Sound advice. Can you tell me where to buy the asbestos armor for my suit, so that when Warlord turns around and hits me with his accursed flamethrower I don't get one-shotted?
It's hard to "do you best not to get defeated" when defeat arrives literally out of nowhere. It's like advising someone who's just arrived in the Desert at lvl 15 to "do their best not to get beaten up by Grond."
THIS!
Seriously, that damned flame thrower comes out of NOWHERE -- and the only warning s a SPEECH BUBBLE taunt, no charge up sign, no warning...
You know what's worse than zero chance of failure? Anything less than a 90% chance of fun. Fun may or may not be connected to chance of failure, but it's definately always connected to:
* Frustration.
* Steep Learning Curve
* Confusion
* Unclear and/or Inobvious requirements for success
* Unadaptive difficulty set above capabilities of player
Too much of these is a deathknell for fun. And it doesn't take a lot of them to send people elsewhere for their fun. Challenge is a far less important quotiont of fun for most people. For the smaller portion for who it is important then there are higher difficulty levels in missions, alerts just need a varying difficulty system too so you get your higher chances of failure and i get my higher chances of fun. Everyone wins then don't they?
See, I don't find rolling over content fun.
I agree that there are problems with the new alert, and believe that it should give clear warning that there is a lockout, but I'm not against the lockout, it forces players to not barge in, be a little more cautious when taking hits, and consider refining their build if they continue to have problems.
I like steep learning curves. Fights that are learned within moments are dull. The most fun I've had in any game was trying to down a dungeon that was built to be impossible without acquiring gear from that dungeon. It took my group several months of frequent gameplay, build crunching, team makeups, and learning the boss mechanics before we finally beat it. And it was an amazing feeling of accomplishment when we finally did. This was the norm for said dungeon as well, no group beat it until a month or so after it's launch..
You're an exception not the rule. Even in that, I sympathise -- even I find there's a threshold of "too easy" at which point boredom sets in -- wanting to just see the end of the story I tried for about half an hour to play on "narrative" difficulty on Mass 3 before knocking it up a couple notches out of absolute boredom -- but there's definitely a line, and real difficulty is not made through onerous artificial elements.
Steep learning curves are not a thing that belongs in Champions. MMOs in general are, more and more for better or worse meant to be accessible -- and the hardcore tough stuff is usually far at the end. This is not the end, this is a random PUGgable Alert -- there is a cataclysmically large difference here. And even then, Champions in particular is not meant to be like other MMOs.. that's part of its charm, really.
And people have been complaining about how easy CO's content was. Now they're complaining that it's too difficult. You just can't please everyone.
So what is it, do we want the lock-out removed and let Warlord Alert be the generic "clear all mobs + boss" where graveyard-rush tactics win the day even if the team is doing abysmally poor? If you ask me, that's counter-productive to a player properly honing their skills and improving their A-game.
A small, noisily vocal group were complaining. This is what listening to them gets you. They always complain, and their idea of fun is always a bad thing to endorse overall -- it needs segregated from mainlien content, because otherwise that small noisily vocal group will be the only ones wanting to play the game at all.
And yeah, that's pretty much what the majority of players here want -- exactly what they had before this was shoehorned n, because at this point only the new bloods and the old hands or those who found the game as is to their liking are around still. There's not a lot to keep the neutral, take it or leave it group here once they see what the game offers, after all -- so the vastest majority of those who do stay kinda like what they'd been given already and don't want this new, fake difficulty nonsense, and certainly don't want it mainlined.
You don't need lockout mechanics to fail. Make it sufficiently hard, and believe it's hard enough already, and people will fail simply due to the boss regenning to full every time he wipes the party. Plenty of people are already failing this alert due to people quiting out of frustration. The lockout, by itself at least, wasn't the way to go. If they are going to make heavy use of lockout mechanics, they need to re-work the system, since you aren't even guaranteed a healer, none the less a rezzer on your team.
So...you're okay with zero chance at failure? Because I'm not.
Zero? Zero might be a little to low. 33% or more (we're leaning toward probably 75% currently) is vastly too much however, especially when its shoddy artificial mechanics and not actual real challenge doing folks in....
- Warn the players about a lockout. That is the least in my opinion.
