City of Heroes Braces For Infinite Content

Excitement on the City of Heroes front: Issue 14 will reportedly roll to live servers “soon,” with the pre-download already started. “Soon” is a tricky thing with MMORPGs.  It could be tomorrow, or it could be a month, but that we’ve reached the pre-download stage indicates that Issue 14 is firmly on its way.  Best shot in the dark: 2 weeks.

My advice: get those Invention Origin enhancements (IOs) while you can.  The reward structure has changed in such a way that this will be really hard to do soon.

Sure, the tickets are supposed to make getting choice salvage easier, but that random salvage is no longer quite as easy to come by will result in players throwing significantly less unneeded stuff up for sale.  Consequently, prices on the auction house should skyrocket.  This is going to make it fairly hellish to get your hands on a full set of IOs.

So that’ll be my focus over the next few days.  I’ll take my new dream team of alts (Controller, Blaster, and Scrapper) to level 27 and trick them all out with IOs.  For better or for worse, Issue 14 is going to completely rock City of Heroes, and I want to be prepared to see it.

Unsettled Matters Settled Upon

Like sands through an hourglass, so are the cold-fighting down time days of our life.  Granted, this cold is not a particularly nasty one, at most it manages a dull throbbing, occasional cough, and frequent chest congestion – but it’s stubborn.   (I seem to recall hearing somewhere the mild ones are.)

Forced Development Break

I had puzzled my way to the bottom of the obfuscated wellspring that was City of Heroes’ oh-so-complex Character Generation system.

The key, I decided, was going to be a Gravity Control /Kinetics/Psionic Mastery Controller because only this magical combination had the ability to easily reposition foes (with some correctional facility) for optimal damage boosting and then lock them down for containment before I put their brains in a blender while being protected from disturbances.

No other power combination could do this – a Mind Controller came close, but he didn’t really have a way to establish lock down for AOE containment nuking.   Thus, I had finally found a character of optimal variety, power, and group contribution with a relatively good level of creativity as well.  If everything shook out as I expected it would, this was a guy who I’d take through earning all the badges, completing all the story arcs, fleshing out with all the best invention enhancements, and so on.  He would be a main character without regrets.

I woke up this morning eager to put my plan into effect… and then my hard drive broke.

City of Heroes Issue 14 Preview and Speculation

Issue 14: Architech has gone open beta and I gave it a spin for a few hours today.

I have to say, I’m fairly impressed.  It’s basically taking City of Heroes to a whole other level.  However, it’s not without a potential doozy of a downside.

Backpedling and Frontpedling

On the agenda today:

• My latest City of Heroes-based cognitive dissonance.
• My new PCGamerbike Mini gets an initial test run.

Enough Serious Business

Yeah, okay, this sucks.

I tried to limit my Blog to not mentioning what I’ve been up to lately, and instead focus on things of relative depth or utility, and apparently the whole thing devolved into me moping about getting old.  Lets go back to what I’ve been up to lately – if nothing else, it’s more consistent content then waiting for me to muster the effort to rub my brain cells together.

Short version: Work, City of Heroes, anticipating a cool bit of exercising gear, and depriving the world by failing to produce anything particularly meaningful.