A call went out for a Miss Liberty Task Force with about 4 hours to go (on Protector). It looked like the person was relatively new to the TF but wanted to experience it before it was all over. After a few minutes, I left my current group and joined him (Dire Wraith). Whelp....it was just the two of us so far and he was having problems locating Miss Liberty...not a bad sign just solidified my view that he'd never done it before. So we both put the feelers out and after awhile we got a full PUG.
Dire Wraith - Scrapper
Cesar Salad - Rad Troller
CoyoteM - Energy Blaster
Chaos Nexx - Fire Blaster (me)
Ultra Woman - Invuln Tank
I feel terrible that I cannot remember the three other players now (if anyone was there and remembers please let me know - no damn screenies what was I thinking?)....but it was another 2 blasters and 1 other troller (bubble?). We had a couple of incarnates and a couple of non-50s and 5 players who had never done it before (and some of them it was their one and only 50 in the game). I'm not one for perfect team composition but it wasn't the greatest mix of powers was my line of thinking. 1 tank, 4 blasters, 2 trollers and 1 scrapper. Loads of inexperience. I had only tried it twice before myself.....one failure (at Ghost Widow), one completion.
The TF started off fine with relatively no hiccups with CoyoteM guiding us through most of the way. Then came Ghost Widow and she TORE US UP. At first we pulled Scirocco too but next half dozen tries she was solo. We couldn't get past her. Did I mention that we lost one of our trollers earlier so we had 1 tank, 1 scrapper, 4 blasters and our rad troller left. If an attack got through, most of us were toast quickly. Then I remembered I had a bunch of team +res insps from Super Packs....used a bunch of em and we finally took her down. Whew. The other three AVs were hard but we hacked them down as well.
The toughest part of our TF was the towers. Our tank was having problems holding aggro long enough for us and pnce Recluse was on us, we went down fast. I didn't count the number of team wipes but it felt like 30. I in no way blamed the tank, she did a great job. We didn't have much in the way of support for our tank.....no noticable heals or buffers so she was on her own. Sure we had destinys to buff us but it wasn't long enough for the tank. We tried all sorts of tactics....not many of us had team insps left but I think everyone used all they had...I know I did. We also stocked up on +res insps. I spent 100s of millions of influence to by out the market of medium to super +res insps.......there was none left when I was done and I spent almost all of the influence I had left. Who cares right? End of days! Well that didn't work either. We were done. We lost our steam and had just over 1+ hour left until servers down. A couple of people had called for us to end our misery. Things like "We gave it our best shot" and "No shame in going out like this" were being said. After a minute of some silence I called for ONE MORE TIME...ONE MORE TEAM WIPE AND WE ARE DONE. We used whatever big buffs and insps we had, rushed in to take down that Red tower and tank went to hold off Recluse. OMG Tank was holding out a little longer than usual. We were below 50% on the tower, 30 %, 20%, Repairmen being repelled fast, 10%, 5 %....it went down! We were elated! It gave us the juice to journey on. We still had some of those team insp buffs left so we rushed to the next tower...it went down too. We had a few hiccups along the way but we knew we could take the towers.....and we did.
Lastly we rushed Recluse. He's one tough son-of-a-bitch. We were sloooowly beating him down and then his reinforcements started to show up. His health was rising and falling depending upon how well we could hold out against his buddies. It was an AWESOME battle. It ebbed and flowed for quite some time but we were hurting him. If one or two if us would died, we'd rush back into the fray and immediately start to go at it. It was exciting. We had one team wipe at this point but we regrouped, buffed and jumped back in. 30 minutes left......no pressure....if we dont do this, we will never do this.....we can do this! We HAVE to do this. The red notice came up "30 minutes left" Tick tock. At this point, the troller that had left earlier signed back on and she said "you guys are STILL on that TF?" "YES! We are battling Recluse now, come help us!" She came fast and jumped right in. We felt a surge of possibility. We CAN do this! I still believe that we would have been able to down Reculse with just the 7 of us who did most of the TF but our 8th helped us do it faster. WE DID IT! 20 minutes until I was, by far, the best feeling of accomplishment that I had in all my years playing COH. A few of us yelled "F yeah" or something to that extent.
I couldn't have asked for a better way to go out....on Protector......fighting a long (3+ hours) hard battle......almost giving up but persevering.....and winning! I was happy for myself to have that memory but I was also happy for my teammates that they will have it too. Thank you all!
After the TF, I logged in one of my oldest toons (Groovy) and stood on the Atlas steps with my fellow Protectorites for the last 15 or so minutes. A SG mate of mine was there, Dark Chaos. We helped start our SG back in 2004 and we were there to end it. It was sad and joyous 15 minutes. That final message of being booted from the server and the game will also not be forgotten for some time.
Yours Truly,
Hedonism, Chaos Nex, Groovy, Super Flu and Mentax.