Rodion

I'd go with the defender. If you can manage to get full invisibility somehow (Super Speed with a +Stealth IO is an efficient way of doing it), you'll be able to handle Lambdas much more easily. Lambdas require you to run around in hallways filled with mobs, and being stealthed really helps squishies.

The key to these trials is avoiding aggro. That means, at first, to let someone else attack first, and hang back out of melee. The Praetorians are especially bad at killing you after they're dead -- they tend to explode with a big burst of energy damage that can be enough to kill squishies in one shot.

As others mentioned, the BAF is the easiest because it's basically just stand there and beat on AVs.

Once you see how the trials work you can get your other characters involved. Most any character can help, though each trial has a phase in which one particular power or AT is especially invaluable. The BAF, in particular, favors characters with area slows and immobilizes because of the infamous prisoner escape phase.

I play on several servers, and I noticed that the players on Freedom do have this thing about spending as little time as possible completing missions. It's all about the reward at the end.

I have no problem with efficiency, but recent changes to the game don't reward minimum times, they reward maximum carnage. In particular, getting incarnate slots requires getting lots of shards and threads, which means defeating lots of mobs. Other servers I play on acknowledge this, and most ITFs and trials are run to maximize shards and threads and accommodate players who need them. But on numerous ITFs and Lambdas I've run on Freedom they insisted on doing it the old "end-reward only" way, skipping over mobs. This allows the TF/trial to be completed in 25 instead of 35 minutes, but results in fewer shards/threads and less iXP.

Another tendency I noticed is that in the headlong rush to get things done ASAP, too many risks are taken, the team gets spread out, lots of characters die, and much time is wasted regrouping, especially on pickup teams. So in the end, you wind up taking more time than if you just did the "slow" way. I was also on many Freedom ITFs that just failed outright, and that just never happens on the trials I participate in on Pinnacle.

Similarly, with the iTrials we need to accumulate iXP and threads to craft powers, so speed Lambdas don't help players who have a lot of characters they are trying to get incarnate powers for. Yes, players who are only interested in getting that one roll for the VR they need at the end of the trial want to spend as little time doing trials as possible. But many players still need threads and iXP, which they miss out on with speed Lambdas.

Saying that people from other servers are slow and old-fashioned is wide of the mark. Other players have different requirements than you do. Some of us have dozens of characters, and don't care about getting any T4s, we don't need any VRs, so we don't need to run the same trial with the same character hundreds of times. You can get all T3s pretty easily, but it does require that you defeat the maximum number of mobs each time in order to get the iXP and a smattering of rares and Empyrean merits for the rares you don't happen to get randomly.

I have no data, but anecdotally, the drop rate for salvage feels higher than it used to. By today my level 23 SJ/EA had a ton of tier two salvage -- filled my personal vault with 50 pieces, after using a dozen pieces to craft IOs. That's only two or three levels worth of salvage because you only get tier two starting at 20, I believe, and it's split with tier one drops. That is running about 50-50 at x1 and x2 solo.

I noticed the same thing with a brute that's now 35. With careful shepherding I used to be able to satisfy all my tier 2 salvage needs. Now I have far more than needed for my personal use and have sold tons of it.

And I too have seen double salvage drops on low level characters, so it's dropping from LTs and minions.

This is true. You can find this information at ParagonWiki.

At level 8 I was able to take out an LT and two even-con minions with three attacks: Assassin's Strike, Heavy Blow and Sweeping Cross (got two crits to take the minions out with Sweeping Cross).

Actually, the thing that levels you the fastest is running through missions quickly against +5 enemies. This is the essence of fast PLing: having a higher level character bull through a mission set to +4/x8 against hundreds of mobs with you in tow. You don't have to run farms when you do that: it's just more efficient because you don't have to travel from mission to mission.

