Part_Troll

Did a Synapse today on Virtue. I was on as Heavy Companion Cube (yes, the Cake *IS* moist and delicious), my L42 Dark Armor Scrapper, who was, of course, "autoexemplarified" to L20, fighting those pesky clockworks for hours on end. The team was pretty good, Scrapper, Peacebringer, two Blasters, a Forcefield Defender, and a Grav/Kin controller.

But during the recruiting phase, there was this awful hiatus, whilst we waited on some never-to-be-named controller, who was fighting an AV in Faultline when I contacted them asking them if they would like to join.

"Give me 5 minutes to defeat Nocturne please"

'ok, send tell when ready'.

Rest of team (4 of us) were sitting there in Skyway, waiting for him. He finished about 7 minutes later, sent me a tell, and I post the invite, which he accepts.

'Hi, come to Skyway and then wait at the Green Line, when we start, we'll be off to Steel'

Guy disappears from Faultline, and goes to 'on Mission map' (i.e. his/her Base, because even after 10+ releases the Devs STILL Can't fix the 'Mission/Supergroup/Zone' notificaiton in the buff-bar area!).

'Er, ok, can you come to Skyway'
"On my way to tram"

We wait a while, and someone else sends me a tell asking to join, so we invite them (L16 controller, totally awesome too), and we wait, and wait, and wait.

'We're waiting on you < name >, can you PLEASE come to Skyway so we can start'
"on my way to tram"

< fx /waiting >

After another two minutes, we had a little discussion on the team, and sadly, he was toasted.

'Sorry guy, we're starting now, have fun'

/kick < name >

Honestly, we waited more than 15 minutes whilst he jerked us around, it was very irritating.

He sent a tell post kick, saying he was 'nearly' at the station when I booted him. I'm not at all sad.

Anyhow, It was a great task force, really easy going, people listened, we did stuff, it went swimmingly.

Until the flaky blaster (who had a tendency to go AFK every 15 minutes or so) decided that going from -right next- to the entrace of Boomtown to Steel Canyon was fastest via ... Pocket D.

I mean, the mission in Boom was in the closest building to the Steel Canyon entrance, and the next mission was posted, as being in Steel Canyon, and he goes to pocket D.

Well, he was commonly AFK so that didn't matter much.

Except he just stayed in Pocket D.

"Uh I thought Pocket D was a zone, how do I get out of here?"

The team was aghast in local chat.

We tried to talk him through it. Tried quite hard, and for quite a while. He just couldn't get out of the place.

Eventually we finished the "Long Tom" mission (you know the one) and our very patient controller went to Pocket D to get the Blaster. He was standing next to the elevator, apparently.

"Cmon, this way" she said
'Oh is that all I had to do'

< fx rolleyes in local chat >

Then the controller goes to the Kings Row Station, inviting him along -- and he goes instead to the trainer, fair enough. Then he goes to the station and goes to -- Atlas Park. Then he FINALLY zones in to Skyway, I use Assemble the Team and we get to go into the first Warehouse and Wreak Havok.

"Why am I not getting any XP?"

'You hit Level 21, max level for this is Level 20, you get double influence instead'

That pacified him, a bit, but not a lot.

"How can I make it so I get XP?"

'You can't , you're on the TF, but you'll get a shiny badge and some merits'

It was then that I was a little bit rude (Say it ain't so, Excession, -you-, rude, no way!), and I suggested

'Hey < Blaster > You should hire yourself out to Gaming Conventions. '

"Huh?"

'You know, as comic relief'
'I'm being horrible, just ignore me '

"Oh I'm funny in real life too, it might even work."

'Recalls line from Good Morning Vietnam'

"Not a bad movie"

< insert unstated [rolleyes] here >

...

We finish the warehouse, and whizz off to the next one -- but he goes to the tram and hits Atlas Park.

Slogging through the mission, I eventually ask if he intends to come back. Stony silence.

"if you don't respond, I'll have no choice but to boot you from the TF"

Nothing.

As we near the end of the mission, I ask for a vote from the players, only I respond to my own call, with an all caps "I vote YES"

< blaster > has quit the team

< fx blink >

'LOL!'
"Did he quit?"
"Yeah, he quit"
"Comedy gold!"

