Spaghetti Betty

I am reviving this once just to share that I have completed video playthroughs of both parts! Here is my suffering for your viewing pleasure!

Maybe I'll see it when I dive back in on Sunday night! Consider this an open invitation to join me Sunday night around midnight CST

I will have a maxed out build ready to go before I ever hit the creation screen! If I decide to play a toon through progression, I usually have a pretty good idea of what to pick and slot on the way to 50 in order to have as smooth of an experience as possible. Any holes are usually covered up by all of the goodies provided by the START Vendor! Some of my toons have quite a few holes in their arms from Recovery Serum abuse

Ice Armor is great! It's one of my favorite armor sets. My Ice/EM is in my top 3 most played Tankers and stomps pretty much everything! In fact, I just ran a 4* LGTF with it last night and it succeed with flying colors! I don't really play it in a way that's newbie friendly, though!

Here you go! It's a little old! Do a big zap - Tanker (Electric Armor).mxd

I have finally completed Part 2 of my absolutely brutal AE "Task Force!"

Please don't inflate my ego! I am the most humble creature to ever exist in all of history! But thankie for the compliment

The +MaxHP from Consume is activated even without a target and lasts a very long time. The intention is for it to be a net gain to survivability without interrupting normal use of the power. It's actually a pretty substantial buff! Absolutely worth picking and slotting for, even if you don't need the extra endurance.

Here is a quick and dirty on how I would build a Rad/Dark for Hard Mode, plus a few extra liberties given so it's not a complete disaster in regular content! SB Please - Tanker (Radiation Armor - Dark Melee).mbd In this example, Soul Drain is only 4.42 seconds off from being perma. Hasten is sitting at 6.9 nice seconds from perma. This is something a Kin or Ageless can easily fix! Resistances here are a bit anemic, but in a highly coordinated Hard Mode team, Barrier will easily solve that! What's important for mitigation is Particle Shielding, which is why it has a healthy amount of slots. A tiny bit of max HP is also picked up, as this is incredibly important for absorbing heavy blows from AVs!

Nemu hit pretty much every point that was necessary. Procbombers are fun, but they give up a lot! There are a few combos that can definitely bend the rules in their favor quite easily, but I don't feel Dark Melee is one of those! At least, not without outside help! Dark Melee is completely reliant on Soul Drain to maintain good form, so global recharge is very important to it! Procbombing means you give up on this. The most popular way to mitigate that is to use Knockback powers in order to abuse FFback procs, but DM has none of those! In that sense, while the attacks do hit like a train when proc'd, you are seeing a very significant decrease in performance due to Soul Drain having low uptime. Of course, as Zem mentioned, if your goal is to maximize effectiveness in Hard Mode scenarios, then you kind of have the right idea! There is expected to be a lot of buffs being brought to advanced content, not least of which is a Kinetic! Hooray for friendship!

It certainly drew the fight out! So, I am a melee player. I wasn't sure the Vortexes did much of anything until I ran into one on purpose. The Vortex itself wasn't very bothersome, but being flung into the spikes definitely was! A little bit of Knock doesn't bother me. I am one of the few players that thought Freem! was a very fun addition. It's just another thing to adapt to! I guess from my observation, the main issue with the Vortexes seems to be their path? It could also because there isn't a real threat causing melee to want to move away from the Minotaur, but as it stands right now, I had no reason to move from where the team was initially dropped into the arena, and I am never touched by a single Vortex as the Tank. Nerf Gun with Full Auto please! I think these will all be great changes! I am all for making things fair for all players, but I am a bit worried about this fight if the intention is for it to be a reasonable challenge for a potential 50 players with a lot of Incarnates being fired off. I'm hoping my small group testing is at least proving he could use some muscle! If these roll out, it may be in our best interest to schedule a huge testing event to try to get him to spawn at +10!

