Amberyl

I'm not convinced that, post-Rikti Comm Officers, that your typical MA "farm" mission is any more efficient than running regular radio/paper missions, save for the fact that you waste less time going from group to group, and traveling from mission to mission.

I have certainly seen plenty of idiots try to do farm missions with the equivalent of a sewer team, deluded into believing that it's smart to try to fight purple-con custom LTs at level 5. Even more moderate forms of this tend to be slower than an eight-man sewer team. The situation gets better in later levels, particularly the post-SO levels, but in general, fast leveling in MA tends to come from leeching, just like it does outside of MA. It's just that the auto-SK seems to make team leaders less aware of the leeching phenomenon.

As a farming individual, you might be able to optimize an MA mission for your particular build, but if you're someone of this sort, all you're doing, in all likelihood, is switching from a dev farm to your own farm to eke out that last little bit of reward per minute. Creating a good farm for an 8-man team is another matter, particularly if you expect it to be played pre-level 40 or so. The kinds of things a group of IO'd-out 50s can take on are very different from, say, a group of level 25s with SOs.

Post-Comm Officers, the community hasn't, as far as I can tell, settled on particular MA farms. If you join a farm team, chances are that the arc you'll run will be something you haven't seen before, with custom powersets and costumes that are new and unique. At the very least, new visuals are a welcome change. Ironically, by farming, you're actually probably going to see new content with every new group you join.

Since this is your highest-level character, if you're solo I'd actually recommend running story arcs. Team for fun if you want, but the stories are usually worth seeing at least once.

On your iMac, do a:

/macro GFX reloadgfx

Put the macro button somewhere on your toolbars. Hit the macro immediately after you zone, as well as every time you are in a place with a lot of people (like Ms Liberty on a high-population server). You may also want to hit the macro immediately before zoning.

Do this faithfully and it's generally pretty stable. Forget and you'll pay the price in crashes.

6-slotting with recharge is fine with you have TOs and DOs, but when you get SOs, three recharge SOs will be all you need (after that, you'll hit the heavy diminishing returns with ED).

I think the assumption is that a bugfix to the actual problem is not going to come anytime soon.

For more fun, I switched from editing an arc on my Mac to editing on my PC, and the file size dropped nearly 30%.

I agree on the controller. You're going to want the ability to lock things down later on, especially if you run TFs, and the secondaries will have useful team augmentation as well.

Fire and Plant both deal excellent damage. I would suggest pairing Fire with Rad, and Plant with Thermal.

Alternatively, consider a Dark/Sonic defender. Dark is a fairly control-heavy primary, and the Sonic attacks will help boost the group's damage even further with their -res.

For the OP:

An edit and republish will not change your arc ID and stars (only unpublishing will do that). I'd suggest you add something to your arc description as well as the text of your first mission warning people about the balance problems.

I've decided not to touch my own arcs until the nerf/buff cycle settles down and we get something that looks reasonably like equilibrium. I think it's a waste of time in the face of utter dev silence and what I assume is a deliberate attempt to obscure changes in the name of not revealing "exploits". When it all settles down, I'll look at my content and what's left of MA, and decide whether or not it's worthwhile to try to fix it. I'd suggest you'd have lower blood pressure if you resigned yourself to it being entirely broken for balance for a while, and simply flag it as such.

I strongly agree with the suggestion about mixed ranged/melee mobs -- if they have a ranged powerset, they should never use the one from their melee set.

I use Martial Arts much the same way Ultimo does.

The grand irony, of course, is that if the devs continue to favor an MA (architect) balance that makes it hard to create story-focused, soloable, story arcs with custom critters reasonably on par with normal PvE critters, they'll end up with an MA that is overwhelmingly used primarily for farming and for challenges to melee toons, rather than an MA that has broad appeal and vastly expanded content range for all players.

