Rodion

If you have a tanker, a couple of controllers, a couple of defenders and the rest scrappers and blasters you can finish it in 30-45 minutes. You have to know exactly how it works to do it this way.

Doing it fast involves skipping over most of the second and fourth missions. Most teams get someone with invisibility and Recall Friend to make the second mission easy. The fourth mission can be accomplished by a few characters with Flight, as I recall.

Check out the Paragon Wiki entry for this TF at

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Katie_...Force#Strategy

I think the merit reward system is broken. You should get a base number of merits for doing a TF, and then extra merits for the number of mobs you plow through (up to some maximum). That way people who just play it for fun aren't penalized by the playstyle of the people have optimized it to death.

I've been playing this game since almost the beginning, and I don't think AE in and of itself is bad. It's just like any of the other exploitative content we've had in the past.

The problem is that the basic reward structure is broken. The Winter Lord problem, the Family Farm problem, the Fire Tanker on the Demon Farm problem, the door-sitting perma-46 mentor mid problem and the AE problem are symptoms of the same underlying problem. That is: it's possible to get tons of XP for standing there doing nothing while some level 50 runs off and does the mission solo, or running missions that pit you against some gimped enemy group that gives much more XP than they're worth under the conditions you're fighting them.

The rate at which you receive rewards needs to metered to some reasonable maximum. Leveling to 50 in a few hours is not reasonable, no matter what mechanism you use. If the devs meter XP rewards so that you can't level to 50 any faster than N hours of actual playing time (where N is 50 or 75, or whatever is reasonable) then this problem is solved once and for all.

This XP metering would never come into play for players who travel between missions, spend any time in the market, write AE stories, or just yak with their friends.

There are many ways of doing this. Probably the easiest would be to set some minimum number of minutes for each level. If your character's connect time (or maybe the the time from creation) is less than this value, you accrue XP, influence, tickets, etc., at half the normal rate. If your character's age is less than half the limit for your level you accrue rewards at a quarter the normal rate. These Diminishing Returns wouldn't stop you from getting rewards, it would just slow you down to a reasonable value. It's along the same lines as merits, but it's applicable across all content.

For levels 1 to 20 the times could be zero. For level 21 it could be 10 hours, or 20 hours, or whatever the devs have targeted as reasonable. They've already got targets that they used when they increased the leveling speeds several issues ago. They should just use those same targets, perhaps cutting them in half for good measure, and then making them hard limits with a Diminishing Returns strategy.

If you want to make it "fairer" (albeit more complex), you could include the kind of activity in the equation. That is you could include different timers for each type of content so that switching to regular missions will avoid turn off the Diminishing Returns. Someone doing too many Radio/Paper missions could switch to AE or a task force to avoid the DR.

Until the devs do something like this, every time some bug or exploit pops up that gives excessive XP we'll hear this same refrain. In the present case we'd all just yawn when the Rikti Comm Officer exploit came up, because it would impossible to get anything out of it beyond what you can get through any other activity.

The Defender inherent should be changed to buff the defender with a share of the buffs they give out, or the opposite of the debuff they're dealing.

Most progressive inherents (Fury, Domination, Defiance) increase in value as you excel at your archetype's function. Brutes do more damage when they are attacked by more mobs. Dominators get more domination the more they dominate. Blasters get more damage the more they deal damage.

Defenders currently get their inherent benefit by failing to do their job. If you're doing well, you will never see any benefit whatosever from your good performance because your team will lose no hit points. In essence, defenders are punished for doing their job well.

The defender inherent should work along the same lines as Fury, Domination and Defiance. You reap some benefit based on the action you take.

For example, each person you buff with Fortitude would give you some small increase in defense, to-hit and damage. Using Deflection Shield on a team mate would give you some smash, lethal and melee defense and toxic resistance.

Debuffing powers buff the defender with the opposite of the debuff. For example, a defender running Hurricane would get a to-hit buff. A defender running Radiation Infection would get a defense buff. Glue Arrow would give resistance to slow. Ice Arrow would give Hold Resistance. Lightning Storm would give +End.

Powers that already buff the defender (Healing Aura, Steamy Mist) would do nothing extra. Absorb Pain, Heal Other and O2 Boost would have to be special cases. Each use of these powers could give a brief +Recharge buff, or a brief End discount buff.

There's ample precedent for this sort of thing in the comics. Heroes are often resistant to the powers they wield because of their deep knowledge of elemental forces.

