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; and that people can drop out of a Task Force but cannot be brought in once it starts. Very few Task Forces stick it out.
NOTE: This page has been updated with corrections and follow-up report.

With the release of Issue 5 comes a new zone: Croatoa, the old colonial town on the outskirts of the Paragon metropolis. It'd been closed for ages, so they say, but they've re-opened the University there and are starting to bring people back. Which would be nice except for all the ghosts, walking pumpkins, witches, grass demons and gnomes trying to kill everyone. Anyway, when a new zone is added, a Task Force gets added right along with it, sometimes even two. The Hollows got the Transcendence Trial. The Shadow realms got a Task Force for each realm. Striga Isle garned two TFs, Moonfire and Hess. And with Croatoa we got the Katie Hannon Task Force.

I like to mix up my diaries by having one of my many characters run it and report it up. Blue Arc, both Wittys, Vectura and Greystone, my original five, have already done and gone that. So I'd like to introduce Bookmark, my first scrapper, for his first diary experience. Congratulations, Bookmark!

Croatoa opens up for people between Levels 25 to 35, which is where Bookmark was operating at Level 32. From previous experience in the Hollows and Striga, you need to unlock the TF contact by working the four door mission contacts on the zone. Bookmark was too high for the first two but just right for the third and fourth contacts, through which he breezed all the door missions except one (okay, two). From there Bookmark offered up the Katie Hannon contact to his newly joined supergroup, Omega Flight, to allow members there who hadn't run Croatoa yet, or were too high to be able to access it themselves. Auto-exemplaring is so cool now.

It took a week to get people together for this, but by Thursday night we had a good turnout: Miss Winters, Haldis, Iced Latex, and Crimson Shroud were already there when Bookmark popped in. We were waiting for one other person I knew wanted to show up, Target's alt Ruined One. In the meanwhile we sent a call out for more people just in case, and we were able to secure Canadian Samuri (oh, he ran out of name space...DAMN YOU DEVS!) and Generic Henchman. With a full team, we set out to hunt lions tigers and bears, oh my...

Okay, we set out on the newest Task Force, rumored to be the shortest TF yet, and the most maddening, as we would soon discover...

THE WICKED WITCH OF THE NORTHWEST

Katie wants to test your mettle first against the Cabal, the coven of witches who fly scouting patterns overhead and wear funky hats. In particular, you must Defeat Mary Macomber. If you don't know your art history, she was an artist from Massachusetts, which means the game devs might be hearing from her estate's lawyers right soon.

This is one of the much-talked-about aspects of the TF. Mary Macomber is an Arch-Villain, whose specialty is she doesn't stay dead. She respawns with her minions after every defeat you witchslap her with. Essentially, the door mission could never end. For this, you get badges. If you defeat Mary an X number of times, that is the badge you get. The big deal is when you beat her 10 times. At that point you get the final badge on it, and you unlock a costume option: YOUR VERY OWN WITCH HAT. Well, as a guy, it'll look...stupid. But Bookmark is not above taking on the challenge of an AV! Bring it on, witch!

We first went shopping... Um, scouting for Mary's location. She's not too far from the portal, usually at the base of the first set of hills straight west of your position. It's suggested you clear a few mobs around that area, just so you don't aggro those mobs later. The deal is, Mary and her minions will always spawn at that location, no matter where you go to, although Mary will chase after you once you've gotten her riled up. We tried to move to a decent spot away from the trees but instead got too close to a wooded glade, so the fighting sometimes got tangled up in the branches.

The problem with fighting Mary Macomber is two-fold: One, dealing with a hard-hitting AV to begin with; Two, making sure you get 10 shots at her. ALL teammates need to give her some damage at some point with each of her spawns to ensure each and every one of us gets a count toward the badge and the hat. If you miss a shot, then you lose track of your counts, and your next spawn confrontation starts the counts up again. It can be very frustrating if you miss a shot, especially if you think you'd hit her and the game decides by its logic that you didn't. Ruined One was having that problem from a previous TF run at her, and I hate to say it but it carried over to ours as well.

We'd beaten Mary and her minions about six times straight, when all of a sudden: MISSION COMPLETED. Mary stopped showing. And everyone was noticing that the badge and the hat option weren't there for them.

