DaddyMike72

I've been running a home server for my family and friends for a while now. For the longest time I've had the maxdifficulty=true in the game.ini and overrideofficialdifficulty=5 in the gus.ini. Recently, ish, we've been playing through the game in a storymode format. This might seem like a duh question, but will the override mean that 150 is the highest level we'll see in Aberration and Extinction? Or will the maxdifficulty take precedence? Thanks (Edit. So I think I had a bit of a misunderstanding on my end. I had just started a single-player Aberration map this morning with Maxlevel turned and difficulty all the way up. I had thought the dinos were in levels that were multiples of 6 like Teks tend to be. I also seemed to remember hearing that Extinction tameables have higher levels than pervious maps. But... after posting this question, I realized the critters in Aberration were actually in multiples of 4 and I can't find any info to actually support the Extinction bit.)

Well, the purpose of this wasn't really to debate what I went through so much as to see if anyone else had similar situations with gigas or other beasties that just seemed to do more damage than what the onscreen numbers were showing. I bred up a new super rex and took it out fighting. First giga I was able to abuse terrain on so much it 'lost interest' and ran away from me, getting its toe stuck on a rock... Really??? and I was able to finish it off at a safe distance behind it. Second giga was really close but it ended up killing my rex (this time I managed to dismount and run fast enough to throw out my wyvern, mount, take off and circle around to finish it off). But this time I made a critical "duh" mistake and forgot to actually level the rex before taking it out giga hunting, so that one was completely on me. Now I have a male and female pair that I'm leveling up specifically for situations where I can't backpeddle up hills.

Yeah, I'm sure it was less than a minute. I had only just started the fight when my kid who was watching pointed out how low my rex's health was. I looked and figured I must have taken some fall damage on the way to start the fight. After about 5 giga bites, my rex was already at 80% health. Which did not make sense with the amount of bite damage the giga was doing. So I kind of blew it off as fall damage (80% - 60% is still 20% health left over), but also kept watching it. The health icon emptied pretty darn quickly. And while I was using terrain against this one in the Ragnarok Highlands, the other gigas I fought were in the desert section where I was unable to use terrain and had to straight-up face tank. Now I suppose it's possible that since I was backpeddling up an incline that somehow I was constantly taking fall damage, but the incline wasn't that steep and I never went back downhill, just uphill. Also bear in mind the bleed damage did 40% damage to the mated pair in the time it took both of them to finish off the last 25% of its health, with each of them doing over 1.2K per bite. And that time I didn't even bother with using the terrain but fought it on more level ground since extra tames tend to completely negate the tactic with their constant forward push. And just as a point, I've been face tank killing Gigas with super rexes for a couple of years now, so I'm quite familiar with how the fights generally go, which is why this caught me by such surprise. On the upside(?), it took the giga 4 bites to completely destroy my gear as I futilely tried to run away. "Don't run away, you'll only die tired."

Yeah, emulators could run on most standard PCs. The client base for most emulated servers weren't all that populated. Maybe over a hundred for some of the more popular ones, but most had an almost skeleton-crew player base. I briefly ran both an EQ1 and a WoW emulator on a linux box running on a i386, so the emulators themselves weren't all that resource intensive. Both were used by a small handful of friends who yearned for Ye Olden Days, but we all kind of agreed that even the headaches of dealing with other people was a part of the charm of MMOs and we lost interest pretty quick. Other emulated servers were popular enough that Blizzard was in fairly constant Cease and Desist battle with them and a lot of people, myself included, believe the emulated servers were why Blizzard finally released their Classic servers. If you can't beat them, join them... and profit. If/when WC decides to stop all support for A:SE, the only issue I see with running my own Ark server, which I currently do (on a much beefier linux box), is that in order to engage with even a LAN-based server, the client first hast to talk to Ark's server list to verify my server before I can log in. If I close that handshake port on my router, my family can not play on the server that is physically 6 feet from my desk. There have been times where Steam could see my server on the LAN, but Ark's login servers weren't seeing it and I would have to restart our modem to get the handshake going again. Unless there's something I'm missing that would avoid this step, which is always possible. So the most an Ark emulator would have to do is listen to the handshake port and provide a server list to log in to.

