War Stories

[TheOtherTed]

I was going to post this in the "Fallen out of use?" thread, but realized it might be better to start a new, tangential thread.

 

On live, I played a Kinetics / Archery defender for longer than anyone should.  It got to the point where I'd become immediately angry when I logged on as the character, because I fully anticipated a session of constant annoyance.

 

This story isn't about those annoyances.  It's about a moment, late in my Kin career, that made me laugh out loud, literally, and kept me grinning like the idiot I am for a full 10 minutes.  I was reminded of it in the FOOU? thread.  Thanks (or blame) to @dtjunkie for dredging up the memory.

 

It happened in that annoying room where there's a stairway going up on the left, and an open area on the right.  The stairway leads to a kitchenette, and beyond it there's a balcony, plus a gangway that leads to the next corridor.  It's an ambush room, basically - if you try to engage the baddies on the bottom floor, the guys on the balcony will join the party, and vice-versa.

 

Our team came in from the other side (the gangway side), so I figured we were safe if we were careful.  Someone wasn't careful.  Someone never is.  We were playing on near-max difficulty, and we weren't exactly an optimal team, so we were immediately overwhelmed with red+ mobs.  The tank was dipping fast into yellow, I was dipping into orange (I had this crazy thing about wanting the benefit of my own heals and buffs), at least one character was deep red.  I hit Transfusion, but, unknown to me, our Something / Storm controller hit Gale a split second before me.  As a result, my beautiful green healing aura went flying off the gangway, healing exactly no-one, and taking every last mob with it for good measure.

 

I couldn't help but laugh.  To the team's credit, they all jumped down from the gangway immediately, though to this day I have no idea if they knew Transfusion would be ready soon enough, or if they were just hepped up on Speed Boost.  In any case, we prevailed.

 

So let's hear it - your funny, frustrating, dramatic, or devastating war stories!

[dtjunkie]

I remember standing in front of Ms. Liberty with my very first toon back on live and seeing this impossibly high level (27!) Kinetic Defender who hit Inertial Reduction for all of us poor lowbies. What a rush! Thanks to that experience my second toon was a Kin/Rad defender and oh I had so much fun. And yes, plenty of memories of transfusions hitting right after the target died, or was knock backed, or the toon I was trying to heal jumped back.

 

But the war story I want to mention is a story of a Father and a Son. The Father finds, miraculously, that the game he loved in his 20s has somehow, someway, been resurrected. He introduces the game to his children, and his oldest, a boy rolls a big bad Brute. The Father helps the Son and the Son devours all the knowledge the Father provides, eventually becoming an Incarnate. However, the Son has become too powerful too soon, imagining that his successes were the result of his own work, diminishing the contributions of the Father. And, in a moment of hubris, the Son challenges the Father. Though just barely level 50, with only incremental progress towards unlocking the alpha slot, the Father plays defense. Every time the Son believe he is going to strike the final blow the Father activates Hibernate. Frustrated the Son wails against this block of ice, losing endurance and patience. The Son then makes a fatal mistake. He pops his Tier 9. And when it wears off the Father catches him with a Knockout Blow.

 

One day the Son will be ready. This day was not that day.

 

 

 

 

Edited May 2, 2023 by dtjunkie

[cranebump]

Running solo back in the day, just hitting L10 or 12 or some such. I hop out of SC South Tram, hang a left, head toward University (for reasons I can't recall). Run into an Outcast mob that has a Brick in it. I get KB'ed up and into the adajcent building. Toon ends up with just his legs sticking out the side of a wall (maybe through a window, but I can't recall that clearly). Had to stop and admire that for sec (and lament the fact I wasn't on a team for others to see it).:-)

Edited May 2, 2023 by cranebump

[Oubliette_Red]

Back on Legacy, I was running in an STF with my RP group on my Illusion/Emp Controller and our ever-exceptional Tank had pulled Scirocco and the rest of the group was smashing away at him when all of a sudden he runs off and starts wailing on GW.

Tank: "What the fuck!1!!eleventy-eleven!!1!1!"
Me: "Oops".

 

Using Confusion in my rotation was just automatic and apparently after several applications it was enough to bend Scirocco's will to my own, at least temporarily and break the Tank's aggro and nearly caused a team wipe. Needless to say, I quit using Confusion when maintaining aggro was a key part of a fight.

