Insanity of moving blue spots while you have powers that root you.

The blue patches don't bother me, they are easily avoidable unless you run into someone elses patch without realizing it.

What annoys me about Apex (and it's not a huge annoyance) is the sewer section in the first mission with the rikti pylons protected by Toxic spewing tentacles.

They seem to ignore defenses and hit my /SR and /Shield character where they are weakest - Toxic resistance.

It felt a lot like a sewer run on a 1st level toon.

I still don't particularly enjoy Apex and find Tin mage much more fun but I have learned to fight and run and yesterday managed 5 Apex TFs with only one failure.. Of course that is the first failed WST attempt I have had since week one when on two straight days I managed to wind up teamed with the SAME inept leader that got us into situations in the last mission of the STF where we simply could not finish. The first was due mainly to him insisting on attempting a Master of run with a team composition that clearly wasn't strong enough.. we failed that attempt in mission two and then were forced to go without temp powers the rest of the way. Then when our tank proved a little too squishy to stand toe to toe with LR and it was suggested he hover.. "I don't have fly and I can't use my RAPTOR pack we can't access temps" DUHHHHHHH

One thing I have noticed already this week ... We are into weel #5 and all any character needs to craft two rares and one very rare are four Notices of the well. The RWZ is not jam packed with people desperate to find an APEX and I pulled out my new 50 level Blaster and easily found an STF and an ITF to get enough shards so I could slot her Alpha and then make her my 4th Incarnate to complete the APEX as the WST. A lot of players are simply saying.. Okay Apex is the WST? See you next week when its something that doesn't frustrate and annoy me.

Yeah I know people are saying they love Apex cause its more of a challenge but I think my problem with it is this... I spend more time running around trying to save my own skin than I do actually fighting anything. As I mentioned I did 5 yesterday.. one with my Crab Spider (Set up as an AoE machine), 3 with Blasters and one with my Bots/DM Mastermind. Three guesses which At was on the lone failed attempt... WRONG and WRONG it was the MM. My pets didn't last more than a few seconds and after a while I just stopped even trying to rez them. That left me with 5 attacks (including my Epics) and my DM debuffs. Half the time I couldn't get close enough to BM to even use most of those thanks to the placement of the Blue Clouds of Almost Instant death and when I did manage to find a spot to use one .. as soon as I got off one debuff 3-4 of those stupid flying swords appeared out of no where and I'd face plant AGAIN.

Can ANYONE see how this might be considered annoying by most of the player base? Forget usng half of your powers (which you worked through 50 levels to obtain), Keep moving constantly or risk almost certain death, spend half your time trying to find a spot you can fire off a couple attacks before its time to run away again, oh and JUST to add to the frustration when you do get off an attack HARRY POTTER has sent a thousand magic swords to one shot shot. HAVE FUN!

I have been on Beta previewing Issue 20 and while the BAF is a challenge at least we can actually ATTACK and use all the powers we have there. THAT is infinately more fun to me than the nightmare that APex sends us into. I LOVE mission one but they can take BM and her clouds of death and shove it. LOL I am done for the week and will concentrate on other TFS that give good shards and components.

I ran this for the first time last night w/o getting killed in that fight on my Son/Son. Helps that he has (some) mez protection and is S/L resist capped (not to mention ranged def). I usually die a few times in there though, even w/my Stone tank in Granite, cuz I'm too busy, rooted, or just plain don't notice the blue death patches before it's too late. I accept it's just part of that particular fight, hosp it and get on w/life. The most frustrating part for me, at least, is that I can't type any messages to the team like, "stop whining, hosp it, and get back in the fight!" (This is not what I'm accusing the OP of doing, btw.)

I appreciate the wholesale hatred of rooting animations, since I mostly share them, and yeah, getting mezzed in that fight pretty much = death. I also don't appreciate the fact that controllers & doms are neutralized a bit, since immobs & holds (and slows) are counterproductive against BM. It's not a perfect fight, but I think it gets a lot more negative press than it deserves. Are the insta-deaths kinda cheap? Sure. Handle it correctly and I think the encounter's a lot of fun.

I played it for the first time ever last night. I used my dark/dark tank. We had a lot of deaths but universally the complaint was about the swords, not the blue circles of death although those got people sometimes too. Unfortunately I was the only taunter in the group with 1 controller and there was no way we could keep Battle Maiden on me and control all the widely dispersed minions running around.

I had read the guide but I was absolutely NOT prepared for how many blue circles show up. It seemed like we had 2 or 3 on the ground almost all the time with another forming. At times there were literally only small corridors between circles that were clear in the battle zone. To me flying was not the answer because it is sometimes hard to tell exactly what patch of ground you are hovering over.

One thing I did learn (besides not to ever use Shadow Maul if I hadn't just moved) was to move less. After reading the various guides I thought I needed to constantly moving and maybe that's true about everyone else but I didn't think it worked well for me as the tank.

