Raising the Kheldians

Lately I have had a Kheldian focus when playing City of Heroes. As I have mentioned before, archetypes that have some strong areas, some weak areas, may provide some tactical variation  in game play (e.g. active combat decisions) and provide some game mechanic supercharge/bonus mode – those work quite well for me.

Han Sente, my Warshade, is continuing his climb to becoming an incarnate. First the Alpha slot was unlocked through gaining a few incarnate drops and shards – mainly playing a few strike/task forces. With a tier 3 Spiritual Alpha component (spiritual is mainly about improved recharge rates) he is now level 50+1 and together with a number of invention origin (IO) enhancement sets the recharge time for a lot of powers are much shorter than they were originally. The difference is quite noticeable from the unenhanced gameplay.

The mandatory giant robot fight - Tin Mage task force

The almost-I-Win-button power Eclipse is now most of the time recharged by the time the previous use expires. However, since the efficiency much depends on the number of enemies at point blank range (the more the better) and must be triggered in human form, there is a timing and risk factor involved to make it work well. This is part of what makes it fun to play, IMHO.

I find that it has been a bit tricky to use Eclipse well when running the incarnate trials – not so many time windows with suitable enemy clusters. Still, a weak Eclipse is better than no Eclipse.

Running a couple (7) of incarnate trials provided incarnate XP and drops+rewards to unlock and slot the Judgement and Interface incarnate slots. For Judgement, which is a powerful AoE damage power, I picked the Void line – negative energy damage at point blank range. This fit quite well thematically with the Warshade, who is already doing such energy damage and for Dwarf and Human forms, enemies would likely be at point blank range. For Nova form it is not so suitable, but since I could not pick different powers for different forms I had to pick one. Seems to work out quite well so far.

Applying Purple Doom stuff

For the Interface slot I picked the Gravitic line – this provides recharge rate and movement debuffs to enemies. Again this fits in thematically, since this is pretty much what the Warshade is already doing – presumably more of the same will be better 😉 While I see that the debuff is applied to lots of enemies, it is not directly obvious if their recharge rate is lowered even more than before.

I have also started to raise a new Peacebringer, Zenera, currently 18 levels young. Whereas my Warshade moved over to the dark red side as soon as he was able, my plan for Zenera is to  keep her on the hero side for the time being. This is primarily because the Kheldian specific missions are all on hero side and I wanted to follow the stories in these missions this time.

So far I have done the below-20 Kheldian/Peacebringer missions and have done a few (3) sewer trials (Death From Below) and with those reached level 18. Next set of Kheldian missions is at level 20, so until then I was thinking of running the Faultline story missions and perhaps also the Safeguard mission for Skyway to pick up a temporary revival power.

Peacebringer Zenara

My plan for the Peacebringer is to go tri-form here as well, partly because I like the variation such an approach provides with the Warshade. I expect a bit of experimentation and some respecs here to find something suitable over time. So far gameplay has been mostly in Nova form, because the overall damage output is significantly better there than in human form – human form has some quite powerful attacks also, but those has a relatively long recharge time.

The Kheldian missions so far has been ok – they provide some of the background for the Kheldians and some of the relations with some villain groups. But some of the missions have been of the somewhat annoying “kill everything on map” or “find/rescue N persons” where the last enemy/person is tucked away in some remote hidden corner. Unfortunately it seems that the “last objective” indicator that was introduced a few issues ago it not active for the Kheldian mission maps 😦

Despite that the overall game play is pretty fun with the Peacebringer. While I do play a little bit with other alts, the Kheldians get most of my play time in the game now.