Just to throw my 2 cents in here, I am not really looking forward to A:SA or Ark 2, though both sound appealing. For a moment I was interested when both were going to be up for the same, one-time price, but then when they walked that back, I lost that interest. My reason is that I'm just kind of done spending money on buggy games. Or I should say I'm done giving money to developers that release buggy games and then make little effort to fix the bugs, but rather gloss them over with shiny new content. It's not that I expect a game to be completely bug-free upon release, but more a matter of how the company responds once the bugs start coming out. Wildcard is hardly the only ones to do this. Bioware and Dragon Age: Origins quickly springs to mind (guaranteed game crash 30 minutes into the game anyone?). And there are others as well. I mean, there are several games where mod builders have stepped in and created mods that fix issues with games and the developers themselves don't bother to implement the fixes themselves. The fixes are right there. The work has been done but the developers just seem to be "Meh" about it. And I'm aware that the team working on Ark currently isn't the same team that initially worked on the game (or at least I seem to remember hearing/reading that). But I'm willing to wait until 6 months, a year or even more have passed after the game release and listen to all the youtubers/streamers/forums talk about buggy features or lack thereof before making a purchase. If experiences with Everquest, EQ2 and WoW have taught me anything, it is that when the developers make unfavorable decisions that leave fans in the wake, it doesn't take long before people band together and come up with server emulators to take you back to what you used to enjoy. I can guarantee that if WC stops all support for A:SE, someone will come up with a way to spoof the login servers to allow people to keep playing. If people haven't already.

Only thing close to that is when I wasn't ready to take on an Alpha Rex that was stomping around on Carno Island so I grabbed a raptor with my argent and led the Alpha into deep water, dropped the raptor and watched the Alpha sink below the water. A few weeks later, I passed through the area on basilosaurus and saw the Alpha Rex still chilling there in the deep water. That's when I learned that Alphas don't drown. Hmm... or maybe the time a tranq'd out Yutie kept fear roaring things that approached it while I was waiting for it to tame up.

The bleed was definitely doing more than 1% per tick. This was the lowest level giga of the five I killed. All of them took my rex to about 60% health. The one Carchara took her to 75%. This one killed my rex in less than a minute and I was using terrain to assist with my knockback to reduce the number of bites the giga could get. (For those who don't know: If you stand your rex uphill on a slope, the little bit of knockback they get on a giga can push it out of bite range. With good timing and backpeddling, you can deny a giga more than a few bites. Works with alpha rexes too.)

So I was stomping around on a super rex (21 health mutes, 10 melee mutes) clearing out the low level gigas and carchara's (or cucarachas as my wife calls them). I came upon my 6th one, a level 20, and engaged with full 25k health and a 250ish armor saddle. The giga was doing something like 30 pts of damage per bite which seemed about like the others, but my rex's health was plummeting fast. In the end, I lost the rex and lost my life. I went back with two more super rexes for the mate boost to finish off the giga and get my saddle and gear back. It was at 25% or so and I was able to kill it, but not before its bleed took both rexes to 60% health. I can't say I've ever seen a wild giga's bleed do so much damage, especially not to my super rexes. Has anyone else encountered this apparent glitch in giga bleed damage? Or perhaps other critters that have done surprisingly high amounts of damage for their level? (Addendum - If anyone wonders why only 10 mutes into melee, it's because my current base melee is 378. I am waiting for a 396 or 408 to do a full 20 mutation run.)

Something I have seen a few times over the years is after fighting the dragon on the Island, dinos, usually the rexes, will die after teleporting back to the island, even while being actively healed. Tonight was a first though. One of the players in the fight dismounted their dino and instantly died, even though there were no fires or mobs left, nor was she near the lava. She dismounted her stego and was on its back and.... urrrgggghhh... Is this just one of those persistent bugs that Wildcard never got around to fixing or is there something mechanically going on? (I have also seen this happen after killing the Dodorex. 5-10 minutes after the fight, rexes will just die, even ones that I had manually pumped meat into to bump up their health to 25%.)