I found that I needed to pick a a clear space that was well away from the rest of the party. Then taunt Battle Maiden continuously until she moved toward me or the blue circle appeared on me. If she got to me I'd hit her with fast attacks or the envenomed dagger until a circle appeared. Once I was the center of a circle I'd move just enough to be outside the circle, being sure not to be near anyone else in the party, and start the process over. Things went much faster after that as the blue circles started overlapping and taking up less of the battleground and folks were able to fight more/move less.

It didn't keep blue circles from showing up around the high dps folks sometimes but it did help I think.

I'm not sure if I should be proud or ashamed that my tank lived when everyone else was dying all around me but I was the only one in the party that didn't die. Lots of minions + Dark Regen = win. Gotta love Dark Armor.

I love the Battle Maiden fight 'cause it takes tank 'n spank tactics and throws them out the window. Ideally, you'd have someone getting aggro and drawing BM out of the blue patches as they appear. During half-time (when she chickens out) it's just a matter of focusing on the Champions and avoiding the blue patches, which I'll admit is slightly tricky, especially since the Champions seem to blend in with the surrounding environment. After several runs I can pick out the warning patches pretty easily. Plus they have an ominous sound effect.

Small tip on the BM fight. If you're ranged, try to hang out near the walls of the zone. That way when the halberd spawns, it only takes up about 50% of the floor it otherwise would.

Done it 3 or 4 times on various Controllers and never died to a halberd. Once to a sword before I knew they couldn't be controlled. Super Speed helps a lot. As do IOs, obviously.

When I heard about this Taskforce, I feared the worse for my Mastermind Primary and spec'd up a second build that used Group Teleport to force my henchmen to move as soon as I needed them to.

First time I ran it, perhaps because it was post-level shift for many, I had no issues with my standard Hover-build and just commanding the henches to move away. I only lost a drone or two.

More of an issue is the darn Greater Swords who kept chasing me around. Battle Maiden's patches themselves really haven't been any issue.

Strangely enough - I could deal with the swords fairly easily.

They zoom around but really they aren't any different than any other foe. On my scrapper I died once while peeling BM off a squishie and a blue patch dropped.

On my Fire/Dark corr I never died and was able to keep moving around the edges and debuff BM while dropping tarpatches to slow the champions and swords.

On my ice/Storm troller - I died multiple times as the swords aren't knocked back and they just mobbed me as i sought to slow BM. The blue patches while you are running white and blue Ice storms and Ice slick............

I can't agree that people take time to die and its easy to move away at any point, everybodies healthpoints goes down at different speeds for usually more than one reason. The usually more than one reason is due to free aggro, blue patches and an AV who could be being fought in melee by Brutes without aggro glue taunt. With chaos being rooted for a lil while is a bad thing.

I am not yet sure if any team mix is fully capable of Mo'ing it like I might be with STF etc.

New Dawn: The Master of Apex badge is different than the Master of Stateman/Lord Recluse/etc. There is no zero deaths requirement; it's a completely different set of criteria. Link: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Master_o...sk_Force_Badge

I really have trouble understanding the point you are making in the first paragraph above.

The other point that might be made is this: The Devs designed the Incarnate content to be Hard. Not Easy. So when you don't defeat it on the first try, WAI. And when you get on a pug that has had no real thinking put into whether it can meet the challenges posed by the TF, and you fail, WAI. It's Top Level Content.

And a corollary to this is: If you're hung up on being defeated, if you think it's shameful to faceplant, if you think bringing Wakies is not a good idea, well, that won't work. It's why the devs made the Reqs for MoApex NOT include 0 deaths. So embrace your Inner Blaster, Pile up a few Wakies, and Roll On.

I'm not crazy about the 'blue thingies' either. Why not? They're freaking invisible to me. There is absolutely zero graphical clues as to when I'm about to faceplant... but there are audio clues. Once I picked up on those it became much, much easier to avoid the blue thingamabobs unless I flew into one by accident. So, while I'm not crazy about them, I'm not angry about them either.

I did this TF for the very first time last night on my tank, and I enjoyed it. The blue flames were not as hard as I expected them to be. Our team was not very experienced. It was the first time for a few guys, including me. But thankfully we did have some that knew what to do. They explained to me what would happen before we started the TF, and it sounded pretty scary. In reality it wasn't as bad.

Being on a tank, I barely even had to worry. At some points I actually jumped into the flames to kite BM. Having a PvP background, moving around while attacking is totally second nature to me.

The biggest problem was actually doing damage to BM. I have a theory that -speed debuffs actually hurt the team. I was desperatly trying to taunt her out of the patches so we could attack her, but she was practically running in one spot from all the slows. So there was simply no way to get her out of the blue. Every time we just had to wait for the patch under her to disappear. The whole fight took probably 30 mins. Overall, definitely fun. But I may have had a different opinion if I had been on a squishy