The Ideal AE Buster Team, and the Ideal AE Buster Team Team Buster

Well, I tried it with my Shield Defense/ Kinetic Melee tanker at -1x1 (bosses on, AVs off because I don't have the damage output to solo Siege as an Elite Boss on this character). I got as far as the Necrocaster Disciple before being defeated. I don't know if this was the Gun Drone pets or an auto-hit dark aura, like Chill of the night. I might have been able to get through that by using inspirations, but I doubt it. Because of nerve, I was still looking at 10% to-hit chances. But I think the largest problem for me is that I'm just not used to trying to find targets in groups that large. I knew I needed to take the Necrocaster down, but I couldn't find it.

Pulling to the door spread the groups out enough that I could actually tab target through and find the Necrocasters. Fighting on the ramp and platform let me fight one Mastermind at a time, for the most part. I think, knowing what I know now, I could do this fight without being defeated.

Note for Forward Commander: Cryo-bullets are very pretty.

The Fight with Necrocaster went well until I discovered that the Necrocaster Void had... Soul Transfer, I think it is. Trip two to the hospital.

The Chaos Enchanters went down pretty easily, aside from the Ninjitsu version of Elude. I just had to wait that out. Major Decoy, however, would never have made it past the Terror. For parts of the fight, the Chaos Enchanters would just wave their hands at me outside of melee range, seeming to do nothing.

This fight... Maybe without defeat, if I used enough break-frees before taking the Void down.

I shouldn't have been surprised by Necrocaster's Soul Transfer, but I managed to live through that one, even with the Netherstalkers and Netherfrosts. I found time to heal during fights by turning on Ninja Run and just leaping around and regenerating.

Then I discovered that the fight with the Netherfrosts had taken long enough for Soul Transfer to recharge. (It probably didn't help that I discovered a Chaos Enchanter that had been wandering off alone somewhere and stopped to defeat him.)

At this point I decided it was taking too damn long so I tanker stealthed to the doctor.

A Patrol Happened by during my fight with the Doctor and I decided that, since I have somewhere to go tonight, I'm done with it for now. I might try again later.

Tried it with two characters, both set on the easiest settings I could manage: -1x0 no bosses, no AVs. One character was the Ice/Fire/Fire Dominator who did the Scrapper challenge previously. When he died due to lacking a self heal, I switched to an Ice/Radiation/Psi Controller, who did much better, but didn't have the damage output to kill things very quickly.

On the second character I was able to get as far as the Netherfrosts without dying. By kiting enemies around I was able to outpace their damage pretty easily despite a couple of scares where both AM and IW went down. I died when I got more or less one-shot by a something/Ninjitsu elite boss that I didn't know I was fighting. At that point there were about 6 elite bosses running around that I might have been able to kill, but would have taken me a really long time. If any of the enemies had had heals, it would have been almost impossible for me.

It did occur to me that some game mechanics are extremely arbitary in their level of power. Arctic Air was very useful simply because all-boss spawns weren't turned on. If they had been, AA would have been next to worthless.

Mission well done. I do want to try it on a team eventually, although from what I've seen so far, am sure it will be painful.

Went to try Arcana's new challenge mission. I got a tell today when I went into AE asking whether I was going to farm. I said, no I was about to attempt a ridiculously hard challenge mission for likely no reward

My tank is my only viable possibility, and I knew I would likely be in there banging my head against a wall of capped resists and healing. PVP build worthless for PvE. Tanking build extremely low damage. Exemplar build sort of poor in every area compared to what I could do but it's my best option. I need more build slots!

Anyway, set to +4 X8, bosses on, AVs off. Went to Ouro and bought a tray full of small purples. Punched out the first boss' starting spawn and I think the first ambush, but maybe not; maybe the first ambush is the one I got stuck on. Anyway, on either the first or second ambush, the one with the fire guys and zombie and robot summoners, I got stuck. Sure enough, capped resistance with healing. Using tier 1 lucks and insights, I managed to punch out three of the fire guys with the resistance auras, through their capped resistance, keeping them away from the dark pets. Whenever they would get a heal, it made me very sad. Sad enough that while slowly chipping down the fourth fire guy's life I decided to call it. I died a couple times, but if I used a tier 1 luck, or in some situations 2 tier 1 lucks, I wouldn't die.

Very impressively hard mission, but I prefer damaging and damagable over resistance capped and healing. I liked the mean patrols and I had to dodge them a few times. One wandered to the mission door and permanently camped there.

I'll probably give it another go after the new incarnate powers add a dot to my attacks and give me a buffing pet and mini-nuke.

Edit: Went back in and punched one of the static spawns. Took out 2 engineers and called it good. Think I got detention fielded 5 times for each engineer I took out but didn't require any inspirations or danger.

Extreme challenge, but not so exciting to solo. Very nice for teams I'm sure.

