Master of Lambda design flaws
By
Another_Fan,
Posted on: 2011-04-26 01:19 in The Global Training Room Test Server
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I have to agree with this completely. The requirements for the lambda badges are the same. It is all just one strategy. Certain powersets and Incarnate powers are required to succeed at this. Although I like Seers, people should not be forced to create them just because they have Psi powers which is not resisted by Marauder. |
Originally Posted by Virusman
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. |
In another thread dealing with this topic, I suggested that Antacid and Well Stocked have the can't use its specific temp power while you can use the other temp powers. I also suggested that Lambda Looter would be given if the League didn't use any temp powers in the previous portion, but collected them all. So to get all 3 at once, it would be a regular Master of Lambda run. However, it would be possible to get Lambda Looter by having a few players go after the temp powers in the courtyard and use them. The system would check to see how many temp powers have been collected and how many have been used. If the number is less than 10 for each temp power, then badge is not granted. If number is greater than or equal to 10, then Lambda Looter granted. Don't have enough -res or exotic damage, then collect a grenade from every drop and pacify Marauder. Ambushes slaughtering your league, then grab a few acids and close the portals. Mastering a Trial should be all about using strategy and tactics to overcome difficult odds and holding onto temp powers is not an effective strategy. Any League should be able to get the Master of Lambda badge with the right amount of skill and strategy, not having the right powersets and incarnate powers.
The first step in being sane is to admit that you are insane.
On top of the design flaws others have mentioned (s/l damage is useless being the big one), there really isn't any kind of challenge to it.
With a team that is comfortable enough with the game to be participating in end game content, the collections are something done as a matter of course. The mobs are ignorable with a couple buffs and one or two people clearing adds when they show up (there is a job for an s/l dmg dealer, but its not really a full time thing).
The only challenge is recruiting enough people who deal psi damage and are willing to spend at minimum roughly an hour (plus other trial time) mashing their attack chain to get the Marauder kills it takes to get the badge.
Wrong your statement is, why, it's easy if you plan it out right to get Marauder down with out useing any type of temp power, I got my Master already and saw a great group who plan this tf out the right way, they had a great deal of DeBuff and also had good deal of damage. Also dude using your Incarnate power will do wounders for this Mo Badge.
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Agree because, all AV are at there weakness when you apply Debuff, also maybe you MO badge team aren't good. All Mo Badges need great planing, you need to bring the right group of people, friends, no Pugs, people you can count on and bring them on these Masters Runs. If you Pugging it alot of the time then you are more likely to fail. Bring alot of Debuff some holds on the Mobs. Debuff the crap out of the Av and you will stop him, count it be time Consuming but just keep on taking his Life Points.
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Originally Posted by FredrikSvanberg
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. |
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Global:@Greenflame Ratz
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I am laughing my derriere off at the notion that those of us posting in this thread don't know how to organize the team, aren't using our Incarnate powers, etc., etc.
You didn't reply to any of the actual detailed complaints in the thread, and basically posted (in some rather interesting, Yoda-like ways) "lrn2play".
Thanks. We already know how to play. No one said this was hard. We said it was poorly designed. We said it wasn't terribly fair, and not terribly exciting to do, especially not 3 times over
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I don't think you understand what is being said. Doing the actual task is not a problem. What is required to be done is very simple. |
Originally Posted by GreenFIame
Wrong your statement is, why, it's easy if you plan it out right to get Marauder down with out useing any type of temp power, I got my Master already and saw a great group who plan this tf out the right way, they had a great deal of DeBuff and also had good deal of damage. Also dude using your Incarnate power will do wounders for this Mo Badge.
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All the work is wrapped up in finding specific things to do it, and putting in an hour of boredom beating on a sack of HP, as many, many characters are next to useless.
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The problem with this is that antacid and well-stocked are the same thing if they collect them all. You can't collect all of A before any of B collecting all of B after all of A.|
Originally Posted by Cassie_Storm
This is what I'd do to change it:
1) Lower Marauder's enraged resistance. Maybe drop him down to 80% - 85% or something but keep his unstoppable the way it is now. This way teams without a metric ton of debuffs or psi damage won't get stonewalled on him when going for the badge. It would still be difficult but not to the degree it is now and wouldn't require leagues to stack the teams in their favor. Using the grenades would still be the preferred method since it drops his resistance well below that anyway. 2) Change the badges so that they can all be gained in one run if the team is experienced enough.
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Think it should just be changed to collecting all of one type within 5 mins gets the badge. Same difficulty (if not more if going for both badges) and can be done in one run.
I don't mind the way the Lambda Looter badge is laid out, but I do think it should also award the Antacid and Well Stocked badges as it currently does in it's bugged stage.
Here is what I would change: With the Antacid badge you should be required to get all the containers and none of the grenades during the "sabotage" portion, but should be allowed to use any of the grenades you can get in the courtyard. No Acids from the courtyard.
