DR_Mechano

Here's the thing...I see a LOT of these people complaining about difficulty...but you know what they never do? Challenge themselves. We had someone very much like this in Everlasting help the other day who would go on and on and on about how he was playing 'hardcore' and that AE Babies (well he called the PLoobs....I personally feel AE babies is more well known by the community but hey-ho) were ruining the game for everyone. Basically he was pretty much a snobbish elitist and, I suspect, basically a troll and probably the very same person who made this topic. These people want the game to be harder but they never go out of their way and actually MAKE the game harder for themselves. Hell this person in Everlasting help was thrown a challenge to successfully complete an Iron man, increasing difficulty (+1/x2 at level 10, +2/x4 at level 20, +3/x6 at level 30 and +4/x8 at level 40) Blaster only, no teaming, solo only (usual rules of no PLing etc.) 1-50 Blaster run. He refused despite being offered 700 million inf (hey we fire farmers have a lot of inf to throw around) if he could provide proof and updates to show his success. Theses included myself and Green Dwarf, a well known marketeer and farmer on Everlasting. He mentioned how he liked soloing the ITF...congrats the ITF, even at +4/x8 is one of the easiest TFs to solo but when I mentioned soloing the Miss Lib TF, suddenly he wasn't interested. He went on and on about how +4/x8 requires skill in order to get the fastest clear times, like that somehow matters? You know why? Because these people don't want 'challenging content' what they actually want is 'challenging enough that it I can still beat it but casual players can't'. For example these sorts of players never run the Mythic level raids in WoW, they run Heroic, the next step down in difficulty despite there being one higher because it's just challenging enough but not too difficult for them. Hell a lot of these players don't even run the raids on Heroic, they PuG Normal mode because that's challenging without being too difficult since it's not Looking For Raid casual levels they feel it elevates them above the 'casual peons'. They don't want challenge, what they WANT is to feel better than other people, so they can be above 'the casuals' because THEY do content that's 'hard'. They never form groups for doing things like the Magisterium trial on 'The Very Hard Way' difficulty, they never form groups at all, they just sit there, in help, complaining that people are having fun and that they're the weirdo for wanting things to be harder despite there being content and challenge run options for them to do so. Having played Classic wow back when it was new, the raids themselves, compared to even modern LFR difficulty...are actually god awfully easy right up until the very last raid. Naxx requires all sorts of things that were genuinely hard to pull off. AQ40 was a little harder than Molten Core and Blackwing lair but most of it was stacking nature resist or having people ready to pick up the right twin when they swapped.

Basically, yes you need to communicate that you want the TF run on ONLY +0. A lot of people don't just run TFs for the merits/badges, they'll also run them for XP. If a team is stomping through missions at high speed, the leader will usually ask if they can crank up the difficulty, now the group as a whole will decided if they want more XP or faster clear times. In the case you're on a team and the majority ask for a bump in difficulty, then, well democracy is at hand and you're going to have to go with the flow on that. If you suddenly quit 2 missions in because it goes against your singular idea, which you're free to do so, it still kind of makes you look like a Jackass...

Do you have access to that reddit post by any chance, I can't seem to find it, would be cool. So they question becomes, why HAVEN'T these costume pieces been released for the live server? I mean if I could get one of our dev team in here to answer that'd be great, it seems like it would be a fairly simple job especially for the ones in my original post, they're already fully customizable with regards to colour and don't cause major clipping issues. As others have mentioned, they've been released on the Issue 24 servers so why don't we have them here?

Just mucking around in mids and managed to get Stone/Stone tanker up to 55% defense to all but Psi, capped resistances to all but Psi, which was 40% AND about 30% bonus recharge as thought experiment to see how silly I could get defensive wise whilst still being somewhat viable. If you willing to sacrifice more recharge you can get to 60% defense to everything with capped resistances to everything with the usual Psi hole left.

