Wing_Leader

I'm so glad my friend doesn't read these forums anymore...my job (trying to convince him to resub) is hard enough as it is...

Very true! This used to be something he really loved about CoH when he first started playing. The feeling that you are a super-powered hero pretty much from the start made CoH a unique MMO experience. Unfortunately, the Issue 4 nerfs and ED left him bitter. His beloved regen scrapper became a toon he hated to play anymore thanks to the changes to Instant Healing. Say what you will about how "overpowered" it used to be, he liked it that way, just like he (well, most of us) liked tankers that could tank an entire room's worth of mobs without needing a healer on hand to keep them alive. We always felt that the way to make the game challenging was not to nerf the powers, but to make the mob A.I. better. But, of course, nerfing is just much easier to implement.

In the end it may turn out he's a bit of a lost cause. He may play a little bit as a Freemium player, mostly just to have something to do with his two boys, but I'm probably never going to be able to convince him to subscribe again. Maybe if the "cone of content" was mostly out in front of L50, rather than behind, I might have had a chance, but I think it is a hard sell when he is mentally comparing the amount of post-L50 WoW content with the amount of L50 CoX content that has come out in the same amount of (calendar) time. I think the unfortunate, sad truth is that WoW has poisoned him into believing that MMOs are only worth playing at the level cap, and that all the other game content is merely stuff to begrudgingly slog through to reach the "real" game.

What is meant by "old hat"? Usually that is a way of saying "obsolete".

I was assured, up and down, in the "Casual players" thread that SOs are still the dominant form of enhancement, that builds filled entirely (or even mostly) with crafted IOs are not the "norm", and that not everybody chases gear (IO sets) as if it was the "new hat" you have to wear in order to be accepted or effective.

How was the Hollow revamped? The Lt. Wincott missions looked exactly the same to me when I checked in there recently.

I originally started playing CoH after Issue #1 had already been out a while and Issue #2 was just being released. I never knew the game when 40 was the level cap. What are Titan-Os?

He is planning to return at the Freemium level because it will give him something to play with his kids without having to pay for three accounts. But I am trying to find a way to arouse his interest in the CoX end-game because I want him to join me in the Incarnate experience. But I'm pretty sure I need something more than just that to convince him that CoX has a rich variety of end-game content so that he'll even consider going VIP. I just don't think Incarnates are enough, on their own, to reel him in. And exemplaring down to (the wealth of) lower-level missions will almost surely feel like a step backwards (downwards?) to him. I've never known him to be a badge hunter, for instance, so going back and doing lower level content just for the badges probably won't appeal to him.

In the end it sounds like there is little chance I will be able to entice him to go VIP and join me in the Incarnate stuff. Not unless I give him a 60-day game card for Christmas or something...

Well, I wasn't actually asking for build advice on any of the forums. I was just reading the pertinent (or what I thought would be pertinent) threads in the hopes of getting some general insights on the leveling and building process for Scrappers vs. Brutes, i.e., how the process differed between them. I wasn't looking for "which is best", rather, I was looking for general info that would help me decide what would work best for me.

What I discovered was that there was no general consensus, but worse than that was that it took many pages of reading posts before I realized that the debate over which AT was the more capable melee class was purely focused on L50 builds with maximal set bonuses (and, in many cases, Incarnates slotted up). I didn't know going in that the conversation was only interesting (to the participants) when talking about end game builds, and not when talking about the 1-50 leveling career of either AT.

It made me wonder if maybe COH had become mostly a playground for min-maxed L50s who have been grinding the end game content for the last couple of years, just like WoW had become (and has been for quite some time, IMO). I'm gratified to learn that this is definitely not the case, rampant AE farm PL'ing notwithstanding.

This is worth (me) spotlighting for a moment. My concerns go beyond the solo experience of the game, because after all I can always ignore repeated runs of things if I just solo the way I like. But I must point out that the one aspect of COH that fills my heart with great love is the openness towards teaming (and the ease with which COH's QoL features make it trivial to do so). No other MMORPG can even come close, IMO (though I confess I have not tried them all).

So, you can imagine how important it is for me to understand how team dynamics and expectations have evolved during my three year hiatus. Rather than the invention system remaining a dubiously conceived sideshow (my personal feelings of it when it first arrived), it felt upon my return as though it had become the very foundation of standard end game builds and had become the primary focus of end game play activity. I mean, surely all the Tips teams and AE teams that I see broadcasting LFM every day aren't running the same content over and over again for their health (or even the fun of the content itself).