It depends whether you are interested in having solo players see your story or not. If you're mostly making something gameplay oriented, with the story as a lightweight wrapper around reasons to go out and kill things, you may want to upgrade the challenge (while noting very explicitly in your arc description how many EBs / AVs there are in the missions). If you're focused on story, I'd recommend sticking with normal bosses. (Among other things, a player who has to fully focus on trying to kill the darn thing without dying is much, MUCH less likely to read either your boss dialogue or descriptions.)

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I hate villains. Especially in CoV where everyone is just a pawn in Recluse's puzzle and MOST players seem to think that evil must be so darkitty dark dark bad that their characters must kick every puppy they come across and rip the heads off babies because they're -just- that evil.

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Hmm. I've always felt that CoV was not so much dark, as inadequately lit.

You have to play for a bit, and be somewhere populated -- if you're on a low-population server or in a low-population zone, you will have fewer issues, probably due to fewer costume loads.

Log into Freedom. Go to Atlas Park. Stand somewhere there are a ton of heroes. Try running or jumping towards the AE building. There's a very good chance you'll have a crash. If not, try going into an AE mission, running around a bit, and then zoning out. There's a good likelihood you'll get a crash within thirty seconds or so.

The balance problem, of course, is this:

Scrapper, tank, or brute: Hey, quit it! That tickles!
Everyone else: OH GOD MY FACE, MY FACE!

MA content is certainly startlingly challenging on my melee toons, especially when there are enough minions to stack enough magnitude to overcome mez protections. But it's a little owie compared to what squishies face, especially now.

I'd rather the devs impose XP caps and other explicit anti-abuse protections, than to prevent fine-grained controls over critter power level and indeed, reasonably standard-mob-equivalent critter design.

I realize in retrospect that my testing was somewhat skewed because all the custom critters in the mission I was testing have Martial Arts as a secondary, and therefore, all of them were flinging shurikens, so it was really raining death. The hit rate seemed pretty close to 100%, though, although I've got some okay defense. Do shurikens get a weapon accuracy bonus?

As added frustration, I originally used dual blades on quite a few of my custom critters (remember, this mission was designed for lowbies). A spawn of three white-con DB+MA minions managed to splatter all three of my Imps. I'm going to have to go back and change that, too, due to the much higher damage from the new combos. I'm trying to decide what to do about that, because I love the DB animations and I have a bunch of critters thematically costumed along those lines, using different types of blades.

(Yes, I admit, I experiment with MA in part because I get to create lots and lots of costumes.)

At the moment, I'm choosing not to rebalance my arcs, because I have frankly no idea how I would rebalance them. I'm just going to go back and add into the descriptions, "Warning: Squishies cannot solo this mission because MA critter balance is now broken." and leave it alone until we get some dev sanity.

Well, I'm testing this on a 50 -- with defense, resists, regen, and extra HP from IO sets.

My defender would simply die, even with 3 white minions rather than 5.

Put another way: Melee mobs should not have ranged attacks that do damage like Nemesis snipers.

Damage over time doesn't matter, here; we're talking about an alpha strike. No other melee mob on the game does ranged damage like this on an alpha.

I think you're missing the point, which is that I could have waltzed into that mob of 5 white-con minions and taken the hits of 5 attacks from their melee sets without dropping into red health. I could have approached 5 white-con minions with a ranged blast set and taken 5 hits without dropping into red health. Or into a mob of 5 white-con minions of any normal enemy group of the game and taken 5 hits, whether ranged or melee.

My controller is /kin, and I have a six-slotted heal, so in fact, yes, I immediately healed. But what would a blaster do?

More broadly, what would any other ranged toon do? Blasters and defenders and corruptors usually depend upon hitting things from range -- and because the game is balanced with that in mind, ranged attacks are generally weaker than the melee attacks, across all normal (i.e., non-custom, found in regular missions) enemy groups. Self-heals only recharge so quickly, and the new custom melee characters can do a whole lot more ranged damage than you can heal in adequate time. That leaves those ranged toons with the ugly option of charging into melee, where, assuming they're not specifically built to stand in melee (not blappers, scrapfenders, etc.), they will promptly be owned by the melee damage set.

