Live Patch Notes - 5/12/10

Yeah, so now there are at least two ways to beat them, having a team with decent damage output, or a team with lower damage output but a decent amount of Holds.

Seems reasonable to me.

Hmm, hold on a sec...
The 70% is only considering their Regenerative Aura, right?
They also get 20% from their Resistance.

Well, there will be. The current 50 mag protection will be hard for even a decent amount of holds to get through. At the moment it's probably a better bet to go for outdamaging their regeneration. It may take a few weeks for the change to work its way to live.

Still easier than getting a MoLRSF or MoSTF.

Because I don't think you hear it enough, thank you Castle. Thank you for being reasonable when you could have stuck with the original plan. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to put this fix of the fix in quickly.

And thank you to all the developers for continually trying to make this a game I want to continue to play even though some aspects of both the game and the development cycle frustrate the heck out of me.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

Thank you for this, Castle.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Ummm... The Lady Grey TF already has a mission of locked doors where an objective has to be finished before moving to the next phase.



Wouldn't this be the case with snipers and Immobilization? When I created a MA mission with spawns that had snipers and Emps, the Emps buffed the snipers and they became mobile!




I would have absolutely no problem with speed runs if it weren't for one thing: Same Merit reward for a speed run as with a group that kills-all. The reward-over-time metric is being bypassed here and thus penalizing those who play through.

I've tried to lobby the powers team to move some or all of the Merits of a TF into drops to even out reward-over-time. So that a TF that is sped through in 10 minutes would give 10 Merits. And another team that killed-all over an hour would get about 50 Merits on average in drops plus the 10 Merit reward. Both teams would be earning 60 Merits/hour, but by their own play style. Synapse said he was looking into it, but nothing thus far.

One or the other needs to be fixed: The ability to bypass the intended design of a TF or the static reward for widely disparate time efforts.

Oh how happy that would make me. I don't think you would appreciate the upshot though.

With all the back and forth about Green Mitos and the LGTF as a result, I wish to voice a concern I have abut this note.

I just did a "mission" from Ashwin Lannister Go talk with Alexander and do whatever you can to bring him into protective custody

This "mission" consists of:
1. Talk to Alexander
2. Patrol Independence Port - 5 locations
3. Talk to Alexander
4. Defeat 35 Family
5. Ambush
6. Talk to Alexander
7. Beat all warriors in warehouse
8. Talk to Alexander
Then talk to the original contact again to move on.

Okay, before - I /think/ I would have gotten XP for steps: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 (all but the ambush)
It might have been more like: 2, 4, 7, 8 as some of the talk to missions had already had rewards removed or lowered previously - like the Origin of Power arc had.

Now though? I get XP for the patrol and the door mission. That's it.

Doing the math - at level 26 I think mission complete bonus was 2000xp and 1600inf. So - I went from probably getting 14k XP - possibly as low as 6-8k (as I think even killing XP from most talk to misison it would have retained the final talk mission's XP?) to 4k

I get the whole no XP for "talk to" or "fed-ex" missions, really, I do. But no XP for hunts? At level 26ish finding 35 family may not result in XP (it didn't for me) if you hunt for the closest ones near the train in IP so you can move on with things quickly - no XP. Some kind of reward for running down 35 family would be nice.

I realize that people were abusing the abandon mission ability - but how many were using hunts for this? Fed-ex mission exploiting I understand needed to be stopped, but hunts? Really?

My preference on a fix for this would probably end up taking more time and effort to fix, but I'd rather see one of these:
1. Remove ALL linked missions - make us call the contact after each part - since we get the cell phone numbers after the first mission now - just make everything standalone?

2. At least give us XP for completing hunts. On the ones where you have to go into a hazard zone and may incur more debt on the hunts than you get for XP - they are outside, full debt not half-debt like inside door missions - the complete bonus often helped haul me back out of debt. I rarely get debt on fed-ex missions - though it's happened sometimes with ambushes linked to a few.

3. Boost up the completion bonus for the completed series (say in this case double bonus for the talk to + patrol when you finish the patrol, then the cumulative bonuses for the series of talk, hunt, talk, kill all warriors when you finish with the warehouse mission) or give us all the missed bonuses at once when we turn in the mission with your contact.

When XP has been removed from things like summoned critters from Death Shamans, Rikti Portals, and Assembler clockworks - haven't you generally boosted the XP for killing the thing that does the summoning? I could be wrong, but I think that's the way you dealt with the fact that we're still putting in the work to defeat the summoned critters that we cannot generally prevent from being summoned but getting no reward for defeating the summoned critters. Give us /something/ for doing the missions - as it is, it's far to easy to get on an AE team and power through mission after mission where you never have to go from door to door, never have to hunt outside to get your next door mission, etc.


