Coyotedancer

And you think this happens often enough, and is done by a large enough percentage of farmers, to be an "average" rate of return rather than an unusual edge case like Angel's set-up?

Who? Because I really want to know how that 4m is even possible.

*sigh* Switch... You've been reading the AE threads, You've seen the "Actual Play" numbers some of us regular farmers and AFKs have been posting of our farm runs. You KNOW that both of those quoted statements are huge exaggerations. Angel, farming at the raw bleeding edge, may make 2m INF per minute, but that's in no way typical. I haven't seen *anyone* claim 4m per minute. much less that that's any kind of "average". Making false claims to back up your preferred narrative is bad mojo. Unless you're accusing every single one of us who posted our averages of lying. Which is also not a good thing.

I like the tip Morality missions. myself... If you absolutely want to be buried in a whole pile of merits at once, though, do Doc Q when it's the WST. It's pretty easy to solo or duo and the merit reward is juicy. (Yeah, the hunts are tedious. But there are no AVs involved, and a fair few of the missions are boss-kills that can be stealthed. FCM and I take in a pair of stalkers and clear it in a little under two hours going at a pretty casual pace. Solo takes longer, but really isn't any more difficult.)

Thread drift happens. It's just the nature of the beast.

Sort of 2 here, sort of 3? I tend to run them once just to see it and to say that I have. After that... nah. Not really my "thing".

I'll continue to use them for the same thing I've always used them for... Incarnate bits to make the powers my next alt needs. (Merits are very easy to get elsewhere, even for a solo/small-team player like me. That made Emps more valuable for Incarnate use than as conversion fodder.)

Adding a +1 to that. It should not be assumed that everyone going into these has all three level shifts.

Okay,,,, as sick as I'm getting of seeing this mission over and over again, my re-run with Aegis (Illusion/Time Controller) was hilarious this time. I set the mission to -1/x1/No Bosses I let her keep her full set of T3 iToys, so she went in at 50+3 The first group I pulled apart into two groups of four. Her Phantom Army and Phantasm had no trouble with them The next groups I didn't try to split. I had to resummon my Phantasm halfway through, but ultimately Team Aegis won. Confusing a couple of minotaurs definitely helped when I decided to use that trick. The last batch was close to another group, so I tried to pull them over to another spot. BOTH groups aggroed. Disaster? Well... no. I let the gang do their thing with the first group and went the cheese-route with the second group. 'Used Deceive on them one by one while they threw rocks at my PA. Watching them teleport each other into little knots was fun. If you have an Illusion Controller, I highly recommend it. 👍 So, with the goons at -1 and a full set of level shifts and no bosses, a squishy controller with a confusion effect can handle full groups. For the second run, though, I pulled her Lore and Destiny, taking her in at 50+1 against the same -1/x1/No Boss conditions. She was still able to cheese her way through groups using (Abusing? 😝 ) Deceive, but there was more missing involved, so it took longer. Hitting the monsters the non-cheese way with PA and her Phantasm and her assorted other powers was tougher. Like the first run I did with her there was some timing and luck involved. She could handle up to six at a time pretty reliably, but a full group of eight was hairy. If she didn't have the high recharge she does, I'm not sure she could have pulled it off. So.... yeah. With a 50+1 Illusion Controller, Deceive is your new best friend. Sets without some kind of confusion power? I'm not sure how they would handle a full group. That's why I wanted to try hitting groups both with the use of Deceive and without it. Next up is Amtes the Mastermind,

