Hephaestus

A few times I have managed to wait6 long enough and stack up enough mag of deceive to got Romulus in the ITF to not only turn on his Nictus AVs, but actually killl all three of them one by one. This is the 4th/last mission.

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Come to think of it, changing pets to be unaffected by recharge buffs is an excellent reason to make all the recharge buffing powers a little better. Speed Boost, Accelerate Metabolism, Adrenalin Boost, etc.

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I won't speak for the others, but AM also buffs damage and recovery, and it is an area of effect buff rather then being individually targeted. Speaking as the player of several ill/rads, AM does not need a boost.

With your toggles on you recover about 2 end per second. I suspect (could be wrong) that this will not be enough to supply end for your AoE attacks as often as they will be up. AoEs on forts tend to be end hogs. Not to mention Gloom, which is a very effective attack, but also an end hog.

I think the basic idea of staying at range with hover, getting ranged attacks and ranged defense, is a good one, and you have enough melee defense to be ok in a lot of situations too.

Ill/rad. Hands down. I have never felt as much like a god with any other character. I have easily been able to solo any Giant Monster in the game except Kronos (psi resistant) and Adamastor (because so far I have not been able to find him when I have soloed outside of missions, and he is a wimp in missions).

I have been able to solo every AV at 50, and most at 51 and 52, 53 is pushing it, but I managed that too in a few cases with shivans and Heavies.

I completed a mothership raid (shields down, bomb planted) with just two other ill/rads and no help from anyone else.

I soloed the LGTF, ITF, riktispec, Mender silos on invinc, the praetorian arc on invinc, and the first four mission in the STF (I could not beat doctor aeon at the end of the fourth mission soloing).

Not only that, but is is kickass teaming too, just that it's a lot harder to describe how good it is teaming.

Mind you, in pure dps terms, especially when it comes to large numbers of mobs, other controllers will beat ill/rads, and they will beat ill/rads in the ability to set up containment (ill/rads suck at that). However, for general effectiveness both teaming and soloing I have never found anything that comes close.

Yes.

Honestly, if you want perma-PA, it is doable, but probably expensive. Best place to start is to get set Ios that get the recharge rate from enhancements in PA up to about 100%. Then get Hasten. If you get enough recharge to perma hasten (probably about 85% if you put decent enhancements in hasten and use siphon speed), then with hasten and just one siphon speed going you have another 90%, so with that you are already up to 100 + 95 + 85 = 280. If you can just generally have doubled siphon speed going (recharges twice as fast as it's duration) then you have perma-PA at 85 global rech.

At base, PA recharges in 240 seconds and has a 60 second duration. In order to make it perma you need to reduce the recharge to 60 seconds (or 1/4 of it's current amount). The formula for recharge is:
new recharge rate = old recharge rate / (1 + recharge rate reductions expressed as a fraction).

In practical terms this means you need at least 300% recharge reduction to make PA perma.

Given 68% from enhancement in the power and one siphon speed (double or triple stacking siphon speed may be possible, but just one for now), that gives you 88% recharge rate reduction (siphon speed = 20%). You would still need 212% recharge rate reduction on top of this. Every extra siphon speed you can manage to stack on top of the first will reduce this by another 20%. If you can get perma-hasten that reduces it by 70% more.

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The one thing that perplexes me though is people listing items for less than they would get in a store. For instance today almost half of the Computer Virus sold have been for less than 250inf. and mostly for 100.

Why when they could just sell it to a vendor for 250?

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Normally I do. I don't really care about the 250 inf. That's chump change, but I visit a vendor after every TF just to dump extra salvage (other then rares) because it is not worth my time and the market space to try to sell it.

However, on each character, I like to have as many market slots as possible. That means selling 7,000 items. That can take a fairly long time, so what I will often do is pick a somewhat desireable piece of common salvage, that I can usually download, but that I can often buy for a reasonably modest amount, in bulk (say, 300 inf, or 500, oer even 1000, not usually more then that). Then I will proceed to fill up all my market slots bidding for 10 of that salvage at that relatively low price, and when I have a decent amount, selll them all off for 1 inf. Then buy more, and sell them. I figure I may lose from 299 to 999 inf on each one (depending on the buy price) but the overall cost of 7000 * 999 (max) = 7 million inf, is worth it to me for those extra market slots.

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Farmers get blamed for everything


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Lies!

Say, did you know that farmers caused global warming, and the current worldwide economic recession?

I'd suggest you examine the end costs for the fortunata AoEs pretty carefully. One thing that always bugged me is that fortunata multi-target damaging powers (at least the ones that recover in any reasonable time (<30s) require a lot of end and so you can't just build a very high AoE/high rech fort and expect to spam your attacks as often as they come up.

