ceaars

And many of us are very, very nice. Totally drooling bouncing off the walls lunatic insane. But nice.

Back when I was married, two combos the pretty much got my ex-wife and I all the way to 50 (and well beyond): Fire/Fire Blaster and Invul/Axe Tank. That's really just an iteration of the classic blaster/tank pairing (the sets aren't all that important). We were literally designed to be complete compliments to each other - it was literally her job to burn everything down (very VERY fast) and mine to keep whatever she was setting on fire from touching her. Heck, what got oddly fun is when she'd deliberately rush up to a large spawn, aggro them, and run away just to see if I could get them off of her before she bought it (which actually was very useful in tweaking the build to make a better tank) - and in case you are wondering, I never got any warning at all of when she was going to 'test' me. Thugs/Poison MM and Sonic/Thermal Corrupter. Really synergized well ... huge debuffing capability (combine poison with sonic attacks adding -res to everything) combined with thermal buffs and heals (and of course, the corrupter could attack with impunity thanks to the MM's ability to hold huge amounts of aggro). Another thematic pair: Plant/Thorn Dom paired with Stone/Stone Brute (think even nature/earth pair). More fun for the theme than the actual capability, but it was that pair that taught her how much she loved dominators. Just a few ideas based on ones we tried out and enjoyed (including don't discount the blindingly obvious pairings - that first one was not exactly creative, but it really was a huge amount of fun).

I don't quite have Haten to perma, but its only about 28 seconds of clear headedness every two minutes before the hatin' begins again. Fortunately there always seem to be "crooks" around to hate on.

Yep. Overall it does look better. More specifically: About two thirds of the time they at least fall more "naturally" (variation as expected, but mostly sort of tip over ... kind of limp but not to the 'all joints turned instantly to teflon and gained 360 degrees of movement' from before). About one third of the time their "spine snaps off at their pelvis" and they twist pretty wildly around their waist. Still, gotta admit - it looks better overall. Nice!

