Post by Balshor on Jan 25, 2005 2:33:34 GMT -5
Prior to Hami I3, the generally established strategy of taking out the mitos revolved around blasters sniping from out of range of the mitos' return fire. This required six-slotting the snipe attacks with range enhancements, often range enhancements at least 2 levels above the hero. The blasters would line up and let loose.
Of course, 6-slotting your snipe for range means you'll be doing piddly-ass damage. To overcome this problem, massive damage buffs (fortitude, AM, and fulcrum shift) are used on the blasters while radiation and storm heroes debuffed the mitos' damage resistance. Stacked tactics were sufficient to keep the blasters hitting their target. In general, defense buff/debuffs or accuracy debuffs are not used as the mitos' have an insanely high initial accuracy, and everybody's staying out of range anyway.
There were really only three real hurles to cross in this initial mito clearing. First, this takes a long time. Heroes (especially the non-buffing, non-sniping ones) would get bored, discouraged, or otherwise become disinterested in putting forth their full effort. This just slowed things down more.
Secondly, there is the difficulty in keeping everybody working together to clear the mitos. (Truthfully, lack of organization and teamwork has killed far more raids than Hami.) In order to make sure that all snipers were targetting the same mito (especially under long range conditions), a single hero with phase shift would run in close, select a target, and have all snipers assist off of him or her. To aid this, every blaster would add that hero to their friends list in order to make targetting easier. (Heroes can be targetted by selecting their name on your friends' list, a fact that makes playing hide-and-seek far less challenging than it should be.)
This tended to keep the blasters on target and focused on the correct mito. Coordinating the distribution of buffs is a bit trickier, but since individual buffers can work mostly independently, this proved not to be a big issue. The largest miscommunication usually arose when a tank or scrapper would herd a group of level 42-45 DE minions (no threat at all to level 50 heroes) to the group for controllers to hold and kineticists to fulcrum shift. Bored non-sniping heroes or controllers with their pets out, thinking the group was under attack or being trained by a griefer, would immediately slaughter the fulcrum fodder, depriving the snipers of a significant damage boost and destroying the hard work the herder put into luring those DE away from the monster walls.
The final hurdle in beating the mitos is purely technical. When the client exceeds a certain limit of heroes and mobs to be drawn onscreen, the most distant heroes and mobs are not rendered. Thus, Hamidon and the mitos often vanish temporarily from the players' screens. This problem can be worked around using the friend/assist technique stated above. Additionally, the sheer number of heroes and powers going off lags out even the best of computers. To alieviate that strain, all heroes would don costumes without capes or auras, and heroes tried to minimize the use of powers that provided no boost to the raid (eg, no forcefields, no pets, no spam healing unless necessary, etc.)
Using these techniques, Pinnacle has cleared out all of the mitos in the past. The main difference between previous Hami and Hami I3 at this stage is that we cannot expect to avoid all return fire. This will necessitate a healing umbrella (since other methods of damage mitigation are useless), which will in turn increase the graphics strain on everybody. These problems, however, are hopefully easily overcome with proper teamwork and restraint on the part of raid participants.
Of course, 6-slotting your snipe for range means you'll be doing piddly-ass damage. To overcome this problem, massive damage buffs (fortitude, AM, and fulcrum shift) are used on the blasters while radiation and storm heroes debuffed the mitos' damage resistance. Stacked tactics were sufficient to keep the blasters hitting their target. In general, defense buff/debuffs or accuracy debuffs are not used as the mitos' have an insanely high initial accuracy, and everybody's staying out of range anyway.
There were really only three real hurles to cross in this initial mito clearing. First, this takes a long time. Heroes (especially the non-buffing, non-sniping ones) would get bored, discouraged, or otherwise become disinterested in putting forth their full effort. This just slowed things down more.
Secondly, there is the difficulty in keeping everybody working together to clear the mitos. (Truthfully, lack of organization and teamwork has killed far more raids than Hami.) In order to make sure that all snipers were targetting the same mito (especially under long range conditions), a single hero with phase shift would run in close, select a target, and have all snipers assist off of him or her. To aid this, every blaster would add that hero to their friends list in order to make targetting easier. (Heroes can be targetted by selecting their name on your friends' list, a fact that makes playing hide-and-seek far less challenging than it should be.)
This tended to keep the blasters on target and focused on the correct mito. Coordinating the distribution of buffs is a bit trickier, but since individual buffers can work mostly independently, this proved not to be a big issue. The largest miscommunication usually arose when a tank or scrapper would herd a group of level 42-45 DE minions (no threat at all to level 50 heroes) to the group for controllers to hold and kineticists to fulcrum shift. Bored non-sniping heroes or controllers with their pets out, thinking the group was under attack or being trained by a griefer, would immediately slaughter the fulcrum fodder, depriving the snipers of a significant damage boost and destroying the hard work the herder put into luring those DE away from the monster walls.
The final hurdle in beating the mitos is purely technical. When the client exceeds a certain limit of heroes and mobs to be drawn onscreen, the most distant heroes and mobs are not rendered. Thus, Hamidon and the mitos often vanish temporarily from the players' screens. This problem can be worked around using the friend/assist technique stated above. Additionally, the sheer number of heroes and powers going off lags out even the best of computers. To alieviate that strain, all heroes would don costumes without capes or auras, and heroes tried to minimize the use of powers that provided no boost to the raid (eg, no forcefields, no pets, no spam healing unless necessary, etc.)
Using these techniques, Pinnacle has cleared out all of the mitos in the past. The main difference between previous Hami and Hami I3 at this stage is that we cannot expect to avoid all return fire. This will necessitate a healing umbrella (since other methods of damage mitigation are useless), which will in turn increase the graphics strain on everybody. These problems, however, are hopefully easily overcome with proper teamwork and restraint on the part of raid participants.