With the Well stocked badge, reverse that. No Acids during the Sabotage phase, but any acids you can grab in the courtyard etc.
As for Marauder, drop his s/l resist to 95% at least before he goes Unstoppable.
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Originally Posted by PapaSlade
Rangle's right....this is fun.
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Agreeing with something like this. Requiring a surgically stacked league is kinda a bummer. I've helped on a couple MoL runs--but only on my debuffer. In it's current form, I doubt I'll ever get to tag along on one as dead weight with my +3 S/L scrapper.
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Originally Posted by Dispari
My thought was something along the lines of making Marauder's RES cap 95%, and lowering his Enrage to at most 90%. That way S/L people could still damage him, and it would require less -RES to actually take him out.
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They're not the same, really. Maybe you just misread them or didn't understand what I was saying. The way I wrote it would let teams decide how they want to spend their first five minutes in stage three. They can either collect all the Pacification Grenades first while eating their time up, or they can go with Molecular Acid. Either way, collecting the second 10 temp powers to gain an additional badge out of it is going to be very difficult because of the time constraints. My suggestion, however, does not punish experienced teams who can collect all 20 under those conditions.|
Originally Posted by AquaJAWS
The problem with this is that antacid and well-stocked are the same thing if they collect them all. You can't collect all of A before any of B collecting all of B after all of A.
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You'd gain more time back as you collected the second set, sure, but your time remaining would be so low you wouldn't have much of a buffer. Some teams might not even be able to collect all 10 of the second type; and if you didn't get them all, you could always run it again and reverse the order to get the badge you missed.
That's neither here nor there though. That was just my suggestion
I don't expect them to change it to that or anything.I don't really agree with the notion that you shouldn't be able to get a Master badge all in one attempt. That's limiting the rewards from the trial and putting unnecessary caps on well run leagues. Getting it all in one run should be more difficult than doing it multiple times, but we should still be able to do it. The goal should have been to allow the badges/rewards to be obtained by average teams individually (multiple runs), while also designing for experienced leagues that can push themselves a bit harder to get all the badges/rewards in a single run.
@Cassie
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How would you feel if you had to do two additional runs for MO, since you completed it in it's bugged state where you actually could make one full MO run?|
Originally Posted by GreenFIame
Wrong your statement is, why, it's easy if you plan it out right to get Marauder down with out useing any type of temp power, I got my Master already and saw a great group who plan this tf out the right way, they had a great deal of DeBuff and also had good deal of damage. Also dude using your Incarnate power will do wounders for this Mo Badge.
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Regardless, it actually seems as though - while you may not agree with us that it's "broken" - you prove the point that unlike every other MO which can be accomplished with strategy alone, this one requires planning as far as the team composition goes, which of course will exclude classes which are incapable of providing something useful and "objective-oriented" to the team.
Thanks.
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Originally Posted by GreenFIame
Agree because, all AV are at there weakness when you apply Debuff, also maybe you MO badge team aren't good. All Mo Badges need great planing, you need to bring the right group of people, friends, no Pugs, people you can count on and bring them on these Masters Runs. If you Pugging it alot of the time then you are more likely to fail. Bring alot of Debuff some holds on the Mobs. Debuff the crap out of the Av and you will stop him, count it be time Consuming but just keep on taking his Life Points.
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Even Reichsman can be done without ridiculous amounts of debuffs- or any at all, in fact- because you don't have a 20 minute window to kill him.
Don't get me started on BAF - done MO runs with many 50 +0's on the team, many many many times in a row, with a complete PUG. Just takes people who can use some sense when monitoring reinforcement spawn times and AV health, capable of holding back when needed.
So I know in comparison how terrible the design for Lambda is.
-Proud leader of Captain Planet's Magical Friends
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Originally Posted by Virusman
Don't get me started on BAF - done MO runs with many 50 +0's on the team, many many many times in a row, with a complete PUG. Just takes people who can use some sense when monitoring reinforcement spawn times and AV health, capable of holding back when needed. So I know in comparison how terrible the design for Lambda is. |
Mo baf in a single run is a different problem. The combination of the requirements for the badge and the reward system means two of the teams have to be willing to take lesser rewards when getting the badge.
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No it doesn't. We've done it before by assigning 2 people from each team to do adds.
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Originally Posted by Another_Fan
Mo baf in a single run is a different problem. The combination of the requirements for the badge and the reward system means two of the teams have to be willing to take lesser rewards when getting the badge.
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Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU
Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.
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Originally Posted by Dispari
No it doesn't. We've done it before by assigning 2 people from each team to do adds.
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Six of one, three teams of two, of the other. The people handling the adds are going to get the bump.
The point being you are going to be electing the winners beforehand. At best you do it as a group, at worst you have a team leader that is aware of the scoring system and decides to sneak one past.
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I don't know what you're talking about, because if you get people from each team on adds, every team (IE, every player) shares iXP.|
Originally Posted by Another_Fan
Six of one half a dozen of the other. The people handling the adds are going to get the bump.
