UberGuy

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When the hell was phase "required" for a raid (aside from way way back and that was stopped in the same time period) this just seems mean and serves no purpose, kinda like stopping all those uber mega overpowered /dev blasters from teleporting their crazy overpowered autoturret about.......

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It never was.

PA, however, is central to the pre-I9 raid strategy. And that's what they wanted to change. PA have the "Untouchable" power, just like Hibernate and PS. And that's what Hami now bypasses.

It was PA they wanted to indirectly nerf in Hami's presence. PS and Hibernate were collateral damage.

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Chew on that in your "limitless" universe

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Let me take this moment to mention that I believe it is a mistake to allow people with temporary reprieves on their accounts to post on the forums. Normally I'm not one to be big on silencing dissenting viewpoints, as I'm a rather frequent dissenter myself; I hardly agree with everything the devs do, and am vocal about it.

However, I've got a big issue with the influx of people who quit the game out of whatever disgust they have with it or the devs popping in and attempting to enlighten the poor mislead playerbase of how crappy this game is.

Here's a hint. We're still here. We still like the game after the changes (or, for some, discovered it after they hit and don't know how it was before). As much? Sometimes yes and more, sometimes no.

If you left because you dislike the game that's fine; sorry to hear that. Do please tell the devs about what would get you to come back. If you don't like it anymore, fine. Say you don't, and even why. Don't try to convince people who still do that they shouldn't, or delcare them wrong for doing so. Or do; I'll happily add you to my ignore bin.

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I'm not a fan of that either.

People have found ways to avoid them, but they're not easy.

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I think that's the point.

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The only means of escaping them currently known is trigger-reflex use of teleport. Since the raid isn't supposed to depend on single-power gimmicks, either we don't know the right way to get away/survive or the point is that there's just supposed to be a whole lot of death.

If the answer is the latter, I disagree with it as an encounter design. "You chose some more popular travel power, or don't have a team TP-er on team, so you lose." If this is the real situation, then I think it would be better if there more of a delay before the mitos attacked, to at least give attentive folk "stuck with" with more traditional travel powers a hope of escaping.

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This whole thread is making me lmao.

Why would you even do Hami now?

The time isn't worth the reward anymore. Not when you can do the STF with only 8 people and you can do it twice to get your HO and Rare, and do it in a whole lot less time. Some may say its for the recipies but just doing missions will get you those.

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Because everyone isn't in this for the most efficient way. Because I predict that, in around 8 weeks time, there will be little difference in the time it takes to do a raid or an RSF/STF. Because not everyone has a team to do the STF/RSF on, or has the right AT to get one from people running them who are frequently unnecessarily elitest about who they admit.

Because you can do both and get two HOs or two recipies.

Because beating on anything with 50 people is cool.

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So...I questioned your statement that a power is useless because a) ONE monster in the ENTIRE GAME can shoot through it and b) it has a 30 second timer, and you responded with that much bile? Wow.

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Because now that Hami has "adapted" this ability, the door is wide open for other foes to magically "adapt" this ability. What's to stop the devs from giving giant monsters, Lusca, the Ghost of Scrapyard, any/all of the signature heroes and villains, or any number of zone monsters and AVs the ability to ignore phase shift? In a single word: nothing. And the rationale? "Well, they adapted like all living organisms do."

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Yeah, they could do that.

They can do anything they damn well want, ultimately.

I don't see them doing that for non-endgame content, because I think it would be stupid.

You may thing Hamidon's design is stupid. I don't, for reasons stated. If things that poke through phase shift and hibernate start showing up in door missions then I'll be on the bandwagon with you.

Simply because they did it in this particular case doesn't mean they're dense enough to do it everywhere.

Personally, I think claims that the new Hamidon is harder are a crock. The new Hamidon reqiuires greater coordination and active participation. If you were there to put powers on auto, then yeah, the new raid is harder for you. I always participated and paid attention at raids, meaning I was one of the people enabling all the akf-ers to get their HO. Nothing much changes for me in the new raid, except perhaps that I will die more often.

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What frustrates me is the seemingly unavoidable group wipes that happen whe Hamidon "blooms."

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I'm not a fan of that either.

People have found ways to avoid them, but they're not easy.

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Hamidon only exists as a "challenge" by cheating almost every aspect of the game.

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I really don't see your point, other than you seem to be taking advantage of your account reactivation to drop in and be negative wherever you can.

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Its a prefectly reasonable point to make and the poster in question didn't raise it as positive or negative.

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Context is helpful. Look around at the poster's other posts in the last two days.

I think I explained why I don't think it's a reasonable point to make. Hamidon has to deal with a scenario that no other mob does. I don't see any issue with it "cheating" the normal rules to do so.

