Flux_Vector

Some of the people in the trial did petition it, I never heard about a response so I decided to add a report here.

I have heard from other players via global channel that currently the individual acid and grenade badges are bugged, and only award if you do a full Master Of Lambda run and get all 10 of each, then don't use any of either. At that point all the badges award. But doing them individually doesn't work yet.

Last night myself and several friends ran two successful Lambda Trials where we acquired all 20 temp powers from the fort's interior, and did not use the acid grenades to close any portals.

We were not awarded the "Antacid" badge on completion.

In both cases someone did destroy at least one containment chamber spawn in the courtyard during the fight with Marauder, so technically we ended the trial with 11 or more acids in our possession.

Also in both cases, connection problems caused people to drop out and re-join during the trial.

We did not gift either of the temp powers all to one person.

I didn't notice anything else that seemed like a probable cause.

I don't see many people ever kicking one character for another in City, anyway.

But if they did, scrappers, brutes, and stalkers would be getting booted left and right in favor of most VEATs, who do similar or superior damage (other than shield defense, which is its own league) at similar survivability (except banes), while also providing strong (and stacking) teammate buffing. "Survivable DPS" is the backbone of City gameplay, either teamed or solo. The fact that VEATs buff teammates is what then gives them that leg up.

I can see wanting to have one scrapper/brute/tanker to act as a meatshield. But otherwise? VEATs offer highly survivable DPS characters who provide solid teammate buffs. That's better than just being highly survivable DPS by a factor of leadership

I also don't know any farmers who farm at -1 instead of +0.

Maybe there are some, but they must be using terribly poor farming characters, and/or are farming AE so the level of the enemy has no bearing on the ticket roll reward levels... but still must be using terribly poor characters, since in AE you directly do get more tickets for fighting +cons.

Or else they're just misinformed, like very many people are about this game.

As far as risk vs reward, I agree there's something wrong there, but not in the sense of reward vs level scaling for individual enemies. I think it's much more of a problem that difficulty is rewarded less than length in many cases. I think the "merit reward formula" for trials and taskforces should have a factor in it not just for how long a given TF takes on average, but also for how many teams disband without completing it. It should be explicitly taken into consideration as a quantifiable measure of difficulty when people can't complete the TF at all.

In terms of individual creatures? There's no way this wouldn't force a rebalancing of classes or further entrench melee ATs as the 'golden children' of the City. In a sense, the rebalancing would be welcome - but I seriously doubt it would be very welcome to most who are currently playing scrappers, brutes, or tankers (and probably VEATs).

IMO Defense debuff resistance is a critical factor to consider in soft-capping, since a character without it will find that their investment is being eroded by debuffs with over 50% of enemy groups at level 50. If you're mostly planning to farm cherry-picked enemies, that's less of a factor - but then, if you're cherry picking your enemies you may want to just be fire armor or electric armor for the 90% resistance to the picked damage type

Further, newer content (or older, harder groups like Rularuu) tends to include more 'casual def-busting' (and arguably, WP-busting) enemies, with -def and -regen attacks or +tohit buffs. The short of it is that while softcapping is certainly nice most of the time, a softcapped WP, fire, elec, etc brute is still going to end up at negative defense on a regular basis in the ITF, against the PPD's kheldians, in the cathedral of pain, or vs praetorian clockwork.

On the other hand, alpha slots combined with the diminishing returns of stacking recharge, help make +defense more attractive for brutes. A very rare spiritual alpha will cover 30% worth of +rech bonus or more (dependent on power slotting), and of the 4 alphas, only spiritual and cardiac are of particular interest to most brutes - the low AT mod deprecates the value of the musculature tree, and everyone with sets will have enough accuracy to deprecate the nerve tree. This encourages you to have your cake and eat it too on the recharge/defense front.

Just don't be surprised if you end up still needing buffs and support, if you're not SR, shield, granite, or maybe invuln.

