Kelenar
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Posts
2093 -
Joined
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Quote:Are you sure a player did it? Because once or twice, I've seen people who have pets out (especially Lore pets, since ATs that aren't used to having pets can get them) flying/superjumping around the courtyard to get the crates, only to have their pets wander through the middle of Marauder's mob and aggro him.Originally Posted by Zyphoid
While fighting the vat someone (I don't know who) drug Marauder over. -
Quote:Yeah... my Dominator's original build, with two purple sets, purchased just before AE hit, cost her almost a billion inf combined. A couple of months ago, I purchased her two more purple sets, which were going for about half a billion per piece on average. My perception is that there was a sharp price spike in the months after AE hit, a slow but steady price increase afterward, and a moderate price spike between when Incarnate content was announced and when it hit live.Originally Posted by Intrinsic
I remember paying 40 mil for Hecatomb too. Prices on purples made a huge jump after I14, when the farmers moved to AE farms. They're still going up steadily though. I just paid significantly more for an Apocalypse set a week ago than I did 6 months ago.
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My own anecdotal experience:
I'm doing Incarnate stuff on an Earth/Fire dominator who's deep into perma territory. During clearing phases, I hit the enemies with Stalagmites, then AoEs. I use my AoE control patches against the adds on BAF and to slow down the pursuing enemies inside Lambda. In Lambda, I usually use every single power I have except for Stone Prison (which I like to feel is pretty good design) pretty commonly. Between the two trials, I've done probably about 20 runs, with a slight majority of them being BAFs. I've gotten 6 Rares, the rest Uncommons. I didn't even know it was possible to get a Common in the reward table until I heard people talking about it, and likewise, I've never seen a Very Rare. -
Quote:My Clockwork have been doing just fine, and I have the most damage-oriented rares, with no self-defense abilities. I usually drop them before the Siege/Nightstar phase on BAF and the Marauder fight in Lambda, and they usually both survive unless I die myself. On those two, it helps that they're ranged, so they stay away from Marauder's Nova Fist. They're not invincible, but they can take a beating.Originally Posted by dave_p
How durable are the melee pets or other damage pets in general? I went for the Seer Seekers for my first Dest. slot, but am thinking of a melee damage dealer (Vicky, it sounds like) for my Kin. I've heard others say the non-invulnerable ones melt away pretty fast, esp on the trials. I assume they're pretty sturdy on regular +0 TFs?
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Quote:Actually, as of the latest version of Culex's spreadsheet, which admittedly hasn't been updated in a while, average enemy resistances to various damage types (with enemies that take 10x damage from everything, objects, fire, everything that's invincible to damage, and other things that you don't actually fight in spawns excluded) are...Originally Posted by Chaos Creator
Right, because the strongest damage type should have a nuke available to all...
9.5% Lethal
7.8% Toxic
7.5% Smashing
7.1% Psionic
5.2% Cold
4.6% Energy
4.2% Negative Energy
4.1% Fire
There are other ways to sort the data meaningfully, but these are approximately the order that I usually see them in. Lethal and Toxic are almost always the two most heavily resisted and Fire the least, no matter how I've seen them sorted. -
Quote:On the note of stacked Destiny powers, as I pointed out before, a well-coordinated team could probably outdo certain Defender/Corruptor builds in certain areas, most notably raw damage mitigation from buffs. That said, this sort of thing has been true for a long time. A properly-built team can decimate every spawn with rolling semi-nukes without having any Blasters around, or charge into every spawn with no Tanks, or, hell, take out STF Ghost Widow with all melee. Or, yes, survive with no Defenders/Corruptors/Controllers/MMs buffing them. Hell, even before Incarnates came around, they could softcap themselves and then some, between Shield users, VEATs, and Maneuvers. The Incarnate system will probably make this more accessible than it was before, but I don't see this as a particularly new situation on anything except a team coordinated specifically to leverage it, and that goes double for every powerset that isn't Forcefield.Originally Posted by Obitus
I'm sure most people on the forum would agree that Force Field is an underwhelming powerset, or at least that it's too one-dimensional. That was pretty much the consensus even long before Incarnates were announced. Heck, it may have been the consensus even before Inventions came along and gave everyone the opportunity to add lots of DEF to their builds. But a single Barrier doesn't come close to replacing a fully matured FF build's contribution to team survivability. Stacked Barriers? Sure, I'll buy that.