 

Edited May 2, 2023 by Oubliette_Red
speeling

[High_Beam]

So I was on a Cruiser and one day General Quarters is sounded at Oh Dark Thirty and I jump out of my rack like every other drill we've been doing for the last three months, steaming around the Red Sea in a box pattern.  But you never know so I am in my gear and up on the O-3 Level, headset on and letting Combat know that my Battle Station was manned and ready.  So there I was, my team all thinking about lighting up cigarettes because we are all outside the skin of the ship and nobody is going to know and we just assumed it was a drill when all of a sudden we hear a pop-roar and suddenly a freaking Tomahawk Cruise Missile clears the line of sight up forward and is outbound.

 

More followed.  At that moment Desert Shield became Desert Storm and shit was never the same for me in the Navy.  I was scared that first few days but in hindsight it turned out to be a pretty good war story.

🙂

Edited May 2, 2023 by High_Beam

[Techwright]

Back in 2005, when I was a complete noob, not only to CoH but also MMOs in general, I learned of a technique that allowed a team lead to drop off the other 7 members inside an instance, then go recruit 7 more and bring them in.  Did I mention I was a complete noob?  I had no idea what an exploit was at the time, nor how illegal they were.  I did this "technique" twice bringing in a total of 22 players, myself included.  It was the Atta cave mission, and the game adjusted accordingly.  the whole cave (one of the wide ones fortunately) was literally wall-to-wall Trolls.  I cannot believe we didn't crash our computers or at least slow them to a slide show, but the fight was epic.  EPIC!   *Deep sigh of contentment*

 

I was SO embarrassed when someone finally explained game exploits to me. I did report it once I understood.  It's probably long patched, but oh, how I wish I could (legally) duplicate that event with the power of modern computers running it.

[MrAxe]

The only reason I have Air Superiority on my main is the nostalgia of my most favourite CoH moment. PvP with 2 teams. A member of the enemy team got cocky and hovered above us, waaaaay above us. I flew straight up, hit him with Air Superiority and he fell to the gound. All I saw was a circle of my pixelated team mates charge in and delete his health bar. 🙃

[Snarky]

Well, I was just in two Red SF where the leader upped the difficulty.  These are Sharkhead and there was no reason.  team had no healers and light damage.  i am on my Exemp'd 50 AR Blaster.  We load into one mission.  The team is right on top of a Longbow spawn.  I dont want to waste full auto.  I am fully stealthed.  I hover past them and up a blacony.  Full LB spawn waiting to ambush them.  I drop caltrops and a mine in front of it. Line up my full auto shot.  And a STORM of Longbow run towards me.  targeted ambush, stealth was useless.  They did the "Airplane" scene on me and then turned around and ran back through the door they came from.   *blink.... really?  F me.

[High_Beam]

All kidding aside I would have to say that besides being on a team that was part of the first Hamidon takedown on Freedom server it would be on Homecoming where I was playing my Illusion/Empathy Controller Doctor Finetush, on a team that could be best defined as a challenge (Snarky would have dropped in like three seconds).  We were on a Silver Mantis Strike Force with a two blasters of no real significance, a dominator whose powers I never figured out because he was seemingly never in the fight, a Bots Mastermind who was doubly gimped both with bots and the clear inability to control them, an Arachnos Soldier, a Stalker who seemed to only attack when he could Assassin strike and a tank who had clearly focused their build on damage dealing and not survivability.  Oh and in some of the missions, they liked to split up.

 

The result was that they were constantly losing health and on the edge of dying.  But I was full on Empathy that day.  Sure I had the PA out and such but really all I was doing was running back and forth healing and refreshing Clear Mind on the non-melee types and hitting squishies with Fortitude and combat dropping RA when I could.  It was frantic and frustrating at the same time and what made it a glorious war story in game was that the only one that died was the Stalker . . . twice . . . because he had gone to the opposite side of the map thinking he cold take on more than a pair of Skulls without getting his sneaky ass kicked.  He bitched about it too and I simply reminded him that there was strength in numbers.  There were guys that were a second away from going down and then I hit them with HO and Absorb and suddenly they are back.

 

Oh and in the final mission at the Raider Sea Base where Masterminds normally lay face down in the water because not flat linear battlefield, yeah the bot boy was still standing as I had flight on and was speeding from one triage point to another healing and buffing and looking damn good doing it (its the hair bow).  It was . . . glorious.

 

There are many players, myself included that will say that a dedicated healer in the game as it is right now isn't really necessary but sometimes . . . sometimes you need a skilled trauma remediation technician . . . and that's when you call Doctor Finetush.

[Glacier Peak]

It was just before dawn....

 

They came out of nowhere...

 

**mumbles intelligebly***

 

... and then they took our gold and gone to the Americas!

 

I was lucky enough to partake in and post on the original thread of Unique Dragon. 