I hope this information will help. Think of it as a "mini-guide" to how endurance works (applies to players too, but here I'm talking about mobs). The Basics: How Endurance Comes Back Basically, every three seconds you get a "tick" of 5 endurance back. Actually, the "tick" is 5% of your endurance, so if you've got accolades or set bonuses (or are not a minion if "you" are an AI controlled mob and a bad guy), it'll be a more than 5 per tick. But if you have the normal 100 endurance, then it's 5 per tick. Like regeneration and your health, recovery ("regen" for your endurance) does not make each tick restore a larger percentage of your endurance (it's always 5%). Instead it just makes the ticks happen faster. Here's one way to calculate it: Take (100 + recovery bonuses - recovery penalties) and divide by 100. Call that "R." The time between ticks of recovery is now: "Tick Time" = 3 seconds / R. If you get divide by zero, or a negative value, you simply won't get ticks of recovery until the current value of your "Tick Time" goes positive again. Actually, there's a better way to understand it, but it's a bit more involved than the calculation above. I'll get to that later. However, as an Example: The Stamina power gives you +25% recovery. Let's pretend you just got it, and you put a level 5 endurance modification TO into it (so only a 9.6% boost). So your total recovery boost is: 25 * 1.096 = +27.4% Therefore, R = 127.4 / 100 = 1.274 and, Tick Time = 3 / 1.274 = 2.35 seconds. So one tick giving you back 5 endurance every 2.35 seconds. So what does the -100% recovery debuff most electrical attacks apply very briefly actually do? Let's answer that with an example (but it's pretty much what you think it'll be: just prerhaps a more involved calculation than you might have expected if you want the exact effect.) Say a clockwork hits you with a lightning bolt giving you a -100% recovery penalty for 2.00 seconds. At least for that two seconds your Tick Time would be: R = 27.4 / 100 = 0.274 Tick Time = 3 / 0.274 = 10.95 seconds between "ticks" of endurance recovery. So let's say your endurance "ticked" right as the clockwork bolt hit you. For 2 seconds you had a "recovery" time of 10.95 seconds between ticks. So after that two seconds is over you are (2 / 10.95) of the way to your next tick: 0.183. In other words, you're only 18.3% of the way to your next "tick." Once the recovery penalty wears off (in 2 seconds) you now have 81.7% of the way through one "tick" to go: (2.35)(0.817) = 1.92 seconds. So you'll get your next "tick" of endurance 1.92 seconds after the recovery debuff wears off... or about 3.92 seconds after you were first hit. So that -100% recovery debuff was pretty close to delaying your tick by the full 2 seconds it acted. And that's really the main take away: the -100% recovery debuff will typically "delay" the next tick by something just a bit under (worst case: equal to) it's own duration. Which is what you'd expect. So How Does All of This Apply To Mobs? Like you, a mob can "queue" it's next desired attack so that it'll go off the moment it is (1) available, and (2) the mob has the endurance to use it. But contrary to what some players seem to think, the mobs do not cheat when it comes to endurance! Like you, if their endurance bar is zero, they can't use powers. So why do they seem to get to attack anyway? Well, the moment they get a tick of endurance recovery their next queued attack will fire (provided the tick gave them back enough endurance to use it). But since they're computer controlled, if they have endurance, but not enough to use the attack they want to use, there's a good chance they'll instantly switch to an attack they do have that is "cheap" enough for them to use (assuming it has recharged/is available). So provided they get that tick of recovery, they WILL get to fire off one attack even if you keep hitting them with endurance draining attacks. As some many others here have pointed out, that means the only way to flat out keep them from attacking is to keep -100% recovery on them indefinitely. The good news: almost all electrical attacks have a -100% recovery debuff. The bad news: it's typically very short (like 0.5 seconds to perhaps 2.0 seconds depending on the power) ... short enough that by the time your next attack has animated there's a decent chance the mob had at least a tiny sliver of time not under the debuff, which is often all it takes to get that "tick" and launch an attack. Also as many of you pointed out, there are some very key powers in the electrical sets that actually have very long -100% recovery debuffs instead of the very short ones typical attacks have. In the electrical blast set, the three powers with very long recovery debuffs are Short Circuit, Tesla Cage, and Thunderous Blast. So making sure those are in your attack rotation (if you are a blaster) is the secret to keeping a mob at 0 endurance so that it never gets to attack you. Tesla Cage is especially useful for this, because if the mob happens to also be held by it when the tick comes back, you'll actually have a chance to use a 'normal' attack or short circuit attack to drain out the recovered endurance before the mob can use it. So If They Only Get One Tick, How Come That Boss Still Hits So Hard? A final potential source of confusion: if mobs don't cheat, and more powerful attacks use more endurance, how come that boss still gets to use very powerful attacks even with a sliver of endurance? It's because mobs higher ranked than minions actually do have a "cheat" of sorts: they don't actually have 100 endurance. Lieutenants actually have 140 endurance, so each tick gives them 7 endurance back. Bosses have 200 endurance, so each tick gives 10 endurance back. In both cases that's going to "open" up costlier (and harder hitting) powers than a minion would have. ArchVillains actually have a pool of 800 endurance, and very strong resistance both endurance drain powers and to the recovery penalties that would "pause" a lesser mob's recovery completely. Which is why a solo character typically cannot drain out their endurance and keep it pegged at zero as effectively as they can a lesser mob. I'm not saying it's impossible - but it's much easier with several characters working in concert. The Alternate Way Another way to look at endurance recovery that might make getting how the recovery penalties interact with times where there is no penalty is to give you an alternate (but equivalent) way to look at how recovery works. Instead of thinking of Tick Time as a variable, think of it as a constant, that is always set to, say, 3000 milliseconds. A mob in this scenario has a 'counter' that starts at 0 and counts up, 1 millisecond at a time. Whenever it is above 3000, subtract 3000 from it and give the mob a "tick's worth" of endurance. Now you can see recovery bonuses and penalties in a way that might be a little more intuitive: each 1 millisecond of "real" time adds proportionally more (or less) to the counter depending on your recovery. Specifically, each millisecond that passes adds the current value of "R" to the counter. When the counter exceeds 3000, reduce it by 3000 and give the mob and endurance tick. So if R = 1.274 (like in our earlier example), each time 1 millisecond of real time passes, 1.274 gets added to the counter. When the counter exceeds 3000, it is reduced by 3000, and the mob gets the tick. While "debuffed" by the recovery penalty, R = 0.274, so during the debuff, each 1 millisecond of real time only added 0.274 to the counter, but the debuff itself didn't affect whatever the current value of the counter was when it was applied. I used milliseconds as an example, but it can be whatever you want and the end result is more or less than same. It could be "half seconds" - in which case the counter would need to hit 6, and every time it did, 6 would be subtracted from the counter and you'd get a tick of endurance. The value added to the counter would still be the "R" from before, but now you'd think of the counter being updated once every half second instead of each millisecond. Actually, I suppose a very relevant question would be what is the time increment the game itself uses? I can't remember this one off the top of my head: I very vaguely remember Arcana once stating it was 20 times per second (so 1/20th of a second, and the counter would need to hit 60 for a tick of recovery to occur). But I could very well be mistaken. That was a long, long time ago when I last read that. Dropping A Mob's Toggles It turns out mob's don't actually have toggles the way we do. To save on processing, "toggle" powers owned by mobs are basically "click" powers whose effects are set to be removed should the mob be mezzed or drained of all endurance. Once you understand that, a couple of odd anomalies in how mob "toggles" seem to work become clearer: 1. This is why a mob with "toggles" up drained down to a silver (but not zero) of endurance never sees its toggles drop even when under a recovery debuff (unlike what we often experience): they're not actually toggles, so they're not actually continually draining the mob's endurance the way our versions of those powers do. 2. That's also why mobs voluntarily "detoggle" certain powers even though there is no obvious reason they should (e.g. "Why did that sorcerer just randomly shut off hurricane even though he still had plenty of endurance and it was making him virtually impossible for me to hit?" or "Why did you just shut off temporary invulnerability for no good reason, Doc Deliliah?!") - they didn't detoggle at all. The duration of the "click" power just expired. So if I dev wants to replicate a mob using a toggle that is "sometimes up" they make it a click with a longer recharge than duration. If they want it to always be on, and only have to "bring it back" should it get detoggled by a hold or loss of endurance, then give it a very, very long duration and a short recharge time (so it'll be available again the moment the hold wears off). The little "flag" that ends their effect if the originating mob runs out of endurance or is held is meant to further the illusion that they are toggles when they are not (and remember that originally all of our toggles would go down if we were mezzed, not just be suppressed... so the 'detoggling' of a mob's defensive toggles when 'held' is a holdover from when it happened to us too, and all intended to further the illusion the mob versions of the powers were toggles). And that's all probably more than you ever wanted to know about how mob endurance, endurance drain, and -recovery works... hopefully it's helpful.

