Character Spotlight
  • Natural BlasterArchery/Tactical Arrow@Rose Claymore Eli Bowman joined Freedom Corps shortly after the first Rikti Invasion. He worked as a hero liaison for a time, then as a trainer in King?s […]

    Commander Bowman

    Natural BlasterArchery/Tactical Arrow@Rose Claymore Eli Bowman joined Freedom Corps shortly after the first Rikti Invasion. He worked as a hero liaison for a time, then as a trainer in King?s […]

  • Mutation BlasterPsychic Blast/Martial Combat@Rose Claymore Terrilyn Brant was born with latent psychic power that came with an odd side effect – the inability to distinguish between pleasure and pain. In […]

    Rapture

    Mutation BlasterPsychic Blast/Martial Combat@Rose Claymore Terrilyn Brant was born with latent psychic power that came with an odd side effect – the inability to distinguish between pleasure and pain. In […]

  • Mutation TankerIce Armor/Ice Melee@Rose Claymore Winifred North grew up in the Bronze Way neighborhood of Steel Canyon, a place caught in the grip between the Outcasts and the Trolls. After […]

    Agent North

    Mutation TankerIce Armor/Ice Melee@Rose Claymore Winifred North grew up in the Bronze Way neighborhood of Steel Canyon, a place caught in the grip between the Outcasts and the Trolls. After […]

News & Events
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Halloween Event!

The Halloween Event is a suite of gaming tasks and visuals that are reminiscent of the Halloween holiday season. This includes Trick or Treating, costumes, monsters, ghosts, witches, and horror movie cliches such as a Zombie Apocalypse and mad scientist’s monster.

Dr. Kane’s House of Horror

The eccentric scientist Dr. Kane turned his home into a haunted house and has invited all of Paragon City to come and visit. Things are not as they seem in Dr. Kane’s House of Horror, though. Visitors enter the mansion never to be heard from again!

Dr. Kane’s mansion is a zombie-filled nightmare, and while exploring it, you learn of the doctor’s nefarious plot to transform the innocent people of Paragon City into a slavering horde of zombies. As you investigate the halls and rooms of the haunted mansion, you face off against Dr. Kane’s freakish creations, including his greatest handiwork, the giant Abomination.

Dr. Kane’s House of Horrors is a co-op event for four characters of level 15-50. Access this new event through the Team-Up Teleporter (only).

Whispered Rumor Tip Mission

When a character goes Trick or Treating in a Temporary Costume, there is a chance of a Halloween Tip Mission dropping from a ‘Treat’. This Halloween Event Tip will drop even if you already have 3 Alignment Mission Tips. You need to be Level 20+ and not in Praetoria to get this Tip. The Tip is entitled Whispered Rumor and has a jack-o’-lantern picture on it. The Halloween Tip Mission grants some minor rewards plus one of five badges.

Deadly Apocalypse

The Deadly Apocalypse is a type of zone invasion introduced in the Halloween Event of 2009. Haunting Banners representing iconic horrors appear in a zone and are protected by foes that embody that banner’s horror. Players must attack the defenders and then the Banners and then finally a Giant Monster. Rewards include badges and a selection of temporary powers.

Eternal Night

During the event, the entire game is locked in nighttime mode. This is not just a visual effect. All aspects of the game that depend on a day/night cycle are locked to the night side during the event. Enemies that only spawn at night spawn continuously during the event. Banisher, The Slayer, and Haunted badges (Hero side) and Pirate and Spectral badges (Villain side) are examples of badges for which hunting will be much easier during the event.

Note that some zones, such as Cimerora, The Hive and The Abyss are unaffected by Eternal Night.

Zombie Apocalypse

The Zombie Apocalypse is a zone event that uses the Rikti World Invasion engine; random zones throughout the game come under attack by zombies for periods of time as the sky turns red. A new enemy group, Zombies, appear during this event. There are badges for Zombie defeats and an unlockable costume piece, the Pumpkin Head.
Trick or Treat

Trick or Treat

During this event, players are be able to ‘Trick or Treat’ by knocking (that is, ‘clicking’) on mission doors in the various zones. Treats are rewards which include Temporary Powers (a throwable Rock and Costume Powers), Tier 1 inspirations, and Halloween Event Salvage (from defeating the spawned ‘Tricks’) which can be traded in for an extra costume slot. Tricks include spawns of special event enemies for which there are defeat badges.

Giant Monsters

The Giant Monsters from Croatoa, Eochai and Jack in Irons, spawn in most zones (including the City of Villains zones) along with the Unseelie spirits. There are Halloween-specific badges for their defeat (which are different than the badges for the defeat of the regular Croatoan Eochai and Jack Giant Monsters).

