UberGuy

It's worth pointing out that something like the Keyes damage does not bypass all of a Tanker's survivability. A Tanker is more than just an AT with the strongest self-Defense and self-Resistance buffs. It is also the AT with the highest base HP and the highest HP cap. That means you regen more HP/sec than any other AT with the same +regen applied, and gain more HP for a given self+HP buff percentage.

While Keyes's antimatter damage "cheats" by bypassing your shields, and "cheats" by always dealing damage equal to 50% of your max HP, because a Tanker is the toughest, hardest to kill AT in the game, the Tanker is one of the least likely characters to die because they were reduced to 50% HP. Losing 50% off the top leaves someone like a Blaster or a Stalker in a far more vulnerable position, because all the threats in the trial that are not the antimatter blast are probably more likely to hit them than they are to hit the Tanker, or would hit for more damage, and that damage would be more likely to be most or all of what the Blaster or Stalker have left.

The point is that as much as the AM blast itself may be ignoring AT survivability, the threat in the trial more than the AM blast alone. I don't like the AM blast, but I don't think it really achieves what you say it does, at least to the degree you seem to be arguing.

Strictly true, but there's an implied one that's pretty clear.

In response to...

I figure something is wrong if I have to use more than 5. I'm often the person with the grenades, so I actually do have a sense of how many are used.

I certainly do gravitate to a core of players who know what they're doing and usually (but not always) have high-end builds. As much as I PuG the iTrials, though, I don't always have them along. (And when I do, they aren't always on something bad-***.)*

So it may be a server culture thing. Kind of like how some servers have a consistent Hamidon raid culture and can do raids by rote while others can't get a successful one often at all. Maybe reliable Lambda tactics became well-disseminated on Justice or something. Don't get me wrong, I've been on some disastrous Lambdas. Heck, I even led a disastrous one, but it was an 8-man with too many folks that lacked slotted incarnate powers.

* When I can get nothing but those players, we actually run 8-man Lambdas.

Carefully read what a lot of posters in this thread are saying. At least half of them outright say they don't think the Keyes trial is particularly hard. What they say is that it's not enjoyable, and that it's not a good return on time spent for the end reward.

Content that's not got a great reward per time invested will still be played if enough people think it's a lot of fun. Stuff that's not especially fun will still be played if the reward is high enough (though I think that's a last resort way to get people to play stuff). Keyes is pretty clearly widely considered not worth it and not fun. How "hard" it is doesn't even need to factor in.

Yeah, we know. I am pretty sure no one here is confused or in the dark about that. The discussion is about how Keyes (not other trials that do not yet exist) has failed to capture broad interest. It'd be dandy if they could adjust Keyes in ways that would make it more popular, but more important in my mind is that they understand what they did wrong with Keyes, so they can avoid repeating it in those future trials.

More iXP is an extremely poor thing "balance out" a longer, harder trial against. Here's why: unlocking the slots is the most basic and least functionally useful achievement you can do in the Incarnate Trials. You need components to craft the powers that go in those unlocked slots. I would gladly run more, lower iXP reward iTrials to get to my unlocks because I need the component drops, Astrals and Empyreans anyway. About the only reason to start hurrying to get iXP faster is when you're to the point that you already have enough components to craft an Incarnate power. Once you're unlocked, all you care about is the completion rewards.

This is abysmally insipid, even for you.

Do you really not understand that most people want the devs to create new, alternative things for players to do that aren't broadly unpopular? That's a waste of developer/designer time that produces something that so few people want to do that the people who actually do want to do it can't do it anyway.

The question in the OP, and thus hopefully the thread, is about what could have been done to make something very few people want to play into something enough people would want to play that someone could find a league willing to run it on a regular basis. The answer to that should not be "ignore it and do the other stuff". That's just idiotic. Perhaps not because it makes sense for the devs to actually "fix" Keyes, but at the very least because we don't want them to make more trials that so many people want to avoid.

Given that I could do two Lambda trials in not much more than the time it takes to run a Keyes, I don't think I agree. Looked at overall, I don't run iTrials for the Empyrean and Astral merits - I run them for the component drop at the end. The comment up-thread is spot on: the iTrials are something that, collectively, we all have to run dozens of times to get into the top-end, Very Rare powers. In light of that, the iTrials need to be both fun and internally competitive with respect to reward per time invested. If they aren't, people will focus their repetitions on the ones that are more fun and faster.

