Venture

What if the mob difficulty was closer to FFXI, or EQ, where you'd need a perfect or near-perfect party in order to safely take down an enemy?

You only needed a "perfect or near-perfect" group in EQ if you were taking on raiding targets. The corrolary here would be AVs -- are you prepared to argue that AVs should be solo material, or that you should be able to take them on by just throwing any old bunch of people at them?

In any case, missions will continue to scale to the number of participants, which means soloing will always be an option.

It's always easy to hunt over your level, or do other things to artifically increase difficulty, but it's much, much harder to try and work around overpowered mobs.

No, it isn't. This is the point -- it's an artificial increase in difficulty. Because it is artificial, support classes -- three out of five in this game -- are never truly needed. That means they'd might as well not exist. Because it is artificial every defeat and every victory is hollow. If you are defeated it is only because you chose to be, by taking unnessecary chances. You could have played it safe and levelled just the same. And if you win, so what? The people playing it safe get the same rewards.

I'd also argue that dramatically higher difficulty makes for more interesting gameplay, in and of itself, at low levels; is 'pull, hide around the corner, repeat' really any more fun or heroic than 'wade into the fray'?

Ask Batman.

It's not fun to be chain-stunned, or even to be whacked around and have to restart your toggles every ten seconds. It isn't any fun at the high levels either, poor Fire and Ice tankers, but that's no reason to bring that sort of gameplay dynamic down to the lower levels.

Sure it is. The lack of defenses on Blasters is supposed to mean something. They can stack pool defenses to get almost as much Defense as a Reflexes Scrapper (which is not a good thing, but that's another argument), and they can even get small amounts of protection from Immobilize, Hold and KB if they take Leaping, but they can't protect themselves from Disorients. That means they need someone to take the shots for them (Tanker) or to pre-empt the enemy (Controller) or protect them when they do get hit (Defender). The faster that is made evident, the better. The bulk of this whining is coming from Blasters who suddenly discovered they couldn't just fire at will and blow everything to pieces. The weaknesses of the various ATs should be manifest at all levels of play so that people won't become spoiled by not having to deal with them at the lower levels.

If the two groups can keep the variety of powers, but possess no status effects and damage somewhere between where they are now and where they were before, it'd probably work out well, without ruining their uniqueness.

Right, because mobs that a level 5 Scrapper can fight 8-10 at a time are just too powerful.

And yet, you couldn't finish the mission. COULD NOT. You keep going on about what you did do, when you could choose your targets, make educated selections, and fight when and where you wanted to. But the fact remains that you had to 'game' the system in order to finish a mission.

First off, I didn't do anything the designers didn't intend, so you can't say I "gamed the system". You are supposed to be able to put off that mission and level first if you like. If you weren't, it would have been timed.

Second, and more importantly, you just can't keep harping on this and act like it supports your argument. It doesn't. I beat the whole map, +1 spawns notwithstanding, except for one mob. This does not support the original thesis, which was "+1 spawns in newbie doors are overpowering!"...in fact, it refutes it in the general case. It does not even support "+1 Bosses in newbie doors are overpowering!" At best it supports "+1 Bosses with Hurricane in newbie doors are overpowering!" I'll concede that one freely, but then I'd like to see Hurricane removed from every fricking mob in the game anyway.

The problem is that you have people who've never played a computer game before (like my wife) trying this game.

Again, "but what about the children?" They'll cope.

If she came here on the first night she played, she probably wouldn't have bothered coming back.

A true newbie isn't going to make level 5 in her first session, either.

On your first night playing the game, you're so overwhelmed with new things that you don't even know what's important.

That is no excuse. If you're overwhelmed you should be paying attention to notices like that.

My only point is that if you have a plan for your character, you're several steps ahead of the first time player. You likely have an optimum build (for your level) and still could not complete the mission. If your build is suboptimum, you have no chance.

How suboptimum can a build be by level FIVE? You can't even gimp yourself with worthless pool choices yet!

However, I'd argue that most of the indirect and active measures are going to be tough going. One attack on a boss won't hold, if it even hits.

The indirect stuff will stick just fine. Immobilizes will need to be stacked. If you read the manual, you'd know that more powerful mobs need multiple Immobilizes. If you didn't, you deserve to lose.