It was an awesome display of cluelessness -- he said in a tell that since he wasn't getting XP he was quitting anyway.

Anyhow, that was our awesome Synapse TF. We downed Babbage and clobbered the Clockwork King just fine. Who needs a Tank for Synapse!

-End of Post-

[*]Thanks in advance to the One Star Rating guy, < fx hugz >[*]If you don't like me posting, just shut up and I might go away.[*]If you liked this post, don't encourage me, the rest of the Forumites -hate - me

Fastest I've been on was 27 minutes.

But I've seen a screenshot of someone doing it in 24 minutes.

Anything under 90 minutes is ok, under an hour is good, under 30 minutes is AWESOME.

Ex

I have just under 85 active characters. By 'active' I mean I still play them. I have some placeholder characters, and some supergroup fill-up characters on servers I don't play on, and I have 55 'deleted' characters.

Logging them in takes a bit of time.

Since I've changed my screen definition about 2 months ago (I *love* my 32" HDTV on my desk!), it's funny seeing just how MANY characters I haven't logged on for 'a while'. 435days on Pinnacle not logged on is prolly the longest.

However, logging in and updating my spreadsheet, takes a lot of time, especially if I decide to go find an NPC whose name begins with the letter M to find out my /played time (number of hours played).

That led to some interesting results. A level 25 'AE' toon with 3 hours /played. A level 42 blaster with 33 hours played.

My first L50 "Archvillain Q" I played a -heap- at L50 doing Hamidon Raids (pre Issue 9) and he's got my most logged on at 750hours, even though I've hardly touched him since 2006.

The Role-Play L49 villain I created 'Relentless Revenger' is a snappy 129 hours for L49, which is quite fast for me (and none of that AE cheating or other PowerLevel either).

On Justice, I have 25 characters now, the richest has 119M, a couple more have over 100M, and my total worth there is just about 750M, which is peanuts compared to the 'real' power-gamers out there.

I've logged in all my characters on Freedom (17), Infinity (8). Chamption (6), Justice (25) and Liberty (6), with Victory and Virtue left for tomorrow (since 3 hours logging in characters and updating my spreadsheet, really detracts from actual play time).

Who else finds the 'better get the badge' logon-race a little, er, tedious?

And characters don't need powers other than brawl. Powers are metered by Brawl Index -- stop the incessant power levelling, everyone has brawl, use that. This does away with 99% of enhancements too, and the salvage required for Brawl Sets cuts that down by 90%. Win-Win!

My "Brawl-Brawl" Brawler will be called 'Gimped', he'll be on Freedom server. I look forward to this change, and would like to sign up for your newsletter.

Angry of Mayfair.

I have to do this with ; since it now puts up / ...

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
/bind ; beginchat ;
</pre><hr />

fixes that little red wagon.

you can alter your keybind for ] in the Option-&gt;Keymapping, but you'll have to use the mouse to get there first.

Ex

Base portal suffers from two drawbackes:

1: the 30 second animation.
2: 24 months vet award , not everyone you're playing with is likely to have it (90% of time, 99% in Pick Up Groups)

Ouro doesn't do this 30 second delay business, so the entire team can be in Ouro and ready to roll within seconds of a mission finishing. Rather than waiting for them to zone out to the zone-that-the-mission-was in.

Sometimes teleporting to base IS quicker, especially when you know that tne next mission is likely to be in an awkward to get to place, like the tail end of Citadel TF, which is always Dark Astoria (much quicker to get there via base teleporters than by travelling across Talos from the tram).

Pocket-D is another good one, but not everyone opted for the GvE pack (fools!, it's awesome).

As for spawning the Ouro portal in a mission -- if you're all together, one person spawns it and WAITS for the others to go through, it's more effective that way, so if you find your next mission finishes 'really quickly' there is going to be someone else on the team who can spawn another portal.

Ex

(Please note: This information is mostly for Blueside/Heroes)

Once you hit Level 25 and get your Portal, I'm a strong advocate of using the Ouroboros portal -within- a mission, to exit the mission.