I set Shonokin's difficulty to -1/x1/with Bosses for his first run and -1/x1/No Bosses for the second. He had an Alpha shift only, so was 50+1 himself with T2 powers. (He's the "In-Progress Everyman") I went in with Grey Kestrel at +4/x1/With Bosses and then +4/x1/Without. She's fully Incanrnated, so was 50+3 with T4 powers. (She's the "Over-engineered Edge Case") Aegis, the Illusion Controller is also 50+3. I sent her in at +3/x1/No Bosses. She's has T3 powers. (She's the "Average Non-melee Incarnate") Kai, the Stalker, is 50+3 with T4 powers and I sent her in at +3/x1/With Bosses. (In the past, prior to the Cim mob revamp and aggro changes, she was able to solo the mission without the helpers at +4/x8/With Bosses, so she was my "control character" so to speak. ) Does that clarify things? ETA: I'm about to head back over to rerun the Illusion controller at -1/x1/No Bosses, along with a couple of other new transfers... A Shield/Street Scrap and a Demon/Time MM. ETA 2: Tessamun (The "Average In-Progress Melee" test) Street/Shield Scrap Mission set to -1/x1/No Bosses I removed her Hybrid, Destiny and Lore completely to simulate an incomplete character working on their toys. She went in at 50+1 with a T4 Alpha and T3 Interface and Judgement. She had no trouble at all with the monsters in groups of 1 to 3. (Yeah. I actually found a cyclops off by himself and managed to pull him as a single with her Blackwand-) The average pull of 4 was painful but survivable with some judicial use of inspies and jousting. She survived a pull of five with a tiny bit of health because the last minotaur missed and she didn't. Pure RNG luck. A group of anywhere from 6 to the full 8 was, pretty much as expected, deadly.

That's why we've been testing on Beta. And yeah... It's hard with the Page 4 build to pull the monsters in ones or twos. I only managed to do it a few times with one character, using Zapp (an actual snipe attack-), from cover, right at max distance. Even then, it wasn't a sure thing. As I said my average attempts at pulling ended up with groups of four. Jousting is pretty luck-dependent... I tend to bounce around A LOT with Shonokin (the Sent I was testing with-) and it really didn't seem to be a good solution. Eventually they still got enough hits in to knock him over.

Like anything, it's also dependent on the character you take in. Kestrel (DB/WP Scrap) and her Adept were able to go Leeroy Jenkins on a full group that was level 54 with the bosses off. They could handle half groups of four monsters at that same level (Effectively +1, since she was +3 and the goons were set to +4) with the bosses on. Full groups at +4 with bosses took her apart pretty handily. But Kes is a fully T4ed character with a ludicrous build and a perma-summoned sidekick. She's not what we should count as any kind of average... She's the over-engineered edge-case. The more "average" character (the Dark Sentinel) taken in without the extra two level shifts from Lore and Destiny, with just an Alpha shift and a set of T2 toys did, indeed, have trouble with the mission set to -1/No Bosses. He could handle smaller, partial groups of monsters and the Talon hordes at that difficulty... But a larger or full pull of the monster groups flattened him every time. I think the problem with the current/Page 4 monster mobs is that this is an arc intended to be a) soloed and b) done by characters still trying to completely equip their incarnate slots. It's part of the progression, not the "end game".... So, if an average-strength character like Shonokin, with lower-tier incarnate toys and incomplete level shifts, can't handle the groups on their own (The helper NPCs may not survive to that point, remember, so the odds of having to face those beasts completely solo is pretty high-) then it needs to be given a once over. Maybe the answer isn't to downgrade the monsters, but to buff the survivability of the NPC helpers? You do get a nice badge for diving in without them, but forgoing that badge to clear the mission with a less-developed character might be a reasonable trade.

I've been trying it out over on Beta with characters at all kinds of different levels, stages of incarnation and boss/no boss settings... Even in cases where the level was effectively -1, pulling a sizeable group of the monsters (Which was typical with the aggro changes in Page 4. My test pulls most often got four at a time.) tended to be problematic if the characters weren't already solidly-built full incarnates. That was particularly true with the one I took in with just an Alpha shift and some T2 toys, which wouldn't be an unusual situation for someone using the arcs to build a character's goodies. Even turning bosses off in addition to flooring the monsters' level didn't solve the issue completely in the cases where Shonokin ended up with a full mob of eight rather than a partial pull. The monsters still got lucky often enough to make those fights a matter of "How many inspies did you bring?" Granted, that was on a Dark/WP Sentinel... But I picked him to test the "Incarnate whose iToys are still in-progress" situation BECAUSE Sents are very middle-of-the-road characters. Even a well-built one isn't going to be an UberToon. They're somewhere in between being great and being paper tigers.... so... a reasonable average "Everyman" sort.

