Reichsman and the Dimensional Grounding Ray

I so misread this thread's title as "Reichsman and the Dimensional Groundhog Day."

*rubs eyes*

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

When the Kaaaaaahn! TF first came out, I was on a variety of teams using my own Blasters and Controllers. I never saw anything in-game that explicitly stated the "One and Done" nature of the Dim Grounding Ray, and indeed, since every team member got one, and each had 10 charges, Occam's Razor seemed to indicate that periodic applications were in order.

What got even stranger was the varying success on the TFs I encountered. On a couple of them, we defeated Reichsie; one was a pretty fast beat-down and the other took about 15 minutes. On a couple of others, we got Reichsie down to a sliver of health and never could finish him; in both cases we beat on him for around an hour. I never could figure out the "key" to it--- we had Rads on both winning and losing teams, and no Rads on both, so that seemed to rule out the "Lingering Radiation or Forget It" problem when the GM Scaling first came on.

I ran several this week, all successful. The one that took the longest featured me as the only Controller, an Earth/Storm/Fire. I spammed Freezing Rain, Earthquake, Quicksand, Volcanic Gasses, Fossilize and Stalagmites whenever they were up, ran Snow Storm on Reichsie the whole way and whacked him with Fireball and Fireblast, my Nem Staff and good ole Tornado and Lightning Storm as fast as I could. It took about 30 minutes to beat Reichsie down, and at one point, someone hollered, "We have no debuffs!" I pointed out that I was debuffing with everything I had, and they replied, "Well, they are not the best..." For a while, it looked like we would never get over the hump, but down he went.

So I am at a loss to explain any reasons for the above or to articulate a Grand Strategy for Reichsie. Some times he hangs in, and sometimes he goes down in a few minutes, Rad or no Rad.

And just before he finally went down on that last, long battle, I popped him with the DMG. Well, it felt good and down he went. Go figure.

It was posted here, the relevant part is highlighted:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Horatio Hi, I’m Bruce Harlick, aka Horatio, the guy who was in charge of the Reichsman Task Force and Strike Force. Thank you for the comments and feedback on the TF & SF. I’d like to take the opportunity to respond to some of them and let you know our some of our intended responses. To start, there is a difference in the challenge of the final fight in the SF and TF. The TF fight is much trickier and takes longer. We didn’t address that when assigning the initial merit values for the SF. We will be increasing the merit award for the Strike Force to 30 merits later this week. As time goes by and we collect more data on how long it takes groups to complete these arcs, we’ll likely be adjusting the merit rewards further. There seems to be some confusion as to the use of the dimensional ground ray in the final fight of the Task Force. Before Reichsman’s hit by the ray, he is in a phased state and is running a rather nasty debuffing aura. When he is hit by the ray, it “grounds out” some of his power and he returns to a normal state and his aura is shut down. This will persist for the duration of the fight. The dimensional grounding ray isn’t intended to be used at specific points in the fight; it should be used early on, and one hit will do. On the villain side of things, our intent was to try to do something a bit different for the end fight. As has been previously stated, we wanted to do a “gadget” fight; something that was more than just hit the bad guy until he fell over. And we wanted to encourage teams to include different ATs, to help shake up some standard team compositions. Certainly, the end fight is more difficult without having each of the appropriate ATs on the team, but it is still doable. Each of the temp powers is intended to make stages of the fight easier. There is no one “golden solution” to solving the fight; by including some or all of the ATs that can take advantage of the various temp powers, you can approach this battle using different tactics. The Mastermind temp power is not working at this time; Castle has fixed that, but his fix did not go out with the release due to some build issues. This power should be working in a patch this week. Switching voices, I am aware of the canon issues with the story. The problems are purely my fault; when I came up with the original flow for the story I was under some mistaken impressions on some events in the game’s history. While I did make some adjustments to the story due to the feedback from the training room, I didn’t get all the details nailed down as best I could. Due to a tight translation deadline, I was unable to get final text passes into the build that was going to the Live servers, but rest assured I’ll be doing my best to address them over the next week or so to bring the story of Reichsman’s return in line with the existing history of the 5th Column. I’ll certainly be reading this (and the other) threads for any other comments you have on the issue. Please feel free to PM me with your comments and concerns if you’d like. I’ll do my best to respond to them in a timely fashion. ------- -Horatio

1. I tend to use it occasionally just because its fun, and because I don't like explaining what it does in-game. If it makes people feel good to spam it, great. If I say don't spam it and the battle fails for some reason, guess who's going to be blamed for that.

2. The mission hands the power out to everyone as a safety precaution: you never know if someone might d/c or die or whatever: this way its impossible to not have it for the fight with the big R.

3. It has multiple charges because it doesn't last forever, it actually lasts for about 2.8 hours if I understand its mechanics correctly. Technically, if you were to suspend the TF and return to it the next day or something, you'd have to hit him with it again. Or if you actually take three hours to defeat him. I once saw it take two, so who knows how long the longest Kahns are taking.

I use it when he goes Unstoppable just to have something to do. Me not adding another low single digit of damage during those 5 secs isn't going to drag the fight out any longer otherwise.

I'll admit that I didn't even know what it did - nor did I notice *any* effect when I used it on him during the fight. It didn't have any effect that I saw, it still took the same amount of time to defeat him, and he was still ridiculously overpowered while in the midst of the other avs.

If I get the power again, I will try to lob it at him at the start, but frankly it didn't seem to have *any* effect after the fighting started.

I don't care that it only needs to be used once, I just like the graphic and use it when I get bored during the fight - which happens pretty often. I've also used it during STFs on Recluse, during ITFs on Nictus Romulus... heck, even the computer!

Quote:

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

I like using the Fire Extinguisher on him when he pops Unstoppable, because it's just as effective as any other of my attacks at that point.

It did used to work on him for a short period on test as I recall, though.