Bosses that have "godmode" clicks that come back every 2 minutes and have no end crash? Mobs that can attack from phase shift? No, I don't like those things. Hamidon? I'm OK with Hamidon.

I've not yet seen anyone on the forums posit a design for an entity that can take on 50 players with consistent challenge that never breaks any rule the players have. I'll be very impressed if I do see it. I'll be even more impressed if it's something that the devs could implement without something like engine changes or other time-consuming modifications, meaning they'd have to prioritize their development time around it.

Until we see that, I'll gladly accept hamidon working like it does, and no, I don't see the point in griping about how it "cheats". And yes, because of the posters tone everywhere else, I do take the above post to which I responded as a gripe.

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Hamidon only exists as a "challenge" by cheating almost every aspect of the game.

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Yeah, maybe that's got something to do with the fact that it's actually reasonable for a team of 8 people to take on between 4 and 8 level 54 AVs. What do you expect when there are 50 people available?

I hate when standard mobs "cheat" the rules with player powers, but I'm perfectly fine with a raid mob like Hamidon doing it. I really don't see your point, other than you seem to be taking advantage of your account reactivation to drop in and be negative wherever you can.

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The most insane stop-action evar!

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That was freaking cool as hell.

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Will the builds feel gimped when you exemp? I don't think there can be any question that they will - the set bonuses are too powerful not to notice their absence. But will they be gimped compared to the i8 build exemped to the same level? I don't think so.

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I have a pretty hard time understanding this, and if you posted a breakdown of your thoughts on it, I'd appreciate it.

Why do I have a hard time understanding it?

Well, you've adimittedly done several non-optimal slotting from a I8/ED perspective things. In particular, you've slotted less damage, recharge or accuracy than "normal", in the expectation that these will be corrected/supplemented by set bonuses. In addition, you potentially have slots that literally do nothing, such as the extra three slots in Health that contain the uniques. Maybe not all three are nulled, depending on your exemplar level, but in the I8 build those slots would actually enhance something somewhere else.

If you're one of the lucky folks who has access to a lot of HOs, this seems even worse, because the "slot compression" you get out of HOs goes a long way to helping counter the loss of enhancement strength that happens with Exemplaring. Since (in contrast to HOs) multifunction IOs have enhancement strengths lower than SOs, it's hard for me to see how it wouldn't be better to just blow off set bonuses nearly entirely if you plan to (for example) PvP in Siren's Call. I'd be happy to be shown this is wrong, though.

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I think that question is going to be extra complex simply because, in order to be exemp'ed down, there pretty much has to be another player with you - one that very well might cover for any lost bonus sets.

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That's completely untrue. You are exemplared any time you enter a PvP zone under your level.

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Excellent write up! I particularly like that you did two builds and a comparison between them and the I8 'standard.'

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Sadly, something a lot of players will have to consider is how spectacularly gimp this build would be if it exemplared underneath the level of its set bonuses.

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This cripples our future content. If it's tough to do with Nukes and Shivans, it's impossible without. If it's tough without, it's easy with.

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Adding to this puzzle is somthing I think is important. And something I think a lot of people overlook.

Shivans aren't on our tray by default. Clearly there's an open question about whether they're hard enough to get, or related factors like how many per run, or how strong per Shivan. But we never have to go get them. It's a choice.

I could trivialize the game regularly with Shivans. I don't. I get them for really hard fights that I either can't win without them or that take so long I don't want to do it without the help.

In other words, I use them for what they're presumably meant for. I don't skate through the rest of the game with them, because there's no point. That's not fun for me.

Do I need to be protected from myself? Made so I can't bore myself by intentionally making the game too easy in that way? I'd rather have the option, honestly, to clear those damn hard fights, or clear them faster.

Should so many of our missions have AVs in them even when we're solo? Should even some EBs be as tough as they are? How do you account for differences in powersets? In ATs? In the powers of the EBs themselves and how they counter some powersets? Some EBs are a joke to one character and a bane to another. A fun fight often lurks somewhere in between.

Are Shivans, Nukes, or what have you "balanced"? I'm not going to argue that they are. But do I think they serve a purpose that they serve well, and removing them or severely neutering them would be a bad move.

Should we have a tool to push us over those challenge humps? I think we should. How do we make it so you can only have that tool when you really need it? I have no idea. And so I am reluctant to advocate removing it.

I have no complaint about the change to Vengeance, except for one that's old news. It's the only buff in the game that's (supposed to be) non stackable. I hope the change to make this one power non-stackable isn't something that will become a balance trend. I tend to doubt it will, but I am still wary.

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They're both meatbags with massive hitpoints and regen.

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That's fine, but you were using an example of Babbage to reinforce your point: that Regen is critical to taking down AVs.

