Adeon Hawkwood

You say that like it's a bad thing . We have enough OP sets int he game, we don't really need more. I'd much rather the devs add more solid middle of the road sets than keep adding sets which are more powerful than the previous sets.

Because it means they save 10 seconds per run by slightly fewer enemies. Over the course of a few hours that adds up to more runs. The whole point of farming is to optimize rewards/time. If you get a larger "mission complete" bonus then you don't need to kill as many enemies during the mission.

The thing is good farmers will always look for anything that maximizes their rewards/time. If someone found out that a bright pink spandex costume improved load times I guarantee you the next day the AE would be full of brutes in bright pink spandex. Similarly if you added a "give this arc more rewards" button (which is essentially the proposal) I guarantee farmers would select it just in case.

Well what would be nice is if "Stay" meant "Stay". Essentially an AI setting that means they only use powers if they are already in range rather than moving into range
to use a power.

I would say that the problem is the exact opposite. There isn't a direct management option for positioning. If you tell a pet to "go to" during combat they will completely ignore you most of the time. I don't consider switching them to passive to be a useful option since a pet in Passive/Go To or Passive/Stay is effectively a non-entity since they don't attack and if you tell them to attack they will move.

We aren't asking for an autopilot mode but the ability to put more effort into controlling our pets if we want to. Currently our only (useful) commands in Aggressive or Defensive mode are "Attack my Target" and "Follow". Trying to use "Go To" or "Stay" to take a more active role in their positioning is pointless since they completely ignore it. Providing some means to actually control their positioning in combat would be less "autopilot" than simply putting them into Follow/Defensive and charging into the middle of a mob.

I'm not sure that's true. From a balance point of view forcing your pets to stay at range is sacrificing damage for (limited) extra toughness. That seems like something reasonable to have as a tradeoff to me.

I disagree. It's not the best MM set but I think it has a lot to offer the discerning MM. To address some of your points:

Yes, the HoT is a bit weak, but it also helps the situation where you fire off your heal to heal one pet just before a different pet takes damage. Additionally you are neglecting the "Accelerated" buff. Even on SOs you can keep Temporal Selection permanently on two pets and they get the healing you provide them substantially increased (by about 50%). In Demon Summoning, for example, the Demon Prince and the Hellfire Gargoyle end up taking the most damage so placing Temporal Selection on them will mean that you are getting a lot more effectiveness from Temporal Mending. Essentially it's combining an AoE heal and a single target heal into one power. It might not be to everyone's taste but I think dismissing it as a weak AoE heal is a mistake.

Time's Juncture is weaker than the numbers Aett gave but it's still a pretty powerful debuff. Even unenhanced 9.38% to hit debuff and 15% damage debuff is quite a bit of extra toughness for your pets. Yes, melee-mastermind is not to everyone's taste but if you take a melee oriented pet set it works pretty well and even without TJ I think the set as a whole works.

As for the general "clickiness" of the set. It's no worse than a lot of other MM secondaries and better than some. Most of the powers are once-per-spawn (or less) so while it's more intensive than Traps it's no worse than some of the other set (Trick Arrow for example).


I'll also point out the stuff you neglected to mention:

Temporal Selection is a nice damage buff and when placed on your highest damage pets will increase their damage AND help keep them alive when they draw aggro.

Distortion Field and Time Stop provide extra control which helps keep your pets alive

Farsight gives your pets a nice defense bonus AND increases their to hit by the same amount as Tactics. Given the current Incarnate Trials Tactics is almost essential for MMs if they want their pets to be able to hit anything but Farsight allows you to skip it (or take it and slot less accuracy in your pets).

Slowed Response is a nice resistance debuff for more damage.

Chrono shift is a nice emergency heal (it's also a recharge buff but I'd save it more for the emergency heal if I were soloing a MM).

I think the point you're missing is that we don't want to park our pets and wonder off on our own. We want to park our pets in a position where they can safely make ranged attacks while we work to keep the enemies at range.

For example suppose I'm on my Bots/Traps and fighting a DE Greater Devoured. Now GD's have Footstomp which will decimate any pets in range when they use it. The ideal solution would be to immobilize the GD with Web Grenade, park my bots at range and let them pound on him. The problem is I can't do that, even with stay the bots will all charge into melee, even the Protector Bots who don't even have a melee attack. The end result is that the GD uses Footstomp and turns my bots into scrap metal.

