"You are under no obligation to save me" - A scrapperlock thread

I ordinarily only play my main, an Inv/SS tank. It's a fairly old character with by now several billion spent on IOs; as a result I only die rarely if ever. It had even gotten to the point where it was somewhat boring to play her. I didn't even have to pop inspirations, instead I usually gave them away.

That's when I discovered the joy of macros, and the combine inspiration command. After realizing that I didn't need yellows due to Rage, I didn't need blues due to IO:s and I certainly didn't need greens as my health bar rarely moved, I set up a macro to combine whatever was in the tray to Reds and pop one. All with one keystroke.

I spent the first part of the evening in a red mist on the Cimerorian walls, popping Reds as soon as I got down below the damage cap. As long as I didn't stop inspirations were dropping often enough that I managed to keep myself at the cap for most of the time.

At the end I joined a group to round off the evening. Unfortunately I wasn't in a tanking mood from the earlier experiments, so as soon as we got on the mission map I went off on a killing spree away from the group with the goal to have as many victims around me as possible for Footstomp. Yes, NOW I remember that it only hits ten at a time. Didn't think of it back then though. I needed to kill to get reds, so that I could kill to get reds.

Quite a vicious circle, in other words. Luckily, the team was happy to let me go nuts as they had a second tank it was safer to follow around. I on the other hand was attacking everything in sight, pulling in neighbouring groups with ranged attacks to keep the pile around me nice and dense. Together with a scrapper durable enough to survive the stray aggro I think we matched the rest of the group in kill count.

While I was playing a tank I suspect I was in scrapper-lock. That, or I just needed my next fix from the red pills...

ima just throw this in here sry for bad writing skills
So i wz on a Really tank heavy frostfire mission with my Katana/regen scrapper at +3 (i wz fightin at a lower lvl then everyone else it wz really +2) and we had just attacked a huge group and the tanks were doin their thing very well when they decided to bail to up the mish to a higher lvl while i being the scrapper that i am had stacked an AoE with a long animation followed by sands of mu so by the time i wz done animating the tanks were out and i had agroed 4 purples and like 12 reds. i poped all of my defense insp (time waster) and sprinted for the exit. i clicked the door with about 10% health right as an ice shard hit me. You would think i escaped but nooooooooo the game decided to make the door a hot one so when i spawned (with exactly 1hp i checked) the tanks had a fun time of agroing everyone while our forcefeild defender buffed me as much as he could to try and keep me alive. all in all it was pretty freakin amazing

I generally try to avoid Scrapperlock. This is because my Inv/SS tank is often playing under the level I got Physcial Body Mastery at (Or whatever it's called) and while it's IOed out, most are still 40s and common IOs, have are sets ranging from 40 to 50. I just lack the endurance to stay in 'go' mode all the time.

I suppose I can just pop blues like candy, but I'm a more cautious player. I try to hold my Insperations until A) I reach the boss, usually of the Elite varity or B) I'm in a bad spot and not popping something will make me eat the floor. In either case I tend to pop MORE insperations than I need. I know you get them back as you down enemies, but you don't always get back ones you need, so I tend to ease up until it's time to whoop butt.

When I do get into Scrapperlock though all I really need to do is watch the blue bar though. My passives are all triple slotted and my toggles six slotted with IO sets (Well, Invincible is HALF slotted anyway) so unless I'm up agianst a psionic user an Elite Boss or an AV my green bar almost never reaches the 3/4 mark. On a good team with good support I can even take the best an AV has to throw and laugh it off. And as I try to be the first one in (Usually i check to make sure everyone is ready first though) to get all the aggro I can.

Which brings me to the actual story portion.

It wasn't until about levl 47-48 that I really got around to finishing off the main TFs. I did Numia, Citadel and Psyche, but not the first three. On a saturday I was looking to see if I could join a Manti while flying about Steel Canyon when someone (Something 1. I remember the name though) was asking for one more person on a Posi. I figured, hell, have the time even for a Posi which I heard was... tedious in lenght. So I ask to join, and find the team has an elec/elec scrapper... and six controllers, all Something 1-6, all fire/rad. Two were female toons, 2 and 4, the rest were male and were full body suits, no details, faces covered, each a different colour.

I learned that this was actually a family playing together, a man, woman and their four kids. At this point I knew I lucked out: They would trudge through this for the sake of family after all. And I could tank for them, although I lacked Invicibility at 15 so I had to rely on Gauntlet and Taunt.

