Consolidated Thread: Statesman's Task Force
By
abnormal_joe,
Posted on: 2007-04-03 08:09 in The Market and Inventions
When you kill the Thorn Tree, the Nexus is revealed (the white glowy sphere behind the branches). Its power can be used to make Dr. A vulnerable to attack through his force field.
Don't worry if you haven't seen the temp power from it. Usually its given to a sturdy team member who'll be up fighting Dr. A and can survive well (re: tank or scrapper).
Regarding the poster who had problems with Dr. A: your illusionist could have been useful confusing Dr. A's clones after dropping pets and throwing secondary powers (buffs/debuffs). Having the EB's pitch in on the fight can be quite significant.
-Sandolphan
"When heroes fail, the Angels will save you."
MASTERMIND NUMERIC KEYPAD PET CONTROLS
HAMIDON NUKE RAID GUIDE
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Ran STF last night. We did fine no deaths up until fighting DR AEON...Now what is the best strategy. He owned us multiple times. What were we missing?
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Step 1: Do not accidentally aggro Dr. Aeon without warning. That is asking for a TPK. I like to come in from the left side and clear all the spawns first. If there is a spawn on the ramp (with Aeon's spawn on the right), pull it down, there's a convenient wall on the right to hide behind. Otherwise, scrapperlock melee'rs might have a chance of aggro'ing him unplanned.
Step 2: Ask who has the temp power. Make sure they know they have it. Get them ready to use it (on the PURPLE Aeon) once the tank goes in. I prefer to give it to someone else other than the main tank so I have less to think about and just hold aggro, but I've done the whole thing (eat alpha, hold aggy and zot Aeon) once by myself before.
Step 3: Tell everyone to focus fire on the PURPLE Aeon and ignore much of the rest. Presume your confusers know their jobs and will confuse the clones, etc.
Step 4: Invul tank fires unstoppable. (You can do without it, but imo, it distracts support team members from the main goal of pounding the #$)(*@# out of Aeon, which makes the fight go fast fast fast.) Then runs in, targetting Mr. Purple Aeon and doing whatever he does to soak alpha and hold aggro.
In my case, that's combust, fire sword circle and proceed to pound the living daylights out of Aeon. By the time I finish the first two powers, my temp power guy has zapped Aeon, debuffs have anchored him, PA if any is swirling around to distract the clones...
Quick fights. Very quick fights. So quick I usually have my unstopp crash sometime on entering the ship in mission 5. The temp power user just has to keep using it every time it recharges to prevent him phasing.
Invictus Est Level 50 Invul/Fire Tank
Malentis Level 50 Ice/Energy/Leviathan Dom (Freedom)
Black Jeremiah Level 50 Fire/Fire/Mu Dom
Sejanna Level 50 Dark/Dark/Elec Def (Virtue)
Arc #119664 - The MiniMech Cometh - Hess TF Mini-Sequel
One of the most important things to remember about Aeon's fight is that it's very binary, with his power and the temp power. Aeon's got a power that flags him as invulnerable for a period after he uses it. The temp power, if he is flagged as invulnerable, removes that flag, but it doesn't have a persistent effect. If the timing is bad, Aeon can and will re-use his power a couple seconds after you hit him with the temp power, and so be unhurtable until your temp power recharges.
What with +Recharge and -Recharge and everything, you don't want to re-use the temp power as soon as it recharges. You want to use it immediately after you see the "Invulnerable!" pop-up. Otherwise you're likely to waste it, and have a lot of trouble.
Jerk 4 Life
In brightest day, in blackest night/No evil shall escape my sight/Let those who worship evil's might/Beware my power ... Green Lantern's light!/(Meowth, that's right!)
My Arcs: #4827: Earth For Humans. #6391: Young Love.
I ran this TF with some friends last night for the first time......and all i can say is wow, best TF ever. AWESOME JOB DEVS!!!!!
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The only way you can kill him.
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It's not the only way, it's just by far the easiest.
I had a run with 5 controllers, 2 blasters, and a stone tank, where the temp power wasn't used at all. I was on an elec/elec blaster (3 holds w/ APP), and the stone was SS (another hold from KO Blow), and I'm fairly certain that all the controllers had both their ST holds and AoE holds. Together, we kept him perma-held for the whole fight, and I never needed to activate the temp power.
