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

Awesome. That does not invalidate the fact that brutes, tankers, and scrappers are also very good at aggro control. If you feel you must play your fortunata because they are "better" in this one encounter of the TF, then that is fine. I think the other armored ATs can handle the job just fine, but I can see how a fort has a range advantage.

Doing aggro control with a squishy is great. I am glad you look out for the rest of your team. It is most excellent that you prefer your fort and corruptor on the Apex, range attackers do have their advantages.

Most people are not as decked out as you. They do have trouble with warrior and sword aggro. I am glad you can choose to tank those mobs with a squishy or a fort. Most people will rather tank with a scrapper, brute, or tanker. The joy is, you can bring them all and they are all useful.

I'm going to call your bluff. Unless your characters have a Taunt of some kind (maybe Fortunatas do and I don't know about it, but Corruptors surely don't) what you were doing is not "tanking." Nor is being soft capped comparable to the survivability an equally IOed melee. The facts of the Battle Maiden fight are that everyone is at a disadvantage in some way. But if you think s/l softcapped Corruptors somehow able to spit out so much DPS that no one can pull aggro off of them are the standard for squishy characters, I can see how you would be upset.

P.S. You also won't hear an argument from me that VEATs are a well balanced class.

That wasn't really my point, I understand how it can seem that way however.

I don't refuse melees and I still play my melees.

My argument is that this encounter does in fact marginalize what melee characters bring to the table.

It's less about why would you take a melee character in the very real sense of purposefully denying someone a spot on the team and more about the metagame aspect of the sheer fact that after bringing 1 decent aggro holder like a Tanker/Brute - you are, mechanically speaking, much better off filling the team with ranged damage & support ATs.

This is also true in other areas of the game, but this particular encounter is on the rather far end of the spectrum.



Fair enough.

And I do think 1 solid aggro holder like a brute/tanker is best, but beyond that - yes you can do it with more melees, but you are also much better off with ranged &support ATs (So much so that the best time I've heard of from people I group with regularly was 21 mins. A Tanker or Brute, A scrapper who spent most of the fight face down, and the rest was corrs/controllers & 2 Arch Blasters that were pumping out RoA like crazy - wish I had been there to see it).

I'm not saying you can't do it, I'm saying that the fight marginalizes what Melee ATs do.



By 1-2-3-4 you must be alluding to the use of an optimal attack chain.

If you are not rolling through your attack chain, you are not doing consistent DPS.

If you have no method of taunt AND you can't roll through your attack chain - you are even less useful.


I welcome you to re-read my posts above and quote where I said I was "tanking".

I specifically said I kept aggro off of other ATs (I didn't specifically mention swords/warriors aggro, but that was in the quote I was responding to)


I'm not sure how you could think that taking aggro is not possible.


I'm not trying to be rude here, but have you ever played /rad?

Rad toggles piss enemies off en masse. Fireballs & AoE attacks piss off enemies en masse.

As long as no one else has pissed off those enemies more than you
then you will have the attention, or aggro, of those enemies.

This is why Tankers & Brutes have a threat component in all of their attacks in the first place. This allows them to generate a level of threat that even a debuff toggle or an AoE attack alone won't overcome or vice versa: it allows them to easily overcome the threat previously generated by said AoEs.


Correct.

Of course, you can just stay at ranged which provides an amazing amount of protection all by itself.

I also think you underestimate the power of SM/L softcap against SM/L using enemies, a self heal, two AoE debuff toggles and excellent mobility in terms of what survivability they can provide.


So basically the only thing we have established is that it would be unlikely for either my Fort or Corr to stand toe to toe in an endless slug-fest with Battlemaiden or her endless waves of party favors.

Of course, I never actually said that's what I was doing.



I'll let you try it, you seem like an experienced player in your posts.

Grab a character of yours that has some fast recharging AoE.

Use it as aggressively as possible against a group of swords or minions that have not been taunt. Let them run to you, move away > repeat.

if you're fast enough, you can also switch target groups and deal with them, or alternatively deal with BM herself. 1 Fireball actually goes a really long way.

This.

I don't know about everyone else, but my melee characters also have at least one ranged attack. Along with those ranged attacks I can still use my melee attacks even if the blue patch is around BM.

