DrunkFlux

Alpha only gives +1 at tiers 3 and 4, tier 1 and 2 powers only give a +1, Musculature core boost is only a tier 2, so your only getting the enhancement effect but not the +1. The Lore/Destiny also only give an "incarnate level shift" at tier 3 and 4, "Incarnate" level shifts only apply to incarnate specific content. So you still have more to progress for your alpha slot before you have the consistent +1 in the rest of the game 45-50. Once youg et up to any of the four tier 3 alpha powers you'll have the +1 and you'll keep it once you get to tier 4.

Its not from people having lives so much as people just not learning the mechanics much when they do play. Be it from being an AE baby, though thats very rare actually, or simply never learning how buffs/debuffs work. The weakest PI team I ever had was lead by an empathy defender. And you can 100% guess why it was weak; they clearly over-valued healing and had not understood the value of buffs/debuffs and there was no other +1 toon. I eventually left. I did save teams before by myself whenever I switched to my widow, however, but she's designed around salvaging weak teams.

Honestly AE farming shouldn't be the only way to rapidly level toons from 1 to 50. in fact, AE farming is almost akine to cheating practically, always has been, only reason it never seems to get hit hard as AE fire farmers always claim is because its the fire farmer doing all the work, no one else ever joins in except hitters like blasters with max fire-resist and high defense on top of that. When we just close off power leveling routes players find other ones, its true, and then close those off all it'd do is just make the HC team come off as nothing but nerf-heads. And honestly I don't think most players have the kind of time required to level toons from 1-50 normally. Even con enemies give such low exp that I barely notice the bar moving, when I join friends in non-50 content exemplared down to say, mid 20s I often don't notice the exp bar climbing at all, even on non-50s with double exp. I run say, 6-7 missions with them and only gain like, 3-4 bars of exp at most in that time span. Edit: I am fine with PI teams going for others but I had seen one PI team only go after council still, like the team leader hadn't caught onto how the council play being much harder for lowbies to survive and the teams killing power wasn't quite high enough to stop warwolves from popping up.

Its clock based RNG and yes, very badly designed, and always has been more working against the player than the enemy mobs, rather than evenly between the two. My most frustrating deaths on defense based builds have always the dreaded "double hit" where I get hit by two attacks at the same time rolling sub-5, not even a proper defense cascade, no time to react, just full health to zero in an instant. Because the two mobs attacked at the same time when the RNG clock happened to be sub-5. This also leads to an annoying factor with the player when the same attack in the attack chain, and one of your better attacks, missing every time. Wait about 1 second before attacking and it stops suddenly, every single time.

Thats largely why my stalker ended up clearing the mobs faster than my blaster, it was 'entirey' the warwolf boss spawns making them effectively more annoying freakshow. My blasters I feel were only getting closer risk of being defeated purely due to the bosses simply living longer, while my stalker was fine simply due to being able to survive a protracted fight against boss ranks and also had far superior single-target DPS, that her inferior AoE was entirely negated compared to the blasters. It'll always take a long time to clear through council now.

I admit I find carnies and malta more fun overall and always found them fun to fight. If anything, I think they are still more fun than the new CoT, since they are managable groups that aren't really overpowered in any particular manner. Carnies weakness to lethal and malta are just kind of dependent on CC, the sappers are just glass cannons that stick out like a sore thumb, I felt them also a lot of fun. I had noticed most people ignore though the more threatening enemies in both groups; sappers get focused but gunslingers not so much, in the case of carnies, dark ring mistresses are not dealt with by ranged toons as fast as they should be imo(they are effectively death mages). Whats funny is I think Malta are way easier than the new CoT and honestly thinking on it, the council are capable of doing way more aoE damage, some even guaranteed, so lowbie teams are likely to get hit especially hard guaranteed, but I noticed that its not the worst, and the warwolves are just an extra health bar to drill through more than anything. The new CoT are a bit higher than banished pantheon now(maybe we should buff banished then? Just cause...), though my blaster never had problems with the nukes. Like, I've usually one of two goals on toons: Either: A: They are strongest possible solo with maybe some leadership. So if the team drops they can still keep going, the last alive. B: Make the entire team virtually unstoppable. Which is well, my support toons, they aren't made to be super solo focused. The toons I was testing were in the former, since non-support toons. I admit I rarely play them as I had bad experiences playing support during live, but thats a tale for another time. Last team I was in: council only, team mostly died to AoE res powers and the PBAoE life drains, except a few +1's, the non-50s 90% losses were from the eclipse, with only a few from the equinox's. But no CoT, it was just all council.

