NeonMan

I tried it with my blaster. I got one on my third spawn and thought, "Man, this is easy money!" Then I killed around two thousand more hellions and skulls and got nothing, before I got bored and wandered off. I have no idea whether the RNG was holding out on me after that first drop or if that's normal, but it wasn't a good return on my time investment.

I ran it twice. The second run took 8:12, and that included a couple of wrong turns - I'm sure I could shave 30 seconds or so off that, and it wasn't with a purpled-out monster character, just a mediocre scrapper.

The point of the time commentary here isn't e-peen, it's the ridiculous rewards being offered. The Alignment Merit reward selection is clearly way out of bounds, compared both to the time and effort required, and the other rewards offered on the table.

I'd strongly advise the devs to fix that before it's been live so long it's seen as a big nerf. PR-wise it's always better to nip things in the bud early, especially since you've discussed selling access to these arcs in the marketplace. It gets pretty sticky reducing what many will see as the reason they bought this arc, the massively disproportionate rewards. I guess if the intent is Pay2win (it's possible...) then ignore what I've said.

A-merits aside, I rather enjoyed it. Beautiful maps! The next time I play it (for the nearly-free LotG 7.5), I'll take more time to savor it and may have further feedback.

Addendum: I realize that the rewards cap at twice/week, but it's still a 20-minute solo LotG or Numina's once per week. Per character. Level 20's are not hard to populate servers with.

*/Super Reflexes is the best I've found, as it lets you click glowies while mobs are shooting at you without being interrupted. Anything at the soft cap to ranged & AoE will work, but SR also has strong defense debuff protection and is simple and cheap to get to the caps.

As mentioned above you probably want a fast attack chain of AoEs in your primary/epics for harvesting tips, so... spines/sr/* or */sr/dark perhaps? That should be able to AoE level 20-ish mobs as fast as you can get to them. Note that finishing off every mob in each spawn is a waste of time - get as many in the central clump as possible and move on to the next one.

As for stalker vs. scrapper, when you're capped for defenses the stealth is totally unnecessary, so the two are pretty equivalent really.

I just tested with Fly, and I drifted every time for the 35 tests done (Fly + IR was no drifts out of 30+ tests as expected). Interestingly though, sometimes the drift seemed faster than others. Sometimes it would be slowed down to around normal Hover speed, and other times it seemed to be pretty much full Fly speed. Since judging the speed is pretty subjective I didn't record stats on that, but I strongly suspect it's in about the same ratio as Hover's drift:stop.

What I think is happening is that the toggle tick rate means that it may or may not apply one tick of the inertia control portion of Hover and Fly (Red Tomax calls it MovementFriction, so I assume that's the internal name) before the toggle is suppressed, depending on when the mez hits. Hover has a value for this of +100, which I assume means 100% and when the tick applies it stops you completely. Fly has a value of +8, which means it only partially slows you when its timing lasts past the mez.

I think the ideal solution, if the game engine can do it, would be to make the +MovementFriction portion of Hover and Fly be unsuppressible, similar to armor toggles. However, I'm not sure if only part of a toggle can remain unsuppressed. Alternately if the MovementFriction is non-self-stacking, increasing the duration might work.

I sent Synapse a note about this and he said he'd have his folks look into it, so any further insight or ideas for testing would be welcome.

Luckily I have a kinetics character handy, so I ran the test with Hover + Inertial Reduction. I got to 0:38 drift:stop before I got bored. Roderick's basic proposition that it's based on inertia seems to be plausible, as IR completely cancels the drift when mezzed.

Well, this goes to show the value in doing a control when experimenting. I did 50 tests using CJ + Hover, and got a 30:20 drift:stop ratio, that is 30 times I kept floating off in the direction of travel, 20 times I stopped where I was mezzed.

For a control I used just Hover, and got... a 30:20 drift:stop ratio. So two thing learned, the bug doesn't always occur, and Combat Jumping doesn't appear to affect it at all.

I'll do a bit more testing with different power combinations when I have time. One thing of note is that my initial post is incorrect in that the bug seems to affect Fly and Hover equally, it's just noticed more often with Hover since it's used in combat more often.

