KaizenSoze

IMO. The animations are a bit clunky. The melee attacks are pretty meh. It's not the damage of the attack, it's just one is a slow PBAOE, the other is a narrow melee cone. Only Skewer is good in actual play. It is really good at immobilizing mobs. Slot for that, not for hold in Vines. Vines->Blizzard, it's nasty.

First you're dealing the page 7 CoT, which are noticeably nastier than before. Keep an eye out for the Earthquake and Tar Patch indicators. If you see one, move immediately out of range. Do you have your Rad debuffs slotted? That will help. Holds can break mob toggles. I know it's close quarters, but hit and run works, or at least hit and break line of sight. Force the mobs to come into your debuff aura range. Find ways to get them clumped up for your Fire aoes. Figure out which mobs are causing you the most issues. Also, some combos solo better than others. My elec/ice blaster can solo just about anything. End drain and slows are very useful.

Final badger 83 capsules.

Second badger completed 114 capsules.

Wow I really had crap luck.

Quick and dirty average is 81 capsules.

Solo

Sigh. Took 118 capsules to get all the badges. Worse than the Winter event. I wish there was a way to increase the spawn rate of CoT and Rikti.

I had it happen at least twice. You click on the capsule, the "Ambush" text appears. Nothing ambush. Minor issue. I was in Brickstown if that helps.

I do have a problem with Incarnates, but that is another issue outside this thread. And for the time it took, it was a PUG. I know that some SGs have gotten some 4 star hard modes to under an hour with specific setups.

Impressive mind reading. And completely wrong. I do engage in hard mode and watch Incarnate trivialize them. Example, I was on a PUG 4 star Aeon. The only organization was a request for a debuff, tank, and dps. Not specific power sets just a general type of build. And T4 Barrier. The leader was very experienced, they cycled Ageless and the rest of us cycled Barrier. Cycling Barrier solved most of the durability issues. DPS is almost never an issue with all the Judgements, Nukes, and procs, topped off with a layer of debuff. Completed in 1.5 hours, had two party wipes during "special fight", that the worst of it. For a PUG. I have harder 801 runs than this 4 star hard mode.

There is more to this game then focusing on faster clear times. How about an actually challenge, maybe get hit occasionally before the spawns are nuked out of existence. Maybe I would like to use more of my powers in melee. I have been crunching more numbers. A lot of folks think I am picking on Blasters in particular. Actually, I am picking on nukes for all ATs. Ion Judgement is doing 5107 damage per activation. Let's round that down to 5100K. Level 54 Minions have 436 hp, Lts 867. One Ion per activation hitting 11 targets on average. Dishes out ~12 minions worth of damage or ~6 Lts, once every 2 mins. My Fort build can fire it's nuke every ~30 seconds before Ageless for 4600 DPA. That's 11 minions worth of damage every ~30 seconds. Or 5 Lts. The risk vs reward for nukes is completely out of wack.

Yes, a web based MIDS would be really nice. One day. I'll might tackle it, but it wouldn't be for at least a year.

Sappers have a lot of endurance drain resistance. Pretty much nothing can drain them w/o spending way more time than it would take to kill them. Fortunately, they are the exception, not the rule.

I have updated the first three sections of the FAQ to take the page 7 changes into account. I'll be working on the rest over the next couple of weeks.

Agreeing with Yomo. Two specific examples are mob nukes and some T9. Fort Mistresses cannot nuke at low endurance. Mino and Cyclops if zero'ed out and -recovery cannot T9. Having said that, there is a massive problem with secondary/control powers in the end game.

There is the famous 801s. What other missions where you went OMG this is very hard!

Pretty sure that's working as designed. There are few contacts in the game that just repeated hand out a random mission out of a small list of mission. If you want arcs there are plenty of RWZ contact with arcs.

It's fun to watch, but alas highly annoying to melee. The trick cast it on the toughest target and drop TK as soon as the anchor dies. Most of the time, once things have clumped, fire levitate to drop TK.

What you and @skoryy are saying is that I can only enjoy the game is a semi-solo it. I don't play this game just solo, there are other games for that. I want to enjoy the team aspects too.

Yes, but it deletes you character.

The problem that the tank/brute is question is has no risk. They are basically soloing the TF with us along to clean up the strays.

Players would not optimize so much for damage, if there were downsides to it. Due to Incarnates there are very little downsides. I don't have have a problem with players off soloing, unless it's hurting the team. Examples would be Market Crashes where players run off to the next spawn leaving the lowbies to clean up the rez'ed bosses. PI radios where there are only 2-3 50+ and only is off soloing, leaving the others to protect the lowbies.

Since, the topic has branched out into a general end game discussion. Once, I got past a certain level of influence. I quit caring about it. I have not thought about optimizing inf per hour or damage per second in a while. Except when I help out with testing. What I love and will always love is the mobile kinetic combat system. What I do not love is not being able to use a lot of powers, because in the end game the mobs die so quickly. This is not a problem restricted to just low damage ATs. I distinctly remember a RWZ contact team fighting Vanguard. My poor stalker could barely get 2/3 attacks before the spawn was destroyed. The poor thing spent all it's time trying to find the one mob that was not dead. This is not fun. It doesn't feel powerful. It's boring.

I think an easy change to make Poison unique and powerful is to take some the changes that made Trick Arrow so powerful. Unresistable debuffs. Imagine if a small portion of the -resist was unresistable. Or any of the other debuffs. Obviously, making the whole debuff unresistable or stacking would be massively OP. But maybe 10-15%? That would be very helpful taking down mobs that pop T9s.