IceScykle

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Reasons why devs might be silent on an issue:

1) We didn't see the issue. There are a lot of threads out there.
2) We are in the middle of looking at an issue, and saying anything at the time might be invalidated. Even something like "we are looking into it" can be read as "we are going to change it" if we look at it and find it to be fine, we would get blasted for not changing it when we said we would.
3) The answer is already being given by a lot of players already
4) The answer is obvious (and thus will eventually be given out by a lot of players, see #3).
5) It involves talking about stuff we can't/shouldn't be talking about.
6) The question is a "when" question. We rarely answer these, because even when we put disclaimers on it, our answer becomes taken as gospel, and if we fail to deliver, we look bad.

There's a secret 7th reason that I am not going to give you because of reason #7.

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Really cant see anything in there that would prevent SOME form of comunication onf the Cathedral of Pain trial and Items of Power. The thread on "feedback" was closed recently without saying anything.

Does reason 7 involve sticking fingers in ears, closing eyes and shouting "la la la la cant hear you......."

I think its a little cheeky to lock the other thread without so much a post by a red name, its been read, locked and ignored, way to go....... awesome.......

lets be fair, its not like the COP trial was a release feature or a selling point on the COV boxes now is it?.......

Arenas were I4 and are still massively buggy, im not hopeful on ever seeing the COP trial, past issue features seem low on their priorities, if only someone could show that by NOT having the COP trial running meant everyone was getting 0.00001 xp per minute faster than the devs would like then im sure it would be fixed instantaneously....

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Hamidon and the mitos do damage through Phase Shift to prevent Phantom Army and Phase Shift type powers becoming "required" for a raid.

Fictionally, Hamidon evolves. When he's continually defeated using a particular strategy or power he's naturally going to evolve a counter to it. This ability to attack phase-shifted targets is part of that evolution. Why not simply change the AI so it ignores Phantom Army? Because we don't want it to ignore Phantom Army. Using Phantom Army as a diversion is a perfectly sound tactic. We just didn't want PA to be any better than other pets/minions for that purpose.

We've gotten many PMs with similiar laments about defense, resistance, stealth, etc. All of which are reasonable complaints. However, it's simply not what this particular encounter is. As others have pointed out, in order to make a single entity that can be attacked by 50 players at the same time we have to step outside of the bounds of 'normal' rules in order to make it challenging.

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When the hell was phase "required" for a raid (aside from way way back and that was stopped in the same time period) this just seems mean and serves no purpose, kinda like stopping all those uber mega overpowered /dev blasters from teleporting their crazy overpowered autoturret about.......

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Domination gives a +75% damage enhancement. So I dunno, I would guess that that more than makes up for a low base damage modifier, especially when Doms have giant melee attacks that they can safely use against held AVs.

Their melee modifier is higher than their ranged modifier, by the way.

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melee modifier is 0.75, ranged is 0.65, this was increased in i7(I think) from 0.65 and 0.55 respectively. I still find time to apologise to people I am attacking in pvp for the amount of time it is taking me to kill them, something I never have to do on any of my other characters including defenders and controllers.

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Let's look at it another way...

2 Controllers and a Defender have been able to output enough damage (myself being a controller) to take out Praetorian AVs (Namely Antimatter and Neuron)...without -regen debuffs.

Granted, Doms will probably never know the wicked glee of Storm Summoning, but the base damage in the Controllers and Defenders is below that of Dominators.

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Im not sure thats really the point, I know a controller who solod every AV and GM in the game (including lusca) and my defenders total focus that can outdamage a blasters even when they use aim and build up. Part of the joy of trollers and defenders is their versatility, they can be ST monsters or aoe map munching powerhouses or pure support and the cornerstone of a team, a dominator controls and attacks, its not a variable roll as far as I can see.

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I'll use Char as an example. It's a mag three hold, so under Domination it's mag six. Four doms means that's 24 mags through the first application alone. Another application means 48 mags, 2 under their PToD (Char recharges rather fast (eight seconds and would last for at least 10 seconds vs an AV, not factoring in Hold enh), and most Doms have Hasten for their long-cooldown powers).

