Greycat

As far as this - I'll see advertisements (typically on the weekend) for ... I think it's the 801 series, "these are built to murder you" arcs, and the occasional test run for something. Non-farm content, in my experience, seems most often to be run by SGs to run RP storyarcs, or with small groups that know each other and aren't going to have someone random just want to rush to the end, kill the boss or grab the glowie, and jump to the next mission - they actually want to *see* what's going on and what the author's done. So, no LFG advertising, but talking to each other in SG chat, private channels or Discord to arrange times to run stuff. It flies under the radar.

Tinpex, typically. I've seen some people try to call it ApeMage, too, though that hasn't quite caught on. :)

If you feel like organizing (not necessarily leading these, though it's not that hard to lead a team - keep the wiki handy,) I'd go to your server's board below, Discord and an announcement or two in game and say you're getting a "newbies run everything" team (or something similar) together. No master runs, no speed-this, +Xthat, just "I want to see this content." Pick a day and time (or talk with whoever's interested,) and just start running them. If you're not a 50/incarnate, you'll need to level for some of them, of course, but again - read through the WIki and plan with that, it should tell you requirements.

I *suspect* this was in the works, in a way, with the Council being one of the groups getting Praetorian tech (the War Walkers,) but not finished. Had the game been alive for another... I'd say three issues, maybe, we'd be talking about how the Council got buffed and X group needs it now.

As far as the comm officers, they're worth extra XP specifically because of the summons. Plus that summon is interruptible, similar to the Sky Raider Engineers. I'm not really for or against the badges - though, for the gunmen and bosses, unless they're silly high numbers, they'd probably be gotten in one good MSR. 20-odd minutes of a constant stream of Magi, Priests, Mezmerists and the like? (And Headman Gunmen, though they die quickly.) The other two could probably be gotten before you're done with the RWZ arcs, even solo, which isn't a bad thing.

Yes! ... kidding, obviously. But something I hope the dev team keeps in mind while creating new content in general - I'm not sure how hard it is to add NPCs to these "buckets" for things like safeguards/mayhems, but yeah, it'd be worthwhile.

5 servers, 1000 slots each. That's the "full reroll."

Farming wasn't the intent of any mission, AE or normal content. yet they were used for it. Still are. Short of having every mission unable to be repeated once someone's run it (theirs or not,) and put on a timer, if something's able to be farmed, someone will find out how and do so. As far as "allowed" and the devs "caving?" I believe the phrase "pushing back the ocean with a broom" is relevant here. There's no way they could *stop* farms being created without punishing everyone or gutting the entire system, and they flat out knew it. All they could do is keep an eye out for the real outliers as far as exploits and handle those as they came up. Which they did, to greater or lesser extents (specific mob farms, like comm officer farms, and ... whatever mechanic the CEBR farms used, I think that was the "INSP up before diving in" leading to inspiration buffs getting stripped on entry, but may be remembering wrong.)

Absolutely not. I've had SGs where AE was heavily used to create and play through storylines - and that was well before the players were 50. No reason they should be punished despite fighting right alongside everyone else. All this would do is encourage PLing. You've added irritation for no benefit.

Well, two things on that - First, the *game* obviously tracks both how much INF we both have and make already - it's got to display it to you for the first, and it awards badges for the second (and the two are not the same.) So this as an option (one of many that have been requested) on the character select screen shouldn't be *that* big a deal to dig up. The login screen has to talk to the server to show whatever the last costume was, after all. Second, I suspect the information's already in there able to be accessed. I know we had to rely on CIT (external) on live, but they were looking at an internal tool and trying to develop something simliar (though they dropped it due to the load it put on the server or the speed or some such) - I'd be really surprised if that wasn't available somewhere in the spaghetti to reference.

Side note, you should always be careful of saying "Nobody likes X group," because you will inevitably get the answer of "I love fighting them." ;) Plus there are ways around most all of those, especially on today's teams. Protectors? Throw holds on the ones using energy attacks, since those are the ones that MoG, or hold on to your *big* hitting attack 'til they're at about 1/4 health or so since they can't MoG if they're dead. (Alternately, KB/KD plus another attack.) Heck, if you're running a control set and have a moment, right click and peek at info and it'll tell you what sets they run. If it mentions energy, get ready to slap holds on them. Sappers? Easy to target. Blinded? Pop a yellow (if you're not on one of the sets that has a +perception buff or Tactics built in.) Or if you've got a PBAOE, well, that will hit things whether you can see them or not. Honestly, the most dangerous thing about Carnies (besides a fair bit of psi, which is often a weak point) - especially if you're melee - is getting into a group and having multiple END drains hit you when they die. If you're not watching, you can have toggles drop. Besides, by the time you're fighting these, you've got most or all of your powers and slots, plus you *should* have experience with dealing with problematic enemies from the last 40-odd levels. There's a reason they're tougher, after all.

