Ironblade

Well.....

stable boy: "What's his name?"
Jonah Hex: <pauses> "Horse."

* travel about killing pylons.
Right. You have to destroy every pylon in the Warzone to take down the force field around the mothership. The pylons appear on your mini-map.

* I hear something about vents. No idea where this was
More commonly referred to as 'grates'. The top of the mother ship has.... 'canyons' running from the edge to the center. The canyons have the vents/grates along the sizes. You need to break through the grates and plant bombs in the corridors behind them. Each bomb extends the amount of time the force field stays down. Planting 3 (or more) will bring out the Rikti giant monster.

* gather at center bowl on top of ship and fight
Yep.

* Fight GM on top of ship
Right. He spawns in the 'bowl', but people usually pull him out of there to fight him.

* fight for a really long time (I hear something about bombs)
See above. The bombs are earlier in the process.

Clearly I missed some things. Can anyone fill me in?
No, you've got most of it, just not all in the right order. At this point, I'll mention the POINT of these raids.
1. If you're not 50, you can get a lot of XP very fast.
2. If you are 50 (and VIP, and have your Alpha Slot unlocked), you can get Incarnate Shards.
3. If you have done the Vanguard introductory mission (which becomes available at level 35), you can earn Vanguard Merits by the HUNDREDS which let you buy some cool stuff in the Vanguard base. 250 Vanguard Merits gets you 1 charge of *THE* most brutal pet summon in the game - the Vanguard HVAS. You know those big robots standing outside the Vanguard base? You can summon one and it can beat a Shivan like a rented mule. You can also buy a PERMANENT increase to your salvage storage. And a bunch of other 'moderately' cool stuff.


2) Did my first Lambda last night. During the smash and grab phase...I got lost. We go downstairs, start fighting a spawn...and a few moments later I'm by myself. I try to run around the map to find things, but all I find are many, many mobs, all aggroing on me. The wiki talks all about crates and not about the mobs or movement. Can someone give me a tip on the detailed strat here?
Okay, this is more complicated and more dangerous. Referring to my previous comment, clearly you are VIP status since you can do these trials.
1. Beat up guys in the street until it 'unlocks' the main complex.
2. Destroy the guns on the complex wall so they don't harass you later.
3. Go inside and beat up the security robot.
4. Teams split up. One goes to the lab to get the 'molecular acid' (10 total charges available). One goes to the warehouse for the 'pacification grenades' (again, 10 available). The objectives do NOT appear on your map and most regulars have the map layout, and objective locations, MEMORIZED so they will be sprinting through the complex.
5. Before fighting Marauder, people use the acids to destroy the doors around the courtyard. This reduces the constant ambushes.
6. WHILE fighting him, the grenades let you damage him more easily. Without the grenades, you need two full teams of good builds/players to defeat him in the time limit. With the grenades, any teams can do it as long as the guy with the grenades has a clue. The grenades are typically given to the toughest guy in the league.


However, in the NS & Siege battle, how are people checking to compare their health? I wrote two macros to target each after my last run, but I'm not sure if that's the right technique.
It's not. You should have an additional UI (User Interface) window that shows you JUST their hit points. At earlier points in the raid it shows how many Warworks defeated to summon Nightstar, then it shows escaping prisoner status, etc.

Maybe it's not supposed to? It didn't give me any. Matthew Habashy's arc did. Twinshot's arcs did.

Were they making noise? The glow is related to the object color. I've seen a Council mission where the objective is a black filing cabinet and the glow was almost invisible unless you were standing right next to it.

If it looked fine for a teammate, then maybe it's something about your graphics.

If you were VIP, you didn't have to buy Time Manipulation: you got it for free. In fact, you would have been UNABLE to buy it as a VIP.

Street Justice was a purchase for everyone, even VIP, so you'd still have that when you downgrade to premium.

Okay, I unlocked the contact with Capt Tom Tachyon.

Too soon for a crash. From the time the Signature Story Arcs were introduced, calculate how long it will take to accumulate enough A-Merits on a single toon to buy one. THEN, we may see a price crash.

My toon with the most A-Merits only has 10. (I'm a slacker.)

ParagonWiki comes through again!
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Search_Window

It sounds like you're running fullscreen, which has always been flaky. Can you tolerate running in windowed mode? I frequently run two accounts windowed and it works fine. (I do use /maxinactivefps 5.)

Let's just hope your internet doesn't go away again.
Or else it's like this....