UberGuy

There is no generic answer to this question. Here's why.

Defense makes your foes miss more, which means it causes you to avoid some average percentage of the damage you would have otherwise taken in that fight. That percentage of damage expressed as HP of damage per second is a function of what amount of damage is coming your way. That is a function of all sorts of things - how fast are you being attacked? By how many foes? How hard do they hit? Do you have any resistance to their damage?

Regen bonuses mean you regenerate a percentage of your base HP per second, meaning some fixed amount of HP per second. So how many that is becomes a function of things like your AT and HP bonuses from powers or set bonuses.

So your HP/sec regenned for any HP and regen bonus is fixed, and HP/sec damage is variable based on what you're fighting, and defense is removing a percentage of that variable damage.

In short, the answer to your question varies basically under every new circumstance under which you might ask it, meaning it's not really a terribly useful question to answer.

Using what name? I find that incredibly hard to believe based on times I have seen the trigger message on me when a mine was seemingly nowhere near me.

I believe it to be a bug because it is inconsistent with every other example of a cone or ranged attack being ported from a Blast set to a melee AT as part of an epic pool. I have reported it as a bug, and I think others here have as well. Unfortunately, such things never seem to get much traction unless we PM them to a dev.

You're doing it wrong.

Tell us how you really feel.

I really don't know what to say to that. Do you not understand that, in this game's AT implementation Tankers are a support AT? They're able to defeat a lot of stuff through sheer ability to slug it out and survive, but they are not the game's best damage dealers by a long shot. The idea that you would speak of playing a Defender in a way that suggests you look down your nose at it while playing a Tanker tells me that you don't have a realistic grasp of how the AT roles are laid out.

There's a lot more to DPS than slotting for damage. That's what I'm talking to Heraclea about. There are people in the Scrapper forum thread about soloing Rikti Pylons (the ones in the War Zone) with Tankers. They're not in the top ranks of people doing it, but they're generally laying out DPS that would let them solo an Archvillain without any outside help. You can build a Tanker than can do that.

The feel I get about the Incarnate content is that it's going to be the sort of thing that prompts you to look at your character and ask "is this working as well as it could?" If the answer is no and you want to solo, you're going to want to look into that. If the answer is no and you don't want to look into that, you might want a team. If the answer is no and you don't want to either look into it or team, you may be out of luck.

Yeah, look at all those AV encounters and how they make Dominators a liability. It's a real shame how it stopped people from playing them, isn't it?

It's fine to be worried about the slippery slope and giving feedback. You've gone well past that. You're into "this is what's happening, and everything is ruined because of it." You've moved past feedback into doomcrying, and frankly I think it's sad.

I've done this content where my melees are a liability. I've been fine. I've been invited to teams. I've gotten heaps of badges and rewards. I've been as kick-*** as usual where there wasn't a reason I couldn't be, and only select little components have meant I couldn't be. It's not what you claim it is. Go delete your characters if you think that's the thing to do, but if you delete them when you'd rather play them, I think you're being dumb for not doing the things that would adapt them to "harder" content.

Why do you think they are being frozen out of anything? I see you with choices which I consider completely viable.

For characters that have been intentionally built to be low damage output (because of concept, you wanted to play powersets with low DPS, whatever), it's completely reasonable that you should expect these characters to sometimes need help. It would be unreasonable for you to expect they would never need help. Why would you build a low DPS Tanker on some server where you don't know anyone? What was the thought process here?

That leaves characters who have low DPS unintentionally. That means they could have better DPS, and you'd be willing to do the things that would let them. For characters who intrinsically either have the DPS needed naturally, or who can get it through build choices that wouldn't ruin your concept, why can't you adjust their build or your playstyle? And yes, Tankers can have the DPS to do this, and Scrappers are one of the most likely ATs to be able to deal with Trapdoor outside of debuff-wielding ATs.

I don't see this content gated the way you're saying. I see you excluding yourself from this content because you are both unwilling to seek assistance and unwilling to explore how to improve your existing characters. The inference I take from your taking the time to mention that you might as well delete these characters is that you think that's a crappy choice, but if you really think that it absolutely beggars my imagination that you'd fail to explore options for how to avoid it.

Funny, little of that poison seems to have seeped out of the Hamidon raiding community. Justice server slaps Hamidon around several times a week. (Last night we did it twice in a row after 12 EST.) Do you know how poisonous that was? Back when free server transfers were available, a group of our players and players from Freedom started swapping to help Freedom get a more successful raid habit going on.

I think you're afraid of shadows.

Before.

You know you're on to something when the first four missions required you to click a zero-countdown glowie in a tiny one-room map.

(Honestly though, tricks like that stopped making much sense once they lowered the ticket cap from 9999. If you've got a sufficiently tough character, it's so easy to cap tickets even on large map that arc tricks like that really aren't worth the time any more.)

Story doesn't explain the power.

Well, unfortunately I think those arena limitations I mentioned I think did contribute some there. But I think that sort of misses the point. Serious PvP players did use the arena for ladder matches and the like. They still do. But even if you take PvP very seriously, every time you want to play against another player, you aren't going to want to organize a match.