- Try the soft lockout approach as mentioned by Yuri. In case of the Warlord Alert, maybe destroying a generator guarded by two villains class Shadow Army soldiers, which allows you (and only you, every player has to destroy another generator) to rejoin the fight.
EDIT: I just realized that the War Machine, Warlord's personal team of enforcers are 5 supervillains. Let each on of them guard a generator. If you are defeated in the battle with Warlord, you have to defeat a randomly chosen member of the War Machine (standard supervillain) and you can rejoin the fight with Warlord himself.
The black X are the generators. The light blue walls are forcefields which are active before you start the fight with Warlord himself. You cant get to the members of the War Machine at this point. The dark blue line is the lockout forcefield. Now you are defeated and respawn at the point I marked with entrance (the blasted wall). Now you get a message: 'Defeat Warcry to rejoin the fight!' The forcefield of Warcry goes down, you defeat Warcry, destroy the generator and then you can rejoin the fight with Warlord. Defeating every member of the War Machine and Warlord himself could grant you the 'Warmaster' perk and title.
- Find another approach to put some difficulty in the Alerts, instead of the lockout. This is of course the hardest way, but probably also the most rewarding, both for the Devs and the players.
Kaufmann n for the win with great ideas as usual. I wholeheartedly endorse this.
A small, noisily vocal group were complaining. This is what listening to them gets you. They always complain, and their idea of fun is always a bad thing to endorse overall -- it needs segregated from mainlien content, because otherwise that small noisily vocal group will be the only ones wanting to play the game at all.
And yeah, that's pretty much what the majority of players here want -- exactly what they had before this was shoehorned n, because at this point only the new bloods and the old hands or those who found the game as is to their liking are around still. There's not a lot to keep the neutral, take it or leave it group here once they see what the game offers, after all -- so the vastest majority of those who do stay kinda like what they'd been given already and don't want this new, fake difficulty nonsense, and certainly don't want it mainlined.
If statistics really show that what the majority of players want is their instant "I WIN" card all of the time, then the majority of the game's content services that want. Those of us who have been playing through the standard content pre-Alert know enough that it's mostly pretty easy.
As of now, Smash and Warlord Alerts provide, in my opinion, a rather significant level of challenge faced with a sense of failure risk credible enough to be taken seriously. They make up a very tiny fraction of the game's content and I see them as a welcome feature. What's more, the rewards justify the difficulty. For Smash, you get huge XP and XP boosts. For Warlord, you get random Warlord costume pieces + a substantial amount of daily recognition points for an instance that can be completely quickly enough if team competency is there. You're not going to find rewards of those calibres in the rest of the game's trivially easy content.
The Warlord lair is not terrible, it's not difficult, and the learning curve is an absolute minimal.
A map full of densely-packed spawns of knockback-heavy mobs is a bad design, especially in this game where there is effectively nothing you can do about knockback. The Warlord fight locks out travel powers for no reason other than to prevent players from avoiding a ham-handed near-instant-death mechanic and combines that with an undeclared failure condition. Neither the failure condition nor the travel power restriction have any justification; they are just imposed by fiat. Your likely reward for putting up with all this aggravation (compounded by having to deal with all the usual PUG alert issues) is 1 rec and a handful of cash, which is to say, nothing.
What is the technology behind Champions respawn feature? You get to teleported to a respawn point, that i get. But how?
In CoH the tech was that in a moment of defeat hero is teleported to hospital via device every hero is carrying. Also that explains in some occasions defeated hero ends up in a jail cell, the villains have tech to disrupted the teleport to their own location.
How that works in CO?
Would it be too hard to implement a Jailcellkind feature, where defeated heroes are thrown in and must fight their way out of there to continue the battle. Or something like defeated heroes must destroy the forcefield around the boss. Locking people out of the fight is just bad, bad, bad feature.
You don't need lockout mechanics to fail. Make it sufficiently hard, and believe it's hard enough already, and people will fail simply due to the boss regenning to full every time he wipes the party. Plenty of people are already failing this alert due to people quiting out of frustration. The lockout, by itself at least, wasn't the way to go. If they are going to make heavy use of lockout mechanics, they need to re-work the system, since you aren't even guaranteed a healer, none the less a rezzer on your team.
To bring things back my point, does anyone else have a solution to prevent using Zerg'ing to defeat a boss? Most everyone see's nothing wrong the ntire in running into combat, get a couple of hits against the boss, dieing, respawning, run back into battle, rinse and repeat until boss is dead. (Lockout is to prevent suich tactics as the devs don't want players doing that.)
