Synapse Task Force Duo

After finishing the Positron TF without any problems the other day, I figured I'd give Synapse a try. At first I tried to recruit for a group, but there weren't any takers. So I got some SG mates to give me a hand filling out a group so I could start a duo with my tanks.

The big question for this one was - can 2 tanks as a duo deal enough damage to take down an AV?

It took about 2.5 hours to finish herding or tank-stealthing all the missions except the last one with the Clockwork King in it. Even the King mission itself was easy enough, no real threat of defeat like in Positron. Until I hit the Clockwork King Arch Villain himself. Basically we were at a standstill, I wasn't able to deal enough damage with just Scorch equipped with DOs. Neither was the King - I had surrounded him with even-con minions and was boosting regen with it. (though I wasn't really sure I actually needed it, it was more of a "Well I herded up this bunch and there is the King, let's add him in." sort of thing)

So while one tank was tanking the mess, I took the other tank out to pick up some IOs from the Wentworths and a tray of small damage inspirations from the Arena. 1 Acc, 2 damage, and 1 recharge DO were replaced with 1 ACC IO, 3 dmg IO. Took about half an hour, cause I was trying to find large damage insps around with no luck.

I went back into the mission, slotted both tanks with the IOs, and the damage was just shy of even. I burned off the insps too, but they didn't really last very long.

So I started using my unslotted Boxing pool power, and that made the difference, I beat down the Clock King with Tier 1 attacks and pool powers. :D

Now, I have the Synapse task force badge and L21 on my two tanks. Wish I'd taken some pictures of it. It's not really an experience I'd care to repeat, there are just so many clear-all missions in Synapse. :P

Upsen.

Positron Task Force Duo

Oh, forgot to mention, I am dualboxing a Positron TF right now with
the 2 tanks - this way I can break it into multiple days, since it is
one of the longer TFs that people generally aren't interested in.

I started at L12 and it was TOUGH, the foes are all L15-16 for the
task force. So I went out to Boomtown and blew away some Nazis...
sorry, generic Council fascists and Clockwork, getting up to L14.
Things went pretty smoothly after that. I levelled to 15 in the TF
and I'm on the stage with the Clock boss "Constructor" - I flew both
tanks straight through the map, with a score of Oscillators flying
after me, and I was still able to take out Constructor and all the
fliers with no troubles.

Upsen.

edit - finished with no problems. Sort of anticlimatic. Also the mission timer counts the time you are logged off - no way was I playing 20 odd hours to finish this task force.

More rerolling and LKT-1700 Flight Pack

Well I had fun with the shield set, but I decided that in the end, I
prefer a toggle status protection over a click protection. So I went
back to Willpower/Fire for Tenmos, and gave up on the shield set for
now. I also decided to do the pact with a WP/Fire on the second
account as well, so that it would be able to survive anything the
first account does... and I can basically interchange which window I
play from and it shouldn't really matter. (Plus having 2 sets of AOEs
available every 10 seconds or so? Sweet stuff.)

So they are "Tenmos Steel" (again) and "The Fires of Conviction". I rather like the second name, gets the Willpower/Fire sets both reflected in the name.

IO wise it may be a little difficult, since this would mean I
have to double up things if I want the 2 tanks to be fitted the same
way. Right now I have some stuff like a Kismet Accuracy that I've put
on Tenmos that Fires doesn't have, and there is a noticeable
difference when facing red-cons. But I guess what I'll do is outfit
Tenmos properly and let extra drop by Fires' way - after all I went
through a heck of a lot with Aegis of Flame, my first WP/Fire tank,
with just a set of Red Fortune, a few cheap heal set IOs, and a couple
of ACC debuff set IOs.

I also picked up some chopper packs (LKT-1700 flight packs) from the
NCSoft store, to save a travel power pick. The helicopter sound they
make is sort of annoying but I'm getting used to it. Also, it took me
two days to actually get them - I could only add one pack the first
day, and had to wait a stupid 24 hours for the second flight pack.
Why don't they implement a shopping cart at NCSoft I really don't
understand. I mean a lot of people do have multiple accounts that
they may want to modify when something new comes out right? Imagine
if I was a family of 4 trying to get flight packs or something, that
would be 4 days of waiting before everyone got their pack.

Upsen.

