Hero Fireteams HQ

Kato Katana picks up "Elude" in Super Reflexes set

2006-04-04T08:35:00.000-07:00

Kato Katana finally made it to 38 last night. At the end I was resorting to farming swarms in Crey's Folly, if you can believe it. :) Screenshot at right. Beyond making you supposedly almost impossible to hit with anything, it increases your speed, jumping ability and endurance recovery (the speed and jumping are very noticeable even with just the one socket). So far it has been impressive in use against some purple and red villains in Founder's Falls. It has a Nova-like crash at the end, meaning endurance goes to zero and you can't recover for a while -- but at least health is not impacted at the end like Unstoppable, nor while in use like Moment of Glory. So it's pretty cool in that respect. :) It also has strong resistance to Defense DeBuffs.

Rikti Magus boss (Rikti with nasty CoT powers)

2006-04-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

Little Kat and Metal Mandroid did a Rikti mission about 43 last night with a very painful and interesting Rikti boss called "Rikti Magus." If I've faced him before I don't remember him. He's sort of a mutated Rikti boss with nasty CoT boss powers. What I wasn't expecting was that he hurls the nastiest sort of fire blast that does tremendous damage. I had enough greens on hand to survive it, but we had a whale of a fight with him. He was also zapping with lightning blasts, doing about 450 damage a pop to MM.

Is something wrong with our BBS?

2005-08-16T16:52:00.000-07:00

I am getting DNS failures on http://1.mfphpbb.com/fireteams.html, which is the URL that my browser saved when I bookmarked our BBS both at home and at work.

I also tried leaving off the "1.", as that might have been a load-balancing thing or something, but apparently "mfphpbb.com" is no longer a listed domain.

Is anybody else having this problem? Does anybody have a solution?

2005-07-28T21:11:00.000-07:00

SG Uniform Cape idea

2005-07-04T20:16:00.000-07:00

Doctor Galaxy's night watch

"Fire" Team Forms on Guardian

2005-05-17T18:54:00.000-07:00

Quite by chance, a new team heavy on fire users has gathered on the Guardian server over the last few nights. While I don't expect it to become anything official, it was interesting to see come together.

Out of the five characters, three of them are primary fire users:

Super Imp (fire/kinetic controller) Info Overload
Burger Man (fire/energy blaster) Blackjack
Fireocious(sp?) (fire/fire tanker) Nanoshock

Complimenting these three and completing the set of five different ATs:

City Cat (katana/? scrapper) James Kirk
Superheroic Man (empathy/energy defender) Captain Meson

As of last night they ranged in levels from 4 to 7. Was a nice change of pace and a chance to check out another server "community." :)

New look for Crusasder

2005-05-07T08:25:00.000-07:00

New 2nd costume look for Crusasder.
Posted by Hello

New Costumes Live!

2005-05-04T17:26:00.000-07:00

The new patch is finally live.

Oh, yeah, arena combat, "Kill skuls [sic]" badge, and so forth too. But it's the new costumes I was waiting for.

FLASH Free respec to celebrate City of Heroes' 1st anniversary!

2005-04-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

In case you didn't know, a free "anniversary" respec went live today (Friday, April 29). You can read more about it at official forum thread.

This is gonna be so awesome for Corporal Cold. I can finally fix his sorry self! :)

2005-04-26T06:58:00.000-07:00

Info at the site of a crashed Rikti ship

Anchored AoE Toggles may be doomed

2005-04-21T20:36:00.000-07:00

Cherno Bill may be going in for a respec after what's currently on Test goes live.

Apparently in their zeal to avoid letting bad guys carry "whammy" powers (Bill's two main powers, Snowstorm, Darkest Night, etc.) to the far reaches of creation, they are making the powers turn off when the anchor gets farther than your "maximum perception distance" from you.

None of the devs on the official boards has corrected the interpretation of this that a stealthy bad guy (or say, a sorc using Hurricane) could make your "whammy" drop at such a short distance as 30 feet. I'm hoping that this is a misinterpretation and the actual "perception range" (which a dev said start at 200 feet before enemy powers are taken into account) will be more reasonable.

The biggest concern for me is that I built Bill around those powers; to the extent that I planned his power progression for the first 24 levels around getting them and making them useful. If they become useless, I don't know what I'd replace them with. Since his secondary schtick is being very hard to hit and that includes Maneuvers, maybe I'd trade them in for the other two parts of Leadership.

Here's the full thread on the official boards. The thread was started to discuss a severe bug with "whammy" powers on the Test server, but this information came out during the discussion. At the time I read it, the thread was 3 pages long.

NCsoft's take on "packaged" MMOs

2005-04-19T08:25:00.000-07:00

An NCsoft VP posted some thoughts on forums about whether NC Soft would offer a "package" deal as SOE does for those who play multiple MMOs published by one company. NCsoft has a lot of upcoming MMORPGs (Guild Wars, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa) on top of City of Heroes and the Lineage games:

We're looking at the potential of package deals for PlayNC products, but want to have a bunch of titles in the lineup first (so it's a better value).

GuildWars has a different revenue model (no sub fee) so it probably doesn't fall under a package - it would be for subscription games only if we did it.

There's a number of reasons for and against the model - one of the trickier issues to deal with is that we have to pay royalties to our 3rd party companies (Cryptic Studios, NetDevil, etc.) and if someone's paying a package rate for a bunch of games it turns out to be quite tricky to properly assign royalties. Sony hasn't done a lot of 3rd party products so they don't have that issue as much (Galaxies? Is that part of Station now?) - but about half of our upcoming games are from outside developers.