If you don't have a friend with a character that can do that easily (a brute or tanker with lots of AoEs), and you don't want to create such a character yourself, your best bet is to team with players who are running at +1 to +4 and -- this is the most important part -- can do so easily. If people are dying or taking several minutes on each boss, the difficulty is too high. It's more xp/minute if you turn down the difficulty so that you're cruising than when you're struggling.

If you're going the team route, the key thing to running against higher-con mobs for fast leveling is debuffs. If your team contains two or three properly built characters with the following powersets: Dark Miasma, Trick Arrow, Storm Summoning, Radiation, Thermal, Kinetics, and probably Time Manipulation, you will be able to steamroll through most content at +2 to +4, starting in the late 20s and early 30s, when leveling starts to get really slow.

If you're not really committed to the dominator and just want to get some character to 50 ASAP, you might consider switching to a debuffing character -- any knowledgeable team will be glad to have you. The characters I found quite useful include a Fire/Dark Miasma corruptor (good for soloing), Earth/Storm controller, Rad/Sonic defender, Fire/Thermal controller, but any of the sets mentioned above will be fine.

This is the same cynical attitude that was made against the establishment of child labor laws in this country, or the slave trade, or prostitution, or illegal gambling, or police corruption. "Oh, everything is bad so we can't do anything to make it better."

RMT is something that we as players of the game can actually DO something about. There's little I can do about the chocolate trade that will make a significant difference, except not buy it. The chocolate trade is worldwide, and me and my friends boycotting it will make only the tiniest difference in the grand scheme of things. The real problems are happening in other parts of the world where I can't affect them directly.

But RMT is happening right here and now in our game. It's a battle we can fight directly. I've probably seen RMTers running around Paragon. I've certainly been spammed by them. We can actually make a huge difference by boycotting RMT and mobilizing attitudes against it. We can express approval instead of outrage in the forums when devs ban players for buying inf and PLing from RMTers.

My question is, are the people who are advertising PLing of lowbies on Freedom (the only server where I see such broadcasts) for 4-5 million a run just regular players, or are they fronts for RMTers collecting inf that they can then turn around and sell?

These days there's no reason why anyone should have to pay real money for inf or pay inf for PLing. Anyone can get almost anything they want in pretty short order, except for PvP recipes, if they know how to approach it. With Freedom, if you really want to PL your characters you can get a free account, level up a farming character on it by dual boxing, and then use that character to PL characters on your main account.

People who patronize RMTers should realize that these guys are criminal gangs that steal credit cards and playing time from game companies, as well as player's game passwords.

Here's the thing. There are thousands of legitimate story arcs. Depending on how you do your search, that can produce dozens of pages of results. If there were no farms at all, the average author's arc would still appear on page 15.

Now we're bemoaning the way those capricious farmers one-star arcs. But if there were no farms, people who want fancy custom characters would be one-starring your Nemesis-themed arc. People who hate Carnies because they always run out of end fighting them would one-star your Carnie arc. People who want a difficult challenge would one-star your trivially easy lowbie Hellion arc. People who want dark villain themes would one-star your light-hearted romp. People playing stalkers would one-star your arc because one of the mobs has SR and always sees through their Hide.

This is no different from the rest of our existence: different genres of art have different conventions and expectations. The average romance novel reader would automatically one-star any science fiction novel, and the average science fiction reader would automatically one-star any romance novel.

We all like to think we're above average. But absent any active advertising program to promote your arc, or getting a lucky break by having the devs stumble upon it, there's no way for an average author's arc to get any notoriety and higher placement in the results.

In the best of all worlds, art and mission arcs need to be judged by how well they work for their intended audience. The AE rating system could function that way, but most people rate an arc based on how they liked it, not by how well the arc succeeded at what it was trying to do. And sometimes people really hate an arc for exactly the same reason that other people really love it (challenging arcs have this problem a lot).

So, even if there were no farms, the average author would still get no plays on their arcs. It's the same everywhere: for every writer who gets a book published or a script turned into a movie, there are a thousand more languishing in obscurity.

And they use stolen credit cards to pay for their paid accounts. The most important thing we can do is to not patronize them.