Anyone have trouble with Mako? I was doing the TF with a PUG last night and it took forever to take down Mako. We hit him for like 20 minutes, then stopped and went to Bloody Bay for shivans and it took at least ten minutes after that to get him, if not longer. I ended up using at least two shivans on Mako. He was just so bloody tough to take down.
It was a fun tf. We didn't finish it as we couldn't take down Recluse, but I really enjoyed the experience.
Uber Talgrim - level 50 emp/dark defender
Uber Rod - level 50 dark melee/regen scrapper
Rod Valdr - level 50 invuln/SS tanker
Talgrim - level 50 ninja/dark mastermind
OMG!! Please add these costume designs now!
I just wanted to poke my head in here and offer up a suggestion or two after having run several STFs recently (none of which were a success but meh).
Please consider allowing Kheldians the ability to use the the Temp power gotten from defeating the AV Tree.
I ran the STF the last time without a tank, so being that I am heavily slotted in Dwarf form, I volunteered to be the tank. Which to my amazement went alot better than I was expecting, we ran through each mission at a decent clip, and our support team mates were excellent and helped to further beef up my meat shield abilities to keep me alive to fight the good fight.
Then comes the Aeon mission. All hell breaks out because I can't use the temp power while in dwarf form. So, the moment I swap to human form Aeon's agro goes everywhere and team wipe after wipe.
Now, you might think, well, just have someone else grab the temp power.
And I would agree with you, had I known at that time that it wouldn't work for me I wouldn't have grabbed it. But please consider the logic on why *I* was the one that grabbed it to begin with.
My job was to taunt the heck out of everything, and in dwarf form I had few attacks, and those few attacks do a token amount of damage anyway. So I was a glorified meatshield.
Everyone else's time was better served using their powers instead of stopping to activate the temp power. So that left me, since I had plenty of time during my limited attack cycles to toss in a use of the temp power. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Nice, sound logic...
Anyhow, please consider allowing this temp power to be used in Kheldian forms just like accolades are usable in kheldian forms. If not, then at least when I9 goes live it won't be due to an oversight like I'm really hoping it is, but rather working as designed. Either way, at least now you guys know, DO NOT LET KHELDIANS GRAB THE TEMP POWER ! hehe.
We finally did manage to beat him, through dumb luck and fast timing I was able to swap forms, use the temp power, and dwarf back up, but it seemed like an unfun and unnecessary situation to have been stuck with.
The other issue we had was at the last mission, our team managed to work our way through all of the previous missions. Then our blaster using precision sniping skills, managed to pull Mako solo. We thought, GREAT, we only have to deal with one AV !
........45 minutes later, we all decided to quit the TF and call it a loss.
We had absolutely no way to hurt him. We were a good team, competant players, we just couldn't hit him enough or hurt him fast enough before his super defense cycled and he regained his full health. He couldn't kill us either, so basically it was a draw. We felt frustrated because there was litterally nothing that we could do, no changing of tactics, no insps, no power, nothing that we had at our disposal would have allowed us to beat him. We would have needed more yellows than our insp trays could hold to have been able to maintain a high enough accuracy for a long enough time in order to have beaten him.
So I'm really hoping that the STF doesn't become like the LRSF where you *have* to have the right formula of ATs/Power sets/specific powers, in order to get onto an STF team that has an actual chance of succeeding. I was sort of hoping that the lesson that the Devs learned about the LRSF was that folks wanted any "decent" team to at least have a chance at winning, without excluding any AT/Power Sets as a liability.
Heck, I was thrilled that we got as far as we did without an actual tanker !
I have nothing but Kudos for the Devs so far, just saying, I think some tweeks might be in order.
"All that crap is grey to me, no XP." - Positron 5/15/05 8:36am . . . The world stopped and silence ensued except for the sound of a crying infant off in the distance.
"Everyone needs to chill the hell out." - BackAlleyBrawler 11/13/08 3:26pm . . . Geeks around the world stopped and blinked.
Ahhh i can't wait!!! 
