So 3 minions=1 PC, right?

I don't see a single point in Gavin's post where he suggests that IO's are required. He was giving you an option that might improve your character's ability. If you want to arbitrarily dismiss the idea without considering it, then that's on you.

Then again, that's pretty much what you do in every thread you post whining about something in the game that is 'too hard'. You rant about something that most players have no problem dealing with, a bunch of posters show up and waste their time giving you suggestions trying to be helpful, and you ignore them all and keep right on complaining.

Oh well...

They aren't required. You're choosing to play with optional difficulty increase. IOs make it easier to manage that difficulty increase. If you don't want to use IOs, and you don't want challenges as hard as what you faced in the OP, then don't increase your difficulty.

You have two options.

#1 Turn your difficulty down to match your skill level and character build.

#2 Turn your build's power higher to match your difficulty level.

IO's are the best way to achieve #2. You can also add more accuracy SOs and fewer damage SOs. Or take slots from other powers and add them to your attacks. But I think you'll have more fun following my frankenslotting advice and it will save you inf also.

They are not required, they are simply more efficient and help you achieve #2 easier since you are not interested in #1.

That is also very much going to be a factor fo teh powersets and AT's as well as the boss in question. For instance, my BS/Regen can solo over 18 Crey tanks of various kinds including a large number of the power tank lieuts. I can, and have, had 10 of them attacking me and gotten up to make a cup of tea, then came back and killed them. On the other hand, one lone Roman Boss can get a pair of back to back crits and I'm down.

That's not because there is anything wrong with the difficulty, or he was too high level, it's because Regen as a powerset is very strong against slow ongoing damage and very weak against spike damage.

Similarly, I have an elec/elec brute who can handle rikti mobs of nearly any size and level. But many smashing/lethal enemies like nemesis and freaks tear her to pieces. She has 90% resistance to energy, but only ~30% to smashing/lethal. Again, not a problem with the difficulty, but simply the fact that some builds are better against some enemies.

that's why I asked you above, what AT, what Powerset, and what enemy. It makes a big difference.

Much more of a difference than +1 or +2 levels.

Also, I will point out that at low levels the difference between a boss and a lieutenant is a joke. I mean below level 10. A level 1 Boss has 108hp a level 1 Lieut has 73. The boss is worth 5 times the experience.

By level 20 the boss has 674hp and the lieut only has 359. The boss is still worth the same x5 exp but now he has nearly twice as many hit points. Way, way tougher than the lieut.

Low level, bosses are squishy pinatas full of candy and xp. Mid level they rapidly become dangerous.

Actually, I generally find them to be a hassle to make. I don't play this game to craft. I play to be a super-hero.

You are basically saying that you have to have IOs to play 'effectively'. Another shut up and learn to play.

+0/x1 settings should be the basic playing level for anyone that isn't playing a 'gimped' build like an Empath with almost no attacks.

A duo (like playing with my friend that joined the game because of me) should not require special settings (lowering difficulty, IO slotting, etc.)

That should be the *basic* settings. I'm sure part of the problem was that the Widow is slightly overly twinked, but it is not fun.

Part of that I think is because they are holding over the -1 Sidekick level... even though I think more people would be happier being even level with their team/mission leader.

I'd recheck your setting if you're having difficulty. I solo'ed and duo'ed with unslotted blasters and defenders (of varing variety) at 0/0 with no problem.

We did Numina the other day where the leader was 35 which meant we all got exemped down to the same level, the mobs were ranging from 39-42 with the occasional group being 43 in the first mission no matter which setting we tried. In the end we changed leader so we were all 40 apart from the previous leader who got sidekicked to 39.

This is something they really need to tweak as it makes the level range of the TF rather pointless.

No, I agreed with other posters that they're an option.

Actually, +0/x1 is the baseline setting. I misread the setting as +1/x1. So you haven't actually increased your difficulty. (The default, +0/x0 is functionally identical to +0/x1, and really seems to be more of a misleading labeling than anything.)

It doesn't. While I concur that Night Widows can be quite challenging, I never had that much of a problem with them, and I soloed quite a few villains through them before we even had IOs. I don't know what to tell you. Inspirations are expected to be used in the game.

I'm not sure how this is part of the issue if the bosses can be defeated solo. Even a -1 sidekick is more help than no one at all, and if they can be defeated with no help at all (and they can), then that shouldn't be the problem.

