Enantiodromos

I had no childhood. Thing is, there really is never such thing as a 'wisp childhood.' But I never explain that to humans.

It's that totally adorable maternal instinct thing. I can't get enough of it! I even learned to act that way myself.

But if I told the whole story, I just wouldn't get pampered the same way. Which I kind of like.

For starters, we're not born, we're hatched. No, we're not lizards. A closer analog to ordinary earth life would be salt water invertebrates. Newly hatched, I floated around the shard absorbing from the free energy streams in larval stage; I'm sure I must have eaten a number of my siblings for substance, too. When I started being able to make speech noises, I started to need adult energy, and like all my kind, I drifted off to find one of the clusters where adults feed.

These clusters are controlled by the Soldiers of Rularuu; my society is anything but lawless, even though most humans think evil *is* lawlessness. But we have a kind of caste system. As a Wisp larva on the cusp of maturity, you have a simple choice: obey or starve.

When I began to mature, I starved a lot. There're always willful larvae that starve to death young. I survived because I realized a simple thing: I could really make my elders pay for my obedience.

Interacting with humans was forbidden. Most young wisps know humans will kill us if they see us. The rule isn't really for their safety. But since it was a rule I could break, I broke it.

Humans born in this world of course don't always kill us. The first human I met was from this world. Her name was Emilia Janworth, a researcher and explorer. She wore elaborate and concealing bodily adornments like most humans-- and her's were really rugged. Her colorful eyes and long black hair were hypnotizing. I learned about the human maternal instinct from her. She made me ache for her in ways that were as bad as starvation. I wanted to be as like her as I could. She was the one who gave me the name "Lucy."

One day, while at my station in the shard, we were attacked by the Circle of Thorns, including those who specialize in controlling the energies and forms of life itself. Several wisps were captured, but I escaped. I knew humans didn't eat our kind. I guessed they must want something else.

So I snuck away and found some. They were hard to communicate with. But I made them explain to me what they wanted from those they captured. Information to use against us. And I knew how to get it. We made an agreement.

Pretty soon I was able to tell them what they wanted to know-- the location of a strange device our local Overlord was guarding. I described it to them, told them about the arrangements of its guards.

The reward was, they used their magic to change me. I wanted to be human, and to have control over my own life energy so I could get energy the way humans did, and escape Rularuu society.

When they changed me, I thought I looked totally human. I went along on the raid on the device. But we were defeated, and trying to escape, I fell into the device. I ended up here, in your world.

When I got here, I was pretty upset!

I found out that, to humans, I still look pretty weird. I also found out that, because of the way humans reproduce, most females give all their real attention to males. I'm sure that seems totally normal to humans.

I think it's stupid.

Anyway, since I got here, I've been experimenting with the power to control life energy I was given. I've grown to a size only some overlords achieve. And I can do tricky things to my enemies' life energy, too.

As it turns out, I do get a lot of attention from humans just because I look strange to them. And most people expect me to be either a villainess or a heroine.

The difference, as far as I can see, is that villains get more attention from males and rebels. Heroes get more attention from females and those who conform to human rules and caste.

It was a really hard choice, but I decided to become a heroine.

And it's not so bad. I've already met a lot of really nice people!


(Wisp Outlaw, L14 Rad/Psi Magic, Freedom)

[ QUOTE ]
Remember, your mission with the warrior clan. That boss nailed me with a 1260 shot. ONE.

[/ QUOTE ]

Bah. As you recall, that was a +3 boss. If we can't agree that a +3 boss should be able to one-shot any blaster, controller, or defender, we'll have a lot more to cheerily disagree about.

States' solution looks at first glance to be a withdraw of the whole boss thing. That doesn't change my opinion of whether it was better for the game, and I'm disappointed to hear there'll be a rollback.

It certainly 'proves' to some that he reads people's posts, though.

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If the game is becoming more of what it was intended to be by creating greater and more dangerous obstacles to grouping, why has the game also singled out certain ATs for solo experience bonuses?

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I have a sorta hard time seeing that out of the mission slider. For me, set on unyeilding, I can take a couple three people a few levels lower than me into a mission of mine, and boom we have a superb and safe form of XP (because I can keep sizable clusters of 51s held easily long enough for teammates to do them in.), in fact superb XP for the guys I bring along, and really, better XP than I could possibly get solo.

