EricHough

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Same here. Some missions are immediately obvious garbage, and I shouldn't have to play through five missions to rate it accordingly and try to warn off the next guy.

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However, if you can only rate it if you play through it and the only way to get to hall of fame is to get ratings, then bad/unplayable trash will automatically be penalized simply by not being rated. The good ones will get played and rated (or at least the playable ones will get played) the bad ones will not get completed and not get rated.

Any other method is going to leave us where we are now - with folks being given the ability to grief/pump up an arc without even trying to play it.

Basically what most folks are proposing is that we replace low ratings with NO ratings - which then should be a searchable criteria.

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As has been said, your best bets for conserving end are as follows. And more or less in this order of importance.

Accuracy (assures less end wasted on missed attacks)
EndRedux (directly lowers your end utilization)
Damage (killing enemies faster means you attack less, and expend correspondingly less end)

As noted, you're STILL going to have to rest on occasion, and you'll periodically drain your end bar. Just carry a few blue inspies to tide you over.

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I have to disagree with this order of slotting - accuracy does come first but until you hit the damage cap, slotting damage and end reduction is of equal value as far as improving DPE and since more damage means killing faster (and taking less damage yourself) it is always better to slot for damage, once you are at the accuracy cap.


The exception to this is brutes - who generate so much damage bonus through fury that they are actually better off slotting for end reduction first.

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I had it slotted in soldiers waaay back when you could buff soldier recharge. It almost never makes any meaningful difference, compared to the chance for neg proc.

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According to mids the achilles heel proc has a 20% chance of firing, just like the touch of lady grey proc. So it should go off just as often.

I am curious how you decided it was less effective than the negative energy proc - I have the toughest time getting GOOD data on my pets attacks. I can tell when a proc goes off but without manually tabulating damage I see no way to really compare the two considering that the debuff will affect more than just the attack that procced it.

Also, with careful slotting you should be able to put both it AND a negative energy proc in soldiers - I did and it the debuff goes off all the time, often enough I pulled the one I had in spec ops as they don't stack.

I don't know how effective it would be in enforcers - it will only go off in attacks that do a def debuff which is why it is effective in soldiers, if the enforcers attacks don't all included -def then they might not be as good a choice.

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Gah, now regular missions are [censored]'d as well.
What do you want to bet this goes unlooked at until Monday?

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I hope not as I am seeing the same thing on protector - the problem occurs when entering missions and sometimes when logging into my SG base.

I guess I will have to go play my villains on justice until they figure out what is goign on.

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I'm asking for something rather reasonable, I think -- for custom mobs to be approximately equivalent to normal enemy groups of the same level.


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I guess I threw out that assumption long ago. If I go against custom groups I presume they are more effective than most normal groups unless the author is specifically gimping them for a farm. I certainly wouldn't go against custom groups in the teens with *increased* difficulty. I guess my point is I would find the point much more compelling if you were running on Heroic.

Plus, I don't know that 5 sledge hammer melee mobs in the low levels wouldn't put me into the red if they all hit. And I believe getting hit by the melee of 5 Warrior minions would be as bad.

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You are still missing his point - it is one thing to be harder than normal mobs, it is another to be impossible to balance for squishy mobs. If the ranged attacks really ARE toing more damage than any single melee attacks no blaster is going to be able to survive unless you are an unreasonable build (ranged def softcap, etc).

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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.


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I believe the idea is that the ranged powers have a long recharge so they need to hit harder to be non-trivial against fliers. So an individual attack might hit hard, I didn't seem to me like they had higher damage over time.

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The problem with this line of reasoning is that damage over time isn't a big deal for enemies that are normally meant to die fairly quickly (i.e. - minions) so it doesn't matter if they have 5 melee attacks that can kill a blaster 3 times over - as long as said blaster can kill them before they get off those 5 melee attacks then the game is reasonablly balanced (which is the point of high damage, squishy archetypes like blasters). However if 3 minions can slaughter a blaster with thier single ranged attack, then there is NO way to balance them and no way for a blaster to handle them.

I am sorry but defending overpowered attacks like this is completely unreasonable. Seriously - I think the developers have not sat down and REALLY worked out the consequences of giving attacks with a PC damage scale to mobs with NPC damage modifiers. Things like the ranged attack overkill and the HUGE effect of aim/buildup powers (which should either be completely removed from custom mobs or scaled WAY down due to the high NPC damage base) are clear signs that someone didn't really do the math.