...really? He did not say lrn2play... You don't have to play at +1. You dont have to use IO's You can turn it back down to +0. If you still can't beat the widow/whatever, try to use a different aproach.

One piece of advice I give to all squishies, is don't stand infront of a boss that deals cones. Widows deal cones. Even if your sidekick is taking no aggro at all, he is going to be taking just as much damage as you. You might recommend to him to stand behind the boss and attack it.

If you are playing at +0/1, Then your original post where it says the mission is being run at +1 to the leader is misleading and easily confused.

From http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Task_Force:

On a "signature" Task Force, enemies will spawn based on the task force's maximum level (and the leader's notoriety setting) regardless of the team's composition. Therefore Signature Task Forces are usually done by characters at (or above) the top of the level range. The majority of Task Forces are considered signature.

A Non-signature Task Force spawns according to the highest level person on the team (and the leader's notoriety setting). These include: Moonfire, Hess, Imperious and all four of the Shadow Shard task forces.

I do wonder what the point of that is, though. It's really saying "hey, don't do this till you're at the top end of the range, or get someone who is to start it for you". It just seems kind of needless.

Which I _think_ means you were Warshading.

I don't have a L20 blaster, but I do have a L14 one (sonic/elec). I'm going to try soloing an Arachnos mission, +0/x2 with bosses, right now, see what happens.

- - -

Does three purples and a red count as "massive insp use?" Because that's what I took and I won easily (boss and one minion, plus a clueless minion in back who didn't join the fight.) I actually had more trouble with two +1 lieuts and a minion, unInspired. (Sonic/Elec blaster, without any vet powers or temp powers, green DO's.)

It's not a perfect test- I'm level 14 instead of 20, with no sidekick- but it's what I could test with what I had.

Nope, I gave at least three options. One included using only SOs. You have chosen to ignore that one, and deliberately misinterpret the other two.

In your first post you said that you "add +1 level to the primary mission holder". That means you turned the difficulty up above normal. I said, turn it back to normal if you can't handle the increase.

I also said choose a different enemy group to face, because some are harder than others. Lots of people avoid the circle of thorns, malta, and knives of artemis. They are a pain, much harder than their levels suggest, and there is no bonus reward for going after them, so many people skip them altogether. If you have an issue with arachnos, then just fight council, nemesis, freaks, lost, rikti, etc. There are a ton of options. At your level head to Striga or Croatoa and do the stories there, no arachnos great content, no changes to your build required.

I also said add one extra slot to your attacks, or change from 1 acc 2 dam to 2 acc 1 dam.

None of these are "learn to play" none of them are "IOs are needed".

If you don't want to craft, then buy them finished. The ones I recommended you should be able to get for very cheap, like 200k or less crafted. I bought a few attack IOs redside yesterday for 65k to 150k crafted.

Your experience is totally unrelated to the sidekick mechanics. Let me give you an example, let's say in some random sport Chicago always beats LA but always looses to NY. Meanwhile NY always looses to LA. If Chicago went around saying that NY was way too good and twinked and no fun and the league needed to change the rules to make it a fair contest, LA would be really confused. LA would tell them, try to change your strategy, your opening lineup goes right into NY's strengths, or whatever. NY is fine, we kick their *** all the time. And clearly it's not a "learn to play" issue because Chicago takes down LA, so they obviously know how to play. It's just this one matchup, for whatever reason, is harder for them.

It's not the sidekick mechanic. That's trying to pass the buck and dodge responsibility. Some enemies require different tactics and different builds than others. And some are just never going to be easy for a warshade. Zombies resist negative damage heavily, so do the circle of thorns. They will always be harder for you to kill. Widows have unusually high defense and an attack that debuffs your tohit. If you do not slot extra accuracy to compensate, you will miss more often. That is all there is to it. The same thing will happen at any level.

You can either adapt to the different enemies, or you can pick your fights. But blaming the devs for your build not working equally well against 100% of the enemies is silly.

No, I said it spawned a +1 to the mentor, which happens *normally* during play.

Which I had pointed out 1 acc is fairly standard (and one DO is what a lot of level 17+ people have slotted.)

That *is* telling me how to play. I'm not a big fan of buying/selling items to make enhancements. It makes the game a grind (ie. work) instead of play.

I buy them only sometimes, because I would rather play than grind recipes and salvage.

