UberGuy

They only do this if you have recently zoned.

Go stand in a zone somewhere and make sure you are not stealthed. Turn the toggle with the IO in it on, observe stealth. Turn the toggle with the IO in it off, observe stealth end immediately.

If you zone, you break this behavior. The stealth buff from before when you zoned becomes disassociated with your toggle, and this allows you to still stack the stealths on zone.

This.

That's a strawman position. No one claimed every power would be useful in every situation. This is about attacks specifically, and how many attacks will be complete before something else defeats the target. Other powersets than EM have long activating attacks. Very few of them have the lion's share of their DPS contribution tied up in such animating attacks, and none of them have both that situation and an almost entirely single-target focus.

That is the problem.

While I can't comment on whether they have good or bad network code, this isn't an accurate description of the problem.

Bad network lag means you do something, and it registers later instead of immediately. That's not the same thing as time slowing down.

This "time dilation" means that the server is slowing down, not the network transmissions. This is why our powers don't recharge in time. Our client (and we players) think X seconds have passed. But the server doesn't think in terms of "X seconds have passed". It thinks in terms of elapsed "ticks". A tick is a discrete processing pass in which the server updates all the things that should have changed since the last tick, like where things have moved to based on their current velocity, or how much our powers have recharged.

Normally, so many ticks happen every second, making server-side processing feel real-time. When the server can't keep up, because too much is going on, each tick takes longer than planned. The server doesn't skip ticks, rather it just each one take longer, and when they take longer than their "tick/second" target, the server's version of elapsed time starts getting slower than real time.

You can also experience network lag, but that's not what the OP was describing.

Maybe the fact that everybody else gets to deal damage to non-corpses without this issue?

Maybe the reality that basically everyone else with comparable damage scales can deal comparable damage to those things (and sometimes everything around them) without being locked into ~3 second animations that prevent them from doing anything else, like pop a heal, an Incarnate click power, etc?

Tying up DPS delivery into two powers that both take a long time to activate may deliver adequate DPS, but the game has been moving for a while away from "stand around and DPS stuff" as the best tactic. Mobility and the ability to switch what you're doing in the middle of a DPS chain is useful and sometimes important. EM in its modern form is very limited by that, and it doesn't really gain much for that limitation compared to its peer powersets.

Yep. Going to be loving that on characters that already have a lot of defense and/or DR.

I can confirm that this is not true. We've tried it a number of times, and the cutscene went off with no one anywhere near the door.

What's the motivation for doing this? I'm going for the Very Rares, so it's almost impossible that I'll get stuff I can use to create enough common components without running enough runs to have earned all the iXP I'd need ages before then.

And it costs money that I don't need to spend. I have more than enough, but I don't see a reason to spend it on that when I get unlocked so fast anyhow. The most common scenario I can see here is that I might be able to use the Common versions of a power a bit sooner.

The one bar that seems to take forever to fill is Lore, but I don't like Lore that much other than the level shift, so I have a hard time convincing myself to burn stuff to get it. I just grunt it out and use the spoils to work my other slots towards their Very Rares.

I have only spent Threads on iXP in a couple of situations. The most common is when I complete a trial and end up at something like 95% or more from completion. Then I get antsy and burn a few Threads to close the gap. The other was because people were planning on running a ton of successive BAFs and I was not done unlocking Interface, so I burned like 10 Threads and 25M to unlock it. It chapped my hide to do that, because Lambda just one Sector would have unlocked me, but the people I run with were focused on Judgment and Lore (for the level shift) at the time.

Cool. That's what it seemed like, certainly.

So Werner would be able to get debuffed, pop the resistance power, and have the debuffs lessened. Granted, the magnitude steps down fairly quickly, but it could buy time. I actually use things like MoG and Shadow Meld (and now, Barrier) to try and recover from heavy debuffs, but sometimes you're already so badly debuffed they can't pull you out of the hole. (It'd have to be a deep hole for Barrier, though.) A burst of actual DDR would be nice for more graceful recovery from that.

What does "short trial" mean here? Basically every one I'm attending is "short" in the sense that it's basically a speed run, so I'm curious if it's the same thing.

I very infrequently get commons. I think four times so far out of around 100 trials. I usually get uncommons, fairly often get rares, and rather occasionally get very rares. To date, I've gotten more very rare windows than common windows. I have never seen the "10 threads" window. I've been on teams with people who did, though.

This is how some of us on Justice are doing it, sort of. We split into four teams so that, barring an odd number of people in the trial, we can split into two pairs of teams, with each pair being equal size.

We then defeat the AVs where they spawn. We don't bother with full "MO" in the sense that we don't try to defeat the AVs with all their support down. That level of cat herding isn't usually productive. Other than that, though, we do all the MO things, including leaving the towers active.

The folks I run with just split up and maim stuff as it comes out of the doors, with each door group responsible for its own spawns. We aim for no less than 3, no more than 5 players per door. We also aim for at least one character per door that can interfere with minions (meaning people with AoE immobilizes or slows). A couple of us break away and periodically check known exit paths to make sure nothing is sneaking out. (We actually usually don't have to do this, but if we get too "puggish" sometimes it bites us.) Often, someone sets on the sidewalk between the southwest and the middle south building, because stuff will run off between those buildings to the manhole exit behind the SW building. Edit: I should mention that since about last Saturday, we had an unbroken streak of no escapes doing it this way until today, running this thing god knows how many times a night since then. I'm pretty accustomed to the extra Astral Merit it provides at this point.

Actually, I'm not at all sure this is how debuff resistance interacts with debuffs. For quite a while I had Focused Accuracy on my DB/Regen as a place to slot Gaussian's set. (I ditched it for Tactics with I19.) The main thing I used it for was toHit debuff resistance when faced with Death Mages and large numbers of Council/5th Vampyres. Turning it on after I was already debuffed restored my toHit chance to reasonable numbers. The debuff from Death Mages is a tick (though a pretty slow one), but the debuffs from Dark Blast and Dark Melee powers used by Vampyres (and Death Mages at range) are clicks. If what you're describing above is correct, turning FA on shouldn't have raised my toHit by anything like as much as it did. We're talking 30-40 points at times when I was heavily debuffed.

Got it. I figured assuming you got 8 Empyrian Merits because some of those 20 successes were within the same 20-hour windows, but I didn't think to tie it back to your breakdown.

So you ran two of the same trial on the 9th but 20+ hours separated? Heh.

Lambda is a joy comparatively for iXP purposes. I think it's a combination of things. If you do both trials straight through and pretty much only fight what is required to complete the trial, you still end up defeating more stuff in the Lambda Sector trial. I think there is also more opportunity for "collateral defeats" as you do things like take out the containment chambers and weapon storage boxes. Much of what you defeat in the BAF is either minions or LTs, or the two AVs, and if you defeat the AVs rapidly, you don't get as many supporting boss mobs. Combine that with the smaller league size and LS just progresses you a lot faster.

I probably average just under 33% progress on Interface per LS, and only about 10-15% on Judgement per BAF.

I'm just curious about your Empyrean stat here. Do you mean that you've been on an average 12 failed trials out of 20? Or just that your total ratio of trials that provided an Empyrean to those that did not (including extra trails per day past the first) was 20 to 8?