_Avid

Shadow Empire completes it again!

started Saturday 3:18pm est. finished Saturday 5:50pm est.

Team members (All members of Shadow Empire):

Isyss - L50
Mistress Foley - L50
IceMaiden - L50
Despair - L50
CHERRY - L47
Walks Among You - L50
Radiant foley - L50
Arctic-Doom - L50

BTW, The descriptions for these SHOs are different. So far, for dam/mez, heal/end, and acc/mez it says Numina magically synthesized it. Dam/range, dam/acc says Positron replicated it.

One of our teammates DCed in the fight against Statesman. We stopped and waited for him to come back. He did not receive a SHO at the end. Really wack.

From Positron:
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It took over 2 months for people to beat the Hamidon.

It took just over a week for the LR SF to be completed.

Just because one group used specific builds to beat it, does NOT mean that 'only those builds can beat it'.

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Hope is not lost? Get to work people. Go find the other ways

Again from Positron:
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It is possible to split up the final guys.

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Looks like there is a way to pull. We just haven't found it yet.

Now if I could only get a comment about the SHOEs...

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The only reason my team walked through this so easily is because we have almost the perfect setup played by highly skilled players coordinating our efforts almost perfectly. And we still had a hard time. I really doubt that most teams will be that good; let alone bring the right powersets.

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You might be absolutely right about that (I have to differ to your judgement considering you have done it and I haven't even tried yet) but that means there is a severe issue with this SF that needs to be addressed. I would be "I quit this game" kind of angry if the only way I could get some SHOEs for my Dominator was to level up a Corruptor to go through the SF for him.

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I don't see how any team can beat this without a mix of 7-8 of the right MM/corruptor. Big problem for everyone else.

Honestly, I couldn't really see much with all the buffs/debuffs and fx flying around. Was spending more time worrying on other things.

They all had around 30k hp.

The obvious is that Numina is a empath with fort, both RAs. She has psionic attacks. Didn't notice if she had heal other or rez since we took her out first. Didn't notice if she had a nuke or not.

Sister psyche is mind/ff. She bubbles her allies and uses psionic attacks. She has a very accurate nuke when her hp is low. Took out over half my uber buffed team while she was debuffed. We just barely took her after she nuked us. Only me and foley survived to finish her.

Manticore uses his AoE arrow attack ALOT. He is the most accurate of the 8 and hit us more then anyone else. Really annoying but it didn't hit as hard since it was a DoT thingy. Looked like he had leadership. Will confirm it on our next run.

Positron seemed exactly like anti-matter.

Synapse move REALLY FAST. We could not slow his movement speed at all. So we had MM pets surround him so he couldn't move

Citadel is weak. He uses Nova when he's low on hp.

Back Ally Brawler has huge hp. He took the longest to take down and uses unstoppable when his hp is low. His AoE and ST attack hit really really hard.

Statesman is meh. He hits really hard but he didn't hit us He uses some kind of lightning nuke at the end.

I don't think all you people actually know how difficult this SF really is. You're going to have people failing more often then passing. Consider how often a Hami raid fails compared to this. Then consider if you need help in a Hami raid you can always bring more people. You're stuck with your 8 person team in this SF. If you didn't bring what is needed you're out of luck.

The only reason my team walked through this so easily is because we have almost the perfect setup played by highly skilled players coordinating our efforts almost perfectly. And we still had a hard time. I really doubt that most teams will be that good; let alone bring the right powersets.

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So for the SHOEs :P Do they have the same attributes and graphics as the original?

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They seem exactly like HOs. The only difference is the word Synthetic in the name and a slightly different description since they are 'replicated by positron'.

Edit: *Possible Spoiler* The Future Freedom Phalanx seem to refer to them as H-Boosters in the SF.

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This SF is not something that will fail due to lack of #'s. Matter of fact once the AV's regen are brought down a bit as stated by positron you can probably due this TF with 5 or 6 of the ideal powersets.

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For SG's that have more than 8 ppl, maybe, but for a lot of us, getting together enough people of the right AT's and right powersets wont be that easy. I shudder to think what it's going to be like with the average spastic-cant-follow-orders-let-alone-plan-ahead PuGs. At least with respec in CoH, we could just get 3 of us together and bring along any scrub...

Not to mention it takes 3x as long to do for all involved, instead of what happens with hami where half the ppl show up after he's held.

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This is exactly my main problem with this SF. A PUG for this SF will have to be almost perfect to complete this. It's not like hami since you only have a pool of 8 people with the required powers to do it.

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Meant to ask before but what was your Diff. setting?

Do you know if you run it on "Villianous" will you get EB versions of the AV/H's?

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We were set on villainous. All mob lvls were spawned at 49. First 4 Heroes spawned at L50 Hero. Next 5 at L53 Hero. Last 8 at L54 Hero. Even setting the mission for 1 person spawns L54 Heroes. So their levels are set.

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For this SF you ONLY need 8 villains. Thats it. That means villains can easily throw down and get thier sHO every single day if they want.

