UberGuy

I want my endgame to be more stuff to get. I like that. It motivates me to play my existing characters more, which is exactly what I wanted from CoH. I never, ever wanted my characters to be "done".

I don't actively dislike large team content, but I now know that I do not like for it to be the dominant focus. Greater access to standard team and/or solo content which can allow meaningful progress would be much more desirable to me than the sole focus on "raid-sized" content.

We will be denied a fine photo if TJ's controller who raids only in a cowboy hat and high heels.

Wait, that might not be how he wanted to be remembered anyway...

Justice had a good stab at the Really Hard Way iTrial badge, and we had a full league for three tries, with spare people each time. And there was an all-Brute teaming event running at the same time.

Now, part of that was that I announced it in advance. There's no doubt its quieter. But there are still peeps around and looking to just have fun, fill out their bucket list, or just stubbornly ride the coaster to the cliff at the end if it comes to that.

I count as all three of the above. >.>

Hey, all. Per this thread, we had some success but not the full success I wanted to achieve on Master of Magisterium badges tonight. We did finally pull off Ready to Rumble, and we got Hard Way twice pretty handily, but we need a lot more work to get Really Hard Way.

Basically, we need to front-load the team with Corruptors. Preferably, we want ones that can dish out -DR debuffs and maybe +damage.

Tyrant is immune to -regen debuffs. Only -DR, +damage and -maxHP are likely to be meaningful.

We need everyone who remotely possibly can be to be +3. I don't want to accept anyone on the league who is not at least +2, and I'm only going to accept a few of those at most. I don't like forming leagues that way, but it's too hard to meaningfully DPS or debuff a +6 AV.

For those that don't know, the lower Tyrant's HP are, the higher his regen rate goes. This means that any given net DPS can hit a kind of floor where his HP won't really go down any lower, because his regen eventually balances the incoming DPS. This is why Corruptors are such a big deal - right around the HP levels where that really kicks in for Tyrant, Corrs start dealing more and more damage due to Scourge. Naturally their debuffs are also a huge help.

If you need this badge on something that is not on a Corruptor or primary damage dealer, you may need to help others get if first. Basically, we're extremely unlikely to be able to get this badge for everyone who wants it in one pass - too many folks with lower DPS contribution will mean no one gets it. We need to load up the team with a bunch of Corrs, mix in the badgers (paying attention to how much we dilute DPS if possible) and run multiple times, hopefully swapping people in and out to get the badge.

If you want to contribute but don't have a +3 Corruptor, that's OK. I'd appreciate all the help we can get given the community's current mental state. If things go well, though, we may not need you for every run - just the ones where you're up for the badge.

Given the above plan, I will keep scheduling this until we get peeps the badge. I may accelerate the scheduling to get more times per week in next week if we need to.

Edit: It probably helps if I state a start time, eh? I blame being fried from tonight's trials. Let's say 8 PM Eastern, 7 Central, 6 Mountain, 5 Pacific. We will likely go for a few hours at least, so if you can't get into the first wave, don't sweat it. Please bear with the initial trial being slow to get rolling, as we figure out who can bring what, etc.

Thanks again to everyone who helped tonight, and my apologies to those who couldn't really help out.

Well, we had some success, but it was kind of painful. Let me thank everyone who came, and Ullikummis, I'm really sorry I couldn't get you back in on the last run.

We ran three times, and got Hard Way on the last two, and Ready To Rumble on the third.

Every time, someone different ran into the zone early on the IDF. That was really frustrating.

We really didn't make a dent in Really Hard Way. I think the lowest we ever got his health was 20%, and that was super brief. Most of the time he was in the 35-40% range and we couldn't really move it lower for any meaningful duration.

I still need Triple Threat on my badger.

I'm going to start another thread for the next run. We're going to have to be smarter about Really Hard Way. I think am going to be more hard-*** than I usually like to be about what characters come on the trial.

Defeating a zone AV solo, even with all that temp stuff, is a pretty big deal. They're way, way tougher to take down than a standard AV. Pulling it off solo was a pretty big deal before I13. If you did that after I13, you deserve some serious props.

