Apex: anti-follow/melee Battle Maiden
By
Arbegla,
Posted on: 2010-12-15 13:37 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
Did the Tanker Taunt to try and move her?
Too many 50's to list here's a few you may know.
Slazenger, Area51, Area53, Area54, Erruption, Mind Plague, Thresher, Sheath, Broadside, Debt
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For half an hour, as she slowly regenerated amongst the very low damage we could deal. |
Originally Posted by Slazenger
Did the Tanker Taunt to try and move her?
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Here was my process: move out of flame/wait until flame disipates.
When she was in the flame, taunt at as soon at it recharges, while ducking flames.
When she swas out of the flame, open with bruising, throw as high a damage string as possible, taunt when it came up, pulling back when the blue signal went out. She would use one attack while in melee, while at range, while she was moving, while I was moving: crossbow. She was simpling stuck on it.
As I said, standing melee as often as possible, pulling with taunts, corner pulling, the shiny sword of hers made its debut twice over a half hour period. Any pulling/stepping out of melee resulted in the crossbow. The longest string of honest-to-goodness melee attacks she used were three in a row. (I counted.) the rest; crossbow arrow, again and again. I'm not sure whether increasing the crossbow recharge, making her prefer melee, or what would fix this, but the way the AV would stand for extended periods in unresistable/autohit damage areas was pretty crippling to melee damage in the encounter.
I love the idea of a moving battle that keeps one on their toes..but the AV getting stuck in an immobile/ranged rut made the encounter seem a bit buggy, and hurt the whole of the movement. Having her try her best to close in on her targets at all points would help tremendously.
It will work, you'll just have to pull her out. One thing, she's apparently pretty easy to immobilize; nobody on the team tossed one her way did they? The blaster has an immob and the defender, scrapper & tanks have one available in the APP.
I've found that when you attack her in melee and she grabs her sword she'll tend to stay with melee and follow you. If you can't get her to move then either move out of her range or break LOS, she'll come to you then. There's several areas on that map where you can duck behind something and force her to move to you.
COH has just been murdered by NCSoft. http://www.change.org/petitions/ncso...city-of-heroes
The flames seem to spawn on top of players, so you can create a rotation if you will of them.
Basically, if she refused to get into melee, then you refuse to close into melee with her, and she'll spawn flames on top of you (which is outside her melee range) then you rush her, pound her face in a little, and when the flame reappear, run out of melee. Repeat. Without -regen it does kinda such cuz she'll regen a little during the 'range' phase, but if you can get her in a rotation like that, she'll drop pretty easily
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With that team makeup, you should've immobilized her, using the blaster (only take 2 immobilizes to immobilize an AV, even with purple triangles) to proc containment, kept double stacked fort on the blaster/defenders/controllers, and blasted her down. With a rad defender, you could've floored her regen, or atlest slowed it down alot, plus the rotation i mentioned in my previous post
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Originally Posted by Seldom
Team makeup:
1 ill/emp controller 2 mind/emp controller 3 cold/cold blaster 4 rad/rad defender 5 inv/ss tank 6 shield/Em tank 7 MA/SR scrapper 8 absent |
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Believe me, that's the way it's supposed to work. Hence why I posted this in the bugs section.|
Originally Posted by Call Me Awesome
It will work, you'll just have to pull her out. One thing, she's apparently pretty easy to immobilize; nobody on the team tossed one her way did they? The blaster has an immob and the defender, scrapper & tanks have one available in the APP.
I've found that when you attack her in melee and she grabs her sword she'll tend to stay with melee and follow you. If you can't get her to move then either move out of her range or break LOS, she'll come to you then. There's several areas on that map where you can duck behind something and force her to move to you. |
I spent a half hour with the team bouncing around in rotation, but she would not even activate her sword powers on me (Inv/ss, fully slotted taunt, softcapped) even for the exended periods of melee confrontation. The only way to get her to pusue was to be outside of her crossbow range, which was a great distance. The lack of cover made corner pulls difficult, but when done to get her face to face, she would use the crossbow. (Ignoring the sword.)
The fact that her iconic weapon was her sword, but her crossbow was her go-to weapon was frustrating, considering that it allowed her to root herself often.
As to immobilizes: the only immobilizes on the team were the blaster, and the possibility in the Ma/ scrapper. The controller did manage a few holds for containment, but that became counter-productive when the melees closed in and the fire always followed, so they had to clear out but she couldn't leave. See: rooting within blue fire problem for melee characters.
I'm well aware of the way the encounter is supposed to work, but refusal to go melee and pursue, using a slower attack chain to my tanker's face (crossbow>crossbow>crossbow>crossbow>etc.) seems buggy to me. Let me be clearer: in a situation where almost any enemy in the game with a melee ability would result in an enemy using said ability and using a melee mode, battle maiden did not do so in my encounter. She was 'stuck' in ranged mode for a half hour until the team quit the task force due to inability to progress. (Yes, I clocked it, as we'd cleared most of her ambushes, and were just working on her. Also note, this was after a period in the encounter before I'd begun clocking, but I won't play that in as it cannot be quantified.) She simply would not put het crossbow away.
The lack of pursuit on battle maiden's part and persistence in using ranged abilities in melee even with a hand to hand engagement for an extended period seemed counter to the design of the encounter. As such, I assume this was a bug, and a frustrating one at that.