Well I was the only target for a X8 spawn, so if they're gonna detention field it's going to suck for a soloist; that's just the way unresistable controls are.

By the way, how well does ninjitsu actually work? I assumed that enemies would be attacked or otherwise get in combat and wouldn't get a hide damage bonus, but do they get to use the damage bonus even if you try to spoil it?

I saw this thread since it was created but never bothered reading till today. This is an extremely interesting idea that I would love to participate in. I will take a look into it today. And I have a scrapper that I'd like to take through Aeon's Army mission as well see how he does. I'm assuming the Aeon mission is listed under @Elfis_Presley and Arcana's is under @Arcanaville?

I haven't read every single post in this thread, so anything specific I should know about? My first thought is to try this on my Fire/Fire blaster since he's my favorite/best toon, but I'm not sure if I'm allowed to use inspirations to begin with or not.
I'll take one or two of my toons through Arcana's mission and hopefully I can manage to get another run with a team as well.

I'm just @Elfis in game. Someone already got that name for the boards, though I've never seen them. My challenge mission is good for a pretty ridiculous challenge from normal enemies. Arcana's Extreme challenge is pretty off the scale-hard, with resistance-capped enemies sometimes, debuffs against everything under the sun, and everything and it's brother is a boss mastermind.

I took my damage god scrapper into Arcana's extreme challenge today just to see. Set to +4 X8 and jumped on a normal static spawn. Needed insps to stay alive for long, which was no surprise. The surprise was that my hit chance was floored shortly after they buffed up, even with 50% hit bonus from buildup, tactics, and kismet. Logged back on my tank and jumped on it with my sub 100-dps tank build, punched out an engineer. Changed build to my 150 dps exemplar build that I used yesterday, hit chance was about 30%. Moved the spawn around, different hit chance. Their defense varies greatly depending on what is aggroed and their positioning. Settled down to punch them where my hit chance was about 30%. Didn't make any headway and sat through many detention fields. Eventually I think everything ran low on endurance and my hit chance climbed steadily to 95% and I punched out another engineer.

Can you make the interrupt time for the computer 0 seconds?

I wanted my tickets and now i've got debt from dying twice -_-

I just wanted to do the mission for the tickets anyway. All 8 of them.

Just finished then on +0/x5, and I regret not doing it at +0/x8 just for the sake of the challenge. It would definitely be doable at +0/x8.

The fight was tough and by no means a breeze. Some fights were a war of attrition where I had to back off and pull people around corners. I died a few times and filled up on inspirations as the different challenge called for.

I was playing my 50 SS/Fire brute. No temp powers used.

Observations (AND SPOILERS SO SKIP THIS IF YOU WANT TO DO IT YOURSELF )




























....spoilers here!

The detention fields seemed to actually make the fights easier by letting you heal and recharge your powers which benefited you more than it benefited the enemies.

The second boss was at least for me an awful awful lot harder than the last boss. The second one killed me a number of times and the last boss only once. The waves of whatever-they-are that summon spectral horrors/phantasms and can stealth/confuse/etc. etc. were a serious pain and after I finished off everything else just turned into a serious time waster so I left them alone. Having double stacked Rage permanently up (and IOd accuracy) made the masses of -tohit not such a big issue but I imagine it could become a nightmare for other characters without that luxury.

The Netherfrosts/Netherstalkers were very tough on the initial burst but after their powerful opening hit it become once again a matter of attrition.

I'd say that at this stage a melee character with a resistance base, IOd up for defence, and with considerable AOE, can probably do this so long as they keep a big stock of Break Frees. That's the main threat... facing off against dozens and dozens of mezzes when going up against a larger spawn size. For me to do it at x8 I'd just need more break frees. The actual damage you take is not so significant, it's really just a matter of not being mezzed.

Finally... when Doctor Murnau says: [NPC] Doctor Murnau: My strongest disciples have arrived! the last wave was a bit slow to reach me and it was barely a challenge. I'm not sure why that spawns was meant to be so tough but they were a piece of cake. Perhaps they have something that SS/Fire is strong against.

Edit: I'd hazard a guess and say that a Mind Dominator with perma-dom and sleep could probable handle it quite easily too, so long as they were careful pulling and seperating the mobs apart.

2nd edit: The success message should not say "Who's the man!" as some of us are not male

UPDATE:

1. Computer time reduced to 1 second to make it easier to bail out. You'll still need to at least clear the general area enough to click it.

2. The final ambush on Murnau was bugged to send the standard spawns for the mission instead of the correct ambush. This should be corrected in the updated mission: that ambush should be far harder.

3. Standard spawns should no longer detention field players. This was unintended at the rates they were using it.

4. Non-gender neutral completion message altered for completing the mission.

Mission should be much harder now on the final fight, and should no longer continuously detention field players who cannot mez the force field Warbots. This also means players will not be protected from damage constantly by detention fields and thus the overall threat of the mission should now be higher.