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the slider is rewarding me and people who group with me for grouping. Because I'm good for grouping.

[ QUOTE ]
You play your missions solo, you receive one piece of candy per mission. You team, you get two pieces.

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You may not like the way this impacts your (non)distinction, but that's punishing me at the rate of one piece of candy per mission for not grouping. That's a punishment scheme.

You punisher you.

[ QUOTE ]
For months, people have been complaining that the relative amount of XP received for completing a team mission doesn't match the XP of a solo mission.

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Now, I've been wrong before. Twice I think, as a matter of fact. But I'm pretty confident the people complaining they're getting less XP when they group are flat out wrong, FWIW. As I understand it, an 8 man team, everybody gets 22.5% of the defeat XP for doing 12.5% of the work-- that's +80%.

So, I see it exactly opposite from the way you do. Grouping is good for XP, but people aren't teaming very much-- witness the comparative irrelevance & scarcity of characters that are geometrically stronger in groups, particularly at high levels.

Moreover, and States already said this, people *would* have more fun if they grouped. It may give people fits to be contradicted about what they like, but on the one hand, that's exactly why economists have the term "revealed preference," as well as this being perfectly familiar stuff from a wide variety of other skilled forms of entertainment such as dancing or playing music, which we also have to be encouraged to learn and behave certain ways to get any meaningful enjoyment. And on the other hand, I doubt anybody's saying the game will appeal to everyone now that it has more encouragement to group, just that: 1) it will be truer to itself, and 2) it will be more fun to more people. IOW, it may have improperly attracted some hardcore non-multiplayer-players. If you want to make a case that those people have been misled, you're welcome to, but it doesn't look like a winning case to me.

And when you use rhetoric like "why is this so threatening to you," whether or not you mean to flame, you're really just straw-man-ing me. It doesn't threaten me, and that's nothing to do with my argument.

I'm arguing from what I perceive to be the welfare of the game as a balanced, coherent, believeable setting.

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Teaming should be made preferable over soloing by making the rewards for teaming greater. NOT by punishing those who want to solo.

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I don't follow your reasoning, because I don't see any meaningful distinction between the two. A lesser reward is a punishment. Either way, it means, doing more work per reward if you solo.

And I agree that people's reasons to not team all the time are valid.

But the game's not being taken away from them. There's plenty to solo. There's SOME stuff that, to solo, they'll either have to adapt to, risk lots of debt for, put off until they can get a GOOD group, or lower their standards about the kind of group they'll tolerate.

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My point, Doc, is that you're running an MC.

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And you could have, too. Or a scrapper, or tank, or any of the other controller or defender or blaster builds that are good for soloing. Instead you built a character that's one of the least viable for soloing even+ bosses I can think of.


[ QUOTE ]
... not everyone runs with Stealth or with Superspeed or Cloaking or any other type of stealthing. They MUST deal with bosses, like it or not.

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But that's just not true. They can certainly deal with bosses solo. By building a more viable soloable character or building in some stealth.

I'm not being even remotely facetious, either. You must realize that the ONLY alternative is to take the ATs a HUGE step in the direction of being completely cookie-cutter, with no difference one character to the next.


[ QUOTE ]
Why? Because I had to conform to the Flavour Of The Month or the cookie cutter AT in order to have I wanted, what I had with my Blaster's build.

...
But what irks me is that I shouldn't have to change out my concept to play the game.

[/ QUOTE ]

You're one of the coolest and probably the most tactically savvy people I've played with in the entire game, and I like you as a friend, and you've put up with me being arbitrarily grouchy about things in the game like a saint.

But we disagree strongly over this, and I don't think it's something that can be left at a difference of taste. I think it's pretty unreasonable, objectively speaking.

I AGREE that it's irksome that they didn't have this game perfected when they released it. But that's just not going to be sufficient reason to demand they don't move this game closer to how it was intended to be, and BETTER, which this does in my opinion, and I think, in the long run, in the opinion of lots of folks who at the moment aren't looking beyond a change in the role a character they put time into, now plays. That definitely happened to some people like yourself, but that also is not a sufficient reason to demand they roll back something that makes the game overall better and truer to itself.


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But why must a player make a cookie cutter AT that everyone and their monkey is making just to be able to solo? That takes away their ability to choose.

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The goal isn't infinite choice. It's structured choice. Infinite choice would allow people to do things like build an EXTREME damage character with few or no real defenses who could still SAFELY go toe to toe with supervillains AND their henchmen without ANY help.