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Quote:Thanks, I missed that, since it's only on one tree. Fixing the post.Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
Ageless provides debuff resistance.
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Quote:Unless I'm doing something horribly wrong, in the absence of high ToHit/Accuracy buffs on the enemies or high -Def debuffs, 45+% defense is more total mitigation than 30% resistance to all and 30% defense to all.Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
You might want to take a look at those numbers again. Remember that the Barrier buffs both resistance and defense. +30 resistance and +30 defense is far, far better than +47 defense from a FF bubble.
Here are the total mitigations I get:
(Formula I used for mitigation:
1 - ((1 - player resistance) * ((enemy level acc bonus * enemy rank acc bonus) * (0.5 - player defense)))
More simply, total mitigation = 1 - ((1 - resistance) * (chance of getting hit))
Granted, if the player has pre-existing defense, which isn't rare, the mixed bag starts pulling ahead. And really, Forcefield is the hardest hit by this by far, which isn't exactly new--it's had some issues with endgame desirability ever since softcapping became all the rage. Nobody's going to be providing better healing than an Empathy Defender by dropping Rebirth every two minutes.
The hospital also has a timer before you can get out, plus a walk back, which can be dangerous and relatively long in the Lambda labs/warehouse phase. I've seen several raids get into rolling team wipe situations, where half the team is in the hospital and the other half is slowly dying at any given point. On most of the worse BAFs I've been on, I'd kill for Howling Twilight.Quote:It doesn't help that resurrection is useless because the hospital is inside each trial. That's another bad design.
Plus, Destiny only covers certain buff types (no +damage, +ToHit, or stealth, for example), and the debuffs from Interface have a stacking limit, which leaves most debuff sets in the clear.
If your team has a lot of coordination and can stagger their powers, this might be more of an issue. In my experience, people basically just all fire off their Destiny powers before big fights and ignore them the rest of the time. My survival has been considerably better in trials with defenders and corruptors around--even with stacked Barriers, it doesn't take long at all for a few unmezzed level 54 bosses to kill a Dominator, and no kindly tanks were running up to spot-heal me with their Rebirths in the middle of fights. In the end, this whole thing just seems to be a slightly newer version of 'you don't NEED any specific AT.' But they're all sure nice to have. -
Quote:From the numbers I'm looking at, they're better than FF buffs for 7.5 to 10 seconds. For the next 15-20 seconds, they're not really as good as having a FF Defender around, and it just goes downhill from there. And that's for the Very Rares.Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
The Barrier buffs are better than FF or Sonic buffs for 30 seconds, as you say. But the recharge is 1:30. So they're better than non-incarnate buffs for 1/3rd of the time, and for 1/3rd of the time they're comparable.
No, but the character who has those powers also has eight other powers in their pool to help the team with. Once per two minutes, your Incarnate tank can do something Defender-like. Congratulations. An actual Defender can do that constantly.Quote:Now take a look at other radial buffs. AM has a recharge of 7 minutes. Recovery and Regeneration auras recharge in 500 seconds. Even fully slotted for recharge, these buffs are nowhere near permanent or even 'frequent', as you describe them. -
Quote:Tanks can now FF people... pretty poorly. Even at the Very Rare, Barrier drops to just 'nice to have' levels of defense within thirty seconds or so--doesn't hurt to have around, but it's not going to do much for a squishy with no inherent defense. They can heal people once per two minutes. They can AoE and mezz once per 90 seconds (and the mezz is unreliable), and they can have pets up one third of the time. If I had a Defender who was using a single power from their primary every two minutes or a MM who only had his pets up a third of the time, I'd probably be pretty upset.Originally Posted by Nyx
People were upset with the lack of proliferation in the last issue. My question is do we need it anymore?
Technically the well powers almost seem as though they take away from others niches. Tanks can now, FF people, Heal and res people, AOE people, debuff people, summon pets and even hold enemies.