This works really well on task Forces, when you have the contact's cell-phone number. It cuts down travel time a bunch, most of the time, since you can go from Ouroboros to either Talos for the Greenline, or Atlas for the yellow line.

A lot of people exit the mission, and THEN spawn the Ouroboros portal to go to a travel hub or a particular zone. It's two lots of zoning.

It's so much quicker to exit the mission using Ouroborus portal, it's beyond great, it's truly awesome. Since Ouroborus os a very small zone, it loads quickly.

If your next mission is a 'Train' mission, the Ouroborus exit is a valid 'click here to enter mission' point.

To further extend the point, there is a lot of inter-mission travel that is unnecessary -- going from the door of the last mission to the nearest Tram, travelling to the new zone, going to the next mission. Even going to the base portal, or going to Pocket D, or Teleporting to Base, they all take far far longer than dropping a portal and stepping through into Ouro, then heading to the new zone.

There are times when exiting via Ouro can be time-consuming, like if you're doing something centred on a Zone (AE missions or Radio missions). Pays to think about what you're doing guys

But on Task Forces and regular missions, it's very very useful; a lot of people don't even know that you can spawn the portal within an instanced mission!

Try it, you'll like it.

Thankyou for the committment to your customers Mr Falcon -- your efforts are appreciated, since the concerns are, as you can imagine, very real here in the antipodes

Excession

I get serious frame-rate lag in SAFEGUARD missions.

All of them.

According to the ingame frame counter, I'll be on 60-75fps, when I go into Safeguards it drops down to 20 or even single digits sometimes. Nobody else seems to be affected, and claim I'm imagining it.

This has been going on for a few releases now not I14 specific.

A partial solution I used back in the early days (May 2004, when I couldn't connect for more than 5 minutes before losing sync) was to go into Graphics settings, and set my PARTICLE COUNT to be much much lower than maximum (like 15,000 instead of 50,000). This absolutely fixed the problem, and I persisted with it through two computer ssystems and three or more video cards

I may be guilty of perpetuating a myth, but it really did solve a problem I had with early CoH netcode.

Ex

You do know =why= enhancements are supposed to be 'fixed', right?

Because expired enhancements could then be 'passed on' to other characters, affecting the 'economy' of the game somewhat.

Over on other MMO's they have the concept of 'soulbound' items -- once you touch it, it's yours, nobody else can use it, no other character, no other player. It's tainted and it's yours. Thats the way -they- stop trade in 'rare items people don't want anymore', forcing players to destroy stuff that they worked so hard to get.

Prior to the endless respecs all my characters get from veteran awards, I used to do Respec trials just so I could avoid the 'pain' of spending new inf on new enhancements, because you now get FULL VALUE back for your -old- enhancements during the respec process. It saves you money. With rarer enhanments like Hamidon Oriigin, or really expensive Invention Origin, you can set aside ones you want to 'kaap' (up to 10) in your enhancement tray during a Respec -- even THAT small window of opportunity is somewhat frowned on by the Devs, because it makes wealth more transportable, gives the market content that is meant to be difficult to acquire -at all-, rather than merely 'expensive' (since the economy gets richer and richer over time -- look at those people who gloat at spending $,$$$,$$$,$$$ on their characters these days).

How do you think they manage to acrue that money? By using enhancments until they upgrade them, then -selling- them back on the market.

Sure, they can only do 10 at a time. My Peacebringer (L50, I don't play him anymore) did this with his 12 or so Hamidon Origin enhancements, used a couple of respecs, kept the HO's, sold all the SO's for full value, then sold the HO's on the market for $millions each, and wallowed in wealth, he has more than 130Million now and doesn't need it, because I never play him. Fortunately it's a good bank for my alts, but that's beside the point.

If you allow people to freely move enhancements around without restriction, they'll finagle a way back on the market and cease to be a time-effort sink, and become simply an economic statistic.

Apologies for the garbled explanation.

Ex

Another Tuesday, another UNANNOUNCED, -EARLY- maintenance.

