Spinny, you state in the post immediately before my last that you "just" have Heroic Gear. And "only" R5 mods in them.
I haven't done the grinding to get Heroic Gear. I've never needed it before. From the sound of things, though, it's the least I'd need for this Rampage. So yeah, there would seem to be a need for better gear than I've got, and yeah, people need to know what role they're filling in the fight so they can know who (and how) they're supposed to attack next. I'm way too casual for that.
I suppose I could force my way in, but it sounds like nobody would enjoy that at all.
Nemo, are you Gold? If so, are you one of those who refuses to do any testing on PTS because "it's not your job"? If you answered no to either of these, you're not who Smacky was talking to.
Infact I actually managed to complete this with no super stats / specs and only using an energy builder when it for some reason put me in while I was respeccing.
And you know what? My group completed it with me with no defense / heals / damage whatever and I even got 3 points so got a reward. :O
Infact I actually managed to complete this with no super stats / specs and only using an energy builder when it for some reason put me in while I was respeccing.
And you know what? My group completed it with me with no defense / heals / damage whatever and I even got 3 points so got a reward. :O
Call us when you repeat that scenario with a PUG and not your usual pre-made.
Private Queues have plenty of bugs.
Despite that, I'm not sure if I agree with not having the tank be affected by ice prison. It just means DPS needs to pay attention to the adds and kill them. The tank shouldn't even have time to type out "frozen" because the DPS should have killed it already.
I just don't think its fair on the tank's end. Its pretty obv they wanted whoever has Frosticus' attention to want to block often, but disabling it like that just goes against the nature of that design. To put in a very bursty, high-dmg boss is fine, sure, but his tank needs responsive tools to deal w/ that.
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Spinny, you state in the post immediately before my last that you "just" have Heroic Gear. And "only" R5 mods in them.
I haven't done the grinding to get Heroic Gear. I've never needed it before. From the sound of things, though, it's the least I'd need for this Rampage. So yeah, there would seem to be a need for better gear than I've got, and yeah, people need to know what role they're filling in the fight so they can know who (and how) they're supposed to attack next. I'm way too casual for that.
I suppose I could force my way in, but it sounds like nobody would enjoy that at all.
Again, Jon, you'd probably wouldn't be dragging down the group, at least not anymore than most of the PuGs I see still learning the fight. No matter how well built or geared, they fail cause they lack understanding of the fight, or that you need teamwork and balanced heals/mitigation overall (or, aren't full teams, but that's a long-standing queue fail).
In an organized team that plans out its method beforehand- you'd be fine, honestly. Aside from a committed healer and tank for Frosticus, nothing else is really stress-tested, role-wise; rest of the slots can be hybrids_dps (even ATs), or backup tanks/healers/ressers.
No one person can really make or break this fight- even my AoRP healer struggles in PuGs (though much of that is UI issues, as I outlined before- I'm fighting the UI almost as much as the bosses ).
I just don't think its fair on the tank's end. Its pretty obv they wanted whoever has Frosticus' attention to want to block often, but disabling it like that just goes against the nature of that design. To put in a very bursty, high-dmg boss is fine, sure, but his tank needs responsive tools to deal w/ that.
Sure they do, active defenses. I like that the tank has to be broken out from time to time, it puts a lot more pressure on the team to break them out.
I guess I'm the only one here that doesn't think its fair design- esp since ADs are limited for non-FFs. Maybe it wouldn't be as prominent in my mind if the ice prison wasn't as frequent vs. the fire bubble.
To be fair, I've played a total of 3 pre-made runs so far, but put every one of my builds through pugs which meant ATs galore.
And all of them have completed pug instances for me to get the rampage perk. One of the surprise finishes was my AoED pet build with barely any defenses to speak of standing beside a Radiant AT in his sigils and attacking but I was the only one. Players don't bother to take advantage of others enough though from what I see in pugs. Make better use of the tanks and healer's support can go a long way.
I must be a masochist.. but I logged on again and did some random PUG's for the rampage. And bam! Three successful runs in a freaking row - and I even got drops two of those times. :biggrin:
One character just had the Nemesis gear on him. So no dodge or anything. Two things seem to matter. A tank that can hold aggro, and a healer that keep him/her alive, and break holds.