Yes, we tried to do the pull circuit, but the limit of my taunt range compared to the ever-present crossbow mode meant I had to get closer to taunt than she had to to shoot; this meant she could be rooted for longer than I, and thus ended up standing cozily within her blue fire kill zones. I assume she is meant to be able to go into melee mode and pursue a tanker taunting, punching, and leading, yet her dogged crossbow training greatly inhibited this.
The part that really made me think it was a bug was this: when I was melee, there would be a long pause between her darts. Yet even if I was melee and she had to choose between a sword attack or the crossbow, she'd be idle until her crossbow recharged.
A team of eight of us ran Apex last night late, and we had similar problems. I was on my tanker and constantly taunting and moving out of range, yet BM stayed in the flames a lot. I don't recall the exact makeup of our team, but we had a fair amount of melee and needed to close to defeat her. When I looked carefully, which wasn't so often since I'd get swarmed by floating swords I could see there was sticky glue, oil slicks, webbing and hold animations on BM often, despite several of us yelling at our teammates -not- to immobilize her. It's also possible that I had too many swords following me around to keep BM consistently on the taunt list. We won, but it took longer than we'd liked.
This is strange, I ran an Apex a few days ago with CMA and didn't have a lot of trouble getting her to follow me once I figured out a method, and I know she was using her sword when I was close... she dropped one of the scrappers with whirling sword. You may try getting her into the center of the map, there's several obstructions around there that you could use to break LOS.
I do agree that she's frustrating on a melee heavy team since you'll have only a few seconds to attack between having to move out of the blue zones. Still, we had 1 tank, 3 scrappers, 2 controllers (I think Ill/Rad & Fire/Rad) and 1 blaster... I can't remember what the last person was, and we pulled it off. Yeah, it took awhile, and it took me a bit to figure out the best way to get her to move; she does tend to go to her bow. I would jump into melee, nail her with a couple of attacks and taunt then jump out when the blue circle of death formed and hit her with Laser Eyes and taunt again. If she went to her bow I'd duck behind something to force her to move and repeat the process.
COH has just been murdered by NCSoft. http://www.change.org/petitions/ncso...city-of-heroes
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Originally Posted by Call Me Awesome
This is strange, I ran an Apex a few days ago with CMA and didn't have a lot of trouble getting her to follow me once I figured out a method, and I know she was using her sword when I was close... she dropped one of the scrappers with whirling sword. You may try getting her into the center of the map, there's several obstructions around there that you could use to break LOS.
I do agree that she's frustrating on a melee heavy team since you'll have only a few seconds to attack between having to move out of the blue zones. Still, we had 1 tank, 3 scrappers, 2 controllers (I think Ill/Rad & Fire/Rad) and 1 blaster... I can't remember what the last person was, and we pulled it off. Yeah, it took awhile, and it took me a bit to figure out the best way to get her to move; she does tend to go to her bow. I would jump into melee, nail her with a couple of attacks and taunt then jump out when the blue circle of death formed and hit her with Laser Eyes and taunt again. If she went to her bow I'd duck behind something to force her to move and repeat the process. |
This is what I tried...for instance, I jumped behind the train, she jumped over to target me (melee range) aaaaaaaand...crossbow. It was odd, and a bit buggy. I was practically begging her to hit me in the face with her sword, but all she wanted to do was shoot me in the eye, point blank.
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I'm not doubting you ran into a bug there; it's just strange that I didn't see the same thing a few days ago. I could see a change if there had been a patch; and possibly it's different since this morning's patch but we had the same version last week.|
Originally Posted by Seldom
This is what I tried...for instance, I jumped behind the train, she jumped over to target me (melee range) aaaaaaaand...crossbow. It was odd, and a bit buggy. I was practically begging her to hit me in the face with her sword, but all she wanted to do was shoot me in the eye, point blank.
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Ah well, chalk it up to weird and intermittent bugs I guess. I can guarantee that she had the sword on Sunday? I think since she killed one of our scrappers with that whirling sword attack.
I hope they fix whatever it is, and also fix the borked pet AI that's making Phantasm and several other pets nearly useless.
COH has just been murdered by NCSoft. http://www.change.org/petitions/ncso...city-of-heroes
I ran an Apex TF on my tanker, and found thhat the team had to quit due to low ranged damage and an exceedingly frustrating bug: battle maiden did not want to move..she just wanted to use her crossbow.
As she was immune to the flame, her determination to stand in it flatlined our ability to complete the mission. Before the fire, we were easily capable of lowering her to 50%...but when the showers came, and we had to move more, her AI became 'stuck' on her crossbow. To the point that during the half-hour encounter of the fire falling, she used her sword twice. This was with a tanker pounding her in her face, taunting non-stop, and even doing corner pulls. For whatever reason, her AI seemed to have mistook our movement as kiting, and went 'all-ranged' and would not close in on any target. She would only wait until in range of her crossbow, so for most of the encounter she was standing in areas wherein no melee character could stand.
Our team was low on damage to start with, but was capable until she refused melee, as a good chunk of our team had no ranged capability to start with.
Team makeup:
1 ill/emp controller
2 mind/emp controller
3 cold/cold blaster
4 rad/rad defender
5 inv/ss tank
6 shield/Em tank
7 MA/SR scrapper
8 absent
About half the team was melee. The controllers had no containment opportunities against her, (holds were counterproductive) so that put most of the damage on the scrap/tanks/blaster/defender. We actually did well when we could stepping stone her out of her fire...but she refused.
The mission is designed for movable combat, it would be excellent if the AI could be corrected so that she always gives chase out of the fire fields. (That is, moves.)