In Praise of the Endgame

I ran several BAFs last night, most of them failed with me being frustrated at the end. The one that was a win was the most epic satification feeling at the end. That trail was 3 full teams.

Having a set leader and people willing to follow makes all the difference in the world.

Have yet to try Lambda

First Impressions:

BAF = Like
Lamba = Loathe

How will I feel about them after having to run them repeatedly because there is no other way for my main character to continue to "reasonably" progress in power = To early to say yet as it's only been live a short time.

However, I can make an educated guess based on my known likes/dislikes:

BAF = I will like less because of the "grind"
Lamba = I will have to come up with a word that is more powerful than "Loathe".

I honestly have yet to try either of the new trials. Hell, I have yet to even attempt an Apex. But that's because, unlike your character, the Incarnate storyline has not fit into any of my current 50s. Despite that I wish it were different, I acknowledge that, and let it go.

I give you kudos, Escalus. Not because yours is the only topic I see (thus far, in this forum) bearing a positive reaction to i20, but because you acknowledged both viewpoints as valid, and adopted a "to each his/her own" mentality. I think if more of the negative comments did that, discussions would be a lit more diplomatic and based on evidence rather than opinion.

But then, where's the fun in that?

So far my favorite thing is Photobombing Marauder as he's going through his big dog speech.

Nothing says 'overstuffed clueless macho cheesehead' than a pink, teal and goldenrod clad man off to the side of you doing /dance6 while you sputter on about how awesome you are.

Done three trials on live and did three on test. All of them Lambda, so I have nothing to say about the BAF.

Managed my first success on live tonight while 'leading' a 16 man raid (I say 'leading' as I tend to say what nees to be done, then leave it to people to do it, but I do shout a lot in the 'saying what needs to be done' phase )

My recipe for Lambda success tonight?

0) get the raid split into two vaguely balanced teams before starting Trial.
1) make sure everyone's using League chat.
2) remind people about the map option to show league members.
3) Clear all the way round (it's still early days, we want IXP and Threads, dammit!)
4) Clear the Courtyard (more IXP/Threads)
5) Clear the guns off the walls.
6) Beat up the Security Guard
7) STOP for 3 minutes and explain about glowies, ignoring mobs as much as possible, extra time for Acid+Grenade combos.
8) assign teams to acid or grenades
9) Press the go button for chaos by entering the lifts.
10) run around, hitting your team chat targeting bind on glowies
11) give the rest of the team/raid some credit for intelligence, so they'll likely be able to keep up and do what needs to be done without micromanagement.
12), 13) 14) faceplant a few times
15) once all the acid's been got (always seems to go faster than the grenades IME), head over to help with Grenades.
16) quick instructions on checking for temps, and getting acid onto portals. (Trading all acid/Pacifiers to teams leads seems needlessly complex to me, but if it works for you, then good.)
17) Chaos part 2. Acid on portals ASAP, then trim down excess aggro from weapon deliveries if you've got it, move on to Marauder.
18) Trim down his 'friends' before you start pacifying and hitting Marauder.
19) run round like headless chickens trying to shoot/slash/burn/freeze/irradiate/whatever Marauder whilst also trying to manage any aggro from weapon spawns and reminding melee to GET THE HELL AWAY FROM MARAUDER WHEN YOU SEE THE NOVA FIST WARNING.
20) shout for pacifiers when needed, almost run out, then drop Marauder while part of the league's off trying to get another grenade.
21) We win. Hurrah!

I quite like Lambda. It's straightforward enough when you know how it works, and if you don't, then it's easy enough to pick up.

Trying to 'lead' a trial and at the same time fight on a pretty damn squishy against Praetorians Katana/Regen Scrapper was probably the trickiest bit.

I reserve judgement on the BAF, as I've yet to run it.

Anyway, congrats to the people who attended the Lambda that I ran tonight on Union, and apologies for wall of text syndrome.

Hahah, nice stories here

I, too, like the new challenge and can't wait for more I don't have much time (until the weekends) to play the iTrials but still want more power!

I was able to get into a Lambda Trial this morning before work and while I've done a Lambda trial or two on beta, I've never actually beaten it so I wasn't expecting a victory. Heck, the closest I've ever seen Marauder's health go down to was like 43 or 42 out of 100.

So, anyways, we were doing the trial and Arbegla was leading it (or co-leading it with another person; forgot name ) and everything was going smoothly. We got past phase 2 with all 10 acids and all 10 pacif. grenades (got the last grenades in the last few seconds heh).

So we take out 8 of 10 of the portals and we fight Marauder; before I knew it he was getting pummeled. Maybe it was the -regen from everyone (mainly Arbegla's poison trap....mmm...poison trap anyways)....but he was down to like 1/2 health before a few minutes passed it seemed.

