When Spode, after harvesting himself an exobit (an _aggressive_ one!), proclaimed himself an exobit-ionist, KY and I nearly lost it in chat. That was DDO-level punmanship. And all the more appropriate since we’d just been facing the Riddler.
The Riddler wasn’t being a supervillain in this adventure; he was being an investigator, having retired from villainy to become a clandestine resource for Batman. It’s the Riddler who clues Batman (and through Batman, us) that Joker is now no more than a tool for Brainiac. As a result of the Riddler’s discovery, the villain Deathstroke (whom we’re watching in “Arrow”) has been hired by the Joker to kill the Riddler. Once paid, Deathstroke will not stop before his target is dead, but Batman stopped the Joker’s funds transfer, meaning Deathstroke would not be paid, causing the villain to take off near the end of the fight.
Robbing us of the XP!!!
Anyway, the Riddler wears clothes with questions marks all over it; so did the Doctors #5-7 in Doctor Who. Coincidence? There’s no such thing as coincidence.
We did try Oolong Island again last night. While we did do better against the Tornado Tyrant, we weren’t able to defeat it. There’s a spot around 50% where there’s lots of minions running around while the Tyrant does his various attacks. I noticed that while the Tyrant’s tornado twister was AoE, his glowing orbs attack was frontal — he can’t hit you with that if he’s not facing you (but, he can turn pretty easily). His attacks could be blocked, but we weren’t blocking at the right times, and people would get killed trying to revive other people, leading things into a death spiral whenever someone would die.
Nothing a few more levels can’t fix. We hope. Besides, Spode’s armor was kaput. As the tank, he really needed to have gear that wasn’t broken. As a free player, though, he couldn’t keep enough money to repair his gear. Catch 22. He couldn’t play with broken gear, but couldn’t get money to fix it without playing.
Only thing we could do was to leave and do some story missions. We finished this Riddler arc, killed Clayface, became zombies for Etrigan and defeated Isis’ lich. Spode got enough money from that to repair his armor, and most of us ended the night at level 26 (from the level 23 we started the night). Guidance for next Sunday is level 28. If we can’t kill the Tornado Twit at eight levels higher than the instance level… we’ll have to skip it.
I don’t know when this instance shows up again in the challenge mode versions at level 30, but hoping we have more tools to deal with it then. I don’t think it’s Tier 1.
But, next week we probably will hit 30, and start in on DCUO’s end-game the week after. Grinding the Tier 1 instances for Tier 1 gear, then on up through Tier 4.
