Eiko-chan

Still harder than the blueside trial. The reactor doesn't take "strategy", it just takes sitting there and bashing spawns as they come in.

Good. The concept of "Veteran Rewards" is long past its prime.

Why, then, are my TF completion times pretty much on par, but SF completion times so far below par? If I did poorly on both sides, I'd see a point that it's me, but I only perform "below par" redside, where I spend most of my time.

I've yet to see a convincing argument that it would be. Who'd know the difference?

Blueside trial does not require killing fast - yes, you can get overwhelmed, but you also get tools (heals) to help make up for doing poorly.

Redside trial requires killing fast or you fail, period full stop. There are no tools to help you make up for lost ground.

I've never completed a redside trial because of this difference.

I like making my characters as tough as possible. That's really all it is. Soloing AVs certainly isn't optimal - last one I did took like forty minutes.

That's pretty much exactly my point. Speeders are skewing numbers low and hurting the rest of us.

I would like this game to discourage the mindset of "speed runs" as much as possible. It is not intended gameplay and it is bad for the game overall.

I still run the occasional SF because it's nice to team with my VG and, as an RPer, I like being able to claim various deeds as actual in-character victories, such as defeating Reichsman or the Freedom Phalanx. But just because I have other motives doesn't mean the pitiful merit return doesn't still bug the heck out of me.

Excepting Posi and Synapse, my experience has quite firmly been with SFs not being noticeably shorter than TFs - certainly not to the extent their merit rewards would suggest. I've done the LRSF a half dozen times, and not once have I even come close to the slightly-more-than-an-hour that its 25 merits suggests. Three hours is much more typical.

My Tarkoss runs have been around 90 minutes, Barracuda tends to be around 3 hours, and the last Mistral I did was about two. The only SF I've seen that even comes close to the right length for merits is Silver Mantis, which is probably why I'm sick of running it because we've done it so much.

While we're an RP VG, we're not slouches in play - at least two of my main characters can solo AVs and x8 content, and we've got similar power builds running with us too - and I simply cannot fathom how these merit rewards got set; SFs just aren't that much faster.

Their only bonus is being far less annoying than TFs in that they're pretty much in the same zone, but that can be said in general for all redside content.

Time probably isn't a horrible basis for measurement. The problem is basing rewards on median time, rather than some more static figure, like expected time, "average" time (meaning average players, not power gamers), or some time based on median team completion, thus eliminating a group that speed runs the same SF every day from pulling down the numbers.

Basing rewards solely on how well your players that are encouraged to game the system game the system only encourages your players to game the system even more.

That does not change the fact of my statement. If 25% of all SF runs are, for instance, speed runs, that's still going to pull down the median time. And given the way merit rewards currently sit, anything but a speed run is being actively discouraged by the low merit returns, which will result in an even larger percentage of runs being speed runs, thus further lowering the median time and further lowering the reward.

Especially with the smaller base of people playing CoV in the first place, this is a serious error in the system.

I basically only play blueside when my VG mates are playing blueside too, and I really don't get how in the hell SFs come out with shorter average completion times over TFs. It's completely contrary to my own experiences.

Just yesterday, we ran two teams - a Sister Psyche TF and a Barracuda SF.

With Psyche, we finished the whole run in about two and a half hours, and that's including several of us taking breaks for food and business while doing so.

With more or less the same people, we ran Barracuda later that night. It took us three and a half hours to complete, with no breaks, and on paper Barracuda is a much shorter arc. And this is not an atypical time; our LRSF run a few weeks ago likewise took around three hours.

If the datamining just happens to be full of a bunch of speed runners pulling down the completion times, I don't think the right answer is to lower overall merit returns for people playing as intended; instead, there should be mechanisms installed to discourage rushing the SFs and skipping content.

As it stands, no one wants to do SFs because the return is simply not worth the investment due to anaemic merit rewards. You can spend three hours getting 30 merits redside, or spend the same three hours getting 50 or 60 elsewhere. Why bother?

Pets are also defence for the mastermind and the mastermind's team, both in terms of taking damage they don't and because of Bodyguard mode.

The real problem with Masterminds is they don't fit into a nice niche (or combination of niches) like the other ATs. They're really not like anything else.

While playing my Grav Controller yesterday, I had a realisation on what would really help Propel, both thematically and balance-wise: make it a narrow cone, like Penetrating Shot from Dual Pistols. You're launching a large, heavy object directly at someone. That it hits everyone in between and possibly those behind as well just makes sense.

Calling Masterminds "Ranged" is completely off base. Two MM primaries are ranged (Bots and Mercs), two are Melee (Ninja and Necro) and one is a mix of both (Thugs). While the attacks in the sets are ranged attacks, Mastermind sets are not "ranged damage" sets in the slightest.

Which is bloody stupid, considering how many powersets are based on defence and to-hit debuffing for protection.

I am so glad someone already had "Blue Bunny" when I made my Tanker on Virtue. It forced me to come up with the far more clever, and far more enjoyable, Lapin Lazuli instead.

Enemies run all the time in comics, actually. The only problem here is, when they run in comics, they count as "defeated" for purposes of the comic story. In the game, running enemies are not "defeated", and eventually wander back to where they started (and, if it's a defeat all, need to be defeated to complete the mission).

A counter proposal: allow enemies to continue to run. But make them run towards the exit, and, if they reach it, credit them as "defeated" for the player/team. Let's bring the comics back to our superheroes.

It wasn't all-MMs, but this weekend I ran an LRSF where we had 4, and it went swimmingly. Our main tank was a Thugs/Dark Tankermind (mine), we had two Bots/Traps protectors and a Necro/Poison debuffer, along with a Dom, two Corruptors (one of whom was also a Dark, the other a Rad) and a Stalker. We literally ran roughshod over everything, including Malta, the Vindicators, and the Phalanx (took down Statesman first, in fact.)

With the debuffs of the Darks, Poison, Rad and Traps, along with the buffs of the Rad and Traps, we were pretty much untouchable. My Tankermind stood for a good solid two minutes tanking Statesman solo before the group got its act together and took him down. I can't imagine more MMs making the fight more difficult than it was; an all MM LRSF seems eminently possible to me.