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Here's what I think is wasted for a VEAT team -

Elude - when you pop this, your chances of getting hit will go from 5% down to... 5%
Vengeance - see above
Weave - see way above


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Agreed on Weave and Elude, but Vengeance also gives a +35% to hit and damage, an d for that I would highly recommend it.

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This is based entirely on the soldiers TT: Maneuvers offering more Defense than the Widow counterpart.

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Very true, but if the widows get perma mindlink, in addition to maneuvers, the widows provide the team more def then the soldiers do with just maneuvers.

Numbers:
soldier TT: Maneuvers: 10% base, 16% enhanced.
Widow TT: Maneuvers: 5% base, 8% enhanced.
Widow Mindlink: 10% base, 16% enhanced.

Without having mindlink perma we need to start guessing based on average uptime, and then soldiers might be the better bet for team def bonuses.

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With that said the best ideas are what I think Posi already posted.

If you exploit you get the hammer.

[/ QUOTE ] This.

The OP assumes that nobody likes repeating content. The OP is wrong.

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Well, the OP assumed that nobody enjoys doing the exact same thing over and over for zero reward. Tons of people like doing stuff they will get rewarded for, and doing stuff more then just once can be fun because you can do it different ways or pay more careful attention to details.

In other words, you made assumptions about the OP, and those assumptions were wrong.

[/ QUOTE ] I didn't make any assumptions. The OP said this:

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The first is that, at base, people don't enjoy doing the same repetitive thing over and over and over. They'll do it, if the reward is really great (think factory workers and getting paid at a job), but they won't actually like doing it.

[/ QUOTE ] There were no qualifiers in that statement. It was a flat statement saying people don't enjoy it. Which is an assumption. And a wrong assumption about many people.

So I didn't assume anything. I went by what he typed. Nice attempt at making stuff up though.

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Seeing as I am the OP, I believe I know my own mind a little better then you do.

What you quote from the original post is not exactly the same thing as just assuming nobody likes to repeat content, which is the assumption you said I was making.

Nice insults though. Well, actually, not so nice. Kind of unoriginal and bland. Try again?

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With that said the best ideas are what I think Posi already posted.

If you exploit you get the hammer.

[/ QUOTE ] This.

The OP assumes that nobody likes repeating content. The OP is wrong.

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Well, the OP assumed that nobody enjoys doing the exact same thing over and over for zero reward. Tons of people like doing stuff they will get rewarded for, and doing stuff more then just once can be fun because you can do it different ways or pay more careful attention to details.

In other words, you made assumptions about the OP, and those assumptions were wrong.

First off, the soft cap on defense isn't as important as most people make it out to be. One of my forts generally has about 70% def to melee/ranged and 60% to AoE. Since soft cap is 45 you would think anything over that wouldn't be terribly useful. Not only do I get hit far less often then people with just soft cap def but I find on occasion that swallowing a luck inspiration or two really saves my [censored]. Most of this is due to many enemies having -def in their attacks, and when I have max aggro this often comes into play. Also, when facing certain opponents they seem to have significant to hit bonuses, even in PvE.

I would say that no only was requiring everyone to have maneuvers and/or mindlink (for widows) a good idea, but would strongly encourage all members to take maneuvers from the leadership pool too.

As for assault, if everyone takes BOTH versions of assault as well, and stays together, damage bonus from that alone will be 240% (team of 8, 2 versions of assault each, 15% for each version). Even if you use enhancements to cap damage from powers (+100%) and get very nice set bonuses fro damage (adding up to maybe 25% bonus), this still only gives 365% bonus, which is close to cap, but I think the cap is 400%. If I am wrong, and it is 300%, then this might allow some leeway as far as slotting, or people to split up somewhat.

I strongly recommend against people not taking stamina or hasten. In order for that to pay off with stamina you would probably need about 100% end reduction (halving end cost) in all your attacks and most of your toggles. That's three dedicated enhancements (well, at level 50, maybe 2 dedicated ones and one com,bo with other stuff). Nothing any of the soldiers has gives teammates bonuses to end or recharge. I would recommend against dumping hasten because a lot of powers have long recharges, where diminishing those is very useful.

Of course, I'm just some random schmoe on a message board.

With all the issues around farming/powerleveling going on now it occurred to me to seriously consider why people would do these things and, more importantly, why people would abuse exploits that allowed extreme versions of these things. AT base, what is occurring is that some very clever players are finding a very efficient way to get extremely good rewards, either in terms of inf, xp, tickets, merits, prestige, recipes, or anything else they make a regularly gainable reward in the game. Then these players take that activity (which, if it were to happen once every few days, would be no big deal) and figure out a way to do it over and over and over. MA makes this much easier, but you can find stuff like this in repeatable missions or story arcs or TFs too. When the reward is so far out of whack with the rest of the game (say, 100 times as much as through normal play) that there is no possible way that people could gain it naturally, this is considered an exploit. However, for those who just want to gain the rewards in the most efficient manner possible, they really don't see much difference except that they have been very successful.