This is where the anger and frustration kicks in. There's not much enjoyment when you defeat a villain and don't get the prizes you were hoping for. Ruined One was particularly incensed: this was the second time for him. When things don't go your way in-game, your only option is to File a Petition and see about getting a Chat with an online Game Dev. Unfortunately, all that does is two things: One, you wait for an hour or so for a Game Dev to reach you; Two, there's not much the Game Devs can do for you anyway. If you miss getting a badge for an action, it's because somehow you missed. And for Mary to stop showing up on us after 6 visits when she's supposed to do 10 meant we missed a step somewhere. The only times the Game Devs can help you are if the door mission won't let you out when you've clearly won, or if some glitch is constantly booting people off in mid-mission, or if there's a specific goal that had been reached for a badge and you still didn't get said badge (such as completing the TF and not getting the badge that goes with it).

I found this out later from ReDorthy, who told me what she knew: to succeed at this mission, you MUST first defeat all of Mary Macomber's minions that swarm with her BEFORE you defeat her personally. That could have been the key: we were focused on making sure we hit Mary and didn't focus enough on the minions.

Still, it's very important that you petition the Game Devs: it sets up a record of the complaint, and if a good number of complaints on the problem crop up, the Game Devs will know there's something that needs fixing. For me, the complaint here is how the whole damn badge thing has been set up and how flimsy the objective can be. Any single misstep, however minor, ruins the attempt. I know there are supposed to be challenges to a game, and to a TF, but this can get TOO frustrating for people, okay? The obsession to get the badge can overwhelm any enjoyment of the game itself.

From there, we moved on to the second door mission, to Free Amy from the RedCaps. Amy was a member of Katie's coven, the one responsible for party planning and gift wrapping. RedCaps are a new villain set: essentially gnomes with red caps. Nuff said.

The second door led into yet another cave. Veterans of the Cave Wars will tell you these can be the most eye-painful maps to look at: a dull blue wall to stare at, nooks and crannies, twists and turns, cave rooms with open levels on them where you can't see villains lurking, all of that. But still, needs drive us when the devil calls or something to that effect. So we sauntered in.

We didn't need to fight all the mobs we ran into, just the one defending Amy from our rescue. Still, a large team of heroes are bound to run into a fight or twelve, so we got ourselves a good sized mob of RedCaps and dove right in.

Here's an excellent action shot of us taking on the Rascals, Hooligans and Fiends among the RedCaps. From this shot, you can't see how the RedCaps fight us, other than throwing punches at us. In fact, they shoot arrows as ranged attacks and pull out knives for their melee shots (that Hooligan is holding out knives as he prepares hitting Haldis with downward stabbing attacks). But the best attack they can throw at you, literally, are the SUGs: Suicide Underwear Gnomes.

A Fiend boss will reach down (even if he's not surrounded by Rascal minions, he'll still pull one out) and lift up a wriggling gnome. He will then toss the gnome at you. You'll suddenly find a gnome on your back, punching you with DoT hits of minor pain. You'll also notice that fused barrel on his back, so you're standing there screaming "Gedditoff gedditoff me!" before you feel the earth-shattering KABOOM! Actually you get moderate damage, at least you do if you're a Scrapper with Damage Resistence. It is the wickedest looking attack you will ever see.

Rescuing Amy is an easy affair. Standard hostage mission. You find her pumping her fists rooting for her alma mater of Miskatonic University ("Go, Calamaris!") while the RedCaps ("Aberdeen rules!") are doing their best rioting techniques in defense of their soccer squad (Hooligan: "Bloody YANKS! IT'S FOOTBALL YE BASTIDS!"). You blow em up real good and that's that.

TO THE ROOT OF IT

The third mission is pretty straightforward: Defeat All Redcaps. Another door mission, and this time with a surprise:

New cave look.

The cave is much like the standard cave but this time lit a dark reddish glow. Wooden planks on the floor over the water puddles. The roots of the Croatoa trees above us reaching down into the dankness. You find yourself taking a moment just to stand there and look at all of it. Of course, finally you need to charge in and fight all the RedCaps. Standard smackdown recipe: drop in the melee fighters, buff everyone with heals from the Defenders and Controllers, stir for 2 minutes, then serve. Sorry about the food jokes, but when you run into giant cauldrons of soup cooking, well...

But I digress. Besides, we were out of after-dinner mints.

AND IF YOU'VE HAD SOME KIND OF MUSHROOM...

The fourth mission comes up. Katie finds out she's been feeling under the weather because... she's standing in the middle of a forest in Northeast New England! Duh! No, it's because the RedCaps have captured her soul and have it imprisoned with some of Katie's coven mates. So it's up to us to go into the realm of the RedCaps and Recover Katie's Soul!