It's simple, just kite in and out of melee range so you're only there for a second to get your attack off. Sure, you'll take a little bit of damage from the patch, but not nearly enough to kill you unless you're bad.

Of course ranged AT's will have the advantage in this particular scenario since they can put out more consistent DPS. Just like ST builds will have the advantage over AoE builds.

It's not a fact, it's an opinion. I think what melees bring to the encounter is useful. I gave my reasons for thinking that and seek them out for my team. You're welcome to disagree.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Nitpick: I think more "squishy" types go for ranged/AoE def cap than S/L. You're particularly well suited for the BM fight if you happened to have gone the S/L route, but I tend to think most of the game favors positional defense, esp to toons who can pretty much always stay ranged.

My Son/Son who has both ranged def cap & S/L resist capped can totally laugh off both BM and all the swords & champs in that fight. My Ice/Storm controller also happens to have ranged & S/L capped defenses and similarly can treat all threats as a joke. My other various ranged def capped controllers & blasters can't. Well, the hovering ones can (don't like using temp fly for the suppression, though I will). The grounded ones tend to get nailed by the swords far more than the blue patches, and this is where melee can help. Even if they can't do their optimal DPS chain on BM, they can keep the freakin' swords out of my Fire blaster's hair. 1 tank (unless he's exceptionally good) isn't going to cut it bet. BM & all the spawns on the map--I'd far prefer at least 2 melee on the scene at all times.

The last Apex I ran had my fire blaster, a controller of some kind, and six scrappers and brutes. The TF went fine, and everything, including BM, died, so unless I'm considerably more awesome than I thought I was, all that melee must've been doing *something*.

While I agree melee DPS gets shafted a bit here, I'm in the "So what?" camp. I'd argue the Battle Maiden brawl is a welcome change from the norm in that it's nice to see ranged classes get the nod while melee classes finally have to worry about positioning beyond lining up Head Splitter.

As a melee player, look at the Battle Maiden fight the way a Traps or Trick Arrow player looks at the entire game and relish the challenge of proving you can contribute. In other words, play with a chip on your shoulder.

I don't think your note about the metagame and an idealized team is worth fretting over - the scenario isn't nearly difficult enough to justify that level of AT discrimination. Also, keep the encounter in perspective: it's only one part of the Apex TF. Melees can still toggle up and tune out for (most of) the first mission while ranged characters are dodging War Walker blasts and Clockwork spawns that exceed the aggro cap.

I think you go too far when you say it marginalizes what melee ATs (by which you mean the armored ATs) do. It makes them less than optimum damage dealers during the Pylons and the BM fight. During the clockwork and warwalkers they can fulfill all their roles to the highest degree. During the Pylons and BM, they can fulfill the aggro control role to the highest degree and their damage role to a lesser degree.

My Fire/Fire blaster works the same way. My primary role of range damage works very well. My secondary role of melee damage is less functional. In my case, I built to be primarily melee, so I lose quite a bit on that character by ranging (which is why I leap in on BM when I can). While I can try to aggro control to an extent thanks to the AoEs, I am not built well enough to manage that kind of aggro (without a goodly set of buffs).

Having the damage dealing role of melee attackers be lessened does not marginalize the ATs. It does make them less than optimum at a certain level, but less than optimum is a far cry from marginalized. Usually one or two armored ATs can maintain enough aggro control, and while dominators, blasters, VEATs, and Khelds have other options, the range attackers/debuffers do shine brightly in these encounters. Each AT can function well, they just have to realize that they may have some skills that are more important than they are used to and some which are less important than they are used to.

We'll have to agree to disagree then.


I go SM/L because Scorp Shield provides so much bang for the buck.

It also allowed me to build for perma-AM & perma-hasten, on that particular build - which wouldn't have happened building for ranged defense.

The rest is all offensive debuffs & fire damage output.


I didn't say you couldn't finish, if you're going join a conversation - at least make some kind of effort to read what's being written.

I know I'm expecting too much probably.

How long did it take your team to finish?

How many deaths did you suffer?

Did you earn an Mo badge that run?






No melee character can ever come close to providing the raw power of a force multiplier.

As for blasters, yes I think it's good for them that they have TF where they get to really shine.

I think it's unfortunate that it required shafting several other ATs to make happen.



Stalkers and Scrappers are damage dealers, if they are unable to properly fulfill that role, they are effectively dead weight.