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You obviously haven't tried this SF. It isn't exactly easy to complete. I wonder if I never posted how we did it and our builds if anyone else would have a clue as to how to beat it. Judging from the sheer amount of PMs I recieved from people asking how to do this, my guess is that most players would not even think of doing what we did. Honestly, when I laid out the plan my team basically yelled at me calling me a crazy moron. It's a good thing they know me or else none of this would have worked

Now consider your average team trying this. How many do you think will actually be able to pull this off? Even with AV/Hero regen nerf, which doesn't matter, you still have to find a way to separate 8 L54 Heroes, which I don't think is possible, and then not die to their attacks that can hit you for over 3k damage.

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This SF is not something that will fail due to lack of #'s. Matter of fact once the AV's regen are brought down a bit as stated by positron you can probably due this TF with 5 or 6 of the ideal powersets.

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Do you honestly think their regen rate matters to make that much of a difference? If you have the 'ideal' powersets it won't. If you don't then you aren't going to complete this. It's that simple.

So now lets look at the math. 8 villains with the IDEAL powersets. Every 24 hours. Who can actually complete this SF. You're only looking at the hardcore SGs. No average player or PUG will be able to do this (unless they happen to luck out and get the required powersets) not without this SF being seriously reworked. And if it is reworked to be easier, then guess what the same hardcore SGs will be completing this and your average PUG will probably still fail. Like you said, This is about numbers. You have to have the right amount of this or that or else you fail. And you have a smaller pool of people to choose from.

Now of the teams that do pass. That gives you only 8 SHOs to trade per team per successful run. How many Teams and people do you think have the right powersets to do this? Now how many of those right powersets will happen to fall into the same team? My guess is not many and not for a long time. So you only have a handful of people being able to complete this regularly.

Add in the fact that you can't choose your SHO so your entire team could potentially get a lysosome or another SHO that none of you can use. Too bad there is no one else to trade with. Unlike the other 75-150+ people after a hami raid.

If that's the case... considering the required team setup and the fact that there will be only 8 people to trade with at the time, can we please have the option to CHOOSE our SHO? It'll definitely be a huge quality of life improvement.

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NOTE: You can only earn the The Lord Recluse Strike Force reward once every *24 hours* This is by design to help prevent farming.

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That's not cool!

I'm officially so mad right now.

More rewards I forgot about:
Master of Olympus badge - You have destroyed the Kronos Titan, showing Malta that the heroes of Paragon City defend their turf.
Annihilator badge - Nice smackdown on the Freedom Phalanx. Lord Recluse is pleased with your performance.

Our Brute did use taunt. He could only taunt 5 in the beginning but once we worked their numbers down he had most of the aggro. From the amount of times we died or got hit once we took out 3 of them leaving 5, I'd say taunt works. We did get hit though. I'm not sure if it was our brute not perma taunting or if it was their AoEs hitting us or taunt not lasting long on them but for the most part I think taunt works.

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She's mind/FF and must also die.

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I don't ever want to hear you say this, Rush.

Edit: Congrats on beating the SF. Did you all get a year's free subscription?

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You're Next!!
No year free subscription

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You design the team makeup like that on purpose, or it just work out that way?

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I designed our team this way. Our first night we almost did it with a zerg rush but just couldn't quite pull it off. So on our next try we picked up another /rad and it went rather smoothly. Not to mention that they were the only 50s online

Let me just say, rushing into 8 L54 Heroes like that is immensely fun. It was fun charging into 5 L53 Heroes too. Nearly creamed my pants when we dropped Numina

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Much congrats, guys! That's damned impressive!

1 question: Did you all get the Annihilator badge for the (I think) 3rd mission and Master of Olympus for killing the Kronos?

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Master of Olympus yes and Im not sure about the Annihilator though. Cant recall it getting it.

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I asked Customer Service to grant you all the Annihilator badge this morning, so you should all have it by now. It's not working in the game yet.

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We have the badge now. Thanks!

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Grats on this again guys, but I do have one question is the SHOE you get pickable or is it random? Also do you get SO's for kill the AV/Heroes too?

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All Heroes dropped a random 53 SO except Statesman. Statesman dropped a 52 SO for some unknown reason. sHO is randomly awarded at the end which I personally think is wack.

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Read, dominators get lost, Stalkers take a hike. I can see this is going to be lovely.

Im not being critical of the team that did this, congratulations to them.

Im angry at the devs for this, I havent gotten to high 40's but I will say 75% of players arent going to be able to do this even if the AV's were rolled back to i6 level.

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I definitely agree with you. I sent a PM to _Castle_ basically asking how in the world non-optimal teams would complete this along with other issues I had.

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I don't know, personally I would love to be able to put together a good 8 man team and run this whenever I wanted instead of having to wait for a ton of people to log on for a scheduled raid. Random or not is irrelevant to me, sure there are only 8 people on your team you can trade with, or the 8 from another team, or another... I know with AV's as they are now there won't be that many teams completing it but hopefully after the roll back it will increase. Just my opinion you can feel free to ignore it.