My only complaint.... I ran some more with friends in pre-made group. On two of those runs my healer didn't get anything.. not even Q. I realized that was because I didn't do any damage points to Kenia Blaze.
This has to be addressed.
It's unfair that healers are penalized for not doing damage. Especially, in an alert that pretty much requires a healer works their tuckus off. I spent most of my time trying to keep my Tank alive and functional. If I tried to take my attention away (to do damage), the tank suffered.
If the game is going to require dedicated healers for some content, they should be rewarded for the work they did.
This turned out better than expected. If players have a balanced group going in with 2 strong tanks, 2 healers and most characters in end-game gear (heroic, legion, vigilante, etc.) rampages are really enjoyable. If it's a Pug game with players who just hit 35 and have bad gear it's nearly impossible.
My only real concern is the lingering question about the drop rates. I don't mind low drop rates as long as they are fair to healers and tanks who don't do a lot of damage. With Clarence it seemed fair that the higher DPS got more chances at loot, but here that seems really unfair. I'm guessing the scoreboard is just there for bragging rights, hopefully. Some clarification on how the scoreboard ties in with drop rates would be nice.
It finally feels like CO has an endgame with a lot of rare loot that can be farmed for better gear on alts without the farming feeling repetitive.
This turned out better than expected. If players have a balanced group going in with 2 strong tanks, 2 healers and most characters in end-game gear (heroic, legion, vigilante, etc.) rampages are really enjoyable. If it's a Pug game with players who just hit 35 and have bad gear it's nearly impossible.
My only real concern is the lingering question about the drop rates. I don't mind low drop rates as long as they are fair to healers and tanks who don't do a lot of damage. With Clarence it seemed fair that the higher DPS got more chances at loot, but here that seems really unfair. I'm guessing the scoreboard is just there for bragging rights, hopefully. Some clarification on how the scoreboard ties in with drop rates would be nice.
It finally feels like CO has an endgame with a lot of rare loot that can be farmed for better gear on alts without the farming feeling repetitive.
How is it not repetitive to grind the same rampage over and over? Then open lockbox after lockbox to get the necessary drifter salvage.
Too bad there isn't much of a middle ground, unless we're going to consider lockboxes the middle ground endgame gear grind.
Spinny, you state in the post immediately before my last that you "just" have Heroic Gear. And "only" R5 mods in them.
I haven't done the grinding to get Heroic Gear. I've never needed it before. From the sound of things, though, it's the least I'd need for this Rampage. So yeah, there would seem to be a need for better gear than I've got, and yeah, people need to know what role they're filling in the fight so they can know who (and how) they're supposed to attack next. I'm way too casual for that.
Actually, the level 40 blue gear with 2 slots in it you can pick up off the Auction Exchange for cheap will give you comparable stats to Heroic Gear. Don't believe me? Go look for yourself. I think most people just see blue and purple and assume one is better.. but if you actually look at the stats, you realize that the performance gap between them is insignificant. Heroic gear won't make a difference in your ability to succeed in this fight... or really anywhere in CO. My soldier doesn't even have any Heroic gear and they did perfectly fine.
Like I said somewhere else, there's no need for thinking about roles. I never do. I just sit back, shoot off attacks at whatever is in front of me, and grab my reward at the end. The only way you're going to have to worry about your "role" is if you purposefully decide that you are going to fill a role... i.e., if you WANT to be the tank or a healer.
Being the tank in this is as simple as attacking Frosticus and trying to keep aggro on him, and blocking some of his nastier telegraphed attacks.
Being a healer in this seems to mostly consist of healing the tanks, and then rezzing any of the dps that get one shotted if the tank loses aggro. I don't really play a healer much so I can't tell you much about it.
I don't know what you think is going on in there, but it's definitely not the WoW-style raids that I think you're picturing in your head. No one is going to tell you what target you have to attack... you just look at what's happening in front of you and it will be obvious. Like no seriously, it'll be really obvious; no "go look up the fight" happening here.
If you're "too casual" for this fight, then you're too casual to make a ham sandwich. I'm a casual, 100%, and I enjoy this fight a lot.
Call us when you repeat that scenario with a PUG and not your usual pre-made.
