Mind Forever Burning

Pet class... AVs? Whut?

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I consider character markers for escorts and allies to be a huge boon to the core game, myself.

I think you missed this post of mine:

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I'm going to finish these reviews and then close the project. Mostly this is due to the fact that I have so little time to play these days, with a 2nd child just born and other RL factors. In fact, I may have to take a hiatus from the game sometime soon. Hopefully the authors I've reviewed have found my feedback helpful.

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It's a real struggle for me to find more than an hour here or there to play the game right now, and playing through an arc and writing up a thoughtful review can easily take more time than that. I didn't want to make promises for reviews and then not be able to deliver.

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For example, they share the "no exemplar penalty" that purples have...

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I did not know this. That explains quite a lot, actually - there are no purples that give +def, for example, so a +def build that wants to exemplar sometimes has to make some painful choices.

Interesting idea.

The biggest map in the game, to my knowledge, is the outdoor Dreck map. It supports something like 120 regular spawn points and 95 additional battles, allies, or escorts, so it can really be packed full.

There is an arc that is intended to educate people about the AE system; you might want to run that to get ideas about how to use AE details to teach. There's so much in the game, though, that you'll probably have to limit what you focus on.

Also, I'm not sure using huge maps for all the missions is a good idea. A lot of the game takes place in offices, warehouses, and labs, so if you really want to educate new players about the game it seems like you should include exposure to them somehow.

I don't quite understand why these IOs are in high enough demand that people will spend so much on them. I mean, I'm not opposed to spending that much on shinies, I just keep looking at the specific IOs in these sets and going, "Meh, I'd rather slot purples". (Other than the +res and +def globals, that is - those I get.)

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One more question. Why do people try to become an ebil billionaire selling crafted enhancements? Isn't there more money and faster money to be made flipping recipes?

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It really depends. I found early on that, generally speaking, crafting enhancements was vastly more profitable blueside than redside. The market may have changed some since I last looked, and of course it depends on the niche... but during my race-to-a-billion this past February (heroside) I definitely found that flipping a certain 2M recipe for 5M would result in the recipe sitting there forever, while crafting it and selling for 8M it'd sell overnight.

Part of the point was to make the relationship to my in-game global more obvious, so I wanted to avoid synonyms or dropping words. But anyway.

Rules of humor:

#1: If it's funny, repeat it until it isn't.
#2: If it isn't funny, repeat it until it is.

I think I need to play this arc. Manhandle always struck me as just plain wrong.

In addition to some maps having bugged front/middle/back denominations, there are some maps whose mini-map displays are reversed left-to-right but whose markers are not reversed. Fortunately you can tell those pretty easily if you know the map.

Also, the meaning of the location markers was incorrect in the help text last I looked - Xs are supposed to be boss/patrol spawns while Os are rescues, but the help text says the opposite.

It might be good to get a thread dedicated to listing specific maps that have incorrect spawn markers either due to front/middle/back shuffling or to map reversal.

Send me a tell when it's done and I'll replay it. BTW, I changed my forum name to match my in-game global/authoring name (or at least, as close as I could get within 16 characters). Unfortunately this means the title of this thread no longer makes much sense, but c'est la vie.

Name change complete, though cursed forum software limiting names to 16 characters forced me to abbreviate.

'Tis done. I can't believe I'm using "4" to mean "for", but I couldn't think of anything better. "MindEverBurning" just didn't have the same ring.

No work around that I know of. You'll have to find another map or do without that detail.

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Why does AE not have ANY downfalls to balance all of its amazing features that dwarf the regular content?

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In theory, this is all balanced by there being no "end of mission" reward in terms of XP/Influence/Prestige. In practice...not so much.

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OK, I have to weigh in here, because I've been doing some analysis based on my own play experiences. For my own play style, which involves soloing or small teams running story arcs, the PvE experience is significantly more rewarding than the AE.

Why? There are several factors, but the biggest one is patrol XP. The AE gives you no benefit from patrol XP, unless you're defeated, which is something I rarely encounter. A 50% boost to enemy defeat XP in PvE is huge, and although you can drain it, it's replenished quickly if you (a) play infrequently and/or for short periods of time, or (b) switch characters relatively often.

Without patrol XP, AE and PvE reward rates would probably be relatively equivalent. I think XP gain is faster in PvE because mission and arc bonuses more than balance out travel times (given Ouroboros, base transporters, and the Mission Teleporter power), but that's balanced by the inherent advantages of tickets. With patrol XP, however, regular PvE is just plain better.