To bring things back my point, does anyone else have a solution to prevent using Zerg'ing to defeat a boss? Most everyone see's nothing wrong the ntire in running into combat, get a couple of hits against the boss, dieing, respawning, run back into battle, rinse and repeat until boss is dead. (Lockout is to prevent suich tactics as the devs don't want players doing that.)
....Whiteout final boss second form.
And Jenny.. again, difficulty isn't bad. Shoddy mechanics to artificially impose it is.
His flamethrower attack doesn't come out of the blue either, it can be predicted and neither is it a one-shot. It's a pretty fast DoT I give it that, but certainly doesn't kill you in a single hit, and most certainly not if you're quick enough block it.
Hate to disappoint you here, but not all of us are capable of spotting a stupid speech bubble in the middle of everything exploding and pets zipping about and lightning strikes and whatnot - and, as has been pointed out, that's the only warning you get, a terribly non-specific taunt. And it did indeed one-shot Lightning; the very moment he turned toward me (having just felled the tank), I died, with absolutely no warning, no time to block and no opportunity to move out of the way. When I recovered, I joined two others who were already behind the force wall.
Basically, unless you're using just the right Freeform build, and already know exactly what moves are about to be made, surviving this one is a matter of pure luck more than tactics or strategy. (Being an Inventor AT can help, between the Support Drones and the ability to occasionally turn Warlord into a teddy bear, but it still isn't a sure thing.) And playing the elitist here isn't going to help anyone, except maybe persuading them not to even try this mess if you have to be an expert before you can even start.
Personally, I hate the knocks. They're spammed by every mook in the level and are not really challenging, just spectacularly annoying. That's not fun, it's just monotonous... and this Alert has a longer build up to the boss than most which just makes things that much worse.
I think Warlord also needs a nerf, not a big nerf, but definitely a nerf. Specifically to his fire patches and their ability to crit... and do so several times in a row, with a ludicrously fast tick rate, multiplying their already spectacularly high damage. In a very unlucky turn one of the damn things chain-crit'ed my Con-focused, Invunlerability-equipped, IDF-using Tank and it managed to whittle me to nothing in a few meagre seconds, so quickly that I didn't even have time to hope that I could make my way out of the patch with my travel power shut down.
If the fire patches got nerfed down to something reasonable, even at a bad turn of the dice, then the lockout would be fine. As it stands... no. Combining the absurdly powerful crit-capable fire patches and the lockout is just terrible.
So far i've been in two victories (really more like one, as the 2nd one the healer couldn't reach me till it was all over so i didn't contribute much after the first 3rd of his health was gone) over this guy and the solid one was when he wasn't bothering with me and i sat on the balcony zapping. But since then every time he starts on to me pretty quickly, i block as fast as i can when the hurt starts but eventually he does enough through my block to take me down. Oh i tried the recovery but i just stood up in the napalm flame and instantly died again the first time., and the second time i went down and there was only one other left and they went down i decided not to waste my recoveries.
Nope, not fun. Getting hit on the balcony by napalm despite blocking and trying to sidestep and using the recovery device only to be insta-killed by the napalm? Not fun. Trying the block-zap, block-zap alternating with the one other last person standing for many long minutes whittling away the guys health till the other players power armour device quits on them and they get taken out? Not fun.
And how common are the costume drops when you do take him down? As while i want the helmet this missions bossfight makes questionite grinding seem refreshing.
Here's an idea I put forward YEARS ago at City of Heroes.
DEATH TRAPS
It's a comic book staple. Instead of just locking the defeated heroes out of the game, put them in some kind of death trap they have to solve. They do it, they return to the fight. They can't and they're stuck until they can be rescued (presumably by someone who escaped their own death trap...).
That page is inaccurate. Warlord uses Grenade Launcher in Phase 1. The fire patches are a result of Napalm Shell which he starts using in Phase 2 if his target is over 25 feet away (which happens to be the distance his grenade launcher and breaching round like to knock you). It appears to be on a cooldown as well. I'm not certain but I think it's 30 seconds.
What is the technology behind Champions respawn feature? You get to teleported to a respawn point, that i get. But how?
