Ep 41 Stat Clamp Quick Start Guide

For those who haven’t been following the activity in the Testing Feedback forum, here are a few points to help you understand the major changes implemented with Episode 41 and get you started when the Episode goes live.

Daily Rewards

There is no more daily Vault. Instead you claim Daily Rewards. The prompt should pop up when you first log in (though the devs never got it working for players on test, so not sure about that). You claim rewards once per account per day. Most things you claim are account bound (but not everything). Ultimately this is a quicker method than the Vault, but you end up getting less than you would by running multiple Alts through the Vault daily. Example – you’ll only get one piece of gear, and not every day, as opposed to the Vault where you could get one for every toon you ran through per day. So Daily Rewards is a little less helpful in levelling up and getting exobytes.

Allies

When you log in you’ll get a journal mission (Together Unbroken) to visit the new House of Legends. That mission will guide you around the new base & eventually you’ll get another Journal entry called Call for Allies. Essentially Allies are like Pet Trinkets. You call for one in battle, it helps you a bit, then disappears. The difference is that you rank up your Allies like Artifacts, making them more powerful. As you follow the Journal mission, you’ll talk to Cyborg, go through the Batcave for a little fight, then be given an Ally. The Journal mission only tells you to equip your Ally, then the mission is gone and you don’t know what to do next (that the way the mission goes on Test as of today, the 24th). The next step is to fortify the Ally. You are given an Alliance (like catalysts for Artifacts). Instead of Nth metal, you use Ally Favor to level up your Ally, but I don’t know how much you’ll be given on Live since on Test we can take them right to max. Ally Favor is an account-wide item. It’s set up a little poorly. You select & slot it like you would Nth Metal, but if you just click on the item you’ll add your entire account’s worth of Ally Favor. So instead of that you have to use the Load Count U/I to reduce the amount of Favor you add. On Controllers you use Triangle. I have yet to figure out the command on keyboard. Anyway using triangle brings up a counter & you can change the amount you add so you don’t waste any Favor (since you’re going to have to use the rest for the rest of your toons). You do your equipping and fortifying from the new Allies Menu (you’ll see the icon between the Traits & Style icons when you pull up your Menu wheel). Once equipped you use the Ally in a fight by clicking R3 on a controller (or on keyboard the letter ‘R’). You’re given one Ally, but you have slots for three. How do you get more? Unknown. Presumably you will buy them from Cyborg, but on test he has nothing for sale. So don’t know at this point exactly how much they’ll cost / if you have to do something special to unlock them / etc. You can only call for one Ally to help you fight. Your other two allies provide support automatically without you having to call on them (but you won’t see or call for them). At any rate, that should be enough to get you started with Allies.

On Duty

There is no actual new content (instances) with this Episode. The End Game instances are up-leveled versions of pre-existing instances. There are also no Open-World areas, no Dailies / Weekly Bounties. Future Episodes (42 & beyond) will have brand new instances & Open-Worlds, but not this one. There are three versions of the instances from this Episode. An End-Game regular, an Elite, and the original version. Interestingly there are no Event versions that can be played by low level toons. In Flashpoint toons below level 30 could play the Event versions. But in Episode 41 you’ve got to be CR 327 to play the Regular & Elite, and the proper CR to play the original version (for Science Spire & Phantom Zone that’s CR 100, for Power Core & Inner Sanctum that’s CR 30, for Iceberg Lounge it’s CR 150, and Family Reunion is CR 60). So how will it work in Episode 42 when the original version of new content will be at CR 335ish? Will we lose Events altogether? Guess we’ll find out in November.

You’ll immediately see that the On Duty menu has been changed. When you open it up you’ll see a new Mode Select screen. On the left side are Quick Play categories. Save the Universe is Episode 41’s content. Latest Episodes are the top three Episodes. Omnibus is every instance. When you click on those links you’ll find each divided by the available content – Solos, Duos, Alerts, Raids. Open one of those categories & you can with one click queue up for every instance in the category. The concept behind this is that players will go into the instance that is filled first, so you quickly go from instance to instance. That means you could end up going into the same instance again & again. And you might never go into a particular instance (the odd thing about Quick Play is that there’s a totally unnecessary Solo category. I guess if just wanted to do something random, you could let the system pick for you. I’ve never been bored enough to do that).

