Wing_Leader

I wasn't playing back before they softened Keyes, so I don't have anything to compare the current experience to. But I like Keyes the way it is now, at least in terms of the "difficulty factor". I'm not overly fond of the repetitive nature of the assaults on the three reactors, or the fact that the complex rules that deal with how you can or can not unlock the terminals are not very clearly laid out, but in terms of time spent vs. rewards gained I think Keyes hits something of a sweet spot for me. Though with TPN now "mastered" by leagues, it may become the new Keyes in this regard.

The current preferred strategy for TPN, as I understand it and have experienced it at least once so far (very recently), makes it very simple to understand and execute, though it also has elements of needless repetition and certain annoyance factors that can be irritating.

Basically it comes down to this: beat up stuff in the beginning until you are allowed in the buildings. Go into each building in turn, taunt the IDF away from the terminals and beat them up while "technician killers" take down the technicians and build up popular opinion. Ignore the citizens and telepathists outside. You keep cycling through the buildings doing this until popular opinion reaches 500 and everyone is teleported outside to defeat Maelstrom. Take him down (jump out of LOS if you are Marked for Death and wait for the red badge to go away before re-engaging). Go back and repeat the whole buildings-with-terminals phase again. Take down Maelstrom again. Done.

Repetitive, yes. Simple, definitely. Annoying, for sure, in that Maelstrom and the angry citizens will be hounding you (and one-shotting you) as you bounce from building to building, but even if a member or two of the league has trouble getting into any given building because of this, there is usually still enough firepower able to reach the terminal rooms to get the job done.

I have found that this process is so straightfoward as to be almost boring, and the rewards are monstrous. Astral merits and threads like any other trial, but you get 60 threads for the initial take-down of Maelstrom, and then you benefit from the 2/1 Empyrean merit schedule, and extra component drops at the end. If it weren't for the importance of +2/+3 level shifts, I really think TPN would replace BAF as the go-to trial to farm.

If the PPD was smart, they would just send out teams of these security chiefs armed with squadrons of security drones, like the ones that guard City Hall or the tram stations, and just keep the streets clean that way. There wouldn't be a single mob causing mischief on the streets of any zone. This would free up PC superheroes to go confront the kinds of threats that those security drones simply can't handle.

Uh, wait. Why does Paragon City need superheroes, exactly?

This is hardly surprising since inconsistencies and contradictions are pretty much intrinsic to anything called a "bible".

Yes, and as a casual player who doesn't want to turn the game into a second job, I am very much appreciative of this design choice. But in terms of in-world logic and immersion, the fact that Clockwork Cogs can drop Regenerative Flesh is a failure. At the end of the day I don't mind this too much because I realize that's the price to be paid for the overall convenience level I enjoy in the game. But it is still less than ideal, afaic.

That's what I thought! But someone seems to be trying to tell me that is all just a false perception of Brutes.

I dunno. Farming of any kind could be considered boring and lame depending on your point of view. Whether I have to fight a hundred clockwork or a hundred random mobs that don't mean anything to me, what does it really matter? Farming is killing things just for the drops; when did it ever matter to a farmer what the enemy model looked like?

Well, to be fair, dealing with common street thugs is the job of the police, and there is no reason to think the PPD can't handle it. Superheroes should be dealing with threats that the PPD, Freedom Corps, Longbow, and Vanguard can't handle on their own. It's like asking why the Avengers aren't always around helping Spiderman deal with Doc Oc. I mean, they all call the same city Home. The usual explanation is that you leave the Avengers to deal with threats nobody else can, and leave the street crime to the police and the FBI, non-superpowered international intrigue to the CIA, etc.

And by extension, a level 50 (+3) Incarnate should be busy keeping Tyrant from establishing a thousand year reich in Paragon City, leaving the up-and-coming level 20 heroes to handle factions like the Tsoo and the Sky Raiders. There is a kind of heirarchy of threats, along with heroes to deal with them, that the security level system has established in the game. Players can't be faulted for adhering to this "food chain of heroism" when it is exactly as the devs intended it.

But isn't this a direct consequence of a game world with virtually no persistence? Or, more precisely, persistance of changes to the state of the game world?

For instance, Steel Canyon will have the same mobs on every corner an hour from now, regardless of how many times a Lady Grey TF causes an impromptu Rikti invasion there, even if said invasion provokes no heroic response. What would really happen is the Rikti would establish a beachhead, expand their foothold, and take over Steel Canyon one neighborhood at a time. The consequences for any of the villain groups established there would be significant. But such changes to the world's state are simply not permitted/supported.

Another example: notice how the Ghost Ship conveniently disappears of its own accord if nobody interacts with it. It doesn't really matter what the Tsoo might think of the Ghost Ship (or do about it) because any actions they might take would just be wiped away to make sure Talos Island is safely back to square one within a few minutes time.