As Shinobu pointed out - the missions I'm most likely to straight up fail are the ones where you have to "keep someone from getting away." At some point (I'm not sure when) the mechanics on those changed... it used to be they'd stay put until you engaged them, then at a certain point they'd try to run and you had to have some way to stop them before they got out (hold, massive takedown damage, or whatever...). Now once you get within a certain "activation" range (regardless of whether or not the mob has actual line of sight) they just run. If you don't anticipate which corridor/room they might come running out of (particularly on a complex map, like certain office maps), you might miss them completely (you're in corridor C way past junction A, and they just ran down B through A and down the elevators...). I had to learn very quickly to pay careful attention to their "I'm outta here" call-out and try to retreat back to a map chokepoint to try to catch them on the way out. In terms of sheer difficulty: 1. Certain lab maps (which like to put some spawn points really close together, which even on minimum settings can give you a very large enemy group that can effectively chain-aggro onto you). 2. Almost any map where a boss spawns "right around a blind corner" and I'm playing a character that might need to "inspy up" before taking on a boss. 3. Anything with the Rularru. If you've never faced that hellspawn of a group before, you're in for a pretty rude shock. I used to fear the Carnies and the Malta (and they're not so bad once you get used to them). I was so wrong to ever consider them a threat compared to the magnificent bastards those Rularru are.... EDIT: And just to be clear. None of the above are *complaints* about difficulty. I'm in the camp that *loves* this game but considers about 99% of it very easy overall. So to have some missions that throw me completely for a loop - or hit me with something WAY tougher than I was expecting is a very nice change of pace!

