Archie Gremlin

I'm honoured.

Just out of curiosity, what sort of patterns do you get from the in game network monitor (/netgraph 1) when you're suffering from sync problems and when you're not.

(I apologise if this seems like a stupid question.)

Thanks for the replies. It's good to know it's not just me.

It looks like there's something fishy going on with the WW server.

I've bugged it but perhaps GR will give the support peeps a nudge for us on Monday. (Pretty please GR!)

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Perhaps something similar for SB ?

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Crack seems to fit most SB dialogs...

"Crack plz. Crack pleeease. Gimme crack NOW!"

"F**king kin. Stop hitting me with that crack. I'm bouncing off the walls."

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Most of the teams I join or make up tend to take each other for what they are. The evening usually ends up with "thanks for the team. Great fun."
Pretty much regardless who's in it.

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I rarely play with PUGs except for the odd task force. In my rather limited experience they've all been like this; just a group of people being nice to each other and making the most of it.

I'm sure I'll run into the a**hats eventually but they certainly seem to be a minority.

To the OP, I hope your friend can learn to ignore the goits and enjoy the rest.

I got there in time but it didn't help. I just kept crashing to desktop.

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You will, but with diminishing returns if you keep doing the same flashback arc on the same day - you'll get fewer merit rewards the 2nd time around, and so on.

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Diminishing returns doesn't apply to flashback arcs, only trials, task forces and strike forces. See the wiki article for details.

I've been getting a lot of lag in Wentworths recently. Actions such as putting things in WW's, taking them out bidding etc all seem to take ages. (30-60 seconds.) It seems to have started round about the last patch.

This doesn't seem to be client or network related as combat is fine and the netgraph trace looks good too.

Has anyone else been getting this?

I tried WoC a while ago. I didn't slot it though. I found it to be completely useless. The only thing I could do with it was jump into a group of greys and then watch them attack each other. It never seemed to affect anything that could actually hurt me.

Rain of Fire on the other hand is awesome. I've been duoing a tanker with a fire blaster recently. I found that mobs under a rain of fire more or less stop attacking. They spend their whole time twitching from impacts. It also does lots of damage.

On the other hand, I've heard it doesn't work so well if you solo because it causes mobs to flee. But that makes it great mitigation. The mobs either run away or stay and die.

Frankenslotting just means putting IOs from different sets in the same power. It's a way to buff 2 or 3 aspects of a power at the expense of the others.

As an example, my Stone tank has both a Multi-Strike Dam/End and a Scirocco's Dervish Dam/End in mud pots 'cos I want as much damage and endurance reduction as I can get but I'm not bothered about accuracy, recharge etc.

Put a Performance Shifter Chance for +Endurance in Stamina if you haven't done it already. It doesn't make a huge difference but every little helps!

Can you post a Mid's build for us to look at?

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If you're just wanting to convert your merits into cash, you're far better off going for the Trial Random Recipe roll (pool D) for 30 merits, as it only has nine drops (seven at level 50), most of which tend to go for a lot...

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Some of the regulars on the US boards have provided a handy spreadsheet to show which pools and level ranges get the most inf per merit. There are two; one for blue side and one for red side.

The winner at the moment appears to be Pool C in the 40 to 45 level range. Pool D is pretty good and is a safer bet if you don't have many merits. However, you're better buying specific recipes than rolling in Pool D if you're a Hero.

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The trouble with statistics is they're all based on chance. Sure, you might get some good recipe drops out of it, but there's a fair chance that every roll will be terrible and you end up with a handful of useless, underselling recpies and wasted those merits.

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I think there are a number of factors that determine whether random rolls are "good" or "bad" for each player. The factors are the number of random rolls taken, the size of the recipe pool, the player's attitude to risk and confirmation bias.

In this post, I use the typical market price of a recipe in inf. as a measure of it's value.

You're not going to get the "expected" result from rolling in a pool unless you make a large number of rolls relative to the size of the pool. Pool C contains about 100 recipes so large might mean 300 rolls. If you've only got enough merits for 10 random rolls then you're very unlikely to get to the "average" value per merit. There's a good chance that your rolls will be rubbish and an equally good chance that they'll be brilliant compared to the average. Pool D is much smaller. 10 rolls here are much more likely to be average.

If you like gambling then a small number of random rolls is much more attractive. The result may suck and it may be brilliant but you'll still be entertained. If you hate risk then don't make random rolls unless you're going to do lots of them. Just buy high value recipes and sell them directly.

Finally there's the problem of confirmation bias. People have a tendency to notice and remember events which support their world view. There's some cool research out there which shows that people who think they're unlucky tend to remember the bad things that happen to them and forget the good things even when they get equal amounts of good and bad. Optimists and "lucky" people are the other way round. Most people are somewhere in between.

In short, if you think you're an "unlucky" person, you hate risk and you've only got a small number of merits then random rolls will almost certainly make you sad. If you're an optimist who likes to gamble then they'll make you happy.

Disclaimer: I'm not a statistician and I haven't cranked the numbers to work out how many rolls you need to make to get typical results.

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One question, if you use respec do you do it on your active build or do game allow you to choose which one to respec?

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I'm pretty sure it just applies to the active build. i.e. the respec behaves just like it did before dual builds.

You could use the "Verify All Files" button in the updater to find and fix any damage to your installation.

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You can't build up threat - its calculated seperately for each and every attack - its not cumulative.

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Thanks for pointing that out. I've been wondering for a while which way it worked.

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Also the 3rd way to pull aggro off of the tank was missed - someone else can taunt them off.

