Some Worthy Opponent advice on how to slug through it with a PUG.

[KaizenSoze]

After seeing the thread about four players getting the Worthy Opponent. I though I would give my two cents about doing this w/o an specifically designed team.

 

I did my first run today with a PUG. We won mostly through pure tenacity and a lot of super inspirations.

 

We went into the final mission with only 7, at the end the tank dc'ed. So, no aggro control.

 

Fortunately, we had a bubbler and enough other defense to make it doable. Took about 2 hours.

 

A few notes:

The loss of set bonuses didn't hurt as much as the lack of incarnates.

Celerity still works, so you can stealth a lot.

Hero T9s suck. You'll need to wait them out.

Many of the heroes have T9s.

Prioritize your targets and make sure to switch when a Hero pops their T9.

Bring lots super inspirations.

Temp powers are very useful. Pets, wedding ring, envenomed daggers, Warburg nukes, bring them all!

Confuse works with the usual caveats.

You might be able to pull one Hero, but most of the time you are going to get them all. Unless you sleep or confuse the rest.

 

The other thread:

 

 

[Aurora_Girl]

In our 5-man run, the loss of set bonuses was WAAAAAAAAAY more impactful than losing incarnates. I suspect that to be the case all around; especially re: survivability of all Squishies who build for damage mitigation. 

[Chronicler J]

Good work. Glad you understand how Incarnates are much stronger than set bonuses; the right setup is unstoppable. 

[Ukase]

I ran this with a pug 4x on 4 different alts. 

No question in my mind, I missed Barrier more than anything. Hybrid, Interface, Lore, Alpha...I don't often think of those unless I'm in a Magi. 
Destiny I think of a lot, and Judgement is always useful - but I can live without it. 

Worthy Opponent is just annoying, not difficult. The only real difference was the inability to incan people to and fro when expedient to do so. And, with a fair number of folks using the teleport pool, even that wasn't missed as much as I thought it would be. 

A couple of times, we tried to snipe the heroes under the Atlas globe and it worked well. A couple of times - not so well. Lots of defeats, but when we regrouped, spammed temps and buffed and actually focused on one target, it worked much better. If only people would read, the defeats would have likely been fewer, but that's a pug for ya. 

[Milk Sheik]

I did this with two PUGs -- the first stalled when our tank DCed and the Vindicators were all in one room. They divided and conquered us and we decided "heck with that, we'll rerun tomorrow night." Next night we had a tank, a scrapper, 3 blasters, an illusion troller, me the emp defender, and I forget the last AT, possibly a widow. We handled the Vindicators okay (though there were some wipes, each time we took another one of them down and after 2 attempts we steamrolled the rest of them). I *really* missed my KB-resist enhancements. I normally run 3 for a total of 11 points of resist, and found myself getting knocked on my butt continually unless I had Flight on.

 

The final fight was suitably epic. We didn't have Vengeance in the group, so we took it up to the top of the Atlas Globe so only the flying heroes would get pulled. Standard procedure was to take out Numina first. We whipped out pets, but quite a few of them fell off the globe and got ganked when we tried to pull the next AV (blaster pulled, I healed). Got through most of the heroes without too much of a hassle, leaving States for last. Not having a real debuffer, States was *tough* and whenever he got low on health, he popped Unstoppable and spammed Lightning Bolts of Zeus every 10 seconds or so, so I had to heal a ton. We burned I-don't-know-how-many pets we'd collected over a lifetime of badging: Shivans, Snow Beasts, Clockwork, Loa Bone zombies, mini-mechs from RV, whatever. He smashed them all. Our smart blasters stayed out of lightning range and threw damage; the others never really caught on, and I healed and rezzed 'em constantly. After about a 7-10 minute fight, his Unstoppable dropped for a second time and our Envenomed Daggers finally did their job. My toon now wears the Worthy Opponent badge instead of Immortal, because I earned Immortal AFK, and this one, the polar opposite.

Edited January 3, 2022 by Milk Sheik
Grammar

[Ironblade]

18 hours ago, Milk Sheik said:

I *really* missed my KB-resist enhancements. I normally run 3 for a total of 11 points of resist, and found myself getting knocked on my butt continually unless I had Flight on.

This is annoying.  The knockback protection IO's don't work because they are classified as 'globals'.  Meanwhile, the IO's that are classified as 'procs' work fine.

 

I expected to have endurance issues in this SF because I would be losing my set bonuses.  However, it wasn't as bad as I expected and I checked the combat monitor to try to figure out why and IO's like the Miracle +recovery were working normally.  Some IO effects don't qualify as "set bonuses" so they still work on the Old School settings.