Wintry

More of us... do these... things... I hope... ?

No.
Players pay subscription money.
Players facing downtime in prime time get annoyed.
Most players are in the US.
Thus patching in US prime time is not wise.

Pretty much, if they'd have a world map showing income per region where higher income would be indicated by a brighter color the US would be all white and Europe would be darkish gray.
Downtime is put in the timezone of the darkness, in that case.
That's business.

They don't always have the choice, but when you do you gotta do what's good for business.

Takes two hours without that...
Well, maybe not that long, but far too long to remain interesting.
I've soloed near every heroside GM on my ill/rad troller before i20 and I've started on Lusca too, but when I did that I just stopped after 2 tentacles.
Since they actually are GMs of their own... assuming for illustrative purposes Jurassik would respawn as quick as Lusca resurfaces I could've literally killed a Jurassik for each tentacle in the time would've taken me - quite depressing.

It was simple enough, but it's loooong and tedious, very tedious, even with a toon that soloed GMs before these toys showed up.

Agreed, the double ice/rad combo does seem pretty solid and secure, but personally I'd like some more damage as well. Wading through regular mobs it wouldn't be one of the quickest combos for sure.
Additionally, but I guess that may be just personal preference, outside of some special exceptions I prefer not to go with 2 of the same sets in a duo, not even to mention doing exactly that... twice - for both primary and secondary sets.

As for AoE sleep, it's use is rather limited. Like you say you can hold off an ambush, but that would be about it in practice, wouldn't it?
Since you speak of putting damage procs in your AoE toggles... sleep is kinda useless in the mob you're fighting anyway?

And I don't know the whole ice set for controllers off the top of my head, but am I right in thinking those damage procs would be your only real form of AoE damage output?
Cause again... I think that would be way too slow for my liking (yes, yes, I am taking into account rad debuffs), unless I'm missing something here.

All we can do is hope...

Correct. On a dry run before we got lucky on our hit rolls and managed to take down 1 yellow mito, then spent over half an hour trying to take down the second until Sky said what about the lore pet?
Worth a try, so I summonned Victoria and it was pretty embarrassing. She pretty much made us both look like fools as she poked yellow mitos to death.
I could almost read the boredom off her face, at least that's what it felt like.

In the final run I had her do 2 mitos in a row 3 times. In the two pauses between them I pulled her back for healing with transfusion off a pylon.
The net result was all yellows down within the 5 minutes of 1 summon.

Edit: It wouldn't have worked if she would've constantly gotten knocked back either, but I used Clarion on Victoria to fix that.

The quickest I've seen mine die so far was in about 40 seconds which was while she had the full attention of an aggrocap worth of Rikti.
Another time she tanked Rommy on ITF with just the aid of my transfusion perfectly fine for as long as the timer allowed her to last.

Vicky can definitely take a bit of a beating.

http://tinyurl.com/65wzeqd

Aye, definitely. She took those yellow mitos down quicker than I've seen many a scrapper do it.

This idea is seriously awesome, with one 'but'...

But... someone put animated hair in my head a while ago - I want that first.

There appears to be a much, much broader problem with zone instancing atm.
What you're seeing I'm guessing is the tip of the iceberg.

Aha... and I just posted another thread about that too.
That explains...
Well, this will teach me not to log out all my toons in Atlas. From now on I will systematically spread them throughout Paragon City to increase my chances of being able to play something!

I just never get the DBserver message though, it seems to just crash pretty quickly.

For BAF... longer time per run = less boobwatch annoyance = sustaining the grind longer = more threads in the long run.

Other than that I largely agree.

I can only confirm this.
Just to add another example for the unbelievers: Mk-VI "Victoria" played a key role in yesterday's duo MoLGTF.
In short: Victoria made me wonder what in the world is keeping all those scrappers when they're trying to kill yellow mitos.

A pet 2-3 hit acing yellow mitos... even including pulling her back for transfusion healing off a pylon after every 2 of them I was easily able to take down all 6 yellow mitos with 1 summon of 1 Victoria.



Edit: Put up a better screenie.

Actually what Angelic says is quite right... for some people.

It really depends on what your own playing style is and what you like to do in-game.
Depending on that you'll mix more regularly with a certain group of people in-line with this than with many others and thus your vision on other aspects of the game gets somewhat blurry.
We are all affected by this to some extent - some a lot more than others.

For instance, I don't know nearly as much as many, many others about how teamplay in lower levels arcs and TFs goes these days. Who fullfulls what sorts of roles different than they do at higher levels, etc...
Why? Simple, because I don't like playing low-level characters myself and thus end up not doing it.

I know people who like speedrunning TFs so much they have to ask if a normal time for an STF is more towards 30 minutes or 2 hours - they just never do it.

Back to the quoted statement: If you find yourself enjoying the game by playing content in a way that often requires you to really get teams to match certain requirements etc you'll also see this happen a lot more around you by teams others form, because you get a tendency to look towards the people who do the same.
Myself I'm very much in that position as well.

It is exactly this that is also the reason for my opinion on PBs.
Let me reiterate:
Perhaps this post explains it better, but I already tried to illustrate the point there.

That is a direct result of all the above-mentioned in this post.

How everyone plays the game differs and due to how I play it PBs are considered by me and many of the people I team with most and organize things with considered suboptimal.
Ofcourse, for others who play the game entirely differently they can be awesome and that's a good thing too.

There is another issue as well.
Despite the fact Paragon Studios keeps saying the game was not made specifically harder post-i9, IOs are still completely optional and all content bar incarnate content is still doable with SOs there is one major difference in a lot of 'new content' in comparison to the content from before that.
The difference are ambushes. I've never looked into it enough to be able to back this up (seeing as I'm perfectionist when it comes to builds myself and don't bother with SOs at all), so I can't guarantee the truth in this, but it does seem to me that over the course of time content has become increasingly ambush heavy.
For a blaster following the original concept of the AT (which was a more than fine concept, I might add) that can be very troublesome.
All the more since the fact lots and lots of others do go IO / set heavy the use - and especially the proper use - of tanks has decreased a lot.

Easy way to form a quick reply, but it doesn't make much sense.
If you read back you'll see I'm very aware of what the capabilities of a PB are, I just don't agree with many in that it would be sufficient to be a more worthy team asset than just about anything else.

Unless ofcourse you wish to argue that a PB is more a jack of all trades than something more specialized...
If not, my point stands and all that's left for you is to agree or disagree with it as you please.

True. A toon, PB or not, is generally never useless unless they're outside or at the start of the mission standing still, doing nothing.
Personally I'd say a PB in most any team context is a suboptimally spent team slot, so to say.

That said, I'd love the devs to give them some abilities that could make you say "For X you need a PB.". Then perhaps I'd dust off my own PB again, which I haven't really touched since i8 now I think.

I don't play 'em anymore, nor do I reject any on my teams however, so who cares?
Also, WSs don't suck, but imho PBs still do because...

...I'm that type of guy who prefers specialization.

If I need a damage dealer I'll invite a dedicated damage dealer, if I need a healer I'll invite a proper healer. A tank, a tank, etc...
That one person who does a little bit of everything suboptimal to the toons more specialized in each respective task will never have my preference.

That said, however, I realize also this is my own opinion on it. To each their own.
The only time I may ever actually refuse a PB because of him being a PB is if I'm doing something where aggro management is an important factor and I'm stuck with a WP tank, which should be next to never.