Maestintaolius

Without going into specifics on how to do it, my general recommendation is to soft cap your range and aoe def. With maximized range def, you can always turn on force bubble if things get ugly or you wanna concentrate enemy spawns to improve your team's AE efficiency. Maximized AoE def is going to allow you to get into the center of the fights to use powers like irradiate (the romans, for example, have some fairly nasty short range aoe attacks). Also, slotting def-debuff in all your attacks is kinda silly, radiation already heavily debuffs the enemy so there isn't much need to further enhance it, one irradiate or newt bomb is plenty to guarantee your team's chance to hit. As was said before, you're better off adding the -res achilles proc if you truly want to multiply your teams dmg, and its quite nice vs AVs (where -def is heavily resisted). Newt bolt is a fantastic power to slot like crazy with procs (my rad blast build has 3 dmg procs, 1 achilles, 2 acc/dmg HOs, the results are pleasing). Repulsion bomb is also a fantastic power now, it doesn't alert mobs until after it hits and knocks them down, so it's a great alpha absorber and a good location for the force feedback +recharge, just don't slot it with KB enh.

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One minor issue on the "Force Fields, grouped with a kin" thing: It is VERY hard for the team to be anywhere near each other under Speed Boost. All of a sudden that nice big 25' bubble of protection seems really small.

So it goes. You provide layers of defense. People know where to run when they start getting hurt.

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Well, generally how we play is I PBU bubble people and everyone breaks up into smaller groups to finish multiple tasks simultaneously with the squishier people following me. It's pretty easy to keep 6 people PBU bubbled on a coordinated team.

On other missions where everyone moves as a whole, people generally don't get too spread out because we all huddle together in the center of the spawns for tasty, tasty FS goodness so most people are hanging out in the big bubble anyway. Those that run out after FS (e.g. AS blasters for optimal cone usage) I'll usually hit with PBU bubbles anyway.

Usually, the only time I ever, ever see anyone die on our teams is either blatant stupidity (which no amount of shielding can protect against), I forget to rebubble or people just being silly.

Highly depends on the team makeup for me and what you want to do. Since I'm grouped with a kin 98.8931% of the time, I prefer an FF, I prefer 2 specialists over a specialist+generalist or 2 generalists. If I'm not grouped with any other defenders I prefer the cold. For generic grouping and playing I prefer cold. For speed TF runs and master runs I prefer an FF, especially with PBU.

But in all honestly, it's what you have the most fun playing and what you prefer . In the end all the sets work out to be pretty much the same (despite how much the set fanbois/grrls argue their favorite set is teh bestest), they just do it differently.

Except empaths, because they're useless. :P

I'd lean towards the permadom mind/psy. Confusion and sleep powers are your friends when dealing with multiple AVs. One of my fellow players (who sadly has left the game after being disappointed with i14) had a permadom mind/psy that could easily handle multiple EBs and AVs solo but I don't think he ever got around to trying the LRSF solo.

Level 42-42 only were hydra trial rikti and thus had a bonus associated with them. If you took the normal rikti and set their level to 42 using the standard tricks their xp was significantly less.

in before tl;dr

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The Mission Architect is a new system, and it has a new rule, specifically for the Mission Architect: "Do not build Farms." You are smart enough and experienced enough to be able to follow that rule, if you want to.

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This is the part I have the difficulty with. I have yet to see the conduct, eula or devs say exactly that "Don't build farms" since the release of i14. All I see is anti-farmers saying "devs/rules said don't build farms" based off how they interpret what the devs said. I mean, in the entire 200ish page post about farming, there was ONE dev comment, and it was about a gold watering can. Maybe I missed it somewhere in the 2000 pages of posts but I've yet to see it. The closest thing I could find in posi's post specifically banning farms is to not put farm terms in your description because you might be inappropriately banned (most likely by the zealous RPers that have a bug up their butt about farming and report-ban an arc - at least that's how I interpret it).