It would also be a pain in the bum for those of us active farmer types who dual-box with our own alts. Granted, some people probably consider that a Good Thing and an excellent side bonus to hitting the AFKs, but I'd find it annoying to have to stop what Suni's doing to switch over every X-minutes and bump the lowbie she's getting to 32 or the support character whose Incarnate unlocks or iToys I'm working on. It would seriously harsh my zen, man. 😝

The issue is that this particular mission is x8 rather you want that many goons or not. Your difficulty setting doesn't affect the size of the mobs. It assumes that you'll have the helper NPCs... Unfortunately, those helpers may or may not (Too often not-) survive the first half of the mission (buckets of Talons-) to help your character with the second (the herds of cyclops and minotaur). It's not a great design to assume they'll be there.

Most of my crew eventually seem to end up with a piece of music on my "background playlist" that I think of as theirs... Kaikara, who's arguably my main here, suits Inkubus Sukkubus' Belladonna & Aconite, Something of a Gothic classic. Which works really well for a young Death Mage who likes dance music. 😝 Lasya Stanton, Graceful Ivory Mask, from the post-Battalion city of Nova Primeva. is a professional time traveller. She's also one of Kai's descendants. She got Blackmore's Night's rather mysterious Cartouche... Grey Kestrel's music has always been Shiva's R&B Dub from Arling & Cameron... for reasons I can't even really explain. It's just very her. Shonokin, my Appalachian gentleman-monster. ended up with Tony Furtado's Bolinas,,, ,,, And my auromancer Cantus' pick was pretty obvious.... My entry in this year's Slot Machine Challenge, he was named after my favorite Fraggle Rock character. Cantus and his minstrels were introduced into the series with their own theme. Let Me Be Your Song, sung by Jim Henson, who voiced the character.

There's a difference between "shitty" and just tedious. Darn near anything *can* solo Heather's arc at -1 with the bosses off. but that doesn't mean it's a fun time. Especially not as many arcs as you have to run to equip a character, even with the level grants. I've run a few low-damage defenders and controllers through DA for all of their toys. After awhile I was rooting for Mot to swallow the place. 😝

Now I really want level 1 Hami-Os... As random drops from those tiny little baby hydra heads you see in the sewers sometimes, maybe? That would be an adorable Easter Egg kind of thing to add,

I'm not so sure I agree that "changes are needed", honestly. Not beyond killing the EMP-to-Merit highway, anyway... I still think the level grants are one of the very best things added to the game. Removing or reducing them would be a bad move.

*rabble!* *rabble!* *rabble!* 👎👎👎 👎👎 👎👎 👎👎 👎👎 Did I do that right? DO we also need torches and pitchforks?

It would be useful to be able to send along the iBits at least, I think.... As I've said before, the characters I take through DA for their iToys often end up with piles of spare Common and Uncommon bits accumulated while they're trying to get their Rares and Very Rares. They aren't much use to those characters after a certain point. If I could send them on to the next alt? That would be a Good Thing. And yes. Vet levels and the level grants should remain in AE. Not every character is suitable for the DA grind and not all of us are able to do iTrials. Time zones are A Thing.

I'd say transfer is just fine between characters... Threads, shards, iBits, and all that. We can already transfer Emps that way, so why not? I wouldn't really be for transferring between accounts. It just seems to me that iToys are one of those things that are better done just for yourself, if that makes any sense? Being able to hand bits to your own characters that may not be suited to DA doesn't seem odd to me, but for some reason buying your iBits on the auction house or getting tossed a bunch of Emps by an SG-mate does, That may not be a very logical distinction, but... yeah. Opinions don't always have to be.

I like this idea.

Maybe... People can be impatient. Me personally? I'm not bothered by the reduction. It'll add some time to getting a sidekick to 50, sure, but not so much that I'm worried about it. Three hours just isn't that much of an issue over two when you're a zen-type who's doing the farming for fun.

I play a silly game with all of my Stalkers... When I'm running them solo and come across a big room with multiple targets, I try to "perfectly stalk it". That is to say, I try to take out each target individually, without any of the others noticing that I did it. It's harder than you might think, depending on how many goons there are in a group and how close they are together. But it's good fun trying to be the Ultimate Sneaky Assassin.