Aliana Blue

I suggest a change of tactics.

While I'm sure you're already eating all inspirations as they drop (which is why I maintain an AoE heavy /SD is an excellent farmer even with plain SOs), I suggest you start combining inspirations that are not going to be of much use (mostly yellows, maybe blues and mez-pinks) as they drop into reds.

The faster you kill, the faster inspirations drop, the more buffed you get, etc.

That's what I do with my Elec/Shield. 300%+ damage buff is a beautiful thing to watch.

Siege's fight hinges entirely on not mucking around and hitting things fast and furiously. As others have indicated, they get progressively harder as they stay alive longer - but they're still only bosses, unload after a wipe and watch them die as usual.

If your team strategy is the "wait at the court for minutes while someone pulls/switch targets/concentrate on AVs" I've seen, you'll have lots of trouble. Kill those adds. Jump at things. Be fast. Don't wait.

Defense is definitely NOT useless, and you're not a naked blaster. How do I know? I took my /EnA stalker yesterday for a couple of trials. Over 59% defense before buffs (and due to the chaos, more often than not I ran without buffs), and it was quite a noticeable difference vs. the plain softcap of my DM/Inv scrapper, who had to do a bit more legwork with her other tools to survive. The longer the mobs stay around, the more tohit they have, and the higher your defense will have to be to counteract it.

How much defense you'll "need" hinges entirely on how fast your team can kill. It's an unusual correlation, but there you go. I intend to take my Elec/Shield/Fire scrapper in there and see how that one goes. It means that, yes, AoE is even more king than it's ever been, at least for that particular mission.

Hm, couple of things I'm going to comment on from the thread:

1) Don't rush: I disagree.

I was in two... Erm... Well, the one that's not the Lambda... That one. Two failures yesterday. Truth to be told, we were 13 and 15 people (when it can be up to 24, probably all 24 would help because we simply lacked damage to overpower the ambushes). Here's how the first time went:

*Clear Courtyard*

*Keep patients from escaping*

Leader: Stay on the court! Everyone come to the tennis court.
L: Stay here!

*AV has been reinforced by a squad of DEATH*

L: Everyone here? Good. Stay here.

*Time passes*

*AV has been reinforced by a squad of DEATH*

Me: What's happening?

L: Pulling the AV. Stay on the court!

*Time passes*

*AV has been reinforced by a squad of DEATH*

L: She's hard to pull.

Me: o.O

*AV has been reinforced by a squad of DEATH*

*Leader is held and hosps, comes back*

*AV has been reinforced by a squad of DEATH*

*AV finally is pulled and hilarity ensues*

Think the same, but slower, for Siege. Couldn't even find the ************ for at least two spawns. We fail - miserably - before having a chance to finish him off and go to the two AVs fight.

On the second try I noticed, delighted, that the rest of the team had decided not to wait for the pulls. After some hesitation on the AV spawn, half of us rushed them and, while pounding, slowly pulled them to the tennis court (why the tennis court anyway? Dunno, but we did it that way). Much better. But then the second fight with both AVs came.

L: Take Siege first, ignore Nightstar.
L: Siege at 50%, switch to NS.

L: Ignore Siege. Stick to the AV I call.

L: Switch to Siege.

Me: He's taking off.

L: (To the tank) Pull him, stick to him.

L: Switch to NS.

L: Swith to Siege.

Me: Where the heck is he?

Teammate: Back at his spawn point.

With a million ambushes.

x.X

And that made me remember the two successes with my DM/Inv scrapper on the Lambda. There were five or six of us scrappers in those. And we behaved like scrappers - we moved forward and stomped every single ************ in the room as fast as we could.

And you know what? If you don't want to have masses of ambushes stomping your team, you don't want to drown in robots and level 54 mobs, and don't want to fail miserably, the best thing you can do is get out as fast as you can and wail on the bastards as much and as fast as you can. That's about as City of Heroes as it gets.

