Veracor

Thanks for the fix on Degenerative Interface!

I would like to make an announcement about the recent Hamidon raid ethic that's been going on lately. This applies to the daily raids Elmyder and I run at 7pm and 10pm EST: --- (1) The leecher hunt is getting a little too extreme. I can understand the vigilance against multiboxers as almost every multibox leecher has been hostile and dishonest, but don't be so quick to assume someone 30 seconds late to the launch is a leecher. People AFK for valid reasons, or they thought they had enough time to grab a drink, or left to use the bathroom, or whatnot. If you see someone leeching or suspect them of it, please just point it out to me in a tell instead of calling them out publicly. (2) While I do appreciate the enthusiasm that some people have about incanning the league to the Monster walls, it is unprofessional to teleport directly into the Monsters. There are legitimate reasons such as Fulcrim Shift, but such buffs are only effective if people aren't pancaked. Please just incan to an empty space near the Monster walls from now on, and it may also help to wait until I call for heading to the Monster wall so that people can get their defenses ready. (3) Do not teleport the league into Hamidon under any circumstance. Regardless of the raid leader's personal thoughts on the quality of his league's behavior, or the potential wagers he might be having on the Who Will Die? signature story arc, teleporting people into Hamidon is objectively sabotaging the raid. I don't care what your opinion is on keeping the teleport prompt enabled or how dying doesn't matter in this game, just don't do it. (4) Please dial back all the recent inappropriate broadcast/league chatter. Most people (including myself) are just here to raid, not to hear base insults, macro spam, sexual innuendo, politics, or borderline racist comments. If you must say something bad about the raid's performance, people not reading instructions, or the ever-present Brutes/Scrappers attempting to solo Mitos, be creative and at least try to spin your comment in an uplifting and satirical way. (5) Raid leaders are just volunteer players. People being ugly to each other makes raids less welcoming and just causes more issues for us to deal with. If you have grievances with a specific player on the league and they did not explicitly break the code of conduct, please just put them on ignore instead of continuing a public vendetta with them. --- Please remember that the goal is not to have the smoothest and most efficient raid possible, but rather to foster and maintain a positive environment for everyone, both new and old. Thank you for your consideration and I'll see you all at 10pm EST!

Since the February 18 patch, a lot of people have been silently crashing to desktop when clearing out the Hamidon Buds that spawn after the raid. Either nobody crashes, or 15-25 people crash at once. Since there's no exception or bugsplat, and seems to happen arbitrarily when the buds are being fought, we have no idea what the cause is. Varying hardware and 64-bit vs 32-bit usage between all the people who crash and who don't.

I've been running daily Hamidon raids on Everlasting since August and the whole "it fills 20 minutes prior without even advertising" is also a thing here. The issue has been alleviated somewhat by Elmyder joining me to run daily Hamidon raids at different hours and ROBOKiTTY running bonus Hamidon raids on the weekend. I'm not sure what you're asking, though; there's really nothing that the raid leaders can do about early arrivals and the zone filling up. When we tried leading concurrent raids, the second zone would usually fail to fill and/or have a multibox leecher problem. If we announce to arrive early, all that does is push the schedule off-track earlier and earlier each day, not to mention dealing with constant vitriol and complaints from rude and entitled players that think the schedule changes are being done on purpose to slight them. The over-attendance issue is really only fixed by more people stepping up to run additional Hamidon raids at different hours so that the people who are attending at primetime, but could be attending sometime else, don't fill up the main raid slots. Help fulfill the demand on Excelsior by scheduling and running your own Hamidon raids.

Think so, I ran Lambda on Wednesday and there was no problem then.

Can confirm, Marauder is double-casting Nova Fist and sometimes without warning or wind-up. Made for an interesting run today. Combat log looks like this: Marauder hits you with their Punch for 214.28 points of Smashing damage. Marauder knocks you off your feet with their Punch! Marauder powers up their Nova Fist! Marauder blasts you with their Nova Fist for 3152.19 points of energy damage! Marauder blasts you with their Nova Fist for 3152.19 points of energy damage! Marauder blasts you with their Nova Fist for 2887.15 points of energy damage! Artillery Barrage hits you with their Artillery Barrage for 5.11 points of Lethal damage. Marauder hits you with their Hurl for 673.48 points of Smashing damage.