The "reset to zero" mechanic is an intrinsic aspect of MMO design, deployed to insure that new players get access to the same Steel Canyon or Talos Island that older players have had for the last year (or eight). Consequently, the devs have no way to show how the various factions would react to anything, outside of major world-altering zone events. And even then, the outcome of the zone events are already hardcoded into the game world going forward, with no real opportunity to change that. When the Hamidon seedlings started dropping in the zone events for Issue 21, do you really think that anything the players did during that event would have altered the state of the game world going forward? No, of course not!

Deeper storytelling, in which cause and effect has any sort of wider (and/or deeper) impact requires persistence, which nobody has figured out how to properly implement into an MMO. I think the last time a major MMO had such a concept was Ultima Online, and the lesson learned there was that true persistence is to be avoided at all costs.

Maybe it has just been a huge misconception on my part all this time. Brutes were the closest things to Tanks that redside had originally, so I always thought that Brute defenses were somewhere between Scrapper and Tanker. Are you saying that Brutes are equivalent to Scrappers in terms of defenses, but with weaker dps? What possible value do they add to the game then?

TMNT isn't what I would call a superhero universe, no. Urban fantasy at best.

Neither Robin nor Batgirl routinely fight with sticks (they just punch and kick a lot). Nice try though.

And the distinction between truly super-powered heroes and heroes with superior skills within the bounds of normal human limits is important if you want to make any sense out of scenarios where characters are fighting giant robots and cosmic entities like Galactus or Thanos. To say that every character in the DC or Marvel universe is a superhero is a semantic oversimplification that, while true on a superficial level, doesn't help address the essential problem of verisimilitude in situations like the iTrials (TPN and the rock-throwing citizens in particular) where we are expected to accept the absurd notion that normal (but skilled) dudes with sticks can (or should) do diddly squat against huge assault mechs with reinforced titanium armor plating and/or force fields.

Please do.

Of all those, only Mole Man and Mockingbird (a) are major characters in a genre-defining superhero universe, and (b) actually fight with their staves. Stargirl's "Cosmic Staff" is essentially just a focus for flight and energy manipulation. Donatello benefits from existing in a martial arts themed mileux where mundane weapons are the rule, not the exception. He isn't part of a superhero universe.

In CoX terms, I only count one example so far of a major superhero character that makes staff fighting her "Primary Power set": Mockingbird. I would argue that Mole Man is a Mastermind not a Scrapper, and has the Fighting power pool with the cosmetic effect of it looking like bojutsu. His villainous threat to the surface world is in his armies of subterranean followers (and the special technology at his disposal), not his stick fighting skills.

My answer would be yes or no depending on how often one rewatches a movie or rereads a book, and how much time there is between iterations.

Well, for starters dispensing with the Boss Fight as the one and only final objective of every trial would help.

For instance, the Lambda sector trial could have been about trying to sabotage the place without getting captured (where being defeated means being locked in confinement rather than teleporting to a "hospital"). Captured toons must be freed if they are to contribute any more to the effort, but that risks splitting up the team into sabotagers and rescuers. Furthermore, the sabotage wouldn't be in the form of destroying containment chambers or weapons caches, but by setting explosive charges in key areas of the compound. These charges could be "undone" by IDF engineers who can disarm them, perhaps requiring some toons to be on "distract the engineers" duty. And then have the possibility that if the team's efforts are detected on a wide enough scale, then Marauder is called in to deal with the threat, but he isn't necessarily the uber version he is now, but just enough of a problem to throw a wrench into the overall sabotaging efforts. And maybe there are glowies in the facility, representing makeshift bombs, that can be clicked that turn into sabotage charges. The idea is to have an overall goal that is undestandable: set X number of charges and then escape (which triggers their detonation), but provide multiple means of achieving it, along with multiple independent complications and obstacles that threaten the effort.

I mean, the Lambda trial is billed as a sabotage mission but it doesn't feel like one. Instead it feels like a series of unrelated activities that just happen to end in a Big Boss Fight, just like all the others.

Keyes suffers from a withering sameness in every phase of it, until the Big Boss Fight at the end. I think the whole thing should just be one reactor, or the reactor cluster should be treated as just one big system with multiple aspects to it that need to be addressed in order to prevent Anti-Matter from using it as a power source when he shows up (if he shows up).

I'm sure if the members of this forum really made a project out of it, they could easily redesign the trials to be much more interesting, much more dynamic, and much more challenging without resorting to binary gimmicks and the compulsory Boss Fight, which always boils down to nothing more than the application of overwhelming dps (with debuffs in support). I mean, I think the overall storyline of taking out Emperor Cole's ability to conduct his invasion is a reasonably good one, but I think many of the details, both in terms of story and in design, need some major reworking. I like the ideas behind the Lambda and Keyes trials, and even the Underground trial has lots of potential if only it weren't also on a rail. But BAF feel like nothing more than an assassination mission, MoM is great storywise but relies too much on avoidance gimmicks, and TPN is just plain dumb in every sense I can think of.

