Consolidated Thread: Statesman's Task Force

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There's a group fo 8 villains running a respec in there, so watch out.

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If only

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Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Just ran it. Failure.

We didn't have any debuffing and just couldn't hurt the AV's in the end mission enough to do any good. We pulled Scorpion first, and handled him pretty easily. Next, Mako. Mako took FOREVER. Let me reiterate: FOUR EV AH! Next, Scirocco, with his terrible blasty thing that stuns and hurts REAL bad. And that's where we lost it. We could not damage him enough to make any difference. Keep in mind, we were on the boat and were swarming him.

Also, I thought controllers were supposed to be actually useful in this TF? I really couldn't do much against any av's--except spam heals...sigh. If I put down quicksand, the AV's bolted. Volcanic Gas, they bolted. Holds lasted seconds, and only after the two controllers on the team really really laid down every hold they had. As one of the controllers, I can honestly say that my secondary--empathy--was MUCH more useful than my primary power set. That's sucky.

A debuffer almost feels necessary. I know a few of you mentioned doing it without, but we were certainly without season. In fact, I'm sure that everyone on the team said, at least once, "Boy, we really need a rad."

All in all, it was fun--except for the last mission. That was just frustrating. Even if we would have actually won, I would still be here writing about how frustrating it was. I mean, it took us AN HOUR for EACH of the final lvl 54 AV's. That's a bit crazy.

The Team (all 50's), as much as I can remember

2 tanks
3 scrappers
1 fire/kin
1 earth/emp
1 blaster

Our one tank quit after Aeon.

Verdict? I would make sure I have a defender next time, probably a debuffer.

P.S. Sorry about the disjointed post, but I'm tired as all get out, and my poor eyes are buggy from hours and hours of AV beatdowns.

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Don't forget the ridiculously long cut scene after getting to the portal. -_-


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While I do regret that there will be those who don't like that particular cut scene.... I love it to pieces. I think it is -the best cut scene to date-. Heck, it's the best string of NPC chatter to date! I know that I will crack up on it each and every time I see it.

Don't worry everyone. Even if you don't enjoy it, I'll be enjoying it enough for -everyone-!

"AAAAH! Turn it off! Turn it off!"

Yeah. It's entertaining, but it'll probably force me to only do two STFs a week maximum. I wouldn't be able to handle more than that.

Sssooo...lllooonnnggg... Could be...killing stuff.......WHYYY?

I will be making binds to fire off during it though. I was vastly amused by some folks on my team tonight, one had a bind that was "Hi Mom!" XD

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Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

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Yeah. It's entertaining, but it'll probably force me to only do two STFs a week maximum. I wouldn't be able to handle more than that.


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Once I get it down pat (and get my Grav / Storm up a bit more. Or my AR / Dev... Or maybe i'll just stick with my Ill / Emp) I can see myself doing it quite a bit. Sure, not every 24 hours, but I can really see myself getting into this TF, and that cut scene has totally been the deal breaker

Even if I get a bad PUG for it, even if it takes us forever and a day to get to it, that cut scene will totally make the trip worth it. It's just that amusing to me. ^.^

Also Failed with a group last night but unlike your team we had some debuffs and still couldnt do it. We had

Fire/Rad Controller
Ill/Rad Controller
Ill/Emp Controller
Ice/Rad Controller
Katana/Regen Scrapper
MA/SR SCrapper
Ice/Energy Blaster
and a Fire/Fire Tank

We absolutely tore through every av and mission until we hit the road block of Ghost Widow. We got her down to a sliver once, but otherwise she didnt go under half, and towards the last half hour of the fight we couldnt even budge her hp.

Group even ran to bloody bay to pick up Shivans (there were only 6 of us at this point, the ill/emp and blaster had DC'ed)

The shivans didnt make any difference, GW took care of them pretty quickly even with 3 sets of rad debuffs and her bar barely moved. We tried moving everyone we could except PA from melee range to counter her heal, but it just didnt make any difference, we ended up calling it quits after about an hour and a half of trying.

Is the general opinion to take out all of LR's Minions together? Anyone have any success on pulling them away if so what is your method? The team I was on tried to pull and we ended up getting all 4 of them on us, I was the only tank there, and we didn't have any debuffs except for a kin controller who was having trouble hitting transfusion.

At one point we were able to pull just mako, and we got him down to elude range, he ran off a few times, came back he did this maybe 3 to 4 times no one was following him when he did run either, finally on the last time he came back the rest of his gang decided to help. We couldn't take a single one out, this was a straight up PuG, no WB bombs, and no Shivas. Of course next time I try i'm getting all of them (bombs, and shivas), I also assume I might have to spec into Unstoppable, which I am unhappy doing.

