Awakened (1st Ward) - Psychic Battery

I've been taking my L50 Elec/DM through First Ward (at L29 obviously) on +2x4. I ran into these Awakened mobs and hit a brick wall. Here is there info at City of Data:

http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/power...p?cat=Awakened

I was trying to figure out what was giving me such a hard time. I have 50% Psi resistance and 17.6% Psi defense. I carry lots of medium Purple inspirations, and use them generously. That puts me at 43.85% Psi defense (and ranged/melee are both over 45% then, for any attacks so typed).

I'd still get toasted. So, I dropped down to +2x2 and got through the missions.

Now, I finally know what caused me the issues. It's a buff cast by one of the Lieutenants (Conduit) called Psychic Battery. Here's it's info on City of Data:

http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/power...sychic_Battery

Notice it has a damage buff (approx. +25%), but that's not the issue. It has +40% To-Hit. The AoE is 40 feet. It buffs everything in the spawn by +40% To-Hit, possibly even adjacent spawns. Oh, and in a decent sized spawn, you can have 2 Conduits.

There are also Confuse and Fear effects in the group, which is annoying but Break Frees work wonders (for those of us without fear/confuse protection).

So, if you have issues with these, remember that the Conduit(s) must die, die, die!

I havent had much of an issue with these guys with my Dark Armor stalker, but then again, I usually AS the Lts right from the start.

This explains....a lot.

A group of eight of us ran some of first ward a couple of weeks back as part of an SG night. We were running on +1 level enemies, as I recall, and running nicely through the shade/specter parts of the arc.

Hitting the Awakened resulted in absolute carnage. The tumour head seers are pretty nasty when you're getting groups with two or three of them in there, but the main thing was our tanks (we had two, me playing shield and a super reflexes girl) dropping like stones to apparently fairly unthreatening awakened groups.

It now seems so obvious that it was an accuracy buff that was causing it, but at the time I couldn't figure it out. I was scanning through my combat log while we were picking ourselves up after the latest massacre and trying to spot what was hitting me with a massive defense debuff - I could see the enemy hit chances shooting up but couldn't see a consistent previous hit that explained it.

The buff is horrific to anyone relying on defence for survival - as DDR doesn't help and it must stack from different casters (we had a force fielder and a time manipulator in the team so my tank's positional defences were in the 80s, and I was seeing hit chances of 50 and 90% coming in). It also has a decent duration so it's not like devouring earth cairns where you can quickly kill the caster to remove the buff.

To add to the fun, several of the minion awakened can summon a conduit as part of their powers. More joy!

We managed to cobble together various tactics that finally got us going at a good pace, but just about every fight was hanging-on-by-the-fingernails scary. Overall it was a massively enjoyable play session, and kudos to the devs for giving us lethally challenging content.

It was also interesting to note that I happily breezed through first ward solo with an SO'd corruptor at higher difficulty. The awakened get exponentially nastier in large numbers.

Many thanks for highlighting this. At the time of the run Paragonwiki's awakened data was incomplete, and I was still uncertain of what the villain of the piece was.