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.
I began writing these diaries to document the Task Forces I've run, to provide a gauge for people to see which ones are fun and which ones take some effort, and to offer others tips and suggestions on how to survive...
This is late July 2007, the game nearly up for over two years. Issue 10 just arrived, and with it came an alteration to an old and underused zone. The Rikti Crash Site - a high-level hazard zone with a Respec trial, a cool crashed spaceship, and almost no traffic to it - got upgraded to a new Warzone within the game. Warzones are a new development, a map shared with City of Villains in which good guys and bad guys can team together to defeat a common foe. In this case, the Rikti. The aliens were part of the original set of major CoH villains, and were a part of the backstory at the beginnings of CoH (the damage to Boomtown and the Crash Site, the unleashing of ancient evils due to the turmoil of alien invasion, etc.) Lately, the Game Devs had gone back to the unused zones like Faultline (Issue 8) and now the Crash Site and are revising the maps to improve interest and flow of traffic. It worked wonders with Faultline (ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY DONUT!); and now we get to see if the Rikti Warzone works as well.
The Warzone has an advantage over the new Faultline map: Warzone gets a Task Force, high level content TF for those Level 45 to the cap 50. It's part of the ongoing struggle to keep players with Level 50s engaged in the game, as they have nowhere else to level up. A new Statesman Task Force was added for the 45s - 50s back in Issue 8 as well: that one will get a diary as well. It's just... well, as a TF Addict I *want* to enjoy running TFs... but States... that's a different issue. Anyway.
The
TF is offered by contact Lady Grey, a member of the Vanguard,
an in-game Superhero faction that focuses on interplanetary conflicts and issues
(much like the Freedom Phalanx does the training and original TFs, and the Longbow
does the policing and Arachnos fighting). As a side note, the Vanguard issue
special Merits that count towards costume items (and maybe other things) when
you fight the Rikti, so before you run this TF (which is Rikti-heavy) you should
start up the first few contacts in the Warzone and get the Merit system going...
I
sent my primary character, WittyLibrarian, in on this Task Force, and I asked
on the Forums and in-game on the BMT chat channel for a full team of 8 players.
It's mandatory to start the TF with 8: players can drop if they like, but given
what you face in this TF it helps to keep enough players and enough team balance
to succeed, so make sure you get players who want to complete this. Anyway,
I got some early interest right away, from Mashy Niblet
who came on board as a team aggro manager...played as a Stone Brute. Remember
I said this Warzone is where heroes AND villains can team up? This TF also does
that, allowing Blasters to team with Masterminds, Scrappers to team with Stalkers,
Defenders with Corruptors, Tankers with Brutes, Controllers with Dominators,
Cats with Dogs, Lions and Lambs, TOTAL ANARCHY! Cough. Excuse me. Another
reminder: once you start teaming heroes and villains, you CANNOT exit the
Warzone map in any way. Any player who leaves to another zone on either side
gets kicked. You can't invite people from off-map zones as well: everyone's
got to meet in the Rikti Warzone before starting up, just to ensure a smooth
start.
I also got requests from S1ice n Dice, Claws Scrapper; Judgements Hand, another Blaster; Ms Aligned, a Kinetic Defender; Maxi Martin, Grav Controller; Death Tag, an Energy Brute; and Madame Grimm, Spines Scrapper from Witty's SG Angels of the Night! With a full team, off we went into the WILD BLUE YONDER OF A NEW TF!
The
theme of Issue 10 is that the Rikti are attempting again at INVASION, trying
to succeed where their attempt two years ago failed. To that goal, the aliens
had captured a robot tinkerer named Penelope Yin, for some devious alien purpose
(sorta like the aliens from Frankenstein
Meets the Space Monster, but with fewer cheesey NASA film clips).
Like a majority of door
missions, 
you
pretty much slam your way through each mob until you achieve your objective,
in this case searching through the hallways and tunnels until we find Penelope.
What elevates this TF above the others is that we get to see new interiors.
The Rikti are now given their own themed hallways of trapezoidal halls, holographic
light walls, hovering objects, and soda machines. And there are small narrow
air vents you have to climb through to battle the face-hugging acid-bleeding
xenomorphs that are threatening your adopted daug... uh, oh damn I'm thinking
like Ripley again aren't I?