Well to state the obvious, warshades are better because they have higher numbers. In specific, they have very important higher numbers: +damage and +damage resistance. Yes, warshades need to drain enemies to get those numbers, and PBs don't. However there's a funny thing about damage and damage resistance: you don't need either in the absence of enemies. Warshades get their performance buffed by mire and eclipse when it matters, and while PBs may be stronger in the absence of targets for warshades to buff off - that doesn't matter. In fact, PBs themselves still need targets to perform on (as indeed do all characters). You don't do DPS to thin air.

In fact, I'd say that point 'eclipses' other issues between the two ATs, especially on the survivability front. At least on the offense front, there's a reasonable case to be made for the efficiency of Extracted Essence and Black Dwarf Mire as opposed to Photon Seekers and White Dwarf Flare, instead of getting 'mired' in the human form buff. On the defensive front? Eclipse has been like this for years. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that a character who has 2.5 times the damres of another (5-target eclipse compared to PB shields) is way more survivable.

Widows have relatively high end costs for their melee powers, and attack very fast. Widow claws were balanced around their (very fast) animation times under a new formula, and in addition, their attacks don't benefit from the claws power 'special' endurance reduction.

One of the results is that you do burn down your endurance quickly and easily with one. Inherent fitness is a godsend, slotting for some end reduction or frankenslotting some cheap sets in the mid 20s/low 30s will help you alot too.

But there's a bright side - with the right setup you'll be doing just as much damage as most scrappers who don't have the shield defense secondary.

Dart burst is the better overall attack - it does more damage counting the DOT ticks, with a faster animation, and with a faster recharge.

My widow uses both, mainly because they let me cover a lot of a spawn with their cones if I aim them right. The night widow has a real 'jack of all trades' capability that this plays into - with the right build you'll have very high single target damage, good area damage, high to very high personal defense, and moderate team buffing. There's not much you can't do, and you can do it all pretty well.

According to the arc, becoming an Incarnate for our characters consists of 'acquiring an upgradeable mystic artifact, and then taking steps to upgrade it.' Additional power is bestowed on the character by said artifact, to the extent that they upgrade it. The mystic artifact acts as a conduit for the Well's power. It's a piece of magical plumbing, and especially in the early phases really isn't much stronger than the dozens of other artifacts and gadgets the game has the majority of players pick up, interact with, and keep in their pockets throughout the content. In the form of temp powers, ehancements, inventions, salvage, base equipment, and even inspirations if you want to go that far.

It's not any bigger of a leap than playing your veteran blackwand as an IC magic stick your character's been keeping in their closet in case they ever happened to need it. And nobody thinks twice about someone doing that.

In total it doesn't really seem that incompatible with most characters in the City-verse to me, except ones who are rejecting the game's reality to replace it with their own from the outset. And if you're already ignoring the game world, I guess incarnates just mean you'll have to ignore it a little harder.

Forts can take both aim and FU. Widows can't take FU and build up. It's not a bug, it's the intended design.

Fortunatas need an exceptional amount of +recharge in their builds, partly because their mind link has a longer recharge than night widow mindlink, and they don't get mental training, partly because their 'key powers' that give them advantages over NWs are on long timers (wail, total dom, aura of confusion), and partly to support a good attack chain.

The fort's melee attack chain is far superior to ranged ones. Followup is, simply put, really good for performance - and the stats on the mental blasts tend to be worse than the stats on the claw attacks, especially in terms of activation time (which is the one thing about powers you can't improve with your build).

You say you don't want billion-inf enhancers but how do you feel about purples? I consider it unlike you're going to get what you want from your fort without using them fairly extensively.

Or knock Up, which keeps the 'things flying into the air' feel a bit better, but limits the amount of scatter it causes.

I'd consider Soul the better pool overall - gloom is a very superior single target blast (it's one of the best attacks available to brutes or SOAs, period), while dark obliteration is not that far behind ball lightning for AOE damage, though it is somewhat behind.

Static discharge in the epic pool doesn't seem to have high enough stats to be that attractive. And darkest night has a lot to recommend it, especially if you are playing a ranged/support oriented type SOA or 'blastermind' crab.