Naturally, once someone finds one of these ways to very efficiently gain some reward over and over and over, the news tends to get around, and soon a lot of people are using this.

So far so good. Lots of people ar getting rewards at a really fast rate. Nobody is hurt, everyone is happy, no?

Well, there are a few problems with this. The first is that, at base, people don't enjoy doing the same repetitive thing over and over and over. They'll do it, if the reward is really great (think factory workers and getting paid at a job), but they won't actually like doing it. Note: I'm not saying that some forms of powerleveling can't be fun, but most of them, the ones based on doing the same ultra efficient thing over and over and over, aren't. The rewards may be enjoyable, but the actual actions...well, people like variety, not sameness.

So we have a bunch of people who basically sacrifice a little fun now, for the rewards they get, in order to enjoy those rewwards later, but what do they do with those rewards? Well, it depends, but a lot of people use this method to get a character from 1 to 50, and then just start a new character, and do the same thing over again. Part of this is because many people don't find there to be much of an end game in CoX, part of this is because people thik leveling a character IS the game. Whatever the reason, people who do this often become bored, and the more effective this is, the more 50s they can make rapidly, the more rapidly they can slot themselves out with the best recipes, the faster they can get the biggest possible bases, and the sooner they grow bored with the game and leave.

Naturally, the devs don't want people to leave. They don't want folks to get bored, but what do they do? By the very nature of things there is going to be some method of getting a reward in these games that is more effecient then other methods, and if you want the best rewards fastest then using that method makes the most sense. But doing the same thing over and over is boring, adn leads to people leaving faster as they "finish the game" faster.

Well, one thing the devs might consider is making it so rewards ar greater for doing more varied things. This should nto diminish the rewards most people can get, but it should make the process of getting those rewrards more enjoyable. They actually did this for task forces. They saw people doing the same task forces over and over because the rewards for those (per unit time) was so much higher then anything else, and they upped the rewards for most task forces somewhat but made it so that doing the same one over and over resulted in less of a reward each time (well, each time you did it in a 24 hour period). It seems to me that the rewards for most task forces were higher the first time you did it, about the same the second time, and severely diminished for the third and further times within 24 hours,k but if you did a variety of TFs within 24 hours you got better rewards then before. This encouraged more varied play. People DID start doing some TFs they rarely did otherwise.

So what if the devs tried to apply this to other aspects of the game? What if the devs made ticket rewards in a story arc half as much the second time you ran it in 24 hours? How about if they made it so that if you killed more then, say, 50, of the exact same mob (both type and name) within a 20 minute period, that you would suffer diminshing returns on killing more of tat mob, both for xp, inf, prestige, and maybe tickets and other drops? What if they started thigns off by increasing the rewards for those things subject to diminishing returns, and made it so that, if people tried to vary their play somewhat they would never even hit diminishing returns, but if they did the same thing over and over, or kept making misssions/arcs to kill the same mobs type over and over, that they would eventually find that the returns were less then they might get otherwise?

Granted, the clever folks will still come up with the most efficient way of gaining rewards through this system, and do that over and over, but the interval between doing the exact same thing will be longer, and in between they will experience more variety in the game, and hopefully have more fun.

Ultimately, we also need more high end content. More of an end game. I don't have any real ideas on that, but this would, hopefully, address the idea of those who seek the greatest rewards being forced to do the same thing over and over to get that, and growing bored as a result.

Mask presence and the stealth IO will not suppress when you activate AoC. It's because it's a confuse effect. As far as I know, seeds of confusion (the plant confusion cone) acts like any other attack and does suppress stealth, but every other confuse power does not.

So mobs will not have a chance to react in that split second if you are stealthed enough that they don't notice you when you get that close. They also will not attack you if you move away after using AoC, not even the ones that were close but not affected by the power. You can wander in, use AoC, then use single target confuse on bosses and elite bosses who might not have been confused, then walk away and watch them slaughter each other for the next 30 seconds or so at zero risk to yourself.

Alternatively, you could herd up a huge bunch of mobs into a tight area using regular attacks, hit AoC there with contagious confusion, so most of them are attacking each other, if not all, then hit psychic wail to kill a bunch of them while the rest are STILL attacking each other or stunned.

It all depends on what you enjoy.

Superspeed and mask presence, or superspeed and a stealth IO, or mask presence and a stealth IO, or all three together, are all good enough combos that you can walk right up to most mobs (snipers and rikti drones excepted) and they won't notice you. Unfortunately any one of those will not be sufficient. You c an get closer with just superspeed, but to use AoC effectively in the middle of a tight group of them superspeed will not be sufficient to let you stand unnoticed. It won't suppress, but if you just walked in and didn't use any powers at all you would still be seen. Besides, I noticed the original poster did not list superspeed in his build, so I did not suggest it, but everyone as sprint, and he had not slotted it, so I figured a stealth IO there. was a reasonable suggestion.

