If you want to equate it with something more common, the Hydra head in the sewer trial does the same thing with rikti 'spawns.' They did however fix the holding trick on the head.
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But can I just mention holding,iirc in the succesfull Hami raids I've been on the holding phase lasted ages before we he was held and I'm sure it was longer than the last 2 raids.
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Post ED with a high of 29 controllers - 50+ epic holds and 9 AMs could not establish a hold - tried for almost 2 hours after Mitos defeated.
[/ QUOTE ]I would like to see if we can get higher number than this and have people stick there for more than 2 hours trying to hold jello......
IMO it's not been the lack of patience, in the last raid we tried holding him for about 1 hour, 9.30-10.30, but we were nowhere near any change in his attack rate, so I guess it's not a patience matter, we just need to try and find a different way to kill him..
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Jersey pretty much nailed the plan B for me.From what I've read the Heroes only have to be out of his range when he spawns the mitos to get a reduced mito spawn.
But can I just mention holding,iirc in the succesfull Hami raids I've been on the holding phase lasted ages before we he was held and I'm sure it was longer than the last 2 raids.It has been the lack of patience on all the idiots who have brought the holding phase to an end early and imo people not fully slotting their hold with holds.Remember hiold enhancers are type A and as such with 6 hold enhancers you'll get 105% boost as opposed to 90% which may or may noit make a difference.The same applies for damage dealers,everyone should 6 slot damage in their attacks again as an extra 15% damage will make a big difference on mobs with that many hit points.
Also,and I do apologise for not mentioning earlier,if any of the previous Raid leaders want to help I'll be more than glad of their assistance 
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yes the holding fase lasted a bit, however, that was until we got a FULL hold on him. During those hours we had some periodical holds where his attack rate dropped from 1 blast each 5 seconds (normal rate) to bout 1 blast each 10, 20 seconds etc, till we got the required 2 mins. However, last raid we tried holding him for quite a reasonable amount of time and we didnt even get him past the 5 seconds. Now we might be inpatient, but at that rate IF we could hold him I bet it wouldve taken near 7-8 hours to hold him. If you can motivate people spamming holds for 7-8 hours, you really gotta teach me. Second of all, 6slotting hold wont be that effective I think. For the past 2 raids I reslotted my holds with blind being 3 hold, 1 hami (mez/acc) and 2 recharge. Flash was 3 hold, 3 recharge. IMO stacking multiple lesser power holds in a fast amount of time is better than just wait a bit longer so you can cast a stronger hold which increased strength is trivial. Best slotting for holds imo is 3/3 or 4/2 (hold/recharge). Dont bother with accuracy, with all the buffs going around accuracy will be good enough. With the slotting on blind, blind was recharged as soon as the animation ended. So I could spam them without interrupt times. To overcome his mag you need to stack as much holds in as little time. Therefore I think that fast less-effective holds will be better, stacking goes faster that way. Once he is held for just a mere 1 second, the holding will become easier as you have already reached the "critical" stacking. So for those stacking slots MY recommendation will be, check your recharge speed, slot your hold with recharge enhances so (with buffs from AM, hasten, etc) it can be fired as soon as animation ends or with minimum downtime. Of course however, have a minimal of 3 hold slots, cause you of course need to max out your hold itself. For the AoE holds, well seeing i5 already nerfed those, I think 3/3 is the safest bet for those.
Just my 2 inf, feel free to comment.
"god, how many devs did hami have to sleep with to get ED?"
Total Cat @Stagefright
hiya all,
i wish to tell you my opinion.
Reading the US forums, it's clear that pre-I6 raids used 20-30 holders to successfully hold Hami. Now:
imagining that all of them (say 30) had hold power slotted 4/2 with even lvl hold/recharge: this means that all had an increase of 133.2% on hold. Post I6 this is 100%.
This means 33.2% less than before...
What do you think about just increasing the number of holders by 33%? This will be 30+10=40.Not a big number...
Yes, maybe not all have same slotting but this can be the base to calculate the right number.
Same calcs can be done for all that have to increase *really* accuracy.... more numbers to compensate the ED gap.
About the lag: during last Jersey raid (pre-I6) there were at least 160 peeps inside and the raid was successful.
Yes i never seen hami during that, but worked.