Actually, I was noting that since they redid the difficulty (because duos did not used to spawn bosses ever for 13ish issues) that they've made a lot of piecemeal changes to how teaming and difficulty affects gameplay.

Bosses spawning on Duos is part of that. Specifically placed bosses in missions are still harder than Lts., even when they are downgraded. They hit harder and have higher resistances than a comparable Lt. of their own faction (I found that out the hard way running into a downgraded Troll boss.) So to say that they are 'just hit point' differences doesn't fully match their difficulty.

Since the last two or three issues, where they have been playing with the difficulty, adding 'random' spawns that are supposed to emulate the difficulty of the base difficulty, but switching around the types of mobs more (probably to try to make combat slightly more interesting, a laudable goal.)

So when my friend joined up, we started duoning a lot.

When they first did this about a ten months ago, I started to run into fairly broken things. Boss and Lts. from a single click from Trick or Treating.

Random spawns in some missions were 3 Lts. and five minions (and this was not an over-lapping spawn. It was one spawn.)

So I've been carefully noting the spawn difficulty for duos, because they've been frankly unfun and dangerous to play against.

In fact, in the last ten months or so, I've probably quit playing at night in disgust at team wiping with my friend more than I had in the previous five years.

There is something wrong with some of the spawns. Somebody ran some numbers and said, 'This should match the proper difficulty per player,' and forgot to actually take into account front-loaded, back-loaded and the random +1 mobs.

Night Widows are awful at low levels. I was running a team today doing 21 missions at +2. The first two missions were fine and then we pulled an Arachnos mission and we ground to a halt. We never team wiped, but are nice, steam-rolling speed was slowed to a crawl.

The problem, as I see it, is that a lot of the Arachnos deal exotic damage (re: PSI) AND have some really nasty secondary effects added onto their attacks (- rech, - to hit, blindness, et all).

Before SOs this becomes utterly horrible to wade through.

Then I misinterpreted. The way you phrased it it sounds like you turned it up +1. Sorry.

I find there really is no standard. Some people love the challenge of +2/3/4 setting, some like -1/x3/4/5. Those two groups will have totally different slotting. Brutes rarely slot damage because they can cap on fury for free so why bother. There is no standard. People sometimes think there is, but there really isn't. What there are, are percentage chance to hit based on your level, the enemy's level, and your power and accuracy slotting. Against a +2 enemy if you want to maintain an 85% to hit or better, 1 acc is not enough. Standard for those who run at +2 difficulty is to run 50-60% slotted. On DOs that means up to 4 of them. And that is standard in the terms of the people who run that difficulty. Some like to do the Yin-Os from Faultline to save on slots. Standard for people who run at -1 is to skimp on accuracy in favor of endurance and recharge. that's also standard.

If giving you options and letting you pick is telling you how to play, then you have a truly unique and non-standard definition that doesn't fit with pretty much anyone else who speaks English.

Again and expanded:
1. turn down the difficulty for arachnos missions (and any others that are harder for your particular build and duo), turn it back up afterward.
2. slot more acc less damage
2a. version 1 use IOs
2b. version 2 using your existing 3 slots go 2 acc 1 dam instead of 1 acc 2 dam
2c. version 3 add 1 extra slot for accuracy
2d. pop yellows as needed
2e. use your second build to have a team build with leadership
2f. talk your partner into getting leadership =)
3. skip arachnos missions and fight other enemies (at your level I enjoyed Croatoa and Striga, but the Warshade specific story arc is very fun also)
4. Start a pug for arachnos missions and then leave again afterward
5. Work on pulls and controls (warshades have stuns, knockback, holds, immobilizes and every attack slows) to spread out the enemy and take them piecemeal.
6. On my regen I used to like to slow bosses and run them in circles around pillars and other obstacles while I healed up faster than they did. You can do the same while a key power recharges.

I'm sure there are more options too.

So buy the recipes and salvage. Or craft only what drops by sheer luck. No grinding necessary. What I do is I put everything that drops on the market for less than 100inf unless I know it is worth more than 1 million. When I shop, I click the "for sale" and only buy what is available right now. No marketing, no farming, no trading inf from character to character, No grinding and I only craft if I need to and feel like it. I'm with you on preferring to play. It really is a lot easier to do than I think you give it credit for. Hell, I find the market faster than selling to quartermasters because I can dump whole stacks at once. And it's always nice when a common salvage that vendors for 250, which I listed for 1 sells for 100k. =)

Actually this is a mix of correct and partly correct. So bosses did used to spawn, it was rarer but not never.