Yush she is Thicc, I got to draw people in somehow 😄

As the title says there are currently costume pieces that work absolutely fine that are only accessible with the -n option. I've compiled a picture with: 1) Far Left: The Athletics Tights option. Basically a more muscular version of tights but not quite to the level of the Bodysuit option, a bit more subtle. 2)The Middle: The tights texture is only referred to as 'Ladybot' and is available as an option for Face, gloves (not featured here), Legs and Chest, it is currently missing boots (that I could swear I could find before). The Gloves are the Robo-victoria gloves used by the MkIV Victoria Warwork bosses. Yes they may look funny with some powersets and emotes BUT so do a lot of costume pieces. 3)The last one is the Lamatsu chest detail and belt, yes it's for an AV but the rest of the AVs design is not unique, it only features in one story arc and is otherwise unremarkable.

We really do need more tail and back options. Tried to make an Orca style character but there isn't any shark/dolphin/whale tail option.

OK, Assault rifle is probably, IMO, the worst preforming blaster primary at the moment (Dual Pistols may be second, not sure, it seems popular though) but what it lacks in single target it makes up for having ridiculous amounts of Cones and AoEs. Buckshot, Flamethrower, Full Auto for cones and M30 grenade launcher and Ignite for AoE. Its single target isn't bad...it's just not amazing. Now we get to Assault Rifle on Sentinel. It's single target, thanks to the lower damage modifier is still only OK even with Disorientating shot, Aim and Incinerator but its bread and butter, its cones and AoEs just feel so lacking thanks to the combination of lower target caps, lower damage and narrower cones. Been talking with other people and most of them seem to agree that AR is probably the worst Sentinel Primary....so maybe it needs some love?

That is kind of the problem, I really liked the concept I had in mind for an AR/Invuln sentinel but the fact that AR just absolutely SUCKS on Sentinels (and it's not an amazing set on blasters lets be honest, they took what was probably the worst preforming blaster primary and actually made it worse) killed my mood for not only the concept but the AT as whole, ever since then every time I go to make a Sentinel I go "oh yeah...I remember that..." and then proceed to make literally any other AT.

Just curious is there people out there that simply don't play an AT because they, rather unfortunately, happened to pick a terrible combo the first time they played it and have, ever since just been like "hmm no thank you...I'll try everything else before I make another one of those". For me it was AR/Invuln Sentinel. I didn't know but apparently that combo is just kinda trash. Assault Rifle suffers horrendously on Sentinel thanks to the lower target caps and smaller cones (which ignite does NOT make up for) since like 90% of its attacks are cones of some kind and from what I can tell is widely considered THE worst primary on Sentinel. Invuln just felt so incredibly lackluster on Sentinel, even at 38 (which is where I got to). I saw blasters and scrappers doing everything I could do but better...so ever since then I've been incredibly unlikely to ever touch Sentinels again until they get a major rework that is in the works. I know that there are powerset combos on Sentinel that are awesome but that first impression is really god damn hard to shake especially since I loved the concept I had but it just didn't work out and that kind of annoyed me.

So far the only Sentinel I've tried was an AR/Invuln. Needless to say I think it made possibly the worst first impression on me that a Sentinel could have done. The lower target caps, lower damage AND smaller AoE cones hit AR really god damn hard on Sentinel and Ignite doesn't feel like a worthy trade off for all of that. Combine this with a secondary that is both end hungry and probably the worst pick out of all of them for Sentinel...yeah things went as well as you could expect and I've not touched the AT since because of that utterly terrible first impression. I know I picked probably the most awful combination but it has kind of colored my view on Sentinels.

Definitely going to look in to more prep work. Probably change my Lore pet as well. Since I can out damage the regen of AVs (managed to get Black Scorpion down to half health before I had to go help someone) I feel like a buffing/healing pet would work out better, not sure which one to take but ah well.

Well some cock ups on the way but defeated Dr Aeon. Yeah taking purps and oranges was the way to go. First attempt on him accidentally used the tempo power before he became invulnerable again which caused problems and I ran out of insps. Second time, all buffed up to the nines I've got him...just the final mission to go now... >.> Sadly something came up and I had to ditch at the last mission...gave it one attempt and yeah...got to try to figure out a way to separate each of the AVs together.