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Bab mentioned recently that Confuse would have its activation/animation trimmed to 2.0 seconds.

While I'm here, a related question:

Does Aura of Confusion drop you out of Hidden status?

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I am pretty sure it does. I haven't tried but I've tried some aoe toggles with my stalker and they reveal me (Oppressive Gloom, Fear toggle, and EA's repel toggle)

I can't see why aoe confuse won't reveal you. And also, you have to get close to use aoe confuse since it's pbaoe and you will be seen?

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Aura of Confusion, like ALMOST all confuse powers, does not reveal you, but as the poster above mentions, you do have to get close to use it. If you want to use it while remaining hidden I suggest putting a stealth IO in sprint and toggling both sprint and mask presence on and then going in and using aura of confusion.

AoC with the contagious confusion purple proc (which is relatively cheap) has a decent chance of one shot confusing boss types, and even a small chance of cofusing EBs on one application, if you do it in a nice bunched up group of baddies.

Objective feedback:
The current system of rewards in MA, aside from dev choice arcs, is that all recipe/salvage drops have been replaced by ticket drops. However, unlike normal missions/arcs where you might get some of these from accomplishing objectives other then killing-- excuse me, defeating-- mobs, in MA you don't. Even the end of mission reward is based entirely on the amount of tickets you already received from "defeating" mobs. While I understand that "defeating" mobs is an important part of the game, other aspects of the game are also important. Some of those are very subjective, but others, such as the objectives that devs allow us to put in missions other then "defeat" alls, are not. Moreover, making the CoX experience more vaied is bound to make it more interesting for everyone, and by setting the vast majority of rewards to be based solely on "defeat"s the developers are actually encouraging people to create missions that do not have any other objectives and to not play any other form of content (as it is not rewarding).

I'll grant that there is a potential for abuse. If the devs allow players to acquire tickets from, say, clickign glowies, then it is possible, and even likely, that people will develop "glowie farms" and sit clicking the glowies all day. However, is that any more dull then what we have now with the regular farms? Doesn't this at least encourage those who don't want to farm to make and play more varied missions, while not actually seriously affecting those who do want to farm?

Well, for fortunatas at least.

OK, back.

The thing to keep in mind is that what you really need is for mindlink to have 300 "ticks" pass, before 90 seconds pass. Without any recharge reduction you get one tick per second. While Hasten is up that gives you an additional 0.7 ticks per second. 3 membranes in mindlink also give an additional 0.95 ticks per second.

Anyway, based on my previous post it seems likely that Hasten might have some downtime, and mindlink could still be perma. This starts to make the math a bit more complex. Hasten has a duration of 120 seconds, and, at base, a recharge rate of 450 seconds. If you happened to get lucky and activate mindlink right after you clicked hasten you would have about 120 seconds of those additional 0.7 ticks per second. Since we are trying to perma mindlink we really only need 90 seconds so under these circumstances we would get the maximum benefit of hasten while mindlink recharged. However, we can't count on getting lucky. In fact, I only really consider mindlink perma when it will always be on under the worst of circumstances. That would be when the full downtime of hasten occurs while mindlink is recharging, so you get the minimal use of Hasten for recharge rate.

So, while hasten is down, mindlink is getting the following ticks per second: 1 (base) + 0.95 (enhancements in mindlink) + x (global recharge rate bonus) = 1.95 + x.

Let's call the Hasten downtime HD seconds.

During the remaining 90 - HD seconds of mindlink it will need to recharge. During this time it will gain 1.95 + x + 0.7 (benefit of hasten) = 2.65 + x ticks per second.

So, what we need is (HD * (1.95 + x)) + ((90 - HD) * (2.65 + x)) = 300 (total number of ticks needed for mindlink to recharge).
This gives us:
(1.95 * HD) + (x * HD) + 238.5 + (90 * x) - (2.65 * HD) - (x * HD) = 300 ==>
(90 * x) - (0.7 * HD) = 61.5 ==>
x = (61.5 + (0.7 * HD)) / 90


We've got two variables in this equation, the hasten downtime (HD) and the global recharge rate (x). However, we can figure out HD based on x, if we are allowed to make a reasonable assumption, namely that Hasten has three slots which have level 50 recharge rate IOs in them. That gives hasten a recharge rate due to enhancements of 0.99. Hasten is down for HD seconds, during that time hasten will gain
HD * (1 (base) + 0.99 (enhancements) + x (global recharge rate) = HD * (1.99 + x) ticks.
During Hasten's up time it will gain 120 (duration of hasten) * (2.69 + x) ticks (an additional 0.7 ticks per second due to the effects of hasten on its own recharge rate).
The total number fo ticks for hasten has to be 450, so we get:
(120 * (2.69 + x)) + (HD * (1.99 + x)) = 450. ==>
(HD * (1.99 + x)) = (450 - (120 * (2.69 + x))) ==>
HD = (450 - (120 * (2.69 + x))) / (1.99 + x) =
(127.2 - 120 * x) / (1.99 + x)

