Unthing

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GoD picnic in the park then? I'll bring cookies...

Sunday, 12pm until we run out of awakens?

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If you have a base hospital, going to your base and back in the Hive puts you in the same place. No awakens necessary !

Personally I always take it before 14. My last tank took it at level 10 or 12.

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It's kind of interesting how everytime we do a Hami raid we always end up trying to find an easier way.

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But has anyone TRIED the ideas suggested?

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A couple of times, yes.

There were several expedition to find the secrets of the GMs, doors, the factory. Nothing is there.

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IIRC the giant monster ones were clearing out the forests. Was there anything else? I'm quite happy to tank giant monsters with a tank supporting me. Or if there are enough tanks interested it would be a novel way to get my scrapper to 50.

It's kind of interesting how everytime we do a Hami raid we always end up trying to find an easier way.

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personally i rate fire over ice in teams and vice versa in duels, sonic has far more utility than fire although im not sure what the duration of the debuffs is to really get the use out of them. my next blaster if i ever make one will be sonic/nrg, good AoE mez and ST secondary with self buffs.


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The sonic blast attacks have about the same debuff duration as the recharge of the attack. The exceptions are Howl, which is about 80% of the recharge, the tier 1 attack, which is just self stackable and the single target disorient which is about 10 seconds.

So you can expect to keep a 4xdebuff -res on your enemies at all times. I think that is about -50%.

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I have also noticed the route for runners and its a long and interesting one. Its like they really, really want you to run there. Also the number of swarms that have -fly and -teleport is ridiculous. And the lenght of time it lasts is huge.

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It's almost as though they expect us to fight our way to Hamidon. In fact, that might be an amusing thing to do. Any takers? I'm not suggesting actually fighting Hamidon at the end though.

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Humm, worth a try with an empty insp bar perhaps?

After all, mobs drop ambrosia in the Titan trial, maybe there's a rare anti-hami insp drop?

That's the kind of thing you wouldn't see unless you slaughtered a lot of mobs in the zone...

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I hadn't thought of that. Might be worth a try. I suspect we'd need 2-3 teams as a single giant monster is a fairly tough opponent. In the Hive they come in spawns.

It is an average single target power. I don't have it on either of my /Fire tankers.

The reason is that Combustion is far more useful for a tanker than a single target attack and in most builds you only have room for 2 attack powers in the early levels if you want to get stamina at 20 and a travel power. So waiting 2 levels and getting Combustion at 4 rather than Fire Sword at 2 is always worthwhile.

Once you get a chance to get another attack power, more interesting options have opened up.

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Just an update on those 'doors'. They are not doors - they are simply a standard model for rocky outcrops that are also found elsewhere outside of the Hive.

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As I guess the doors in portal corps buildings in the northwest are.

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I have also noticed the route for runners and its a long and interesting one. Its like they really, really want you to run there. Also the number of swarms that have -fly and -teleport is ridiculous. And the lenght of time it lasts is huge.

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It's almost as though they expect us to fight our way to Hamidon. In fact, that might be an amusing thing to do. Any takers? I'm not suggesting actually fighting Hamidon at the end though.

If you activate a second Rage whilst the first one is still active you still get a crash when the first one runs out. This wasn't the case a while ago ( I4 or I5 perhaps or earlier? ).

So if you Stack Rage you end up wasting 10 seconds of the second rage because you are in the crash of the first.


In order to perma-Rage you need 3 recharges or 2 recharges and Hasten.

IIRC
1 recharge and Hasten will give you between 0-20 seconds of Ragelessness.
2 recharges and Hasten will give you up between 0-20 seconds of stacking Rage, however a new Rage will always be ready before the end of the crash period.

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Fire tank remains squishy for a very very long time

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Certainly squishier than other tanks, but with SOs they are just about acceptable, with SOs my fire seems to perform better against +3s than my Ice did in I6 at the same level. I'm hoping Tough will bring the Fire tank to a reasonable point.

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Anyyway, reached 28 yesterday evening, got it, and agree that sunglasses really are needed if you're going to run if for any length of time.

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I run Perma Rage with my Ice tanker, now that needs sunglasses!

I even had to get a black aura just to tone the whole thing down a bit.