I've soloed a good amount of this game as a Bio/TW Tanker just for the hell of it, which is a powerset combination very high on sustained damage. However, Tanker is certainly not the AT to be soloing on and I often had to rely on a temp pet or two to supplement the low Tanker numbers against GMs. TW/WP or TW/Bio Scrapper/Brute specced defensively (stuff like Shield Wall x4's and winter IOs), Savage/Bio Stalker, Fire/Storm Corruptor against AVs that don't run away, Fire/Storm or Grav/Storm Controllers against AVs that do run away, and a few outliers like procmonster Fire/TA or Rad/TA Blaster can demolish a lot of content solo. Turns out -res is really strong (who knew!). A lot of people have recently been crunching this game for solo, and the TF speedrunning competitions are starting to take interest for solo/duo category runs. Hasn't broken into categories by AT yet, though, so Scrapper's been dominating the results. Some general tips: Chug inspirations like candy to gottagofast (Disclaimer: Don't chug candy), and disable the wakies because they'll stop you from chugging. Auction House can be used to buy insps in bulk to claim between missions, email can be used to store insps to claim during missions. Most damage is Lethal/Smashing/Energy and some Fire. The other damage types only show up in dangerous amounts in specific TFs/Trials. Solo on bigger team size if you're an AT or powerset that benefits from having additional targets (such as Warshade). Temp powers allow you to fill in holes on your build. Some of them can be bought at the P2W vendor, some of them can be had from doing specific arcs in Oro. Envenomed Dagger and Kinetic Dampener are crazy value for their inf cost, as long as you remember to renew them after every batch of TFs you run. Defensive ATs such as Tanker will benefit better from temp powers that summon, while offensive ATs benefit better from toggles/damage buffs. Signature Summon powers from the P2W vendor vary heavily in what they summon, including alignment. Switching to rogue and using the Tank Summon to get Lord Recluse seems to yield an abnormal amount of damage, and I personally get to tank for LR's own pet, too (which I presume is the intended weakness of this one: part of its DPS is killable). You'll probably use Ageless Destiny for everything so your build can afford to be pretty harsh on endurance and recharge (Unless you're an AT that needs Clarion for mez prot). Speaking of Destiny, Controllers can get perma-able mez prot in their Psionic Mastery epic pool (Combined with Combat Jumping and/or Acrobatics) so they can skip Clarion forever. Which is good, because they're probably /Storm for the damage which eats endurance like crazy, and Leaping for the gottagofast speedrunners. Longbow Lore pets apply lots of -regen, and Banished Pantheon pets apply lots of -res (doubly so if you're cold or negative damage). As for my own knowledge (Won't bother with a lot of the easy/slog TFs): Redside respec trials were all solo-able. Blueside respec trials were still solo-able as a tank, but definitely way harder. Freakshow bosses coming back to life and aggro caps, ugh. Descent to the Hydra trial was pretty fun to solo as a Tanker, because the damage on the boss is fixed so it really made Bio shine down there in the sewers. Probably the only trial that Tanker is preferred for solo? Eden was a fun one regardless, but offensive ATs will excel here because the Crystal Titan will oneshot summons (or it will when they don't fall off the platform and lose line of sight, typical pets). The Market Crash AV is pretty tough solo if you just sit in one place or don't summon anything else to take aggro for you. You'll need to kill shield generators at 75/50/25 life and you need to let the maxHP debuff wear off, unless you don't really care and just die to reset it. Summoned temp pets can get squished/distracted/stuck in ragdoll from knockback pretty easily here, so this TF solo definitely favors high DPS. Lady Grey TF is an interesting solo favoring the ranged ATs because pool powers can literally kill yellows, but I know it's been done on Scrappers and Stalkers regardless. Ice Melee has an advantage here with its big DPA attack also being a hold, but a big take-away is to use Enhancement Unslotters during this TF to swap out your hold abilities for Lockdown's +2 mag proc. You'll eat fewer EoEs killing the greens, and yes you do have to kill all the Mitos for the mission to complete (Killing Hamidon first extends the mission, as you then need to kill the Buds). Honoree may require pets for additional damage, or else his actives could recharge during the fight. I know a few people who tried to solo Dr. Kahn and weren't able to kill Reichsman before running out of temp power charges. Not even with Ultimates and super reds going, but they all tried it on Scrappers. Maybe a character focused on -res could make it work (Psy/Cold Corruptor comes to mind with its strong singletarget chain and -regen as well, but Psy has terrible AoE so that might need to be Fire instead). Barracuda SF has to be soloed by a Defender or a Mastermind due to the AT restriction. As far as I know the adds do eventually run out to prevent intentional farming, but there's a ton of them to get through. Rad/Thermal Fire Defender is the best shot here, I guess, but it would still take ages to clear the adds. Other: I've led somewhere around 350 iTrial badge/master runs since Homecoming started and I can't think of any that could be soloed aside from Keyes (AM has no level shift and doesn't naturally regen, can aggro warworks to jump off of terminal platforms, but you'd need to be Bio or WP to reliably survive and recover from Disintegration). Maaaybe Lambda with temp power usage and psi damage and/or res debuffs? We have, however, completed some iTrials with fewer than the minimum required players just for fun (multibox accounts to get ourselves in, then quitting the league with the dummies). I thought BAF's prisoner phase would be impossible with only one team, but the number of prisoners was scaled down pretty hard (Scaled down to less than the minimum 12 players? We're not sure).