Our "usual premade" changes constantly... I don't think we've had the same 10 people two times in a row so far. Try asking for an invite to a group, or making one of your own... it's not just for """"""elites"""""" you know... if it was, then how the heck would any of us have been in the group? :O
If me and mrhinkeypunk are your definition of "elite", then you have set the bar low... so low that it came ramming out the other side of the planet and shot off into outer space.
I guess I'm the only one here that doesn't think its fair design- esp since ADs are limited for non-FFs. Maybe it wouldn't be as prominent in my mind if the ice prison wasn't as frequent vs. the fire bubble.
Well, I'll relent on that point at least.
Are there any Archetype tanks that don't have access to Protector Spec and Active Defenses?
After running the alert on a few different characters I will say this:
As my tank (Invuln) or my healer (AoRP) on a pre made team and even 70% of the PUGs I was in, I had no issue. I like the fact that these two classes are required/have a role to play in the course of the fight.
Up until now, personally I felt that both of these classes (Support and Tank) had been side-lined in favour of DPS classes due to things like the Forum Malvanum Custom Alert.
Based on the usual performance of the following passives I will say this:
Defiance - Likely will do well in this alert, backed up by healing.
Regen - Similar to Defiance
LR - Whilst I have not used this passive in ages, from what I have seen, it seems to do well.
Fire Form - Meh, it's elemental resistance works but personally when I tried it as a PUG it didn't go too well, but that is likely due to it being a PUG.
Quarry - I ran into the alert with Bionic Bullet, quite haphazardly and started PEWPEWING everywhere and got promptly flash frozen and roasted simultaneously.
Now...here lies my personal issue:
Personal Force Field - The damage values that I've seen Frosty and Kenina put out with things like Frozen Dagger (~20k base) and Fire Blast (45k~ base). Would decimate PFF and likely the user. From what I have seen (I myself have not yet tested, because the values alone speak for themselves and a friend of mine has tested and has confirmed my suspicions/fears.)
I'm not going to litter the thread with ideas or complaints cause no one really wants to hear that, if they did this power would have been fixed up a while ago. Besides I'm sure a post about it will happen soon enough, or maybe not.
A few suggestions regarding the boss fight:
- Could we have some form of perhaps telegraphing for when a frozen spire or the very rare fire cage is going to spawn on someone?
- Allow Healing and Supporting techniques to factor into the scores. Or perhaps just remove the scoring system? It's a team effort as opposed to "a 10 heroes who happen to be in the same place against two wacky villains and want to out do each other" sort of scenario.
- Re iterating the OP's concerns regarding the private queue system. The system is buggy, but it is meant to randomly drag you into Rampages, that you haven't queued for? Match chat also seems to be a bit weird, I was seeing chat from another match whilst I was casually running around MC.
As far as I can tell the 70-80k Map wide Detonations are from Living Fire and Ice and cannot be mitigated.
Does anyone know if anything else in the alert carries that same property?
I'm not so happy with it so far. They look in my direction and I die.
Also anything where there's a scoring mechanic that determines if I get loot, means I'll never get anything. It should just be random.
This probably explains why I've never gotten a single drop from Gravitar in hundreds of runs, if the old rampage used a similar system.
But glad some of you can do it, means eventually I'll get in a team that can carry my worthless self. However if I'll never get anything because I don't do enough damage, I guess winning doesn't matter does it?
I agree. These stupid scoring things ALWAYS favor DPS builds in some way. I don't understand why developers STILL don't understand that not everyone has a DPS build. There's other roles to play.
Why isn't the scoring based only on who does the most healing?
Did this alert last night, and only got 1,500Q and some 50 useless perk points (Why even bother giving perk points anymore?) out of it. And for that reason, I probably won't be running this alert again. The reward was no where near worth the effort.
Considering the healer's job of keeping everyone alive is a lot harder than the DPS' I can see the player base drying up pretty quick for this one. No healer is going to want to waste their time with this alert for a reward that is not even worth it. If the healers stop playing it, then everyone else won't even be able to finish it.
How high your score is doesn't matter except for bragging rights. The drops are not affected by the score.
That's weird how everyone's talking about score has an affect on reward, and concensus seems to show that the higher scorers are usually the ones with the better rewards.