Third application will perma hold them, and likely will never be able to come out of the hold due to the recharge and duration on the power. Combined with /assault secondary, after an AV has been permaheld, those four doms should take him down rather fast.

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I dont know, the numbers sound fun but Im doubting 4 doms can take down an AV with their low damage attacks even while in domination and spamming holds before domination falls. It comes back down to lack of damage.

I like doms, i think they are nearly there, I do think their damage modifier needs a buff though.

1) You have the default To Hit value (ie no buffs), your target has no Defense value. How often do you WANT to hit him? base - 50% ie with no acc enhance

Conversely, as the defender, how often do you expect to be missed?expect with no defence, 0%

2) You have the maximum possible To Hit value, and your target has no defense value. How often do you WANT to hit him? Conversely, as the defender, how often do you expect to be missed? 100%, 0%

3) You have the default To Hit value, and your target has the maximum possible defense value. How often do you WANT to hit him? Conversely, as the defender, how often do you expect to be missed? 0%, 100%

4) You have the maximum possible To Hit value, and your target has the maximum possible defense value. How often do you WANT to hit him? Conversely, as the defender, how often do you expect to be missed? 50%, 50%

'defence' as defence is seemingly much maligned by the development team and I cant really figure out why, sure the values used to be nuts back when blasters could run around with 40% def and such but res sets dont seem to be so 'hated'.

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Aim is a 50% (defender) or 62.5% (blaster) tohit buff.

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37.5% for blasters.

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BU is a 20% tohit buff (10% on blasters).

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15% for blasters.

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So the best buff you could get from one Tactics is 3 slotted on a defender, about 20%. Less than a small yellow.

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Your value of yellows is a way too high. Try the following values:
S - 7.5%
M - 18.75%
L - 37.5%

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You're right on the first two. I was doing them from memory and had them wrong.
On the last - Are you suggesting the 25%/33%/50% numbers given on the insps themselves are lying? They certainly buff tohit, not accuracy.

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Insp numbers are nonsense, large purples with a 50% def buff face vale are in fact 25%, only red and oranges are accurate to their face numbers AFAIK

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Throughout this entire thread there's one, almost unamimous thought: Cap'n Mako is borked! There's just something really wrong when one of Lord Recluse's flunkies is as hard or harder to take down than he is. The problem seems to be Mako's Super Elude. Tone it down or just remove it from him and we'll have a pretty enjoyable final mission.

At least with the RSF, none of the Phanlaxers have a "You can't hurt me" button they can keep hitting every so often.

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I beleive many people complain about Statesmans Uber-Unstoppable in anything but optimal stoner/corr teams, but then who wants to run a RSF in anything but a corr and stoner team? That last mission needs a redesign.

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So, the fish out of water was the toughest?

In COV, we could not bring mako down. In the STF we did.
We had 2 controllers and an ice blaster. I wonder if the key is to hold him before he super mogs?
(It appeared you had enough controller debuffs).

I think mako mog will make/break the STF (did you go out, stock up on yellows and pop them when he mog?). He didnt mog on us, so he wasnt that much of a problem.

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Never had a problem with mako in any team configuration, GWs uber heals were more of a problem. Aim and BU pretty much always hit him and dropping burn everywhere took care of the rest. Burn pwns this TF

I found ice tanks much better than inv, any tank can do with relevant support

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team buffs have a mechanics problem. Teams vary in size from 1-8 so a buff that applies to everyone on the team is multiplied in effectiveness from 1x to 8x. Either a buff is useless for small teams or godmode for large teams - or both.

What if team buffs had diminishing returns? Say 150% effectiveness for teams of 1-2, 125% for 3-4, 100% for 5-6, and 75% for 7-8 (numbers given are just an idea, the real numbers would need to be better balanced and more complex like (Y-1) X (12.5% + R/2.3).