2) IOs don't help: In my experience, false.

Being IO'd to the gills absolutely made the difference for me - looking at what I survived and why I survived it. That's a good or a bad thing depending on your point of view (SOs forever vs. gear nullification thesis), but that's my impression. Being at 60% defense before buffs with my stalker (after hide suppression) made a heck of a difference when looking at how others were falling to the AVs and how I was surviving their aggro (it was the powered-up mobs that did me, rarely the AVs directly). And the mass survivability jump on my DM/Inv thanks to a tight build too.

To be honest, I finished the first one with a win, was presented the reward table... And didn't have A CLUE what to get or what I needed, I hadn't even advanced much on the unlocking itself (18%).

Of course, winning feels good tho =)

I wish I could start the Lambda solo, those turrets are gagging for some scrapper lovetapping =(

I've just finished two Lambda runs with my DM/Inv Scrapper. And two successes.

As far as usefulness goes, I don't expect many people to be as kitted out as mine, but if you're /Inv, have you considered the usefulness of being able to get up close and personal with Marauder?

He actually killed me once, and the one-shot code prevented a few couple more deaths, but that's mostly because I don't do "retreating" (as you're supposed to when he lets loose the PBAoE of Doom). Sure you're not a tank, you can at best cap at 75% resistance. Use inspirations and the hospital is right there with a helpful nurse.

I don't think many /Inv scrappers will be able to lead the charge on the destructible objectives on split teams like I did, simply because not many people will have sunk a couple of billions in their build, but I can see you doing quite well with a bit of care with a cheap, decent build. Choose and prioritize targets, let the tanks deal with the Psi bosses unless you're eating skittles, and there's no shortage of targets that need clearing out.

Start from the ground up with a careful approach, and up it slowly as you measure what you can handle. Let the teammates die in the meantime

The biggest "what" of the whole thing is Tina's arc.

Tina: Ohnoes, someone is attacking the Portal Corps offices, halp!
Player: Okay... There, I stopped them.
Tina: Thanks! But they stole the technology anyway, so now they have the knowledge for Portal Technology!
Player: That's terrible. Here, let me help... Okay, so that's the invaders stopped, who were they?
Tina: They were invaders from another dimension.
Player: So why were they trying to steal our technology?
Tina: To be able to travel to our dimension of course!
Player: But... But...
Tina: Go along now; find an italian plumber and go talk with Maria Jenkins, she has a job for you.

The only thing inspirations are good for is playing inspiration Tetris, where by combining three of the same kind into one your objective is to be left with only one inspirations. Game Over if your tray goes full and you can't combine your way out of it (at which point you delete/use/pass everything and start again).

I don't think you need to level before the event. A team of many doing one of the low level arcs will blitz past the really low levels and there's quite a bit of quality low level content in there anyway.

Regarding the handicapped toilets, there are indeed handicapped people in Paragon City. Despite all the progress made in the medical sciences since the first Rikti War and the amazing technological advances that have made tech-based heroes possible, there are certain injuries and conditions which cannot be totally reversed, or replaced with cybernetics.

Most modern-day handicapped aids come in the form of external cybernetcs, commonly referred to as exo-actuators, which reproduce the natural movement of the handicapped limbs and body parts (i.e., not just the limbs, but also the trunk, swagger of the body, etc.); Crey's Exo-6 is the most common modular model - capable of being adapted from the smallest limb-movement aid to a full-body actuator.

The legacy design of wheel chairs, while convenient due to their low-tech ease to use and maintain, posed severe problems, not just for movement and freedom of the user, but also the health issues associated with prolonged adoption of the same posture. Natural-movement actuators have tremendous health benefits just for that alone, and thanks to the reduced need for them (yes, medicine HAS progressed that much in Paragon Primal Earth, as well as the miniature cybernetics capable of replacing some spinal injuries), it is affordable to subsidize this technology for those who need it.