I just got done with another test run! So, this time I made sure to only bring a team of 8. The Minotaur was actually active when we entered, so he was a looming factor. He definitely did hurt a little bit charging into us at +6 while fighting Seers, Arachnoids, and IDF, so we ended up having to vacate until we gained some shifts. One thing that was noticed was that he spawned at +6, but the nav bar notated him at +5. With our hodgepodge team (it was 3 Tanks, an FF and time Def, kin corr, stalker, blaster), we decided to give the big guy a clear advantage and fight him with only 3 shifts. I am sorry to say that it felt even easier this time! Our team was definitely way less dialed in this go around (the last run included a handful of colds, a TA, and a kin), but he was just simply not very threatening once we stood our ground. I am going to attribute it to Incarnate spam, honestly. With Barrier up, Hoof Stomp could not even down our squishies. Speaking of Hoof Stomp, I did notice he started firing it off a lot sooner. Like, way sooner! I'm not sure that giving him more HP is the right idea. Just speaking from experience, more HP doesn't necessarily mean more difficulty. I'm thinking there needs to be some kind of outside meddling with the fight or some such. Shouldn't the sand vortexes be a bit more annoying? They don't seem to do much. We also took the time to gather all of the badges in order to enter the final door, so I'll detail my experience with that below! I do still believe the Labyrinth is perfect for its intended purpose: a fun romp for those that want something fresh to look at while they're grinding. I am just someone RPing as a powergamer that wishes for more to sink my teeth into!

It wasn't! This was on July 9th. I guess I could try and wrangle some people up for another go! I see. I had a couple of randoms get picked up when my group was ported, so I assumed it was the entire zone. I think it should be a zone-wide TP! This would serve as a way to grab any stragglers that haven't found their way into the League already! Not only that, but due to the nature of the Labyrinth, I think it's a little bit easier to expect than randomly being pulled from whatever floor you're on just because it's technically close enough! Maybe have a way to opt in/out if possible?

Master of runs are super easy if you pop Ultimates the whole time! It's not cheating, it's gaming! Also, I just completed a +4 MoKahn last night!

Yargh! I forgot to post some feedback! I staged a small run with a group of 12 (including me) last Tuesday! I do believe this captures the essence of "Halloween Motel but a dungeon crawl" 100%! Running through the maps gathering herds was a lot of fun (I was one of the Tanks)! Although, we went in as the Minotaur was on a small cooldown (think it was 30 minutes or so), so that could've possibly influenced what I'm about to say! Also, I'm an extremely biased player! An entire "gameplay loop" (grind mobs, kill Minotaur, repeat) is very much doable by a team of 8 Incarnates. We eventually had one person (me) scouting ahead for opportune herding spots to maximize uptime on level shifts. If I didn't immediately see dense spawns, I cycled floors and had everyone TP to me. This allowed us to get to and maintain 10 shifts for the 20 minutes we were waiting on the Minotaur. A word to the wise: If you are just intending on getting shifts, just kill the EBs! The other mobs don't matter as much towards getting them. Speaking of the Minotaur - once again, bias coming into play - I think he might be a little too easy*? He is absolutely going to trounce anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves alone, but when he spawned on top of my party (in a PPD station, no less), we didn't even notice that we had lost all of our shifts. We just went right to town on him at +6. I found it very interesting that damaging the Minotaur will cause everyone in the zone to be ported to the arena. This is a really nice feature! It serves as a great checkpoint to pick up solo adventurers and redisperse. 60 minutes seems like a really long time to wait for the guy, though, as there isn't much else to do for a full league outside of going back to grinding mobs (and maybe finding hidden doors). I think someone suggested having zone events randomly take place inside the Labyrinth? That's a really good idea! Make it the everything zone! I haven't been able to get through the Gate of Darkness or whatever yet, because I have no idea where all of the motes are! Whoever hid them either needs a raise because they did such a great job or fired because they are the most evil person on the planet! TL;DR This is definitely group content but it's going to be a breeze for 8 coordinated players or more. Bring a group of friends if you want to focus on badges and stuff! *-We had at least 8 debuffers and 12 Lores so this definitely played a major part!

Woo! Secret Cow Level! And it's a dungeon crawl! I can't wait to make this the only thing I play for 6 months!

See, the thing about 4* builds is that they are extremely specialized in maximizing performance under the influence of Barrier/SB/FS/Clarion/Heat Loss. Diving into this kind of play will see builds with very, very little personal armor, minimal Slow RES (since SB, 2x Arctic Fog, and a Winter's Gift IO will cap you), and a surprisingly small amount of global recharge. You will mostly see 4* builds geared towards Max HP and proc bombing heavy hitters. What gives Tankers QoL in this regard is they already have high base/Max HP and mitigation, so they're able to cover a large variety of content with a general purpose "scrapper build", as I like to call them. As I said before, a focused Brute or Scrapper will still see better performance in the Taunt role in a coordinated team (since Barrier and shields will make them just as safe but with more DPS), but certain Tanker combos are up there as well.

Yes, I know. 🤭 I was being a rascal!

