Rodion

I don't target through tanks or brutes and usually get attacked only when I use AoEs, or when there are no brutes or tanks generating aggro. I do wait until a melee character is attacking the crates before I attack, but I have noticed that if I hover at maximum range behind the mob around the crates/containment vessels, I am sometimes able to destroy them without attracting any aggro. But I avoid doing that if I can.

When I run squishies through the Lambda I generally have some form of stealth. If you don't have that, the key is to fly fast and high, near the ceiling. You'll take an occasional pot shot, but usually not enough to kill you. Getting the acids is sometimes tricky, because you occasionally have to go through doors that are clogged with mobs. Sometimes I just go around the other way, or don't bother to enter that room.

To be safe, wait until a melee character attacks the target. If you start taking fire, pop a purple or two and stop attacking for a bit. Don't use AoEs, like your rad toggles, if you're taking fire.

Also, it really helps to use the geometry of the room to shield yourself from attacks. In the warehouse some of the crates are among tall shelves. If you go around the side of the room, you can get a bead on the crate while being screened from most of the mob surrounding the crate. They seem to prefer attacking the characters they can see, rather than moving to attack someone they can't see.

Over time you'll learn what gets you in trouble. Avoid doing what gets you in trouble.

I've played both squishies and melee characters in the trials and over the long haul I've noticed that I've got marginally better incarnate salvage drops on the squishies than on the melee characters (tanks and brutes). So my tactics of holding off when taking fire have not harmed the rewards I get. I do use a lot of AoE attacks and debuffs in the big fights, however, so I don't use significantly different tactics during the rest of the trial. I also used to think that the reward system was skewed somewhat, but over time I've seen the drops even out over all ATs and powersets (excluding MMs, which I have no experience with in the trials).

The OP didn't mention whether he had any auras running, but if he's playing a Fire/Rad, he should be sure to turn off Choking Cloud and Hotfeet during trials. Unless you have very high defenses, you shouldn't be in melee -- those powers will do next to nothing to AVs, and will have little effect on all the bosses in the trials either. You will just wind up getting stunned, splashed by massive AoEs, or sequestered along with the occasionally oblivious tank or brute who doesn't know what those ring thingies are.

Reward merits are the only way to directly buy specific uncommon recipes. There aren't many that would ever be worth the cost, but if everyone is running 50s grinding tips and trials, and no one is running regular content or AE missions for tickets and bronze rolls, the supply of uncommons will decline and the price will increase, especially for sub-50 recipes.

That may eventually make buying things like Steadfast: +Def recipes with reward merits the most economical alternative. It will be a while before that happens, though, because they're going for 20 million on the market now, but cost 125 reward merits, which you can convert to 2.5 alignment merits.

For comparison, you can sell a LotG: +Recharge for 100 to 200 million these days, though that conversion will cost you 40 million inf. Similarly, a Kinetic Combat: Dam/End/Rech goes for 150 million. That puts the value of an alignment merit somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 million. If you subtract the 20 million reward merit conversion cost, a reward-merit derived alignment merit is worth 55 million, making each reward merit worth approximately 1 million inf. That means the price of a Steadfast: +Def would have to hit more than 150 million to make it worthwhile (if all other conditions remained the same, which is doubtful).

I would personally like to see an option for buying full sets of uncommon recipes with Alignment Merits, or single uncommons at specific levels with Astral merits.

This is true, but as someone who has played all basic ATs and most blasters, each blaster primary/second combination has a different flavor. I adopt different playstyles based on the specific character.

With Fire/Energy I adopt the "attack incessantly with AoEs, Rain of Fire and Fire Breath, but knock back anything in melee range with Power Thrust or clobber it with a melee attack, killing everything as fast as possible" style. I normally stand on the ground, though I hover as necessary. I have considered increasing S/L defense, but with high recharge it simply doesn't seem necessary, especially on teams. I do have Force of Nature for when it gets really hairy, and Aid Self which helps speed up combats. This kind of a build is relatively cheap to make because it doesn't require expensive S/L defense sets. Decimation, Crushing Impact and Positron's Blast are the most exotic things I use in the build.