This would mean that certain Defender ATs would reap benefits only when teamed. But since those powers are only useful on teams, the player already made the deal with that devil at creation time.

This would be a big project, and is probably beyond the scope of what we can expect the devs to implement for defenders. But they should at least change it so that you get a short-duration end discount, or regen, recovery, or recharge buff every time you use a primary power, and not just when when your team is dying.

A Kinetics/Sonic defender can do pretty decent damage, even before Fulcrum Shift. With Siphon Power you can get a 25% to 50% damage buff all the time. The 20% -Dmg Res secondary effect on the sonic attacks also corresponds directly to more damage.

Once you get Siren's Song and Fulcrum Shift you can go after big groups solo: sleep them, use Fulcrum Shift, then take them out one by one with your single-target attacks. You're getting a 100% to 200% damage bonus on even fairly small groups, which means you can take down minions in a couple of shots.

That's blaster-level carnage.

The OP's impression is right, though. Radiation is underpowered. I've played all the defender secondaries, and it's the weakest. Yes, you can buff it with lots of IOs, but you could do the same for other defender secondaries. It only has one fabulous attack (Cosmic Burst), and all the rest are, ironically, not very "rad." The AoEs don't work well in concert (the cone, the PBAoE and the Targeted AoE are kind of clumsy to use in quick sequence).

The -Def component, while useful, is much less so these days with the profusion of +Acc IO sets. A typical defender using IOs will have 20-30% acc bonus already when using some of the most common sets (Thunderstrike, Positron's Blast, etc.). The only time the Rad -Def bonus makes any difference is on things like Rikti drones. But if you're a Rad/Rad, Radiation Infection is more reliable because it's autohit.

One of the /Radiation attacks should be made to do -Dmg Res in addition to the -Def. That would put the set on a better footing with the others. It would also make it more viable as a blaster set.

Yes. And everyone knows that the only purpose other archetypes serve is to please melee ATs.

Knockback is tricky to use in the presence of melee characters. You have to be very careful with it.

But a good tanker or scrapper, seeing that someone on the team has KB attacks, will use those attacks to their advantage. Instead of pulling to a corner, where knockback will scatter the mobs, the tanker should pull to a dead-end corridor, or the interior corner of a room, and have the knockback-users help collect the mobs. In this case the knockback-users can be very helpful by knocking the ranged attackers (Juicer Freaks that won't close to melee range, for example) into the tanker's melee range.

The key to being a good team member is to utilize the other team's capabilities to the max. Utilizing synergies from different ATs' powersets is one of the funnest thing I've done in the game.

Nothing is more tedious than being on a team where the bossy tanker says "u all wait here 'til i bring em back AND DON'T ATTACK TILL I SAY!!!" These guys take forever to gather them all up, and often herd more than they can hold aggro on (or even survive).

I run lots of different kinds of tankers and brutes as well as all kinds of other ATs, and I don't really care if someone on the team knocks back a few mobs. I have a fire/ice tanker, which is probably the most sensitive of all tankers to KB attacks (because of the Ice Patch/Burn combo), so I can commiserate with other tankers on the issue of knockback. But if an energy blaster is knocking one Freak back, so what? He'll be dead soon enough and won't be doing anything while he's picking himself up.

Now, if they're still using Gale or Energy Torrent every single time I drop the Burn on some big outdoor map (where you can't find dead-end corridors), I have a legitimate gripe. The OP doesn't seem to have been doing this.

A question to the OP: I don't have a character with Force Bubble, so I don't have direct experience with this. Might an alternative action in this case have been to call all the squishies to you and retreat down the corridor a ways? This way, the tanker is happy and your blasters can take pot shots at all the guys bouncing off your bubble.

I'm curious as to what exploit is possible that the devs would want to avoid? The only thing I can think of is that someone was replace an arc that has acceptable content with objectionable content. Which would last only as long as someone didn't object.

The same thing can be accomplished with a few edits directly to the published arc; in particular, changing the initial dialog or description to be objectionable.

My guess is that it's more complex than that. There would need to be some kind of command that accepts the name of a new file. The compilation process would have to occur and then there'd be two copies of the arc around -- the original and the new one. There must be some limitation that makes swapping the new file for the old file non-trivial. Maybe the file produced by the arc compiler has a name that is the arc number, and changing that is not possible without major gyrations.

It may also be complicated by the fact that someone may be running the arc you're republishing (they may be currently logged in, or they might be logged out), and that has a lot of odd implications in and of itself.