Ran the STF tonight from about 6-9pm (took a bit over 3 hours, but we did a lot of waiting for load time).

Team was:
Stone tank, empathy/electric defender, rad/psy defender, 2 blasters (one was fire, I forget the other), ice/storm controller, fire/kin controller and a spines/regen scrapper.

LOTS of AVs. LOTS of bosses. LOTS of fun! The missions were all different and unique. The last mission took some time because the AVs newfound resistance to regen debuffs. But with 1 rad it was still very do-able.

This is SO much more fun, doable with a non-optimal team, and more enjoyable than the RSF. Good job devs, now rework the RSF! : )

Edit: I forgot to include an error we saw:
the final cutscene repeated animations, and 2 people who had previously done the RSF said it was buggy and not like when they first did it.

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Is the general opinion to take out all of LR's Minions together? Anyone have any success on pulling them away if so what is your method? The team I was on tried to pull and we ended up getting all 4 of them on us, I was the only tank there, and we didn't have any debuffs except for a kin controller who was having trouble hitting transfusion.

At one point we were able to pull just mako, and we got him down to elude range, he ran off a few times, came back he did this maybe 3 to 4 times no one was following him when he did run either, finally on the last time he came back the rest of his gang decided to help. We couldn't take a single one out, this was a straight up PuG, no WB bombs, and no Shivas. Of course next time I try i'm getting all of them (bombs, and shivas), I also assume I might have to spec into Unstoppable, which I am unhappy doing.

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We got Mako, GW and Black Scorp together, I (stone/axe tank) left them with GW and led Mako and Scorp away and kept them taunted while the rest of them killed GW. Then they did Mako then Scorp (suspect might have worked better the other way round for those two). We barely used Shivans, think we never had more than one out at a time and no nukes. We also had few if any debuffs (only bubbles and kin available to us of the defender sets) so the regen reduction seems to work.

I found Geas of the kind ones good for hitting Mako through elude.

Mr Minotaur 50 stone/axe tank Freedom

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Is the general opinion to take out all of LR's Minions together? Anyone have any success on pulling them away if so what is your method? The team I was on tried to pull and we ended up getting all 4 of them on us, I was the only tank there, and we didn't have any debuffs except for a kin controller who was having trouble hitting transfusion.


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taking them together seems easy enough, my pvp tauntless ice tank tanked them all (with no nice insp as the mean AVs dropped nothing) with just punchvoke doing its thing. We went to get shivans for the last section as we had no aoe control/damage for the repairers and found the mission had reset, oh well, 8 shivans massacred them. The AVs, flyer, towers and Recluse took less than 5 mins

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One thing I didn't understand is why the repair guys were only minions and were level 45. I was one shotting them with Dragon's Tail (and humerously making them fly in every direction) every time they teleported in, no threat at all.


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Without aoes those lvl 45 repairmen are a nightmare, they fix the towers almost instantaneously. We were pvp spec and all in ST spec

Just a note - I know everyone who goes to get Shivan's wants to have everyone get them, but it is often easier to keep one person in the mission [maybe a dead person for veng bait when you re-enter the mission] so that it doesn't reset.

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Just ran it. Failure.

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I was on JMJ's team. We needed more debuffs. We had a good team and played well. I'm never happy when someone quits a TF, but we managed pretty well with 7 until the level 54 AVs. They took forever and a day.

I'm sure we would have been fine with a full 8-man team of Shivans, hell, we could probably call it an easy cake-walk, but I'd rather play with teammates than pull those things out every TF. Shivans should not be more valuable than teammates. It was late and I wasn't about to suggest a run to Bloody Bay.

So that was my 2nd failure at the TF (not counting the time there was a server reset and my team never got back together). Despite the failures, it's more fun than the LRSF, which I will probably never do again.

Jeromus

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Just a note - I know everyone who goes to get Shivan's wants to have everyone get them, but it is often easier to keep one person in the mission [maybe a dead person for veng bait when you re-enter the mission] so that it doesn't reset.

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yeah we remembered that too late, been a long time since we got temps for the RSF

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Just ran it. Failure.

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I was on JMJ's team. We needed more debuffs. We had a good team and played well. I'm never happy when someone quits a TF, but we managed pretty well with 7 until the level 54 AVs. They took forever and a day.