Great write up! This is about the gist of the strategy being used by high level teams as well, but I would just like to add my own notes. A well-oiled team will move Dra'Gon over to K'ong after gas has expired to maximize DPS. Since they share a health pool, this means all of the AoEs being used to suppress monkeys will also be doing overtime on the two AVs! -Regen buffs also seem to have a stronger effect on K'ong than Dra'Gon. I'm not exactly sure of the reasoning, but I have observed the 2 Colds splitting their Benumbs between the AVs and it works better. Rains and patches are incredible in this fight! They allow the team to control monkeys without breaking much of a sweat. Another win for Ice Blast! Trick Arrow is an absolute powerhouse in this fight. It literally has an answer for everything!

He will spawn in one of 3 locations in the beach area that the Colossi spawn in. A quick note, you can prevent his spawn by pulling the Colossi far into the water on the northern shore!

What a great little experiment! I will admit that Aeon isn't my favorite SF, and I prefer to get it over with pretty quickly. There also isn't much point to grinding the hell out of 4* ASF since MDCs are no longer allowed in missions (unless?). Also, I would definitely still consider it the Intro to Hard Mode. Outside of the optional Vanguard fight, nothing is especially demanding and can be completed by any team full of IO'd/T4'd toons and a bit of brainpower. But, as you said, it really is down to how long one wishes to take to complete the run when it comes down to optimization. If this takes longer than an hour, I start getting cranky!

Good call out! I appreciate the mention. Yes, it is true that Tanks are left behind at the very top end of gameplay. There is nothing they can't do that a specialized Brute or Scrapper can't do just as well or better! A single target taunt is all that is required for most challenging encounters in 4* content, and mitigation is being handled by the support and Barrier rotations. What this means is DPS becomes the huge deciding factor in clear speed and overall efficiency. Tanks are able to bridge the gap a little bit by leveraging heavily offensive-leaning builds to compliment their already strong base mitigation. Much like the Rad/Axe build DR posted above! I will say I have noted that Tanks are making a bit of a comeback as the Omega K'ong encounter becomes more optimized. The AoE Taunt is more convenient for dragging in the Magus/Suit/Scientist ambushes (and is usually followed by a Fold Space and nukes), and combat strategies have made up for the marginal loss in DPS that comes with having them in the Taunt role. This also comes with the massive caveat that the Tanker is proc'd to the gills. To keep on topic, the skippables in Axe are Beheader and Cleave! Cleave is saddled with the unfortunate flaw of having terrible DPA against a single target. I would suggest going Fire Mastery for Char and Fire Ball!

This is where I'm disconnecting a bit. If you're double-tapping Consume and Ageless, the tiny bump in recovery isn't doing much for you. I think that slot is served better getting Build Up on a smaller timer so you can blitz mobs quicker. Since EM specializes in burst DMG, high uptime on Build Up will let you maximize that!

Hmm... Ok! Just a couple of things I noticed. I think having the 4-piece Avalanche in Blazing Aura is a bit of a waste. If you were going for the melee DEF, I could see it being worth, but if you're stopping at 4, I think I would go with the slotting I offered above - Moving a 3-piece Gauntleted Fist there (one piece being the absorb proc, a suggestion made by Sovvy I haven't dropped since). This would save you a slot, and it could go, well, anywhere! Personally, I would put it in Build Up for a +5 Recharge IO. Speaking of places to put Gauntleted Fist, I don't think it's in a fantastic spot in Total Focus! In my findings, TF is best situated with a 5-piece Hecatomb, sans the proc. Its base damage is stupid high, but the recharge is long. You'd think, "Oh yeah! I'm proccing that business!", but you need it to give you Focus more! You could move that 3-piece G. Fist to Energy Punch (and maybe use the other slots for muling). I think you are on the right track procbombing ET! This is what I do as well. Yeah, it's base recharge is pretty low, but this attack already does thick damage, so ED-capping it then filling the rest with procs is just icing on the cake! Armageddon in Phoenix Rising isn't a bad choice for the global recharge, but I just feel if I'm clicking that button, I want it to heal me! I dunno how dead set you are on not using Hami Os or D Syncs, but they would fill in a lot of gaps! Oh, another thing! I can't tell from the screenshot why your Global Recharge is so high. I'm guessing it's Ageless Radial? If you're using that, I don't think Energy Punch will be in your rotation at all!

It is still an extremely high-DPA attack for what it does, it is just not also that three times over anymore! I'll have to try loading a chunk after work, but the last time I tried, it didn't take. You could absolutely post a screenshot of the build and I could pick from that!