COMING SOON:

Slightly stronger standard spawns
Slightly more resistance to strong mezzing characters
Slightly better offensive nature against single players attempting to solo mission

I put together a team of 7 last night to run this mission. I set my difficulty to +0/x6, so it was actually run on x7 for the team. I set it to that to give it a quick test, but it turned out to be not-so-quick. We spent probably an hour clearing it the "safe" way. The plan was to go back and run on +4 with a full team, but people wanted to go do other things (like sleep). We did have plenty of deaths on the team, but only one team wipe. That happened when we first encountered Soul Transfer en masse. I had tried to warn my teammates what was coming (based on what I had read from this thread) before it happened, but I guess that one slipped my mind. Oops.

Our team makeup was: /dark, /therm, /kin, /cold corrs; ill/rad, ice/cold trollers, and a /elec brute. Lots of buffs, lots of debuffs, lots of debuff resistance, overall a very tanky team (the brute was surprisingly tough with all the buffs, being the only one to survive the team wipe). For the large part, everyone did their job of using their powers properly. Something I feel is needed to move through the mission quickly would be a targeting bind/macro for each boss group. I know that at least I lost track of the bosses, themselves, several times.

On my next run through, I plan to set to +4, have a full team with at least one real healer (no disrespect to our therm), and blitz right to the bosses, only killing the mobs necessary to complete. This is how I run SFs/TFs, so may as well put that method to the test. I expect to see increased importance of +def and +res buffs with less room for slacking as well as much more use of die > PBU > venge > rez. However, I specifically do not plan to use a venge/fallout doll, as I sometimes might like for speed SFs. Provided I can round up the same caliber of competent players, I expect we will be just as able to complete the mission when set to +4. I also expect it will be more entertaining if we rush through without regard for the hazards that will present.

I'll post back hopefully later tonight with results.

Demorecord the run if you can: it should be a lot easier than trying to video cap the run and should cause no real slowdown on a relatively zippy machine. I'd love to see a successful runthrough to get ideas for how to improve the mission.

Your team composition is a much more "brute force" team of tanking and buff/debuffing and less of a control-y team, which is an interesting counterpoint to what people are saying in terms of the mission being vulnerable to controls (its intended to be at least partially vulnerable to controls used efficiently). If you can smash through the mission with buffs and debuffs, I might need to crank up difficulty slightly. Of course, it will be harder at +4.

I don't expect people to clear the entire thing, but I designed it to intend the players to actually fight most of the ambush spawns. If you can spike the boss dead out from under them, that would be a smart way to bypass a lot of the threat but I might need to increase the resilience of the bosses to compensate for that tactic so they live long enough to make their reinforcements a legitimate threat.

Also, technically none of the bosses is a literal requirement, more of a handshake requirement. The computer lets you complete the mission and exist at any time, so players aren't trapped in the mission having to quit out. But yes: I would have designed the mission to make the three bosses the requirement if it wasn't for that escape hatch issue.

Gratz on the run though: if you actually cleared it in an hour that's pretty good. The occasional death is to be expected, and yeah, that Soul Transfer grouping is specifically my way of saying "surprise!" to heavy-AoE packing teams and teams that try to go all-melee or think they don't need to support the tank (if they have one).

I thought of making all the bosses nine feet tall to make them easier to find in the crowds but then decided against that. They do look usually different and do stuff designed to call attention to themselves. I'm not deliberately trying to hide them, but I am trying to make sure there's enough stuff happening that everyone's aggro limit is being well served, and things like AoE controls and debuffs cannot easily hit everything quickly.


Overall, what did you think of the mission? Was it a fun challenge, or an annoying challenge? Did you feel like everyone was needed and useful, and everyone had to be engaged all the time? Were you using all your powers, or did some things seem unnecessary or worthless?

Most importantly, did it seem like the mission caused you to change tactics frequently depending on what was coming at you, or did the same basic set of actions serve you well against everything? Did it actually *seem* like there was a lot of different threats, or just a huge mass of monolithic threat? I'm trying to amp up the diversity quotient, so it doesn't just challenge but does so in different ways so players aren't bored.

@Arcana: I feel like we could have just rushed to the bosses, killed them, and moved along. The extra time we spent killing the ads was just that, extra. Some of the people that teamed with me now don't want to run it again because I made it so boring. I think I can still get a competent team together, I just don't know when. Also, I don't feel like we used our skills any more than normal (aside from our kin who was kind enough to keep ID on some of us).

@mauk2: I believe that /elec is good, I just haven't played it. The more corrs, the better. Targeting binds are very useful if made ahead of time. And what can I say? I like speedy SF/TFs.