Author Topic: Noteworthy Hamidon Raids - Did Yours Make History? (Help complete the wiki!)  (Read 24265 times)

Kurrent

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I just remembered something about a special Hami Raid. I didn't see it, just heard about it.

A character called Peace on Earth is reputed to have solo'd hami in Nova form. A bug of some sort allowed him to place all of his slots during a respec into his nova character - all on one attack.

With sufficient range, he supposedly one-shotted hami. (a dubious claim, to be sure - even with a 67 slotted nova form. )
That could just be a myth, but it was sufficiently amusing enough to share.

I can verify Peace On Earth solo'd Hami. 

The bug Peace found was that shortly after a major update, you could continue to slot enhancement beyond the 6 that were visible on the screen.  Due to ED, which was established by that time, each enhancement after the first 6 was extremely weak; I think the 7th and 8th only gave something like another 0.2% and the others dropped to 0.1%, but there was literally no limit to how many that COULD be slotted.  Peace reported this bug to the devs, who responded in the way that the most awesome devs ever often (because they were) would: They gave him about a billion INF and told him to see what he could do.  The end result was him soloing Hami. 

Yeah, it sounds crazy, but it seriously happened.  Several other Liberty old-timers can verify this as well.

K

eabrace

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They gave him about a billion INF and told him to see what he could do.  The end result was him soloing Hami. 
And that's why I loved the City of Heroes dev team.  :D
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Kurrent

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I had the opportunity to run many Hami raids over the years, even a few with the HDS.  Good times.  Most of us back then had our Hami outfits like Pickle was talking about; no capes, no auras. 

I was with CoH from the first week, and fondly remember running Hami raids on DIAL-UP at the beginning.  Not joking in the least; most of my Sisters can verify the issues I had.  I'd lag out about a dozen times on some raids.  I got to where I would load my steel-case desktop in the back of my car and drive into my office at night to run a Hami raid because I had DSL there.  Finally moved into a house with cable modem, and it was a whole new world.  I loved the afterglow of standing there at the center, chatting and trading Hami-Os with others.  Really gave a sweet feeling of teamwork and accomplishment.

Other than running some of the early raids and succeeding in several over dial-up, I guess the other historic one I was part of was the first successful raid on Liberty after the final upgrade to the Hami raids.  I had the honor and privilege of leading the Assault Teams during that raid, which took around ninety minutes if I remember correctly.  A lot of slugging and rough mechanics, but it was worth it in the end.  God, I loved flying around shooting stuff.

Most of Hami-Os went to one of my main's builds, her stealthier build; the second build used the IO set.  The extra Hami-Os I had left over went into what turned out to be the second 50 I had, my TA/Archery defender.   Didn't have enough to fully slot her out, and I even wound out taking a few out to slot in some purple IOs when I'd get enough to slot 3 or 4 of a set. 

Good memories.  I love all of you.  We shared some fantastic times over eight and a half years, and I still miss that game, that world and my friends and teammates today.

K

Kurrent

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And that's why I loved the City of Heroes dev team.  :D

They were truly amazing.  I still am amazed that things like the Retro Sci-Fi set ever happened, where we got to vote on and select everything from the theme to the individual pieces in the set.  No other Dev team in any game could ever match what we had those last few years.  We even had Ghost Widow show up to one of our Christmas parties.  I've been trying to post some pics from the party, but I apparently can't figure out how to do that.

K


eabrace

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We even had Ghost Widow show up to one of our Christmas parties.  I've been trying to post some pics from the party, but I apparently can't figure out how to do that.
We don't have a method of posting images on our forums directly.  They have to be stored somewhere else first (photobucket, imgur, Google Photos, Flickr, etc.).  Then you grab the image URLs and paste each URL inside a set of these tags:
Code: [Select]
[img][/img]
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Kurrent

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Thanks for the explanation, Eabrace!

Okay, I'm just going to post the link here, because for some reason the image isn't showing up in the message, even between the img tags.

http://s1083.photobucket.com/user/JoKurrent/media/screenshot_2006-12-16-14-40-40.jpg.html



I hope it's visible.  I don't ever use an image uploader, so I just picked photobucket because it was the first one you mentioned..  If I need to move it elsewhere for people to see it, I certainly can. 

primeknight

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It has been a long time since I have been on any forum, but this topic stirred a few great memories.

First a little background on the whole "Liberty Server Open Sourcing" of Hami raids.

Just after the addition of capes and auras--Issue 2 I believe--I left my SG "Front Line" to join the Hamidon Death Squad.  Upon announcement of the formation of this SG with one dedicated purpose, there were literally hundreds of join requests. 

See, a few months before, 2 SGs on other servers had proof of defeating Hamidon.  One was on Pinnacle I believe (whichever one was considered the "drunk server")--JaggedLegion. 

