Resistance in Maria Jenkins missions are Broken

As I recall, in this particular mission, it doesn't really help that the Resistance stealth is actually ridiculously buff. Base Empowerment buffs don't help, and IIRC, it takes two small yellows to make them visible (1 medium yellow will work, but those aren't as easy to just run to the contact and purchase). The mission itself is fairly long...running in and out multiple times because you have five minutes of inspirations and twenty minutes of mission really isn't acceptable either.

But honestly, at baseline, I'd say that if you're playing smart at +0/x1 and chugging inspirations that fast, there's still a balance issue. There's no other group out there that's going to make you do that. And really, "get inspirations" isn't a challenge, any more than "get a Mastermind" for Barracuda.

I like seeing challenges in this game, but it's better to define a challenge as something that makes you play smarter, first and foremost, rather than just running back and forth to stack the deck. Put another way against the Inspiration argument, let's take Hamidon. Your group is going to need EoE Inspirations, more than likely, if they want to do a successful Hami-raid. But I guarantee you that having fifty players each with a full 20 EoEs is not going to win the raid for you. Heck, having fifty players who somehow have 200 EoEs each still isn't going to magically fix everything. That's because Hami requires strategy (it may have become rote on some servers, but it's still strategy). Hence, Hami works well as a "challenge". These Resistance don't require anything except to make you slog to and from your contact repeatedly.

I wouldn't call the Resistance "challenging." They don't hit any harder, they don't die any harder. What I would call them is "annoying," because you're only actually fighting them half the time. If you're on a character who's at least reasonably survivable - and I usually am - then their actual threat isn't all that imposing. They're just irritating. I've fought them with a variety of my own characters and never found the mission impossible or even all that difficult. It just takes longer and frays my nerves considerably more. And then people bark at me for being grumpy and complaining too much.

The resistance are on the same level of "annoying" as that Mastermind bug which causes enemies to scatter to the four winds whenever you lay down a Poison Gas Trap - it doesn't make things so much harder as it just pisses me off.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I was snippy. More than warranted, objectively.

This is why I was snippy: my threshold for what constitutes "broken" is very, very high. Much higher than, say, "not very good". I am tired of seeing things called "broken" when they are merely not very good. "Broken" is a term I prefer to see reserved for "there is literally no way at all to do this, no matter how ludicrous", which is a very high standard indeed.

I agree with the poster upthread who mentioned mez as something that is not very good. Sadly, most of the things that can be done with perception and stealth also fall into this category, because like mez, perception and stealth are implemented in a very simple binary fashion. This, along with the stacking math for buffs and debuffs and the tremendous miscalculation of the advantage of AoE damage, is the root cause of many things that are not very good (although sometimes amusing).

On the other hand, I do not call it "broken" when the developers choose to strip away one or another of the many advantages we have over NPCs in an attempt to make an encounter more interesting, unless doing so actually renders the encounter completely impossible when it is intended to be possible.

It might not be very good, though.

Funny thing about perception, and slight anecdote:

A while back I was running my Spines/Regen Scrapper from way back when. I fought a Spectral, he went invisible and I lost him. Only I could still see the orange numbers that floated from him as my Quills aura kept hurting him. I followed the orange numbers, stood next to them and did a Spine Burst. Next to me, a Spectral appeared in its dying animation, and then instantly disappeared again. I'm not sure if I cheated the system, but I felt very accomplished thereafter

If I could blind-fire more of my attacks, I could fight invisible things a lot more easily, because a lot of the time they may be invisible, but there are ways to tell where they are and, failing that, a lot of ways to outright GUESS. That might make perception a bit less binary.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Mobs really shouldn't have abilties much more powerful than the players version, unless they are encoutnered one on many, an IncTrial boss, or AV for example.

I have a different take on this.

Don't fight them. Run past them, sleep them, confuse them if you have to. If you don't have these powers then do whatever you need to stay alive and fight as few as possible. But just because they are there does not mean you have to kill them.

One of the things I kind of LIKE about these enemies is they are one of the few who are not basically XP vessels. Annoying, yes, but not so much if you treat them like an obstacle to get around.

Add these to other 'broken' NPCs:

Spectrals with their -ToHit

Rularuu and Cimerorans with their -Def

Illusionists with their phasing

Vanguard Magi with their -End and -Res

Succubi with their Confuse

EB rezzers/ambushers

Final Bosses with some unresistable damage, especially in patch form (move or lose)



So, um, yeah... business as usual. And I love it.

Nice to see the uber Defense ATs sweat once in a while, especially when squishies have the tools to circumvent the foes' gimmick.