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Well, aside from what Castle came along and said, I think it would be pretty weird if they thought PA dropping was a gimmick but a Braveheart charge of Shivans wasn't.

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By the way they have fixed PA dropping versus Hami . . .

Take that for what you will.

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Yeah, I know that.

And BaB said the tactics for the new one shouldn't rely heavily around any one power or AT.

Thus reinforcing my notion that the new Hami raid wasn't balanced around the expectation everyone would bring a Shivan.

Interestingly, I don't think it would do anything really if they did. I think the mitos would own them hardcore as they wandered around being knocked on their behinds.

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6 to 8 what? And what, pray tell, was your opinion of the reasoning behind rad's nerf?

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Do you actually understand the scale of the "nerf" to Rad?

Do you actually understand that it made everyone else with meaningful -regen actually able to contribute -regen when it really is needed?

All the nerf did is make it so that two powers of LR's general power completely shut off an AV/GM's regen, instead of having the magic bullet of a single Rad.

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I'll tell you why. When you have 8 folks slamming on Babbage in Skyway getting nowhere and a single /rad shows up and Babbage goes down in 5 minutes, you quickly learn that rad is "needed" for all AV encounters.

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Bill... you know Babbage isn't an AV, right?

I said AVs. Not GMs. AVs and GMs are not the same.

The LRSF has AVs in the end. Not GMs.

I should add that I've participated in GM defeats literally hundreds of times that had not an ounce of -regen in them. +Damage, -DR, +AttackRate - those things have been sufficient to allow teams as small as six characters defeat open zone GMs like Enochai and Jack in Irons. Could absolutely any ATs of any powersets at all have done that? No, almost certainly not. But it is possible, and without regen debuffs.

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If you don't need shivans and warburg bombs, then you don't need them and you should be backing the call to have them removed.

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That doesn't follow at all. It certainly doesn't follow the rest of your earlier argument. You claim the missions are impossible without them, and so they should be removed so the missions will be made easier.

First, I question that very much. Second, if Shivans and Nukes aren't needed (which I maintain), then they aren't actually affecting the balance of missions like the end of the LRSF/STF, and removing them would not achieve that goal.

They have their uses. They add damage and aggro soaking. Do they add to much? That's a separate debate - you're linking it specifically to the end "raid" content difficulty, and I think that's a big mistake.

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Because he flat out said that gimiicks weren't the way.

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You have no proof that he thinks shivans and bombs are gimmicks.

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Well, aside from what Castle came along and said, I think it would be pretty weird if they thought PA dropping was a gimmick but a Braveheart charge of Shivans wasn't.

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You know the moment I knew things had gotten out of hand? When I was on my brute in RV, in control of a pillbox, and looked up to see that not only were there 4 heroes about to tear me a new one, but they felt it necessary to bring shivans and drop a bomb on me.

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They did that because they could. Nothing more and nothing less. This is the same mentality that leads to things like the Brute who, on seeing my Scrapper in Warburg popped not only Power Surge, but several lucks before attacking me.

I'm happy to say I Touch of Feared him and took his Scientist.

My point really, though, is that people will do anything to win. In this game, there are a lot of boosts we can get, some large and some not, that help us through rough spots. They aren't distributed evenly, which leads to feelings of unfairness and belief in imbalance, real and perceived. Part of the problem, of course, is that performance in this game has many dimensions of measurement, but not everyone values every axis equally.

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Then try to complete it with no rads, stoners, vengeance, shivvies, or nukes. Oh, and have at least 1 dom and 1 stalker on the team. None of this "Oh, but these guys did it" cards people throw, I wanna hear of YOU doing it, with builds.

Call me when you're done.

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What a ludicruous attitude.

I know people who run it regularly. I don't happen to, because I either wasn't the right level or I've been waiting for I9 because I prefer the notion of a Hamidon raid to the LRSF. And part of that preference is exactly because the LRSF has promoted AT- and powerset-elitism.

But I know people, as in I'm in the same supergroup and/or chat rooms or voice coms, who run RSFs regularly. And they do it with no stoners. They do it with no rads. At times they do it with none of either. They do it with a core of around 5 people, with three "pity slots" that can be given to Stalkers or MM's with the "wrong" powersets.

I know these people. They aren't making it up when they tell me how the SF is going. And I've got no reason to make it up when I tell you. I'm sorry if you haven't found a team that can do this. They exist.

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Considering that Shivans and Warburg bombs were in place prior to the LRSF, it would have been a gross oversight on their part NOT to have considered them.

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You mean like the 1000% AV regen increase? Like the test showing Scrappers one-shotting +8 mobs?

I'm not still especially down on the devs over those things, but the AV one was relatively recent. It's not like gross oversight has somehow been rare.