Brutes are damage dealers as well, but at least they also bring a secondary function of maintaining aggro.


Agreed vs. Clockwork & Warwalkers.

However, they don't provide anything particularly special over anyone else capable of either:

A) Dealing as much or more raw damage
B) Dealing damage + bringing buffs/debuffs/controls to any of those same fights.

The aggro role is only really open to Tankers & Brutes (in terms of people forming teams). A well played scrapper could also make it happen, I doubt they would be selected for that role though.

Sucks to be a Stalker.



We're disagreeing on some portions, but I think we're of the same opinion on team comp.

1 or 2 melees to run interference, the rest of the team filled with ranged dam/support.

Can't speak for him, but ran an Apex 2 days ago with :

Fire/SS tanker (me)
Inv/SS tanker
Elec/Elec tanker
Fire/SS tanker (friend)
SS/SD brute (friend)
DM/inv brute (friend)
Rad/MM blaster (friend, his first time on the TF)
Ill/Cold controller

23 minute completion time ; my average completion time is usually between 17 and 22 minutes.
About a dozen deaths ; usually I see about twice as many deaths. That would be a point for the meleers, but honestly who cares about deaths?
No MO, we're not RPers. Again, I don't see what that has to do with anything. All you have to do to get the MO is fight below the stairs, and the other badges I don't even know the requirements for because I never managed to *not* get them. So melee or ranged doesn't play a part.

Bottomline, on the only metric that matters, that team was about 3 minutes slower than average. I'm pretty sure I would have spent more than 3 additional minutes recruiting if I went all elitist and turned down the tankers. Even if you want to argue this doesn't matter in a hypothetical situation where you're given a choice between ATs... How is going ~15% slower being "marginalized"? Frankly, if you care about differences that tiny, I wonder how do you cope with playing melee ATs at all, as there's a much, much wider gap in many situations. Hell, if we're talking solo performance you can routinely see 50% performance gaps *within the same AT* with different powersets, let alone different ATs.

Now I can see something potentially coming : "oh, but you had a cold and a MM blaster, they kept perma -regen on BM!". No, just no. As I said, the blaster was doing this for his first time and he spent a fair amount of the final fight dead. I think he hit BM maybe once with DP, that's about it. The cold was admittedly doing a fine job at, well, being a cold, but if you want to argue he did all the work, I'm just going to laugh.

I'm no hypocrit, given availability I will pick buff/debuff ATs before anything else. This is just what I do for everything, not Apex especially. I can even understand people who dislike Apex or want specific ATs because it's too hard for them otherwise - but you say yourself you don't have a problem with that and that you're a minmaxer. With that it's really hard to take your posts for anything but some guy who loves melee ATs specifically and is very subjective when he argues anything regarding overall balance.

To be fair with the bad points, I think people who argue meleers are just as fine as ranged in Apex to be equally biaised and silly. Melee ATs will operate at less than their full efficiency in the BM fight, even if it's 80%, 90% or even 95%, it won't be 100%. It technically can't be, unless you've got a truckload of +regen and heals directed your way I guess, but then that means someone else is wasting their potential healing you. So, one can't really make the "melee = ranged against BM" argument without implicitely saying meleers are overpowered in the rest of the game, and in that case you should go and say it directly. Of course, it does sound very silly when phrased that way.

In the end... Just like everywhere else in the game, the difference in player skill, build investment, etc. from player to player will be magnitudes bigger than the difference between a melee AT and a ranged AT. It's likely more time was spent arguing in this topic than the difference between a full melee team and a full ranged team would be over a hundred Apex TFs.

I'm not trying to be rude either, but it seems to me that what you are going to great lengths to demonstrate is that "Sometimes enemies attack you." IMO this is not helping your argument. Unless what you are trying to argue is that "...and every one who gets attacked has armor equivalent toa melee." Because it is the fact that enemies do attack you that makes not having armor relevant. In essence, you are demonstrating the point you are trying to refute: without intervention via taunt, enemies will attack people who may not be built for it. You said yourself that you are not able to hold aggro. Unless you arguing everyone has the same armor you do, this weakens rather than strengthens your point.

