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 love the Synapse Task Force. I love it for the narrative flow of facing off against a singular group of villains. I love it for the Monster you face, Babbage, and the Arch-villain you confront, the Clockwork King. I love how it raises your character almost two whole levels when you're finished.

It was the first task force I ever ran, with Blue Arc Anom back when he was 16. I enjoyed it so much I went back two more times, in fact one right after the other. Every following character since then runs it, and I make sure once that character hits 17 (the best spot to play it) he/she heads straight for the Synapse contact. WittyLibrarian went, Vectura went, then Witty the controller version. Now, this time, it was Greystone Anom's turn to run it.

Greystone (Tanker) teamed with Soulstitch (Defender), Shinobi Warrior (Scrapper), New Word (Tanker), and El Fuego Fuerte (Controller) for a Friday afternoon on Task Force Speed promising to be a great mission for all.

TASK FORCE SPEED

So let me tell you about the longest, most painful TF experience I've ever had outside of Positron.

The problem came at the beginning, from the fact we were exemplaring two heroes: New Word and El Fuego. Exemping is where a high-level player reverts down the levels in order to play with lower-leveled characters. The incentives for exemplaring are 1) players in debt will have the debt cleared much faster than at normal levels; 2) in exchange for XP to level up, the exemped player gets more Influence needed to buy items; 3) gives players a chance to play Task Forces that they missed earlier with their characters.

Because of the potential abuse that an exemplared player would, in mid-TF, unexemp and proceed to use the high level powers to clear maps more effectively, the game developers created an automatic boot function should the player unexemp. This unfortunately causes a problem: if the player offering the exemplar quits or is otherwise kicked from the game (most often due to Mapserver Error), it automatically unexemps the high level tied to him/her and thus automatically boots that player. AND THEY CANNOT GET BACK ONTO THE TASK FORCE. Not to mention the possibility the exemplaring player suffers the Mapserver freeze as well.
We were taking a heavy risk in exemping New Word and El Fuego Fuerte. But they wanted to run the TF for the badge and the experience, and we needed their skills. We prayed for a good connection throughout the missions.

We actually had to start twice. The first time was without Shinobi, the Scrapper. A task force of just Tankers and Controllers went too slowly, even though we were surviving rather well: a Scrapper or Blaster is needed as they provide more weaponry than Tankers and definitely more damage dealing than Controllers. We went back, found Shinobi waiting, and hired him on. Back to the TF.

They had changed the beginning of the TF since Blue Arc's time at it. We go straight to a door mission now (oddly enough, almost all missions are in Steel Canyon, while the Steel Canyon TF missions are NOT. Confusing, no?) and we hurried to Steel Canyon. From there, we began our procession into the realm of the Clockwork King, the great Arch-villain of Level 20s everywhere.

The door missions are often a Defeat-All situation, clearing each room and hallway. Running into Boss-level bad guys, the Clock Princes, is very important: it leads to a Gearsmasher badge when you kill their Gear spawns after their own demise. Grey got his right there in the first door mission, thanks to a set of contact door missions against Clocks in earlier levels. Normally you don't want to run into Bosses all the time, but Clockwork Bosses are too good to pass up. Fun all around, kids!
Past the first door mission, you get the Scouting mission and then the Defeat 30 Clockwork street hunt that used to introduce the TF. From there you immediately go into a rather repetitive mission set: Defeat all Clocks in three consecutive power stations.

It was during this part of the mission we suffered our first mishap. SoulStitch suddenly disappeared in-between doors exiting one of the maps. She was the exemplar to New Word, our other Tanker. Even though Soulstitch finally returned a few minutes later, we had lost New Word for good.

Rather than start over, we kept going. Past the 3 stations, we then had another scout mission in Steel to run to two locations, and then another door mission against three named Bosses. After that, we needed to run another scout mission to five locations in Steel, this one pointing us toward (Big) Bertha, the sole door mission set in Steel's Hazard Zone Boomtown.

Against Bertha, you get your first temporary power, a special gun designed to Hold a Boss like Bertha while you whale on her metallic fanny. Doing that wasn't a problem. The problem came just as we finished up on Bertha and we were preparing to exit: El Fuego said he needed to AFK (Away From Keyboard) for a few minutes. Next thing we know, standing outside the door mission, El Fuego begins to log off!!!

El Fuego was exemplared. There was no way he could log back onto the TF, even if he had done a full shutdown exit rather than quitting the TF itself. Shinobi and I stood there in shock watching him leave, and then we waited for a few minutes to see what happened if he logged back on. He did: and El Fuego Fuerte was no longer on the TF at that point. It turned out he had not logged off for his AFK: he had suffered a Mapserver freeze-up that kicked him from the game.

Saddened, the remaining three players on the TF soldiered on. This, however, is a problem: even with the smaller team count creating smaller mission spawns (the number of bad guys we face behind each door), we were now down on a lot of firepower and health boosts we would need to finish the task force. Door missions became noticeably slower to finish. Being named Task Force Speed became a cruel irony.