Unfortunately, these are merely movement-aids and not full survivalist and self-sufficient containment suits. Which means the user does need some disassembly when having to perform certain bodily functions; no more difficult than the old "get off the chair and on the toilet," but it does require more space and support bars for convenience. Or larger-than-usual and extremely reinforced titanium toilets capable of supporting the extra weight, but these fell in popularity when it was attempted to introduce them, legacy exo-actuators were not compatible with them (meaning, one had to still get off them, and then would have to sit on a freaky, large toilet, constantly in fear of falling into it (!!)), and the cost of retro-fitting handicapped toilets, given that had had the same basic design since they were first introduced for wheelchairs, meant the idea had to be scrapped.

Interestingly, these exo-actuators became quite a headache after the rise of the Freakshow. Civilians using them were commonly attacked by the freaks and their aids stolen to be used for spare parts. Several initiatives were introduced to deal with the problem, with little success, until Sleight of Hand, a technological genius in the field of force fields (har har) and optics, created the "blendevice", a special module that could render the exo-actuator invisible if built with the proper materials and the required wiring. He put all the schematics in the public domain and it was enthusiastically adopted by all exo-actuator makers.

Now the biggest problem for the end users is finding lost exo-actuators.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5: All the good suggestions for AE.

Why isn't the city(ies) littered with contacts with arcs from AE? Why aren't we seeing recurrent contests or calls for themed arcs to be put out there in the world? Why are we still limited to three arcs (with the option to purchase some more to whitewash that fence) that languish in the isolated system forever instead of filling new zone after new zone with newly themed arcs and contacts we'd be thrilled to fill?

This isn't your typical Raid-and-grind Fantasy Everquesty MMOAN (Ant's Nest). This is City of ************* Heroes, home of the comic book fans and hobbyists who're interested, yes, in game and fun and loot and all the MMO bits, but also in the stories of fights of heroes and villains, of saving the world or enslaving it, and having epic confrontations one after another where we save the day or just snatch defeat from the band of wussy heroes who couldn't stop our Machiavellian plotting. If the markets and PvP and everything else can be a mini-game, the mini-game of building the gameworld our creations will be populating can be as much part of the experience as everything else.

Work on the incarnate raids and all that endgame MMO-y stuff. Let us handle the rest, let us feel this is OUR game just that much more.

So. Much. Potential.

Sigh.

Somewhere in Sharks island, over The Pit:

[Local]Fate Hunter: THIS. IS. SPARTAAAAAAA!!!

*Consortium Guard is Crane Kicked into the pit*

Oh yeah, good times. I've been doing that since I first set foot in there. At level 50 and with some KB enhancement, it's really quite impressive!

So, I ended up running that two-mob test on AE. With an AV plus a Rikti Infantry in range, it behaved just as I expected: Streakbreaker after some hits when gauntlet misses, streakbreaker never kicking in after one miss.

Interestingly, if what I had next to the AV was a Guardian (no melee attacks) I couldn't get the odd behaviour to trigger, streakbreaker worked as "expected". I suspect it has something to do with the mob not being where my client think it is, but it's a bit odd nonetheless.

Thanks everyone.

So it's the AoE Gauntlet then (I had left the tank doing auto-barrage one-on-one on Marauder overnight, and found out this morning the game had frozen and I had almost nothing in terms of logs, bah).

So now my question is... How can a Gauntlet miss on -6 underlings (the monkeys) allow for three consecutive rolls of the dice without the streakbreaker stepping in? Because that really doesn't make any sense - only thing we could think of was the -20% tohit that's supposed to be vs. special mobs to be happening with everything, and that still falls short of how easy it is to hit those monkeys.

Any other tanks with something other than EM can check this? It happens often enough not to be hard to check (just see if the dice rolls sometimes after a miss, or if you get a "forced by the streakbreaker" message every time). Or someone else with EM on a tank to confirm I'm not going crazy... I'm starting to suspect the server just hates me.