aethereal

Right now, there's no way in the AE to have two or three AVs (or EBs) in the same spawn. You can do a little hack where you put only AVs (or EBs) in a custom enemy group and have a spawn of those, but then if the team that's fighting it is a large team (or has notoriety set to mimic a large team), you get a spawn of like 11 AVs which is a whole different thing. I would like to be able to say, "Fight an AV, but actually it's these particular named enemies, one of each." Let's face it, single AVs are not usually much of a challenge to a decent-sized team, and it would be very helpful for making a broad class of RP-oriented AE arcs. This does not seem to me that it would make farming any more efficient than it already is.

Lighting Rod summons what we call a pseudo-pet, which is to say a pet that was intended to get around some limitations in the powers engine. It doesn't take pet sets because it's not a "real" pet, but behind-the-scenes, it's coded as a pet.

I agree that people who say, "Blasters are plenty durable now, why do you need to sacrifice a bunch of damage for better mitigation when mitigation is already 'good enough'" are overly focused on the very tip-top of endgame with expensive builds. There's a pretty clear role for sents every place before that as durable ranged DPS, and if they pale in comparison to any AT in the levelling game, it's not blasters, it's scraps/stalks/brutes. I do think it would be interesting to imagine what a buff to sents would look like that both tried to give them more parity with scraps/stalks/brutes in the levelling game, and also gave them a bit more of a separate identity from blasters in the very tip-top of endgame, though.

Eventually his summoned bosses add enough to his DPS that he overwhelms my defenses and kills me. If I kill his summons, I end up just doing that, I barely get a chance to attack Recluse.

I mean, to be clear, I'm soloing him as a level 54 AV regardless. But yes, I'll try to handle him without the towers, I'm not sure I can at all.

Is he different in different places? I'm just using a mission from Mender Silos that has all of the big five Arachnos AVs available in a single mission (plus Silver Mantis). It's useful. I've got Degenerative Interface (albeit only T3 right now), Musculature Alpha (also T3), Vorpal Judgment (T2), Ageless Destiny (T2, which is enough to keep me in Offensive Adaptation indefinitely if I want to be), Warworks Lore (only T2 right now, so I could get pretty big DPS gains), and Assault Hybrid (T1 right now). So I think of all that as a pretty standard incarnate load-out. Sorry, I run MacOS Catalina, so I can't use mids and share my build, but I'm not doing anything crazy. My attack rotation is more or less Assassin's Ice Sword > Freezing Touch > Moonbeam. That's not actually a tight attack rotation, I'd have to sprinkle in Ice Sword a couple of times if I were just doing that, but between Build Up and my three Bio Armor clickies (and Hasten, and Agelesss Destiny, and so forth), I often end up dropping the Ice Swords and just using my three big hits. My durability is based on global recharge doctrine: I have perma-Hasten and perma-Ablative Carapace. My defenses and resists are unimpresssive in comparison -- I'm a little shy of capped S/L resist, and in the 40's on Energy/Neg-Energy/Fire/Cold defense.

Correct.

I'm on a mission to solo all the big name Arachnos AVs. The ones left in the docket are Scirocco and LR. I'm pretty sure I can figure out Scirocco, but I have no idea where to begin with the big guy. His boss summoning seems like a big problem and I don't know how to handle it. Any tricks here? I'm an Ice/Bio Stalker. I'm not completely tricked out yet, and maybe it's just a question of having a T4 Lore pet, but if not I'm not sure where to go.

Please do not buy ATOs with merits. For 100 merits, you can get 300 enhancement converters. These routinely sell for around 80k, minus a 10% AH fee, so 72k. 72k * 300 = 21.5M or so inf. You can buy ATOs for half that money. Just... friends don't let friends buy ATOs with merits.

A global increase in to hit would create pressure to build towards a 50% defense target instead of a 45%. It would increase the value of the few sets that can reasonably reach 50% and diminish the value of hybrid sets (it would also increase the value of pure-resist mitigation techniques). I think that making the incarnate content have a big global to-hit bonus was a bad idea. Having something where going over the 45% defense target has decreased returns, but not no returns, doesn't create the same strong pressure to just build to higher defense.

Since this isn't a suggestion that would ever be implemented, I didn't bother to create an exhaustive tracing of a million details, but yes, my suggestion was intended to be more-or-less global. Maybe, if this were actually being taken seriously, it would phase in and not affect very low levels (maybe 0% proc rate under level 10, maybe half the listed proc-rate from 11-20, or something). And obviously if someone wanted to actually do it, the numbers would all be subject to tweaking. Is it 5% proc rate for 10s for minions or 7% proc rate for 5s or what, who knows. Yes, procs off missed attacks, no, doesn't stack. And might there be particular enemies that need rebalancing for this? Sure, maybe. But the vast majority of enemies would not need to be rebalanced in light of this. Again, this is a low proc rate chance to have probably 1-2 attacks from this enemy have a mild to-hit buff. It's not going to turn groups into holy terrors. What it actually does is create a tier of diminished returns -- but not *no* returns -- on high defense. Low defense characters won't notice this. If I have 0 defense, fighting +0 enemies, and I'm fighting 10 minions, then after a particularly unlucky alpha strike, 3 of those minions will proc it (ie, this is 6x more than the expected case, a very unlucky set of rolls for me), at which point of the next wave of 10 attacks, instead of the expected case of 5 of them hitting, I'll see 5.3 of them hitting, for an expected increase in damage of 6%. For a defense-capped character, on the other hand, in the same unlucky situation, I'd see a scenario where instead of 0.5 attacks hit on round 2, 0.8 attacks hit, for an expected increase in damage of 60% (again, this is in the unlucky case where the proc happens at 6x higher than the expected case). Note that I'm still expecting less than one hit in the second round of attacks, and the alpha strike was fully mitigated. This is in stark contrast to the defense-halving idea that I took to be satire, which is more in the vein of creating a huge "hole" in defense mitigation, kind of in the spirit of things like psychic or toxic "holes." My suggestion isn't like that. It's a mild softening of defense at high levels to create a scenario where you say, "Well, yes, I'm at 45% defense for everything, but I do like it when someone brings Maneuvers onto the team and I get a little more mitigation."