I like digression and conversation, so all cool. I like to start taming Carnos the moment I get tranq arrows. Even before I get their saddle, I will usually have a set of 7 (named for the deadly sins) following me to sic on non-rex alphas. But I have never progressed a mutation line more than 5 mutes per health/stam/wt/melee in carnos because when I hit Thyla I just don't use them anymore and after I get crossbows I start investing my time into building my rex breeders' stats. I also like to mix up my dino sizes for boss fights. Positioning a bunch of rexes or theris so they encompass a boss can be a little bit of a pain sometimes as they tend to get hung up on each other, but when there are smaller dinos in the mix, the big ones don't have to fight as much for real estate and the smaller ones stand inside their range. which sucks for the dragon, but for the broodmother and ape it's fine. So I was hoping the carnos would fit the bill for a small dino to slip in and do some bleed damage. But now I know the bleed doesn't work, so... meh. The megalosaurs are about the same size, have more health than (my) allos and just go nuts... at night.

I kinda/sorta do that with the S+ Transmitter. I check the levels into stats like Health and Melee and if I see one that is near 30 points pre-tame, I go get it. And quickly learned that this does not guarantee a good tame, it just hedges the bets a little. You can tame a dino with 29 points in health to have it only put another 4 levels once the tame takes place. But regardless, if carno bleed doesn't affect bosses, then I won't bother. I have megalosaurs and allos that have better health and better damage and I already have mutation lines going for them. My rexes are at 20 health mutations and 10 melee and so I'm done with that line for now (until I find a better melee base stat) and my theris are up to 10 health and melee mutations. And yeah, I know I could just have a team of 10 rexes and 9 theris... or all one or the other and one Yuti, but I like to play around with my groups to see what's viable.

Huh. I thought I read a post that the bleed worked on some bosses but not all? Perhaps it was an old post? Or just wrong.

I love a good flock of 12 Dimorphs with health and speed bumped up (so they can keep up with a sprinting Argent). They will melt most things short of an Alpha Rex in short order and they free you up to ride whatever you want. I've even used them to clear out wyverns (though a lightning wyvern can mess up the flock pretty quick). So they are my favorite "flyers". For personal mounted flyer, I would have to go with the tried and true Argent. There are others that are a bit more fun, but the Argent is just solid. Good health, good carry weight and awesome stamina. Once you find a Mastercraft or really good Journeyman saddle, you can face tank Alpha rexes with them (while the dimorph flock rips them up). There are times I will fly around with my argent and my flock of Dimorphs pretending to be a Protoss Carrier from Starcraft. Zoom, zoom, zoom.

I think I have lost a little more of my sanity. Spurred on by acquiring a really nice asc. carno saddle bp, I am starting a new mutation line for my carnos. The thought is to mix 3-4 into my boss fighting team for the bleed damage, but I want to minimize the glass cannon effect. Health mutations are usually my primary focus as I figure the fewer points pumped into health, the more I get to pump into melee. My current stock of carnos have a base health of 3360. I hate getting deep into mutation lines only to find better stats from a wild tame. So I am curious what a good health from a carno is using standard server levels (150 max wild dino). Could I find one that has 4k+? 5k+? Rarity is a consideration too. Kind of like I KNOW I've tamed a rex with 408 Melee, but over the past year, I have yet to find another one with this from the wild. Thanks. P.S. And yes, I know there are calculators like Dododex, but those show what is 'possible' and not what is 'likely'.

Did a fair bit of building in a communal port town on the Island (unofficial, private server). Call me a Beach Bob if you will, I prefer Beach Bum, but it is hard to build a port town without ocean access. Plus the rum (beer) tastes better with a sea breeze in your face. Think Port Royal from Pirates, but scaled down and a large breeding area where the fort would be.