Miuramir

My best character there was, in fact, in the above general model; but my second-best character was a very playable combination that's difficult in CoH, basically PBAoE damage + soft control + pets, with a bit of healing... I suspect a pet-optimized Crab with just the right mix of pool, patron, and Incarnate powers is now the closest we could come here, but you'd not really have your full concept until 53, where there you were pretty much rolling by the mid-late teens.

In general, one of the few things that worked well there was that if you had a cool concept, you could be into it very early; too many CoH concepts don't really come into play until much later in your career. I found it much easier to bring in existing superhero roleplaying characters from decades of P&P games and have them feel somewhat like "themselves" within hours of play, not months. Plus, personally I was more interested in exploring the space of "interesting-and-workable-enough" rather than focusing on "minmaxed"; I came up with a number of really cool concepts that were fun to play and effective *enough* for standard content, although clearly far below PvP-grade optimization monsters.

The other thing is that the types there were (by launch or a bit after, at least) arguably closer to typical comic book types; how often do "glass cannon" blaster types without significant defense of *some* sort actually become popular major characters, or really durable types with weak and short-ranged offensive powers? A much more comic-book (and comic-TV) split would be to give "heavy/melee" types Resistance, and "light/ranged" types Defense, for instance; but that's an entirely different discussion

Let me be straightforward about this up front: I mostly play "squishy" ATs; my primary concern in all this is far less about how much damage the durable ATs do, as how well they can actually protect the less durable ones. In my personal opinion, I die way too often on iTrials; I'd like to see better tanking tools given to someone.

I actually agree in a *very* limited sense with Johnny Butane; in a heavily-buffed iTrial setting, Tankers don't seem to be substantially more durable *in practice* while probably doing less damage. IMO that's OK... what they should be doing is tanking better, so that the league as a whole performs at a higher level. The obvious solution to me would be to give Tankers a higher aggro cap.

A substantial problem on the iTrials, especially Keyes, is some Vicki coming along and spleening me (for ~2/3 my max HP when I've just lost ~1/2 my max HP to a pulse, for instance). My suspicion is that given the hordes of enemies, arriving reinforcements, and general positional confusion, the existing aggro caps aren't doing a very good job of reliably "touching" the enemies.

Individual aggro levels are a bit less of a concern... when I am doing enough damage to Marauder to cause him to turn on me, or get double-ringed fighting Siege, I can back off a bit on the attacks, and at some level it's confirmation that I'm doing my job (damage) well. The missile blast or assassin strike from some IDF or Warworks reinforcement who has never been affected by a tank is far more a concern, and far more frustrating.

To summarize:
* Give Tankers (the AT) a higher max aggro than any other AT

* Give them at least one improved or new tool for getting there (PunchVoke improvements are an obvious place to look, but I'm not an expert here)

* This allows their higher theoretical durability to be actually useful, as they will be being attacked by more foes

* This allows them to shine as clearly better at doing their primary conceptual job, tanking, than other ATs

* This easily fits withing the conceptual moral side of things; Brutes, as villains, want aggro merely for personal performance reasons; Tankers, as heroes, want aggro so as to be able to protect those weaker than themselves. It's both logical and reasonable for Tankers to have "wider" aggro than any other AT, even if some can approach it in "depth".

* This contributes substantially to overall team performance... dead blasters (etc.) aren't supplying DPS, and blasters (etc.) who have to clock back DPS to avoid death / sequestration aren't supplying as much as they could. The overall increase in team (league) DPS is substantially more than would be reasonable to actually give to Tankers directly, even if one thought that giving them any was a good idea in the first place (I'm not convinced).

Something else to check: Buried somewhere in your NCSoft account configuration is a field for "Max daily charge limit" or some similar phrase. IIRC the default is fairly low; you might be running into this limit if you've not explicitly changed it (or it somehow got reset in all the account rejiggering a while back).

If you really think that the majority of people are in enormous, super-active SGs with a dozen actual friends or more on at all hours, that helps explain some of your otherwise baffling disconnect. It is certainly not the case for a lot of us that are adults with a wide variety of real-world responsibilities. Just to give you an example, the meta-SG I'm in has 2 nearly-full SGs and a VG on our primary server, plus at least 7 other SGs and VGs on other servers that get play with some degree of regularity. For special events, we have a peak simultaneous of maybe 16 people, but that's pretty rare and only for special events known well in advance. A typical Tuesday evening meetup, when we've been trying to do more structured group content lately, has 4-6 people available, what with timezones, kids, overtime, kids, sickness, kids, weather, computer problems, or whatever; sometimes as little as 3, sometimes 7 or 8. Some of them are long-term vets, some have been playing for a few years, some are new to CoH and only have a few lower-level characters. Sure, with rather more effort and less fun one can gather together with a bunch of loose acquaintances and some total strangers for big special events, but it's certainly not the norm.

As far as I'm concerned, *primary* content, CoH's core strength and what most of us are here for, is content that has the following qualities:

* Minimal entrance barriers, and preferably only for the leader; high-level and low-level characters can enjoy playing together without forcing unpleasant choices of the "do I earn rewards that help my character progress or do I have fun with more friends" variety.