How did you find Lord Recluse and the tower section? I'm assuming the towers still have their ridiculous HP.

Yeah I think I'm going to have prep a little more next time. I seemed to survive fine until Aeon hit half half and then no matter what I did I just got murdered..I'll probably try again tomorrow.

Yes they are auto-hit because they're using the raditation debuff toggles annoyingly, I'm going to have to try it some other time and just taking a tray full of purples and oranges...see if that works.

Anyone managed to pull this off? To be fair I did it on a whim, so no shivans/nukes etc. Did it on a TW/Bio scrapper set it on normal +0/x1 (she has recently solo'd a +4/x8 ITF) since I wasn't sure how things would go. Mission 1: Easy, no trouble at all. Mission 2: Also easy, solo'd the AVs just fine. Mission 3: Being TW became something of an annoyance since killing the vines quickly proved to be tough, thankfully managed to get it done, solo'd the tree, got my power and done. Mission 4: Now HERE is where the problem start. Firstly Silver Mantis, done but the only stand out from the villain sidekicks that really gave any trouble....now we get to the big problem itself that I can't get passed. Dr Aeon. The Doc by himself isn't much of a problem, what IS a problem are the bosses he summons which are /rad, flooring your resistances and debuffs. Now I don't know if setting solo bosses to off would cause them to spawn as Lts and be able to kill them in one Arc>Whirlwind sweep but it's something I'll have to work on. Naturally I got hard stopped her by the good Doctor so I have no idea how the last mission would have gone.

It's VERY well known that the inherent for Sentinels is kinda garbage and its been mentioned by the devs that they're going to be looking at Sentinels as a whole in the future. In fact Sentinels themselves suffer from being good solo class but not filling any kind of niche on a team that a blaster (damage) or scrapper (survivability) could already fill, they don't really have a 'niche' as it were. They're already lower damage than blasters but also suffer from smaller AoEs (which makes no sense to me, surely just lower damage would be enough) which makes AoE heavy sets like Assault Rifle feel like complete crap on a Sentinel since it's key attacks are all cones.

Yup, no objections to this at all, sounds good.

Mirroring this I would like the 'Spectrum' texture to have a non-glowing matt version as well as the glowing version. Also a very easy option for the devs to add since it's already in the game files is the 'Athletic' tights option. Currently it's dev only but it's a bit more subtle than the bodysuit version and would allow for a nice muscular build.

Thanks Sov, didn't mean to be rude, your work is hella appreciated. 😄 However definitely am going to wait until we go test things out fully on the test server and then see how it plays/feels. Like I said, the elec/shield stalker was fun but felt crippled by the lack of a heal and the build didn't have the space or the slots to get it in and still maintain perma-hasten so I've stripped out the IOs and reworked my TW/Bio scrapper and I'll use the other stuff to help build other character :D.

One thing I'm hoping for is when the test server comes back to its non-live state that I can simply see how this plays. If I'd have known how my elec/shield stalker played I probably wouldn't have gone to the problem of getting her up to level 50 and completely IOing her out as she just feels...eh...to me, far too squishy imo even with all the the trimmings.

Ok last time, made a few changes as recommended. The Accuracy thing is kind of a byproduct of the various sets just happen to offer large +acc bonuses. Took out one of the Winter IO sets since it wasn't offering much beyond pushing my defenses past 42% (which isn't needed with barrier etc.) and replaced it with Ragnarok which means hasten should be perma with the FF +Recharge proc in crushing impact, hopefully.

Which assault incarnate ability is better for brutes. They have lower damage scaling than stalkers and scrappers for whom double hit is the obvious choice which means the secondary hits aren't going to do as much damage BUT they also can already get stupidly high amounts of damage boosting and in teams I feel like it's just not going to be too worthwhile so I'm at an impasse about which to pick.

Ok update on my War Mace/Bio brute, she can easily solo +4/x8 Smashing/Lethal comic-con farms, she won't do it quickly but she takes virtually no damage and this is without barrier being at tier 4. She definitely won't put out pylon times matching the one in the pylon DPS thread but she is a bit of a stonker.