"PvP Messiah"
Tonight's STF:
All level 50, 1 tank, 1 blaster, 3 scrappers, 3 controllers (kin, rad, emp for the secondaries).
Everything went reasonably well until the last mission (well, the Dr Aeon one was rough - he and his doubles were on their game tonight).
We cleared from the boat to the 4 AVs, and successfully drew Mako and Black Scorpion away, then separated Mako, so it was us on just him near the boat.
Everything seemed okay at first until he got to about 1/3 health or so, and apparently popped Elude or whatever. From there things went downhill fast. I checked my combat log and with everything well slotted, was hitting him about once in 30 attempts. he managed to regen to about 2/3 health pretty fast before we could finally hit him a bit better. Got him down to 1/3 or so, then couldn't hit again. His health back up to nearly full, then we could hit a bit better, so down to about 1/3 health or so, then the miss-fest started again.
After several more cycles of this, interspersed with numerous deaths on the team, we called it when he was nearly full on health and we still couldn't hit him.
This was as bad or worse than when the regen rate was 1000% or whatever, because now his Elude seems near permanent (and TONS better than the one on the scrapper I was playing - they hit me with it like it was nothing).
And yes, I am ( we all were) well slotted with Hami's and some of the wonderful IOs, and we had him debuffed up one side and down the other.
Edit - Good to see it wasn't just our instance - ours seemed similar to Ashlocke's.
My Deviant Art page link-link
CoH/V Fan Videos
So, the fish out of water was the toughest?
In COV, we could not bring mako down. In the STF we did.
We had 2 controllers and an ice blaster. I wonder if the key is to hold him before he super mogs?
(It appeared you had enough controller debuffs).
I think mako mog will make/break the STF (did you go out, stock up on yellows and pop them when he mog?). He didnt mog on us, so he wasnt that much of a problem.
50 Tanks: Invul/ss, Fire/ice/fire, Ice/em, Stone/fire
WP/Stone, dark/dark, shld/mace
50 Other: WS, SS/dark/sc brute, BS/Regen/WM scrpr, fire/fire/force blaster, rad/kin corr, mind/rad ctrl, ill/storm cntrl
I finally made it to the final mission tonight, but we basically bounced off Mako. As I recall, we had a Stone tank, a Scrapper, two Defenders (Emp and Dark), two Controllers (Cold/Storm and Fire/?), and two Blasters.
We managed to pull Mako just fine, but after clubbing him for some time (with a pair of Shivans), he hit Elude and by the time we could hurt him again he was back to about 80% health. The Fire Controller dropped (he had had a poor connection, so we don't know if it was voluntary), and we sent four people to Bloody Bay for reinforcements. They eventually returned (the Tank and Defenders stayed to keep Mako's attention) and we began again. But even with the Shivans, this time we couldn't even get him down to low enough health for him to need Elude. We weren't really in great danger, but we called it a night once our Shivans died.
I have to say, it was a very disappointing end to the night. The TF had been fun up until that, and while difficult, Dr. Aeon (et al) made for a satisfying encounter that we could plan against. But Mako was basically unbeatable. I'm not sure what we were doing wrong. It's just so hard to hit him (even innately, he's a+4 AV with some defensive powers), and if we do mange to wear him down he just Eludes and we're back to square one. I guess we jsut needed more buffs/debuffs and Shivans.
As I said, disappointing. There's no need for this to be so stacked against us; fighting +4 AVs is already a stupid idea based on the way the rest of the game works, but his innate defense makes Mako an extremely tough nut to crack.
I hope this will be tweaked a bit before it goes live. I'd like to run this TF, but now I'm worried I'll need a near perfect team to succeed.
-D
Darkonne: Pinnacle's (unofficially) mighty Dark Miasma/Radiation Blast enthusiast!
Be sure to check out this mighty Arc:
#161865 - Aeon's Nemesis
I've run the STF about a dozen times now, the first five failed at the last mission (Mako and GW specifically, once at LR); all the rest have been successful.
I've been trying to watch for what allows us to defeat GW and Mako, but I can't exactly say. Teams usually have 2-3 damagers; two being the minimum I'd go with, and three being optimal in my eyes (1 tank and 4 support rounding out the team).