* Adjusts semi-automatically to the number of people who show up, over the range 3-8 or so, without prior knowledge; i.e. you can plan to run X and not have to change those plans based on having too few or too many people tonight due to RL issues.

* Have at least some ability to further adjust difficulty based on how people are feeling; if everyone has had a bad day at work or whatever and just want to relieve some stress it can be turned down, if people are sharp and wanting a challenge it can be turned up.

* Accommodates the real world; if someone's kid wakes up crying or needs a bit of help with their homework, if someone needs to go put laundry in the dryer or isn't feeling well and needs an extended bio break, or whatever... we can easily accommodate them and take a quick break because hey, we're all friends and RL takes precedence over our entertainment.

* Allows people to join in and drop out during progress. We've got friends on the East coast who need to get to sleep because they have to be up before 5am to get into work by 7am; we've got friends on the West coast who work for megacorps notorious for long hours to meet project deadlines. On worknights they don't overlap much if any. Plus more sustained interruptions of any of the above sorts can lead to people needing to join or leave an hour or few different than what they planned.

* Have an actual plot / story of some sort that is relatively fresh, something that we haven't done so many times it has gone stale. Doing things with different characters helps considerably with keeping things fresh; separation in time helps keep things fresh; the worst possible case is repeating the same content on the same character more than a few times in fairly short succession.

* Offers some sort of progression, advancement, or reward for everyone involved except in the worst failure cases; partial success should yield at least something.

The majority of content in CoH does a pretty good job of meeting the above criteria; in fact, it's industry-leading in many of the above qualities, which is *why we are here* rather than playing one of the many other MMORPG. There are a multitude of other MMORPGs that have practically Skinner-box endgame grinds for those that find that attractive; I don't get it, but unlike some people I acknowledge that there are plenty of types of people in the world.

One of the many objections I have had all along with this Incarnate / endgame system is that it goes *directly* against CoH's strengths and the reasons we play CoH. It forcibly separates Incarnate play from ordinary gameplay, so you have to choose between playing with your friends and advancing your characters. The nature of the reward structure forces a focus on just a few of your characters, yielding less and less fun as they are overplayed, rather than playing whoever you feel would be fun tonight. And worst of all it forces a literally order of magnitude more repetitive content than before.

How many ways are there to get from 49 to 50? How about 50 to 51? 51 to 52? To the best of my recollection, prior to the Incarnate trials I had never run any single piece of content more than 5-6 times on the same character, and that would be the widely-despised Baby New Year and Snaptooth grinds for the costume unlocks (and one character that might have done that many ship raids over the years). Most characters don't even see all the content, and few repeat anything more than a few times and it's usually months in between. The incarnate system expects you to run ten times that many repetitions, on the same character, in short order.

Let's say you are part of a regular weekly gaming group, who enjoy getting together to roleplay and advance their characters. The GM has been hinting for months that they're working on an epic new system for taking your favorite characters further. Finally, you show up for the "preview" session, and it's oddly unappealing; it requires minifigure manipulation on the map that makes it much harder for the out-of-town friends who usually are only there via chat to participate, it has all sorts of seemingly arbitrary restrictions on power use that limit some characters far more than others, and the rewards are underwhelming. You slog through but start to have doubts.

Some weeks later, you get the first actual taste of the new system. The rewards are decent, but incremental; you cast a bit faster, hit a bit harder, or whatever. There are still some weird limitations on what they affect, and you can only earn them playing a limited selection of high-end modules. Annoying and not what you were hoping for, but tolerable, and there's the promise that there's far more to come.

Some weeks later yet, the full-bore unveiling of the new epic system! The requirements for getting the adventure started are unusually strict, it has all sorts of bizarre arbitrary fail conditions, and what you have to do to win is poorly documented. Even more annoyingly, the GM sets a timer and says that if you don't succeed before it goes off, you fail no matter how well you were doing up to that point, with no option to continue next week like you usually would. The first week doesn't go well, but you learn some of how it goes. Next week, you try again, and muddle through at great cost; at the end, your epic reward is... a strangely-enchanted gem? "If you collect dozens of these, you can turn them in for cool stuff!" says your GM. Dark looks are exchanged. "If you do things to purposely make it harder in direct opposition to common sense or any sort of tactical reasoning, you might get another gem! The gods love bull-headed stupidity far more than clever tactics!" The muttering gets much louder...

When it is announced the following week that there are two colors of gems which unlock different things, and that you are going to be playing the same two adventures, with no changes, every week for the better part of a year until you've accumulated enough gems, this is the point at which most groups would threaten to microwave the GM's dice and/or get a new GM. Even the most tolerant of groups is going to snap after a half-dozen repetitions of exactly the same night of gaming with no changes in plot, setting, foes, or anything, and being told they're only a fraction of the way to the cool stuff, plus it turns out that most of the coolest stuff can't be used in normal play, only to get more gems. Offering to come up with a third adventure in a few months that can earn both colors of gems is not going to really mollify the players.

My personal observation is with Snow Globe on this; the only time I've ever seen the "10 threads" bottom reward was the time I spent the most time actively explaining things to people, and one of my few Commons not connected to multiple disconnects was similar. It's highly likely that I was activating significantly fewer powers, killing / damaging fewer enemies, etc.; it's hard to see how that *wouldn't* negatively affect any sort of participation-based score.

