Soloing +4/x8?


Adeon Hawkwood

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eiko-chan View Post
Yes, that's exactly what she was talking about. Malta's status as a "problem enemy" is almost entirely based on Sappers, and Dark Armour is less susceptible to sapping than other armour sets (except maybe Electric, which is pretty much immune to it).
Any character that doesn't have stun protection is going to have an annoying time with Malta, even if we ignore Sappers completely. Those ~30 second stuns are outrageous.

The truth is that for all of our potential power (via high-end IO builds, via the upcoming Incarnate system), level 50 mob factions are more often annoying in some way than not. Every build will have a weakness to at least one or two of them, and probably more.

Council is likely the closest thing we have to a vanilla late-game faction, and even they can present situational difficulties. As someone else mentioned, the Wolves are endlessly frustrating to deal with if you're used to relying on slows/immobilizes. For instance, my Ice/Storm Controller is one of the more consistent performers I can conceive, but those wolves give her heartburn.

Even if you can theoretically handle +4/x8 missions, which probably isn't an unusual capability at least among forum posters, you probably can't handle it efficiently and consistently across all factions. If you're just trying to farm one mission then great, but if you're relying on the game to assign missions to you, then you're going to spend an awful lot of time running to the Difficulty-Slider NPC.

I mean, seriously, even if you're immune to end drain and psi damage, does anyone really want to fight multiple +4 Carnie Illusionists every spawn?

It's easy to get caught up in on-paper analysis and declare that the game is laughably easy. In some ways, it is laughably easy. But I think the devs don't get enough credit for varying the threats among high-level mobs.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze View Post
Nice build

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Obitus View Post
Any character that doesn't have stun protection is going to have an annoying time with Malta, even if we ignore Sappers completely. Those ~30 second stuns are outrageous.
Well, fortunately, Dark Armour isn't without stun protection, and Tankers have the highest mez protection in the game.


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eiko-chan View Post
Well, fortunately, Dark Armour isn't without stun protection, and Tankers have the highest mez protection in the game.
Right, but across the full spectrum of available builds in the game, there's a better than even chance that Malta will annoy you more than usual. Sappers are only part of that, though admittedly a very large part.

I wasn't interested in the bit about Dark Armor.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze View Post
Nice build

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Von Krieger View Post
I've seen it mentioned a bit around the forums, that people are capable of creating characters that can take on missions with maxed out difficulty. I'm just curious as to how that works, what sort of archtype and build is required, how many billions you have to stuff into IO's, and if it's a general thing, or is it only a limited set of circumstances, confined essentially to optimizing yourself for one particular farm mission to run over and over again?
Soloing +4x8 is NOT a general thing at all. If it's for farming, I don't think soloing +4x8 is that efficient. It takes a lot longer to kill and you may die doing so.

Some ATs can do it a lot better than the other and it really depends on what powersets and what enemy group you fight. At lvl 50, Council is probably the easiest enemy group. Circle Thorn can present a major problem if several Death Mages cast darkest night. You may not die easily from CoT but it will take a long long long time to kill. You'll be missing left and right.

The hardest regular enemies group to do +4x8 IMO are Aranchos, Longbows, Carnies and Malta. I don't see Rularuu in CoV much to care but they are very hard as well. Oh well.. just about every group is hard except for Councils.

My Night Widow has done +4x8 Longbow but it's pain. When you get hit by their rifles, your defense drops so much and sonic grenades debuff so much of your resistance. Sometimes you run in and you die in seconds before you can react.


What's left is to normalize all Assassin Strikes and improve Stalker's old sets (Claw, MA and EM)! You don't need to bring back the missing PbAoE attack. You just need to make the existing ones better! For example, make Slice a WIDER and LONGER cone.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eiko-chan View Post
Well, fortunately, Dark Armour isn't without stun protection, and Tankers have the highest mez protection in the game.
For what it's worth, while soloing +4/x8 Malta, there have been occasions where they managed to stun me.

Fortunately for me, you have to kill Dark Armor twice to actually kill it. And slamming the Malta troops with an autohit mag 30 stun was a kind of poetic justice that just makes me giggle.


Where to now?
Check out all my guides and fiction pieces on my blog.
The MFing Warshade | The Last Rule of Tanking | The Got Dam Mastermind
Everything Dark Armor | The Softcap
don'T attempt to read tHis mEssaGe, And believe Me, it is not a codE.

 

Posted

I'd say Bots/FF /Traps and /Dark are good contenders for +4/x8. I've easily done +2/x8 rikti mishes on my bot/dark and struggled through +2/x8 malta, but I've not attempted +4/x8 and not likely to now with the AI melee issue - the higher the difficulty the more exagerated the melee bug gets


http://www.scene-and-heard.com/cov/covsig.jpg

 

Posted

I have a MM Bots/Dark that has always done missions at +4/+8 and doesn't even have any IO's or PVP IO's in its slots he still using Single enhancements. Also i have my Fire/Fire Tanker also does mission at +4/+8 without any issues, and still is an awesome farmer and this one also doesn't have any IO's or PVP IO's in his slots...go figure...


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Von Krieger View Post
So it looks like the big thing is to have defense soft caps and good AoE damage, yes?
Pretty much. It's all about the soft cap...


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jibikao View Post
The hardest regular enemies group to do +4x8 IMO are Aranchos, Longbows, Carnies and Malta. I don't see Rularuu in CoV much to care but they are very hard as well. Oh well.. just about every group is hard except for Councils.
It's also worth pointing out that different groups are very different difficulty to different characters. I used to wonder why people complained about Carnies so much because my Blaster found them to be one of the easier high level groups as long as I turned off bosses so I could mez the MIs. Trying them on other characters (especially melee characters) made me realize why people dislike them.


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by JuliusSeizure View Post
Pretty much. It's all about the soft cap...
It's not all about the softcap, softcap alone means squat in practice when fighting +4/x8. What you need is reliable layers of mitigation stacked with each other, ie high defense (even short of the softcap), high resistances, high regeneration/healing, knockdown, slows, debuffs, control and any and all types of active mitigation.

In the presence of powers such as Mask of Vititation, Mental Scramble, non-positional psionic attacks, and an entire firing squad worth of -def debuffs, you definitely need something more than "It's all about the soft cap..."


 

Posted

My latest Tanker has been very enjoyable in this particular Threads topic.

Ele/SS/Mu

No Purples (Never even had a purple recipe on any of my toons LOL Dam RNG)
**But have plans to add Shieldwall +3% Res when I can**

To date only thing that has given me any problems as far as a group is Longbow. Everything else has ranged from Super easy mode, to Moderate (for Heavy negative Energy or Psi types). Besides Multi layers of Protection, the biuld also uses passive Protection (Knockdown in all SS attacks and End Drain in all Ele Attacks )

Still experimenting around with different groups

Speical Note to Lady Greys TF, Those Hydra and thier near 100% toxic Damage will rip me to shreds unless I use Power Surge.


Main: Praetor Imperium Elec/SS/Mu

 

Posted

My fire/sr scrapper can do it. He's not that fast though, since he doesn't do much AoE damage. He's softcapped with perma-hasten, and the build cost me about 2 billion. This was at a point when things were much cheaper though (I bought most of my purples for around 100 million each), so the same build would be significantly more expensive today.