we didn’t see is that there were two crystals spawning their little black clouds of death the entire time. There are at least a dozen of them and they make quick work of our unprepared team.
Back to the hospital… again… and again… and… by now, I am ready to punch Bill Cosby right in the face if he even mentions Jello.
See, those crystals had built up quite a head of steam and had filled the antechamber with nictus and as quickly as we can kill the nictus, the crystals keep pumping them out. The only way to win would be to zip through the mass of enemies to get to the two crystals and destroy them. We would have to run a pretty deadly gauntlet.
So, the team gathers and makes the plan, no one engages the nictus. We head straight through to the crystals and everyone focus fire on one until it is dead. Right!
And we do. Everyone follows the plan perfectly and we manage to luckily get past the dark nictus clouds without dying. We see the crystal and the team follows the tank’s lead and piles on, laying a nice amount of damage down. Of course, all the while, our health bars are dropping and many of the team are dead, or very close before we manage to nuke the crystal and then…
BOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oh right, forgot about the blowy uppy thing when you kill one of the crystals… and presumably our blaster has never seen it because she is dead and spouting a whole load of WTF!!! on the team chat. Back to the hospital, but by now, I was giggling like a schoolgirl at every encounter.
The final door is in sight. Victory is ours with just one more room! Everyone is feeling pretty good as we open that last door, but beyond is the toughest room yet. Three large groups with bosses in a tight bunch, and all of them are staring at us, daring us to cross the threshold.
It is at this time that my own boss, my wife, gently reminded me that it was 1:00 am in the morning and the baby was awake and perhaps I should tend to him… like right now. And so sadly, I had to leave my team in the lurch. I wonder if they ever got that other healer?
It might sound like I had a miserable time. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I had a great time. The mission was hard. The players were fun and did a nice job given the circumstances. I was laughing the whole time. This is why I will always have fond memories of CoX and why I rolled on Freedom!!