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.

Witty Librarian, the Controller version, has worked his way up to the 20s Levels, which means he can gain access to the Striga Isle missions and their two task forces. And upon reaching Level 23, he took the Moonfire challenge for her Task Force...

Task Force Astral, Unite! Hmm, too Marvel-ish...

The real person who wanted to do the Task Force was Ranma Saotome. (Scrapper) from the Safe Harbor sg. From there we were able to recruit El Fuego Fuerte (Controller), Harbormaster (Controller), and New Word (Tanker). Since the Task Force requires at least 6 people to start, we recruited Soundblast (Blaster) and Kiltmandu (Scrapper) to balance out the team.

The Moonfire Task Force Astral has one goal, and one goal only: Kill Sk...Ouch! Okay. The primary nemesis is Council (both TFs on Striga are Council-based as they are the primary nemesis on that map). The first mission is simple: Defeat all Vampri in a cave. The cave is a lot like the Troll caves you get in the Hollows, which are wider than the original, hard-to-maneuver CoT caves of Perez, but also darker earth tones to make it hard to see where you're running.

Our team ran into a few problems during this and the second door mission, where we found ourselves splitting up, either taking separate tunnels or else our lead hitters (Word, Ranma and Kilt) rushing off to the next batch of bads while the rest faced down stragglers. At some point, as team leader I ordered (I tried to word it as a suggestion, but it was an order) that we all follow the Tanker, New Word. This was an order we usually stuck to, although I admit some of us did jump ahead frequently (okay, I did twice, but Sound, dammit you're a blaster! Let the Tanker take aggro! Sheesh!).

The second door mission was Defeat all Villains in the cave. This time we faced off against Wolves.

Time for a side note: There's an Accolade called Atlas Medallion which earns you 5 extra endurance points (not much, but take what you can). You earn the Accolade by getting a Tog Dog (top of Atlas globe) explore badge, a Pupil history badge (the plaques in Atlas, Kings, Galaxy and Perez), the Spelunker badge (the fortune teller mission: if you get it, RUN IT!), and ESPECIALLY the Silver Bullet (100 wolves) and Slayer (100 vamps) badges.

As a side note to the side note: most of us running this TF were earlier joined in a badge hunt in Striga Isle for Wolves and Vampri to get those badges. Now it turns out, we should have just waited for the Moonfire TF. Do you hear me? Wanna get the badgers? Moonfire TF it!!! Hehe.

The fighting could be described as intense and prolonged: there were many a mob and a sizeable number of Lts. that don't go down easy. Also, the team was top-heavy with Controllers, which meant we could heal others and control the mobs we faced, but we didn't have the firepower to mop up the floor with anything, not even a real-life mop. There were lots of stealthing in Group Invis, buffs on healing and speed boosts, and quick heals. Unfortunately, we had the occasional death: this is a TF, it's not supposed to be easy. But yay me, Witty controller has Resurrect to bring them back to life.

Next step after Door 2 is a Delivery mish, taking Flask to contact Stephanie Peebles. The clue is supposed to be 'Nictus' the otherworldly dark matter that subverts reality, twists friends into villains, destroys parked cars, and (gasp!) listens to Don 'No Soul' Simmons (NOOOOOOO!). After that we faced down Archon Fontain, on a Galaxy-heavy map (blasters using Nictus or negative energy). This time we had to save 6 hostages to prevent them from buying Steely Dan albums (NOOOOOOO!).

Below are a set of photos I took of the other teammates, in various poses and battle actions. You can tell that's Harbormaster by his shoulder blades...

One of the things to note about Task Forces: you get truckloads of XP and influence for it. If you're low enough to run a TF, odds are you will quickly Level up. That happened to Witty, jumping to Lvl 24 during this tough cave run. HarborMaster had also leveled, although a higher level he was already close to doing so. The thing there was Harbor hurried off to IP to train up.