[Scarlet Shocker]

On 5/2/2023 at 6:38 PM, Techwright said:

Back in 2005, when I was a complete noob, not only to CoH but also MMOs in general, I learned of a technique that allowed a team lead to drop off the other 7 members inside an instance, then go recruit 7 more and bring them in.  Did I mention I was a complete noob?  I had no idea what an exploit was at the time, nor how illegal they were.  I did this "technique" twice bringing in a total of 22 players, myself included.  It was the Atta cave mission, and the game adjusted accordingly.  the whole cave (one of the wide ones fortunately) was literally wall-to-wall Trolls.  I cannot believe we didn't crash our computers or at least slow them to a slide show, but the fight was epic.  EPIC!   *Deep sigh of contentment*

 

I was SO embarrassed when someone finally explained game exploits to me. I did report it once I understood.  It's probably long patched, but oh, how I wish I could (legally) duplicate that event with the power of modern computers running it.

 

 

When Scarlet Shocker dinged 50 I did that... it was one of the old farm maps and would've been around late '06 or early 07 - there were about 30 of us in the map all following around 🙂

[wolfshadow31]

Not so much a war story... but a silly story.  Once Invention Origin enhancements became a thing, I kinda resisted them for awhile.  Not that I disliked them, but I was resistant to change, and I didn't really understand them all that much.  Finally, I decide to try them out.   Things like Edict of the Master etc just sounded so cool, I had to have them!  I spent all my influence buying a bunch of Pet damage enhancement sets for my MA/SR scrapper, and then couldn't slot any of them.  So ya...fun times.  

[TheOtherTed]

My Illusion / Empathy story is almost exactly the opposite of @High_Beam.  I'm vague on the specifics - it was a long, long time ago - but we were on an outdoor map looking for some random number of altar-shaped glowies to click and deactivate.  Or something.  I can't remember if we were fighting Croatoa witches or Banished Pantheon, just that there was a lot of mezzing going on.

 

At one point, the fight really intensified because a couple of teammates accidentally (maybe) invited two or three extra spawns to our party.  I reflexively went into healing mode and stayed there for a long time, until it became clear we were losing a war of attrition.  At that moment, something clicked in my brain, and I realized the only way to save the fight was to take a chance on letting someone eat grass.  I pulled my little Teleport/Flash trick (patent pending) and managed to blind most of the minions and lieutenants.  Then I Blinded a boss within the Flash radius for good measure - and much to my surprise, it worked.  Then down went Phantom Army, down went Spectral Terror, and then, only then, amidst the chaos and confusion, did I start alternating between buffs, Spectral Wounds, and more single-target Blinding.  The situation quickly stabilized, and, miracle of miracles, nobody had to take a dirt nap.  I'll admit, I was a little disappointed...

 

In any case, it was my first true "holy scrap!" moment on a controller, the moment I realized just how powerful they could be.  And then someone said "Nice job on the heals!".  😒

[Techwright]

3 hours ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

 

 

When Scarlet Shocker dinged 50 I did that... it was one of the old farm maps and would've been around late '06 or early 07 - there were about 30 of us in the map all following around 🙂

 

30!  You're lucky if your game wasn't a slide show back then.

[Scarlet Shocker]

42 minutes ago, Techwright said:

 

30!  You're lucky if your game wasn't a slide show back then.

 

I've always been lucky in that I have fibre right to my router. I haven't had bandwidth issues for 2 decades. That said, I've had other issues but no it ran really well

 

[Zect]

This was in the days of yore, when blaster nukes were not crashless.

 

I was on an ITF, playing a fire blaster, and I used the nuke. Without a word, the kin beside me recognized the animation, and immediately used transference, the +end power. The timing was so precise that my blue bar was back to full before my toggles could tick again, and I never detoggled.

 

I always remember this incident as an exemplar of what a good coh player is. Truly excellent players are defined not by having the most finely tuned builds, but rather by their situational awareness and adaptability. You may be familiar with the military concept of the fog of war, where a lack of information, direction and orientation combine to cloud an individual soldier's perception of the battlefield, resulting in confusion and paralysis. Low-skill players are so deep in the fog of war that they are often barely cognizant of what is going on right in front of them, and typically can only follow a rigid script of actions. High-skill players see through the fog of war and perceive not only what they are doing, but also what their teammates and enemies are doing, and adapt their response swiftly, decisively and appropriately.

[srmalloy]

15 hours ago, Techwright said:

30!  You're lucky if your game wasn't a slide show back then.

The real slide shows were the original Hami raids, back when the zone limit was 250...

[Techwright]

2 hours ago, srmalloy said:

The real slide shows were the original Hami raids, back when the zone limit was 250...

 

That and Rikti invasions under Atlas.