In the game City of Heroes, players can team up for special missions known as Task Force, where 4-8 players run through an elaborate storyline / series of missions all the way up a Villains chain of command to the Archvillain of that dastardly group.

The advantages of a Task Force are that you rack up incredible amounts of experience and influence: Experience to getting the next Level, Influence needed to buy enhancements and inspirations. You also win enhancements along the way, and if you defeat the Archvillain, you win a Single Origin enhancement (very expensive!) well above the average level of the villains you've faced.

The disadvantages are that the TF can take about four to six hours, maybe half a day; and that people can drop out of a Task Force but cannot be brought in once it starts. A poorly built team could have troubles even getting past the first mission. While early on, very few Task Forces had been successful, as players' abilities improved, Task Force survival and success improved.

Blue Arc has done a couple of Task Forces by now (including an undocumented Task Force through Talos Island (Bastion/Citadel contact), and after getting word from a few fellow players decided to offer my services to the next available group starting a Task Force in Brickstown. Invited by Scarlet Torch, I teamed up with 8THWonder Medic, Rhinoceros, Rex Power 2.0, Human Reactor, and Flaming Pharo. And we were thus dubbed...

Task Force Penumbra

With contact Manticore in Brickstown (level 30 - 35), you find yourself on about ten missions against the Crey. Crey is a corporate organization that makes a lot of superhero-based weaponry within the game: they are also owned by an evil countess who wants control of all superhero activity in town, up to and including making her own superpowered troops (with armor and weaponry on par with the gamers!).

The first set of missions are all "Defeat All Enemies" missions, which means you gotta slog through inch by bloodied inch a series of lab floors. Making it nastier than it had to be were the Crey Protectors: superpowered Boss villains dressed like heroes who have scrapper and/or blaster and/or tanker powers and can persist in a battle all the way down to the last bit of endurance and health and stay that way for 10 minutes. Just think of Tsoo Sorcerors and being 10 times more annoying and lethal. Yeah, that bad.

And even then, that wasn't the worst of it. We can laugh now, I think we tried laughing then, but the toughest most annoying bad guy we faced was in the first door mission, and it wasn't even a Boss: A Crey Juggernaut, lieutenant level, threw up a Personal Force Field and then stayed there for the whole of the game. We couldn't punch a hole into that defense, so we moved on and killed everything else in the building, and yet we were stuck with this one jerk-off Juggernaut. Finally we realized if we kept hitting him with everything we got and never let up, his force field would lose endurance (once to zero the shield would turn off and then he was toast). So for 20...yes, 20...damn minutes we tagged the Juggernaut until the shield collapsed then BOOM killed him. UPDATE: I have since learned that Juggernauts don't have PFFs that stay on forever, if at all. It was most likely the Defender we had on team who quit very early during this door mission, who had placed the Juggernaut into a Detention Bubble and then forgot (better not have been intentionally) to drop the bubble before leaving the TF. Sigh. This is why Detention Bubble wasn't a popular power to get...

And again, fight and more fight and more fight. It got repetitious, especially when those DAMN PROTECTORS WOULDN'T DIE LIKE THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO! Ah, well...

To your right, this is the first image you'll get of Rhino...and the last. At some point between mission 2 and 3, Rhinoceros dropped out. Flaming Pharo was gone by mission 2. Still, you can survive a TF with 5 people...

Here are a bunch of Fire Imps being created by a Fire Controller. It's not part of the TF, it's just something I witnessed running between zones. Moving on...

The first three door missions are about the same: Kill all bads. When playing that type of mission it takes time, truckloads of time, which is why Task Forces can take about 5 to 6 hours. There's a trick, though; using a combination of Concealment (Stealth/Inivisibility) and Teleport (Recall Friend), you can on certain door missions sneak ahead past the slew of guards and get to certain targets (files or items to recover, hostages to rescue, the building's Boss and escorts to kill). That speeds up the game considerably, and once we got to those set of missions the rest of the TF went smoothly. This image is from one of those door missions where all we needed was to find a hostage and kill those holding him.

And this is me once Scarlet Torch teleported us to the target site, using Thunderous Blast to kill the hostage takers. Thunderous Blast is a superweapon I got at Level 32, and IT ROCKS (except for the End drainage). With this, I took out two bads and left the third so weak it took only one hit from one of my teammates to finish him. And that was it: Mission Completed. Only killed three bads and saved one hostage. Easy money... Note: I had to remain in Stealth (near-invisible mode) to get this close to the bad guys.

After a few more door missions with set targets, we got a few street hunting missions (these used to be at the beginning of task force missions, but because of leveling abuse they were shifted toward the end of TFs...and yes, I abused that loophole. My bad.). One street hunting mission took us into Crey's Folly, a hot zone for those above Level 30, full of Creys and Ritki and Nemesis (oh my!). We actually suffered a few deaths here, but that was because of a few things: 1) It's very deadly in Crey's Folly, and 2) It's very deadly in Crey's Folly. Other than that we did fine...

And now, I bring you the ARCHVILLAIN OF THE TASK FORCE: HOPKINS!!!

Hopkins is a weapon-wielding tough guy capable of wiping out entire Hardees with his appetite. He also proves to be rather durable in a fight. I nailed him with a few sniper blasts, got my Voltaic Sentinel to get a few shots in, and even wasted a Thunderous Blast on him with little effect (!!!). There is, of course, a very good reason to have 4 other people with you when the time comes to beat up a bad guy. With Rex Power landing punches and Medic's Phantom Army and Phantasms joining in, we took out Hopkins and made sure his Crey HMO was notified. After clearing out the rest of the warehouse corner where Hopkins was hiding we got an interesting message: Mission Completed. Badges galore, and a Single Origin enhancement for each of us. And so...

WE WON! And here we are, debating whether to hunt down the Dark Astoria resident monster Adamastor. Dude, it was midnight, I needed sleep...

Suggestions for playing this Task Force:

1) Given that the lineup has to start with 7 players, might as well go for the full 8
2) Given the Paragon Protectors you face, and a lot of them, get Controllers to Hold the PPs and prevent them from activating their MoGs.
3) Hopkins is a wimp. The least intimidating AV you'll meet in any TF. Just peg him down with a Tanker and go at it.
4) You'll need at least one person with Speed/Recall Friend or Stealth/Recall Friend to hurry through a timed mission to defeat a Security Chief.

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