Today my friends and I took on the Arch-Villain Madame of Mystery, from the Carnival of Shadows… and I have a problem. I can’t find any information about this on the forums at CoH and honestly, don’t want to ask on there if I can avoid it, as I hate that forum. People complain about this board being slow, but 9 times out of 10 I can’t even see the CoH forums - they just time out on me.
That said, I did do a search on there and waited until I was sure there wasn’t anything coming up that would help me before I came here.
Now, to get to the point (you knew I would eventually, right?): we couldn’t kill her. Heck, we couldn’t even dent her, really. Her hps would fluctuate maybe 1-2% at most, but it was like she was getting regenned to full hps every combat round. I exaggerate not at all.
I bug reported the mission, advising that my team and I (I included classes and numbers for their info) couldn’t hurt her at all. I added that I had a ‘temp’ power assigned for this mission which also wasn’t doing anything apparent.
I got this response:
That’s a direct quote, other than my insertion of some line breaks so that the sentence topics aren’t all jumbled together.
Okay, I’m mildly irritated because I’ve already stated that I *had *a team and even included the class breakdown, and I’m also kind of irked because I’d have thought it was pretty clear that if I’m taking on Madame of Mystery it’s phenomenally unlikely that I’ve never encountered an AV before, so I really didn’t need - or want - the Newbie’s Guide to CoH Encounters.
As it happens, we’d just taken on the Clockwork King AV about an hour before. All AVs are not created equal, of course, but I’ve done a lot of AVs. Sometimes multiple times - I have a few characters on there, at varying levels, and I have a solid group of friends I play with. You can’t merge missions in CoH like you can in CoV, so we usually end up doing the same AVs for each person.
Two of my groupmates/friends had already done this AV - though it was my first encounter with her - and said that she didn’t have this problem when they did her.
Anyway, I went to the forums and tried a search on both “Madame of Mystery” and just “Madame”. The sum of information I can glean from this is that she’s 3 people’s favourite AV and two people think she’s unfair for soloers. Not helpful.
So I turn to you, fellow CoH-players. Any advice will be very welcome.
In case it helps, here’s the advanced info on our five-person group:
Blaster (fire) - also armed with Psychic ‘temp’ power
Blaster (electrical)
Blaster (energy)
Tank (fire)
Defender (dark)
Madame effectively remained at 100% health with 3 blasters nuking her brains out, a fire tank perma-DOTing, and a dark defender dropping her resistances. The’temp power’ I was given by my Contact is apparently for specific use against her but it, again, does nothing that I can see.
She did not drop below 98% health the whole time, and when she did it would be for a single combat round, so there was not even the possibility of building on that damage. The tank and defender have both defeated Madame with their primary characters and believe her to be buggy on this occasion.
I didn’t think to ask my friends about the ‘temp power’ - it may be that it’s not meant to do anything obvious and just de-buffs or something. Because I’m not sure of that, I’m reserving jugment on whether it was doing what it was meant to or not.
Perhaps Madame went wonky when I revised my reputation level down from ‘invincible’ to ‘heroic’? I’d had it set high because I was RSKing a level 50 tank the previous weekend and wanted to keep things interesting for him. To clarify, I did not select the mission (to play) as ‘invincible’, I merely accepted it from the contact while my reputation was set that high. Since that time I’d changed my reputation down, and completed other missions (including Clockwork King AV) at ‘heroic’ before taking on Madame. I’m fairly sure I’d even logged completely out for lunch since revising my reputation downwards, but I am not 100% sure on this … at any rate, it was definitely ‘heroic’ well in advance of selecting that as the active mission. All other mobs in the mission accurately reflected this.
What do you think, fellow City of Heroes players?
- Am I missing something obvious?
- Am I being jerked around by Tech Support that frankly doesn’t care if I have an impossible mission?
Please help me, Obe-wan SDMBers - you’re my …well, okay, not my *only *hope, but you’re right up there, honest! 
If you’re on Villains, you might also see me around on Requisite Force - that’s my ice/ice corruptor (and a very nice powerset it is too).