In fact all of the AT's out there are now technically able to do everything, although they can do their normal job the same, but they have everyone elses powers.
The Incarnate stuff gives characters abilities normally associated with other ATs, but with nowhere near the frequency. The only one that really compares is Judgement vs. crashless blaster nukes, and that's not exactly a new situation. Between Lightning Rod, Shield Charge, Archery, and Assault Rifle, 7 out of the 10 non-epic ATs have had some sort of crashless mini-nuke available to them for years. Plus, Judgement ignores recharge buffs and can't be slotted for recharge--most Archery Blasters can lay down Rain of Arrows way more often than that tank can Pyronic Judgement. Tanks and Scrappers have had holds available to them from epic pools for a loooong time, too.
But hey, I mostly play Defenders. I got used to Controllers tap-dancing on my AT's toes about five years ago. -
My favorite extant character as far as power customization is probably Silverbuilt, my liquid metal Stalker.
Favorite of all time was probably Neon Jenny, a Fire/Rad Corruptor whose fire was colored green and brown to make a nice pollution blast appearance, or Magatama, a Rad/Energy Blaster whose powers were light yellow and white for sunlight blast. -
Quote:I think it also might prevent you from throwing a grenade if he's already pacified. Last night, Marauder jumped away and enraged. I queued a grenade while flying toward him, but somebody beat me to him and pacified him. I got it range to throw the grenade before I could unqueue the attack, and it just sorta didn't fire.Originally Posted by Rebel_Scum
Regarding more than one person tossing grenades at once, I think it actually has a solution to that in place. More than once I've seen the message saying he's pacified again come up literally at the exact same time the message saying he's enraged does, and without me noticing the rather distinctive huge blue explosion around him that signifies a grenade landing. Now, unless people have some truly spectacular timing with that, and considering there's a significant delay between tossing the grenade and the message appearing that's highly improbable, I think it actually 'saves' the second grenade and applies it only when the first runs out. Only circumstantial evidence, but still.
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Quote:I've always wanted Rogue Robots to become a faction of their own. Robot supremacists would be far more interesting to me than, say, the Council.Originally Posted by IanTheM1
There's a level 30ish mini-arc where the Council's robots gain sentience and try to take over. They're even their own villain group.
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As far as IXP, I was under the impression it was awarded the same way as regular XP--when an enemy dies, the XP from it is distributed to every team that damaged it. As far as the reward table, I didn't even know Commons were an option. I've gotten five or so Rares and a metric ton of Uncommons, but never a single Common or Very Rare. I've also had a shortage of threads so far, even with breaking down my merits and converting shards to threads once per day.
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Quote:All good advice. One problem I've found is that you end up with a long trail of angry mobs from all the weapon guards you piss off, since teams don't tend to mop those up. Though, again, teams could probably kill those guys without wasting too much extra time, so that comes back to how it could ideally be run vs. how it is being run.Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood
Now on the specific instance of the Lambda Weapons Phase as a squishy. I don't consider it badly designed, it does however require a skill set that players haven't necessarily developed (because this is the first piece of content to require it). Specifically you need to know how to speed run. Speed running on a tough character is easy, you turn on your toggles and go for it. Speed running on a squishy is trickier. You need to manage inspiration usage (purples, oranges and greens are all very useful). You need to watch your teammates and the NPCs to avoid aggro, keeping your distance from enemies by jumping over them decreases the chance of them aggroing you, also as Dechs said try to use the melee characters to draw aggro off you. It's worth investing in a bit of stealth, you don't need full stealth but adding a stealth IO to sprint and running that makes it much easier to skirt large groups. Finally, you need to keep moving, standing still gets you killed.
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Quote:Could certainly help, though as scattered as the teams on my runs ended up, I'm not sure how doable it would be to stick with the tanks. (This comes down to a question of whether it's a design flaw or a flaw with the teams running it. However, I suspect that 'meleers split up and charge through like drunken Juggernaut' will remain the default approach and squishies will just have to cope however they can.) Like I said, I'm running through it invisible and mostly invincible, so I'm pretty safe most of the time, myself. If I end up running a Defender through this stuff in a couple of weeks, I'll get to see how the squishier side can deal with it.Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison
One of the things to leverage is the taunt auras that your league's brutes/scrappers/tanks have. Just follow close to them, most of the attention will stay off of yourself.
