Kong_Fuu

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It is no coincidence that every MM pet class has ample knockback powers.

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I've wanted to ask about your sig and what that means.

Why do they? Proponents of KB usually say that it just takes skill, but there is no way to use that KB strategically.

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My sig was just annoyance at having half of the powers in the sets more or less require the mobs to be close together for maximum effectiveness (burn patches especially, but even with the big cones like Full Auto, Full Auto Laser, etc...), and have the other half of the powers cause 20 or 40% knockback AoEs to scatter the mobs out as randomly as possible.

The idea of "tactically" using a 20% knockback AoE is pretty funny too.

Picking up Scirocco's tiny little AoE Immob shows just how powerful the bots would be if it were not for the knockback though. Using it as the alpha can shave tens of seconds off of taking apart each spawn just because it avoids the random scattering, especially with very large spawns on teams and doubly so on big empty outdoor maps where mobs hit with knockback go flying for miles.

The biggest problem is that Thugs don't live up to their on-paper damage output because in both sets a big chunk of the damage comes from stacked burn patches. On Bots those burn patches come from the Assbot, which is a tank that is typically the last minion to fall when you're under heavy attack. On Thugs it's on a suicidal minion that has an AI set to "hug the nearest boss despite what the MM says". This cuts down on your damage output as your either always resummoning the arsonist or you're holding him back and not letting him use his big damage power.

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Bombs seem to stay in one place. However the Rikti ships have rayguns now that can damn near vaporize you in a single blast. My L50 MM without bodyguard on got reduced to one hit point by a ray blast from a ship. I even saw it shoot me. I was like, WTF!

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Hasn't this always been the case? I've been getting zapped by the "death rays" for a long time now.

8 man spawns tend to be very boss heavy, which is bad news for most MMs. MMs are better at slaughtering large numbers of minions and lts than picking apart spawns with 4 bosses and a meager handful of support characters.

Team Hamster was having some bad luck yesterday. After finishing off Black Scorpion's last mission we went and ran through Ambassador Rikti's two arcs, then started on the Spider Lady. Unfortunately, her first mission was buggy (we rescued the spiders and killed everything on the map, but it never completed for us). Because it was timed (and undroppable), we decided to run some newspaper missions instead, and in there a Master Illusionist got itself stuck in a rock and made the mission impossible as well. At that point the team just gave up and disbanded for the night.

My guess is that it's the usual Avatar wonkiness on the boards.

Not too bad tonight. Made it to 42 and got to play with all of the MMs in this Isos. I didn't even have any slowdowns. When we stuck together we were pretty much unstoppable too. Even the newly upgraded Malta were no match.

Well, redside isn't nearly as punitive against sidekicks (some blueside contacts just love sending you to Crey's Folly). You could just come by and get SKed up.

My guess is that it interrupts the animation, but I doubt it prevents the power from affecting people just because the game just doesn't work that way. It would have to be set up as an interruptable power, but somehow only interruptable by the temp power. Nothing else in the game works like that.

Really, all you need to beat the SF in the current state is a few debuffers. The "tools based approach" the devs talked about doesn't work because one of the critical tools (the MMs) is busted right now. After it's fixed, it may be possible to run the TF with a random PUG and beat it, but in the current form you really need to bring some good solid debuffing with you.

The Hero TF is the same way, except that it's not broken, you just need 2+ debuffers or be prepared to spend hours beating on him.

Hero side the temp powers are mostly useless. You have to use them at the start of the fight (once, out of the 80 shots you have spread throughout the team), but after that they're worthless. The quicker you learn that, the less time you spend trying to figure out why you have the dumb things.

A SF worth more merits than the equivalent TF? Impossible!

I don't think his phase is working heroside.

The difference between "breezing through the TF in 30 minutes" and "after 2 hours we gave up/barely won" is teams that have 2+ debuffers on them. That is all. if you can debuff him enough to keep doing damage with his unstoppable up (it only puts him up at 110-120% RES vs. all) then he's just a boring old bag of HP that you'll blow through reasonably quickly.

If you don't, then he'll go to 99% RES regularly and take forever to finish off.

Yes, heroside is just another "LOL, bring debuffers" TF.

Apparently Rikti Drone and Zenith Hoverbot deaths were buffed in I15.

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After dealing with ambushes, it took 12 minutes to defeat Reichsman.
Whole SF will be done much faster as soon as people become familiar with routine.

1 MM
4 Brutes
2 Corruptors
1 Bane

These TF and SF do not require any specific AT on team, the same as rest of TFs/SFs in the game

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Can someone connect the dots for me? I'm quite in the dark as to how some teams like the one above knock over Reichsman like he was made of Kleenex, and others pound on him and eventually give up in frustration. This team had a MM, but people are asserting the MM temp power is borked, so that shouldn't have made the diff. Did this team have a huge amount of debuffs? Did you simply have enough damage and -Res to pound Reichsman before he could phase or hit Unstoppable?

