Rodion

This can happen on a BAF if someone isn't paying attention to the rings and someone gets sequestered. If you don't know what I mean by that, it is likely that was the cause.

Check out the BAF strategy page on ParagonWiki.

Sleet actually provides pretty decent damage mitigation with the knockdown and slow, though it takes corruptors a long time to get it. It's very nice because you can hide around corners and fire it off, avoiding an immediate alpha.

I used to use Snow Storm all the time on my Storm/Electric and Cold/Ice defenders, but over time I came to use it less and less. It does help somewhat to keep mobs inside Sleet/Freezing Rain, but often as not someone kills your anchor in short order and it's gone.

Another thing about Snow Storm is that it can make it impossible for melee characters to see anything in the vicinity of the anchor, especially if you use custom colors to make it more opaque. I have intentionally made it as transparent as possible because I hate not being able to see anything in melee.

You might try copying your character to test or beta and do a couple of respecs to try out Snow Storm at an earlier level to see how it works with your tactics.

I have Placate still. It's nice for things like the fight where you have to beat on the Sentinel, then stop beating on him and beat on the runes. Placate makes him ignore you, and half the time he never regains interest in you at all until you've finished with the runes. It's also nice for the mission where the Tsoo elite boss is protected by four Ancestor Spirits, and you have to defeat the spirits first, one of which inevitably goes and hides by the ceiling.

If I needed the power slot for something else Placate would probably be the first power to go, however.

One of the problems I noticed when CoV was reelased was that their original AT mechanics all required them to be played in a certain way, at a certain tempo. Brutes always had to go-go-go to keep Fury up. Stalkers had to pause a lot to wait for Hide to come back, then sneak up and get to the mobs early so they could initiate assassinate to avoid AoEs from interrupting them. Dominators sometimes had to slow down or make detours through additional mobs to make sure that Domination was available for boss encounters. MMs always caused major slowdowns at the start of missions or after their pets bought it, and the pets often interfere with the reliable operation of other ATs by constantly getting in the way and sometimes making it hard for melee characters to do their jobs properly. Only corruptors had a straightforward mechanic that didn't demand they play a certain way, or make them the source of repeated delays or detours.

A lot of these problems have now been fixed for other ATs, but the change to stalkers is probably the biggest, because you just don't need to mess with assassinate if you don't want to. You can charge right in with the brute or tank, or you can lead, or you can follow, all depending on your team makeup or the nature of the mobs you're dealing with, and you can still be effective.

Can you say "moon base?"

The problem is, if you have an open league and someone queued by themselves, or multiple teams queued separately, the system has to choose a league leader arbitrarily from among the possible choices. If their heuristic was "make the person that was league leader of the biggest league" it would work most of the time, but it would essentially be random if all other things were equal.

Leagues obviously have some weird stuff going on with them. When the trial actually loads after queuing, the system spews out a bunch of "X quit the team" messages. The weirdness with who gets the league leadership probably has a lot to do with the way the league is reassembled as each player pops back into the trial.

It seems that the whole concept of teams inside trials is kind of murky, given the fact that the league may have to be assembled from as many as 24 separately queued players, and the maximum number of teams is 6 (or is it 8?). Given that, there are cases where it would impossible to do anything "reasonable" based on the limitations of team size and number of teams in the league.

Nobody currently uses the LFG system in that fashion, but they coded it in a general way to make it possible for people to queue singly. If you have some people on teams, and others not, the system would in some cases be forced to rearrange the teams to fit the requirements.

It's probably having to deal with these weird possibilities that the trial mechanism goofs up and messes with the teams on occasion.

When the Lambda and BAF came out, probably nearly every character had a +1 level shift. We'd had months with the Alpha slot, and I had had enough time to get to +1 on a couple of dozen characters.

The +1 doesn't seem like a lot, but when you're getting hit for nearly all your hit points, it can make the difference between success and failure.

My guess is that they've done research and have found that people who tend to do just one thing burn out on the game more quickly and don't subscribe as long. I know that if all I did was play one character I wouldn't have lasted more than a few months. Similarly, if all I did was grind one fire farm solo I wouldn't last a week.

Most people also tend to desire human contact, so promoting team activities encourages players to have a wider circle of friends and provides more "social inertia," making it more likely that people will stay because the people they know are still playing. Players seem more likely to quit when all their acquaintances drop out, and the smaller your circle of friends, the more likely you are to quit as well.

You may in fact be different. But you're the exception: most people need variety to avoid burnout, and are bound by social interactions.

If you want to do nothing but grind the same thing over and over, you can still do so and reap maximum rewards by making multiple alts and grind the same thing out on each of them in turn. Yes, it will take you more time to accomplish the same thing. But that's the entire point of these exercises: to keep us subscribing.

While this is more or less so, it would be completely possible for the devs to make it so that at level 32 both a "pet" power and Mass Confusion would become available. They could code so that you could choose one or the other, or get both of them.

