Wednesday 18 October 2006

Pic of the day: Reboundancy is my favorite superhero this week. He is a dark/regenerate scrapper in City of Heroes and is a naked green teenage plant.

CoH: Reboundancy

After I learned how to correctly play regenerating scrappers, they are by far my favorites. Spines/regen is my favorite, really, because they can do continuous area damage while still packing a punch on one specific opponent, while healing themselves continually.

But dark attacks are not too bad either, although only one of these can attack multiple opponents, and only if they are very close together. The nifty thing about dark attacks is that they reduce the accuracy of the enemy, so once you start hitting him, he will have a hard time hitting you back. Even with fast healing, it is always a good thing to be hit as little as possible!

The real reason why I made him with dark attacks, though, was to secure a place in Paladins of the Night, a mostly LiveJournal populated supergroup on Virtue, the unofficial role playing server. A lot of LJ friends have drifted there, seemingly more than any other server, and many of them have signed up with the Paladins. (Although some of them play very rarely.) I am one of the more active players at the time, actually. All of us have this tendency to make ever new characters ("alts"), so there are no high-level heroes in the SG. Reboundancy is the second Itland character in this group, the first being the dark/dark defender I wrote about last month.

Reboundancy has (from level 20 onward) two different costumes. Very different. This ties in with his backstory: He is a plant from a different world (or different Earth, perhaps) where plants fought back and eventually developed sentience. His dark powers are not magical, but toxic fumes that he secretes from his hands, which damage and blind his opponents. His regenerative powers are also parts of his plant heritage, so he is a "natural" hero, unlike mutants and mages. He can change in a heartbeat into a convincingly human form, thanks to a cloaking device, and a translator makes him speak English quite well, if a bit stilted. He can say short phrases with his translator off, but they often break the rules of the English language. His name comes from one of these expressions. Other favorite expressions are "happitude", "completification" and "seriosity".

All this is role playing stuff, of course. In practice, most of the time goes into beating stuff up. Not that I complain, I have wanted to beat up bullies since I was little. And starting today, there is another activity in the game that takes up almost all the time: Halloween Trick or Treat-ing.

That is right, Halloween has started early. And with it, the yearly ToT. Heroes (and villains) can click on any of the hundreds (thousands?) of doors in the game, and will either be rewarded by a treat (a big inspiration and possibly an costume piece) or a trick (a small group of opponents that run out to do battle with them). There are various badges to be had from beating up the Haloween monsters, which are such as witches, werewolves, vampires and giant pumpkin plants. And if you have 4 different costume pieces, you can go get a fifth costume slot! Actually it need not be your fifth, you can get it before your second slot (available at level 20 at the earliest). So the Halloween costume slot could allow you to get a second costume much earlier than otherwise possible. The costume pieces can be traded, and supergroups can store them in racks.

I'll be rather busy clicking doors for the next few days. (Even though I detest Halloween in real life ... but then again, in real life I have unlimited costume slots already! I just don't look like it anymore.)