Nihilii

Thank you very much! That thread seems to be exactly what I'm looking for. Guess I got some playing to do.

I've tried searching ingame arcs with the "challenge" tag, but so far it didn't fit what I'm looking for. So, here goes.

I would like to play arcs reasonably hard, ideally something at or above the level of Vanguard, Longbow, Arachnos, Resistance, Rularuu and IDF. I am not especially looking for ludicrously hard "can you beat this" difficulty, but it can be worth a try.

I would strongly prefer for the mob factions to have custom foes or old groups mixed up with custom foes ; if it's just a single vanilla mob group in the whole mission with a special boss at the end, it's probably not what I'm looking for.

I would prefer to avoid multiple objectives such as pick 5 of this glowie, grab 2 of this other glowie, escort 3 hostages and finally punch boss guy mcboss in the face, which only appears once you've completed everything else.

A good story can be nice but for the purposes of this thread let's say it's irrelevant.


If you've got or know an arc like that, please point me in the right way. I'll give 5 stars if I like it and won't vote if I don't (unless you want me to). Thanks.

I like widows, melee ones, for that purpose. You've got all the powers needed for a good attack chain by level 12, as well as a decent AOE. By level 25 or so you're softcapped and can provide roughly ~20% defense to your team.

It lacks any aggro control as well as the ability to increase team damage output (beyond TT:A), but in my experience enemies don't last that long at these levels.

It seems to me most people are answering the OP as if he was asking about Time in general content whereas he specifically limited it to itrials, so just as a general reminder, the incarnate softcap is 59% and trial AVs are, so far, highly resistant to controls.

I haven't checked the fourth trial on Test, but on the three released ones, I would tend to consider the damage tradeoff for better controls not worth it on high control primaries. If it's an AV, you're still not going to be able to mez it, if it's a normal mob group, fire has more than enough control to do the trick.

To be honest, I don't even use Flashfire while soloing itrial groups on my fire/cold. The animation is too long, the higher amount of bosses per group makes it much less efficient, and 59%+ ranged/AOE def with high regen coupled with spamming the AoE immobilize is almost always enough mitigation.

About the only itrial encounter where controls at the cost of damage are desirable is the escapee phase in BAF.

Illusion (PA, really) can be invaluable to absorb all those nasty ST effects the AVs tend to use, but the AoE ones can be a pain in the *** to the league - a decoy will never move back after two rings, for example, nor will it stop attacking Antimatter too early if too close. In a situation where the decoy isn't the one holding the aggro, it's essentially bringing no survivability value, just small additional damage.

I'm all for that, with the caveat that we should still be able to discuss itrials in normal forums.

I tend to agree with fire/time controller being on the highend of time manip characters for the purpose of itrials.

Standard MMs are more than able to keep the aggro cap of targets on them, thanks to their buff debuff secondaries, bodyguard, provoke and/or APP AoE immobilizes. Having stone armor instead of buffs debuffs would just lower damage in most situations.

Hello, dude who made long-winded posts to claim credit for stuff other people did before you and that you learned from them. I do remember you.

I like when people "if" and "would" things that I see in my daily experience, but I like it even more when people who build for 46-47% def complain about SR being shafted every time we get new content that is harder than freakshows.

Admittedly, that is more often because of tohit buffs than defense debuffs, and people disagree with the part of my point of view that is about defense debuffs.

For something a bit more constructive, there are numerous def debuffs without damage attached to them, in fact many of the most dangerous ones don't do damage. Tarentula mistresses, seers, arachnoid bosses come to mind.

Stuff that you can shrug off on +0/x8 or +2/x8 can become a threat on +4/x8 as mobs take a longer time to die, have a higher minimum chance to hit and debuff for more. It all adds up.

I'm more or less in the same situation as TeChameleon. My machine was great when I bought it in 2007 or so - dual core 2.4ghz, 8800GTX, 4 gigs of ram. I am running on XP 32 bits.

I have performance issues in other new areas of the game ; praetorian maps and so on, but nothing as crippling as the lag I get in AE. Even the dreaded warehouse room (you know the one) doesn't seem to be as bad.

My experience is also the same as Eva's. I used to be able to edit AE arcs without a hiccup back when it was released.

Ah, well. Good to know, even if not reassuring. Thanks.

I guess there is the option of editing text files directly outside of the game, but having to unpublish/republish every single time is kind of a hassle, and without proper syntax documentation lacking a graphical user interface is a significant drawback.

This seems nice, but paying 1 extra euro in commission to my bank for something that's supposed to cost $2 (~€1.5) is a bit steep.

Hmm...

I'm actually amazed this is the first time I run into this sort of issue, in our world of microtransactions everywhere. I guess I'm usually buying locally or in bulk.

I quickly skimmed through the guides list and couldn't find anything related to this. When I try to edit my AE arcs, I'm getting terrible performance. Clicking on the "edit" button alone locks up my screen for a minute or so, and when I finally access the editing screen, framerate is in the single digits, which makes using the UI alone painful.

It's nothing new, I've ran into this issue for months (years?), but I just never bothered much with AE. Just wondering how do people who have the same problem deal with this, or if there's some option to make it better. It seems the game is still rendering the whole "real" game despite the window being in fullscreen, which might be why performance is so poor, but regardless which zone I go in or how low my graphic settings are, framerate plummets as soon as I get in the editing screen.

I dislike the new Icon trainers simply because it'll take me an extra click to level up each and every time (which I do often) for a feature that I'll likely never use.

I tend to have this problem when servers are under heavy load. It happened last weekend (double XP). It didn't happen for me for months before that.

It definitely seems odd to push back the set despite it being ready. One of my friends is really frustrated with this and pointed out that while the rest of our group will reroll Time something or Beam something, he'll have to wait for his own new character. It ruins team rerolling.

One buff/debuff set, one ranged set, one melee set. You'd think it'd make sense to release all three at once.

Claws/Elec is one of these combos where the brute version is much more interesting. Higher damage on powers, and while the recharge is also slower, it's still fast enough to not cause a problem. Higher resistance cap, and you will hit 90% energy with just SOs. Some aggroholding capabilities, so stuff doesn't scatter to the four winds as soon as you kill one minion while Lightning Field is running.

Building for 59% defense on my SRs has yielded better results for survivability than any other approach I've tried, even for normal content. The amount of enemies with significant defense debuffs or tohit buffs is often underestimated on the boards, and capped DDR is often overestimated. Getting hit by -100% def, which can happen on +4/x8 solo missions against certain factions, still turns out to be -5% def with 95% DDR, and if you're barely at 45%, 46%, 47% def, the drop in survivability is sharp.

Max HP is also good, you should get much of it naturally while building for other things though.

I wouldn't build for regen (beyond slotting the unique procs and enhancing Health properly) these days as Rebirth gives so much of it.

There isn't many options for resistance, outside of Tough, which you should have enhanced and toggled on, and the Shield Wall +3 res.

The psi "hole" isn't worth building against, it's a mere few illusion/mind control powers.

Gloom seems to be worth it on a KM brute, due to the lower benefits of Power Siphon on a brute Gloom's damage make up for having a smaller amount of stacks.

Before Reactive, you're still looking at sub 200 DPS at perma-hasten levels of recharge, though. Which is, mind you, respectable and enough to solo AVs and such, but a bit disheartening compared to the 250-255 DPS a KM/SD scrapper would reach with the same investment.

I asked myself the same question a while ago and did the math: up until you end up above the damage cap, stacking Rages is always beneficial to your damage despite the added downtime, even before procs, veteran powers and time spent moving from mob to mob were considered.