UberGuy

Wow, that's so contrary to my experience. I find myself pestering people to actually go to the hospital. I'm amazed at how much use I get out of Vengeance at times (and happy I have it on a lot of characters).

Both are bad. Getting a (decent) rez gets you back in the action so much faster than the iTrial hospital, people really should wait for a few seconds. But they shouldn't lay around dead until they've wasted way more time than it would have taken to come back on their own.

There's no set team composition. I think that run had two Dark Miasma Defenders or Corruptors (I don't recall which), and a bunch of Scrappers and Brutes. At least one person was a Scrapper in their 40s who was along for the XP. It was formed by someone who's working on the 50 WST assists badge.

Our tactics are to (1st mish) head south, then north to free Sybils, then head directly to the altar to free Sister Solaris, (2nd mish) run from Cyst to Cyst, sometimes splitting up if we're able, (3rd mish) assassinate the generals in order from front to back, then pull the AVs onto the computer and AoE to taste and ability, (4th mish) clear the tower tops until about 120 traitors are left, then charge the AV, usually pulling the courtyard troops up to him. We don't usually target the Essences, though I like to do so personally, sometimes without telling anyone. >.>

Our teams for this have always been well-able to perform these antics. Before high-end IO builds were commonplace, we achieved it with heavy use of buffs. After IOs were more common (among us, at least, which was almost certainly ahead of the general populace), we needed less buffs. With Incarnates now we need less buffs and can mow things even faster, since people have level shifts, everyone can provide some limited (though potentially very strong) buffs, and everyone can have a pseudo-nuke.

Well, case in counterpoint, mobs in this game (and pretty much every other one, including the very most recent MMO on the street) stand around waiting for player characters to engage them. Fighting them one or even a few spawns at a time across a map containing hundreds of them makes just as little sense as rushing past them.

Let's not wish for a GM to react only to the nonsensical behavior you happen to disapprove of.

Things I can tell you do that we don't - you were targeting the Nictus Essences. (Actually, I like to do that, but the team normally doesn't do it that way. Our best times recently though have been when the Essences are defeated by AoEs and the like.) You look like you also have a very nicely built team there, four Corrs and four high-end damage scalar ATs for maximum force multiplication. I can't tell powersets, of course, but that looks like it's built for speed.

In contrast, we pretty much always speed with whatever people bring, occasionally tweaking if we have too much AT imbalance. Lately we just run with whatever. We often have 1-2 non 50s along.

Hold on a second. Are you saying you play table top games with GMs who can't adapt to the players doing things that are innovative and force him to react to their tactics, instead of forcing them to react to his story?

I used to be a GM like that. I've met other GMs like that. I thought they sucked, and didn't play with them any more. I decided I didn't want to suck, and didn't GM my own games like that any more.

Speed runs are not breaking the rules. They are simply being as efficient as possible by doing the minimum actually required. The closest I would say any come to truly perverting the intent of any mission is when people intentionally fail missions to cut time. Most stereotypical comic book heroes would not do that, at least not if failure led to the harm of others. Of course, not all our characters have to be stereotypical heroes, or heroes at all, so that point is not really unambiguous.

There is no failing a mission like that in the ITF. There is only avoiding fighting what you don't have to, and burning what you do have to fight with white hot nuclear fire.

Whatever run gave you that idea was not a speed run.

This was a speed run.*



Even a radically overpowered kill-all is going to take a good 40 minutes.

* This is the best time achieved by me or folks I know personally. It's not typical, even for us. 20-25 mins is more normal.

Interestingly, I think the ITF has one of the best-balanced "speeding" mechanisms of any TF. They just aren't used universally through the TF. It absolutely requires the defeat of what, prior to its release, would have been considered an ungodly number of foes.

Personally, I enjoy speeding. I enjoy seeing how much faster we can run it. Yes, that's an exercise in metagaming. I think that's perfectly reasonable to start doing once you have run something at on the order of hundreds of times. People "metagame" other escapist entertainment, too. Eventually, some of us play the game for the sake of playing the game, not for the immersion. Immersion is good, IMO, but you can't maintain it forever. Given the choice of ignore content I can't be immersed in or find new ways to be entertained by it, I choose to find new entertainment.