BTW there is nothing special about Radiation debuff toggles that makes enemies come after you any more than other powers. What will cause this is if the toggle is running and enemies enter its range without being engaged by someone else. In any case, the fact that powers sometimes make enemies attack you is not surprising and in fact is the basis of Taunt existing to prevent it from happening.

I think the argument is really that meleers are so used to their armor that they take survival for granted. Meleers for the most part have one target to worry about during the BM fight. Not so for anyone else. Even just trying to keep shields and buffs on people is difficult as they bounce around, die unexpectedly, and the swords/warriors chase you around. Three hits from a warrior will bring down any of my squishies and has a fair chance to stun them. And if I don't die, if the other squishies on my team do, that's a significant loss of DPS too. It is not the bed of rose petals its being portrayed as by some posters (not you). And that's why every single AT has had its turn to complain that it is uniquely difficult to contribute on this Task Force. My Ice/Rad can't even use more than 3 or 4 powers for fear of slowing BM, immobing her, holding her, or my slick/aura being mistaken for a blue patch.

But you know who isn't marginalized? People with a self rezz. Rise of the Phoenix rocks this fight.

Well done, and excellent time.



Regardless of what happened, your team was melee heavy and completed Apex in an excellent time frame.

I can't do anything but commend you and your group.



You're correct, I prefer melee play in this game. I still have a select handful of ranged/support characters I enjoy.

My dislike for the TF is not that it's difficult.

It's the blue patches which potentially neutralize the defense half of a melee character, and simultaneously prevent them from bringing their full damage to bear on BM.

I disagree with any gimmick that specifically double penalizes any AT in any encounter.

So while the Blue Patches are dangerous to ranged characters - they aren't double penalized against the AV.



Well said.


No, what I'm saying is that you can keep packs of enemies focused on a ranged character on purpose to keep them off of other characters who don't go out of their way to pull those mobs off you.

I'm sorry, that's as simple as I can state it. If you still don't get it, nothing I say will help you.

So, you're back to saying you're tanking, but without saying it, but only as long as nobody attacks the stuff you pulled? How exactly do you defeat the required waves of Battle Maiden's allies doing this? That's a 100% reduction in DPS for squishies--let's get started about how they're marginalized.

The issue is not me "not getting it." The issue is you are overstating your case, and wavering on what it is you are overstating.

No, I still disagree. Unlike a Blaster, melees do two things: do damage, and not get killed as easily.

To imply that if they suffer when they aren't currently doing damage because they're moving out of a patch is to similarly imply that any time they aren't getting attacked and thus taking advantage of their durability is them being marginalized. So literally any time a Scrapper is not currently being attacked by something they're wasting their potential. And I don't view it that way.

Melees can do one, or the other, or both, and still be useful to the team. Just because they aren't at that moment standing there attacking the AV doesn't mean they're becoming less useful, because they do other things than just do damage, which they can easily do when there's a patch on BM.

I suppose I could similarly argue that Defenders and Corruptors are marginalized because the presence of patches means they'll have to spend more time healing or rezzing people who can't dodge or resist the damage than normal, and thus aren't attacking. If I'm going to ignore the usefulness of their non-damage function I mean.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

I think its canonically obvious that long range is better than or equal to short range, and that range is better than melee by definition, all other things being equal. This means not just in Apex, but everywhere: its never a disadvantage for your attacks to hit from farther away, period. It is thus logically inevitable that in any situation where shorter range attacks are disadvantaged, whether that is Apex or the Envoy of Shadows, the advantage of having ranged attacks will be amplified.

However, I'm not sure this is the best argument to prove the point, because even if melee characters are operating at less than 100% efficiency, its not obvious that ranged characters are operating at 100% efficiency. In the case of blasters, its not obvious that blasters can function in Apex with 100% efficiency on offense, because they too have to move. And to the extent that its likely their efficiency loss will be less than melee, its not obvious that their increased efficiency isn't due to some other player on the team taking enough aggro for them to use that offense.

The degenerate cases people are talking about where blasters and defenders and controllers can just tank the whole map and even draw aggro from the rest of the team are just that: degenerate cases. In the general case, ranged squishies who claim they have absolutely no problem with aggro or damage in this mission are in effect making the converse claim you suggested above: they are suggesting that they are so game-breakingly overpowered everywhere in the game that they can completely ignore the combined threat of the entire last mission in Apex, and its because of that moreso than the design of the mission that anything not them, in this case melee, is redundant.