I can't definitively say the answer is 'no' - but having been tweaking customs for some of my arcs I have noticed that so far I've only seen primary and secondary power sets available (with a few modifications, such as melee sets having at least one ranged power - often from another set - added in so a designer can fulfill the "mob needs to have a ranged attack to be full XP"). It *is* possible a few pool powers are mixed into the primary and secondary sets available, but if they are, I haven't spotted any yet (including Arcane Bolt).

It's definitely NOT a case of "bosses are broken in MA." It's actually only one power (and, to your credit, you did mention that power) in (as near as I can tell) one set. It's Savage Leap. Although it says it is typed lethal and AoE, it totally ignores one or both types of defense. I have no idea if that is just the version ported into MA, or if the actual player version of the power has that little bug as well. Literally every other attack power the mobs had possessed exactly the to hit chance I would have expected based on enemy rank and level relative to me. I didn't even see one that was unexpected (in fact, it was pretty clear only the bosses had Blood Frenzy). Savage leap was the only power that ignored defense. All of the other powers were affected normally by defense. So there's your answer. The Savage Leap power is missing its lethal and AoE tag. What I don't know: 1. Whether or not that is WAI. Savage leap may be intended to behave that way because it is a teleport attack. I doubt it, but I don't presume to know (didn't design the set, after all). 2. If it is just the MA version, or if the player version has the same behavior (generally players don't notice when 'things go right' - just when 'they go wrong'). So it may have literally never occurred to a single player that Savage leap was not supposed to be hitting 95% of the time. They might very well just be leaping in, seeing the damage numbers fly, and think "cool" and NOT "wait, should that have actually hit ALL of the +4 Rikti drones I was aiming at?" So it may not even have been reported.

I decided to take a look. First, since you're doing this at +4, you're dealing with the purple patch. Even with totally softcapped defense, that means that every single attack from a boss (and at x8 there'll be a lot of those) has about a 10% chance to hit you regardless. To make matters worse, the designer gave those bosses their version of "build up" - which will grant a to hit bonus and full stacks of blood fury. To make matters even worse, one of the powers debuffs defense, one of them debuffs damage resistance. If they hit blood frenzy, even with 50% defense, that chance to them to hit you suddenly jumps up to close to 20%. Gets worse: that "summon a hawk" power a bunch of them have *might* also be buffing them (it's possible when they ported it from beast mastery over to savage melee in MA they left 'pack mentality' into account, which *might* very well be buffing the attack AND all of their allies every time they hit with it). And since even the minions have the attack, that's a lot of hawks coming your way at once each with 10-20% hit chances. Some are bound to get through, buff everyone around them, let them land more attacks, etc. And as good as your defense debuff resistance actually is, it won't take long for the collective defense and resistance debuffs in the savage melee set to tear down your defense (especially when boosted by 40% thanks to the purple patch) completely and take you down. In fact, based on what I'm seeing, once the "cascade" hits, you'd probably go from full strength to completely defeated faster than the combat monitor actually updates. And once you are defeated, all buffs and debuffs disappear, so you'd never know they were there... Of course, I might very well be wrong. But that's the impression I get (and I looked at what the numbers would be applied to a boss in AE, NOT a character): unless you go in with 90% smashing/lethal resist (and possibly even a defensive Destiny buff), I wouldn't expect a character to last long. And it looks like a defense based character relying on inspirations as their only source of resistance (and that cap out at 75% versus 90%) is going to get murdered. I have no doubt your SR character is quite good. But that just doesn't look to be what this particular farm was built around... But again, I don't really know for sure. I've got a character with soft-capped S/L resist (versus the positional defense SR is based on). Tell you what. I'll take him in at both normal and +4 and see. But I suspect he'll get killed REAL fast...

