UberGuy

Yeah, I could see that one. At least it's possible to get inspirations from the new mission contacts now.

And he's right. The LRSF is not hard. Like most things in MMOs, the LRSF just takes certain keys to unlock victory. Not all the keys are required for victory, just some combination of them, and there are many such winning combinations. If you don't bring any of the keys, you'll fail. The more keys you bring, the easier it gets, and once you know the set of working keys, you can repeat dozens of victories in a row without a failure.

Those keys can be discovered elsewhere in the game. In the rest of the game, mixing those keys is usually overkill, used to speed a team to victory that was already guaranteed. In the LRSF you do need a least some of them to win at all, but once you have them, victory is generally simple and repeatable. The only "hard" part is finding the keys. We've tried to lay them out here in this thread.

You don't need a specific team makeup. You don't need a particular combination of ATs or powersets. I sometimes see people building an RSF team by calling for a particular number of Corruptors of particular powersets, and a Stone Armor brute. When I see that, I shake my head. That approach is not required for victory. However, whatever you do bring needs to provide the team with certain benefits. There are many different ways to provide them. You need specific benefits, not a specific makeup. Any makeup that provides the benefits should do. If it provides them via temp powers and inspirations, that wildly opens up the horizons of what's viable.

I will definitely concede that several Masterminds get a short stick with this encounter, because of the wide level difference between the pets and the AVs, and the many AoEs. Much as people complain about how AVs in a broad sense reduce most Controllers and Dominators to their secondaries, and I feel this encounter broadly reduces many MM builds to their secondaries as well. Bots, which have range-oriented AI, are some of the only pets which I see consistently survive this encounter. It'd be nice if it didn't work out this way, but making it not would require a significant redesign of the encounter, MM pet mechanics, or both.

That seems incredibly odd to me. I attend speedy ITFs constantly, usually at least one a day, and losing 1-2 people is rarely anything more than the merest of speed bumps to the team. We've barreled through all but the fight with Nictus Romulus with as many as half the team dead sometimes. Given that I don't even expect that many teams run and gun as hard as we do, restricting the team composition so, of all things, someone can hand off a res inspiration really doesn't sound like a very reasonable speed optimization tactic to me.

If you have a PuG of unknown player skill breakdown, or a known flock of newbies, sure, I guess I could see someone trying to keep it simple this way. But then such a team isn't what I'd look for to steamroll things, either.

I really don't see any posts like that. I think you're overreacting.

He described going in with stacked Vengeance (I assume it was stacked since he mentioned using TP on the target) and Shivans. Now it's possible they had some really bad luck with the Heroes' hitting through high defense, but in general, Shivans with +DEF and +Damage eat the heroes alive.

No, you can't win the LRSF with just any old team, because there are degenerate teams that are going to have an awful time. One that deals all Lethal and Smashing damage, as mentioned, is one of them. But any team with a decent mix of buff/debuff characters, and either a mix of damage types or at least some Shivans/HVAS are very likely to be OK. Some will win faster than others, some may have more deaths than others, but most should come out on top.

Things you want for the LRSF, in some combination from some source:

• High defense. Be it from VEATs, Corruptor/MM buffs, Vengeance, Lucks or Accolades, you want to be at or above 45% defense to all vectors/types if you can manage it when you go in on the Phalanx.
• High DR. This is less important than high defense if you already have high defense, but the AVs are still likely to hit you at some point even at the defense "soft cap". They hit hard. Thermal shields, running a few oranges or the Demonic accolade are good ways to take the edge off it.
• Healing. If the AVs to connect, you want a way to recover. Especially if you don't have high DR, strong burst healing to recover can help.
• Damage. You want high DPS. You can get +Damage directly via Kinetics, stacked Assault, Accelerate Metabolisms, Bio nukes, Vengeance, red inspirations. You can debuff their DR with Rad, Col, Dark and Thermal powersets. -Regen is helpful, but a team context +DAM and -DR are likely stronger effects, though see below. You need to defeat the Heroes as fast as possible to cut down their numbers rapidly. This is especially important if your initial buffs are short-lived.
• Exotic damage types. If Statesman in particular gets his Untoppable off, the last I knew it capped his resistance to several damage types, particularly L/S damage. You need other damage types on the team. If you don't have them, Shivans can help provide this because they deal truckloads of Energy damage. If you are being heavily but not full resisted, Regen debuffs might be able to pull you through.

If you're using Shivans and you can give these things to the Shivans they will generally crush the heroes. I have seen all 8 heroes go down in under 60 seconds, no joke, under the onslaught of defense-buffed Shivans with capped damage and Speed Boost.

Other things that may be useful...

• Damage debuffs, such as Darkest Night or Enervating Field. I was on a MoRSF run where in the end Statesman was hitting our Invul Brute for like 50 damage with Knockout Blow, because he was so badly debuffed and the Brute had good baseline smashing DR.
• Regen debuffs. If Statesman is running Unstoppable and resisting most of your damage, this effect may become very important.