We can manage lag, just go holding....
edit: so i agree with DiscoKing... also a 5% more can do the difference
pre-ED most hami-holders had their holds 6x hold, meaning a rough 200% hold, according to your calculation, if we 6slot now its 110%, so we need to increase amount of holders with 90%? Of course not everybody had 6slots, but we just judge on the general setup that worked. If you also read my post copied from the US boards that after ED 29 trollers + 50+ epics couldnt hold him, I think that 40 is a bit off .
Second of all, it indeed DOES make a difference, even if its 5%. However, you should take into consideration what you are sacrificing for that slot. With a 3/3 hold/recharge on blind, you'll have 95% hold, 95% recharge. According to some enhancement calculators, that means your recharge time will be just bit lower than 4.5 secs without buffs (standard recharge is 9) with a 1.7 secs animation time. So it almost cuts your recharge rate in half (if it werent for the animation time). For simplicity reasons lets say you can fire off 2 3/3 blinds in the same time you fire off 1 6/0 blind. I know this aint exactly true so diminish the numbers a bit. That means you'll have to choose between stacking 2 95% holds vs 1 110% hold, to me thats a rather easy choice. Of course with all the massive buffing going on these numbers are viable to chance and tbh i'll just keep my 4/2 on blind to give it just that extra 5% kick. If somebody else runs same calculations and gets other numbers, please let me know I'm always up for correction .
"god, how many devs did hami have to sleep with to get ED?"
Total Cat @Stagefright
I did only a base example, just to say: if we do some math we'll find the right number. Well increasing by 90% means 48 instead of 40, not a big increase...
According with your suggestion (using 4/2 instead of 6) just increase the number to reach that 200% pre-ED.
Also with 60 we can manage lag i think.
The only problem will be: are there around enough controller to do that?
Hami holds like any other villain I think, just on a larger scale. This means he has a magnitude hold resistance which needs to be overcome first, the kicker is that once this is overcome you must also maintain that magnitude otherwise he'll break out. Essentially, you need to have enough holding power to keep him held and then enough recharge to replace every hold that is on him before that previous version of that hold runs out.
Herein lies the ED issue, both recharge and hold duration play directly into the magnitude of hold you can put on Hamidon. A basic example might be that with three recharge and three hold instead of six recharge you could apply the hold for half the time but twice as often. However, recharge enhancements and buffs give diminishing returns since unlike hold duration they don't enhance from the base value everytime. This means that we are able to essentially floor recharge rate using Accelerate metabolism and still have a 200% boost to hold duration. Now however, we lack the ability to boost hold duration and are unable to reduce recharge rate further so that puts everyone in quite a pickle since there aren't really any other factors that affect our ability to hold him.
There may be hope however. On the issue 5 raid I helped lead, there was a spectacular (and lagtacular) turnout because there was such a long wait between it and the previous raid. We were able to hold Hamidon with the controller turnout without great use of the vanguard medal which boosts hold durations for 1 minute. Reinforcing with holding/attacking blasters after the hold began to stick, it's possible that we could have held Hami with just the sparing initial use of the vanguard medals that Dave Pyrons called for. In Hamidon raids past the real trick was to activate the Vangurads just before 50% to make sure he had no chance of breaking out.
Onto the point though, the Vanguard is an effective way of boosting hold duration, if enough holders turn up to overcome Hami's hold resistance but he keeps breaking out then a simultaneous vanguard surge could provide enough hold duration boost to hold him for I'd say about a minute and a half before he broke out after the vanguards had worn off and total hold magnitude began to decrease again. If we have enough heroes to defeat Hami in about a minute flat the jelly could be ours.
Best case scenario's still about 40 controllers though.
If this
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It hasn't been definitively proven if this has been changed, but Hamidon used to have higher mez resistance the more people were standing in the goo. This may or may not be true now. But even if this has been changed, having more people around the controllers does make their lives difficult in other ways, in particular by adding more lag around them.
[/ QUOTE ]is still true, can we try and decrease the number of people in the citoplasm instead than increasing it?
Maybe 2 full trollers teams with as many */Rad-Kin we can find to help the recharge...
Best case imo wud be 2 full teams of grav/rad or grav/kin for recharge buffs(AM or SB)and to try and have asm many as we can out, leaving the Hami tank as far as taunt can reach and the healers as far away as possibile to hope they can be out of the citoplasm to not increase his mez res..