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Is this true?

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Yes.

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How completely stupid!

Thanks to everyone who were in the Taunt team. It didn't go according to plan, but I feel we all gave it our best shot!

The final line up was:-

Golden Golem
Sara Aegis
Rooks
Jessica Raven
Idris
Khorrigan
Belgaroth
Agent 619

Special thanks to Agent 619 for being the most foolhardy of Team Faceplant! As he was a defender with Group Fly who courageously joined us in the suicide drop at the start and stayed with us all through the raid, although he did faceplant the most.

@Double
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Well, although we got bested, we must remember two things:

a) It's not the fault of any of the leaders who were in the secret leading room. We did our best to make sure everyone was doing their best, and I thank babel for orginizing such an event.
b) In the past, we used the fact that hamidon didn't attack while held. This time, this was no longer a possibility since it can now attack through holds, even when held. So we used the next best thing - containment. What we didn't take into account is the fact that containment also does double damage for immobilized enemies. Either Hamidon is inherently immobilized (so everyone would see double damage log, can anyone confirm this isn't the case?), or he got immobolized half way through (which did happen, I saw some tenacles, ice, earth immobilize animations under hamidon). This led us to believe he wasn't held, but it was too late to fall back as everyone was losing hope and there wasn't enough time to set everyone in place again.

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I'm not convinced that containment is a valid test. After all Hami doesn't move. Superdine crates don't move either and I'm pretty sure you get containment damage on them whether you hold them first or not. So I think he probably is perma-immobolised. We need to test this by sending a invisible controller in to hold Hami alone. How many grant invisibles do we need to allow a controller to stealth in?

@Black_Light
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An other thing that people complain about is the lack of information about what the current status is, so why not have one person resposible for that and make sure that once a minute (or something) there is a message on "Christmas Hami" like "We are in Hold phase, only Hold teams and Rad teams on Hami." or "Hami is down to 23600 HP, prepare for Mito spawn", of course everyone but a few will be silenced in that channel.

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I think the next raid should have a designated PR man. This person doesn't even have to be on the raid, just be in charge of keeping people informed. I was getting tells from one of the leaders of another tank team. Now I didn't know what was going on at the time and was trying to find out so I ended up being slightly rude to him. Sorry.


3 other things.

Tank Postioning: During the raid I had the taunt team stand at the North of Hamidon. I tried to get the tanks in other teams to stand to the north too. I noticed a number of people complaining about tankers taunting Hamidon were making him attack us. That was the point of having all tankers to the north, so that squishies wouldn't be attacked, because they would be south, east or west.

Targetting and gfx setting: unlike last raid I actually kept Hamidon visible and targeted until the Mito's spawned. Once that happened I lost it, until I jumped over them. I think that with a powerful enough computer you don't lose visibility if you are close, this wasn't the case last Hami raid with my old computer. I put my gfx settings back up to full halfway through the raid and noticed no change in performance, the lag was server side.

Dealing with Lag and power recharge: The Icons in the power bar lie as they are client side. You have to use the Combat window. It will tell you when things recharge. Someone really needs to write a guide about this before the next Hami raid.

I found this on another board.

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You just made a base at 5:00 PM! Your rent is due on day 14 at 5:00 PM. You can now:

1) Pay your rent at any time before 5:00 PM on Day 14. Next due date: Day 28, 5:00 PM

2) Pay your rent at any time after 5:00 PM on Day 14 and before 5:00 PM on day 28. You will be warned that rent is late. Next due date: Day 42 at 5:00 PM.

3) Pay your rent at any time (even one minute) after 5:00 PM on Day 28. Your base will be shut down for however long it takes you to pay. Next due date: day 56.

So basically, you are rewarded for paying late, or penalized for paying early, however you want to look at it.


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Is this true?

That is correct.

Because Jiaozy found another way.

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...Now that I've finally gotten Hibernate, even some bad luck won't be able to stop me.

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That's how I view Hibernate too.

Even when the bad luck happens to be stacked Illusionist Holds, Hibernate is there post break free to get you up and running and stop a team wipe.

For Dark, most of the powers are good.

The hold is skippable but useful( if you don't want a hold ). Black Hole probably is too, I'm not planning on getting it anyway.

