A Plea: Test your MA at different levels with different ATs

This is mostly for authors who:

• Create enemies with "custom power selections"

and

• Assign their stories a 1-54 level range

Note: I'm referring to story arcs, not farms.

Please, please test your arcs on characters with different ATs and at multiple level ranges. Have friends help you with testing if you don't have a suitable range of levels and archetypes amongst your own characters. Custom power selections do not scale well across the entire 1-54 range, and what can be fairly simple for a particular AT in a particular level range can be virtually impossible for a different AT in a different level range.

I first encountered this problem a while back when running one of these MAs on a low-level scrapper. The custom enemies had so many defensive abilities that, despite having all the appropriate enhancements for my character's level, I simply could not hit the enemies with any kind of consistency. Every encounter with a group of three enemies (even when those enemies were merely Minions and the same level as my character) took a ridiculously long time to overcome, purely because I was only able to land maybe one out of four attacks. And after each of these encounters I was left with my health so depleted that I was forced to spend an insane amount of time just standing around waiting for my health to regenerate (what with Rest still recharging). However, I had previously completed the same MA much more easily on a higher-level blaster.

I just ran into the opposite problem on a different MA. It was a very entertaining story and I had a great time playing through it on a level 18 brute. So the next day I decided to run the same MA on my level 36 fire/fire blaster ... and it was a miserable, frustrating experience. Why? Because blasters, at least at that level, have little in the way of defensive powers (this character has Combat Jumping and ... that's it). Blasters depend on being able to take down enemies quickly, from a distance. I.E. "The best defense is a good offense." And doing that becomes next to impossible when every enemy we encounter is loaded up with knockback/knockdown powers.

My best example of why this is a problem is the very first group of three enemies my blaster met when she walked in the door for the final mission of the arc. She attacked, and all three enemies immediately unloaded on her with knockdown/knockback powers, which promptly knocked her down and into the corner next to the door. By the time she could stand back up, the enemies had run right up to her and surrounded her in that corner. Being backed into the corner forced the camera into first-person perspective, so the only thing I could even see was the enemy directly in front of me. I couldn't even see the targeting reticle at that range to see which enemy I had targeted. The low ceiling prevented me from seeing the floor (couldn't angle the camera down enough) so that I couldn't even target an AOE attack that would have made them run away from me. Add in more knockdowns, preventing me from even blindly attacking whoever I had targeted.

Now repeat that same basic scene over and over for the duration of the mission, and you have a mission that takes entirely too long to finish.

Getting beat because an enemy outfought me or because I made mistakes (mistakes I can learn from) is acceptable and still fun. Getting beat because of enemies spamming one attack for which I have no defense, that results in my being able to do absolutely nothing to defend myself (i.e. I can't fight back because I'm spending all my time lying on the floor and trying to stand back up, only to get knocked right back down again) is simply frustrating and no fun.

Of course, I realize y'all aren't doing this deliberately. It just appears to be an unintended side effect of assigning custom power sets and then not testing to see how those powers work at different levels vs. different ATs.

1-54 is generally regarded as a cue to run in the opposite direction of an arc due to the very reasons you mentioned. Doubly so if the creation date pegs it as being published in I14. AE has a problem with arcs being abandoned and still coming up with search. Even if not actually abandoned, it is unfortunate that a number of people don't test at all. Not everyone obviously since there's some great arcs out there but you still got to keep an eye open.

A lot of people test with scrappers and brutes and don't really run into problems with, for example, knockback in their testing.

Then again, at that level, you can be juggled by stock in-game mobs if you hit them wrong, so...

Interesting...

I only have two missions up, both are old. I haven't tested either in about a year. However, when I created them I tested them both with a level 50 MM, a level 26 Dom, a level 40 scrapper, and a level 18 Stalker. For the curious the missions are:

345127 "All the wrong places"
345128 "A Tale of Four Wizards"

Neither one would be suitable for farming. Both are intended as extended storyarcs with multiple complications (patrols, ambushes, rescues, allies, etc.) as the story unfolds. The reason I'm skimming through the forum today is I'm in the middle of making a third extended storyarc that is completely unrelated to the first two and I was curious what was fashionable in the MA world these days.

Whaddya MEAN that an "All AVs with EB ambushes" mission is a "bit much" for level 1s?

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