barrier

Good summary, MJB. I'll add a bit of info to that: dark/* is pretty good. Having played a ton of Ice/Temp, switching over to a Dark/Plant was night and day. Moonbeam is a great finisher and you often find yourself hitting the to-hit requirement to go instant by just clustering with your team on a spike (not that that matters when you're cycling aim and toxins) or when you get overgrowth at the start of a match. Strangler -> Abyssal Gaze -> Life Drain -> Moonbeam is a ton of proc damage, if you've built it for 8v8's (no heal slotting on Life Drain), and depending on your positioning, you can even start with Moonbeam if you know your going to be in range when you start the Strangler-led chain (and aren't going to be out of aim/bu by the end of the chain). I think Ice leans a lot on plant on the current meta. BFR is a nice way to get yourself killed (I respec'd out of it on my Ice/Temp), and because you lean on plant so much, it means that the performance delta between blast sets has a lot of room for skill / picking what could be considered a subpar blast set and making it your own (as long as you have two or three things that can be 4+2 proc'd).

Globals: @barriah / @recalx Known Aliases: Black Barrier, Envelope Follower, Warps, Branches, Frames, Stages, Ornament and Crime PVP Builds: ice/temp blaster dark/plant blaster psi/plant blaster nrg/emp corruptor rad/nature corruptor ice/therm corruptor dark/fire dominator - only if they fix the stupid hold by july 7

I dare any of these people to come up with an example other than Hurricane early in like i4.

PVE'ers are such a-holes.

14, 5, 2, 16, 4, 11, 9, 10

Fixt for you.

Time Stop, the Temporal Manipulation for Blaster's hold, is supposed to cast -heal on a crawled target. It does not do so in PVP.

Actual villain zones. The entry area at Mercy would be pretty solid, ideally with the alleys and dead ends around the main courtyard. Maybe also the Longbow base in Nerva (walled off, of course) or the first RSF Map (also partially walled off).

I'm also going to quickly note that though damage may still be king, there is a solid role for control classes in the current game. m3z's mind/rad dom, coupled with a solid set of blasters, made evasion on Sunday virtually impossible at times. I was spiking with an earth/fire on my dark/fire in a couple of matches and the damage was solid (way better than it was prior to the proc changes). Having encountered a couple of squishies with no accos in zone on my dark/fire, I can tell you there is definitely a role in zones for doms (especially if you always run around with a tray of greens. I'm not even in a proc-optimal build (fire sucks for procs, though dark is sexy AF) and there are huge benefits to the current state of ppm-rules for doms. Anyways, the big point: If I were a dev, and I wanted a major redevelopment project, I'd start by looking at knockback and either standardizing fall times or giving acro kb resistance again, and following it up with bringing slows back to i12 levels now that travel suppression is history. That second change would be a huge boon to kins, and potentially make it so that poison isn't the default go-to for debuffing on a spike.

@recalx Warps - Ice/Temp Blaster

I replied there, but TL;DR is that recipe drop rates didn't change and the XP scale should not affect drop rates. Has any of the GMs tested this?

Regardless, I think there's something messing with the XP/Inf gain and drop rate in AE. While running today, I noticed significantly lower inf gain then would be expected. Upon closer inspection, the XP/Inf on Patrol/Ambush mobs seems to be wildly ranging to extremes. The standard Minion in my map, who is not Pat/Amb, gives ~10.1k XP. However, Ambush/Pat minions can award as little as 1k Inf, and as much as around 9k. Same minion, same villain group. Meanwhile, the average Minion from a Mission Content farm (Red side Nem TV Farm mission) gives about 13k (Werfer) to 14.5k (Dragoon). Using the averages between the two groups you get 13.75 for Mission content, and 5k for AE. Now, I have no way of showing that the average weighting of Ambush minions is actually an even spread, it does appear to me that there might be a goober in the code. In addition, I'd like to note that prior to AE going down, I had received dozens of PvP/Purple IOs from AE standard rewards each afternoon farming. Since AE has gone live, I have yet to receive a single one of either. Which is far and beyond what should be expected of reasonable deviation/margin of error. There are a couple of bug reports and a bit of conversation about it in the respective forum. I'm with you on this, I farmed for a bit last night and my trays, which are consistently full after a run or two (given how much I keep on my toons) were not filling up at all. Something is definitely way off and I'm sure the market will start reflecting it in next day or so.