That way buffs would be more useful on smaller teams and less powerful on bigger teams than they are now. A team buff should still give a bigger total boost on a large team but not 4x on an 8 person team what it does on a 2 person team.

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Yes, they should. In fact, adding diminishing returns to buffs and debuffs of all sorts would allow us to alter many, many problematic powers. In all likelyhood, though, it will not happen. The change would simply be too fundmental and require a great deal of work on our part.

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Lord help us, they'd do it if they could!

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Sure! Then Weave could give 15% Defense, and Combat Jumping could give 25% Defense (or whatever) and combined, they'd give 30% instead of 40%. When the local FF Defender buffed the character, instead of the normal 25% for the FF, it'd be 5% for 35% defense.*

Basically, additional buffs would always be helpful, but the base level abilities could be made better and more useful across the board.

* Disclaimer: All numbers used illustratively and do not indicate any relation to what said values or formulae would actually be if we were ever to implement a system such as this, which I doubt.

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how monumentally inane and to suggest that this is something that you would actually like to do is facical imo

All this change would do is make the people who spam defenders asking "are you a healer" justified as empath powers will not be fundamentally deminished by team make up.

"ooh theres a FF defender looking for a team, hmm we could get a whopping 5% def buff but this will increase the difficulty of the mission past sucess point"

I think its time for the devs to come out from the number clouds where they have been residing for far to long and spend a good few hours playing the game and exploring the actual working dynamics, "datamining" which is apparantly their blanket buzzword that solves all ills, in reality shows far less than they put stock in.

Now a deminishing effect from stacked buffs could be more logical but would still make certain sets like FF undesireable as opposed to the more proactive empathy.

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Trip mines are going to be of limited use against the repairman I think. They just spawn too fast. I have Dragons tail slotted with two recharges and have Quickness and it wasn't always up before the next spawn appeared. If I had to guess, I'd say it's somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds between spawns, with the lower range being more prevalent. Sometimes it felt like every other attack was going towards the repairmen. Still, they're deep grays and Dragons Tail was one-shotting them. Even if you have to dedicate one teammember to just clearing away the techs, that shouldn't be too hard. An AoE blaster or scrapper will be able to kill them without even breaking a sweat.

The towers do have a lot of HP, but they don't self regenerate (at least not very fast), so it's just a grind to take them down.

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A fire/fire blaster running blazing aura, hotfeet and burn on the towers kills the repairmen as they are spawning and can solo the towers. My fire/fire will be my first toon of choice as it really does the job so well (but needs AB and SB to function)

single target teams have problems with the repairmen, 1st time we ran it we were all in ST pvp spec and couldnt take out the repairmen faster than they could fix so one member ran a fast respec and got ice slick and we went and got shivs and that took care of them,

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DEVs can we change it so AVs don't run from rain effects?

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I thought they did change this, it seems like they might have missed rains (or maybe they didn't include rains on purpose).

From April 5ths patch notes:
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Archvillain and Monster class critters should now be more courageous when faced with Caltrops or similar powers.

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I noticed that I could keep Hot Feet on without making them run away, but it and Caltrops use some different mechanics than Freezing Rain.
I would bug it when an AV runs from my Freezing Rain, it may not be the intended behavior anymore.

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Nope, they ran from Freezing Rain for sure. The leader told us from the start not to use them but when they were pounding on Mako and his health wasn't budging much, I tried one....he ran....fast. I got another don't use Rains. When we got him to the ship and had him trapped a couple times(read previous posts) then I was allowed to use rain. After the half hour point no one seemed to care when I used Rain and Mako DEFINITELY ran each time. He didn't run far and sometimes he would run back into FR just for a second. On the ship there were more obstacles so maybe that was why he ran back and forth so much. When we were in an open space, he would run much further away before stopping.

I will bug it when I get home today then since I did not know they were not supposed to run.

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did it run in the same way minions do or did it run like a spaz across half the zone? Im sure the change doesnt make them just stay still on aoe damage effects just stops them going mental.

On another note Castle removed the immob protection the he put into the PTODs so you can just spam immobs to keep them stationary.