Well, those ten runs I did to open up Judgement and Lore also gave me enough shards and salvage to slot an Uncommon and a Rare in them, respectively. Call it an hour per run for the time needed to get onto a league, wait for everybody to drift in, and run the trial, assuming you don't do any back-to-back ones. That's about five hours per slot, which is around how long I take per level in the late 40s solo, and not horribly longer than most teams would net me. Considering that the time you'd spend to push yourself to level 50 gets you a whopping three enhancement slots, that seems okay to me. I wouldn't argue with making it shorter, but I can't label it as much more casual-unfriendly than the rest of the late game is. In a few weeks or months when the trials are being run more rarely, perhaps.Quote:Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
I agree with everything you had to say except 'The Grind' -- I feel the grind is excessive. Casual players will not be able to access the new incarnate slots in any reasonable length of time.
... I never even realized that was probably what's doing it.Quote:To fix the BAF I think they should remove the AE confusion from the escapees. It doesn't have that much effect; in about a dozen runs, I think I've hit a teammate only once by accident. Taking away dozens of AE procs should reduce the lag to a level that's more playable. -
Quote:Makes sense. It also makes me wonder even more why team leaders have always harped on everybody to hospital even when I've been teamed with multiple Howling Twilight bearers. Even using an Awaken seems to get me back in the action about as quick (and I don't miss out on iXP in the interim.)Originally Posted by Sermon
Just a comment (apparently a long one...).
I think the stagger-exit at the hospital is, in fact, to intended to penalize players for dying and not getting resurrected on the spot. The taking roughly 30 seconds to get back into the action can be an inconvenience, and one which can hurt a team. If there was no delay, most people could be back in the actions in 10 seconds or so, and there would be little point in coordinating a rez power.
My experience is that this is pretty much the case for BAF... for Lambda, having your Molecular Acid drops go to unattentive players leads to several extra minutes of attacking the weapon drops at best. Which should still be doable with an attentive team, but I'm not entirely happy with one person being able to inconvenience the entire trial like that.Quote:Also, I personally find the teammate interactions to be the major value of these task forces. Having to work together in larger and smaller groups within the trials is a great time, and really are the make-or-break moments (as they should be!). There will always be bad players who don't (or don't want to) pay attention. Despite this, a team which is predominantly made of attentive players will do just fine. -
Quote:... okay, yeah, I've gotta get me some of that. That plus the Lore pets, I'm guessing, could shave about thirty seconds off of my AV time. Seriously, dem Lore pets.Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
Someone on the scrapper forums ran City Info Tracker and found that the 50% chance fire damage proc was contributing around 21% of his total damage. So it's a significant amount.
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Quote:Yeah, I plan to pick up Interface, it's just not really exciting me as much as it could. Part of this is probably the fact that, again, I'm on a /Fire Permadom. If I'm fighting a single hard target, it's mezzed or I'm dead, and my AoE is kinda sparse, so I don't see most of the debuff ones helping me much. I won't pass up Yet More Fire Damage, though.Originally Posted by EvilGeko
give Interface another chance. It's frikken awesome.
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Quote:I think those are the exact words I used to talk my friend into watching it. Or, at least, those, plus the resulting explanation when she insisted that she thought Eva was Eva done right.Originally Posted by Father Xmas
I've always thought of RahXephon as Eva done right.
They do kinda share the whole 'creation myth about teenagers piloting biological-looking giant robot against weird, vaguely mythologically-themed enemies' thing.Quote:Originally Posted by Bronze Knight
I have no idea how people get from RahXephon to Evanglion. They story's have allmost nothing in common. -
The forums may not really need another thread on the topic of these two trials, but hey. Here it is. I haven't really seen such a heated topic since, I don't know, probably the launch of AE. Since my own feelings on the trials are a bit more complicated than 'these are [good/bad] and everybody who disagrees with me wants the game to fail,' I figured that maybe there would be some value in putting my opinions out there. If nothing else, it will give me a list of my opinions to point back to the next time I wander into the middle of the firefight.