Nope, not even a little.

The majority of the things we do in life repeatedly we do for reasons not even remotely related to how fun they are. And the fun things we do do repeatedly usually involve some form of dynamic potential so that the experience isn't nearly identical every time. Repeatable MMO content has very little in its architecture to help make it new and different each time through. It is relentlessly unvarying, in fact, and even the participation of different players can't always compensate for that, especially in the iTrials where the same exact sequence of activities and events play themselves out regardless of league composition.

Right, because fighting with a stick is such a great manifestation of super-powered abilities. How many stick fighters are there in any of the major superhero continuities anyway?

Gambit, for example, fought with a stick, sure, but he used it as a focus for non-ranged energy blasts. Without those energy blasts, he would have been nothing but an obnoxious d-bag with a trenchcoat fetish and a funny accent.

Yeah, yeah, I know, they quietly took the word "super" out of the game's tagline while I wasn't looking. I should probably just resign myself to the fact that it has lost any semblance of genre identity it may have once had (or had ambitions of having) and is now just "the game about anything that fights" and will remain so going forward.

I sense another departure from the game for me soon...

Never having done the ITF, I can't say what I think of it or speculate on why people run it repeatedly. I think the classic TFs are mostly fun the first time through, but after that the only reason I do them is to get the Task Force Commander accolade.

This is pretty much true for all the repeatable content in the game for me. Once I've experienced any given mission/TF/Trial once or twice, I'm pretty much done with it, and only repeat it for the character progression rewards or the team play experience. Content that offers no meaningful rewards rarely ever gets run again for that toon.

Honestly, I don't understand what the appeal is of "the grind"--which I define as running repeatable content over and over and over again, even after its immutable narrative script has been mastered--outside of the tangible xp/inf/merit/component rewards.

I would endorse such a campaign. At least until such time as the game provides a clear separation between content intended for merely-talented heroes and content intended for super-powered hereoes.

Well, there are basically three options here: selectively suspend disbelief and take the boning (i.e., "Thank you Paragon, may I have another?"), stop paying/playing (i.e., "I'm not putting up with this, see ya!"), or express discontent and try to steer the devs in a better direction (i.e., "I'm gonna kvetch and moan about it in the forums."). Of the three, the second option is probably the most effective while still keeping one's intellectual integrity intact, though it is just as much total capitulation as the first option. The third is the most actively constructive, but the hardest to translate into concrete reality. I think it is obvious which one I am taking at the moment...

Fun isn't the only reason to run a trial. I imagine that quite a lot of players will endure trials they don't particularly regard as fun so long as they get the Incarnate-building rewards they need. You know, just like how the majority of people on this Earth work jobs they don't particularly like and would never describe as fun, strictly for the paycheck. To the extent to which players have decided that having Incarnate powers is a "necessity" (for their enjoyment of the game), running the trials will remain an equally necessary evil, whether they are fun or not.

To my mind, there is really no other plausible explanation for why BAF and Lambda get run so often. The veteran trial runners clearly want the rewards; whatever "fun factor" these trials may have once had has long since been extracted, as evidenced by the fact that they are essentially executed purely on auto-pilot.

Agreed. Thankfully nobody is making that argument.

Having said that, though, a level 50 superhero is above virtually all reproach from normal civilians, a superhero with Incarnate powers even more so. They aren't invulnerable to other superpowered beings or technology that delivers massive damage potential, despite what the power set calls itself. But surely we all recognize the difference in threat potential between a Malta Titan and civilian demonstrator (irrespective of any -DEF or -Res debuffs that might be in effect).

Power, as it pertains to attack damage/effects, is a spectrum, and a very wide one at that. The existance of beings farther along that spectrum than our 50+3 Incarnate toons does not change the fact that most everything else in the CoX world is further behind. It is also not unfair to ask that we be given an iTrial experience in which we feel like near-godlike beings once in a while without having to go street sweeping Atlas Park. What some folks are asking for are trials in which parts of the story makes us feel like the rare inheritors of godlike power we are, rather than just being schooled in how inadequate the game engine can make us feel by giving everything we face more hit points, more level shifts, more non-resistable damage and/or debuffs, etc. They aren't asking for the trial AVs to be eqivalent to even-level Elite Bosses that can be trivially solo'ed by any one member of a league. They are asking for challenges that don't marginalize our position on the power spectrum. Anyone who feels that the current approach to trial design is the best (or only) way to do this is profoundly mistaken, IMO.

The more I think about it, the more I am coming to the conclusion that the solo Incarnate content may actually be what it should always have been. Stories in which individual heroes can feel like the stars of their own books, or in which regular teams can engage in epic storylines that resemble the comics. I don't know where the devs got the idea that the narrative and dramatic potential of the "Incarnate Journey" and "The Coming Storm" was best represented by WoW-style dungeon raiding, but it is clear to me that is the primary source of this disconnect many folks are feeling.