At least one scrapper usually has Focused Accuracy, and support has an empath (me) using Fortitude on the damagers. There is a mix of de/buffers on the teams every time, so it's hard to say if any particular debuffs/buffs become the key to cracking Mako/GW a particulay time through. And of course, spamming holds from the controllers whenever the PTOD drop gets some quality hold-time in. Shivans are not used, and Vengeance was used once. I don't consider any single power crucial to the battles, but having some selections from a list of key powers is.
I can say that Mako/GW are the two longest fights for any particular single foe. Each of the towers can be long, but there is a slow, steady progress if the team has things under control (perhaps just a bit too slow).
The final LR/Tower battle alway comes down to team coordination and tactics, not specific powers and temps. It's well designed and a nice piece of work, devs. Only the aforementioned tweak of tower difficulty might be looked at, but only 'just'.
It's such a long affair to do more than once a night, and I don't have a set team to try it with only one person variance to test what is the key to Mako/GW.
Something or somethings is allowing my teams to stay a tiny bit ahead of the curve on these two toughest AV's. Maybe it's scrappers getting through with their epics, maybe it's a combination of a threshold of buffs/debuffs, maybe it's keeping up holds whenever they can be held through PTOD's...I simply cannot tell which it is. I will say fights with them take too long relatively for them compared to the others.
I'm sure the devs are mining our battles and maybe they can get some insight from the numbers. Meantime, I explained my ideas on team composition in a post above and tend to stick to that formula if at all possible. It's very loose on any specific powersets to join, but tighter in the proportions of the categories.
-Sandolphan
"When heroes fail, the Angels will save you."
MASTERMIND NUMERIC KEYPAD PET CONTROLS
HAMIDON NUKE RAID GUIDE
We had plenty of holds/immobs, and had 3 scrappers and a blaster dealing damage, as well as some people's Amy and Werewolf temps running for a bit.
It seems that this last patch may have bumped the defense and maybe regen rate on these guys, because with a Rad and Kin buffing/debuffing, we were still having a devil of a time hitting him at all.
The AVs before Aeon were somewhat normal for what one would expect, then Aeon seemed much tougher than normal, then Mako took it to the 'drop the TF' stage.
My Deviant Art page link-link
CoH/V Fan Videos
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I finally made it to the final mission tonight, but we basically bounced off Mako. As I recall, we had a Stone tank, a Scrapper, two Defenders (Emp and Dark), two Controllers (Cold/Storm and Fire/?), and two Blasters.
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I was on this tf with Darkonne on Friday night 4-13. Ran it again on Sat. night 4-14 and the team had similar trouble. This second team had a rad controller and kinetics defender, couple more defenders, two blasters, stone tanker and a scrapper (me). We got to the big four, Mako, GW, etc. and took out Black Scorpion and Scirroco. Then, we tried Mako, and had the same trouble. Unbelievable defense, and of course the elude. Personally, I think the four AVs should be 52 like the rest of them. If that is too low, then 53 at the highest. The devs also need to desperately do something about Mako's defense. AS for GW and Recluse, I don't know. I never fought those two. I will say, as much fun as the TF can be, Mako and company are fast becomming a deterent for me. Hope the devs will work on this.
QR
Ran it for the first time yesterday. Successful in right around 3 hours.
Team:
1 Stone/Stone Tank
1 Inv/SS Tanks (me)
1 Dark/Dark Def
1 Ice/Fire Blaster
2 Rad/Rad Def
1 Kin/? Def
1 Fire/Kin Trollers
1 Shivan and 1 Snow Beast both used on Recluse
1 Shivan used somewhere else as well, but can't remember when.
Edit: Forgot to mention 4 members had leadership - quad-stacked Tactics probably had a wee bit to do with us beating and holding Mako so easily. I think I only missed him 3 or 4 out of around 30 or so attacks. I also have FA, Rage and Inv, but everyone seemed to be landing attacks consistently.