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Very true. I was assuming we were talking about squishies that don't want aggro but if the squishy really wants aggro then I'm happy to share.

If you've got two tanks then you can play mob ping pong. Start with two tanks about 70 feet apart. The first tank taunts a mob which must now run towards it. The second tank taunts the mob just before it reaches the first tank. Rinse, repeat.

Works best with slow, melee mobs. Can also be played by a tank and blaster. Enjoy!

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I think the problem may lie in the taunt target cap and its radius of effect several times on 8 man teams where there have been large spawns I've noticed that the taunt can very often overlap into a second mob meaning that its pretty easy to end up having to manage multiple groups especially if your in AOE heavy teams as the same thing can happen with team mates AOE powers.

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Yeah it can all go horribly wrong at that point. If you've already got one large spawn taunted and you (or your team mates) accidentally trigger another spawn then there's not much you can do. If you try to taunt the second spawn you exceed the spawn cap and lose control of the first spawn. I tend to just hang on to the first spawn at that point and hope the damage toons take the hint.

It would be nice to see Defenders get a better inherent. As everyone's pointed out, the current one just seems useless.

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While yes to a certain extent yes i suppose it is partially the blasters fault the fact that the blaster can override the aggro generated by CoHs meat shield AT just proves to me that tanks no longer do what they were supposed to do.

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I'm fairly sure that a tank can only lose aggro to a damage toon if the mob is no longer Taunted. There might be an exception for AVs which allow the damage toon to build up a lot of threat. Paragon wiki has an article with the threat calculation. So as long as the Tanker maintains taunt he holds aggro. This is certainly the case with my Stone tank who can hold aggro all day against his duo partner who is a fire blaster.

Of course the opposite is true as well. Once the mob is no longer taunted, it's hard for a Tanker to hold aggro from a damage toon. It just doesn't dish out enough damage.

Back on topic, I like TheMess's solution. It keeps tankers in their primary role and makes them solo better. The extra damage won't bother a team 'cos the damage toons will still kill everything first anyway!

I sympathise AstroBear but I think I have to vote against.

The main reason is that it would almost certainly be a right pain for the dev's to code. The is because they can't just clone the IO when you put it in or people could use dual builds to manufacture high value IOs. They'd have to come up with a sort of "ghost" system instead where one build has the master IO and the other get's a slave version.

The other thing that makes me say no, is that I don't think second builds are used that much. On the toons I have so far, the primary build is good enough for all situations. (I don't PvP though.) I don't think this change would help enough people for it to be worth the effort.

I think you mean that the game isn't patching and won't load.

Try closing the updater and starting again. If it get's as far as connection 3 then close and restart again.

This should fix the problem within 2 or 3 retrys.

QR

<Climbs down off high horse>

Sorry. Got a bit carried away earlier. First of all, I should confess that my only tank is a Stone/Energy. I suspect Mud Pots is one of the better powers for holding aggro. (It's an auto-hit toggle.) I should have remembered that other combinations might behave very differently.

Re: Knighly's tank. You don't have a nice AoE toggle to hold stuff which makes it harder. However, Combustion and Fire Sword Circle have reasonable taunt durations and recharge times. I'd slot at least one of these for taunt, accuracy and recharge and then fire them off as fast as possible. That should ensure that you hit each mob at least once before the Gauntlet taunt wears off. If you've slotted both these powers for damage then the Gauntlet taunt will tend to wear off.

As for the Mess's inv/energy, yikes. You really don't have much to hold aggro there. I think the only thing you can do is slot Whirling Hands for taunt, recharge and accuracy.

I'm guessing that you both have the PBAoE powers slotted for damage. This means that the Gauntlet taunt is wearing off before you can punckvoke again.

I can see why you'd do that; they're your primary damage powers. I guess you just have to decide whether it's more important to do damage or hold aggro.

I've found that WW's doesn't always change the list of stuff that's displayed when you change the filter drop down from "For Sale and Bidding" to "All". In this case, I just click on "recipes" (or whatever) again and all is well.

AFAIK, P-strings are just placeholders for bits of text. They're normally replaced by the right bit of text in whatever language you're using. It sounds like something's going wrong with your system if you're seeing them for existing recipes.

Sounds good to me. After all, if I'm in hospital then I've probably just blown all my inspirations in an attempt to stay on my feet.

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Tanker inherent is either useless or way under-powered. Even if you wade into a mob first and start cracking heads before the teams has moved in, enemies will STILL rip off after that nice squishy blaster and normally pulp them all across the floor. This is low level, before taunt.

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This doesn't match my experience of tanking at all. There are only two circumstances when a tank loses control. The first is when the tank attempts to aggro more mobs than the taunt limit. (16 IIRC) In other words, the tank is biting off more than it can chew.

The second, is when the tank fails to maintain Taunt by hitting or Taunting the bad guys often enough. That's why the classic tank move is to aggro mobs into range of an AoE such as Mud Pots which will then aggro them indefinitely.

Really, if your tank can't hold aggro then you need to re-examine your build or your tactics.

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I don't think you can take Gauntlet away from Tankers without breaking them in team play. Punchvoking and holding enemies with Mud Pots etc only work because Gauntlet makes all Tanker powers Taunt. Without this, enemies simply flock to the first blaster that hits them with an AoE. (As the Blaster's damage makes the Tanker's look feeble.)

Of course, there's nothing to stop the devs from giving the tankers something as well as automatic taunting! I can't see this happening really.

Also I'm with Tyger on this. It's quite handy to get enemies to stick close to you, especially when your attacks are predominantly melee.