Cebr

Well, i just created a claws/elec brute. I attempted to run the arc mentioned. I don't seem to be leveling at a rate that would seem to be at 5.5 hours. I was also dieing in each mob and having to go to the hospital. It was taking 2 or 3 trips to get 1 run completed. Maybe im missing something. Im only running at 0x1 and using every isnp. that i can get a hold of. It's not as easy as made out to be. Unless, like i said, im missing something? Im only level 11 now and it's taken me an hour of runs. I dont think im hitting 50 in 4 more.

Eryq2 are you capping your defense, resistance and damage before entering the mish at the inspiration vendor? You need to do that. And like the others said, you need to set it to x8 with bosses to keep the inspirations raining. Watch the video in my sig for a full tutorial from the second you leave breakout to starting the farm. It shows you everything you need to know.

Ok. I'll try to do that and see. Im still doubting here. But i'll give it a try.

So to further refine this:

A) You can add Integration to your Mobs, and Reconstruction to them as well. They wont fire it in time for you to not kill them, and you do one shot them. Reconstruction might be iffy, I was testing it on bosses and didnt notice a difference.

B) Swap your maps from the Abandon tech lab map you are using to the Abandon Warehouse - City of Villains; Large; Map 2.

It'll concentrate all the bosses and Ambush Triggers into the initial corridor, along with the glowy being there. It makes it so you dont have to hunt for the glowy and you dont even have to drag the two Ambush Triggers, you can just kill them there. Just make sure the glowy is a wall glowy.

You can try out the small arc I made to play around with this, search of 'Clawls Ftw' or '@Diesel Punk'

Top Doc, I stumbled onto this thread late last night and decided to give it a go. It's fantastic! I've run the AE arc 6 times and am now at level 32, with 81mm Influence in the bank. My leveling went as follows:

Round 1: levels 3-18
Round 2: levels 18-22
Round 3: levels 22-26
Round 4: levels 26-28
Round 5: levels 28-30
Round 6: levels 30-32

My first run-through, I died a lot. It took awhile to figure out to run and move and go or broke. I load up on Reds, Yellows, and Purples and run in. Many times the RNG will work against me and I die, but usually I can make it through alive. A few times, I was running so good I lost track of time and got the entire 1500 tickets from fighting.

I mainly focus on my inspirations during the battles and don't even look at the enemies I'm fighting. I just need to click on all the insp. that I need to max outgoing damage and min incoming damage.

I think I've put 4 hours in so far, so I'm moving along very nicely (for me!).

Thanks TD!

So, I finished running mine through to L50 - Yay.

He goes from 0-50 in 12 hours... So, about as fast as a Prius...

I WANT my money back dammit!!...

It cost me 0 to make him and I only got paid ~375M to run him to L50... Oh, wait, nvm...

That said, it was the first toon I have ever PL'd from 0 to 50, so I thought I'd put
a post in here about my experiences as a Rookie PL'r.

TL;DR. It was a lot of fun, but you're running on a knife's edge the whole way, and
given the extreme efficiencies in the process, a lot of things can trip you up, or
greatly affect your performance.

Below, I cover a lot of things that I found or thought were pertinent during my
12 hour journey.

First of all, as mentioned before, this is a radicially different playstyle than normal
for me, and 12 hours is, at very least, a factor of 10 faster than I'd get an L50.

It still took me a bit more than double TopDoc's estimated time, and I can think of
several reasons why. I think 5-6 hours would be Plausible for somebody well versed
in the approach.

Why I was SO Slow

* I slotted absolutely bupkiss in the build - it's completely devoid of enhancements.
The procs and buffs would have sped things up, but I intentionally didn't put
anything in this first time.

* I ran at 0/8 w Bosses. Initially, because I was a bit leery, and then I forgot
about it till I was L42. I switched at that point until L45, but personally, I felt
I was dying too much, so I dropped it back again from L45-L50.
It's slower, but it felt safer as well... A willing tradeoff for me.

* Macros. Basically, they drove me nuts. I ended up not using them. By the time
I knew/remembered which one I needed, too late... Also, I use insps with the F1-F5
keys, and it was far easier for me using those whenever inspies dropped. The downside
was that I often wouldn't have any to combine either (more on that in a sec).

One bind/macro I did use was extremely helpful - it targeted the bosses and got
rid of pesky awaken inspirations (all tiers of them).