It's pretty hopeless. CoTCaveDweller says it's since I14, and I can safely say it's been going on sporadically for the last few months, and -constantly- since I14. Every Tuesday it goes down. Is it coincidence that WoW goes down for it's -weekly- maintenance on Tuesday? &lt; /paranoia &gt;

I wrote about this bizarre idiocy before. NCSOFT steamroll over the Aussies, Americans and other unaffected particles spout platitudes like 'it's their right' and 'it's in the agreement' and 'oh, they HAVE to have maintenance, dont'chya know?', whilst NEVER being in the situation of having their prime-time playing cut abnormally short -- we get it cut short ever single week, three or four or even SEVEN days a week.

Maintenance window needs to be shifted.

Australia and Japan are in the same timezone, I'm sure they're peeved too.

For all the NCSOFT-apologists out there -- save it, seen it all before. You don't care, and you laugh because 'only a few people are affected'. What you don't get is that if NCSOFT continues to treat paying customers this way, they will leave. Oh a few thousand aussies (if that) might not make an immediate difference, but when it comes time to shut-down the servers due to lack of population/game-closure (hello Tabula Rasa, I'm looking at you), you can bet that nightly hostage of game-playing time to 'random maintenance' will be a factor in people giving CoH the flick and moving to something with a little less chaotic maintenance schedule.

I'm writing here to support the opinions of others who ask the same things:
[*] WHY weren't we told it was going down early tonight?[*] WHT weren't we told the -reason- for the close[*] WHY are patch notes only available hours and hours -after- the event?[*] WHY is it important to do maintenance on a MOnday night and THE NEXT NIGHT do it AGAIN? Can't the stuff just go in -monday- along with the other changes?

Oh, and a big haha to the oaf who suggested that 'banning accounts' would require taking down the shards -- wake up, it's just a database,

SELECT "Offender" from &lt;Server&gt; MARK "Banned"

It's not rocket science, contrary to your frail grasp of computing technology.

This time, even the European boards didn't have any stated reason why it was going down, or what's going on. Lots of ruckus about the upcoming 'expansion' (i.e. money taking exercise).

Ex
[ peeved ]

[ table of drop rates, elided ]

Love your work , Catwhoorg.

Ex

Gosh, planets are hard to explain to the terminally thick.

"oh, don't you -get- Daylight Saving's, Excession, teehee"

It makes my blood boil that you patently refuse to understand the underlying issue, that you try to cloud the issue with this nonsense about 'It's a US game', that you stand behind some farcical End User License Agreement and shout me down, when you clearly do not understand the relevance or importance of what is being stated. You misunderstand, and you obviously LIKE misunderstanding, it suits your purpose to be obdurately inconsiderate, to be supercilious about the 'downtime we had to have', to be completely and utterly uncaring about how NCSOFT's decisions affect others.

I love proving people wrong. Even idiotic Neanderthals who cannot possibly understand the depth of their incorrectness (like some of the respondents in this very thread). It's cathartic. It's nice to see the light of reason dawn in the eyes of the few, and yet have the baleful stare of disbelieving unrepentant ignorance shine forth from the non-comprehending masses.

So here's an explanation, I'd use ASCII Art, but that's too much effort, I have literally 5 minutes to go before I need to dash out and get a lovely Indian curry, so here goes.

2004 : maintenance was haphazard, it would sometimes happen on weekdays, sometimes on weekends, it was from the normal start time and went for '2 hours', but you could pretty well guarantee that the 2 hour window would only be about an hour or so.

2005 : maintenance was still haphazard, but the time-frame was fixed. it hit when it was 11pm in Australia, or when the world flip-flopped from Daylight savings, it gets pushed back to 1am local. It NEVER started before 11pm local unless there was something really special, like a new release.

2006: They started the Monday/Friday schedule. Again, starting at 11pm local, or during our summer, 1am local.

2007, 2008 and 2009 the schedule has been very much the same. Special events aside, the maintenance window's -earliest- start time was 11pm local.

Then in March 2009 they started to have 'early' maintenance, which we saw starting at midnight -- Australia still in Summer time, and the US not yet into DST. Then in the week I "ranted" (such as it was), Australia dropped out of summer, the US went into daylight savings, and suddenly we're getting maintenance at 11pm, OR 10pm, or even as early as 9pm.