I cringe every time I see a scrapper, tanker or brute without taunt and without web envelope. Those two things can net you a solid spot in an 8v8. There is a role for every melee in an 8v8. It's not the same role as in PVE (you'll be running disruption), but nonetheless it is a valid role.

Yup. I built a fortune on live from rare drops just playing in RV and while playing the market. Making PVP IO's drop from mobs is a huge tax on the PVP population, and I'm only ok with it because we are all broke AF compared to the last time around. It would be nice if the pendulum swung the other way once in a while.

And it's really one of the funnest things you can go in this game. Kickballs have also been the start of pretty much every league that was played on live after i13. If we get a solid number of people coming on, I'm sure more fun will follow.

Just give it a bit. Most of us are still outfitting our builds and leveling up. I bet that by the end of this week/this weekend, you'll start seeing a bit more action; but as long as the arena is down, I'd be shocked if you see much happening anywhere other than in RV.

Just to play devils advocate, near the end the games pop was at an all-time low including the pvp population. How could the game be fine and what were the underlying issues causing people to leave? There is a reason many of the people I'm seeing again whether they are friends or just merely acquaintances I stopped seeing them in game years before the game was shutdown. Incarnates did not bring these people back. I think incarnates being on at the end is actually knock against it since the game was at its lowest point, I think a lot of people kind of want changes, right? Especially with the ability to alter the game as a private server compared to when the Devs during live didnt give the pvp community necessarily what it wanted. I guess I wonder, why is suddenly keeping Incarnates a worthwhile fight but reverting TS or other changes are considered good. If your argument is "The game was fine" that doesn't really hold water because the game and pvp was at its least popular point, also TS/Heal Decay were things during that same time period where you claim "The game was fine." and yet most people seem happy those were removed on the private server. Okay, I'll play. 1. Zone play is not arena play. A dude that only plays when his Incan is up is not pushing back anyone and will likely get camped in RV, where the geometry broadly favors villains. 2. Incarnates are a solid patch for issues resulting from DR. Namely judgment partially patches the low damage coming from any AT other than a blaster and the DR caps on healing (I'm not talking heal decay, I'm talking DR hitting heals hard). If you remember pre-i13 PVP, you should then remember emps that were able to heal through fire/em spikes when you didn't have 4 locks on a target; Incandescence patches towards that former state. 3. As to comparing this to TS/Heal Decay: TS/Heal decay "Off" were standard settings in every ladder/league. The counterpoint is DR. DR is kept on because if you turn it off, inherent resists mean your squishies suddenly become tanks, and your tanks double lol. Keeping DR on keeps us closer to the pre-i13 state of things. The goal is to get closer to i12, right? That doesn't mean reverting functionality. It means looking at the game and thinking "does this bring me closer my goal?". I'm blasting Divine because he never played with incarnates in Zone. I did. It actually brought things like my dark/cold and my doms much closer to what they were in i12 than what they were before incarnates were added.

And FYI; I was around towards the end when Incan and Judgement were all over RV. The game was fine. Especially with DR still on.

No. Judgement makes a whole bunch of builds viable in zone that would otherwise not be (namely any low-damage dominator secondary). Also, it's zone pvp; not like it's supposed to be competitive. Way fitting that your first post is you claiming something is broken and asking for special treatment. You just want emp/blasters all over everywhere. That's dumb.

See thread topic.