They do say don't exploit the system to provided unintended statistical advantages and posi stated they adjust things based on the reward/risk ratio. Fine, that is perfectly acceptable, comm officers were stupidly underpowered for the reward they gave, particularly the lvl 42 ones because they had some hydra bonus attached to them which obviously shouldn't have been there when you weren't fighting the hydra (normal comm officers gave far less rewards compared to the 42-42 ones). Honestly though, my fix would have been to make it so all comm officers automatically summoned portals the second they got agroed, whether or not they were held/stunned/slept/etc. The heavy handed fix they have implemented now completely sets comm officers in the wrong direction imho because now they are worth almost nothing and are capable of causing far more havoc than the average minion if not quickly locked down.

I would say the same with the hover blasting of rangeless melee custom critters, obviously an unbalanced risk/reward (the devs actually had this problem before, warwolves didn't always have rocks to throw on those warwolf only mishs). That too was something that clearly needed to be fixed.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

When MA came out, the story telling aspect was, quite honestly, meaningless to me. For me, MA meant I had the ability to finally make challenging missions that were actually difficult to complete. That's not to say I didn't put a story in my arcs, but its purely secondary in nature. Before MA, my typical play-night usually consisted of doing a quick speed run of ITF, LGTF and STF in under 2 hours then either sitting in the base and chatting while working mids/browsing the internet or focusing on quickly leveling my newest theory-crafted toon with my SG (I rarely group with PuGs because I find the level of skill/character advancement in the common PuGs frustratingly slow and not fun).

Generally, that's what I do in this game for fun, I open up mid's and design myself a new toon based around a theory of operation and then make it and see if it performs as expected. My playstyle purely revolves around creating a toon, gathering the IO sets for it, and testing it. MA is just another portion of CoH that I can theory-craft in order to make missions as punishingly hard as possible and then building a team to do them. I honestly have no interest in playing Soandso's mission arc about the background story of their catgirl. Likewise, I don't care about Soandso2's mission arc that has a great story but is still just a bunch of Council click missions (or whatever group/standard goal). Now, if someone makes a challenging arc with lots of variety and a great story, that's fine, that's fun, but honestly, it'd be just as much fun for me if the intro said "placeholder" and it was a fun mish.

MA also provided me with another option to play, one I didn't have before, the ability to make a quick mission that I found fun and challenging AND netted a decent return on rewards. I didn't do much meowing, because I found it to be horribly boring, I'd much rather farm Elite Paragon Protectors (or even Lord Recluse's if my buddy's bubbler is available). MA also allowed me to craft the mission in such a way that I wouldn't have to bug people for fill requests in order to provide myself with a challenge (because I personally find them irritating so I don't subject others to fill requests), namely by filling a mission with just lewys and bosses. I thought MA was awesome for this because it gives me something to do at 2 in the morning when no I know is online and also allows me to advance my toons at what I feel to be a reasonable rate without having to bug others with fill requests.

Of course, now, the threads such as these fill me with a fear that if I go and make outdoor arcs filled with lewys or bosses that some righteous rper on a personal mission to ban the game of all farmers is going to see my mish, hop in, see the lack of a story, see the lewy spawns and rush off to cry to the devs (via the report button). Resulting in the loss of my slot. I honestly don't see how filling my mish so there are no minions constitutes abuse, but I've seen posts on the boards of players that insist that it is. Lewys and bosses give higher rewards for a reason, they're higher risk (and honestly minions provide NO risk which is why I exclude them, they're wastes of my time). I'm not circumventing Posi's risk/reward critereon, I'm manually increasing my risk to increase my rewards. By filling the mish with lewys/bosses I actually provide myself with a challenge that sometimes even manages to kill me, to me that's fun, something with a chance of failure but also a chance for great reward.

Is my lewy/boss mish a farm? I guess technically it is, but Castle's post about rerunning the freak-lympics because you think its fun isn't farming but rerunning it for rewards is farming. What if I'm running the mission for both? Is it farming, not farming or some kind of Shroedinger's cat farming? Where its not one or the other but both? That's why these zealous anti-farmer posts really tick me off. The worry me that what is fun for me, might be considered a farm by another, resulting in reportings, banning and then me having to deal with CSRs to get it fixed.