Years of playing, years of having the same maintenance schedule, and then they unilaterally, arbitrarily, decide to have it start earlier. (That's the bit where some of you peabrains are hopelessly wrong, where you fail to grasp the meaning of 'earlier').

NCSOFT did advertise that they were doing early maintenance, it wasn't a surprise, what it WAS is disappointing, because 10pm is prime-time for Australia. 10pm is prime game-playing time whereever you are in the world.

They did a few 10pm (local) starts, and it looked like it was a permanent change.

Then they reverted back to the 'original' 11pm start.

This week it's been maintenance every weekday.

Monday 11pm, Tuesday 10pm, Wednesday 11pm, Thursday 10pm, and tonight 11pm.

Yes, I know they're doing stuff, yes, I know it's needed, NO, I DO NOT AGREE THAT THEY SHOULD KICK IT OFF EARLY, and hey (here's the good bit) I RECKON THEY SHOULD PUSH IT BACK an hour.

You guys claim that it's only Australia, and maybe Singapore, Japan, New Zealand, and a bit of Russia -- and that those geographical areas will always 'suck' for time-zone stuff.

Yet the biggest MMO of them all, "WoW" has maintenance just once a week. Just one day (Tuesdays). And sometimes they even skip that.

It's all well and good for those of you who don't ever see the maintenance window kick into YOUR game-playing times. We see it all too damn often, and it's very -very- frustrating when you're trying to organise a task force or a team event, and Maintenance comes crashing down -early-, so preventing the event from finishing on time.

Oh yes, I'm sure you're all going to get hurt and miffed that I've collectively lumped you all into the dimwit basket -- get over yourselves, enough people were so hopelessly wrong, I think it's reasonable to state you're a bunch of uncomprehending orangutans ... just to get the message to sink in.

As ever, it doesn't matter. You'll continue to be dim, and I'll continue to be peeved when Maintenance kicks in 'early'.

Gotta love the idiot factor in here.

Maintenance fluctuates with Daylight savings changes on BOTH sides of the pond.

The complaint was that maintenance SHIFTED an extra hour ON TOP of the 'apparent' Daylight Savings move.

We're used to six months of the year being 11pm maintenance, and the other 6 months being 1am maintenance.

It was horrible to have a week of 10pm maintenance (and it was for more than a week -- it reverted back to 'normal'' 11pm maintenance yesterday).

As for this assertation that it's a US-centric game, that's not very cogent. How many people are put out by the current 6am/9am Eastern/Western time-zone maintenance windows, and would be 'adversely affected' by a 8am-11am window instead -- not many!

Japan is in the same timezone as us, and I know quite a few Japanese players, and there are the New Zealanders who are an hour ahead of us, who would be spitting chips at 9pm shutdowns.

My request was to move maintenance back to what it was, or perhaps a bit further, not to shift maintenance to 10pm USA TIMES.

Gotta love the 'someone elses problem' attitude a lot of unthinking people have.

Ex

I am spread all over Justice, Virtue, Freedom, Victory, Liberty and Infinity. I find it nice to be able to jump on any of those servers are times when -other- servers may be down, or full, or empty, or whatever.

Moving ALL your eggs from one basket to another is foolish. Just diversity, it's not hard, or painful, lots of cool folk on other servers, it costs nothing extra to keep your 'old' characters on your old server, and just move.

If you really needed to, you could consolidate your influence, and just pay to move ONE high level character over, who can be your bank on another server.

There is no need to move 'in bulk'. There have been subtle hints that the concept of 'a server' may go away in future revisions, and people on ALL servers will play in instances around the 'same' homogenized zone. They do that with Eve Online with &gt;50,000 online at the same time, which is at least 5 times the max 'concurrent' usage of CoH these days.

Bite the bullet, start new guys on other servers, enjoy the game.

I have more fun with my lowbie characters than any of my mid-level characters.

Ex

I think 14 has been a good roll out, a huge success. With multiple tens of thousands of arcs, and all those unique critters, it's like Christmas every mission "what will this one be like?".

