Eva Destruction

Oh yeah, she looks great, but that's pretty much all she has going for her.

I would really really like to see exactly what percentage of the population really actually farmed Katie, and later the ITF. I'm betting it really wasn't as high as it seemed, and it certainly wasn't "almost everyone." It was more likely the same people farming it over and over, which of course made the farming so visible. I'm not talking about the people who joined a speed Katie here and there, I'm talking about those people who ran Katie multiple times a day.

The point is, we do have players who get bored doing the same thing over and over again, no matter how good the reward is, to the point that they'll take a less efficient path to the reward if it means they get to do something different.

Well yeah, if you're forced to grind anyway, you might as well grind the activity that gives rewards the fastest, thereby minimizing the total amount of grinding you will have to do.

No, Tyrant as the insane Well's champion was not the idea all along. It was an idea they pulled out of their butts when players complained that we would need multiple teams to beat up the guys we've been curbstomping since issue 1.

Why does the Well need a champion? Why can't the well remain the inanimate object it originally was?

Yes, that's right, they have nothing to do with the Puddle of Annoyance. They also have a lot of background that justifies them suddenly stepping up their threat level, without having to resort to the "a crazy cosmic puddle loves him!" ***-pull they had to use to make powering up the Praetorians to their current level even remotely make sense.

Edit: The puddle doesn't have to have anything to do with the Incarnate system either. Just because it is a means to godlike power, doesn't mean it has to be the only means. There is no such thing as "the" lore explanation for any mechanic until someone decides to write one. And considering the lore explanations we got for power proliferation, the flashback system, and AE, you would think they would have learned to not do that.

You are approaching the issue from the perspective of a speed-TF farmer. Of course to you and your crowd it's "the only way." To the people I frequently run with, it's not.

Nor is it the most efficient path to rewards. Playing the market is.

Or you just want to argue with people.

Even though you're wrong.

You've...never run UG have you?

And your sarcasm detector is automatically broken.

Desdemona doesn't need your mundane Leadership powers. For you see, she has the Power of Hotpants. Watching her butt wiggle in front of you will provide the whole league with a morale bonus of some kind. Remember boys, this is what you're fighting for!

No, I've never fought the Minions of Igneous on a squishy, or had to put up with Vahzilok -regen. For you see, I was getting PLd on fire ambush farms long before it was cool.

No, they shouldn't, so why is there a "mooch setting?" Why not just have it say "you must be this tall to ride" like every other damn task force in the game instead of adding this stupid mechanic and then explaining it with an even stupider explanation?

Cheesy supervillains always have a weather machine, and there is no supervillain cheesier than Nemesis.

There were no Preems when the TF was introduced. Simply flagging the TFs to "VIP only" would probably be a lot easier than the stupid level-shifting mechanic. Besides, the level shift doesn't actually deny access, it turns you into useless dead weight.

It definitely would have.

Not nearly to this extent. The people running quick Katies or speed ITFs do it because they choose to. Nothing is gated behind these activities.

And again, not nearly to this extent. Loot drops from everything. You can run all the content to get your loot. You can go weeks before you have to repeat anything. Or you can just play the market and pay someone else to do the grinding for you. I made my first 2 billion playing AE arcs and selling bronze rolls. I didn't have to repeat a single scrap of content.

Yeah, but you don't have to think. BAF is something that goes on in the background while you watch Mythbusters.

Only the CoT, really. And only Praetoria throws these enemies at you in wave after wave of ambushes, at a level where you likely don't have sustainable endurance or a reliable way to regain health.

The only reason you need Alpha slotted is because of an arbitrary decision to use the TFs to show off the new level-shifting mechanics. There is nothing about the actual difficulty of the TFs that actually requires that Alpha. Personally, I think this artificial limitation is stupid, and essentially says "slot your Alpha or mooch." Then the trials come along with that participation metric that tells you mooching isn't allowed....huh?

Grind trials so you have the gear to grind the next trial.


Underground is also the newest of the Incarnate trials. Keyes had some of the same problems, in that it encouraged players to bring a specific ability.

I haven't played TPN and MoM because the character copy tool is broken, but I do know that they also contain level-shifted enemies. This means they are not really an option for players still unlocking Incarnate slots.