Now, using the previous value for x in terms of HD and substituting that into this equation for x we get:

HD = (127.2 - 120 * ((61.5 + (0.7 * HD)) / 90)) / (1.99 + (61.5 + (0.7 * HD)) / 90) ==>
HD * (1.99 + (61.5 / 90) + (7/900 * HD)) = (127.2 - 82 + (28/30 * HD)) ==>
(7/900) * HD ^2 + (1.99 + (61.5 / 90) - (28/30)) * HD - 45.2 = 0
I'm going to work out those fractions and give approximations so that we can easily solve this as a quadratic equation. Here the a term is approximately 0.00778, the b term is approximately 3.60667, and the c term is -45.2. Plugging this into the solution to the quadratic equation we get:
HD = (-3.60667 + (3.60667^2 - (4 * 0.00778 * -45.2)) ^ 0.5) / (2 * 0.00778)
= 12.21
and
HD = (-3.60667 - (3.60667^2 - (4 * 0.00778 * -45.2)) ^ 0.5) / (2 * 0.00778)
= -475.79

Clearly for hasten downtime the former is the correct solution, so this should work (barely) with a hasten downtime of approximately 12.21 seconds. Plugging this into the previous equation we get:
x = (61.5 + (0.7 * 12.21)) / 90
= 0.7783, so under these circumstances, to have mindlink truly be perma (even during the maximum downtime of hasten) we need a global recharge rate of at least 78%.

Let's check that the math is all correct by substituting all this back in:
If global recharge rate is 78% (0.78) then we get 0.78 ticks per second for that all the time. Then hasten downtime is:
(450 - ticks during hasten up time) / (ticks per second during hasten downtime), where
ticks during hasten up time = hasten duration * ticks per second during hasten up time
= 120 * ( 1 + 0.99 + 0.7 + 0.78) = 120 * 3.47 = 416.4,
ticks per second during hasten downtime = 1 + 0.99 + 0.78 = 2.77,
so hasten downtime = (450 - 416.4) / 2.77 = 12.13 seconds.

Now, during these 12.13 seconds of hasten downtime, mindlink will only get 1 + 0.95 + 0.78 = 2.73 ticks per second, or 12.13 * 2.73 = 33.11 ticks total. Mindlink still needs 300 - 33.11 = 266.89 ticks to recharge fully. During hasten uptime mindlink gets 1 + 0.95 + 0.78 + 0.7 = 3.43 ticks per second. This means the remaining 266.89 ticks will pass in 266.89 / 3.43 = 77.81 seconds, which is clearly less then the 120 second hasten duration, so we don't have to worry about an additional hasten downtime. Moreover, the mindlink recharge time while hasten is up (77.81) + the mindlink recharge time when hasten is down (12.13) = the total mindlink recharge time (89.94). 89.94 is less (barely) then the mindlink duration of 90 seconds, so this should just barely work.

Mind you, in practice, it's a good idea to have the recharge time 1 or 2 seconds faster, but technically this is the minimum global recharge you need, with hasten, to make mindlink perma.

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Fortunata
total rechage needed for perma ML is 300%
95% if you soft cap the ML with membrains or IOs
70% for hasten
that leaves 125% for perma (at that hasten will be
perma too if alteast 3 sloted)


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OK, just to add in some actual numbers here (from Mids', all numbers for fortunatas):
Base duration for mindlink: 90s
Base recharge rate for mindlink: 300s.

Recharge formula:
actual recharge = base recharge / (1 + all recharge bonuses expressed as a fraction)

So what we need is:
90 = 300 / (1 + rech bonuses) ==>
300 / 90 = 1 + rech bonuses ==>
7/3 = rech bonuses.

Or, to express this as percentages, you need 233% recharge bonus to get mindlink to perma on a fortunata.

Now, three membranes in the power do indeed give you about 95% recharge bonus, so then you would need about another 138% more. If you had perma hasten that would get you 70% more, and you would only need 68% global rech in addition to that. However, in order to get poerma-hasten it takes about 105% global rech, so getting perma hasten will, automatically, get you perma-mindlink (assuming you went with three membranes in mindlink as well).

However, there is a way to get mindlink to perma without having hasten be perma (I'd still recommend taking hasten). That requires more global recharge though. It's tricky to figure out the exact amount of global recharge you need, but 80% should do it. I'm in a bit of a hurry now, but I can explain how the numbers work out when I have more time.

