UberGuy

Yes, but that's a different post. You're projecting that attitude into other people's posts.

No, sorry. I'm not going to just accept that some guy on the internet has a flawless ability to detect what other people mean in a textual medium. Perhaps you're not describing what you did clearly, but parsing language and (correctly) inferring intent are not the same thing, though one is required to do the other. Your correct detection of my snark gives me no great faith in your ability to infer intent this because I meant it to be obvious.

I was not holding him at all. If you think Dark Servant is going to hold a +2 EB by itself with Petrifying Gaze, I'm quite confident you're in no position to be breaking out "No ****".

I never once disoriented him. I do not have (and will never have) and clearly did not use Dark Pit. You cannot stack disorients from just Howling Twilight. I pretty clearly am using Power Mastery as my epic pool, so I have no other powers with which to disorient him.

The -recharge from HT lasts 30 seconds, and the power has a base recharge time of 180 seconds, down to around 80 for my character. He was +2, so the -recharge was at 80% effectiveness, around 50%. In any case, I'm not sure what -recharge would have to do with multiple simultaneous Bifurcation summons, which is what some folks are saying he does.

So in summary, what the heck are you talking about?

I have some fairly strong but not verifiable suspicion you are in a minority.

My sense of "strong" in this game is and always has been tied intimately with the meta-game. The "formally correct" thing for me to fight and be pretty successful is something that cons white, and something that cons orange should be at least a bit worrisome. But I can build my characters so that, broadly speaking, I am wildly successful against orange stuff, and purple stuff is at least a bit worrisome... assuming I actually face more of them than one character normally would.

For someone like me, I am crushing the stuff that I faced 1-50. In order to have it even begin to bother me in most cases, I have to crank it up in both strength and number. Suddenly, planet-shaping forces arrive and I'm on the front lines to face them? Right on, this is about what I've been waiting for. It's all level 54? Cool. I'm actually on par with that.

This gets back to the idea that the devs are not tuning this new content for the same base difficulty we've seen so far. They know there are people turning that up eight or nine notches, so they made this stuff turn it up to eleven. I know this gets back to that being intensely distasteful for you, and you (and Johnny) have made clear you're not cool with it. I can't say for sure they're tuning it correctly for this game's community, but I do know it's about right for me. What I would agree would be wrong for the devs to do is to carelessly crank up everything from now on, and I do think we need to be vigilant against the possibility they will unintentionally let end-game power creep seep into other designs, but I do not assume they will do that automatically, as Johnny seems to.

It's notable to me that my characters don't feel like that, except with the possible exception of uber PO'd Bobcat. She hits like a mac truck made out of neutron stars, and frankly she puts Web-empowered Lord Recluse from the STF to shame in raw power per blow. The rest of the TF, though, doesn't really leave me feeling like a gnat at all. It makes me feel fairly bad-***.

While the folks I play with try frequently to bring a good mix of buffs, debuffs and damage to our ITFs and LGTFs, we basically do that so we can bum rush most of the content. If we bring less effective combinations, we can still succeed, but sometimes have to be more cautious. And by cautious, I mean we don't pull all the AVs into a pile and AoE them to death. On occasion, we've had a long fight with Romulus, but sometimes at least one of us are bringing characters that can put out the DPS to solo an AV on their own. Even without strong debuffs, a team with a couple of characters like that can usually whittle down Rom even with the healing Nictus in play. Throw in a Kin or even just four or five copies of Assault and we're usually good to go.

I will say though that, in those two TFs, one thing that can trip us up is The Honoree. It's possible to get into a situation where you cannot defeat him if you bring too much of the types of damage he can get 100% resistance to with his Unstoppable. Even with people who regularly steamroll, well, everything else, we sometimes find we can't beat the Honoree down, and we end up having to summon Shivans or HVAS in order to defeat him.

I have a fairly intense dislike of the fact that this outcome is possible, not because I take offense at the notion we can't just roll over him, but because if it can happen to us, it is probably happening to a lot of other people who may well be less well-equipped to deal with it. There is nothing in the TF itself that warns you this is possible, and you could run it multiple times without realizing it if you have enough Psi, Dark or other damage types he doesn't get immunity to. I also don't like the idea that you can bring a character who can end up able to contribute nothing to defeating him because you deal damage to which he can be completely immune.

What follows contains no commentary about what happens for you in those situations. It's only information, an example for you from someone with a different perspective. Do with it what you will.

Since this game's inception, I've sought out big fights. For whatever reason, I find them a joy. Piling 30 or 130 foes on the team? For me, that's where it's at. Seriously, I've been doing that (and playing with people who do to) since like the first month after pre-release of CoH, back long before there were aggro caps. Most of the people I play with love the ITF, exactly because it's big fights. (We all hate the lag, but that's a related but separate problem, and it plagues ship raids, too.) That's a common refrain, from what I've seen, about why people like the ITF - the big epic battles. If I remember correctly, the devs took lessons from what people said they liked in the ITF and LGTF and others and used it to create the I19 TFs, and so they too include these large-scale, manic battles. (The BM-fight honestly isn't that large-scale, comparatively, but it can be manic.)

