Apex Battle Maiden makes me sad

If you haven't done the Apex yet and want to go into the final fight blind, then spoilers ahead.


I tried an Apex TF today. It didn't quite work out, but that's besides the point. Battle Maiden in that tf makes me a sad Scrapper. I'm a soft-capped BS/SR Scrapper, so I shouldn't have many issues with BM's direct attacks, just gotta avoid the death patches, right? So painfully wrong! She had a 47% chance to hit me with all of my defenses up! I might as well had ran up to any other AV with all my toggles off for all the good my defense made. On top of that, she hit hard enough to three-shot me at range with her crossbow. Two-shots in melee, but only thanks to the anti-one shot code (and I'm just shy of 1.8k HP too). I doubt I've ever felt so unscrapper-like before. Felt more like a Blaster with only two poorly slotted ranged attacks.

Yeah, basically a brief rant about how an AV who seems to have 90% native hit chance makes my /SR Scrapper feel a little useless. Especially when I've killed other AVs on the toon.

Wow, she has that much chance to hit you?

Reminds me of the Tin Mage TF. A venganced Bobcat was hitting my /FA with capped smashing/lethal resists(thanks to a therm on the team) for 3400 dmg with spin. A poor blaster on the team got hit for 6000 with focus. I gained 3 debt badges during that....

My Invuln has soft-capped Defenses (except Psi) and the attacks that did get through were mostly shrugged off for the Battle Maiden fight. Boobcat however... is another story. She hits like a freakin' freight train! I didn't die last time I did the Tin Mage TF, but man was I close. Being at 75% Smashing/Lethal Resist and at the HP cap was equivalent to wearing cheese cloth armor. Yeesh.

Hmmm...could of been a lack of S/L Resist.

I was tanking BM on the first Apex TF I did (I have confront...none of the brutes did), with the softcapped defenses (didn't see what her chance to hit me was).

But yeah, have to stay moving, and you can't let anyone on the team immobilize her, or else she gets stuck in blue patches you can't attack her in :/

Do you have tough?

I do. I did lose a little bit of health and regen when I specced out of Aid Self, but nothing significant other than the self-heal which wouldn't have helped when she was hitting me at range for 800 a pop every few seconds when she had aggro on me. Tried spamming -Range with Confront on her, but half the time it didn't seem to do much. Probably purple patch nerfing my debuff. Or maybe it just felt like it was not doing much since her crossbow animation was slow enough I could run across the area before she fired, thanks to the Kin.

If someone doesn't beat me to it, next time I fight her I'm bringing a power analyzer to see if her hit odds are native or something else is giving it to her. I want to say she was stronger the second time she attacked since we took her down relatively easily the first time.

You do have the Alpha slot filled so you're not debuffed for the TF, right?

Definitely. I was even making sure everyone else on the TF had it slotted so that nobody would be functionally useless. +4s are hard enough, I can't even imagine fighting +8s, let alone an uber +8 AV.

Well she is a Broadsword set ... so in addition to accuracy buffs of 1.4 and 1.5 for level scaling and rank she has 1.05 for her sword attacks I imagine. And probably far more importantly a Build Up type power. And a last hit chance of 47% definitely sounds like a To Hit buff at work vs capped SR stacked onto the Acc Mods of around 2.205. Don't recall seeing her actively using BU but then again there is a lot stuff to "watch" in the fight. Unenhanced BU for my Broadsword is +20% which with the accuracy mods is going to be up around 50% (or a bit over) last hit chance vs soft capping.

Edit: PW does not indicate the presence of a BU type power fwiw. Any idea how much you were getting defense debuffed thru ddr?

I keep my defenses monitored so I can spot cascading failures before they become deadly, so I did check in the fight to see if that was it. Unless I missed a massive defense debuff, it's not. I got debuffed about 1% or less from both her and the floating swords. Not sure if that was one or more hits, the fight was a little too frantic to keep track and I wasn't thinking to monitor it that closely.

I partially suspect she might have been given higher to-hit to compensate for people running soft-capped Blasters and such. The other mobs in the TF seem to hit much more often too, though I didn't have a hit-roll tab set-up until well into the BM battle. Again, something to check in a future run. Could have also just been pure attack saturation combined with high damage for those though as the Apex mobs are pretty big and the War Walkers only hit me a couple of times. In fact, I think the only other point I had problems getting hit a lot was with the hydra tentacles around the pylons in the first mission.

I haven't tried the tf's yet, but it has been noticed that the devs have been tinkering with defense busters in the tip missions. It's fine to use them with rare opponents to keep softcapped toons on their toes, but if they become too common, defense reliant builds are going to be gimped.

Obviously building for defense is very popular now, because it works. But its not something that is achieved until late game, and through a fair amount of work and effort in most cases. The problem with defense is, lower levels of defense and become almost useless, especially against the defense busting tactics this game employs. So overusing them would really over-gimp builds that have only defense as damage mitigation. I understand the devs are reacting to a popular tactic, but I hope they don't over-react like they did in the past in some cases.

I think it has to do with what Positron said, the more powerful you become the harder the content.

It's called over specialization. Frankly I saw this coming, just took longer than I thought for the devs to do this sort of thing.

Melee is far from useless in Apex TF. I for one welcome content that doesn't involve melee forming a circle around the AV for a button mashing smack down.

I ran this on a pick up team of 2 tanks, 2 brutes and 4 scrappers. I was on my claws/regen...
Gotta say I think I've died more on that TF than in the past year combined





I so love this TF....
So who's up for an all scrapper APEX????

If the Devs are going to go with a big defense busting route on all future content, then they really ought to look at SR again. It's not the set's fault that it's a one-trick pony with a trick that turned out so good everyone else copied it, even if they have a plethora of other tricks themselves. Beyond defense, SR natively only has scaling resistance to fall back on and it's pretty safe to say those won't save anyone. Tough as well as HP and Regen from IO sets help, but those won't keep a SR standing when his main mitigation is nullified.

How would I change it? I don't know, I'm not going to worry too much about it until I20 hits and we see what they pull out then. For all I know anti-defense may just be this time around and the next TF may have an AV with unresistable damage but normal hit rate.

If anything, SR is the powerset best suited to deal with defense-busting moves thanks to capped DDR and Elude.