Sovera

From my (shallow) experience with (non buffed) ITF on an Invul then Invuln would breeze through it. It has DDR. It has extra defenses when more enemies are around (which is precisely when defenses are needed). It has high resists. It does not buff damage, but TW pre-balancing nerf would carry it. Hmm... Invuln does not have endurance recovery though. Though if we want extra challenge there's an option no one has mentioned yet: player is debuffed.

Sounds about right since the natural state of things is mobs missing us 50% of the time, so, yeah, you've nailed it. At -50% they just hit 95% which not even 90% resists helps against.

No, resistance is at a shiny 90%. Not debuffed. Unless debuffed but not showing in the monitor but I monitor it. It's not a case of cascading failures.

You have mentioned this a few times but I can't say that I felt it. I played a Stalker using only the the first three attacks for ST plus AS. Slotted to have near max damage in order to maximize crits, and then each attack (minus AS that needed the recharge) had no recharge and a minimum of three damage procs, with one of the attacks having four. It still only gave me 2:30 ish pylon times.

Same here. Barrier simply pulled me through all the way to the end and it was not uncommon for me to take too much damage and fly up and wait 30-40 seconds for Barrier to finish recharging then dive back in. I might try Ageless with DDR someday. A stupendous buffer of defense or 40% that won't move should be about equal, but for the rest of the game Barrier is still better against psi and toxic and whatever else. It would have been simply impossible without it. As much as we say that a resistance set can ignore defense debuff the truth is that I don't know how the mechanic works, but once we are at 40+% in the negatives the damage received seems to ignore those 90% resistances. An honorary mention to Judgement. 1:30 CD was good enough to have at every cyst pack and it was a chunk of HP done that sped things a lot and by that stint made it safer since things dead don't hit back. That said the bots that animate as we break the computer did not debuff, so I just ignored them and they did not hurt even when my screen was a mess of bots jumping around and shooting.

You're all 'best tankiest is X' and I'm just back from (near) soloing the ITF with buffed enemies at +4x8 on a squishy Fire Armor 😄

No, Romulus' ressurection stun takes Clarion at its height to suppress (I think, I rarely tested it due to normal strat avoiding it altogether but once in a while someone pulls the Clarion card). I'm not sure how much the fluffy death stun has, but it was enough to get through tanker mez defenses so I'm kinda assuming it is on the same magnitude. If I hadn't tried to be smart I would have just followed the regular strat of breaking LoS when Romulus dies in order to avoid the stun.

Right. I'm bowing out of this challenge just because it takes too long. If it wasn't a Master Of I would just hit respawn, but once dead the whole point is gone and I'm not starting from scratch for another two hour slog. So I took it all the way to the last boss and decided to try aiming for the fluffies. I didn't think they would stun on death (I hardly ever do that approach) but turns out that they do! At the first one dead I was stunned and with all toggles down Romulus one-shoted me. I'll just headcannon it as having completed the thing since, welp, after all that was left behind Romulus with the fluffies wasn't hurting me and I just had to kill him four times instead of aiming for the fluffies. Did it with no insps, no temp powers (RECOVERY SERUM, I MISSED YOU LOTS!), no amplifiers.

Superb going, Nihili! Wha tthe game calls 'a general' is usually someone of their retinue that wandered off. Next time check the spots where you killed the generals and you might notice a lone minotaur or cyclops standing there.

Blah. First attempt failed at the third mission. Being greedy cost me two missions just for the sake of trying to squeeze one last hit. To add insult to injury it was at the pack of enemies mostly composed of surgeons -_- It was not very bad though so I predict no unexpected results. Barrier carries me and the Fire/Claws killing speed makes short work of everything, even cyst packs and minotaurs. I did skip the ambush with the intention of coming back to it later, but for now I'm just focused in getting the buffed ITF done first. I'll try again tonight.

...so we have moved from butt capes to panty capes? 😛

A friend of mine trying to make an AE mission is struggling with the monologue options. Darn NPCs are supposed to talk when the PC gets close. But no, they unload all their text all over the screen (oooer) the second we zone in.