You shouldn't get to safely be weilding crazy damage AND have very little defensively going for you AND safely solo extremely dangerous things, like bosses.


[ QUOTE ]
But...in regards to taking down the bosses in PI...the thing you're forgetting is that it's mainly due to the fact YOU are holding them.

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You know even I can't keep +4 clusters including bosses quivering indefinitely, because we occasionally come close to disaster doing that stuff. Moreover, I think you must know that I can't do *anything* about doing damage to those guys.

I HAVE to group. I can't realistically do anything meaningful without a group, aside from stealthing for objectives and content.


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Our choices of group or solo has been taken from us. Yes, you can argue that we can still do so if we adapt. But in most cases, adaptation isn't the best course of action.

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You *can* solo unadapted. Just not everything.

You mean "Our option to take builds that are supposed to be hard to solo, and comfortably solo through *everything*, has been taken away."

That option never should have existed to begin with. It ruins the verisimilitude and balance of the game.

Unadapted with a hard-to-solo character, there's still lots to solo. There's still adapting. There's still grouping.

That a character should have to do something to adapt to the world and its dangers is an underlying premise of every setting I've ever heard of except Tom and Jerry. We also don't have the choice to safely go up against mezzers without one form of protection or another.

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I just think and feel that this move to "encourage grouping" is wrong...especially when the majority of the player base is willing to group on their own as it is.

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It's built into the game that there are ATs that are group oriented-- some that will be far better at grouping, some, like mine, that need to group to make meaningful progress and experience the game.

As States said, an MMO shines when you group. And, they're trying to build an MMO with Controllers, Tanks, and Defenders. The way people played this game it was overwhelmingly evident that it provided sparse encouragement to group.

I don't at all think everything about the game is perfect now, but this was the kind of move I was always hoping for, not just for my own sake (I can solo with Oak fine), but for the sake of the game itself.

[ QUOTE ]
You say it's perfectly acceptable to die a few times on a mission, as long as you can finish it. If that's the case, then you're absolutely, 100% correct: you CAN solo each and every mission.

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Well, there are some (before we even talk about AVs) I can't, but right, generally, I can.

I didn't say it was perfectly acceptable to die a few times per mission. As an Empath Controller with no pets, I resolutely hope everyone intends to try and play death free, because that's about all I'm good for.

I think it's acceptable that (as is currently the case) some BUT NOT all missions will require you to EITHER risk lots of death, or group.

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A lot of people, judging from the displeased posts, do not have the luxury of being able to find a good team, or playing a good AT.

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Look; that second part is something that isn't getting any truer the more it's said. You can play five of the seven archetypes and any of the 137 builds possible under those five in each of 8 slots on each of 11 servers, right out of the gate. 88 chances to play 137 combinations is all the opportunity anyone needs, to solo.

And as I was saying to Ahtropa the other day, I'm sympathetic that not all pickup teams are great, but there are ways to get around that. There are lots of great intelligent players actually playing the game all the time.

Not only that, but a lot of the less-than-great, tactically, players are mediocre because they're not as familiar with a few things as some of us who've played the game a lot are. And ESPECIALLY because they don't have much experience grouping.

Because people don't group enough in this game.

It's a learning curve. If people hadda group more, more people would be good teammates.

And anybody who likes can rail myopically at me re: what idiots everyone online is. Ask some of the people I've been playing with the very longest-- they've seen me do awfully stupid things, and repeatedly. But I tend to be *fairly* good on a team now.

CoH will not *become* city of scrappers-- it already practically was-- if we take defender/controller/tanker numbers as the norm, there're already 6% excess scrappers and 16% excess blasters. In the high end (31-50) game, it gets even more extreme, where by the same logic there are 9% excess scrappers and 20% excess blasters. If scrappers suddenly became the #1, rather than #2, diversity balance buster, what would be the big difference?

THIS move will get people to group more-- a thing that's perfectly available, and when people see what a rad/* defender, Mind/* controller, or properly built (and hopefully fixed) tanker can do on a large team against missions set on unyeilding, it will 1) become the new (acceptable) PLing, and 2) increase the diversity of ATs in the game.

It seems like a no-brainer to me that if the THREE ATs built most for team play are a smaller (49.2%) combined part of the population than the TWO others, you make grouping more relevant if you want diversity in the game.

