Defenestrator

That would be about as expected as the Spanish Inquisition.

The pets are the only part of any of this I'm having a problem justifying thematically. My electric blaster is a technology person, so I went with the Clockwork. My electric brute went with the Seers, because...well, for no real reason.

And I hesitated to take Reactive on my electric blaster at first, but then I realized electricity CAN set stuff on fire.

I thought the same thing about "Lord of the Rings." Those books are so bogged down in minutiae at times that they're not always easy to slog through. I know the movies made some fundamental changes that honked off a few people, I thought most of the improvements were worthwhile.

I've not read any of the books "Game of Thrones" is based on, but I definitely enjoyed the premiere. I noticed HBO trotted out Timothy van Patten to direct again last night. Check him out on IMDB...he works on just about every one of their series. I was kind of shocked because the tone of last night's episode is so much different than "Boardwalk Empire" or "The Sopranos" or "The Pacific," all of which he has spent significant time on. There was an early moment with the White Walkers that actually got me to jump, an element I wasn't expecting at all.

Actually I was on the weapon storage team, only I went in to help the other team finish.

And, really, you've nailed my big concern. One person does it on a trial, then the next trial 4 or 5 people do it. Then suddenly you have more attention-starved lemmings out there trying to get in on the act on the next run.

On any of these I will lead, I'll lay out the instructions for the phases, and include "Please do not enter the cut scene, as it can cause the trial to fail."

I will hope that people will respect that.

Seriously. Why even take the chance of bungling a trial at that stage?

If a trial fails because something goes hideously wrong...it happens.

If a trial fails because one person decides to be a complete tool...I have a problem with that.

Part of the league trying to keep Marauder occupied usually results in:

On the ground again?
On the ground again?
On the ground again?

SPAM

He's such a griefer.

1) No reason to be an ***.
2) Okay, so we should believe that some how and in some way they've coded the reward tables to take into account the other intangible things other than damage, which may or may not include: buffing, debuffing, healing and traveling back from the hospital?

What I CAN believe that they might have coded is that someone who repeatedly disconnects (i.e. doesn't participate), or someone who sits in place and not fires off any powers (i.e. leeches) is being tracked. It would be easy to have this on some sort of timer. That's something that would actually be very easy to encode, and their reward is therefor a rock (i.e. 10 threads).

So this would skew your experiments. "I stood around and did nothing and got the worst reward," would actually be working as intended. But the Common/Uncommon/Rare/Very Rare drop rate would probably still be random, as intended.

Masque, if you still have that character's name, can you PM it to me? When I start leading these things that is NOT someone I want on my team.

So that one trial where I spend most of the time running back from the hospital on a low damage team and got a very rare...how does that fit into your anecdotal evidence?

And that other trial where I died once, gained close to 50% of the XP needed to open up a slot and got a common reward. How does that fit in?

In order for your theory to be correct, the dev team had to come up with some sort of a reward table based on some sort of arbitrary way of determining which characters participated more, and code that in to work on just these two trials without breaking anything else.

OR...random = random.

When applying Occam's Razor to this, you come out with the latter.

I've seen stone tankers face planting a lot, too. And my electric brute, with capped energy resists, has trouble against energy-wielding attacks on these trials

These are meant to be difficult, and buffs are meant to be stacked up onto teammates.

Fortunately on something like a B.A.F., you have 23 teammates and hopefully some of them have defense buffs.

I haven't run this with my reflexes scrapper yet, but I've been on Statesman TFs where my base defense gets up into the 80-100% range. Definitely overkill, but on the trials you'll need it.

My advice? Do not let any one person hold all the grenades. It is almost impossible to waste grenades (unless you use them before people are actually attacking Marauder). If someone throws a grenade a second person attempting to throw a grenade will get an "Invalid Target" message.

If the grenades are held by multiple people:

1) If the grenade holder gets killed you don't need to wait for him to get back from the hospital.
2) If the grenade holder is a jerk and logs out with all the grenades (since this post is about sabotage)...or he ends up simply getting disconnected (it does legitimately happen), then the rest of your Trial isn't hosed.

Masque, myself and someone else have been discussing this on the Victory forum. I've actually observed this and can confirm.

If the portals behind where the acid cylinder spawns are still open, reinforcements will spawn there and start running over to Marauder. If anyone attacks one of those MOBs, you will pull Marauder and all of his buddies over to you.

The B.A.F. actually works this way, too. You can pull Siege and/or Nightstar to you by attacking one of the reinforcements as they run across the compound.

They actually do come out of the portals and run over to Marauder. The horrifying problem is that if you aggro them even when they're across the map, you will aggro Marauder. If the team is trying to destroy a canister to get another acid, things can go wrong quickly if one of the reinforcement mobs runs through that area.

This also works on the BAF. You can aggro and pull both Nightstar and Siege by attacking the reinforcements as they run across the compound.

Just make sure you tell the team not to touch those things ahead of time.

Some people don't know.

I'm not sure, either, but I think I would buy that, too.

For it to NOT be random that would mean the Dev team had to invent some criteria to make it non-random, and, for these two trials only, program that criteria into the events without messing up the code for other events.

I've received a Very Rare on a run where I spent most of the time in the hospital on a low damage team and I've received commons where I received almost 50% XP needed to unlock a slot. Those two results alone should skew the whole argument.

I choose to take the path of Occam's Razor, which in this case suggests that random results are random.

That might be an issue. I think the lowest I've ever gotten on a run was 12% on a BAF, and that's because we failed miserably. (This was early on and it was a PUG run started from the LFG queue.)