As someone who has formed UGTs, trust me, I'm well aware of the limitations of having a vanilla 50 along. You don't need everyone on the league to have Clarion. 4-5 of the Rare/T3 version or better is usually plenty.

No, that wasn't different. Sure, it may be different from what you had previously experienced, but it isn't different from what people were doing before. I've been on teams doing that since the ITF was only a couple of months old. Most of us could do it in our sleep now.

And yes, I mean running past stuff and fighting in the middle of objective spawns only, defeating only the key mobs.

I don't play everything that way, but I do play most TFs that way.

Edit to add: Absolutely agree. A speed run where (a) everyone can't keep up on their own or (b) the team cannot provide the support needed for everyone to speed through is a failed attempt at a speed run, or one in which the leaders are being really obnoxious. All speed runners are not obnoxious in this way, and should not be painted with that fat brush.

Given that this is not that other game, I'll respond with a hearty "no" to that.

Yeah, with you on this. Speed TFs have been typical for a long time.

I might see them being more prevalent if there are more people with level shifts and Destiny than there used to be people with superteams or IO builds, which does seem likely.

Edit: I should point out that the ITF is one of only two TFs that I regularly see people explicitly broadcast what amounts to kill-all (or at least kill-most) runs. These are so-called "shard runs". The only other TF I see that done for is the Lady Grey, and I see that far more rarely. So no, the ITF is not always run as you saw it. What I find weird is that you never ran into it run like that before.

Honestly, as long as there are a minority of such characters, I don't mind if they come. As with everything, it depends on what else is going on. If I have four or five of my in-game friends on my league, and most of the rest of the league is at least +1 and not known morons, I'm largely confident the trial will succeed. (So far only one UGT I've lead has failed.)

Those +0 folks can still fight the spawns mostly fine. And while I do want to limit the likelihood they'll cause my trial to crash and burn by having too many of them, I don't blame them for coveting the iXP version of the ITF.

On my server, there aren't that many trials run. There's usually only 1-2 leagues running at any given time. If you want iProgress, you need to take what's running, or you don't get a trial at all. That is going to be one of the most compelling benefits of the new Dark Astoria, in my opinion.

The only trial I think anyone should be doing that on is the MoM. I think most everyone needs to be +2 or +3 on that. On the UGT or TPN, I don't think that. If at least half the league is +2-ish, they should be fine. The fewer +3s you have, the more important it is to have buffs and debuffs on the league.

To read folks here, I can see where maybe there are servers that lack much quantity of +3s, and in such an environment, I could see leaders specifically requesting them, just to get a core of them on a league. Some place like Justice, that's just not usually necessary. Sure, random PuG #117 might not end up with many +3s, especially late at night, but it's not especially the norm.

I don't think that follows, for a couple of reasons.

First, they are still VIP focused. Nearly everything they do with free players tries to coerce them to upgrade to VIP because it's better. At the top end, where you have premium players who have all the VIP benefits through having paid enough (which, for most people will mean having subscribed long enough), they explicitly hold out the iTrials as a VIP-only experience. So if there is any content they want to wring subscriber dollars out of, it has to be the Incarnate end game - there simply is nothing else.

Second, and I think more fundamentally, the devs still need people to be interested in playing the game in order to get them to buy doodads of any sort, be they consumables or full subscriptions. The MMO industry is, by and large, focused on goals as how you maintain that interest. Cynical people call those goals "time sinks". You need to give people a reason to stick around, some shiny to reach for, in order for them to stick around. At least so the prevailing wisdom seems to indicate. And you need them to stick around in order to buy anything.

Based on the new Spring Fling event that's on beta, that tech seems to exist. I would love greatly to see it folded into the Lambda and Keyes trials.

I forgot about the whole temp power mess, but it is something I very much dislike about some of the current trials. It's not specifically restricted to them, but it does show up pretty severely in some of them.

