Heraclea

Yes, that's what the recent patch does. You will get very little or no XP so long as the buffing minions are present.

I bought the eight, and still planned to rotate them. I didn't care all that much about the ratings or about having low arc numbers; I gave all that up long ago. My muse tended to be moved by ephemeral things like forum and internet memes, and I tend to write arcs that are three missions long, tops; more and the jokes would start wearing thin.
Some of us still have bad memories of ED and the GDN.....

There are no doubt several qualified maps with clearly defined final rooms, in the warehouse, Oranbega, caves, and other sets. Whether they work for the story is hard to say. What I really wanted when I used the Danger Room map was some kind of arena or stadium; that seemed closest. I remember seeing an Oranbega map with a clone of the final Infernal room on it as well.

The real issue is whether the final room has enough final spawn points to support all the objectives.

The clutter in the AE interface is already a source of steady complaint. This patch leaves the affected arcs in the same place as stale boss and Rikti farms. They've no value to anyone who actually came to play the game; if I only wanted to tell a story, I'd just write one.

When there's an obvious right way to fix this, we shouldn't have long to wait.

At Synapse levels, your defenses from HS won't be performing all that well due to exemping down reducing their effectiveness. Having both QR and Stamina working for you at that time is probably more helpful than having HS. My usual method, which is somewhat controversial, is to postpone both MoB and HS until Stamina at 20, I've found this performs well enough even at those lower levels; your regeneration is more important than damage resistance or defense. And Super Strength may mean you want to modify that, because I do think you want KO Blow early.

Your second build looks very solid and very costly. My only quibble would be with order of power selection, but it seems obvious that you aren't intending to run Synapses with this character for the merits. (Even if that's a very good thing to do with a Willpower tanker.) I'd still want KO Blow by 22, and I usually don't take Heightened Senses until 30.

You need maps that have very clearly defined "back" and "final" areas, that will reliably spawn mobs set to spawn "back" in that room.

Johnny Sonata's Hell, the Council danger room, and Infernal's Lair are the ones I know best. There are probably others. All of these are unique maps. They all have one room that's obviously special, so you can get the mobs to appear there.

I'm not sure exactly what you want, but the right map is a help. I've used the Council Danger Room map to spawn four AVs very close to each other; there are four or five spawn points in the large room at the end of the map. They are usually separate enough that they can be pulled one at a time, if you know the layout, but they will all be in reasonable proximity and the chance to aggro more than one is a possibility.

I remember when messin' with Hydra in Perez Park was the thing to do. Good times.

Don't let yourself be too much troubled by the global defense nerf and ED. I stopped playing for a while myself about that time.

But since those dark times, Fire has also received a number of buffs, including shorter recharge on the self heal, that will make your life a bit easier. And your ice melee's single target damage has been improved as well, and it always had a lot of valuable control in it.

You should also acquaint yourself with the invention system. Certain invention sets such as Steadfast Protection, Karma, and Blessing of the Zephyr allow you to add knockback protection to a fire tanker. This avoids the need for Acrobatics. They can be pricey, but you can save up your reward merits that are now earned from running task forces and story arcs.

And welcome back to the game.

Actually, what I had hoped to be able to do was to create game content for an MMORPG.

These will always have a variety of reward structures, but even so, the goal in every such game is to progress characters forward in terms of levels and gear. If you aren't doing that you may as well be cybering in the arena.
Unintended irony is the best kind.

Look, I have a high regard for the developers generally. This game will always be the one I come back to. I eventually came back even after the even grosser disappointments of i5 and i6.

I want AE to be a smashing success. As I've said before, AE has done wonders to sustain my interest in the game. I enjoy the creative outlet, I enjoy having missions available that actually contain new elements ... and I enjoy the XP, and the tickets that allow me to sidestep WW/BM for salvage and recipes, because that's a mini-game I don't enjoy nearly as much.

I probably am done with writing for AE, though; my next arc will be my last for the foreseeable future, and I probably will take down the ones that are made wastes of time by the patch if this drags on like the other one has. Yes, this makes me sad and angry. I'm no longer willing to put in the time to create arcs only to see them so casually stepped on.

If we want AE to remain viable as an alternative way to play the game, the writing community needs to unite in defense of our mutual interests. Telling people that it's nothing to get upset about is not helping what ought to be our common cause.

We aren't supposed to notice the obvious disconnect with what they thought they were doing, and what they said they were doing --- and the actual effect, which is to spoil arcs that contain captive rescues (not "allied critters") and even defendable objects?

Given the obvious disconnect between what they thought they were doing and what they did, it seems to me that the patch is "not working as intended". Broken, for short.

I suspect they didn't know how much they were breaking until the players discovered it for themselves. The entire episode seems to suggest that this patch went straight to live with minimal testing if any.

I'm not sure that it's possible to slot 4 pieces of Kinetic Crash without actually resorting to a piece that enhances knockback. This will turn a power that ordinarily does knockdown in which it is slotted to knockback. This is the least desirable path, but possibly the least expensive.

Using phrases like "gamer rage" is offensively condescending. It's only a small step above adding stupid tags to threads.

AE has been an important part of keeping my interest in the game relatively lively since it went live. So they can't give us entirely new maps to explore; this way we will at least be able to fight dozens of new mobs as we level. The ability to create mission arcs for pure self expression is also something I value fairly high, and has occupied a good deal of my time playing on live.

Yes, it made me angry when the devs decided to devalue the new and player created mobs at the expense of the supplied ones, and require that they suffer a substantial penalty while still being harder than the ones in game. This at least left you with three quarters of what you once had.

But it makes me even angrier when it was pointed out very quickly that this damned patch was not working as intended, and yet it is still live. This entirely ruins any AE mission that aspires to anything more complicated than a radio/newspaper mission.

I am also entirely unconvinced that there is any emergency that comes anywhere near justifying having this patch still live as an "exploit fix", given the fact that buffing NPCs have been a feature of AE since the day it went live.

There's only one right thing to do here. And it has not been done yet.

I think the trick on that is to start that arc and get to that point in it immediately after you hit level 10.

Lady Jane has powers of perception unavailable to player characters, and like most combat NPCs she has a deathwish that clouds her mind to the actual goal in question. The trick is to do the mission in the levels before CoT mobs spawn spectres that turn invisible and run. She can still see them, and will follow them obliviously into other mobs and die. So the trick is to do it at a level when the CoTs are not spawning those.

The missions I tend to skip are with mobs that I don't enjoy confronting, or mechanics that make them tedious. The defend the power grid Levantra mission with the four hostages and four bombs is one I often skip. Vanguard Sword are essentially unteamworthy and untankable, so I either solo them at -1 or skip through them. Anything with stacking caltrops like Knives of Artemis or Chimera's minions will get skipped.

MA was sold, as a special edition, with the promise that it would provide an alternative means of levelling through player created content. Removing XP would involve a pretty nasty bait and switch involving real money. I could see people getting even more upset about that.

Now, the characters I take into AE are mostly level 50s anyways. I'd still play it for tickets. But that isn't how it was sold.

FWIW, the string "SFMA", for Story Focused MA Arc, is still usually put into the descriptions of actual stories. Those who don't know about the tags are recommended to the list. Some are rather specialized and not widely used, but SFMA seems to be fairly widely recognized. This problem was recognized early on, and the tags work as well as anything else.