There are many sets that give a number of different options for getting powers at a certain level. Epic ATs in particular have several options at particular levels, and when you take a power pool you get a choice of two different powers. Dual Pistols has one power that, when taken, actually gives you three different toggle powers.

This last brings up the possibility of the following: the level 32 power bestows two powers that would be on the same recharge timer or have some other mechanic that prevents having the two powers from being excessive. This way you could retain Mass Confusion while making another pet or similar power available.

My personal favorite would be to pair Mass Confusion and Enthrall. Mass Confusion works as the current power, while Enthrall would be a sort of a "super Confuse" that would affect bosses in one application: a single-target high-mag long-duration confuse that turns the target into a pet that follows you around like a regular pet, using all its powers to benefit you. As long as you keep the pet alive and regularly reapply Enthrall, it would be your pet.

The real question is whether Mind Control greatly suffers in comparison to other powers because of its lack of true pets. I've played Mind Control controllers and dominators, and well as nearly all other controller and dominator primaries, and I do not find Mind Control severely lacking due to a lack of pets. Controller/dominator pets are actually pretty stupid and ineffectual. Some of them do provide additional damage and can attract aggro to keep the character safer. Mass Confusion does this too, but with some caveats with regard to experience.

The real question is whether the level 32 Mass Confusion power is devalued by the fast-recharging Seeds of Confusion in Plant/. Mass Confusion can affect 32 targets but has a 240 second recharge, while Seeds of Confusion has a 60-second recharge and affects 16 targets. (The Cone vs. Targeted AoE difference is moot in practice, duration is similar.) Seeds of Confusion comes at level 8.

That's my only real complaint: Mind Control is getting stiffed by comparison to Seeds of Confusion.

The single target confuse is very useful for confusing targets like Sky Raider engineers, Rikti Guardians, and so on. In their confused state they treat you like allies: the Sky Raider force field generators of confused engineers protect you. The Guardians put bubbles on you and their Accelerate Metabolism affects you. Since this power recharges so quickly, it's very useful in any fight, whereas mass confusion takes forever to recharge.

Terrify is an excellent power. Besides being a good opening move that functions much like a short hold, it puts out a decent amount of AoE damage, especially if the targets are already mezzed (for example, you sleep them, then Terrify them, then hit them with another couple of AoEs from your Epic power pool).

I highly recommend it for tankers and brutes. When Fiery Embrace is up it can melt minions very quickly and put a big dent in LTs and bosses.

It's no longer auto-hit, so you need to make sure you have enough accuracy, as well as damage and recharge. Sets like Obliteration work quite well in it.

One reason the capacity was large originally was because there were a LOT of different kinds of base salvage. You basically needed to hoard all the salvage you found in order to have any chance of finding the piece you needed when you finally wanted to craft something. Since the only thing you could do with salvage was make base items and temporary character buffs, demand was pretty low because most people didn't do either of those things.

When they reduced the capacity of salvage racks they also eliminated base salvage drops, switching over to invention salvage for base and buff crafting. That meant that even more things needed invention salvage, and certain pieces of invention salvage were already in extremely high demand. If salvage racks could still hold 2500 items, everyone would have hoarded the salvage in their bases instead of putting their excess on the market.

That could have driven invention salvage prices even higher, and made many players even more unhappy.

Even now, people still complain about how much Luck Charms cost, and it's trivial to get them by the truckload with tickets and random common salvage rolls. Today I needed seven, so I spent five minutes in a fire farm and quickly rolled everything I needed. You don't need to hoard salvage in your base, nor do you have spend a ton of inf if you don't want to.

I took Agility on my Time/Electric defender for that reason (and the defense and recharge, of course), and it didn't help my endurance recovery at all. Between Chrono Shift and Conserve Power I don't usually run out of end. But if the OP has no other recovery tools and was depending on Cardiac for end reduction, they will not be happy switching over to Agility.

My guess is that the solo content is as slow as it is to give people a taste of what Incarnate content offers. The devs fully intend that players be frustrated with the slow pace and decide to do trials to speed up the process.

Why? I'm betting the #1 reason people leave the game is that their friends are leaving the game. The wider your circle of friends, the more reason you have to continue playing.

When large-league trials were announced the group of people I had been running SFs with knew that they would have to expand their membership and made plans for it. On smaller servers the players all need each other in order to make a go of trials, and greater interaction and cooperation among more players is a net improvement to the game.

If everyone is off running DA content alone or in tiny groups, you just don't have that same vibe, and in the long run non-soloists will feel isolated and alone, and will quit the game. If that produces a "cascade failure" in subscriptions, soloists will ultimately be affected if the game is shut down.

Moral of the story: soloists need lots of people to subscribe to the game in order for it to be profitable enough to survive. Even if you hate teaming, you should go out and join an iTrial once in a while when a league needs members to make it happen. You'll be doing the game a service, and also speed up your incarnate process by a factor of 10.