It also seems like a no-brainer that that diversity is not achieved by making the different ATs more alike in capabilities, such as, soloing.

[ QUOTE ]
OK, so you’re saying I should be able to solo this mission and not defeat the Lesser Devoured bosses. ...

So what you’re really saying is that all of these other missions with bosses in them can be soloed as long as you are willing to die many, many, many times, and spend 6 hours per mission taking pot shots at the bad guy you need to kill.

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Just for crystal clarity, you've got it mostly right, but I didn't say anyone, e.g., you, should be able to solo the mission. The fact that *you* can't doesn't mean the mission is unsoloable.

And, yes, one of the alternatives is to die many many times. I've done it that way myself. For some people that's what soloing bosses will be.

Which brings us to my point. It's not that you can't solo anything. It's that now, there are more things you don't LIKE to solo. (I assume I've guessed correctly from you tone that you don't like dying several times per mission).

Alternatives include: group.

[ QUOTE ]
In my experience, 'stealthed' boss-missions ARE missions in which you have no choice but to go face-to-face with the big bossman himself. The number of times I HAD to defeat the boss(es) FAR outweigh the number of times I didn't.

Also, I find it QUITE odd that this type of mission is considered to be a "known bug". Why the hell hasn't it been fixed yet?

[/ QUOTE ]

I disagree on the first part, and boy howdy do I agree on the second part.

I have a LOT of experience doing missions in which I only hunted objectives, or only hunted objectives, lieutenants, and minions. TONs of it. I normally don't do bosses if I can avoid it, and in the 30s and early 40s (up until the AV thing, which is a whole new can of worms), I'm seriously pretty confident I've NEVER seen an unmentioned boss that had to be defeated to complete the mission, except for: 1) stealth defeat-alls, and 2) the few wierd storylines in which it's inherent.

And, yeah, I'm with you. How could they possibly have not fixed this bug, which I've bugged ZILLIONS (okay, like, 5 or 6) times, and argued in-mission with GMs until they brought in *their* bosses to talk to me, and they conceded almost every time it was a bug.

Anyone who wants proof I'm not a blind fanboy can hit me up for further discussion of the 7-month-unfixed hidden-defeat-all bug.

[ QUOTE ]
Not quite as cute as taking a civil discussion and turning it into a personal insult.

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I'm not feeling too bad about it; sarcastically calling a general trend cute wasn't exactly a bitter personal attack.

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What people are discussing here, however, despite what you choose to believe, is that for many of us even normal bosses are show stoppers.

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Solo? They should be. I can't really any longer say I can't solo even-con bosses; I can, and that's as a Mind Controller/Empathy, one of the worst solo builds there is.

But you've heard States say in this thread (unless I'm misremembering), that that's what HE thinks bosses should be too.

[ QUOTE ]
In fact I wish, hope, pray that he would come out of hiding more and be MORE clear about this.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well I agree with that. All the moreso, having somehow made myself his impromptu apologist.


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What I do object to is that there are randomly generated, generic bosses that are no more difficult now than they were before to a few classes, but wipe the floor (like a named boss) of many other classes and MUST be dealt with unless you were smart enough to min/max or lucky enough to pick the right class pre-I3.


[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not sure I agree that there're some ATs that are unaffected. If I have infinite time, taking down a single boss my level or lower is almost always doable (very high regen rates will defeat me), but my AT is probably among the foremost exceptions. And even I have to take a *lot* longer. Anything can happen during that lot longer-- like ambushes and walkers in missions, which will kill me extremely dead if I don't promptly run.

I agree that boss survival and mission-soloing requirements having changed WITHOUT the free respec available was awful. It's awful. Serious.

But I just don't think everybody should be able equally to solo all missions or even con bosses. It goes to AT diversity, to verisimilitude, and, frankly, to the degree to which people group, since like, 40% of the ATs in this game are explicitly and heavily group oriented.b We'll have to disagree there too-- I'm grouping-booster.

But that's what I'm interested in. Let's get at the real problems. I want to see:

1) the respec issued ASAP
2) States clarify what he meant so either all of you, or I, can be clearly wrong.
3) the cotton-picking hidden defeat-all issue, which is a BUG, darn it all to heck, that I have been dealing with for six months now, dealt with.
4) A revisitation of Terra, Justifier, Akarist, Mr. Wolfe Esq., and whether those mission structures are still reasonable,
5) A revisitation on certain power sets to make sure they're not being run over by I3; again the one that comes to mind is Empathy, not because it's my secondary (I don't heal much anyhow), but based on Ahtropa's experiences.