Anyone with familiarity with the game's ATs and powersets will see that just any team may not provide enough of those benefits, though a great many will.

Note that I am not at all a fan of the ridiculous resistances that AVs like Statesman or the Honoree get when they pop Unstoppable or similar powers. I think it is completely suck that people have to strongly consider choosing what character they will bring to such events on the basis of the damage types they deal. A character's damage type is something players cannot easily control outside of wholesale powerset choice, and which it's far too late to do much about once you get to level 45+ and discover that things may completely ignore your given choice. However, until the devs see fit to change that we're stuck with having to bear it in mind.

The AVs in the STF are just about as easy (or hard) to separate as the ones in the LRSF. The main difference is that there are more Heroes to try to single-pull, so the odds that someone brings friends are ultimately higher.

Single pulling the AVs is not a reasonable approach any more unless you're trying for a "Master Of" badge. Most "Master Of" runs I've been on have accepted as many as 3 Hero/AVs at once, and one I was on (accidentally) pulled the entire Phalanx and still won.

I really don't understand where that's coming from. Do you have defective inspirations? The only hard-hitting defense debuff is from Positron, and I don't ever recall having it land on me. Lucks and Sturdies work just fine against the AVs. High-order defense is the most common way to survive them.

Lets stop and think about this for a second. You're waving your hand at eating ten Lucks? Seriously?
Fought Scirocco recently?

Frankly, I do think that the AoEs on Back Alley Brawler's CoV incarnation are ridiculous. His Handclap is a > 1500 damage AoE. His Energy Transfer is an AoE. But other than that complaint (which is mostly formed from fighting him in story arcs, not the LRSF) I really don't see the issue. I don't find Statesman any worse than Lord Recluse.

He summons level 54 bosses.

You understand the merit reward foundation, right? It's based on median completion time. If you know how to do it, the LRSF is easy, and it doesn't take very long to complete. I don't know if there's any fudge factor in the devs' calculations for number of failed TFs - there should be if there isn't. But the fact is that a lot of LRSFs are completed and completed pretty quickly.

That generally takes longer no matter how fast you defeat the foes, because its structured differently. Remember: median completion time.

In this game, healing is not as important relative to other survival tools as it is in many other MMOs. Ally buffs and foe debuffs usually have much stronger initial effect - healing is useful for covering the stuff that still gets through these effects. A team that relies on buffs and debuffs primarily to counter foes will be far more effective than one that relies primarily on heals.

You may hear the above advice translated as "healing sucks" in CoH. It does not. It's just not the most powerful tool in the arsenal of support characters. It remains useful - it's just good to know where it stands in the spectrum of tools available.

Welcome to the game!

Accuracy I can agree with. Endurance reduction I strongly disagree with. Damage slotting increase damage/time and damage/endurance equally. Slotting endurance reduction increases damage/endurance only. You are provably better off going for damage first, because you need to defeat your foes not only before your blue bar empties, but your green bar too.

The only power you can possibly be talking about is Darkest Night, which technically could be defined as self stacking if the individual timed pulses were not flagged to not stack. That's true of all toggles.

Of course, there are no examples of debuff toggles that behave that way. The only buff toggles that behave that way are those which have to self stack because they buff off of multiple opponents, such as Invincibility, RttC or AAO. So assuming that's what you're talking, you'd be once again being highly pedantic.

Of course, if that's not what you're talking about, I'd love more details. Please, do enlighten.

It's full of set bonuses!

If you ran in with Vengeanced shivans and got murderlized, I really don't know what to tell you. Either you had some really epic bad luck, or your team's effective DPS (including -regen and -DR) was somehow too low even including the Shivans, which really shouldn't be possible. These sorts of things are ways speed RSFs are run. As in you don't actually need them to win, it's how you do them to win as fast as possible.

It's got to be a matter of lack of familiarity or something like that.

It works well for plenty of them.

Wow, are we in grade school here? You made an assertion I felt was wrong, and I explained why. I didn't attack you personally, and yet you resort to this kind of childish remark. I don't know about what other readers of the thread think, but I don't get the idea that I was who looked like their underwear was out of whack.

Hm. I seem to recall Tomax showing his damage effects being flagged [Ignores enhancements and buffs]. Either I misremembered that, or it's changed, I'm not sure which. I noted it quite some time back, definitely before I9.

I'm sorry, but that's an overly pedantic definition of "debuffs". The "secondary effects" of blasts are also debuffs, not just powers from buff debuff sets. Because there are so many of those effects, and because so many of them do in fact stack with themselves, that does indeed mean that most debuffs self stack. The debuffs in the primary sets that don't self stack are in a minority of the game's debuffs.

A prime example of a primary debuff powerset where the debuffs all self stack is Dark Miasma. The only debuff in that set which can't self stack is Darkest Night, which is a toggle, for which the concept of self stacking is mostly nonsensical.

That's not correct. Most debuffs do stack from the same caster, even for the same power. Rad blasts stack, even from the same blast over and over.

As mentioned, Dark Servant's damage can't be enhanced or buffed, so slotting damage in him is wasted.