The other big area I have an issue with this is the Numina TF. There are how many hunt missions? I just went and counted on Paragon Wiki - 16 hunts all over the city, 18 different typs of foes, not a single door mission among all of those hunts. Now, a lot of them are things you won't get XP for, and won't have any issue killing with many toons - but - if I did my math right - 330 kills with no rewards at all for at least 240-270 of the defeats? Previously that was 16 bonuses, now it's no bonus at all - there isn't even a door mission from the time you call for the first hunt to the time you call back in once the 16th one is done. Now you get 6 mission complete bonuses on a TF where you used to get 22 (actually 23 if you used to get one for talking to Azuria who gave you a linked door mission)? That seems rather harsh.

Could this be a little less heavy-handed? Please?

Thank you for insight. I realize this wasn't an "easy" issue to deal with, PR-wise. For what it's worth I think you came to a good decision.

Hmm, yep, you're right the resistance is split between the two powers. That changes the calculations to 571/693 for LGTF and 6540/7660 for the Raid. 700 dps is still well within the limits of a team of SO-slotted damage dealers, although its now approaching the upper limits of such (an intermixed set of damage dealers and damage buffers or resistance debuffers should also be able to reach that value, probably more easily).

Holding the LGTF Mito reduces the numbers to 71/224, so being able to hold the mito reduces the damage you need to somewhere in the general vicinity of 1/3rd what you would need otherwise. So holding the mito is still very meaningful, but its still possible to overcome the lack of holds with reasonable - but plentiful - damage.

I actually think those numbers are even better than the ones I miscalculated originally. The represent a better value for controllers in that one specific phase of the fight.

Quick question(s) - if the actual Hive Hami is mag 50 wouldn't it make more sense to scale the LGTF Hami down to 8 instead of 10?

I ask because you can have a max of 50 people in the hive, and that works out to a 1:1 ratio of magotential person in zone.

If Hami in the LGTF is a scaled down version, shouldn't it still be a 1:1 ratio of people:mag? Otherwise wouldn't the LGTF Hami be considered harder, since you have a 1:1.25 ratio on the holds?

Quite a bit more actually. I just noticed (when the numbers didn't triple as expected) that you're only applying the Resistance to the Regenerated Health, not the base Health (the numbers for Held Mitos seem to apply the Resistance to both though).

So, we'd get (57.132 + 855.1/7)/(1-0.9) = 1792.89 in order to defeat them between heals.

Quick answer: No.

Long answer:
Both the Hive Green Mitos and the LGTF Green Mitos use the same Resistance power, so unless Castle is actually creating a new set of powers for the LGTF Green Mitos (and there has been no indication that he is), the Hive Green Mitos will not be staying at Mag 50 (well, 50-ish) protection either. The Hive Green Mitos should effectively have Mag 1 higher Mez protection due to their Rank, but that's it.

One possible way to get a reading on the popularity of that TF: If I recall correctly, the only triggers for a Riki Invasion are this TF, and the Rikti Invasion weekends. So you can think about how often you see Invasion announcements during regular game play; each one means somebody just finished the LGTF. Obviously, this technique does not count failed attempts.

And that's actually my personal gripe if this TF really does become unpopular for this or some other reason. I've never run it myself, but I enjoy the Zone Invasion events quite a lot.

Actually you only recieved full mission bonus if you were in the zone the hunt took place in when it completed. If you split up and waited in another zone for your turn, like most teams do, you only recieved half the ammount of xp and inf. That in itself was the way they made sure you were not recieving rewards too great for your effort.

Now that they removed the rewards you are spending a good portion of your time on the TF taking a issue1 tour of the city zones and the villian groups. I understand the issue of risk vs reward but there also needs to factor in time to complete the task. If I am forced to do these tasks, which I am on a TF, then I atleast deserve some reward.

I never did like this whole rating thing.

It's the Hamidon - shouldn't it go to 11?

Actually, most of their powers, including the attack power with the -heal/-regen effect, are set up as Auto powers so they don't shut down while held. As is Regenerative Aura, technically - I assume it was not made a toggle so that it could only be shut down by holds and not by disorients or other mezzes.

Fair enough, and the reduction to 10 is appreciated. But I'd still like whoever is in mission design to have a look at what you said is the design, that they're supposed to be almost unkillable without being held, and decide if that's appropriate for the TF. Yes, apparently a very good group was able to do enough damage without holding it, but a number of other groups weren't able to do so. As a player who really liked the LGTF but have had a few groups unable to get past the "bugged" Hami encounter, making that part harder seems to be not adding to fun.

I second this notion.

There really is such a thing as a 'bad customer' that a company is better off without. Some customers are whiny pests that will never be satisfied and the only prudent course of action is to ignore them.