In CoH the tech was that in a moment of defeat hero is teleported to hospital via device every hero is carrying. Also that explains in some occasions defeated hero ends up in a jail cell, the villains have tech to disrupted the teleport to their own location.
How that works in CO?
Would it be too hard to implement a Jailcellkind feature, where defeated heroes are thrown in and must fight their way out of there to continue the battle. Or something like defeated heroes must destroy the forcefield around the boss. Locking people out of the fight is just bad, bad, bad feature.
The technology is likely the same as the Automated Systems Supply (A.S.S.) device issued every hero and villain from which we pull weapons of every nature. It was invented by Dr. Smith at ACME.
If statistics really show that what the majority of players want is their instant "I WIN" card all of the time, then the majority of the game's content services that want. Those of us who have been playing through the standard content pre-Alert know enough that it's mostly pretty easy.
As of now, Smash and Warlord Alerts provide, in my opinion, a rather significant level of challenge faced with a sense of failure risk credible enough to be taken seriously. They make up a very tiny fraction of the game's content and I see them as a welcome feature. What's more, the rewards justify the difficulty. For Smash, you get huge XP and XP boosts. For Warlord, you get random Warlord costume pieces + a substantial amount of daily recognition points for an instance that can be completely quickly enough if team competency is there. You're not going to find rewards of those calibres in the rest of the game's trivially easy content.
Jenny, i'm using a high-level (level 39 though i haven't finished buying all my specs and advantages as i like taking my time on those decisions) tempest archetype, and i'm no elite gamer. I am doing this alert with randoms because the people i have been regularly teeming with have given up on champions (having to retcon most of their characters at the last patch was the last straw for them) or are too busy with work to play. I tried the standing on the balcony and using my longest range attacks and it worked just the once, every other time i've been napalmed out of play even using my box-granted recoveries. I simply don't have the time and energy and health required to climb the steep learning curve you like to. And i love bubble-dome helmets and use them on four different characters including my main and really want to get warlords helmet to drop.
So tell me, considering all these factors, just how do i survive this alert and beat Warlord? (and beat him more often than not?)
Jenny, i'm using a high-level (level 39 though i haven't finished buying all my specs and advantages as i like taking my time on those decisions) tempest archetype, and i'm no elite gamer. I am doing this alert with randoms because the people i have been regularly teeming with have given up on champions (having to retcon most of their characters at the last patch was the last straw for them) or are too busy with work to play. I tried the standing on the balcony and using my longest range attacks and it worked just the once, every other time i've been napalmed out of play even using my box-granted recoveries. I simply don't have the time and energy and health required to climb the steep learning curve you like to. And i love bubble-dome helmets and use them on four different characters including my main and really want to get warlords helmet to drop.
So tell me, considering all these factors, just how do i survive this alert and beat Warlord? (and beat him more often than not?)
After reading that wiki page of the Warlord, I felt its seriously incomplete and since I have the book that has detailed information on him. I feel compelled to contribute more information to him but I am not so sure how much I can put in there that Hero Games would allow me to add in, let alone actually putting in that info in the wiki.
Well Bats, you know I respect ya but more often than not its a more of a team effort by ways of providing in enough DPS to quickly dispatch him. This fight is part DPS race and part surviablity because the longer than fight the more those napalm patches will emerge. Which of course means less room to move.
For the most part, if you or the tank is knocked back in any way by Warlord that would need to block ASAP or so other way to not attack him if he is looking at you. Because if you do attack him while he is positioning or posing like he is ready to fire his napalm bomb, that is when you know he is about to fire. I would also suggest investing in using the kinectic field inversion power (defensive force form) to provide further constant protection for you in case you or anyone else get hit. Its not much but it helps survive a tick or two.
Other than that, get a good team working for ya and things will go in your favor.
can we just have the supposed knock resistance that we tanks build up actually work? How many times has the tank been doing their job, when they get knocked (through blocking I might add) to that distance of 25 feet and then get napalm'd.
Knockback has been pretty awful in Champions since ... before FFA even. It began to be noticeable when Cryptic introduced Serpent Lantern, and thus 'beefed up' the Viper goons. Argent was given the grenade-knock spam which we all know and loathe today. There was a bit of a racket about it on these forum pages, but after a while it died down - or Cryptic did the ol' bait and switch, or flashed something shiny at players.