I agree that, in general, this is the way to do a speed ITF. However, there are a few things I think could be improved slightly. Detailed below:


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Team Mix

Team mix is crucial. If you do not have the appropriate team, don’t start until you do. My choice for a Speed ITF team looks something like this:

Lead Brute or Tank (Must be able to hold large mobs unassisted)
Backup Brute or Tank (To keep team alive and finish off mobs)
A Kinetic anything (Defender, Troller, Corrupter)
3-4 Squishy Control Toons (Corrupters, Trollers, Defenders, Dominators)
1-2 Damage Dealers


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First a word of general advice. The cimerorans do a lot of def debuffing, but not much int he way of dam. resist. debuffing. As a result, defense based sets tend to be slightly weaker then damage resistance based sets. If, for example, you have a choice between a force field controller or a sonic controller, tgenerally the sonic would be the way to go.

If you have a lead brute, keep in mind that most brutes can't hold large mobs unassisted. Generally a tank is better for the lead.

Also, when it comes to squishies past the kinetic, I strongly favor debuffers, and preferably one person who can shield/bubble the team.

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Not to be critical of others, but I am amazed to see long time players who do not recognize the potential of their toons. A great team is one to where every player is maximizing the effectiveness of their unique abilities. That being said, a few words to the kinetic: Your primary function is to Speed Boost the team, and spam Transfusion on the AV’s and EB’s. Transfusion keeps the big baddies from regenerating health for a bit – a great debuff. Please know your value to the team kins, as I hate to beg for SB. Also, know that I wouldn’t consider attempting a Speed ITF without a kin. So to that degree, the kin gets the MVP award for this TF.

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I have had very fast ITFs with no kins at alll (no stone brutes or tanks either). Rads make the key opponents go down really fast, and if you have enough AoE damage then you can still do the tf very fast. It won't feel as zippy, but when you look at the timer it ends up the same. That being said, generally at least one good kin IS incredibly useful for speed runs. The advice about kins needing to keep everyone SBed is very well put. In general, I have seen too many kins feel they are ok if they just keep the stoner SBed, or maybe SB the others when they ask for it. You can do that, but you are losing a lot of the kins utility. SB doesn't just improve movement rate, it also vastly increases recharge and (if slotted correctly) end recovery rate. I almost never see bubblers/shielders decide to only bubble one or two characters, but it would be just as wasteful of resources. That being said, the team often spreads out and it can be very difficult to keep everyone SBed (or bubbled). If you don't like spending most of your time on that task alone, you picked the wrong character to play on an ITF team.


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Mission 1: Save the Girls, Release the Hostage (10-12 Minutes)

Lead Brute/Tank is off solo looking for the girls. Backup and Team will quickly clear the first couple of mobs to the main corridor, then assist the lead as needed. Again, we are not clearing every mob and we are not pulling. We are releasing each of the 10 Hostages – The second they stand, move on! Lead will communicate with Backup and Team constantly to let everyone know what’s happening. “Come to me when you can” is a phrase you will hear often. Backup Brute/Tank must use their own judgment regarding when they can safely leave a mob or not. After all 10 Girls are up, run to the exit – bypass any mobs in the way. Just run through them or jump over them. They are not important, and will not follow you outside.

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The girls are in the following locations: 3 in the room to the south of the first T (go there first), 3 in the corridor at the intersection of the second T (the one you get to by going north at the first T), and 4 in the room to the right of the second T, and straight past the four way intersection after the second T. They are ALWAYS in these numbers in these locations. Not hard to find. Don't bother having the lead look for them, have the tanks/brutes try to aggro folks on the way there to let the squishies run past and then have the brutes/tanks run past too, trailing the mobs. Have the squishies kill any mobs the brutes/tanks aggroed when they get to their destination near one of the girls and then have the brutes/tanks herd the mobs near the other girls. In each otf the three areas it shoudl only take one good herd on the part of both brutes/tanks to pull everyone guarding the girls there.

Also, for anyone doing controllable single target damage (as opposed to uncontrollable, in the form of non-MM pets, and AoE damage) generally, throughout the TF, target the surgeons first. They are way to good at preventing damage not to make the best targets. In this particular mission leave the bosses alone when trying to free the girls, because the girls are only ever guarded by minions and lieutenants. There may be bosses nearby, but they won't be guarding the girls.

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Mission 2: Bust the Crystals (12-17 Minutes)

Depending on the map spawn, it is possible to ditch all the ambushes. Basically the mission looks like this: Lead will just focus on busting crystals while the team handles the surrounding aggro. If we can ditch the ambushes, we will. If not, the backup and team will take care of them while the lead keeps looking for more crystals to bust. Usually I can hit unstop and bust the last 2-3 very quickly solo, and then out we go. This mission has the propensity to go bad quickly, so lead and backup must communicate effectively throughout this mission. Even if we have to kill all the ambushes but the last 2-3, we can still complete this one in about 17 minutes. My advice would be to stay tight, and let the ambushes find you if you have to kill them all.

