Tin Mage TF is just ridiculous..

Is it a bug that Director 11's mines can hit you in the air? I'm all the way at the top of the ceiling and I'm getting nailed.

Sounds like one of his minelayers is crawling along the rafters.

I have been told that both the detection and blast radius is 30', so just being in the air is no guarantee of safety. That said, I'm pretty sure they do actually get planted on rafters on top of that.

I've done two Apex TFs by now and did a Tin Mage TF two days ago (I ended up leading that TMTF. You know how it is, you ask if that TF is happening, someone else starts saying OMG SOMEONE IS FORMING A TIN MAGE TF and the next thing you know is you are leading seven Incarnates into the heart of your enemy's capitol and wonder how you got there. Anyway, I digress).

Personally, I had quite some fun with them. They're challenging without feeling unfair, for the most part. I actually liked the Battle Maiden fight and found her Blue Death to be an interesting gimmick.

Now I heard some people say that these two new TFs gimp out MMs, and I imagine many of them had this fight in mind, and I have to disagree with them. Having fought Battle Maiden on a Mastermind, it's true that at first my henchies kept dying, but that's because I was still getting used to the gimmick. After an adjustment period it was as simple as telling my henchies to stand wherever there's no players and tell them which targets to attack while they're set to passive to make sure they won't wildly run around because someone aggroed them. In that sense it's one of the few situations that actually require you to control your henchies as opposed to letting them run hogwild.

The Tin Mage TF was also pretty fun and I cannot my team had any problems with the fight in the final mission. Fighting four level 54 AVs at once isn't really a new thing after you've done a couple of STFs or LRSFs, so I can't say I was too caught off-guard by that.

There's one part of the two TFs that I really didn't enjoy, though, and that's the Director 11 fight. Where Battle Maiden's gimmick was pretty interesting and kept you on your toes, I felt that Director 11 is just cheap. Now it's entirely possible that I just failed to understand his patterns, but his mines seemed to spawn in random locations at random intervals, and where the Blue Death was a bright blue mist that was impossible to miss, the mines just blend in with the floor and become even harder to see when the usual lightshow that is a team of 8 supers start. The only way to tell you're even close to a mine warning text on your screen and even then you'll just end up dodging into another mine. Where Battle Maiden's fight felt frantic and chaotic, Director 11's just felt like a confusing mess.

$0.02

I agree about the Director 11 fight. Maybe I'm just missing something, but getting the badge in that seems like a matter of pure luck and/or ridiculously overwhelming force. Outside of the badge, there's nothing special or annoying about it, but the badge aspect of that fight bugs me.

I'm not a badger, so not getting the badge doesn't really bother me. It's getting blown to smithereens because he somehow managed to snuck a mine under my feet using his mad ninja skills that just rubs me the wrong way.

Yeah, he just seems to automagically cause mines to spawn nearby without any actual effort to plant them. I guess I can see it as being generally annoying in play, but I'm mostly inured to this kind of "cheating" by NPCs. It doesn't make much lore sense though, even in the realm of NPC cheats.

If one is badging, I think it's frustrating, since the badge is for avoiding mines that seem to magically appear all over the place with nothing you can do about them. It seems to completely lack a gimmick, and thus be almost totally outside the control of players, which seems like a sucky thing to reward a badge for.

UberGuy, have you come across that old adage "If you didn't succeed with brute force, you didn't apply enough of it?" I got the Midnight Dodger badge in a team where each member had an HVAS and a Shivan. A few of us had bio nukes and a few others had chem nukes. I personally summoned a wailer, a rikti drone, a snow beast, and a devouring earth minion to boot. He went down so fast I don't think more than 3 mines were placed.

Some of my characters

Most of the times I got the badge when we weren't even trying for it. While other times teams I were on had more trouble when focusing on getting the badge.

If you really just want the badge, you can just load up on temp powers like Rikis said and take down Director 11 before he even drops any mines.

Director 11 is supposed to run every once in a while. That's part of his AI and the [Tactical Retreat] power allows for.

Are Trip Mines affected by Repel? Looking at the Blaster player version on City of Data it looks immune to everything but that and knockback. Targetable powers like Oil Slick do have explicit Knockback and Repel protection. I wonder if Force Bubble would push all of the bombs away. Here are the stats on the player version of Trip Mine:

[EDIT: List is too long. Direct link is here: http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/power...?id=Pets_Mine]

The mines are not critters. They are put down by invisible critters which can not be targeted. Previously, the invisible bombers could be affected by certain AoE powers, but that was fixed.