A luck-filled and grindy week in DCUO -- CR 299

I went a bit crazy last week, team. Crazy. 

It all kind of started back on 11 October when:

1. I started thinking about DCUO when I read an old article on MassivelyOP about spiritual successor games, which got me thinking about DCUO (and why it wasn't mentioned somewhere in the more "super hero'y" sections of the article) 
2. I dropped in on Discord and asked old Team Spode how long it would take to catch up.  My old gaming buddy Tony was like, "pretty easy tbh," 

. . . and that's how it began. 

I've only mentioned my DCUO days in passing on this blog, but crazy enough, I have a whole OTHER blog where I've talked a ton about my experiences leveling through the ranks. All of my previous efforts at DCUO left me at a-one-time-impressive combat rating (CR) of around 180. 

One of my favorite "old" screenshots of my DCUO hero.

A needed sidebar here: once you hit level 30 in this game, all your "leveling" is then done through increasing your combat rating, which is a statistic found on player gear.  As you equip more and more pieces of gear with higher and higher combat ratings, you likewise get a Combat Rating score for your character.  End of sidebar thought.

To put things in perspective, my buddies were all sitting around the CR 315-320 range. From CR 180, that gap seems like it's gonna take forever, but I'm happy to announce that by Sunday night game time on the 18th, I had managed to raise my CR to 299. 

Whew.  

What's so important about 299?  Well CR 299 is the perfect number needed for the most recent DCUO expansion, which is all about the "Wonderverse." That's a magical place where a "sourcewall" has cracked and created a point where all the earths have combined, and you get to chill with a multiverse full of Wonder Women . . . and fight against the gods and a pretty magnificent looking hydra.

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Here's how it happened:

1- My timely return to the game was timely, and as it turned out, DCUO was giving away a free bump to CR 255 thanks to Fallfest.  BAM!  I mean, come on, what stars aligned to make that happen?

The Hallowings are pretty great btw.

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2- I began grinding up the Wonderverse Single Player adventure . . . over and over and over and . . . y'all . . . I played that instance about 35-40 times. It takes about 10 minutes per run, which means I spent about 6-7 hours grinding this same instance over the course of a week. Each run would consistently net me 1 to 2 upgrades. Easy.  To do this, I had to use a lot of replay badges, but I actually had a glut of them from when I was playing DCUO all the time.

Me and the wonderwomans in an explosion of color!

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3- Welcome to the magic of the Metalverse! Back in September of 2019, DCUO released an expansion that began a two part series of a "metalverse," where people start to turn into Metal versions of themselves and a crazy Flash / Batman hybrid from the multivese starts tearing up Gotham.  

All my grinding in the Wonderverse unlocked this zone for me and BAM! I discovered a vendor there that sold gear upgrades for sourcemarks.  That's a currency you can earn in DCUO to buy legacy gear. Once again, I had a glut of sourcemarks from my old days of playing DCUO and what is "legacy" to modern DCUO players is all brand new to me. 

Long story short, I bought a complete set of gear from this equipment vendor and BAM! I was CR 282.

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4- The next few days I was able to log in and complete dailies in both the Wonderverse expansion and Thanagar because of my new CR 282 rating. Thanagar was introduced back in December 2019 and was the second part of the metalverse story. 

Sportin that fresh I'm-an-edgey-hero look in Thanagar

Hehe, you better believe I looked for another sourcemark "legacy" vendor in Thanagar, but it's considered current content and because of that, no dice.

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5- New solo encounters opened up as I was grinding up these levels and those also offered new opportunities to grind content, but I gotta tell ya . . . those solos are TOUGH.  In the grand scheme of efficiency vs. upgrades, it was well worth my time to hit the wonderverse single player event over and over instead of running those encounters and dying and dying and dying time and time again.

Red Death is terrifying

I mean, I won eventually, but not after repairing my gear a few times.

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6- One hour before the scheduled start time of the Sunday night game, I had resubscribed to DCUO and had 500 premium station cash to burn and about 40 lockboxes in my inventory. I'd need 3,600 station cash to open ALL the lockboxes, but I had enough to buy 5 lockboxes, which contained just enough gear inside of them to push me up over the edge and get to 299 just in time.

299!!

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So there I was, game ready and ready to go one week later. It felt pretty awesome, and Team Spode didn't fail to provide a fun night as we instantly started the raid circuit in the Wonderverse expansion. It's pretty smartly done and definitely deserves a blog post of its own to explain how it works. I had enough upgrades by the end of the night that I was CR 302 and feeling a lot tougher than I was a week ago.

Happy Dueling!