I understand the RPers complaint that meow farm mishs fill up the MA and block out their story mishs that they enjoy. Of course, I could say story focused arcs that provide uninteresting missions (no matter how well crafted the story is) block out the kinds of missions that I enjoy. The pendulum swings both ways, and while I usually side against farmers when it comes to most prior dev nerfs (family, demons, etc), in this case I feel its the RPers that are in the wrong because they're the ones being totally intolerant of other people's playstyles for little reason other than they're different in what they find fun. Of course, out of courtesy for the RPers, my short lewy/boss mish gets unpublished when I'm done with it for that night because I have no interest in badges outside of accolades and couldn't care less about the X players played or stars awarded badges.

I've also heard the argument "well you could go play other peoples missions, there are good ones out there." To me, that's just nonsense. I'm not denying there are good missions out there, but for every mission that I would consider good, there far more bad ones. My career frequently results in 10-12 hour days in which I often spend doing an awful lot of reading, particularly patents and white papers and also writing reports. The last thing I want to do when I get home after filtering through 300 different patents is go through a list of 20,000 missions to try and find 1 good one to play that night when instead I can just instantly create one the I want to play. Of course, the tags help with the filtering, but with no one daring to use RBMA out fear of the righteous RPer bans, the tags don't help me (much like patent abstracts).

My job also prevents me from logging on until rather late at night (usually after midnight), at which point Guardian has about 8 people online, and 5 of them are afk severely limiting my options on what I can do that night. I could move servers, but after 4.5 years on Guardian I really have no desire to do so. MA breathed new life into the game for me because suddenly I was actually able to instantly play missions I wanted to play and didn't result in the mindnumbing challenge-free boredom of the standard 2-3 minion, 1 lewy spawn or relying on fills to up the difficulty. It also allows me to stay out of caves, which I really dislike and do NOT find fun (I never understood how a city with so many danged caves in the bedrock could have so many skyscrapers). And in actuality, most of the standard radio/cim/FBZ/RWZ missions net better overall rewards per unit time than MA missions because of the lack of salvage and purple drops, especially now with the 1500 cap. I mean, technically, if you want to do 'optimal' farming MA isn't the way to go. I play my MA lewy/boss missions because I enjoy soling herds of lewys/bosses over herds of minions/lewys (much like I enjoy fighting herds of bosses/EBs/AVs when on a team over the standard minion/lewy/boss spawns) and MA allows me to do just that and improves my gaming experience. Which is the true goal of the devs, to improve the overall player gaming experience, not craft a game that focuses on having fun in only one kind of way. The MA system has the potential to cater to both rewards focused and rp focused players through its incredible flexibility.

When MA was first discussed the rewards focused portion of the community had practically no interest in it while the RPers did. By adding the rewards and making the system flexible enough to allow players to individually set the level or risk they felt comfortable with so as to improve their netted rewards, it made the MA appealing to both factions (of course the poor PvPers are still left in the cold, all 3 of them that are left). With this recent slew of anti-farm rhetoric, the reward based players have shied away from MA out of fear of retribution. This hostile playstyle vs playstyle mentality serves to only make these people feel excluded and ignored which harms the game (see: PvP). The MMO graveyard is full of MMOs that suffered the fate of having a dev team that tried to force players to play in a manner that they felt was fun based on their vision, but was ultimately not all that fun for the player (as many of us from the states days remember).

Edit: minor clarification and spelling fix

/signed

I noticed 2 nights ago on my spines/da scrapper that if you slot the Numina's unique in Dark Regeneration , the resistance of the mob to your damage affects the magnitude of the +regen/+rcvry buff. Typically its supposed to give 0.17-0.18 eps, but if you use dark regen with the numina's unique against low level grey mobs it can give 0.92 eps. Of course, that wouldn't be too much of a problem (heh) if it wasn't also true for the other direction. If you use Dark Regen vs mobs that are like +3/4 to you, you only end up getting 0.13-0.14 eps or so instead of the 0.17-0.18.