Once it got started though one thing was made clear: I (And the scrapper) was along for the ride. They didn't even NEED us. Sure, I pulled some aggro, but it never lasted because everything kept DYING. The only time they slowed down was to cast Accelerate Metabolism. All six of them. At the same time. It was like Speed Boost on crack. Then there was the fact that ALL of them dipped into the Leadership power pool... The father joked about how people thought controllers were 'weak'. My response?

"They are, until you get six of them together."

Long story short, butts were kicked, fun was had, and the next day I got the Task Force Commander Badge.

LOL, what a great thread!

When I'm tanking (Lvl 50 Inv/Stone/Stone), it's run and smash time. I just keep going till I'm either asked to stop for a moment or I run outta End. Even then, as long as I've got enough End to run my toggles and keep things bouncing up and down then I'm happy. If you wander off, I make no guarantees.

I don't actually have any scrappers over level 12, but I get Blasterlock sometimes. You know how it is. You try to get a little better angle for a Cone or you accidently chase a quarry into another mob or you piss off the wrong Boss. It happens.

A hundred nazis.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

Oh the stories i can tell about my bots/traps. i get scrapperlock on her almost every time i play her. I used to run a ITF and a LGTF a day, tanking the whole thing (or rather, absorbing the alpha, and then everything dies) and one day, we got a stone tanker, and no kin.

the tanker refused to drop granite, and kept getting mad at me for tanking the mobs and taking point. He even tried the 'hang back and let us die' trick, which really didn't work very well for him. We cleared over half the map before he came back and i just typed in team 'Ya coming? we're almost done here.' When we got the hami, i actually tanked it (with a emp keeping me buffed, not healed) as the stoner tried, and got eaten. It was a fun night, and i think the guy put me on ignore afterwards for doing his job better then him.

One of my stories takes place on my tri-form warshade. It wasnt complete scrapper lock though. I retained enough situational awareness to switch roles for what the team needed at the moment. Namely dwarf if the tank went down, or human if the controller went down. But anyway. This is at level 32, so I'd just gotten unchain essence. Anyway, onto the story.

I'm happily teleporting into the middle of large spawns in dwarf form to eat the alpha, then using black dwarf mire. I frequently follow up by dropping to human form for a sunless mire and finish off with nova form AE. Sometimes I instead use human form blasts to kill one mob, then hit unchain essence. I'd previously warned the empath on the team I don't need healing unless in the red or enemies aren't dying fast. Didn't realize that our empath was the team leader. Or that they were a 'pure' empath gimpfender.

After a while our tanker goes down as he racing me into the next group of enemies. I imediately drop to human form, turn on inky aspect and TP into that group. Once the horde of minions were stunned I switched to dwarf and began taunting and rotating which enemy I smack around. You know, standard tanking tactics. Still not really paying attention. I only saw our tanker die cause he was in my field of view.

After that me and the tanker started to race from enemy group to enemy group, seeing who could reach them first. At some point the controller thought it was a brilliant idea to try tanking too. And face planted faster then the overweight kid in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory fell in the chocolate river. I drop to human form and start to mez everything we find. And through all this I not once called out the voids and quantum gunners. I'd also ran off once to solo a cyst that spawned before the team noticed it.

With the cyst gone I hit rest (no enemies around to fuel Stygian Circle). While recovering endurance I glance at my chat window, and see that our blasters, scrappers, and controller have been chewing me out for stealing their roles in the team. With the next group I once more annihilate everything, then heal to full health/endurance from the corpses.

Aaaaand.... then I find myself loading. I'd been booted from the team. I sent the team leader a PM, and he told me he'd had enough of my stealing everyone else's job on the team. And that my stealing HIS job of healing was the last straw. As I sat there scratching my head over that, I decide to get something to eat.

As I ate some supper I saw the team run back to the mission 3 or 4 times. Finally the tanker zoned out of the mission, alone. He PMed me and said he'd just quit the team. After I'd been booted the party kept getting wiped out on what had previously been 'easy' fights. And the team leader was blaming the tanker for that.

That was also when I found out the gimpath team leader's personal battle tactics turned out to be "healing aura on auto, only heal the tank cause only the tank should be taking damage".

I have but one short story to share.

Me: Katana/WP. The husband: WP/SS.

We decided to try out one of the Ouro TFs.

Yes, the one with the Nazi Extravaganza. We didn't know that was what was going to go down at the time.