There are more times that I can remember that some character of mine was the last one standing and who managed to survive alone, without retreating, until everyone else got back. Many times there was a huge dose of luck involved, but it still always felt good.

• I remember one time in Talos when my Dark/Dark Defender was probably still in her 20s, maybe early 30s, that I was ambushed in Talos island by a vastly over-sized Family ambush. This was way before IOs, probably well before I6/CoV. For some reason, you occasionally would be ambushed by a spawn much, much larger than made sense for a solo player. (These days that bug would actually be nice.) I fought them and won. I remember it being a touch and go thing, very hard on my blue bar. It happened outside the Magic store in Talos, and so one or two other heroes came by and they only watched from the sidelines. When it was over, people congratulated me on pulling it off. Back then, it was likely much more impressive for a lone defender to win against that much stuff solo.

• I have always been proud of these character descriptions. They have gotten me many comments and compliments through the years. Back before we had Global Names, I can't tell you how many players assumed I was actually female based on Nightfall's bio. For Noir's bio, I had another player actually ask my permission to use it as a springboard for a character with a related backstory.

• I was on a team once with some friends, and I noticed a bunch of foes swarming towards a Controller on the team. We were all knowledgeable players with strong builds, but I recognized that this much stuff (successfully) swarming her was abnormal. I ran over and started firing AoEs to either defeat or aggro critters off of her. She said in team something to the effect of "god, I love playing with observant players".

• I played with a group of players who normally strove to run TFs as fast as possible. Not as in we sat down and planned a team that could do that - to the contrary, we let people bring whatever they wanted. But given what we had, we always tried to run it as fast as we knew how without making use of bugs or the like. I think the best ITF we ever did was 14 minutes and change, the fastest Kahn around 16 minutes, the fastest Lady Grey about 17, the fastest Eden around 10. The fun part about the Eden was that we didn't know that some of the other people who were clocking times like ours were actually using bugs/exploits to do it.

• Pulling Siege and/or Nightstar on my Dark Miasma characters when none of the Tankers or Brutes stepped up.

• Pulling Antimatter to terminals using my Dark/Dark Defender when we didn't have a Tanker or Brute who could survive his aggro.

• Saving pre-I9 Hamidon raids from wipes using Howling Twilight on my Dark Defender. Saving it for real emergencies was something of an intuition art form, because having too many people dead at once risked letting Mitos concentrate fire more on surviving players, which could lead to a kind of cascade raid failure. The raid wouldn't literally fail, but suffering too many defeats would slow it down a lot as people regrouped. My DDD got the 10M HP healed badge before I9 primarily from casting HT at Hamidon raids.

• Soloing yellow Mitos at post-I9 Hamidon raids. Originally I didn't go fight them on my own to showboat - it was an intentional strategy to try and divide the attention of Green mitos among multiple damage targets so that the main melee team could bring down their targets faster. Over time, that became less important, and I got interested in just seeing if I could pull off defeating them on my own as a test of my burst or sustained DPS. I get a kick out of succeeding on ATs or powersets that are not obviously good at it - Stalkers before their recent buffs, Night Widows, etc. I also got a kick out of defeating multiples before the main melee team caught up with me from the other direction,

• Soloing Baphomet as an AV on my MA/Regen Stalker before any of the recent buffs. Because he had Healing Flames, I expected this to be horrifically difficult and so overdosed on temp powers like temps, Warburg Nukes, a Shivan, etc. Result? I killed him in under 60 seconds. My Rage inspirations were still blinking to warn of impending expiry when he went down.

• Soloing Trapdoor at +2 on all my 50s, even the "support" ones. I probably wouldn't have thought a lot of this, but based on forum feedback regarding Trapdoor's difficulty, it was something of an achievement. I even made a movie of doing it on my Dark/Dark/Power Corruptor.

The 40' range limit needed to go because it was not a sensible trade-off. Fighting at 40' range in order to use that power effectively limited all your powers to a 40' range. And 40' is a fairly trivial distance for lots of mobs to move in order to be in melee range with you unless you are hover-blasting them. If you did not move immediately after firing the 40' blast, and instead fired another attack, it's pretty much guaranteed that something that was trying to melee would be in your face before the 2nd attack finished animating, unless it happened to be slowed or subject to some other effect disrupting its movement.

