Pool Party

In City of Heroes, sixth level is something of a milestone, since it's the first time that “Power Pools” become available. Initially you pick powers from your primary and secondary sets, which come from a list of those available for your class. Power Pools are available to all classes equally, and it's from these that you can eventually get such things as Flight and Teleport. You don't have to take any Power Pools, if you prefer to concentrate on getting the powers in your regular sets, but it allows extra flexibility.

RadStorm, MightyMidge, and Barbizon all hit 6th level recently, so got to choose from among the Power Pools. For RadStorm I chose Flight (which starts with the lowly Hover power–even slower than walking), and I'm really looking forward to true Flight. Even being able to hover up to the tops of buildings and look down on the city below is worth the price of admission. MightyMidge got Jumping, which will eventually let her leap tall buildings in a single bound. For now it just gives her a slight boost to her Jump, which I think will be useful, since it seems that the programmers actually bothered to give shorter characters smaller vertical leaps–or maybe I just stink at jumping, but it definitely seems like Midge has trouble clearing fences that the normal-sized characters just hop over. I suppose I could test that hypothesis by making a minimal size character… Finally, Barbizon took Fitness, which will eventually reduce the Endurance cost of all her powers; she's the only one of my characters that regularly runs out of End while fighting, due to the high Endurance cost of swinging that big old axe around.

I actually spent a fair amount of time last night on the Virtue server, just standing around talking in character, rather than going on missions. It was fun as a change of pace, but I don't think that I could do that for an entire night the way some of the rp-ers seemed to (or at least every time I wandered back to the central square it seemed like Cog Sprocket was still there, jawing away in character).