Whilst I was greatly concerned that teaming had gone the way of the dodo in the first few days of I14, teaming is back, and MA missions aren't the only thing in town. I've run a few TFs, and some lowbie missions 'just like always'. The farming is going on in atlas, and it doesn't worry me at all. Once you get to 50 then what?

I like levelling normally. I like the AE as well. It's the best of both worlds.

Good work, Devs, pleased it's gone off so well.

Well today (Monday, my time) Maintenance was back at the 'old' time of 11pm local.

Which is WAY more acceptable and useful than 10pm was.

I hope it stays this way, and thankyou to the people behind the scenes who made it happen.

Ex

I fully understand the need for a maintenance window, especially in a game environment where things change.

Yet I'm deeply affected by the recent shift in Maintenance times, which now hit smack in the Peak Game Playing time for East Coast Australia.

Maintenance now starts at 10pm, with the howling administrator warnings at 9:30pm.

It was horrific when Maintenance in "our" winter months hit 11pm, and now NCSOFT is starting maintenance an hour earlier than that!

For many Australian players, this is a huge source of frustration.

Maintenance needs to be done, but surely after 5 years there is SOME possibility of NCSOFT moving or adjusting the schedule.

Having ALL the servers go down at the same time, just piles on the sheer frustration of it all. It's prime gaming time!

One of the reasons I'm looking forward to the CoH competitor coming along (Cryptic's new MMO), is because I reckon it won't have these garbage maintenance windows smack in the middle of peak Australian playing times, or they won't take down ALL the servers at the same time.

I'm asking nicely -- please reconsider your recent changes to the maintenance schedule. Friday evenings are PRIME TIME in Australia, and having Maintenance effectively kick in at 9:30pm is horrible.

Ignite is the awesome. People should know.

(Quick Response)

Very nice, well thought out post.

This forum has a few articulate posters who have managed to avoid the "short, choppy sentence" syndrome that permeates today's intarweb, as well as a quite a few one-line-only people. I could go on for hours about the evil of censorship and the small mindedness of some people, but that wouldn't serve any purpose; these forums have a veneer of respectability and courteousness, if you scratch at that veneer, the truly awful nature of -many- posters will waft out like a bad smell.

Yet, if I want to know something about CoH, this is the forum to check. The Player Guides section is gold -- people put in hours of effort to break down and explain stuff in the game, and it's mostly searchable. Thats the best part about the forum. The worst parts are the stupid quote pyramids, and endless one-liners from the forum-hermits, those sad people who spend more time in the forum looking for 'new posts' or adding their $0.00000000002 worth, RATHER than actually playing the game.

Now compared to OTHER forums dealing with MMO's, this forum is probably at the apex of the 'good pile'. The other forums are full of hate, idiocy, illiteracy, and 'one line only' garbage. What might be a veneer of respectability in here, at least makes people put in -some- token effort to be unoffensive, and even slightly informative and on topic; stuff which completely goes by the wayside over on World of Warcraft and Eve Online official forums.

But thats me preaching about my ideals and my misgivings -- your post was excellent, informative, and you admitted not understanding things. Not many people can do the hubris thing; they think it is a sign of weakness, something to absolutely avoid "I got something wrong".

See you around.

Ex

[ QUOTE ]
A guide to Hero Reputation and Task Forces, by Excession (Part_Troll).

What is this guide about?

How Reputation (Heroic, Unyielding, Invincible etc, changed at Hero Analysts throughout Paragon City) affects the difficulty of Task Force missions.

This post was originally offered in response to someone asking "does everyone have to set their reputation to Heroic before task forces begin, or just the Team Leader". After spending some time on it, I figured it was a good candidate for my First Guide. I hope you like it.

This guide was written from a Hero perspective. Here's a table of the CoH and CoV reputations

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Hero Villain Effect

Heroic Villainous Base. Critters generally spawn at level, minions should con WHITE
Tenacious Malicious number of critters per spawn is increased as though you had an extra team-member
Rugged Vicious Same as Heroic, but spawns are one level higher than base
Unyielding Relentless Same as Tenacious, but spawns are one level higher than base
Invincible Ruthless Same as Heroic but all spawns are TWO levels higher than base.
</pre><hr />

What to do if you disagree with something stated here

Private Message to me with details, and I'll investigate.