With Ice/Ice I use a hover-ranged style, using lots of holds and single-target attacks, plus Flash Freeze, Snow Storm, Shiver, Frost Breath and Ice Storm. It has just mediocre ranged defense. I tried a second build with a totally different style: soft-capped S/L defense, fighting in melee and using Ice Patch and Chilling Embrace. I just didn't like it, and it didn't seem any more robust.

With Psy/MM I went with a soft-capped S/L defense and Stealth, getting into melee range a lot in order to use Mind Probe, Drain Psyche and Psychic Shockwave.

If you don't have any experience playing blasters, I would suggest that you not make any expensive decisions now. Assume that you'll be respeccing the character after you figure out what you like. Slot with SOs or IOs, using a leveling build that sounds interesting to you.

Really, only you can tell what you like and what works for you. But you will first need to get some experience with blasters to make those decisions.

Lightning Field, Power Sink, Electrifying Fences and Ball Lightning can pretty much drain an entire spawn. It doesn't stop them from attacking completley, but it slows the attack rate significantly as they regain end in dribs and drabs.

Fences is also a great place to get 4% S/L defense if you're trying to softcap your brute (with Enfeebled Operation). The AoE immobilize is also quite useful during the BAF prisoner escape phase. That is, if you're on league small enough to avoid the incredible lag...

I agree that you need to test your arcs with a large variety of characters to make sure they're viable.

To be fair, however, there are many dev-created groups that mop the floor with some ATs and powersets. My shield tanker can have serious problems with large spawns of Nemesis and Devouring Earth, but my Fire tanker doesn't bat an eyelash. That same Fire tanker gets creamed by Carnies, but my /Electric brute doesn't. Stalkers often have problems with Rikti because of the drones, and squishies have problems with them because of all the mezzes. Melee characters despise Knives of Artemis, but blasters, corruptors and defenders can often melt them like butter.

The other thing is that many players just don't understand how best to counter the powers that custom characters have. They're often not even sure what killed them. It takes a long time to figure out the standard enemy groups and the best tactics against them; custom groups open up a whole new can of worms.

So, just because a particular character type has a difficult time against an enemy group doesn't necessarily mean it's poorly designed. That's something that's lost on many players who complain about the groups in AE arcs, forgetting that they have the same kinds of problems when they face Malta or Longbow.

But they at least know what they're in for when they do dev missions. They know what to expect, what difficulty level to set, etc. With AE it's a total crapshoot, even with well-designed arcs and groups. While some players run missions just for the story, the vast majority care about rewards at least as much.

If it turns out that running one mission takes two or three times longer to complete than another one, because of the inherent weaknesses and strengths of your character, it doesn't necessarily mean that that the arc or the group is bad. But you will perceive that arc as bad because it wasted so much of your time for so little (comparative) reward.

That inherent variability and consequent unpredictability is the core of the problem with AE arcs in a reward-conscious game-playing population.

I've got an Earth/Fire and a Mind/Electric perma-dom. I like them both, but maybe like the Earth/Fire a little more. Having a pet all the time can be advantageous, and the targeted area effects really shine during the prisoner escape phase of the BAF.

Both sets have their strengths and weaknesses, and since I can have both I don't have any regrets except that one is stuck on a server I don't play much on any more.

Oh, and I have a cute, shiny gemstone teddy bear instead of poo-monster.

I had the same problem with a 15-player BAF, though as soon as I got two warnings I would go around the corner of the building to avoid being sequestered. I got two warnings about five times. I think we only had three taunters. After a while I started beating on adds as soon as I got one warning, and that seemed to help.

When I see another player get two warnings I will immediately taunt the AV (if I don't have already have two myself). On small teams you have to be really careful: when you get two warnings you should immediately get away from the rest of the team so that they don't go down with you.

So, your problem was either too few taunters on the team, or people who weren't paying attention to what was going on around them and letting you get sequestered.

The AVs don't seem to follow me when I duck around the corner after the second warning; I'm not sure whether it's because they're usually surrounded and can't move or if there's some special code that stops them from pursuing you. But even if they do follow, that's better than having everyone around you getting sequestered.

Since I20 came out I have been getting a huge variety of crashes (from corrupt .piggs, to illegal instructions, to "tell us what you were doing", to the game just falling out to Windows without any ceremony whatsoever).