Shields, Low Aggro, Rerolling and a Levelling Pact

Well, after about 20 days or so and 38 levels of shield/dark tanking, I got tired of the low aggro generating capabilities of the pairing. I was regularly being out-taunted by invul scrappers running just their invincibility aura, and any time anyone threw an AOE, half the mobs would run away from me and pay the AOE-tosser a visit, usually with pretty messy results. Well, messy in that I would have to jump over to toss in a taunt on top of them, and the enemies would be scattered across our 2 locations instead of nicely packed in. I never had this difficulty with my Willpower/Fire tank, I think it's probably attributable to the /fire aspect rather than the WP/ aspect.

So I rerolled my shield tank as a Shield/Fire, giving up the health leech of /Dark, and getting back some AOE attacks for both damage and aggro generation. I'm sure I can sneak in a Medicine Pool on this guy if I really need something, he is a good one for med pool since defense tanks don't have to deal with a lot of interrupts. We'll see how this one goes, I figure it should be pretty fast - I always seem to go back to /Fire on my tanks.

I also decided to try a levelling pact so I could get a L50 character on my occassionally-active secondary account. You know, the account that is sometimes subscribed, sometimes cancelled, so that you can do a truly secure transfer, or mess around with dual-boxing. Anyways, I paired up the new shield tank with a Kinetics Defender - probablly not the BEST option for the tank, but a generally viable hero that could play on their own merits in a group if I felt like it.

Anyways, that actually took 2 nights and 2 respecs - my Shield/Dark was decently vested in IOs that I wanted to keep, and it meant that 10 enhancement slots were not enough to keep the really important ones. I had to sacrifice a few since I didn't have a 3rd respec option available, but they weren't too much of a big deal as these ones could be replaced for under a million influence each.

Upsen.

Halo (the Angel type, not the Bungie type)

Dude this is a sweet costume.

I picked up one of the new Halo auras for Upsen Downs on City of Heroes. This is from the new 2008 Winter Event.

Looks pretty sweet. :D

End of the 20s. Also Jumping vs Flying.

Shield Tank at L30 now, the 20s went by REALLY quickly.

I went through L21-25 by way of a single Sister Psyche Task Force, and 25-29 in a couple of Citadels.

I guess it's time to start looking into some IO sets. Maybe start figuring out how to add in a couple of sets of Blessing of the Zephyr on travel powers, for +positional defense. It's expensive though, costing a few hundred (500? 600?) merits or about 60 million on the market at the moment. So it'll probably be a while before I have a full set.


At some point I'll have to change over from Super Jump to Flight too. I feel that as a character is levelling, speed is of the essence - you need to get there fast, get away fast, etc etc. Endurance use is at a premium too, so Combat Jump makes the most sense for melee fights, it is really good defensive bang for the endurance buck.

Once I roll into the 40s, the sense of urgency is a lot lessened and I have some reliable defenses and better endurance options. So flight starts feeling like a better option - finer positioning for the big pulls, faster hover due to higher level, and being able to hang permanently in mid air for evil places such as the shadow shard or inside the Hamidon.

Upsen.

Shield Tank at L21 now

I just finished the Faultline arc on my shield tank the other night. I was impressed at how easily I could do it - did they dumb down the encounters? Or was it the new powerset? Either way, tanking any of the elite bosses was no problem at all, not even requiring any special preparation.

Maybe it's a combination of Dark Melee's Siphon Life attack together with the excellent defenses of the shield tank. They had trouble hitting me, and whatever they did do to me, I was getting back every time my Siphon recharged.

It was over way too quickly.

If there is anything I dont like about the Shield set, it is that you have pick between:

- micromanaging the status protection and setting an auto-firing attack.
- auto-firing the status protection and hitting your basic attack manually.

I guess it's not that bad but I think I prefer toggle status protection for the convenience.

Upsen.

Left 2 Die

I saw T online last night and we did another 2-player level of L4D - this time it was the airport scenario, Dead Air. I thought it was going to be at a radio station or something like that from the name.

It was as always a lot of white knuckle excitement, with a huge mess of zombies everywhere. The levels are all very open as it does take place in an airport terminal, which really favoured the mad zombie rushes over the survivors - at least in doorways you can pick off the foes a few at a time, but wow, this was a total free-for-all.

I imagine the tactics we used on normal difficulty wouldn't "fly" at all in a harder setting.

I picked up 6 achievements off this session.