That suggests the bosses then must have some sort of amazing self buffing abilities. I'm inclined to think if the combat monitor showed you basically softcapped defense and hardcapped resistance, then the only way to get 95% to hit and 700+ damage is if the bosses were running some spectacular +ToHit and +Damage buffs (well, above what the purple patch gives them, which is already pretty substantial). If you were running x8/+4, then if whatever was buffing them was AoE, you could easily have had a whole lot of them stacking. *Why* whoever wrote the arc would set them up that way is beyond me. Unless they intended it as a challenge or something. But both my experience and yours seems to suggest that it was just that set of bosses (which, again, implies it's those bosses and likely a design decision by the author and not a bug), not all bosses in all MA being bugged.

I don't really know the details of those bosses, but a few observations: A boss would normally only have a 65% base chance to hit. If the power has a 95% chance to hit, your actual defense (purples plus powers) must have been debuffed into the toilet! OR the mob has a massive to hit boost. (In other words, it sounds like it isn't so much that "bosses are broken" as "this boss has been giving some serious buff or debuff powers that it is using on you"). Hitting for more than 700+ damage sort of suggests a similar scenario. Not only is your damage resistance debuffed enough to cancel the effect of the oranges, it's probably in the negative values (even taking into account that damage resistance debuffing would start at 25% strength at your damage cap, if enough has been applied to you, it WILL cancel all your resistance out and start putting it into negative numbers). What you need is to actually open your combat monitor and then watch your defense and damage resistance numbers as you try to fight these bosses. It should (in real time) give you a list of what is buffing and debuffing your stats. If you see a huge list of debuffs starting to stack onto you, that's what's going on. If not, then it means *they* probably have some pretty serious buffs they are applying to each other... For what it's worth, both of my published arcs are using both normal and custom mobs of every rank up to and including bosses. I always run with key values being tracked on my character's combat monitor - and I can report nothing out of the ordinary when I'm fighting bosses in MA. At least in my arcs. So I don't think "bosses are broken in MA." I think *these* bosses have set to do something to you. Something very, very bad.

This is one of the missions in the "Lost and Found" pseudo-arc from Timothy Raymond - a bunch of randomly ordered missions including one badge mission that have a story-arc style title in the mission descriptions, and award merits when they are all completed, but don't give a souvenir. But that's not the bug... The mission itself is Defeat Thornbird and his Guards. It's in Primeva (well, that's the mission map - the entrance was actually pretty close to the Nerva entrance). Once you enter, it warns you not to let Thornbird escape. Nothing unusual so far... When you approach Thornbird, he rattles off his usual text, including saying "I must get away!" (Actually he said it before I even spotted it.) I however did spot him - just standing doing that "I'm ready to mix it up with you fist-palm" thing. Verify the boss' name is Thornbird. He's a Crey Protector (even though the mission description briefing Kelly Uqua gives you says he's a Paragon Protector, not a Crey Protector). I figure he's gonna run the moment I engage him - so I'm going to need to hope for a stun or he'll get away. So I queue up Total Focus (not enough to get a stun, but the other Energy Melee attacks will probably stack enough stun on him to do the trick - I hope) and charge 'ol Thornbird down. I get right next to him and before the attack even goes off WHAM! I zone out. Mission Failed. (Still get the reward merits. Timmy Ray ain't happy with me - well at least until the next mission, but other than a 'nerfed' XP reward typical of mission fail ... which I don't care about because this is my 'do all the villain missions on one character guy, so less mission reward means eventually less time spent at level 34 with XP turned off, I get normal mission rewards.) I did look it up on the Wiki, and apparently when the game was live (irony of ironies) you couldn't actually *fail* this mission (apparently running into the red 'mission exit' box did not flag a mob as escaped, so Thornbird simply could never get away). So it does look like an attempt was made to fix them - but it broke in the opposite direction. Now he doesn't even *need* to run. All you have to do is get near him and the mission fails right off the bat. (And since somebody is sure to mention it: yes, I'm positive he wasn't near the mission exit. And I'm positive I was looking at the right mob. And that his 'partner' (who was a Riot Guard) didn't get away while Thornbird stayed behind, or anything like that).

