Eva Destruction

So you're all a time-traveling extra-dimensional Nemesis Plot?

I'd be interested to see how many people who don't already have ice powers will actually take Cryonic Judgement.

I play DM/SD, so anything can kill me if it gets lucky and/or I get careless. +4/x8 Rularuu would kill me before they had time to blink.

"Do you want an angry Well or a happy Well?"
"Happy Well, happy Well!"

Just because you don't mind flashing your underpants at everybody who calls you a bad name, doesn't mean others aren't more modest No, seriously, I used the punch for a while on my miniskirt costume because my daughter complained that the bad guys could see my underwear. I changed it back pretty quickly, and told her I was wearing my bathing suit under my clothes.

Relevance? Oh yes, this was immediately after the change to Cobra Strike, which I immediately swapped out Crane Kick for, because Cobra Strike is way cool, but previously wasn't cool enough to compensate for being totally useless. Now I use it after EC all the time even though CaK benefits more from the increased crit chance, because it looks cooler dammit!

A good villain doesn't show off their weaknesses, not to their enemies and certainly not to people they're supposed to be bossing around. You don't see Doom going around crying about his mommy, do you? And he's certainly not going to tell the people of Latveria he's ticked off 'cause Richards is smarter than him.

Aside from the Nictus weapons and the new WST badges, there is no reward that I'm aware of that requires you to run any pre-i20 TF more than once. All the other rewards are available through other means, repeating TFs is just a more efficient path.

I would partially blame that on the players, for running everything on the default difficulty, and partially on the developers, for giving people no real incentive to raise it. I absolutely love that the Tin Mage and Apex TFs are locked at +4. It forces people to run as a team, not just to solo everything until they get to an AV, and I say this as someone who has several characters who can just solo everything short of an AV on a standard pre-Incarnate TF run.

Solo, I don't miss the challenge so much, because even with the level shift and my super rare and billions of inf worth of IOs +4/x8 Arachnos can still kill me.

You heard it here first folks. Speed runs are directly responsible for heart attacks, clearly guilty people going free, and buildings collapsing. Buildings full of cute fluffy kittens. Kittens I tell you! WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE KITTENS?

This message has been brought to you by the Coalition of Concerned Citizens Against Speed Runs.

Not to mention that everyone who embraces the system will trivialize content for you even if you reject it. And if you raise the difficulty to their level the people who haven't spent hours and inf bringing themselves up to your level but can still handle it with your help will be in way over their heads.

To me, it's a much better end game that allows for far more character and playstyle diversity than running the same raid a bunch of times to get the same new powers as everyone else.

Players are griefing authors right now. It's quick, it's easy, and it's completely anonymous. Griefing would actually be harder if signed comments took precedence over anonymous everything as far as presenting other players' opinion of an arc, and even harder still if rating or commenting required actually completing at least a significant portion of an arc. Those terrible terrible arcs Positron was so worried we wouldn't be able to 1-star? They would still be sitting at the bottom of the list right now if nobody could 1-star them.

At this point it's actually reducing the potential for good stuff in AE. Hall of Fame was a good idea in theory but in practice we saw where it led, and isn't a good way to give out new slots since if an arc loses its HoF rating the extra slot goes away and the author can't edit any arc. Dev's Choice is similarly flawed, even if they were being given out regularly, since it locks out editing. We are not writing novels, we're writing content for an ever-changing game, it needs to evolve along with the game so the AE can always present content that looks fresh.

I am assuming that writers for CoH write for CoH because they are interested in CoH. No, a writer cannot predict what someone else will like. But a writer who can hold a back-and-forth dialogue with an audience that is certainly not shy about expressing their opinions can somewhat accurately predict what at least a decent portion of them will like. If you write only for yourself there's no reason to put your work out for public consumption, unless your tastes happen to exactly match those of your target audience.

I don't dismiss anything that's bad about them. They're longer than they need to be, too many defeat alls and "your princess is in another castle" and "go slog through this warehouse to find this blinky then go to this one to kill this boss," because no boss ever sticks around a warehouse after he drops off his blinky. On the other hand, too many people are confusing the shiny and unique mechanics of the new arcs with "good writing." I'm not talking about people who actually like the story behind the arcs, I'm talking about people who claim it's a better story because it has unique maps and in-mission dialogue

I don't recall Venture complaining about any aspect of i20 that wasn't "testable" by reading the overview and Prometheus's dialogue. If there's any huge deep storyline buried somewhere in the new raids, which I'm assuming there isn't or someone would have said something by now, it's a bad place to put it, what with trying to coordinate up to 24 people and the timers and all.
You can't test that. People go to test specifically to test the new trials, and most people read up on how to start them before they try. People on live have other things they might rather be doing and most of them don't read the forums.

Honestly, my solution is probably going to be more and more "don't team." Then I can run around fighting Arachnos and Malta on +4/x8 to my heart's content without worrying about trying to bring people who couldn't resist the easy button the devs gave them around to my point of view. And every time a boss tries to trash-talk me, I will fire Judgement at them and laugh maniacally.

If shard runs are slow you're doing it wrong.

Speed runs are about as much fun as superspeeding through a zone clicking on plaques.

Speed running during pregnancy has conclusively been linked to ADHD and "that annoying kid in the mall who won't shut up and stop bugging his parents for every shiny he sees" syndrome.

Hey, robot janitors are scary.

Did you miss the memo? Tyrant is buffing him up, doncha know. Now he's uber-mega-awesome and you need to bring 8 friends. Yeah, he doesn't look any different, but he is. Believe it. The overview said so.

Yeah, what's the point of spending time and thought working on an awesome Blaster build, earning billions of inf to make it happen, rethinking your playstyle and adjusting so you don't die on higher difficulties, when you then go team with people who ran a few trials and can kill everything before you even get to it?

Remember teaming with a bunch of Elec/Shield characters back in i17? Yeah, it's like that.

A few people I talked to in game were actually kind of upset about it.

Well, first they got their Banisher badge, then they got upset about it.

Then what's the point of getting it in the first place?

You're completely missing the point of progress. You get more powerful so existing challenges become easier and you can take on new challenges, not so that you have to do raids because everything else becomes trivial. If they were going to do that they could have just raised the level cap, it would have amounted to the same thing.

Imagine that, someone whose playstyle isn't suited to the trials but who doesn't insist on soloing everything.

Only if you're leading, or can find someone with a similar mindset to lead.

I set all three ITFs I led last week to +1, and nobody said a word. I certainly didn't hear the sidekicks complaining about all the XP they got.

People on test are running 3-man ITFs with SOs and 7-man Mothership raids. I'm liking Incarnates less and less. The more you trivialize existing content the more it becomes a case of "do the trials or don't play." Or am I the only one who thinks a "I win" button isn't fun after the novelty wears off?

Lightning Rod is just one of those powers that is, for me, a perfect marriage of form and function. Kills lots? Check. Looks freaking awesome? Double check. It also does knockdown, which is another great combination of cool and functional.

You can at least make sure you end up in the same league. You may be split up among different teams but league chat > team chat for these things, so you'll still be playing with your friends. If your group is big enough you can do the trials with just your group, or with mostly your group with a few random additions.

Now if your group is small, then yeah, you'll be lost in a mess of people.