EricHough

Well, Astral hit 50 this afternoon and I opened up her alpha slot - but its going to take a few days at least (if not more) to get a T3 alpha crafted, let alone the other two level shift T3's, so later is probably better :-). I would imagine an all kheld lambda is going to need everyone with 3 level shifts, full pets and every bit of incarnate power they can get to make up for the lack of debuffs.

The scrapper is probably going to have a slight damage lead, especially at the begging of a fight before you build fury. The brute is going to slightly more durable at the start and potentially a lot more durable if you can get perma-DP and all the +HP accolades, as they have higher base HP and max HP, which translates into a more HP regenerated per second. The scrapper does have a defensive advantage once you get to APP's/PPP's as they can take shadow meld in the soul mastery patron pool, which is a mini-MoG on a shorter recharge timer so you can alternate it with MoG and with enough recharge have a huge def boost at the start of every fight.

Not really any good ones unfortunately - every active power in the app/ppp pools is going to cause redraw. If you where not regen I would suggest energy master for superior conditioning and physical perfection but the last thing you will probably need is more recovery :-). Your best bet is likely to be soul mastery - take either gloom or soul tentacles as a set mule and then take Darkest Night for the -to hit. You can use it at the start of a fight to pull and bunch up your opponents, so the redraw is not going matter as much.

Go to the scrapper boards and search on this topic - I know it has been discussed to death there. I don't believe you have any optimal AoE chains - not enough AoE in katana, but the single target chain is something like GD -> GC -> SD -> something??? I don't remember the details and I think it takes a lot of recharge to get the top chain but I know the goal is to cycle your top two attacks as often as possible (soaring dragon + golden dragonfly) and fill in the gaps with gamblers cut, as it has the best DPS in the set after the top 2.


Unless you somehow magically manage to hit the def softcap in your build (not likely without a ton of sacrifice) Barrier Destiny is your best bet - not just for the def, but also for the resistance it supplies. In many ways it plays out a lot like MoG does - a huge burst of defenses up front that tapers off fairly quickly. Get the longest lasting version you can (Barrier Core Epiphany if you can manage it) and use it at the start of fights when its up, just like MoG.

Judgement is really up to personal choice - there are pro's and cons to all of them, although for a melee type the cyronic judgement cone is going to be tough to use. For Lore, if you don't have a roleplay/thematic reason to get a specific one the cimerorans put out the most single target damage and have great heals, otherwise you could look for some constant def buffs in the pets. As for interface, the reactive -resistance + fire DoT is usually best.

Midnight Astral is currently about 4 bubble short of L49 - I can see how far I can get her by friday. No promises - way to many alts keep attracting my already short attention span.

I don't remember it being bright green and glowing. Mind you, its not hard to spot IF you know where to look and are not panicked because the timer has run down.

The real problem here is that there is not enough info in the mission to know what to do - you have no way of knowing that killing groups of igneous will add to the timer, so most folks rush to the original exit, which burns up a good chunk of the timer, then if they don't happen to turn in the correct direction when they get the message about the exit not working they can easily miss the cave door, since they are not expecting it on this map. I first did this mission with 2 other very experienced players and none of us figured it out - I had to ask on global channels to find it.

The overall problem here is not that its hard to complete the missions once you know what to do - its that the first experience can easily be very BAD - and thats not a good idea for the first introduction to content the dev's are pushing as a 'bonus' for VIP's and that they want to sell to premium players.

This just screams of being a bug FFM - did you bug it in game?

I think I ran it solo once on my warshade and I don't recall hitting anything that would kill me like that (L45 warshade) but I also kept my difficulty settings intentionally low (+0/x2 no bosses) because I knew that the arc scaled up in a really ugly way. Second and third times I ran it on my warshade where in all kheld groups for protectors all kheldian friday night - and while we did have a few deaths, I don't recall it being overwhelming, just tough.

Last 5 sales as of 2:57 PM PDT are 160m; 133,333,333 (x3); and 175m.