Either way the reward is hardly worth the time and effort that has to be put into this alert. If this is how things are going to be, just bring back the old Gravitar rampage where I can get the exact same reward with less trouble.
That said, I still think the scoring thing is dumb and should be removed. It influences player behavior in ways that aren't helpful. For example, ever since it came to light that only Firegirl gives score, it seems she's always dps'd down much faster than Frostyboy. Even after it's fixed to come from both, it's likely to promote "tunnel vision" where people are much more focused on keeping their dps rotation going on the bosses than they are on breaking living fire/ice, ice cages, and paying attention in general.
The problem is that no matter how much you tell people that score doesn't affect anything, it still remains as a rather prominent source of feedback that players will react to, and the way in which it influences player reaction will never be helpful to anyone.
This is especially true because of the limited information it produces, and the fact that what information it does give is rather meaningless in gauging who contributed the most to the group's success. Healers contribute more than anyone, but will never be present in the score. Tanks are a close second, but there will never be a visible measure of what % of the fight's duration any given individual had aggro. Even just looking at dps, the person who did the most dps is not automatically the greatest contributor, because they may very well have never used their dps to break anyone out of anything; in fact, someone with super high dps could very well have made things more difficult for the group by only focusing on one boss the entire fight and making their health lopsided towards the end.
Scoring system is worse than useless, it is harmfull. Remove plz.
PS - you want a great example of scoring system promoting negative player behavior? Run Red Winter with me sometime xD
That's weird how everyone's talking about score has an affect on reward, and concensus seems to show that the higher scorers are usually the ones with the better rewards.
The consensus doesn't show that at all. I know a healer who has like 12 tokens already. None of the runs where I scored top of the charts even netted me anything other than questionite. I only have DPS characters in the rampages, and I only have 3 tokens. That healer isn't out-dpsing me.
Either way the reward is hardly worth the time and effort that has to be put into this alert. If this is how things are going to be, just bring back the old Gravitar rampage where I can get the exact same reward with less trouble.
Yes, screw new content, we just want our reward for "less trouble". Video games.
Yes, screw new content, we just want our reward for "less trouble". Video games.
Ironically, this is the mind set of people, they think they should get the rewards instantly for doing something instead of bothering. But then again most people saying that are also the ones that believe playing as a team player is stupid an archaic game design.
No, thats not it, people like to be rewarded for completing a challenge, they are not being rewarded here. There is a big, big difference between spoon-feeding someone success and rewards and rewarding someone when they do something challenging. This is not a rewarding rampage purely because it doesn't give the item people want out of it, simple as that.
It gives me the item that I want out of it every single time.
did a F&I, with Scruffy , my nothing in particular build(2 attacks, 2 summons, 2 heals, etc). got third or fourth on the table and got 1500q and a dog whacker... I mean Axe
nettest results today 333ms. dodging those circles was not fun
Glad I didn't try it with a melee character
now to continue with house cleaning.
I don't get the hatred at the supposed "trinity" element that is kinda pushed.
Yes, overall, it's an old hat for MMOs. I get that part. But with the complaints I read, it ends up sounding to me like, "I want team content where we don't have to be a team." It's an oxymoron. Being a team means people have roles to play to cover the weaknesses of each other. Teaming up is a long standing tradition in comics. Avengers, X-men, Justice League... their members all bring different skill sets to the groups. Probably could easily match up members with our ATs in many cases.
You can make team content that doesn't require you to have someone healing a tank all the time in every, stinking encounter. The X Men don't have someone healing them all the time they protect each other using OTHER powers and abilities to PREVENT each other from being seriously hurt. They heal outside the battle, not during it, the only one that heals in a fight is wolverine.
Other super hero teams tend to be the same way as the x men.
In mmorpgs however it's ALWAYS a tank taking ALL the hits and some healer replenishing his health bar at all times in any encounter. It's predictable, it's boring, it's dull. When every encounter is dealt with that way, you don't have a game anymore due to just how predictable it is.
Edit: The fact is, support in this game is limited to almost exclusively healing anymore, ESPECIALLY in this particular battle, and debuffs apparently do nothing to the bosses in fact they seem to be changing it so legendaries/cosmics will be unaffected by debuffs and cc 100% while not including enough of a variety of buffs to mitigate damage to fit any variety of themes anymore. Some "freedom".