So, if you want to do a particular instance, Quick Play is not what you want. Instead go to the bottom of the Mode Select Menu to the Custom section & select Custom Play. That brings up the same On Duty Menu that we’ve been using since the start of the game & you can select the exact instance you want.

Stat Clamping

You might have noticed that those original versions CR minimums I mentioned above don’t sound right for the instances you’ve been playing for years. That’s because all instances have been reorganized. There are no longer 10 Tiers, there are now 6. Now all instances within a Tier have (or are supposed to have) about the same level of difficulty. So, when you que in, you’ll find you have the same stats for every instance in the Tier. The only exception to this is Tier 6, presumably because the Tier is not yet complete. So, if you’re at the top CR / stats and queue into Wonderverse, you’ll see that you retain your full stats. The devs have determined a range of stats that are appropriate for each Tier. If your toon is lower than that range your stats are increased. If your toon is higher, then your stats are lowered. I’m going to illustrate this with an example in a moment. Now these Tier stat ranges have seen some tinkering during the testing period, so these numbers I use may not end up being exact on Live, still it will give you an idea of what’s going on. For this example I made a new toon, and I looked at an old toon that’s just about maxed-out on stats. For the new toon I used only gear for stats – I didn’t put on any artifacts, augments, didn’t slot any SP, no generator mods, etc. I just opened a gear box for each Tier, played a Solo, noted the stats. Because of the buff up I was able to take this toon through a Solo in each Tier. Naturally Tier 6 was much tougher to get through than Tier 1. Just as an example of how the clamping works we’ll take a look at one stat; Might, and we’ll look at Tier 5.

For the new toon I used the CR 210 gear box. That gave me a Might stat of 11287. When I went into LexCorp Tower the stat was buffed up to 21310, an increase of 10,000+. And that was enough that I could do enough damage to beat the ads & bosses. Now my old near maxed-out CR 344 toon’s Might is regularly at 94934. When I put that toon into LexCorp Tower it’s CR was decreased to 268, and Might was debuffed to 40718. So, a significant decrease, but still almost twice the Might of the buffed up new toon, and of course, no problem at all getting through the instance.

Based on this monkeying-around with your stats you might be wondering if there’s much point to doing things like working on your SP, ranking up Artifact / Augments, etc. Well, there is. First, you still need as much as you can get for End-Game instances. Second, all that stuff on top of your gear is the reason that my high toon’s Might is 40718 in Tier 5 instead of 21310.

So yes, your end game toon is going to be more powerful in old content than toons that have just reached a Tier. But you won’t be able to solo old Raids anymore. The effect of this is that it will take longer to get through old content. You may have to fully play the mechanics. You will have to use roles. All of that together may add up to fewer end game players spending their time on old content – time will tell.

One other note; I really, really hope the devs are prepared to do adjustments after this goes live. Not nearly enough testing was done to determine if the stats are right (both for us & for enemies) in EVERY instance. From what I saw 90% of testing focused on the up-levelled End Game instances, very little on the rest (especially lower Tier raids). I would not be surprised to queue up for a Tier 5 or 4 Raid to find a massively overpowered boss, but we’ll see.

Styles

One last thing I realized just the other day. In the House of Legends you’ll find style vendors for both Heroes & Villains. Both factions can buy, use & get the Feats for all these styles. Yes, heroes can now get Feats for Villain-only styles. And Villains can get Feats for Hero-only styles. This is true on test, hopefully it will make the transition to Live.

Thx for the info.

As a note about gear, they did add a bunch of scaling gear drops to the loot tables, so running one instance per day on a character will net you at least one daily scaling gear box in the same way the Vault would.