First, it was silly for the team leader to run at +2 at that low a level. You're just wasting time running back from the hospital. Your XP/second is much lower when you struggle against +2 mobs than when you cruise against even-con mobs.

Second, when I play an defender with Time Manipulation/ or Radiation/ I generally hang back as well. Defenders in the middle of combat are often exposed to AoE damage attacks and stuns (especially from Freakshow), which gets you killed quickly.

That said, however, I will move in to heal team mates as needed. I just ran the Sewer Trial with a TM/ defender, and I was constantly in the middle of melee healing the tanker and scrapper. At low levels it's not so dangerous for defenders because there are fewer mez attacks.

What I want to know is how many of those defenders had Time's Juncture and were running it while hanging back. That is a PBAoE debuff. If they're not mixing it up in melee, they pretty much don't get the point of that power and are just wasting end. Four defenders running that would floor the mobs' attack rate, make it almost impossible for the mobs to land any attacks, and the 5% of the time they did hit, they would do almost no damage.

At that level of debuffage, there's no reason for defenders to stay out of melee.

Yeah, I sometimes put the +Stealth IO in one of the prestige sprints, which gives it an alternate graphical effect in addition to the transparency, and lets me use sprint separately when I don't care about stealth. But then I have other characters that I just the the +Stealth IO into Sprint.

It really depends on the character's appearance and general concept.

Yes, I remember several years ago when there was significant downtime twice a week for maintenance. They cut that down to once a week, and the servers were basically up all the rest of time for months on end.

You've got to expect hardware and software problems when changes this huge occur. This latest downtime was announced last Friday, for the day when downtime is regularly scheduled. So I'm not sure what the OP has to complain about.

I can't know for sure, of course, but if we have 100,000 players in the game, it's not unreasonable to assume that 1-2% have been running trials endlessly for months. This is based on my running trials with dozens of my own characters across four servers while watching numerous other players run the same characters through the trial every time.

I thought it was obvious from context that I'm talking future incarnate abilities that would be opened up by the upcoming trials. If you allow the threads and salvage we have now to open the new incarnate slots and build the new powers, then thousands -- okay, hundreds -- of players will have those new powers 5 minutes after they log the first time, without running any of the new trials.

You seem to misunderstand me. I'm not in favor of new currencies, I'm just speculating what the apparent motivations of the developers are and what the consequences of reusing existing currencies would be. I'm assuming the devs don't want players to get instant access to new powers because it "cheapens" the content, making it possible to obtain it with no further investment in time and money. Which is contrary to obvious business goals.

The other problem is that many players feel cheated when others are able to get something immediately and they aren't. The devs don't want parts of the player base to become disenchanted when a subset of players gets something "too fast."

Yes, I agree totally that people who did all this work to get all this salvage earned it. But human beings are notoriously illogical and jealous. They don't care that people earned something. At the very least, they feel cheated because they just don't have the time to run the same trials endlessly to hoard 800 empyrean merits, thousands of astrals and dozens of rares and very rares. These people wouldn't think it "fair" that hoarders would be able to get a head start and get all the incarnate powers five minutes after logging on.

It's roughly analogous -- though obviously not identical -- to the people who ragequit the game because of PLing in AE. They feel the whole experience is cheapened because some people can get something quickly and they can't.

By putting everyone on an equal footing when new content is introduced, the devs can sidestep issues of petty jealousy and keep players in the game longer.

Like you, I don't really care what other people have. So what if someone else gets a T4 Omega power immediately? Assuming the new trials will give new iXP and new salvage at the same rate as the current trials do, hundreds of players will have T3 powers within a few hours of the issue going live. Because, honestly, it doesn't really take all that long to get to T3, and T3 powers are all I've ever needed.

The problem is that so many of us have so many characters, and we want them all to get the new stuff. That's when the mind-numbing grindiness of the trials really takes hold. "You mean I have to do these 20 trials for 47 more characters? That's almost a thousand trials!"