As someone who was building a new costume yesterday and was forced to hand wave losing the bio-luminescence stripes, when will we finally have the skin textures separate from the clothing options? We already have a 'skin' tab that is only used for skin color. Transplant all the darn skin options there. We can't have bio-lumi, scaley, fuzzy, organic, zombie, and etc more if we want to wear tights with skin, or wear fishnets, or wear skin showing gloves, or skin showing boots/shoes.

I tried not to quote too much but trying to snip something would butcher the message. I've been told in the past that cutscenes (in other games, not CoH) were necessary to give time for the engine to finish loading up resources and that was why they were not skippable. I take this with a shovel sized pinch of salt, but, lacking the technical expertise, I would not call those who say it liars. But if I log into the game and the world and all the players load around me I don't see why me crossing a threshold in a mission needs to trigger a cutscene for things to have the time to load. Regardless I would prefer a loading bar than a cinematic. On a tangent this conversation was had regarding the base macro. My own point at the time mirrored yours in that I, personally, don't come online to play and consider the travel times a riveting part of the experience. I agree it is part of the experience, but when it is the 200th time of playing ping-pong between IP and Talos then I give thanks I don't need to add 2-3 literal minutes of aiming my nose to the nearest tram, travel there, move to the other map, point my nose to the next mission, travel there. The base macro allowed to kill half of that. Or the infamous missions where we are at the butt end of the map, and told to travel to the ferry, loading screen, then to Talos. Then to the tram, loading screen. Then to Skyway. Then travel to the NPC to deliver two lines of text. THEN DO THE SAME BACKWARDS! Part of the experience? Yes, sure. The first three times. The next 197th times it would be a killer. Thank $deity we get the base macro to poof directly to Skyway and then back to Striga. Regarding more of the same I did a LRSF yesterday and was grumbling on chat. I MAY have skipped some mechanic I was unaware of, but it was good we had a second tank because I must have been phased 6-8 times during the fight against all the AVs. And it was a loooong phase. Unable to play. Unable to interact. Unable to save my squishies 😭. Unable to pop a breakfree and get out of it. Over and over twiddling my thumbs as I waited to be allowed to continue playing.

You're right. It won't be a magic solution. But we can't compare the ambush (30 or so bosses) with a normal cyst pack (10 or so bosses). The ambush is a huge thing that surpasses 99.99% of common content (where else do we get 30 actual bosses thrown at us in a single wave?). It's superb bragging material. But in the end it's a MotITF, not a master-of-running-in-and-killing-every-enemy-ITF. We already do these attempts either not fighting all the enemies and just running from oracle to oracle, or leaving every cyst with a sliver of HP and then destroy them all at the same time. Skipping the ambush is, IMO, just fine. Perhaps just mentioning whether or not it was done. As for how not trigger it it is not something I do since loads XP, but when unfortunately roped into surprise-it-is-a-speed-run! the way done is the moment we finish rescuing the oracles and leave the cave we immediately fly up. I believe the trigger lays in the group just before of the pack with the minotaur that is actually guarding the NPC so coming from behind avoids it. And I mean, heck, once you try it and if you manage to get past the cysts and the double AVs and the auto hit fluffies, nothing stops you from coming back and studying the ambush and how to beat it just for completion sakes. I know I barely managed it on my Fire Armor on regular +4x8 even with Barrier and it was only with the invulnerable Banished Pantheon pet sharing agro that I got it. But this was before I upgraded the build with the procs to up the killing speed.

The kheldian ambush is too much of a hurdle and tbh it should be considered optional for such a challenge since we can complete the ITF without triggering it in the first place.

HE LIVES!

If that is what you have extracted from all I've said, then carry on.