I'm sure we would have been fine with a full 8-man team of Shivans, hell, we could probably call it an easy cake-walk, but I'd rather play with teammates than pull those things out every TF. Shivans should not be more valuable than teammates. It was late and I wasn't about to suggest a run to Bloody Bay.

So that was my 2nd failure at the TF (not counting the time there was a server reset and my team never got back together). Despite the failures, it's more fun than the LRSF, which I will probably never do again.

Jeromus

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Nah, its not a cakewalk with 8 players x 5 Shivans :/ - Recluse is a heck of a heavy hitter until you take down the Red tower (Acc/Dmg buff tower) - he eats Shivans for breakfast.

Just out of curiosity... if anyone was in a situation to know... for the time(s) when you're in the Fab in Grandville, does it require turning off geometry buffers on an ATI 9200 series video card to avoid the prismatic light show you get in the "real" Grandville if you don't turn them off?

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Well I just tried, by the last mission we had 7 left.

1 tank, 2 blasters, and 4 controllers.

We actually got to the last mission - we took out Aeon somehow.

We were royally owned by the 4 signature villains. We could barely scratch them. A few times we managed to get one down to 1/3 their health - and then they would just starting running around like a super speeder on meth until they regened. (which does not take that long, in a few seconds they can get back up to half life)

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I was a part of this attempt. Our controllers were */emp, */ff, and */rads. Oodles of debuffs, sufficient damage, and the ice tank was doing fine with bubbles, stacked AM and emp buffs on him. We kept getting all of the AVs after the first attempt though, and the squishies on the team were just getting 2-shotted continually. Not sure if we just needed more buffing, or the tank was having trouble holding agro, or the squishies were just jumping into aoe range, but we just couldn't survive long enough to kill one.

I wasn't bothered by this, it was my first time after all, but the more I thought about it, the more irritated I've become. Not because we lost, but because of the design. The one big lesson that the LRSF teaches is that fights against multiple high level PToD AVs programmed to cross aggro is poor design. The devs talked a lot about learning from their mistakes (and I do see some evidence of that) but then they went and created another encounter with the *exact* same poor design. That's not cool.

Yes, its only 4 AVs instead of 8, and no they aren't buffing each other, and yes they can be beat - I'm not saying its impossible, I'm saying its poor design. The devs *should* have learned better from the RSF.

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Well I just tried, by the last mission we had 7 left.

1 tank, 2 blasters, and 4 controllers.

We actually got to the last mission - we took out Aeon somehow.

We were royally owned by the 4 signature villains. We could barely scratch them. A few times we managed to get one down to 1/3 their health - and then they would just starting running around like a super speeder on meth until they regened. (which does not take that long, in a few seconds they can get back up to half life)

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I was a part of this attempt. Our controllers were */emp, */ff, and */rads. Oodles of debuffs, sufficient damage, and the ice tank was doing fine with bubbles, stacked AM and emp buffs on him. We kept getting all of the AVs after the first attempt though, and the squishies on the team were just getting 2-shotted continually. Not sure if we just needed more buffing, or the tank was having trouble holding agro, or the squishies were just jumping into aoe range, but we just couldn't survive long enough to kill one.

I wasn't bothered by this, it was my first time after all, but the more I thought about it, the more irritated I've become. Not because we lost, but because of the design. The one big lesson that the LRSF teaches is that fights against multiple high level PToD AVs programmed to cross aggro is poor design. The devs talked a lot about learning from their mistakes (and I do see some evidence of that) but then they went and created another encounter with the *exact* same poor design. That's not cool.

Yes, its only 4 AVs instead of 8, and no they aren't buffing each other, and yes they can be beat - I'm not saying its impossible, I'm saying its poor design. The devs *should* have learned better from the RSF.

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Controllers are well liked in this mission because of all of the ambushes. The developers never said that controllers would be more useful against AVs.

Still here, even after all this time!

One thing that's occurred to me since our attempt, if the toon with Power of the thorn DCs, are you completely screwed, or does it pass on to somebody else ? If the former then this is a major design flaw as I'd be pretty frustrated if it became impossible to complete for that reason.

Also we found that by somebody sniping one of the 4 patrons and somebody recall friending him out, we didn't have to fight them all at the same time. I think that with the changes to debuffs and AV regen, debuffing is not as important as it was if you can handle the aggro and incoming damage (we didn't need to take the dam/acc tower(s) down). A stone tank being able to handle Aeon and all his clones with minimal support or 2 and sometimes 3 54 AVs does make it a lot easier.