But that's not the devs' fault. That's our fault.

I agree. If they didn't, thousands of players would have enough salvage to create all the new incarnate slots without running a single trial.

It would be possible to use the same currency and to gate the new powers by time instead, but people hate that even more than new currencies.

Yeah, I notice a tendency for pickup group leaders to insist on getting a full eight players before they start, which means you often wind up waiting 10-20 minutes doing nothing. I mostly team with people I already know, though, and we just run with the friends who are on line, which means we have two to five players most of the time.

If we have the right ATs and the right enemies, we usually crank the team size up to x8 regardless of how many of us there are. For example, when we're running missions against Council, Nemesis, Freaks or Rikti with a Fire tanker we run at x8, but when we run against Carnies and Malta we turn it down.

The thing to do is find a group of players that has the same tastes that you do, and team with them. If you depend on pickup teams alone, you're always going to be hit and miss.

Also, it depends on what enemies you're fighting. Some of them have defensive bonuses, so your chance to hit them will be lower, and some of them will debuff your to-hit chance (CoT ghosts and Tsoo Sorcerers, in particular) and actually will make you miss a lot of the time. Also, your chance to hit higher level mobs is lower, so if you're fighting level 17 or 18 mobs you will miss more.

Be sure to slot at least one DO accuracy enhancement in your attacks as soon as you can, and then upgrade to at least one SO accuracy when you can. I generally try to get at least 45% to 65% accuracy in my attacks from enhancements, and I almost always have IO set accuracy bonuses. Building your character this way generally means you will hit 95% of the time, except for the cases mentioned above.

This is a valid point, especially considering that only the team leader can see most of the sometimes very lengthy expositions that the contact gives. Even when I'm running the team, I just skip past it because I feel it's rude to make team mates stand there idly while I read three or four walls of text.

That's not to say that I think that the devs should avoid creating difficult missions. Like all new things, everyone will be stumped by it at first, and then they'll get used to it. Like the Mender Ramiel arcs, they'll learn how to deal with it solo.

If all you're interested in is story, then turn the difficulty down to -1/x1, and pop purples as necessary. I completed these arcs solo with a level 22 brute, on a team of two with a level 20 corruptor and a level 50 tanker, on a team of three with a level 20 corruptor, 50 tanker and 18 scrapper and on a team with two TA corruptors (level 31 and 19). All were successful runs. We ran out of time in the glowie mission when there were three of us, but there didn't seem to be any consequences to that.

I was most concerned with the two corruptors (doing the villain arc for the first time, so I wasn't sure how different it would be), but using purples resolved the issue. It's not clear how far or if the ambushes pursue, because they never caught up with us, though we had used some Glue Arrows, and the PPD are slowed by them, unlike the Pumicites that populate the hero arc.

But have those people also reported that bug and do they have 27 level 50 incarnated characters?

Yes, if one player is running a solo mission at x8 with 6 active ambushes, that player will be using at least an order of magnitude more CPU time than a player who's running a regular mission at x1. That will cause more load on the server and potentially cause more server-based when there are a lot of players active.

The server has to look at every mob to determine what their actions are, and if they're in close proximity to the player and/or are aggroed, the server will have to run through the logic to determine their actions.

We don't know exactly how the server is written, but assuming the code is reasonably well optimized, mobs in another part of the mission that aren't yet on the aggro list won't require any processing and won't even be examined most of the time. Therefore, people running regular missions won't use a whole lot of CPU. But fire farms with x8 spawns and multiple ambushes will be using oodles of CPU time.

I saw a Time Manipulation character in an incarnate trial league on Freedom on Wednesday night who said it took four hours to get to 50. I don't think "normal' aggressive play is triggering MARTy in any significant way.

This is probably due to a memory leak, and is not actually a corrupt file. Most likely the game is trying to read that file, and it's running out of memory, but it's not reporting that error. Instead it calculates a checksum on a file that wasn't properly read, which of course isn't what it's supposed to be.