I gotta say, PW, if you actually ended up having to fight him as a real set of three bosses (at full boss level) several times, you are a saint for giving the arc the rating you did! Obviously, that particular issue is fixed. Although it may be obvious to most everyone here already, I'll post what I discovered so anyone who doesn't know won't make this mistake: The issue was caused by a "custom" group (Skulls) existing that had only the end boss and a single minion type in it in the actual story file versus a "master" custom group (that existed outside the story file) also called the Skulls that had all of the original Skulls mobs as part of the group, *plus* the special minion, lt., and boss. "Regular" Skulls were used for the first mission (i.e. the default villain group), but the modified Skulls were used in missions 2 and 3 (and also as the "source" of certain bosses in placed boss battles). It gets weirder. Apparently the "full" custom Skulls group (with standard and custom mobs) was somehow "included" in my story file, but when I transferred files over I *only* transferred the story file - not the custom group and custom critter files. So when I first tested, then published and played everything seemed to work fine. However, I'd respond to poor ratings by going in and try to "fix" things I thought were annoying people playing the arc. What I didn't know was that every time I did this it had a tendency to "remove" assets from the story file that were not used directly and also had no matching asset in the custom group file (which, again, didn't exist - so that second part was always true). So in a nutshell when I first tried to tweak things I "tweaked" the end boss and the seers (inadvertently ensuring they remained in the story file), while wiping out the custom bosses and lts. I'm not even going to pretend to understand why my custom group was still spawning normal skulls... but I know it was because the end boss worked fine, but for the life of me the mission two and three groups would always be normal skulls - never the custom ones designed to add flavor to the story. Also - both the Gravedigger Seers and the end boss were only worth 75% XP (they were "standard" in terms of their powers). I wanted them worth 100% not 75% (based on the idea maybe *that* had irritated a player into giving it 3 stars). I was able to bring up the end boss and pull that off, but there was no sign of the Seers for me to even modify the powers of! (Without knowing it I'd somehow 'removed' them from the story file.) That left a custom villain group with ONLY the end boss remaining in it (the "normal" skulls had also vanished from the "in-story" custom group when I tried to adjust what the end boss had). And me clueless that that was what I'd done: the very last time I tested it, I'd done the tweak to the end boss - played through and verified everything was working as planned. Then edited again intending to "tweak" the Seers ... and then just "saved it off without changes" when I failed to find them anywhere in the story file. Since I hadn't changed anything (as of the last time I'd tried to test play it) - or at least thought I hadn't - I figured everything would still be as I'd left it. Nope. And along comes PW to find a custom group spawning end bosses only. Like I said. She's a saint for being even remotely nice about that. Anyway, don't make the mistake I did. Also bring over ALL of your costume, custom mob, and custom group sets (which, by the way, if you don't remember, are separate from the actual story files) too! Once I did that, things started working again. The custom version of the skulls went back to spawning normally* and the end boss only showed up at the end. *Sort of. Turns out it was only spawning normal skulls; it would spawn a 'custom skull' in a random only 1% of the time - well seemed like that. Suspecting the system might be getting confused about my having a custom faction with a name identical to a default faction, I changed the name of the custom faction to "The Skulls" and bam ... the customs now spawn alongside their 'normal' counterparts. I also tweaked a few things that were bothering me (I never liked how the 'combat arrests' in the first mission used the same custom mob with three different names, so I went ahead and made him three separate mobs - once for each 'boss-fight-that-actually-uses-a-minion-instead-of-a-boss-as-the-boss' trick). And a few more flavor encounters to the second mission. Tested it. A lot. Everything was working as intended (except I forgot about 'Terry' in mission two - I need to go back and fix that). So *hopefully* the next person to play it will get it in working order, instead of what PW saw... And, again, much thanks to PW: if you hadn't actually sent me feedback I would have never known the arc had been broken and it probably would have kept getting low ratings without me understanding what was upsetting people about it. So - for the third time: thank you!

I remember this one also being a very good one. The fact that you somehow managed to snag the arc ID that spells out 'leet' has struck me all morning as a seriously funny (if completely coincidental) in joke...

Me too. I'm extremely happy to see this one back in the mix!