Rodion

The Complete Mission option used to be there, but they appear to have disabled it. I admit to abusing that myself a few times when I was in a hurry to get to Cimerora.

Your best option is to find a friend who can get the arc and help him complete it, unfortunately.

The other is to hang out in Steel Canyon and wait for someone to talk to the Latin Student. Anyone on the team when the team leader gives the password gets the badge and can get into the Midnighter Club.

When I load your build and turn on Maneuvers, Combat Jumping and Steamy Mist your character is at 41.4% Ranged defense.

It seems that you have already exceeded your target and are within striking distance of the softcap, unless you want to reach that threshold without turning on any powers.

They wanted to do "character-driven" shows (in part because they need fewer sets and fewer guest actors), instead of action/idea shows. I appreciate the sentiment, and shows like Lost likely led them to do this.

The problem, however, with both SGU and Caprica was that they made too many unappealing and whiny characters who couldn't get along with each other. Rush and Everett were constantly trying to kill each other, placing the entire crew at risk. The only likable characters on Caprica either had minor parts or died quickly.

The target audience for these shows is presumably the same audience that watched the predecessor shows. While there were some scumbag characters in SG1 and Battlestar Galactica (Baltar, for example), the majority of the lead characters were "good guys."

The people in Caprica acted like idiots and the people in SGU acted like jerks. Now, that might be the way real people would act in this situation. But that's why I watched SG1 instead of Survivor -- I'm tired of petty and embarrassing behavior and would rather watch something heroic.

In both SGU and Caprica the episodes that aired after these shows were canceled were far more interesting and promising than the vast majority of episodes that preceded them. I think the writers and producers finally realized what their audiences wanted, but by then it was too late.

I have little hope for Syfy's future, though. Showing pro wrestling seems like a last-gasp effort to pump some dollars into a dying channel.

Every time I've taken Mesmerize on a character it was primarily for the damage, and the sleep was just a useful side effect. So I would want the DoT to work as DoT with Mesmerize. (The sleep effect is most useful at lower levels when you're trying to solo and keep multiple mobs at bay at once -- by level 50 the sleep in Mesmerize has been moot for 30-odd levels.)

Now, Siren's Song is a different story. I use that primarily as a sleep, and a DoT in that would be bad. But that doesn't mean that Reactive is broken. It means the DoT powers in Reactive are inappropriate for that character. Which means that I would slot Total Core Interface on that character, and never bother with a T4. Or I'd slot Diamagnetic because that character already has considerable -res debuffs.

Finally, I have to say that, even as a big fan of sleeps, they are pretty much worthless on the trials. The mobs are higher level and highly sleep resistant, so even if you find a place to use them their performance is pretty spotty.

It seems to me that there is too much load on the server. Between all the escaping prisoners running around, all the characters attacking them, and the processing of all those AoE and single-target attacks, the server seems to be so bogged down that the server timer "ticks" fall behind the rate at which time passes in the real world.

That is, each tick is supposed to represent some fraction of a second, but when the server is overloaded it actually takes longer to process all the actions occurring in the game than the timer tick is supposed to take.

The effect of that is to cause a mismatch between the recharge rate on your powers as calculated by the game client (running on your PC and usually unaffected by the server load, and apparently calculated with real time) and the recharge rate calculated by the server, which is apparently calculated in server ticks.

Suggestions? The only thing I've seen that works is to run the BAF with 16 players instead of 24. It is much nicer, and if you have the right combination of players it can be just as successful. We did it with 16 on Champion and no prisoners escaped. Of course, being able to use your powers more than once a minute really helps.

Yeah, and I want them to buy my pocket lint too.

SOs are next to worthless. Even if the devs wasted only 1 hour on this change (and no change to a running system ever takes less than 1 hour to make, verify and document), it's time they would have better spent doing something useful.

I'm not sure it works this way. I've been playing a TA defender, Earth/Storm controller, Earth/Fire dom and Fire/Dark corruptor. I've only ever gotten 10 threads once, and Common once or twice, mostly getting uncommons and rares, and three very rares. I do hit a lot of AoE attacks, and heal when I can do that.