Big fights work for me. I take a very big picture, try-to-find-the-zen approach to these large-scale movements of team and massed foes. When my regular TF teammates and I fight Romulus at the end of the ITF, we usually pull the courtyard spawns onto Romulus, making the fight more large-scale and epic than it would be otherwise. I'm used to huge piles of seeming chaos.

Because of these preferences, past practice, perhaps because of learned or inherent ability to process or distill large amounts of combat information into more manageable chunks, something like Battle Maiden or the fights with the War Works in Portal Court are no great shakes to someone like me. They're new foes (or new gimmicks, in the case of the nanite patches), and they're level 54, but other than that, they're just more of the same kind of combat info processing requirement.

Or, one of the most flammable of responses, some variation on "I don't want to do that."

I don't think then that you really grokked the info on that page. It tells you what exemplaring does to each enhancement, and what that effect is depends on how much enhancement each enhancer provides, and what the level you are exemplaring to is.

There are no other rules for what happens to enhancers than what's shown on that page.

Maybe you should give an example you want to see the effects on?

From the definitions on the Free Online Dictionary for infer.

Your position is increasingly one of defensiveness, and I believe you see assaults on your person instead of on your position even where they do not exist. Certainly ad homenim is a staple of internet discussion, but I think your defensive attitude is helping you see it where it was not intended. I read the same text you did, and I see "come on, inspirations are a big deal here" not "I'm assuming you're a moron and didn't even use inspirations." Sometimes, a cigar really is a cigar, and all that.


I don't think I am.

I think that probably supports my point. You're aggravated, and I think you're looking for stuff to respond to in this way. I called that occasion out, because I honestly don't think it was meant the way you read it. I read the posts in order, and got to your reply to that and was like "woah, what now?".

The only thing your right about there is that I got relatively lucky that he didn't hit me. I ran the enounter three times and that was the third. The second time I fought him much longer, probably ten minutes. The Bifurcation rate you see in my video is no different than what I encountered in the other fights, including the longer one.

Moreover, I do not believe that he spawns multiple Bifurcations at once, ever. Every time I saw the message, he spawned one. However, during the long fight, I know that I was away looking for a Bifurcation long enough sometimes that spawned another when I was not near him, and in those cases there is no warning popup. This makes it appear as if he has summoned more than one.

That's some pretty strong hyperbole. I guess I have to reiterate that it took me three tries to do that, and it only worked so nicely once I conceded I needed to spam Howling Twilight on him to win.

Since it's apparent that you take most discussion along the lines I'd need to take this as insults, I'm just going going to say that I got hit plenty during my other two fights, and I didn't die. I have binds for break free usage, and I can get to them quickly. That character also has moderate resistances to energy damage, hovers quickly (as you could probably see), and I have a 95% chance to pull off a 50% heal on a four second timer once I've hovered more safely out of melee range.

He wasn't going anywhere, with me stacking multiple Tar Patches on the platform and leaving him a Dark Servant to play with. Keeping him on the platform so I could scout from a central position was an pillar of my strategy.

Unlike some folks, I have a possible explanation for reports of multiple Bifurcations which no one has countered - that a spawning warning message was missed. I think people are mistaken in the conclusion they are drawing from finding multiple Bifurcations out after only seeing a single message.

It was. I'll bet, though, that you don't know what was behind it. It felt, well, wrong, to be all "you're wrong, stop it" on Christmas Eve. So the spirit of it was "great, now I've said all this crap, Merry Christmas."

My apologies, I missed where you were taking that. I understand, and agree. (Barring possibly that holds to prevent Bifurcations, which might leave you with a slow, but winnable fight.)

Unlike some, I don't think it's likely that a totally arbitrary character can complete this mission solo unless they use external means, such as temp powers. I don't necessarily think that's a problem in this case.

Well, I really hope you won't take this the wrong way, but that's your choice. You're choosing to play something that's painful to solo when what you basically do is solo. There's no implicit guarantee that's going to be successful at all content, and it's likely to be a slog at all times compared to, well, an awful lot of alternatives.

There are builds in this game that really are pretty clearly weak solo, and most useful helping a team get stuff done. If you play them solo, you have to expect to be weak, and someone who's weak isn't going to be able to overcome all obstacles. And let me be clear here, I'm not using "weak" in some elitist sense to denigrate you as a player. I mean your character is not a strong combatant.

I solo a lot. I have a pretty strong solo preference streak in me. I make a lot of things I think a lot of people wouldn't play solo be pretty decent at it. But there are some things I just wouldn't build to play solo, because I know it won't work well.

Blanket rules like that have been successfully challenged. Of course, if I recall correctly, even on-sign-on rules have been successfully challenged, but of the two, the catch-all version is likely on weaker grounds.