Behavioral Adjustment Facility
BAF was the first trial I ran, and my first run of it didn't really give me a good impression of the trial system. It took about 20-30 minutes to get the league together in one zone. We went in, watched the cutscene (which was only mildly entertaining the first time), cleared the spawns without problem, and went to the tennis court, where we spent several minutes watching tanks and brutes try to pull Nightstar and die. We finally grabbed her and killed her without much effort. Team leader told us all to grab doors, and then the time dilation started. Or hami lag, or lag hill lag, or power lag, or whatever you darn kids call it these days. We scraped through this section, followed by Siege/Nightstar. This is where things got rough: Team X was directed to handle the adds. Except, either Team X didn't know where they were or were just illiterate. A minute or two into the Siege/Nightstar fight, people realized there were +3/4 boss robots running around killing all of the squishies and yelled at Team X to go do their job, but by that point, it was too late. We got into a sort of rolling team wipe situation where half of us were in the hospital at any given point, and there were enough death robots around Siege and Nightstar that even semi-coordinated attempts to attack them failed.
Thankfully, I've had plenty of good runs since then, enough to unlock my Judgement and Lore slots. Point by point:
The much-hated cutscene
I don't really have a huge problem with it. It's a nice chance to check my e-mail and figure out what I want to slot next. It kinda makes me wonder why it's there, though. Compare it to, say, the Marauder cutscene or Rommy in the ITF. Those two serve to go 'oh, it is ON now,' whereas the BAF cutscene just sorta says, 'so those guys you came here to beat up? They are totally going to collect some intelligence and disseminate propoganda if you fail.' This is something my heroes are against and my villains should theoretically care about inasmuch as they care about Praetoria, but it just feels like an entirely different level from the other cutscenes. Also, I am informed that Mother Mayhem has cleavage. Thanks for pointing it out a thousand times, everybody. I never would have noticed.
The runners phase
Hate hami lag so muuuuuuuuuch. It takes what would probably be a fun phase and makes it a pain in the butt. I'm one of those masochists who actually runs Stop 30 Fir Bolgs for fun, but Stop Mezz Resistant +3 Lieutenants While All Of Your Powers Say They're Recharged But Actually Aren't is not as entertaining.
The individual AV fights
These are kinda lame, and help to highlight why I dislike huge teams. Everybody dogpiles the AV and mashes 123412341234 (or 3232 in my case) for about three minutes. Every so often, a group of bosses run up. I've never seen even a hint of failure at this point, even on the most uncoordinated teams with near-zero support. I enjoy myself a bit more when I can ignore the AV and focus on the bosses.
The Siege/Nightstar Fight
I enjoy it when I'm on boss detail. Part of that has to do with stuff I'll get into later (Controls Are Nice) but a big part of it is, as I mentioned earlier, dogpiling an AV has never been my idea of fun. Plus, in the dual AV fights, there often seems to be nobody attempting to tank, which results in my poor Dominator getting randomly one/two-shotted by Siege through the defense cap. Boy hits like a train full of anvils.
Overall
BAF is in a weird position. If it were designed for about 4-8 players, it would probably be one of my favorite pieces of content in the game. As it is, the lagginess and the unreliability of teammates (see The Unreliability of Teammates) knocks it down about five notches to just 'this is kinda nice.'
Lambda Sector
I didn't run Lambda at all until I'd already gotten my Lore level shift. It just seemed to be put together about a quarter as much as BAF, and the few times I tried to join all fell apart before we even set foot in the mission. My first Lambda was almost as smooth as can be--we cleared around it and the courtyard, took out the turrets, smashed the EB, got all the acid and grenades, then fought Marauder. We ended up a little short on grenades for one reason or another, but somebody got a few in time to finish him off with time to spare. While I've run the BAF quite a bit, I have a whole two Lambda runs under my belt, so I'll have a bit more guesswork in here. Again, point by point:
The clearing phase
Is okay, I guess. I mean, it boils down to 'there are a bunch of dudes standing around. Go beat them up!' If I didn't like that, I probably would have left the game about six years ago. It kinda confuses me why every team I've been on leaves the turrets for last, since those things were far more dangerous to me than any of the spawns (and seemed harder to avoid, too) but hey.
