FredrikSvanberg

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They can still be the cover guys, but show us they're "normal" heroes too when the cameras are gone and its business as usual. Mechanically this is obviously doable, in fact they already "sorta" do it with EB scale downs, but when the chips are down and a full team shows up they suddenly go into overdrive AV mode without any explanation, once again reminding us even naturals like Manticore aren't exactly "normal".


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I decided a long time ago to explain this to myself by imagining that the AV eats a bunch of inspirations during the fight.

Maybe if they removed XP, increased tickets and allowed us to buy XP with tickets.

That was quick. Ask for power customization next.

You don't actually search through that much each time you open the MA. The searchable part of a mission is hardly more than a kb, and I bet that's really well indexed.

How about why not, and who are you to decide?

Yeah, well I want a fire/MA or eng/SS blaster.

$30 for one slot?!!?!

A more reasonable amount would be $10 for 10 slots.

They could also be retroactive veteran rewards like the respecs: 3 slots per year maybe.

Personally I think they should just start handing out more dev's choice. I hope they are just waiting for the MA to stabilize a bit so they don't create too many locked DC missions that can never be updated with the latest technology.

In theory only the highest rating counts for tickets. So if someone starts by clicking 1, then 2, then 3 etc it will be the same as if they clicked 5 stars first. It is possible that the message you get for ticket rewards only goes out once, the first time someone rates. I haven't checked, I'm just guessing.

I'm always looking for more reviews.

#1152: The Doctor Returns.

#114284: Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friends

If you want to review either or both of these I'd greatly appreciate it.

Thanks!

You take a map and fill every spawn location with patrols, except for that boss spawn. Set the patrols to spawn when the boss objective is defeated. Replace some of the patrols with ambushes if you want. This might not work on all maps so you will have to experiment.

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Awesome Fred! I wish I would have known you were looking to ding a couple 50's I would have helped.

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I have more characters in their 40s I will be working on soon so you might get your chance yet.

Finally someone gets it.

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Fredik, as I read your post it sounds as if you played this thing through (because you found the 7 or 8 AVs) ...


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Yes.

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From this, I assume you benefited from what you thought was a farm ...


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Sure, except this isn't what we currently think of as a farm. The mission was actually NOT set up to exploit several known problems and yes, we did have to work to defeat the AV over and over. Once we almost wiped. That's not what my original post is about.

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... and now you come here to complain about it.


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Actually I came here to point out a way that MA missions can provide access to certain high-yield enemies FASTER than the normal game does. In my opinion too fast and too easy. I didn't report the mission since it was not technically a farm the way I understand the term. I didn't note the arc ID either. It seemed pointless. I wasn't going to write about this particular mission after all.

This is a general problem with how MA missions can be designed in a seemingly perfectly non-exploitative way, while still providing rewards an order of magnitude greater than anything we can find in the normal game. That is the problem. That is what I'm trying to provide a solution for.

Why would we need that?

I guess you missed where he said that he had computer issues and wanted to do this without logging in.

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It had a story and no exploits WAI.

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No, it had a "story", but that's not the problem. I don't even care about farms here, this would have been equally ridiculous in a dev-created "real" mission. The difference is that the devs wouldn't create something like this.

The potential exploit in this case is the ability to gain access to this villain type faster than you ever could in the proper game outside the MA. 7 or 8 of them in the same mission, no TF, no story arc, nothing to prevent you from finding and killing LR over and over all day long. In the "real world" missions you would not be able to reach this xp/hour in this manner because you would be forced to play through several missions of normal enemies before you found even a single AV. That would slow down the process enough so that the final xp/hour would be more reasonable.

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Break out the whips and the hairshirts

Somebody made a story that gives good rewards

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You're not reading properly. This wasn't "good rewards". This was ridiculous, completely bad-wrong-bad, utterly insane, terribly unbalanced and probably exploitable, three-hundred-seventysix-fecking-thousand xp for five minutes of entirely safe buttonmashing. If you think this was merely "good xp" then you are a spoiled MA farmer.

Perhaps the paragonwiki has enemy groups sorted by level range somewhere?

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Your avatar fits your post.

What is a reasonable amount of AV's per mission? Suppose somebody decides they want to make a mission where you take on the Freedom Phalanx.


