User talk:Quizzical/Sorted

Vizunah is only difficult if you don't have MM (preferably two). O_o I've personally made my other heroes into minion masters if I didn't have 2 necro heroes for this one. :P I'm surprised to see it so high on this list. So what are hero restrictions, if any? Because if none, then this is one of the easiest Masters in my books, even with the other team being all AI. On the other hand, Dzagonur and Gate of Madness are the two "nightmares" that I refuse to even attempt HM with h/h. Eternal Grove is a given just because of the split, but not that hard with two people and half a brain each, so it gets #3 from me. RoseOfKali 19:04, February 19, 2010 (UTC)


 * MMs, or semi-MMs in the form of something like Discord :> --- [[Image:VipermagiSig.JPG]] -- (contribs) &emsp;(talk)  19:26, February 19, 2010 (UTC)
 * Of course. Exploding meat shields and spike pwrs for the afflicted rits? Yes, pls. RoseOfKali [[Image:RoseOfKaliSIG.png]] 19:35, February 19, 2010 (UTC)


 * Please note the assumptions that go into making the list, in order to have an apples to apples comparison. It was one player, three heroes, and the rest of the party henchmen.  The player was of a class that didn't match up very well with the mission.  No putting attribute points into a secondary profession (which rules out Sabway and Discordway).  No peculiar gimmick gear that isn't widely useable (which rules out 600 and 55 builds).  No use of PVE only skills except for Nightfall skills, and the only class-specific Sunspear skill was the one for the primary class of the character.  No consumables.  No use of titles that grant bonuses, apart from Lightbringer rank 4.  Must get both mission and bonus in the same run, or master's reward, depending on the campaign.  Start dropping assumptions and you change things considerably.
 * In sorting missions, I used a combination of how often I failed the mission and how close it subjectively felt like I was to wiping on other occasions. I did implicitly tweak the failure numbers, putting far more weight on what happened after I had figured out my strategy, and little weight on what happened in the first few attempts.  Because I grouped with other players about half of the time, this skewed things somewhat as well.  Failures that had nothing to do with skill or strategy, such as due to getting disconnected from the server, were discarded entirely.
 * Some missions are "randomly" hard, as in, seem easy much of the time, but then suddenly I'd wipe without warning, and after making no obvious mistakes. If a mission were set up such that half of the time you win and it seems easy and half of the time you wipe, without regard to the skill of the player, I'd rate that mission as very hard, because I couldn't reliably beat it.
 * I'll go into a bit of detail on missions mentioned above. Vizunah Square is easy if you have four players and twelve heroes.  I'd argue that having several players makes Vizunah Square easier by a bigger margin than any other mission in the game.  It's much harder with one player, three heroes, and twelve henchmen and the restrictions above.  It's also much harder if the one player is melee, as having to move around a lot to fight mobs makes it much harder to distribute damage evenly between your party and the henchmen party due to their AI of how they do or don't follow you.  I had, in total, 18 failures in that mission, in spite of about half of my characters clearing the mission with a group, and nearly always succeeding in the grouped attempts.  That figure of 18 failures is second only to 52 in Eternal Grove, with only one character able to win solo subject to the above restrictions.
 * In fact, I dare say it's essentially impossible to reliably win Vizunah Square subject to the above restrictions and an unfavorable choice of your own character. A foreign character starts from the foreign quarter, and the henchmen party from local quarter doesn't always hold out very well.  Occasionally they'll wipe completely before you get there, and Togo dying means mission failure.  More often they take several deaths before you get there, meaning they're out of rez signets, won't get rez signet recharges, and have a fair bit of death penalty, meaning that they'll die again very easily.  Maybe you make it to the second big battle area before the henchmen party is gone, but again, you're toast.
 * As for Arborstone, the battle at the end is pretty random. There's a big group of mobs with healers that can't be pulled.  When you approach, some additional stone mobs activate and join in.  There's also a boss that deals considerable damage.  Killing all of those mobs is quite a daunting task in hard mode.
 * But you don't have to do it. Get close to the door, survive for 10 seconds (which isn't hard to do), and Danika opens the door, ending the mission.  Well, usually she does.  Sometimes she just stands there.  I've timed it at holding out for about 45 seconds before a wipe, and Danika wouldn't open the door.  It's not due to knockdowns, either, as ward of stability doesn't prevent it.  And if you go in assuming that Danika is going to open the door, and she doesn't open it, well, that makes the mission awfully hard.  If you only beat the mission once, it's likely that you'll never see Danika go AFK, and think it wasn't that hard.  But it's one of the randomly hard missions, not a consistently hard one, and randomly hard means I can't reliably beat it, so it goes high on the list.  I had 10 failures total in getting ten characters through in hard mode, but five of those came on my last two characters, after I had figured out about as much strategy as I was going to.
 * I think that the difficulty of Gate of Madness is vastly overrated. I put it as high as #21 largely on reputation, and could have justified putting it much lower if going strictly by results.  I never wiped on that mission, ever.  I got all ten characters through in easy mode, and all ten in hard mode, and never wiped once.  I did reset very early once or twice very early when I figured out that I had the wrong builds, but other than that, every single time I started the mission, I finished it with master's reward.
 * I only had two close calls, even. One of those was when I nearly wiped at the gate by the Shiro'ken, as I didn't know to move forward to avoid getting hit from behind.  The other was because one of the other players in my group was an idiot.  Once he finally disconnected, so that I could flag his heroes, the rest of the mission went smoothly.
 * I think it's largely that Gate of Madness fits how I play the game very well, while not being amenable to blitzing through it with Sabway or Discordway. Battles with Titans take a long time, and the mission effect decreases your healing.  Bring lots of healers and defensive skills and you can survive long enough and you're fine.  The portals can be a bit tricky to pull, but at worst, you have to take on a pair of torment creatures and three portal wraiths at once.  With plenty of healing and other defensive skills, that's quite manageable.
 * Some players get stuck there because they just don't get the idea of changing their builds to fit the mission, and want to keep their preferred high damage builds and hope to kill mobs really fast. That doesn't work against Titans.  And then they get a run through Gate of Madness and get stuck on Abaddon's Gate for the same reason, even though that's a cupcake mission.  Quizzical 23:09, February 19, 2010 (UTC)


 * Holy... mother of Pyre... Can you summarize that? tl'dr sry RoseOfKali [[Image:RoseOfKaliSIG.png]] 00:39, February 20, 2010 (UTC)