[ QUOTE ]
Perhaps, but it does depend on having to kill a boss (actual mission requirement or not) often enough to make his statement, even in the context of soloing a mission, seem a bit disingenous.

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Well, fair enough.

We can disagree on how to characterize how many of them are boss-objective missions. (I think: few, not sure, but I think you think: many.)

And we disagree on whether it's fair to call non-boss-objective missions "soloable." (I think it's very reasonable. You I guess think it's a dodge.)

We do agree, BTW, on whether or not Statesman's treatment of this issue is flip, at this point; it is. I think so, anyhow. If I'm wrong about what he meant, I've already called him an ignoramus. And if I'm right, he should have said what he meant.

Oh-- Davistian reminds me of something, and though I have to run, I want to say this (not that I'm afraid of having people hate me... but...):

I think it really is reprehensible that they'd push I3 without making the free respec available.

That was a fairly stupid thing to do, and very unfair. I happen to be in a good place with my build, but I'm very sympathetic to people with builds that don't work as well in I3 who don't have respec.

That sucks. Sorry.

He said that in the context of a discussion of the soloability of a mission. The soloability of a mission does not normally depend on defeating everything in the mission.

His statement at face value means nothing to the soloability of a mission. So in a discussion of the soloability of the mission, we'd have to believe he was making a completely random remark like "the sky is blue" to interpret it as you have.

It goes against common practice in communication to assume people would be making completely random remarks. So we should look for a different intepretation.

Also, every mission I can think of (post L10 or so) can con bosses with the right number of teammates. His statement, taken out of context as you have, must mean: every single mission without exception should warn you that "there may be a boss here."

For one thing, since that's the case, it's common knowledge that every mission can con bosses, and mission breifings ought not waste space mentioning them.

For another, to interpret it this way, you are forced to assume States doesn't understand the basics of how missions con, and doesn't understand what are mandatory elements of mission breifings. IOW, your interpretation requires that we think States is a COMPLETELE ignoramus.

Even were it not completely unreasonable to assume such a thing, according to the standards of communication it's still impolite. Hence we should be looking for other possible interpretations.

In fact, that's a large part of the reason people have been jumping on Statesman's statement. Not to correct actual misalignments of the game (if so, you should be [censored] about the hidden-defeat-all bug), but only because you enjoy sticking it to Statesman with the rude assumption he doesn't know a damn thing about the game he's the lead developer for.

That's very cute, being insulting that way. You'll excuse me for not being impressed with your polemics.

[ QUOTE ]
The problem is, YOU can mez them, you're a Mind Controller. But many of us aren't.

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[ QUOTE ]
Doh, silly me, I keep forgetting to buy those mez enemy inspirations.

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Without placing blame for miscommunication, my point hasn't been taken.

The poster said: "You can't comlpete the mission without killing the bosses in order to free the lawyer."

I was making a point in an admittedly smartalec way. The smartalec part is: That poster is dead WRONG. *I* could SOLO that room conned for two people with the tools I have available at the level I got the mission. And I could do it with or without taking down the boss.

But the point part was: the poster used the generic "you" as if to say "Wah! Nobody can solo this mission (without taking down the boss)."

Saying nobody can solo that mission is flat wrong. A number of controllers, most tanks, and most scrappers, can, at that level.

And what's more, all kinds of ATs can solo that room, so long as they're willing to die a few times, and do some running.

The game still has lots of soloable content. You just have to make some semi-intelligent choices about AT or at least powers IF YOU WANT TO SOLO A LOT. That's an EXTREMELY REASONABLE place for the game to be.

The fact that it's not universally soloable by any build whatsoever, for example a melee-oriented blaster with no defenses aside from stealth, is, to be sure, a disheartening development for people like Ahtropa whose melee blaster used to be able to do that stuff.

That flaw lies with the fact that bosses were *ever* soloable to such a character. If CoH had been released in I3 form, we could avoid all this acrimony and the disappointment of players. But the disappointment of individual players over individual characters is does not necessarily mean it's a bad move for the game overall.