Now there are work around, for example my tactic here is to immobilize the GD and then use provoke to make him attack me, as long as I remain at range he won't use footstomp even if my bots are in melee. Still it would be nice to have an alternative solution where I can make my bots remain away from him.

Dang it, I was planning to roll a Time/Elec. If you all do so as well then I won't be a special snowflake .

That is a a fair point and I'll admit that I am making generalizations about the people who participate in AE. I'll also say that the solution I proposed is not perfect. However, given the goal of "make it easier for people who want to run story arcs to find them" it's the best solution I can think of .

An "opt in" option for story arcs is not a great solution and indeed goes against what the AE is intended for since it basically assumes that most people are using the AE for farming and that stories are the exception. However within the reality we operate in I think i is the solution that is most likely to actually work.

It should be perma-able. According to the current test server recharge is 360s (I guess it was changed since Aett wrote his list) which means you need 300% recharge to perma it (or about 25% more than perma hasten).

That breaks down to:
95% from Enhancements
50% from Chrono Shift
70% from Hasten
85% from Global Recharge

So form a practical point if view it's actually easier to get than perma-hasten is for most characters. It is high but it's doable if you've got the Inf and of course you could always take the Spiritual Alpha which would give you about 32% of it.

No, it's just hyperbole. By "as soon as they see something to attack" I actually meant "as soon as something registers on their threat tables as a valid target" I just think the first sounds better.

Basically if they are in defensive/stay mode when they decide to attack something they will almost always opt to charge into melee range. They will generally make ranged attacks first if possible but as soon as those are recharging they will ignore the stay command in favor of moving to use their melee attacks.

Time doesn't have any direct end drain but I still think the synergy is still decent. Electric Blast has pretty good sapping on its own with Short Circuit providing -recovery and strong end drain. The synergy comes from the fact that both Time and Electric work well in melee range and Time has tools to keep you (relatively) safe while you move in to spam Short Circuit. That being said, I'm planning to make a Time/Elec Defender and will almost certainly take either Electrical Mastery or Mu Mastery to get Power Sink for additional sapping (and a third single target hold).

The problem with both of these pairing (at least in my opinion) is that they provide to much of the same. TM already floors the speed of pretty much any enemy and will floor the recharge of even con enemies (althoguh higher level enemies will do more. At that point adding more slows doesn't really do much. Cold is probably still a decent choice due to the holds and the damage from Ice Storm but the secondary effects from both sets aren't going to be doing a huge amount.

In terms of a set with good secondary effects synergy I'd actually be looking at Dark Blast. The -to hit values Aett gave above are higher than what's on the Open Beta Server (I guess his numbers are older) so adding more to hit debuffs seems like a good choice. Of course the problem with Dark (and also AR and Sonic) is that the reliance on cones doesn't work hugely well with Times Junction.

It depends how you look at it. Yes, an arc based around a story would still provide lower rewards than an arc optimized for maximum rewards. However with that change an arc tagged as a story would provide higher rewards than an identical arc tagged as a farm.

Therefore the change would encourage farmers to declare their farm arcs to be stories in order to get the better rewards in which case we end up exactly where we currently are with farm arcs and story arcs all mixed up. If you want to separate stories and farms in a useful manner then the system needs to be designed to, at a minimum, provide no incentives for a creator to lie about their arc.

Now there is a possible compromise setup that could be used to give a goal along the lines you want without penalizing creators for tagging their arc as a farm, call it "Reward Normalization". What you would need to do is have a scaling arc completion bonus that provides a larger completion bonus the smaller the total rewards gained during the arc were. The problem is how do you balance this? You can't do rewards/time or someone would leave their character logged on overnight in order to get a large arc completion bonus (it took 12 hours and I got 1 ticket). You can't base it on arc length (it's almost as easy to make a 5 mission farm as a single mission farm). If you make it a static "X Tickets per mission minus the number you got in the mission, if less than 0 no bonus" then that provides incentive to simply make an arc with a lot of "get the glowie" missions speed through it and get the arc completion bonus.