Yeah usually my intent, though I also sometimes switch toons if i'm on a lowbie and the teams leader likes taking on more than they can chew. I rarely actually form teams, if i'm being honest. And yeah I noticed most teams can still destroy them without much difficulty, this was more for when I needed to switch to someone cause a team was bad. Honestly maybe i'm just being to insecure about it, after-all usually the best solution to a bad team is to leave, usually. But sometimes I like to switch to a toon to save one. Its more for when i'm switching in an effort to save a team more than anything. I found them easy on the ice blaster on +2, and also was in a team that crushed them very very quickly, so much so the archons never got to transform into warwolves. so I'm kind of retracting on the Council a bit further, though I don't think I even stated the council as OP to begin with. Mostly just the CoT and the overkill to-hit debuff making focused accuracy a requirement which I kind of hate if i'm being honest, as it feels like all the new pools added just as well have not been added at all to the game. Bad design there as a few others mentioned so far in this thread.

I was gauging how well my toons could do so I could know how well I could carry a team or not with them and whether things were fair or not, an largely sharing my thoughts on it so far. I already adjusted the build of the ice blaster to account for the dark damage attacks, and plan to gauge and perfect over time :). Experimentation phases and all that. But its also a mentality; if I was to join a 54 and I needed to switch to a 50+1(I have had bad teams with weak incarnates even before this update, collosally weak in fact) I wanted to make sure I was bringing a toon up to the challenge. Something worthy of difficult combat. Fixing flawed builds is always something I'm doing anyways. To be unable to solo them is also to be unable to carry a struggling team. A standard I go by on all my builds, be it support, tank, dps ect. I already have my widow but she makes the rest of the team unstoppable, this experiment was for my non widow toons. I suspect the same, I mean I saw teams when leveling toons myself who were captained by people who were far from capable of handling even the council back then, let alone say, CoT today. I admit I usually just split them a bit and then cut them down after, rather than simply trying to "tank spank" them, in fact I prefer mobile builds specifically to deal with patches and ensure i'm always in the best position for cone attacks ect. Maybe i'll actually take a second look at focused accuracy, since I realize they lowered the end cost of it considerably(at least I thought in a patch note? Mids says otherwise, unless it was even more and i'm remembering incorrectly). Hard to though when snipes can do so much damage that its a huge loss to take focused accuracy for a few mobs. But it does make me think of how I could improve on the stalker who excelled at the council already to punish the CoT even further on her.