No one told him there's a trainer on the Striga map: Ravenstorm, just below the hilltop where Moonfire stands. After that door mission we took a bio break, and I traveled to Ravenstorm to ask for a pony..(OUCH)...Okay, I chose a new power: the empathy power known as Clear Mind (prevents a character affected from Holds, Immobilizes, Stuns, and tooth decay).

It was also at this point everyone started getting cross with me about the /bind command I set with my Phantom Army. Every time I used the Bind command I stated "Arise Libaray Ninjas! Defend the books!" After 10 times of doing that, I got yelled at by...oh, everyone. So I used the mouse key click after that...

Next mission was easy: Defeat 20 Council. The street hunt. We used to get these at the start of a TF, but...long story. As our team has fanned out, we formed solo and small teams to get Council where we could find them. Our esteemed Tanker New Word took it upon himself to breech the walls of the Council Base itself, a reckless act so daring in its execution that I forgot to take screenshots of it (just as well: as a controller I would have gotten blown up within 50 feet of the wall, thanks to those howitzers they've got mounted up there!). Suffice to say they will be singing of his efforts in Sto-Vo-Kor for centuries.

After the beat-down, one of the Council troops reveals three things: the true nature of hedgehogs, the secret name of the fourth Magi, and the location of Dr. Todd, our rescue target. Now, we have moved up in the world, fighting in Council base tunnels than in Troll tunnels. I miss Troll tunnels. Council tunnels are so bloody claustrophobic!

From there we entered another door mission, and again a Defeat All Villains entreaty from Moonfire. At this point the discussion came up about the nature of this task force, the series of door missions we've been running into. We ended up comparing this TF to two other existing TFs in game: Positron and Bastion. We all agreed the Moonfire TF was better than either: We had a good mix of bad guys, there's a decent narrative arc, some changes of scenery, and it's not as repetitive as Bastion gets to be (Bastion is almost all door missions: and ALL of them are in the same Council base cave map! BOOOORRRRIIINNNNGG!). Someone, I can't recall who, defended the Positron TF because it at least had a mix of bad guys. I tried to point out the lack of narrative focus on a specific group of bads, but we were fighting for our lives quick enough and that settled that.

We also ran into our first difficulty of the game: El Fuego Fuerte's sudden departure. El Fuego, in his 40s, had to exemplar down to fight the good fight with us. That meant a big problem if he ever got booted from the game, be it a mapserver error or an attempt to quit out without quitting the team. It was more than likely a mapserver error: he suffered the same fate in an earlier TF. We wept, we wailed, we gnashed our teeth, we moved on. But we were down a Controller, and one that gave us Speed Boosts (which work as Endurance Recovery for us).

There was another delivery mission past this one: this time off the map, to Skyway City and to Dr. Phelp. SoundBlast jumped (literally) ahead of us on this, and the deal about delivery missions is that anyone on team could do it, not just the team leader and certainly not the whole team. Although some players grumbled that I should have gone (team leader), we let SoundBlast make the delivery, which he did without any noticeable problems.

That led to what will be talked about for ages to come: THE EPIC BATTLE AGAINST SALVATORE AND HIS GUARDS! Actually, it wasn't that epic. The biggest problem was how to get there: it's in the middle of the Council Base! Speedsters like Witty had to work our way past sensor-guided attack autoturrets (OUCH), and then wander through the dirt paths into the base itself before getting to a cliff to climb to the doorway. We charged in, and fought and fought and fought our way into the bowels of Salvatore's tunnel.

And then, success, we defeated Salvatore! And then...

...Kiltmandu's ex-wife showed up in Real Life. Kilt went AFK for...well, forever.

Ex-wives showing up on game day. There ought to be a law against that sort of thing. Anyway, the door mission wasn't totally completed yet, so we cleared the room and got the Mission Completed message, and then we streamed out. Except for Kilt.

