Kaikopere

I was dismayed to discover that the XP is still split as if there was a full team, even if some team members were out of range. We had started new characters and some of us were hunting while we waited on the others to train up. They didn't get XP, but we were still splitting xp as if they were.... If the goal was to make the reward match the risk, I think this is not the correct behavior.

I'm also concerned about the death timer. If I'm mentoring someone and get defeated, I don't go to the hospital because I don't want to get out of sidekick range. Sure I understand that this isn't an issue in a mission, but there are some non-mission situations that could cause problems. The Babbage ambush is the first one that springs to mind - it can be a tough fight for some teams. Should I not get xp for Babbage because I died while healing my team or debuffing Babbage?

The power levelers really didn't affect my gameplay until you tried to put a stop to it. In my opinion, these changes have too much of an impact on the non-power levelers to merit the small impact it makes on the power levelers. It doesn't stop people from farming wolves. It doesn't stop fire tanks from herding up a mission map and burning them with practically no assistance from the team. I've been "power leveled" running around the docks in Peregrine when I wanted to get my lvl 38 to 39 quickly so I could participate in the Eden trial with my SG, or when I wanted to get a new character up to a level to get into a hazard zone with my friends. Since I was following my mentor around even though I was absolutely no help in the battles, these changes wouldn't have impacted that at all.

There will always be people who want to skip ahead and get all their high end powers without a lot of effort, except the effort they expend trying to figure out how to get around actually playing. It yanks my chain too sometimes to see characters just standing around leveling and not trying to contribute to the team. However, I don't think it's possible to get rid of egregious power leveling without having a high negative impact on the folks that don't do it. The begging for influence and "PL me plz" tells are much less of an impact on my fun than the game mechanics changing. It's not fair that some folks can get to 50 in 8 days, and it takes me 8 months. but I'm still having fun in those 8 months, so I don't particularly care.

Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and annoys the pig...

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Second, Teleport. Everyone complains about what an endurance hog it is (I've used it myself and have to agree) and its just not worth that much endurance to travel 100 or so yards per tp in line-of-sight.

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Well, not everyone. I haven't had any real endurance issues with it since I took Stamina and six-slotted it (...)

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Teleport is by far the fastest travel power out there (when there's not a lot of lag of course, then it's by far the most embarrassing travel power). I only needed to add two slots to TP to make it work well, 2 end reducers and one range. With SOs, you can pretty much make it across any zone except IP. I also ended up taking hover with my tping empath for lag protection while traveling and to make tp more useful in battles. Granted some folks may see it as a wasted power pool since that's the only power in that pool she took, but it's turned out to be very useful for tping around indoors or in tricky zones like DA, targeting team mates behind obstacles, and getting out of trouble.

My biggest complaint about TP is also the targeting. It's mostly a function of camera control and having to switch to the keyboard to adust the camera effectively instead of using the mouse. Not sure how to fix it... you could have the targeting cursor stay in the middle of the camera FOV instead of following the cursor, but that would probably be harder to control than the current system. Maybe increasing the hang time after a tp would be enough, and allow the "X" keep to drop you to the ground when you've reached your destination.

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I am sorry to tell you that the more I play CoH the less I like playing in groups. The game just doesn't seem to be built for large groups at least for my taste. The more I play however the more I find I love soloing this game. Partnering is also very cool because you can't have a "balanced" team (AoE blaster, healer, tank) in a 1 or 2 person team so you have to think instead.


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I don't really agree that you can't have a balanced team with a duo. All you really need for a balanced team is damage, aggro management, and damage mitigation. Some builds can handle two of those roles, even if they aren't as effective as a "specialist", i.e. a fire blaster in the damage role. An ice/devices blaster has good damage and some damage mitigation with their slowing effects, pair them up with a a good tank for aggro control and you've got a balanced team.

This is sort of off the point, but I don't understand why a lot of folks think balanced teams need a "healer" - there are so many better ways to mitigate damage. Personally I'd rather not get hit than hope that the healer has enough endurance to heal me when the whole team is getting chewed up. Debuffs like Darkest Night in the dark miasma power set, or team buffs like steamy mist in the storm power set, protect the whole team with minimal endurance and less effort. Sure heals are nice if you get in a bad situation, but the often neglected buffs in the empathy power set can help you not get into them in the first place. I'd much rather team with a radiation defender or controller that has accelerate metabolism fully slotted than one with radiant aura fully slotted.

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I prefer strategy not just mindless punching. Once you get more than about 3 people on a team villian groups get so big that, in most cases, targetting specific mobs after the first one becomes pretty hopeless if you want to take them down fast enough. You just rely on AoEs both for damage and aggro with single target shooters just picking up who they can or trying to get bosses/leuts. There is no strategy involved in most fights it is straight bull in full force and whoever does the most damage wins.


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I like tactics over mindless plowing through a mission, and I prefer the 4 person team. It seems to be a sweet spot where you can coordinate your tactics and where the spawns are difficult enough to require tactics without slowing progress down to a crawl. The 6 or 8 person team is just too much chaos for me... it's too hard to keep everyone buffed, too time consuming to coordinate who attacks what, and the number of bosses that spawn are just ridiculous. I like soloing every once it a while when I don't feel like building a team or when all I can seem to find are bad teams, but it's not as fun for me as a good team.