If you happen to have the right powersets, you do have some protection. However, every group that goes into this mission needs protection from them.

And fortunately, most Defender primary sets have something you can use. If not by level 5, then by level 8.

Agree on hurricane. But do you think a level 5 character should be facing hurricanes? Unless it's changed since the publication of the manual (and a lot has), it becomes available to players at level 20.

Yeah, and a level 7 Mire Eidolon has Oppressive Gloom, a level 35 Dark Armor power. Mobs have the powers the devs choose to give them, regardless of level or even AT limits. Bone Daddies use Dark Melee and Dark Blast.

You must never put together pick-up groups. I've explained agro to people in their teens.

This is why PLing is bad.

I like a challenge, but asking new players to pull like pros is not going to happen.

What is this pulling of which you speak? That group of 11 Outcasts? I didn't pull from it. I waded in and killed everyone.

Some people don't play the game for challenge.

The Sims Online is <--- that way.

For this game to continue to be as successful as it has, it has to have broad appeal.

The most successful commercial mud to date is EQ (no, I'm not counting Lineage), and it is 100% geared towards PvE achievment. So no, this game does not have to appeal to the lowest common denominator to succeed.

Appealing to people who don't have Sun Tzu on their desk is a good thing.

Now that you mention it, I do have Sun-Tzu on my desk. Along with Lao-Tzu, Chuang-Tzu, Confucius, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Machiavelli's The Prince, and Raymond Chandler's The Simple Art of Murder (for the title essay) -- seven books that contain all you really need to know.

But the simple fact is that if the game has no challenge, it will become boring to everyone, even the My Little Pony crowd.

It wasn't too difficult anymore because you out-levelled your mission.

And what about the part where I chopped up hordes of Outcasts and Trolls on the street?

How about the fact that I was able to clear out Eel's map, +1 spawns and all, except for him?

Fundamentally, when I'm playing low level characters, I want to get them to Talos/IP.

Why?

I also don't like the idea of new players going into door missions at second level and getting pounded by two patrols of two yellow minions and an orange lt. each because they don't yet know their character or the game well enough to handle that fight...especially if playing a controller, blaster, or defender.

I'm sick of these "but what about the children?" arguments. Newbies faced with +1 spawns will learn how to handle them, just like we did. They're not morons, and frankly it is just not that difficult a thing to deal with. Existing players have been spoiled by the ease of the game.

Newbies will be just fine. They don't need to be handheld or coddled, and they certainly don't need anyone crusading for them to be protected from anything that might be even remotely challenging.

Keep in mind that the difficulty of this game is based solely on the discretion of the player.

I am sorry, but this is just not true. A trivially easy game remains unchallenging even if you don't put 'X' in the center square. Achievment in this game is currently meaningless; you can get to 50 entirely by fighting battles you can't lose.

If people can choose their own difficulty, what's the point of having Controllers, Defenders or Tankers, classes meant to function in support roles? Everyone will pick fights they don't need groups for. Should everyone be able to solo like a Scrapper, just do away with the idea of support classes entirely? If they could the game would be even more ridiculously easy when they grouped -- and in any case, what's the point of an MMO in which everyone solos? The developers could never include content that needed any real teamwork to overcome, because the necessary support roles wouldn't exist. Support classes need the game to be difficult so that other players will value and appreciate their help.

I can guarantee that toned-down +2s will be much more difficult than the even cons you're fighting now.

Actually they won't, and that's the problem. Despite the whining to the contrary, the "purple patch" did not go far enough. I took down eight or nine level 40 Rikti Minions the other day with my 36 Kat/SR...+4 mobs should have handed me my head with a side of fries, no saving throw, but the truth is that I was never in any real danger.

Catering to the less skilled players only means that the skilled ones get xp faster... you're not about to go complaining about that, are you?

Yes, I am. If the game isn't challenging for everyone, it isn't challenging for anyone.

YOU STILL GET A CHALLENGE POST FIX AND YOU GET MORE XP. Why is this so hard to understand? Plus the players less skilled than you get more xp because they can take whites. Both sides win. What's wrong with this? You want to lose?