After Bertha came Long Tom, and that then sent us onto the final leg of missions, this time in Skyway City itself. Investigating three warehouses first sent us into a building to rescue 6 hostages: you kinda need to kill everything along the way, so JUST a rescue is a moot point. That leads you to a Clockwork Lord (not the king, but his proxy, his dupe, his towel boy, whatever), again a warehouse and again a lot of butt-kicking.

TICKING AWAY THE MOMENTS THAT MAKE UP A DULL MONSTER-FREE DAY

Always key, always important to remember: WHEN YOU EXIT THE CLOCKWORK LORD DOOR MISSION PREPARE YOURSELF!
PREPARE
FOR
BABBAGE!

He comes storming across the map toward your direction, and once within melee range he starts dealing out the damage. Babbage is a large-scale Tesla Prince, trapping players in Tesla Cages and swiping punches. The tricky part is his Monster status: it sets his Hit Points extremely high and quick to heal.

On a six-player group, he can go down rather fast with all those players hitting him faster than he can heal back up. A four-player group will take more time but he'll still go down soon. With a three-player group, your damage count equals the amount of healing Babbage generates, a sort of stalemate. This happened before with Blue Arc's first Synapse run, when the remaining 3 players all happened to be Blasters. Even then, we weren't dishing out as much damage; worst of all, we didn't have a healer to keep US alive, and if not for the intervention of a passing Healer, all three of us would have fallen. This time, SoulStitch was there to keep us healthy but we didn't have enough firepower to knock Babbage down.

So…we had no choice. I issued a public Broadcast for all players in Skyway to come and defeat Babbage with us. It took a while, giving directions to where we were, but soon enough a group of Blasters and Defenders arrived, and the damage dealing picked up. In another minute, Babbage fell. I checked with the non-TF players to make sure they had gotten XP from the kill, and was assured by two of them that they had gotten good XP (Task Force kills tend to give above-average XP rewards, which is why leveling usually occurs during a TF).

With Babbage gone, the team leader travels back to Steel for one more thing: a weapon from Positron, a Hold gun that can freeze the Clockwork King for a few seconds, in a fight where every second counts.

This is the other thing that changed from the time Blue Arc played the TF: the final map room was spruced up. Originally it was Just Another Warehouse: Revamped, it is now the Clockwork's Edifice to the King. Red lit. Steam pouring from the vents. Raw robot parts strewn along the walls. Dangling above, large cog circles with crucified robot heretics in a hideous mockery of the Blair Witch's wood art sensibilities. And absolutely no sign of pie.

The three surviving members worked our way to the back room, to the King's lair. As we got closer, the tension became palpable, the stress level maddening, as closer and CLOSER WE CAME TO OUR OWN DOOM AND…

Suddenly Soulstitch froze up.
Hell, thy name is Mapserver Error.

For five minutes, Shinobi and I waited, quickly clearing out the rest of the area surrounding the King so that we wouldn't get swamped during the Last Battle. Then it came time to deal with the minions waiting in the King's presence, trying to pull them out without stirring the King to attack us. Without a controller/healer to deal with minion mobs, and with keeping us healthy, this was a risky move.

Turned out to be a bad one. The Clockwork King awoke, alert to our movements, and began attacking us. Without a choice now, I used the BFG weapon against the King to hold him in place. The gun worked: we didn't. Distracted by the minions attacking us, we were unable to damage the King quick enough to stay alive. Boom and boom: we died.

Dying right beneath the King's position, I had no way of Awakening there. Forced to the hospital, I rushed back to the warehouse as best I could. The good news came while I was away: Soulstitch returned from Mapserver oblivion, and was working with a revived Shinobi to clear out the minions without attracting the King's ire.

With my arrival, we went back against the King. Without the special weapon (only one shot), we fought long and hard, almost three times longer than earlier fights when we had him Held in place. But finally, he did fall.

And so...WE WON!

Long, hard fought, we learned three things from this task force:
1) Exemplaring and Task Forces don't mix.
2) The 4-player minimum to start the TF is a good hint that you need 4 players at the end to kill off Babbage and the King.
3) If the Synapse Task Force takes 6 hours, don't be surprised if your bladder hates you forever.

We finish this with a salute to our fallen comrades, who speak to us still from beyond the exemplar. And they say to us: DAMN YOU DEVS! FIX EXEMPLARING NOW!

UPDATE: The Game Devs did indeed fix Exemplaring for Task Forces. By creating an AutoExemp feature that automatically lowered the above-level heroes down to the maximum level required by the TF. This meant that Autoexemped heroes did not have to be tied to another player; it allowed players who suffered Mapserver Hell to rejoin once they relogged; and it helped to SK lower level players up to the max level to deal with the villain spawning levels. It also helped with team formations, where you could get friends who had leveled above the TF to join in anyway, avoiding the hassles of a blind-invite type TF.
Thank you Game Devs for the AutoExemp!

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