The point being you are going to be electing the winners beforehand. At best you do it as a group, at worst you have a team leader that is aware of the scoring system and decides to sneak one past. |
You only have to "elect winners" if you're lazy and assign team 3 to do adds or something similar.
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Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU
Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.
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Actually, assuming a full league of 24, there is a way to even that.|
Originally Posted by Another_Fan
Mo baf in a single run is a different problem. The combination of the requirements for the badge and the reward system means two of the teams have to be willing to take lesser rewards when getting the badge.
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Instead of 3 teams of 8, change to 4 teams of 6. Top two in each team go after one target (Siege, Night Star, or the Ambushes), bottom two in each team go after a second target, while the remaining two go after the last target. All four teams will have equal participation with all 3 targets.
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I was talking about scoring on the rares/very rares table hadn't even considered Ixp.|
Originally Posted by Dispari
I don't know what you're talking about, because if you get people from each team on adds, every team (IE, every player) shares iXP.
You only have to "elect winners" if you're lazy and assign team 3 to do adds or something similar. |
Edit: Thinking about it Ixp compounds the problem, especially if the leader is out to take advantage.
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BAF actually does have a problem with that, I will admit, though it's a different problem..|
Originally Posted by Another_Fan
Mo baf in a single run is a different problem. The combination of the requirements for the badge and the reward system means two of the teams have to be willing to take lesser rewards when getting the badge.
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In a nutshell, when going for MOBAF, Teams Siege, Adds and Nightstar, are each going to sometimes have to idle at their own rates. Let's say the damage or debuffs on Siege are weak- the Nightstar team is going to have to idle with a few % remaining as Siege catches up. This reduces their reward pool at the end. It's even worse for the team on adds - they'll sometimes die within a few seconds, as they should if you're going for Strong & Pretty - but you don't further the main objective AT ALL and almost certainly get a slacker pool, perhaps simply because of the fact that you're standing around doing nothing for 50 sec / minute.
BUT, you *CAN* complete it all in one run, unlike Lambda, and get 5 extra Astral Merits for doing so, more than making up for it in my mind. If you can potentially get Rares/Very Rares regardless, you shouldn't have to worry about getting the extra merits! (Granted, it's actually only 2 extra Astral Merits over doing Strong and Pretty without Keep em Separated, which actually seems to boost everyone's reward tables... but this is off-topic)
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If you mean has a chance of causing a "10 threads" option, then yes, it could.|
Originally Posted by Virusman
Let's say the damage or debuffs on Siege are weak- the Nightstar team is going to have to idle with a few % remaining as Siege catches up. This reduces their reward pool at the end.
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If you mean it could reduce them from potentially getting a "v Rare" to only a "rare" then thats not how the system is stated to work.
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Originally Posted by VoodooGirl
[*]Watching out for the Spinning Disco Portal of D00M!*
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Not sure what server you play on, but any server that is AT specific for either of the trials is a joke. It's downright laughable, because AT has no bearing on the trials whatsoever, it's just about teamwork.
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Originally Posted by Reiska
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? |
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You either haven't read OP or you are missing the point completely.|
Originally Posted by XFUNK
Not sure what server you play on, but any server that is AT specific for either of the trials is a joke. It's downright laughable, because AT has no bearing on the trials whatsoever, it's just about teamwork.
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Marauder has 100% res to S/L when enraged (Always during MO Lam) and 100% res to everything but psionic when he hits Unstopable. No amount of teamwork is going to help it.
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True for a normal run, but I believe the OP is referring to a Master of Lambda run where you can't use the grenades so that all of the S&L-specific power sets are at a decided disadvantage.|
Originally Posted by XFUNK
Not sure what server you play on, but any server that is AT specific for either of the trials is a joke. It's downright laughable, because AT has no bearing on the trials whatsoever, it's just about teamwork.
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Note - I'm not saying I agree, I was just restating my take on the OP. Personally, I'm not enough of a badge hunter to care. I just want to get my tier 3's in as few runs as possible. I try to avoid fancy badge-runs as much as possible because my experience with them is very negative so far.
Edit - scooped by Nord LOL
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Seer pets. If everybody on the League slots a Seer pet, even the first one which only costs 3 commons to make, Marauder goes down fast. Giving up 3 commons or 60 threads so your team can succeed is part of teamwork. Your S/L character takes care of the ambushes while you focus your Seer pet in Marauder.
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Originally Posted by NordBlast
Marauder has 100% res to S/L when enraged (Always during MO Lam) and 100% res to everything but psionic when he hits Unstopable. No amount of teamwork is going to help it.
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Leandro, does he go down in 5 minutes fast? Meaning, could 16 people summon the Seers in the very beginning or should they still wait til later? I'd like to know what you mean by fast.
Just an aside on this point:
So I think anything that keeps a team for losing a MO credit on the basis of destroying the cylinders is a good change, because that implementation detail makes getting "credit" for that kill far to easy in a highly unexpected way.
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