Reaching
Penelope is easy: freeing her gets to be tough. Blasting away her guardian Rikti
is one thing, but it unleashes a set of spawns including Clockwork! That's right,
Clockwork! It seems Penelope has a celebrity stalker Ex-Boyfriend, goes by the
name of Clockwork King. Yeah, our old party buddy! Once you free Penelope from
her lasershow prison, you have to escort her out to the front door... where
Ye Olde Rustbucket is waiting to 'defend her honor.' Sheesh.
Just pummel the jerk and be done with it. Do have to warn you though, he's an
AV status and he's Psi-based attacks, meaning it will take some doing (thankfully
without any Team Wipes!)
Getting Penelope to the door gets you the Mission Completed sign and Theme Song, and from there it's on to the second mission...
Door
Two takes you to teh ever-famous Paragon City sewer system, where the Rikti
like to farm for their appetizers. This mission is a pretty straightforward
affair. You keep going down the tunnels and you hit absolutely everything in
your way. The affair part is with that cute Playboy Playmate from Germany and
takes place later at an undisclosed Marriott on the outskirts of town. Ahem.
The mission gets interesting when you run into a new Rikti threat introduced with Issue 10: The Assault Suit. These are Elite Boss level weapons of total doom, and people are meeting them in a hard and heavy way during the Invasion. The thing in this mission is that the Assault Suits have gotten ahold of the Left Behind book series and decided to name themselves after the Four Horsemen of the Apaco... Apopco... Apocallis... Four Horsemen of Uber Doomage. They are the Riders you have to stop.
With
two Aggro Takers, we took out the first set of Riders (Named for the First Horseman,
Ralph) without problem. The second set got messier: that set of Riders come
with Fear and Terrorize mezzers that made us squishie types freeze up and lose
our Endurance (and Health!). It took some effort (and a few teammates deaths)
to move out of Melee range from them, but once we left the Brutes and Scrappers
to handle them we piled on the ranged damage and took them down. That's the
photo on the right here (The red glow about our heads come from the Vengeance
Leadership power: that activates when a teammate falls in battle).
We met in turn Three of the Riders: Ralph, Famine, and Pestilence. The sewers led into another set of Rikti tunnels, and from there another large room. And in here, all four Riders have gathered, joined this time by the Riders of DEATH! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE! GAME OVER MAN G... oh, we won. ;-)
Best tip about this door mish: watch out for the Fear and End Drain from Famine, make sure you leave the Assault Suits to the Tanker/Scrapper/Brutes (do Stalkers get a Mezz protect?).
The third mission sends
you to another abandoned building in the Warzone, this time to Save Captured
Psychics. Just to let you know early, this one is a bit buggy.
You have to rescue 6 Psychics, and 2 of the ones you rescue are escort missions. You can meet them at any point in the map, sometimes early on other times somewhere on the second or third level. The two you rescue for escort are Sisters, Infernia and Frigia. The buggy part of this escorting is, for the love of Faathim, Infernia is a bleeping incurable gossip who just stands there and TALKS! You have to wait around for like 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and she KEEPS YAPPING! She's like that Donna from the Dr. Who Christmas episode with that evil spider woman and she is just so BLOODY USELESS! She made me miss Peri, and GODS was she annoying! (head thump) Wait, where was I? Oh, yeah. Once she stops talking is when the ambushes hit ya, so be prepared. Frigia's a little better, she's light on banter, but her rescue brings up the Animation Movie Sequence of an alien Boss Dra'gon who demands Clemenza gets rid of Paulie. Or am I mixing up my cultural talking points again?
I
mentioned this earlier, the Rikti get their own door maps now, and they include
air vents. So you can re-enact key scenes from ALIEN and all. At this point
in the TF, we had to explore the vents for hostages, so I got some screenshots
here.
Once you take care of the two escort stages of the door mission, you can focus your efforts on clearing out the remaining psychic hostages, and then find your way to Dra'gon's office. He'll have the last two hostages with him. He's a standard AV with Rikti powersets, energy damages, high hit points, and a tickle spot right under his third abaverate rib. There, riiiiiight about... THERE! TICKLE HIM! Dra'Gon: Humans: Stop. Reflexive reaction: unacceptable. Blue Meanies: Take NO for an answer. Ack.
