Dr_Mechano

Well bally ho, the servers are down wotwot, well stone the crows I'll be surprised that those devious devs appear to have made a kerfuffle on the timing of the maintenance of the servers I say good man.

The timing is poppycock as you would say.

But it does give me time for tea.

Which is just bully.

There you happy now Sam?

This is my most impressive so far, tray full of small Reds, the Call to Justice alignment power and Rage. Was trying to one shot a Rikti Pylon, unfortunately it only took about a third off instead.

Heh well that gives me something to do, taking a break from 'what AVs can I now solo thaks to the pets' to, How quickly can I solo a Pylon...

Right semi-necroing this because.

Well, the LFG tool seems kind of...pointless.

On Union EVERYTHING is premades, nobody uses the LFG tool or if they do, really rarely.

It seems that from what I hear on the US servers, they too are utilizing 80% pre-mades as well so.

It appears this fact of gathering and using premades surprised even the devs, I guess they all assumed everyone would just use the LFG tool to randomly join raids but the playerbase seems to have gone 'eh, rather just gather up in Pocket D/Rikti Warzone and go from there'.

So I ask once more, what's the point in the LFG tool again?

Not going to spoil the surprise, run the new Sutter Taskforce for yourselves people!

Ok tested against Marauder.

Now got the Very Rare Vicky + ACU (don't feel the buff bot is worth it) and if he hadn't had unstoppable, would have dropped him in about 20 seconds, if that.

So yes, the Warwork Lore pets turn a person who can't solo an AV into someone who can.

Update:

Just shy of soloing a GM with Shivan help, give it another 2 minutes and would have done it.

I'm in the same boat, picked it before I knew it was bugged since I wanted a sort of Zeus's lightning style attack for my character.

It gets easier to stack the higher up you go, I believe the limit is -25% damage resistance oh, to be fair I'd recommend going the 50% chance of dam res, 25% chance of fire Dot.

The Fire DoT actually really adds a lot to damage.

In about 25 Trial runs I have not once seen the very rare reward table.

Kind of cheesing me off now.

On Union MO BAF or nearly MO BAF runs are regular occurances which nets you 5 or more Astral merits per run.

These translate into 20 Threads plus whatever you got on the Trial.

Normally bugs like this are fixed sharpish so I'm assuming that it's actually a lot harder to fix than normal.

I do hope they don't overnerf it to compensate though.

Hardest I've seen my Very Rare judgement Ion hit is it once cranked up to a truly incredulous 1500 damage per mob with Rage + whatever the Heroic align damage buff is called + very rare damage Alpha and a boatload of red insps.

Wish I'd screenshotted that.

Find it interesting that it is rare for the US servers to run the BAF 'MO style' yet on Union it's pretty much the ONLY style run, as in every run follows the 'Fight AVs individually at spawns, 1 team per AV with 1 additional team and 1 member from each of the other teams dealing with reinforcements'.

An interesting divergence in tactics used by the different servers.

Do the US servers tend to use the two 'choke points' either side of the tennis courts for the escaping prisoners or the way it was first done when trying it, 2-3 people to a door to deal with the prisoners?

Actually wasn't the dip from Issue 6 and ED merely matched by the addition of new subscribers bought in by City of Villains IIRC?

There may have been a little net gain but if they'd done ED without Expanshalone (stupid name and stupid idea as well, should have made it an Expansion, WoW style) then it could have been a very serious problem.

I will point out that the Ion core judgement is currently bugged to be RIDICULOUSLY powerful.

It either, from what I can figure out.

A) Accepts outside damage buffs, mine says 400 something with another 200 on the proc when I regularly see it hitting for 700 damage and then the 200 proc ontop when Rage is in full swing. Now this may be the +45% damage Alpha I have slotted.

or

B) Jumps back onto targets it's already jumped from, meaning it tends to hit a clustered group of say, 20 enemies, twice each, dealing absurd amounts of damage.

So while at the moment it's beyond awesome, don't expect it to remain so awesome in the future.

Yup you basically need to go.

Common->Uncommon-Rare x 2

Since the Uncommon uses the Common as a component of crafting and the Rare uses the Uncommon as a component of crafting.

Once you have 2 Rares plus your favour of the well (2 x Notice of the well and 32 Shards) and 2 common salvage, then you craft your very rare.

Using the easiest method it takes rougly 4 weeks from nothing slotted to very rare slotted due to needing 4 notices of the well, which are awarded for completing the Weekly strike target.

Yeah I can see that.

They imagined everyone would use the LFG tool to do the raids, however pre-mades are pretty much the ONLY way I've seen trials run on Union from Day 1 of release, this is mainly due to the a lot smaller server numbers compared to Virtue or Freedom.

The advantage the smaller server numbers also afford Union was that you got the same faces in the premades again and again, often for 3 or 4 BAF runs in a row. From that tactical discussion arose, from that Union being the first server to achieve the Master of B.A.F. badge and to run it consistently.

The LFG tool is pretty much pointless on Union because:

1) It doesn't put you into almost full groups who are missing 1 or 2 people, it only bumps up the numbers to a minimum and then doesn't seem to add more people beyond a certain point.

2) Union makes vast use of Global channels such as Sal's Badge hunters, Union Chat and a few others to organise things.

3) Even with the global channels down on initial release of Issue 20, everybody moved to Pocket D for the reasons that are expressed in this thread. It is easy to get to and a co-op zone which made it the natural place to launch raids from and completely ignored the LFG tool.

4) The Rikti Warzone, while it does get some use, doesn't see as much as Pocket D.

Atleast on Union, there might as well not BE an LFG style option, it's premades or like the other night where we were going for an 8 man Lambda run, it'll add 1 extra person and that was it.

Well came back and while Vicky is much more survivable against Kraken than against a Rikti Pylon the DPS isn't enough to overcome the regen with a Tank to be able to solo the GM in the 5 minute timelimit.

the health WAS dropping and if the peta was perma, give it 30 minutes and I could probably solo it.

This was with the Very Rare Reactive 75% -Res chance and 25% chance of fire Dot, very rare +45% damage alpha and a Rare Warwork buff pet.

Now if you include a Shivan with that, it might be doable, I'll test again later.

Yeah but the abbreviation for Astrial merits becomes As-merit...

Ok just managed to Duo a Paladin clockwork with a level 40 Corruptor heroside, having the -res interface really helps.

Seriously for single target DPS, just about the best pet in the game, the numbers, especially when combined with the +damage Alpha and the -res/fire DoT of Reactive, turns a Tank into a possible GM soloer.

I'm going to go test that out once the Warwork pet has recharged.