BellaStrega

I do this too. I don't really like making the shoulders smaller on my characters because they do not look right. I don't particularly mind if my characters look a bit masculine, but I don't think increasing shoulder width particularly achieves that effect as uniformly as was suggested.

??? Exploit?

As for the hyperbole, I thought it would be helpful to post some relatively accurate numbers as I'd recently had the opportunity to see how quickly one can get shards in solo play.

Since you can get T2 solo in under two weeks just by doing five tip missions a day, I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion. It takes a long time to get that alpha slot going due to low drop rate, but that long time is a matter of days, not weeks or months. I was able to get my T1 in three days, which included confirming my hero alignment once and doing each SSA chapter twice, while set on x4-x6. After I confirmed my hero alignment the second time, I had 10 shards left to go toward my T2, and that was within five days. I haven't really played the character much since due to another MMORPG (aside from speed running SSAs to get once/week rewards), but I can probably finish up my T2 fairly quickly the same way.

My answer is like this, except Dark Control/Dark Affinity.

Yes, other games had raids prior to City of Heroes.

No, I wouldn't say that the Hamidon raid was a failure. I don't know of there are still active Hamidon raids (but I would be surprised if there wasn't) but I do know Hamidon was actively raided for years, through all the various changes (and the latest incarnation is actually pretty decent for needing to coordinate up to 50 people).

Perhaps my perspective comes from being involved with people who have been active in Hamidon raids, but I am not sure the ability to fill up the Hive and defeat Hamidon even when the game is nearly 8 years old qualifies as a "failure."

I don't really care about the aesthetics, but I so much prefer how Windows 7 handles windows I don't ever want to go back to XP. But then, I am extremely particular about the order my windows are in, and I suspect most people aren't fussed nearly as much.

I find that increased power gives you more options. It's just not as explicit, as it's not "I have a new power to shoot you with" but more "I can use my existing powers more frequently, effectively, etc. and engage in riskier play with greater chance of survival." Obviously, there's not really much in the game that can match the ability to have permanent status protection on characters that didn't have it before. That's a huge game changer.

For example, IOs make my DM/DA scrapper into a passable tank, and solves a lot of the weaknesses in both powersets. Of course, a lot of that is geared so I can run ten toggles at once and fight without keeling over, but still.

I think that Hamidon was always meant to be that, but they never managed to design it that way. The later change to it to limit the Hive to 50 players was an attempt to get away from this, but since it was still set up as an open world raid, people still leech. At least I recall this happening when I was doing Hamidon raids in 2010.

For what it's worth I don't think our misunderstanding was your responsibility. What I said lacked enough context to come across with my full intended meaning, and it was a terrible joke anyway.

I agree that the incarnate rewards are so much better than any previous endgame rewards (HOs and SHOs primarily) even before all the nerfs there's practically no comparison in terms of quality.

Your reaction didn't seem harsh.

Oh, it's completely valid. You can't just go into the Hive and smack Hamidon whenever you want to for a drop, you know?

You're making a matter of how well the encounter was designed into whether the encounter counts for that philosophy. Intended behavior was not to simply hit Hamidon once and get your reward. Early on you would get an enhancement for every goo you killed, and supergroups would set things up to mass kill goos to get multiple rewards when the intention was one reward to a player. They changed the design to prevent that, just as they changed the design again to make it harder to just go into the Hive and smack Hamidon once to get your reward.

I wonder how Hamidon would have been designed if they'd worked Leagues into the game at launch?

Yes to both. Panther 541 is pretty simple - find a good chokepoint if you like that sort of thing and hold the line until the mission ends. I really like it.

One Good Spider is perhaps my favorite mission in the game right now, but you're right about it being long and involved.

Sorry, that comment didn't come off as I wanted it to. I wasn't trying to be insulting, and I am sorry that I came across as insulting or trying to say you're some *** who wouldn't admit to being wrong.

Well of course not, that'd be tantamount to saying you're wrong.

They're an evolutionary advancement over Hamidon enhancements. It's the same concept of trial rewards, but vastly improved so people will be more willing to spend their time getting them.

Do you think I'm arguing against the idea of various advancement paths?

Of course they don't, because they weren't really all that well designed or implemented. It took years for the dev team to improve enhancements to make them more interesting than "slot them in a power and improve that power's numerical statistics." They were also balanced poorly with how most existing powers actually worked.

The Mothership raids are also such an example, but much less restrictive than the Hamidon raids were. Open world raids (which technically both Hamidon and Mothership are) are not a new concept in MMORPGs, nor are they particularly considered to be entirely different beasts than instanced raids.

Both are currently designed to be accessible and fast, which is part of CoH's design philosophy.

The philosophy I'm using Hamidon enhancements to support is the idea of having superior rewards for raid content. That's it. And in that regard, incarnate rewards were not a change from past design. Incarnate rewards are handled differently from past awards in that you need XP to unlock the the incarnate slots and you need shards (for Alpha) or threads (for any) to build the powers you put in those slots. They're also not tradeable, can blur the lines between ATs by giving everyone access to self-buffs, team buffs, and pets, can boost existing powers in effectiveness just from the alpha slot, and in general are much more interesting and fun than trying to slot 6 nucleolus exposures in every attack.

