Coyotedancer

"Get back here, you big baby!"... To any of the many, many runaway goons in this game.

/Bio Sents are tough as nails... I ❤️ my Dark/Bio and Fire/Bio. My Psy/Bio... Well, I love Artemian as a roleplay character. As a game-play choice, he's very safe. But slower than proverbial Christmas.

Blaster threat level helps, too, I think just from watching it in action... Things run out of it, and then turn around and run right back in, very much like they do with Ossuni's Burn patch. But that's all way, way off-topic for a Sentinel thread....

Nope. He uses Bonfire with a KD special... Blaster Hot Feet apparently has an "avoid" effect in it that actually makes the scatter unmanageable. He tried that first and respecced out of it double-quick.

For what it's worth, Obit, Mr. Coyote's favorite farmer is a purpose-built Fire blaster. He doesn't use or need the P2W temps, and tends to burn through (Pun mildly intended-) about the same number of inspies as my zen-mode Claws/Fire/Mu Brute, Ossuni... 'A fair few less than Harry, my traded-safety-for-more-damage Claws/Fire/Fire speed-famer, does, honestly. He also doesn't seem to have much trouble with mopping up runners. That's the advantage of range over us melee-types with nothing but Patron attacks to use on them.

Sometimes you just have to dumpster dive... 😆

Trinity-based divisions are hard to nail down in this game... In a world with Masterminds, Offender-build Defenders, Swiss army knife Peacebringers, Corruptors and all the rest, you can't just nail things down neatly by looking at someone's AT. Me? If I want to guess how a team is likely to handle a particular run, I usually start by looking at the characters' levels in relation to the "suggested" level of the task at hand, and the difficulty the leader's picked. Even a really good player is going to be under the gun trying to bring a level 35 along on a level 50 leader's +4 ITF or Lady Grey. If half of the team is 35 and the leader still insists on that difficulty... Oh boy.

Agreed. I actually have been on a failed rando-ITF. It was exactly as you described... Made mostly of 35/40-somethings with a pair of 50+ characters (My Dark/Bio/Dark Sentinel, Tavaris, was one of those two-). The Brute-playing-Tank was *not* the other 50, but still insisted they just HAD to have the TF set to +4 or it "wouldn't be worth running". It was supposed to be a smash-run, but a few of the folks apparently only knew how to speed and thought that was "standard practice" for all ITFs... No surprise, it was a disaster. The Brute left in a huff after the leader told her he was turning down the difficulty. I do suspect that if we'd had a mostly-50 group, we'd have been fine in spite of fast/slow-run issues, but on +4 with the lowbie-heavy composition we had? Not so much. Ending up with a scattered party doomed enough of that group to make it no fun at all.

And what I'm trying to show you here is that, while it's fine to *have* standards, as criteria go the one you've chosen isn't great. It may not be a reasonable indication of what you're looking for. It may just be badge-hound bias. If you'd used badging as your standard back-in-the-day, you'd never have run with Nemissary or Sola. ('Pretty sure Task Force Commander was the only accolade Nem had at the time, and that was just by virtue of him being my blue-side main. Sola has never had any of them.)

I've never had any trouble getting the EBs to engage me one at a time... If you don't have a ranged attack in your primary or secondary, pick up a Nemesis Staff or Blackwand from P2W. Target the one you want to take out first, fire it at the longest range you can, duck back around the corner and the one you popped ought to come after you, leaving the other in place. They aren't aggro-linked. or anything like that. If you killed the portals from a distance, you may not even have any spare Rikti to deal with.

If I'm on a character that doesn't do a lot of damage, or one that I don't think can handle Honoree's damage well, I just turn down the difficulty to +0 or even -1. That's usually enough to let even the squishiest of my gang get through it. No matter who I'm on, I do deal with the ambushes and snipe the portals typically, and pull the EBs one at a time. I usually hit Honoree first, and follow with the captain because of her Curse debuff, which is annoying.

