ZemX

That design isn't changing. Or it already did in newer arcs vs. older ones. What the rewards do is pay us off for putting up with that stuff. And it works. People do plenty of older TFs with zone hopping and defeat alls, even when they're not the WSTs (but yeah, especially when they are). My hope though is that offering team rewards for arcs is a simple enough change that even if it doesn't work tremendously well, at least didn't cost anyone a lot of effort. Another thing that could be done. Not sure if this is the case or not, but the merit reward that is offered for running a story arc as a flashback should be comparable to TFs in terms of merits/hr and XP. Given the commitment is the same from the team, reward should be the same formula. It might be fun to see more people running flashbacks like alternatives to TFs. I see people do this only rarely.

As someone who is lately mostly playing tankers... I don't let it bother me. If someone snatches away all the mobs I have gathered around me, I take this as them telling me, "I got this!" and I move on to the next spawn. Gives me extra time to collect them up. Same thing I do when someone uses an AoE knockback to scatter my group. "Oh, you're gonna handle this now? Cool. I'll move on to the next." And usually it IS fine. Not like many teams NEED a tanker these days.

Or just give everybody on the team the story arc completion bonus XP and merits that are already given to the story arc owner upon completion of the final mission of the arc. I don't think your checkbox system is necessary. I get that it's an attempt to make sure everyone on the team has earned the rewards but, counterpoint: So what? Main concern is really avoiding any exploits and in this case, I don't see any that are worth doing when one can just farm more effectively by other means. The main limiting factor in farming that last mission is getting that last mission. Someone still has to run through the arc. At best you could have a group individually solo the same arc in parallel up to the last mission and then collectively do the last mission as many times as there are people on the team but again.... you could just farm. And that exploit requires people to all be the same level and get the same arc. It's almost a leveling compact. Not something anyone really needs to worry about. Story Arc awards are already set less than Trial and Task Forces. The formula for merits, for example, is something like 60% the merits of a same length Task Force. I think that could even be bumped up to 80% without really discouraging anyone from running TFs, especially the WSTs. It's more of an observation than an assumption. You and I might be willing to do Story Arcs but anyone watching LFG can see people do orders of magnitude more DFBs than they advertise for story arc teams. DFB is a gateway to Posi and then you're off to the TF races. That's for people who don't just hop on a farm or PI radio straight-away of course. Boosting TEAM awards for Story Arcs is an obvious solution to encourage more diversity of content being run by teams.

This is good advice. I got on a PuG Tarikoss one time that wiped out just inside the FIRST door mission. Nearly the whole team immediately quit because the enemies were all waaaay above our level. That's when I noticed him lurking in a shadow. Not the team lead. That would have been too obvious. But clearly.... involved!

Great range. Great knockback. Shitty recharge. Yes, this will do something for a few seconds. As others have said, it's the party composition. And yes, @cranebump the mariners need to die first and fast. I think really any debuffers but we had two mariners if I recall right. I watch my ten power monitors including recharge, recovery, some resists, one defense, hit chance, damage bonus, you know... so I know when I am being debuffed. All that stuff went red and my 50 full-loaded tanker hit the carpet a few seconds later through half a tray of inspirations. Guess I should have ate em all. Sure, exemplar all the way down to Posi 1 levels does a number on all my stats, but still a beast and I got wiped out like a blaster. We HAD to single-pull that mess. Not like we were all walking around with bank accounts full of super team insps like the miscreants @Spaghetti Betty hangs out with. 😈

Thank you for both asking this question and then demonstrating the answer. I've been on +2 Posi 1 TFs that were a total steamroller blowing away anything in its path all the way up until that last fight... and then we get wiped multiple times by ourselves. This is the problem. The stronger YOU are, the stronger THEY are. I'm always encouraged when the team struggles a bit earlier in this TF. It means we're probably not strong enough to kick our own asses quite that badly at the end.

You get five server transfer tokens every three days so it's usually no problem on the day in question to transfer to and then back from Reunion if that's not where you call home for that character. If you're at all worried about reserving your name when you leave your home server, create a level 1 or give the name you want to keep to an alt on your home server. You can use the character rename button as often as you like.

But did the enemies hit by the damage proc remain placated or did they become instantly aggro again? You can be in Hide and still have enemies shooting at you. Hide won't drop until you are hit.

We need to start calling that a +7 Freakspec because that's how it ends. Maaan was that a slog in the last couple waves. Really glad I didn't bring the Icer. On top of everything else, those bosses are like 30% resistant to cold. Yikes! The Rad Melee however worked great and hopefully helped a bit hitting those highest level Freaks.

PLV on the forums: "We will decide the diff in game." PLV in game last night: "We're runinng at +4 and you can kiss my feet for not being @Spaghetti Betty and adding no temps/insps!!"

Hi @elfeanor! Please also have a look at our weekend, once a month, edition of Tanker Tuesday (on a Saturday!) with a more Europe-friendly time: Next up is this Saturday.

Despite indulging in some math nonsense up there I think I am with @lemming. Stick with just the AT, primary, and secondary combos. Everything else after that is just build variation you can mix, match, and respec at will. And there are effectively an infinite number of build variations because all of us together will never try all of them or even more than a fraction of them.

