SpittingTrashcan

Echo Null's player here. I thought I'd bring up two minor corrections to the account as presented:

1. Echo is 12 years old, not 10.

2. While the rest of the team was cracking weapon caches for extra pacification grenades, Echo was left tanking Marauder with a stream of Phantom Armies and Decoy Phantasms.

Not raiding nearly as hard as Gale or Pyro, but I'll get my Judgement yet!

When a game forces me out of my comfort zone, I assume that it is trying to teach me something. I like it when games alternate between teaching me skills and asking me to apply them in various situations. When a game on the one hand has nothing more to teach me, or on the other hand asks me to learn more faster than I want to, I lose interest.

So, yes, I prefer that games take me out of my comfort zone, but by steps. Games that do not ask me to grow are boring. Games that expect me to be grown before I approach them are frustrating.

1 Open up the Powers tab.
2 Right click on a primary or secondary power the character has not taken (greyed out)
3 Open a context menu with the Info option.
4 Select Info to open the Detailed Info window for that power.

Back in the before times, the interface did not allow this because we were not supposed to see the Detailed Info for powers we did not have, because Jack Emmert that's why. Now that we can just type any power's name in [brackets] to open its Detailed Info window, there is no reason why the UI should still disallow opening the Detailed Info window for powers we don't have from the Powers tab.

It's a small thing, but it bugs me.

Damage debuffs and resistance buffs do not accumulate in the same way as tohit debuffs and defense debuffs.

Suppose you have a 30% resistance buff and the enemy has a -30% damage debuff, and the enemy attacks with an attack that does 100 damage unmodified. The formula for final damage is:

Di * (1-Dd) * (1-R)

where Di is initial damage, Dd is total damage debuff, and R is total resistance. So, first the initial damage is multiplied by 0.7 due to the damage debuff, so the attack now deals 70 damage. Then, the damage is reduced again by resistance, by another factor of 0.7, so the final damage is 49. The reduction in damage is 51%.

Now, suppose you have a 15% defense buff and the enemy has a 15% tohit debuff. The formula for final tohit chance (simplified to ignore accuracy, inherently higher base tohit, and the purple patch) is:

0.5 + (Tb-Td) + (Dd-Db)

where Tb is total tohit buff, Td is total tohit debuff, Dd is total defense debuff, and Db is total defense buff. So, initially, the enemy has a 50% chance to hit. The tohit debuff reduces this by 15%, to 35%. The defense buff then reduces this by a further 15%, to 20%. The reduction in incoming damage is the difference between the final chance to hit and the initial chance to hit, divided by the initial chance to hit:

(50%-20%) / (50%) = 60%

So the expected reduction in incoming damage is 60%. Tohit debuffs and defense debuffs stack more strongly than damage debuffs and resistance buffs.

So, then, why bother with damage debuffs and resistance buffs? There are three reasons.
1. Higher rank enemies resist tohit debuffs. Only enemies with damage resistance resist damage debuffs, and not all high rank enemies have damage resistance.
2. Higher rank enemies have higher base tohit and higher accuracy, which can erode the effectiveness of defense buffs and tohit debuffs. Damage debuffs and resistance buffs are not affected in this way.
3. Tohit debuffs and defense buffs can reduce the chance of being hit, but not the ability to survive hits that come in. Bad luck can take out a character with a minimal chance of being hit, and over a long fight the chance of bad luck increases. Damage debuffs and resistance debuffs make incoming damage slower, so there is more time to determine whether the situation is survivable and lay on additional mitigation.

Of course, if you can have both hit rate reduction and damage reduction, that's even better.

I've tried -1/x6, Dechs, and the problem isn't incoming damage, but incoming secondary effects. Resistance is an extremely powerful damage mitigator, to be sure, and resistance that scales to spawn size is exactly as powerful as you explain. However, the following effects also scale up with spawn size, and resistance does not help against them:

- Mez
- Debuffs
- Enemy force multiplication
- Endurance drain
- Aggro control difficulty

These are the things that prevent me from leveraging my multiplied resistance and damage, and kill me by degrees - by pushing me into Dwarf Form, thus slashing my damage and my versatility; by overwhelming my aggro control and killing my pets; by presenting more problem enemies than I can lock down at one time; by removing my ability to hit enemies for buffs and to produce bodies; and so on and so forth.

If I were more skillful with Gravitic Emanation, if I were better at positioning enemies and choosing targets, and especially if I were more willing to use breakfrees, I doubt I'd be having these difficulties. But I'm not, so I do.

+0/x2 is all right though. That gives me 3-5 targets per spawn, 1-2 of which are serious threats, which is comfortably within my ability to manage. And of course, on teams where the above secondary factors are mitigated, I am able to leverage all my tools to their maximum benefit.

The sets I use most are Crushing Impact, Thunderstrike, Red Fortune, and Doctored Wounds. I can pick up a set of any of those for under 10 million inf easily. Also, I use Air Burst frequently for frankenslotting. I pay a moderate amount for a moderate increase in performance, and then I save for big-ticket items for another moderate increase in performance.

A billion inf is just a number. Inf has no fixed value on the market. In fact, the less one inf is worth, the easier it becomes to achieve the level of performance that the game was designed for, because NPC vendors never raise their prices for SOs, while you can get more and more inf by selling drops on the market. I remember when it was hard to afford SOs; now I don't even think about it.