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I don't know what is reasonable. That would be better answered by the devs, if they decide to implement this idea, by setting the scale of the reward reduction of the temporal power. I would hope they could figure out what a reasonable reward reduction would be, and how long duration the power should have.

If someone decides to make a mission where you take on the entire Freedom Phalanx, and they aren't doing it for farming purposes, then the reduced reward would of course be annoying but since it would only affect the AVs in the mission it would still yield a sufficient reward to be considered "playable".

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From what I gather, you've already considered this and think that because of the possibility of exploits, this problem should be dealt with. My worry is that when all is said and done, we will be left with a shell of what could have been.

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I'm merely making an observation of what I thought was an unreasonable use of the MA, or at least why filling a mission with high-yield AVs leads to unreasonable rewards which we can't get in "real-world" missions with the same frequency. I then proceeded to suggest a solution for this particular kind of farm.

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Why do people seem to be begging to get MA missions nerfed?

Heck, let's just get it over with and have all rewards in MA reduced by 75%...

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I don't want it to be nerfed. My suggestion was intended to be the least intrusive method for "normal" MA missions. Did you even read my post?

Interesting...

The group I play with didn't have problems with people leaving permanently but we used to have an ingenious way to deal with temporary absences from the game. Whenever a player couldn't make it to a session, his character was hit on the head by a falling toolbox and knocked out for the duration of the session.

In games of Vampire it was a magical toolbox. In Werewolf, the toolbox was made of silver. Etc.

There's no point to this thread other than to declare that I finally got 50 on my earth/storm controller "Geography" after what must be at least a year. He levelled on a random spawn of possessed scientists in the Portal Corp parking lot, "writing parking tickets" as some of us used to call it. Not very epic but I was sick of looking for a TF to finish him.

Earlier this week I dinged 50 on the DM/WP reroll of my main "Take One". That took almost exactly a month but only because I spent the last week looking for an LGTF to ding on. I failed because the team wanted to avoid all the actual content (i.e. fights) on the TF, so I only got to 49½, but then I finished off with Dark Watcher's arc so it felt pretty good.

Has anyone else done anything interesting lately?

I played a mission yesterday that for all intents and purposes was a farm. It was "cleverly disguised" as a story with a plot but all it really was was a vehicle to put the team up against the weakest possible custom enemies and level 51 AVs that would give 376 thousand xp to a level 49 character. That's almost a bubble per AV. There was 7 or 8 of them on the map.

Normally, in real missions, this particular AV wouldn't be found in seven or eight easily dispatched instances in the same easily navigated map, filled with such laughably pathetic foes. Normally this AV would only be found at the end of a 2-hour TF, or an almost equally long story arc, or possibly as a bank robber in Peregrine Island. Lord Recluse doesn't leave his tower for nothing.

The problem is thus: we can create missions which puts us up against enemies with insane rewards which lets us bypass hours worth of "build-up" which we would normally have to slog through in order to reach that enemy. This build-up period is what usually keeps us from "farming" those enemies effectively.

As terrible as it seems to me, I think what is needed to keep MA missions in check is a "cool-down period" on AVs and other highly rewarding enemies. After killing an AV in a MA mission we could get a temporary power which would reduce the rewards from killing other AVs within its duration. This temporary power would stack with itself so the more AVs you kill and the faster you kill them, the less reward you would get from each. The reward should not reach zero, but it should be discouraging farms like this. Instead of getting from level 49 to 50 in a single mission we might have to play through an entire arc of 5 missions, which seems much more in line with the normal game content.

Normal story-based MA arcs should probably not be affected too terribly by this suggestion since they would presumably have a reasonable amount of AVs in a single mission. "Real-world" content should not be affected either since those AVs shouldn't drop this temporary power on us.

I mostly use my nova form on teams where someone else is tanking. Now and then I go back to human form to create a new pet or use stygian or mire, and if I get mezzed I go dwarf until it passes, but most of the time I'll spend in nova form to just sit back and blast.

Some temporary costumes change your size. In fact all of them do, if you're small enough. Animations seem to work fine with those, even strange animations like a freak tank using eagle's claw. It seems like the "animation size" can be altered on the fly, which means that it seems like it should be possible to alter it with a costume change.