This
screenshot is WittyLibrarian unleashing his Energy Blaster's nuke attack of
Nova. It's scary when I figure out how to make that work... >:)
Beating
Dra'Gon is pretty simple: Debuff him like all the other AVs, and then out-pummel
him. He'll have his special attacks, to be sure, but with a balanced team and
with the appropriate buffing, debuffing, damage dealing and aggro taking your
team can handle them and (Witty dies) AW DAMMIT REZ ME! (Ms. Aligned hands Witty
a towel) Well, a towel
DOES help after all...
Usually on this TF, you've gotten to the two-thirds mark. If you've run it well, you're well under 2 hours done. This is good. If you've managed to keep everyone together on your team, this is very good, because the next mission is gonna need every player you've got...
Welcome
to what is the most talked-about stop on the tour: Your very own Private
Hami Raid!
Yes indeed! You get to fight your very own Hamidon, complete with hovering Mitos, stuns, energy drains, and toxic damage galore!
Your team drops by helicopter into a zone map, an Eden laid waste by invading Rikti forces that are attempting to seize Hami for their own nefarious reasons. Follow the river to a waterfall, below which is a lake where the Hami is being secured by 6 Rikti pylons.
Your
mission: Destroy the Pylons and the aliens defending them. The trick: avoid
aggroing Hami too early. The solution: MORE RUM! No wait, excuse me. The solution
is to circle on the outskirts of Hami's Jello force field, keeping any pets
at a distance, and making sure you only stay targeted on the Pylons and on the
nearby Rikti.
Once the Pylons are down, and the Rikti cleared, you now have to work methodically on the next phase: Destroying the Mitos protecting Hami. You'll notice three colored Mitos: Yellow, Blue and Green. That's the order, at least as I was told, you need to take down. Yellows first, Blues second, Greens last.
Easier
said than done. Without Group Fly to keep everyone together and elevated enough
to hit some of the high-levitating Mitos, lacking any Empathy Healing Auras,
we faced a few team wipes. When you can't keep together within any healing aura
range, you need to adopt Hit-And-Run tactics. Hit one Mito, then run back to
the cover of the rocks near the waterfall. It's slow but it works and you don't
have massive team wipes. We... well we had a few team wipes early on. After
we perfected the Hit-And-Run tactic we fared better.
Once the Mitos are out of the way, you can charge right up against the Hamidon itself. This is, mind you, a Weakened Hamidon. He's not a Giant Monster that takes 150 Heroes to defeat, who doesn't spawn massive Mitos whenever you lose your Stacked Holds on it. After all, you're down to 8 players and that's it. So you get a weaker version, but one that still takes some time to finish. And you can get a player or two to drop dead because they were on the far side of Hami and out of range of deh heals. Still we fight the Hami. And thus... you get a HAMI DEFEAT EXPLOSION OF BRIGHT LIGHT!
MISSION COMPLETE. No Hami-O though. I think it was because my Enhs tray was already full. Sniff.
The
Final Mission of the TF takes you into the largest map zone of the game ever.
Just want to let you know that right off the bat. You end up tripping through
each of the interior maps that Rikti hide in: Sewers, Abandoned Offices, Troll
tunnels, the new Rikti tunnels, back to the offices, back to Sewers, back to
Rikti tunnels. The mission objective is simple: Stop the Honoree. That means
taking on the Rikti AV boss. Taking on this Honoree AV, whoever he is. There's
also 4 Pylon Generators you need to take down to complete the mission.
Getting
to the objectives, that's also simple. Smash your way through the mobs of Rikti
until you get to the end room. You can try to stealth and then teleport your
way through, but remember Rikti Drones see through Stealth. Your stealthers
won't last long. Best to play smash mouth here.
You
know you've reached the final door when you get the Animation Movie Moment.
The Rikti Lord of War, Hurry'Doz or something, is issuing orders to prepare
for the Honoree's arrival. You now have a good idea of who you need to beat
up first.
When you charge into the room, you will see a vast chamber with four Pylon Generators creating a Portal opening in the middle of the room. The Rikti AV should be straight ahead. You may be tempted to try and clear out the Generators first. DON'T. The Generators spawn large Rikti ambush waves that will complicate your situation. You should focus on your primary target, the Rikti Lord of War.