Therakiel and Gravitar both disagree, as they have massive non tank healing required (or more accurately, people bouncing lights for Therakiel). Vikorin has a boatload of damage going to everyone, the Bronze King I don't remember too well.
For custom alerts, Forum Malvanum needs approximately zero tank and spank. Eye of the Dragon has a ton of AOE, as does Cybermind, and for most of the non 40 lairs you have a large amount of add phases/aggro everywhere situations that need a healer to heal everyone.
Generally speaking, in comics the Thing will continually get beat on all the time because that's his job. Much like Wolverine, or really the Hulk, virtually all groups have a "tank" just as often as all comic book groups have a "healer." Teamwork revolves around different strengths and this is most obvious if you just look at the Fantastic Four (Blaster, Tank, Healer, Jack, see if you can attribute it where it should go).
When everyone brings the same thing to a group, it's not teamwork, it's throwing numbers at the problem and having more numbers. This leads to atrocious min maxing and horrific elitism (more then there is now) and is all together awful for any sort of grouping. Case in point: Guild Wars 1 (and 2, though I don't know specifics) REQUIRED people to be in bear stance and either one monk or one paragon. Your class and skill set didn't matter, nor did your layout, you NEEDED to be in bear and the paragon/monk NEEDED a specific set of skills. There's no trinity in that game, or 2, and it shows.
Get rid of the penalty of no reward for being too busy healing to dps. Frosty is hitting hard enough I can't take the time to target someone other than the tank a lot of the time or the whole rampage team drops like dominoes.
Ironically, this is the mind set of people, they think they should get the rewards instantly for doing something instead of bothering. But then again most people saying that are also the ones that believe playing as a team player is stupid an archaic game design.
That's not what I'm saying at all.
But when the content takes 3x longer to complete, and still get 1,500Q. I'd rather do the old content. That is IF you actually complete it, which isn't always the case because of people leaving and the connection issues as of late.
Rewards are supposed to scale with effort. If the alert is 3 times harder and takes much longer to complete, then the base reward is supposed to reflect that. Just like a paycheck is supposed to scale with the cost of living.
Oh, Sky Command (unless siginificantly changed) is going to be 3x as long as F&I, so if the drop rate is unchanged the forum backlash will be... impressive.
But when the content takes 3x longer to complete, and still get 1,500Q. I'd rather do the old content. That is IF you actually complete it, which isn't always the case because of people leaving and the connection issues as of late.
Rewards are supposed to scale with effort. If the alert is 3 times harder and takes much longer to complete, then the base reward is supposed to reflect that. Just like a paycheck is supposed to scale with the cost of living.
Fire and Ice is actually a shorter fight than Gravitar in my experience.
In a different game - Smite - some things that are measured on the end score screen are;
Damage done,
Damage mitigated,
Healing done
(and damage to minions but that doesnt apply here)
Final score for a Rampage should be a sum of all 3 factors. Tanks get points for TAKING and reducing damage. Healers get points for healing done, in addition to scoring actual damage. In fact, if a tank is mitigating lots of damage, and doing good damage AND maybe self healing a fair bit - they should be getting the highest scores in the battle.
The other problem with pugs is you might get 5 hybrid random builds in your group - and have 0 tanks and/or healers out of the whole group. Fight lasts seconds not minutes. *Attack - BAM 30-40k damage, see a string of 'Defeated' across the players on the team...game over.*
And as for not enough player testing...it doesnt take a math wizard to know that hitting non-tank builds with 20-40k damage spikes is going to insta-kill players with 5-7k health, and 80k spikes?
It is too much work to make the queues force role selection, so healers and tanks in every group etc, but that seems to be the direction it is going in.
Comments
Infact I actually managed to complete this with no super stats / specs and only using an energy builder when it for some reason put me in while I was respeccing.
And you know what? My group completed it with me with no defense / heals / damage whatever and I even got 3 points so got a reward. :O
A Playlist of my CO PvP video's (starting from post nerf PTS team duels)
Call us when you repeat that scenario with a PUG and not your usual pre-made.
