We attempted the Statesman Task Force and did relatively well up until the end, when we failed.
Our make-up consisted of:
3 Scrappers, all of whom had sets I cannot remember to save my life.
1 Invuln/SS Tank
1 Rad/Rad Defender (myself)
1 Fire/Fire(?) Blaster
1 Mind/Empathy Controller
1 Illusion/Kinetics Controller
As a note, we had 4 versions of Leadership stacked together, though not everyone had them on at all times. Everyone was level 50. The TF starts with Statesman, who is standing on a Longbow boat in IP. He was shorter than I expected.
The first mission, Destroy Web Parts, consisted of an outdoor zone near Grandville. You get there via a convenient Longbow submarine right next to Statesman's ship. You must destroy 40 'Web Parts', which are mostly just cables of various sizes that blow up in a satisfying Mayhem Mission way. There are more than 40 cables available so you aren't going for a 100% destroy rate. It'd be nice to see this applied to other missions as well (an Organbega mission where you need only arrest X number of Circle of Thorns, rather than a defeat all). After destroying some parts near the deployment zone with zero opposition, we then moved into the web facility itself down a huge ramp. The mobs were all level 50, though the spawns were large. Once we blew up the last part, we got a cut scene involving Arbiter Sanders (Arch Villain) trapping us in the facility (upon retrospect, we should have saved the last web part until we weren't in the middle of a fight). Sanders had a gigantic swarm of guys with him with ambushes that came along during the battle. With 2 Controllers, along with my psi-speced epic set, we were able to control the huge swarm of bad guys without much trouble. Our team was pretty disorganized but we more or less rolled over this mission.
Overall, a very enjoyable mission.
The second mission was to capture Dr. Aeon. You employ the time honoured villain trick of using your portal room to appear near /his/ portal room. Thus, this mission is in Peregrine Island at Portal Corp. You first appear in a Portal-esque laboratory set and are treated to a cut scene as soon as any member moves forward from the mission entrance. In it, Dr. Aeon flees through his portal, making it clear you have to chase after him. Unless you're on a speed run, be kind and wait for all members to get into the zone before triggering the scene. At any rate, you follow him through the portal without needing to kill any bad guys. You appear in a beautiful Arachnos-style laboratory - not the ugly lag fest that is normal Arachnos labs, but rather the standard labs with an Arachnos skin on it, similar to Longbow bases. Very pretty, though the mini-map had a lot of missing pieces to it. You are treated to another cut scene. This one is longer but hilarious. Your mileage may vary, but I loved it. The laboratory leads to an outside area which is a version of Recluse's Victory, stylized in its Villains Win scenario.
The cut scene makes it clear you must defeat four Arch Villains scattered throughout the Recluse's Victory map: Regent Korol, Mu'Drakhan, Shadow Spider, and Viridian. Mu'Drakhan was just outside the entrance near a Pillbox. Korol was just under the gigantic Recluse statue that takes the place of Atlas. Shadow Spider was northeast of the statue, and Viridian was behind City Hall near the blue boundary wall. With group invisibility we were able to skip all the mobs in between and just defeat the AVs. I'm not sure if it was a lack of 'avoid' type powers (Burn patches, caltrops, etc), but none of the mobs scattered or ran away, and so we surprisingly had no adds. Having the aforementioned 2 Controllers probably helped here as well.
We defeated the four Arch-Villains and returned home. Another excellent mission.
The third mission uses the submarine in IP again. Your assignment is to find a power that will be able to prevent Dr. Aeon from fleeing again, and to make him vulnerable. The power of choice is the nexus from the Tree of Thorns that you fight in the Villain Respec Mission. The mission starts you outside, however, in an instanced version of the area outside the Thorn Tree door. This is the outdoor Circle map with the circular island, a gigantic pit in the middle, bad guys all over, and thorny vines and altars scattered about. You must get to the door that leads inside to the Oranbega. Most annoying was that you didn't know which door would take you inside to the rest of the mission. There are /many/ doors, and neither the mission map nor the mission description tells you which one it is. All the doors aside from the correct one gives the 'You cannot enter' message. This would have been even more annoying if we didn't have Group Invisibility. For the record, the correct door was directly south and very slightly east of the central altar inside the pit.
Once you get inside the door to the Oranbega, it's just like running the Villain Respec. Indeed, you even run across a group of Boss level custom Rogue Isles villains halfway through fighting to the tree. Nice touch. Their position was at the bottom of a multi-level room, though, which caused an accidental agro which killed several of our heroes. Once we knew they were there, though, we mopped the floor with them. Another bit of annoyance with this mission was that, from inside the Oranbega, recalling a friend from outside near the mission entrance was out of range. Tough given we group invised our way past all the outside mobs in the first place.
