DCUO

[drjackwolfe]

I like the color schemes personally, I may even like Jack's DCLU costume better then his CoH, though I still flit back and forth between likeing and hating the in game models.

[ghostveil]

Eveningstar and I did an alert for the first time yesterday. Feelings on it are mixed.

The content is great, no question. The alert seems pretty simple, it's a series of instanced mission objectives, with a 4-man team. The problem is that the default way to get into these alerts is to enter into a dungeon queue, similar to World of Warcraft's queue. World of Warcraft does a pretty decent job of making sure you're in a level appropriate group with all the proper class roles filled for whatever dungeon you sign up for.

Basically, you can rest assured that the very least you'll have the classes and roles to complete your objectives in World of Warcraft. This is definitely not the case in DCUO.

So Eveningstar and I queue up, and we get into a level appropriate alert (Oolong Island, level 20ish, we're level 19, so we're in the level range for it). I'm a Tank, Eveningstar is a Healer, and we're paired with another tank, level 23. Ok, fine. We're missing a fourth team member, but no doubt the game will bring us a Controller as our fourth, and we'll be good to go.

Nope.

About 2 minutes later our final group member pops into the instance: a level 30 in max level gear who proceeds to basically solo the entire instance. No communication between anyone, and the level 23 tank is a moron (Ex Patriots member, same SG/League as the Virtue counterpart in CoH). The only teamwork happening anywhere in this alert is between me and Eveningstar.

I've got to imagine that these alerts would be a ton of fun in a properly formed team (i.e. Level appropriate tank, healer, controller, DPSer) that used teamwork. But as it stands, I'd stay away from any group content unless you're willing to hand pick and form the teams yourself.

This is a very different experience from CoH on Virtue, where you can basically form a group out of anyone you can find and expect a decent PUG with pretty good teamwork.

[drjackwolfe]

I've run a couple alerts, same experience, no communication run and gun, still nice stories/missions. On a completly unrelated note I spent 40 minutes yesterday thowing snow bolts at cars at stoplights, beating up civilians, smacking around some dude named trent and, this is great, pushing jumpers off the ledges around town. Heh, that's Evil.

[ghostveil]

Did another alert last night, level 24, Bludhaven. Again, the content looked great, and this alert actually felt very difficult from the get go. The enemies did terrifyingly high amounts of damage, to the point where there was no way even a level 30 could solo this place.

So again, it's me and Eveningstar, tank and healer, at level 23. We have a DPSer at level 25 (Don't know what his alternate role was, but I think it was also healer, so that's fine). And then we had a level 30 controller in a DPS role. Who never said anything, and never responded to any chat we sent his way begging him to switch into Controller role.

/facedesk

We wiped at least 5 times, tons of deaths throughout, but hey, the level 30 had the top damage, right?! Nevermind that me, as the tank, had no power to work with to keep threat on the enemies and keep my health up. Nevermind that Eveningstar, as the healer, was running empty on power after only a few seconds into a fight and could not sustain healing on anyone. Nevermind that the two DPSers were basically stuck using regular attacks and no superpowers because they didn't have the Power to use their abilities.

We have yet to encounter a single Controller in their role in the three alerts we've done so far. This is getting retarded. We're done with queueing for instances in this game, the frustration is just not worth it. If we're doing team content, we're hand picking the teams, in that we're making sure we have a controller in controller role that knows what the hell he is doing.

[caios]

It sounds like you're running into bad pugs. This happens in every game. I've done a ton of alerts with bad pugs and it never ends well.

Once you hit level 30 there are a number of people that look to build pugs the old fashioned way, by advertising over shout what they actually need and making teams ahead of time. They're still pugs but people are alot better about their roles. So you get much better group dynamics.

Bad pugs are bad pugs, and annoying as hell. But when you're in a good team doing these runs is a thing of beauty. I've done a fair number of successful hard alerts with Caios both as a tank and as DPS and they are alot of fun when people are doing their jobs. This is why we need people who are actually going to play to play more together in the end game.

[ghostveil]

Feb 18, 2011 13:46:14 GMT -5 caios said:

It sounds like you're running into bad pugs. This happens in every game. I've done a ton of alerts with bad pugs and it never ends well.

Once you hit level 30 there are a number of people that look to build pugs the old fashioned way, by advertising over shout what they actually need and making teams ahead of time. They're still pugs but people are alot better about their roles. So you get much better group dynamics.

Bad pugs are bad pugs, and annoying as hell. But when you're in a good team doing these runs is a thing of beauty. I've done a fair number of successful hard alerts with Caios both as a tank and as DPS and they are alot of fun when people are doing their jobs. This is why we need people who are actually going to play to play more together in the end game.

Luckily Dawnstar (me) is 25 and Arcaness (Eveningstar) is at about 24.75, and we're getting 2-3 levels a night. We should be level 30 easily by the weekend. Hopefully we'll be able to get some teammage going.

Do we have a League started up or anything yet?

[caios]

Not as of yet. I'd say feel free to start one. I think we'd probably go with Urban Legends.

[ghostveil]

Urban Legends is already taken. We can either try to do New Urban Legends, or The Guardian Angels. Or The Urban Legends.

[ghostveil]

Ok, I've tried everything. Urban Legends is taken. The Urban Legends is invalid. The Guardian Angels is invalid. Guardian Angels in invalid. New Urban Legends in invalid.

