Blasting through the Rogue Isles in City of Heroes.
For my return to the Rogue Isles I've went with what was formerly one of the hero only archetypes - the Blaster. "The best defence is a great offence" says the AT select screen, and the Blaster is the glassiest of glass cannons - with the highest base damage in the game but with no defensive powers at all. A Blaster can down most foes in seconds but most foes can do the same to them... if they get the chance.
So enter Bad Girl, an Energy/Energy Blaster fresh out of the Zig and ready to do some villainy.*
*File this name under I-can't-believe-that-wasn't-taken-yet, along with that of her future heroic counterpart, Good Girl.
For this character I have a fairly good idea of which contacts and story arcs I want to hit during my run through the lower level zones. I won't be doing Hearts of Darkness this time, and I might switch off XP once or twice along the way to avoid out-levelling contacts in Port Oakes and Cap Au Diable. I've also passed up on the newer Mercy Island contacts in order to move on to PO as soon as possible.
Well, almost as soon as possible. After finishing Kalinda's arc I did follow up on her introduction to Mongoose. His missions mostly involve the Snakes, who I prefer to avoid fighting on this character, but I wasn't going to miss out on his first, because it's one of the best missions in the game.
One of the bank staff looks up and eyes you nervously
If there's one thing that's even more evocative of the supervillain experience than breaking out of a high security prison (and I did that during the tutorial) it's robbing a bank. The mission to rob the bank in Mercy is neither long nor complicated, but it's an absolute blast to fight through the security guards to the vault, smash the vault door and grab the loot while fighting off more guards. Best of all this mission has its own theme music, which was also used in a couple of the original trailers, but is otherwise not heard anywhere else in the game, except for in the reprises of this mission which come up ocassionally in newspaper missions.
(A version of the bank robbery instance also forms the focus of Mayhem missions, but without the music.)
Oddly I've never seen this specific track listed on any compilation of the music of City of Heroes. I've seen speculation from other players that this is due to it being unique to this instance and so being classed as background ambience rather than part of the soundtrack. It's also fairly uncommon for any mission in this game to have music play throughout an entire instance. Indeed compared with most MMOs CoH uses music very sparingly - mostly in short tracks that play upon entering a new district of a zone, and almost never on a loop. That really struck me when I first returned to the game in 2019 after years spent in other games in the genre.
Then again not every track is ideally suited to accompanying the sounds of energy blasts and rent-a-cops bouncing off of walls.
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