Powersets/settings that should be used sparingly
By
AUTAUMNFYRE,
Posted on: 2009-04-20 10:56 in Mission Architect
it isn't so much the sets as the setting.
regen doesn't do much at low - on extreme it is extremely powerful.
but as a general rule heals, controls, and debuffs should only be in lt's or bosses.
keep in mind - people's idea of what is fun varies. Some people just want to face AV's - anything less is too easy.
Shields of the bubbles/sonic flavor, on Extream Lut or Bosses will provide them with a stackable defense and resistance bonus. 4 Luts with Dispersion Bubble, and 2 Sonic Shield Bosses.... makes for a LONG fight on every mob.
Okay, so no ninjutsu, trick arrow, energy aura, shields, super reflexes, dark melee, dark armor, regen, controls, force fields, sonic resonance, most control sets...
...so what CAN we use?
I don't mean that in a snide way, I'm just wondering what sets are safe to use. Lately all I read about are sets which are too dangerous to use in MA, but finding GOOD combos which make enemies that aren't overpowered is getting difficult.
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You might wish to note that some of these problems are being caused by giving these powersets to, f'r'ex, minions on Hard or Extreme difficulty. I know that Regen is a pretty soft powerset when used on Standard (two passive regen boosters and the mez protect), but on Hard or Extreme it becomes a PITA. Same to Trick Arrow -- the powers it grants to higher diff customs make it much more powerful than it is on Standard diff.
I'm starting to think that the problem is less with what powersets are used (except Ninjitsu) and more with what difficulty they're being used at.
she who needs no mic
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- Ninjitsu: it's been well-advertised on these forums that this powerset is broken, and apparently some mission creators know it's broken, yet still insist on putting it in their missions. Please don't use it until it's fixed. The overkill in damage is pretty intense, and non-melee ATs are obliterated almost instantly.
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Sorry, but when I need an enemy that has a cloaking/hidind concept, ninjitsu is currently the only powerset that allows me to do this. So I use it. Sparingly, but I use it. My suggestion here is to give your nin-using enemies weaknesses; like making them easy to mez and such.
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- Trick Arrow: huh? Yep. Flash arrow goes off **constantly** and it's no fun fighting blind or converting all your insps to accuracies every time you see a trick arrow minion. Note to fire control builds: be mindful that Smoke can do the same thing if being spammed by several npcs.
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Add smoke grenade from /devices to that list. 
Also, something you missed: minions with dark miasma love spamming tar patch, which is even worse than caltrops. 
Watch what critters you give these things to.
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
Characters
Your point about settings (first of a few people to comment on this) is quite valid. I'll adjust my comments accordingly.
I'm with you on this one. What Can we use? If I can't use either Defense-based armors OR Dark armor what does that leave? fire?
I'm going with my guys as is set to "Standard" except one boss. I'll see how it goes in testing.
This is getting annoying. I wish to heaven they had allowed us access to the npc powers or given us the ability to edit standard npc's added to custom groups. I'd love it if I could "Add to Custom" then have the edit pop up with the costume creator that includes a "Skip" button if you don't want to change their look and proceed to the name/description page.
Dark Miasma / Dark Melee Minions, Trick Arrow / Stone Control Luts, and PSI Assault/Stone Armor Bosses....
* goes off to make "Another Rikti Farm" *
My point about defense-based powersets came up due to my experience with a DM/SR Elite Boss, as well as a mission that was overrun with shield defense minions & lieuts. My comments aren't meant to say **never** use them, just be careful or you'll make a very tedious mission. Those powersets are particularly hard on characters that rely on controls.
I think it is more important to be able to label to ARCs clearly so people can find what they want - on one end, some want challenging unpredictable ARCs that take real coordinated team work while on the opposite end others want simple farms. The great thing about MA is it allows for both and everything in between. The bad thing about MA is that it is very difficult if not impossible to search for exactly what you want. Fix the search problems and the rest of this won't matter.
Yea, having a separation for what kind of thing your building, like "challenge arcs", "exp focused arcs", "story arcs", would be a nice setup to have to keep things categorized.
As for powers, i went into one mission, and i believe the author wanted to have one boss at the end that was an extreme gravity control/extreme ice armor boss, but the problem was, he didnt realize that in boss form, the boss would be spawning in every spawn on larger team sizes. This led to, of course, a large team getting usually at least one every spawn, and when they have singularity out and then go into hibernation, much less that they have hibernation in the first place.....annoying. And short of making the boss still a boss but in a different custom enemy group, one has to make the boss an EB or AV for that not to happen (as far as i know).
Also, control sets in general are a pain in the butt if every minion has them, as are minions and leuis with good heals. If we want more difficulty, we can always up our diff to invincible as audiences of the arc.
Extreme mind control, and extreme dark miasma should also be used sparingly imo, because very little players have fear protection, and fears are quite overpowered when used on players.