I've copied it here:
/bind B "inspdelete awaken$$inspdelete bounce_back$$inspdelete restoration$$
target_custom_near enemy alive Boss$$target_custom_next enemy alive Beta$$
target_custom_next enemy alive Alpha"

* Inspiration Usage. I loaded up before each mission, so I went in with capped
Dmg, Res, and Def along with a couple Acc's. I kept columns of Heals and Defs
in reserve, and dipped into them when needed. All other non-reserve inspies
got popped when they appeared (unless I got ahead of the curve, occasionally
and saved them for later). The downside to that, is that my damage was rarely
capped except at the beginning... 300-400% was pretty typical. Whenever reds
dropped, I used them right away, but I relied completely on those drops to raise
damage above normal Fury levels.

* Buffs - the only powerset buffs I had were Hasten and Energize when they
were up. Hasten, especially was noticeably helpful. I didn't level past L31, (until hitting
50) and I didn't do the SG Empowerment buff either. I'm certain those extra
powers would contribute noticeably.

* Death. On average, I'd estimate a death per arc. It was probably a death per
mission or so at +1/8, but safer for me at 0/8. Unsurprisingly, dying slows you down...

* Speed. It took me roughly 20 minutes or so to spin through all 5 missions in the arc.
I would run until all the bosses were defeated and leave any leftover Lt.s and minions
at that point. In terms of simply capping tickets, it would take ~2 mins.

Some folks (maybe most) simply run missions faster than I do. YMMV.


Expectations

Based on my experience through the arc, these are some things you can probably
expect to encounter.

* Pure Chaos - Once the ambushes are rolling, it is pure crazy. If you're not
doing something all the time, you're probably dead.

* Death. You ARE going to die. Probably often. Certainly, inattention, and/or
plain stupidity will get you killed - I proved both cases repeatedly

However, even if things are going well, you can still die. A couple times, I went
from full health & softcapped defense to dead in 2-3 seconds.

Maybe it was streakbreaker in those cases, but several times, animation times alone
were enough time to get killed before being able to pop some inspies.

Sands of Mu was a glaring culprit - I finally removed it in favor of Brawl.

Early on, I had trouble targeting bosses and so, I'd end up getting spiked.
The macro helped solve that for the most part. In some cases, I simply ran out of
inspies that would keep me alive (in one instance, zero purples dropped the entire
mission - Go Figure. RNG really busted my keester on that one)...

* Survival - It is important to realize you have minimal defense and resistance
at this level. Consequently, there are only two factors that will keep you alive.

First is inspirations - *ALWAYS* keep a very close eye on your Def. If it falls,
so will you. I kept reserves, just in case, and it helped me a lot. Learn to use
them earlier than you'd normally think (if you're one of those who, like me, rarely
uses them in the normal content). Even with softcapped def, you'll still get hit a
lot, and need greens as well. You really need to stay on top of this to make it.

Second is Kill speed. The reason folks want to be damage capped is to kill mobs
faster than they will kill you. You have game mechanics helping you here, in a
lowbie mission, but use any damage inspies you get or can create (if you use those
macros) as soon as you can to keep your dmg level high.

Conclusions

* First, and foremost, I had fun doing this. It was a completely new playstyle
for me. I'm pretty sure I don't need one on every server, but I enjoyed the change
of pace, and a quick (and rich) L50 in the bargain made it quite worthwhile to try.

* Unlike Fire Farms or normal content PL where you have an optimized build,
typically with full resistances, defenses, heals and buffs, here, you have very little
but lowbie game mechanics, inspirations, and your wits working for you.
Basically, when it's running good, it goes very quickly and smoothly, but there is
virtually no safety margin, so if it does go south, it does so very quickly, and there
is only one result. Dead.

If, as a player, that bothers you, this farming approach will seem too risky compared
to other approaches. Otherwise, the chaos can be pretty exhilarating, and you'll
end up with a shiny L50 toon with decent funds to equip him when you're done.


Anyway, Thanks to TopDoc for detailing this approach. I enjoyed it, and I hope
relating my experiences here can help other folks have some fun with it too.


Regards,
4

I've run into a few people who've experienced difficulty with this whole CEBR thing, and each time the failures have been the same, regardless of the person. They're doing it wrong. Biggest thing I've come across is inspiration usage. Not using and abusing them like they should, and instead reserving them "just in case." You can't run this Super-Solo if you're afraid to put on a few band-aids.