The EB
Seriously? Seriously? It's... he... why? I'm just not sure what purpose an EB is supposed to serve against a league of 50s except for as a speed bump. Maybe the lobby of the building just felt empty without it. That EB really ties the room together, man.
The smash-and-grab
Uuuuuugh. Uuuuuuuuuugh, you guys. This is where my ignorance comes into play: Every time I've done this trial, the leader has basically gone, 'okay, we run in to the spawns with boxes, then blow up the boxes! Ignore all the enemies!' Which leads to the more durable Scrappers/Tanks/Brutes charging through the mission, while most of the squishies trail after them and get horribly maimed to death over and over. My own quasi-main, my Earth/Fire Dominator, has PFF and is invisible, so it's not a huge inconvenience for me personally, except that it usually ends up with about three people trying to do this entire phase alone as a result. For all I know, you get extra time every time you kill a spawn and my leaders are just ignorant, but if this phase is best handled by stealthing, that's kinda bad design in my opinion. This isn't a standard glowy hunt; the boxes are surrounded by level 54s.
Marauder
Doesn't seem too bad when people follow directions (see The Unreliability of Teammates). I'm not sure why he needs Unstoppable, except to make you think you're going to win with three minutes left only to start seeing Your Blaze burns Marauder for 0 points of fire damage!
Overall
I'm still making up my mind how I feel about this one. It seems much more reliant on your teammates being able to follow simple directions than the BAF is, and as I said before, if the smash-and-grab phase is best handled by charging through the mission and blowing up crates while being shot at, I consider that to be bad design. On the other hand, BAF is pretty darn near a cakewalk if everybody follows the standard strategy, whereas it seems to me that Lambda would be a little more challenging even then. Which I hold as a good thing.
Both Trials
The Unreliability of Teammates
I don't know if you guys were aware of this sad fact, but a substantial portion of CoH's playerbase were dropped on their heads as children. On both Lambda runs I've been on, we collected most or all of the grenades and acids, only to have a third of them mysteriiiiiously disappear because some people couldn't follow the repeated, simple instruction to check their trays and power windows for Pacificiation Grenades and Molecular Acid. And oh, if only that were the worst of it.
[League] LeaderDude: Those of you with acid, toss it on the doors. Everybody else, stay here for now. Do not pull Marauder until the doors are down, and once we start fighting him, only hit him with grenades when he's raging.
Somebody immediately charges forward and hits Marauder with a pacification grenade. Two people who have acid are confused about whether it goes on Marauder or the doors. Three doors don't get hit with acid, partly because one of the guys with acid got killed repeatedly in the ensuing Marauder rampage, and as far as I can tell, because two other people just didn't check their power menu. We proceed to spend the next several minutes trying to blow up crates until people who can read get acid grenades. For a good amount of this time, about half of the team was zerging Marauder and dying repeatedly, despite the leader repeatedly telling them to ignore him and focus on getting more acid. Since those people were using grenades, by time the team was ready to focus on Marauder, we didn't have enough grenades. While my experience with the trials is limited, as far as I've seen, the leader's plan was generally sound.
Being majorly set back in my goals solely because some random dudes I've never played with before can't follow directions is one of the more frustrating things that's happened to me in the entire time I've played this game. This isn't the first time it's happened (I once ran a STF with a Defender who was so dumb I was never sure if he wasn't just griefing us) but the trials are a lot more prone to it than the rest of the game. I'm sure a well-coordinated group could pull off some fun things here, but I don't really do the SG thing and 90% of my friends have left the game, so I'm not going to be seeing that any time soon.
On the upside, this should get better as the trials become old hat for people.