But knockback in the tight confines of these coridoors and knockback out in an open plain are different beasts. In the Harmon Labs, you can get embedded in a wall and can't see jack. This happens so often in the alert, it isn't funny.
No I tried this alert again with a Fire toon last night. Fire shield R2, should give me 60% Fire resist according to the tooltip. It does sorta. Just took me 3 ticks of napalm to die instead of 2. Seriously I did not even have a chance to block, could not see Warlord's attack coming, it was just spin, bang, you're dead, too bad how sad. 100% HP down to zero in less than 2 seconds, it's pretty frustrating. It's certainly not fun.
I know not everyone reads the whole forums, so I just wanted to let anyone reading this know that I posted a video that is pretty typical of what's been going on in the Harmon Labs alert. The post with the link to it is here: http://forums.champions-online.com/showthread.php?t=148824
So tell me, considering all these factors, just how do i survive this alert and beat Warlord? (and beat him more often than not?)
I've played at least a dozen Warlord alerts with my main and a newish PA character. Both characters usually ended up tanking. Venture is actually specced Avenger/Vindicator (but played in Hybrid or Tank) while WolfRAM is Avenger and just getting into the Guardian tree (and likewise played in Hybrid or Tank). To my recollection I've only been on three failed alerts, and one of the victories had only Venture (tanking) and two other level 40 characters. So I have to agree that the Warlord fight itself is not especially hard; you have to be on your toes and be sharp about blocking and managing your cooldowns.
What it is, though, is excessively annoying and tedious. The slog leading up to it is even more annoying and tedious. Both are enough so that today, even though it required pooilng money across characters, I bought the one costume piece I wanted (the helmet) and will never set foot in that miserable encounter again. The reward (usually nothing) is not even close to being commensurate with the aggravation.
warlord... someday... XD
i don´t play to much so it took me a while to realize that those "special" alerts come and go and once their time come, they gone for good... oh what a shame that i havent played them all
All I can say is that, while the other alerts are about getting them done quickly, this one is about patience. Block his big attacks, position yourself carefully, and whittle him down little by little. Watch your health and use the reconstruction circuits on the device as needed (if you don't have a self heal).
I do want to point out that the power armor device is probably not as good as most freeform and several AT builds, so don't use it if you don't have to.
I'd also like to point out that since there's no time limit, stick together and take it slow. If someone on your team can rez, then let them hang back during the Warlord fight and make sure you have someone who can take a hit.
Yea by then the whole room is on fire and we're all dead.
i would have been better if it was a iron man vs warmonger styled fight over the arc reactor. but instead your fighting near the chemical labs in the building and the only way to survive is to put on the suits and throw tanks of liquid nitrogen (having the suit on allows you to do this easily and safely) at warlord to immobilize him for some good hits or to put out the fire patches he deploys so that way you can move around.
C.A.U.'s: We keep your dimensional problems in and the other ones out.... :cool:
Comments
THIS!
Seriously, that damned flame thrower comes out of NOWHERE -- and the only warning s a SPEECH BUBBLE taunt, no charge up sign, no warning...
Absolute truth. This one understands
You're an exception not the rule. Even in that, I sympathise -- even I find there's a threshold of "too easy" at which point boredom sets in -- wanting to just see the end of the story I tried for about half an hour to play on "narrative" difficulty on Mass 3 before knocking it up a couple notches out of absolute boredom -- but there's definitely a line, and real difficulty is not made through onerous artificial elements.
Steep learning curves are not a thing that belongs in Champions. MMOs in general are, more and more for better or worse meant to be accessible -- and the hardcore tough stuff is usually far at the end. This is not the end, this is a random PUGgable Alert -- there is a cataclysmically large difference here. And even then, Champions in particular is not meant to be like other MMOs.. that's part of its charm, really.
A small, noisily vocal group were complaining. This is what listening to them gets you. They always complain, and their idea of fun is always a bad thing to endorse overall -- it needs segregated from mainlien content, because otherwise that small noisily vocal group will be the only ones wanting to play the game at all.
And yeah, that's pretty much what the majority of players here want -- exactly what they had before this was shoehorned n, because at this point only the new bloods and the old hands or those who found the game as is to their liking are around still. There's not a lot to keep the neutral, take it or leave it group here once they see what the game offers, after all -- so the vastest majority of those who do stay kinda like what they'd been given already and don't want this new, fake difficulty nonsense, and certainly don't want it mainlined.
