Guide to the Imperious Strike/Task Force
By
Alexandria2000,
Posted on: 2008-05-15 24:15 in Player Guides
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You clearly run with teams (PUGs?) that don't whine when you try the tower strategy.
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I'd whine. It's a ridiculous tactic to make an already simple AV even simpler through the use of an AI exploit.
[/ QUOTE ]I have to ask; why in the hell do you need a bloody tower strategy? It should take no more than 10 minutes to beat Imperious down and that's all four times. The tower strategy sounds like you are adding unnecesarry time to make an easy AV even easier.
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You clearly run with teams (PUGs?) that don't whine when you try the tower strategy.
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I'd whine. It's a ridiculous tactic to make an already simple AV even simpler through the use of an AI exploit.
[/ QUOTE ]I have to ask; why in the hell do you need a bloody tower strategy? It should take no more than 10 minutes to beat Imperious down and that's all four times. The tower strategy sounds like you are adding unnecesarry time to make an easy AV even easier.
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The Cimeroran ambushes can't make it up there. They sometimes kill off squishies leading to a cascading effect of lost heals, buffs, and debuffs.
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Haven't done this in over a week now. Man, I'm jonesing!
Okay, so there're two basic "beat Romulus to a bloody pulp" strategies:
1. Somebody draws the healing nictus out of range of Rommie so it can't heal him. That person gets a support toon if needed. Everyone else just beats on Rommie three times, dealing with the ambushes and the resurrection mezzes as they happen. Then everybody beats him down the fourth time.
2. The simpler strategy seems to be just everybody beats on Rommie four times, dealing with the ambushes and the resurrection mezzes as they happen. Not as fast as 1, but simpler.
That sound about right?
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Haven't done this in over a week now. Man, I'm jonesing!
Okay, so there're two basic "beat Romulus to a bloody pulp" strategies:
1. Somebody draws the healing nictus out of range of Rommie so it can't heal him. That person gets a support toon if needed. Everyone else just beats on Rommie three times, dealing with the ambushes and the resurrection mezzes as they happen. Then everybody beats him down the fourth time.
2. The simpler strategy seems to be just everybody beats on Rommie four times, dealing with the ambushes and the resurrection mezzes as they happen. Not as fast as 1, but simpler.
That sound about right?
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Well, in #1, the taunter doesn't need a support toon since the Healing Essence doesn't do damage. I'd say the strategies are:
1. Rush Rommie and company and let high damage outpace the Healing Essence and AoE damage take care of ambushers.
2. Pull Rommie to a place where the ambushers can't reach and the Healing Essence can't target the players to create heals (the tower strategy).
3. Pull the Healing Essence far enough away so that it can't heal Rommie and beat up on Rommie.
4. Go after the Healing Essence first (either piling on it, or using only long range blasts, or buff up defense so it can't hit to heal off of you).
Every team should give #1 a chance before trying other strategies.
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I've seen the Ambush summoned by Rommy actually make it up to the tower a few times. They come up the mountain side and jump onto the tower. Takes some time though.
Most of the PUGs i've gone up there with don't seem to find it any easier.
That said, most of the PUGs I'm with also get pwned by the Ambush on the platform if we stay down there. I always warn them it's going to happen, and even try to assign scrappers or brutes to "Ambush duty," but it still seems to pwn people. And I'm stuck taunting the healing nictus so I can't get over there and tank the ambush.
Then again most PUGs I'm with also let the summoned essences pwn them -- nobody uses their AOE controls against the summons, they just leave em there shooting at people. I try to taunt but sometimes I'm too far away occupied with the healer.
Any suggestions on this.
Also my runs lately are around 1.35 to a tee.
Time sinks are the 2nd mission (crystals) where basically killing every ambush takes time -- and most PUGs can't do the "skate through" (Cheaty-Face) strategy well, so we always have to kill all.
The 3rd mission is also a huge time sink -- it seems more laggy lately even at the console (as does the 4th mission). Any suggestions on speeding up the general killing? I've tried keeping the team just ahead of the bridge and pulling generals back to the team, but the ambushes still pwn people. And when I try to just get peeps to kill the gens and move ahead to the next general, there's still a lot of dying.
If either of these could be done faster, we could get this down to an hour at least probably.
"Sometimes you have to roll the Hard Six." -- Adama
Teabagging Ms. Liberty - http://kk-comics.com/allmmproject/rsf21.jpg
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Any suggestions on speeding up the general killing?
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Try killing the engineers on those towers. Whenever we've killed them, the lag has always significantly decreased.
Doom.
Yep.
This is really doom.
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lol, I was on that ITF with you. Yeah, 3 hours was a pain, but it wasn't the most optimum ITF team either. Lots of damage, 1 tank and 1 support character (me).
I suggested the cheesy blast the Nictus from range strategy because everything else up to that point failed. On hindsight, we probably should've just charged up and rushed Rom. We had plenty of damage, so it probably would've worked.
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We probably should have.
That's actually what I have done the last two runs I have been on, the past two days. One team had a VEAT and a FF MM. The other had 3 VEATs. So everyone's defense was between 40-60% for the two runs. The whole run was much easier, and we were even able to shrug off the Nictus ambush on the first mission without having to sneak around back or anything. And we did the all rush in and kill Romulus straight up thing. Healing essence didn't hit us enough to matter.
I think at this point I might start actively recruiting two spots for VEAT and/or FF def/troll/mm. It just makes the whole thing so much simpler. Don't need two tanks/brutes to try and separate Rom from the healer and all of that stuff. Actually the last run our only "tank" was a Warshade. We had a lot of fun joking about trying not to attack him throughout the TF. 