Aaand I did. Forgot one last line: 7. Fours pools AND one epic/patron (line 5 in my previous post times 10 epic/patron choices = 4500 more options). So total of 7875 pool/epic combos times 289 pri/sec combos = 2,275,875... wow... so many Scrappers! Minimum six. You have 24 power picks to make and can only fill 18 of them with primary and secondary if you choose all of those. Max is actually 21 though since your first pool is picked at level 4, hence 3 picks to make before that (2 at creation and one at level 2). But I'll let someone crazier than myself prove it. Read this old thread by @Spaghetti Betty... and despair! (and yes, it reads in the thumbnail as "Show me your poo..." to me too).

Must... resist... can't... okay, we're doing this: If you really want to count standard pools, it's a bit more complicated. You can't choose zero standard pools. You have 24 powers to pick and can only fill 18 of them by taking all primary and secondary powers. That leaves six, as @lemming has also noted. This means two pools must be chosen, one of which or neither of which can be an epic/patron. So you have one of these cases: 1. Two pools. (12 choose 2 is 66 but 3 of these are illegal combinations of two specialized travel pools, so 63) 2. One pool and one epic. (12 times 10 choices = 120) 3. Three pools (12 choose 3 is 220 but this time there are 9x3 illegal combos of one standard and two specialized pools, and one illegal combo of all three spec pools, so 220-28 = 192). 4. Two pools and one epic (line 1 times 10 = 630). 5. Four pools (12 choose 4 is 495 but again more illegal combos. We'll need a footnote here!(a). Total = 495 - 45 = 450. 6. Three pools and one epic (line 3 times 10 = 1920. whew! Sum of all these is 63+120+192+630+450+1920 = 3375 (but I'll be shocked if I didn't make a mistake in here somewhere). This 3375 is what you'd multiply by primary and secondary choices you have from your post. So 289 times 3375 = 975,375. Almost a million scrappers combos! And you thought ONE on the team was trouble! Footnote (a): Illegal combos of two specialized pools is 3 combined with two choices of the other 9 (9 choose 2 = 36. Illegal combos of all 3 spec pools is 1 times a choice of the other 9. So 9. Total is the sum of 36 + 9 = 45. What was that you posted while I was in the middle of all this @Snarky? Tooooo laaaaate!

I know that, but as I explained, I am not counting standard power pools as a "powerset combination". As such, your pedantry on top of my pedantry is denied!

To be serious about this (unlike my other reply) the useful answer here is the simplest one (number of primary choices multiplied by number of secondary choices) summed across all ATs. If you think about how we most often talk about what characters we are playing, we tend to just give the pri/sec combo. e.g. "I am playing a Katana/Regen Brute!" Less often, people will throw in that epic/patron pick and say they are playing a Dark/Dark/Dark Blaster, so that's fair game too, I think. Pools are much less differentiating, however. It's not that the powers themselves are unimportant. Just that nobody introduces themselves as a Fire/Fire/Flying/Speed/Concealment/Mace Blaster. As such I declare @Snarky the winner of this thread: And I declare myself the thread's Pedant in Chief for reminding him that it's 11 epic/patron choices... since "none" is a choice. *pushes up glasses*

Ooo.. party in the reactor room again? I might have to take my Rad/Rad out of storage for that. Wasn't that much fun trying to scratch those +6 bosses at the end with a sword. And Cold would be even worse.

What? No Incarnates?! *runs away*

I think I've only ever had trouble with Posi 1 when the difficulty was set at +2 or more. Maybe also the team has too many sub-15 level characters who are then -1 to the +2 content. At that level, it makes a huge difference. I had a similar team setup with a couple Marines and an MM but at +2 and the simulacra team, could zero my level 50, fully IOd and purpled, Rad Tanker's health in about six seconds flat. THROUGH inspirations. We rocked literally every other part of the TF up to that point like it was easy mode, despite being +2. It was like hitting a brick wall at the end.

Not exactly, but I'm probably splitting hairs here. SS suffers poor DPA because of the general problem of powers not being balanced around animation times. Rage, however, is better than Build Up at adding damage, especially double-stacked, so in that way SS can solve some of that "original sin" problem of poor DPA by itself... but only if you take Rage and really only if you double-stack it (or get close enough to it).

Yeah, it's a shame. The Minimal FX options needs to get around to some more powers and powersets. The original devs were really too fond of particle effects and that just doesn't fit a whole lot of comic book genre super powers. Rad Armor would be a good fit for this character too, but similar problem. It has flying "ping pong balls" on one of the armor toggles that I suppose are meant to suggest electrons flying around a nucleus but you can only tone them down with certain color customizations. Can't get rid of them. Same with the taunt aura. I get it to where it's just a subtle smoke effect near the floor surrounding the character but you can still see it.

Oh if I were to do it, I'd definitely do it as a secondary build. Not gonna destroy the main way I play but if I ever do get curious about HM+'s, that's how I'll go. But I'd have to do a lot more research before I bother. I'd have to know first if you even really want a tank for that.

Embrace the chaos! 😈

That Simulacrum fight has to be the most variable thing in the whole game. Just based on who is on the team it can be anything from a light breeze to a total nightmare multiple-team-wipe-fest. Especially when the game gets "creative" with the clones when it can't deal with non-original powersets. I bring a Rad Armor tanker and it pits me against a clone that has Radiation Emission powers like Enervating Field... but is also a tank. Recently ran a +2 posi with that tanker and there were a couple marine affinity folks on the team as well. The debuffs were absolutely crippling. We wiped maybe four or five times and had to resort to single-pulling like straight out of old school Everquest or something, just to get by... ourselves.