More City of... Tales
I'm exhausted today. I stayed up all night doing a combination of RPing on both the hero and villain sides, and then after logging at around 4am I stayed up for another five hours to teach Nick the basics of playing CoV.
...Yes, Nick has finally caved, after two-and-a-half years of wating me and others play and hearing about it non-stop, and he's trying out CoV (EVE's Devs must really be pissing him off, that's all I can say). He's also considering trying out WoW, but as CoX is my area of expertise, I sat with him and walked him though the first few levels with his new Brute.
Having watched him play, I realise now that I'm going to have to re-think my opinions of new players to the game. Because Nick, of course, is far from a little kid or an idiot, but several of the things he did while learning were making me want to leap up, grab the mouse/keyboard from him and scream, "NO! THIS IS HOW YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO DO IT!!" Nothing was major, of course, it was all learning curve and playstyle differences, but I've realised that I've become an elitist gamer somewhere along the way.
This worries me slightly. But only slightly.
I'm only slightly worried because I know that there's still a difference between those who are learning and those who are kind of clueless. Earlier that day I'd teamed with a couple of SG members on my Mind/Kin Controller (other members were an Energy Blaster and a Kin/Dark Defender) and we ended up doing the FrostFire mission.
Now FrostFire has a reputation of being something of a nightmare mission, so our leader (the Blaster, who knew exactly what he was doing) picked up a couple of other people to do the mission with us - an Empathy Defender and an Archery/Fire blaster. Empathy Defender was the lowest level at 11, but she didn't mind and we all kept an eye on her to make sure she didn't get any aggro.
We entered the mission. Mission is set to Heroic/Rugged and we're a team of 5, which means there's some pretty large groups. So our strategy forms and is that the Energy blaster snipes and tries to pull as few as possible, but if that fails I run in and sleep as many as possible with my AoE sleep before switching to single targets, so that there are as few as possible actually attacking. Good plan, right?
Well, it worked fine... for about five seconds. Then the Archery blaster let fly with her AoE explosive arrow and woke half the sleeping mobs up. This happened every time, but thankfully everyone was on the ball and enough damage was being done that there were very few problems.
The other little problem I noticed was that the Empathy defender seemed to be healing only rather small amounts. Now I only noticed this because I've got an Empathy defender, and I was pretty certain that I was healing more at level 11 than she was (although I'm willing to accept that my memory may be rusty). I also noticed that the Kinetic defender's heal was healing for more than her's though, as was mine (and Controller heals are slightly lower than Defender heals). Which made me suspect that she hadn't really slotted her heals.
All in all though, the mission went fine till the end, when the kinetics defender had to drop due to an emergency just as we reached FrostFire, and we had a near teamwipe (we still finished the mission though, because the Energy blaster was exemplared, so when his exemp dropped, he just cleared the remainder of the mobs up because they were suddenly grey.
So there were little niggles there, but it could have gone much worse (especially if the AoEs waking all my carefully slept mobs had led to uncontrollable mob rushes). The archery blaster was obviously a new player (no veteran badges), so it's always possible that I was the first controller she'd ever encountered and she had no idea how my powers worked, but the empathy defender had the 27-month badge. Maybe she'd just never played an empath before. But it was certainly a reminder of how you really have to be on your toes with people who you haven't teamed with before, in case it turns out they have no idea what they're doing.
And finally, although he will never admit it in public... Nick actually enjoyed playing CoV.
...Yes, Nick has finally caved, after two-and-a-half years of wating me and others play and hearing about it non-stop, and he's trying out CoV (EVE's Devs must really be pissing him off, that's all I can say). He's also considering trying out WoW, but as CoX is my area of expertise, I sat with him and walked him though the first few levels with his new Brute.
Having watched him play, I realise now that I'm going to have to re-think my opinions of new players to the game. Because Nick, of course, is far from a little kid or an idiot, but several of the things he did while learning were making me want to leap up, grab the mouse/keyboard from him and scream, "NO! THIS IS HOW YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO DO IT!!" Nothing was major, of course, it was all learning curve and playstyle differences, but I've realised that I've become an elitist gamer somewhere along the way.
This worries me slightly. But only slightly.
I'm only slightly worried because I know that there's still a difference between those who are learning and those who are kind of clueless. Earlier that day I'd teamed with a couple of SG members on my Mind/Kin Controller (other members were an Energy Blaster and a Kin/Dark Defender) and we ended up doing the FrostFire mission.
Now FrostFire has a reputation of being something of a nightmare mission, so our leader (the Blaster, who knew exactly what he was doing) picked up a couple of other people to do the mission with us - an Empathy Defender and an Archery/Fire blaster. Empathy Defender was the lowest level at 11, but she didn't mind and we all kept an eye on her to make sure she didn't get any aggro.
We entered the mission. Mission is set to Heroic/Rugged and we're a team of 5, which means there's some pretty large groups. So our strategy forms and is that the Energy blaster snipes and tries to pull as few as possible, but if that fails I run in and sleep as many as possible with my AoE sleep before switching to single targets, so that there are as few as possible actually attacking. Good plan, right?
Well, it worked fine... for about five seconds. Then the Archery blaster let fly with her AoE explosive arrow and woke half the sleeping mobs up. This happened every time, but thankfully everyone was on the ball and enough damage was being done that there were very few problems.
The other little problem I noticed was that the Empathy defender seemed to be healing only rather small amounts. Now I only noticed this because I've got an Empathy defender, and I was pretty certain that I was healing more at level 11 than she was (although I'm willing to accept that my memory may be rusty). I also noticed that the Kinetic defender's heal was healing for more than her's though, as was mine (and Controller heals are slightly lower than Defender heals). Which made me suspect that she hadn't really slotted her heals.
All in all though, the mission went fine till the end, when the kinetics defender had to drop due to an emergency just as we reached FrostFire, and we had a near teamwipe (we still finished the mission though, because the Energy blaster was exemplared, so when his exemp dropped, he just cleared the remainder of the mobs up because they were suddenly grey.
So there were little niggles there, but it could have gone much worse (especially if the AoEs waking all my carefully slept mobs had led to uncontrollable mob rushes). The archery blaster was obviously a new player (no veteran badges), so it's always possible that I was the first controller she'd ever encountered and she had no idea how my powers worked, but the empathy defender had the 27-month badge. Maybe she'd just never played an empath before. But it was certainly a reminder of how you really have to be on your toes with people who you haven't teamed with before, in case it turns out they have no idea what they're doing.
And finally, although he will never admit it in public... Nick actually enjoyed playing CoV.