There was another (cant remember who or which server), but they were rather arrogant and flaunted their Hamidon enhancements in the forums.  A screenshot of their raid showed an excessive amount of Radiation powers...almost completely controllers and defenders.  On Liberty at the time, a huge influx of Radiation defenders was rolled based on this.  In fact, the HDS' de facto leader "Retro Knight" rolled from a scrapper to a defender named "Bio Infection".  Here's how we figured the unknown SG used radiation to beat Hamidon: a well known radiation infection power bug and a bug with snipe.  You used to be able to cast Radiation Infection on a group of mobs who would immediately aggro to you.  You could run in a building like an enhancement store with this toggle on and the mobs would sit at the entrance waiting for you to come out.  It was particularly fun for griefing Steel Canyon for all the lowbies trying to sell off the enhancements they got in Steel Canyon from the Positron TF.  IIRC, Phase shift also used to let you use a power, toggle phase shift, and the power was still active.  So our belief was that many of their SG did that and hid behind a boulder with Radiation Infection active.  Now for snipe.  You could jump up from a boulder, target a mito, then jump again and set the power off. The animation would play and the snipe would go off, but you'd be safely behind a boulder.  Imagine 20+ SG members doing this and you can understand why their raids took hours.  But it did work until the devs nerfed the RI rnge problem.

As for Jagged Legion, they posted a video of their raid, but not their secret.  Upon watching the video over and over, I noticed that in their Hami battle scene, Hami was not attacking.  Also, Animated Stone was running around, Singularities were out all over the place, controller powers, etc.  So we came to the conclusion that the mez threshold was broken.

After one failed raid, I did see a combat notification that said Hamidon has been overcome with Cinders.  In retrospect, it just may have been a canned message, but we all took that to mean that we should permahold Hami.  First we had to overcome the damage from mitos and Hami--we did this on previous raids by using the heal bubble tactic--constant aoe heals, constant rezzes.  We also had a taunt team (Miss Snips generally for most of the failed and successful first raids).  Snips was a regen/claws scrapper, stacked with regen buffs and speedboost along with a heavily slotted taunt.  Snips held aggro while we all stacked mezzes.  Snips would tell us when hai was no longer attacking.  When Hami was held for 2 minutes or so it was damage dealer time. Absolute Chaos!

Some notes on the early raids.

This was slightly before the Council of War issue and I remember being annoyed that useful archetypes were playing alts to do the Striga content.  Also, I went from zone to zone spamming the upcoming raid.  We didnt have global chat back then.  It was pretty embarassing...

We got really efficient with using group fly and phantom army to hold aaggro while we swept mitos.  I found it ridiculous that 20 tanks could be taunting a mito or hami but one Phantom Army drew all of the attention.

Kinetics were awesome to spam the superjump power.  Scrappers loved em.

We asked people to turn off capes and auras.  In fact we encouraged people to wear simple costumes.  A t shirt and jeans perhaps.  HDS chose to wear Black suits with Red trim.  Capes and auras lagged out a lot of players--there were hundreds in the zone at a time and it wasnt uncommon to go link dead from all of the effects.  In fact, I went link dead on the first succesfull Hami raid just after he exploded.

In the early raids, all you needed to do to get a hami was to kill the mini mito things that spawned after Hami died.  The more you damaged, the more HOs you could get.  Retro used to spam a warning to delete all of your inventory before Hami died so that we could get as many as possible.  I always filled a tray at the early raids.

A controller on Triumph named Tremere apparently came up with the permahold idea at about the same time, though we knew nothing about it and their raids were not sucessful until the open sourcing.  He and I maintained a bitter forum manner towards each other ever since.

The open sourcing was performed "tabloid reporter style" by a scrapper named Delivery Man.  It annoyed most of us since he basically dropped it to everybody while we were in the process of listing out the strategy.  Deliveryman subsequently deleted his character--most likely rerolled--and was never heard from again.

Most servers had one of two attitudes about our strategy: they were thankful or they called our method "ham-fisted". The truth is they all took the strat and ran with it.  Hami raids schedules were posted in every server forum.  They even took HDS' announcement and changed a few words to make it their own.

My initial idea was to get a zone full of mind controllers and have them confuse a nearby monster named Stropharia--a mushroom monster.  It had untyped damage and I thought that was the devs Key to defeating Hamidon.  With a confused monster, and through the mass use of telekinesis, I was confident that the monster could be pushed into Hamidon and destroy it with the untyped damage.  I never got around to doing that.  Nobody rolled a mind controller back then.

HDS believed that with the farming of Hamidon spread to all servers, we were forcing the Devs to create a higher level cap with new content and different enhancements.  But what happened was the next issue was Coliseum, and on the test server, PVPers with Hami enhancements absolutely shredded their opponents.  The devs responded at that time with Enhancement Diversification. So indirectly, I felt like I helped break the game  :(

HDS was effectively disbanded by Issue 5.  People's interest in a Hami raid began to wane due to the oversaturation of raids.

One of the devs did spill the beans oh how they meant for the raid to take place.  Basically as we had done, yet at key points in Hami's health, everyone but one person ran out of the "goo".  This only spawned one mito to be killed and Hami could be worked again.  It was supposed to happen 3 times before he died.  Once at 50 %, once at 25%, and once at 10% health.

I am sure I am forgetting something but thanks for letting me spout off what I remember on the Liberty Raids.
This was a great stroll down memory lane.  Thank you for this.  (and not just for the raid info, I remember you from the main forms and I usually enjoyed reading your posts.

I wish I had a historic raid to add.  What I can do is verify the belief that removing capes and aura's helped.  And I had an orange costume for my scrapper that was hami-raid ready.  I had a friend that used to do raids on Liberty all the time.