Sure big spawns go down a bit faster if you've got AOE damage, but I don't agree that most fights are only won by brute force. Figuring out how the power sets on the team work best together in different situations it my favorite part of the 4 person team. Do you handle that Lost boss that's kicking your tank's butt by holding him, debuffing him, buffing/healing the tank, sending your high single target damage team mate after him or some combination of those? It depends on who your team mates are and what powers they have. You probably can't AOE the boss into submission fast enough to save the tank. With a duo, the options are a little more limited, although some duos can be very interesting. With 6 or more team members, the synergies just don't matter as much.

Maybe I'm just lucky that I've found a group of friends that enjoy the strategy as much as I do... it is painful trying to find a good team with a new alt when none of my friends are online, or for some reason it doesn't make sense for us to team up.

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It often amazes me how people get hung up in that "multiple means no solo!" mentality. Just because a game is available online (i.e. a Massively Multiplayer Online game) does not mean that some people might not want to do things in that world on their own, perhaps occasionally teaming or just having the pleasure of knowing that it is a "living" world made up of other real players, even while they themselves are the lone wolf.


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I like having the option to solo. I think it's an important part of any MMO, because sometimes I just want to jump on and play - not futz around with building or finding a team. I do however think it's unreasonable to expect to solo ALL of the content in the game as a previous poster wanted to do. It's not a matter of the game being multiplayer or wanting to force some sort of play style on the rest of the world, it's just a matter of resources. The majority of the target market for MMOs is probably the folks that want to group up, so it makes sense that you develop content designed for the team players. If Cryptic had unlimited resources maybe they could figure out a way to make that content soloable without degrading the team experience, but with so many other cool things they're trying to get into the game, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to pursue it.

My supergroup did the sewer trials for the first time (as a group) last weekend. I'd never done it before and everyone I talked to made it sound impossible (especially since we didn't have a controller). Well, we whupped it on the first try and it was a thrill. Yeah it was hard and a lot of folks died a lot, but we did it! The reason we succeeded was because we worked together well as a team. I really don't see how you could make that "soloable" and still make it the same experience. Maybe it's not a good example because you can take the mission without a team, even if you can't finish it, but it was the first example of content designed for a team that popped into my head.

I believe there should be team only content and that players should not be forced to team to get to level 50. I can understand the desire to solo in an MMO. COH was my first experience with MMOs and when I first started playing I wasn't all that interested in teaming up. The "team only" content encouraged me to try teaming up with folks and showed me a whole dimension to the game I would have missed. I don't care whether folks solo all the time or not - everyone's idea of fun is different and you should play the way that maximizes your fun. I don't think it's fair however to begrudge me my team oriented content. Teaming really does add a lot to the game in my opinion, and I can't fault Cryptic for encouraging it with task force badges and such.

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I have to disagree here. My first to main characters were both ones that had a substantial weakness at soloing, either being squishy or not being a solid damage-dealer. Maybe our concept of "reasonable time" is different, but the time it takes for a Emp/Rad Defender to solo a mish......well, I haven't played her since before I3 and its boss correction, so maybe this is not accurate. Anyways, I was going to say that going through most of the mish was not a problem, it was the inordinate amount of time spent killing just the boss. Okay, so now there are less bosses in missions. But that's another balancing RL problem--I stopped playing her because she was so hard to solo, which is my preferred style of play. And because I am a "casual" player, I had not brought her back out since the I3 correction.

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As can be read above, I completely agree with you here. If you are "casual", should you not just be enjoying your character and the hour or so of relaxation it provides, not worring about your exp/min?

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I'm a casual gamer and xp/min usually isn't a big concern. I really like my defenders, but they're pretty tedious to solo. My mid-level kin/dark defender had a stale kill-all mission where the spawns were -2 and -1 to her and it took an inordinately long time. Not just because she took a long time to kill stuff, but because she had to pause between every fight to regain endurance. In terms of fun per minute it just doesn't make sense to solo her. If I want to solo, I grab one of my scraps.

Everyone has a different threshold though, and I think it's accurate to say every AT is soloable, although maybe not every build of every AT. Whether everyone would have fun soloing every AT is debatable and I think it's certainly true that the method of soloing has to be adjusted depending on the AT. It depends on how you define soloing I guess. If your definition is getting to level 50 without teaming, I see no reason any AT can't solo. If your definition is experiencing all the game content, I don't think any AT can solo.

Team play is a big part of the content in my opinion. If it's not content you enjoy, you shouldn't be forced to do it, but I don't think it's reasonable to complain that you can't do everything a team can do (I mean that as a general observation, I'm not implying that anyone specific is complaining). Teaming up adds a lot of variability to the game. If you're solo, the only variability you get is the villain type for the most part. On a team, a whole slew of new tactics become available depending on who's on the team and what powers they've got, and it (at least for me) is a completely different experience than the same mission with a different team.

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Stop tailoring the game toward uber supergroups and adrenalin-addicted teenagers. Remember us older adults who are casual players who do have a life.


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I empathize... we're in the same situation and finding more and more games are targeted toward the "power" gamers. They're getting so difficult you can't just sit down a play for an hour. I don't think CoH is going that direction. When the bosses were changed in Issue 3, I ran into a group of missions that were basically undoable with a three person team of fairly experienced players. I expressed my concerns along with a number of other folks and Cryptic fixed it.

I believe all that needs to be fixed are the mission descriptions so that people know what they're getting into before they take the mission. Some missions already say "you should put together a team". I also believe something is in the works to let you abandon a mission. Right now, some missions are just harder than others for certain types of heroes, even at heroic. I don't think every mission in the game should be scaled to be doable by solo or small teams. I believe some missions should require a team but you should still be able to progress if you choose not to do them.