Also, giving a thugs summoner gang war should be used sparingly as well. Gang war doesnt die when the caster does, so they will keep on attacking, it also can start to cause a lot of lag if the leui's have it and there is more than one, and minions can also get this move. I learned this from trying to make an ultimate pet mission. Even though it can be interesting, it wont get many ratings because its too much of a niche, and can easily cause people to start to die due to the fact that they cant target the enemies causing them high amounts of damage because they have to hit tab so much.
And for the love of all that's holy, vary up your custom mobs. I know file space is limited. But even set on Standard, a lot of powersets become problematic when every minion has it. I play on Unyielding; when I go into a mission and every minion is the same I immediately cringe, and prepare to hit "Go to Hospital" and then immediately afterward the "quit arc" button.
Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper
Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World
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- Trick Arrow: huh? Yep. Flash arrow goes off **constantly**
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Only it you set them to Standard so that is one of the only powers they use. On Hard and Extreme they use it much less often as they have a large list to cycle through, and even then I never get blinded unless it's 2 or more arrows at once and I am not using any +perception at the time.
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- Defense-based armor sets (e.g., energy, shield, SR); on minions, the fights take forever, and on EBs+, the fights are almost impossible without an ungodly amount of acc or to-hit buffs. If you must use them, I'd suggest limiting the use to a few lieutenants or a rare boss, but please don't overdo it. See my example below, too.
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Funny, I have an large villain group where nearly every one of them has Energy Aura, including the minions. Usually I get complaints that they die too easily.
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- Regen: please, never, never, never put on minions. One mission arc I went on with my controller had wandering patrols of regen minions. The status protection was bad enough, but then these mobs revived when they finally went down. After a few rounds of this, I quit in frustration.
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Only a Hard Regen LT can revive. The minions don't get that power no matter what.
One of the rules of thumb I use with any powersets is minions get the easiest settings for both primary/secondary. lts get the next highest on primary/secondary. Bosses get the highest on primary but same as lts on secondary. Elite bosses and AVs...anything goes.
Extreme Willpower tho seems to be a universal no-no even for AVs. You must have a team designed to kill AVs in order to take Extreme willpower AVs.
Playtesting thru this setup has yeilded some good results.
Carrion Creepers is one power that if I see being used, I will quit the arc immediately. Last one I was on where this was being used, at least three in each group would throw these down. Pretty much same effect as caltrops except it interferes with targetting and visually aquiring the little bloody buggers that are casting them.
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Only a Hard Regen LT can revive. The minions don't get that power no matter what.
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It might have been another powerset (Willpower?) - I had lots of fireworks going off, and at the time, I assumed it was Regen. The last time I ran into the multiple revives, I'm certain it was a group of minions. Very, very annoying.
Also note that Dark Armor on even Minions makes them completely immune to holds. This can be complicated if you have other minions which use Blaster (so at standard they basically use all their attacks even when held). A large group of those and no Mezer will like you much.
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You can't please everyone, so lets concentrate on me.
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Only a Hard Regen LT can revive. The minions don't get that power no matter what.
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It might have been another powerset (Willpower?) - I had lots of fireworks going off, and at the time, I assumed it was Regen. The last time I ran into the multiple revives, I'm certain it was a group of minions. Very, very annoying.
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Freakshow?
>.>
I keed, I keed!
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Id say you can use all of those.. Its not what you use, its how you use it.
the person is making notes on how these powers can suck, and i pretty much agree with all of them. Its about balancing out stuff.
CoT doesnt have all ghosts and spectrial lords, they have archers and mages, and fire breathing guys and other things to fill up the space.
Say i put a dark, ice, fire, minions, Dark armor/BS leut and a TA boss, this mob would probly work pretty defecent..
But if i went, 3 Ice minions, 2 TA/fire leuts and 1 DA/DM bosss.. that just went from, a mob that probly wasnt to hard to one that is insainly impossible
They just need to let us pick and choose powers individually for custom enemies and things would be much easier to balance.
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Okay i do agree with the idea about mezs to a minimum. I made an arc (see signature) with a couple mezs. At first I thought it would not be a good idea, but after experimenting I found out that a minion combination i used (plant *standard*/Archery *standard*) only held the player on very few occasions. I liked this effect and as a result I have kept it.
I made a dark miasma custom group on test.... ive never hated doing my own arc so much in my life 
" I don't let me kids play on the Freedom Server" -Oya
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Only a Hard Regen LT can revive. The minions don't get that power no matter what.
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It might have been another powerset (Willpower?) - I had lots of fireworks going off, and at the time, I assumed it was Regen. The last time I ran into the multiple revives, I'm certain it was a group of minions. Very, very annoying.
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Only a Hard Willpower LT can revive. The Rezz powers are tier-8s and tier-9s, Minions don't get those.
I always hate running into a plant controller enemy as any character without slow resistance. Carrion creepers is an invisible, invincible pet with a slow aura.
It's caused me to quit a few otherwise interesting MA arcs.
