Oedipus_Tex

The ticket rewards for doing missions like these are really low. These sorts of missions are basically the AE equivalent of beating an AV or GM.

No, Ice Slick will not throw enemies based on level difference. It will only throw the ones with an inherent vulnerability to knockback.

I don't understand what you mean. What seperates knockup from knockback is the relationship with the position of the caster. Knockback throws a creature backward along the angle between caster and victim. Knockup throws a creature straight up into the air without much (any?) regard for the caster's position. When you slot knockback into knockup powers, stuff does indeed go flying... mostly straight up. They are the same only in the sense that both move the enemy in some direction. The difference is what direction the enemy moves.

In terms of the animation that plays when a creature gets knocked up or back, I believe but haven't exclusively tested that KBs or KUs less than the KB threshold do not really do a "full" short range knockback. What they do instead is play a stock animation that is more or less like a type of custom hold. I don't have access to my logs, but I think it is usually called SWEEP_LOW or SWEEP_HIGH. SWEEP_LOW looks like the knockdown in Ice Slick, SWEEP_HIGH looks like the flip through the air in Air Superiority. I need to test this more with knock up though.

In any case, the game does have the mechanics to "lock" the magnitude of a KB effect and prevent it from changing when creatures of higher or lower level are encountered. This effect currently exists in Repel, Repulsion Field and Whirlwind to prevent you from standing on top of high level enemies with an autohit KD toggle. I also think it might be used by Ice Slick and Earthquake, as low level enemies do not bounce out of those like you'd expect.

Unless you are 100% soloing AVs, I would not recommend skipping Spectral Terror. Even then, I still wouldn't skip it. Unless you are focusing exclusively on soloing AVs who do not summon ambushes.

BTW, as mentioned above, Fear + Rain does not make enemies run away immediately. What it does is root them with a chance to attack or run every so often, which from my observation seems to be identical to the "proc schedule" of the power (on first cast and every 10 seconds after).

Yes, it's in Arctic Fog. Controllers, Defenders and Dominators all have the same resistance value (60%). It also protects from -Speed. Unless the description is bugged, that is (wouldn't be the first time for that particular power).

I may be dooming myself by informing you of what my default strategy recommendation would be for the team, but it may give you insight to holes you can plug in the pilot version of the mission. My apologies, because this post is a little rambly.

My assumption going into this is that what the enemies are tossing at you is far too dangerous for the team to stand toe to toe in. In whatever ways possible, the players need to minimize their contact with the enemies and keep away from them.

The first thing players need to consider is how they are going to keep the fight on their terms. We know some basic things about the AE. Firstly, because the AE has such a large tactical disadvantage, nearly all difficult fights will likely begin as ambushes; the AEs strategy needs to be turning as many things as possible into a fire fight. That means ambushes, ambushes, ambushes. Ambushes cannot happen unless the players complete or partially complete an objective of some kind. This means that for the players, the first step needs to be identifying any likely triggers. Specific things to look out for would be:
- any obvious bosses hanging around
- glowies
- defeatable objects

Defeatable objects and bosses are capable of triggering multiple ambushes. Care should be taken to limit the rate at which damage is done to them. But before even doing that, players should take the time to eliminate any minions they can identify, and take them out first. If the players are unable to tell the actual boss from the other enemies, the difficulty increases extraodinarily.

In any case, the sheer amount of horror enemies are capable of throwing at you means kiting them around an obstacle is probably a requirement. Even a team with +300% defense will go completely red if more than 5 or 6 Earth/Rads show up. On the ship map specifically, I would probably want to fight in the narrow corridor room. Someone with Force Bubble would stand around the corner, blocking enemy entry as much as possible. This won't keep everything out--most armored creatures can waltz through it, as can AVs. But it keeps out anything with ranged/debuff combos, or at least slows them down. This strategy isn't absolute, and can backfire if the enemy group turns out to feature massive number of buff-bot sets (Empathy, Kinetics, Force Field, Cold Domination, Thermal, Pain Dom, mostly.) But it limits the possibility of enemies simply one-shotting you.