I just don't think its fair on the tank's end. Its pretty obv they wanted whoever has Frosticus' attention to want to block often, but disabling it like that just goes against the nature of that design. To put in a very bursty, high-dmg boss is fine, sure, but his tank needs responsive tools to deal w/ that.
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Again, Jon, you'd probably wouldn't be dragging down the group, at least not anymore than most of the PuGs I see still learning the fight. No matter how well built or geared, they fail cause they lack understanding of the fight, or that you need teamwork and balanced heals/mitigation overall (or, aren't full teams, but that's a long-standing queue fail).
In an organized team that plans out its method beforehand- you'd be fine, honestly. Aside from a committed healer and tank for Frosticus, nothing else is really stress-tested, role-wise; rest of the slots can be hybrids_dps (even ATs), or backup tanks/healers/ressers.
No one person can really make or break this fight- even my AoRP healer struggles in PuGs (though much of that is UI issues, as I outlined before- I'm fighting the UI almost as much as the bosses
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
Sure they do, active defenses. I like that the tank has to be broken out from time to time, it puts a lot more pressure on the team to break them out.
Well, I'll relent on that point at least.
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
And all of them have completed pug instances for me to get the rampage perk. One of the surprise finishes was my AoED pet build with barely any defenses to speak of standing beside a Radiant AT in his sigils and attacking but I was the only one. Players don't bother to take advantage of others enough though from what I see in pugs. Make better use of the tanks and healer's support can go a long way.
One character just had the Nemesis gear on him. So no dodge or anything. Two things seem to matter. A tank that can hold aggro, and a healer that keep him/her alive, and break holds.
My only complaint.... I ran some more with friends in pre-made group. On two of those runs my healer didn't get anything.. not even Q. I realized that was because I didn't do any damage points to Kenia Blaze.
This has to be addressed.
It's unfair that healers are penalized for not doing damage. Especially, in an alert that pretty much requires a healer works their tuckus off. I spent most of my time trying to keep my Tank alive and functional. If I tried to take my attention away (to do damage), the tank suffered.
If the game is going to require dedicated healers for some content, they should be rewarded for the work they did.
My only real concern is the lingering question about the drop rates. I don't mind low drop rates as long as they are fair to healers and tanks who don't do a lot of damage. With Clarence it seemed fair that the higher DPS got more chances at loot, but here that seems really unfair. I'm guessing the scoreboard is just there for bragging rights, hopefully. Some clarification on how the scoreboard ties in with drop rates would be nice.
It finally feels like CO has an endgame with a lot of rare loot that can be farmed for better gear on alts without the farming feeling repetitive.
How is it not repetitive to grind the same rampage over and over? Then open lockbox after lockbox to get the necessary drifter salvage.
Too bad there isn't much of a middle ground, unless we're going to consider lockboxes the middle ground endgame gear grind.
Actually, the level 40 blue gear with 2 slots in it you can pick up off the Auction Exchange for cheap will give you comparable stats to Heroic Gear. Don't believe me? Go look for yourself. I think most people just see blue and purple and assume one is better.. but if you actually look at the stats, you realize that the performance gap between them is insignificant. Heroic gear won't make a difference in your ability to succeed in this fight... or really anywhere in CO. My soldier doesn't even have any Heroic gear and they did perfectly fine.
Like I said somewhere else, there's no need for thinking about roles. I never do. I just sit back, shoot off attacks at whatever is in front of me, and grab my reward at the end. The only way you're going to have to worry about your "role" is if you purposefully decide that you are going to fill a role... i.e., if you WANT to be the tank or a healer.
Being the tank in this is as simple as attacking Frosticus and trying to keep aggro on him, and blocking some of his nastier telegraphed attacks.
Being a healer in this seems to mostly consist of healing the tanks, and then rezzing any of the dps that get one shotted if the tank loses aggro. I don't really play a healer much so I can't tell you much about it.
I don't know what you think is going on in there, but it's definitely not the WoW-style raids that I think you're picturing in your head. No one is going to tell you what target you have to attack... you just look at what's happening in front of you and it will be obvious. Like no seriously, it'll be really obvious; no "go look up the fight" happening here.