And so to the guide.

[ QUOTE ]
Dear Forum

I have been asked on multiple occasions to set MY reputation to Heroic when we are forming a task force, even though I am not the leader. It is my understanding that only the Leader's reputation matters in Task Forces, and that my changing difficulty will have no positive benefit to me or the team in question.


[/ QUOTE ]

It makes sense for everyone to set their difficulty to Heroic.

Mission difficulty for normal Task Forces (Positron, Sister Psyche, etc) is determined by a number of factors.

Generally missions are at a set level, the MAX level for the TF, so for Positron thats L15, for Synapse it's L20, for Sister Psyche it's L25. This can be bumped up by having more people in the TF, so a 7 or 8 person team will probably run into L16's or even L17's on Positron.

The LEADER's difficulty will determine how much more difficult a TF will be, here's a little table as a guide.

UPDATE: A much better version of this information is available here

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>

TF Difficulty

Heroic Tenacious Rugged Unyielding Invincible

Positron 10-15 15 +critters 16 16 +critters 17 critters
Synapse 15-20 20 +critters 21 21 +critters 22 critters
Sister Psyche 20-25 25 +critters 26 26 +critters 27 critters
Moonfire 23-28 28 +critters 29 29 +critters 30 critters
Citadel 25-30 30 +critters 31 31 +critters 32 critters
Manticore 30-35 35 +critters 36 36 +critters 37 critters
Numina 35-40 40 +critters 41 41 +critters 42 critters
</pre><hr />

So according to the above table, Positron is for Level 10 to Level 15 heros, the base (heroic) difficulty will be Level 15, at Tenacious there will be more Level 15 critters per spawn, at Rugged there will be the normal number of critters in each spawn, but they will be from a Level 16 base. Unyielding will be Lever 16 base, with more than then normal number of critters, and Invincible will be Level 17 with the normal number of critters.

Please be aware that these numbers aren't rock solid, there are slight wavering of critter levels and numbers within TF missions.

To put it into a practical example, a full team of eight Level 10 heroes, doing a Positron Task force on Invincible reputation, would be facing level 17 critters. They would not survive unscathed.

Here's a con chart: "con" means what colour a particular critter's name is when you target it.

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Off-white = -4 levels or below your substantive level
Grey = -3
Green = -2
Blue = -1
White = even
Yellow = +1
Orange = +2
Red = +3
Purple = +4 levels or more above your substantive level
</pre><hr />

And how lieutenants and bosses con different colours to players, even though they are the same -level- as you are:

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Cogs/spiderlings/et @ level con blue
Minions @ level con white
Lieutenants @ level con yellow
bosses @ level con orange
elite bosses @ level con red
AV @ level con purple
Giant Monsters @ any level always con Purple
</pre><hr />

A great article on difficult sliders and mission rewards is Mission Diffuculty &amp; Reputation for Solo Play , and another nice article on XP and difficulty sliders is Maximising Mission XP. Paragon wiki has a good page for all the CoH taskforces Paragon Wiki: Trials and Task Forces

The LEADER on a TF is a set position, determined by who is team leader when the TF is formed. It cannot be voluntarily changed in the game. Only if the leader disconnects/quits the TF will the Leader position change. Once that happens, the NEXT person who joined the -team- will become leader, and mission difficulty will now depend upon their current Hero Analyst rating.

So if you have

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Player Difficulty

Joe Heroic
Mary Invincible
Annabel Rugged
Peter Heroic[*] LEADER
Zachary Tenacious
</pre><hr />

Then the TF will start on base level, and everything will be sweet.

If Peter Disconnects or otherwise leaves the server, then the next person in line is the first person to join the team -- Joe. Since he's Heroic, nothing will change.

If Joe disconnects, or otherwise leaves the TF, then Mary becomes team leader. Suddenly all new spawns(*) will be at Invincible level of difficulty. I don't believe that this difficulty level -ever- ramps -down- only -up-. So even if Mary disconnected and Annabel was leader, the critters would still spawn at Invincible level, but spawn sizes (rather than level) are still based on the NUMBER of people in the team at the time the spawn is triggered.