On the other hand, with some reflection it is possible that the fact that I *needed* to spend that much time explaining how things work to folks who hadn't done it before led to the league's overall "efficiency" score being significantly lower; and that might be a much more significant factor than my individual participation. In other words, the interesting question IMO is whether the results were from me having a significantly smaller slice of a somewhat smaller pie, or from me having a somewhat smaller slice of a significantly smaller pie.

My primary objection on rewards remains that the trial seems to be designed to reward people *not* trying their best; I am reluctant to slack off in order to get the more valuable Commons, but other people with less integrity or drive do less and are rewarded more. Fortunately this is fairly easily fixed by manipulating either the exchange rates so that Uncommons convert to Commons at 1:1 or better, or the tables to allow you to pick from the lower levels.

Both? Neither? Based on my experience, a decent run is around 4 Astral, 6 threads, an Uncommon, and a fraction of an Empyrean. Occasionally you'll instead luck out and get a Common or a Rare.

To equip a Common in the first two powers, and a level-shifting rare in the second two, takes a total of 20 Commons, 2 Uncommons, and 2 Rares. The Uncommons are easy, and chances are good that during the process you'll get at least one Rare, and will have enough Empyrean to build the other; the limiting factor is the Commons. Each costs 20 threads; a typical run is therefore 6 direct threads plus 4 Astrals at 4 threads each plus one Uncommon at 8-10 threads each; rough average of 31 threads, or 1.5 commons. That's around 12 runs to get baseline configuration on a single character (assuming you luck into getting a few commons), if you're willing to take the risk of burning all of your Merits on stuff now instead of holding them for whatever they're actually for eventually. Getting to four rares adds maybe six runs if you're on the lucky side getting rares or commons, and possibly considerably more otherwise.

So in round numbers, getting a single character reasonably well kitted out (four rares, no VR) takes 20 +- about 5 runs. Given that there are only two things to run, that's 10 repetitions of the *same* content... I consider that poor design at best even for people with only one character; I'm reasonably certain that I've never repeated the same rehashed piece of plot that many times on any character prior to this. For people with several or many 50s to incarnate or who want even one Very Rare, it starts looking like an insane soulless grind very quickly; the upstream poster was talking about five characters, so 75-125 repeats is about right, and mindbogglingly bad. There are plenty of players that have been around for ages with dozens of 50s...

Personally, I have two 50s, and after getting my first one to four Rares (~19 runs, but I had parts left over, could have probably done it in a few less if I had planned better and been more willing to burn Uncommons down to less-than-half-a-Common early), I am sick of it enough that I'm having to take a break not only from the Trials, but that character, normally my favorite.

To put things in a different light: It's roughly five times as many iterations of grind per character as the long-despised Baby New Year, except that it takes far longer per run and requires vastly more logistics to make each run happen.

Semi-cynical response: How much does the success rate go up if we assign fewer of them to balance something? (My limited experience is that at least the later-stage fiddly number balancing sort of thing is in fact best done by a single person, as seemingly orthogonal changes usually aren't as independent as you thought.)

Week #1: Senior dev / producer / etc. monthly letter to community; summarize last month's patch as usual, and then talk about upcoming changes in general terms. Have a paragraph that says something along the lines of "We routinely datamine performance at several levels, as we'd prefer to catch problems before they become obvious to players. No solely numbers-driven review is perfect, however, and our Community Team has been paying attention to some of the recent forum discussions. This month, we're focusing developer attention on several balance issues, both entire sets and specific moves that have come to our attention. This is a good time to remind everyone, however, that due to the diversity of powers and situations in CoH, there will always be some cases where certain builds will outperform others to some degree. Our goal is to keep that degree down to a reasonable level while providing enough real choices to keep the game interesting. We ask that you help us out by providing our Community Team with clear, specific examples in the stickied threads they will be starting on certain specific issues this week; and hope to see you on the Training Zone later this month to give us some good data on the improvements. As usual, the live publish will include a freespec."

W1 Assignments: Devs A, B, & C brainstorm and rapid-prototype ideas for fixing #1, Shepherd's Crook. Dev D work with Community Team lead to set up and monitor designated threads to discuss #2 (CoJ), #3 (Meekling), and a couple of other balance projects high on the to-do list; specifically including dev posts in the threads to focus attention. Someone on CT assigned to work with Devs ABC on research, including searching forum and off-forum HG boards for signs of #1 exploit knowledge spreading.

Week 2: Meeting 1 (early in week), figure out which plan for fixing #1 gives the best combination of balance results while preserving both original intention and powerset feel for those who have taken it. Assign whichever dev came up with the best plan (we'll assume it was A) to flesh it out full time.

Meeting 2a (also early in week), pull together the forum posts and additional datamining to try and figure out *why* the players think #2 (CoJ) is imbalanced. Even if the powers are numerically correct, there is likely to be something at the root of the perception; the power's looks, sounds, situational issues, popular enemies / maps / farms, incorrect documentation, or something.

Assignments: Dev A full time on plan for #1 rebalance. Dev B,C, 0.5D on clever ideas for #2 fixes; may involve other teams if the issue really turns out to be about animation times or some such. D spends some time also checking over Arcanaberg's and remaining community suggestions for fixing #3, focusing on possible numerical fixes that don't require new tech or other resources.