Right now, I figure Keyes would have to be worth at least three Empyrean Merits for me to try and run it. I would not run it more than once a day - I would try to complete it for the Empyreans and then run Lambdas and BAFs for component drops (and of course, a couple more Empyrean Merits).

These.

The amount of damage is fine with me mostly. I personally think it's a sucktastic mechanic for the trial, but if it's going to be included and not basically neutered into meaninglessness, it's about where it probably needs to be.

I just find the reactor phases boring and the end fight completely obnoxious. It's not obnoxiously hard - my problem has nothing to do with the level of challenge involved. My problem is that the challenge it does provide is achieved through some of the most irritating overload of "cheaty" AV tricks I have ever imagined. I have no serious problem with any of the "cheaty" things that the boss AVs do in the Lambda or BAF trials, or in the Apex or Tin Mage TFs. I like all of those, yet I greatly dislike the Keyes end fight, because it feels like someone tried to add all the tricks from all the other Praetorean TFs and iTrials to the end fight, and they created a mess.

I never fired up a trial. I bought this game before it was live without having ever played it, and I have never once let my sub lapse.

That doesn't make me better than anyone, so don't run down roads I wasn't traveling with the above response. I'm just pointing out that your attempt to show I have some special shared bond with a free player simply doesn't apply.

For me to see how flipping as dishonorable, I would have to see not flipping as honorable. I do not. The market is a highly abstract tool, and that abstraction is a function of the fact that it's fed by large numbers of players. Forcing value judgements into the frame requires assumptions about which player one is interacting with that I feel usually makes the judgements flawed.

In your example of something that costs 1M, why do you have to buy it from the flipper for +9M? Why can't you buy the next one that sells for 1M? If you have to compete with the flipper for that purchase, is it an amount of dishonor worth mention if they force you to pay 1M+1 inf to outbid them? How do you know you had to pay +9M because a flipper bought the one that was 1M inf? If the flipper (or anyone) is successfully selling them at 10M, how do you know you didn't just get beat to the bargain, 1M purchase by another "honorable" buyer, and then bought a widget for 10M from an "honorable" seller?

There's a show on Spike TV called "Auction Hunters". It's about two guys who go around bidding on stuff in storage units hoping to hit the jackpot being able to resell the stuff that's in the units. That's how I view people who flip. They're trying to make an (in-game) buck because they see something they can buy cheap and sell for more. I certainly don't personally find it very glamorous - I have more fun beating/blowing stuff up. But "dishonorable"? Meh.

A totally fair correction. Unfortunately, all it does is lop off the qualifier about critical hits. Criticals are somewhat challenging to quantify, because their probability is usually a function of the rank of the target, and sometimes a function of the power used. It's 5% for minions (and underlings I believe) and 10% for everything else. Because critical hits yield double damage, their average contribution to DPS for an attack is equal to their odds of happening. Even just the 5% average increase in damage for minions pushes the Scrapper ahead.

1.125*5*1.05 = 5.90625
0.75*7.75 = 5.8125

In practice, it's probably more like 6-7% averaged across all entities one meets in missions. Against hard targets like AVs, the Scrapper will rail at the 10% hit rate. All the numbers increase a little bit if the Scrapper has a powerset with a a power that has a hard-coded 15% critical rate, like Headsplitter or Eagle's Claw.

I didn't even notice you said this, except that Siolfir quoted it. As Siolfir said, this is simply factually incorrect. The Scrapper base * (1+the Scrapper damage buff cap) is larger than the Brute base * (1+the Brute damage buff cap). If you had a Scrapper and a Brute using the exact same attacks while both at their respective damage caps, the Scrapper would deal more damage every time, and that's assuming the Scrapper doesn't critical.

Some folks see anything that doesn't involve "earning" the sale, either by getting it as a drop or at least converting components into a crafted item, as dishonorable. There's not much anyone can do to argue with such views. It's akin to arguing points of religion or the politics of social policy.

Min/max for teams and ignoring AoE are incompatible. AoEs are how teams wipe out large numbers of foes, and large teams face large numbers of foes. Even if each player on a team can wipe out a whole spawn with a single AoE, min/max team play is going to call for rolling from spawn to spawn (or pulling lots of spawns together) and repeat the destruction every time. There aren't many teams that are going to be able to repeat such AoE destruction from spawn to spawn unless they have lots of AoE attacks available to significant numbers of their members. Once you're into team composition realms where that holds true, the AoE potential of the individual characters that make up the team starts to matter a lot. Ignoring it is going to create false skew in the results of any analysis of such play.

