CoH: Screenshot Nostalgia Trip #1

This evening, I hooked up my old external hard disk drive and started browsing the ol’ City of Heroes screenshot folder, intending to find the -perfect- screenshot for use in the next NBI Screenshot Challenge of Murf’s.

Since I was sifting through literally hundreds of screenshots, many of them with UI (I hadn’t quite acquired the art and habit of turning off one’s interface for nice screenshots yet), I ended up chucking the rare decent to accidentally great picture into another folder of their own.

By the time I was done, there were 69 jpegs in there. (Pure coincidence. Really.)

Not only did this make choosing the -one- screenshot impossible, it occurred to me that I really wanted to share these beauties one more time (they wouldn’t exactly come up in a normal post since *cough* CoH can officially be declared “ded gaem”) and that a post with 69 screenshots would be quite insane.

Hence the decision for a series of posts with a few choice screenshots each. (Hey, it gives me something to post about. Blogger’s block is no fun.)

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Way way back in Jan 2005 (more than 10 years ago, wow,) I had a stone/stone tanker as one of my first characters.

Here he is, in the notorious “poo man” rock armor. His crowd control immunity skill literally “rooted” him and kept him immobile.

And one can observe his taunt aura, mudpots, in the screenshot as well. I can still recall the burbling “bloop bloop” of that skill, I sure listened to it long enough.

A whole bunch of Skulls are in the picture too. This was taken about six days before the whole “Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls.” meme, but hey, it’s a useful segue in to mention it.

When the devs finally revamped the look of rock armor, ol’ Ragnarl (or Raggy, as I liked to call him) could finally be revealed as a dwarf in combat.

Err… for some definitions of combat.

The /stone powerset was so damn slow in the early stages of leveling a tanker that I’d often just herd up a bunch of mobs around a corner and let mudpots boil them to death while I went and did other things, like read a book, browse in the other screen, get up for a bio break, whatever.

For lack of anything better to do while a whole bunch of mobs were being snared in mud and boiled alive for xp, I started experimenting with the art of screenshotting with unexpected camera angles.

These were a bunch of Family mobsters. The color coding of their suits was kinda amusing. Made for a nice screenshot though.

Naturally, I’m usually too late to the party for anything.

Before I even hit max level on any tanker of mine, I heard the impending news that they were going to limit the number of mobs that could be herded with a cap.

Too many pre-Enhancement Nerf totally immune to everything invul tankers herding up whole open world map-fulls of spawns, jumping into a dumpster and burning all the dumb mobs that followed with a bonfire, apparently.

But but… I hadn’t even tried such a joyous thing yet!

So I went to the Troll Caves underneath the Hollows and gathered up a whole bunch of grey Trolls on my lowbie tanker, JUST TO FEEL LIKE I HERDED STUFF LIKE A REAL TANKER ONCE, BEFORE GETTING WHACKED WITH A NERF BAT.

Speaking of caves, I remember there was this extremely cavernous mission filled with a ton of gangster spawns of some kind, and the gang leader’s cavern had this set piece throne, which was great screenshot fodder after mission completion. Clean forgotten the exact name of it though.

My scrapper couldn’t really give a darn. Just testing out the fit of the seat.

And that’s all the screenshots for this post. Until the next time, where we’re likely to show off herding, herding, and more herding (and maybe some other stuff but probably herding. Such bad habits my first MMO taught me…)

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NBI Writing Prompt: Do you have any screenshots of stuff (a skill, a landscape, an accomplishment, etc.) that doesn’t exist anymore because the devs of your game whacked it with a nerf bat or drastically changed in some way?