Nice variety of styles to them, too.

Good stuff

No Additions

Forgot to mention this; based on previous Episodes you might be expecting to get a few things that you won't be getting in Episode 41. There are no Generator Mods, Adaptive Augments, Artifacts or OP item for this Episode. This Episode is going to have very short period before Episode 42 (only three months), so there's not a lot of content. As designed there are three instances the first month (Science Spire, Phantom Zone, Power Core), three the 2nd month (Iceberg Lounge, Family Reunion, Inner Sanctum) and three more (Wonder Woman focused) the third month. It's a little unclear if the 2nd & 3rd months' instances will be additions or substitutions. In other words, will End-Game first month versions of instances be available through the entire three months? Hopefully yes. Either way opportunities for Episode currency are reduced from previous Episodes. That's reflected in a (slightly) lower cost for best-on-vendor gear. I'm expecting there will a mid-Episode cycle style addition to the vendor, but that may not happen. Also, the BOV gear set doesn't raise your toon's CR a full 10 points. And there are very few Feats for this Episode.

The concept about Save the Universe is to; once in a while have future Episodes set up like Episode 41 highlighting a few older instances that are levelled up to End-Game for a short period of time. Then when the next Episode drops, the up-levelled instances disappear. So when Episode 42 arrives, (my understanding is that) these End-Game versions of Power Core, Inner Sanctum, etc, will disappear, and only the original versions in the lower Tiers will remain. But the next time a Save the Universe Episode arrives the highlighted instances should use the same currency (Time Grains). If anyone knows better on all this, let me know.

Hey I appreciate your putting this together but there is an OP item this Episode.

Great work and very helpful!

Thank you for the summaries...going to be helpful.

Thanks much. This is the kind of thing this game is missing that really makes things hard for casual players. Torikumu did an excellent job for many DLCs, but he quit some time ago. Having all the information you need in one place for a new DLC is extremely helpful. Having to search around is not easy and most people don't even know what to search for.

Also, it would help an enormous number of players if someone were to write out (with words and pictures) explanations for raids. If someone is already doing this, I'm totally unaware of it. There's a constant complaint that most people just try to brute force everything. IMO, it's not because they are too lazy to do mechanics, but because they don't know what the mechanics are. There's just so little information being distributed. Sure, leagues know what to do and Elite players know what to do, but that's a small percentage of the player-base. It's amazing how much better things go when someone says "don't stand in red circles" or "block when Superboy has a skull over his head" before a fight starts. That proves to me that it's not laziness or bad players. It's a lack of knowledge.

As others said there is an op item (hands)

Also I believe the max leve of the four body mods has gone up five levels

From the announcements page:
New Content Format: Save The Universe
In case you forgot in the blitz of information above, House of Legends will also have content to play, in the form of Save The Universe. This system will present past content favorites up-leveled to end-game Combat Rating requirements, with the rewards to match.
In the future, Save The Universe will return as a pseudo-seasonal event, but in House of Legends this content will be how you earn rewards, earn episode currency, and progress your characters.
Three sets of Save The Universe content will cycle in and then out while this episode is the latest. The first set will feature up-leveled Superman content, the second up-leveled Batman content, and the third up-leveled Wonder Woman content.

They don't mention what will happen once the next episode comes out but the content will be cycling in and out while it's the latest one, i think we just had two sets up at the same time for testing purposes but the intention is for them to replace eachother.
Also as was mentioned above we do have a new OP item and there's two new sets of gear in this episode (the increase in CR is not much but it's there)

regular augments and i believe SP trees too went up to match the increase in the episode's gear.

Oops, figured i might get something or other wrong. For some reason I can't edit my posts, going to see if I can get a dev to give me access, then I'll correct that. And anything else about which I'm mistaken. Thanks

You usually get a 30 minute time window from when you post where you can make edits.

There's a little more leeway in the Guide forum, though.

One thing I didn't check-- does anyone know how Avatar Bombadier gear will attune if you have 342 CR?