My assumption is that all of these are due to running out of memory, because they almost always happen when I try to run more than one or two trials in a session. I always have noted that memory footprint of the game creeps up from about 1 GB to 1.5GB by the time I get the crash. (I have 3.4GB RAM.)

These crashes, more than any other aspect of I20, have had me down on the game. While everyone else was complaining about the repetitiveness of the trials, and that they were getting common or 10 thread incarnate salvage, the game would crash about a minute before we were to finish on every third trial and I would get a big fat nothing.

Since then I've turned down all the settings and taken to restarting the game after every trial or two to avoid the crashes. Thus, I will find it very useful to know that it's a memory problem and not something else. Being able to detect the cause of a problem can also help the devs track down where the memory leak is, and maybe fix it.

Speed Boost is becoming a targeted AoE, not a PBAoE (I suffered from the same misconception when I first read about it). From the above link:

I realized my error when the devs clarified what will happen with ID: only the targeted character will get the mez protection. The target and everyone within 30 feet (except the caster) will get the other aspects of the buff (slowed speed and damage resistance).

It's really much better that it's a targeted AoE, because there's no need to have everyone gather. You can also buff melee characters at range (though a Kin is likely to be in the middle of combat anyway).

Increase Density can also be used to slot Steadfast: +3% defense.

The new changes are quite welcome, and I feel necessary, except for the changes to Kinetics.

I started out playing an Empathy/Psi defender as my main, then an Illusion/Empathy controller (my first level 50). So I know what it's like playing empaths.

I've also played all the basic red and blue ATs to 50, as well as nearly every power set for all those ATs.

Empathy isn't getting the same treatment as Force Field or Sonic because nothing in Empathy is comparable to the powers in Force Field or Sonic. Fortitude cannot be buffed into an AoE because it's far too good to be buffed: defense to everything, plus a damage buff and a to-hit buff.

Empathy's other powers (Clear Mind, Regen Aura, Recovery Aura, AB, and the heals), are already AoEs or are not the simple defense or resistance buffs that are now a dime a dozen due to the Fighting pool being readily available to anyone due to inherent Fitness, and IO bonuses.

Having played all the ATs, I found the buffing ATs to be the least desirable, because of the tedium. Empathy is not as bad as the others, because all you really need to worry about is keeping Fortitude on as many people as possible. Clear Mind and the the heals are reactive, AB has such long recharge and is only really needed when you're fighting Big Bads. This change, to my mind, is only evening out the disparity between sets like Sonic or FF and Empathy.

I'm the first to admit that Kinetics is already overpowered. I play Kins, so I'm happy for the change to Speed Boost and ID. But I think it's wrong. I can see why the devs want to be "consistent" by making SB be a targeted AoE. But it's not a survivability buff to a subset of defense or damage resistance as the buffs to Thermal, FF, Sonics and Ice are. SB increases your damage output (by increasing attack frequency), and that makes it more like Fortitude. By omitting the change to SB the devs could have also saved themselves from having to make the change to optional reject speed increases.

I can only think of one buff that Empathy should get, and that's to do something about Absorb Pain. That power is worse than useless to me. I would like to see it turn into a PBAoE heal, with the side effect of being a PBAoE -regen debuff or AoE damage. Empathy needs some kind of debuff in its stable, and Absorb Pain is the obvious vehicle.

Memphis Bill has it right.

In addition the mez protection available available for Force Field and Sonic defenders is only partial: it doesn't protect against sleep or knockback. But many people really don't want to play FF and Sonic because they don't want to be buff bots. FF, in particular, ranks as one of weakest of all power sets in the game. That will improve with I20.5, but it still won't give the few defenders who actually can get mez protection something anywhere near as good as what Dwarf form gives Khelds.

And while Defiance is nice, it's no replacement for real mez protection, because you can only use three powers, excluding Build Up, Aim and all AoEs, the things that ultimately make blasters blasters.

It not really only a convenience factor. It requires a different style of play for certain power sets, like Kinetics. You will have to get within 30 feet of your targets, which means that if your targets are more than 60 feet away from one another (happens all the time in big AV fights) you can't get them all.

You also can't be sure you hit all targets with an application of an AoE buff (if a previous casting of the buff is still on a character there is no noticeable difference in graphics or buff icons).

A buffer will now have to bounce around the battlefield a lot more, getting within range of AoE attacks and mezzes that you wouldn't previously have needed to expose yourself to.

