Thus Always, The Tyrant

[TombTyrant]

I decided I would do an irregular blog of my gaming experiences. I feel like most regular posters are what I'd call heavily enfranchised, and I thought it might be interesting to share a slightly different point of view. I play pretty regularly, but casually. I have one main character, Count Carcosa, my only Incarnate, and main badger. For me that means he has somewhere over 600 badges, a lot for a casual player, but peanuts to a dedicated badger. And hey, maybe one day he will get there. But he will do so at a casual pace, playing around my work schedule, altaholism, and other hobby obligations. I also have a full stable of other alts, funded on their own adventures and the largess donated to them by the Count. Sometimes I'll be talking about my experiences with them, sometimes my main, sometimes just jamming a wacky concept through a few Death From Below Trials. Sometimes I will have thought to add a screenshot or something. Most times probably not though. 

 

So that's what you're in for. Feel free to add questions and comments. I'll post again soon.

[TombTyrant]

So yesterday's project was The Beast Beneath The Mountain, better known as the Virgil Tarikoss Strike Force. I decided to do this in part because it is the weekly, and in part because I wanted to share my love of redside content. Also, for some reason, it now spawns a Zombie Invasion when you finish it. I already have this badge on the Count, as well as the Zombie badges, so I decided to run this on one of my higher level alts. She's trying to put together some merit intensive sets right now, so the double reward would be nice. With that in mind I loaded up Katabeatrix, my Thugs/Storm/Mu Vigilante Mastermind. She's kind of a Mutant Rights Extremist thing going on, not so much a hero as a rabble rouser who leads low powered mutants to knock around groups that oppress or exploit them. It's a pretty loose concept that allows me to join any mission for  the most part just by saying X NPC was a jerk to some mutant somewhere and I'm here to make a lead donation about it.

 

So forming a pick up Strike Force is the first challenge. Its not as easy as say, throwing a Posi 1 or 2 together. You get resistance from people, people don't even know how to get to the zone if they are willing to play. Also, not for nothing, but this SF is hard and gives poor rewards compared to other stuff you could be doing. So forming a team is the first hurdle. And it doesn't go flawlessly. Few bites in the first few minutes, and what I do get are some folks who lose interest when they hear the content is red. So I adapt my recruiting message to make that more explicit, fire up the Discord, and redouble recruitment efforts.

 

The new and improved recruitment message and wider net brings in a good crew. I get a Robots MM right away, and then a very friendly Widow soon after.  Then a Plants/Thorn Dominator and Mace/Fire Brute with a great attitude. A demon themed Scrapper joins us, followed by an Ice Controller I believe. Finally the last spot goes to a Thugs/Traps Mastermind. I recognize this guy from running iTrials, he is one of the only Incarnate Masterminds I have ever seen, and super capable, as well as a fun roleplayer.  I actually had to turn away a 9th player, so even though recruitment started slow, once it picked up it really picked up. 

 

I take a few moments to lay the trouble spots in the strike force out to the team. In my mind, the two sticking points are the outdoor PTS map with a CoT army camped on it that you have to rescue a foreman from, and the final mission what with all the lava and all.  So we talk a little strategy on that and I kick us off. I decide to run at +0 because as a veteran redsider, I know that when this gets hard it is really tough. Plus I want to finish in enough time to enjoy the zombie parade. The first mission, rob an office full of Legacy Chain, we destroy it. Mission 2, to the PTS and we hit the sticky wickets. The good news is the foreman spawns hella close to the mission entrance, so we rescue him pretty quick. But corralling 3 sets of pets as we hunt down the raid leader brings in a hellacious amount of aggro. It is worth noting that the Circle in this level range are guild danged monstrous. Flying fleeing ghosts with -to hit attacks and reasonable resistances, demon lord lts with -to hit auras, and Force Field bosses crush your chance to land a blow and hit hard. Pulling in extra hate really pours the heat on fast and people start to kiss the concrete. We're holding our own, but people do die and have to rez or hospital. The friendly Widow quits without complaint or a word. I feel bad because she obviously wasn't having fun if she quit, but also now we're down to 7 for the rest of the SF. Also I had another person I turned away. But hey, no sense being bitter about it. Once we correct for the added aggro, we clean up the adds and drop the raid leader without issue.  