It's only gotten worse since that post. I'm assuming the variable rolls over after 32767. The number of available respecs I had rolled over to negative after 127 and a GM had to fix it, so vet levels probably do too.

I just had an incorrect password error 3 times in a row so I immediately went here and changed it with my forum session still being logged in. I was able to log back in with the new password, but this is very unusual as I rarely flub passwords.

I noticed that Tornado does not increase its damage if you use red inspirations or gain +dmg through external modifiers. Tested with a Fire/Storm Corruptor, the damage was increasing for the other pseudopets Rain of Fire, Freezing Rain, and Lightning Storm, but not Tornado (and yes, I was resummoning it each time). Only damage enhancements slotted into Tornado affected Tornado's damage. Perhaps this is why Soulbound Allegiance's proc affects the caster and not the Tornado when slotted into it? Thing is, I don't know if Tornado is intended to operate this way or not for balance reasons.

I can confirm, I run a lot of itrials and I always get a Catalyst within the first few groups killed in the first itrial that I run for the day. Don't know what the cooldown is, though.

Thanks for adding me to the fire farm! Been getting a lot of tells from EL farmers who got a chance to beat up their raid leader!

It seems I have fallen behind on badges, but this is understandable as I play one character and I spend a lot of time leading hami and itrials to get others on Everlasting their badges. I'm still on track for finishing all the day jobs by the time the valentine's badges are available, though! ...Don't look at the vet level. Just single-character things. Funny to see my old post back when that was a lot of badges. Guess I should edit it.

Well we've had 3 days since the 50-cap change and so far: It seems everyone assumes overflow just takes place in Hive 2. Recruiting simultaneously for blue/red didn't work out, everybody just camped in Hive. The overflow raid doesn't get quite enough people to launch until the main league downs their second Hami and breaks up to join them. So far it looks like doing the 8pm EDT raid works best if the main league forms up 30 minutes early (nothing new there) and the overflow doesn't bother forming up until the actual 8pm EDT, and both leagues are in the Hive. Also, thanks to Elmyder for stepping up to lead the overflows after the 50-cap hit us! If anyone else wants to lead a Hami raid, possibly even redside in the Abyss, feel free to form one up! I'll put it on the Everlasting TFs schedule.

Everlasting's Hami raid composition is, on average: Arachnos: 1 Blasters: 9 Brutes: 4 Controllers: 6 Corruptors: 2 Defenders: 3 Dominators: 4 Kheldians: 2 Masterminds: 1 Sentinels: 2 Scrappers: 8 Stalkers: 1 Tankers: 5 Though there is some overlap with powersets and ATs for roles, Defender and Tanker would certainly be worth levelling up for helping with Hami raids.

It does if they are leeching hardcore and not even attacking anything, which has been the case in the last few raids. But yeah, there's not a whole lot we can do about it.