Meanwhile, I still would have a rough time being as disappointed as Ahtropa is in her Blapper. I always *thought* her concept for the character was extreme-damage with support. And that character performs SUPERBLY. She and I duoed can take down 10-strong cons of reds as fast as two scrappers, more safely, with only one of us doing any serious damage.

Seriously. I blink, and she has stuff on the pavement. We were routinely taking down +4 clusters including Bosses yesterday; we cleared out two "arrest 50" hunts like that.

That's sick.

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So if anyone points out evidence that directly contradicts your assertions, you will brush it off by just assuming that it is the result of a bug? If the facts don't conform to the theory then they must be discarded, eh?

The facts are that there are missions in every story arc where you have to defeat a boss who is not mentioned or hinted at until you take the mission, and sometimes until you find him in the mission.

[/ QUOTE ]

The facts, Scorus, are something we'll each have to confirm for ourselves, aren't they?

So, instead of freaking out and declaring that I've ignored facts, get a grip and deal with the fact that all I'm ignoring is anecdotal reports that may have other explanations, that I can't confirm. Meanwhile, my experience trying to solo missions without killing bosses, at 1300 hours of playtime with a Mind Controller, is fairly extensive.

I'm saying, people may not be paying very good attention. I'm saying, I recognize two things: Akarist and Terra are special exceptions, and there's a bug with hidden defeat-all conditions on missions.

Does that mean states is wrong? Of coruse it does. He's wrong. But the reason is, there are a couple of exceptional missions that have to be that way for the sake of content, and there's a known bug that's needed to be fixed a long time. And aside from these two things, States is right.

You're welcome to think it's fact that missions with boss-defeat objectives that fail to say so are commonplace. I think you're wrong. And I'm going to adduce evidence myself whether you want me to revere your opinion as truth or not.

Meanwhile, you know, this leaves a huge looming cryptoargument, which is, are missions harder than they're really meant to be? Of course they're not. They're just hard, and some of them are now not soloable by everyone. They should always have been harder than they were prior to I3, and there should always, and have always, been SOME missions patently unsoloable by SOME builds.

This is not to say I think there're no problems with the game as it stands-- I'm waiting on the serious invuln tanks to give us the word on their major rearrangement (before I respec my own L28, as it happens). And as Ahtropa points out, I'm seriously wondering whether I3 doesn't bring a long-standing problem with the irrelevance of healers to a head.

[ QUOTE ]
Therfor you can't complete the mission without killing the bosses in order to free the lawyer.

[/ QUOTE ]

The guys holding aren't bosses. Mez the bosses, kill the hostage holders, and go home.

[ QUOTE ]
Wait, now we're suppose to use stealth to avoid villains? Some heroes we are. Batman and Superman must be proud. (I know this seems kinda like a personal attack against you personally. But honestly, how can you make a game about heroes and design it so the heroes have to do something like what was posted above?)


[/ QUOTE ]

Absolutely!

And Batman *is* a stealth guy. If he has an objective that, yanno, is gonna save lives, he's not the sort to come bumbling out of the shadows to try and incarcerate Two-face in his element and at his strongest, when there's something more important afoot, that being beaten by the badguy would keep him from.

So, yeah, stealth is one way to do it. Stealth past bosses to rescue hostages and win the day? You bet your sweet bippy I do, all the time, and I feel quite heroic when I do it, thanks.

Stealth is just an example. In a general sense, the only alternative is, make missions so easy they can *all* be soloed by *anyone*. Some can be soloed by nearly anyone. Some require either certain ATs or certain other combinatinos of powers. Another way you can get through missions like that is, as a Mind Controller, with a judicious use of confuses, mass hypnosis, and sprint. Another way is to be defeated several times, and keep coming back. I'm not the CoH guru, so I can't give you an exhaustive list of ways to get around bosses.

But since we can say neither "some missions are soloable by none," nor "all missions are soloable by only a narrow few," there's a lot of soloing to be done, even if part of it requires you to make some semi-intelligent power and AT choices.

Making semi-intelligent power and AT choices if you want to solo a lot is not that great a burden.

[ QUOTE ]
That is the most anti superhero thing I've heard yet. In the comics, how lame would it be if superheros had to run and get help everytime they came up against a boss? I'm not even talking about archvillians like Doctor Octapus, Shocker, Kraven the Hunter, etc. I'm talking about run of the mill thug bosses.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not a fair comparison at all. In the modern comics, how many superheroes do you know that go toe-to-toe with at most ONE real "supervillain" -- a super powered villain-- (AV according to you) in the first third of their career? Few. Bosses are indeed in many ways filling the supervillain role in CoH, as best CoH maps to the modern comics.

