All Controller iTrial Domination: Virtue tonight, 16/9

1 hour left! Come and watch me die hilariously over and over again!

Controllers Convene!

Lam, BAF and Keyes are done. Underground forming now, bring your troller and come!

I was out doing family stuff or I would have been there. Maybe next time, give a little more warning?

Yes but see, that would have been the sensible thing to do. Not come home from work on a Saturday, realize tomorrow is a holiday (I work weekends) and think "This is unusual, I should do something special!"

And I never do the sensible thing. Anyways.

Thanks to the members of ROBOKiTTY, the speedsters, @Ara for sending some angels my way, and everyone else who showed up at one point or another. There was one guy who transferred their main from Freedom just to come and someone else who transferred their /sonic controller. I was moved.

We only did the first five trials - BAF/Lam/KIR/UG/TPN. By then I was wiped out and I think everyone was tired too. I wanted to see if the plan would work for MoM but that's something I want to try with a fresh league.

Anyway, while waiting for the time to come I kept wondering, "will it be too easy?" (following the general rule of difficulty being in inverse proportion to the number of support sets on team) and "will it be too hard?" (since this will have to be done differently from normal, and confusion might result).

The answer was it turned out to be too easy. How often do you get an UG where nobody dies?


1) BAF

This was a complete walkover, like anyone expected otherwise. If you look at the screenshot below you will see that nobody has warnings. The AVs can't give PAs warnings through their Untouchable status, which I thought was funny, since the design intent seems to be to reward passing aggro rather than just one really tough guy taking fire. There are few things in the game that say "screw you" to the so-called "intended" way of playing louder than a controller.

Also, someone totally upstaged me by pulling NS instead. <3 Exx



I worried a little whether the controllers could kill boss class escapees fast enough. But I forgot to figure in the legion of pets that an all-controller league would bring. Do you think anything short of a trial AV is really going to make it through all this:



In the end nothing did. We pulled Siege flawlessly and kill them both on the mark.


2) Lambda

Lambda was the only trial where there were deaths (that I noticed), with the league having to split up and given the speedrun style that I like to run it in. The poor security bot was mezzed into the floor from the first moment, he never got off his heal.



My death as promised. I'm quite proud of this. It takes real talent to die on an illusionist softcapped to everything. I swear I did not detoggle intentionally.



We overran Marauder while the IDF troops drowned in a sea of pets and debuffs. The kill speed was actually faster than regular leagues. Although the controller ranged damage mod is only 0.55, they do double damage with containment, so for practical purposes controllers really have a 1.10 ranged damage mod vs anything that is not mez immune. (Compare scrappers' 1.125 melee damage mod.) Add in debuffs and the flag that makes trial AVs proc containment, and...


3) KIR

I got a little worried on KIR when I saw that AM had taken 20% damage from PAs in the time it took us to clear the first reactor (I'm not sure how many decoys they had out since I wasn't watching the tanking controllers). It turns out I was just paranoid.

We completed the 2nd reactor before AM could even show himself and the third one a second after he spawned. You can see how blisteringly fast the kill speed was from the below screenshot. With a minute to go, we've almost killed the required amount of Goliaths.



Maybe it's the fact that they're all controllers and used to thinking of themselves as support, but the teamwork on this trial was fantastic. There were people hurricaning warworks off the reactor, others killing them, a few pulling, heals and buffs everywhere, lots of splitting up into mutually supporting groups, etc. It was beautiful.

Antimatter went down like a house of cards. Would you fancy your chances against this? Even if you had a fancy space station with lasers on it?




4) UG

A lot of trial AVs can't put their special attacks on PAs or decoys. But by the time UG was released I had noticed at least one big exception: AM's obliteration beam can kill PA. It made me wonder if it was the start of a trend that would be followed in later content, so I was somewhat worried going into UG.

It turns out that PA can be hit by the "Targetted" power (which gives you "Targetted!" below your status bar), but they're immune to the actual special attacks themselves, like I was hoping for. Not that they would have done any good if they actually hit the league. I went and got shot by Lethal Force in the interest of science. There were so many buffs, it did just 49 damage a tick.



We fought both walkers where they spawned. People killed lichens without me telling them to. You guys were awesome. <3 The final Avatar fight has got to be one of the fastest ever to conclude: its health bar went the way of the Titanic and it died after using its end drain attack once.



I noticed that some decoys were idle during the war walker and Avatar fights. They were literally standing idle next to the big AV and doing nothing, even though they have ranged attacks. You know you're on an awesome league when you make your enemies hit the aggro cap.


5) TPN

This was the only trial that was not significantly faster than a regular league - but it was not that much slower either. We went terminal to terminal killing stuff as planned, although really, I think I should have tried asking people to pull as usual, given that they did perfectly fine on KIR.



There was basically no challenge as we went around completely destroying everything in sight like a squad of tanks (not the AT).


And that's all. If you've not done an all-controller league before, you really have to experience it at least once before the end. A lot has been said about how great the community, the devs, the costuming, etc. are, and that's all true, evidenced by all the wonderful people who showed up.

But I also think the Controller belongs in that list as one of Paragon's more unusual accomplishments. You get controls, support, damage and mitigation in a single character. I doubt there will ever be anything as versatile as it in another MMO. Wherever I look, they all seem to believe in the myth of "If one character can do everything, nobody will bother to team!"

This game didn't subscribe to that idea (at least, not very strongly) and we came together to put the lie to it one more time.

Thanks to all of you who came.

Till next time!