I still don't get people's "need" for X or Y for this Task Force. I've done it with 1 Brute, 2 Veats 2 Blasters and I've done it with 3 Defenders, 1 Controller and 1 Blaster. I can't imagine any team of 6 competent players that couldn't do it.
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I still don't get people's "need" for X or Y for this Task Force. I've done it with 1 Brute, 2 Veats 2 Blasters and I've done it with 3 Defenders, 1 Controller and 1 Blaster. I can't imagine any team of 6 competent players that couldn't do it.
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we tried an all scrapper team, 5 lv 50's and 2 SK's.. most were spines/regen, and a couple were willpower, and i was a DM/SR. everything went fine, up to the last part w/the nictus. we tried bum rushing rom, with my elude on and me taking the intial aggro, but we died pretty fast. we were more or less competant, and ran the ITF several times with success but with a more varied group of course, we just tried it out for kicks.
so the part about having any AT as long as the players are competant, isn't totally true. you don't "need" a particular AT, but having one over another because of a team make up sure makes it a lot easier.
I stand by my statement.
I used hurricane and tornado to knock the ambushes into the water. They don't come back. till later because they use the stairs and not the hills. THAT was fun! I self destructed and came back and they were standing at the points where I had blown them off the cliff.
Forgot to mention one thing. we killed the av and a nicutus sacraficed itself, The last two thou! we sent the AV to the side of the stage and killed him there while half the team kept attacking the healing Nic so it wouldn't rez.
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I still don't get people's "need" for X or Y for this Task Force. I've done it with 1 Brute, 2 Veats 2 Blasters and I've done it with 3 Defenders, 1 Controller and 1 Blaster. I can't imagine any team of 6 competent players that couldn't do it.
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Good luck with getting the universe to bend to your will like that....
Shameless.
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I still don't get people's "need" for X or Y for this Task Force. I've done it with 1 Brute, 2 Veats 2 Blasters and I've done it with 3 Defenders, 1 Controller and 1 Blaster. I can't imagine any team of 6 competent players that couldn't do it.
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Good luck with getting the universe to bend to your will like that....
Shameless.
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I continue to do pick up Imperious Task Forces, on Invincible, on Virtue and Freedom. Any archetype/level welcome as long as we have enough mentors. No sissies allowed. Everyone required to deal piles of damage. "I'm a healer so I don't attack", "I'm a tank I just taunt" and "I'm a kin so I just speed boost and buff" are not valid excuses.
If you, or anyone else, would like to join one keep an eye out in Freedom Events or VU2008 (9?). I'll be spreading to other servers soon as well. Just today we ran with 1 Tank, 1 Brute, 3 Scrappers and 2 Blasters. The one with 4 Controllers, 2 Dominators and 2 Blasters was outrageously unfair.
We average an hour and a half and 50 deaths. We don't skip content. It's a fun time if you are willing to play aggressively
and don't fear death... er... debt.
*EDIT* Now THAT was shameless advertising
Plug noted. I wish you well with encouraging successful ITF PUGs.
However my point was that just because you don't "get the need" that someone else has doesn't make it go away for them.
Shameless.
LoLz 1 1/2 itf,s we do it in under 30mins
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LoLz 1 1/2 itf,s we do it in under 30mins
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Ohh yeah, my mom did it under 29 mins, true story.
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LoLz 1 1/2 itf,s we do it in under 30mins
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Ohh yeah, my mom did it under 29 mins, true story.
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Much too easy to be vulgar with a quote like that 
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I still don't get people's "need" for X or Y for this Task Force. I've done it with 1 Brute, 2 Veats 2 Blasters and I've done it with 3 Defenders, 1 Controller and 1 Blaster. I can't imagine any team of 6 competent players that couldn't do it.
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Don't forget the one we did with 3 defenders, 3 corruptors, and 2 controllers on invincible with enemies buffed. Killem All Run, no speedy tactics, Roughly 50 deaths and about an hour and a half maybe two hours, I was too busy killerating to really notice the time. If there was anything alive in any of the missions at the end of the run, it wasn't our fault, we did our best to killem All. That run was too easy, next time I'm adding Players Debuffed as well.
Note: I'm aware it's possible to speed-run the ITF in under 30 minutes. The record as far as I'm aware is 23 minutes, and I've personally seen 26 minutes. However, I do not as a rule run using speed tactics. I much prefer the Killem All, or at least Kill most of them, runs.
Oh, and for other peoples examples, there's Nihilli's Scrapper Soloing the ITF just this past week. That was some really sweet footwork on the Auto-Hit Nictus. Everyone should skip over the the scrapper forums and check out that particular video, even if you don't watch the whole series of videos. We seriously need to recruit him into our fold.
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Gave the tower thing a try this afternoon. I don't wanna badmouth anyone in particular, but let's just say some of our team wasn't as sharp as they could have been.
Never could get Rom on the corner right with the essences on the other side. I saw some of the team cheaty video to figure out where the best spot looks to be. But it just didn't seem to work with our group. Hopefully can try another time with sg members and really give it a solid go.
Also, we ended up doing the "blast two essences that aren't the healer from 80 ft" thing. First time I have done that. Surprisingly easy, but very time consuming. Another 3+ hour ITF, and that is really sad. But at least I haven't lost one on live yet. That's two at 3+ hours though and that's not much fun.
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lol, I was on that ITF with you. Yeah, 3 hours was a pain, but it wasn't the most optimum ITF team either. Lots of damage, 1 tank and 1 support character (me).
I suggested the cheesy blast the Nictus from range strategy because everything else up to that point failed. On hindsight, we probably should've just charged up and rushed Rom. We had plenty of damage, so it probably would've worked.