Olimar

The one and only time I've done the Barracuda version so far the MM temp power seemed to work for us. We had Reich immobilzed and I was range taunting from above to cut down on his PBAoE spam. He would phase "on schedule" and fly up to me losing all his immobilize/-fly. Then the MMs would click on whatever and shortly thereafter he would fall back down and we'd continue beating on him, and he never had a chance to regen his HPs back to some painful level.

Or it could've been because we had Traps and Poison with us so the -Regen from those stayed around long enough even while phased to counteract his own. But that doesn't explain how we were able to immobilize and ground him so quickly again after he phased.

A Hami raid requires far more people and organization than a TF/SF. You can't compare HO risk/reward because of that.

HOs were added as an option to the STF/LRSF for those people who can't do Hami raids. Some servers have Hami on permanent "farm" status, making for an easy and regular source of HOs. Other servers rarely do him at all and instead need to do the TF/SF to get HOs. And even on the servers that farm Hami those are usually done on a regular schedule which many people can't attend so again the STF/LRSF would be their only option to earn HOs as a reward (i.e. not counting buying/trading for them).

As an aside, the servers that farm Hami can do him in ~60 - 90 minutes, depending on how long the monster clearing takes. That puts the merit reward for Hami on those servers well above what it should be compared to the STF and LRSF.

We did it with some MMs but no Stalkers. It's incredibly painful without a Stalker but the Ambushes do eventually let up. Can't say how hard it would be without the MM-specific temp power. We had a lot of debuff, though, so we probably would've been able to finish it, it just would've taken a lot longer.

Hero-side we did it in 60 minutes. Villain-side it took us 3 hours thanks to the ambushes plus all the other running around and non-stealthable parts (unlike Blue-side). Not sure who at Paragon Studios thought these things were both worth 20 merits but they need to get their stopwatches checked.

I15 supposedly fixed the endless chain infection (haven't tested yet):
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Hamidon Mitochondria Electrolytes' Electrolytic Blast will no longer chain indefinitely.


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http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/pat...release_n.html

Also as most regular Hami raiders probably already know the merits got increased from 40 to 52:
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Defeating the Hamidon has had its Merits awarded increased from 40 to 52. This was due to a merits per minute recalculation made in a previous patch that was overlooked for the Hamidon.


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Edit: it's actually 53 merits.

Also, the Electro blast isn't back to it's pre I14 state -- it'll still follow you around even after all the Blues are down but it will expire eventually on its own.

The "safest" would be a Mind controller with Illusion being next.

Not sure what the most "efficient" (fastest) soloer would be. Illusion can stealth a lot of the missions which speeds things up *a lot* but it doesn't kill particularly fast.

Edit: I forgot to add that for Controllers, Rad would be the best secondary for this purpose since you get RI and other goodies early on.

I haven't seen the "Shadow Maul misses more often than other attacks" one yet I don't think.

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This reminded me of someone I ran into a few weeks ago. We were fighting the Banished Pantheon, and one of the guys was having a hard time landing hits on the BP Masks. After awhile, he informed the group that we should attack the masks from the sides or back since apparently the mask itself was deflecting attacks from the front. It took awhile of me explaining how the game actually works for him to accept the possibility that he was wrong, though it didn't stop him from circling around to the back of the masks to fight them.


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In some MMORPGs facing does matter and that person may have been used to those mechanics. E.g. in EQ you would do more melee damage per unit time attacking the back of many/most mobs cause they can't parry back attacks. It was actually annoying how many players *didn't* know that as you had to constantly remind people to "stand on the other side please" if you were the one tanking.

A pair of Illusion controllers or an Illusion controller with perma-PA can handle GW easily since she can't heal off of PA. Everybody just stay out of PBAoE range and let the PA(s) tank.

Another approach is to root her in place and attack from max range. She won't be able to hit with her PBAoE and her ranged Heal attack has a relatively short range. This in fact is the standard "safe" STF tactic if you don't have something like perma-PA. You immobilize GW and a Tanker taunts her from max range.

She can still do her uber hold but dropping PA right at that point will draw her away from the held target and allow them to recover.

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Group Flight had a specific niche in Hami Raids for "PA Drop Teams". It was used to distract mitos so the raid wasn't bombarded with residual blasts. Some MMs use it now to move pets around, but the fact that flight enhancements in the power only apply to you and no one else in the area causes it to be too slow. I believe Group Flight was intended as more of a tactical power.


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Group Flight was also sometimes useful on the post-I9 Hami raids for the Yellow Mitos teams (it really cuts down on your DPS if you have to jump up to hit the Mitos) until they added the Flight Pack vendor to Firebase Zulu.

Yes we started on the Greens before the Blues as usual and we were able to Hold one (it was taking damage) but it kept getting healed before we could kill it. It's a little counter-intutive to switch to the Blues at this point but it worked for the Villain raid (at least until too many bailed) and I could see we were having trouble with the chain infections and since this was an "experimental" raid anyways I figured we might as see if we would have better luck doing the Blues first, which we did once we got the secondary attack (those few attacking a 2nd Blue to draw off some of the healing) better organized.

Another I14 update:

If the new in I14 Blue "chain infection" is giving you problems you might want to take down the Blues before the Greens. We did this successfully on the Villain Hami raid last Tuesday and again today on our 18ish person Hero-side Hami raid.