On the other side of the wall, players need to work to create a "wall of hardship." Ice Slick, Earthquake, Quicksand, etc. This is to make it so anything trying to reach them is slowed down enough that Force Bubble has a chance to eject them. This won't stop everyone--Teleporting enemies especially. But it's at least creating a buffer to slow enemies down. Pets should be kept in this region to whatever degree possible to encourage enemies to blow long recharge cooldowns on them. This frees you up to single target (mostly) enemies that make it through to you. The reason this is a good idea is it limits the AEs ability to trick you into destroying a boss/objective that allows the AE to throw more ambushes at you.

Enemies should always be pulled. ALWAYS.* To whatever degree possible, this should be done with pets. The reason for this is simple. Enemies in the AE have insane abilities that are far stronger than anything encountered in the main game. You want them to blow as many of these attacks as possible on a pet. A player simply will not survive getting hit by 16 Aim + Infernos no matter what his defense and resistance look like.** You may be able to relax this rule some on multiple runs once you have an idea of what enemies can do to you. In any case, Phantom Army is a godsend here due simply to the fact that it is 100% immune to anything the AE can throw at it.

[*EDIT: Rethinking this, I'd pull them after attempting to confuse them first. Reasoning is the same for a pet pull: you want them to blow long recharge powers, and you get the side benefit of them possibily obliterating each other. However, there is the risk that they might blow away a creature that spawns multiple ambushes. Mind, Illusion, and Electric Control and I think also Fortunatas are the sets most suited for this. This specific strategy is also why I think confusion resistance/protection is such a must-have for enemies. Sticking snipers or enemies that see through invisibility in the pile make this a lot harder to do.]

[**Actually, you could survive, but I still wouldn't try it.]

Ambush spawns are a total dice roll and IMO by far the most dangerous and unpredictable part of the mission. If they spawn on top of the team, the team might end up in a very bad predicament, especially if there are a large number of additional enemies still hanging around from the spawn that triggered the ambush. The only real strategy I can think of here is "everyone throw a mezz at them and hope to hell it lands." This is one situation where Black Hole is potentially very useful, for buying time if nothing else. But Black Hole can also make all the other mezzes miss, so that could backfire. If there is a Tanker present, s/he could try to grab aggro as fast as possible. Depending on what the enemy is, he or she is also likely to die. The goal here is almost damage mitigation via death triage; try to limit the number of people hit by the enemies, and resurrect everyone else. Most enemies don't have teleport protection, so if all else fails, a fast moving Gravity may want to try throwing the new group around the wall outside Force Bubble.

For groups of AVs, or loads of enemies with armor secondaries, you are pretty much forced to take them head on. I'm at a total loss to think of a default strategy, because it depends so much on the powersets they have. For the bosses, you can at least be reassured that enemies can't combine a buff set with an armor. A buff/debuff AV on the other hand could be a thing of such terror that I'm at a loss to think of an effective strategy, other than: engage via Phantom Army and hope it didn't ambush you. If it's a group of debuffing AVs... well hopefully you have a lot of resistance to whatever debuff they're selling.

[EDIT: If you actually read all of that, the other significant factor players have to account for are patrols. To my knowledge, patrols can't trigger an ambush, but they can definitely turn up at the wrong times. The existence of patrols makes me question whether fighting in the narrow hallway is a good idea at all. But I don't really know of anywhere where patrols are unwilling to go. One sick possibility that I'm not sure would work is to have one player suicide into the patrol, and then teleport him or her back. Does the patrol stop moving then? If not, this doesn't work. And it's kind of an insane "tactic" in any case. The alternative is to scout the map and kill the patrols early, but sheer map size combined with the right "filler" enemy group could make this impossible.]

