Changes made to STF?

Were there any changes made to the STF recently? I ran one this morning for my notice of the well, and although the team was on finished it successfully, we ran into some unusual things that none of us had ever seen before that made it more difficult. I'm not sure if these changes were intentional, or if they were simply bugs, or just unusual happenings that you won't usually see. Here's a list of the ones I remember.

The first time the flyer spawned, it was hovering directly above Recluse's head on the tower platform. We tried several times and could not get it to move from there.

The flier seemed to be summoning some sort of bomb that I don't remember ever seeing before. They looked like the crab spider's omega maneuver bomb.

The tank was having serious trouble keeping recluse's aggro. I know he was using taunt, because I saw the animation go off around recluse, but there were a few times that recluse simply ignored it and ran over to attack us at the tower.

When we got the 4th tower down and started attacking recluse, about 3 spawns worth of random arachnos came running over to attack us. I'm not sure where they came from since we had cleared out all the spawns close to the platform. They weren't the bane spiders that recluse summons either, it was just normal mixed arachnos enemies.

That's all I can remember.

Like I said, they may have just been coincidences, but I've run the STF a couple dozen times and I've never seen any of those things happen before, so I was just wondering if there had been some small changes made to it.

Yeah. I usually play taunt bot with Recluse when I run STFs, and while Taunt is autohit, it doesn't seem to be while the towers are up.

I figured he had taunt protection of somekind.

Usually, this isn't a problem, but every now and again, with enough misses, the duration will run out and he'll run off, just taunt him back.

Of course, that could be hard to do when he runs up to a shield scrapper.

Taunt is most certainly auto-hit and has, in my experience, been more than sufficient to keep LR aggro. The notion "if a tank is just taunting then he's doing it wrong" is quite frankly - wrong.

I wonder if that tank took the pool power Provoke, which is not auto-hit.

It's also possible (and I'm not inclined to do the number crunching right now) that if a no to low recharge build (say a stoner in Granite with no bonuses) also did not slot any Taunt durations, then it may be possible LR is resisting (shortening the duration of) Taunt before the next Taunt can be fired.

To other OP questions

I too thought the Flyer behavior was odd a few times (out of the dozens of times I've done this over the past 5 days). As the OP described, it was just hanging out on the plaza and it was not prone to move, whether taunted, attacked or debuffed and yes, line of sight was broken. Eventually it would move about, though I do remember once when it wouldn't.

The arachnos bombs have been around from the beginning. They pack a whallop.

The seemingly random ambush also happened to me once. At the time I thought we must have missed them clearing around the statue, or that someone had aggrod them while coming from the hosp. It seemed odd but I thought nothing of it.

The only thing I noticed on the STF run we did tonight was that the flyer respawned after less than 10 minutes.

As I understand it, the Flyer is on a unique respawn timer. 20 minutes after the team enters the mission map and every 20 minutes thereafter, if the Flyer is defeated, it will respawn. This means that if the Flyer is defeated 19 minutes after the team enters the map, it will respawn one minute after that.

First-hand experience on several MoSTF runs seem to indicate that this is true, but I might be wrong on the details.

Spawns: Recluse is a Mastermind. He can summon a ******** of ARachnos (the power is, IIRC, called "Summon Army". It does)

Nothing new at all. I could enquire to how the tankers taunt was slotted but thats it. I can't imagine it 6 slotted with goodness.

I have run the STF a bunch of times this week; haven't noticed any changes.

About the tank: if you have an illusion controller and you're not so sure about your tank, have PA take the initial LR aggro and try to bring down the red turret ASAP. Even a weaky tank can tank him fine after the red turret drops. PA will take aggro like crazy, so the tank might not be able to pull LR out of them until after they despawn.

Ran another one today, and didn't run into any of the same issues, so they must have all just be random.

As far as I know the flyer does not actually pull. It seems to be on a regular schedule of moving. However, once it is aggroed, it will remain in its current location until aggro is lost AND until the schedule to move is reached (if the scheduled time has already passed, it will move as soon as aggro is lost). I have had it actually move once or twice while fighting it. I think it may have been aggored on a stalker who placated it the one time and for the second it lost aggro, but before it could choose another aggro target, the schedule to move code kicked in. I think it has also happened when it lost aggro due to killing a target.

People may think it moves due to breaking LOS, but it is more likely that it moves because breaking LOS also broke aggro and the schedule for it to move had already passed.

The best way to handle the flyer is to not engage over the main plaza (I prefer to get it when it is at the lowest point, melee cones can hit from the ground there and it is well within Blaze/Focus range also). Do not try to pull it, just wait until it moves.