Once you attack the Rikti AV, you get another Animation Movie Moment. The Honoree itself is passing through the portal.
OMG.
Hero-1.
The backstory of the previous Rikti invasion was that Hero 1 sacrificed himself by closing off the main hyperspace portal at the far end, on the Rikti homeworld. It was the reason given for why we didn't have Capes as a costume option for a few months (and why the Capes mission to unlock it deals with protecting the Museum dedicated to Hero 1's life). It seems that the Rikti didn't kill him. Well, actually they did. And then they did something to his body...
Hero
1, excuse me the Honoree, won't come charging into the battle until provoked,
so you have a chance to stop the Rikti AV before you have to deal with both
at the same time. Finish off the Lord of War quickly: it is doable with the
debuffs and the whatnot. Your biggest distraction will be the Rikti minions
nearby, but don't get too caught up in them. Once he's down, the Honoree is
next.
The
Honoree's attacks are mostly standard issue melee and high damage types. His
bonus attack is that he can phase in and out to prevent getting held down or
seriously damaged, but still able with his Psi-based attacks to inflict damage
on others. You have an advantage: the team leader had gotten a special power
from the Hamidon, an essence power that counters the Honoree's phasing abilities.
Since
I was the team leader, it was up to me, a mere Blaster, to keep the Honoree
honest. It wasn't much, my blast damage kept him wounded but there wasn't much
else to stop him until he un-phased himself, at which point the Brutes and the
Scrappers could finish him off.
As you fight him, the Honoree talks, his messages becoming fraught with recognition, his mind... he remembers. But he doesn't stop fighting you. You have no choice.
You MUST KILL HERO 1. To save the Earth, the line must be drawn HERE! The Rikti will go no further. And we will MAKE THEM PAY FOR WHAT THEY'VE DONE TO HERO 1. Damn, the coolest bit from Star Trek First Contact!
The Honoree finally will fall, it is just a matter of time with a good TF team. Past that, you then have to let the Melee types finish off the Generators to close off the portal once and for all.
With that, Mission Completed. With sorrow, we gathered at a nearby wall to pose, with melancholic grace, our success at... at stopping... sniff. WAAAAAAHHHH!!!!.
Of
the Task Force itself, I want to congratulate the Game Devs on recognizing some
of the elements that make for a fun TF. We ran into unique game maps. We faced
off against rare and unique challenges. We faced more than a few Arch-Villains
along the way, including an old fan favorite like the Clockwork King (who turns
out to be a bit of a perv. Dude!) We ended up playing against an AV (the Hero-1
zombified Honoree) that added some pathos to the game's backstory. Oh, and we
got wicked good prized like Vanguard Merits, rare Recipes and truckloads of
the usual Inf/XP/Prestige! :)
--
Suggestions to run this TF:
1) The mixing of heroes and villains may be fun, but get everyone in the Zone
before inviting a team together.
2) Balance, always balance. You need Aggro takers (Tankers/Brutes), Buffers
and DeBuffers (Defenders, Controllers, and Corruptors), and Damage Dealers (Blasters,
Scrappers, Stalkers, Dominators and Masterminds). You need at least one Tanker/Brute,
and at least one DeBuffer to really have a decent shot. And that's not even
considering your fight against the Hamidon.
3) Play the Hamidon smart. Keep your team close to you at all times, team splits
on Hami will get you killed. Deal with the Mitos in a prescribed manner (kill
by color code Yellow Blue Green). Run away and use the sea cliffs for cover
whenever the team is suffering, staying healthy is key. Plan ahead if you can
and get someone who has Group Fly as a power. Group Fly can keep everyone together,
espeically when fighting the floating Mitos.
4) Shed tears when you fight the twisted nightmare that is the Honoree. Try
not to wear capes to honor the true person Hero-1. Sniff. Whimper. Open wailing
of tears.
Well, that's that. Now, to get the Game Devs to FIX POSITRON! (actually, there might be a way to play Positron successfully and swiftly: Solo Posi...!)
--
back to TF/Trial page | back to main Wittylibrarian page | email me just for the Hell of it!
