OneFrigidWitch

Def, thats the one where we kill the AVs at their respective spawn points? I have no qualms doing this every time I feel comfortable with the team we have. That could be several extra astrals per BAF multi-run. It for sure is not as difficult as it looks at first glance.... (thumbs up PV for showing the way)

Ran this last night, 2 by me, 1 by Patient V. Have to say, PV ran the more interesting one, as it got 23 people MOBAF if they didn't already had it. 17 Astrals were to be had. Total run time was 1hour 15 minutes.

Hope everyone had fun!

I will be running one tonight, and then off for some time.

Global is, as in my sig, @Hewmaster

I will be starting with the min number to run if I feel comfortable with who is on the team and who I know. I have had several successful 14-15 member BAF runs, so this is fine.

PS: I prefer just Hew. The full name comes from RP reasons that my original main tank had. Hew is short, sweet, and unused.

Musculature et al boost this. That's working as intended. If you are saying it jumps to the same mob, well, that's not.

Whats broke?

Voo; I take anything and everything that can run the trials. I have run BAF with 14 people and had no problem succeeding. However, lots and lots of tanks and people new to the BAF seems to be a bad combination. :/ I will always be running with the same char, 1984. Maybe in a month or two I will run with my namesake, but probably not.

Well, I have decided that when I want to run a Trial, its most likely going to be a speed-baf mult-irun. For those not in the know, this means:

1. Whatever League we run the first baf with, we will run the second baf with.
2. There is at max a 5 minute layover between bafs
3. We speed-kill the AVs. Absolutely no attempt at farming iXp. The faster you gut them, the faster we go

You may ask, whats the point? To be frank, the rewards are amazing for doing it. You can run up to 4 bafs in slightly over an hour, or with good teams under an hour. This means, for each hour you invest,

1. You get 16 astral merits (or more if this the first time you have run it, with bonus merits for badges)
2. You get 4 shots at a vrare or rare salvage
3. You get a fair number of threads as incidental damage
4. 16 astral merits turn into 64 threads turns into 1+ threads per minute. That's pretty damn nice.
5. 64+ threads + 4common-> vrare salvage = one, perhaps two powers slotted immediately, maybe enough to work you up the food chain.

People have said that Lambda is faster. I find that you can kill NS/Siege faster than you can kill Marauder. There is no jumping involved; you do not have to worry about people hoarding/wasting/not using temp powers vital for mission completion. Frankly, I just find it faster. And people like blowing things up more than running in tunnels getting massacred. At least I sure do.

For reference, I was able to make 64 total threads in the course of 2 failed and 2 successful speed runs, got lucky on a rare, and picked up one of the usual uncommons. I thought it was a good investment of 45 minutes.

If you hear me in channel broadcasting for one of these, this is what it is. 4 runs, balls to the wall (or other bits if you are of ladylike persuasion), pushing for an under 1 hour completion.

PS: Having 6 tanks out of 23 people on a team of 23 really makes the prisoner part difficult. Also, if you have never done this before, PLEASE read the map faq before joining. The two failures we had were due to parts of the map being completely uncovered..... :/

test_rat, still sounds like you have a pretty crappy set of teams. Teams should be balanced as best as possible to spread everything around. If your league leader isn't massaging the teams, find a different league. What should be on a team is variable, but being in a league where you have all tanks and defenders on one team is going to blow for that one team. That is the fault of the league leader.

Clouded/Test_rat, you are on ****** teams then.

I pulled 51% on my very first BAF. It depends on what your team is, and if you have a leader who can communicate.

The overwhelming majority of your iXp comes from killing adds in BAF, and clearing the outer perimeter in Lambda. Any mob left unkilled is less iXp for you.

In BAF, cycle between killing Siege and Nightstar. It gives you 10 seconds of breathing room when one is down. Have part of your league be dedicated to killing the viki/9cu adds. If you want threads, have the League Leader split your 3 times up, top 2 of each team, dedicated to killing adds, while the bottom 6 dedicated to killing the AVs and cycling them. This will get you exp plenty quick. If you aren't killing the adds, you are going to get squat for iXp. You should be able to cycle the AVs two, maybe three times depending on the team. If you are extremely DPS heavy, with good agro management, you should be able to push your time all the way to 5 minutes or less, and still complete the trial no problem, having killed stupid amounts of adds.