I thought the toughest part for us was the vines. The lack of true damage (ie: unbuffed or mob not debuffed) mattered here, but fighting all of the AV's was really easy. Mako took the longest to kill. We pulled him, but Scirrocco and GW came also. The Stoner stayed with them while we took out Mako (I think some Imps were with him too). He died once as did I once he went down and GW put a collar and ball gag on me. But Mako didn't run hardly at all. I know that he was held/immob a good part of that time and saw him frozen by the blaster a few times as well. Not sure exactly what kept him held, could only identify the Ice easily. After Mako, then GW and Scirocco didn't take long. Maybe 5 mins for both combined. Then Black Scorpion we just bumrushed. We took the towers out ( I got a little screwed up and went after Recluse at the beginning like an idiot and died). It took about 20 mins or so to take out the towers and Recluse. Really helped that some had done the TF before, and one of the Trollers had Group TP and we could just get past a lot of stuff and go straight to the mission objectives.
The biggest issue for us was several people having lag and performance issues. I turned off all sound and dropped my settings so that everything looked like a really crappy Anime flick from like 1974 and still only managed better than 10 FPS on the last 2 missions. When in IP or PI I was getting 20-25. I haven't seen many complaints about Framerate in this thread, so I assume that it was specific to me and a couple of others on our team and probably had more to do with our rigs. I was getting between 1-4 FPS in the first 2 mishes and was basically useless to my team for those.
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I've run the STF about a dozen times now, the first five failed at the last mission (Mako and GW specifically, once at LR); all the rest have been successful.
I've been trying to watch for what allows us to defeat GW and Mako, but I can't exactly say. Teams usually have 2-3 damagers; two being the minimum I'd go with, and three being optimal in my eyes (1 tank and 4 support rounding out the team).
...
Something or somethings is allowing my teams to stay a tiny bit ahead of the curve on these two toughest AV's. Maybe it's scrappers getting through with their epics, maybe it's a combination of a threshold of buffs/debuffs, maybe it's keeping up holds whenever they can be held through PTOD's...I simply cannot tell which it is. I will say fights with them take too long relatively for them compared to the others.
-Sandolphan
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I ran the STF 2x, once unsuccessfully, the next (with Sandolphan) successfully.
The first time, I had specced Focused Accuracy out of my build, we failed at Mako.
The second time, I specced Focused Accuracy back into my build, and that, combined with Fortitude (from Sandolphan), and the Radiation Emission's Defense Debuff, I almost never recieved a "Deflected/Avoided/Eluded" etc message while fighting Mako. The Dark Melee guy in our group had a hell of a time hitting him when it was up though. I also had the +5% ToHit Set bonus from the Red Fortune IO set. I had 2 Nucleouses in each attack (Acc/Dmg).
For both, I had 3 Membranes (+ToHit, +Def, +Rchg) in Focus Chi (Build Up).
Neither of the teams had Leadership toggles active.
Basically, in order to keep hitting Mako, you're probably looking at needing to eliminate something akin to 60-80% +Def. Which, for an unprepared team, is going to be rough.
For this reason, if you have a Radiation Emission person along, hope that they have Enzymes (Def Debuff, ToHitDebuff, EndRdx) slotted into Radiation Emission, and that there are at least 2 people with ToHitBuffs. Tactics will improve the whole team by some margin, or that they have something like Focused Accuracy or Targetting Drone.
There are non-Radiation Emission defense debuffs:
Sonic Resonance - Liquefy (functionally identical to Earthquake, longer timer)
Storm Summoning - Freezing Rain (can be an issue with Mako)
Storm Summoning - Tornado (needs slotted for this)
Earth Control - Quicksand
Earth Control - Earthquake (minor)
Trick Arrow - Acid Arrow (needs to hit, this guy probably ought to have Tactics to make use of this)
So basically, it's Tactics, or the above if you want your whole team to be able to hit Mako. That or a hell of a lot of Insights.
The OTHER option, and this is something I haven't tried, is that the entire team is going to need Geas of the Kind Ones, and a LOT of Rchg buffs, basically everyone Speed Boosted 2x, and then a little more. If you wait until he starts using Elude, and then EVERYONE uses Geas at the same time, you might be able to front enough damage to put him down.
Sgt Liberty - 50 Martial Arts / Super Reflexes
Verdigris Eagle - 50 Archery / Energy Manipulation
Stormeye - 50 Storm Summoning / Electric Blast
RO folks finally got around to running it.
