Obviously, player skill matters

Last night I finished an Imperius Taskforce that left me dissatisfied and a bit angry. The team did complete it so if I probably shouldn't be grousing about it; however they completed it in the most painful way possible.

The team line up was a dream line up. 3 kins (including my fire/kin controller), 1 dark defender, 2 scrappers, 1 brute and a stone tank. 3 kins and a dark defender, if piloted competently, means you can basically trivialize any content in this game. You're talking about everyone on the team with max recharge, max speed and max damage with heals and all enemies debuffed for -spd, -rech, -dmg, -res and -regen.

However, that wasn't the case. The team teetered on the edge of collapse against nearly every spawn even though the task force was set at challenge difficulty 1 (heroic). The steam roller was anything but. I could point the fingers at a lot of things..bad builds, players who clearly didn't understand or use their powers or just players who had the right powers but didn't understand when/how to use them (e.g., howling twilight is powerful -regen and AoE stun *as well* as a rez) Yet in the end, I think it came down to player skill.

I'm positive the same AT combinations piloted by competent (and experienced) players might have even set a record on how quickly they could finish that ITF, and could surely do it without the restarts, team wipes and tricks our team needed to finish the task force.

Competent players intrinsically understand what their characters are capable of: how much aggro they can take, when to attack, when to wait for buffs (attack after fulcrum shift is applied not before), and buff teammates without having to ask for said buffs. I think a lot of it comes down to timing, an understanding of enemy mob behavior and what their powers can and cannot do.

I think in some ways, I've gotten to the point that I will take a good player who plays a suboptimal (or even a concept) character over a perfect min-max character almost every time. Skill and experience obviously matter, and last night's example was yet another illustration to prove that fact. Good players on any AT will just figure out how to make it work even with oddball combinations. Poor players will struggle with even the dream line up.

A stone tank that can't hold aggro will cause a dreadful situation when combined with the AoE nature of /kin, but more over, those kinds of sfs are the learning experiences that new players need to have in order to improve, so don't hold too much of a grudge, if ur holding any at all, which it doesnt look like u do.

That may be your dream team, but it's not mine, not by a long shot.

I keep thinking I should change my sig back to "What this team needs is more blasters".

You know, the worst part of it is that it's not like we're demanding some mad skillz from our more lagging behind teammates, but just to use their powersets in a semi-competent fashion.

How many times have you found yourself in a team that's struggling through a TF, and yet the buffer still refuses to cast shields/sb unless he's prompted several times, or that scrapper still insists on soloing that mob that looked at him funny, when everyone else is trying to beat the AV's regen?

Actually: 2 kins, so they can SB each other too. But after that, you're better off getting any other buff/debuff set, they all stack a bit better than kin does. YMMV as always, this is from playing my kin/sonic defenders.

I'd rather have two rads than two kins, let alone 3 unless those kins are controllers. Controls help more than most people give them credit for.

If an All-Kheldian Team can do it, any team composition should be able to do it.

Aside from perhaps doing Hamidon I pretty much could not give a toot about what concepts or powersets people have. Its all gold to me!!!

Edit: I hope they can play tho.

Who cares what the dream team is? Give whatever your version of a dream team to a bunch of people with no skill and no clue and you end up with a team full of disappointment.

The point is that a team like that with competent players would have ripped that TF apart. And for the most part 2-3 competent to good players can carry a whole team, so an experience like what Fury is describing is saying something about the quality of players on that team.