In Lambda, leave one of the portals open! IF you can handle the adds. But because Marauder is such a chimp, it should be reasonable to handle the adds from 1 portal and put him down as well. Even if you leave all the portals dead (probably a wise decision), if you didn't clear the outer perimeter before you entered the gate, you would have been missing several % of iXp. Always kill everything!

Moreover, you don't have to do Lambda if you don't want to! Sure doing BAF means you get no physical iXp. However, you get 16 threads which you can just burn for iXp, components, and who knows what goodies. I have more fun doing BAF. I don't think I will be doing any more Lambdas, even though it will take me longer to get my slots. I just can't stand the middle phase of Lambda.

edit: Just to be clear, nuking the adds in BAF is not as easy as it seems.... but if you picked Judgement up quick, and you have a lot of Judgement in your league, it makes managing the adds much much easier.

10 trials should have been enough to take care of a lot of slot opening.

You get 4 threads per astral, possibly 4 astrals per trial (unless you did something wrong and failed). You get some number of % towards your slot.

4*4 = 16, *10 = 160 threads. Thats a whole ton of threads, not including whatever dropped during your trials. Based on that, at 30 threads per slot, you have already opened all 4 of your slots, and have threads left over for components to boot.

I have done 2 on Thursday, 2 on Friday, 2 on Saturday, 1 on Sunday, and I have 1 rare, 1 uncommon. I could have slotted out to have 3 slots instead of two high power slots, but I just wanted my clockworks. And I am 3 trials short of you, and never spent any shards to convert.

I dunno man, I think you burnt yourself out. Why did you do that?

BAF is stupid fun. It has something for everyone. And I totally love blasting the snot out of things. Plus, it gives my tricked out dom something dangerous and exciting to do. My tray is always full of purples, which I eat 6 at a time, to try and stay upright. Between that, my inherent powers, my incarnate powers, I find BAF to be a truly awesome expenditure of my time. I log in, spend just a few minutes, blow the snot out of some things, get some rewards, log out and have dinner.

What I don't like is Lambda. I'm sorry, but the break-neck pace at which people try to speed from container to container just gets me killed in the middle part. I can't contribute without dying. And the hospital is so far away from the middle part, dying becomes a horrible detractor. Dying in BAF is no problem. Wait some time, buy up on inspirations I used, jump back out there and blow things up!

You just don't get this kind of crazy awesome (BAF) elsewhere in the game. I just wish Lambda had something more interesting. The first part and last part of Lambda are great. If the middle part were great, I'd play that a lot more too!

Screw ITF.

I have a problem already with pre-20 content. People complain that they loose sight of what is being contributed in large groups of teams. One person here mentioned that in teams of 8 or less.. I have to agree with that person. When you see blasters at the front lines with +def kitted out IO sets causing more mayhem than the brute, you have to say... what's going on? When you see two or three blasters like that, or maybe a scrapper, you have to say, what's the point of me being here? I mean, really. Half the team is team dependant. The other half is a team by theirself. Add in additional super awesome powers, and you end up with more people being super-awesome without help. Doing fun things like teaming will actually become less and less likely. People need to remember that teaming is fun because you rely on each other. If there is no threat big enough to really require the base elements of what a character is, then what is the point of the team? I think 4/8 just isn't sufficient anymore to push a team to function properly anymore. We need something bigger, something more crazy. Maybe 4/16 for a team of 8. Something that really makes individuals useful in teams, and allows them to shine again.

I am equipped with only SO enh, yet I have managed an 80% res to s/l. Thats a whole lot of res. And I have like, 7% def total from weave. Once I get my very-rare cardiac, I will have even more res to s/l, plus my 90% fire and 60% energy. That is pretty dang spiffy if you ask me. I am not sure where survival is an issue, except that if I had some reasonable amount of defense I would be pretty tough to kill. I expect to get ~20% def, maybe a little more, once I have IOs instead of SOs. Plus I get to burn things and use my axe attacks, so I do pretty good. I am certainly no god of firearmor.

I have a question.....

What do you do about the god awful slow animations on the two cones in fire/mental?