I specifically focused on the numbers aspect because people were saying that "nothing like level shifts existed before," which is incorrect. Despite the lack of an explicit level shift, enhancing one's powers will have a similar net effect of enabling one to fight against higher-level enemies with fewer complications. It is true that no explicit level shift mechanic has existed before, but similar outcomes were achieved in the past via other means. How am I supposed to explain my position on this without referring to game mechanics and numbers?

It's all about the cognitive dissonance.

See my reply above. I didn't make the claim they were exactly the same thing. I said they were in the same category of thing. What you're describing isn't that incarnate rewards are anything new. They're simply much improved rewards over what's been available in the past, and some (not all) of those rewards are relevant only because certain past rewards (or powersets) were nerfed.

Does your forum join date reflect the time you started playing as well? I may be talking about a period of time you simply didn't experience, which means you don't know what it was like and what characters with full Hamidon slotting under the pre-enhancement diversification, pre-Hamidon enhnancement nerf, and pre-global defense reduction were capable of.

Hamidon enhancements were nerfed so IOs would be meaningful, or at least that's the explanation that was given at the time, despite IOs not being around for some time after (I forget the exact interval). A lot of people did find them appealing and went to great lengths to fill out some of their characters with these enhancements because the comparison to not having them was rather immense. You are right that incarnate slots are more appealing but this doesn't refute my argument at all.

I'm fairly certain it's documented fact that Hamidon enhancements represented character advancement beyond the limits of the game outside attending Hamidon trials, and such advancement actually made it fairly trivial to fight +4 mobs. The game's changed a lot since that time and the dev team is much better at designing rewards, or at least has more freedom to design better rewards, than they did then. It's not a matter of opinion that CoH had options to make your character significantly more powerful from launch.

Actually, I would argue that the potential of Hami slotting was much greater than being nudged up another level. It didn't give you new powers, but it made existing powers extremely potent. The difference is that Incarnate progression is designed to be coherent and not as heavily random loot roll reliant as Hamidon enhancements were

Obviously, the addition of incarnate powers represents an evolution in the designer's methods. This doesn't mean my correlation is wrong, it simply means that they've found more interesting ways to advance one's character than "bigger, better enhancements."

The level shift thing is precisely what epic level gear tends to do. It makes you more capable of facing more powerful enemies or larger numbers of more typical enemies. You would get big honking super splosions, but they'd be from your existing abilities, not derived from wholly new ones.

Anyway, you're trying to refute an argument I didn't make. I never said Hamidon enhancements represented an identical progression to incarnate slots. What I was saying was that the dev team didn't just suddenly start locking content and character progression behind raids, this was something in the game from the very beginning. What's changed over time is how well the raid/trial rewards have been designed as well as the variety of raids/trials. I also said that fully slotting out with Hamidon enhancements made characters fairly powerful, to the point that facing mobs above them in level was less of a problem than it was for those who didn't have those same enhancements.

Even cheaty trial mechanics that bypass your powers existed in various ways in the Hamidon trial, and have been changed three or four times over the history of the game. The Eden Trial also bypassed powers and required the use of special inspirations to fight the Crystal Titan long before they added inspirations to buff against Hamidon. Altering game mechanics in specific fights is something the devs have been doing in trial content for a long time. I think it's ridiculous, but it's there.

No, you are not reading that correctly. I never stated that end-game content should be teams only. I stated that the way they handled incarnate content was not a departure from previous attempts at end-game content. The fact that some of it turned out to be soloable does not mean it was added to the game with the intent to solo.

I actually prefer to spend most of my time soloing and I think that Dark Astoria's rewards could use some improvement, although I do agree that it should not be nearly as fast as running trials.

My issue is that people are making arguments from a false premise, not that I particularly disagree with what they want.

On the contrary, Hamidon enhancements elevated characters to a fairly high power level. They didn't give you new powers or explicit level shifts, but with a character with full Hamidon slotting, you'd be fairly powerful. Would the level shift really matter if you could increase accuracy and damage both by 270%? They weren't a "bit of refinement." They were a new power level. They didn't provide access to entirely new powers, but they really didn't need to.

Also, as I recall, players did treat it as a form of progression. Hamidon enhancements lost some popularity after IOs, however, for good reason.

The level 48-50 analogy makes no sense at all, however. Content like the incarnate trials exists to give characters at max level more things to do. No one's going to lock actual leveling mechanics behind required teaming. The incarnate slots are more like epic gear than true leveling.

You're mistaken. Hamidon enhancements were raid content. They could be traded to characters who never stepped foot in the Hive, unlike Incarnate shards, threads, or components, but in order for them to exist in the first place, someone had to raid for them. Later on, you could get them through Statesman's and Lord Recluse's TFs, but initially you pretty much had to be there or someone who was willing to give them to you had to be there. And when HOs were stronger and there was no ED, there were characters that were entirely slotted out with HOs, who were significantly stronger than characters who weren't. What is the difference, exactly? Even after ED, HOs were still fairly strong. Even after HOs were nerfed to make room for IOs, they were still more potent than anything else you could slot.