AE Missions

Most of the Developer-created content is designed to be do-able for the solo player. A team composed of similar level (through sidekicking and exemplaring) competent people can overcome most challenges. High-Level Task Forces and Strike Forces have significant challenges, but there are usually several ways to overcome them.

Tank+Healer can be a good tactic, but overall:

1) Deal enough damage to defeat enemy
2) Survive enemy damage
3) Have enough endurance to finish the fight

There are multiple ways this can be accomplished, other than having a damage sponge, and someone to patch them up. An all blaster team could be very effective, as they would concentrate on #1), dishing out massive alpha-strikes to eliminate the most dangerous opponents quickly, or just AoE-ing everything in sight.

Tactically speaking, if you can adjust your tactics and playstyle based on your team's abilities and strengths, and the strengths/weakenesses of your enemies, you'll usually do well.

However, AE missions are created by players, who have no such mandate to be solo-able, or reasonable for groups of competent players.

Some players create missions that tell a story, create a challenge, or just farm rewards.

Therefore, they can range from the stupidly easy, to the ridiculously hard.

Some AE missions are designed by their players to be very easy, or very hard, for their specific powersets and preferred team compositions.

If you have a regular account, not a trial account, you can create your own AE missions, and allow others to play them.

XP gained is based on the level of the character, the level of the defeated enemy or completed mission, and if the character has XP debt, patrol XP, and size of group.

As previously mentioned, check www.paragonwiki.com for more info.

Generally, the greater the challenge, the more xp gained. In a group, xp is split, but there is a bonus for teaming, and good teams can do very well.

Everyone else here explained how it works better than I could have.

I just wanted to give some advice, since you seem to be new to the game: Spend some time running normal (non-AE) content, instead of just diving into AE and staying there.

If you spend all your time in AE there are things you will not learn that you otherwise would figure out just by playing normally.

There has been much complaining about "AE Babies" of late. An AE Baby is a player with a high level character that knows little or nothing about the game outside of AE. Generally they don't understand how their powers work very well (if at all) and have very little idea of how to work well with players using other powers. The only real way to avoid becoming one by accident is to spend time doing things other than AE missions. Other players are generally pretty helpful here, but it's kind of a crap shoot finding one that can answer your questions in the AE building. They could be knowledgeable and helpful, or they could know as much as you do and give you incorrect information because they don't want to admit they don't know.

I'm not going to stand on a soapbox and preach against AE. I think it's a wonderful feature, it just happens to be being abused by some players. I just wanted to give you some advice so you can avoid becoming an AE Baby. You and your future teammates will thank me later.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

You forgot 4. have enough buffs or control to never take damage to begin with.