In any team where the squishies are not indestructible, melee characters can be useful. In any team where the squishies are indestructible, melee characters will be less useful, because they bring defense to the table. Indestructible things don't need defense. But that's a truism, and not exclusive to Apex.

I consider tanking to be standing toe to toe with the enemies being the focus of their attention and damage.

The swords don't have ranged attacks, if they're simply chasing you around while you move continuously, you never actually have to withstand their damage - So I was kiting them using CJ.

You can do this with the warriors too, they do have a ranged attack but it's nothing like standing in melee with them. And if you time it just right they spend a lot more time chasing you than they do firing their crossbows.


I never once said in this entire thread that I was tanking them.

I said I was holding their aggro.

It's just a simple hit and run tactic really, inflict damage and then avoid retaliation.



What percentage of efficiency do you think melee characters are operating at?

Nihilii's mentioned 80 to 95%.

From a damage dealing standpoint, I think that's too high.

It's definitely too high against just battle maiden herself.

If you have a seamless attack chain, I don't think you're getting 80% of those attacks in on BM.

I don't have any percentage numbers, I just have my own experiences which tell me that my ranged characters feel much more effective at dealing damage in this encounter than my melee characters.

I never claimed to tank the whole map.

I've never once even used the word "tank"


The final BM fight is in a giant wide open area, this is great for kiting even if the blue patches have to be avoided.

If this fight took place in an enclosed room, you can't do the same thing.

If the enemies all had machine guns, or energy blasts or fire blasts instead of swords with a back up crossbow or no ranged attack at all - I couldn't have done this.

But I didn't think any of that was relevant, because we were discussing this particular encounter.

Before I reply I want to make it clear that even though I disagree with you, it's not personal. I enjoy debating these points. Thank you for keeping this discussion civil.

As to your point, you are basically still saying you are tanking without saying it. Statements like "the swords simply chase you around the map" dismiss the fact that its the swords chasing you around the map that makes being a squishy dangerous during this fight. The swords and minions are deadly to my squishy characters. You make it sound like no one should ever die to them, yet I do. And I cannot hover blast them because hover causes the halberds to spawn in mid air and take out teammates who are unable to see them.

You are presenting your case basically as if no squishy character has to worry about damage, because some small few of them might be soft capped to slash/lethal, and/or it's so easy to kite that you can do it and maintain 100% DPS on the AV. Or, you are presenting it as if because you have two characters with capped defenses, melee is no longer desirable because a squishy character can just do it all (otherwise known as "Controller syndrome": "OMG Fire Controllers can farm and Illusion Controllers can solo GMs, ALL Controllers are damage-monster-farmer-tankers!") Aracana's point about ranged characters applies here; if squishies are able to tank-except-not-using-the-word-tank the entire map, the problem isn't this encounter but that squishies are so overpowered that nothing can challenge them. That's a claim about the larger game that I find impossible to accept.

In any case I do not know where you get the idea that everyone should expect to fight at 100% capacity in every AV fight. I would sort of like my Controllers and Defenders mezzes and debuffs to be at 100% effectiveness. That doesn't happen, in this AV fight, or any AV fight.

Yes, I was about to mention something like that, I'm pretty sure that mentioning a characters S/L mitigation against S/L mobs while mentioning that they 'hold' aggro constitutes 'tanking' in this game.

Same. Thank you for keeping it civil as well.


I guess I just have a different idea on tanking and I separate it mentally from what I consider kiting.

Kiting is a tactic I've used in this, and in other MMOs, on ranged/squishy type characters that aren't really designed to go toe to toe with enemies.

It's generally not very efficient in terms of time per kill, but it often allows a solo character to do things they normally wouldn't be able to.

Having someone tank a pack of mobs would be more efficient for killing large groups in this game. If the tank/brute was able to gather all the swords, warriors & BM all into one large pack for a debuff+AoE dogpile - I'd be advocating that instead for sure.

I'm only employing it in this fight because it's a viable tactic to keep packs of enemies off of other characters who don't have the same means of surviving it.


You're right, I do forget sometimes that not everyone shares my play-style philosophy. I generally do not take non-IOd builds onto TFs - simply because they don't allow me to really enjoy the TF at it's fullest.