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Controllers are well liked in this mission because of all of the ambushes. The developers never said that controllers would be more useful against AVs.

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Missed point there - I'm saying that kind of encounter is bad design in general; it's not about the desirability of controllers. I mentioned our troller secondaries specifically because the buff/debuff available on a team makes a difference in what the team can accomplish. i.e. I just included it for completeness' sake in my short review of what happened in our attempt.

i'm not exactly thrilled about the amount of psy damage thrown around by just about everybody in the TF.

Ran it yesterday, started with 2 scrappers, 3 blasters, 2 defs (kin/kin and dark/dark) and my invul/fire tank.

we had deaths just about every mish, thanks to psy nukes from the spider/fortunata bosses and the AVs. one of the blasters quit mid 2nd mish, guess he was tired of waiting on the new people to find their way around. Bunch of deaths around Korol, those psy nukes just shredded most everybody. (granted, the dark/dark was completely useless and didn't do anything)

The CoV respec (mish 3) took quite some time, but eventually got it down. The thorns did take a while to re-spawn, which was quite nice.

We stopped at barracuda after our rad/rad had to go, leaving us with 5 and no support, and b/c cuda was still shredding us with those psy.

I know Arachnos has a lot of psy, but jeez.. did they boost up the nuke rates for those bosses? Seemed to be a lot of psy nukes going on.. Can we plz mix it up a bit? how about some smashing/lethal damge?

At least maybe stone/* won't be all that.. do you either have psy shields and get killed by everything else, or protect from everything else and get killed by the psy?

We managed to take down ghost widow. The way we did it ended up being no PA's and no Transfusion, tank in close and everyone else back. That way her AoE heal didnt heal her as fast as the other powers, and transfusion + PA's... well I might have been alittle paranoid by this point but when she was down I was relieved.

So from how we took down the AV's, the order was:
Scoriccio - Has a nova at 1/2 health but no stupid tier9 power to make him waste an hour of our time
Black scorpion - hes 90% invuln, no tier9 power so he didnt waste an hour of our time either
Cpt Maco - Tier9 silly power. Some guy died and another respec'd in vengence with 3 tohit's so we could get past all the deflection's that we were getting. We finally killed him after an hour of trying - no rad in the team
GW - took 30 mins after we started pulling back and kept out of her healing range.

The LR encounter is hard. He loves to drop a lev54 boss every 10 seconds. So when you have team mates dying, rezing and coming back into the fight via Recall friend, its quite easy to get 10 or 20 of these things up. And they get buffed from the towers. And then 1 shotting everything including the invuln tank that was with us.

Recluse then goes ahead and drops people to repair the structures making it even that much harder again - he spawned about 3 techs in a row to repair it on us, one time he spawned about 6... and then he 1 shots me for 3000 damage. Great.

Another thing I noticed was drawing agro from the flier, I hid behind the chest of the LR statue, and within 30 seconds he then shot a barage of missiles that went through the statue and did a bunch of DoT damage that killed me. Shouldnt the flier move around the statue? Or is the statue not there?

And finally, I keep seeing, after LR is introduced, what looks like every mob and flier getting a Fulcrum Shift every 10 seconds...

We eventually gave up when it was apparent that the only way to defeat this was with archtypes and power sets that werent in our team.

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Just ran it. Failure.

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I was on JMJ's team. We needed more debuffs. We had a good team and played well. I'm never happy when someone quits a TF, but we managed pretty well with 7 until the level 54 AVs. They took forever and a day.

I'm sure we would have been fine with a full 8-man team of Shivans, hell, we could probably call it an easy cake-walk, but I'd rather play with teammates than pull those things out every TF. Shivans should not be more valuable than teammates. It was late and I wasn't about to suggest a run to Bloody Bay

Jeromus

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lv 54 AV's Are just really not so much fun. I was on a team where we had the diff up all the way too. I was playing my Grav/Rad controller and kept the Fields on the AV's the whole time. But even with that, Fallout and Vengance going... when we got to Ghost Widow we couldn't dent her. So we all took a run to bloody bay and got Shivans. That is the only way we finished the TF. I'd like to know if anyone has beat this on the highest diff with out temp pet help.

fyi, the Patron AVs are hardcoded level 54, meaning they are 54 on even the *lowest* difficulty.

Edit: did I mention that I think fighting the purple patch is stupid rather than challenging?

Oh. well then. I didn't even know that they were always 54. We had the same problem with a person dropping out. So I don't know if we would have been able to take them out with an 8 man team. I'd like to think that you don't HAVE to HAVE temp pets to beat it.