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Correct me if I'm wrong with the AV/Hero rollback but from my understanding of the AV/Hero rollback they are only lowering their regen rates. If that's the case then I won't expect any non-optimal team completing this. With all of our -regen powers we didn't notice their high regen rate.

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That makes the most sense. I assume you all were singling out one hero at a time to beat on while trying to contain the others inside the debuff? Was there any one that was easier to take down than the others? Or conversely, was there any one hero that caused the most trouble that you wished to eliminate first? I suspect Statesman or Brawler was your priority.

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Numina First. She's an empath and must die. Sister Psyche second. She's mind/FF and must also die. After that it's your choice who to get. We took Manticore 3rd to rid them of Leadership buffs (at least it looked it he had it). Take out the support first and the team crumbles

Statesman does have this cool looking lightning nuke power when he's near death. Too bad he couldn't hit any of us

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Good work guys!

Can we get a play by play for a guide?


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Will write one up when we do this successfully again.

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Much congrats, guys! That's damned impressive!

1 question: Did you all get the Annihilator badge for the (I think) 3rd mission and Master of Olympus for killing the Kronos?

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I don't remember the Annihilator badge but we did get Master of Olympus. I'll check on it later.

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GJ Guys



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Can we still get that free year subscription?

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/em salute

Awesome job, I can't wait to try this.

Just one question? My main is an ice/cold corruptor, and I'm hoping I'm one of the "right" builds. For those how beat the unbeatable, am I?

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/cold helps alot. +def, +hp, -regen, slows, heatloss ftw!

Testing shows that /cold/Snowstorm does not bring flying Heroes down, not sure if this is a bug or intended. You will want people on your team to have web grenade. 5 out of the 8 fly and synapse is just freakishly fast.

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Congratz!

It's a shame the game is presently designed for the Team Corrupter victory


I'd like to see someone win the SF with a fairly even distribution of all ATs. As long as buffs and debuffs stack to the ceiling or the floor, no other AT brings more to the table than a corrupter.

Cheers,

SUN

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Yeah I tried it with them the night before and the team blew through to the last mission without a hitch. Despair replaced my spot on last nights run and they got the job done. Just goes to show you what 1 more corruptor adds to the team.

GJ all. Damn proud of you guys an gals.

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Thanks Vego. Sorry for all the debt you got

The problem is that you have 8 L54 Heroes to survive against. Another form of defense is to kill what's attacking you before they kill you (Blaster 101). Without the -regen it's going to take you longer and your team will have to keep buffing the team more often. With all the chaos of 8 L54 Heroes pounding on you I'm sure it's not as easy as you think it will be to keep up. Each one of them has around 30k hp so you have to beat their regen rate and their resistances and survive their counter attacks.

Each one of them can 1 shot you if it wasn't for the 1 shot code. Even with high resistance and a high regen rate, you will still be nearly 1 shot. So my plan was to bring high defense and high tohit debuffs to make sure they don't hit us. The problem is that we had to keep them all close enough to debuff them all at the same time and not die to their AoEs. That was the tricky part.

Like I said before, we couldn't find a way to separate them to kill them one at a time. So we had to take them all at the same time. If your team manages to pull them apart then congrats to you. You did what we couldn't. I'm just stating my opinion from what we've experienced and proven.

The fight against Ms. Liberty, she kicks you for over 3k damage. Good times watching foley die in a split second

What really surprised me is that RoTP from /thermal actually stunnged the Heroes once in a while. That was pretty cool.

I'm still all hyped up about what we did. Who would have thought rushing into 8 L54 Heroes would work?

btw, what the hell Guild Leader Foley? That one time the night before I did run in first.

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Congrats. Only 3 hours? Where's Black_Scourge to dismiss that you did it in 3 hours. That it was impossible

If it took 3 hours with AV/GM's that were at the uber regen rate, I can't imagine how quickly it could be once the chopped down regen rate comes.

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Their regen rate is a non-issue. -regen ftw Honestly, I think if you don't bring the right powers you're screwed.

It took 1.5 hours to get to the end and another 1.5 to finish the last mission.

Not being able to pick your sHO is definitely a problem. No one got a lyso but imagine how mad we would be if we did. They should allow us a choice considering how difficult this is for just 8 people. I can understand a Hami raid since that has no limit of people, but in a SF of this magnitude we should be able to choose.

When we do this a few more times, I might post a guide... If I'm not so lazy

More pics

The Freedom Phalanx
Poor Despair
Oh snap!
Wwwwweeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

It's definitely harder. Took alot of patience, coordination, effort, right builds, and a solid game plan. Notice: you NEED the right builds to do this and that's messed up.

It'll only get easier when they nerf AV/Heroes but we had so much debuffs flying that we probably won't notice it anyways.

Now that we have the Archvillain badge, where the hell are my purple triangles??

Let it be known! Shadow Empire and Skrape (diff SG) first to complete Recluse SF!

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Even though I play on another sever. I salute you guys!!! How did you get past the last leg of it?

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Many corruptors and Vengeance. We didn't pull any Hero. Straightforward RUSH! Leeerroooy that.