Meeting 2b (late in week): Bring together folks to pick an option for handling #2, assign someone involved with the best idea to deal with it (we'll assume B). Check to see if folks are generally OK with the concept of changes for #3.

Week 3: A working full time on #1, B working full time on #2, D now full time on #3, although hopefully this will be mostly regression testing as the actual changes are quick. C works on New Stuff until late in the week. Test builds internally by mid-week. By the end of the week, A, B, and D are expected to be able to (independently) explain in a few minutes to C what their change *actually* does, and what it *looks* like it does, to someone who knows the powers system well but hasn't been looking at those parts of it all week. Dev D sends NDA'd PM to Arcanaberg and possibly selected other folks who made good suggestions on #3, outlining proposed changes. By end of week, closed beta build goes up so select players can bash on it over weekend; beta channel instructions are explicit that folks should focus on changes to #1, #2, and #3 (and possibly any minor New Stuff that worked its way into the build). If there's a competent and separate QA group, they start their checks.

Week 4: Monday is evaluate closed beta data, final dev checking, and then publish for open beta Tuesday morning unless some parts are simply unworkable. Senior dev post on main boards discussing the opportunity to test out changes to #1, #2, and #3, and focusing . CT brought in again to focus sifting the firehose on forums and training zone channels. A, B, and D responsible for showing up at least once to an announced event on the training zone to interact with players about their temporary focus area directly. Encourage Arcanaberg via PM to work on a detailed post explaining how #2 is "now" balanced compared to similar powers.

Late Thursday, big meeting to decide if things are working, or if *minor* tweaks are both necessary and possible; decision made as to which changes go into Release Candidate build Friday morning. (Hopefully, no changes from the Tuesday AM build, or minor typo stuff.) Check to see if Live servers having any significant problems from people figuring out #1, which may influence how desperate it is to get that into this month's patch.

RC runs Friday - Monday, and unless absolutely disastrous last-minute issues will go live Tuesday morning. Senior person writes monthly letter talking about balance changes, starting off with #2 and mentioning something about "wanting to make the minimum changes necessary to bring the power into line with similar powers" etc. Describe #3 in terms of "We understand that folks have been unhappy with this for a while, but resources are limited", praise the community for being rational and involved. Be honest on #1, "Previous changes did not have the desired effect, and we have had to adjust SC to prevent it from becoming a problem. We have gone to a fair amount of effort to preserve the feel and flow of the set, and welcome detailed feedback on how SC performs on the Live servers." Consider sending Arcanaberg cookies.

This all assumes that the problems are both urgent enough to try solving in a month's timeframe, and tractable enough that it can actually be done. If #1 blows up badly, it might be necessary to pull everyone onto that and push a hotfix; make sure it is announced as a temporary measure that will be refined as soon as possible.

A somewhat more pessimistic take would be to assign 3 devs to #1 in hopes of getting something usable before it blows up on live, and the remaining dev to figure out a smokescreen change to #2 and to make a concerned but apologetic post on the #3 forum topic explaining that they acknowledge the player concerns, would like to fix the problems, but simply don't have the resources to do it right now.

A somewhat saner take would stretch the process out over two months, with the first 2 weeks working on a crash priority quick fix for #1 that can be hotfixed in case it blows up on Live, then a more rational change process with at least a full week in QA+closed beta and a full week of Open, possibly two.

I'd regard the detailed schedule as an "OMG, things are coming apart" plan, we get only a few person-days of dev work on new stuff out of the whole month, which is unlikely to be practical very often. It's got an OK chance of working if "simple" numerical changes can have the desired results, but as the complexity and/or weirdness of the changes needed goes up, the likelihood of success in this sort of timeframe plummets. With really good devs, you can hope that the fix takes much less time and gives you more time to regression test, but you can't count on that. The more I reread this, the more it sounds like a "hotfix" process rather than a "patch" process, despite having a month turnaround; and the lead dev and CT need to be on top of whether they need to pull the red handle and put everything onto a #1 hotfix even faster.

This is likely to be at least part of the problem. These "on demand video cards" have very poor driver support, and CoH is unusual in that it is seriously twitchy about any interruption of the graphics pipeline. (E.g. I have a desktop with a slowly dying graphics card I can't replace for another month or so; every other program occasionally will glitch for a moment to a black screen and then come back OK with a little warning message about W7 having restarted the driver, but CoH panics and locks up irretrievably every time it happens.)

It's possible that the launcher vs. program is also part of the problem; you could try setting both so that they run under "game mode".

If at all possible I would strongly recommend trying to find a way to set a performance profile that locks the CPU and graphics into high-performance / game mode, and switch to it before even starting the launcher.

I would suggest looking at the GeForce 9500 GT; we have some at work because it's about the best card you can put into a PCI slot (but you should be able to use the better PCIe x16 version); power consumption is also quite low for a semi-modern card. Typical prices would be $55 - $65 each.

Exact comparison across such different card generations is difficult, but eyeballing some specs it may give you up to four times the performance of your old card.

Why not? There's no mechanical reason that they couldn't design something balanced like, say, Dr. Kahn (built for 4-8), with the expectation that instead of 45-50, folks were 50 to 50(+1). We've got several existing examples of TFs where the PCs take on Incarnate foes with less than a team of 8, and they are some of the most popular.