The missionserver, as its called, is a separate piece of software that stores the mission data as created by players. It does use some resources, but that part is not a big deal. Once you start an AE mission, it's loaded in a mapserver, like any other mission. They are not treated any differently. The problem is that players can build missions that are a lot more resource-intensive than normal missions from the game. When enemies spawn in normal missions, most of them have their AI in an "idle" state until they are aggroed, which doesn't require much processing power. But most AE farms rely heavily on ambushes or patrols, which spawn the critters with fully active AI. And that's the problem. Missions are run on 9 servers with a total of 224 cores. For the most part you can run lots of zones and missions on a single core without a problem; but AE farms tend to max out a core all for themselves. If there's just 100 AE AI-intensive farms running, that eats half of the mapserver processing power for all 4 shards. Fascinating. Do we have any info on how NCSoft handled this? I can't believe they were just throwing money at the problem over and over instead of figuring out a way of making the AI requirements from AE missions draw on elastic resources... If I'm remembering right, the way NC dealt with the problem was removing the missions when they found them. No farming missions, no problem. Of course, they weren't transparent about WHY they were so against farming, but at this point, I'm guessing it's because the farms were taxing their server cpus. Didn't just lead to people having their farm missions unpublished when not in use? I vaguely recall a couple of ticket farms that would appear/disappear at random times which seemed to mean someone was just publishing it when they needed. Maybe I am wrong and the guy just uploaded it each time they played and let the thing get deleted, but I do remember the same couple of farms with the same "description" appearing and disappearing. That is broadly correct. I had 3 mission files that were shared with my arena team. My record was a lvl 50 in 45 mins just through straight up map/mob saturation.

The missionserver, as its called, is a separate piece of software that stores the mission data as created by players. It does use some resources, but that part is not a big deal. Once you start an AE mission, it's loaded in a mapserver, like any other mission. They are not treated any differently. The problem is that players can build missions that are a lot more resource-intensive than normal missions from the game. When enemies spawn in normal missions, most of them have their AI in an "idle" state until they are aggroed, which doesn't require much processing power. But most AE farms rely heavily on ambushes or patrols, which spawn the critters with fully active AI. And that's the problem. Missions are run on 9 servers with a total of 224 cores. For the most part you can run lots of zones and missions on a single core without a problem; but AE farms tend to max out a core all for themselves. If there's just 100 AE AI-intensive farms running, that eats half of the mapserver processing power for all 4 shards. Farmers are not harmless. Farming actively robs resources from the other players. That is a stupid stance. By your standards, GMs shouldn't spawn because they rob resources from people in missions. You're full of it. its a valid point when server resources are as limited as they are currently... Okay, no Giant Monsters for anyone. Keep server loads low! /s

The missionserver, as its called, is a separate piece of software that stores the mission data as created by players. It does use some resources, but that part is not a big deal. Once you start an AE mission, it's loaded in a mapserver, like any other mission. They are not treated any differently. The problem is that players can build missions that are a lot more resource-intensive than normal missions from the game. When enemies spawn in normal missions, most of them have their AI in an "idle" state until they are aggroed, which doesn't require much processing power. But most AE farms rely heavily on ambushes or patrols, which spawn the critters with fully active AI. And that's the problem. Missions are run on 9 servers with a total of 224 cores. For the most part you can run lots of zones and missions on a single core without a problem; but AE farms tend to max out a core all for themselves. If there's just 100 AE AI-intensive farms running, that eats half of the mapserver processing power for all 4 shards. Farmers are not harmless. Farming actively robs resources from the other players. That is a stupid stance. By your standards, GMs shouldn't spawn because they rob resources from people in missions. You're full of it.

You're so annoying. No wonder RO kicked you out. That was uncalled for. You have the ability to scroll past posts, maybe you should try that. Yeah but, to be fair to him, the ability to Ignore people on this forum appears to be missing or well hidden, so I feel his pain. Nah, you are pretty annoying. I’m pretty tired of the whole “lolpvp” crap. If you don’t like it, fine. No one needs this passive aggressive bs. Do we know each other Barrier? I feel like I PvPd with you on test/freedom/champion Yessir. You, me and Philly in the Freedom League. I distinctly remember you as one of my favorite people to call targets with.

Look at this nerfherder trying to appear like he's a nice guy.