I understand it just fine, it's just wrong.

It is critically important that the lower levels (1 to 12 or 14) be relatively easy and fun.

No, it isn't. It is important that they be challenging, that players learn -- fast -- that they will have to use tactics in order to win fights, and that they may be faced with adversaries they just can't beat without help.

It's a fact of life that most people will quit something FAR, FAR more quickly if a task is too hard, than if it's too easy.

I don't accept that, and I don't accept that current CoH difficulty is too hard by any stretch of the imagination.

We don't know yet which powers are being removed. It could be a bad guy has Flares, and Fire Bolt and Flares is being removed. It could be they have unseen powers such as Stamina and they are being removed.

They hardly have any powers to begin with. Outcast Minions are using one ranged elemental power (except for Crushers), and one melee elemental power. That's it. LTs get the same, only stronger, plus a support power. Bosses are the only ones with any real spread of powers.

Any "unseen powers" they might have must be nearly insignificant. They sure don't have Stamina -- LTs and Bosses burn out their end in nothing flat.

The only other complaint I have about the Hollows is the defeat Atta and his Guards mission. Somebody went crazy with the troll button on that one, and Atta is a bit too uber for a level 14 boss.

Near as I can figure, that entire story arc was originally meant to be a Task Force but got reimplemented as a story arc instead. It needs to either become a Task Force or become a story arc, and if it's to be a story arc that means the spawns have to be changed from static to dynamic (scaling to number of participants) and the simultaneous-objective fascism has to go.

Do you really want more challenge in less time or more challenge in more time?

I want more challenge all of the time. I want an end to people taking on 8-10 white cons with a level 5 character and winning. I want Statesman's "one hero = three +0 Minions" to be a reality instead of a joke in bad taste. I want an end to herding through the simple expedient of ensuring that anyone even trying to pull that many mobs will die instantly. I want to have to stop and think about what I'm doing when I see a +0 Boss, not just hit BuildUp and chop him to pieces. I want people to be afraid of red cons, not happy they're getting more experience. I want to see Blasters looking for groups, and I want to see Tankers, Controllers and Defenders getting groups without having to beg for them.

And I think the challenge belongs in the entire game at all levels once you leave the Tutorial.

Preach it, sister!

So you're telling me that your scrapper, THE solo class of the game, couldn't solo a mission at level 5.

No. I am telling you I beat the entire map except for one mob with an over-the-top power. When I tried this trick on Test, before the Lightning Field/Hurricane swap, I soloed him without trouble.

I'll grant you that you did finish it solo. How many first time level 5 players, probably still trying to figure out the interface, know they can leave a boss in a mission, go make a level, get some inspirations and come back to mop up?

By level four, your trainer will tell you that if you face a mission that's too difficult you should get help or gain levels before attempting it again, so the answer to your question is ALL OF THEM. There is no excuse for not paying heed to the instructions.

How many of them are familiar with which powers to take at a given level so they're not completely useless at lower levels?

You really can't gimp yourself at level 5.

Especially scrappers, where almost every primary powerset has a total loser power in the first three?

That's hardly so. The worst I could say is that many players might not know they don't need to take both the slow and fast attack powers, only one or the other.

Now, ignoring the new players for a second. If a scrapper can't solo a mission, how do you expect another class to be able to?

I don't. They could outlevel it. Soloing is provisional for all ATs except Scrappers.

Imagine a team of a tank, a defender, and a controller trying to tackle that mission. Nobody at that level has status defense.

Direct resistance to status effects: Accelerate Metabolism (Radiation Emission, level 2), 02 Boost (Storm Summoning, level 1)

Indirect protection: Twilight Grasp (Dark Miasma, level 1), Deflection Shield (Force Field, level 1), Radiation Infection (Radiation Emission, level 1) -- because if they can't hit you, they can't change your status.

Active Countermeasures: Stone Cages (Earth Control, level 2), Fire Cages (Fire Control, level 2), Frostbite (Ice Control, level 2) -- because Immobilized mobs can't reach you to hit you, and if they can't hit you.... I'm only counting AEs here, not the single-target versions, on the premise that you'll have one Controller and many mobs.

