Team Invince
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This was very cool. Thanks for posting it. I this idea. Kind of like a league night.
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My SG started something like this, alas we have not gotten all that far yet. It's an all RAD team, either defender primary or controller secondary, the basis being everyone taking....
Accelerate Metabolism
Radiation Infection
Enervating Field
Radiant Aura
Leadership Pool
...basically huge damage, recharge, stamina, movement speed, good mez protection, great accuracy. Only ran it one night so far, so hard to coordinate, but we mowed through whatever we wanted up to like level 12. The power would come later, but these types of concept things are really cool I think and you don't see enough of it.
Keep posting guys - this is a really good read!
Session 43
Ran the Eden trial on the spur of the moment. Our Ice blaster wasn't available, so we picked up a L38 or L39 Peacebringer. Halfway through he says, "You guys are like a machine!". Thanks, lol.
The regular spawns were L43 and L44. I a few L42's but I think those were only the boulders and shards that 'spawn on defeat'. Both walls conned L44 (+5 to entire team), as well as the ambrosia bridges. So, we were quite disappointed to find the Crystal Titan was only L43 (+3/+4 as a few of us had leveled enroute). The generous timer allowed us to take our time, clearing all three bridges while the Peacebringer was afk, though we had enough ambrosia after the first two. We also cleared the entire Titan room. The Titan fight itself was uneventful, other than lucky back to back hits on me while I was clearing my enhancement tray. For a L39, the Titan was worth about 23k xp, and the trial completion about 122k. Nice.
Great run, we'll do it again with our Ice blaster.
A couple observations on the two trials, none of which are really news...
The single largest factor affecting success or failure is the timers. To me, 1.5 hours for the Sewer and 4 hours for Eden doesnt make sense. The two timers should be similar, maybe 2 hours. There's zero sense of urgency in Eden, yet in the Sewer you're rushed and there's no way to speed up the final fight.
More specifically, the problem with the Sewer trial is that the weapons are both unbuffable -and- scale with level. Either allow them to be buffed, or have the damage fixed regardless of level. Apart from maximizing the generator-down window, theres nothing a team can do to speed up the final fight. I think its highly unlikely a team of L38 and less can complete it.
XP rewards between the two trials seem out of balance. I'll have to look up the trial complete reward for the Sewer, but I don't recall it being anything significant. Certainly not on the order of Eden's 120k. The reduction of XP for the hatched krakens remains a glaringly disproportianate change. Overall, the Sewer trial yielded about 1-2 bubs while Eden rewarded 6-7 bubs.
Trial enhancements should be revisited. The lower percent compared to SO's, and the issue of out-leveling them renders their utility marginal despite their multiple effects. If it wasn't an issue before, it certainly is now ... with enhancement diversification. They need to be brought upto SO percents to make a tangible and more generally useful reward.
Session 44
Eden again, this time with the teams regular eight. A little under two hours, but now they're only +3/+4.
Session 45
Ran Tina Macintyre's missions. The Clockwork King AV at +2 levels went down in ~30 seconds. Successfully completed the 10 minute, grab four clicky mission. Ended the night at or near 41.
Session 46-47
Finished Tina's Praetorian War arc. The AVs (Bobcat, Shadowhunter, Neuron, Anti-matter) spawned at +2 to +3 and were ~30 second fights. Made about 12 bubs in about 4 hours, putting the team at L42. Need to knockout the Multidimensional mission before we level, so that we can start the Portal Smasher TF against L47's.
Session 48
Started the first Shard TF, Dr. Quarterfield's. First door mission was +3 Rularuu. They didnt give us too much trouble, but detention field on the tank was annoying.
Session 49
Cathedral of Pain trial went live. We decided to run it with our Team Invince toon, rather than figure out which of our 50's to bring. Members of the SG formed up a team of eight 50's. So that was two teams for the trial, 8 L42's on one and 8 L50's on the other.
Trial spawns weren't affected by difficulty, so effectively we were facing even cons after being auto-d to L50. Our SG mates took one pillar, while we took another and we all met at the third at the same time. In the AV room, we went left and they went right. Cleared all the spawns and met at the AV. AV went down in a matter of seconds. Total elapsed time was about 4-5 minutes. Not counting the time for 16 people to zone into the trial map and recover from blue screen crashes.
The reward was the 20% debt reduction IoP. So we went out to monster island to try it out. Took a while for the monster to get a kill, but it does indeed work. We budged the HP bar, but we still dont have quite enough sustainable single target damage to take one down in a reasonable amount of time. We'll try again at L44, lol.