If you're "too casual" for this fight, then you're too casual to make a ham sandwich. I'm a casual, 100%, and I enjoy this fight a lot.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Our "usual premade" changes constantly... I don't think we've had the same 10 people two times in a row so far. Try asking for an invite to a group, or making one of your own... it's not just for """"""elites"""""" you know... if it was, then how the heck would any of us have been in the group? :O
If me and mrhinkeypunk are your definition of "elite", then you have set the bar low... so low that it came ramming out the other side of the planet and shot off into outer space.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Are there any Archetype tanks that don't have access to Protector Spec and Active Defenses?
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
As my tank (Invuln) or my healer (AoRP) on a pre made team and even 70% of the PUGs I was in, I had no issue. I like the fact that these two classes are required/have a role to play in the course of the fight.
Up until now, personally I felt that both of these classes (Support and Tank) had been side-lined in favour of DPS classes due to things like the Forum Malvanum Custom Alert.
Based on the usual performance of the following passives I will say this:
Defiance - Likely will do well in this alert, backed up by healing.
Regen - Similar to Defiance
LR - Whilst I have not used this passive in ages, from what I have seen, it seems to do well.
Fire Form - Meh, it's elemental resistance works but personally when I tried it as a PUG it didn't go too well, but that is likely due to it being a PUG.
Quarry - I ran into the alert with Bionic Bullet, quite haphazardly and started PEWPEWING everywhere and got promptly flash frozen and roasted simultaneously.
Now...here lies my personal issue:
Personal Force Field - The damage values that I've seen Frosty and Kenina put out with things like Frozen Dagger (~20k base) and Fire Blast (45k~ base). Would decimate PFF and likely the user. From what I have seen (I myself have not yet tested, because the values alone speak for themselves and a friend of mine has tested and has confirmed my suspicions/fears.)
I'm not going to litter the thread with ideas or complaints cause no one really wants to hear that, if they did this power would have been fixed up a while ago. Besides I'm sure a post about it will happen soon enough, or maybe not.
A few suggestions regarding the boss fight:
- Could we have some form of perhaps telegraphing for when a frozen spire or the very rare fire cage is going to spawn on someone?
- Allow Healing and Supporting techniques to factor into the scores. Or perhaps just remove the scoring system? It's a team effort as opposed to "a 10 heroes who happen to be in the same place against two wacky villains and want to out do each other" sort of scenario.
- Re iterating the OP's concerns regarding the private queue system. The system is buggy, but it is meant to randomly drag you into Rampages, that you haven't queued for? Match chat also seems to be a bit weird, I was seeing chat from another match whilst I was casually running around MC.
As far as I can tell the 70-80k Map wide Detonations are from Living Fire and Ice and cannot be mitigated.
Does anyone know if anything else in the alert carries that same property?
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I agree. These stupid scoring things ALWAYS favor DPS builds in some way. I don't understand why developers STILL don't understand that not everyone has a DPS build. There's other roles to play.
Why isn't the scoring based only on who does the most healing?
Did this alert last night, and only got 1,500Q and some 50 useless perk points (Why even bother giving perk points anymore?) out of it. And for that reason, I probably won't be running this alert again. The reward was no where near worth the effort.
Considering the healer's job of keeping everyone alive is a lot harder than the DPS' I can see the player base drying up pretty quick for this one. No healer is going to want to waste their time with this alert for a reward that is not even worth it. If the healers stop playing it, then everyone else won't even be able to finish it.
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That's weird how everyone's talking about score has an affect on reward, and concensus seems to show that the higher scorers are usually the ones with the better rewards.
Either way the reward is hardly worth the time and effort that has to be put into this alert. If this is how things are going to be, just bring back the old Gravitar rampage where I can get the exact same reward with less trouble.
The problem is that no matter how much you tell people that score doesn't affect anything, it still remains as a rather prominent source of feedback that players will react to, and the way in which it influences player reaction will never be helpful to anyone.
This is especially true because of the limited information it produces, and the fact that what information it does give is rather meaningless in gauging who contributed the most to the group's success. Healers contribute more than anyone, but will never be present in the score. Tanks are a close second, but there will never be a visible measure of what % of the fight's duration any given individual had aggro. Even just looking at dps, the person who did the most dps is not automatically the greatest contributor, because they may very well have never used their dps to break anyone out of anything; in fact, someone with super high dps could very well have made things more difficult for the group by only focusing on one boss the entire fight and making their health lopsided towards the end.