What. The. F.

Edit: Alright, so apparently one of the rules is that you can't have more than one space in a league name. That severely limits options. Additionally, if the game thinks that any part of your name would violate a copyright anyone has on anything anywhere, it's invalid. I imagine either Guardian or Angels is copyrighted, so yay for retardation. And Urban Legends is taken, so we're hosed on that front.

[caios]

Feb 18, 2011 18:10:35 GMT -5 ghostveil said:

Ok, I've tried everything. Urban Legends is taken. The Urban Legends is invalid. The Guardian Angels is invalid. Guardian Angels in invalid. New Urban Legends in invalid.

What. The. F.

Edit: Alright, so apparently one of the rules is that you can't have more than one space in a league name. That severely limits options. Additionally, if the game thinks that any part of your name would violate a copyright anyone has on anything anywhere, it's invalid. I imagine either Guardian or Angels is copyrighted, so yay for retardation. And Urban Legends is taken, so we're hosed on that front.

Sadly this is probably the biggest reason why I may stop playing. If Sony's going to be this stupidly anal about shit I may as well avoid the whole mess.

This will probably be wait and see kinda deal. If people aren't playing and nothing interesting is happening here then I'll probably prefer to cancel the subscription before I get charged for anything else. Then resub it once thing actually get good again.

[snowdog]

i've still been on the fence about getting it myself, but being that Jen is still heavily into WoW, I tend to play with her. Fiancee and all that

[caios]

Also ...

www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2757-DC-Universe-Online

LOL

[gothicshark]

and see, once again i will save $50+ By saying, well its sony and sony ruined a good MMO twice I doubt I will join, also I can't fix my account since I have to answer a question I have no answer for.

"Who is your childhood hero?" my Sony account is unchangeable until I remember the answer. and sony's reply to me was if you can't answer that question then give us the CC# you used on SWG back in 2004... wait if I can't remember my hero from childhood, how the hell can I remember a CC# from a bank card 7 years ago, hell I don't even know which bank it was... ((BoA, WaMu, OCFCU)) three CCs I had in the early 00s.

Aw heck and DCUO is an End game game, and as you know I am tired of the End Game focus...

Recently I have been playing Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age so I can get a perfect playthough.

although since both my roommates are playing COH and Caios fixed my copy so it works again... I'll be back in two weeks, I'll be focusing on my Preatorian Mariel, not sure I want Mariel prime to be a God killer. although Tiburon should get there.

Also I need to get Irken fixed, and named changed around, Irken fire controller is going to be redone as a female pyromaniac and Evil Irken will be renamed Irken since he will be a hero... works better IMO.

ok that was a lot of rambling sorry... TTL

[ghostveil]

It is an end-game game. The leveling experience is quite brief, although it's an enjoyable ride. However, the game makes no illusions that the focus is on grinding gear and achievements at max level.

This isn't anything new. This is, in fact, the modus operandi of most MMOs out there right now, City of Heroes included. The difference is that City of Heroes has a much longer level grind, and the gear grind, up till now, has not been strictly necessary to play most, if not all, of the max level content. The Incarnate system is slowly but surely changing that paradigm.

There was a patch yesterday that improved a lot of things. A lot of the ability descriptions have been fixed, the UI feels a lot faster and smoother to use, and a lot of chat problems have been fixed (Although there's still no /emote channel, no chat bubbles over people's heads, and no way to resize the chat window).

Being the first major patch for this game though, it also introduced a number of bugs, the best of which, in my mind, is a bug in which they replaced the walking animation for the female Flirty animation set with the Comedic animation set walk. Characters who used to saunter about sultrily now skip about wildly. It's really hysterical, and I imagine that a mini-patch will fix it either today, or within the next few days.

I do like DCUO's approach to max level content. There's a lot of options for a lot of group sizes. There's solo instanced content for people who feel like doing things on their own. There's also duo instances, which are instanced content designed for just two people (Never seen this before in an MMO, and it's brilliant. Every MMO should do this).

The next step up are 4-man instances called Alerts, which have been a mixed bag in terms of groups. We did get a really excellent group once, and blazed through one of the level 30 alerts, and it was a blast, but it's frustrating if you don't have a good group otherwise. And then there's 8-man raids, which is the largest you'll see groups get in this game. Have not done any of those, and I don't have any plans to at the moment. However, assuming you have a coordinated group that's properly geared from the Duos and Alerts, a raid apparently doesn't take more than 1-2 hours to complete, and there's only what, 3 raids at the moment? So far this isn't exactly World of Warcraft style 16-hour-a-week raids.

In addition to all that, there's a substantial PVP element which I'm staying far away from until a lot of the combat exploit bugs are fixed (People are writing keyboard macros that do upwards of 20 attacks in an instant by using animation cancelling. Yeah, staying away from that), but could be good if they fix some of the gaping problems. There's Races, which have been a lot of fun, there's exploration, and there's roleplay, which has been surprisingly good.

For now, I'm really enjoying it. I may stick with it for a while, who knows.

[caios]

Yeah, something else the latest patch did, revert all my settings.

Now I have to go through and reset everything back the way I had it in order to play.

I don't think I'm going to want to spend the money on this right now. Sorry guys. It's a fun game, but I'm feeling like I'm already done playing it.