The actual Thorn Tree itself was fairly annoying. The Villain respec doesn't get as much action as the hero one used to due to the many other methods of getting respecs these days, and so our team was not very experienced at it (including me). For those who haven't done it, it's a giant circular room with rocks all around. There are CoT in the outer most rim of the room, 80 vine bad guys closer towards the middle, and the Arch Villain Thorn Tree itself in the middle. The AV can't be killed until all 80 vines are destroyed. Indeed, you cannot even target it with a power (so no laying down debuffs on it). Furthermore, the vines will respawn if you aren't quick, so it is a race to kill all 80 and then the tree itself before they do. Once one single vine respawns, the AV is invincible again. Plus, the tree AV will snipe at you while you take out its vines, and it deals out mega damage. If it targets you and you are a squishie, you are probably dead. Worse, if you get rezzed in the same spot, the tree will often still be agroed on you and will kill you again. Accordingly, either recall friend to safety before getting rezzed, or move your butt out of its line of sight ASAP.
We were disorganized at first and killed vines willy nilly. I've heard differing strategies on whether you should split up to kill vines or stick together. We finally just stuck together and it worked out. Once we destroyed the AV, there was a glowie to click to end the mission. Whoever clicks it will receive the important temp power that makes Dr. Aeon vulnerable in the next mission, so give it to someone who can hang back and not die. I took it in this case.
Overall, crashing a Villain Respec is a great idea, though recall friend being out of range, no indicator for which door to enter, and the Thorn Tree in general were all a bit annoying.
In the fourth mission you go after Dr. Aeon again. Accordingly, it takes place in a version of Cap au Diable, which is nice to see when you're a hero. Your mission: 1. Find the security chief in the outdoor area in order to gain access to the lab. 2. Enter the lab and fight through the first four levels, each of which has a villain sidekick AV in it (Wretch, Silver Mantis, etc). 3. Use the temp power on Dr. Aeon and beat him down.
Finding the security chief was remarkably difficult, as there are many bosses labeled as 'Security Chief?' and you don't know which one it is you need to kill. The spawns are huge and we had a lot of ambushes. Plus we didn't stick together as many ventured off to find more Security Chief?s. Again our Controllers helped out a ton. After killing four or five fake Security Chiefs we finally found the right one and headed inside. It was frustrating trying to find the right guy. It was at this point one of our Scrappers bailed, which was a shame since she seemed to be the only one that had done the TF before.
The inside map is an Aeon version of the lab tile set, but with all new rooms. Nice. Very small levels, but each has an AV. They all have nice dialog when they fight, too (Silver Mantis is a creepy gal). Ice Minstral used Glacier on us, which nailed a bunch of our squishies and nearly turned the tide, so stand back if you can. Barracuda used a stun AoE nova type power, so same deal. Silver Mantis has some kind of unstoppable thing going for her but otherwise wasn't an issue. Wretch was a cinch though if I recall from other missions he does have a nova.
Finally you fight Dr. Aeon, who is way tougher than in other incarnations. He is an AV with a forcefield around him which can only be taken down by using the temp power you got from the Thorn Tree. It has crap range and takes ages to recharge. I made the mistake of starting with it which just got be slapped down. Dr. Aeon will summon a squad of Elite Boss versions of himself, making it a very tough battle. We had some defeats before taking him down. In the victory we didn't really do anything different from our losses, so we more or less chalked it up to lucky hits from Aeon.
Overall, a decent mission, though finding the Security Chief was frustrating. The AV battles were great.
The fifth and last mission was to kill Recluse's four lieutenants (Ghost Widow, Scirocco, Black Scorpion, and Cap'n Mako), the Arachnos Flier, and then Recluse himself. This takes place in Grandville. There were a bunch of mobs in the way but we bypassed them with travel powers and invis. The four AVs are standing in the middle of Grandville in the area where the level-up Arbiter, the Reputation gal, and the Quartermaster stand. We tried many methods to pull them one at a time but simply couldn't do it. We had a nice corner, but would always get at least 2 AVs. We probably could have handled that, but shortly after the other 2 AVs would always agro on us, even from very far away. They'd zip in and kick our butts. After trying and failing this a bunch of times, we finally gave up. Having read up on how others were pulling, I'm not sure what we were doing wrong. We had group invis for our pulls, and I know at least once we tried a snipe, but each time we'd shortly get all 4, and they would wipe us out.
Tough to gauge the mission since we didn't complete it, but there's got to be a better way of fighting these guys. I'm not really a fan of any mission that forces you to do this anyway, though, since it doesn't seem very comic bookish.
Overall, the task force is shaping up to be a very interesting one. All the missions were unique. We took a fair bit of time getting to where we were, and this was with skipping just about everything we could with group invis and the like. I don't know how long it takes to fight the 4 AVs, the Flier, and Recluse, but given there's only 5 missions, it's remarkably long. I ended up with a bunch of recipes, though interestingly I only got 2 enhancements throughout - and one was a DO for some reason. Once we get that pulling problem licked this is going to be a fantastic task force.
You also get a bonus token for the first time you buy points of any amount, so you'd only have to buy the one lot of 1200.
, or LoM).