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Farewell

On August 31st, 2012, Andy Belford announced NCSoft’s decision to close Paragon Studios, effecting ending production of City of Heroes. Additional information regarding the cessation of services is to be expected in the coming weeks.

http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/news/news_archive/thank_you.php

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Agent Bowman

Eli Bowman joined Freedom Corps shortly after the first Rikti Invasion. He worked as a hero liaison for a time, then as a trainer in King?s Row. It was then his talent for unarmed combat (and archery skill) were first noticed by his superiors and he was offered a position in Longbow.

Surprisingly, Eli turned down the offer. He expressed a preference to work as one of the heroes of Paragon City, as part of a small unit of sanctioned heroes. He outlined and proposed a plan for a special unit of Freedom Corps which would be composed of heroes with talents and skills not commonly found among the Longbow soldiers. This unit would operate along side other super heroes rather than Freedom Corps agents, with a special emphasis on coordination and cooperation.

After careful consideration, and with the help of four like-minded members of Freedom Corps, Agent Bowman founded Star Patrol.

Resent Updates & Player Notes

As the founder of Star Patrol, Agent Bowman is a highly recognized character to every member of Star Patrol, even if by name only. Unfortunately he rarely sees any playtime and few members outside the other Star Patrol leaders have met him. In an effort to rectify this, the in-game version of Agent Bowman has undergone a number of drastic changes in the past few months.

When originally rolled back when Star Patrol was founded, Agent Bowman was a Trick Arrow/Archery Defender. I quickly discovered the play style associated with this build was not what I was looking for, and so I switched to a Archery/Devices Blaster. Unfortunately, after nearly a year and a half of playing Bowman with this build, I grew more and more frustrated with it. It’s not that the build was ineffective, it just wasn’t fun to play. As improvements to the Blaster archetype were released, I kept going back to him but never for very long. For blasters I simply preferred Energy, or Electric or Fire or basically anything without a weapon. I eventually brought Agent Bowman to level 50 through an exploit, just so he’d be at the endgame with several other members of Star Patrol. And there he sat, mostly unplayed over the next several years.

Over that time I learned more about other archetypes and playstyles and discovered there were two playstyles which I very much enjoyed. One was the healer/buffer. In came as no surprise my first characters I achieved level 50 with (sans exploits) were tankers and defenders. So I revisited Agent Bowman with an aim to bring him back into play, but in a way I’d enjoy playing him. Unfortunately TA/A Defender was still not my cup of tea. I want to buff and heal, but couldn’t wrap my head around anything which would really seem “Bowman-like”. So I turned to the Tanker archetype. After considerable experimentation, rerolling, renaming and server transfers, I ressurected an older tank who had already reached level 50, and brought Bowman back right where he left off, only as a specialist in unarmed combat rather than as an archer.

I’m looking forward to having his name frequently appear in the Star Patrol chat channel and to playing him on Monday nights.

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Agent Collins

Helena Collins was born in a very small town in Kansas, and was , as far as anyone else could see, an ordinary child. However, had they been able to see through her eyes, they might have been surprised. Surrounding everything, there was a slight aura of color, the tint fluctuating as things moved. Having nothing else with which to compare, she assumed her vision was completely normal.

When she was 9, her parents were killed by a sudden tornado while driving to the next town to pick Helena up from school . Afterwards, she moved to Rhode Island to live with her aunt, her only living relative, who had an apartment on the fourth floor on a small building in the Royal Overlook neighborhood in Steel Canyon. On her 14th birthday, her aunt gave her a kitten, whom she named Tyke. Her aunt died of a heart attack when Helena was just 16, leaving her alone with only Tyke as her friend. While placing her aunt’s ashes on the shelf next to her parents, she accidentally knocked her mother off the shelf. Reflexively, Helena reached out to catch the urn, and the aura around the urn shifted. The urn itself was suspended in midair. Helena suspected she had developed some sort of telekinetic ability, so the next day she went down to Federal Bureau of Super-powered Affairs for testing. Despite her obvious ability, and having been declared legally an adult by the courts, she was told that she had to be 18 years of age to register. Three months before she turned 18, she was attacked by a group of men being controlled by a Succubus. She was taken captive and dragged underground to the abandoned tunnels of Oranbega, but was thankfully rescued by a small group of heroes before anything was done to her. Helena recovered physically from her attack, but still bore the emotional and mental scars. While in the hospital healing, she resolved to do what she could, with her new abilities, to keep others from having to endure an ordeal like she had.

