Anyone remember the old "Dumpster Diving" tactic?

[TrueRaiden]

I remember in the early days of CoH where a tank would gather up a massive group of enemies, typically happened in Brickstown, and would jump into a large container or "Dumpster".  It was something like a clown car, where impossible amounts of enemies would all be crammed into this little box and then your Blasters would Build-up and nuke the whole lot.

 

Leveling up back then was quite a slow task and people were pretty inventive with methods of boosting people.  Did anyone here participate in this activity back in the old times?  I helped my group as much as I could as a Controller with the Kinetic power set.  I had some usefulness in the form of Speed Boosting the Tank, but the work was mostly done by the Tank and Blasters.

[Rylas]

I started playing shortly before the issue that nerfed dumpster diving. It was entertaining to watch, and excellent for XP. I remember being in the Hollows and joining a team for a Troll cave mission (I think it was the one for Atta). The Inv/ tanker herded that whole map into one room and we just took pot shots at a massive mob, left the boss alone, stepped out to reset, and repeated.

 

Not having a cap on how many enemies you could effect was ridiculously hilarious.

[TrueRaiden]

It really is for the best that it was nerfed, but you're right, it was a hilarious sight to see.  Xp was so tasty too hehe.

[Obduran]

I had an energy/fire scrapper that was built specifically for large burst and survival that I used to run PL farms out of portal corp.

 

Good times, a pack of 7 lowbies, sometimes with a few levelled folks as instead, just mowing down mobs and watching the leveling explosions like a wave of fireworks.

[USCI]

I remember in the early days of CoH where a tank would gather up a massive group of enemies, typically happened in Brickstown, and would jump into a large container or "Dumpster".  It was something like a clown car, where impossible amounts of enemies would all be crammed into this little box and then your Blasters would Build-up and nuke the whole lot.

 

Leveling up back then was quite a slow task and people were pretty inventive with methods of boosting people.  Did anyone here participate in this activity back in the old times?  I helped my group as much as I could as a Controller with the Kinetic power set.  I had some usefulness in the form of Speed Boosting the Tank, but the work was mostly done by the Tank and Blasters.

 

That was a great tactic for Dreck....until it got Nerf'd as a timed mission.

[srmalloy]

I remember in the early days of CoH where a tank would gather up a massive group of enemies, typically happened in Brickstown, and would jump into a large container or "Dumpster".  It was something like a clown car, where impossible amounts of enemies would all be crammed into this little box and then your Blasters would Build-up and nuke the whole lot.

 

The classic was the Portal Corp mission 'wolf farm' on the instance map that was the NE corner of Bricktown; the mission goal was to close the eight dimensional portals, but you ignored them. You needed a tanker (Inv worked best) and a /Dev blaster. The blaster flew to an open-top dumpster to the north on the east side and started putting down Trip Mines continuously while the tanker ran around aggroing the map (the trip mines would age out and vanish, so the blaster had to keep putting new ones downl. When the tanker had grabbed the map, they would call 'inbound', and the blaster flew up toward the height limit. The tanker would jump into the dumpster, and the wolves would jump in after them. Because mobs didn't have a vertical collision box, mobs could jump down onto each other and overlap, and you'd get about 90% of the map in the dumpster. Because of a quirk with Trip Mine, if the blaster that put it down was too far away, the mine wouldn't go off, so the 12—15 trip mines in the dumpster would just sit there. Once the tanker was sure they'd gotten all they could into the dumpster, they'd call 'in', and the blaster would dive down; when they got in range, all the mines would go off. All the wolves in the dumpster would go down, your Inspiration and Enhancement trays would instantly fill up, and you'd get around 600,000 to 800,000 XP. Exit, reset the mission, and repeat.

 

One of the funny things that would happen, if you were too close to the dumpster when the mines went off, is that you would get a pop up window from the game engine that said "Too many effects to render."

 

Unfortunately, the change to the aggro limit made it impossible to get the entire map at once, so the classic wolf farm fell to the game updates. Prior to that, though, putting limits on how many times you could reset a mission, and making that mission timed, restricted how much you could exploit it for XP and drops, but didn't stop it.

 

A lower-  level open-zone version of this, with somewhat different tactics, came from before the changes to Burn that ended the Burn Tanker as the brain-dead leveling build, epitomized by the Burn Tanker -- and I'm sure someone still has screenshots of this -- running through Perez Park aggroing all the Skulls and Hellions on the streets and dragging them to the dumpster in the southeast corner of the zone, jumping in, and burning down all the mobs that followed them in.

 

[Chuckers]

I remember when someone first told me about it.. I thought it was HYSTERICAL. The tank ran the map and aggroed almost every mob with in miles and came back. I set off my energy blaster nuke and BOOM! I laughed so hard and then was like "AGAIN!!! AGAIN!!!"

 

[Paladin]

It was fun! If I remember right, wasn't there no enemy collision? It wasn't quite dumpster diving, but I recall getting a row of fifth column to stack in a single space and nailing them with Headsplitter. The 10+ enemy crunch was ridiculously satisfying, and the series of 5th jumping in a row looked like some kind of time loop. Definitely miss the satisfying smash!

[TrueRaiden]

Very cool to hear stories of the old leveling tactics from you guys!  Damn it takes me back to the really silly things people would do to level faster.  Certainly beat getting lost in Perez Park or stuck in Faultline while you were trying to get to your cool powers at the higher levels.

[srmalloy]

It was fun! If I remember right, wasn't there no enemy collision?

 

There was collision, but the collision box was only for same-level movement -- I'm sure you've run into NPCs. But from above, there is no collision box, so if you can get a mob to jump over an obstacle, or down off a balcony or ledge, it can land completely overlapping a mob that was already there. That's why you could fit an entire map of mobs into a dumpster.

 

The other wolf farm, on the instanced outdoor 'forest' map, had the tanker collecting the wolves up against a notch in a big boulder. That wasn't as efficient, because the wolves would be running up to the tanker, and collide, but their pathing logic would make them try jumping over the obstacle (the wolf in front of it), resulting in a similar but less dense packing; when the trip mines went off you'd see dead wolves flying everywhere.