Range is supposed to offer a survival advantage. That's part of why Blasters (and other ranged ATs) didn't have specific survival tools built in.

It also had no comparable equivalent in melee attack sets. There's no functional penalty in any melee set for using your larger attacks.

DDoiD's SG costumes have been a recognizable feature to me for a very, very long time. It's somehow comforting to experience that continuity and see something recognizable for years on end, be it individual characters or things like SG uniforms.

So some sort of congratulations are in order to folks who managed to remain recognizable for so long. Heck, Liberty Justice was on an iTrial I led last night.

Yeah. Compare the name of recharge SOs and IOs. IIRC, SOs enhance "attack rate", while IOs enhance "recharge". Granted, if am recalling that correctly, IOs were probably the devs adopting player terminology.

Hey, all. Tying in to @Redshadows' thread on Master runs, I would like to try and get some Magi badge runs together this Thursday.

Unfortunately, Red and some other folks I want to help get this badge have some fairly incompatible on-line times. (Red can't be on until 9 Pacific, which is midnight Eastern.) However, I am also willing to make a go multiple times. I would like to initially shoot for an attempt around 8 PM Eastern, 7 PM Central, 6 PM Mountain which is only 5 PM Pacific.

I know I need Ready To Rumble (Defeat the 4 AVs within 8 minutes of the 1st teleport in) and Triple Threat (defeat the 1st 3 AVs within 5 seconds of one another). My understanding is that these may be best done in separate attempts, with different strategies. After attempts on either or both of those, we can go for at least The Hard Way (close no more than 12 Lights of the Well) or (if we're really hot stuff) The Really Hard Way (close no Lights). Achieving RHW gives you HW automatically.

R2R is a high DPS challenge. I've been on a lot of leagues that have likely had the raw DPS to take down big sacks of HP like AVs fast enough for R2R, but they often lose too much time taking out the 250 IDF. We need to be smart about pulling, debuffing and AoEing the IDF to speed this up. If your contribution is single-target damage, bear in mind that minions and LTs count towards the 250, and are far faster to defeat than bosses. I recommend prioritizing those foes defeat unless there is just nothing but bosses in sight. (I have read that Battle Orbs count for the 250, but have not confirmed it. If anyone can confirm here, please do. These are very fragile. AoEs usually kill them fast anyway, though.)

While I do not wish to be exclusionary, these badges really call for +2 and +3 characters as much as possible. Assault Hybrid is very helpful for DPS, as are -Resistance debuffs and of course things like Kinetics. -Regen is very useful against the 1st 4 AVs, but Tyrant is immune to it.

If you can, I recommend bringing Ultimate inspirations. While we may not need them, having them is still a good idea. Each one grants a +1 level shift, additive with any other shifts you have. Each Ultimate lasts 3 minutes, during which you can't use another one. Ultimates are very expensive on the Auction House / Black Market (10-20M), but "only" cost 2 Astral Merits at Astral Christy in Ouroboros.

My goal in posting this in advance is to try and get folks to set aside time to attend. For obvious reasons, iTrial attendance is a bit thin currently. I'm sure that in addition to less people being on due to general malaise, folks who are playing are also busy trying to achieve other goals. If we cannot get enough people, or if we do but don't get the badges on Thursday, I would like to try again on the weekend, probably Saturday evening.

Please reply here if you're interested, so we can get a sense of how may people might come.

Deleting your characters does absolutely nothing to keep them out of NCSoft's hands.

I've been on every night but one since the announcement. That night, I was out late with friends.

I have soloed. I have attended iTrials. I have led a few. I have raided Hamidon. I have gone on TFs. I have plans to help channel-mates get iTrial badges (and am hoping to get a few myself). I joined another SG's ongoing efforts to complete the 100 CoP SG badge. (They're really close now. )

The game itself hasn't changed, nor are my characters any less enjoyable. We may have changed, but we have control over that much, if nothing else. I know it can be depressing - it can feel a lot easier to just give up on it. But there's still fun to be had, and still people there to have that fun with. Don't give up on fun you can still have. If we have to go out, go out like you played before - enjoying the game you love playing