Brilliantly put. I agree.
Zero? Zero might be a little to low. 33% or more (we're leaning toward probably 75% currently) is vastly too much however, especially when its shoddy artificial mechanics and not actual real challenge doing folks in....
Kaufmann n for the win with great ideas as usual. I wholeheartedly endorse this.
If statistics really show that what the majority of players want is their instant "I WIN" card all of the time, then the majority of the game's content services that want. Those of us who have been playing through the standard content pre-Alert know enough that it's mostly pretty easy.
As of now, Smash and Warlord Alerts provide, in my opinion, a rather significant level of challenge faced with a sense of failure risk credible enough to be taken seriously. They make up a very tiny fraction of the game's content and I see them as a welcome feature. What's more, the rewards justify the difficulty. For Smash, you get huge XP and XP boosts. For Warlord, you get random Warlord costume pieces + a substantial amount of daily recognition points for an instance that can be completely quickly enough if team competency is there. You're not going to find rewards of those calibres in the rest of the game's trivially easy content.
A map full of densely-packed spawns of knockback-heavy mobs is a bad design, especially in this game where there is effectively nothing you can do about knockback. The Warlord fight locks out travel powers for no reason other than to prevent players from avoiding a ham-handed near-instant-death mechanic and combines that with an undeclared failure condition. Neither the failure condition nor the travel power restriction have any justification; they are just imposed by fiat. Your likely reward for putting up with all this aggravation (compounded by having to deal with all the usual PUG alert issues) is 1 rec and a handful of cash, which is to say, nothing.
So yeah, I'mma say "terrible design".
In CoH the tech was that in a moment of defeat hero is teleported to hospital via device every hero is carrying. Also that explains in some occasions defeated hero ends up in a jail cell, the villains have tech to disrupted the teleport to their own location.
How that works in CO?
Would it be too hard to implement a Jailcellkind feature, where defeated heroes are thrown in and must fight their way out of there to continue the battle. Or something like defeated heroes must destroy the forcefield around the boss. Locking people out of the fight is just bad, bad, bad feature.
To bring things back my point, does anyone else have a solution to prevent using Zerg'ing to defeat a boss? Most everyone see's nothing wrong the ntire in running into combat, get a couple of hits against the boss, dieing, respawning, run back into battle, rinse and repeat until boss is dead. (Lockout is to prevent suich tactics as the devs don't want players doing that.)
....Whiteout final boss second form.
And Jenny.. again, difficulty isn't bad. Shoddy mechanics to artificially impose it is.
Basically, unless you're using just the right Freeform build, and already know exactly what moves are about to be made, surviving this one is a matter of pure luck more than tactics or strategy. (Being an Inventor AT can help, between the Support Drones and the ability to occasionally turn Warlord into a teddy bear, but it still isn't a sure thing.) And playing the elitist here isn't going to help anyone, except maybe persuading them not to even try this mess if you have to be an expert before you can even start.
I think Warlord also needs a nerf, not a big nerf, but definitely a nerf. Specifically to his fire patches and their ability to crit... and do so several times in a row, with a ludicrously fast tick rate, multiplying their already spectacularly high damage. In a very unlucky turn one of the damn things chain-crit'ed my Con-focused, Invunlerability-equipped, IDF-using Tank and it managed to whittle me to nothing in a few meagre seconds, so quickly that I didn't even have time to hope that I could make my way out of the patch with my travel power shut down.
If the fire patches got nerfed down to something reasonable, even at a bad turn of the dice, then the lockout would be fine. As it stands... no. Combining the absurdly powerful crit-capable fire patches and the lockout is just terrible.
Nope, not fun. Getting hit on the balcony by napalm despite blocking and trying to sidestep and using the recovery device only to be insta-killed by the napalm? Not fun. Trying the block-zap, block-zap alternating with the one other last person standing for many long minutes whittling away the guys health till the other players power armour device quits on them and they get taken out? Not fun.
And how common are the costume drops when you do take him down? As while i want the helmet this missions bossfight makes questionite grinding seem refreshing.
DEATH TRAPS
It's a comic book staple. Instead of just locking the defeated heroes out of the game, put them in some kind of death trap they have to solve. They do it, they return to the fight. They can't and they're stuck until they can be rescued (presumably by someone who escaped their own death trap...).
