Date: 2009-08-03 20:57 Subject: City of People in Underwear! Security: Public Mood: mighty Music: Queen

Okay, I have posts to make regarding my road trip, and Comic Con... but I'm going to talk about something else. City of Heroes and/or Villains! Last weekend was Double-XP weekend, so I reactivated my account and ran some characters around. My brute, Jemmy the Belligerent, got pulled into a task force so she quickly earned six levels, which caused most of her enhancements to expire. I found my Mastermind to be unplayable, as I couldn't figure out how to control her minions. Even after I got the hang of it, I found myself stuck for five minutes because my minion-control window vanished and I could find no way to get it back.

Aside from that, I had a lot of fun. Mostly with my archer, who has a very satisfying combo of knocking someone away with a punch, then pulling out his bow and putting a flaming arrow into them. There had been a lot of changes in the year and a half since my account had expired, though, and I would have done well to read about them first. I thought my characters had huge amounts of XP debt to work through (I died a lot; one of the reasons I quit) only to find out later that they had implemented a Resting State like WoW, and that was actually 18 months of double XP I was burning through. I had heard about the looting and crafting system that had been added, but sold most of my loot before I learned that there were also banks to put it in. And on my own, I still die a lot. I later stumbled across the way you can reduce the difficulty of the instanced missions, only to shamefully realize that I already had. Frankly, it seemed that the best way to progress in the game was to find unprotected Lieutenant and Boss foes out in the cities and take them out. It also felt a lot more satisfying than the dungeon crawls most of the missions end up as.

I only bought a month of game time, but I'll definitely play more in that time. Now that the Double XP time is over, I can take time to improve my costumes and buy equipment (Jemmy will probably spend everything she has on that chore.) I doubt I will stick with it... I expect it'll get old again, and the next World of Warcraft patch will pull me back... but it's fifteen bucks well spent.

Also it was nice to read my character bios again. Hardly anyone bothers to do them, but I found mine to all be perfectly satisfactory.