Bill Z Bubba

I was never a fan of any of the raid content. Sure, I did them when I had to for the loot but it was always begrudgingly. I knew I was contributing but with that much going on I also knew that if I was replaced with any other player running any other AT/Combo, the outcome would be the same. I'm glad I've never experienced other games' endgame/raid content.

Guess my only question is why? Is it possible to get faceplanted at -1?

I honestly grok where you're coming from on this. I agree with much of your post on what happens with balancing. Unfortunately for me, when I see gross imbalances, and worse - imbalances being made greater through poor decision making, the whole thing becomes less fun for me. Fact is, even now, my desire to play or hang around the forums has been lessened greatly by the way things have been going. And that sucks... but, it happened on live, too.

Same thing happened to me. Soon as my spreadsheet showed how close brute claws had gotten to scrapper output it was an immediate no brainer to move BZB Scrap to a different server and recreate him as a brute on Pinnacle. Yes, AT balance was broken in many areas long before the snap happened.

To be fair to those folks, choosing added difficulty for no added reward doesn't make much sense either. I would certainly be more inclined to disable insps and temps if, say, drop rates were slightly increased for doing so.

Yea, that's not an issue when you're solo. Adding teammates already greatly lessens difficulty as it is and that's actually a good part of the design. A lvl 35 on the ITF fighting +5s isn't an issue when he's being spammed with leadership toggles, fulcrum shift or whatever other buffs are flying around.

You have to unlock PPP through the various Patron Arcs. Black Scorpions is the quickest route and by doing his arc you unlock all 4 PPP. Once you hit the appropriate level, head to Pocket D, talk to Null the Gull, change you alignment to villain, drop your diff to +0/x1, talk to the guy standing outside of the main Arachnos tower, do all the missions up until you're granted some badges, done.

Hard mode is already available through turning off insps, temps, buffing enemies and nerfing players. Hell, you can even turn off enhancements.

I do find it a problem that my shield/nrg tank now has the same DPS as my claws/sr scrapper while maintaining VASTLY more mitigation and that's WITHOUT a procmonster build. Tanks should NEVER be able to match scrapper damage output. The HIGHEST damage output tank should NEVER be able to match even the LOWEST damage output scrapper. It's a prime example of how ridiculously broken AT balance has become in this game. Edit: yea, this will be my sig for a while.

My undying disappointment.

Seriously, thank you for saying so. I completely agree. Judgement is also extremely problematic.

I think you're looking at it the wrong way. I'm betting that no one on your 64 minute Synapse was eating inspirations stored in email or cranking 8 hours of all 3 amplifiers. All I want to do is remove the cheats from the game. Cuz cheaters suck and make everything worse for everyone.

Understood. But I still fail to see where that little extra DPS can come close to the massive loss in mitigation and utility that I'm seeing. But, for a character that does nothing but fight pylons just to get the big numbers, yea, makes perfect sense.

Pics?

I found them boring on live and haven't run a single one since coming back. I can go from 0 to 50+3 fully T4ed and IOed in 48 hours but that's now.. starting out, of course, I had to get the farmer to 50 and amass all the emps into transcendents in email, etc. No, I don't really long for the days when it took me 4 months just to hit 50. Granted, again, I soloed a LOT before the snap. Like 95% of my game time.

I've hopped on a lot more pugs here than I ever did before the snap and apparently running at low diff for no challenge to gain merits is the way? Awfully boring to me but whatever.

Of course the HOs were 53 but I wasn't missing enough to bother with 2 of them. Musc and Assault core were both in play. Had to swap out barrier for ageless to cover the end suckage.

Point of info: Copied my claws/bio scrapper to test, respeced into a fully proced out attack chain: Followup: 1acc/dam HO, 3 dam procs, BU proc, 50+5 recred. Focus: 1acc/dam HO, 4 dam procs, BU proc. Slash: 1acc/dam HO, 4 dam procs, 1 -damres proc Crosspunch: 1acc/da, HO, 4 dam procs, 1 -damres proc Pylon times were between 1:45 and 2mins where my standard build sits at 1:40-1:50 consistently. The proc build loses out on practically everything on the mitigation and utility fronts. It's certainly not a build style suited for someone that likes to stay alive at the bleeding edge while ignoring insps and the P2W cheats. Maybe this is a claws only issue but I found the proc build quite sucktacular. Doesn't mean that procs are ok, however. Turning non-damage powers into damage powers has always seemed wrong to me. Doesn't stop me from doing it, of course. I play a shield/em tank knowing damn well how broken that is these days.

What damage gets through my mitigation, I can heal.

Could we maybe stop dropping golden apples and over-buffing armor and make potions harder to spam?

Just this morning I failed to solo a +4 MLTF. Again. #(*#$&(#*$&(*& Aeon.

This is where I'm at. The game isn't too easy. The problem is that, due to balance issues and the introduction of various I Win buttons from the P2W vendor, *some* characters, build combos, etc, are so brokenly overpowered that they no longer fit within the game's perfectly acceptable difficulty levels. It's not the enemies or missions that are the problem.

As noted earlier, that's 40 seconds better than my main's average. Nice. I'll also be on beta. Finally got a full procmonster build done in Mids for the claws/bio scrapper. Edit: I am not impressed with the followup, focus, slash, crosspunch procmonster build. Same to worse pylon times as my standard build with drastically reduced mitigation and endurance management. Even swapping out barrier for ageless, while tightening up the chain and fixing the end issues helped a bit, it's still an awful build that I'd never use for anything but testing pylon times. Guess it really is a different game when you don't have to lean on insps and amps all the time.

@Bopper I'd go for the scrapper simply because the widow's 26.67% DDR means that its defense will mean precisely nothing in an ITF or against PPP Khels while solo. Those defense cascade failures ain't nuthin to sneeze at. But that's solo. On a team, the widow brings vastly more to the table and I'll save your build to steal from since my widow has needed a lvl 50 respec for about a year and a half now. This last bit is a me only thing. I absolutely hate the sound FX for psi attacks and I've only been able to silence some of them. But you have me curious: what's the average pylon time for that widow build?

It was down for me last night and *I think* since the big crash but appears good to go again.