The res doubles up as a good 15-20 second disorient, so can be used as extra control.
Tar Patch and Fearsome Stare are IMO must haves. Darkest Night and Twilight Grasp are too.
Shadowfall is more skippable but it is still a very good power for the E/N resistance and group stealth. In CoV and PvP the Fear/Confuse protection is also great.

Remember that Follow Up has a to hit buff too.

I had Tactics and Focussed Accuracy for a brief time. It was quite funny. I was hitting +5s everytime but it costed lots of endurance.

FA is better than tactics it, gives a +18-20% to hti buff rather than +7.5%. However it costs about 2-2.5 times as much endurance.

Galaxy Quantums and Vamp ranged attacks. Personally I found these were enoguh of a probably when I delayed mine to 24.
BP Spirits and Totems IIRC.
Freak Juicers and Stunners.
Clockwork, whether Praetorian or not.
Cabal.
Carnies?
Malta?


So basically you have:-
DE, Warriors, Tuatha, Red Caps and some praetorian missions where it isn't needed.


It also provides the final 30% of your cold resistance and some of your defence debuff resistance.

However from playing both an Inv nad an Ice the main advantage of an Ice verses Inv is that Ice doesn't care whether what the damage type is so long as it isn't Fire/Toxic or Psi.

I have had 2 tanks with DOs post ED. My Ice Tank and my fire tank. In both I only slotted for 3 shields.

This was fine for the Ice Tank as Chilling Embrace took a fair amount of the heat off and the difference was only 4 defence and I had Combat Jumping to fill in some of that. Also he was so mobile it really didn't matter, usually I was kiting spawns.

With the Fire tank I felt unpleasantly squishy.

I could help you too. I have a number of toons on defiant and Unthing managed to amass vast amounts over the weekend ( >10 million I think ). My global is @Unthing.

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I do plan to team as much as possible, I just don't want to be one of those defenders that when they can't find a team have to stand around twiddling their thumbs. Are there any good primaries I'm overlooking?

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Dark perhaps.

Tar patch for -res ( better than +dam IMO ) and slow, Darkest night for protection ( -dam -acc ). Fearsome Stare for soft control and -acc. Shadowfall for resistance ( E/N ) and stealth. Howling Twilight for hard control ( disrorient ). I think with Short Circuit and Ball Lightning you should be able to take care of most minions. You get a hold which you can stack with Tesla Cage on Bosses.

But then I love my Dark Corruptor so much...

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I'm a 3hover/port/recall. Tell me where to go, and I can get there.

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I'm not sure where Cowards Hill is. But as a superspeeder I can get pretty close in safety. Maybe I run in first, find a good spot where we can fly from, you tp in and then we get the rest of the team.

The team as it stands is:

Golden Golem
Sara Aegis
Rooks
Jessica Raven
Emberwilde
Idris
Dutch Barbarian
Khorrigan

If people don't turn up, we can start substituting.

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Not really arguing the point, just trying to clarify; that the margin between the best and worst theoretical tank is WAY smaller than the margin possible between good and bad player.

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I absolutely agree. I have been given complements on my tanking with my flying Fire/Fire tank, who is my worst tank ( from an both an aggro grabbing and a survivablilty perspective ) and ended up as main tank because the other tank[s] ( despite being higher level ) didn't play as well.

On the other hand on the weekend I had experience of some particularly bad tanking. One incident stood out. We were on a 5 man team, we had a Rad/Rad defender, my Spine/regne scrapper, another scrapper and 2 tanks, an Inv tank ( EM I think ) and a Granite with no Mud Pots but with taunt.

We were fighting Siege's robots and were about halfway through wiping out our spawn ( of about 10-12 enemies ) when a patrol of maybe 8 enemies decided to come along and stop 20ft from where we were fighting. The tanks didn't budge. 15 seconds past and then one of the new enemies got caught by the debuff. Rad defender dies. Now the tanks run in. Afterwards I asked them if they saw the new ones. They replied that taunt can only hold so much aggro.

All they had to do to save the defenders life was for one of them to jump into the middle of the group of new enemies ... or taunt them... or do anything other than ignore them.