A 2-Person Raid
I recently got hooked once again on City of Heroes. The Crimson Osprey, who'd been forced into early retirement due to his player being way to freaking busy, has enjoyed a little bit of play time over the last week or so.

One of the nice things about City of Heroes is that the game is pretty friendly for more casual (I guess I should say, "less hardcore") play. You can jump in, do a mission in about 20-30 minutes, and call it a day. You can team up very quickly with other heroes (or villains, with City of Villains) with an easy interface, or you can solo (which may be more difficult for certain character builds than others at higher level).

Unfortunately, my infrequent, short play has prevented me from ever rising to high levels in City of Heroes. Well, that, and I'm a player who has a case of what my superheroic partner last night called, "Altaholism" - a fondness for playing way too many characters ("alts" or "alternate characters") instead of concentrating on just one.

Now, City of Heroes has it's own version of a "Raid," called a "Task Force." For those of you not familiar with what raiding is in Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs (MMORPGs), here's my take.

Once upon a time in MMORPGs (I tend to attribute the origin to EverQuest, though I'm sure it started sooner than that, possibly with text MUDs) folks realized they could take on enemies more powerful than normal simply by zerging it.

"Zerging" is another term that may need definition - it comes from the game StarCraft, an older, huge hit from the makers of "World of Warcraft," the 800 lb gorilla of the Massively Multiplayer world right now. In StarCraft, the Zerg race specialized in cheap, disposable units. One of the most successful tactics for new players was to do a "zergling rush" or "zerg rush" - a winning move in the first ten minutes of the game if the opposing players were unprepared. It was basically an attack by massive numbers of disposable units.

So if a powerful dragon is too tough for a party of six players, you might be able to zerg rush it with five parties of six. Of course, coordinating an assault of this magnitude takes a lot more time and effort (particularly since it only takes one stupid player to wipe out an entire raid at a crucial moment). These assaults became termed, "raids." Raids tend to be long, grueling affairs. And too often, fairly boring. But there's often the potential for good loot from the slain dragon and its minions or whatever.

City of Heroes doesn't have quite the emphasis on loot - which is both a pro and a con. But for those who do like to raid, the developers created "task forces," which are a series of linked missions with lots of boss monsters and some nice rewards at the end. They are also long and grueling, though not as boring as some EverQuest raids I'd been on. They also tend to scale to the size and power of the raiding force - which means once again, stupid players can be a liability.

Well, last night I got invited to help START a task force. The girl starting it needed at least three people to start the task force, but was planning on soloing the whole thing. (She paid us 100,000 influence each just for helping her out - influence is sort of a mock currency in City of Heroes). I offered to stick with it, as I was looking for something to do. It was supposed to be one of the smallest Task Forces in the game.

We ended up "raiding" for over four hours to complete the sequence, which was a bit longer than I anticipated putting into City of Heroes for an evening. But I do have to admit, I had a blast playing it. I'm a sucker for superheroics to begin with. I was a scrapper (A science-based martial artist with super reflexes), and my partner was a tanker with fire powers. No "healers," so we had to rely on inspirations or quick rest breaks to restore ourselves.

Highlights of the evening:

* Both of use had super-jump travel powers. So I had a lot of fun with us following each other from mission to mission bounding across rooftops, pausing to comment occasionally. I'd never really followed anyone with super-leap before. It's incredibly amusing.

* Two heroes trying to deal with 2 or 3 Vahzilok Embalmed Abominations at a time. The embalmed are basically walking bombs. Besides just smacking you around and puking poison on you, they like to get into an animation that looks like they are fighting constipation REALLY HARD, and then explode in a firey mess that only hurts their enemies. If you can keep hitting them and getting them on the ropes, you can prevent them from self-destructing. We were usually successful at keeping one or two pinned down (if we could keep track of them in a mess of 8 or so enemies). We found ourselves the unfortunate targets of 2 or 3 detonations at a time in a couple of confused melees.

* Getting 3 badges at almost the same time - I got the "Gravedigger" badge (for putting down way too many Embalmed Abominations in my career), the "Tourist" badge (for earning 10 badges), and the "Positron's Ally" badge (for completing the Task Force sequence) all in the last combat of the night.

Labels: Mainstream Games, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 1:13 AM (Permalink)