To look at it another way, they've already said that the early content will eventually become easier with increasing Incarnate-ness (as it would nearly have to). If the content is intended to be playable with 8 level 50(+0) characters, with only Commons in their Alpha, why wouldn't you be able to go through it with say 6 level 50(+2) characters Incarnated out the wazoo? In the existing game, you're free to show up to Dr. Kahn with 4 level 45 characters with SOs, or 8 level 50(+1) characters full of purples; the first group will have a significantly harder time than the baseline and the second significantly easier, but it is *left up to the players*, not some arbitrary limit; and there is no fundamental mechanical reason that Incarnate content could not be designed in the same fashion.

On yet another angle, a significant fraction of the setting basis for the game is focused around soloers and small teams. What fraction of the most iconic and popular comics usually feature less than 8 protagonists? Superman. Batman and Robin. Birds of Prey. Fantastic Four. The X-Men... particularly relevant because when they threatened to get too large, they split into sub-teams. Are there really that many popular and long-lasting comics that have 12-24 protagonists regularly participating on the same mission?

Of course, no one is forced to do anything. But we've got a wide variety of folks; some have been around since beta, have hundreds of characters and dozens of 50s; others have only had an account for about a year and a CoH-capable computer to allow them to play regularly for less than a month. The old-timers are understandably mostly interested in new stuff, and even the mid-range players want their signature characters to advance the plotline. If we can bring a level 35 character along to fight Romulus, and a level 45 character along to fight Statesman, Lord Recluse, or Reichsman, why can't we bring even a level 50 character to fight Neuron if they're not Incarnated... especially one that's already taken him down at level 40 and again at level 45?

The devs are certainly capable of crafting new stories with new mechanics and interesting twists that are approachable by a wide range of levels, builds, and playstyles; and even have user-adjustable difficulty on top of the usual team size auto-scaling; the Leonard "Army of Me" arc is a great example, and once some of the bugs got shaken out the Dr. Kahn TF is a welcome addition to the TF lineup. But every person-hour spent developing content for an increasingly exclusionary sliver of top players is a person-hour not spent developing content everyone can enjoy together.

Hence my wanting to make it clear that it's not a good thing. Arbitrary timers benefit few or no people, and significantly hinder gameplay for adults with real lives. There are plenty of things out there more important than computer games, and one of the great things about CoH up to now is that in the vast majority of the content, the game was perfectly capable of accommodating RL concerns.

Some people may find it interesting and exciting; probably on average younger folks without physical handicaps, and with good computers and network connections. That's certainly nowhere near everyone who plays and enjoys CoH. Personally, I've got adequate reflexes and a decent computer and network, and merely found it annoying; others were quite blunt in saying it was a nightmare of un-fun and they have no intention of doing that again if at all possible. A MMORPG should be about the *character's* stats, not the *player's*. (And remember, everyone gets old and slow eventually, unless you plan on dying young

Show, don't tell. Shouldn't that be up to the players? I've got several low-level characters that simply cannot destroy a Bomb on their own, but the game doesn't keep me from trying. I've also got characters *lower* than that that can destroy a Bomb without difficulty; the difference between characters is greater than the difference between levels. Are you seriously suggesting that some random person's 50(+0) character, with a mix of Common IOs and a few cheap sets and a Common in their Alpha is that much better than a multi-billion-inf build optimized by one of the leaders of the Scrapper challenges, before they Incarnate? There are people out there that solo Lusca, for crying out loud... it's going to be a long time before Incarnate content has gotten so hard that a team of that grade of character wouldn't have a chance if they were allowed to take it. Isn't one of the most classic superhero moments of all when the bystanders gasp and say "No one could have survived that!", and yet somehow the hero pulls through? Aren't some of the more memorable moments in comic (and CoH) history when heroes know they are outclassed, but step up to the challenge anyway, because that's the difference between merely being superpowered, and being a hero? ("We're sorry, the Omega Team isn't large or powerful enough to have a reasonable chance of surviving, you're not allowed to click on the portal" would have led to a very different world...)

From another viewpoint... the Incarnate system is "what we're getting instead of levels 51-60". If we actually *had* gotten level 51-55 and an appropriate set of Arcs in Issue 19, there's no reason that the super-sidekick system would have stopped working; and presumably characters of a range of levels would be able to enjoy playing together the new content. What we're getting seems to be *by design* more exclusionary, and that's pretty much by definition intending to keep people from having fun together.

This is not new. I at least have been saying all along that my friends are a comparatively small SG on a low-pop server. We tend to avoid TFs that require a full 8-man team of 45+ players already, because it is a major hassle, reduction in flexibility, and reduction in accessibility from other available content. We *have* tried the new Apex and Tin Mage TFs, and the vast majority of players were of the opinion that it was a major hassle and LESS FUN.

Things that we do NOT want:

* Completely arbitrary rules that make it harder to assemble a team based on who we have and who they want to play tonight. One of the greatest strengths of CoH is that a level 35 and a level 50 can play together on, say, an ITF... they are both contributing, both earning rewards, and both having fun. Every time you limit the range of people who can play together on content, you REDUCE THE FUN.

