Since I'm Self-Stimulating My Own Ego Today...

I'll take this opportunity to mention a couple landmarks for two of my primary characters.

During the "Double XP Weekend" I pushed SomethingWicked over the level 30 threshold so he could finally have the flaming head I'd wanted him to have from the beginning. We also swapped out his moldy shoulderpads for some wicked shoulder ribs. He's so proud!

And, while I always loved Prankenstein's name and concept, his original costume just didn't capture the full depths of his wackiness. So we finally headed over to the taylor for new threads (and to see if Serge was hiding all those missing trash can lids). In true What Not To Wear fashion, here's the pranktastic before 'n after! Prank and all his imaginary friends are quite pleased!

Hello. I'm Doug and I'm a Toon-o-holic.

(Apologies in advance to those with slow graphics load times.)

I think it's time I exposed my addiction to the harsh light of day. I'm jokingly known to have a lot of characters spread across all the various servers, but I don't think anyone knows just how many I really have. It's time to come clean. They say the first step towards curing an addiction is admitting you have a problem. I'm not willing to admit to that yet ...so don't expect to see an end to these any time soon... but even I was a little unnerved when I tallied up just how many character I've created. I still have my primary set (proudly illustrated here), so I won't give them duplicate coverage here. I've also mentioned Victroller, Crosstown, and the Crimson Brain elsewhere. Some of the toons depicted here maybe have been mentioned before but this is their first public appearance. I'll add scintillating commentary where appropriate.

We'll start with my contributions to the "Bad Food" villain theme group mentioned earlier this year. While I find most of them a hoot, by far my favorites are Spam-Thing and Baby Back. "Where's the vomit emote when I need it??" was commented about Spam-Thing by someone playing a knockoff of The Monarch from Venture Bros. High praise indeed. The rest of the motley (moldy?) crew are: Macho Cheese, Salad Shooter, Canned Ham, Psi Ala'mode, and Bananas Flambe.



























































The next more or less related group of characters are the ones inspired by my time on the Underground roleplaying game. In the instances of The Stigmatador (long running toon pictured in my original family of characters), The Testosteronin, and The Crimson Ka-boom I've simply lifted the names from the game and made them my own. The Atomic Kennedy (also from my original family), American Lesion, and Line-Item Vito were designed with the hope of capturing the actual Underground look and feel as best I could with available CoH costume bits, as well as the "Cyber-Celebs" Charnel Houser MD (Neil Patrick Harris), Apollo Creep (Carl Weathers), and Iron Will (William Shatner). I love the over-the-top look of The Ka-boom and, combined with my love of his Energy/Energy power set, would probably play him like wild if I didn't already have Turbulence (pictured shortly) leveled up so far. He also, sadly, calls attention to the lack of a "blowing shit up" power set for blasters.















































































Next are two additions to my 1920's hero group, The Midnight Squadron... Tesla's Monster and The Frightener.




















And now a parade of assorted inspirations, some successful, some.... not so much.
• Turbulence: I love playing this guy. There's something immensely satisfying about blasting villains all over the map, and the knockback-rich Energy/Energy power set does that with gusto!
• Hawkeyee: My place on the new archery power bandwagon. Now with 75% less copyright infringement!




















• That Crazy Guy (mentioned previously here): A regular joe running around beating down thugs with nothing more than his raw punch?? He must be ...well... crazy. Here he is in his dirty wife-beater and faded jeans.
• Captain Aztec: Sure, the idea is dumb as hell, but I was just too tempted by the costume posibilities.




















• Dr. Necropolis: The cool, slick bridge between this world and the next!
• Absolute Zero: I'd never made an ice-powered guy before and decided it was time to try it. In hindsight, I question my double-edged naming wisdom.




















• Ampere: Because I just wanted to make a guy with a giant cranium who's covered in glowing circuitry. Abandoned almost immediately for the infinately more humorous Ampiere!
• Ampiere!: The electrical Frenchman! Oui!




















• Poultrygeist: Vengeance most fowl from beyond the grave! Fun to play and darkly humorous, he also calls attention to the need for "beaks and bills" costume options. Oh, the slight....!
• Houn'gan: The illusions power set lends itself nicely to a voodoo character, and I wanted one. Strangely, I spent literally 2 hours trying to come up with just the right "cool" name for him, failed, and used this.




















