Will of the earth mission arc, can we please STOP with the impossible spawns?

That's part of what my friends and I have taken to calling the new "Praetorian Difficulty" setting. Solo Praetorians are punished for not having more friends with +1/X2(or 3) spawns. I'm sure it's all part of Cole's plot to ensure that no one survives scheming against him in secret. The one -- and only -- time I solo'd through Praetoria, I foiled his plans by stalking most of the missions. (Coincidentally, I recommend Responsibility for Stalkers. Felt like Glowie-Heaven in Neutropolis.)

It seems to follow the Praetorians into Primal Earth, too. Missions and ambushes that are ordinarily cakewalks can very quickly become death traps once they catch a whiff of that "solo Praetorian" scent.

Perhaps a team of seven Thug/Dark MasterMinds, and one Warshade?

All the MMs activate Gang War...

It's server crashing time!

Castle, could you or someone else explain this a bit more clearly? Not sure what you mean by auto hit pulse triggering a spawn. Also, it have something to do with the fact a will of the earth double spawned ambushes when we ran from it, then tried to get close again?

Are you kidding? I love the blaster Manipulation sets and think we need more of them. I wish I could play them as a primary set in combinations outside the normal AT allowances.

An Energy Manipulation/Energy Aura (armor) would be fun. Fire Manipulation/Fire Control, sign me up for some of that! Ice Manipulation/Cold Domination would be a chilly treat. Mental Manipulation/Illusion Control would be interesting. And Electricity Manipulation/Storm Summoning FTW!!

But seeing as how none of that is ever likely, I'd also like to see maybe Dark Manipulation created so the devs could give Dark Blast to blasters. I so want a dark/dark blaster, and a dark/dark defender just doesn't do it for me.

Oh, and you know what else? Maybe some kind of "Martial Manipulation" combining a few melee attacks from the martial arts set with some other Natural-oriented powers for blasters who don't want to be Magic or Mutant or Tech or Science but still end up with secondary powers with very unNatural appearances.


***thinks for a moment, then wanders off to another section of the forum to maybe suggest some new powerset ideas in a more appropriate location.***

I just did that yesterday on my brute solo and they were very widely spaced apart thankfully.

By the way, burn patches can be avoided by hovering just about where your knees are at head height to the enemy. You don't register as on the ground for the burn patch to attach to.
That's one reason I take hover, and that is how I defeat those blast masters easier on a lowbie shield brute who is a bit squishy.

I'll explain it. This DE ambush is not a standard ambush. A standard ambush is triggered by some event in a mission, like the triggers you can see in AE. The ambush mobs are spawned in level and quantity based on the mission difficulty settings and current team size, possibly adjusted by the mission script. They appear at one or more spawn points defined by the map, and they have a target they charge and attack.

This is nothing like an ambush. The WoE mob has a power that summons mobs. If you've ever done the Eden Trial, it's like the spawns at the walls, and maybe the Lichen Colonies as well. The power probably has a large range, like hundreds of feet, is auto-hit, and is AoE so it will "hit" every hittable target in your team. That includes players, MM henchmen, Troller and Dom pets, Fluffy, trap based pets, and anything else that is part of your team that can be hit. There are no visible effects associated with the attack, it just happens. For each target hit, a mob is summoned at that target. I'm not sure how they summon different mobs, maybe there's some percentage involved or something like that. But the key thing is that you get a mob for every targetable thing in your team.

The AI could be somewhat broken here. Normal mobs will attack the members of your team (players and pets) somewhat randomly based on distance, threat rating, and the like. These summoned mobs may just be connected to the summoner, so they only attack your MM because she's the only one directly attacking the summoner.

The timing can be a problem. I think these sorts of powers activate (spawn a new set of mobs) every minute or something like that. If you can't clear a spawn before the next one is spawned, you'll eventually get overwhelmed. This problem is particularly bad for MMs and others with lots of weak pets. The summon power is probably tuned so it summons mobs that take the average player say 30 seconds to defeat. But an MM with 6 pets does not put out enough damage to defeat the 7 summoned mobs in 30 seconds. End result is a continued build-up of mobs.

The summon power is usually an auto power, which means it is running all the time. For whatever reason, it seems to trigger when you agro the mob for the first time, but internally it is still activating on a fixed timer. If you agro the summoner right before the power should activate based on the timer, you get one spawn as it agros, and another as the timer triggers another activation.

There are several ways to deal with these sorts of encounters. Inspirations are your friend. Just pop 4 Lucks and destroy the summoner mob, then deal with the summoned mobs. When it comes to DE and their SILLY OVERPOWERED Quartz emanator, you might be better off with lots of orange Damage Resistance Inspirations.

Another nice tactic is to fake the summoner out with a single target. The summon powers are usually line-of-sight. An MM can hide out of line of sight, and send a single henchmen to attack the mob. Mob wakes up, and summons an ambush of 1 minion to fight that one henchmen. The summon starts recharging, but is unavailable for a minute or so. So the MM and the rest of the henchmen pop up and attack the summoner before the next (large) spawn. This works well with Phantom Army as well, since summon powers will probably fail on that completely.

Another option is to just fight it without pets, or perhaps without weak pets. Trollers and Doms should be able to manage that fairly easily. MMs can go in solo or maybe with just their biggest pet. The ambush size will be much smaller. Concentrate on the summoner.

If the summoner has guards, just pull them before dealing with the summoner. Do a jump pull or something else that keeps the puller and the team out of line-of-sight of the summoner, and deal with the guards while staying out of line-of-sight.

Of course the best option is for the Devs to fix this. Summoning mobs based on the number of targets in line of sight seems like a bad design decision. It's only used in a few places, so it's hard for most players to understand. It can be easily gamed to produce very small or very large ambushes. It's been a source of exploits since the game was released. The mob ranks aren't properly balanced, and don't take into account the mission difficulty settings. It's a neat concept, but there are too many implementation problems with it.

A better option would be to have a Summon Ambush Spawn power that triggers a standard Ambush spawn to appear. Alternatively, the Summon power could easily be tweaked so it only summoned mobs when it hit a Player. That's a no-brainer fix. All Summon powers should definitely have a Max Targets attribute set to 8 or so. All Summon powers should have a limited number of charges, so at worst you can whittle the mobs down bit by bit and eventually win.