So I'm trying to solo them on 8x+3, reason being that if forming a 54 PI team, often there are lowbies, if your the only incarnate and not able to 100% solo things, then the team is going to struggle very very hard. So with this in mind, I decided to so far try the mobs on 8x+3 for one main reason: Some mobs are 53, some are 54 due to some getting 1 level higher than the setting(barring 54 streight). So far; Melee toons struggled against CoT due to way, way to much -tohit aura spam, I ran into a situation on one of my scrappers where I had to just flat out abandon the mission, it was 100% undoable. They'd stack to much -tohit and I had no effective counter to it. My stalker could partially counter it, but even then I frequently had to pull back, and this was only one run. Also I had noticed confuse/terrorize are used in spades and many sets provide no protection from that, which horribly damages one of the main draws to playing melee classes/sentinels, protection from CC. My ice/martial/ice blaster was able to deal with them largely due to simply destroying them at a distance thus negating the huge to-hit aura. My staff/bio/mu scrapper in fact had the worst luck; a mob composing almost exclusively of death mages and ghosts, due to just sheer luck. She couldn't do any damage, at, all, due to the sheer amount of to-hit debuffs. Even judgement couldn't hit 'any' of them. Meanwhile, my ice/martial/ice blaster couldn't deal with the council to terribly well. This was due to a combination of factors, the big one being that dark eclipse archons have WAY to much health, and also almost ALWAYS turn into dark warwolves which are also very, very tanky. Even though she leans heavily towards survivability she struggled and died TWICE, which to me is an F. My water/time/fire blaster meanwhile died once on the first run, but managed to avoid dying the second run after switching to diamagnetic and spamming the hell out of AoEs to stack it asap on the mobs. Even then I had a few close calls such as two big hits in a row both rolling identical 4%'s. She even handled 3 mobs consecutively but the slower ST kill speed that blasters generally have compared to a certain other class, it was only due to having to escort a very slow npc and lower ST issues). After a third mission I concluded my water/time/fire blaster was in a better direction and it leads me to consider a respec fore the ice/martial/ice to an ice/martial/soul blaster(since neg energy damage is so rare in IOs *shrugs*). My DB/Bio/Energy Stalker actually stomped the council super easy and even cleared the map faster, purely due to the ST being higher ST against bosses allowing her to dispatch the dark eclipse archons/dark warwolfs so much faster that the lower AoE(Still had some) actually didn't matter, I was able to clear the mobs just fast enough and clear the bosses faster that my clear time was far, far higher. This wasn't perfect as she also had some difficulty with circle of thorns and to-hit debuff spam, but I could always teleport out of the auras and patches quickly. I'll continue periodicly testing characters against 8x+3 council/CoT to see how things are effected. So far; There seems to be no limit on -tohit aura spam for the circle of thorns. This isn't cool for melee at all and was a main problem players had with the original positron TF. God help a pure melee team. This in fact actually lines into fake difficulty; best you can hope for is keeping moving away and use the ST you have from your ancillery pool, god help you if your main set has no ranged attack which is 90% of them for a clear reason. Council aren't to bad but the dark eclipse archons(which always turn into dark warwolves) are so tanky(due to 90% of the time turning into dark warwolves) that high ST builds out-pace high AoE builds, unless they have a lot of both. The non-vampire eclipse galaxies seem far, far more interesting now, though, and are actually a lot of fun with teleports and the reses. So for team gameplay they are nice, solo the dark warwolves are more annoying attack sponges that might sometimes hit you absurdedly hard. This was a problem for the blasters, not so much for the stalker. Both groups are much harder than arachnos and carnies. Honest opinion; With my tier of F being far to easy to A and S being very fun, and SS+ being cheating and very frustrating with no fun: CoT: Overtuned, easily, melee simply cannot counter 10+ to-hit auras when a mob is unlucky enough to have a lot of ghosts spammed in it. Combined with confuse and terrorize having no cc protection for many sets, this puts them in SS+, cheater level. Tone the ghosts to-hit spam back, or relegate that kind of spam to TF's only. This is NOT fun for radio missions, not, even remotely. I also noticed the other mages, ruin/madness/agony seemed surprisingly rare so far. Since it seems to just spam dark to-hit debuffs and nothing but, this makes them feel like a poorly designed AE mob with to-hit anchors spammed. So thus, SS+ cheater level. Council: Far more balanced, but dark eclipse archons seem to be the most common bosses at times, and always turn into dark warwolves. When every single mob seems to have one 90% of the time and then 95% of the time turn into dark warwolves, it gets repetitive fast. I very rarely encountered the more interesting eclipse galaxies and there lt/boss counterparts, I ultimately felt council to be annoying in spots with some missed potential, but it might be my rotten luck. A tier. Nice roadblocks but my luck turned fighting them into a slog on my blasters, and my stalker managed to out-pace the blasters inspite far less AoE firepower simply due to superior ST being the big winner in this. Things this has done in this update: I won't be building blasters as much but I also won't be fighting circle of thorns solo, if I do ever form teams i won't be ever picking circle of thorns until they tone back the to-hit spam. Edit: I Am going to make some clarification, these conclusions were made regarding solo play, for two reasons; Some of us enjoy being able to solo things, and also 53 and 54 teams often only the leader is 50+1 and I've not always seen top builds, and I wanted to see how my top-end builds performed and also tested one scrapper even with a medium-build. I am very glad i'm not the only one who feels this way about the new mobs. 54 with only 50+1 is effectively one player carrying the team, and they may be fine with it as they want the company, also many people join 54 on non 50s because yes, they are trying to level lowbies, and may not have a few months to level that toon in the long run, or simply not the time to grind forever. And 54 PI is actually faster than AE due to even the non 50s participating. When a mob is powerful enough, 54 teams simply move onto other mobs and ignore the more dangerous ones. Ironicly, I find even malta to be easier than the new CoT, and the new council are just meat-bags in teamplay, simply taking longer to clear. 54 normal mode ITF is still faster yet than 54 PI, and honestly i wouldn't ever want the normal mode ITF to get the changes to it that hard mode introduces.

