Heraclea

Velvet Underground w/ Nico - All Tomorrow's Parties

Something involving poison themed powers comes to mind: a thugs/poison MM perhaps? Poison, because you are drawing power from the dirt and smog of a city, contrasting with a nature priest like a druid. Thugs, because they seem city bred fellows.

I think I may have found a workaround, Before you edit your arc on a remote machine, delete all of the custom enemy groups you may wish to change on that machine. You may get an error: the first time I did this I was told that the enemy group was non-contiguous; impossible, because they were all customs. When you load the group in the editor, it apparently has no choice but to fetch them from the server, and you should then have a synched copy on that local machine. Save it and move on. This will require that you use the same trick on the home machine as well.

Cael. Iamnæa Iuliam ter consulem sal. -- Rogavisti ut te moneam de signis superbitatis in Heraclea. Ecce imago novissima: Caelia Yamnaya greets Julia, thrice-consul: You asked me to warn you about any signs of excessive pride in Heraclea. Get a load of the most recent statue:

Regen is objectively inferior to other armor sets. You can improve it with set bonuses and pool powers, but the same can be done to any blaster or defender. It remains the case that, like the blaster or defender, you're starting damn near close to zero on resistance and defense. Relying on click heals and other trouble buttons is simply unworkable where power sets are 'balanced' by lengthening animation times, as happened with the Energy Melee nerf. Nothing at character creation warns you against this, either. Animation traps are just too common for Regen in the current game.

When I took on a jail room on a Citadel on a level 27 scrapper and realized the rest of the team had taken off in another direction.

Black Merda - Long Burn the Fire

Black Sabbath - Megalomania

Tried to run Katie Hannon on +2 this evening. It ended in tears. Now, it's been my longstanding suggestion to offer master badges for Posi 1, Posi 2, and Synapse, on the usual condition: no temps, no deaths. That would be difficult in ways that Master of ITF is not.

Exactly. I can't remember the last time I needed to fire DP on Heraclea. Then again I slotted up Siphon Life for accurate heals.

Truth is, a MAJOR reason why I like this game is that it's much easier and less frustrating than other MMOs. It specifically lacks misfeatures that send people to online voice chats to play because the boss fights need that much catherding. You can solo on a tanker or defender if you want to; it will be a bit slower but you'll get the missions done. Anyone who wants to take that away is going to get an argument from me.

The room that's likeliest to kill me by surprise, not able to react at all, is the Rikti/Hydra rooms on Apex. Fairly sure the Hydra is to blame. And dying there is a problem because of the damn useless maps; you get separated from the rest of the team and are not given a clue how to rejoin them. One more reason to hate on Apex. The blue patches don't so much kill me as get me lost and prevent me from playing by constant headless chicken mode. Resistance at level 50 and Neuron Clockwork are more annoying than deadly, they tend not to spawn in clearly defined groups and way too many plinkers. If people still did corner pulls and LOS breaks that might help.

Actually, Energy Melee would not be a bad fit to Invuln or Willpower, if only because Invuln's self-heal is so slow in coming that no one relies on it from one spawn to the next, and Willpower just doesn't have one. You don't want to pair Energy Melee with something like Fire or Dark because you rely a lot more on click heals that way. But if you think Dark Melee has been done to death, I'd suggest Radiation Melee in its stead. You have at least a chance of a self heal in the attack set, and a good mix of single target and AoE.

When the encounter first went live, it was possible to pull Trapdoor out of the room where his healing clones spawned and defeat him straight up. At some point, this was changed and it became impossible to pull him out of range of them. so he always ended up getting healed back to full. I was fortunate enough to get past it on most of the characters that I cared about before this change. Afterwards it always required a teammate with spammable holds to get past it.

I was not terribly active in the game in the months before closure was announced. I had invested enough time in the game to have more than 30 level 50 characters. Getting all their incarnates unlocked and built sounded like a terrible grind to me, and it engaged a lot of the active player base, so I never really took to it. I also did not like and continue to dislike the design of many incarnate oriented encounters, which seemed to me to be designed specifically to sideline melee characters, make tankers irrelevant, and sidestep defenses. I saw the writing on the wall when the Trapdoor encounter was made unplayable for tankers (but trivial for any character with hard controls); the one strategy that worked was taken away. Since I did not want to play that stuff, and many of the active players did, the game and I had parted ways. I appreciate the major QoL improvements to the incarnate system made on HC. I can gear up incarnates while exemping down to run a Citadel the way I liked to in the content I liked best.

I don't do 'mains', really. Heraclea (Invuln/Dark Melee tanker) is probably my 'main', in that she was the first character I made, and is one of the few characters I have to have full T4 incarnate stuff as well as a build that is basically finished. And this means that she doesn't get played all that often any more, but I am happy to bring her out for master badge runs on task forces. She is not my badge collector, though, She isn't going to be a villain. I tend to distribute badge collecting among several characters rather than trying to collect them all on one, which I realize is kinda the point of the badges game. Heraclea does specialize in the crafting badges. Stealthists collect exploring badges, ranged DPS and control characters do incarnate stuff. I have many niche characters. Ice Minstrel (ice/plants blaster) goes to Hamidon, so when I need reward merits I turn to her. La Faiseuse d'Anges (ninja/ninja stalker) unlocks locked content best unlocked on a stalker, while Jungle Jenny (rad melee/electric armor brute) also does this. Pomba Gira (dual blades/fire brute) grinds inf for what can be bought with inf. And so forth. This is why I don't have mains, I have specialists.