I think there must be some reward for taunting and being attacked, otherwise tanks and scrappers, who typically don't do lots of AoEs, wouldn't get very good rewards, and we'd certainly hear about that if they weren't. My dom gets one or two rings of sequestration on almost every BAF (though that is probably due mostly to sloppy tanking), and I've never gotten less than an uncommon.

I will excuse a tanker for delaying taking Taunt. Some tanks just aren't robust enough to hold all the aggro at lower levels. Or, back in the olden days before Inherent Fitness a tanker with an aggro aura and a tight build could get away with taking it later. And it's perfectly reasonable to delay taking Taunt until after you get Tough and Weave.

But these days, with Inherent Fitness, there's absolutely no excuse for level 50 tankers not taking Taunt and using it. If you're not capable of drawing aggro at range you can't effectively do your primary job.

Plus, Taunt is useful for tankers even when they solo. Ranged attackers will come closer when taunted, which sometimes gets them close enough to engage in melee rather than just standing back and taking potshots at you.

Of course, the other poster wouldn't know that if they never take taunt.

You don't even need to get a drop. At level 20 you can start doing alignment missions. Accumulate 2 A-Merits (a couple of hours tops over a four days at -1/x1 and on your own schedule) and you can get a rare recipe that you can sell on the market at those outrageous market prices.

The main reason PvP IOs are so expensive is that no one PvPs. I have the sense that the people who complain most bitterly about the cost of PvP recipes spend more time posting in this forum than they do PvPing.

I have been on only one trial where I just queued in LFG with a friend, on the first night after the issue was published. The server crashed after a couple minutes.

Since then every trial has had 16 or 24 players, making it impossible for anyone to get in with us with the turnstile mechanism. This is on three different servers.

I'm curious about how many people actually get into trials queuing just themselves.

So far I've never seen the 10 Threads option, and have seen the very rare table once or twice, and the rares, uncommons and commons several times, with approximately the same frequency. I've done about 15 trials

I've played three different characters in the trials: Fire/Dark corruptor, Earth/Storm/Fire controller and a TA/Archery defender. All of these put out lots of AoE debuffs and damage, especially compared to a stalker. During the AV fights I'm hitting the AVs and the reinforcements with lots of debuffs and AoE damage, while the stalker is probably doing massive single-target damage on the AVs.

On the other hand, it's taking forever to get enough iXP for the Judgement slot. I've done the BAF 4-5 times on one character and still only have 59%. The Reactive slot went very quickly for me (I think three Lambdas), but I don't know if the required XP is higher for Judgement or what the deal is.

There are plenty of mobs that are resistant to slows and immoblizes (like those damned wolves, and those junkheap creatures in Sharkhead, and most anything with a huge body type, it seems). Most robots aren't affected by sleep. Nemesis aren't affected by confuse, as I recall.

Over the entire life of a character, you're going to be dealing with those mobs much more often than these escaping prisoners (or at least I hope so...).

These are high-powered psychic monsters, so it's not out of line for them to have high resistance to fears and holds, especially psychic holds. At least you've got something to slow them down; my Ill/Emp controller doesn't even have Lingering Radiation. My Mind/Kin controller only has Siphon Speed, making it only marginally more useful than my Ill/Emp.

On the other hand, I've got an Earth/Storm controller, where there's finally a use for most of the powers in those sets. When I ran with that no prisoners escaped (my team mates had a lot to do with that, of course ).

The devs made the prisoners to be challenging in a different way from the rest of the trial, not just to make you feel weak. They don't want characters to be able to do everything, because the whole point of these trials is to emphasize the importance of a well-coordinated team.

Having to defeat the two AVs within 10 seconds of each other is perhaps the most obvious case of the level of teamwork required, but it's not the only thing.

In the long run, your being able to make mincemeat out of AVs on a regular basis with your Ill/Rad is more of an advantage than being able to stop fleeing psychic prisoners who don't even fight back.

