Although last night was a wildly successful night for Team Spode in DC Universe Online, it turns out I took only two screenshots last night, and both were of the same thing: killing a sub-avatar.
When I logged in, Lord Spode was finishing up the Brainiac dailies. I joined his group and headed to Gotham to help. See, Brainiac is slowly bottling and digitizing the buildings of Metropolis and Gotham City; once these cities are entirely digitized and stored, Brainiac will destroy the Earth. Preventing this is the role of the player heroes and villains.
The usual heroes and villains of the DC Universe have already failed once, since they couldn’t learn to work together against a common threat. The timeline has been reset, and it’s up to a new generation of heroes (and villains) to succeed where the others have failed.
This is how Team Spode finds themselves on the front lines of the war against Brainiac, while the other heroes lounge about in police stations or the Watchtower, sending us out to do their dirty work, or to rescue some sidekick who though he or she really ought to be doing _something_.
Hint: you always fail, always have failed, and always _will_ fail. It is _written_.
In these Brainiac dailies, the players band together to prevent Brainiac’s androids and Borg-ified construction workers from creating Sub-Avatars, mechanized creatures of destruction based on previous Brainiac attacks. Efforts to prevent the construction always eventually fail, and the Sub-Avatar is released onto the streets of Gotham City as a roaming boss mob, killing all those it encounters.
Killing it is worth an extra five marks. If someone has a combat rating of 43 or over, they even get an additional bit of gear as well.
As a full group, Team Spode tore through the quests, fighting crowds of monsters (and the always fun aperitif, the cat-sized Brainiac Tumblers), completing quests and being killed by someone’s Sub-Avatar. Well, that wasn’t right.
We went and found our OWN Sub-Avatar, one just being born. And we destroyed it. Usually people join any Sub-Avatar fight they see for the easy marks and gear, but nobody found ours. I figured we couldn’t handle it by ourselves, but I was very happy to be proven totally wrong.
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The daily double for the night was Ace Chemicals again. With four missions to cycle through, I was kinda surprised it’d end with the same one we did _last_ week, but at least we knew the fight, so in we went. The mission sent us in a slightly different path than last week; we faced a couple monsters (a clown and some amorous sludge) we hadn’t faced before, and completed our investigations and briefings we weren’t able to complete with just a single run through the place.
We only wiped once, when we went to clear security patrols while still being in our roles and becoming overwhelmed, but we retried all in damage and everything was fine. Sting and I reverted back to our healing and control roles, though, and we still reached the final reward without issue.
Since we’d finished in plenty of time, we moved on to the Tier 1 version of Area 51. Aside from the addition of a floating personal spaceship that aided the bosses, the fights weren’t appreciably different from the normal version, and we sailed right through.
Final tally for the night: One dead Sub-Avatar, one dead Chemo, one kryptonite processing plant deactivated. And a lot of marks for everyone involved. And a lot of furniture; my base is looking pretty crowded now.