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I'm curious too, because the failures I have heard about have him go to 99% RES at 50% health and recast Dull pain every 360 seconds for 96000 HP on top of that, even with debuffers.

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The perfect team would have 2 or 3 Mind/Rad Trollers, a bunch of scrappers/blasters, and a good tank I think.

[/ QUOTE ] I ran the TF today with 5 Scrappers(one quit in third mish though), 2 blasters, and a rad defender and we didn't have any problems. Personally, I don't see a need for a tank on this TF.

Also, does anybody think this TF could be soloed? Is ten shots of the gun enough time for a high DPS build to take Reischman down?

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I don't know which Reichsman you got, but the one we got had 226k HP, 70% resists to the type of damage scrappers do (which gives him effectively 767k HP, and a version of unstoppable that cycles on and off when he's less than 10% and a Dull Pain power he uses somewhat randomly when below 60% (or so).

Anyway, he regens 113 HP/sec.

Assuming his unstoppable power is on 50% of the time (this is a rough guess based on the fight), you'll have to do a base DPS of greater than 753 HP/sec sustained to take him down for that last 10%. You can drop this if you have procs that drop RES or reduce regen, but it would still require some sort of godly build to do it.

The number of charges on the temp power doesn't seem to matter much because it doesn't seem do anything except draw pretty swirlys on the screen.

Assuming your build could sustain 800 DPS of Smash/Lethal but you had no debuffs, and used his Dull Pain power only once, but for the full 40% heal, it would take you 2313 seconds (38 and a half minutes) to knock off the first 90% of his health, and then 3229 seconds (54 minutes) to get the last 10%.

For the record, the best scrapper DPS values typically fall somewhere in the 200-250DPS range. Liberal use of debuff procs could account for some extra damage, but it's still an arguably insurmountable challenge for a solo player.

Frankly, if it was a mission full of nothing but 54 bosses, that was probably just a farm mission and the bosses will be set up to not have any to hit buffs or high power attacks.

Just finished the Hero TF: 2:04 with exactly 200 deaths. Granted, our only debuffer really liked hanging out in footstomp range of M.Bison and was faceplanted a lot.

I had the Power Analyzer Mk III, and watching the real number system I can say that the guns do nothing to him that shows up in the real number system. Even when the rest of the team was dead and I was soloing him and just zapping him once to see what changed I could see nothing.

It looks like the trick to the Hero Side TF is just: bring two competent debuffers and decent DPS. Also useful: A confuser to make use of Vanessa's excessive PSI damage (Psi is the only thing that doesn't go up when he uses unstoppable).

The perfect team would have 2 or 3 Mind/Rad Trollers, a bunch of scrappers/blasters, and a good tank I think. It can be beaten with less, but you'll be taking a long time chipping away at his massive HP and annoyingly high 60-70% resistance (70% to Smash/Lethal/Negative Energy and 60% to Fire/Cold/Energy/Psi/Tox). My guess is you could blast through it in 30 minutes easy if your scrappers had stealth and everybody was competent. Highly optimized teams might even drop it to 20 minutes.

The trick to those Super Arachnids is to put up the Force bubble and stuff them into a corner. Unlike AVs, they don't resist repel. then your bots keep on blasting and dropping burn patches on him and after 15 minutes or so you'll drop him. Spamming personal attacks and vet powers also helps. You do have to keep an eye on the battle though, because sometimes the buggers will squeeze past your force bubble anyway and make a break for it.

IMHO, the most annoying part about Bots/FF is that for some reason the combo causes every single spawn to scatter. EBs and AVs tend to get stuck in the "run constantly" mode, so your bots are forever chasing them and plinking away at their health. Force Bubble solves this problem quite a bit, but it doesn't work on AVs or Ballistas. You can use your Patron Immob, but they all recharge pretty slowly and have a fairly short duration for double-stacking on EBs and AVs, and they get resisted a fair bit anyway.

The most fun is when you're on an 8 man team with another bots user, and both of your Assbots launch burn missiles at a spawn at once. The overlapping burn patches with reduce minions and lts to cinders in just a couple of seconds. It's glorious.

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwaaaaassswwwwwwwwwww wwwwwa11231122321wwwwwwMore annoying than the chat bug?

So the first tier is Smurfs, the second tier is Ewoks, and the third tier is a Hobbit?

Two Acc SOs is enough for soloing at difficulty 4. You may get debuffed by some enemies (CoT Ghost Lts for instance), but in those cases the extra buffing from another SO typically won't help much (because they're bombing your to-hit).

Or you could just run Doc Q twice.

It still drives me crazy that you can't click on an ingredient in a recipe or on the item itself and have it pop up automatically in the auction house.

Shouldn't you post this in a forum that a Dev/Admin might actually read?

I can only post what I have. Sorry that I didn't get PMs between Hamster and Voodoo in my chatlog, but that's the way the game works. I also didn't trim it down because I didn't want to be accused of selective editing and add even more drama.

All in all, people seemed a little cranky on Wednesday for some reason and it's all turned into pointless forum drama. Whee.