Reformed the TF, and knocked out a few missions. I think most of us are about L42.5
For me, it was the first time I had ever attempted the CoP trial so I wasn't sure what to expect (I was on the non-Team Invincible team). I was truly surprised at how quickly the entire thing was over. It was almost blink-and-you-miss-it.
I think one thing that helped was using Teamspeak. It helped everything go like clockwork. One bug I noticed was some people got the mission complete with the exit button. For others the mission name remained and the clock continued to count down along with the exit button.
We are going to try it again tonight on villains, but I expect much more of a challenge since many members of the SG only have mid-level (late teens to 30s) villains.
What I thought was a lame reward turned out to be one of the unique items of power (only 1 per server). 20% debt reduction doesn't mean anything to a 50, but I guess it really helps lower level alts.
We did do the villain CoP trial 2 nights ago and it was not smooth sailing compared to doing it as heroes. With heroes we had 16 people and it went fast (2 teams of 8). With villains we had 18 (3 teams of 6) and it was no cake walk. We took out the 3 sets outdoors easy enough and got inside where the AV was but we had several team wipes with lots of mobs respawning inside. We finally got things together and did it but it took 7 times as long with our villains. To be fair, with heroes it was almost all level 50s. With villains we had villains that ranged from level 9 to level 50. We got the Damage Increase IoP for our villain group.
Session 50
Ran more of the Dr. Quarterfield Shard TF against primarily +3 Crey. Our Kin/rad wasn't available so we had to adjust buffs and endurance usage, which slowed us down a little bit. Damage wasn't really an issue, as we were only able to generate +3's. Team is L43 now.
What's your average completion time for a Paper when you're a full team of eight, I wonder.
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What's your average completion time for a Paper when you're a full team of eight, I wonder.
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For a paper? We'll have to wait until I8 police bands, or until we roll Team Relentless.
For missions in general... hmm, I havent really tracked it specifically. In terms of experience, we've been doing about 5 bubs per 1.5 to 2 hour session. I could probably dig back through the Herostats logs and find some times for missions.
Edit to add:
Looked up Session 34. We ran three Warburg missions with a team of 7 L37s and 1 L39 against +4's. One of the team members wasn't available, so a member of the SG with a L39 grabbed missions for us. Start to finish times were 9-12 minutes. Total turn around time, ie getting mission, travel ,zone-in ... was 13-15 minutes. We weren't rushing.
Session 51-52
Finished the Dr. Quarterfield TF with the team at L44. Mission after mission of just +1 to +2 Crey. To make matters worse, the last two missions spawned -1 and even con. Still not entirely sure how that happened, but it was pretty disappointing.
The irony is, and I almost hate to admit it, but we were so detached we actually team wiped against even-con Crey. In 44 levels, even at times against +6's with DO's ... we never wiped so bad, lol. I'm pretty sure two guys had alts logged into the Hive, two guys were watching TV, I was drinking, the Empath was putting drops in her eyes, and one guy was hanging drywall.
Ok, maybe I exaggerated a little... two of those aren't true
Okay. I know 2 guys had alts in the Hive. Two guys were watching TV I could see. I'm guessing the drywall was out. Now you drinking or PB putting drops in her eyes are equally plausible so not sure which it is, heh.
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Now you drinking or PB putting drops in her eyes are equally plausible so not sure which it is, heh.
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I'm not sayin'. *hic*
I may have contributed to that near wipe with my arctic air herding on my controller. What can I say. I got a little bored with even lvl cons.
Heh, I was also kinda watching TV, running an alt in the hive and drinking myself. Can I multitask or what......
Session 53
We wanted to see how fast we could run down Eochai in Boomtown where its been sparsely populated. Instead we went to Brickstown due to the L20+ thing, but there were multiple teams on every Eochai. It took the remainder of the night until a Jack popped up. So, we didn't really accomplish much.
Session 54-55
Did Fake Nems in Shard for accolade and to get one bub for the guy at L43.9
Ran the respec trial. Initial door missions gave L45-L48 to our L44 while the reactor room spawned L44-46 and was typically dull. The meleers ran without bubbles, some of us went afk or watched TV at times, and we discussed the merits of using fruit in various beverages.