Cold is a almost required set because of the -Recharge resistance. I'm much more skeptical of Fire Blast. Fire Blast's best ability would probably, IMO, turn out to be Rain of Fire. In an ideal setting I'd favor Ice Blast over that, for the stacking slows, single target hold, and two ranged placeables, one them being a nuke. But I still wouldn't want more than 2 or 3 Colds. You're left too wide open to some of the more exotic attacks, and have no mezz protection or heals to speak of.

In terms of damage resistance, the assumption should be that many enemies will have very strong resistance to most attacks period. I don't feel like any set really has an advantage there.

Vengeance, of course, applies to any character. The Corruptor version of it is about equal to a Controller or Mastermind, and somewhat weaker than a Defender.

VEATS might be an effective class to consider. I've looked at them but don't know all of their actual strengths and weaknesses. Widows are basically like someone just copy-pasted all of the best powers from 4 or 5 different Psi sets, gave it mezz protection, removed the nuke crash, and soft capped it to everything. I still probably wouldn't use them for the whole team though I can see how they might have a place. Their major weaknesses are the lack of endurance recovery or healing, sleep powers (particulary Mass Hypnosis), or exotic mezzes like Fears or knockdown patches enemies have trouble coping with.

I also wouldn't call the AE "highly artificial." It's a different environment, and it would be silly to say that any character is the most or least powerful based on their performance in it, but at the same time the STF, ITF, Apex and the rest are arbitrary in the same way, and people DO say those things based on performance there. Erroneously, IMO.

Are you saying you aren't thrilled that you now GET to share an origin with Marcus Cole, the most heroic and yet most vile, most powerful and yet most emotionally vulnerable, most humorless and yet most charismatic man ever to live in any timeline, plane of existence, or marketing campaign since the dawn of Adam (who, it will later be revealed, was actually an aspect of Marcus Cole)?

The STF is not a particularly hard Task Force. It has the brick wall at the end that is the AVs, but not so much because they throw a train at you. They are big bags of HP and, IMO, kittens compared to what the AE could do to you. Recluse is a tank and spank that happens to require killing 4 other objects before attacking him, but standard fare none the less.

The AE is capable of throwing out ambushes of Illusion/Fire Blasters who are armed with: Confusion, Group Invisibility, Phantom Army, Aim, Inferno. Then there are the Ice Control/Storm Summoners who are able to hit you with -400% Recharge each and are invisible, have confusion protection, three autohit slows, -fly, and capped exotic damage because of stacking Steamy Mists. There are Ninjitsu Dominators, Masterminds with Kinetics, ambushes of all-Earth Control Dominators with autohit -Defense, enemies with PBAoE heals, 16 mezz protected bosses running Hurricane and casting Tornadoes, and all other forms of nightmares. Oh, and that thing we call the soft cap? It's five times higher than what the Tank needed to deal with Recluse...

Addition: The reason you need mezz, specifically, is that without it the enemies are free to buff each other the same way your team can buff itself. There are restrictions on how many enemies can attack a player at a time, but none at all on how many can stand around buffing their allies. And the attack powers of AE creatures outstrip anything in the game by a HUGE amount. You have to shut them down if you can--altho if the mission is almost entirely AVs, that won't be (as) possible. The strategy would probably begin to revolve around groups of Illusion and Mind Controllers stacking Confusion on the AV prior to the fight (some people would suggest a Mind Dominator but IMO its not worth losing the buff secondary).

If you want to really throw the hammer at Controllers, look for some way to prevent or limit immobilizing AVs. You just cut their damage in half.

P.S. is that Famine enemy from the LGTF available in the AE? I'm not sure if he's the one who's hit me for -300% Recharge before, but something in that Task Force is able to floor me.

