It is getting harder and harder to find enough people to do what every it is you want to do in the game. I have to wonder what it's like on other servers, because Virtue remains one of the most populated servers in prime time on the West Coast, and yet I see so few people. The weekend was quite busy, we even did a redside Cathedral of Pain on Sunday, but come Monday and Tuesday it's a ghost town.
Tonight when I logged in I checked the global channel that I'm an Op for -- MG's Taskforces -- and there were three people total including me on. I checked Brickhouse and there were only two people including me. I checked Whisper X, which has always been a much bigger channel that gets a lot of use for iTrials and such, and there were maybe 9 people total on in that one. Some people were trying to form an Apex but there wasn't enough interest, so they decided to wait and see what came up later. In the meantime I saw someone in LFG advertising for a Numina, and I wanted exp on Swift Sky and I need most of the Freedom Phalanx TFs so I joined up.
This went well, we finished in 45 minutes. I was a big worried when most of the team was at half health in a normal battle with Freakshow in the first mission... but things went well from there. Although we didn't have a lot of direction during the hunt sequence, and what little we had was ignored. The leader basically said (at the very start of the TF), "Here's the order: perez, atlas, steel, kr, sky, faultline, bricks, crey, tv, ip, boom, talos, founders, eden. We'll just go in order from the top, I'll do perez, Arrow does atlas, etc." I was the third person on the team so that meant I had Steel, but of course when the time came we had other people who immediately shouted that they were heading for Steel too, and from that point people just went wherever they wanted. Ah well.
Around this time Freaky was trying to form an Apex, and once they had six people they gave up trying to find more and were simply looking for fillers. They still needed one filler so during our hunt phase I logged in my other account on the laptop and joined long enough for them to start. It turned out they did a successful six-man Master of Apex run. ^_^
After our Numi we ran a Manticore with mostly the same people, but with a different person in charge. They set it at +2, but it still went fairly well until the final mission. Here, things kind of unraveled a bit. First, two people ran to the very end of the mission where Hopkins the AV was, then were unable to teleport anyone to them, then died, then rezed, then died again... both eventually just decided to wait while the rest of the team cleared our way all the way to them. How very... helpful.
Then, I was charging ahead trying to lead the rest of the team to the end of the mission as quickly as possible, but the rest of the team kept pausing to kill every single thing they saw. So at one point I found myself with 5 or 6 Paragon Protectors on me, and nobody else helping. Once we got past that, we cleared the middle of a large room, and while I charged into the next hallway, the rest of the team decided to clear the corners and balconies of the large room. So once again I found myself going up against 5 to 6 Paragon Protectors at once, and these were level 38, +3 to me. I did die that time, but hit my Return to Battle and managed to finish them off, with the help of one of the people waiting at the end of the mission who could now see me and decided to actually backtrack and help out.
At the same time, the five people who had failed to follow me had a near full group wipe, which only confirmed for me that my scrapper was tougher than our two brutes. :D But anyway, we all managed to meet up at the AV in the end. It's not like Hopkins ever gave any team a hard time, ever. I mean EVER.
So yeah... at the very end there, the legend of the PuG reared its ugly head. "You cannot deny the awesomeness of the PuG", one of my global channel friends said. ^_^
But the good news is I got Swift Sky to 48. Less than 2 levels to go! I think I should run a Citadel or Yin tomorrow night....
During the rescue the councilman in King's Row mission, I went to Crey's Folly for the Kill 40 Crey hunt that happens right after. THIS is how you prepare for that! :D Kind of reminded me of the old days herding enemies into containers with my fire tank.
Oh look, it's the least fearsome AV in the game, with the possible exception of the Hellion in Death From Below. You can tell the fight has just started because he's not held yet, and that happens about five seconds into the fight and then he pretty much stays held for the rest of the fight.
Right after that Jane wanted to do a DFB badge run, and I had my "random" level 1 character that I'd made on Sunday. I'd changed the character's name to Vashi and gave her a better costume, but I probably should have changed it to "Annoying Stormy" or "Clueless Stormy" because that's what she'll be if I ever get her high enough. Anyway on our big badge run we screwed up on the first and hardest badge, by letting a cadaver get killed by a proximity bomb. Right after that people wanted to bail to hopefully join an iTrial (they'd been waiting for enough people to log on so that they could actually run one), but Jane still wanted that badge we'd missed. I switched to Tiffany Blackhearrt on the theory that I'd be more helpful and MA was mostly single target anyway. Other people switched, and before we started most of the other people came back because there STILL wasn't enough interest to form an iTrial yet. We got the badges on the 2nd run, and that was pretty much my evening.
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