Alexei vs. The Praetorians (CoH)

Alexei, my Katana/Dark Armor Scrapper in City of Heroes, beating 11 Praetorian archvillains in a row without dying a single time, and without using inspirations, temporary powers, veteran powers, base empowerment buffs or click accolades.

I won't burden you with my music choices, so just put on some hard driving music of your own while you watch it. ;)

The archvillains in the video are Chimera, Shadowhunter, Bobcat, Neuron, Battle Maiden, Black Swan, Malaise, Mother Mayhem, Infernal, Marauder and Tyrant. There are four other AVs in the story arc, Nightstar, Siege, Diabolique and Dominatrix. I do not have the DPS required to take the remaining four down as archvillains, so I only fought them as elite bosses, so I didn't include them. They didn't kill me; I just knew that beating them as archvillains would be impossible for me.

Technically, I also don't have the DPS to beat Tyrant as an archvillain. So I cheated by taking advantage of the bad AI, luring him into some lava which did half of my work for me. If you don't want to count that one, that's fine; in that case I took out 10 AVs in a row instead of 11.

The Chimera fight isn't actually the one that I did in sequence. I forgot to record it, so I fought him again after the rest were done. I also forgot to record the first half of the Mother Mayhem fight, but decided to just show the half of the fight that I did have instead of doing it again, mostly because she's a long way into the arc, while Chimera is the very first AV, so easy to repeat.

Frankly, most of the fights weren't interesting. While Alexei doesn't have an AV-specialist build, it turns out that he's much better at it than my two scrappers that DO have AV-specialist builds. Sergei and Werner have old builds, though, and there have been some new enhancements introduced in the past few issues that make this all possible on Alexei.

Malaise was interesting (to me anyway). I was a little worried heading into it, since I rely on my soft-capped defenses, and Malaise has a lot of non-positional attacks. He tore Sergei (Dark Melee/Super Reflexes) apart, and was at least challenging on Werner (Katana/Regeneration). I figured I'd be relying heavily on my psionic resistance and my heal. Everything was going great until the middle of the fight, when he started confusing me regularly, preventing me from attacking him or healing. After a few very close calls, I figured out my boneheaded mistake - I'd turned off Tactics to conserve endurance. But Tactics, you see, provides my confusion and fear resistance. Oops! Toggled back up and finished the fight with no further incident.

Infernal was the fight I was dreading the most. Or anticipating the most. Anyway, the fight I thought would be the biggest challenge. On Werner and Sergei, he had required multiple failures before I eventually succeeded through persistence. So I'd psyched myself up for my "no deaths" run coming to an end. It was probably the toughest fight of the bunch if you don't include my giant oops with Malaise, but I still managed to pull it off on the first try. I apologize for having the big guy in the way for most of the fight. He was already dead, and showing dead enemies still standing is an artifact of the demorecord approach, so I didn't know there was going to be a problem.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• CoH
• CoV
• katana
• dark
• scrapper
• solo
• archvillain
• AV
• Praetorians

[VampireofEpicness]

What's your attack chain?

[WernerCoH]

@VampireofEpicness In the video, Divine Avalanche -> Gambler's Cut -> Sting of the Wasp -> Gambler's Cut. This was done to reduce endurance consumption and save a power pick.

In my current build, now that Cardiac takes care of my endurance, I'm running what I'd consider the standard defensive chain, Divine Avalanche -> Gambler's Cut -> Golden Dragonfly -> Gambler's Cut -> Divine Avalanche -> Gambler's Cut -> Soaring Dragon -> Gambler's Cut.

[matridusXraishi]

Hi i have a question reguarding secondaries is Regen better for doing pve or is DA just as good. thanks for the help :D

[WernerCoH]

@matridusXraishi Without knowing more about what you're after and what primary you'd be using, Regeneration and Dark Armor are equally good. The secondaries are all nicely balanced after this many years, just different strengths and weaknesses.

[GinZen1]

wow nice job 11 avs sure is an achievement.

What katana are you using its freaking awesome and where can i get it?

[WernerCoH]

@GinZen1 Well, it used to be called the Talsorian Katana. Now it's called the Vanguard Katana. It costs 100 Vanguard merits to unlock it.

[matridusXraishi]

i also wanted to know if i should get hasten at lvl 6 instead of build up and at 8 divine avalanche.

[matridusXraishi]

primary is katana and looking for survivability damage for soloing. thanks :D

[GinZen1]

@WernerCoH oh thanks been wondering what it looks like im trying to get it but not at 35 yet so can't do any rwz missions :(