There are people in FPS games who play ladder and league matches, but they spend most of their time in PUGs on favorite servers. The PvP zones were basically like that for this game's PvP. The problem isn't that you wandered into organized play. You wandered into PUG play, but it was PUG play containing a decent percentage of people who are serious about PvP. You really can't go into an open PvP zone in a game with a functioning PvP community expecting anything less.

But see... The vast, vast majority of people who play PvP of any kind in any game do it for one reason. They want to win. Within some boundaries, those people play in a way that's meant to maximize their chance to win, not to fit a concept. The typical PvP mindset is competitive, and if adhering to concept means that you're going to be less effective, then concept is usually right out.

Just to head off where I can see this possibly going, this competitive nature has nothing to do with trash-talking punks, though there's a lot of tendency by non-PvP-minded folk to characterize seriously competitive PvPers like this. When I play vs. other players, I do it to win. That doesn't mean I cheat, or that I'm going to be verbally abusive, but I'm going to play the game in a way that will lead to the greatest likelyhood of victory. If my opponent has a weakness, I'll take advantage of it, and that may frustrate him, but that's what I need to do to win.

If you want to play with limits on how other people get to PvP with you, the arena provides instanced play where no one else will bother you. The arena has many significant limits, but I would think that it would be vastly preferable to wandering in an open zone hoping people would honor your self-imposed limits on how to fight.

My suspicion then is that something is broken. It doesn't make sense for them to have those pylons there "draining" Hami to absolutely no effect, especially when there's actually a power in the game for the express purpose of it.

I'd say they're up to date, which means they include more use of newer mob factions that have (often indirectly) been made harder with time. Personally I think it can be a tad rude to run into Longbow foes as a hero, and you get that in tip missions. There's also the DE in the high-level tips, which have explicitly been made to have I think it's +14% base toHit against player characters, which I think counts as being a bit harder. I'm not sure that's explicitly unique to tip missions though - that may just be the first place we're running into a new, ramped up DE.

Mostly I think the tip missions are designed to be more complex in terms of their internal flow of objectives, using more of the tools we see in AE missions. Stuff like chained objectives, where you can't do X until you complete X, mandatory ambush fights, custom bosses (which are sometimes your clone), etc. These things make a lot of the tip missions harder if not actually hard, because you often can't just race to the end, defeat a boss and be done.

I'm wondering where you've been for like... the last four years.

Seriously, you're looking through this though ridiculously narrow lenses, and they're doom-colored lenses at that.

The optimum number of Tankers on a team has been zero ... I don't even know since when. Probably since release. If you don't have an optimum team, the optimum number of Tankers for a non-optimum team almost always caps out at one.

We have one new task force where melee is non-optimal with one foe in one mission. I won't be terribly surprised to see the same trick used a few other places, but I seriously doubt they are reworking the game so that melee is teh suck going forward. Edit: if you include Proteus, it's already been used once before, but I really didn't find him any problem on my melees.

Do you know what the optimal number of characters who deal lethal or smashing damage is on the LGTF? Zero. When did we get that TF, Issue 11? Eight Issues ago? For the record, I am not a fan of that example, but the point is that this isn't somehow new where some content marginalizes some characters, and in my own experience, Battle Maiden in the Apex TF marginalizes melee way less than the Honoree marginalizes L/S damage. (That experience, by the way, includes having run the Apex TF several times a week since it came out.)

Ditto x2, or x4 if you consider that I have two Dark Defenders too. >.>

The hyperbole is strong here.

The main trick that trivializes Trapdoor is available to an awful lot of characters. That trick is called DPS. DPS kills Trapdoor, and DPS kills his clones. What you found is a trick that's certainly handy for people who have low solo DPS, but do you know what's even more handy for most people than an Illusion Controller? Er, no, besides inspirations. Getting a team.

I'm a fairly avid soloer. I don't get on a team for normal content. I get on teams for TFs and raids, or to help my friends with their content. I almost exclusively do my own characters' content solo. But when I am faced with something I can't solo? I break out the big guns, and see if that works. Inspirations, accolades, temp powers, the works. If I still can't do it? I ask for help. That's always done the trick.

Seriously, the idea that Confuse/Deceive is somehow going to become the FotM for defeating Trapdoor is just silly. He just doesn't call for that kind of tactical specialization, because there are too many other ways to take him out, and in an MMO, "get a team" is probably going to be the normal one.

There have been people with builds that can't solo EBs for ages. I think the only reason this case of it is even being discussed is because we can't drop his mission. Acknowledging that that doesn't mean I think being made able to drop the mission is the right solution to the larger problem. Being able to skip content you find too hard is, frankly, probably part of why people even have characters that they would try to solo through this kind of thing. I am starting to think that ability to drop missions has accidentally created a sense of entitlement about the degree to which we are expected to solo anything with anything that's never been intended, and I think it's gotten to the point that it's kind of ridiculous.

Hear, hear.

But what has that got to do with who's fault the design of the system is?

I mean, I'm pretty much with you on the whole "it's not that smart to crap on the devs" thing. But I don't think it's reasonable to turn that into logic that suggests that the devs are blameless and everything that goes wrong is the fault of players. Bearing in mind that "blame" means they missed the mark, not that they willfully produced something no one liked.