Master of Lambda design flaws

Note: This post has nothing to do with the mutual exclusivity of the badges. That point has been raised in other threads ad nauseam, and while it is a good point to make, I think it will distract from the real reason I'm making this thread.

What I want to know is why the conditions to acquire the Master of Lambda Sector badge as currently written essentially render five entire Archetypes and host of powersets in other archetypes a waste of a team slot. How are players of these archetypes and powersets supposed to acquire the badge when they are not capable of meaningfully contributing to the effort and teams will not take them except out of pity?

Take Scrappers for instance - out of Scrapper's 10 primary powersets, six of them cannot do any meaningful damage to Marauder on a Master run. (Five can't do any at all; the sixth, Spines, does only very token damage with its DoTs.) The four remaining sets all do damage at significantly reduced efficiency. Why would you take a Scrapper?

How about Brutes? Same thing - six of Brute's eleven primaries are wholly incapable of damaging Marauder on a Master run, and again, the five that remain all suffer significantly reduced efficiency. A brute isn't going to tank Marauder very well either, so why would you take one?

Stalkers? Same situation as Scrappers. Assassin Strike isn't a plus either - in all the stalker primaries that do have any exotic damage, the assassin strike does 2/3 of its damage as smashing. So stalkers here come off even worse than scrappers, most likely, and we've already established that scrappers are of questionable utility in a master run. I thought Stalkers were _supposed_ to be better at taking out single hard targets...

Tankers? Well, they're perhaps a little better off in some ways, and not in others. On the one hand, you pretty much need a tanker to, well, tank Marauder. On the other hand, five of Tanker's secondaries are incapable of damaging Marauder, which means they're also incapable of generating any meaningful threat, which means they're incapable of actually tanking Marauder. They still have the problem of reduced efficiency, but bottom line, you're probably going to need *some* kind of tanker for running this. Unfortunately, five of the sets are useless, and one of those five just happens to be the most popular tanker melee set in the game. Oops.

That brings us to the last AT I was going to single out, and that's the Soldier of Arachnos. While you can point out that the SoA's leadership buffs do provide a significant benefit to the team, a Bane Spider is in more or less the same position as a Spines scrapper or stalker when it comes to damaging Marauder (slightly better, if you took Poisonous Ray, at least); Crab Spiders are at badly reduced efficiency, but still marginally functional; and Huntsman builds are screwed.

It goes further than these five ATs, too. What about all the Archery, Assault Rifle, and Dual Pistols blasters/defenders/corruptors? What about Earth, Gravity, and Plant Control for controllers and dominators? What about Earth and Thorny Assault for dominators? What about Ninjas, Thugs, and Mercenaries masterminds?

So... when you've got your sonics and rads debuffing Marauder's resistance and regen, wouldn't a bunch of scrappers, stalkers, brutes and tankers be nice for damage?

Or is there something else going on? I've never tried a MoLambda.

Fortunately there's more to the Master attempt than just killing Marauder. You still have to get all the acids/grenades, and clear the road/courtyard, and turrets, and kill off the adds. So I'm sure that all of the archetypes you mentioned will still have plenty of stuff to do.

No, really.

If you bring along 3 or 4 S/L-focused ATs they will still have plenty of work cut out for them just killing off adds. And they are all likely to have useful Destiny, Lore, Judgement and Interface powers that can affect Marauder.

The next round of incarnate slots should turn it into a joke, the same way the current set have turned MoSTF, MoITF, MoKhan, MoBarracuda, MoTinmage, MoApex into jokes, that people manage to "ACHIEVE" by accident.

It's certainly possible.

Note that folks I play with have, to my knowledge, never failed to achieve a MoApex run. I got MoTinMage by accident with them twice. We do fail to get it intentionally at times, but we also don't do everything we could (intentionally) to get it. Edit: Forgot to add, that was all before I20.

About the only mechanics I can think of that would make MoLambda significantly easier would be either just massive DPS increases, unresistable damage, or some way to modify one's own damage types.

I've been on two or three successful MoLambdas (out of six or seven attempts), and the consideration for team selection was for 1) competent players who will follow directions, 2) level 50+3 characters, 3) plenty of debuffs and 4) plenty of damage. There was no exhaustive search for illusionists and psi blasters. The players consisted of members of our SG and whoever we could dig up. Playing on a smaller server doesn't give you the opportunity to be picky. You just have to suck it up.

The problem I have with MoLambda is that there's an apparent memory leak in the game, and since it takes so long to whittle down the AV I start getting massive lag as the game thrashes, and then the game crashes before the AV is down, and the attempt fails, in part because my Fire/Dark corruptor is no longer there.

In any case, scrappers can get seers for psi damage. Just do whatever it takes to get the pets alive (destroy anything that picks on the seers) and there you go.

Interestingly, the four attempts I have been on didn't have the IDF/WarWorks mobs get completely out of hand. I think it might have happened on some I wasn't on, which were the earliest attempts by the crew I've been attending with. What we found was that AoEs directed at Marauder did a decent job of thinning them out. There was usually a crust of ranged critters (Seers, War Walkers and a few IDF soldiers) who would hang back and fire from range, and that's what we sent the L/S folks after. Since I was DM, I stayed on Marauder until he popped Unstoppable and only ran off to the adds to pop Soul Drain and/or my Void Judgment power.

Yep. For the most part, primarily S/L damage dealers will have a harder time getting on MoLambda runs. You're certainly going to want to get as much debuff/psi on the runs as possible, but it's not entirely dire for S/L damage dealers.

• Primarily S/L damage folks can focus on the adds.
• They can get the slot the Reactive Interface to add some fire DoT and a little bit of -res on Marauder.
• They can get Seer pets, who will be very helpful as has been mentioned.
• They can add dmg with Judgement powers. None of which, if I recall correctly, do S/L dmg.

This is a big problem in my mind..

Not only is this now (or will be?) the only Collection-of-badges "MO" that cannot be completed in one run, it all even boils down to the exact same challenge, which is defeating marauder without using any temp powers.

It's not even really much of an additional challenge to *only* get grenades and not use them, or *only* get acid and not use them.

It's still about beating marauder without using grenades. And then doing it again. And again. Which, given you've pretty much got the only group composition capable of doing it repeatedly, isn't much of a challenge, either.


There already exist players on some servers who are excluded from trials for various reasons - why GIVE PLAYERS THE EXCUSE to do so? The exclusivity of some players is bad enough, now some content is excluding specific ATs...



Give us a worthy MO for Lambda please.

A similar suggestion that got a bit lost in the larger discussion:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snow Globe I think the design of doing three separate runs to get all the badges to be a bad design. Additionally, it is far too easy to cause grief from someone destroying either the weapons cache or containment chamber in the courtyard. A much preferable design for these badges are: Get all of the weapons caches in the warehouse within 5 minutes, but not use any pacification grenades in the final battle, the league gets Well-Stocked. Get all of the containment chambers in the training facility within 5 minutes, but not use any molecular acids in the final battle, the league gets Antacid. Get all the temp powers in the warehouse and training facility and not use any collected temp powers (pacification grenades or molecular acids) in the final phase to get Lambda Looter. Note, none of these requirements penalize players for accidentally or intentionally destroying the containers during the last phase. It is still as difficult to get Well Stocked or Antacid as there is a 5 minute time limit on collecting the respective temp powers. It does allow for players to get all the badges in one run, which goes along with your statement of "Not every Lambda run should need to be a badge run." It also allows players a bit of flexibility in tactics if something goes wrong.

It is harder than Cassie suggested, but should still be possible.

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