And the reason I was kiting in the first place was to protect other buff/debuff/ranged ATs who weren't really built for it, so yeah not everyone is capable of that.


Here's the flipside to that.

I also didn't consider until now that other melee characters might not be softcapped as well. I wonder if other people in this thread have.

What happens to melee players who are not softcapped on this encounter?

Now they are both unable to attack BM directly for any extended period of time, and are probably not very suited for dealing with entire packs of swords on their own either.

All of those buffs that earlier in the thread you mentioned squishes might not be in range for? The melee player might not be in range for them either.

How useful is this character?


IMO? Not very. I've seen several melees who were clearly not IO'd and not prepared for this fight spend more than 50% of the encounter face down.


I'd like to know why my Softcapped to SM/L Corr would be considered by some to be an outlier in terms of performance, and yet that's not really considered when we discuss the melee side.
I think there has been a running bias in this thread the melees should be able to take care of themselves. Not everyone has a self heal, not everyone is softcapped.

Kiting is weaker than tanking IMO, even though we don't see eye to eye on the differences between those (yet?).

I don't believe that about the rest of the game on a 1 AT vs. 1 AT comparison - but I do believe that force multipliers when stacked are easily overpowered for most of this game's content.

Stacked buffs and debuffs has got to be a titanic headache for the developers to balance against.

I assume this is why we have the purple patch to begin with.



I don't expect 100% all of the time, and I'm sticking my neck out with this statement I'm sure - but I think that all but the best melee players in this game would be hard pressed to actually get more than 50% of the amount of attacks they normally get off in an AV fight onto BM in this encounter.

Anyone who is not a very mobile player and has less that average timing would probably see that number drop even further.


Except we both know that would make an absolute joke of the entire game.

Uh, i take it you're already familiar with the Halberds having a spherical area of effect? It's not hard on a ranged character to stay high enough to make the odds of a teammate running into an aerial patch quite low. On one ATF i had two other teammates who used flight powers during the BM fight and neither we nor the non-flying team members had any greater difficulty with airborne than ground-based patches. Actually, my characters have fewer issues with airborne patches than the ones one the ground as long as those who are flying stay more than ten feet or so up. Those that fly are dropped out of the patches by the -fly before they can take significant damage and my non fliers who are hopping about high enough to hit airborne patches also have fewer problems surviving than when they land on a ground-based patch.

It might be unique to the assorted mostly PuG ATF teams i've generally run with. Once or twice it's been useful to suggest that fliers try to maintain some altitude. In my experience that works rather well on most PuGs.

Depends on the blast set. For many/most of them, the Tier 3 blast has a base range of 40ft. I'm not sure what the radius of the halberd sphere is, but the graphic appears to put it at about 25ft (about the same as Dispersion Bubble). Assuming you're not hovering directly over Battle Maiden, and triangulating a distance based on an assumption that you're about 10-15ft away on the x,y grid after moving, you either end up with a vertical height z close enough to catch people on the ground (particularly jumpers) or taking the same penalty meleers have by being forced out of range for your best attacks. Not incidentally, this is the same penalty that "marginalizes" melees. If you could safely park yourself at a safe height and stay there it would be a bit different, but you will be forced to move around.

[EDIT: Meant to add the other advantage of avoiding hover: if you stay on the ground, the blast radius of any halberd attacks takes up 50% less room on the map, as half of the sphere is "absorbed" by the terrain.]

Not that "melee" is a necessarily a useful category. Blasters and Dominators lose a significant portion of damage whenever they are forced back out of melee range. Meanwhile a Scrapper's or Stalkers ranged blasts are extremely powerful. Compared to the Dominator version, Fire Blast on a Scrapper recharges 2 seconds faster and does 42 base damage more, with a chance to crit for double damage.

And of course all of this assumes blasting is even a good idea. Since this particular discussion focused on ways meleers are disadvantaged, we skipped over the discussion about Controller damage during this fight, which is cut in half whenever the enemy isn't contained. Meanwhile the swords are immune to stun, confuse, sleep, hold, fear, repel and knockback--immob works, but you have to use it far away from BM. I'd rather not rehash that if we don't have to, but if you are interested in reading about it, it's somewhere in the middle of the pile about how this encounter makes Masterminds, Dominators, Defenders, Tankers, Stalkers, Kheldians, and Blasters useless.