THAT is why it is important for ALL of the team-members to go and change down to Heroic before a Task Force is formed, so that you don't get unpleasant surprises later. Of course, if you're a Superteam and can do it on invincible, well you don't care.

note well The calculation for RESPEC TRIALS is based on the HIGHEST PERSON in the team PLUS 2, up to and including max-level for the respec trial. That means a team doing the first respec trial with all people at L24 (24,24,24,24,24,24) will be facing L26 critters. A team of 24,27,24,24,24,24 will be facing L29 critters. A team of 50,27,24,24,24,24 will be facing max level critters for the TF, which is L33 (the 50 will be autoexemplared down to max level for the trial). As you can imagine, Level 24 people up against L33 critters would NOT be conducive to a pleasant event. Mission Difficulty ADDS to these base levels, and again, the LEADER's difficulty determines the difficulty modifier. If the LEADER changes, the DIFFICULTY may change, and it only ever changes -up-.

Extra Special Note When on a TF/TRIAL, the Mission drop down in the Nav Bar will only ever show the difficulty that YOU are set to. So if you're on Heroic, and the leader is on Invincible, when you look at the mission in the Nav drop down, it will say 'Task Force (Heroic)' but if the LEADER looks it will say 'Task Force (Invincible)' and it is the LEADER that determines the level, not you. So even if you check and it says the TF is on Heroic, unless you're the leader or sorted this out before the TF started, you can't be sure. Similarly if you are on Invincible, but the Leader is on Tenacious, the actual level of the TF will be Tenacious.

(*) Spawns -- mission spawns are calculated at some relatively-large distance from whatever person 'triggers' the spawn within an instance of a map. Whatever the difficulty rating of the mission is AND the number of people in the team, WHEN THE CRITTERS SPAWN determines what will spawn and how many of 'em.

This is why you get those people who was to buff up a mission's team size, they will get 8 player team, and then 'stealth' run, or otherwise trigger every spawn on a map. Once triggered, a spawn is "set" for the duration of that instance, and no more (or fewer) critters will spawn. Similarly you can do it the other way -- start off a mission with only 1 person in the mission, the rest are logged off or not in the team. The 1 person zips through the mission triggering all the spawns to be 'one person' spawns at their difficulty level. Then they go back to the start, and invite the rest of the team in, and proceed to have a tailored cake-walk mission. Useful for doing AV's (as long as you can pull off the 'triggering' alone without dying in the process.)

Some special missions don't follow these rules, notable the AV ones and 'one off' special missions.

[ QUOTE ]

Resetting the mission

I know for a fact that this one is no longer true. Missions are now dynamically loaded, so if you add a significant number of members during a mission, there is no need to have the mission reset. The next spawn will be sized appropriately.


[/ QUOTE ]

You're partially correct. If you get more or fewer people in a team and spawns have not been triggered, then the game engine will dynamically increase/decrease the number of critters, depending on team size. A map that has had its spawns triggered will NOT ramp up in difficulty -- so those teams that have some stealthy guy race through looking for glowies, and then invite a heap more people to the team, may find that the mission is way too easy, and WILL need to reset the mission in order ot generate 'normal' spawn sizes.

So sometimes you DO need to reset, but in 95% of cases, it's not required, and only 5% are specialist cases where the team is doing something different from a normal PuG.

Hope that clears some of this up.

This was my first attempt at a guide. Please be gentle.

Ex
[edit: add con table(s)]
[edit: modified information on Invincible missions spawn sizes]


[/ QUOTE ]

Update for spawn sizes and added a new link.

Ex

Seems I can no longer edit my own post

The information I posted about spawn sizes, has correctly been identified as mistaken. Thanks for the clarification.

Please be sure to read the excellent guide on Mission Difficulty :

here

Ex

Excellent guide, thanks.

It was nice to find so many teams!

Excellent weekend. Truly awesome.

Ex

Triffic stuff.

I really liked the canonical names ("Trouble shooter"), and the way you made your costumes up (either fitting the costume to the name, or the name to the costume).

A-1 effort.

Five gold stars from me.

Ex