Brainiac dailies Didn’t take any good screen shots in our Sunday game of DC Universe Online, which was kind of a downer, because it was a really good night. Kaptain KY said he was going to be a little late, so instead of starting with missions, we went to the Brainiac Incursion zone in Gotham City to try and find some Sub-Avatars to kill. I think Spode or Sting hadn’t yet done the dailies, so we just started killing everything we saw. ...
Team Spode vs Sub-Avatar Although last night was a wildly successful night for Team Spode in DC Universe Online, it turns out I took only two screenshots last night, and both were of the same thing: killing a sub-avatar. When I logged in, Lord Spode was finishing up the Brainiac dailies. I joined his group and headed to Gotham to help. See, Brainiac is slowly bottling and digitizing the buildings of Metropolis and Gotham City; once these cities are entirely digitized and stored, Brainiac will destroy the Earth. Preventing this is the role of the player heroes and villains. ...
Chemo Patrolmen. We can deal with violent experiments that survive on toxic waste. Special security patrols, giant, venom-infused hounds and their masters, no problem. But if you want to see Team Spode start to panic, send in an Ace Patrolman with his Flamethrower of One Hit Doom. Last night was Team Spode’s first try at a Tier 1 group mission, the beginning of DC Universe Online’s end-game. Having leveled to 30, the game now ignores your level and bases every encounter on your “combat rating”, the game’s version of World of Warcraft’s gear score. During the past week, we’ve been separately working on our gear. The Tier 1 solo missions give some Marks of Triumph – the Tier 1 gear currency – some faction, and usually a piece of very decent gear on their own. Additionally, there are a set of three related missions in Gotham City that give fifteen marks per day, and the daily Vault lotto mission that occasionally gives 25 marks. ...
I am the egg man What does it take to defeat the Tornado Tyrant in Oolong Island? Three weeks and nine levels. But that’s done. After an impromptu mid-week play through some mission arcs, we all started our assault on Oolong Island Sunday at level 28 or 29. We flew through the early fights, which have become so familiar that we could just joke around and fly casual and have pterosaur barbecue, as much as we liked. Prehistoric drumsticks for everyone. ...
Riddle me this! When Spode, after harvesting himself an exobit (an aggressive one!), proclaimed himself an exobit-ionist, KY and I nearly lost it in chat. That was DDO-level punmanship. And all the more appropriate since we’d just been facing the Riddler. The Riddler wasn’t being a supervillain in this adventure; he was being an investigator, having retired from villainy to become a clandestine resource for Batman. It’s the Riddler who clues Batman (and through Batman, us) that Joker is now no more than a tool for Brainiac. As a result of the Riddler’s discovery, the villain Deathstroke (whom we’re watching in “Arrow”) has been hired by the Joker to kill the Riddler. Once paid, Deathstroke will not stop before his target is dead, but Batman stopped the Joker’s funds transfer, meaning Deathstroke would not be paid, causing the villain to take off near the end of the fight. ...
Haffer and Haffikin I was thinking that EverQuest II’s double xp days last weekend would be enough to push Arda up to level 95, the current level cap. I had xp potions running. I was working through the last of the Chains of Eternity signature quest. You’d think that finishing up the content for the latest expansion would leave you at the level cap. But, noooo…. I ended up at level 94. I hadn’t done as much xp grinding as Scatter had, you see, so I had a fair bit to go. These last levels are hell levels, taking vast amounts of experience – that’s problem #1. Problem #2 is that each kill in every expansion since Kunark gives only a very tiny amount of experience. Evidently, SOE thought they were being too generous in Kunark and decided to ramp things back a lot. ...
Ding! 30! Just like in the original Guild Wars, the road to level cap in DC Universe Online is pretty much an extended tutorial ahead of the real game. As in Rift, the instances you get while leveling are just rough sketches of the instances as they appear at max level, when you get a chance at the REAL fight. And better loot. I started Nurse Goebbels (please, feel free to report this name I now regret) (and it should have been Nurse Mengele anyway) (I was trying to think of something really villainous, but I kinda went too far). Anyway, I started Nurse G as an outlet for DCUO game play when I couldn’t play my Team Spode main, Teal Lantern. We have leveling restrictions in place so that people with a lot of time to play don’t outlevel people with little time to play. ...
Team Spode and the Tornado Tyrant Last week, our lack of Kaptain KY’s greasing influence made it impossible for us to finish defeating the Queen Bee and interrupting her plans to ship Luthor’s future exobytes back up to Brainiac, who claims them for the destruction of Earth. True fact: there is no entity in the entire universe, outside of Earth, who does not demand Earth’s destruction. Only about half the people actually on Earth want its complete destruction; the other half only want to rule over it with an iron fist. Though forces spiritual, alien and technological join forces to crush our planet, at least there’s Team Spode, cut-rate superheroes from the slums of Austin, Toronto, Portland and New England, to King Cnut-wise, hold back the tide. ...
To the Moon, Alice! With Kaptain KY off fighting evil in Mexico this week, Team Spode was short a hero. Undeterred, we decided to make Metropolis a little bit safer by taking care of some of the “Wanted” poster quests – the Avatar of Sin, Bizarro and the Minotaur all met their temporary ends. Before all popping up again, minutes later, proving just how ineffective heroes really are. When you get right down to it, the exobits that turned regular humans into weapons of mass destruction echo the debate about whether arming every lawful adult in America would be a good or a bad thing. DCUO takes the position that unrestrained superpowers lead to devastation. And that’s with both heroes and villains coming together to take on outside threats, like HIVE. ...
I've been locked in your heart-shaped box Happy Valentine’s Day! Logged on last night to do the Valentine’s Day content that SOE patched in to DC Universe Online. There was a Valentine’s quest in my journal; I completed it and got all the rewards. Which was weird. It included a silly looking clown/ballerina costume! This morning, in my daily Vault run, I got a heart-shaped bed! This was a sign from the DCUO gods. Or something. ...