Such teams are potent, but the environment in an AE Gauntlet (as I've come to think of them, due to their resemblance to the insanity of that old game from the 1980s) is quite a different environment than the STF. Just glancing at your lineup, the lack of an Illusion Controller would worry me greatly. You also do not have enough -Recharge resistance to overcome the likes of 2 or 3 Ice Control/Storm enemies--god forbid an entire boss level ambush full. And although I am possibly missing it, I think Fire/Kin is a poor pick for a Gauntlet. The enemies are virtually guaranteed to have mezz protection via bubbles, which eliminates ALL of your controls (well, except Bonfire), and its too dangerous to get close for Hot Feet. Not saying your group wasn't great, and might even do ok on a blind Gauntlet like this, but I don't think the STF is really comparable at all.

EDIT: Re-read what you wrote and realized I was responding to the wrong point. I agree that buffers would be very useful because of their ability to act pre-emptively. I still think you'd want a very heavy dose of debuff and control too though.

Looking at the version of Wormhole available to enemies, it looks like it doesn't actually do Teleport. It appears to be just an AoE stun with knockback. But in the right circumstances Wormhole could be hugely useful to players, because if you were to pick enemies up and throw them out of the radius of radial mezz protection, you might cause them toggle drop.

On enemies, Force Bolt is Mag 9. That would be enough to cause some issues. IMO the best player strategy is defense buffing so that most of the bolts miss. But ID helps too. Luckily it appears that Force Bolt is pretty much the only KB available to custom enemies that rises above Mag 8 (two -kb IOs). Most other KB powers appear to be around Mag 3 or less, with a few exceptions (Wormhole, Power Push) at around Mag 7 or 8. I should note that Bonfire appears to be able to throw you even if you have protection. At least, it seems like my characters with Mag 4 protection get thrown sometimes despite Bonfire supposedly being Mag 3, maybe due to stacking KB, or maybe because enemies actually use the same pet players do so the values shown in the AE detailed view are wrong?

The other effects I left out were Taunt and Placate. Getting a Tanker in this mix really wouldn't be a bad idea IMO. Mainly for the autohit Taunt and it's associated -Range, which in some circumstances you may be able to abuse to heck and back with the right map and clever use of Force Bubble. If I had to drop one support set, it would be the extra Radiation character in favor of a (probably) Dark Armor Tanker. We'd just have to pray s/he was able to actually hit enemies with the heal. But if nothing else, that autohit Mag 30 stun in the self rezz would be nice to have around.

Interesting statement. IMO, the Well isn't necessarily the devil setting up a Faustian bargain.

It could be God.

Desire to make this game still play in Peoria (Praetoria?) limits how far the storyline could ever carry this, but to me at least there ARE some compelling possibilities. Even if they will never be fully realized as official canon. But setting up any magical entity as the "source of everything" has definite metaphysical implications, intended to be read that way or not.

I went back and tried it with bosses. Knowing what I know now about the structure, I was smart enough to clear out the area before attacking the main boss, and kited him around while I took out everything else in the area. His vulnerability to Ice Slick is exploitable to an extent. I was very very glad to be an Ice Dom and not a Fire. Plant or Mind might have had a somewhat easier time due to their ability to confuse bosses, which Arctic Air can't. On the other hand, the ability to slow them seemed to help me out a lot, and let me at least race behind boxes. The Masterminds summoning their minions right into my AA was pretty LOL too, when they'd all show up and blow the MM away.

It was all smooth sailing until the second ambush wave. Holy carp. Instant death the moment they spawned on top of me. I came back, managed to pull 2 or 3 bosses at a time. They still killed me. More an issue of not having the sustained DPS of a "true" damage archetype and the serious handicap of mezzes failing. A Mind Dominator might have had an easier time, although I can see many full teams wiping on that second wave. Still I think it's a cool mission. It scares me to think of how much harder this could be.

Just tried it on my Ice/Fire/Fire Dominator, Solar Icecap. Great mission. I don't have any characters hardcore enough to solo something like this, so I did it on +0x8 with bosses turned off. I don't get to claim the fame of saying I beat it at the intended difficulty, but it was a lot of fun regardless. It wasn't as hardcore as what we've been talking about, but met a different challenge niche (that is, doable with practice by many people). I included a few screenshots of the action.