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There is a faster way of doing this mission, but the team definitely needs to know you will be doing this strategy beforehand. If two people can either each solo the cysts entirely, or can work as a team toegther and kill the cysts quickly and stay alive by themselves when handling the cysts (they also need to be able to safely run past all the mobs between the cysts), then the remaining 6 characters can just hang back near the entrance and "catch" all the aggro from ambushes while the other two work on killing the cysts. On example might be a tough kin and a stone tank or brute, or a tank/brute and a really good ill/rad, or two very tough brutes who dish out a lot of single target damage (the goa is just to kill the cysts for these peopel and move on). I have soloed the cysts on my fortunata, with way beyond capped defense and high damage output. Regardless, one person who can solo the cysts isn't going to make this a faster strategy, but two people who can solo the cysts well or work well as a team to kill the cysts does make this faster.

If the team does split up the ambushes almost always go after the larger grouping, regardless of which group killed the cyst.

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Mission 3: Lag Mountain (12-15 Minutes)

The most dreaded of all the missions. This mission used to really tie up a lot of time before we started using the Lead and Backup Strategy. Constant spawns and the Lag would bog us down midway up the map. No Fun. On this one, I usually keep the entire team together. Lead may jump to the next General once one is down, but then the entire team quickly joins. If the current mob is not down, let them pull. The game puts limits on how many baddies will follow any given player. I have heard that this was to stop tanks from pulling massive herds. So let’s use this to our advantage. Abandon a mob, and you’ll be surprised how many don’t follow.

Once in the mission, buffs all around – then straight to the bridge. Focus only on the General and his posse’. Watch the Navigation Bar. When the General Count drops to 4, time to move on. 2nd General is just above the bridge. Entire team to him and watching the Nav Bar again. 3rd and 4th Generals are past the aqueduct looking bridge. When #4 is eating dirt, entire team moves to last area, which is directly in between the giant robots. You can have someone ghost and tp if you like. I prefer to be the last one out, and then we’ll mop up any mobs that follow before attacking the console.

End is simple. All on console, with squishies dealing death from 500 feet or so to avoid the 3 defense stages. When console is down, brief regroup, more buffs, then lead pulls Rom or Req. Sometimes we’ll pull em both. We have 2 very competent Brutes/Tanks on the team, so one can distract the other while we drop them individually. Exit on Complete.

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This one I tend to do very differently, and having done it the above suggested way many times I find that the way I am used to doing it has been a lot faster. You start by having everyone go to the hill above the bridge and buff there. Then take the guys on the bridge as a group. When those are almost down one of the tanks/brutes (or someone fairly tough) runs to the next general and pulls them to the bridge. At the bridge there is very little lag, but past the bridge lag is horrible. Everyone else stays on the bridge while the puller keeps going out and pulls back (one at a time) the remaining three generals between the bridge and the end point.

Some of the guys on the general will follow, and possibly an ambush will follow, but you might not get all the guys around the general. This is a good thing as you only need to kill the generals here, except for the general surrounded entirely by elite bosses. You have to kill all the elite bosses with him, so those need to be pulled as well. That part is tricky and may take two trips. Either way, because of the lag avoided, pulling each of the generals is actually faster then having the team jump to them.

Once you kill the last general (or maybe a little before, not counting Requiem because he is past the path), if you have someone with recall or team tp have them get to the ledge above the AVs. TP everyone there, and pull the avs (one at a time or both at once if you have a really good team). Pulling these guys is a bit tricky as they will tend to jump up to where they can shoot the puller, shoot the puller, and then slide back down again. You have to have everyone stand back and out of line of sight of the cliff edge if possible. Once the AV is fully up on the ledge everyone jumps in, but not before. The reason for the ledge is that aside from those two AVs, nothing can get up there, so there will be no adds to deal with.

Once the AVs are killed everyone jumps to the control console and kills it. There are two reasons to do it afterward. First, you want the whole team for both the control console and the AVs, and you are more likely to have people die at the control console then at the AVs, given there will be no adds from the AVs, so no time spent ressing and recovering IF you do the AVs first. Second, people have a deplorable tendency to try to pull the AVs once they are done with the control console by pulling them down to where the team is, rather then having the team go up to the ledge. This does lead to many additional mobs and takes more time.

Sometimes, using this strategy, if the team was very efficient at pulling and killing the generals, you won't have killed all 100 Cimerorans after the control console is down. In that case just grab the last few Cimerorans on the path, possibly having the tank pull them off the path to avoid lag. You only need minions now. If people died fighting the control console it isn't as big a deal either (as opposed to if you still had to fight the AVs)

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Mission 4: Kill 300 Romans, then the Big Guy Four Times (12-15 Minutes)

This mission can flat suck away the time if you are not careful. Here is my preferred method for completion: Team enters and immediately buffs. We’ll meet the ambush in the middle of the first mobs on the stairs. Demonic Aura again, or a few purps. Squishies hang back and deal death from a distance the entire time from here on out. Take the left path. It just seems shorter to me. The second a mob is 80% down, move to the next area and let them pull. If we miss a few Romans, no biggie. Continue on left path to the end area. Be sure to have your F7 and F10 buttons ready for the cinematic trailer.