Enemies do not attack at a particularly frenetic pace, and this proposed change is much more significant for high-defense players than low-defense ones. Very occasionally having an attack have a 60% chance to hit you instead of a 50% chance to hit is not going to radically change the difficulty of the game.

I think I'll stand on my record: I don't particularly like the end game, I've never in fact ground out a T4 incarnate ability, I play the leveling game much more often than the 50 game, I rarely group and I play on much higher than base difficulty. And I avoid the hell out of Council farms. As said at the beginning, this isn't a terribly serious suggestion, because it would change too much, but I don't think of it so much as a difficulty increaser. Yes, it would add a bit of difficulty for people invested in defense, but not a ton. It's more about creating a sort of tier between "pretty good defense" and "great defense." If you soft-cap, you have full resistance against alpha strikes and full resistance against 90% of other attacks, but you notice when you've got a widow or bubbler in your team, and the SR tank or brute has a bit more defensive ability than you do. That feels about right to me. You get sharply diminishing returns after soft-cap without it being almost no returns the way it is now.

This isn't a terribly serious suggestion. More... Something to think about. What if all enemies had a global chance to proc the following effect: +10% to hit, self only, for 10 seconds. Minions would have a 5% chance to proc it on all attacks, lieutenants 10%, bosses and above 15%. The idea here is to somewhat defray the value of defense, while not making it super useless, and to give more of a role to powers that have been made somewhat useless in a world of easily attainable soft-cap. Since it's based on a proc, defense would be just as good as it is now against an alpha strike. SR character's might have some use for Elude, Parry might see situational use, etc. Too big a change to do globally, but I think it's kind of interesting.

My understanding is that, in PvP, there is value in layering additional stealth on Hide, for stalkers. Do multiple stealth IOs stack, or just one and then I have to go the Concealment pool? Can I be functionally invisible as a stalker, or are builds with some +perception going to see me no matter what?

Awesome!

I get that on some level the front loading of the crits was a technology limitation, not purely design choice, but it would be a nerf to change them to dots, and some amount of balance around crits has probably crept in over time. It's not like this was a straight up mistake, it was known and presumably balanced around. So I'd only support a change for a set that felt overturned, or with a compensating buff.

I think this thread kind of fundamentally misunderstands farming. I don't think there are a ton of people out there saying, "God, I long to do regular content, but I just can't get over the insufficient rewards." You farm because some of the following apply to you: You enjoy farming. You actively do not enjoy (or are bored with) other options for levelling You want to get enough money/XP for some goal (purpling out an alt, seeing what a particular combo plays like at high level) as quickly as possible, especially solo Making the rewards for other content higher will not affect either of the first two reasons, and it will only affect the third reason if we actually make the rewards for other content not just higher, but superior to farming (and maybe not even then. You can already make more money from the market than farming).

How is stalker hemorrhage incorrectly coded?

I'm guessing "no." I think the answer to this one is no, too, but are the plant/nature powers that put like mushrooms on people and stuff available to custom enemies in AE? I wasn't able to find them.

I'm looking at the power definition per the "Powers API" in the tools. I don't see any regen benefit. I'm not totally sure how to interpret the powers block for healing powers, but it looks to me like what it does is give a 9.04 heal (base, enhanceable), at level 50, every 2 seconds. I may be misunderstanding something, though. It also says scale 0.075, which maybe means it's actually a 7.5% heal every 2 seconds (probably not, that sounds way too high)? But I'm not sure. (In comparison, Healing Flames says it's a 301.19 heal, scale 2.5.)

In for example the villain clone arc, there are enemies that are sort of Praetorian army and/or clockwork that are infected by Devouring Earth, plus some more traditional Devouring Earth enemies. Are these available in the AE? If so, what's the name of their enemy group?

Geometric, not exponential.

Minions and lieutenants get scaling AoE defense to team size. Minions more than lieutenants. Probably not a good idea, but one that's narrowly about the dominance of AoE.

Yep, I was trying not to assume super high-end builds, since I don't think that's a useful metric to balance general performance to. I also don't have epic attacks in here, and the way that epics works is that they benefit more sets that just have one gap. If all you need is one more great attack to fill your attack chain with great attacks, epics are really good. If your attack chain is a bunch of mediocre stuff, adding in one epic attack doesn't change things that much. Clobber has a 16 second base recharge time. With 200% total recharge, it's on a 5.33 second cooldown. With 300% total recharge (like say 200% global 100% local) it's on a 4 second cooldown. That still leaves a .3 second gap in the attack chain to get a three-attack chain with Jawbreaker and Pulverize. So getting a gapless three-attack chain with Jawbreaker and Pulverize takes a TON of recharge, but maybe a four-attack chain with an epic or something is pretty good.