Her recovery delayed her registration, but as soon as she was cleared by her doctor, she went down to City Hall and signed up. It was there that she saw a notice that a special division of Freedom Corps called Star Patrol was looking for new cadets. She finished her registration and went to Freedom Corps Head Quarters in Galaxy City and completed the application to join Star Patrol. Her application was accepted. It was during her orientation and training that her world began to change. Agent Sharpe, one of the leaders, introduced her to Dr. Sorina Tavarisch. Dr. Tavarisch had the ability, through her amazing inventions, to control localized gravity. When Helena witnessed Tava use her abilities she was amazed that she could see the energy that Tava manipulated to create the desired effects. The ever present colors swirled and shifted around Sorina. Aside from the visual changes, Helena discovered that the pull of gravity was so concentrated that she could even smell and taste the changes in the air around Dr. Tavarisch. A quick learner, Helena began to mimic the adjustments to the colors around her, and soon started to gain more and more control of the energy. Before long, she even learned how to fly.

Having very little to do with her days aside from her work, Helena spent most of her time in Star Patrol HQ monitoring the Police scanners, the various public communication between the Heroes of the city, and searching the Freedom Corps archives for anything and everything she deemed interesting. She also has made it known that she is interested in trying out untested tech. Her first gadget was a small eye piece that locates and tracks hostile targets. More recently, she discovered an abandoned power armor suit referred to only as “Project Valkyrie.” The design had been abandoned because the built in pneumatic wings did not provide enough lift to make personal flight possible, and Freedom Corps opted to use the Chasers and Rocket Packs for aerial patrolling. Since Helena had already learned to fly telekinetically, she used her status as a Freedom Corps Special Agent to acquire the suit. With the help of the ICON designer Serge and the fabricators in the Star Patrol HQ, the armor was re-sized to fit her, and given the official Star Patrol paint job. She wears the base components- gloves, boots, and the neural interface body suit- under her Star Patrol Uniform. Using a device on her belt, she can teleport the remainder of the suit to her, so if a situation requires extra protection, she can utilize the armor at any time.

Despite the obvious usefulness of her abilities, her discovery that she could see, taste, smell, and manipulate the gravitational field made Helena feel somewhat freakish. She began to wonder if in fact she was a mutant, if the FBSA had missed something on her genetic profile. It wasn’t until she was assigned to a Special Action Task Force, given to Star Patrol by Synapse himself, that she abandoned that theory. The team consisted of five Star Patrol members, one of whom was Drostan. Whenever Drostan was close to her, a sensation overcame Helena. It was not an unpleasant feeling, just distracting. Later that night, Agent Sharpe, hearing about the incident, accompanied Helena along with Sgt. Richardson (the PPD Liaison to Star Patrol) to Croatoa and conducted tests to see if she had a similar reaction to other Fey creatures. She did. The Tuatha de Dannon caused a violent reaction, as well as the Red Caps. However when she came close to the benevolent Sprites, she felt the same sensation as with Drostan. Agent Sharpe set up a meeting between her and one of the Cabal, Katie Hannon. After being in her company a while, Katie told Helena that she had fey blood in her, and that she would someday change. Helena did not take the news well… the creatures in Croatoa had experienced some rather extreme changes, and Helena did not wish to sprout antlers and start having issues with unsightly body hair! She has gained access to a secret society called the Midnighters, and has been spending some of her free time there doing research on her origins.

There are several facts that Helena does not know. One, the fey blood that runs through her veins is of the same clan as Drostan, and is 100 generations (about 2000 years) old. Two, her birth coincided with a cosmic event that altered her biological make up, changing her in to a being of great power, and awakening the abilities she now has. Three, it was this fact that caused the Succubi to attempt to capture her to provide a vessel so that they could free the mother of all Succubi, Lilith, from her prison. Four, while she was on a mission with Sgt. Richardson, she was unknowingly infected with a small portion of the Rikti virus when an injured Lost scratched her arm. Events are leading Helena down a path which may change her inexorably into something completely different than she or anyone else is expecting…

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Admiral Sutter Task Force

Star Patrol will undertake the Admiral Sutter Task Force on Monday, July 11th. The Admiral Sutter TF is a new TF added with Issue 20 and is intended to tie-in character under level 50 to the Incarnate System. This week it is also the Weekly Strike Target, and thus it awards a bonus 22 Reward Merits (for a total of 44). Any level 50 character who has unlocked the Incarnate System will also earn a Notice of the Well. The Admiral Sutter Task Force requires a minimum of 4 Heroes or Vigilantes level 20 or higher; any participant over level 40 will be exemplared to level 40 for the duration of the task force.