Let me start by saying that's a fair point. Back when the blue patches were added for Apex, I didn't like that sometimes they are hidden in the terrain. That said, it had never occurred to me that this was a problem in the MoM, as I have never fought an AV on the slope.

Related to your complaint, I wouldn't mind if mid-air patches were a non-possibility as well.

News to me. I know people who do this all the time, and did it as recently as two weeks ago. When did it change?

I have only ever had a severe crashing issue with CoH once, at a time mostly everyone else did too. I tend to attribute this to a few things. Since you share my experience with non-crashiness, you might be able to eliminate some of them as actually relevant if they clearly don't apply to you.

• My ISP is very broad band. It is currently at 2MByte/sec sustained downlaod capacity. (It will allow me as much as 5MB/sec in short bursts.)
• My ISP is very reliable, with very long intervals between any sustained periods of degraded performance.
• I have always played CoH on relatively high-end nVidia video card.
• My PCs are not always new, as that's all but impossible for mere mortal income brackets, but when they are new, they are very high end. They tend to have lots of memory compared to the norm.
• I am PC savvy and tend to keep my PC clean of malware/viruses and protected from the worst / most common threats.

I want to mention that it's not possible for your computer to matter sigificantly in things like the "valley of lag" or the old BAF prisoner phase. The reason is because that lag was cause at the server side. If you did not experience those areas of "lag", it has to be because your team/leage did not trigger the conditions needed for it. For example, smaller leagues in the BAF had far less lag during the prisoner phase.

Notably, "lag" was something of a misnomer for those problems. The term "lag" does usually apply to delayed response times, and the usual culprit is high internet latency. While things like the "valley of lag" did cause delayed responses from the game, what was actually being called "lag" was more accuratly described as "server-side time dialation".

The server was getting bogged down with too much to do, and it wasn't updating things in real time any more as a result. The clearest indicator of this is when our powers do not recharge even when our client thinks they should have. We click on our power, which is now full-sized and no longer translucent, and we get the "woob" sound with a "recharging" message. Why does this happen?

It's the server that determines when our powers should recharge, but it has to let the client know when that is to show that on our power icons. It has to update our client if something causes it to change, such as when we get recharge buffs or debuffs. When time dialation is going on, it lets the client know, and unless something requires it to send an update (like we get debuffed or activate Hasten), that's the end of the conversation until the power does recharge. But the actual elapsed time on the client and the server don't line up, because time is "taking longer" on the server.

This was what we experienced in places like the "valley of lag". The presence of elongated power recharge time was a core element of the phenomena, which means our clients and/or our network bandwidth were not the dominant factors.

Presently, changes made in the run up to CoH:F immensely improved the CoH server side's performance in these areas, making "time dialation" far less common. Things like the "valley of lag" appear to largely be a thing of the past.

At present, there actually is one power (edit: other than PFF) that gives Base Defense. The T3 and T4 Radial Vorpal Judgements do so.

Yes, I was very surprised to see this.

Bearing in mind the clarification the OP has made about his careful wording, I do want to point out that "need" is relative to your goals. DB may not "need" Hasten, but DB can actually deal significant higher damage at very high levels of recharge than it can at more modest levels. This not just because its best single-target DPS attack chain requires very high +recharge, but also because more recharge means you get back Sweeping Strike faster, which is the set's best AoE damage by a country mile. (The best single-target DPS attack chain actually includes Sweeping Strike, which should say something about how good it is as an AoE attack.)

Let me quickly concede that no one needs to make DB perform at those levels. However, what counts as "thriving" will definitely depend on the goals of who's answering that question, and someone who both plays DB and considers "thriving" to include doing as much damage as fast as possible/reasonable would probably want Hasten on a DBer. It's worth noting, though, that a reasonable runner up to the best DB attack chain can be run without Hasten if you have good +rech slotting in your attacks, plus around 60% global recharge (which is pretty close to the [non-perma] benefit of Hasten itself.)

It affects accolades, but not Incarnate powers. Nothing makes iPowers recharge faster. Not even Spiritual Alpha.

Yes, they do. They're just not authoritative in that regard.