 

So the rest of the Strike Force runs pretty smooth. Longbow and Legacy Chain have their fair and fun challenges, but don't really have a reasonable chance of stopping us. We have a couple of people get defeated when we do the Oranbega raid mission, but nothing that breaks our rhythm.  So we get to the final mission, head into the lava dome to fight the army of flaming hot buffalo wings. We totally wreck Infernal. I get a sweet rp comment about him bringing an axe to a gunfight. Pew Pew. Now here is a personal  thing for me. I took group fly on this character and early in my build. So I am excited to have it to keep the thugs out of the lava. Except the dumb bastards just randomly decide to go lava diving anyway half the time. Sigh.  Well, apart from re-summoning the little jerks every few minutes, we blow through the final fight pretty quick.

 

Then it's off to Port Oakes to fight zombies! And finally get to unleash my full powers after being malefactored down to 20 for a whole SF. Man that was a wild cool good time. We had folks gating in from all over. Two full teams running up and down the hill. Got all three badges for that. Hit level 47. Good times.

[TombTyrant]

Another thing I learned on this, or possibly just remembered is that as a Vigilante, you don't get villain zone event notifications. Which makes sense I just didn't think about it. If my team mates hadn't mentioned they were heading to Port Oakes, I would have missed the zombie parade.

[ZorkNemesis]

3 hours ago, TombTyrant said:

Another thing I learned on this, or possibly just remembered is that as a Vigilante, you don't get villain zone event notifications. Which makes sense I just didn't think about it. If my team mates hadn't mentioned they were heading to Port Oakes, I would have missed the zombie parade.

 

By default you don't (assuming you haven't set up a new default already) but you can enable all faction zone event messages in chat tabs.  Hero Zone Events, Villain Zone Events, and Praetorian Zone Events are all able to be enabled on any tab.

 

And just in case you were wondering, Praetorian Zone Messages will pretty much only advertise the Seed of Hamidon's respawn in First Ward, and Zombies/Banners during Halloween.

[TombTyrant]

I was today years old...

[Xenosone]

Tarikoss is a stalker dream job especially if he has grab teammates. I wish teleport team was assemble the team but better because yes.

 

Sadly all i ever do is teleport team hot because its funny especially when its an all mm tf and the boss is in the office with the cubicles off the main hall. Oh lawdy im suprised peta dont get put outside the map

[TombTyrant]

So I had some time off work and I logged back in for a while.

 

Day one I was on at a strange time and there wasn't much going on so I fired up my main. Count Carcosa is basically an evil eldritch genie spirit. His service can be compelled through the use of yellow signs, but he tends to drive his summoner mad or turn on them in time. A good concept for an Incarnate level Rogue. He's a Mind/Rad/Energy Brute and I couldn't love him more if I tried. He's my main badge character, IO'd to near maximum potential, near the end of his Incarnate powers, damn near indestructible.  And like I don't just say that, it's wild how much abuse he can take.

 

Anyway since nothing is going on, I fire him up and load into Dark Astoria. I had been putting the Incarnate specific stuff off. Partly because I was afraid that it would turn out to have some wild twist that would require me to change my build or playstyle  to do well. Partly because I have never done it before and want to experience it solo for the first time. Also partly because I had been chasing that Servant of Recluse accolade forever, running all the patron arcs and I didn't want to start another solo project until I was done.

 

But that's all done now. So I am running Dark Astoria, and today's arc is Mu'Vorkan. I'm sort of excited for this, because I like Sirocco and Ice Mistral a lot and I infer they are featured. So I run this arc. And first things first, I love the Incarnate enemy groups, but my fears they will invalidate my build choices are entirely unfounded. If anything, the patron missions were much closer to challenging. I like the designs though. Nothing  that slows me down, but cool visuals while I am stomping through. What an awesome finale too.