You enter a fenced-off open air map, with large mobs of RedCaps spaced out every other hillside. You can scout around without them hitting you, and then you can find the targets you seek: A bright glowy henge arc under which a witch's spirit sits. This is your rescue target. Now, the reports we were getting leading up to this was that we rescue Katie's soul by destroying the arc. You then lead her spirit as a hostage escort back to the portal doorway. This is new: Hostage Escorting. This makes the rescue missions tougher, because during the escort mobs will spawn to attack you and kill both you and the hostage. Making it tougher is that some hostages will fight back, meaning they can aggro mobs to you, and they can fly off outside of your reach to attack someone and get killed in the process. Very risky procedure to fulfill.

Ruined One, having run this earlier, heads off to where Katie's Soul is imprisoned. We ran into our first problem right there: our team split up. In an open air map, that can happen to you, and half the time people are SideKicked and the other half people are in need of Defenders healing or Tankers aggroing. So what happens is that half of us at Katie's prison begins hacking away at it, damaging it to where Katie can be freed...

And then, she disappeared.

Ruined One had her highlighted on his Targeter, and he watched as her health dropped from Green to Black in an instant. And then, boom, she was gone.

We tried regrouping at this point, although two of us were off fighting off a mob surrounding one of Katie's Covenmates. From this point on, confusion reigned. We didn't know what was going on. We worked around the map, freeing up the other witches as best we could, suffering a few deaths along the way, and still nothing happened. The witches we freed stuck with us for awhile, helping out with Storm summonings, but then they disappeared too. We wondered if we needed to clear the whole map, but that didn't seem to be working either. Our frustration and confusion built as time passed.

Ruined One swore that on his last TF they freed Katie's Soul early on, and escorted her back to the portal at the other end of the map. The escorting was difficult because of her constant aggroing of other mobs. But I wondered if we had done this wrong: when we rescued each of the covenmates, each one told us "We have to save Katie!" Somehow implying that they were automatically programmed to say that, and that somehow we needed to save the coven hostages first before saving Katie's soul. And then once we got Katie, we were supposed to escort them all back as one group to the portal. Like I said, things were confusing.

We finally decided to exit out: two of our teammates needed to leave, and we weren't getting anywhere fast. Petitions were sent again, and the rest of us openly cursed and explored our grief.

And so there it was, one of the few Failed Task Forces I'd ever been on. Respec Trials, heck I've failed those, but that happens. Task Forces usually are fail-proof: just Defeat the AV at the end and that's it. This was different, and harder to accept.

The petition I sent got an answer about 40 minutes after I'd sent it. This is one of the problems we have in-game: the response from Game Devs do not match the urgency and time constraints that the players are under. The GM I talked to had little in the way of comfort or even suggestions. He basically took my information about what happened and that was that. It would have been nice if he was able to tell me that our team made mistakes at certain places, but he didn't. I don't think he'd really know what needed to be fixed in the first place. That's the other problem with the Petition responses: we usually get a generic "Thank You Come Again" reply from the support crew and that's that. A little more enlightenment and suggestions on how to proceed would be a little better, I would think, thank you...

Of the Task Force itself, it's not too bad. IF YOU COULD GET THE DAMN BUGS OUT OF IT! AUGH! Sigh, sorry. I can see where the TF would be fun in that it provides differences: a respawning AV to defeat, prizes to win in the form of special badges and costume elements, and a rescue hostage mission that would be more than just Find and Clear, but an actual rescue from end to end.

UPDATE

I'd made some changes to the information about where Mary Macomber spawns. I also wanted to let people know that Bookmark made another attempt at the TF.

Vectura and Blue Arc also made runs in the interim, exemping down for it and getting the whole thing to work right. Unfortunately for Vectura, she found out the Witch Hat costume option DOES NOT allow for hair to be shown. That's right, you go bald underneath it. Her hair, her shiny hair gone! NOOOOOOOOO.

Anyway, Bookmark tried again, also trying to get his former players on this TF run to re-join. Only Haldis signed up, and we ran with a pick-up team. Odds things happened during the Mary Macomber mish, where Haldis and I earned the 10 Times Accolade and the hat on our first fight with Mary. Apparently, the game overcompensated somehow for the glitch we suffered during our first runthrough. The rest of the team didn't get it, btw, and we still had to face Mary 9 more times to complete that door mission. But we gots the hat. And we went on and rescued Katie's Soul as had been suggested. So the glitch was just a glitch. Enjoy the game, kiddies!

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