I thought that your auto-sk level was based on your mission difficulty - if you are at difficulty 1/2 you should auto SK to the minimum level for the mission, at diffuculty 3/4 you should auto sk to minimim level -1 and at diff 5 you should auto sk to minimum level -2, thus preserving the difficulty setting - i.e your enemies will always be level+1 or level+2 at difficulty 3&4 and they will be level+2 and level+3 at difficulty 4&5.

When you talk to the contact look at the mission description text that you see after selecting the 'available missions' option - after the player created text if you are going to be auto-sk'ed it should say something like "The minimum mission level is 44 and your effective combat level is going to be set to 43 because you are at mission difficulty 3" or somethign like that - I don't remember the exact text.

If you want to solo a controller I would suggest the following to get past the lower levels (pre SO's):

1) General slotting advice - first thing to do is to make sure you cap your accuracy or at the very least hit the streak breaker softcap (90% accuracy), then slot up for damage in all your single target controls. Until you cap damage you won't really save anything by slotting recharge/end reduction. If you can actually cap damage (or at least get to 80%+, where the ED code kicks in) then you can start slotting end reduction/recharge or hold/sleep/immob duration as needed.
2) If you have access to Yin's market in faultline (requries you have at least one character that has done the penelepe yin arc and a way to transfer enhancments between characters and/or friends that can buy them for you) then select the natural or mutant origin so you can start slotting damage SO's at L10. Capping damage is the fastest way to get past the teens.
3) Pick up a good pool attack power - air superiority, boxing, kick or jump kick are all good and will take advantage of containment. This will improve your burst single target damage which many control sets lack. The exception to this is mind - levitate is basically the same power as AS but it is ranged and does more damage, so take it instead. On sets other than mind the pool attack powers will allow you to skip your single target immobilizes (or pick them up but not slot them - just use them as controlls) - they do roughly the same damage but don't take 9+ seconds to do the damage.
4) If you are really serious about soloing go with either mind, illusion or plant control. Mind is the best solo set pre-32 as it has solid single target damage and the ability to lock down any group of 3 or less mobs pretty much constantly. Illusion is second best as spectral wounds bonus damage lets you kill minions quickly, plant is probably third best although after you get stamina and SO's it is arguably tied with mind as you can do large groups of minions very easily (pre-stamina your AE powers cost so much end it is harder to solo).

Post 32 mind falls off a bit due to not getting a pet but depending on your secondary can be a very solid set. Illusion starts to really pick up at 18 with PA, speeds up when you get PA slotted for max recharge and is a soloing monster when you get Phantasm. Plant starts to get really good when seeds of confusion is up reliably (although its single target kill speed is still kinda slow) and once you have stamina plus full SO's just gets better and better.

The other sets (fire/ice/earth) can be soloed but pre-32 are pretty slow, with fire being the fastest as you can slot up hotfeet and fire cages and go hunt in hazard zones reasonably effectively.

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Also to the above poster who says that freezing rain won't allow confuse to do its thing because mobs are flopping, I say the opposite. Freezing Rain allows confuse to do even more than any other set, because you're also going to be damaging them with Roots+containment damage, which also prevents the flopping. So they're left attacking each other with reduced defense and resistance, while the rain and your roots tick away damage to maximize your exp gain.

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That is a good point about freezing rain - i forgot that roots countered the knockdown. My primary objection to freezing rain is that it costs so much and is hard enough to get up frequently that you can't always use it every spawn (or don't want to use it for just a couple of mobs) where acid arrow can be used every spawn even if it had less overall debuff and requires a lot less slotting than FR. I think FR is an awesome power but so far I have found that my plant/TA gets far more use solo out of acid arrow then my plant/storm has out of FR. Neither is very high level yet (26 for plant/TA, 24 plant/storm) so at higher levels with more tools to play with I expect the /storm will be just as fun - but the ride up to the mid 20's was much smoother solo for the /TA.

The real problem I have with the current MA content is not that some of it is harder than standard PVE content or should only be solo'ed by purpled out scrappers - its that there is no real way to tell how hard something is going to be just from the ARC description. I don't mind having to turn down my difficulty level from the one I use for PvE content but I hate having to start an arc - die a couple of times to find out how hard it it, then go find a NPC to turn down my mission level. Almost worse is when I have just turned down my mission level for one arc and then the next one I play is a lot closer to standard PvE settings and I am now bored because it is too easy.

Basically the real problem is that, unlike dev created content, we have no objective system for describing the difficulty level of an arc. I have played two different arcs that have roughly the same description and been bored to tears in one - slaughtered in the other and with the same character. I recognize that my corruptor might have problems with something my brute can practically ignore - but when I can practically ignore the enemies in one arc and suck down an entire tray of inspirations in the next one (and still die) then I get a bit frustrated.