Furthermore, the average modern comics superhero is ceratinly not incarcerating one to three supervillains per mission. So, there's nothing about being a hero that requires us to do so.

If you want a simulation of the modern comics in CoH, you complete your mission first, and risking it all to capture the supervillain (boss) comes later, if at all, depending on your morale and drive. How often does the villain get away to fight another day? All the time. It's perfectly genre to leave those bosses alone.

[ QUOTE ]
I find it rediculous as a blaster that I cannot win a mission anymore that has a boss in it.


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ANY mission?

It seems to me there have always been missions that couldn't be soloed by given ATs. My main's AT is actually fairly good at going after bosses, it's just extremely slow. There were missions back in the day I couldn't solo because they had the right comination of a tsoo boss and sorcerer.

Let me throw another unpopular fact out there while I'm on a roll:

You realize that going in three times with inspires and dying twice to take down a boss is still successfully soloing it, right? I've had to do it occasionally. Pre I3.

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If you just read the page that this post is on, you would have seen several more specific instances.

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Again, most of those I wager will be explained by the longstanding hidden-defeat-all condition bug. They need to get that fixed.

I remain skeptical States is wrong otherwise about boss-objectives being listed because 1) a lot of people are sure to be actually dealing with the hidden defeat all bug, and 2) because people obviously (see this thread) have a hard time distinguishing between a boss they *want* to defeat and a boss they *need* to defeat in order to finish the mission, since they're accustomed to doing things like leisurely soloing with blasters (which always should have been a dubious proposition IMNSHO).

EDIT: The best thing about this post which I have nixed is I get annoyed with something I did myself-- not read what the person was actually saying. /em smiles and waves.

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Okay, but if you read this thread you will see many, many instances where his statement is still untrue.

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Er, well, true, I didn't read the whole thread. I agree, though, that there're two known cases of boss-defeat objectives going unlisted-- one exists defacto in every boss-spawning mission that has the bug that it fails to list it's a defeat all. That bug I've been ranting about for months. The other two are specialty stories that hinge on a stealth boss. Akarist and Terra are the ones I remember.

The first is a longstanding bug. The second is trickery that I guess we allow for the greater good of storyline. The latter may be need rethunk in light of I3, but the former is a no-surprises bug.

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I didn't really pay attention until yesterday, but I know every missions I did yesterday could not be completed without defeating the boss.

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I certainly believe you, but, unless you did a pretty small number of missions, that's pretty unusual. Stealth BTW is a good power to ramp up the percentage of missions one can do without fighting bosses.

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Once in a great while a comic book hero will be in over thier head and have to go get help, but you don't see Spiderman going off to get help EVERY issue.

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Yeah, they don't often go for help. But they don't incarcerate at least one major villain in every single mission. Modern comics of course don't have as many minions as CoH, so the comparison isn't perfect. But I don't think any new terrible disjunct with the genre is introduced if you sometimes don't defeat the top villain in a mission.

So, as an alternative to getting help, you can always let the lead villain get away. Superheroes are brash and shortsighed like that, don't you think?

If you MUST do it by genre, complete the mission's objectives, THEN go fight the boss. And if he's about to kick your butt, you can run away, or stick it out and be defeated. EITHER way, the mission's over. The boss was tougher than you. But you took care of business.

OK. Using "named" and "unnamed" in this context is still confusing me. You told me this story right after you did it, and I didn't really understand what you'd found.

Again, there DEFINITELY are named bosses that are NOT mission objectives (and need not be defeated to finish the mission). Seen it scores of times. Also, there effectively can be unnamed bosses that you do have to defeat (in defeat-all missions), and I'm not sure I haven't see a few explicitly "defeat the boss" missions that had the generic name on the boss. Not sure about that.

Regardless, and maybe this seems nitpicky, but the named/unnamed distinction is not related to the mission-objective/not-mission-objective distinction.

So, essentially, you found (evidence to the effect that) that (normally) missions that require you to defeat a boss will always mention the presence of a boss.

And, correct me if I'm wrong: there are two known exceptions. The buggy undocumented-defeat-all missions (which may contain bosses), and stealth-boss missions, like Akarist and Terra.