I think that my exposure to the invention system may end up being mostly, if not soley, focused on filling up Incarnate slots rather than IOs. The Incarnate slots feel more like adding new powers to my character than IOs which just give me better enhancements, which is to my mind how they give us new powers (and even combat level bumps) to attain without raising the actual level cap (something which I presume would involve too many ugly and potentially disastrous code changes to the engine to ever consider implementing).

Thank you very much for taking the time to write all that up for me!

For someone who stopped playing right around the time Vanguard was introduced, and who pretty much ignored merits and IOs when they initially arrived, all these different kinds of rewards feel a bit overwhelming. Having only enhancements and inspirations streamlined the game in a way that really put the focus of the game on doing things superheroes do, which is take down bad guys. All these "inventions", merits, tokens, tickets, and so on feel so outside of the superhero genre to me that I have trouble grasping the intended metaphor, and so for me there is no intrinsic logic behind them to make understanding them (without the generous help of guys like you) more natural.

I come from a tabletop superhero RPG background in which everything had an internal logic that helped everything in the game make sense. For me, the moment crafting was introduced into COH, and the chase for "gear" began in earnest, the game sorta stopped feeling like superheroes and more like every other fantasy MMORPG I've ever played (and abandoned). Only COH seems to have the ability to keep me coming back for more, and I really think it has a lot to do with the fact that there is still end game content that doesn't exclusively revolve around obtaining new gear, though one could argue that trying to fill the Incarnate slots is really no different than chasing the latest Tier X gear in WoW...

Still, I'd like to believe that doing the Incarnate Trials, and "leveling up" via the Incarnate System, will feel more like epic superhero drama than the WoW raids ever felt like epic fantasy drama (they really only felt like looting runs due to how often you had to repeat them and the fact that nobody ever really cared about the storyline or the fact that every run was conducted like a dance routine that you carried out step by step, exactly as prescribed, without deviation).

It was bad enough back in the day that players were constantly running off to vendors to sell or re-slot their enhancements after every mission, which slowed down the game considerably. Now there are a whole bunch of other distractions that have teammates scattering for who-knows-how-long (and at times it is so long you'd swear they just went AFK and didn't bother to tell anyone) while the more focused few of us stand at the next mission door waiting to continue. It wouldn't bother me so much, I don't think, if all that other stuff actually felt like superhero activity, but it doesn't. I realize that it is a large part of what puts the "G" in MMORPG for COH, but I just wish it didn't feel so much like hanging out with teenagers at a mall (let's all shop shop shop til we drop)...

Funny you should mention this. I take it that particular AE mission setup is popular? When I jumped back into the game last month I made up a new toon (on Virtue) just to work the rust out of my brain, accumulated from years away from the game, and ended up on what I realized was my first AE farm. It was exactly what you described above, a single-room "mission" led by a L50 fire/fire brute who stood on a large table and just mopped up ambush after ambush of fire mobs. Most of us on the team would die in the first 30 seconds and lay there face down while the xp (and apparently, tickets) rolled in. The broadcast that went out LFM didn't mention that it was a farm (not that I recall anyway), only that it was AE, and being eager to try an AE mission for the first time I joined in.

It was a very quick way to level the new toon (a claws/wp scrapper), but it was boring of course. To my mind, the fact that this goes on a lot says to me that the devs might want to re-think their approach to alts a little. The fact that most of us (not all of us, I grant you) don't want to have to repeat all the under-50 content every time we roll an alt suggests to me that there ought to be a way to roll an L50 right from the start--maybe after an account has earned a certain number of L50s the regular way first (sort of like how EATs become unlocked once you get a toon to 50). Anyway, that's a totally different topic for a different thread and I don't want to derail this one with what is probably a horribly controversial idea.

In any event, I look forward to getting into the Incarnate stuff with at least one of my L50s. I unlocked the Alpha slot last night with my Scrapper, and now I gotta get on some BAF teams so I can get the stuff needed to actually "craft" an Alpha ability. But I gotta ask, doesn't anyone else think that the idea of crafting an ability is a little odd conceptually? Probably the last thing I picture when it comes to "acquiring" a god-like Incarnate power is sitting at a crafting table tinkering with tools to build a piece of...what...inner cosmic talent?