Edit: You're probably going to take this poorly, but it seriously doesn't sound like you have that much practical experience backing the things you're saying. If you actually do have a reasonable amount of experience, then it sounds like you have really misinterpreted things you've seen. Either way, I think you're going to continue to get a lot of flack from other number crunching, experienced forum folk, because you're saying things that don't line up with their (shared) experiences, and you're kind of mangling some otherwise pretty well agreed upon analysis methods. The only way you're going to convince folks that your position has merit is to show how those experiences - and the existing analysis that is known to somewhat fairly model it - are flawed. So far, I'm not seeing that.

By and large, this shouldn't happen. I am pretty sure there are no uninterruptable attacks in the game that last as long as the time between when you get the warning and when Marauder actually begins animating the attack. (If you trigger one of those amazingly long interruptable attacks, you can, well, interrupt it to run away.)

I am not a fan of un-typed damage, but it serves a purpose. By definition, you have nothing that will mitigate such damage directly. The general purpose of introducing such damage is to get you to either avoid it (as in the case of Nova Fist) or to force you to deal with it reactively (as in the case of the antimatter pulses in the Keyes trial). In the context of this game, reactive mitigation to such damage usually means healing and/or (high) regeneration. Someone who worked on the Keyes trial seems to have wanted very much for leagues there to emphasize healing or +regeneration powers.

The game's non-player entities do cheat in such a sense, because they lack capabilities that players have. Remember, the main iTrial opponents are single entities intended to face down as many as 24 player characters simultaneously. They lack any serious artificial intelligence - they mostly stride around and fire attacks. If they couldn't cheat at all, every fight would just come down to seeing how fast the league could win.

The question is how do the devs structure the "cheatiness" of the NPCs so that it's both challenging and fun. Not everyone will agree that certain things are fun.

The 9CU bosses in the BAF are actually very "cheaty". They get +toHit and +damage bonuses that last incredibly long and self stack. If you don't keep wiping them out, they will attain numbers and levels of deadliness that a league cannot survive. There's a part of me that rankles at this ability of theirs, which is difficult to justify in the larger context of the game setting. But it forces most leagues to deal with them, instead of just DPSing the AVs. Because avoiding a catastrophic outcome is well within the ability of most leagues, I think this is a decent kind of added challenge. So long as your league actually spends some effort on it, the added challenge is manageable.

I find Nova Fist to be similar. It's a cheaty power, but I've never had any serious problem avoiding it. Even when hit by it, I usually survive unless it happens while I am also under heavy fire from IDF reinforcements - something that usually only happens during "Master Of" badge runs where we can't close reinforcement summoning doors.

For me, Keyes is overly "cheaty". It's like they took every trick they had thought of for other Incarnate content, threw them in a blender, and added a few more on top. The result is too busy for me, with too many NPC cheater effects going on at once in the final fight.

Untyped damage is just one of many ways the NPCs can "cheat". I think it has its place, and can be used in ways that aren't overbearing. For me, Nova Fist is a decent example of this. Some others feel overbearing to me. I used to feel that Hamidon was overbearing about this, but nowadays I've run it so many times, I mostly no longer care - the workarounds are well-worn gloves at this point.

I didn't. Read my response to it, ponder the concept of reading comprehension, and then try again.

The people so far who seem to need to unpucker their posterior orifice are the ones posting wildly unnecessary rebuttals to the people pointing out their dislike. That dislike is founded on two assumptions.

• That bundled packs may not be back because they are not back now.
• That the a-la-cart method buying all the parts of what are, today, bundled packs is based on current beta prices more expensive than buying the packs.

A couple of posters here have made unqualified "screw that" posts. I was not one of them. At the time I replied to the "unclench" comment, there was only one. The "unclench" comment was overboard given the general trend of responses, most of which contain "if clauses" in what they say.

No, I don't trust the devs to do anything. I live in the real world, where contracters, coworkers, clients, friends and family can all be trusted to occasionally do things you would never expect or wish them to do because you never said you didn't want them to. Why in the holy hell do some people care so much if we take the time tell the devs what we really don't want them to do? Even if they weren't going to do it in the first place, it can't hurt to tell them what we do and don't hope for.