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Of a strange note we were able to take down two towers our first time but one of them was respawned. The other one never respawned at that point. I guess it was the location of the towers and if any of my pbaoe kb/repel powers were shoving them the wrong way.

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Yeah if a rogue repairman goes to a dead tower he will rebuild it in seconds which is why my fire/fire blaster is my favourite to run the STF with, I can solo the towers and repairmen with blazing aura, hotfeet and burn (burn is so good here ) with that much aoe going the repairmen are dead as soon as they spawn.

Im not sure its been mentioned but to bring the tower down to earth the only way I know is to TF it before anyone has applied any immobs/-fly, the immobs/-fly actually keep it in the air so the best bet is for anyone with TF (tank/blaster/defender) to TF it and then all jump it, it dies really fast.

Have ran a number of RSFs and im quite impressed, its not insane but its in no way easy, have used optimal and badly balanced teamed to get the feel of it and if Im seriously going to approch it for the last mission I would take

a ice or stone as primary tank, res sets just dont seem to shine

a fire/fire blaster in crazy [censored] aoe spec, hotfeet, blazing aura and burn, just watch those towers fall and repairmen die as they spawn

1 if not 2 empaths

1 if not 2 rads

and pretty much anything else, I would say vengence is obviously nice and 2 people with rezes is pretty minimum though we did do it today without anyone who could rez.

It possible with pretty much any combo of decent players (within reason) and I really do think this is a very nicely balanced TF

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Then BOOM! Mish ended, and I got a recipe for Tech Wings, followed by a Fear/End IO recipe.

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Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

The Tech Wings are in the Task Force pool? Significant info!

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I got bone wings on STF

granites not need, sonic isnt needed,

Ran this sucessfully with my ice tank with no fighting pool and with a stoner who deliberately didnt use granite. Any tank can do this

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Well, if you've got immobs you'll be able to immob him in place once Castle gets his fix in.

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they could just fix the AI so they dont spaz out and run round the whole map, scrapyard is a joke these days

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The whole "running around like a spaz" thing is supremely annoying. I can't explain it any better than to say it's just not fun.

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it wouldnt be so bad if they actually fought and attacked, but when recluse wigged out last night he didnt nothing but run round the cleared map while we whittled down his health, tedious and massively annoying but quite risk free. He also ignored the 3 tanks taunts.

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Well, if you've got immobs you'll be able to immob him in place once Castle gets his fix in.

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they could just fix the AI so they dont spaz out and run round the whole map, scrapyard is a joke these days

hmm ran it tonight and the AI seemed to totally spaz, recluse ran around the map like a demented chicken, was using no avoid powers at all

*edit* oh and my fire/fire blaster with every secondary power was awesome in it (but needed perma AB and SB, and yes hotfeet was off for the AV fights) burn was absolutely awesome on the towers

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Just a note - I know everyone who goes to get Shivan's wants to have everyone get them, but it is often easier to keep one person in the mission [maybe a dead person for veng bait when you re-enter the mission] so that it doesn't reset.

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yeah we remembered that too late, been a long time since we got temps for the RSF

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One thing I didn't understand is why the repair guys were only minions and were level 45. I was one shotting them with Dragon's Tail (and humerously making them fly in every direction) every time they teleported in, no threat at all.


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Without aoes those lvl 45 repairmen are a nightmare, they fix the towers almost instantaneously. We were pvp spec and all in ST spec

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Is the general opinion to take out all of LR's Minions together? Anyone have any success on pulling them away if so what is your method? The team I was on tried to pull and we ended up getting all 4 of them on us, I was the only tank there, and we didn't have any debuffs except for a kin controller who was having trouble hitting transfusion.


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taking them together seems easy enough, my pvp tauntless ice tank tanked them all (with no nice insp as the mean AVs dropped nothing) with just punchvoke doing its thing. We went to get shivans for the last section as we had no aoe control/damage for the repairers and found the mission had reset, oh well, 8 shivans massacred them. The AVs, flyer, towers and Recluse took less than 5 mins