SpittingTrashcan

Summary: it works, it's pretty safe, it's not very fast, it bears refining.

Detailed report:

Since my first run of the Apex TF, I'd been wondering if Team Teleport would be an effective method for avoiding the halberd drops. Last Saturday I got a chance to try it out with my usual play group. I can't recall the exact team composition (if others who were there do, please chime in!), but I was on my Stone/Stone Tanker with Team Teleport, and the rest of the team was:
- Fire/Stone Tanker
- Kin/SR Brute
- Traps/DP Defender
- Mind/Emp Controller
- Mind/FF Controller
- Warshade
- Bots/Poison Mastermind

The first mission proceeded smoothly in the usual fashion. The Minds had fun confusing War Walkers, who are apparently vulnerable to that sort of shenanigans.

For the second mission, we cleared the two waves of swords on the roof and then proceeded down to the arena as a group. From then on, we stuck to the following general strategy:
- I focused on three things, in order of decreasing priority: team teleporting whenever blue flame appeared under me, taunting BM, and tapping her with Stone Fist for Bruising whenever I was close enough.
- The rest of the team stayed within 20 feet of me, doing whatever they could with what they had where they were.

And here are some general observations of the results.
- Battle Maiden likes her crossbow a lot. She doesn't avoid melee, but she will use her ranged attack whenever it's up, and that slows her progress into melee range.
- Since halberd patches last until the next wave actually lands, I teleported in a triangular pattern: the prior patch was burning at A, the next wave was about to hit B, and I'd move to C. A more daring teleporter might get away with moving between two positions, but the timing would be awfully close.
- The advantage of this strategy is that, when the teleporter is on the ball, the patches are all in one place and the team is in another. The disadvantage is that when the teleporter is not quite as on the ball (as happened a few times), the patches are all in one place and the entire team is also in that one place. The result was pretty much instant death for everyone except the tanks, who had enough HP to merely be severely wounded (and then teleport away after the first tick).
- Assault Bot had a deep and abiding love for running into melee with Battle Maiden, standing in a halberd patch, and dying. The other bots were relatively obedient and shot her with lasers.
- Clearing the waves of War Earth soldiers was slow. Like BM, they were recalcitrant about moving into melee, and they also tended to spread out and run around and we were loath to chase them lest we spread the patches out. This could be improved.
- Swords were a non-issue. Having no ranged attacks, they flew directly into our huddle and were defeated without incident.
- At one point, one or two of the halberds started dropping out of synch with the rest. This made my life somewhat more interesting, but not unbearably so. If all 8 had been dropping at different intervals, this strategy would no longer be valid.
- We did not get the badge for defeating BM quickly. But we did defeat her in less time than our first run, and with significantly fewer deaths. Had we a team with more ranged damage and/or force multiplication, the badge would probably be within our reach.

Has anyone else tried this? What were your results? What can be improved?

In several dimensions, there exists a man Marcus Cole who finds and drinks from the Well of the Furies. The consequences differ.

- On Primal Earth, he goes on to become the hero Statesman, while his friend Stefan Richter becomes his foe Lord Recluse.
- On Praetorian Earth, he becomes Emperor Cole.
- On Axis Earth, he becomes the Reichsman, dictator of Axis Amerika and leader of the Fifth Column.

That said, it's not unreasonable for a Praetorian to have some distrust for any Marcus Cole they should happen to encounter.

1. Without AE we would not have the Ray Cooling or Vincent Ross arcs, for at least two reasons.
2. When the initial implementation of a new feature doesn't meet the design goals, the right thing to do is to leave it broken and never look at it again?

This is probably better placed in Comic and Hero/Villain Culture, a few boards down in the For Fun! section.

I wish I had the numbers for attempted and successful runs of this arc. I think it would not demonstrate a clear breakdown on archetype lines. As it is, I can only offer anecdotal evidence. I found Ray Cooling's arc harder than Mender Ramiel's.

Also: I parsed the OP's title as "Me: a master of running and temp powers", which led me to believe it might be about someone who is playing a character using only temp powers and running around. Imagine my disappointment.

Despite their shared power category, controllers and dominators are very little alike. The controller, as the name implies, controls a fight: through combinations of layered active control and support powers, they tip the balance of a fight toward a point where they will survive and their enemies will not. While there are notable exceptions, the general method is to guide enemies along a path toward helplessness. Controllers tend to favor longer fights where their cumulative effect is devastating, although their instantaneous damage tends to be low.

Dominators don't generally have the support powers to layer on top of active control. This changes the dynamic from a spiral downwards to a race against time. The dominator gets an early edge with crowd control abilities, and then needs to quickly press this advantage while it lasts. To this end, dominators have a vastly greater capacity for instantaneous damage. Control is used as a means to set up enemies for attacks, both at the single-target and area level. In the early game, where unenhanced area controls and attacks are relatively weak, the dominator is better off fighting a few enemies at a time, using controls to keep stronger enemies out of the fight while taking out weaker enemies with burst damage. In the later game, especially with high levels of recharge, the same general principle applies at the whole-spawn level: incapacitate with area control, then quickly kill with area damage.