Hello Everlasting, I am one of the raid organizers for the server. Over the last three months, we have witnessed Hamidon raids go from 1 full league, to a creeping overflow league, to two overflow leagues. During this time, we went from the safe-and-slow strategy of killing every bloom, to nuking at 50% health, to 75% health, 100%, and then finally 100% ignoring Mitos. This is pretty impressive given that we are Everlasting and half of our server population occupies some sort of galaxy dance club with talking seagulls. As of 9/10, The Hive, The Abyss, and Rikti War Zone are now capped at 50 players instead of 150, meaning we're probably back to the slow 50% health strats, or 75% if the league has lore pets. This is fine, but this 50-cap change has caused a number of other problems: 1). We have way more than 50 people wanting to attend raids, and we were already forming up 30 minutes before schedule due to sheer attendance, which is understandably unfair to west coast 9-5 workers in the first place. 2). The league will fall apart every time we switch zones to The Abyss from people waiting or switching characters. I mean, it already did, but now it forcibly does. 3). There will be no more reserving of spots in a Hami league. You will either arrive in the zone or you will stand at the door going let me in waiting for someone to crash. No more tells to get invites into a Hami raid -- broadcast only. 4). Leechers cannot be removed from the zone, only from the league. All we can do is kick them from the league to deny them rewards. On the 150-cap leechers didn't matter so we didn't police it, but now it is a detriment. 5). Fewer EoEs will be available and a couple of shady people are already buying them all up to resell at exhoorbitant prices. There's really not much we can do about problems 3-5. For problems 1 and 2, we are considering the following options: 1). Hami can form up early and then overflow can take the next instance, and each league kills Hami consecutively in their own instance. But if overflow doesn't get enough people then they wasted a bunch of time waiting for the main league to fall apart and backfill them. No zone changes, everyone would be raiding in The Hive for its greater Monster density. 2). Blue and red Hami could be run simultaneously at the scheduled time. Raid leaders will probably have to LFG together to advertise which league needs filling the most. The problem is that this will probably cause a lot of confusion in the LFG channel, at least until people get used to it. No zone changes, but villains would get to participate. 3). Hami can be run seperately at multiple hours (such as 7pm, 8pm, and then 9pm EDT) by different raid leaders, with an honor agreement from the raiders that people don't greedily alt into multiple raids unless there's space for them to do so. So far, multiple Hami raids at different hours of the day have only seen mixed success but it might get better with regular scheduling. So, arguments and opinions aside about the 50-cap killing the server's biggest social get-togethers and whatnot, I want to know what people think is the best way to adapt the daily Hami raiding to the new player limit, and if anyone has a better idea than the above 3 options. Obviously the solution here was to instead buff Hamidon to be a challenge to 100+ players, but it is what it is: we have a 50-cap now and we have to make it work. We will try all three of the options over the next few days to see what worked the best for everyone, then tweak schedules to get it right for next week.

I completely agree -- I'm actually flabbergasted these damage changes are even on the table. The only thing that Tankers needed, in my opinion, was more aggro gathering for the less-AoE powersets and more threat application so that it is harder for others to accidentally flip an AV to hit the league with a giant cone attack. It is perfectly fine to have damage that is less than average if it means you're better at the role your AT is named after, like Controllers and Defenders. It's the whole reason for the class system! Like, I agree that some of the powersets could use cone/radius buffs to bring them up to the level of others, but all this is going to do is make everyone roll Tankers for damage, and that kind of makes me mad because I rolled a Tanker to tank.

Yeah, the raids have to be more serious now. We have to inspect the league for leechers and kick them, and anyone who crashes is usually out of the raid. Maybe we will run more raids? Maybe concurrently? We've been talking about what to do to adapt to the new cap. We will also likely have fewer EoEs going forward from now on, unless they decrease the chances of Hami spawning from Monster kills.

On the topic of removing Bruise, are we sure this is a good direction to take? Aside from it enabling teammates to do more damage, it gave a solid reason to use the first attack in the Tanker's set in a chain, the attack that they're forced to take.

The only change I am against is making Tankers do more damage. If anything, it should be only when they redirect aggro from non-Tankers, i.e. being an actual tank in a team and not Brute 2.0, or via a teamsize-related buff like Defenders have. I don't want to see 16 Tankers on my league all fighting for aggro when the itrial boss just needs 1 specific repositioning done to it. The aggro changes are good, the damage change is not. Buffing Tankers is just going to make DPS players reroll to Tankers for damage purposes (Over some of the DPS ATs with these tentative numbers) and that's not healthy for AT balance, Tanker-arguments aside.

I disagree with making Tankers deal more damage. I rolled a Tanker to be the best tank for my team, not to be a Brute. Offensively, I want to enable my team to do more damage, not do more damage myself. I don't want to see tons of DPS players and farmers rerolling to Tanker just because they're now super good at dealing damage. I want to be a tank. That's all I ever wanted to be. If you want to buff Tanker damage, I would highly suggest taking an active buff approach based on how much aggro they redirect away from teammates.

Sweats profusely from the amount of tells I'm going to have to deal with and how much earlier than the schedule I'll have to form up the raid every day. But on the plus side, we will actually raid Hami correctly now instead of just nuking the poor jello 100 to 0. More fun to do it properly!

Who is this other kindred soul? I hit vet level 1,000 just a few hours after these stats were posted, so unless you were counting regular levels there's someone else out there who just loves playing one single character and nothing else. I'm curious as to who I'm levelling against!

Very interesting! Now I get to make fun of my Inv/SS Tanker brethren for being so meta. 😂