It's bad enough now that we're having to say "We need to do the WST, and therefore you can't play with us tonight" to folks, or to not have 8 people on with high-level characters available and be forbidden to even *attempt* the WST. (Having Dr. Kahn this week is a lot better than last week, and we've got people looking forward to the end of the month when the WST will allow a far greater number of folks to enjoy playing together.)

Given that the general theory seems to be not wanting more than a factor of two in size... we would want a lot of content for 4-8 players, some for 6-12 players, a little for 1-2 players, and possibly a smidgen for 8-16.

* Content that enforces specific ATs, powersets, or small subsets. No content should *require* a tanker, a healer, a debuffer, or anything else; there should be a wide variety of approaches to a problem. The X-Men do not handle problems the same way the Superfriends do, or the Hellfire Squad. Strength in diversity, fun in repeat play value that is different each time.

* Content that has hardcoded time limits. Most of our meta-SG are adults; they have jobs, kids, elderly relatives, and/or a wide variety of other obligations. If we need to take a 10-minute pause because someone's kid has woken up and is being fussy, or needs help with their homework, or their server has emailed them with an overtemp alarm they need to check out, none of us have a problem with that... we don't want a game system that will artificially penalize us for having real lives.

* Content that harshly limits people dropping in and out, or unduly penalizes people with bad connections. One of the big problems with TFs is that you cannot rearrange once it's underway; if someone has to work late, either the entire rest of the TF has to sit around and wait for them to get home, or they miss out completely, because they can't join it in progress. We also have various people that don't have perfect computers or connections; if CoH crashes they need to be able to reboot and get back in without having penalized the team on time or being locked out.

* Content that places a strong focus on player reflexes and low-latency connections. We're playing a MMORPG (where your dodge chance is supposed to be based on the powers, abilities, and gear on your character sheet, not the player's twitch reflexes and net connection) on purpose. There are plenty of RTSs and FPSs out there for those that want that sort of thing.

* Content that gates the *story* of the game behind increasingly difficult *gameplay*. The last time the Earth was invaded, part of the whole *point* was that everyone mattered; whatever level or powers you had, there was something useful you could be doing. To this day, the Riki raids are a great opportunity for folks from all walks and levels to have a good time together. This time, the devs seem to have gone to an enormous amount of effort to develop entirely new technology for the specific purpose of throwing one of CoH's greatest strengths out the window and limiting the number of people who can enjoy the story to the smallest amount possible; this continues to baffle me.

Absolutely false, and you're a better person than to use such a lame strawman. In our case, the average team size on a non-preplanned event night would be 3-5, and on a preplanned event night 6-8. One of the reasons we're playing CoH and not other games is that CoH is the industry leader in scaling content to the size and desired difficulty of a variable small to medium sized group; and it is really looking like the devs are chucking that out the window.

Building on the Vanguard Pack and the Vanguard video, how about the lighter side of the Vanguard "we take anyone, really, anyone, please we're desperate out here" policy? Mixed with a dash of seriousness at the end.

Perhaps Incandescent (in charge of Vanguard Herald) comes back from the UN for some meetings and takes Levantera, Borea, Serpent Drummer, and Gaussian out to lunch (or perhaps out for drinks after work), and they swap horror stories about new recruits and the pressures of their respective jobs. Maybe Incandescent (who has been mostly elsewhere lately) starts out with a "Do you have any idea how difficult it is to spin positive PR about some of these people?" take, and they keep coming back with stories about folks.

Serpent Drummer: "The enigmatic man called Serpent Drummer is the head of the Vanguard's Gauntlet division. The Gauntlet was originally Vanguard's offensive division, but changing events have seen it shift those responsibilities to the Shield Division, while the Gauntlet concentrates on coordinating Vanguard's forces with the recent influx of super-powered volunteers. Even in the middle of such great changes, Serpent Drummer remains serene." in public... Get a few drinks into him and he'll rant for hours about bizarre extradimensional horrors, people wearing stripes with plaid, ERP leather-and-chains fetishists, and "more machine than man, now" whatevers exclaiming "I c4n'7 w4yT t0 t3s7 0u7 t3h p0w4r 0f m n3w bodi!" But he's got to stand there with an only vaguely grim look like a Tower of London guard, except it's not just tourists, they're recruits. Whatever they are. (Intersperse with flashbacks of particularly weird character outfits doing paperwork, sitting in the training theater, getting rated on the firing range, doing pushups, etc.)

Why do they give you free gloves right at the start? He shudders. Seriously, wear the gloves at all times, if you've seen some of the things I have... they don't make bleach strong enough, some of the SOs that the poor quartermaster has gotten turned in to resell made the Dark Watcher go for the hand sanitizer, and he takes vacations in dimensions that would drive most of us mad. Well, madder. For the love of god, WEAR THE GLOVES. And a full body suit if you can manage it. (Gaussian is nodding all the while, and points out "I'm standing in a protective yellow circle with my hands behind my back FOR A REASON".)

Bonus: If Incandescent isn't present in visual form anywhere, you could hold a contest to design (the unofficial version of) her outfit! http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Incandescent has some info on her background and powers, but it's not clear what the source is, or whether she's been described or drawn in any of the non-game materials.