I have fireball, cone, cone, blast, rain, and flares. Trying to unload cone, cone, ball on someone is so sloooooooooooooooow.

edit: I have hover and cant figure out how to use it with these attacks. How do you hoverblast people?

A well kitted out Elec/Psi/Ice with perma hasten/dom is stupid fun in tfs late game. Pretty fun in midgame too. If you dont mind dying once in a while, you can straight up run scrapperlock too. The only thing that really kills you is being dumb. But... the combo is so fun, being dumb starts to come natural with your general unkillableness.

I like PVP IOs. I think its a ****** system that encourages farming.

I LOVE the zones. I think there are not enough incentives to actually play in them. There are definitely NOT enough people to fill them nicely

Why not close off pvp ios in the zones, but make it so purples have a chance to drop on ANY mob in a pvp zone? Make pvp ios drop much faster, but only in base raid pvp? Everyone loves base raid pvp anyway.

Stuff and things. I really really really liked base pvp. I think generic zone pvp could be really awesome but just lacks stuff to have more people play. :/

Jalena's post is inaccurate. A single elec dom CAN floor his end, but only for the vast majority of the fight. Near the end, he pops some flavor of ultra regen which pushes his end recovery well beyond what even a team of sappers can control. I don't know what power he activates, but it drives his recovery up stupid high.

But if I can buy the recipe for pennies, why are people so happy to get them? Just buy on cheap and craft yourself! Is there something special in the set that is hard to get or something?

Ok, so, sometimes I get these rectified reticles. Everyone raves by them. The stupid things sell for like 50 inf on market tho as recipes. What am I missing?

I found it to be a major difference; However, I am a dom, so that comes with its own unique issues. Level-shifted, a double static field puts everything to sleep; confuse actually lasts long enough to cause some serious havoc as well. On +4s, confuse wore off in about 5 seconds or something useless.

Imps is a standby! How could you ever think of dropping imps! (gasp!). To be honest, I am not sure that dropping imps for subdue or tk is a good decision. I'm basing this solely on the fact that no matter what, your imps will keep attacking, even if you are held/slept/stun/out of end. Any of those conditions knock out your chance to attack with subdue or tk. Keep the imps I say!

I would have slotted differently. Actually, I am an elec/psi/ice, and I slotted significantly different. But in your case, I think the KinComs in mindprobe was an expensive waste. You seem to be mostly going for ranged defense. While 14% s/l is better than nothing, your slots are better spent on getting some more ranged defense. Makos bites are cheaper, and provide 3.75% ranged def. Likewise you could slot 3 erradication into psywave for some more ranged def, bringing you up to 34% ranged def, and slot armageddon chance for damage, and two mixed enh to max out bonuses in the power. This would be vastly cheaper than the very very expensive purples you have there, keep you at permadom levels, and up your ranged def. The way you are slotted/powers you have picked, you should virtually never be in melee range.

I went a very very different route, and went straight S/L/M def, picked maneuvers instead of tough/weave/boxing, and ran a straight melee dom. I have found I can easily farm level 50 freak mishs at +2/8 (with my rare spiritual incarnate), though usually I drag around a horde of bosses with no end and kill them off slowly, a few at a time. My only concern with your build is that, if you were to lead off with

sleep -> jump in -> drain psyche -> psywave -> jump out -> psyscream -> ranged

you may find the initial melee barrage from bosses a bit difficult to survive. Always keep in mind that with /psi, more is better. Each hit target gives you 100% regen/recov, stacking up very fast to obscene levels. If you are fighting small numbers of mobs, you arent getting much out of Drain Psyche. At best, it becomes an AV/GM fighting tool.

Also, I 3 slotted DP with Efficacy Adapter. It was slot light, and effective.

I have no idea what level your dom is, or how you have been doing so far, but at high levels (post 45), its a pretty monstrous, methodical killer against lethalish opponents. As usual, there are opponents you need to avoid, but it is definitely a blast. And in groups, you end up really having a blast. It is absolutely my fav char.

I slotted it. It's dirt cheap, and static field works fine with just 4 legit enh in it. It is just 1 extra slot and very cheap change to purchase. (At least, it was dirt cheap when I picked it up for 2 mil.)