Double XP and preorder time

This weekend sgaming ended up being pretty much only City of Villains, with a little bit of City of Heroes.

It was double XP/reward+ reactivation weekend, so there was a bit more activity than usual on the servers. My main server has a fairly low activity count on the villain side normally, but this weekend it was more busy – no surprise there.

Dirty deeds done dirt cheap...

Most of the time I spent with two characters. First was Dirtmonger, my newest dominator (earth/earth) who I have been playing a little bit every now and then the past months. He was not so far to get to “pet level”, i.e. the level when a dominator can obtain their combat pet.  Other superhero games like Champions Online may have great fastpaced combat, but there is still something with City of Villains/Heroes archetypes – they typically excel in whatever area they focus on.

Dominators kick butt in terms of crowd control, plus that they can smack around somewhat decently. As someone who really likes crowd control aspects of combat, dominators provide some real fun in that area.

With the double weekend running it was also quite easy to get a team and a few levels were gained in quite short time and Dirtmonger got his pet. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there were a few in the team who had not played some of the missions before and they were relatively new. Mixed experience makes up for better conversation in the teams – if everyone knew exactly what everything would be about, teams would probably be more silent.

Unfortunately the double XP did not extend into the Mission Architect system this time. This is a bit unfortunate, XP is already worse than in the “normal” game if you play it as intended; I hope they will fix it so that it will become more attractive to play again. I have not had any new ratings on my arcs in a long time now. I do play architect missions regularly, but there is seldom I see any other characters in the AE buildings.

Sentenwolf, dual pistol/traps corruptor

My other character that I put some time into was a new character, Sentenwolf. He is a dual pistols/trap corruptor which I created during the weekend to try the new powerset dual pistols. I had tried it briefly in beta, but wanted to give it a spin for real now.

This new power set will come with the Going Rogue expansion, but people that pre-order the expansion will get access to the new power sets before the release. So this weekend was premier for Dual Pistols and later in April the other new power set, Demon Summoning, will become available.

The Going Rogue expansion costs 20 Euro, which is an ok price – less than 2 monthly fees. There is no game time included as far as I could see though, so if someone reactivates the gsme it will be at least 33 Euro in practice anyway.

So far it has been fairly fun with dual pistols. One unique characteristic of the powerset is that you can select the type of ammunition used and thus get different secondary effects – ice bullets slow enemies, fire adds extra DoT, toxic bullets reduces damage restistance and damage output.

Some animations are a bit over the top, but it does look a bit cool. Overall good fun, although perhaps not the strongest power set in the lower levels. Time will tell how it works out.

Overall, it was a fun weekend in the Rogue Isles.

Shooting a few curved incendiary bullets