This is IF it hasn't changed...
another reason why your raid succeeded jers, is cause we had more controllers than actually needed.. if I recall correctly there were 3 full controller teams (PA team lead by hobojack, hold team #1 lead by pyrons and hold team #2 lead by me) plus a half-full controller team, meaning a total of 28 controllers. Pre-ED this was more than enough to hold him.
However, if you read the US posts, not even this amount is enough to hold hami post-ED (29 controllers, 50+ epic holders not able to hold him). Now I dunno how many "unique" high lvl controllers we have, but I doubt we have much more than those 28 we had during past raid. Not to mention that they all have to be available. 40 controllers indeed should be enough (i hope) but I ask you, where we gonna find those 40?
Even with the vanguards I doubt we can beat him with a lower number of controllers. The vanguard indeed increases the hold duration for 1 minute, but can we take him out fast enough, and can we hold him within that minute? IIRC, vanguard is only effective when you can are near to that critical hold. Because even if you increase your hold durations with vanguard, you still need to overcome his magnitude. Do you use that full minute to be able to overcome his mag, by time vanguard wears off you lost it again. During mag's raid we had 20ish controllers. Pre-ED it shouldve been possible to hold him with that amount, hard, but possible. We tried holding him the normal way (saving vanguard till that dread 50% marker) for about 30 mins. After there wasnt even the slightest decrease in attacks from hami, we also thought of "lets kick in vanguard so we can overcome him now, cant be much off". So after that, we all kicked in vanguard. Even with 20 guys using vanguard (and of course the epic holders) the attack rate wouldnt decrease. I personally was able to kick in vanguard 2 or 3 times and even still he wouldnt budge. After that we decided to give up.
However, lets say we CAN hold him vanguard, that leaves us 1 min to take him out. No offense intended, but do you seriously think we can take him out in 1 minute? I believe even in your raid it took longer than 1 minute to take him out after he was held. Now the DPS is lowered thanks to the same ED that affected the holding. With such low damage output I really doubt we can take him out in 1 min.
"god, how many devs did hami have to sleep with to get ED?"
Total Cat @Stagefright
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Now the DPS is lowered thanks to the same ED that affected the holding. With such low damage output I really doubt we can take him out in 1 min.
[/ QUOTE ]Not true, with 1 acc, 3 dmg, 1 end red and 1 recharge u can achieve the same exact dps u had with 1 acc 5 dmg(most common slotting)at that time for ppl without Focused accuracy or Targeting Drone.
Test
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However, lets say we CAN hold him vanguard, that leaves us 1 min to take him out. No offense intended, but do you seriously think we can take him out in 1 minute? I believe even in your raid it took longer than 1 minute to take him out after he was held. Now the DPS is lowered thanks to the same ED that affected the holding. With such low damage output I really doubt we can take him out in 1 min.
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Well on that raid his health started to drop just from the holds when he became held. We called in the blaster holders to reinforce the hold incase he broke out but as health began to drop and the hold was seemingly permanent we just had the blasters cycle attacks between holds to take him down all the way as everyone nearby was already targetting through Midnight Agent or Singularities anyway and we didn't want to lag out which was the major threat.
I've heard of Hamidon going down in 45 seconds before so I hold out hope that with enough controllers vanguarding at 60% health and enough res debuffs it would be possible to get him from 60% to dead in 1 minute. I admit it's not very likely but it's an option if almost but not quite enough controllers turn up.
And getting someone to /tell all the kheldians on the night and politely ask them to get their 50's to the Hive might be an idea.
Hm yes, kinda a "worst case" scenario so to say.. Just hope we can get him down to 60% first though
P.S. forgive the pessimistic tone in most of my posts, I want this raid to succeed as much as you guys do and you got 100% my support. Its just I dont wanna stumble upon problems that mightve been overlooked
"god, how many devs did hami have to sleep with to get ED?"
Total Cat @Stagefright
Hi. Two questions from a non-troller:
1) Let's say we go with 6-slotting for mez, right, diminishing returns notwithstanding. Then let's say we rely on kineticits for +recharge. Would that not cover the points on faster holds raised in this thread, while allowing us that tiniest bit of extra holding power? Maybe that critical edge we need?
2) Also, what about Power Boost. I believe it's part of the energy blaster set, but it's also a defender epic. This boots secondary effects like holds, not so?. If I'm remembering this correctly, then that would be quite advantageous during the holding phase, not so?
yup, powerboost has bout the same effect as vanguard
"god, how many devs did hami have to sleep with to get ED?"