Spent about 15 minutes killing a L49 DE Monster in PI. Tank had dinged L45 in the respec, but the rest of us were L44. Reward was an unsurprising, but slightly disappointing 20k xp and 640 prestige. Lag was a factor, presumably from the Halloween Event or concurrent Hammy raid, but even without it I'd still guess 10-15 minutes.
Finished the night by upgrading my mostly yellow enhancers.
Session 56
Partial team runs of contact missions at +2 trying to get Maria Jenkins AV arc opened up. We were just quick completing missions, trying to get to the good stuff (AVs) as fast as possible. I think the team is spread from low 44 to 45.5 now.
Session 57
Two hour session with a L42 Scrapper from the SG subbing for the Ice Blaster. We blitzed Maria's AVs. The Ice/Rad Controller had worked his contacts upto Maria and so dinged L46 in the first or second mission, which was fantastic since it bumped the AV's up a level for the rest of the team at L45.
I'll say it again, Invincible is not difficult enough. We continue to find it necessary to use 'gimmicks' to increase difficulty that could be addressed by the mission difficulty slider.
So, that was nine +3 AV's to most of the team. We took down Battle Maiden, Chimera, Diabolique, Infernal, Marauder, Mother Mayhem, Nightstar, Shawdowhunter, and Siege. Other than Mother Mayhem, we had no defeats in AV fights.
The Mother Mayhem mission gave us a couple defeats. It took us about 3-4 mobs to adjust our rhythm and adapt to letting the DA Scrapper soak some Psy damage for the Inv tank. Accidental aggro from the close spawns on that map required attention, too. That was the case at the AV, somehow the Emp defender took initial aggro and went down. I'm not sure if anyone else went down, but a well place nuke and some troller holds brought everything under control.
The L42 Scrapper had no trouble contributing damage against +6 AVs. He only suffered one defeat the whole night, and that was in the first couple mobs of the Mother Mayhem mission. The L42 scrapper ran unsidekicked the entire time and made 10 bubs, and my L45 made 7 bubs. Most, if not all of the L45's dinged.
Session 58
Scheduling's been complicating getting the whole team together... and its a bit hard to get excited about yet another Shard TF. However, we did get all 8 on to start The Saga of Lanaru TF, but the kin and one troller had to bow out early. We did the first couple missions against just +3 Rularuu with very few bosses... L49 to our L46. Not sure why this TF didnt spawn at its max level range + difficulty. Being short two people, we had a few tricky fights when we unexpectedly bumped into boss groups, or aggro'd a second group.
Last week, we didnt have the opportunity to get the entire group together. Although a few of us did run missions to open up another round of Portal AVs for the Ice blaster who'd missed out.
Team is now 45-47.
I am still loving this :¬)
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I am still loving this :¬)
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Good to know at least someone is reading. Here's a little preview ... We're planning to finish Faathim's TF, then Crimson's arc, and (hopefully) finish with a Hero's Hero. We've begun planning Team Relentless for after Team Invince makes L50. While the AT's are nailed down, we haven't finalized powersets. Additionally, other members of the SG are forming up a second villains team.
WooT!
Great run last night.
All the pieces seemed to fall into place. We started porting to the bottom with the four particle cannons with 1:16 left on the clock
I waded into the tentacles with 52 minutes left to go and killed the last one (sorry CF ) with 39 minutes left to go.
I knew after first run at the head we had it...damage was much better than when we tried at levels 37 - 38.
Couple of observations:
-Defenders are absolutely essential. The heals and buffs on this team are phenomenal. Without them this mission is probably not doable...certainly not at level 39
-Controller holds also absolutely essential. Hatched Krackens were basically perma-locked down and the Rikti waves when attacking the head would be fatal without the controllers.
-A good tank is a must to hold aggro...lots of nasty vills in this mish...without a good tank, blasters and controllers will die too much for the team to really be effective
-Damage dealers...pretty obvious. Unless you can kill +3s fast you're not gonna get this done
Also something for teams that make successive runs at this to bear in mind. There is a bug where the temporary weapons don't expire immediately when the trial is finished. So I went in last night with a particle cannon from our prior run. Well, I collected one as usual, noticed I had 2..thought great, I can use em both. Sadly when the one from the prior run timed out, both dropped out of the tray
Luckily it happened while we still in the shaft so we were able to start over, but pretty nasty bug and something to keep in mind. I petitioned it, the GMs never got back to me in-game but I followed up their e-mail with a more detailed explanation of what happened..hopefully it'll get fixed at some point.
All in all, pretty awesome run. Some said it couldn't be done at 39..it can.
On to Eden....