AT Balance
Of the trials I've failed (which is thankfully a pretty low number), most of the ones that weren't due to my teammates acting like a bunch of five-year-olds seemed to fall under this. A loooooot of people seem to have gone for Scrappers, Tanks, and Brutes for their Incarnates. I can't really blame them. None of the Alpha options really seemed as revolutionary for my Defenders as they were for my high-damage/durability characters, and Defenders and Corruptors are comparably scarce anyway. But the result of this is that the capability of teams varies widely. I was on a queue PUG BAF this weekend that was my Dominator and a whole bunch of meleers. Everything went okay up until Siege and Nightstar, at which point we got repeatedly threshed because there weren't enough buffs flying around to keep 90% of the team on their feet when facing down two +3 AVs and a whole bunch of scary bosses. Which isn't to say that you NEED A HEALX0RZ, but going in without any Defenders, Corruptors, Controllers, or even MMs definitely takes more coordination if nothing else. Once my Dom is slotted to my satisfaction, there's a good chance I'll be grabbing one of my Defenders to run through the trials while they're still popular.
Controls Are Nice
This is a big personal upside to the trials for me. Controls... are nice to have. I mean, controls are okay during the normal content, but let's face it--on about 90% of teams I've been on, the tank/brute or whoever's taking the alphas isn't in any real threat from that x8 spawn, once you factor in all the buffs layered on them. If those x8s are held, it barely makes a difference. A lot of the times in normal content, I just switch my Dominator over to semi-blaster mode, since nobody's under any threat from the mobs anyway. The trials, though, were the first time where I faced enemies that I could reliably mezz (which is to say, not AVs) who were still really nice to have reliably mezzed. A few Victorias loose behind the lines can wreck havoc on the squishies, and some well-placed controls stop them cold pretty well. And while the mezz-resistant runners in BAF initially annoyed the heck out of me, layered Quicksand + Earthquake + Volcanic Gasses is beautiful for the situation otherwise. Stick me on the adds team, baby, because I have a date with some purple bosses who can kill me in three seconds. And I mean that in a good way.
The Grind
Hold on, don't flip out and strangle me because I said the word 'grind.' As I said before, I'm not fond of having to do something ten times for the basic rewards. BUT. Lambda and BAF are quick and mostly painless. They're tiny. Fun-sized if you will. I swear on my honor that I've never done more than a few ITFs in a month max (and usually more like a few ITFs a year), and other than the ITF, LGTF, and low-level villain content, I probably haven't done anything else more than ten times in the past few years. I'm not exactly salivating at the thought of doing another BAF run, but I'm not astoundingly bored with them yet, either.
The Rewards
... are kinda screwy. I've seen people saying everything from 'it should take one or two trials to open each slot' to 'it will take fifteen.' For my personal experience, it took maybe ten BAFs to get Judgement and Lore open. It would have taken more, but on that last BAF, we kept Siege and Nightstar alive as long as we could while killing their boss spawns for XP, which was surprisingly good. Each Lambda run seems to be around 25-30% of my Interface XP, which is nice. Thread levels have fluctuated wildly between them, and while I'm still not sure what the deal with the salvage is, I have enough Uncommons for a lifetime and am reaching that point on Rares, but still haven't seen a single Very Rare. If they can only be crafted, that's gonna annoy me.
The Powers
Okay, technically, the new Incarnate stuff isn't part of the trials, but I'm lumping it in here anyway.
Judgement: PCHOOOOO! Pyronic Judgement is so slick that it should be illegal. I'm a mushroom cloud-laying... nevermind. Judgement helped a ton with the trials for me. Gets rid of stuck-on runner minion piles in seconds! Cuts through Victorias fast! And really nice for those awkward situations on normal maps where you can normally handle x8, but two spawns are right next to each other so you can't really fight one without aggroing the other and it's more like x16. Why pull when you can explode everything forever?
Lore: This slot really, really needs some kind of summary in the power descriptions. Not just 'you summon a Clockwork Hoozywhatsis and a Clockwork Thingymabobber,' but 'This is the most defensively-oriented Clockwork tree' would be nice. Having to read all the pets' power descriptions to know which ones are good for damage output and which have defense powers isn't my idea of fun. That said, my new pet Clockworks are juggernauts of woe fueled by my enemies' tears. I thought I'd be underwhelmed by Lore, but these boys are alright. They'd be more alright if they weren't robot ghosts.