Not really. I had 10 shards and was short by about 7 threads when I wanted to get my tier 3 interface slot. A conversion and 2.5 million inf later and I had everything I needed.

I wouldn't want to get all my incarnate powers this way because the conversion is still rather disadvantageous -- my guess is that threads drop at least 5 times more frequently than shards. But the conversion comes in handy in a pinch.

In my experience super groups lose members over time. When you only ever need at most 8 people to do something on a regular basis, it actually becomes inconvenient to have more than 8 in the group, because someone is always getting left out. That is one factor that makes it hard to muster the energy to continue to recruit new players year after year as players leave. The first supergroup I belonged to had probably 40 people in it to start. It has dwindled down to about four semi-active players, and only two people who play together on a regular basis.

I've done the Lambda trial several times now, about half of them with a group of people who play together regularly. The guy who wrangles this group has been looking recently to expand it because he knew the new content would require large groups.

So, in a very real sense, the new trials are actually building a bigger sense of community. When you only ever need teams of 8 you tend not to look for more than 8 players. And communities of only 8 players will not survive over the long haul.

It also seems that people who only play on small teams get sort of clannish and don't want to team with other people. But you have to play with other people so you can replenish your ranks when there's attrition.

The other thing about the bigger and more demanding raids that are essentially required to get the new goodies is that they force people to play on large teams and cooperate. These trials force people to use proper tactics, because otherwise you fail. Many of the previous TFs and SFs are pretty lax about this, and players can make big mistakes and do everything wrong and still complete them. This is harder with Lambda and BAF: players actually have to be more proficient and perform better as a team.

Having said all that about large leagues, it looks like it is still quite possible to do Lambda with only 8 players, especially once you've slotted your new incarnate powers. I've only tried BAF a couple of times so far, both times failures due to escaping prisoners, so I don't have a good feeling for that yet.

Would you rather have the people who are fixing this spend their time fixing this, or reading the forums and writing defensive posts about why the game keeps crashing?

Programming and debugging require intense amounts of concentration. Impatient complaints from whining customers only distract developers from getting their jobs done. And delay exactly the thing you're clamoring for.

Zwill's job is to write posts and interact with us. The other developers are responsible for making the system run, or overseeing the people who do. I'm always happy to see posts from devs when they have the time to post, but this is not one of those times.

Cut Zwill and the devs some slack and let them get on with it.

There was in fact a bug that for years caused purples to not drop when they should have. It was an uninitialized variable that caused mobs to appear to con gray with regards to rewards, resulting in no drops. This was fixed a year or more ago. Since then I have seen far more purples drop.

The real question is how much is your friend playing, at what level, and how many mobs per minute he's defeating.

Estimates of the purple drop rate range from 1 in 2000 to 1 in 5000 defeated level 50+ enemies. AVs, Bosses and LTs have higher drop chances than minions. There is speculation that Elite Bosses have a higher chance than bosses, but I don't know if that's true.

For years I got almost no purples: one every few months. I mostly played non-50s: when a character got to 50 I'd switch to another and level up. When they fixed the above bug and added the ability to set team size, I started running solo at x4 to x8. I started getting lots of purples, and have probably gotten 40 by now. I tracked drop statistics, and saw a rate of about 1 in 3000 mobs running at x8 with bosses turned on.

Lately I haven't been soloing much, but have been running lots of level 50 TFs and I've got my last few purples on ITFs. Note that this involves defeating a LOT of bosses and EBs in a short amount of time at level 50.

If you want purples, you have to do things that cause purples to drop. Run ITFs that steamroll the mobs, or run solo at x8 with a character that can defeat them quickly (a Brute with good defenses works well, and is more general purpose than a Fire/Kin that's limited to a small set of mobs they can quickly defeat).

The minions do not appear to be immune to slows. I've played a Fire/Dark corruptor on this trial and the minions are definitely slowed, but not as much as I'd like (probably because they're three levels higher than I am).

It would be interesting to put a couple of Earth controllers or dominators on those paths -- Quicksand recharges fast enough to have several out at once.