Shards have slowed down many level 50 TFs for me and made them into "kill most." Well, okay, LGTFs and ITFs mostly.

Some though, are just too involved for anyone to really want to "kill most" them - the LRSF comes to mind, nobody ever wants to clear the whole agincourt longbow base map or the malta base's exterior or the ruined atlas park, and I don't think anyone ever will.

On the other hand, Apex is almost a "kill all" TF by virtue of its mission objectives, and I'm doing that in under 40 minutes now.

A group with 30-40 players is no longer 'small' and is very unlikely to be 'intimate.'

A group of 10-15 players is actually small and likely to be more 'close-knit.' They just also aren't likely to be inviting you to join, a_random_SenseiBlur_0037, because they aren't recruiting. Their friends are already there in the SG with them. To get in you'd have to spend time getting to be their friend, not looking for a recruiter or jumping from group to group.

I've found myself using both Cardiac and Musculature uncommons. For more normal play, Musculature is a slight damage boost; for extended combats and high-effort soloing, Cardiac keeps my end from being an issue.

So like, Musculature doing missions, Cardiac soloing AVs.

I'm actually unsure on warshades, myself. They're certainly better off than peacebringers and function much better in-game, but I don't know if I'd agree they are quite the 'power build' that prevailing wisdom tends to cast them as, without doing some calculations first.

A part of the problem with warshades IMO is that the people who play them and make them work that powerfully, are generally well-skilled and knowledgeable, as well as dedicated players who are willing and able to invest a lot of resources into the character.

On the other hand, investing the resources at least does make the warshade improve proportionately. Investing the same resources into a peacebringer tends to have decidedly less impressive results.

A 'back of the envelope' calculation seems to show me that super strength brutes with enough recharge bonus, can reach over 250 single-target DPS while at 70 fury and double-raged, and using procs. The chain I used for the calculation was gloom - KO blow - haymaker - gloom - punch - haymaker - repeat. Haymaker had the hecatomb and perfect zinger damage procs, gloom had the apocalypse damage proc. Total chain time is 9.9 seconds.

With enough +recharge, from the start of the fight you'll have about 65s of single rage, 55s of double rage, then IIRC a 10-second crash, after which you'll have 60s of double rage again (the extra few seconds of recharge time on rage are 'covered' by the crash period). So once you're a minute into a fight, you'll be able to iterate your attack chain about 6 times per rage cycle followed by 10 seconds of no damage. So once you're 'established' you'll probably do about 215 DPS over 70 seconds (60s double rage uptime, 10s rage crash downtime).

If I'm wrong on the crash duration and it's actually 15 or 20 seconds, then you do about 200 or about 190 DPS over the full cycle of up-and-down. And of course, you need to 'build up' to that output, not just to get consistent double rage, but also to get 70 fury, which may be overestimating the amount of fury you'll be able to generate and maintain against a single target, even though AVs give bonus fury now like they always were supposed to. And you can herd up minions to boost your fury generation, in many instances.

Any which way, at least in theory it's still (eventually going to build up to) enough DPS to solo a 'generic' AV who hasn't especially got resistance to your damage output.

I can anecdotally back this up by noting my SS/WP brute soloed The Radio AV a while ago. The Radio isn't a very hard AV, or at the time I wouldn't have been able to, but he still has the hp/regen targets you need to beat offensively.

If you're an NW, your optimal ST attack chain is all-melee anyway, but your broadest-coverage AOEs are cones (dart burst and psi scream). If you're performing ranged AOE roles, you'll want soul tentacles and dark obliteration. Line up for your cones and throw tentacles-dart burst-psi scream-dart burst-dark obliteration.

If you have a single target, you'll basically want to do First Come First Serve with your attacks, in the priority order of follow up, lunge, slash, strike, eviscerate, swipe, poison dart, mental blast. Ie, of the attacks you have from that list, use them off cooldown in the order listed. Yeah, you can come up with static attack chains, but really an attack chain is trying to optimize the use of your attacks in the best order of DPA anyway - same principle.