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I agree that being able to customize the mob levels in a group (minions, LTs and Bosses) can be overused, but since the mobs have the appropriate HPs, Damage Levels, attacks and regeneration rate for their category I still see little difference in that versus a mission like the Infernal one which my Fire tank can take on solo in record time.

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I've seen someone taken from 1 to 50 in 6 hours using a custom AE mission built around fire damage. I don't think that's mathematically possible in the PvE Infernal mission.

Eva, I think it's fair to say there are great stories that just can't be realized in the AE. So, to some extent, the available gameplay will always guide the story writing.

I'm sort of ambivalent about defeat alls, but I can see why it would be a wise move to consider whether a defeat all in any particular story is going to annoy players who aren't fond of that gameplay aspect. You don't have to write stories to appeal to everyone (if that's even possible) but you should have a good idea of who your audience is, and make sure to write to their satisfaction in the ways they care about.

So, I guess I'm saying there's a middle ground between you and Gemini and common sense should be used as a guide in any particular situation.

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The Infernal and Battle Maiden missions have stayed unchanged for over three years so I don't think that they are planning any changes for them.

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Given that it took three years to change Psychic Shockwave, I don't feel that this argument has much validity.

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Also, my point was, that if those missions are not "exploits" then I don't see how an AE mission with identical mobs could be either.

I'm not saying that it's impossible to make missions that are abusive, just that the damage type that the mobs in the mission do or do not do cannot be the only criteria that a mission is judged upon.

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You may be right there. Making a custom mob that has easily mitigated damage only really matters if you were otherwise going to be in danger of being defeated. For many farming characters, that's not necessary - you're already "survivable enough" even before damage type optimization is taken into account.

It does become a problem in the AE though when you combine it with the ability to scale the enemy difficulty upwards by making factions with no minions. In some cases, all-boss factions can be faced successfully only by also optimizing damage types.

There are two cases where this happens: one is where you get auto-SK'd to different levels, and one is where you get auto-exemplared to different levels (or go between being natural level and exemplared).

I'm just trying to confirm that it's the latter that people care about, because other than vast shifts in level ranges (when critters might pick up extra abilities), I can't think of why anyone would care about the former.

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Now that MA gives the option to manually set the arc's levels, it really helps the overall polish of the arc if it's in a consistent level range -- it just looks less choppy.

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I'm afraid I still don't get it. If I'm a level 1, I don't really care if I'm fighting other level 1s at my natural level and then get auto-sk'd to level 5 to fight level 5s - there's no appreciable difference in combat mechanics between the two, let alone the fact that I probably won't be level 1 for long anyway.

At the upper range, if I'm level 15, I have a choice between fighting -1s (low level enemies not scaling) every other mission, or not getting XP at all (due to exemplaring), or only getting XP every other mission. Among the three choices it's not clear to me that any of them is preferable to the others. Maybe capping at 14 is the best option just to make it clear to 15s that they shouldn't be playing the arc if they care about getting XP, but that's a subtle point.

Maybe I should have just started another thread on this topic. If the topic isn't settled in the next post I'll do that.

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Level Range: 1-14/5-15/1-14/5-15/5-14

First off, there's just no excuse for that level range. The entire arc could be set to 5-14 or 15.


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I'm really trying not to threadjack you anymore, but I couldn't resist this one since it seems to be a technical rather than stylistic matter.

Why does it matter if the whole arc isn't set to exactly the same level range? Are you worried about level 15 characters getting XP in one mission but not the next? IMHO there's no real difference between fighting at level 1 and getting auto-SKd up to level 5, so I'm assuming it's the upper level that matters to you...

The Titan wiki is vastly more up to date than the Wikia one. I don't quite understand why the Wikia site even still exists, the Titan wiki is the "official" one at this point.

Is that table still accurate with the post-i15 dom changes? I know Castle changed the AT base damage modifier, but I don't know if the damage-buff modifier also changed.

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FYI: MA = MA - There is no subgroups of "regular" and "farm" they are all grouped together. So stop using the one that suites your argument best

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There are certain tricks that are not available in regular PvE that increase XP gain. Those include (but are not limited to) the use of custom groups to make all-lieutenant or all-boss factions, the use of auto-SK rules to bypass mentor requirements, the use of battles to spawn more enemies per map, the use of buffing defendable objects or customized enemy damage types to minimize incoming damage, etc.

If you do not use those tricks, the MA is slower than PvE.

If you do use those tricks, the MA is (generally) faster than PvE.

Is that better?

Ironically, I believe the devs consider (or at least, at one point, considered) scanner mission ramrodding to be a bigger problem than farming single maps, based on some comments by Positron last year.