As a controller, I don't have a snipe. Most of my defenders don't have snipes, either. And the snipe is still going to aggro the entire mass -- so now I take nearly my whole health bar over four seconds instead of two, let's say. Not helpful.

I'm asking for something rather reasonable, I think -- for custom mobs to be approximately equivalent to normal enemy groups of the same level. We know that MA mobs are somewhat more powerful, but it's not sensible for them to be overwhelmingly more powerful, especially when their ranged damage exceeds that of their primary, melee powers.

I'm talking about in MA missions.

I can, for instance, create a mission full of nothing but Button Man Muscle mobs, if I want to.

At the moment, I'm at a loss for how to create a missions that use custom melee mobs that do not absolutely destroy blasters.

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If your motive is to give designers options to avoid making crippled custom enemies? Make a reasonable ranged attack damage. But the motive is 'stop farming,' so it's 'reduce the ability to give custom enemies weaknesses.'

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All we're talking about is bringing ranged attacks for melee custom mobs in line with ranged attacks for melee normal mobs. That would make the risk of farming no higher than it is for the melee normal mobs.

No one here is arguing that there shouldn't be ranged attacks of sufficient power to stop exploitation. (Such attacks don't really need to be all that powerful, given that anything that is going to be doing a ranged blast is also going to be squishy.) We're just saying that the ranged attacks should be in line with similar critter ranged attacks, as opposed to actually doing vastly more damage than their melee attacks, including, as has already been pointed out, their tier 9s.

I'd expect that, in a melee power set, the ranged attacks would be in line with melee mobs of the same level.

In the pre-15 game, I'd expect a ranged attack would be equivalent to the Revolver power that melee Hellions get.

In the 15-40 game, I'd expect a ranged attack would be equivalent to the ranged attacks of the melee mobs within the Family (a Button Man Muscle's Automatic Pistol), CoT (a Guide's Hand Crossbow), etc.

In the 40+ range, I'd expect a ranged attack would be equivalent to the Carnies (a Harlequin Fencer's Throwing Knife), Crey (Riot Guard's Automatic Pistol) ,and so on.

Although including a non-combat hostage of appropriate level is one of the techniques now commonly used to force a mission to spawn at a particular level.

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I'd think that the following of your numbers are clearly abusing the system and not using it as intended - 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

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The flip side of this is that by including shields and other similar allies, as a misison author, I can tune the level of difficulty, particularly if I'm using EBs or AVs, and I'm doing a story-focused arc that is intended to be soloable.

These items matter a whole lot more to lower-level and solo toons than to do to a team, as well.

Teamed, I don't think the buffs really matter at all. I suspect that data-mining Meows with and without this kind of buffer will show no statistical difference in either rate of XP gain or death rate.

Explosives are another matter, but the fix for that is simple -- just make them steal XP.

It would, I think, be useful to start a list of the undocumented changes / fixes from the last patch. Some of these break missions, while others make things work that didn't work before, i.e.:

Breaks:

<ul type="square">[*] Crey Hero Lab map has been removed[*] Burning Forest map has been removed[/list]
Fixes:

<ul type="square">[*] Choosing "Random" when picking a critter from a standard group to use as a captive, now correctly chooses the critter from that group, rather than from the surrounding enemy group.[/list]
What else have you noticed?

We could also really use an "arc fix" tool. The "captured" animation is a perfect example. Writing a tool to do offline fixing of the story files is readily within player capabilities (just as much so as the compression tool), but it'd really be preferable if it were part of the existing client.

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Invalid AE missions STILL being run by players who never completed them. They can reset these missions forever as long as they do not complete objective , log out and log back.

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I don't think you can run a team through those, though. At least in my experience, a mission getting unpublished or republished, between the time you get it and the time you start it, causes teammates to not be able to zone into the mission.

Plus the more generic and obvious: a tank, brute, and many scrappers can readily pull three and survive easily, especially at upper levels. If you're regen or WP, you may walk out of it with full health. :-)