It's possible to play a fully-ranged dominator, but it's neither necessary nor particularly advantageous. The mitigative benefit of staying at range is obviated in the short term by the much stronger mitigation of active control, and in the long term by the much stronger mitigation of defeating enemies.

If I were to compare a Dominator to another archetype, I would compare with a Blaster, particularly those sets that mix some control with burst damage. The Blaster has more upfront damage, but the Dominator doesn't need to kill as quickly because their initial incoming damage is much lower. Personally, I think that Dominators got the better end of the deal, but opinions vary. Both, however, rely exclusively on disabling enemies quickly for their survival: you must do unto them before they do unto you.

And on the original topic: my personal favorite wild theory is that Marcus Cole becomes a hero* only in universes where Stefan Richter becomes a villain - and that Arachnos the organization was and is aware of this, and elevates Lord Recluse as a villain solely to keep Statesman a hero, while also ensuring that Lord Recluse is repeatedly informed that under no circumstances can he win.

* To the extent that he can be, of course. However intelligent Marcus Cole may be, he's definitely much stronger than he is smart: see Boomtown.

Faultline appears to be in a happy relationship with Fusionette.

Statesman was married to a woman and had a biological daughter, presumably in the usual fashion.

It is within the realm of possibility that these characters are closeted gay, or bisexual. But the preponderance of evidence would lead me to believe that they are both straight. Whenever the issue comes up in canon - and it does - they behave as if they are. So it's not entirely fair to argue from the stance that there's no evidence either way. Occam's Razor is in play.

Crimson and Viridian, on the other hand, is a crack pairing I can get behind.

I figured it was something like that. MM pet slotting really is a magical mystery box, innit? Well, off to reslot I go.

My Demons/Pain MM is having trouble with her Demon Prince, George. He's going through his endurance at a prodigious rate - much more than I'd expect, given his slotting. George is frankenslotted with Pet Damage IOs granting about 95% endurance reduction. Yet after just a minute of fighting, his endurance bottoms out. Are his powers really that costly, or are the enhancements not applying somehow?

Roy Cooling, yes. My memory isn't what it used to be, and I don't remember what it used to be...

Have you played Ray Cooling's arc?

Play Ray Cooling's arc.

Whoever's been writing the new backup arcs for the past couple issues clearly does not believe in saving it for the pay-per-view.

There is also a practical reason for saving some things for TFs. There are ways to structure an encounter such that teamwork is required or at least strongly rewarded, and I don't mean simultaneous glowies. These encounters can be quite thrilling, but they simply don't work as solo content.

Rogues generally play something like this - just in it for the money.

There are a lot of threads about the Apex TF. Can you point me to the one you're thinking of?

So, um.

Anyone tried using Team Teleport in this TF?

Because Team Teleport does let you port people in the middle of animations, right?

To expand a bit further: the encounters I enjoy on this TF are the ones that admit no solution via preparation. The only thing that works is doing the right thing, right then and there, and doing that works 100% of the time for everyone regardless of preparation. That seems supremely fair to me. But it is an unusual addition to a game where preparation usually reigns supreme. Life or death decided on positioning is a fundamental of action games, which I happen to enjoy. Victory based on careful preparation long before the fight began is a fundamental of strategy games, which I happen to dislike. I suppose where the surprise comes in is that the Alpha slot is a strategic slot, and thus offers little help in an action scenario. But that's just how it worked out, I guess.

I mean, I do a fair amount of build jiggering and stat crunching, but it's refreshing to say that the "right build" for Apex is the one that gives you enough movement speed to cover 20 feet in 8 seconds. Or, if you want to be a real hero for the team, the one with Team Teleport.

... Come to think of it, Team Teleport would make BM a joke, wouldn't it? There's your 20 minute Apex strategy. And I just invalidated everything I said above. :P

Is it too difficult? All I can say is: we won. And we won with, for the most part, the lowest of four grades of boost in the first of ten slots in the Incarnate system. We didn't use our third build for optimal Incarnate builds, we didn't have any strategy formulated other than "fight" and "don't die", we brought whatever characters we wanted to, we didn't use Vent/Teamspeak, we didn't bring nukes or shivans or tier 3 insps or temp powers or base boosts and frequently forgot we had Call to Justice and Fortune and Secondary Mutation, and I personally died at least a dozen times due to my own sheer stupidity.

And still, we won. And I have had serious problems getting through an STF run and had to use a full nuke-shivan rush to beat the LRSF and struggled mightily through some bits of the LGTF and have taken a half hour or more to get through Nictus Romulus and sometimes have been completely defeated by all of the above. I'm not the best there is. I'm not even very good. All the Apex and Tin Mage TFs require is that you pay attention and work as a team and figure out a strategy and don't let your ego or your habits get in the way of doing what needs to be done to finish the mission. And this is the hardest they will ever be - they're only going to get easier.

I predict routine twenty minute Apex and Tin Mage runs in under a month. You can quote me on that. I also predict that some people will never be able to beat them, no matter how many uber Incarnate buffs they cram into their characters, and you can quote me on that too.