Pain Clown makes level 50
In CoX there was a double XP event all weekend, and I decided that my big goal was to finally get my second ever City of Villains character, Pain Clown, up to level 50 at last.
Pain Clown had been languishing on the Triumph server for years. A victim of an early endeavor when I really did not know which sort of character types suited my playstyle, and made when the choices of what kind of character you could play were far more limited (this was before City of Villains or Going Rogue). An Assault Rifle/Gadgets blaster, Pain started off strong, but soon demonstrated that he was far more of a team character than I wanted. For all his awesomeness, he soloed about as well as a mugging victim. This was OK when I had several friends who played CoX and our Supergroup - the Circus of the Mighty, had some fun. But gradually most members of the group moved on to other games, and I rapidly discovered that at the time I hated, hated, HATED just teaming up with a bunch of random people. Too many bad experiences where someone would pull a Leeroy Jenkins and we would all wind up sucking carpet (or sewer water or whatever). When City of Villains came out and my one remaining friend who played, b_hamsterno26 became far more interested in that than "heroside", well - Pain was pretty well out of luck for further advancement unless I wanted to do excruciatingly slow low low-power grinding. It was sad to see the character, who seemed so badass with his giant gun and cigar, reduced to popping low level mooks to advance, so the character languished, unplayed save for an occasional TF mission or double XP weekend.
On Sunday morning, when we booted up and logged in, Pain sat at level 44, where he had been for almost two years.
b_hamsterno26 put together a team (she is far less team adverse than I am) and away we went, running timed missions in the Rikti War Zone. Pain becomes awesome when he is on a good-sized team, with sprays of full-auto going through the large groups of bad guys like a chainsaw through wood. and sniper shots to the head putting serious dents in the health bars of bosses. I eventually discovered that most of my defense toggles were largely unneeded because we had some scrappers and tankers up front to pull all the aggro, leaving me to just blaze away. From 10:00 to around 4:30 I managed to climb all the way to level 49. At that point, both b_hamsterno26 and I needed a break, so we agreed to reconvene at 7:00.
I had one level to go. b_hamsterno26 was tired of large teams (we had a couple of troublesome characters towards the end during the afternoon runs, so she brought in Seismic Hazard (a brute) to provide cover, and away we went again. After another hour or so of plugging away - ding! I had made the level 50 mark!
I don't know what will happen to Pain Clown now that I have maxed him out. I guess I will move him around from time to time so I can get the day job accolades, but I don't think I will play him much and I almost certainly won't be using him to farm. But it is nice to see that he has finally made it to the top of the leveling ladder - as a character for whom I have much nostalgic regard, he certainly deserved it.