• Sea Urchin: Conceived from the realization that there aren't many aquatic heroes in CoH. Now I know why. Nothing currently exists in CoH to make an aquatic hero particularly.... aquatic. No water powers [grumble] and no swimming travel power.
• Helena Handbasket: 'Nihilistic punker chick with a giant gat! I don't normally play with female toons, but some concepts simply require it.




















• Bronze Bombshell: Ditto here. My female Doc savage.
• Pale Shadow: One day only one server was up. I hurredly spat this guy out to have someone to play there.




















• Kiln Lord: I'd wanted to make a character with the name Kiln God (a common ceramics term) but apparently divine names are forbotten. I wanted his armor to look like it was glowing, but there's no good costume option for that. When his fire powers are active, it helps.
• The Rhino of Righteousness!: ....it was late....




















• The Clockwork Juggernaut: An attempt to create a character as huge and imposing as possible in CoH. Having viewed him from head on, charging down the street, I think I succeeded. If I was a Hellion, I'd be scared if I saw this thing crashing down on me!
• Titanium Man: If I was going to make a wicked-ass Iron Man, what would he look like?





















Lastly, the only villains I've bothered to create other than the Bad Food guys. None of these guys has gone anywhere, mainly because I'm just not into playing villains on CoH. There's also the issue that villains can't really be villainous that makes it a waste of time.
• The Atomic Lenin: Arch-nemesis of The Atomic Kennedy!
• Slice-cicle: He'll stab you to death with vicious pointy ice!




















• Zombettie: What if Bettie Page rose from the grave?
• Naughty Gras: I was feeling festive in February.




















• Burning Itch: Oh, the things we think of at 4am. I have no idea what I was thinking here, but I really shouldn't be allowed to log on after 2:00. At least it successfully embodies the name?

I think that's the whole sweaty lot. I'm proud of them! Well..... most of them......

Teamless Teams

Well, here's a wild, half-assed idea.

Once again, my supergroup-mates seem a little light on the being around to team with. My problem is, I'm spoiled. I'd rather not team at all than team with people I don't know or people who aren't as good as our group. (Yes, they really are that good.) It got me to thinking about solutions. I stumbled into one that, while I don't think it would satisfy my personal needs, might still make an interesting concept. I'll call it "Press-Teams."

I've noticed that there are roving, interactive bands of Longbow agents wandering around many zones now. What if a hero could press one of these groups into service and take them on missions or through zones with him? Instant team! Sure, they're not as good as a real team, but they could provide necessary support for the hero in times of need. It also fills some potholes of annoyance in the game. Dread the thought of crossing a hazardous zone alone? Press a Longbow squad into escorting you to your destination, drawing fire from those pesky villains who're 5 levels bigger than you are. Had half your team bail out on you halfway through your task force? Call in the "small guns" to help you finish. Almost all the necessary mechanics are already programmed into the game... The Longbows are programmed to engage enemies on sight; There are already missions in which rescued hostages take up guns and help the hero; etc.

This is all rough, of course. There would have to be rules and limits to prevent abuse. (Avoiding the now famous "Go hunt. Kill Skuls." scenario for example.) Team experience would have to be cancelled or severely curtailed. There would have to be a time and/or frequency limit on commandering Longbow squads.

Innovation or can of worms? You decide. But I think it's an interesting idea.

XP for Healing: The Final Revisit

I'm such a dumbass. I don't know why I didn't think of it before. (Maybe because I do this as a hobby... It's not my job.) I always figured the major stumbling block of awarding XP for healing was because a character could just stand near a crowd and auto-heal til he had Experience dripping out his ass. Awarding XP for healing shouldn't be based on amount of healing delivered, but on amount of Hit Points restored. Say, Tankerboy is down 100 HP, and Healer-Man shoots off 200 points worth of healing. Experience is only awarded for the 100 points restored to Tankerboy, not the full 200 delivered. Experience shouldn't be awarded for healing at the same rate it is for dishing out damage ....it's simply easier and less dangerous.... but perhaps at something like a 2-for-1 rate. (A healer would have to restore 2 HP to gain the same XP as dealing 1 point of damage would gain him.)