My definition of market health has less to do with prices, and more to do with availability. I'm not worried that rare, valuable items cost a lot of inf; I'm worried that rare, niche-value items aren't available at all.

This reminds me. Tried Team Teleport yet, Dechs? I've had one pretty good run and one fairly mediocre run using it. I think the key is going to be learning the timing on the halberd drops so that I can move everyone to a convenient out-of-the way spot right before the blue circle appears, and then dump them right back on top of BM as soon as the halberd targeting is locked in.

That, and having enough survivability buffs on the team that sitting on top of BM isn't lethal. :P

Dominators are not Controllers with blasts. They are Blasters with control. Your primary is not there to do damage; it is there to render enemies helpless so that you can murder them with your secondary. All Dominator secondaries are sufficiently good at murder. Some are a bit better on damage, others offer more secondary effects, but they all kill things.

The key factor in the BM fight is that the halberds drop on a set schedule, and you can decide where they will fall. If you know when they are about to drop, you can make sure they drop in a place that won't affect you. The tricky part is staying aware of the timing.

If the devs wanted to make the fight much, much easier, they could set it up so the targeting circles track for 4 seconds, then stay in place until the halberd lands. As it is, counting the seconds should be sufficient.

Every thread is Tyrant thread. :/

On the Actual Topic of the Actual Thread: while there are plotlines related to a slow unraveling of the Bane Spider psychic web, I think there's also enough leeway in what Marcian observed to indicate that some outside force is fiddling with Arachnos minds. Praetoria, as the Big New Thing, is the obvious candidate, but there are so many other people who might do such a thing that it's hard to say. Here are some other candidates:

Sister Psyche - due to heroism
Malaise (primal) - due to heroism
Serafina - due to heroism; does it in Scirocco's arc
Scirocco - fiddling with the Malleus Mundi again
The Evil Spirit of Red Widow - trying to kill Ghost Widow by killing Arachnos, to whose existence she is tied, due to jealousy
Dr. Echo - having seen so many exploded Recluse Victory Futures, has decided to undermine Arachnos through Wacky Time Hijinks
The Clockwork King - misguided heroism, trying to protect Penny Yin

Of course, some of these theories are pretty wild. But there's one thing I'm confident of: it will probably end up being a Nemesis Plot.

The fact that many players will value alignment merits over access to what was supposed to be an entire game's worth of content indicates that either alignment merits are excessively valuable or the content is insufficient (or at least insufficiently accessible for the price). Possibly both.

Also, I still think that reward merit purchases and all rolls should be at settable levels without resorting to xp-locking shenanigans. There are supply deficiencies that want addressing here.

I'm aware that this thread is likely to attract advice. Probably good advice, certainly well-intentioned advice. Without slighting this advice or anyone who offers it, my point here is not to solicit advice. I already know I'm doing it wrong, and I have a pretty good idea of precisely how. However, getting the higher performance out of the 'shade involves more effort in play than I'm willing to expend. I totally admit it's a skill thing: +0/x1 isn't the theoretical maximum that a warshade can be played at, but it is the practical maximum that I can play like an idiot at. And I'd rather expend low effort for low performance than expend much more effort, possibly more than I'm actually capable of, for high performance.

I guess what I'm saying is that warshade performance is much more strongly dependent on player skill than any other AT I play. I can get good performance out of other ATs, but because of the skill requirement, I can only get passable performance out of warshades. C'est la vie.

At level 48, I'm pretty sure power availability is no longer the issue. I'm also pretty sure build in general is not the issue. I expect that tactics is the issue, but I'm either unwilling or unable to implement the correct tactics. All the powers are great on paper, but I can't make them work in practice.

I can play bouncy claw shrimp, though. That works okay.

I have a currently level 48 Warshade. Throughout my time with the character, I have been told that they are enormously powerful against large groups of enemies, and the nature of the various powers seems to bear that out. So I have tried to play the Warshade against large groups of enemies.

And died, and died, and died, and died.

I consulted guides. I burned respecs. I bought IOs. I double, triple, quadruple checked to make sure that I have the right powers, the right slots, the right tactics. For whatever reason, it does not work for me. If I try to fight x4 Arachnos, I die. If I try to fight x4 Malta, I die. If I try to fight x4 Carnies, I die.

Yesterday I respecced one last time, to pick up inherent fitness, and set my difficulty down to +0/x1. And I didn't die, and it wasn't painful, and it wasn't frustrating. I could control groups without worrying too much about scatter. I could clean up enemies quickly. I didn't get crushed under mez or debuffs. I could keep my pets alive. It was nice.

I'm putting this out here to say that if a Warshade (or any character, really) isn't performing the way it's "supposed to", it's okay to turn down the difficulty. There's a lot that's been said about how great Warshades are, and I fully believe that some players can work miracles with them. Some can't. Specifically, I can't. But I can play in a way that is enjoyable. You can leverage numbers with a Warshade. You don't have to in order to enjoy the AT. I think that's worth mentioning.

I can confirm that, by adding the "blank" line in the channel list to a tab, you will log the pop-up messages. This should really be less obscure.