Dante

Hello everyone.

In all of the feedback over i20, there’s one thing that I have noticed that doesn’t seem to have been mentioned, namely how often we’re now getting intrusive combat spam while fighting. Regardless of how you may feel about i20 (IMHO, D-, must try harder) the new Trials and TFs seem to have cluttered up the UI even more so than the garish Classic (but not ‘classic’) Team and League windows.

I ran the Admiral Sutter TF for the first time last night and although lots of fun, the amount of text we’re getting thrown during events is starting to feel a little tedious. The first time I faced down a Warwalker in the Apex TF and saw the ominous red text: WARWALKER IS POWERING UP ITS ORBITAL LANCE, it was impressive. Once I worked out the trick to avoiding it, it became annoying. On the Sutter TF, encountering a spawn of Warwalkers where they all fire at the same time filled up my screen with red text, causing me to fly into another spawn trying to avoid them.

The iTrials are even worse. Not only do we have the Events panel floating in our UI, there’s also the unexplained Blue Box of Exposition that splats down over the screen from time to time. Add to this the frankly annoying text of: MARAUDER IS ENRAGED, USE A GRENDADE! and it’s not just Praetor White that’s ready to take peoples’ heads off. (Seriously, I’m expecting the next Trials to flash luminous green text on and off declaring: ANTIMATTER LOOKED AT YOU FUNNY, HIT HIM IN THE FACE!!! )

So, two questions really: firstly, is there a way to minimise or stop these visual intrusions and secondly, does anyone else feel slightly condescended to by the vibrant warnings? I certainly never saw anything like them when Lord Recluse summoned his Bane Spiders or when Reichsman called down a thunder blast that could knock me out of Granite. Is it just me or is the combat spam starting to grate on your nerves too?

(For what it’s worth, I play on a 22” Widescreen monitor and have my window scale at 85% so it’s not like I have a normally cluttered UI. The extra ‘guidance’ just seems unnecessarily intrusive and annoying.)

A pretty good start to the new season although I was very disappointed at the 'surprise' within the first 15 minutes. It felt cheap and will so obviously be averted/explained/ignored/retconned that it didn't scare me in the slightest. It just felt like a poor attempt to shock the audience.

Other than that, pretty solid and I love the new... um... the... things, with the lighting... ah.... what was I talking about again?

And I'm in!

Awesome stuff tech guys, thanks for the rapid response!

You too huh?

Same here. I've repatched, verified and I'm about to restart old Bessie to see if that clears the issue up.

*Sigh*

Deleted as the post is now irrelevant. Damn, this thread is moving fast...

I guess this is what we do when the game's down. Forum Wars!

My favourite AT are Blasters. There’s just something a little bit insane about having awesome firepower that generates aggro like nobody’s business coupled with have pitiful defences that appeals to me. As such, I’ve rolled loads of them and I love throwing them into insane situations to see whether they survive.

As such, soloing the old (and IMHO superior) Maria Jenkins arc with my Sonic/En was a challenge, earning my Dimensional Warder badge with no outside assistance.

However, the EB fight I anticipated most was on an old AR/En Blaster I rolled up years ago. Anathema was a victim of Dr Vahzilok and survived by replacing her missing parts with cybernetics. So when I got to the end of the Vahzilok Plague arc, I was very much anticipating the showdown with the doc himself. It may not sound that epic but trying to take on a large sewer map filled with zombies on a squishy ranged Blaster running on DOs… it was pretty nail biting. Dr Vahz himself wasn’t too hard, but thinning the room down without him noticing was a meticulous task and made facing him without having to deal with his undead hordes a lot more satisfying.

Interesting… Anyone else notice how many requests there are for revamps and updates of old content? Devs please take note.

As for three things I’d change, I’ll do my best to be constructive.

1) Completely disconnect the Incarnate System from the Praetorian storyline so that people can choose their own way to become an Incarnate. This includes hitting the Lore slot with a big hammer (many times) until it becomes something that fits better with character concepts.

2) Dedicate a team to revisit some of the zones and storylines that players have been wishing to see developed for a long time. Some zones have been in need of a remake for years and there are many storylines left hanging that could do with a decent ending to them. If they could be satisfactorily tied up such as in the same way that we take down Frostfire or Dr Vahzilok, that would be awesome. If we could refrain from simply retconning them all so that ‘the Well did it’, that would be much appreciated. Not all plots lead to that horrible little Puddle of Godmodding.

3) New Invention sets. Have we had any new ones since BotZ? Fixing up toons with inventions is almost a mini-game in itself and helps to bend ATs and characters to be what we want them to be. The fact that we have only three Targetted AoE sets (outside of PvP and Purples) when we’ve got goodness knows how many for snipes seems bizarre to me.

I have more but most of them have already been posted by people who have asked for them far more eloquently than I could. Thank you.