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Again, the only people completing it without them are using the same stock team makeup that has led to the recent nerfing of Rad. It won't be too long before granite falls in the same hole.

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Dude, come on. The rad nerf only significantly affects -regen. REGEN DEBUFFS ARE NOT NECCESSARY AT ALL TO DEFEAT THESE AVS. I'm sorry for shouting that, but I am sick of people propagating that myth. When you have a team of six to eight you simply don't need it, period. -DR is vastly more effective, and Rad, while a well-known provider of that, is far from the only one.

Let me repeat this again: you do not need -regen for the RSF/STF.

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We keep hearing about BaB's statements that we aren't doing the new Hami raid as they designed.

I find it funny that ample use of bombs and shivans haven't been tried out.

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Because he flat out said that gimiicks weren't the way.

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Get rid of the "I Win" buttons of Shivans and Warburg bombs and then you don't have to design missions with their use in mind.

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And the notion that they designed the RSF with either or both in mind is an assumption. Perhaps an obvious one, but one we've never seen validated.

And the fact that people do complete it without them reinforce the notion that they might not have considered them a critical component.

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sorry not everyone can find 5 corruptors, 2 masterminds, and a stone brute to do the LRSF with

also stalkers and dominators want to be useful on it too.

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See my post above. I'm all for making it so everyone can do something useful.

But sorry, I'm not at all for making it easier. I think it will always be convenient to do it with Stone Brutes and massed Corruptors, because that's the toughest Brute and Corruptors have the powersets most crippling to the most foes.

What they need to to is make it so there are alternatives to "brute forcing" your way through it. Not make it so brute force is invalid. What I see people asking for here is "gimp the end mission then nerf Shivans because we won't need them any more."

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Common occurence for who, UG? Large SGs using multiple kins, rads and stoners?

Nothing has changed with the LRSF. You either have the stock group makeup, or the demands are made that everyone gets shivans and nukes.

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I'm not sure what you're asking for. I don't like the end mission of either the LRSF or the RSF because they both tend to exclude ATs and some powersets (less so now that the AV resistances are being curtailed a bit). I want them to make the end missions more useful for a broader spectrum of ATs, and to some extent I think they did this on the STF.

But that doesn't equate to making the end mission easier. It equates to making it less exclusive through more inventive mission design. And a more inventive mission could still be crazy hard in a way that might still be made easier by having a huge bag of HP and damage to throw into the fray.

Fixing the LRSF does not neccessarily equal making it so a Shivan isn't desirable.

Nemesis LTs aren't using the power we use. It's unlikely they'll be prevented from stacking it, as this is, honestly, one of the few things about Nemesis that make them scary at all. My only problem with it is that it allows them to ignore defense sets, which is a problem with the toHit/Defefnse interaction, not with Nemesis.

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This is all in prep for reworking the LRSF so that it becomes more in line with the difficulty of the STF, right?

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Seeing as how it's pretty common to defeat the LRSF without either Shivans or stacked Vengeance, I'm not sure I see the relevance.

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I, and I have every reason to believe Im a typical MMORPG player, have no interest in a FPS PVP game.

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What you may be overlooking is that FPS players might be attracted to a particular MMO.

I came here with a moderately large contingent of RL friends who knew one another partially because of RL and partially because we played an FPS together (and competitively, at that).

Not everyone stayed, and not everyone who stayed plays regularly. Some of that is lack of interest in PvE, some of that is "gamer ADD" by which I mean to describe people who constantly hop to whatever is new and shiny. But some of us settled in and stayed.

When I play PvP FPS games, I play them for keeps. I also play team combat games, not "deathmatch", except as a skill honing exercise. Competitive deathmatch bores me. When I'm plaing on a team, I am not into casual play, because I don't like to lose. Playing a team game to win means playing often and intently, with organized practices, review of character/team builds, tactics and team interaction. You need to know everyone on your team, their strengths and their weaknesses.

I was usually in a position of authority but not leadership, such as a defense captain or lieutenant "clan" leader. I take positions of leadership or authority seriously - that means being at every practice, and contributing to the team.

That is draining. I did it for five years across two games. I came here and this MMO looked a fair bit like an FPS (albeit a pure PvE one). It was a nice outlier in the MMO world, with a close enough FPS feel to attract me away. And PvE is relaxing to me. There is no one to best. No one to train and practice against. Anyone I team with can be the most aweome or just "OK" and that'll work most times.

You see, I don't do MMOs. This is the exception for me. I will never play WoW. I will never play Lineage. I dabbled with GW and backed away because I saw it as "serious" PvP with all the things above I was burned out on. What I consider "real" PvP requires a time commitment I'm not up for any more.