CO deserved it, 100%, considering the hard neglect the game has had. OR the bipolar sense of balance the game has had with regards to its powers or the impossible to solo qlithopic warzone designed to make healers required, and the mostly rotten community. Of course now cryptic is being disolved into DECA, with cryptic employees seeking work elsewhere now, only with cryptic for a short time until they find another position. This is effecting STO, to(In fact it was an STO player who first caught the pieces and put things together, such as no cryptic positions open directly, only DECA games positions for cryptic games with no mention of cryptic itself many cryptic devs including the absolute top now putting up as available for work ect).

.2 * 2 isn't actually 40%, thats a gamblers falacy. Its more like 36%. (you calculate the chance of it NOT happening first, so .8 * .8 = .64, you take that and subtract it from 1 and thats your actual percentage, even then it'll be significantly more unreliable). Even so, odds are it'll probably still be useful for zoning them a little on my water blaster when I get around to her.

I know I'll see +4's on the game when you set at +3. Didn't need to reply to that on this, I only mentioned +4's spawning to also include that I also got a taste of what they'd be like on +4 so people wouldn't assume that I couldn't handle them at +3, it was +4 that gave me trouble on the blaster. My stalker handled the new council relatively easy compared to my ice blaster, in fact she managed to clear the map faster than the ice blaster simply due to having far superior single-target DPS, as thats what you need to deal with the dark warwolfs, they are so tanky that the AoE power advantage blasters have is completely negated, and the blasters having lower ST than scrappers and stalkers ultimately causes them to fall behind the stalker I had (who to be fair had decent AoE as a Dual blades stalker). This was including the +4's that are in the map.

This is, beyond words, cruel. Like Cyptic nerfing everything not-healing in CO cruel.

I'll have to give it a try sometime then, as the hard-mode ITF and nictus possession, things feeling unavoidable was a major quit moment for me when it comes to hard mode content, I played hard mode ITF once and then never touched it again after that. Although it was also the cysts blowing up 1-shotting my bio armor stalker who actually wasn't fully incarnated out and only half IO'd (still 50), that wasn't the best idea, but it made me feel I had to bring toons in who were 100% perfect to do any hard mode content after that, and by the time I had more i felt were ready everyone was only doing 4* with barrier stacking on all toons.

Finally got around to fighting the new council, I liked the galaxy ones but I hated the dark eclipse archons, they res and the holds from my ice powers weren't working half the time, and it seemed like they had an auto-hit attack, died twice in one mission on 8x+3 solo (though the game put +4's and those were the ones that defeated me.) on effectively the same mob. On a toon with every IO with as much defense as I could stack in every category, barrier, Inner will ect and still said blaster couldn't keep alive effectively. I ended up putting in an extra kb protection IO before continuing. Maybe I should have tested this all on beta or something. An auto hit attack.....that hits hard as heck. RIP defense users I guess. The other things I liked, I also fought the CoT 8x+2 solo, they seemed a lot more fun as I simply had to react and watch that I was attacking the right mobs. Though it wa sa cave and the mobs were rather scattered, though I don't try to fight in tar patches/quakes ect either. Honestly they seem to be likely easier simply due to not having auto-hit abilities. I like they got equivilants of Ruin, Madness and Agony mages(and nice touch with the huge explode power on near defeat, make me keep a distance). CoT = fun to fight again(so far anyways), mobs debuff/cc patches is a nice touch so far as it can be moved out of(or teleport out of if immobed/slowed ect), I can react to them and they react to me, its fun. Council = Why do they have to have an auto-hit attack? Wasn't it bad enough Ralaruu had auto-hit mobs in abundance? I mean do we really want them to be ludicrously hard now I dunno, I wasn't having fun fighting council once I moved from +2 to +3(and the game tossed +4's at me). Simply the fact that the vampire archons are always going to turn into super warwolves(all of them in the entire map did this to me by the way), and seem to have extra high resistance to holds and can auto-hit occasionally before they turn, not very soloable anymore unless your stacked with dark resists. At least, thats how I'm left feeling about it anyways. I felt like it was all luck in the end and keeping a distance from the enemies so they don't auto-hit on me.