I am currently working on a Psi/WP scrapper to replace my Titan Weapons/WP scrapper, whom I don't see having much of a future. My main question is: is Boggle worth having? Confuse effects seem to have very few uses, especially on team content. Does the Insight mechanic make it more useful in any way?

It's a lot easier to build a blaster for stealth - AFAIK any of them handle it fine - than it is to build a scrapper for stealth outside of certain armor sets. Only ones I know of that work easily with stealth are Reflexes and Regen. Now, my /Devices blaster gets stealth in her secondary, no power pool needed; there are others that do this too. This in turn means that while scrappers are murder machines, the blaster is a story arc completer who can hunt the glowies and look for target mobs without spooking the whole herd. I enjoy doing this. And once you get to the Destiny unlock and pick Clarion, getting mezzed is much less of an issue. High level content is, as @Apparitionnoted, full of misfeatures that are unfriendly to melee DPS. I don't enjoy a lot of the highest level content, and think it's badly designed. This is part of the reason why. It remains the case that any blaster is more useful than a scrapper on material like Apex or BAF. Scrappers are one trick ponies. If they can't melee DPS few of them bring much else to the table. Blasters have a lot more variety. I have an electric/electric blaster who's a defender in disguise, debuffing the mobs. My ice/plants blaster is part controller, with three ranged holds and a targeted AoE hold - and these holds also do blaster scale damage. This one is my first choice for a Hamidon raid, being useful there; not sure what kind of scrapper would bring as much to the table. And when needed I have my archery/devices blaster who just blasts. Finally, blasters are unrivalled in their niche, while scrappers compete with brutes and stalkers as melee DPS characters. What compares with a blaster for ranged DPS? Corruptor? Sentinel? They wish. I like Scrappers, and have several of them. But they don't have the flexibility of blasters as far as I can see.

I have Kinetic Melee/Radiation on a scrapper that is probably my scrapper main. Basic concept was to make a speedster characcter. Has five 7.5% movement bonuses so I use Super Speed for stealth.

Have a WP/War Mace tanker I like quite a bit. I did roll a Psi/WP scrapper. (Considering Claws/Ice, but that sounds more like 'tanker' to me.) Is Boggle as useless as it looks? Does it have some kind of interaction with the Insight dynamc that makes it worthwhile?

The issue comes in because animation lag makes some attack sets extremely poor fits with Regen. You can, for instance, make an Energy Melee/Regen brute. I wouldn't recommend it. I made my experimental regen tanking brute Staff/Regen because my impression was that Staff had long, laggy attacks that put click trouble buttons out of reach for a long time. The animation times of Regen's click trouble buttons themselves are a lesser issue. But if you are stuck in a three second animation, any click heal is likely to arrive too late.

I like them because they are among the smallest and least noisy of MM pets. When I finally made a MM I chose them specifically for this reason.

A set based on click heals is out of place in a game where nothing happens instantly when clicked because everything has to wait for animations to play; and many power sets have built in artificial lag based on animation times as an element of 'balance'.

I have two regen characters: a scrapper tuned specifically for under-35 content, which recreates a character from Victory; and a new one, a Staff/Regen brute (tho' with a costume and name from Victory, used to be an Invuln/Dark Melee tanker) that I rolled specifically to see if Regen could be the armor set of a tanking brute. I sort of made it work, but Regen starts way behind anything else on resistance and defense. Can't recommend if you aren't sitting on a large stockpile of merits and salvage. Any other armor set would need a lot less investment.

I don't really do 'mains', so on old live and on Homecoming, when playing through high level content, I have some leeway to choose a character that excels against the content. I don't take tankers or tanking brutes to BAF at all; trying to do their chief function, monopolizing the attention of the AVs, just gets them sidelined. Most aren't all that useful on the escape phase, although the WP/Mace tanker with Quicksand does better than the others. Nor are there many I want to take Hamidon raiding; you have to counterintuitively build for that role. Instead, as I've noted before, my main Hamidon character is an ice/plants blaster. Three ranged holds that also do blaster scale damage work well in that encounter, despite my lack of twitchy skills. Avoiding frustration is always my watchword: so to team content I always try to bring a character that will contribute to easy success. All this talk of harder mobs with more debuffs will only make me roll and level a character tuned to it. Emphasizing debuffs and exotic damage also has another bad side effect: it makes that content team unfriendly. This isn't the only thing that discourages teams in Praetoria, but it does. It's also why Vanguard missions are solo only, as are Dark Astoria Tsoo, and why the only reason to go to Night Ward is to get access to Cimerora the easy way. This has been a concern of mine for some time, as this obsolete guide suggests: https://archive.paragonwiki.com/wiki/Which_tanker_should_I_bring_to_the_task_force%3F