Sunday morning I logged on and decided to do a little more PLing. I had in mind getting Earthsinger and Vashti Ahandra to 35, but mostly it's something I can do when there's nothing else to do that's relaxing and doesn't require me to think very much.
I got Earthsinger up to 35, and by that point there was someone in Whisper's channel who was talking about what badges he wanted to get on his main before the end, including Head of the Hydra, which is the explore badge in the Abandoned Sewer Network mission. You only need 4 to start and it was suggested that he could start the mission and then drop down onto the hydra for the badge. Since I had two accounts logged in, I offered to be two of the people needed to start. But by the time we wound up in Atlas Park, it turned out that he had other people and they wanted to run the trial properly. That was cool too, though it took a few minutes to explain why Tiffany Blackheart had quit the team -- I wasn't about to try and play two characters at once on an AST.
I was using Trinkets on this because that's who I'd been PLing with. She might not have been my first choice otherwise, since she's a shield scrapper, all defense, but she's very tough anyway. But as it turned out, not tough enough to take on a Hatched Kraken GM alone, or even with 1 other person. I used my Return to Battle power and was up long enough for the other person to get back up before I died again, then I attempted to rez twice more but died instantly. Then I waited to be ported somewhere safe, where I waited several minutes for someone to give me a wakie, finally had someone rez me instead, and this failed because the rest of the team decided to pull the baby kraken over to where we all were, so I died instantly again to its footstomp. I got frustrated at that and just hit hospital and ran all the way back, to choruses of "Where did Trinkets go?" and "We could have given you a wakie!"
It turned out virtually no one else had run the trial recently or at all, so I wound up directing people once we got to the bottom. This was a bit frustrating as well because instructions like, "We need to clear the rikti and then take down the pods. But first we'll need to take out the kraken and the tentacles," lead to people pulling rikti while I was still trying to finish instructions. We also had a lot of people taking pods down to 20% while we were still trying to clear rikti from other pods, and a couple things like:
"Okay, take the pods to 20%."
"Down."
"Is everyone at 20%?"
"Mines already down."
/em sighs. "Take them down then, now!"
All of this, of course, is complicated by having no map or anything interactive to show health of the pods you'd find in a modern trial, and probably by somewhat disorganized instructions since I hadn't been prepared to be in charge. But we had a good team and finished in plenty of time, and everyone got their badges.
Right after this I joined a redside team to help take down some AV that I'd never heard of -- a part Coralax priest kinda guy. It was a mission with a lot of freakshow. There was no badge involved, at least for the rest of the team, not sure about the mission holder, but it was fun anyway. I used Mouse Police for that. With all the badging discussion I was tempted once again to try and earn a few more badges on Mouse, I have over 1100 and I'm missing a lot of ones that wouldn't be hard for me to get if I worked at it. I kind of want to rework her build once more and try to go for a good defensive build on a regen scrapper one more time, but we'll see. There's only so much time left to do all of the things we'd like to do.
I spent some time after that checking various of my marketing toons that I've ignored for the last month. I have a lot of money lying around on some of them. I also moved a few characters from Virtue that I don't expect to ever play again, which freed me up to move any characters from other servers that I might want to play. I had this idea that there would be several, but mostly there aren't any. I did one major character move -- I have an ice/ice blaster who is one of my earliest characters ever, who was created as Jalia Ice on Pinnacle in early 2004, eventually reached 27, was later transferred to Freedom and became Mouse Police of Freedom and made it to 42 there, and now I've transferred her to Virtue and remade her again as Blaster Girl One, a clone of all of my buffbot girls because I'm still kind of in love with the look and backstory of those characters. I also transformed my recent "Shin Random" and then "Vashi" storm/water blast defender into "Storm Girl Ten". I'd never actually made a storm-based buffbot girl, and I like the parallel with "Storm Force Ten" which amont other things is the title of a Steeleye Span album. Also, I created a "Stalker Girl One" who is kinetic melee/super reflexes. I've never played kinetic melee to 50, I'm not a huge fan of it overall but it's supposed to be amazing on stalkers, and I've only played super reflexes to 50 once. But no guarantees I'll get this character to 50, of course.
I still don't have a "Brute Girl" buffbot. >.>
When I came back later in the day it was once again too late to catch the hero side Sunday Cathedral of Pain Trial, but in time to catch the redside version. That's cool of course, the hero side runs have been going well and they don't have any trouble finding enough people to join, but the redside ones are always a bit iffy. This time around we had three teams of six, which is getting close to the minimum you'd want for one of these things. I brought AE Baby, who is a 50 + 1 fire/kin corruptor and is a huge asset to any team if I do say so myself. And the trial was completed flawlessly, killed the AV on the first round.
I spent a lot of time after this reworking Blaster Girl One's costumes and build, but eventually I joined someone who wanted to take down Lusca. We were contemplating trying to 2-man or 3-man the big octopus, and I decided to switch to someone who had more defense and less endurance issues -- my Blaster Girl One is not fully IO'd yet after the respec -- so I switched to Jennie Nova, my beam rifle/radiation corruptor, always handy in a GM fight. But we eventually had 4 or 5 people and things went pretty well. Right after that we headed to King's Row to stop the building of the Paladin, and then hunted for other GMs, eventually finding the Kraken, and then summoning Adamaster, and then running a late night Posi 1 and 2. In between the two TFs we also put out a fire in Steel Canyon. I stayed on Jennie for all of this -- she didn't have the Posi badge yet either. Jennie is a fun character to play. I've never managed to incarnate her in the way I intended -- she was supposed to be my best answer for all of the Really Hard Way Magisterium Trials that were being run back in June -- but just as with AE Baby, she brings a great deal to any team.
This is the bio of one of the people I was doing all the GM hunts with. ^_^
One of my new big ideas is to try and play all of my level 50 characters once more before the end. This is probably impractical -- I have more than 40 level 50's, so if I wanted to play 1 a day before the end I'd have to start immediately, and I also want to get other characters to 50, and I kind of want to do some badging on Mouse Police. I can't do all of those things so we'll have to see what I can manage and what I can't. But I can at least try to run short missions on each of my level 50's one last time, just for closure I guess.
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