There was a reason my first villain was a very self-sufficient Stalker. Red side on Liberty was always a quiet place. If Liberty blue side was the City's suburbs, our red side was some place way out in the boonies.

It really is harder to put together red side groups, even when you're doing it from SG and Friends lists... That's the eternal fist-shaken-at-sky situation over there for all of us, I think.

60+ full Incarnate, "finished" characters here... A fair few more than that between my old Liberty crew and Paragon... and you still think I'm a casual because I don't chase those accolades. Yeah. Okay. And you wouldn't want me on your master runs? Really? I'm just going to laugh about that, and wonder how you ever managed to tolerate having me on all of those Master of Underground runs as Anima Sola and Nemissary back in the day. (I'm @Brightfires, Ukase. You've done dozens of Master runs with me and FlyingCodeMonkey. 😝)

*Imagine that I just posted a link to the "Internet is for Porn"-song here*

The only mission I auto every time is the "Defeat All the Wandering Clockworks in that Huge Ass Factory Where They Manufacture Pure Annoyance". I don't think anyone can be blamed for saying *NOPE!* to that one...

I was running around a bit this afternoon with Dennu, my Grav/Dark Controller, and her goofball did seem to get stuck on things an awful lot. I know the pet pathing AI isn't the best, but I don't remember my previous Grav's Singularity being quite THAT bad about it. Maybe red side's more complex geometry is to blame... Dennu is a Rogue and was in Saint Martial, while Amneris was typically played blue-side... but whatever's going on, poor Anku ended up getting dismissed and resummoned an awful lot.

I am *SO* sending her that...

CoyoteSib-in-Law made a brightly-colored, circus-themed illusion/time Controller recently... Because she found out that "Send In The Clowns" was available on Everlasting. (Yes, she's using the mirror option for her phantom army. We are, indeed, absolutely up to our eyes in clowns.)

We're not going to talk about how the CoT succubi manage it... 'Pretty sure the Force isn't involved there. 😆

You know, this thread has made me glad that I only join random TF/SF teams once in a blue moon... Finding out that I'm likely to be judged a questionable player or a "clueless casual" just because I don't collect badges with any of my Homecoming characters, or bother getting those four tedious (and ultimately unnecessary, in my opinion-) accolades on each one of my crew really *isn't* making me any more interested in it, either. But hey... Probably a Good Thing, right? After all, my badge count apparently says that I have no investment in my characters and no clue how to play. 😝

But Snarky, don't you know that they just HAVE to do those things at +4? I mean... anything less means they're all total scrubs who need to Grow Up and GIT GUD! Or something like that.... I don't know.... It just seems like a certain mindset that's starting to be more common than it really ought to be. 😝

I'm not a dev, so I can't detail how it works on the back-end for you... But from the player side, each character interacts with that goon as if it was their level. When the lvl1 hits it, it's just like they're attacking any other mob that's level one. When the thing turns around and takes a slap at them, it does damage as if it's their level as well. If it switches targets and hits the lvl 50 tank next? It hits that character as if it was lvl 50. There may be some sort of internal scaling involved... I'm not sure about that... But the gist is that it doesn't matter what level anyone is. If you want to see how it works out in practice, I'd recommend jumping into one of the frequent Rikti invasions that are going on at the moment. It's an interesting way to make those events both accessible to everyone and independent of the level range of whatever zone they spawn in.

"Level-neutral" mobs that scale to match individual characters already exist in-game... That's how the RIkti and Zombies and Ghost Pirates and such that pop up during invasions are done.

Having done ship raids and other things that resulted in jack-all as far as drops go, myself, I feel like it's safe to say what this really comes down to is the RNG being an absolute butt. Runs of bad luck happen. It's not broken code... It's just the nature of the beast. I've had it happen on lowbies and on my "finished" 50s, so it's not a matter of level, veteran or otherwise. The problem... if it is one, which is debatable... is that the RNG can be streaky as all hell, and when you're on the low side of one of those streaks you really can go a ridiculously long time without getting bupkis.