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Snow is falling in Millennium City and that can only mean one thing, it’s time for the Winter Event for Champions Online! During this event, you can visit Santa, open presents, and duel the evil Black Harlequin and his nefarious toys. What better way to celebrate the yuletide season in CO than to fight evil and secure peace for the holidays? The Winter Event has been going strong for over a week now, and your pals at Ten Ton Hammer are here to give their impressions of this seasonal event.

To begin our impressions, we’ll complete a quick overview of the Winter Event itself. There are a number of things that can be done during this special event, and we’ll examine each of them in turn.

Presents
The first thing you’ll notice traveling around the various zones is that you’ll come across wrapped presents just sitting there on a street, rooftop, cliff, or ground. You can open these gifts which will lead to one of two things happening. The first possibility is that you receive a gift. This gift can be part of an action figure, a lump of coal, a gingerbread man (that provides healing), an item that transforms you into a toy (teddy bear, toy soldier), or some useless item such as a music cd or pen and pencil set. The useless items you can sell off, as well as the lump of coal. The other items have a use, and in the case of the transforming items, a good deal of fun. The second possibility when you open a present is that you’ll be attacked by toy minions of the Black Harlequin. You’ll find yourself being assaulted by tiny evil toys. They’re pretty easy to defeat, and sometimes you’ll receive an item by defeating them.

Action Figures
There are five action figures that you can collect during the Winter Event. You gain the action figure pieces by random drops from presents and by fighting the Black Harlequin. If you’re in a pinch, you can check the auction house. Each action figure requires three parts (head, torso, legs) to allow you to assemble them. To assemble the action figures, go to the Toymaster in the Renaissance Center in Millennium City, where he’ll give you the mission to assemble all five figures. Successfully completing the mission grants you a little over a 1000 experience, but you get the action figure to keep. If you turn in all five action figures, then you get an additional Foxbat figure for free!

Black Harlequin and Clarence
This is the main attraction in the Winter Event, the epic fight against the evil Black Harlequin and his homicidal toys. Every hour per instance, the Black Harlequin spawns in Millennium City. The location of his spawn is around one of the charity workers, who can easily be seen by standing in front of a huge pile of presents and holding a clipboard. Just before he spawns, the Black Harlequin gives a clue to his location of where he’ll spawn. If you happen to be in the wrong spot, chances are that he’ll be down before you can get to him unless you have an incredibly fast power. When the Black Harlequin appears, he summons a horde of his evil toys to do battle as well. After he is defeated, then his giant killer teddy-bear, Clarence, makes an appearance. Clarence goes down pretty quickly, but he can dish out a ton of damage. There’s no worry about your superhero’s level. The damage you do and take is scaled to your level, so don’t be afraid to have your level 20 guy in there slinging lightning bolts alongside the 40th level heroes. After the fight, you’ll gain an item (located next to the charity worker) with the top players getting a better chance at better loot such as costume pieces or action figure pieces.

While it is true that the Black Harlequin spawns once per hour, you can jump from instance to instance to fight him. The best thing to do is to join the CLARENCE channel using your chat window. Just right click on the chat tab and then join this channel. Usually, somebody is posting the server times that the Black Harlequin and Clarence will appear on specific instances. It’ll save you a great deal of time and frustration.

Impressions
Overall, my impression of the Winter Event in CO is a positive one. While there isn’t the sheer volume of things to do, such as in the Blood Moon event, there is enough going on to make it interesting. The only real fights in this event are the Black Harlequin/Clarence fights and the fights you’ll have when you’re attacked by toys when you open a present, but that’s ok. I’m not asking for a world-shattering event; just something that adds some spice to the normal gaming environment.

Millennium City serves as the hub for the event, which is great in that most of the action is concentrated in one zone. However, you can find presents scattered throughout all the zones. While they haven’t redecorated all of Millennium City, they have made it snow all the time there. In addition, they’ve added a nice Santa setting with kids eagerly waiting in line at the Renaissance Center. Having the charity workers surrounded by a huge wall of presents made for a pleasing scene. Overall, I would have preferred some more decorations around the city, but I believe Cryptic is making strides in adding to the atmosphere from the Blood Moon event.

There is no special pvp action in the Winter Event, which I don’t mind at all. It’s supposed to be Christmas in CO, not a free-for-all bash, you dunderheads! The lack of pvp fits in with the yuletide theme. Besides, if you want to fight other heroes, Santa will leave a lump of coal in your stocking!

To sum up, the Winter Event is a nice little seasonal event. It’s not spectacular, but it’s solid in that it adds some welcome diversion to the normal gameplay. In the future, it would be nice if they were to add some more flourishes, such as more holiday decorations, and perhaps a few more missions, such as helping Santa deliver toys or stop evil-doers from stealing them. I think it would be cool to have a little North Pole zone to adventure in for a bit, but I know that’s asking for a lot. Well, make sure you’re good as the big man is checking his list twice! Have a merry Christmas!