Team make up:
Earth/FF/Fire Controller
Earth/Rad Controller
Rad/Psi/Power Defender
Kin/Elec/Dark Defender
Storm/Elec/Elec Defender
Dark/Dark Defender
DM/Regen/Dark Scrapper
Elec/Elec Blaster
Took us around 3.5 hours to complete, the vast majority of which was in the bloody third mission (we had some real issues with the Vines and the Thorn Tree 'one-shotting' every member of the team several times). There is a reason why people hate the villain respec with such a passion... and I was quickly reminded why I haven't done that Trial in over a year.
Pulled three of the four Patron AVs (GW, Mako, Scirrocco). My Animated Stone tanked GW, Mako went down fairly easily (double-stacked Quicksand and Tactics x 6).
Two total teamwipes trying to figure out how to take on Recluse. Finally figured it out and only had a handful of deaths after that, which just meant more bodies for our two FFoF members (me and another) to blow up.
Earth Controllers are incredibly effective for this TF. The hordes of baddies spawned by the Flyer and Recluse were doing very very very little to our team. Almost 100% of the deaths can be directly attributed to Recluse.
Hardest but most enjoyable TF (aside from that bloody Thorn Tree) I've ever done. *thumbs up*
(edit: the only Shivans used were in an attempt to add DPS to taking down the Vines... didn't help though. Nothing used in the final mission)
"A good Defender is the battle hardened Corpsman who will kill a Nazi with a tongue depressor while putting a splint on your leg, then hand you a fresh clip of ammo." ~Jock_Thompson
Repeat Offenders, TNT Profile, My little hero
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So, the fish out of water was the toughest?
In COV, we could not bring mako down. In the STF we did.
We had 2 controllers and an ice blaster. I wonder if the key is to hold him before he super mogs?
(It appeared you had enough controller debuffs).
I think mako mog will make/break the STF (did you go out, stock up on yellows and pop them when he mog?). He didnt mog on us, so he wasnt that much of a problem.
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Never had a problem with mako in any team configuration, GWs uber heals were more of a problem. Aim and BU pretty much always hit him and dropping burn everywhere took care of the rest. Burn pwns this TF
Throughout this entire thread there's one, almost unamimous thought: Cap'n Mako is borked! There's just something really wrong when one of Lord Recluse's flunkies is as hard or harder to take down than he is. The problem seems to be Mako's Super Elude. Tone it down or just remove it from him and we'll have a pretty enjoyable final mission.
At least with the RSF, none of the Phanlaxers have a "You can't hurt me" button they can keep hitting every so often.
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Throughout this entire thread there's one, almost unamimous thought: Cap'n Mako is borked! There's just something really wrong when one of Lord Recluse's flunkies is as hard or harder to take down than he is. The problem seems to be Mako's Super Elude. Tone it down or just remove it from him and we'll have a pretty enjoyable final mission.
At least with the RSF, none of the Phanlaxers have a "You can't hurt me" button they can keep hitting every so often.
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Apparently the 'M' in MC Hammer stands for Mako.
Who knew?
Ran it with a crew from the Livejournal community on Saturday. Ran it and succeeded, despite Murphy's Law being out in force that day. Whole thing took five hours, most of which was due to waiting for people to zone or come back from AFK (like fire alarms). Something was up with the load times that day; some of us had very short and stable loads, and others had to wait five minutes at a time.
In any case, we didn't have any actual gameplay problems through most of the TF. Our team was as such:
Fire/Fire Tanker
Dark/Dark Scrapper
Dark/Regen Scrapper
MA/Regen Scrapper
Ice/Ice Blaster
Ill/Rad Controller (me)
Ill/FF Controller
Rad/Elec Defender
Everyone set themselves on Heroic. We didn't have many problems, although the Thorn Tree was a pain to beat (as usual). Whenever we got it down to just two more vines, the counter sprang back up to twelve. This happened about four times before we finally wiped them all out.
On the last mission, we made much use of the Defender's Vengeance and Recall Friend abilities. We let the Dark/Regen Scrapper suicide, Recall him back, Vengeance everyone, and then tried to pull the AVs one by one.
