Put Echo: The Hive in Ouroboros

[Vanden]

Just imagine it! Healing blankets! Dispersion Bubble beacons! Hold phases! Like in the old days!

 

But maybe boost the rewards, 'cause otherwise no one's gonna bother.

[Vanden]

PA drop teams! Kronos Titan ambushes! It'd be great!

[Zumberge]

PA drop teams! Kronos Titan ambushes! It'd be great!

 

Kronos Titan ambushes!

 

Can we get a P2W temporary power that spawns a Kronos Titan in the zone?  The Steel Canyon auction house was besieged by an ambush of level 35 5th Column a day or two past, and it filled me with both nostalgia and a mighty need.

[justicebeliever]

I am definitely a +1 on this.

[Murcielago]

I don't remember them changing the hive, what did they change?

[srmalloy]

The rework of the Hive is old enough that, if there isn't an Echo version already, I have my doubts that Paragon Studios kept a copy of the original version around, which would mean that the zone would need to be rebuilt and the original Hamidon and mitochondria would need to be redefined.

 

And you'd need to decide whether you wanted the real original (and unfair) version where you got your Hami-Os from defeating the Hamidon Buds Hamidon scattered when defeated, or the intermediate 'drop directly to each participant' version.

 

I don't remember them changing the hive, what did they change?

 

Let's see if I'm remembering everything. Originally, Hamidon spawned on a timer, not as the result of the players' actions in the Hive. If you had enough Illusion members, you would have a group up above the Hamidon dropping Phantom Army to draw Hamidon's fire, otherwise you used a tank and dedicated healer. The remainder of the group would bulk up as a group with all of the healers essentially putting their AoE heals on autofire as the leader of the group led them around to take out the mitos one by one. When all the mitos were down, everyone with a hold would start throwing them at Hamidon, with nothing else but the taunt tank going (except for buffs like Speed Boost, Accelerate Metabolism, et al.) until Hamidon stopped shooting at the tank, signifying that he was held, at which point everyone started unloading on him with everything you had while continuing the holds. If the hold broke, there would be a "yellow dawn", with one yellow mitochondria spawning for each person in the goo; this would almost always be a full wipe (except for the very lucky or fast), and was very difficult to recover from.

 

Because of the one exploration badge directly under where Hamidon spawned, getting the zone accolade depended on either participating in a raid or coming through before he respawned, since it was right under the nucleus and you'd eat a ton of incoming fire getting there.

 

Originally, when Hamidon was defeated, he would spawn a Hamidon Bud for each player in the goo, and you got a Hami-O for defeating a Hamidon Bud. This was heavily biased toward builds with high AoE damage; a Fire blaster could sometimes get six or seven Hami-Os in a run while most of the Controllers and Defenders would be hard-pressed to get any. This was later regularized so that each participant got their own Hami-O drop.

 

The whole thing got reworked when they changed the zone to require you to defeat an unknown number of the DE in the zone to spawn, collecting the EoEs that dropped from them. The different types of mitochondria required different methods to drop them -- one only vulnerable to ranged, one only to melee, and the last required being held first, so the group was broken into teams for specific mitos, with the taunt tank and healer (and usually a backup pair) keeping Hamidon's attention. Once the mitos were down, it moved to attacking Hamidon directly. Instead of the "yellow dawn", at 50% and 25%, Hamidon would spawn a fresh set of mitos; the raid would pull back out, reorganize back into the mito teams, and do it again. If the raid seemed powerful enough, sometimes the raid leader would opt to simply power through the second (and sometimes the first, although that was much rarer) mito respawn to finish more quickly; this happened more often as more players showed up with higher-level Incarnate powers.