I have no good characters who can test this, but people are reporting that holding him stops him from bifurcating. This seems surprising to me, but it could explain why some people are reporting that he is so much easier for their controllers. Edit: By the way, Drain Psyche is one of the nastiest -regen debuffs in the game outside those available to people like Rad Emission, Dark Miasma and Traps characters. It should offer some respite even if you can't use holds to stop him from duping himself.

I should point out that, if you have a character that plays as you describe for your Earth/Storm, that character is begging to have a team. I don't mean to be insulting, but that's one of those things like the old, bad joke about telling the doctor that it hurts when you do something, so he tells you not to do it. It really doesn't make a lot of sense to solo a character like that in general. Taking it to a known hard fight just seems to be asking for heartache.

That's not what he did. You can certainly infer that from it, but it's not clear that the implication was so dramatic.

And I can tell you from experience, some veteran players are total idiots. Present company need not be considered examples of this, but veteran status in the game says nothing about either expertise at the game or more general wit.

Frankly, it's apparent to that you're not really interested in doing much more than griping, arguing with people do take the other side in the argument, and blowing what they actually say out of proportion into something rather different.

Merry Christmas.

Interesting. I did it on multiple Dark Defenders and Corruptors. I realize of course their roles don't overlap perfectly, but I did have many of the same concerns - the need to spam my debuffs, rezzes, heals, and attacks. I think this is just a matter of personal preference and mental wiring. (To be clear, I'm not trying to imply in any way, by the way, that your wiring is "defective". I'm just saying mine may be suited to that sort of multi-tasking, and yours might not be.)

That isn't adequate. If you think it is, consider that I have characters who can run on x6 to x8 by themselves. I have no characters that cannot run on x4. By implication, a team of equivalents to my weakest characters would need to run on the equivalent to x32.

I my be wrong, but I don't. Castle's told us not to expect that, and I have the impression he wasn't just conveying his own decision in that matter. Uprooting the game at that level seems very risky to me given the nature of this game, which is a small but relatively stable core of long-term subscribers. And to what end - so folks can solo anything? That doesn't seem like a worthwhile trade to me.

If I could, I am honestly interested in what it was about it that killed you so often. Please know I am not saying that with an air of wonder at the notion that someone could die a lot on these TFs. I'm just interested in knowing what it was that led to it being so frequent, if you know. For example, was it the nanite patches, and you just couldn't get out of the way? Was it the nature of the pervasive level 54 foes? Stuff like that.

Also, just to be sure, you had your alpha slot actually equipped, right? You definitely weren't in there facing what were effectively +8 foes?

As long as it's not something mechanical that we can't address, like your video card doesn't render the nanite patches, or you just don't have strong gaming reflexes, I'd like to see if I can offer any helpful advice.

If you were willing to discuss it, I would be glad to take this to PMs or something if you don't want to risk people poking fun at your responses.

These three are all variations on something that's not possible without a significantly complex system which is able to detect and dynamically adjust content's difficulty to a team composition, including a team of a one solo character. Some encounters are simply going to be tuned to expect a high DPS team, or a lower DPS team with a DR or Regen debuffer or a team DPS buffer, or some similar permutation. For better or worse, Trapdoor is an example of just such an encounter. With the existing static system, if you require that every encounter be soloable by a one-attack Empath who can't/won't obtain a temp power from somewhere, that encounter will always be a complete snoozefest for a high DPS Blaster, Scrapper, Dominator, etc. If it never matters what you bring and success is always guaranteed, why have any distinctions in what the ATs and powersets do?

There's value in paying attention to the goal you want taken to what I feel are extremes. There are a variety of ATs, for example, that can debuff, buff or even tank. There are a variety of ATs that can bring DPS. I think your goal of avoiding strict archetype composition of teams is laudable. Your goal of avoiding any sense value in providing even broad roles I think is not.

I've no doubt that Arcanaville could launch into a long lecture on this topic. What you're seeing is almost certainly a direct outcome of the strength of buffs and debuffs in this game. Without revamping (nerfing) the buff/debuff system fairly dramatically, the devs have limited choices. They either have to scale up the entities to account for the presence of debuffs and buffs, which makes the entities difficult to overcome without these, or they can ignore buffs and debuffs, in which case the entities will have the durability of a wet paper sack when faced by a team with them. I think in general that the devs have tried to split the difference, but for any chosen entity's balance point, someone will be able to build a team that can either bring more buffs and debuffs than the entity was tuned for, or bring much less.

By the way, you seem very focused on debuffs. Buffs are significantly more powerful in many situations. Debuffs such as -Regen only dominate when you don't have very strong damage base to work off of, because in those situations debuffing an entity's regen can end up contributing more effective net DPS than, say, doubling the team's damage. For already strong teams, +damage and -DR can be significantly more effective. Using both, of course, never hurts.

That's not my experience at all. In the thread on Trapdoor getting harder, I posted a video of my Dark/Dark corruptor soloing him as a +2 EB, and that was essentially only possible because of the -Regen in Howling Twilight. I tried it three times in total, and I could not defeat him (at least at +2) without the -Regen.

The requirement to meet that, with the current game engine, is that everything be trivial.