At the end, they're all back at work and Serpent Drummer heads out of the bunker door (possibly at Point du Hoc, with the ship in the background?) and there's all of the wacky and weird characters that we've been seeing throughout the video, now armored up in Vanguard-armor versions of themselves and lined up in rows, and he kind of shakes his head and straightens up and says something along the lines of "Wherever you came from, whatever you were before, we're Vanguard's Gauntlet now, hitting the enemy first, striking the hardest. 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he to-day that sheds his blood with me, shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition; and gentlemen in Atlas now-a-bed, shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks, that fought with us upon this day.' (pause for effect, everyone salutes) Let's get'em" and everyone flies / jumps / charges over the walls at the nearest pylon as things fade to black, and then fades into the Vanguard poster. (OK, I'd actually suggest Gen. Cheatham's famous "Give 'em h***, boys!" as the final line, but given the context, I don't think it'd be allowed.)

While you could test it if you want, the current understanding is that every member of a team gets to roll for a potential shard drop on every kill that the team makes. I have personally seen more than one person say they got a shard drop from the same AV kill, so it's at least partly true. This is different from other sorts of drops, and explains why teams do much better in general.

For most other sorts of drops, you're effectively looking at ((team kills per time) / (team size)), and so you're only really benefiting from any combined leverage effects (such as a kin and a damage dealer as a duo doing more than twice their individual kill rate). For shards, it's simply (team kills per time), as everyone gets an independent chance on every kill; a team which can kill several times as many foes per unit time will give *everyone* that many more shards per unit time on average.

Additionally, the drop rate for higher-grade foes is substantially better; roughly 1/1000 for minions, 1/150 for lieutenants, and 1/50 for bosses, and believed to be even better odds for EBs and AVs (*). With the exception of certain specific sorts of farming builds and strategies, teams will usually both face a higher mix of bosses and upward, and plow through them more effectively.

tl;dr: Current best info is that there's no specific "solo modifier" on the drop rate, it's just directly tied to the number and quality of enemies the entire team defeats per unit time. Most competent teams can kill both more and better enemies that most soloers, and therefore do better for shards.

(*) My personal guess is that EBs are around 1/25 and AVs around 1/12, for a halving progression; anecdotally I've had enough shards drop from AVs that I'm pretty sure the drop rate is substantially better than 1/50.

(tinfoil hat) Or 1,000 heroes were willing to suffer 80% casualties in the last, best hope to free Earth from Statesman because they hoped he could be goaded into taking the alpha for everyone and therefore overwhelming even his defenses. They failed. (/tinfoil hat)

There does seem to be a significant number of cases where a power does nothing except summon a pseudo-pet, where listing the pseudo-pet's powers down below as they are for "actual" pets would provide useful info with a hopefully minimal programming investment. Having a "Rain of Arrows" displayed down below, expandable to show the "RainofArrows" power, and so on would be arguably better than nothing.

Looking at it in another way, if the game *knows* that the number in the Accuracy column is never used, wouldn't displaying "Special" or some such be better than an unhelpful number? Or both; "2.00 (Special)" in a browner shade of yellow than usual would present the most information for instance. Are there any cases where a summons actually does need to make a to-hit check for the summons itself? (And what would it be checking against if so?)

This worries me for several reasons.

Firstly, as others have noted, there's the fundamental "bad GMing" feel to it; this really sounds like "you're not winning the encounter the bullheaded way we wanted you to, clever players will be slapped down".

Secondly, there's the comic book feel issue; a villain in a prepared trap at the heart of his power... while there are probably a few particularly stubborn heroes that would think "I just have to hit him harder!", the majority would be trying to figure out a way to get him out of his sweet spot.

And most seriously, this means that if you're a squishy character who has a bad day, you're totally screwed. Hospital, restock on inspirations, back into mission, run around to the lava room... previously, that was enough for him to pop out about a dozen bifurcations, but he seemed to have an upper limit and would stop. Without a limit, there's nothing stopping him from Agent Smith-ing into enough clones to crash people's clients, well beyond any winnable state.

As noted above, I've yet to see clear evidence that it's actually useful in any MMORPG, even far simpler ones than CoH.

In general, while inaccurate measurements are problematic, *wrong* measurements are almost certainly worse than none at all; and in most CoH situations any practically realizable DPS meter would be deeply wrong.

(To illustrate what I mean by "inaccurate" vs. "wrong" in this context, if your nominal goal is to describe the nutritional value of a food, an "inaccurate" value might be where someone used a poorly calibrated instrument or inaccurate measurement while recording the amount of sodium, which resulted in a value that was off by an amount outside the acceptable error allowance, but not known to be off. A "wrong" value might be because someone thought that only meat could provide protein and never bothered to measure the contribution from the milk, egg, and soy ingredients... even if their math and lab technique were correct, the answer would be fundamentally flawed.)

There are many reasons for all this, but one of the most fundamental is that CoH characters are far more complex and interesting than in other games. Even when you look at a Blaster, they usually have a wide variety of tools that can significantly alter the outcome of a fight in ways other than their own direct damage output.

Some quick examples pulled out of my own recent experiences to illustrate the problems:

* My Archery/Devices/Munitions Blaster has frankensloted Surveillance to provide -22.5% Defense to all, for 20 sec. What's the contribution to DPS when I fire it against a tough foe?