Yes, unfortunately they don't STAY there. As soon as they see something to attack they charge off into melee range. since fixing the stay command is apparently not possible without rewriting the pet AI allowing us to immobilize them would be a possible solution.

This is power specific. In general aura-type toggle powers (such as the ones you mention) are auto-hit but click style ones (such as Soul Drain) are more likely to require a hit check. Rough rule of thumb, if it doesn't take accuracy enhancements, it's probably autohit.

Again, it depends on the specific case. Most pseudopets are untargetable and as such will not boost the power. However I can't guarantee that is the case for all pseudopets.

As an example, In Maria Jenkins arc there is one map which has a lab with fires. I have seen Mastermind pets attack the fires despite the fires being untargetable by players. Given that it's possible that those would count for the scaling auras.

The problem with that is regulation. There isn't any practical solution to automatically filter for farms that wouldn't be trivial to bypass so unless Paragon Studios hires a bunch of people to spend all of their time vetting AE arcs to make sure they are in the right tab you're reliant on the arc creators to put them in the right tab. The moment story arcs give better rewards than farm arcs every farm creator will tag their farm as a story arc simply to get the better rewards. Any system designed to separate story and farm arcs should keep in mind the idea that farm arc creators do not (in all probability) care how their arc is tagged unless it affects rewards while story arc creators probably do care. I wouldn't go as far as to advocate farm tagged arcs giving better rewards (although that would be an option) but if I were implementing such a system I would do everything possible to make creating a farm tagged arc easier than creating a story tagged arc. Specifically:

1. All existing arcs are tagged as farm arcs (people who care about their stories will be more willing to update their arc than someone who created an old farm using an exploit that no longer works)

2. New arcs are set to "farm" by default (again, story writers will care enough to change this, farm creators are unlikely to)

3. The AE arc window defaults to the farm tab the first time you open it (after that it defaults to the last tab you looked at)

I agree with this in theory, but what you do need to be careful of with this sort of thing is "power creep". Sure adding 3 more slots as a global unlock won't break the balance as long as that the only thing you add. The problem is that you then start getting the situation where people ask for other minor power boosts and eventually they do start making a significant difference. The devs would eventually need to set a line and say "no more bonuses beyond here" and setting the line at "no bonuses, period" is a lot easier than setting it once people have been able to purchase things like extra slots.

We've already seen something of the sort with the Veteran Rewards system and booster packs. Sure the powers themselves are minor but Vets do get a lot of them and it does make them more powerful (especially at lower levels). There's a reason the later Vet and Booster powers tend to be more convenience/travel powers than actual attacks.

Agreed, it might even supplant Traps. I'm know I'm planning to make a Time/Elec Defender as soon as I21 comes out (hurry up devs).

Well it's definitely worse than, say, Fortitude or Speed Boost (weaker buffs and fewer sustainable targets) but it is an interesting power. I do agree though that it's one of the two really skippable powers in the set (the other being Time Stop).

That being said overall I think it's a good set, there aren't any obvious dud powers and everything looks useful which is always nice.

I would think so.

Agreed. I can see it being ok for the temp powers that just clone a relatively basic attack but unlimited charges of things like Backup Radio and Recovery Serum are going to be very powerful.

Personally I like the idea of "pointless ostentation for the sake of ostentation", I think it fits with the basic theme of the group. They are a large group of ultra-powerful mages and I always get the feeling that they consider themselves superior to other humans. As such I think they would favor pointless ostentation as a way of showing their natural superiority. It's just unfortunate that their fashion sense is a few millennium out of date.

A few more basic costumes would be kinda nice for low level enemies at the point where everyone thinks they are just some cult but for the high level foes overly fancy costumes make a lot of sense.

You're probably thinking of the Paragon Rewards Tokens. You have to spend $15 to get a PRT but according to the released info purchasing ANY amount of Paragon Points (or subscribing for a month) will upgrade you to premium. I'm not certain what the minimum amount of Paragon Points that you can purchase in one go is although I suspect it's $5 (since the devs seem to mention the $5 = 400 PPs rate a lot).

That effectively means that as soon as you make ANY purchases you become a premium player.