The thing is, you don't design something with the intent that the player will criticize it and you'll have to change it. This means the devs thought telling players "you're done with these trials now, move on to the next tier" was a good idea. They thought requiring players to craft and slot Rebirth or Clarion just so they would be useful on a specific trial was a good idea. They think insta-death-kill is a good idea. They think "one person screws up and everyone dies" is a good idea. Why do we need to tell them these are bad ideas that won't work for this game?

Which is contrary to the PuG-friendly intent of the trials.

On smaller servers, this is indeed the case.

No, I think they should just give up on the multi-team trial grind now, or at least stop making trials that require 12 people to start (in actually closer to 16, since hardly anyone wants to run with the minimum). A gated progression system is far more feasible when you only need 8 people.

Except that in the rest of the game you don't need 16 other players of your level to do anything.

No, people who most certainly do not want to be carried are also complaining that someone else can screw it up for everyone, either due to incompetence, inexperience, or technical issues.

Players who were essentially asking to be carried due to lack of level shifts didn't have any alternative other than to not make any incarnate progress for the next two hours.

It has to do with trial difficulty in that if UG is too hard for the newcomers, but BAF and Lambda won't give rewards to the veteran incarnates, it will split the trial runners into two groups, which will make finding enough players to fill both groups too difficult. Now, while I'm sure players would have still run BAF and Lambda for the component even without the E-merit, it's pretty clear where they were going with this.

So, you're saying nobody complains about the Lethal Force and Will of the Earth in the UG, nobody complains that if you don't have enough Clarions you fail, and nobody complains that too many non-level-shifted characters can fail the trial? And I guess nobody complained when they announced that players who were "done" with BAF and Lambda wouldn't be getting full rewards from those trials anymore, to the point where they rolled back that decision.

For characters at that level, it varies between hard and annoying.

For IOd and Incarnated out 50s, Praetorians are harder than AE fire farms, so again, yes.

I don't recall the lack of raids being cited as a reason a lot of players quit. Endgame =/= raids, and I really wish people would stop pretending it does, just because that's how WoW does it. Because I guarantee that if CoH instituted a true WoW-style raid system there would be even more complaining than....oh wait. There already is a lot of complaining now that they're introducing trials with "if one person screws up everybody dies" mechanics, specific power requirements, and "you must grind raid X to be powerful enough to grind raid Y" gating.

More likely CS has no idea how it's supposed to work either. This isn't an excuse, it's just far more likely than some conspiracy theory.

I got my Reward Token on Wednesday, and still no points. Last month I got both at the same time. If I don't get them by Monday, I'm complaining.

And now that they're all grown up and I'm in charge, I'm going to send them to Praetoria to deal with the Praetorian problem. Right before I send in the tac-nukes.

I'd rather have Ghost Widow or Crimson or...just about anybody as my right hand than Captain Hotpants and Mr. But My Mom Thinks I'm Cool.

"Ok, well I'm just gonna solo this mission. I don't need a sidekick. You can stay home."

Sidekicks would make better contacts than allies. In-mission allies are usually the opposite of helpful.

If you're on a regular-sized team with the difficulty at an appropriate level it can be hard as well, since when things go south they tend to do so very quickly. On a league though, everybody is buffed to the point of tank-like survivability and blaster-level damage. Things don't get the opportunity to go south. That is why I think the BAF cluster-**** is one of the most boring pieces of content in the game. It's also why it's farmed so much.

Herding cats is work for one person. Waiting isn't work any more than going from the Shadow Shard to Perez Park the old-fashioned way is work. It's a time-sink. I'm not entirely sure how one would deal with the above-mentioned leechers since as long as they're mindlessly mashing buttons they're indistinguishable from everyone else in the FX soup.

No, the raid thing is balanced around the philosophy that some people will have strong IO builds and Incarnate powers. If you're not one of them you get to mooch off the people who are. Also, if there is a new episode of Mythbusters on you can plant your fingers on the number keys and watch it and mooch off the people who are paying attention.

It won't, since it's mainly a showcase for new mechanics that will be outdated next year.

It's kind of like when we got lead-outs in i5. Some people thought they were cool...for about five minutes. Now most people hate them, and everybody hates them if they're overused or used badly.

What content are they removing in DA?

The "Run around and burn zombies" arc will still be available in the Echo.

I really hope they make this post before i22 goes live, so we don't have a repeat of the Trapdoor fiasco.