(Yes, someone will say "just do it by time played" - but then you're incentivizing developers to do things like design their game so it's beneficial for you to stay logged on all night so they get more royalties).

Photobucket supports Blogger

2005-04-19T07:03:00.000-07:00

If you have trouble getting "Hello" to work with our blog here, you might look into the free Photobucket online photo album service, which supports Blogger via an API.

I am using it for some SWAT 4 screenshots but you could easily set up an album there for COH shots and then use it to post to the blogger here.

Auto Turret at last

2005-04-17T06:55:00.000-07:00

Turret at last! Crusasder finally hit 38 and got turret. The damage is only moderate (a sprinkling of single digit damaging against tough targets for example), but it can be helpful in wearing things down.
Posted by Hello

Rejected Recruitment Poster

2005-04-14T22:04:00.000-07:00

Join Hero Fireteams HQ and see the multiverse!

XFire IM supports City of Heroes "in game" messaging

2005-04-13T07:52:00.000-07:00

Some military shooter friends turned me onto the XFire instant messenger recently.

What's really great about it is it supports "in game messaging," which doesn't require you to alt-tab to the Windows desktop to use. (You just press X/Scroll Lock to open a small chat window in any game that supports the "in game messaging").

Lots and lots of games support it, including City of Heroes, World of Warcraft and about every action game out there. It will tell you what game your friend is playing, and in many cases allow you to one-click join their game.

For me, it will hopefully allow my non-COH fan friends to message me in COH and invite me to play other stuff. If you play more than one MMORPG, this might let your friends from the other game message you while you're playing. Or they might send you a message before they log in to something and get your attention to join them in the other game.

Nearly 300 games are supported. For now it's free, and is not festooned with ads like ICQ.

Your pictures go here

2005-04-12T17:48:00.000-07:00

Well, I took a couple of nice screenies of Team Mocha the other night - Expresso Joe, Chocoholic, and Eufloria. On my monster machine they came out very nicely, cropping them to just the characters and a little background still left plenty of resolution.

But sadly, I can't seem to convince Hello/Bloggerbot to submit the things. It says they are submitted, but they never show up. Grrrr.

Preview of revamped new COH comic book

2005-04-12T13:43:00.000-07:00

If you hadn't heard, Cryptic decided to end the current comic's run and start a new one that's more focused on the NPCs and events in the actual game, with a grittier look and put together by fairly well known comic book talents. The new comic's debut issue will have a storyline dealing with heroes suddenly dying in Paragon City when the hospital/teleportation/resurrection system suddenly stops working. I believe #14 wil be the last issue of the current comic.

View a 10-page preview at the Newsarama comic book news site. The preview portion focuses on Statesman, Positron and Manticore working together, along with a bow-wielding hero (archery is a power set promised for a future update).

Taxibot service

2005-04-12T07:47:00.000-07:00

If you've ever wondered about the occasional chat text from a "taxibot," there are various supergroups that focus around the idea of offering teleportion services in various zones. One on the Champion Server is Taxibots.org. It's an amusing site. :)

Another site with members on all servers is Paragon Taxi Service.

Update 5 debt changes

2005-04-11T10:49:00.000-07:00

At forums Statesman mentioned two planned changes in debt for update 5:

Couple of changes we're making in I5:
1) Instead of the first five levels being debt free, the first TEN levels will be debt free.

2) XP debt will be halved on mission maps (that includes outdoor mission maps, too).

I'm just guessing that this is to reduce the frustration factor for low level players and to make players a little less distressed when getting defeated in missions.

City of Villains archetypes

2005-04-10T09:07:00.000-07:00

In case you're curious, the 5 City of Villain archetype names have been revealed but not much beyond that. Statesman said in forums that these are fairly unique and are not just City of Heroes archetypes with villain-y names:

Mastermind

Brute

Stalker

Enforcer

Dominator

1st annual Heroes Choice Awards

2005-04-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

At forums they announced 1st annual Heroes Choice Awards. The nominations period was brief and already closed. This is a "best of" event to be voted on via online poll at the main site though it doesn't appear to be online just yet.

You will need to visit the contests forum threads section at the forums to vote yourself.

It includes both in-game things like best NPC, best arch villain, best story arc etc.; and forum stuff like "favorite board newbie."

Some of the more basic ones included: Favorite Arch Villain, Favorite task force, Favorite zone, favorite story arc, favorite set of villains.

What are your favorites? Since we don't have a forum per se, try adding your thoughts on those via the comments link on this blog post.

2005-04-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

Info at Firebase Zulu

Blackjack tries PvP arena fighting on test server

2005-04-03T23:05:00.000-07:00

Blackjack battling a tanker and defender in the PvP arena on the test server. When a tanker taunts you successfully, you're unable to attack anything but that tanker.
Posted by Hello

Cox Communications network problems

2005-03-31T14:30:00.000-08:00

Saw this at forums today:

03/31/05 05:06 PM
We received information from Cox Communications that they are having network problems. This may affect players using Cox Communications and playing on Freedom, Pinnacle, Liberty, Infinity, Victory, and Triumph. Cox Communications hopes to have this issue resolved as soon as possible.

Natch, I'm a Cox customer. :(