Here is the character meeting the contact, wearing perhaps one of the least intimidating superhero costumes currently registered in Paragon City.



Walking into the opening and spotting the Sonic Resonance bubbles, I knew immediately I was going to be breaking some rules of typical Scrapper challenges. Kiting was absolutely going to have to happen. Luckily I had an inspiration load of about 10 greens, 2 break frees, and whatever other random inspirations I happened to pack.



Opening with a pull onto Ice Slick seemed the way to go since I had no idea what attack these guys were packing.



This evolved into a firefight when the mini robots started showing up. Around this time, Domination kicked in and I was able to immobilize them despite the giant bubbles.




The first couple of groups of just robot guys went ok, but then the ambushes started. I was handling that with modest success, running back and forth between sides of the mission to kite the enemies across Ice Slick. But eventually there were so many I had to face them head on.



Eventually it got to where there were at least 3 or 4 different kinds of enemies shooting at me. One of them was some kind of Energy Blaster that had a nasty melee attack and moved REALLY fast. Luckily they didn't seem able to hit me too often, but at this point I was running low on green inspirations.



Things got more desperate as more and more enemies of different kinds kept showing up, forcing me to abandon my hiding spots.




Suddenly, the word "Confused" appeared on my screen. Oh crap, Illusionists. At this point I was reduced to running and hidding and hoping I could catch them in Rain of Fire when I was unconfused. No luck.



Rather than use Rise of the Phoenix, I decided I needed to depart to the hospital. I didn't bother buying new inspirations despite being out of greens. On my return, my only option was to try to single target the Illusionists before they could spot me.




After this part, I thought I still had to defeat the entire boat. But to my surprise after ranging the two enemies downstairs, the glowie showed up. I snuck past the enemies and grabbed it, claiming my 54 tickets!



Great mission. A lot more fair than anything we've talked about in this discussion. Some lessons learned for me:

- Having an AoE sleep power is surprising valuable against enemies with shields. You can throw out an AoE hold first, then follow with the sleep, and hope the detoggle from the sleep in turn forces the hold to hit.

- However, Ice Control's ranged sleep power still mostly sucks.

- Naming your enemies "Illusion Challenge" greatly assists the players in figuring out who keeps Confusing them. Had you named them "Sword Challenge" you probably could have wrung 2 or 3 extra deaths out of me. A dirty trick, but this is a dirty thread.

- Mezzes completely wreck solo squishies. Not that that's suprising given what we know.

- Had you hit me with -Speed and -Recharge (especially from an autohit set) I would have faceplanted a lot more. However the encounter may also have teetered far into the "extremely frustrating" category.

- Masking which entity summons the ambushes makes the whole affair a LOT deadlier.

- Having a couple of groups of easy enemies between big fire fights keeps players guessing. Even though I could handle hordes of robots fairly easily, the chance that one of them might summon another ambush kept me from getting too aggressive.

Great mission. I may do it again sometime when I want a reminder of how much less my characters can solo than a melee when the game actually ramps up the challenge meter.

I can second this. I remember in the early days of the AE, before the Meow farms came into proliferation, when it seemed like every arc featured some ridiculously powerful AV. Willpower was pretty much unkillable. And, actually, putting any of the full armor sets on an AV is so overpowered that it kind of becomes farcical.

And then there is /Ninjitsu, the armor suited for combining with the blast set of your choice, so that anyone with less than Tanker armor dies in a flash of surprise nukes.

I'd like it if something like this got started. It not something you can do in any other MMO.

My only concern is about AVs. They are pretty easy to make so irritating that the mission stops being challenging and just becomes boring. IMO a common sense rule needs to apply to them. I think it's ok for them to be hard, but IMO the only challenge should not be "lets see you out DPS THIS."