Didn't they change Recluse's energy beams so that they do massive endurance drain? I think it happened pre-I19 or pre-I18, but my first WST run of the STF the Tank discovered this the hard way.

the arachnos flier has always had the bombs

the bombs from my research on it, are called arachnos cruise missiles and most likely a pseudo pet of some kind

i think they are in ae atm listed under the arachnos faction, why i have no idea

The flier has always dropped the bombs. Their seeking AI has always been a little odd, and it doesn't spam them, so it's easy to imagine you never noticed them. I've never seen the flier get "stuck" like that.

Recluse occasionally does phase when being buffed by the towers. The teams I run with regularly leave the blue tower up, and when it buffs him he becomes "UNAFFECTED". I don't know if this is unique to the blue tower, or if any tower would do this. I don't think he does this when all the towers are down.

It's quite likely that Recluse has high taunt resistance, especially when buffed. This would help explain why it's easy to lose his aggro. The occasioonal phasing would then contribute to this.

I noticed an Arachnos spawn come running in one of the STFs I was on this last week. Since we don't take down all the towers, I have no idea what triggered it. I only noticed it once, and I definitely thought it was odd.

On one of my runs this week, I did notice the flyer being "stuck" over Recluse for a while. We eventually pulled it away but it did take some time. I haven't noticed this behavior before, but then again it only really happened once in what were multiple runs this weekend.

Tankers taunt/taunting. The only prob there. For sure.

WARNING: Lots of text ahead.

The main thing that gets done plainly wrong on many STF runs in my experience seems to be the tower order and it often causes much more trouble than anything else at times. I'm not sure if it wasn't mentioned by the OP because they took the towers down in the right order or they didn't, but it was simply taken for granted as it so often by so many people. People are used the towers making trouble and Recluse being a bugger to an extent even without them, depending on the sort of team used.

Like I said, perhaps this wasn't an issue on the particular STF runs the OP started this topic about, but I'm gonna throw this out here anyway even if just because this is a good opportunity to bring it to the attention of all those people who still make STF a lot harder for themselves and their teams than it needs to be.

So... sorry for off-topicness, but I think this may be useful regardless.

In a distant past I used to start with red and leave blue altogether as it seemed sort of useless. I think it was endurance infusion at some point or another, but today I'm not even entirely certain of that anymore. What I do know for a fact is what they do today.
When I lead an STF I always take them down in the order blue, red, yellow and green. There is always someone trying to argue me on it and telling me to do red first, but that really is bad practice.
Red these days about doubles his damage (+105% iirc) and blue caps his recharge at +400% as well as giving him +30% tohit (those who still tell me to do red first also think the tohit is coming from yellow, but that's just defense). Not only does the recharge given by blue translate into a higher effective damage multiplier than he gets from red, it also means he attacks more often altogether and with that gets a chance to go through a def based tanker's def more often. Additionally the tohit is just annoying.
Bottom line: blue is the real killer nowadays.

On the only tanker I have myself each and every of these tower effects become extremely easy to perceive since it's a shield/dark tank. I'm largly def based and I self-heal with Siphon Life.
When I go into the fight (although it isn't a fight at first obviously, but you get the point...) I use 0 to 2 lucks (depending on if there's an emp with fort or other def buffs on team, etc...) to bring my def at or over 75%. Thank goodness AAO and Taunt are autohit making it generally easy to keep his aggro, but when he does start running he runs like a hyena on speed. When he sticks to me he attacks... like a hyena on speed as well. If for whatever reason I let my def drop substantially below 75% the hits start coming in at such speed an emp can almost never keep up anymore.
When blue explodes he pretty much goes into snail mode. He attacks slower and he moves slower - visibly slower. If you've never paid attention to it before, do so. Even if he doesn't run around but just stands there attacking the tank you will very easily be able to see he's a lot slower all of a sudden. It is however still a snail that packs a punch and the emp's heals are still all I have to rely on at this point.
Then when red goes down the damage drops again. This time - most obviously - not just the DPS he's putting on me, but the DPA as well. Many of his attacks that took me down to very low health before only still do half health at best. At this point it gets rather relaxing.
After yellow goes down I can finally hit him again and with that self-heal by means of using Siphon Life. The only thing not possible yet at that point (unless you can debuff heals in some way - I seem to recall there's an option, but I forget which it is.... Cold Domination I think?) - with just green left - is killing him due to the huge heals.

I've noticed many people still find themselves strengthened in their belief none of this is true because they still complete plenty STFs without even touching blue. This is entirely possible and it can even go smooth, but to be perfectly honest if you took down red, yellow and green before killing LR and it worked just fine that's not because blue doesn't do anything notable, that's just because you happened to have a team that could've taken down LR leaving both blue and red intact as well. It's all in the team you've got - that makes all the difference.

If anyone reading this knows of himself he's one of those who thinks I'm telling fairytales I'd advise you to bring a Power Analyzer MkIII temp on your next STF run and scan LR before you start killing towers.

TLDR; blue, red, yellow, green.