Yeah, I pretty much ignore them, honestly, and wish they'd just get folded into threads. ITF used to be "the thing" to farm for them, as I recall.

Seeing this again... I'll say I kind of *like* having two powers I can kind of ignore slotting with. The way MMs were initially back on live, as I recall, we were *having* to slot them as the upgrades were pet by pet, not AOE. Having two right now that I can mostly ignore slotting means I have two levels where I can dedicate those slots to getting my pets fully slotted faster - I really look at them as "free slots next level" instead of another power splitting up an already limited supply.

There's no romancer like a necromancer, don'cha know. ;) As far as the OP, generally (I can't speak for specifics on carnies, right this sec) the summoning enemy gives more XP than normal for their rank to make up for the summons. I *will* agree Carnies are more annoying, *especially* when rescuing something, because they can summon a phantasm, which then *itself* can summon a decoy phantasm, and if you're doing a rescue you need to wait for *both* to go away. Since the decoy can't be damaged and the phantasm itself gives no XP, having that vanish sooner would be nice. (As far as the phasing, it's a pretty quick cycle, and as far as I recall if you have them in some sort of hold it stops the phasing in its tracks - and there's not really a shortage of holds out there, even for non controllers/doms.)

It really depends on the character and powersets. Some of my Kheldians have triform and human only or biform builds. VEATs? I'll alternate a bit. (Though that also has the annoying "forced respec at 24" when building up a second or third build.) For some sets, especially support sets that are more team focused (Emp, FF) I'll have team and solo builds with different power selections. Some I just use to mess around with other build ideas without doing a respec. On live, I'd sometimes have PVE and PVP builds - not so much, now. Though you can build a farmer with a "farm" build and a "non farm" build. It really varies.

Alpha is basically this, though more general. And really, "all powers six slotted" is kind of ... much. With what we have now, we already have perma-everything, capped-everything, challenge-what's-that characters running around for the price of a bit of inf and a copied MIDS build. I don't think making that any easier by adding slots (even if that didn't mechanically break the game given the way the code is, which is a possibility) would really be healthy for it.

I was debating it a bit. To me, that would water it down a bit much - if we had more sets that had this combination, then yeah, I'd probably want that. But that's just me. I'm kind of at the "I'd kind of like to see this, toss it out to see what people do with it" stage with it. 🙂

Next up: The Food Network presents the Wheel of Thyme... Who is the Dragonfruit Reborn?

No, I don't mean the Touch of the Nictus proc. Every AT except Controllers, VEATs and Peacebringers have some powerset which has one (or more) "Heal attacks." Attacks which are melee or ranged, do damage to an enemy and are also a self heal. Typically these are in a dark themed powerset. If you take these, you either have to choose a damage set, a heal or accurate heal set, or frankenslot and try to make the best of it. Given this is the sort of thing that can be used almost across the board, having an IO set which does both damage and healing (with the usual accuracy, recharge, end reduction) in the Accurate Healing category would be nice. It would have to be a "universal" damage, so both the ranged (for instance - MM/Necromancy/Life Drain) and melee can use it. I'd figure it would have to be a (say) 30-50 range set, just to make the enhancement values worthwhile. As far as set bonuses or what kind of balance among the enhancement values? Honestly, I don't have them in mind. Mostly a reasonable split between damage and healing with probably 1 - 1 1/3 IOs worth of accuracy over the whole set, everything else fit in as needed (or tweaked with set bonuses.) I think it's something widespread enough to find useful, but niche enough to not really need more than one set as an option to what's out there now.

They're salvage. I don't see why they couldn't be made to drop. Things in salvage can be made to *not* drop (legacy base salvage, for instance,) after all. Honestly, I think all three should drop (on a very rare basis,) if nothing else just to introduce the player that might not pay attention to forums (and "get this build!") and/or the market that these things exist. "Hey, I got a super pack! ... what's a super pack?" will get people looking. And we definitely have new players.

Wow, talk about *entirely missing what I said.* Here, let me quote myself. Try reading it this time. There, I even highlighted the relevant parts to make it easy for you. By the way, you forgot to thumbs-down CD5's post, which essentially said the same thing: And just to cut off a potential non-argument, no, nobody's talking about an "I've spent thousands of hours on this base" type base either.

Yes, a "I don't care what it looks like, I just want functions" is a 10-20 minute project. Most of the time when people ask for this, it's because they want something reasonably nice. An apartment for their character(s.) A bar. A lab. Caves. A space station/space ship. Something themed. The sort of thing that fits that "daunting" - or at least "time consuming." Something that's not just slapped together and looks nice. "How hard is it to do yourself?" It can be *quite* hard, and not everyone has the time to do it or learn. Yes, some people love spending hundreds of hours on bases. Some people just want something that's not "box with stuff," either for its own sake or to start from and learn from.

Been brought up before, but I'd still like to see it.

... as an aside, I will forever interpret this as Dance Dance Revolution.

Seem to recall there was one on live... (which I generally ignored. Just like I do /general in game...)