As to the OP's request for more respecs - I can't imagine anyone being willing to do respec's over and over on a character. Unless you are such a low level that even bothering to respec is a waste of time, its an ugly, drawn out process. I have respec's coming out my ears (6 vet respec per character, up to 4 earned respecs in game from the respec trials and the villainside patron arc, which gives one out as well and as Zombie_man mentioned, 2-3 freespecs a year) and I ration them out carefully - not because I think I am going to run out, or consider them valueable, but because doing a respec is such a royal pain.

Personally, I don't see how having unlimited respec's is going to make a character any 'better' than the limited amount we currenltly have - if you suck at building a character, its really not going to matter how often you rebuild it, you will likely still suck. It takes longer than an hour, a day or even just a week of playing a build to really know how well it works. So if the OP is really desperate to rebuild constantly I say let him - anyone who spends all thier time in a respec menu is not going to be playing the game, so its a self defeating goal.

Very interesting testing gospel - thanks for doing it, although at this point I am not sure if we are seeing bugged behavior, by design behavior or some combo.

On thing to keep in mind is that there are 3-4 different things going on with an EA brute:

1) The taunt in entropic aura which we know is there, even though the real numbers don't reflect it
2) The recharge debuff in entropic aura, which has the potential for notifying enemies as well.
3) the stealth in energy cloak

and possibly

4) brute fury - I have heard claims that fury can notify mobs to your presence, not sure about this though.

The last things I remember Synapse discussing in the EA thread on the beta forums had to do with fixing entropic aura so that the toggle did not turn off if you where mezzed (which is the usual behavior of toggles that have things like a recharge debuff in them - RttC in willpower will turn off if you are mezzed since it has -to hit in it), instead he coded the toggle to stay up but the recharge debuff to supress.

That doesn't have anything to do with the behavior when stealthed - but I don't remember any mention of changing things so that entropic aura's debuffs/taunt would not break stealth. Hopefully he did and your testing appears to bear this out, but it would be nice to get official redname feedback.

Well, I ran it at L12 on two different brutes without to much trouble, although I also ran it knowing what to expect, went in with a bunch of purples and speed ran it, skipping all the extraneous fights except for the groups of igneous along the way out of the first mission. And while MM's do lose a bunch of power if they lose their tier 3 pet, any MM worth his salt should be able to handle this if they drop down to +0x1 with the pets you get at L20 and their secondaries.

However, brutes and MM's are argueably the MOST soloable characters pre-20, thanks to fury and pets. I have no plans to try this solo on my low level controllers, mostly thanks to the EB at the end, and I would not want to try it on a defender if I had one (obviously that would depend on the fender - a rad/sonic would laugh at the end EB, even at L10, something with a lot less single target damage and resistance debuff not so much).

I think the real problem is that if you DON'T know how to shortcut things ahead of time, you are likely to fail the first mission when the timer runs out (no biggie there, but annoying), die in the second mission when you are overwhelmed by the ambushes and be suddenly shocked by the EB at the end - especially if you are mostly used to blueside content which tends not to have EB's in them.

Worst is if you are a free/premium player who is entirely new to the game or is a very old returning player - the difficulty level in this story arc is a step above the difficulty in the rest of the game up to this point unless you had the bad luck to start in preatoria - and there is little to no warning in the intro dialog.

For something that is a bonus for the VIP players, the current rewards (2 hero merits the first week you run it, 1/week after that) make it worth running 1-2 times, although after we get higher level signature arcs I will probably never touch this one again. For something that the dev's expect preems to play cash up front, this is kinda sad - especially when the preems won't have access to the same rewards we do in most cases.

A lot of the problem here is similar to issues I saw in the new underground incarnate trial - the dev's are trying to fit new mechanics into a game interface that doesn't support them well and it gets very confusing. In the UG trial, there are so many gimmicks the UI can't warn you about all of them, so they try to fill you in with in mission chat - but that is hard to spot, is not easy to read while in combat and tends to scroll of if you aren't carefull.

In this arc they want to play cute games with secret doors and ambushes that are on a timer but the info in the UI is not clear enough to easily figure it out the first time through. It took me 2 runs to figure out that the timer in mission 2 is NOT a 'mission fail' timer like it was in mission 1. Instead I died to the ambushes, losing my temper and patience because PPD are UGLY for an FA brute when they spawn at 0x2 every 30 seconds and I figured I had failed the mission. When I came back from the hospital the fact that the timer had cleared, the ambushes where gone and the mission was still there - so I was able to figure out the tricks. If I had been a premium player who payed real money for this, I might have ended up quitting the game at that point.