I think half of Chicago heard the YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHAW. If there is a mission that encourages scrapperlock, it is that one. So much fun.

I play tanks terribly in the traditional sense, since I play them like a low damage, impossible to kill scrapper in permalock. In fact, if things are hairy, I often have no idea if my teammates are alive or dead, since my eyes are permanently fixated on my blue and green bars and the recharge rates of my powers. My best indication as to whether teammates are alive or dead is often the rate at which stuff is dying around me.

Nonetheless, it is possible to have 'Tanklock', where even the unkillable tank bites off a bit too much. Usually for me these moments are when I think 'I'll just round up up the entire mission's worth of Nemesis', forgetting things like 'the aggro cap' or 'Vengeance stacking 12 times'.

Since I just got send here by Dechs I'll post about the glory that is a level 8 (starting off) SoA team I was on yesterday.

Well actually 7 SoAs and one Demon MM. The Leader was an SoA and seemed to be favouring them over the nubile whip-ladies.

* First mish was a little ropey to be honest. All around level 9 and only 2 of us seemed to have our defensive toggles. So a fair bit of pulling, running around and hoping the Demon/Dark MM beside us would notice we were in the red and about to be planted by a purple Caliban. Got through it though.

Next mission after everone levels up and the Demon/Dark MM who was a bit useless gets replaced by a Demon/Thermal who seems to know what they're doing, suddenly we're all getting hit a lot less, everyone is spamming attacks and scrapperlock begins. A wave of gun toting bad-***** and dart firing, claw wielding dervishes stomps all over the enemies.

Third mish, I realise I forgot to level and go and do so. Three times! So Combat Jumping and Spin. Off we go to Kings to rob the bank. *I decided to monitor my defenses : 42% melee defense, 35% for the others. Now we're at total scrapperlock levels, everyone unleashing cones on everything and anything and us ladies running in to melee range to stab and spin everything. The Hero at the end decided to turn and run after about 3 seconds after seeing her entire retinue of Longbow melt. We of course all run after her, straight into *another PPD ambush. Lots of messy death (theirs, not ours) and mish done.

Serious amounts of fun and no form of teamwork required other than "shoot and stab things in the face". It was like the evolution of scrapperlock. At the start "Man I wish this mastermind would save me". By the end "We have demons on the team?"

We had a bad moment before Lag Hill in the ITF when most the team started dying. I'm about 15ft off the ground, hovering with my bs/sr scrapper facing like six EB Cyclops and Mintaurs.

Mind you, I'd completed my IO build, but I wasn't really fine tuned for soloing AV's or anything extravagant.

Someone comments "You can't tank."

And i'm sitting there, thinking.. 'like hell I can't. I can't kill them, but i'm gonna try.'

Escape didn't even occur to me as eventually something got a lucky hit in and crushed me. Oh, but the single-minded devotion to something's destruction was upon me.

Ever make a five mission AE arc? Being a fanfic writer I like to make my AE missions have a, you know, STORY. I have made one farm but two five mission arcs, the second being the subject of this post, Cimerora and the Kilgoreja Demons. All custom mobs with multiple minions, LTs and bosses. Getting my tank out I called upon any SG members I could. While the team went from 2 to 7 over the course of the mission it was all scrappers or tanks till the last one when a troller joined us. The arc could be called 'Bottled Scrapperlock' due to a lot of mobs aggroing before intended. While we still completed the arc we were often rushing from mob, to mob, to mob. While I try to avoid said Scrapperlock it is fun when you can manage it.

It's also notable for the fact that I respeced my character, dropping Handclap and picking up Unstoppable. I used it twice and find it's a good panic button. The first I crashed on route to the next mob, thankfully BEFORE I reached it. The second was at the end AV.

I popped Unstoppable shortly into the fight so I could tank it for the team. The AV, a fire/invul demon, was able to take quite a pounding and it was a battle to drop it. And just after it fell, JUST after... Unstoppable crashed.

Ten more seconds and I woulda been eating dirt...

Okay, time to share a story that I dealt with... in Sharkshead. *cue mellow guitar*

A friend and I just got our hands on Demon Summoning, he did Thermal Radiation, I did Dark Miasma. We were duoing four man spawns on the mission with Protean right before the hardest mission ever.

