BurningChick

My traps defender can easily stack three patches.

You know the escapees in BAF? Their particular behaviour involves standing around for a few seconds before taking off -- that's usually enough time for one round of ProcTrops to go off. Further, oppressive gloom tends to mez the minions, making them ripe for more procs. Gas Trap? That one's also procced up -- and even lieuts sometimes have to stop for a quick puke. Acid Mortar (at least 2 out at all times)has a purple damage proc. And a -resistance proc. If any lieuts get away from my trapper, a stiff breeze will drop them.

High hilarity!

The other use for Caltrops?

Ambushes

So ...

You don't spend much time PuGging on Freedom?

I've seen some whoppers over the years, like people throwing wobblies over a TA not healing them, a scrapper shrieking at my bubbler (post-i7, with Maneuvers) for being useless 'cause I didn't take my rez (while bubbled, he was dropping like trousers on prom night).

Ahhhh, good times.

Edit: I actually look forward to the idjits with their OMG awful builds and helpful tips. Every once in a while, I even find people who threaten to petition me

There are LOTS of "situational" or "worthless" powers in the game ... but the devs tend to only do anything with them in cases where they exist in underperforming sets.

And, even then, it's extremely rare for the devs to outright replace the power.

FWIW, I don't think Traps is particularly weak. And it has 6 or 7 gotta' have powers (for me, at any rate); having a couple clunkers frees up some space for more blasts.

What sets Caltrops apart, IME, is that you can have 2 or 3 out all the time so you can, at least theoretically, get 20+ mobs lit on fire.

The hillarity increases if I can keep 2 Acid Mortars out (they're destructible) since they fire an AoE that can also set off Reactive (in addition to debuffing resistance).

So ... not sure how long it's going to last. Caveat emptor with Reactive and your stalker because, IME, it's the tiniest bit insane right now.

Edit: oh my god, I'm my own worst proof reader.

And I've been telling people for years that Caltrops + damage procs is a nasty, nasty thing to do to mobs -- my thugs / traps still has 4 damage procs in 'trops from when you could slot targetted AoE, slow, and PBAoE sets in it.

But, OMG, my traps / dark can ticket cap in 6 or 7 minutes.

More like you can tag a holy sweet jebus number of mobs from the patches.

The proc also works in Acid Mortar, another stackable pet (although it's destructible). Traps made out like a bandit with this patch.

I think that we the players can police the leeches ... but only if we form up teams on our own. If we use LFG, the situation changes since the league leader is, AFAIK, randomly chosen and may be either tolerant of leeches or be a leech himself. Further, you have no way of knowing who will be in your league ahead of time.

If LFG were the primary way for the players to engage in the trials, I'd say that some form of participation code is absolutely required. If the players are in a situation where they can't police themselves, it /has/ to be the server punishing the jerks.

I think we can see a couple things at play.

First, the devs thought we'd be using LFG, en masse, to form up for the trials. It certainly is more convenient than spending 5 or 10 minutes in Pocket D or RWZ shooting out tells and broadcasts. But LFG is, at best, a problematic tool and, at worst, manages to both suck and blow.

Second, our first taste of the participation code comes from the zone events in Praetoria, an open world event where it is entirely conceivable that 1 team will do the heavy lifting and 20 people will go AFK for 10 minutes and come back to a new shiney.

And the devs anticipated the same sort of dynamic with the trials. With the players lining up primarilly through LFG, the devs most likely thought they'd be doing the players a favour by rewarding active behaviour.

Only ... the metrics for rewarding active behaviour are problematic, and the players, by and large, dislike LFG in large part because it gives them too little control over their gaming experience.

I get no correlation, but I tend to bark out commands during down time (pulling, waiting for prisoners to escape, forming up in PD).

Not much correlation on my fire dom, solid correlation on my disadvantaged trapper -- I've had 2 VR drops on BAF, ever, and both related to MO runs.

Or ... having fewer people around gave you more opportunity to participate. What we don't really know is how the distribution of drops happens within leagues -- we generally only know what a handful of people get. And, IME, the self-reporting we do get tends to be clumped around the high and low rewards.

What I will say is this: my fire dom gets consistently better rewards than my trapper. My trapper's best rewards come on BAF runs with "high success rates" (lots of badge-worthy events).

Maybe ... the system has some interesting quirks -- the system disproportionately rewards face-punchy ATs for punching mobs in the face, and rewards (de)buffy toons for overall success.

Hmmm ...

The problem as I see it is that, if a kin caps a fire blaster's damage, the fire blaster's primary contribution, damage, just got doubled (or more). If my trapper has 3 Acid Mortars out, she will have, almost, doubled everyone's damage output against an AV. Using a pet that fires every five seconds (in my case, with a purple damage proc). Everyone's damage gets "buffed" with Acid Mortar, not just those within range of FS.

How do you track whether it's better to (de)buff ... or to benefit from the (de)buffs?

Is it a net benefit to toss Bonfire into the middle of a spawn and fug up everyone else's AoEs? Or are some powers classed as being negative ... unless the engine can figure out if that Bonfire just saved the team from wiping?

The best system, IME, simply tracks the success of the trial as a whole, assigns a value to the level of success, and then gives everyone on the trial a roll based on that value. All objectives met in under 15 minutes? 5 stars! 10% chance at a VR, 55% rare, 35% uncommon.

Or something like that, anyway.

Let the players themselves deal with leechers.

The only complicating factor, IME, is if the whole system is geared towards using LFG to assemble teams, and the randomly chosen leader happens to be the leech.

Edit: it occurs to me that the original participation metric was developed for an open mission where anyone can join on the fly. In this case, having a system that weeds out leeches is essential otherwise you could, conceivably, end up with 1 team doing the heavy lifting and 15 people AFK. It might be that the devs were anticipating LFG to be used to set up the trials, more or less exclusively, in which case punishing leeches server-side is damn near essential since there's always the chance that a leech will be the leader. And you have no way of knowing who's going to be in your league.

So, I guess, aside from the new performance metric, the devs should implement a VASTLY improved LFG tool (lots of info for this already kicking around).