I personally dislike AoE buffs because of the annoying "Gather" mentality they promote, in which players demand all action stop and everyone flock to them. "Gather" players also tend to use their buffs long before they're actually needed, so that by the time you're fighting they'll have worn off and the caster will not remember to reapply them because they're occupied elsewhere.

Increasing the duration of single-target buffs would reduce the annoyance factor of having to rebuff, while keeping the same play style, and allowing much more selective buffing, to make it easier when players don't want SB or don't like the graphics effects of Force Field.

The most annoying part of using single-target buffs like SB is that some people don't want to be buffed. If I could buff people once at the beginning of the mission and not have to remember who all wanted what, that would be a tremendous QoL improvement. A short-duration AoE buff doesn't do that for me, and while it's a slight improvement, it's still got a lot of the same old problems while introducing a bunch of new ones.

There is a solution of sorts for players that can't stand the graphics certain buffs have. Create a bind load file and put these lines in it:

CTRL+O "suppressCloseFxDist 300"
SHIFT+O "suppressCloseFxDist 4"

Then load that file with all your characters.

When you get buffed with something you can't stand, press CTRL+O. Most of the graphics on your character will be suppressed. You can turn it back on with SHIFT+O.

This won't solve the problem of ongoing area buffs like the big sonic bubble or the big force field, or graphics on other characters, but it will prevent the display of regular bubbles on your character. I used it because at one point my Dark/Dark scrapper's graphics effects caused ridiculous lag on the graphics card I had at the time.

Personally, I would prefer that the devs increase the duration of single-target buffs dramatically (without an end cost increase), to eliminate the need for constantly buffing other characters. Changing buffs from single-target to AoE will drastically change the way you have to play. I actively dislike AoE buffs because they require you to either interrupt the play to get players to gather, or force you to go places where you have no business being (like within the radius of Marauder's deadly AoE).

Because you can buff an entire team or league with an AoE, it would be reasonable to increase the duration by 7 to 23 times. I would be happy if it was the duration of a mission or trial. Even increasing these durations by 2 to 5 times would be a drastic QoL improvement.

In one sense, vouchers for capes and auras are a perq for players with level 50 characters who have probably done those missions innumerable times already. Gating the skipping of aura and cape missions through 50s ensures that you at least had the chance to do those missions.

In another sense, it's not another hoop to jump through. It's one less hoop. I have a lot of level 50 characters, and not all of them have the cape unlocked, and most don't have the aura unlocked. If I suddenly decide I want the aura on a 50, just spending a merit to get it is a big convenience.

Finally, making a voucher means the devs have to change very little. When you use the voucher it just sets the same bit on the character that doing the corresponding mission does. Actually changing the missions so that any character can do them at any level would likely require more sweeping changes. This kind of change gives the devs -- and us -- more bang for the development buck.

You mean the "ultimate" capabilities. Penultimate means the next to last. The penultimate powers are the T3 powers. Those are already fairly easily achieved, as Rares generally drop in sufficient quantity to craft the T3 powers. If don't get the rares directly, you can use Empyrean merits to make them with a reasonable amount of effort.

And as Arcanaville notes, the difference between the T3 and T4 powers is almost negligible. I have several Incarnate characters with T3 powers, and see no reason to bother with T4 for all but one character, and I'd only bother with T4 on one power.

Not only that, there are many times when I want to buff another character but I don't want to be within 30 feet of them -- like when a tank is duking it out with Marauder, who is just about to let loose his huge AoE attack.

Furthermore, the 30 foot radius of a PBAoE is hard to gauge in practice: you wind up getting a lot closer than you need to be, and wind up in the splash from AoE attacks and stuns hitting melee characters.

In general, I don't like PBAoE buffs that require close proximity, because you have to interrupt team flow to gather the targets, or get into melee. I don't really mind having to buff each character separately with SB, Sonic, FF, etc. What I don't like is having to buff each character over and over and over again.

I would rather have seen these buffs remain single target, but have the duration increased, basically to as long as you're in a mission or trial.

On the other hand, if these AoE buffs affect the caster as well -- and it would make sense if they did, because that's how all AoE buffs work -- then it's pretty sweet. If so, you're going to see the population of FF defenders, corruptors and controllers increase drastically after 20.5.