A strat that worked for us today was to focus everybody on a low(ish) Blue (so people can stand on the ground making it easier for the Shadow Fall that we had to reach everybody) and have a couple of people with minimal ranged (like Scrappers with a ranged attack from their APP) attacking one of the Blues next to it to divert some of the Green healing.

On the last Blue you can get some melee-only to beat on Hami to try and divert some of those Greens but with only one Blue causing infections it should be doable even with all the Greens healing it, as we were able to do it with our "skeleton crew" today.

After the Blues are down, have people that are still infected scatter to clear that so it's all gone when you do the Greens.

Change in I14:

The Blue Mitos chain fear/damage attack doesn't expire as long there's somebody close enough and in line of sight to an "infected" person. Even if there are no Blues around or even if you aren't even in the same *zone* (we brought it back tonight to TI for laughs and giggles), the infection will keep going as long as there's at least one target to chain too.

If an infected person makes it back to the Safe Rock after the evac you'll have a mess on your hands until you can herd the infected cats off the rock and away from everybody else.

This makes Shadow Fall *much* more important than before and it'll also be important for Emps and others with a Fear prot buff to keep it up on as many teammates as possible even after the all the Blues are down.

Not sure if this a bug or "working as intended" but I filed a bug report on it in any event.

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How fast are Hami's being run these days from formation to finish?

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60 - 90 minutes from when we start monster clearing.

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The official times are badly out of date. These days, the raids fill up 15 to 30 minutes in advance. So you need to be on your correct alt and in the Hive by about 10:30pm server time (UTC+0) on Saturdays, and about 12:45am server time (UTC+0) on Wednesday nights (early Thursday morning UTC).

There are plenty of people who show up on time (but not 30 minutes ahead of time as they must to get in) to support a second raid, if they weren't forced to give up due to no second raid being scheduled. Unfortunately, nobody's working on fixing the situation by moving the scheduled raid earlier and a second one in yet. Come next week I might just start doing it myself.

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As predicted with the release of the merit system Hami raids have gotten a lot more popular which is why this is happening. Changing the start time may or may not fix this "problem" (up to a certain point people will just keep coming early those the earlier start times as well).

What's really needed is more people to step up and recruit, organize, and lead the people in Hive 2 if there are enough to start the raid in there while Hive 1 is still going. I've actually lead both raids (Hive 1 and Hive 2) at the same time a few times but that's obviously quite a lot of work for one person and I can really only do that if there's a surplus of Empaths in Hive 1 so I can move my Emp over to Hive 2.

Last Wednesday EmperorSteele stepped up and led the raid in Hive 2 while Hive 1 was still going which was nice since they didn't have to wait around for Hive 1 to finish as is usually the case. If we had more people that would be willing to do that as the need arises it wouldn't matter as much if Hive 1 fills up early. If you want to do that too, that would be great.

Hero-side it's Wednesdays at 8:00pm Eastern Time and Saturdays at 6:00pm Eastern Time. Villain-side it's on Sundays but only when scheduled (at least once a month). There's one this November 16 at 6:00pm Eastern. The upcoming Hami raid schedule is usually listed in the VU2008 global channel's MOTD.

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One tank can probably keep Hami busy, but it would be nice to have two in case one is stronger than the other and one needs to be patched up by his/her empath/storm/kin.


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Yes and we still have the occasional lead Tanker jumping in without eating an EoE first which is why I mentioned having a backup as well.

You don't need 6 tanks to hold Yellow aggro, 3 would be enough, and 2 could probably do it in a pinch with SB or if they ignored the initial spike teams Yellows. It's easy enough for a single Tanker to hold the aggro of 2 Yellows. I had Naomi- doing that one night on her Tanker when we were short Scrappers and I was running an improvised back Scrapper team using Tankers and Warshades in Dwarf form (The two WS were on one Yellow and Naomi- was on the other two).

With the way we've got regen buffing the Hami taunting Tank down pat we really only need one Tanker per round to taunt Hami these days. So with only 4 Tankers total we could in fact use 2 of them to taunt 4 of the Yellows (the extra Tanker is a backup to the Hami taunter just in case). Also when I'm on the Tanker team as a Tanker and I'm not on Hami or the next in line I will taunt whichever Yellow the spike team is on currently since that will speed things up slightly if the Scrappers don't have to recover from the KB effect. I know some other Tankers like Sphere of Earth do this as well.

I believe this is part of how Justice can do their Hami raids with fewer than Virtue typically did it in the past (though we've been able to do it with fewer than our norm recently). If Tankers are taunting all 6 Yellows from range you can have Blappers and other ATs with good melee attacks but no Stun protection pounding on the Yellows so you aren't dependent on having a full complement of Scrappers to take them down in a timely fashion.

FYI the updated Earth Controller pet can take Hami aggro away from a Tanker taunting at range. They must have boosted his taunt duration/amount substantially when they updated his AI.

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- Drop rate for Costume Salvage is really extremely low now. Intentional? Anticipate prices on those things skyrocketing after this event.


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I don't know how the drops compare to last year but they do seem to use the standard "streaky" random number generator that other parts of the game suffer from (like loot drops). I dual-boxed a bunch of doors earlier today and on one character I got 8 costume piece drops (3-2-3, 0 of the 4th) and on the other I got one drop and I got that near the end after my other character got 8.

Umm...did our updated Hero-side Hami raid guide get nuked?

Remove the slash in front of the "e".