You might want to consider plant/TA instead of /storm for casual soloing. Trick arrow has the following advantages:

1) Entangling arrow gives you a cheap way to get containment and will ground fliers so your plant powers will work on them. Snow storm will also ground fliers this but its kinda overkill for the typical group size in solo missions and you don't get containment out of it.
2) Ice arrow will stack with strangler to hold bosses, nothing in storm will do this.
3) While not as good a debuff as freezing rain, Acid Arrow is up a lot more often and costs a lot less end to use so you don't feel like you are wasting it on smaller groups. Freezing rain, while an awesome debuff, is up at most every 30 seconds (without lots of global recharge) and is almost overkill for less then 4-5 enemies.
4) The debuffs in storm, while very nice, reduce the damage done by confused mobs - FR knocks them down, hurricane drops thier accuracy to nothing and snow storm slows them. In a group this isn't a big deal as groups usually defeat mobs fast enough on their own, solo you are relying on the confused mobs to help you defeat their fellows.
5) EMP Arrow + Oil Slick Arrow+Vines gives you lots of good control choices to alternate - a reasonable amount of recharge in each and you can have a hard (emp/vines) or medium (oil slick) control up every fight.

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Recharge from set IOs. And no, its far from overpowering, if making it much worth it at all at this point.

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By that standard damage is an inheritable buff but Enrages, Aim, Build Up, and Defiance do not increase Voltaic Sentinel's damage. I was wondering about things like Accelerate Metabolism, Fortitude, Speed Boost, and Adrenalin Boost. Does Voltaic Sentinel inherit any of those?

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I cannot tell you for sure, but if the former is true, that VS doesn't inherit Build Up, then likely it does not inherit Hasten or other buffs either. Note that AFAIK VS is untargettable so if it inherits AM, Speed Boost or whatever, it would get it from its parent, NOT by being hit by the effect itself.

Although I wonder if VS did inherit Build Up, if it would effect VS for its full duration, or only for the first 10 seconds after it is summoned?

The problem seems to be not buffs or inherited buffs in this case, but Recharge slotting. AFAIK, this is a different mechanism, so the two are unrelated. (Inherited buffs are inherited as the power, but slotted Enhancements aren't powers and aren't inherited in that way)


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Keep in mind that when pets inherit buffs they inherit the buff as it currently exists on your character - duration and all. So if you have 8 seconds of buildup left when you activate a power that summons a pet or psuedo-pet, such as VS or Rain of Fire or burn, the pet gets 8 seconds of buff. Since set bonuses are effectively an auto power that lasts for approx 10 seconds (or so I have read) and refreshes just before it goes away that would mean that the pet would inherit at most 10 seconds worth of bonus, probably less.

For pets that are fairly short duration, such as all the rains, burn, ice storm, etc, 10 seconds worth of build up or aim is pretty good. For a pet that lasts 60 seconds, such as VS, you are probably not going to notice much of a boost. Hasten would be one of the exceptions as it is a 2 minute buff so as long as you have at least 60 seconds left on hasten when you summon VS it would get the recharge buff for its entire duration.

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how are Ice Tankers nerfed? The only power I can think of that would be effected is Ice Patch..... do the aura powers count as pets?

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Its not the pet - its the slows. One side effect of this change is to make all player summoned pets (and by default any NPC summoned pets that are the same as the player pets) immune to recharge slows - this means that any set the relies on recharge slows for mitigation (ice armor, ice control, ice blast) is now going to be at a serious disadvantage in certain PvE material (mostly the MA I think, as folks seem to LOVE putting masterminds NPC's in MA missions) and in PvP against pet summoning PC's.

I actually think this is the biggest danger in this fix and the one that is going to come back and bite the dev's hard as its not obvious HOW much this will hurt those sets and there is probably no good way to get the data until we go live.

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Issue 13 Known Issues

- Travel powers can no longer be toggled on or off while other powers are activated or queued. This was an unintended consequence of some other change and the Devs are working to revert this.

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A note on this - it isn't having a power queued up that prevents the travel power from turning off, its being in the middle of an animation that prevents it. I found that out because i discovered that I could target something at range, queue up a melee attack and as long as I toggled sprint off before the melee attack started activating it would turn off without removing the melee attack from the queue.

Alternatively if you are firing off an power that has a long animation after the power takes effect simply hitting a hotkey to turn off sprint (or any other toggle) will not do anything until the animation finishes, even though the power is no longer appears to be in the 'activated state (i.e. the spinning circle around the power button may have stopped making it look as if you have finshed activating it but the animation hasn't finished yet).