The reason game balance matters.... is the reason that shows up each time I go to look at old obscure MMOs and check what class to pick which is solo friendly, and invariably there is a 'Oh yeah, pick X, it is completely OP. You do great damage, are tanky, and get self heals, so you can solo dungeons. Everyone uses it'. The only thing that saves TW from being the only choice is how terrible it is at leveling and exemplaring, and requires funds to at least be able to cover a forum copied build. Without Momentum, without the endurance guzzling, then TW would be the sole choice.... and then yes, since there is not a lot to do and the leveling is fast then people would try new characters after a while of enjoying their brokenness, but I am unsure how many would find the game palatable after having delved into cheat mode where each hit obliterates NPCs *and* CCs them, *and* hits in AoE. Tell the the new player to try something like Katana afterwards and they would be like, 'Well... It's much faster. No big pauses. No endurance guzzling. It's really nice....' '...but?' 'But I'm hitting them and they aren't dying?' Heck, I get that after the procced out Fire/Claws Tanker and it is not exactly a community recognized power house.

While there have been several suggestions about upping the difficulty (such as running with buffed enemies) and using the other choices to make it harder (only AT powers, etc), the truth is that none of these add to the rewards. It is harder content for the sake of harder content. People do not progress from +0 through all the gamut until +4 for the sake of difficulty. They do it to increase their rewards. If +4 brought no benefits then the game would be played at +0 to finish faster in order to do more. This is a super common theme in Guild Wars 2 where despite the game being incredibly simple and easy the population is elitist to an incredible extreme fostering a very toxic subset of it. They want their dungeon/fractal runs done in exactly 2 minutes. If they take someone who does not know the strategy or does not use one of the community approved builds then they are ruthlessly kicked out or the team disbands if the run takes 3 minutes since every two runs they could have done one extra. We have completely skipped that (thank $deity). This is in part because of the AE. Now those who want to grind for hours can do so solo and not form groups who HAVE to run their Freak missions in exactly 3 minutes. But offering solutions for the heck of it does not work. How often is the extra difficulty used for regular play? At most I activate the 'must be done in X time' just to keep track of things and not for the extra challenge. Using the 'all enemies are buffed' would make an ITF take an extra half hour to finish and we end with the same merits and same inf. This is why the extra difficulty is never used. Now say each adds 10 merits, and the buffs all enemies turns into, dunno, 20 merits? They might not even be efficient but it would be something. My own suggestion of 'all enemies are now bosses' ramps up the difficulty by a fair bit (things do not die in a single AoE volley, they retaliate, when they hit back they hit a lot harder and since there is not just one but a dozen it can easily kill even softcapped squishies) but the rewards are substantial as well since a minion gives something like 8k influence and a boss 51k. The reward makes the extra danger and slowness appealing.

I think you have the wrong person, Mystic. I don't usually meddle with suggestion threads or set balancing, or even energy melee 🙂

Da sky is fallinnnnnnn'!

I read that completely wrong, but I'm not apologizing.

I went to level a Bio/Claws. Hmm... Squishy. Only level 32 though. Longbow and CoT tore it to pieces. But those because they debuffed defense (and since I'm leveling everything but my attacks is unslotted anyway). Council and the.. whatchamacallit.. Wardens something, the low level magic faction redside, they were nothing dangerous even with said unslotted shields. The damage does have that extra crunch, I can feel the -res and +damage working together.... but the QoL that is having a second low level AoE was missed waiting for Spin to come off CD each time. Nice and crunchy though. Theft of Essence works very well in DNA Siphon and I was surprised at seeing DNA Siphon heal so well on a tank. I'm used to it being a midling heal on a Scrapper if memory serves. I don't know if I will stick to it though since I've done Bio to death. I was thinking maybe use SR and abuse it to proc everything to the max though the thought of the endurance woes holds me back.

Yes. I do it all the time when I don't get a team to do it with. You're going to be downleveled to the appropriate level bracket anyway, but if you insist on doing it at the 'right' level bracket, then still yes. Then it depends on what you want to do. +0x1? You don't need a butt load of inf or a super duper build. The end boss WILL be an AV though but they are not super hard and you can stock up on envenomed blades from the P2W if it's a low damage AT. Most of the time you just need to stock up in medium inspirations before the last boss. +0x8? Yes, you're going to want a better build to do it in the low levels and even so the CoT part of Posi 1/2 will probably kick your butt since they stack so many debuffs.