But what about Area of Effect heals?, you say? Don't they crock XP-gaining in favor of the healer? No, says I. The failsafe is already built into AoE heals, as they already deliver less healing than single-target heals. So there!

I'll leave this alone now. I've finally worked out the basic mechanics to my own twisted satisfaction.

Hello, World!

Well, smell me!

I just received notification from Cryptic that they're going to add my little self-satisfying gripefest to the official page of "Fan Sites." Don't worry, I've prepared myself for the flood of 5 or even 6 new readers to the site!

I'm sure no good will come of this, but for now I'm basking in the glow of corporate recognition.

Supergroup Concept: The Classic "Mirror Universe" Adversaries

Here's an idea I had for a dedicated group of friends or supergroup to try that I think would be a lot of fun. I'd love to be part of a group dedicated to trying this out. If 9 or 10 of you would like to give this a shot, drop me a line... I want in!

The concept is the classic "Mirror Universe" hero/villain clash. Of course it was done in (and the name derived from) the original Star Trek series, but the idea spills into the comics all the time. Your Honor, I give you people's exibit A: The Justice League and the Squadron Supreme. The latter is (by design) a mirror image of the former. There's also the gazillion examples of [insert any comic book hero here] who must, at some point in his career, face his evil duplicate. I asked myself one night what it would take to reproduce this in CoH, and what I came up with sounded genuinely fun. Here's the plan....

A group of players (for purposes of our example, let's say 10) construct a typical hero supergroup, each making the kind of character they enjoy playing. Now the names of all of the characters are tossed in a hat, and each player randomly chooses one. That player now builds a villain based on the concept of the hero they've selected. The villain should be similar enough to the original hero, either in powers, theme, or concept, to be recognizable as the mirror of the original. Costumes should be thematically similar to the original. Each group is played at roughly the same rate for leveling purposes. Now comes the fun part. Once the characters are all at least level 20, five characters are selected. Those five and their alter egoes meet in Siren's Call to face off, mirror image vs mirror image. Sure, the same idea can be accomplished in the arenas. but it loses the purity that one mirror image is truly a "villain."

Anyway.... I ....think it sounds fun.

Shields

I realize you don't want to actually encourage people to build Captain America, but I think it's time we added a few options to the scrapper power choices, and shields fit here nicely.

* Related Aside: Not only would I like to see shields added to the list of power options, I'd like to see some size & shape options. This harkens back to a lot of comments I've been hearing that reflect my own opinion: "Weapon" power sets should have special costume options. I'd like some optional looks for things like maces, broadswords, assault rifles, and ...yes... shields. You could choose them along with your other costume pieces during character creation and costume changes. Of course, I'd love to see a complete power effect choice system at character creation, but that's a whole 'nother topic.

Back to shields....

New power set: Shields (Scrapper primary power set)

Shield Bash: Smack your target with the face of the shield. Minor smashing damage. Fast recharge. Chance to stun.
Shield Punch: Strike target with the edge of the shield. High lethal damage. Moderate recharge.
Shield Defense: Toggle power. Increases hero's defense. Animation shows hero automatically blocking attack if added defense would make the difference between hero being hit and missed.
Shield Swipe: Strikes targets in an arc in front of the hero. High lethal damage. Long recharge.
Throw Shield: Ranged attack with moderate damage. Shield returns when thrown.
Deflect: Toggle power. High chance that the next attack directed at the hero will be deflected to hero's current target.
Take Cover: Hero takes refuge behind his shield. Hero is unable to move or attack, but almost all damage is prevented for a while.
Shield Spin: The hero spins with his shield, striking all foes around him. Superior lethal damage divided among all targets effected. Very long recharge.
Shield Charge: When activated, the hero is able to charge past several foes at once dealing moderate damage to each. Defense is also increased. Long recharge.

ooOOOooo.... Ghooooostly Naaaazis.....

Just had the weirdest graphics glitch tonight. We were doing a Council mission and at random times, whether we were engaging them or not, the villains would just slowly fade away and disappear. Not just turn invisible, all the while continuing to attack you like happens in some missions, but completely gone. My phantasms would also disappear.

Spoooooky!