But something I wanted to make note that I ran across and it amused me. I've only died four times from 2-41. First time was because I didn't change my difficulty correctly for the first mission and over-aggro'd without sufficient incoming Inspiration return. Second and Third times were caused by a Lieutenant, two consecutive runs, that activated Nimble Slash and it continued to animate, and damage me, until I died. Bypassing my defense and leaving my resistance to shame as it fwipped it's blade back and forth until I died from a steady and strong stream of numbers. Incident occurred in the 20's, and I've not experienced it since. Fourth time, I left the computer... no explanation needed, obviously I bit the dust. So for anyone "struggling to stay alive," you're probably doing it wrong.

Another thing that's been bugging me about this whole thing: I created the toon three days ago, logged him for an hour the first night, three hours the next time, and off and on throughout today for somewhere in between a ballpark of eight hours total time. When I clicked on one of the citizens in town for my "total hours played," they promptly informed me that I've been logged in for 66+ hours. That's impossible, the toon's only three days old, I've not been logged in for 2.75 days consecutively. So I have no idea how long I've really played him so far. There's apparently a time paradox in the AE system.


In regards to using other AT's for this process: Attempted with a pre-existing level 25 Ice/Elec Blaster out of curiosity. Given the higher damage modifier, I was looking at the speed potential, despite not being able to rack up a 675% +Dam bonus. Besides, I usually only spend the majority of my 90/s with the Brute at or around 450% anyway. Mission took me about 6-7 minutes, so definitely longer; but also included a couple deaths while I figured out that a cone was shifting aggro around in such a way that I was taking far more hits than I had as a Brute. An Elec/Elec Blaster does actually look promising though. Two AoE's and Lightning Field all by level six; it might only have a third the damage bonus, but he'd be doing twice the AoE to compensate with a higher scale. From my guess, there's maybe four Blaster primaries and three secondaries that might pull this off; and a handful of Scrapper/Stalker ones equivalent to Brute expectations. I'm actually looking forward the using one of them for a greater challenge to try and accomplish as close to the same as CEBR's can despite the damage cap.

The death thing is mostly an experience thing, my first one would die 1-2 times per arc pre 25, and then around once per arch after.

The second I've made was running using a level pact so was leveling much slower, got all the way to 34 before dieing. That was only because Steam had decided that I needed to update 3 of my games and the lag got so bad that I couldn't use inspirations

I also play slightly different than TopDoc with not combining my respites and using those instead. How he stays alive I don't know (How DO you stay alive with combining all the Respites TopDoc? ), but combining all Respites got me killed a lot in the start, so I changed it and made a bind to specifically change Respites allowing me to still combine them, but removing the ability for the primary combine/use macro so it wouldn't eat the safety buffer.

Does anyone recommend using attacks other than Spin on auto?

Should I be filling in my attack chain with Strike, Slash and Sands of Mu?

Thanks for any advice....

Last night I ran into a new and somewhat bizarre issue. I ran into a mission, hit Spin once - and then it just sat there as a tiny, non-recharging dot in my power tray. I died due to lack of damage output, zoned out to the AE hospital, and still had a tiny, barely-recharged dot in Spin's slot. I decided that maybe logging would help, and as the countdown approached zero the button started coming back. When I relogged, though, it still hadn't quite finished recharging.

It happened one other time, with Lightning Field rather than Spin. I got killed by random burst damage where a lot of things hit me at once without more than 1-2 oranges running, zoned out, and LF was a tiny dot. It took about five minutes to recharge, and relogging didn't help. It wasn't just a display thing, either; if I clicked the teeny-tiny button, I got the "Recharging" message. I even made a macro to activate the power, thinking that might be a workaround, and got the "Recharging" message.

Anybody else run into this?

This would be my second CEBR, on a new server. The second one really is easier than the first.

Oh, and whoever asked about Sands of Mu?

Don't. Your other claws attacks and brawl are fine if you want fillers. Sands will root you, keep you from chewing inspirations, not benefit from Fury, and get you killed.

Well, i stand corrected. My apologies Top Doc. Like the others said, it's pureply inexperince that kills ya. After i started popping a few Lucks, i've done fine at +1x8.

One question thought, my Spin isn't one of my powers. Why? I selected it asap. I have the 3 lower tier Claws attacks. Should i skip one?