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As someone else suggested, the tower rooftops are a great, FAST, way to get those needed 300. From the entrance, there are two tower rooftops, one forward to the right, the other forward to the left. My suggestion is to not bother with ANY mobs on the ground, not even the initial ambush, and have everyone immediately head for the tower rooftops. Once on an unoccupied corner (left rear for the tower on the right and right rear for the tower on the left, as seen from the entrance), have the tanks/brutes herd as many mobs as they safely can into other mobs as safety allows, then do FSes over the batch while AoE specialists are nearby, and then nuke them or blow them up with other AoEs. The reason to do the rooftops is that you have a nice concentrated group of mobs that has absolutely no elite bosses. On the path, you have tons of elite bosses, and I think a slightly higher proportion of boss mobs as well. The roof to the right (from the entrance) also won't have any ambushes, whereas along the path there will be tons of ambushes from behind the team, often leaving the squishies dead or dying as the tanks move forward first.

Note that the left tower will cause 2-3 ambushes, all coming from the left rear corner (as seen from the entrance). Have the tanks/brutes be prepared to catch their aggro.

If you do these towers right you should be able to clear out a little over 200 mobs in about 5 minutes.

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Rather than clearing the entire last area sans Rommy, I prefer to kill only the few mobs leading to the far back left corner. This will be the kill zone. Pull the Cyclops or Cow on Rom’s left side, then team buffs all around. A few more purps, then lead pulls Rom to the waiting team. The disadvantage to this is that when he goes down, people will scramble to get out of LOS to avoid the stuns. We do not want someone to aggro the platform mobs, so know where you are running before the big guy drops. Or, bring a giant Break Free and don’t run. If you’re lucky enough to have a bubbler, you can stay under the big bubble and avoid the stuns also. Once he drops four times, you will need to defeat about 40 Romans to complete. There is at least that many on the platform.

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In all fairness I cannot comment on this part of the poster's strategy. I have never done it that way. I do know that if you kill everything on the towers including the ambushes on the left tower and you clear the platform and you kil the ambushes that appear while fighting romulus then you will have the 300 every time, I don't usually clear the 5th column surrounding the dais, but I do usually clear the dais of Cimerorans before starting on Romy and his Nictii. People can usually find spots to run out of LOS of Romy this way, and it avoids potential adds outside of the ambushes. Note that the exact time the stun occurs is when a Nictus dies, which occurs when Romy rezzes, NOT when Romy dies, which is how you have a few moments to run out of line of sight when it happens. Also note this means if someone kills a Nictus AV there is no time to run away to avoid the stun.

If the team has a LOT of debuffing (should have at least two good debuffers) you can just take Rom and not worry about the effect of the healing nictus. If the team has no debuffers then this is slower (not impossible, just much slower) then if you have one of the tanks/brutes pull the healing nictus (which is the one to the left of Romy) away from him just a bit so Romy doesn't keep getting healed massively. The size of the heal is based on the number of people standing nearby, so if you have a lot of pets or an ambush shows up, it can substantially slow down the rate at which you are killing Romy if you don't pull the healing nictus a ways away. Also keep in mind that the Nictuses use a weird tether code that means they will always go back to Romy if they are pulled far enough away from him, so just get the healer far enough that Romy doesn't get healed, and don't try to pull it much farther. If you have one good debuffer, which is faster depends on the amount of damage the team can dish out.

Note that some of the nictus things auto-hit in their big AoE attacks. I have had close to 150 defense while trying to avoid these blasts, and they still hit for high damage. Be outside the area of effect or have good healing going off frequently.

The fastest I have done this TF was in 44 minutes (on heroic) my second and third fastest times were at 50 minutes on invincible. I have done this fairly routinely between 51 minutes and an hour on heroic.

I hope my additions helped. The advice of the original poster will lead to a very fast ITF, but (except for the last part of the last mission, which I have never done the way the original poster suggests) my experience has shown that the suggestions I have made might make it a bit faster. I have occasionally run this with a kin (def) and a rad (controller), but usually I have done this with my fortunata, Giant Finale, all on Freedom.

Thanks very much for the guide. With this information I just managed to set up a rotating bind file to, when I hit numpad0, activate a power (which only comes up every 8 minutes or so), and switch to the next costume when I do so.

Thanks. This was very useful.

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If Ramen is wrong, I don't want to be right

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[Fake Scottish accent]They can take ourrrrr lives, but they can't take ourrrr rrrramen![/fake Scottish accent]