Interface: Haven't gotten to use it yet, but reading up on the numbers, they kinda don't excite me. But, again, this is on my Dominator. I don't really need more DoT damage, and I don't have a lot of AoEs to smack entire spawns with debuffs. Reactive's -res would be nice, Diamagnetic's -ToHit would probably improve my survivability against enemies I can't easily mezz, since I'm already near the softcap. But compared to being able to throw a giant fireball and summon robot minions, it's kinda underwhelming.
Destiny: Destiny took the 'kinda underwhelming' prize from Interface. If the numbers I've seen are correct, the Core Epiphany gives nice, but not really overwhelming, buffs for 3/4 of its duration, and averages out to a pretty nice buff. Yeah, a team of eight rocking Barrier will probably trivialize RSF, and once a lot of people have these and are using them often it will probably make the trials a lot smoother. I just can't get very excited over AWW YEAH I'M GUNNA GIVE MY TEAM A BUFF THAT AVERAGES OUT TO 'PRETTY NICE.' (Maybe it's because I play a lot of Defenders. This buffing thing is so passe, but nuking entire spawns is fun and exciting.) On the upside, it's nice to have a defensively-slanted incarnate slot, since almost all of Judgement and Lore are more offensively focused.
The Hospital
I'm a little uncertain why the hospital restricts you to only leaving every so often. I guess the intent is to stagger people returning from teamwipes to give you a higher survival chance. Having an inspiration vendor there is nice, but with the way it's kinda off to the side, I didn't even notice it until somebody pointed it out to me.
In The End
I'm not really the most receptive person to this sort of content. A huge part of why I joined CoH is that I was told it has no raids; I enjoy small teams and I very, very rarely run things more than a few times a year. That I've managed to play these trials enough to unlock things without being filled with utter revulsion probably counts as some kind of victory on the devs' side, and the bits I don't like are partly balanced out by the fact that I enjoy the varied goals found inside of them more than I like charging forward and blowing up spawns in warehouses. It's like one of the newer TFs chopped down to just the actually-interesting final mission.
Honestly, I'm probably getting more entertainment out of these than I would have gotten from anything less than a mechanically interesting new powerset for an AT I enjoy, even if I do think they could use some heavy reworking. (Anything we could have realistically gotten in a single issue, that is. I mean, if we got a full heroside revamp, I'd ditch the trials for a few years.) For content that's aimed about as far from my preferences as you can get without making an all badge issue or an all SG base issue or something, that's alright. -
Quote:This is my experience too, and that was with killing a lot of the guys inside the complex while grabbing the grenades.Originally Posted by Zortel
All enemies around Lambda Complex defeated. All enemies within courtyard defeated. All gun emplacements destroyed. Security bot destroyed. 10 Grenades and Acids recovered. All portals disabled. Marauder defeated. Checked iXP for Interface: 30%.
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Quote:Robot ghosts, I summon thee!Originally Posted by Kosh_Naranek
You're bringing forth the spirits of defeated enemies. How is that not magic friendly?
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Quote:My experience is that the queue also doesn't give a damn about AT balance, whereas leaders kind of do. The queue BAFs I've been in were about 90% Scrappers, Brutes, and Blasters, with not a single Corruptor, Defender, or Controller. We usually got up to the Siege/Nightstar fight until the lack of support caught up with us and we stalled.Originally Posted by Biowraith
My experience is leagues formed through the automated LFG system have a massively lower chance of success vs teams preformed via channels (though not so much global channels - most of them form in Pocket D broadcast on Freedom).
This is mostly because the automated system tends to only half-fill the league, and until everyone's a bit more kitted out with incarnate powers a half-full league is a lot less likely to succeed than a full league (especially if it's a PuG). -
Quote:If you're looking at personal damage, also remember that Corruptors/Defenders will have to spend time buffing and debuffing, while Blasters can dive right into a mob and start nuking. On quickly moving teams, 2/3 of the enemies are often dead by the time my Defenders have laid down their debuffs.Originally Posted by Intrinsic
On an individual level, corruptor damage can be competitive with blaster damage depending on the corruptor's secondary set. On a team level, a corruptor can pull ahead when you consider the corruptor's ability to act as a force multiplier and boost the overall team damage output. Defenders have lower individual damage, but can make better force multipliers in a team.