Okay, this has gotta be one of the spiffiest features going — the new Leveling Pact in I13.
Basically, two characters (at this time) of level 5 or below (at this time) can form a leveling pact, meaning that they end up with the same level of XP, individually earn XP at half the rate, but share the other half with their pact buddy.
Results?
- A duo that’s running around doing stuff is going up at the same amount, just as before.
- But you always ding together. Even if you end up with different bonuses on XP rate or have mission credit that just goes to the mission owner, or click on different numbers of glowies — everyone gets the same XP.
- Your pact buddy isn’t on right now, or is busy screwing around at Wentworths, or is on a bio break, or you see a target of opportunity on the way over to the next mish? No worries, and no need to cool your heels. You can go out hunting on your own, even running missions on your own, and you both go up in XP.
The last is so, so nice.
There are a few oddities of the system. It can take a few moments for the XP division to catch up with you — we’ve finished a mish and gotten the final reward — but not dinged to the next level until zoning out of the mission, for example. Mildly disconcerting, but not a big problem.
Margie and I have one duo like this so far, and, damn, it’s just pleasantly nice. Enough so that I really wish they’d increase the level that you can enter into the pact. I’m sure they’re tuning and testing and watching for exploits — but in the meantime, it would almost be worth it to take some of our sub-travel-power toons and restart them in a pact.
The other eventual expansion of the LP comes in syncing up more than two characters at a time. Not a feature we’re likely to use, but I can imagine times it could be used.
And then there’s the PL angle — folks expressing concerns that Bad People will offer to “PL yuh” via a Leveling Pact. Oh noz! Except … so the heck what? I’ve never seen the significant harm of Power Leveling services, except that people pay exorbitant money and there are probably sweat shops involved somewhere. But my experience of the game isn’t hurt by someone “cheating” in that way., at least not in any way I can think of.
Ah, you guys are leveling pacted. Now that’s what I call romance! 🙂
Yuppers. And it gets rid of the rivalry as to who dings first. 🙂
I was disappointed you could only link two characters – we’ve got a group that tends to play together, and made toons to “go” together. However, we play different amounts, and some of us suffer more greatly from altitis, so it’ll be nice to log back on and still be able to play together.
In other news, so far I’m not really impressed with the shield power sets…
Again, I think the limit on numbers is short-term. There are enough potential oddities in the system that limiting it to two and getting the bugs out makes a lot of sense.
Margie’s playtesting a shields scrapper with me (in our single LP to date). I’ll leave her to give her own feedback.
I find it annoying that I run one shield toggle and have less endurance than Dave running SR. Oh Course it might be the fire secondary. I went with it for a concept but I don’t love it.
Hey Margie! I’m running a Shield/Fire Tank over on Justice (Agni’s Avatar), and I haven’t noticed any significant end difference from other Tanks. My experience has been that while Toggles make end problems worse, but it’s the attack powers that suck down the End. As a Tank, I didn’t have End problems running my 2 toggles until I got my second Fire attack.
So far Shields seem very similar to any other low level set . .frankly sucky. I’m looking forward to lvl 20 and decent IOs/SOs. My major annoyance with the set is a Tank set with clicky Mez protection . . .grrrrrrr.
All that aside, I have to say that the graphics folks really hit the Shields out of the park. Agni has the Fire Shield, and it really looks great!
Members of my SG have reported end issues with shield tankers, but it’s been suggested that the root of these problems are their use of veteran bonus attack powers (Sands of Mu, Blackwand, Nemesis staff, etc) which are huge power drains and can’t accept enhancement slots.
The shield scrappers haven’t complained as much, and I’m not certain why. I suspect differences in builds (slotting endurance modifiers), or differences in style.
We had a run out last night of the Shield Maidens, an all Shield super-team.
3 Tanks (Super Strength, Battle Axe, and Energy) and 2 Scrappers (Fire and Broad Sword).
Best was to describe it id Capital-M Mad..
The ammount of aggro we were generating was phenominal.
We did suffer a bit from End-drought, but no more than any other Tank that I’ve played, but we did make liberal use of Nemi-staves and such so that probably didn’t help.
I must admit I like Battle Axe, the knockup rocks.
Oh, if ever your on Freedom..
Maiden US
Maiden Afrique
Maiden Shibuya
Blaze N’Maiden
Maiden Space
We did some unscientific research into the end drain phenomenon, and have come up with a better understanding of why shield scrappers seem to handle the end drain much better at low levels. The consensus was that low-level scrapper fights are usually shorter than low-level tanker fights because of one reason: critical hits. A lot of tanker secondary powers do moderate to high damage (we tested ax) which are comparable to what a scrapper does in his primary at that level. In fact, it’s higher than what a scrapper usually gets – but a scrapper still ends up doing way more damage.
The big difference is the critical strike – scrappers do big damage on their swings at a very high rate. But in addition to that, scrappers usually swing much faster because of their faster recycle rates.
This means that in the lowbie fights, where minions are beaten in 2 swings by scrappers and 3 swings by a tanker and bosses are beaten on 5 swings by a scrapper and 7 by a tanker, a scrapper will end any given fight much faster. The obvious conclusion might be that scrapper specializes in damage at the expense of health totals and damage resistance, but this is actually not all that big a deal at the lowbie levels, because low level mobs really don’t hit hard.
The real difference between low-level shield scrappers and tankers is in fighting large groups (6+ mobs). In these kinds of fights, the end problem eventually catches up with the scrapper while the lower health and higher damage taken is there at the start of the fight. The tanker has a pretty even experience the entire time through in regards to health. Should both a shield scrapper and shield tanker survive a fight with the same type and large number of mobs, the scrapper will have less health and endurance than a tanker.
Of course in a party, the tanker’s ability to generate aggro automatically is a huge boon with squishies, but in the current environment where everyone is a tanker or scrapper, it’s less prevalent.
All of this begins to change at around L12 due to the way characters project in their development, and of course, by L20, all the archetypes should be firmly entrenched in their traditional roles.
As an added test, we tested two axe/shield tankers side by side for a little bit, with only one of them with their shield defense toggled on. You might be surprised that in the low levels, the survivability advantage the tanker with his shield toggled on wasn’t really that great.
Ho-Ho was (is) a SS/Axe tank. As always, I was annoyed by the lack of actual damage, but I loooooooved the knock-up. My job was not only to keep team aggro, but to keep bosses and lieuts on their butts. Which was sort of an overall mission statement for Ho-Ho, anyway.
I agree, pretty much, with your analysis on Tanker vs Scrapper. Scrappers usually grab offensive powers faster with the idea that the best defense is a good offense — a Tank-less team is probably okay as long as they don’t get into battles with too many mobs (drawing a second group by mistake, etc.), at which point things can so south pretty fast. Or, put another way, even with secondaries other than Regen, Scrappers tend to be golden until they are suddenly dead. 🙂
I’ve played a couple of Tanks at length — both Ho-Ho and Velvet — and in both cases I found them great fun in large, well-organized groups, but I’ve found Tanks less fun in PUGs (since they really need to take a leadership role, which is hard in bad PUGs) and in duos or solo. Might be time to try it again, though.