We managed to pull Ghost Widow alone for about a minute, and then Scirocco came running up. This resulted in a fair number of deaths, as the melee tried to stay away from GW. I know Scirocco managed to hit me twice (one-shot code saved me the first time) through two stacked Large Lucks, with two Rad Infections on him, but that could be just bad luck. The lack of huge damage meant that we were whittling down on the AVs' HPs for a while.
Also, lots of Shivans and War Wolves were pulled out. I believe Scirocco one-shotted a Shivan.
After that battle, we pulled Black Scorpion, and managed to beat him without the use of temp pets. We were expecting Mako to come along, but he apparently decided to let Scorpion go off to his defeat.
Mako was also fairly easy. I don't think he managed to pull off his Elude, or perhaps it didn't make much of a difference, since he went down as easily as Black Scorpion. I'm not sure what we did right. (Phantom Army spam with Psionic damage, perhaps?)
The flier went down a lot quicker than Recluse's Inner Circle. I suppose the level-less Giant Monster code works both ways.
The final rush towards the towers was interesting; the towers seemed to take a while to whittle down, but the main problem (as intended, I believe) was that Lord Recluse was hitting us for over three thousand damage a pop. I also certainly didn't expect the flier to respawn, although I'm not sure whether the other players on the team did. It was mostly a minor annoyance by that time anyway.
After the towers went down, the final battle with Recluse felt like just another (Mastermind-style) AV beatdown, although again, it took a while for us to pare down his HP. I agree that buffs would probably have made things quicker.
Overall, I'd say that it's a fairly well-designed TF. The major problem we had were tech-related, and I know I was worried during Aeon's cutscene in the second mission when the "camera" cuts away to the various other AVs, and my computer started making "okay, this might be a challenge to render" sounds.
Current main:
Schrodinger's Gun, Dual Pistols/Mental Blaster, Virtue
Avatar: Becky Miyamoto from Pani Poni Dash. Roulette roulette~
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Throughout this entire thread there's one, almost unamimous thought: Cap'n Mako is borked! There's just something really wrong when one of Lord Recluse's flunkies is as hard or harder to take down than he is. The problem seems to be Mako's Super Elude. Tone it down or just remove it from him and we'll have a pretty enjoyable final mission.
At least with the RSF, none of the Phanlaxers have a "You can't hurt me" button they can keep hitting every so often.
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I beleive many people complain about Statesmans Uber-Unstoppable in anything but optimal stoner/corr teams, but then who wants to run a RSF in anything but a corr and stoner team? That last mission needs a redesign.
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Overall, I'd say that it's a fairly well-designed TF. The major problem we had were tech-related, and I know I was worried during Aeon's cutscene in the second mission when the "camera" cuts away to the various other AVs, and my computer started making "okay, this might be a challenge to render" sounds.
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Actually, that reminds me: I think Aeon's "cuts" to the various AVs in the future should be removed. Aeon's speech is long enough already; it's a great scene, but less is more and I think the pauses hurt the flow of the speech. It's not like we NEED to get a look at them. On top of that, it would probably help those with with low end computers too.
-D
Darkonne: Pinnacle's (unofficially) mighty Dark Miasma/Radiation Blast enthusiast!
Be sure to check out this mighty Arc:
#161865 - Aeon's Nemesis
Seconded. Most of the people in my STF switched to IRC and started asking if the other people had crashed, on the long load from his first cut. It really looked like the game had locked up. If the cuts are gonna remain, then try to load things before then.
Jerk 4 Life
In brightest day, in blackest night/No evil shall escape my sight/Let those who worship evil's might/Beware my power ... Green Lantern's light!/(Meowth, that's right!)
My Arcs: #4827: Earth For Humans. #6391: Young Love.
[ QUOTE ]
I have a humiliating question.
What is this Dr. Aeon temp power I keep seeing mentioned? What does it do?
I don't think I've been the recipient of the temp power either time I've run the STF, but I'm not sure I'd have known if I had been. I used the same character on both runs, and all three of that character's power trays are completely full.
[/ QUOTE ]
You get the power from clicking the tree of thorns or whatever. After you beat it... Following that, when you face Aeon it is the only thing that will lower his untouchable status, and make him vulnerable. The only way you can kill him.
~Relen~
Life's absurd events deserve absurd reactions.