(On a side note: I use dark regen way more often than every 2 minutes and I want the end redux, rchg enhancement and other numina's set bonuses and miracle and regenerative tissues sets are already slotted in health, so that's why its not in health)

I have no problem soloing bosses with my ff/elec, even purple ones. The key isn't damage via an attack chain, its short circuit. Slot SC with end drain and in two applications with a tesla cage or ball lightning spaced between them (to keep the -recovery debuff on the boss) the boss won't be able to fight back because they'll be at 0 end. Combine that with ball lightning and the minions/lewys will be out of end too. And before you ask, "what'ya do between those 1st two short circuits?" Well thats what force bolt is for, by the time the boss gets back up you'll have nuked his end a second time and he won't be able to fight back. If the boss is particularly dangerous, well then I can hit PBU and drain all his end in one go. This trick works amazingly well, but yes, it is slow, but who builds an FF defender to solo anyway? Finally, don't forget the volt pet, cast it before you go in, and you get 10 additional(but random targeted) charged bolts during the fight.

Using this exact trick is what enabled me to kill a cyst crystal solo after the entire team had died/fled (granted I did use one small purple at the beginning of the fight to give me time to drain all the clouds).

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You overestimate people's morality and sense of fair play.

...

PVE-ers are no better or worse than PVPers. But, the example you gave was a PVP-boot system. I simply followed your precedent, and following the rules you laid out.

In short, if a system can be exploited, it will be exploited. Now, every little in MMO systems can't be exploited in one fashion or another, and sometimes it's not worth the effort to stop it.



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Very true, Luck charms.

I really like this idea of flagging. L2 has something similar, as does SWG. However, as Xury said, it could be exploited by either 'buffer' non-flagged or non-pvp people buffing LR in GV. My solution would be to propose to make the pvp flag viral, like in L2.

So, if you see someone engaged in pve thats flagged pvp and getting their butt kicked, you can play the 'hero' and rescue them as a non-pvp flagged toon, however the second you do, you become pvp flagged. You could also make certain npcs in the zone flagged as pvp npcs, i.e. AVs/Heros/turrets/mechs in GV and the combatants at siren's call hotspots, if you buff, debuff or attack them, you get flagged. I would also make it so the pvp flag can't be shut off easily, once active, its active for 30 min or an hour, even if you zone out of the zone and back in. I would also remove the 30 second count down timer, simply put anyone in the zone, entering from wherever, mish, base, another zone, enter all at the same point, a protected area where you cant be teleganked so you don't get hosed by load times. This would eliminate the wankers that die, rezone in from their base, and rebuff/heal allies while 'protected'.

Personally, I don't understand the purists on either side, much like I don't understand the purists on either side of any argument, i.e. politics, religion, etc. What's the harm in letting pvers into a pvp zone to do just the pve part? They're not interested in fighting so why force it upon them. The same goes for the PvErs that dont ever wanna see PvPers. Yes, you can say 'you don't NEED nukes, you dont NEED shivans,' but they sure as heck make the STF/LRSF a heck of a lot easier and faster for less optimal teams. Also, my toons speced for the LRSF and STF are definitely not pvp optimized. As it currently stands, I just wait until the pvpers leave to get my nukes/shivs, or just ignore them by running around with pff or a couple purple skittles on which isn't much different than the flagging proposal.

The only thing the pvpers stand to lose by this is easy rep by teleganking some poor kin defender or similar squishy who has no interest in fighting. I mean honestly, what the heck is the point of killing these folks other than just to stand on your little hill and thump your chest, its akin to going to atlas and killing hellions with your 50 and calling yourself uber. Personally, when I pvp I like a little challenge and I leave the non-pvpers alone if they leave me alone (with the exception of RV RMT farmers).

Personally, one other change I'd like to see in pvp is the elimination of names, ATs and hp/end on the target bar of all the hostile players. People are either Hero or Villain and thats all you know. If you wanna know what they are, you have to get closer and see what they're actually doing to decide what they are. It'd add an element of risk and challenge that I'd like to see. Eventually, you'd get to recognize people by their costumes (unless they change costumes, adding another bit of randomness to it for a little more fun). Wolverene certainly doesn't have "Wolverene" floating over his head in orange letters with a scrapper icon next to his name and he does have a few different costumes. They've already hidden powersets from opposing 'inspectors' they may as well hide the rest of it. I could see teams/sgs wearing all the same costume having a bit of fun with this. It would also certianly put a little more risk in teleganking (and I'm not talking just stalkers, there's plenty of blaster telegankers too).

I would just like -regen. Granted I have no idea how that could fit into the theme of the powerset...