Total Cat @Stagefright
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yup, powerboost has bout the same effect as vanguard
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True, and people are encouraged to use it as much as possible.
And yes, I assume the plan is to use Accelerate metab and kinetics to effectively floor recharge without recred enhancements, allowing for 6 slotting hold to 105%. Although at 105% boost holds are still about 30% shorter than before.
Lots of good ideas guys and I apologise for not entering in the debate till now.
I have been reading a lot of Hami stuff and talking to my mate who plays on the US servers and it appears that we will need 35+ trollers with holds slotted for hold duration only.I feel if we can get 35 trollers then we should have a chance of holding him.I've just looked at the level 50 list of Union toons and it lists 30 trollers there so I reckon Union must have least 40 trollers who've hit 50,wether they still play tho is another matter.
If we can't get the required amount of trollers then I suggest we completely forget about trying to hold him and instead try brute force and resistance de-buffs.My plan would be something like this:
We will need a Hami tank group,PA group,Blaster squad of 16 and 2 Turtle groups(for want of a better word).
The raid will start as normal and follow normal tactics for clearing the mitos.Once that is done everyone moves onto Hami and just attack and debuff.Once he gets to just above 50% everyone except Hami tank and blaster squad leaves the goo to a safe spot(cowards hill should be far enough away).The blaster squad then moves as far away from the hami tank as possible and keeps attacking Hami till he spawns the Mitos.Once spawned,1 turtle moves in and continues to attack Hami while the other takes care of the Mitos.Rinse and repeat for the other spawns.
Now this is a basic plan and requires a lot of co-ordination and a bit of fine tuning but I think if done correctly then we can do it.Plus I don't think it will take that long if a few basics are adhered to like adding the official targetter to your friends list and just following him/her and targetting thru him/her can make the mito phases much easier and quicker.Also getting people not to use the Request channel far any reason,it should be left for the raid leaders to use.
On a final note can I just say that I wasn't having a go at the leaders of the last raid when I was on about the holding phase not lasting long enough.You guys did a marvellous job it was just all the tools who spoilt it.I mean half way thru the holding phase everyone on Cowards Hill,led by a stone tank iirc,cam charging down and stared to whack him.This went on for about 15-20 mins till order was restored but being on the ground I could still see players attacking him long after.I want to try the raid my way(by keeping date secret etc)to try and avoid getting all these idiots in.
*Edit* the people I regard as idiots are in all probability not idiots but rather players who haven't a clue about what is expected in a Hami raid and also that raiding Hamidon is not the most exciting thing to do in CoH and requires huge amounts of patience and self contoll
Forewarning that getting Hami under 50% isn't the hard part, it's keeping him under. His regen is outrageous and since AKAIK it happens every 20 secs in a large chunk we don't have the benefit of trying to match a constant rate of regen 
Imagine surviving a mito spawn only to cause another seconds later. I have confidence in the normal raid plan though, or at least the organisation for everything to go relatively to plan.
Does anyone know tho if when Hami has spawned the mitos he will respawn staight away if he goes above 50% and then reduced to below 50%?That is something I haven't been able to find out.
But I like the tried and trusted method too but we need at least 30+ trollers who have all the their holds slotted for hold duration and unfortunately all the early 50 trollers aren't about as much as we'd like 
Maybe we should scrap my 1st Hami Raid thread and start a new one but only go ahead if we get 30 trollers signd up,what you reckon?
Well the information I had said it was what would happen but I'm willing to bet that's happened very few times and probably not within a short space of time meaning the information could be not entirely relevant or just plain out of date. We could always give it our best shot since even if that went wrong we'd at least be able to reliably plan around it in future.
Dont worry DK, I know you werent havin a go at us . Lets see.. 35 trollers.. that will be quite a hard number to achieve. As you said, we had 30 on the Union50 list, however, how many of those are "unique" controllers? Cause some of them might be alts of each other. That aside, dont forget we can also use any troller from lvl 45 up, which will increase the field a bit.
On the organizing part to get 35 trollers, its hard to reach em all, for 2 reasons. First of all, they might not play their controllers anymore and people may not know their alts to contact them (CoV also plays a great role here). Second of all, they may or may not be that active on the boards anymore not seeing your post bout the raid. Last but not least (ok so I'm increasing the amount to 3..) the not disclosing date might be a problem to some. I, myself, would love to help if I'm able, but the prob is when you got the definate date sorted, some people that promised to help might not be able to make it. Therefore I suggest you just spread the word as much as you can if you team with 45+ trollers, directing them to the boards or (I doubt you'll mind, DK) send you an ingame mail.