What recharge bonuses? You don't KEEP any of them at L20. Even LoTG +recharge bonuses go away if you are lower than L22, since the lowest level an LoTG +recharge IO can be is 25. I think I have had one character keep a single recharge bonus - and thats because it was from a throwaway set of basilisks gaze in char that where L12-20. That same character had exactly 2 single target attacks and 1 AoE usable in standard melee - because I included fire blast from the stalker APP in my attack chain to free up slots at lower levels, so solo combat outside of assasins strike was kinda ugly.

And killing 3 bosses and an EB is easy for some, extremely painfull for others. The arc is also only that simple if you know ahead of time whats coming - if you don't know whats coming, or don't like stealthing/speeding through an arc, then you end up having to do a LOT more - the ambushes in the second mission for instance are only skippable if you know already know you need to run ahead of them and/or bring a lot of purples, otherwise they can be pretty deadly - especially on villainside with PPD that drop your DEF like a bad penny. I couldn't click the glowies with all the incoming fire and 6-10 PPD at a time is ugly at L20. Now, I don't mind dying if I do something stupid but I didn't do anything other than assume that the dev's would put in ambushes that a solo character was able to handle.

My point is that there is NO reason to restrict this arc to L20 other than artistic sensibility or laziness. Pushing it up slightly higher, to 25 or 30 would clear up a TON of the complaints, let folks keep at least some of those IO bonuses and lose a lot less powers.

Assuming you are talking about Tina MacIntyre and Maria Jenkin's arc's they WHERE revamped when preatoria was released - the current arcs you get from the two contacts use the new preatorian mobs, maps and AV's. While I haven't played Tina's yet, I just finished Maria's on my stalker and it is a fairly quick arc, especially for a stealther - I don't think there is a single kill all and most of the objectives are fairly straight forward and simple. The story might not be the best but it's simple, which leaves less room for them to mess up. I wouldn't rate it as one of the best arc's out there, but it wasn't bad either.

I will second what Claws said and back it up with personal experience on my SS/Fire brute. I played L1-50 on her with only a single -KB IO and maybe once in a blue moon actually got knocked back. Then I got to incarnate content and spent a ton of time flying through the air until I slotted up 2 more -KB io's for a total of 12 points resistance - after that I was fine again. So 4 points should carry you through all the PVE content with only minor issues that can pretty much be ignored, then if you want to run incarnate content I would recommend bumping up your protection to 12 points at least - but I don't see any need for more than that.

Right now my Return to battle vet power is better than revive - it may only return you to 1/4 health and 1/2 end but it also makes you untouchable for 15s. At the very least Revive should be that good.

Thanks - just knowing where to look for the marker will help. Got a lot of markers in Cap :-)

This screams leftover from the days when it was an immobile turret. I would bug it.

Cast time is 1 sec with no interrupt (at least it was on beta last time I looked). Its really fast to summon the gun drone now. You lose a buff - but gain a combat castable power. At least for me, when I tried to summon it for a buff the other folks in my group tended to kill everything in front of me before I finished - unless I went way ahead and drew a ton of fire whenever I misjudged the timing. Even solo, it blew my usual 'stealth in, buff up, drop RoA tactic because it alerted the enemies to my presence. I find the 25% or so damage buff from trip mine to be more reasonably balanced with the casting time and use that as my 'mini' build up, so having the added damage without spending 7+ seconds locked in an animation is nice.

It looks like they basically removed the interrupt (6 seconds) and left the rest of the cast time alone.

Not only scourge but base damage as well - unless they changed it at the last second the defender version of RoF had its damage adjusted down for the defenders lower AT, where the corruptor version is the same as the blaster and does a lot more base damage.

I don't know why the difference here - all other rain powers where either left at the blaster level for both (ice storm and blizzard for example) or if adjusted down it was done for both corruptors and defenders (the corruptor/defender rain of arrows both do roughly the same damage, even if it is less than the blaster version).

You should probably update the note on poison trap so that it only lists only the most recent removal of the interrupt time and not the old, no longer valid reduction in intterrupt time to avoid confusion.