Going to the bank and not robbing it. For those of you who have not witnessed stacking fire-shields from Demon Summoners, it is awesome. For those of you who have not played redside due to the sheer amount of demons, Demon Summoning's attacks make you a primarily close range MM, meaning you can actually kick butt with your pets/tank/both. Anyway, we ended up with the final confrontation, Protean at a +4 AV level and me and my friend were plotting something. One of his pets moved around mine, overshot and aggroed Protean.

My friend got owned, badly, and I'm about to crap myself. So I panic and start playing like a spazz. Set minions to protect me, Darkest Night, Shadow Fall, Tar Patch, hit the panic key. The literal panic key which replaced my tilde key, which had been bound to use Howling Twilight. My friend wasn't aware of the power I selected when I levelled immediately before Protean, so he went AFK in the meantime.

It was just me. My demonlings go down, I spawn three more. My demons go down, I spawn two more, upgrade them, Twilight Grasp, Twilight Grasp, Twilight Grasp, Corruption, Twilight Grasp, Twi-F@#! I crashed! My heart starts to race, I did the only thing I could. I slammed the keyboard. Apparently my friend left a parting gift. I realized this when I heard the telltale whoosh of my little warlock popping a Breather. Then I realized he stockpiled me with these. I start slamming them down, hasten and throw all my demons out, upgrade them and get hammered on. A sliver of HP left, enough end and enough time for one last daring act.

I refused to let Protean clock that kill. Howling Twilight, my buddy's is back up, his demons are summoned immediately before his demonlings, upgraded. Mine hold on a split second, they die, I self-destruct. Protean gets thrown against the wall, my buddy goes to town. I realized that my normal playstyle is too zen. I have to be twitchy.

Love the thread some very funny stories.

I made a em/ela brute for soloing AV,s some time ago. I think he was about 43ish give or take. So I'm wandering the streets hunting bosses when I get a team invite something about help with a EB. I cant recall the enemy, I get to the map its a team of 6 including me. The leader starts to brief me on the tactics etc. The EB was in another room out of site.

Perhaps I was a little arrogant but I said just give me 30 seconds then follow. I leap in perma stun him and destroy him under the thirty seconds. Mean while I have the rest of the team giving me warnings like. He is hard to hit, he has a massive attack.

So I don't even bother to kill his minions and complete the mission I just send a "later guys" and hit the orb portal and exit team as he dies.




Team

Time to revive the thread with some new material. If you want the tl;dr version, my mirelock is back.

I used to be pretty awesome with my warshade. Side note: to be awesome with a warshade, you have to play aggressively. More enemies means more performance, so it tends to work best by being at least one group of enemies ahead of the team. This lead to my warshade stealing the show during SG events and people becoming a tad miffed. I stopped playing him for this reason.

Since the new "epic ATs unlock at 20" change, I decided I should write the guide on how to play a Tri-Form Warshade that I've been meaning to write. It made sense to get some practice with my 'shade to make sure I knew what I was talking about. Log in, select badass warshade, form a LGTF, jump into the first spawn of Rikti.

"And Dechs is dead." - Teammate, five seconds in.
"It's ok, I have a rez." - Me.
"And he's dead again." - Another five seconds later.

Seems I was a bit rusty. The rest of the TF wasn't much better for my poor warshade, but I was starting to get comfortable again.

I didn't try soloing a full spawn again until the next TF I ran. This time it was a Kahn and I was smart enough to not solo the Arachnos in the first mission. I waited for the Boomtown "solo the troop portals" mission.

"And Dechs is dead." - Same teammate from before, twenty seconds into the fight.
"But I got the portal!" - Me.

I was getting better, at least, but I still wasn't able to go off on my own like I used to.

Last night I did another Kahn TF and I think I've got my squiddy stuff back. We were in the mission where you have to find the base leader then check most of the glowies in the base. I stealthed one direction, a /dev blaster went the other. The rest of the team wasted no time finding nearby nazi nuts to bust.

"Who are we looking for in here?" - Stealthing Blaster on the other side of the map.
"This guy. *Goes to town on the EB*" -Me.

I did everything mostly right. I eclipsed and mired up, got a dwarf mire on me then dropped to explode one of the corpses. My health was bobbing up and down despite the 85% resistance that Eclipse gave me. I spent what seemed like an eternity hanging on to a blinking red pixel of health while I tried desperately to feed the EB his teeth before he fixed a meal of calamari. I don't know how I did it, but I was alive when the team caught up to me and put the last few hits on the EB to finish him.

Hey fellas... I'm BAAAAACK!