UberGuy

This sort of thing always boggles my mind. Once upon a time, when dinosaurs walked the earth, I was a newbie too, and I just never got such seemingly epic backlogs of debt.

But yes, debt these days is definitely not much to worry about. You can't accumulate as much, you probably earn half as much per death, and you generally earn more XP per time than people used to. That's not just because of Patrol XP, but also because rewards have been raised, especially in low and middle levels.

The respec trials do not contain any completion timer at all. While the attack waves in the reactor are on a timer, it does not matter how long you actually take to defeat them, so long as you don't let them destroy the reactor. The Eden trial has a four hour timer on defeating the Crystal Titan.

I did forget about the Cavern, though. It also has a 90 minute timer.

No, I really doubt it. Frankly, the most compelling reason for the raid at its current size is that the servers can handle it fairly reasonably. The game simply cannot handle large numbers of entities using large numbers of (or extremely frequent) power activations. Unless GR is coming with major hardware upgrades or some sort of massive retooling of the core game engine (and that latter seems incredibly unlikely), I don't expect a bigger raid out of it.

It's conceivable they might modify the raid, though I'd be rather surprised given how much stuff GR seems to entail already. But even if it were changed, I really don't expect it to be larger.

That you don't like/agree with something doesn't make the counter position dead. There's still a place for a support role. Just ask most of the Controllers who aren't Fire/Kin. Because, you know, not all Controllers are Fire/Kin - something people taking your position seem to conveniently overlook all too often.

It's actually excellent for AVs. You just need something to fuel it with.

Indeed. There are two things that really determine how long someone can "tank" Hamidon - how many HP they have, and how fast they can regen those HP. +Regen is one of the main reasons there's a call for casting AB through Hamidon. Hami makes his target progressively less healable, but does nothing significant to their Regen.

In early days, a Stone/ Tanker running Earth's Embrace and Rooted was king of this pack, since no other Tanker primary offered both +HP and +Regen. Nowadays we have WP as well.

One thing that probably doesn't make sense is for a Stone tanker to run the raid in Granite. The only useful advantage it provides in a raid is stun protection. But other Tankers run without the benefit of their Tier 9's stacked stun protections, so except in unusual emergencies involving soaking Mito fire as well as Hami aggro, a Hami aggro tanker shouldn't need to run Granite for that reason. Everything else the power does Hami's attacks basically ignore. That means a Stone tanker doesn't need to suffer the -recharge or -damage effects of Granite, both of which affect their ability to hold aggro.

Old Invincible was mob spawns sized for one player at a baseline of +2 levels higher than you. On all difficulties, even now, you can meet mobs +1 level higher than the baseline, so on Invincible you met +2 and +3 mobs.

The old progression looked like this when solo.

Heroic: +0 baseline, 1 player, no bosses, no AVs
Tenacious: +0 baseline, 2 players*, bosses, no AVs
Rugged: +1 baseline, 1 player, bosses, no AVs
Unyielding: +1 baseline, 2 players, bosses, no AVs
Invincible: +2 baseline, 1 player, bosses, AVs

* The way notoriety used to work, on the Tenacious and Unyielding settings it modified spawns roughly as though there was one more person on your team, whatever size it was, up to a maximum of 8 people. (I do not believe that Unyielding difficulty for a team of 8 actually spawned as though there were nine, but I could be mistaken.) However, it seems that the way these settings worked was not exactly how the game really responds to having one more player, whereas using the new I16 settings to set for "equivalent to two heroes" when solo really does work that way. This interpretation is based on dev comments that the new system does not exactly replicate what the old system was doing on those Tenacious and Unyielding settings. Comparing the two is complicated by the fact that I16 also seemed to include changes to long-standing ways the game spawned LTs and bosses, generally increasing the numbers of bosses we see on any given setting.

I am actually incredibly happy not just to have the larger-than-normal team size settings for my level 50s, but settings like +0/x1/bosses for lowbies. I always hated that the old notoriety system meant you couldn't get bosses without also getting more or higher level mobs.

Edit: There's a nice writeup of the old system on ParagonWiki. The current system is described right above it.

Not quite accurate. The hit chance floor operates independant of accuracy. The higher a critter's accuracy with a given power, the higher its odds of hitting you after you "floor" its hit calculation. The way this works out is that the minimum average hit rate of a critter due to defense and debuffs is 1/10th of its standard hit rate. This assumes no toHit buffs for the critter and no defense debuffs for you - as you say, those do raise how much defense is needed to "floor" critters.

This is correct. LTs and up have accuracy bonuses. So do critters higher level than you. This makes their chance to hit you, even at their 1/10th rate "floor", higher than an even-level minion's.

To answer the original question, no, the 45% defense "soft cap" is not just for even level mobs. It used to be until I7. Before that LTs and bosses and over-level mobs of all ranks got the equivalent of +toHit against player characters. In I7 this was changed to +ACC. This made defense powers scale against foe ranks in a way analogous to the way resist powers do, at least on average, and in the absence of +toHit/-defense.

...

It doesn't take killing a bunch of miners to spawn him.

He'll spawn all on his own even if no one's around.

Probably obviously now... +2/x2 is, roughly, what would have been one step above Invincible in the old system.

What Werner said. You have a 500' tall tower you want more space in. What's going to give you more additional space in the tower - 10' more vertical, or 10' more feet along one of the base walls?

Then realize that the space in the tower is meant as an analog for how hard your scrapper is to kill. Adding more +Regen to a Regen is like making that already tall tower taller. Adding defense and/or DR is like widening the base.

(Analogy shamelessly rehashed from other posters - Umbral originated it, IIRC.)

To put a numerical face on this, break out Mid's builder if you use it (and start using it if you don't!) and look at what you get for adding regen bonuses in terms of HP/sec. It takes a fair bit of Regen bonuses to add up to even a few extra HP/sec. If you can (for example) instead cut average incoming damage by 40-60%, it's probably going to have a lot bigger effect on your survival.

It definitely shows applied affects like that. I and teammates have used it many times to look (sometimes in awe) at the net effect teams have on AVs.

It does depend on the nature of the wipe. If most of the yellows are loose, I rarely even bother trying to rez, because they'll just re-splatter everyone... and me. In fact you can be lucky to live long enough to rez in such situations. (I've even tried it under EoE protections, but the stacked mez and KB get out of hand fast. Plus, 75% DR sounds like a lot until you start receiving like 2000 damage every few seconds.)

If some of the Tankers are still kicking and taunting things, I can usually get away with dive bomb rezzing the biggest pile of orange names I can find, then running away as fast as I can. Live to rez another day, and all that.

In addition to these, HT is also a strong -Regen debuff, a-la Lingering Radiation. This is useful to cast on Hamidon in the late stages of beat-down phases before everyone retreats, especially since it's common for too many people to leave before the new bloom.

In a no-retreat raid I usually cast it early instead (or not at all before the first bloom) so I can have the AoE rez in reserve in case the bloom splatters the assembled raiders. HT has turned around more disastrous wipe outs than I can remember.

It's possible to cast Tar Patch on underneath even high mitos, because they're actually spawning on small, invisible platforms. Look for the visuals for holds and immobilizes and try to target the placement at the bottom of those effects. If you can't see any such effects, a Dark/Psi can provide their own with Subdue. -DR debuffs on the green mitos is sometimes key to defeating them without help from the Scrapper team - especially the high ones.