It looks to me like at level 5, there are many things a Defender or Controller could bring to the table to help against mobs with disorients.

But the fact that the solo class of the game cannot solo a door mission indicates to me that something is broken.

All it says to me is that Hurricane is a PITA, but I knew that already.

Do you think your experience would have been fun if that was your first night in the game? Imagine being told to go to the hollows, and trying to get to your mission. If you don't even know what an agro radius is, and haven't had a chance to understand the implications of the colors of villians, how could you even make it to a mission without dying?

By level 5, players will know what an agro radius is, and you have had the implications of the con colors explained to you in the tutorial. How stupid do you think newbies are?

and the Thundercloud does insane amounts of damage, constantly, AND it chain stunns you.

Actually what it does is it burns off tons of the Lead Shocker's END for a cheap hit or two, then you run away from it and he follows you.

There are no special tactics, or whatever to be employed that have no been employed before that most of us are used it, and fod forbid we have to go back to quasi-EQ Monk Pulling lameassness to do anything.

IOW, you want to be able to just run in and mash keys without any thought, and still win.

No.

I stated numerous times that I am PRO-CHALLENGE.

No, you are not. You are pro-false-challenge. You want the game to look challenging, but not really be challening. You want people to be able to choose their difficulty, to which I suggest you may have confused this with a console game.

I like a challenge but the bosses and number of boss 'guards' are too tough for the level of mission. Just tonight I died four times trying to do the Eel mission.

I had about 90 minutes to kill before bed tonight so I logged in to Freedom, where I'm levelling up a copy of my main on Virtue (Kat/SR) 'coz some net.friends play there.

I had already hit level 5 so I ran into the Hollows and talked to Wincott. After my two Outcast ambush (wimpy), I stalked around a bit and found a level 5 group, but with a Boss. I popped two Lucks and a Discipline, went in and took down three Minions, about half the group, burning two Respites in the process, then retreated. Zoned, reloaded insps (tedious since Wincott wouldn't sell the good ones yet), came back and found a group of 11 level 5 Outcast Minions. Took them ALL out, solo.

Got the Troll mission. Massive Trollkin ambush shows up, at least six, might be mine and another player's. I took them on and got half my required kills...other players in the area jumped into the fight too so I'm not sure how many were actually there. Hunted around, found a group of eight level 5 Trollkin, spanked them.

That brought me to the two door missions, and I was still at level 5, four blocks to 6. I decided "what the heck" and went for it. Eel is .75 miles away, of course, so I had to trudge over, carefully weaving around groups of level 10 mobs, but I made it. Spawns were a mix of whites and yellows. I was forced to spend some inspirations dealing with a bad fight on the second level, but decided to go after the Eel anyway rather than run back to restock. The Eel spawned +1 and beat me. For the rematch I came back with better inspirations, but lost again because of the Hurricane -- if he'd been the Lightning Field variant I'd have won easily.

I realised this was a non-starter so I abandoned the mission for my first King's Row mission (Security Chief). This got me level 6 (and Hover). I then went back and took out the now +0 Electric Eel with no real problem. By this time it had gotten late, so I ran back to the entrance. Bedrock can wait until tomorrow.

So how is this too difficult, again? The only thing I would complain about here is Hurricane, which is a royal pain for melee ATs at every level. If Outcast are going to get it, better that the LTs have it and not the Bosses -- the LTs are easier to kill. Level 5 can solo in a Hazard Zone and people complain the game is too hard? Please.

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We'll also be tuning down Trolls and Outcasts even more - to make them like Skulls and Hellions (fewer powers, etc.).

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I have to concur with those who say this is the wrong path -- the Skulls and Hellions should be made more like the Outcasts and Trolls.

As it stands, Skulls and Hellions below the Boss level are just punks with guns, so why actually do the police need our help with them? I can see why they'd have their hands full with Outcasts.

It's finally happened: all the gravity controllers multi-casting singularity has caused Paragon to become unstable and collapse upon itself.

Like making Paragon City collapse would take work, seeing as how all the bedrock under it has been tunneled out for networks of secret bases....

We have gone back and removed the multi-tasking missions from Story Arcs and multi-stage missions.

Thank you.