And then we ran into the biggest headache imaginable. The door mission seemingly reset itself. It said we had to fight Salvatore again. We asked, waited, pleaded for Kilt to hurry out the door, thinking he was still on-map and throwing the game off. He soon exited (if soon you meant by 20 minutes). And the mission was still there. I clicked to call Moonfire, which I could do at that point in the game. It said it needed to speak to the team leader. All indications were we had to fight again. So we streamed in, refought the battles, gained more xp, stuff like that.

This time I need to point out something: my controller Witty has Resurrect as a power, but the deal is it works on other characters. When I die, I have to use an Awaken inspir, and somehow I had lost mine in a trade somewhere. No else on the team kept one, except Kilt who was AFK because his ex-wife was emulating a similar person in my family's circle known as She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named-Else-Mom-Will-Rant-For-3-Hours-About-That-Rhymes-With-Witch. I remained on the floor, hoping against hope that Kilt will return with an Awaken available. Mission Completed, still no sign, and when Kilt woke up he passed on word he had no Awakens.

So I headed to the hospital in Talos, and from there hurried back. Moonfire was STILL giving us hassles over the imcompleted Completed Mission. So I stopped by her spot on the way there, thinking a direct confrontation would work. No dice. As a method of last resort, I wept to the Complaint message board for THE LOVE OF DOG HELP US! Then, finally, we realized the game might have gotten confused about the contact person, and so we asked Ranma, the first one who originally started the team (before handing over the reins to me), to check. SUCCESS! She was now the contact team leader.

We needed to kill 20 more Council troops to secure our Archvillain's lair, and from there we move onto the last door: simple enough - Defeat Arakhn!!!

Once more, we stumbled through Council tunnels, until we at last arrived at the last room. In the far corner stood a set of Galaxy troopers as guards, and in the middle, a normal-looking redheaded ARCHVILLAIN FOR THE LOVE OF DOG NO! This image here is as close as I dared get to an AV: Controllers do not last long against any AV. We waited for buffs to charge up, and then...

FIGHT! We went in, Tanker taking the lead. The Scrappers and Blaster focused between the minions and the AV. The Controllers sent out our Phantom Army guys. And for long, very long hours...actually it took about 90 seconds. For all the talk about Arakhn being a quick healing, energy-draining bad guy of nigh-invulnerability, New Word knocked her flat in 90 seconds. About 2 minutes later we finished off the minions and then...

WE WON! And found out the one thing we didn't know about the TF: there's no badge for it. Outside of the SO prize and the XP and Inf you earn, there's nothing to show you kicked Arakhn's butt! We griped about that awful quick.

Just as we completed that the Game Dev Tekcon appeared in the form of a superintellegent shade of blue, asking us what needed to be fixed. I mentioned my lack of a social life and the need for $50,000 to purchase some land in Arizona, but Tekcon pointed out that smartasses don't last long in-game so I told Tek our woes...in the past tense. Love it when game devs show up just after the solution was found/ignored/aborted. It turns out the glitch we suffered was a common one with Moonfire, and that we simply needed to play on. Since we were done, we simply posed for a closing photo shot, and then made plans for the KICKASS HESS TF! WOO-HOO!!! 28 HERE I COME!!!

Post-game: I kept talking to the Dev, Tekcon, about the lack of a badge. Tek was convinced there were only badges for the normal TFs like Bastion and Numina and Synapse and all: I pointed out there was a badge made for the other new Striga TF, Burkholder's Bane. Tek's answer was to petition the official board. UPDATE: As of Issue 5, the Moonfire TF does indeed issue a Badge to show your Accomplishment. However, it looks like a Exploration badge, which suggested not a lot of thought got put into it. UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Rumor has it Issue 6 came with a new-looking Badge, so all's well.

And so, here is the closing photo from this day's mission:

From left: Soundblast, Harbormaster, Kiltmandu, Witty Librarian (Controller), New Word, Ranma Saotome. El Fuego was in Houston, overseeing a hostile takeover of an energy consortium.

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