You just confused me. Carrion Creepers are neither invisible nor invincible.
Dec out.
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Only a Hard Regen LT can revive. The minions don't get that power no matter what.
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It might have been another powerset (Willpower?) - I had lots of fireworks going off, and at the time, I assumed it was Regen. The last time I ran into the multiple revives, I'm certain it was a group of minions. Very, very annoying.
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Only a Hard Willpower LT can revive. The Rezz powers are tier-8s and tier-9s, Minions don't get those.
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They were minions. I remember checking their difficulty level, and being very frustrated. The powerset I was unsure about, but not the rank.
My initial experience with running MA missions is that people are not doing enough playtesting of their own material. As some other posts have commented, some unreasonably difficult and tedious missions are being constructed while the player base gets used to balancing in the MA.
I wanted to generate some constructive criticism of the powerset choices being used too often, or incorrectly, in the early days of MA. I think some creators simply need a bit more notice that the powersets they enjoy playing with their characters are not so much fun to play against.
My comments below (and any suggestions that follow) address the difficulty settings where the annoying problems appear. In some cases, the most imbalancing features of a powerset will appear only when set to Extreme.
Note that, like most posts, this is all a matter of opinion. Feel free to offer counterarguments and other perspectives, but please don't merely offer the useless comment "well that's just your opinion."
- Ninjitsu: it's been well-advertised on these forums that this powerset is broken, and apparently some mission creators know it's broken, yet still insist on putting it in their missions. Please don't use it until it's fixed. The overkill in damage is pretty intense, and non-melee ATs are obliterated almost instantly.
- Trick Arrow: huh? Yep. Flash arrow goes off **constantly** and it's no fun fighting blind or converting all your insps to accuracies every time you see a trick arrow minion. Note to fire control builds: be mindful that Smoke can do the same thing if being spammed by several npcs.
- Defense-based armor sets (e.g., energy, shield, SR); on minions, the fights take forever, and on EBs+, the fights are almost impossible without an ungodly amount of acc or to-hit buffs. If you must use them, I'd suggest limiting the use to a few lieutenants or a rare boss, but please don't overdo it. See my example below, too.
- Dark Melee: on NPCs, the self-heal gets a lot of work, and the debuff stacks up pretty quickly. This powerset is why people avoid CoT missions in the early levels. Don't spam this one all over your minions and lieuts - it's a very tough set. One MA mission that I ran last night had an EB with Dark Melee & SR, a top AV-killing build when used by scrappers. This EB took 25 min to put down on a 1-hour timed mission advertised as "Short," and was located in a large Orenbega map. Bad idea.
- Dark armor: don't put this on an EB or AV, please. Ghost Widow is enough of a pain with it, so thank you, that type of frustrating battle is already in the game. You're not making a wonderful epic encounter if your EB heals back up to full after 10 minutes of fighting; you're making a 1-star rating.
- Revive: tons of reviving mobs are very annoying. At least Freaks do it somewhat randomly - if a custom npc in the MA has a revive power, they seem to do it very consistently. One mission that my controller started had a status protected, reviving patrol of mobs in the front. They took a **long** time to put down since they healed fast, ran all over the place, resisted all my controls, and then revived when they went down (my memory of the fight was that they were minions, but I've since been corrected and they must have been lieuts). After a few rounds of this, I quit in frustration. Whatever the powerset or difficulty, multiple reviving mobs makes for a very annoying mission. People making farm missions may want their mobs to behave like that, but it really gets old fast.
- Controls: I ran a mission last night where all the minions and all the lieutenants spammed hold constantly. Another mission had all-cold mobs slow me down to virtually no movement and no recharge (at least there was a theme to the special effect). Again, bad idea. Non-melee will be controlled very quickly, and melee will get these attacks stacked against them fairly quickly. It's not fun if you can't fight back for a large part of the mission. Please limit these types of effects to rare encounters. Even if you expect players to be prepared with some break-frees, they shouldn't be so necessary that they're all used up in the first 5 minutes of a mission.
- Status protection: yes, armor sets do help define npcs somewhat, and it's hard not to include them when conceptualizing an npc or custom gang. However, armor sets will have status protection by a certain level. When added to the natural status protection of npcs (which it does in the MA), controllers and dominators might as well go home. Be careful to check how often your npcs will have status protection in a mission, keeping in mind the fate of the control-dependent ATs.
Remember - trying out your mission with your favorite character doesn't mean it will work with a wide audience, especially if your favorite character is an AV killer. Try out the mission solo with that alt that you never quite got out of the 'teens (if you're going for a wide level range), or ask a friend to try it out. Some clever folks have trotted out missions that are simply called "test my custom gang, please," which is a great idea if you want to get early feedback without making a whole arc.
Please offer your own observations on powersets that should be used on a limited basis. A good separate thread might be generated by someone else on combinations that are challenging but aren't overkill.
**EDIT: Post edited to reflect input from concerning settings and revive.