Also, downgraded bosses do not technically hit harder than lieuts, what happens is they tend to have better powers. So if both a lieut and a downgraded-boss hit you whit "hack" from the broadsword set it would deal the exact same damage. But the downgraded boss might also have disembowel which has a higher base damage than hack, and the lieut probably doesn't have it. Also, the boss probably has more powers so spends less time waiting on recharge before taking his next swing.

So you are right that it is more than just HP, but downgraded bosses don't have a higher damage modifier, they do (as you said) have better powers.

that said, on my squishiest characters I don't turn bosses off until 17-20 (depending on the character) and I turn them back on again as soon as possible because they are absolutely the most efficient way to level (measured in both damage dealt per exp gained and endurance spent per exp gained).

Actually, if you experiment with making missions in AE you can see exactly what's happening.

There is a mission setting called pacing. Which has values from flat, random, up, down, etc. In a "flat" mission every spawn is exactly the level of the mission. In a random, they vary from +1 to -1. In up, they start at -1 and build to +1 in the back.

Next, some mission components (guarded hostages, destructible objects, ambushes, fixed bosses, etc) have a secondary component for the spawn from easy-med-hard. When you get a +1 spawn from pacing combined with a hard setting, you get (usually but it varies) one or two extra mobs and the whole group at +1. Add to this that as a warshade you trigger quantums, voids and later on cysts so you can end up with three extras at +1.

Solo at 0/0 a flat-medium spawn will be two +0 minions or one lieut. Random it might also include three -1 minions, or two -1 minions and one -1 lieut or one +1 lieut. All those are considered "medium" for a solo 0/0 setting. Add one player and add either +1 level or 1-2 minion or 1 lieut to any of those.

A hard or +1 encounter starts with anything from above and adds 1 more minion, or ups the level. Or it might be a solo boss against a solo player at 0/0. A hard +1 due to pacing might even be a +1 boss. Add an extra player and that boss might have a minion or two with hard pacing and is more likely to be +1 than +0.

As far as I know the only change recently was they made the variety more common, not implemented it from scratch. My understanding was that it was always like this, just really rarely varied from "flat medium". But I've been known to be wrong, so I'm sure someone will point to patch notes or some such to clarify it.

But I assure you, they didn't forget to check it. They put a lot into this system and I assure you they know exactly how it works. And they do a ton of datamining to know the difference in performance between the top min-maxers and the rest of us.

Though I agree with most of what you said, this is completely false. Brutes have a damage cap of 850%. 100% fury only gives a 200% increase to damage, which brings a brute to 300% damage. Still no where near their cap, even if you slot 3 SO for damage you are still less then half the cap.

The reason a lot of brutes do not slot damage is that end/recharge tend to have a greater effect in play. Being able to generate fury faster and attack longer tends to add more damage then what slotting for damage does.

True enough, I misspoke, what I meant was that you get more from fury than you do from slotting, especially without IOs and SOs. Even 6 DOs is only going to get you into the 90s. Or nothing at all and let fury take you into the high 200s for most of your mission... Pretty standard for brutes to go accuracy, endurance and recharge in early slotting.

but yes, cap was a bad choice of words.

I have fond memories of my Fire/Energy Blaster soloing an Arachnos mission with one of the toughest Widows of all, Nocturne (Elite Boss). Since it was Temblor's arc, my blaster was under level 20 at the time (I think she was 18).

Apparently, I totally overestimated the firepower I was going to need (based on how the last character I failed to solo this with fared...That was my Mind/Kin Controller). So anyway, I popped 4 reds, 4 purples, then ran through my attack chain: Fire Ball, Fire Breath, Blaze, Fire Blast, Flares, Gabriel's Hammer, St. Louis Slammer... And that was pretty much it. The fight was over much sooner than expected.

I don't think Nocturne even managed to get through all her quips (same with Sands and Castillo later in the Faultline saga). She quickly rose through the levels...and then came the spanking from the Envoy of Shadow, total humiliation, and again a few levels later from the Rogue Vanguard, which she still hasn't finished. One of these days, when I need a break from Virtue, I will have to bring her back out and get her the last 4 levels needed to hit 50.