Scoring system is worse than useless, it is harmfull. Remove plz.
PS - you want a great example of scoring system promoting negative player behavior? Run Red Winter with me sometime xD
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The consensus doesn't show that at all. I know a healer who has like 12 tokens already. None of the runs where I scored top of the charts even netted me anything other than questionite. I only have DPS characters in the rampages, and I only have 3 tokens. That healer isn't out-dpsing me.
Yes, screw new content, we just want our reward for "less trouble". Video games.
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Ironically, this is the mind set of people, they think they should get the rewards instantly for doing something instead of bothering. But then again most people saying that are also the ones that believe playing as a team player is stupid an archaic game design.
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It gives me the item that I want out of it every single time.
That item is fun.
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nettest results today 333ms. dodging those circles was not fun
Glad I didn't try it with a melee character
now to continue with house cleaning.
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Yes, overall, it's an old hat for MMOs. I get that part. But with the complaints I read, it ends up sounding to me like, "I want team content where we don't have to be a team." It's an oxymoron. Being a team means people have roles to play to cover the weaknesses of each other. Teaming up is a long standing tradition in comics. Avengers, X-men, Justice League... their members all bring different skill sets to the groups. Probably could easily match up members with our ATs in many cases.
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Therakiel and Gravitar both disagree, as they have massive non tank healing required (or more accurately, people bouncing lights for Therakiel). Vikorin has a boatload of damage going to everyone, the Bronze King I don't remember too well.
For custom alerts, Forum Malvanum needs approximately zero tank and spank. Eye of the Dragon has a ton of AOE, as does Cybermind, and for most of the non 40 lairs you have a large amount of add phases/aggro everywhere situations that need a healer to heal everyone.
Generally speaking, in comics the Thing will continually get beat on all the time because that's his job. Much like Wolverine, or really the Hulk, virtually all groups have a "tank" just as often as all comic book groups have a "healer." Teamwork revolves around different strengths and this is most obvious if you just look at the Fantastic Four (Blaster, Tank, Healer, Jack, see if you can attribute it where it should go).
When everyone brings the same thing to a group, it's not teamwork, it's throwing numbers at the problem and having more numbers. This leads to atrocious min maxing and horrific elitism (more then there is now) and is all together awful for any sort of grouping. Case in point: Guild Wars 1 (and 2, though I don't know specifics) REQUIRED people to be in bear stance and either one monk or one paragon. Your class and skill set didn't matter, nor did your layout, you NEEDED to be in bear and the paragon/monk NEEDED a specific set of skills. There's no trinity in that game, or 2, and it shows.
That's not what I'm saying at all.
But when the content takes 3x longer to complete, and still get 1,500Q. I'd rather do the old content. That is IF you actually complete it, which isn't always the case because of people leaving and the connection issues as of late.
Rewards are supposed to scale with effort. If the alert is 3 times harder and takes much longer to complete, then the base reward is supposed to reflect that. Just like a paycheck is supposed to scale with the cost of living.
Fire and Ice is actually a shorter fight than Gravitar in my experience.
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Damage done,
Damage mitigated,
Healing done
(and damage to minions but that doesnt apply here)
Final score for a Rampage should be a sum of all 3 factors. Tanks get points for TAKING and reducing damage. Healers get points for healing done, in addition to scoring actual damage. In fact, if a tank is mitigating lots of damage, and doing good damage AND maybe self healing a fair bit - they should be getting the highest scores in the battle.
The other problem with pugs is you might get 5 hybrid random builds in your group - and have 0 tanks and/or healers out of the whole group. Fight lasts seconds not minutes. *Attack - BAM 30-40k damage, see a string of 'Defeated' across the players on the team...game over.*
And as for not enough player testing...it doesnt take a math wizard to know that hitting non-tank builds with 20-40k damage spikes is going to insta-kill players with 5-7k health, and 80k spikes?
It is too much work to make the queues force role selection, so healers and tanks in every group etc, but that seems to be the direction it is going in.