Thanks for the fix! It resolved my issue, though I didn't use any of those names.

Or if you want the badges or the ability to summon the field crafting table.

I started out playing a lot of buffers, but over time it just got too tedious. The powerful (though decaying) Incarnate buffs have greatly diminished the utility of buffing sets. When Incarnate buffs become universal the incentive to play buffing characters will pretty much go away.

Since the game came out there's been a calculus involving the amount of endurance required to activate a power, along with its duration and magnitude. I think the Incarnate powers change that calculus sufficiently to make a change in that basic relationship.

The duration of single-target buffs should be increased by a factor of five to ten, without increasing the endurance cost. Basically, they should last for the duration of a mission. Area buffs should be increased in duration as well, but perhaps by only two to five. If you want to limit such buffs to team members only to avoid abuse in leagues, I could go along with that.

If you've got 24 characters in a league, you can easily have six characters with Barrier, which means they can fire one off every 20 seconds. In that case you really have no use for a Force Field or Cold defender. On trials you'd be far better served by replacing those characters with blasters, defenders, controllers and dominators with debuffs, slows, area immobilizes and trial-specific damage types.

You might talk me into having the duration increase with level (so that a level 1 bubble lasts 4 minutes, but a level 50 bubble lasts 40). But why bother? Why make FF defenders a bore from the get go?

The idea that some characters should just stand around and buff other characters is bogus. The reward structure of the game is completely dependent on dishing out damage. And from my reading of the comics and watching movies, there's not much precedent for buffers -- the vast majority of characters deal damage directly, or perform tricks with their powers. They don't stand around healing other characters, or putting force fields around them, or preventing them from getting mezzed.

The whole buffer/healer mindset is an artifact of D&D and the reductionist class-based concepts promulgated by Gygax et al. Buffers are a response to the demands of game mechanics, and not a broadly represented archetype of literature and film.

Yeah, but how does this new bat sound? Does it have that silly ping sound that aluminum bats have when they crush a zombie's skull? Or does this new bat have that same satisfying thunk and crunch of wood?

It depends on what direction the devs are taking in the long term. Right now LFG is limited to trials (which are essentially large single-instance missions) on your current server. This is problematic for small-population servers in the long run.

If the ultimate intent is to make LFG and trials work cross-server, then it can't really work like a regular team, which can go into regular zones and enter and exit missions at will.

Howver, it seems feasible for players from multiple servers to be popped into a single-instance trial, which has restrictions on entry and exit. There are obviously issues to be resolved with cross server leagues (naming conflicts and the like), but the limited context of a trial seems the perfect place to start doing this.

My expectation when I first saw the LFG interface on the test server, before there were any trials hooked up to it, was that it was the cross-server interface.

I know cross-server trials would be a lot of work, but it would be really cool if they could make it happen. The interface would need to be beefed up so that you could see the composition of the other teams in the queue, to judge whether the league it was about to form was viable.

I don't think so, and I think the same applies to many of the other buffing powersets. I have an Illusion/Empathy controller that is, in many ways, similarly devalued by the incarnate buffs.

The thing is, no matter how great your empath character is, you'll never be able to buff more than a handful of other characters. Meanwhile, you have up to 24 characters in the league, all of whom can have one of the four major Destiny buffs that they can fire off every two minutes -- and they can buff the entire league at once, instead of having to do it tediously, one character at a time.

That means if the league is disciplined about it, you will ultimately be able to overlap six of each buff, giving you defense, regen, recharge, recovery, and mez protection in greater quantity and quality than your single buffer can ever hope to, all the time.

In addition, even the ability to heal is devalued in trials. Squishies get hit so hard in the trials that they die immediately, making heals useful mostly for high-hit point tankers and brutes.

In addition to the Ill/Emp, in the trials I've run an Earth/Storm controller, Earth/Fire dominator, Fire/Dark corruptor, Psi/Mental blaster, TA/Archery defender and a Shield/Kin tanker. I feel I'm contributing the most with debuffers. Especially in the BAF, the Earth/Storm can alone stop every minion coming out of the two adjacent prison doors at the Nightstar end of the map, while putting a big dent in the LTs that ignore all holds and slows.

Except when that extremely annoying BAF lag prevents powers from recharging when they're supposed to.