Back to the tactics part. Just a question, how many debuffers do you think you need to be able to actually hurt that jelly? Even more so, getting his health below that 50% with just 16 blasters? Think it calls for some numbercrunching during the raid itself as to what our max DPS would be. Wish I could give numbers on that now, but seeing it's new and all and aint something you'll just test in a sec, its on a "we'll see" basis.
Bout the continued spawn of hami hitting 50%, during last raid I had a chat about that with some people as well. We concluded (though of course we may be wrong) that the 50% is a 1-time spawn based on game mechanics in relation to other ambushes (sewer trial, CoV respec). These ambushes only occur when an enemy gets hit past a certain marker (e.g. 50%) but dont occur again until that same marker is hit within a certain amount of time. Of course this is speculative as for all I know, nobody ever battled through a first mito spawn (well, not after the holding tactic was invented anyway). I'm afraid there is no other way to find out than to just test it.
The strategy last raid (if we could get hami to the 50% marker) was almost the same as yours. In making the plan, we assumed that the mitos would spawn all around hami (so not all in 1 spot). The plan was that after hami had spawned mitos, we would rush PAs in first (as with normal mito clearing). After that we would rush in to clear mitos around the hami tank to have an opening in the blob again. After that the main attack group would focus on hami, while the PA droppers kept the mitos busy. This would save precious time clearing mitos, because as jers said, hami has a crazy regen rate. The only flaw with this plan is that the second mito spawn might mess it up a bit.
"god, how many devs did hami have to sleep with to get ED?"
Total Cat @Stagefright
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Bout the continued spawn of hami hitting 50%, during last raid I had a chat about that with some people as well. We concluded (though of course we may be wrong) that the 50% is a 1-time spawn based on game mechanics in relation to other ambushes (sewer trial, CoV respec). These ambushes only occur when an enemy gets hit past a certain marker (e.g. 50%) but dont occur again until that same marker is hit within a certain amount of time. Of course this is speculative as for all I know, nobody ever battled through a first mito spawn (well, not after the holding tactic was invented anyway). I'm afraid there is no other way to find out than to just test it.
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Surely then if this is the case then it makes that tactic a more viable proposition?
Once the mito clearing is done everyone just whacks Hami untill he gets close to 50% then just gradually reduce the number of heroes attacking till we have just enough to beat his regen rate.Once he spawns his mitos everyone else goes back in to clear the mitos.A well prepared and organised turtle wouldn't take too long in taking out the spawned mitos really.
yeah the gradually pulling out of heroes was the plan last time as well, cant see how you can maintain a decent DPS otherwise. Indeed it wont take long with a well organized turtle, but sure it will take bout 30 mins - 1 hr to clear all mitos (hami tank team + 16 blasters = 24 heroes = 24 mitos which is almost same as initial spawn). If in that moment hami isnt attacked he will surely be back to full health after mitos. Like I said, that ambush-trigger will be reset at some point and seeing hamidon is quite unique it might reset once he reaches full hp. However if it indeeds spawns only once at 50% then clearing mitos and letting him regen isnt a prob. My suggestion would be to clear mitos first go, if he then respawns em again when he hits 50% try another tactic that costs less time (so hami can be prevented from regenning). Maybe an idea that while you clear mitos, people keep casting -regen buffs on hami?
"god, how many devs did hami have to sleep with to get ED?"
Total Cat @Stagefright
One wacky idea could be Synchronized Orbital Strike.
The Warburg missiles offer one-shot high damage attack, chemical debuffs damage resistance and biological buffs ally damage.
When enough of these get fired all at once it might help the small number of heroes to get over the 50% threshold more easily. On the other hand they are graphic intensive so they could just lag out everyone.
--
Tenebra 46 dark/dark/dark scrapper
Forked Tongue 22 fire/cold corruptor
Good point dude Nice idea bud
There is also the Warburg temp rad power which debuffs too
I'm gonna get me a rad temp power tonight and try it on something big to see what effect it has
dont pin me down on this (as this is purely speculative) but judging from game mechanics, i dont think the spawn is a power of hami, just an "ambush" as you might say
"god, how many devs did hami have to sleep with to get ED?"
Total Cat @Stagefright