FAR better than a general lockout.
That page is inaccurate. Warlord uses Grenade Launcher in Phase 1. The fire patches are a result of Napalm Shell which he starts using in Phase 2 if his target is over 25 feet away (which happens to be the distance his grenade launcher and breaching round like to knock you). It appears to be on a cooldown as well. I'm not certain but I think it's 30 seconds.
See here: http://forums.champions-online.com/showthread.php?t=148759
The technology is likely the same as the Automated Systems Supply (A.S.S.) device issued every hero and villain from which we pull weapons of every nature. It was invented by Dr. Smith at ACME.
Jenny, i'm using a high-level (level 39 though i haven't finished buying all my specs and advantages as i like taking my time on those decisions) tempest archetype, and i'm no elite gamer. I am doing this alert with randoms because the people i have been regularly teeming with have given up on champions (having to retcon most of their characters at the last patch was the last straw for them) or are too busy with work to play. I tried the standing on the balcony and using my longest range attacks and it worked just the once, every other time i've been napalmed out of play even using my box-granted recoveries. I simply don't have the time and energy and health required to climb the steep learning curve you like to. And i love bubble-dome helmets and use them on four different characters including my main and really want to get warlords helmet to drop.
So tell me, considering all these factors, just how do i survive this alert and beat Warlord? (and beat him more often than not?)
After reading that wiki page of the Warlord, I felt its seriously incomplete and since I have the book that has detailed information on him. I feel compelled to contribute more information to him but I am not so sure how much I can put in there that Hero Games would allow me to add in, let alone actually putting in that info in the wiki.
Well Bats, you know I respect ya but more often than not its a more of a team effort by ways of providing in enough DPS to quickly dispatch him. This fight is part DPS race and part surviablity because the longer than fight the more those napalm patches will emerge. Which of course means less room to move.
For the most part, if you or the tank is knocked back in any way by Warlord that would need to block ASAP or so other way to not attack him if he is looking at you. Because if you do attack him while he is positioning or posing like he is ready to fire his napalm bomb, that is when you know he is about to fire. I would also suggest investing in using the kinectic field inversion power (defensive force form) to provide further constant protection for you in case you or anyone else get hit. Its not much but it helps survive a tick or two.
Other than that, get a good team working for ya and things will go in your favor.
It's utterly frustrating
But knockback in the tight confines of these coridoors and knockback out in an open plain are different beasts. In the Harmon Labs, you can get embedded in a wall and can't see jack. This happens so often in the alert, it isn't funny.
No I tried this alert again with a Fire toon last night. Fire shield R2, should give me 60% Fire resist according to the tooltip. It does sorta. Just took me 3 ticks of napalm to die instead of 2. Seriously I did not even have a chance to block, could not see Warlord's attack coming, it was just spin, bang, you're dead, too bad how sad. 100% HP down to zero in less than 2 seconds, it's pretty frustrating. It's certainly not fun.
I've played at least a dozen Warlord alerts with my main and a newish PA character. Both characters usually ended up tanking. Venture is actually specced Avenger/Vindicator (but played in Hybrid or Tank) while WolfRAM is Avenger and just getting into the Guardian tree (and likewise played in Hybrid or Tank). To my recollection I've only been on three failed alerts, and one of the victories had only Venture (tanking) and two other level 40 characters. So I have to agree that the Warlord fight itself is not especially hard; you have to be on your toes and be sharp about blocking and managing your cooldowns.
What it is, though, is excessively annoying and tedious. The slog leading up to it is even more annoying and tedious. Both are enough so that today, even though it required pooilng money across characters, I bought the one costume piece I wanted (the helmet) and will never set foot in that miserable encounter again. The reward (usually nothing) is not even close to being commensurate with the aggravation.
i don´t play to much so it took me a while to realize that those "special" alerts come and go and once their time come, they gone for good... oh what a shame that i havent played them all
Yea by then the whole room is on fire and we're all dead.
i would have been better if it was a iron man vs warmonger styled fight over the arc reactor. but instead your fighting near the chemical labs in the building and the only way to survive is to put on the suits and throw tanks of liquid nitrogen (having the suit on allows you to do this easily and safely) at warlord to immobilize him for some good hits or to put out the fire patches he deploys so that way you can move around.