The most optimistic view, with a high-Defense foe and a large group of Acc-debuffed allies, would chalk up something on the order of 20% additional damage from everyone in the fight for the next 20 seconds; it might be responsible for thousands of points of damage per click. The most pessimistic view, against low-Defense, high-Def Debuff Resist foes and with very high Acc allies, would be that it does basically nothing, being a complete waste of activation time and End.

Crucially, the calculations necessary to figure out what's actually happening would be absolutely prohibitive on the server side, given what we know of the limitations of what the server can reasonably calculate.

Then there's the aspects that transcend what can be measured by any rationally computerized means; if several pickup teams of people are fighting several tough enemies piecemeal (say, 6 Adamastors and 2 Akarists, like one point in last night's special event) and generally not exceeding their regen, having the giant red cross-hair animation point out one foe to concentrate more people on could easily change the course of the fight from "loosing gradually" (not really denting their HP bars past their regen, and an increasing number of people having to trek back from the hospital across the zone) to "winning steadily" (whittle down one with focused fire, then move to the next). How would you measure *that* in a DPS meter? And remember that this is one, fairly straightforward power, in perhaps the most straightforward damage-output-focused AT.

* Mid-teens semi-regular SG team with six Demon Summoning Masterminds and my Arachnos Widow (long story, and prior to Inherent Fitness); the contribution to overall team damage from my running Tactical Training: Assault and Leadership: Assault to buff the damage of the giant horde of 18 ugly demons stomping about greatly exceeded my entire attack chain, to the point that when I ran short of End it was far more effective for me to stop attacking for a bit than to risk dropping the toggles. (Plus TT:Maneuvers seemed at that level to make a significant difference in their survivability, reducing time and significant End that would have been lost re-summoing and re-buffing them.) Again, this from an AT that tends to be thought of as a "damage dealing class".

* My Storm / Sonic / Elec Defender has his sonic attacks frankenslotted with more focus on Recharge than Damage (not even counting the whole thing some people have about Defenders using their attacks in the first place). Layering the -Resistance debuffs more deeply on hard targets generates far more team damage than his own efforts could put out even with a more damage-focused build (and many of his mitigation abilities work on their own). The little orange numbers he sees floating up are almost a side effect of making everyone else's orange numbers bigger. Somewhat bizarrely, his highest "direct DPS" attack is actually his Ancillary Elec pool Immobilize, so when he wants to debuff foes he attacks them, and when he wants to damage them he controls them

* Twilight Grasp: Out of the box, -50% Regen, -10% Damage, -5% To-Hit, and can just about be double-stacked; it's an awesome debuff that gets better quickly with slotting. Oh, and it also has the useful side effect that it heals all your friends In a damage-control hybrid class, how do you figure its contribution?

* What's the real DPS of Howling Twilight? Sure, it does some direct damage in a radius, but if you've just saved three Blasters and their buffing Defender from a 60-second trip back from the hospital during a crucial point on an undermanned ship raid, the damage you personally log to U'Kon Gr'ai from firing the power is pretty much irrelevant.

* I fire a cone that catches a badly wounded minion, seriously overkilling it; a slightly damaged lieutenant, not quite killing it and therefore allowing it to fire an annoying power (such as a group heal or buff), and doing some damage to a boss. What's the DPS of that cone even in isolation, and how do you compare it to a single-target attack that would have assuredly taken just the lieutenant down with some overkill before they could trigger their PBAoE heal? What about the DPS value of spending an extra second to line up the cone to include another minion?

* What's the DPS of typing instructions?

* To take it in the other direction for a moment, suppose in a moment of sleepiness my finger slips and I fire Gale rather than Howl at a clump of enemies as the team approaches. What's the hit to DPS? The Rain of Arrows from behind me landing on empty floor rather than a debuffed clump of enemies taking 20% more damage almost certainly outweighs the difference in the orange numbers I see personally.

These are not rare, special, or unique examples; the majority of long-term CoH players could go on for ages listing examples like the above.

To bring up another point: simply turning on and reading your log already gives you the exact damage output (to the second decimal place) and time down to the second. IIRC firing off a demorecord gives time accurate to the millisecond, and based on the server's "real" clock to boot. The reason there aren't more tools taking advantage of this is while you could create very precise *looking* results, they would range from at best "basically meaningless" to more typically "actively misleading".

The Lady Winter mission seems to be intended to be a credible alternative repeatable mission with the same reward table; and what we've seen of it so far looks pretty good. Depending on exact build and/or small team, some people may find either Lady Winter or Snaptooth more problematic; but in the worst case you're no worse off than before, and for the majority of characters there will be some much-needed variety.

They do not. I helped a friend's villain with the Mender Ramiel arc last night and the highest villain I had on that server was 39; she exemped up normally and we fought our way through with no problems. Of course, non-50s can't get their own copy of the mission and don't get the Alpha unlock or a shard at the end; but they can earn XP, Inf, Vanguard Merits, defeat badges (I picked up Centurion), and so on with no problem.

There is a rumor that everyone needs to have Cimerora unlocked, having completed the appropriate arc and talked to Imperious; this would effectively set a minimum level of 35 to help out. I haven't tested this yet.