Le sigh. My CoH/CoV server is down right now. I should write a bad haiku, because, well… that’s what one does when servers go down, isn’t it? 
like rivers of ice
my connection timed out
the server has crashed
Last week, I finally picked up City of Villains when I noticed that the price had dropped to $30. Happy deal since I already have an active City of Heroes account and the expansion just plugs right in w/o increasing subscription costs or anything.
In the grand tradition of all things of this nature, I was compelled to see what could be done about raising an undead army. Several hours of play later, I have a 14th level mastermind (necromancy/poison spec). He’s neato. While his individual attacks don’t do a terrible amount of damage, he currently has three zombies who are also attacking at the same time. I can generally drop a single yellow mob before he has time to react. I don’t handle additional mobs as quickly, since I generally burnt everything on the first kill and have to wait for everything to cool down, but that’s ok.
I have hit points. Lots and lots and lots of hit points. Granted, my character himself isn’t all that impressive. He has no defensive abilities and is one of the squishier archetypes in the game. But, when you take into account the three literal meat shields he has in constant attendance, the amount of damage required to take me down becomes significantly increased.
Matt (friend from TAMS, works hacking perl for NCSoft’s billing system) finally got around to playing CoV. For some reason, he never really did CoH. It was actually his fault I got started in the first place, and then discovered that he wasn’t playing 
Hooray for consternation. Well, early this week, we actually managed to party together in CoV. It’s great, our chars were not only the same level with similar power sets (he’s a dark blast/miasma corruptor), we were actually working on the exact same quest arc.
This must be a new CoV feature, because I certainly don’t remember it happening in CoH. But when we completed his first mission, a dialog popped up on my screen, asking if I wanted to receive credit for having completed the quest as well. There was much rejoicing. In CoH, I have very strong memories of doing the same handfull of missions multiple times in rapid succession in order to complete it for each of our individual party members who had it.
What was also fun is because he’s so inexperienced at the game this week was really only his second time in a party. It was great 
We’ll learn him better next time, eh?