We got him down to 12/100 but then we just had too many people die from all the ambushes (still had 2 doors up...not sure what happened/why it happened). After a few suicides, we teamed up and took out the remaining doors (again, I don't remember the pacification grenades or acid grenades respawning outside but THANK YOU for that!).

Kept dying; finally took out most of the Battle Orbs and taking out some of the mobs but by that time Marauder's HP was back to 83/100 or so....and time ran out.

It was fun and I was really surprised, again, how fast/well we were doing

Got 5 threads from it and 23% on my Interface slot

Another vote in favor of the endgame. I failed a BAF and a Lambda yesterday with my 50 rad^2 defender, but both were exciting runs and definite learning experiences. I would've run more, but the ITF beckoned and the new content still can't beat bowling for Romans just yet! That, and I am pretty hyped to eventually get my widow and F^3 blaster in the raid mix since they're the main affections of my altitis.

i20 isn't all good, admittedly. The new team window, that I can see the utility for and my emp defender is thankful, but my eyes are still bleeding from all the bright green. THE GOGGLES DID NOTHING!

I'd like it better if the queue estimates of time waiting were right. I never seem to get a trial that quick.

Just completed my first Lambda Trial - with 25 seconds left on the clock - it was better than sex - almost

? Too much details...o.O

It was one of the best PvE feelings ever

Just had my first BAF that crashed and burned. Despite most of the team living only as long as a full tray of purples lasts and constantly running back from the hospital, we managed to get to the last encounter. Simply couldn't keep up with the adds and kill the AVs at the same time.

I'm having a lot more fun than just doing normal radio missions or hero tips. In BAF, anyway. I've only done 5 Lamdba Sectors, and they all got to the end. Four didn't do so well because of the second to last part. Some were uncoordinated, others were just poor efforts by people afraid to use inspirations, despite passing by an infinite source of them every time they run back from death. The last one we got all the portals down right off the bat, but the adds from the crate drop offs were more than enough to overwelm us. Weird, I know. Still had a lot of fun on that last attempt, though.

I like the BAF a lot better, and I think future trials should be modeled after this one rather than Lambda. Those merits you get for killing the AVs are a great source of threads while in Lambda you need to do perfect on the second-to-last phase in order to get those merits.

The prisoner escape phase is unique and fairly lenient. Only gotten a perfect score on that once, but never had a group fail on this part.

I've been keeping my score, and unless I miscounted I'm at a whopping 12 BAF runs. Put off quite a bit of work to do them, which I'm about to return to after this post. Out of those, 8 were successes. Out of those successes, 6 had one of the final bosses die too early and rez. Out of those, 3 had half the group get sequestered right after one of them died.

My only gripe is with people who are obsessively negative. People who don't listen tend to pay attention after getting shot through the head by a tower, but people with bad attitudes will complain about the towers even after we beat the trial. It's a little disheartening, to be honest.

Thanks to all the random groups in Virtue I've been thrown into and the devs for the amazing experience. It was a blast. I'm going to go pass out somewhere, now.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to add! I think the sabotage phase of Lambda Sector could use more starting time than five minutes. In my (though, admittedly limited) experience, groups will either steamroll it and have more than enough time or will end up with 2-3 temps.

I just finished my first Successful BAF run tonight. it felt Great just to simply get past the escapee phase which seems to be the fail point.

I did an utterly failed BAF on Tuesday a couple hours after I20 went live. Then yesterday decided to try my hand at leading one. Lead 5 in a row, 5 successes. One of them we even managed to get the badge for not letting any prisoners escape. It was a lot of fun, I loved it. It's not too hard once you know what you're doing, but it's still not easy either because of the nature of the enemies and the whole event itself. Every time we finished it was a good rush and massive cheers in the league channel. Still haven't unlocked my judgement slot yet though. /sob

Yet to try Lambda though, I hear that's the harder one.
I'm liking the trials. I'm just not happy about how many times I have to do them to unlock the goods for my toons. I have (Currently) 5 toons that I'm taking down the incarnate path...>.<

End of day two, and I'm having a blast with the trials. I'm out of threads, until I can convert more Shards at 10:10 tomorrow (I'm trying to be good!).

I succumbed to "new shiny" fever and used some Threads on Incarnate XP conversions (around 40-50 Threads or so I think) but when a successful BAF gives around 5 Astral Merits so you get 20 Threads even before drops and rewards I didn't feel too put out.

All my slots are unlocked and slotted. Barrier Destiny is at the magical Rare level for an Incarnate Shift, Ion Judgement is at Uncommon, Diamagnetic Interface at Common and Warworks Lore at Common as well.

I'm feeling good about my ability to do either of the Trials, I have Incarnate powers to make things smoother for me/others. I'm looking forward to everyone else getting to similar or greater levels of power, so we can try for the "Master Of" badge, as well as be ready for the next Trials