Do Not Disturb - T and I snuck past all the witches, wow.
No-one Left Behind - all 4 of us made it - we didn't have to run past hordes of zombies as in No Mercy.
Dead Baron - Finish the Dead Air Campaign (I guess its a pun off the Red Baron)
101 Cremations - there was a LOT of gasoline cans and molotovs around.
My Bodyguard - Most people got this in their first day of play, but I didn't, I guess its because I was usually the point man. But I picked it up this 2nd session anyways.
Dead Stop - Punched a Hunter in it's face, while it was in mid leap.


We need to get a 3 or 4 player game going some time, come on people.

Upsen.

New shields option in CoH

Well I gave it a bit of a try as a tank, and I don't really know how good it will really turn out. It looks pretty cool with the shield there and all but I don't know if I like the numbers that much.

Here's the power list breakdown.

1. Deflection (15% def melee)
2. Battle Agility (15% def ranged/aoe)

These 2 powers are not too bad, and have a pretty standard toggle cost at .21/s They offer blanket defense against all. Most tank sets dont have defense. The only one that does is Ice at 17% and not across all elements - it doesn't do fire or ice defense and the energy/dark defense comes pretty late, well into the 20s.

The first one has some resist to Smashing/Lethal at 15% as well, about half the level offered by other sets (20%-30%)

3. True Grit (15% resist fire/cold/energy/negative/TOXIC Passive! +some hp too)
This is a very all-in-one power and being an auto power is pretty damn powerful. The amount is not that high at 15% resistance but it is ALWAYS ON. Plus the higher defense levels mean you get hit less often anyways. (we hope)

4. Active Defense

This is the status protection power, and has the same magnitude as the other status prot powers out there. However, this one is a click power like the one in Super Reflexes. Thus if your endurance gets bottomed, you get to keep your status protection. However the disadvantage is that you either set it as your auto-fire power or you risk forgetting to keep your status protection active.

Need to slot for recharge reduction - it lasts 2 minutes but takes a base 3m20s to recharge.

5. Against all Odds (+10% damage per foe in range, max 10)

This is the aura taunt power - it is an offense-only power! Usually aura powers are defensive in nature, so you try to get close to mobs to boost your defenses. So you aren't really reliant on the foes to keep your defense/resists strong. This is is the same weaker taunt level that you find in the Willpower set. 10 target max seems to mean you cap at +100% damage.

edit - not exactly 10% per foe, just the first foe - the rest are a fair bit lower and I typically see about 15% to 50% damage bonus. I use it as a herding tool right now at L12. The range on it is pretty small at 8ft radius.

Also there *is* a damage debuff on the foes so I guess it does help defensively too

6. Phalanx Fighting (+5% def melee/ranged/aoe per ally in range, max 3 Passive!)

The range of this power is a 8ft radius around yourself - so while up to an additional 30% defense against all sounds really great, it is going to be a rare situation to see.
It's an Auto power though so damn, it is basically free except for the power pick and slots.

edit - hey you buff yourself at all times for 5%, sweet. Gotta be a bug though. 8) Also additional teammates seem to buff for about 3.75% with a single training origin enhancement installed.

7. Grant Cover (+7.5% buff to teammate defense)
.16/s toggle, 15 foot radius, not too bad. Definitely not a force field defender though!)

8. Shield Charge

A teleport attack - seems to have decent knockdown & smashing damage too, 60ft range. Could serve as a travel power supplement maybe? Not really, it has a 1m30s recharge time. :P

9. One with the Shield

Tier 9 emergency power.

2 minutes of do-it-all with proper tank resists, and endurance recharge.

Recharges in 6 minutes, no recharge reducers allowed. Penalty is the lighter -60% endurance crash, no health crash involved, like Willpower. Could be useful. I didn't use the Willpower version cause it was already reliable enough without it, but this guy might need it once in a while due to the nature of defense tanking as opposed to resistance tanking.

So all of the powers are sort of useful. I wonder what secondary I should pair up with it? :P

edit - I paired it up with Dark to have some minor health draining and endurance draining. The end drain should negate any disadvantage from the tier 9 power. Not much in the way of AOEs though, so bummer, I'll have to rely on team damage - no super self-herd/killing I guess... but that is why I have my wp/fire tank.
Also -acc is better than disorient, or knockdown/knockback for herding.

Upsen.