Nihilii

If you ask me, taking on Holtz alone is already great. It's easy to call him a chump when playing one of the top AV soloing builds such as bots/traps, another thing entirely to beat him on a melee alt. And Honoree at the same time? Well done.

"Skill", knowledge of the game or whatever you want to call it, has everything to do with knowing how to play in order to maximise shard drops solo. If you're running +0/x8 for one hour and don't get at least (absolute minimum) 3 shards, you're too slow and have no business talking about skill.

You can kill 5.000 foes and not get a single purple drop. That's what random means ; but you're extremely unlikely to kill 50.000 foes solo and not get a single purple drop. That's what probabilities mean.

If you're not getting 3 shards per hour, at worst, as a solo player while trying to optimize, you've got no business talking about skill.

Nope, not true. As I said earlier, did it with a SO fire/stone granite brute, running what can't even be considered an attack chain as there was more gaps in it than in swiss cheese and I had to use AoEs while ST attacks were recharging. How fast do you think I moved in Granite + Rooted, without teleport, on a room with height variation? Answer : I just stood still and traded blows with the guy until he fell.

I think the regen boost his clones give him isn't permanent ; at some times I could barely break even or he would even regen back some, at other times he would barely regen and his life was dropping fast.

You have it backwards. These AVs were created as AVs and are identical in every way to the similar AVs you could meet in a TF. Some people complained they couldn't solo high-level content because AVs were in every story arc, so the devs introduced the option to lower them down to EBs to improve soloing experience a few years ago, and made that the default setting.

Turning them down to EBs doesn't even make them real EBs, they still retain the purple triangles of doom (50s up 25s down high mez protection to everything) and the high resistances to most debuffs AVs enjoy.

In comparison, a normal, real Elite Boss (i.e. Frostfire in the Hollows, or that warrior dude in Striga Island) has no such thing, and unless the particular EB you're fighting has powers/resistances against that, you can hold an EB in 3 holds, KB him/her all over the place, or put Darkest Night on him/her and /e dance without a worry.

Only +3 now, for the same reason as the AV -> EB change. Lots of bwaaah this is too hard.

And that's the important part. +3. It's got nothing to do with TFs or story arcs, a +3 AV is an entirely different beast than a +0 AV... Just the same as with every kind of mob, really.

Edit : wow, sniped twice. Time to head off to sleep I guess !

I'm completely sure Empower->SS ran into this problem two years ago. I even posted a video about it, and reported it on the scrapper issue list. Seeing as it's still there in the I18 update, I suppose it's not fixed.

I'd post the link to the vid, but... Well, I'll do it anyway, because the problem might be on my end, who knows? I just get a spinning loading thingy and the video never starts. I guess I should have used youtube.

In pure ST damage, it is only slightly better, because of the bug. If the bug was (is?) fixed then it would be (is?) significantly better. This is assuming you have enough recharge to run Emp->SS without leaving procs behind.

In mitigation, it lacks the KD from Vengeful Slice, but it uses fast animations only and so lets you react faster when you need it (I've died while locked into Vengeful Slice too many times to not mention how important quick activations can be for survivability).

In AOE, it depends. BF->AV does better on paper, but some of it is DoT and will often be wasted. Emp->SS, even with the bug, gives you the benefit of a double-stacked BF on SS and an additional +12.5% (+25% if the bug was/is fixed) damage too.

As you add more and more damage buffs from other sources, BF->AV starts catching up with Emp->SS in ST damage, while still requiring lower recharge.

There seems to be a misconception here. While different AVs have different strengthes and weaknesses, there's no such thing as "full strength AVs in TFs" and "glorified EBs in story arcs". An AV is an AV, with the same hit points, regeneration, damage and accuracy modifiers, everything. What makes the difference is the individual AV itself, the environment has nothing particular making AVs stronger (unless what you really meant is "can scrappers solo level +1, +2, +3, +4 AVs").

/2. Unless it's been fixed and I missed it, there's a bug with combos, if you chain them in... whatever time it takes to do Empower+SS, the second combo doesn't start. So you only get the Empower buff half as much as you should be.

I've unlocked Mender Ramiel on a fire/stone brute (who used to be an AE baby, which supposedly should make me a stupid person unable to play the game correctly) with SOs, which I frantically leveled from 35 to 50 picking whatever so I could just start the arc and join a raid. My granite was 4-slotted (messed up the slotting while training), I still had Legacy Fitness, and yet it still was a breeze (on +0/x1 with "no AVs", obv.).

Given the above experience, I'm not sure how much more solo friendly can you make this arc unless it just consisted of the very first mission, and I'm not sure how can one not manage to complete this arc unless that hypothetical person purposefully sets up to make a terrible build and play poorly (which IS minmaxing, just in a different direction than the usual one).

Thing is, nobody else has made a fancier pig yet. Well, Minecraft has some pretty good ones, but that's a different kind of pig and the multiplayer part sucks. So as much as I might want to move on from CoH, it's still the best thing to play out there.

Yeah, I'm gonna go with "no". Haven't seen more or less purples dropping since I19, but then again unlike some people (i.e. "speed" TFs runners who skip most mobs) I didn't change my playstyle one iota. I agree with Ironblade on that one.