My frustrations with AE, any advice?

First let me start by saying GGGAAAAARRRRHGLAHSKLGHLKJdsf

Now that that's out of the way, I'm having trouble figuring out where NCsoft is in their stance with AE, and better yet how I'm supposed to actually enjoy this feature.

The first of my many frustrations is the experience gain, I understand people "exploited", or whatever, to get levels really fast in the past (and continue to do so maybe? who knows) however this should not nerf people trying to do REGULAR missions that have had hours upon hours (possibly days/weeks?) to make wonderful stories and setup everything just perfect, only to have no one play them because, obviously, the experience is far too low to even bother. Not only that, but you get PUNISHED for doing these missions, because the debt you gain from wiping, which you will wipe possibly more than once or twice since this is not a farm, so the mobs are going to have a lot more thought to them than just a melee and ranged attack, you actually end up LOSING experience in most cases.

Now that that's off my chest, my second frustration has to do with the difficulty of some/most missions. I don't know if this is a design flaw of the creator of the AE, or NCsoft's fault, or because of the settings I set simply being ignored, but most missions are just plain old too difficult to even attempt at lower~mid levels. I was trying one mission today where it was a 1-54 mission that claimed it has bosses in it, whatever. So I figured well it will scale correctly with our levels especially if I set it to +0x1+no+no right? WRONG. The mobs DESTROYED us in about 2 hits each, everyone was level 10~20 which yes, I understand that's low, but that's some terrible scaling, I don't care if it's on purpose or not. There was several other missions we tried with various different settings yet they still seemed to just completely slaughter us within 7 seconds of attacking even with 2 healers, which brings me to my next problem.

Reforming sucks, I understand you want people to finish missions, but who in the right mind thought this was idea? Someone should have been fired over this decision, there's no possible reason I could think of for forcing people into having to quit their team and remake it just so they can start/tryout another mission, or heck even change the settings because it's too hard/easy! Especially in a system that encourages perfection in crafting together a mission, not being able to try it, say "oops, I gotta change that!" then leave the mission, change a tiny detail very quickly, then republish it etc." is just sacrilegious.

And above all, whilst NCsoft is too busy nerfing how fast people level they have neglected/caused some serious bugs that even further this frustration that I have experienced today, namely a bug that kicks people from the group randomly and stops people from loading the mission.

So I'm sorry if I came off as harsh, I'm just frustrated to no end. I have been playing about a week since I took a break for a year and I love what AE was meant for (nothing more fun than banding up with a few other heroes/villains and saving the world from evil scientists and what-have-you :P) it just seems like it's slowly spiraling down and at this point it should just be completely removed from the game in my opinion if it's going to continue down this path.
I will also point out I am an AE farmer, I love farm missions, today I just decided to again try to take a break and have some fun with AE missions and it just seems like that's close to impossible these days.

Any tips/point-outs/mistakes that I made feel free to tell me I'm partially curious to see if some of this isn't just me being dumb or doing something totally wrong.

Stop farming? But you're right, there are alot of problems with AE and it wouldn't be so crappy if:

• People didn't take advantage of it
• People did what the devs wanted AE to be(which is not a leveling spree, it was to make something in a game for people who got tired of regular missions and wanted to try mission created by the players of the game.)
• No farms
• To be fun, it's not fun doing it, if it was just for leveling up

One was kin one was emp, if your saying a silly little bubble would have stopped me from dying then I would have to disagree, at the most it might make it 4 hits instead of 2 that killed me, but there was around 12 monsters all hitting me at once...oh well.

I tried a few other's, this time from the top of the list, and they seemed to work out just fine (mission : awesome was hillarious) haven't tried in a group yet however, very hard to get a group together lately for some reason.

When a Silly Little Bubble takes you from being hit 50% of the time to being hit 5% of the time, it in fact does not make you take 4 hits instead of 2. It takes you from 2 hits to 20 hits, more than enough time for your regen to kick in and heal you, and for your team to take down the spawn.

Well, last thing we've heard from development is 'stay tuned'.

It kinda feels right now like the remains of a once flourishing civilization that experienced war. XP changes are coming (yet again) with Going Rogue. It's been a big 'wait and see' for for months now. They used the sledge hammer to stop as many exploits as possible and plan to level the field again for 'normal' players with Going Rogue.

Whether we'll ever get equivalent XP/rewards to normal play again, I kinda doubt it now. But...no one really knows what is coming.

It feels like the AE's light has diminished for a large part of the playerbase, for the most part. XP/rewards are less for 'normal' play. You might get an overpowering mission which ganks you or you might get what you're looking for when you pick something random to play. The playerbase is generally slightly polarized against the AE for non-farm missions because they've had bad experiences, so teaming for AE is difficult to form. And the mission search is cluttered with countless expired arcs, no longer functioning arcs, farms, expired farms, and rewardless arcs, all of which you cannot often tell until you try something.

There is still fantastic things to play there, but the lesser rewards and general frustrations make me personally generally disinterested until changes come.

It's a shame that the factual inaccuracies about defenders in your posts are distracting from your valid point about AE.

Level 12 force field defenders, with 3 DOs slotted, give 19.5% defense with the single targeted shields, and with 1 DO slotted, give 11% defense with Dispersion Bubble. Thus, two lowbie bubblers take the entire rest of the team to the defense softcap (45%) so long as they're within at least one big bubble. They're also at at least 30.5% defense personally, which isn't shabby. A couple of level 12 empaths with their 1-slotted Fortitude cannot touch that.

You are correct about bubblers being rare, though. Empathy benefits enormously in popularity from the inaccuracies so often repeated about other defenders.

Simple solution: Don't play AE if you don't like it.

Were you doing a farm mission at level 20...? That's probably not going to be very effective. And if you're going to farm in AE, make sure it's a map with no NPC allies, they completely nerf your rewards. Even if you never save them.

most of MAs problems could be solved with some additions to the search interface to make it more useful.


as it stands now you're playing Russian roulette with mission difficulty.


The other problem is structural and less easy to address; MA vastly over-rewards compared to the "real" game, which of course draws farmers like bees to honey.

The ticket system concentrates the 'drop potential' of a farmer and allows them to decide what they're going to get (in my case, giant stacks of level 34-39 Bronze roll IO recipes).

On a 'normal' farm map I'd get a mixed bag of drops- salvage (mostly worthless), generic recipes (potentially worth 100k each at level 50, but still nothing compared to a 'good' IO drop), a couple of IO recipes, and (the only advantage of 'real' farming over MA farming) the chance for a purple.

On an MA farm map all those drops get turned into tickets, so I'm able to invest everything in extremely lucrative set IO drops, to the tune of 50-100+ million worth of recipes for every ticket capped map. A nice return on a ~30 minute investment.

Purples have never dropped reliably enough for me to tilt the field back in favor of 'real' farming, not when I can clog my inventory with predictable bronze rolls I know will pay off.

If they want to move the farmers back out of MA they either need to scrap the ticket system altogether or greatly reduce the # of "tickets per hour" a well tuned character can earn.