Thank you Roderick, that's incredibly useful advice! I'll have to see if I can tweak things to fit in Combat Jumping, at least until they fix it.

If so, it seems likely that it isn't a bug that was introduced per se, and more of them forgetting to add -flightspeed to holds when they made the toggle change. Not that it makes me feel any better when I zip off and smack into a Zeus Titan...

After causing a team wipe twice in the same mission due to this bug, I felt compelled to post about this. If nothing else it's something people should be prepared to work around until it's fixed.

Being held (possibly slept also, not certain) while hovering and moving will shoot you off in the direction you were traveling at full speed. For anyone who has hover slotted up for speed, global flight speed bonuses, Siphon Speed or some combination thereof, that can put you in aggro range of an extra spawn before you can click a breakfree.

Does anyone know when this bug was introduced? I haven't played a combat hoverer for quite some time, until I recently pulled an old character out of cold storage. I know it certainly didn't do that last time I played him.

Okay, I clearly know absolutely nothing about farming or farms. I think I've heard the term 'ambush farm' before, but I've never seen such a beast. The best I could do after some slight tweaking of my difficulty settings was a bit under 1 million inf/min, but clearly this wasn't farming, it was running a bog-standard CoH mission quickly. I would be interested to see what someone who had a clue could do though.

Yeah, I heard it was doing this in beta. I had figured they removed the proc from pseudopets for live release because it was overpowered, and when it came back it would have the 10 second limit applied, but I guess not. Ah well, I've done my duty in reporting that it still does grievous damage. Now I guess I'll enjoy it until they find time to "nerf" it back to sanity.

<wonka> Stop. Don't. </wonka>

Please forgive the melodramatic title, but after attempting 4 trials today through the new LFG interface I've made some observations. In a nutshell, half-sized leagues this soon after release seem almost destined to fail.

What happens is the LFG queue starts up a trial as soon as the minimum size league is achieved. They start working on the task, but almost inevitably people start to die, for several reasons. 1) This is new content, and people don't know it yet, 2) Nobody has any Incarnate abilities beyond Alpha yet, and 3) They're running it with the minimum team size. The first two problems will eventually sort themselves out, the last won't without adjustment from the devs.

After a few deaths, people start to quit. They seem (anecdotally) to be quitting more than in normal taskforces actually, which I find kind of distressing... pure conjecture here, but I wonder if the fact that a computer rather than a person put the team together lessens peoples' sense of responsibility? Anyway, that's a side track.

The result of people quitting isn't as clear as it would be in a taskforce - in a TF if the team drops below a certain threshold people at least see the problem. With LFG leagues, when people drop out they're replaced with new folks. Folks who don't know what's going on, and because they weren't there from the start probably have an even lower sense of group responsibility. Once one of these trials starts to go downhill I've seen quite rapid turnover at times, folks basically just popping in to look around and leaving. This is obviously bad for the trial, but IMHO this sort of mercenary attitude is also bad for the community.

If I had to propose a solution, the easiest would be to give people an option when joining the LFG queue of whether they'd prefer a full (or nearly full) team, or the minimum size. I personally would prefer to not start out short-handed when the content is new. I'd much rather wait in queue longer to have a decent chance at success.

Another possible thing to look at is the algorithm for assigning people who join tasks in progress - purely anecdotal, but I haven't yet seen new members popping into my leagues until after people start quitting. This tells me that the computer's probably assigning people to the leagues with the least members first, which means in most cases those half-sized leagues it starts you out with will never get bigger, because the leagues that are circling the drain will gobble up the new recruits in their death throes.

I'm certainly not writing this in any sort of rage, and I'm not claiming that my experiences are universal. I have high hopes for the LFG system, but my initial experiences with it in a live server environment leave me concerned.

p.s. Actually I decided to check to make sure this topic wasn't redundant, and apparently the learned sage Zombie Man noted this problem (and proposed a solution) on page 1 of the beta feedback thread - I guess my foresight wasn't so keen. Given that, I guess the purpose of this post is simply to point out that I see it happening in-game, repeatedly, not just in theory.

Option 1 please sir.