MrCaptainMan
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Posts
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Joined
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Just tried this arc twice on my 50 with an SG mate for the badges through ouro. Both times we failed the fire rescue mission, and then we both ragequit lol.
That fire rescue badge misison is so cluttered with crud objectives it's horrible. Terrible design. Faile.
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I've got no huge preference in terms of size, but I also prefer 'better' leagues.
What I have found however is that a 'poor' 24-man BAF is better thsn a 'poor' 16-man. I've never been on a full league BAF that's failed, but I've experienced som 16-mans that have. Those generally seemed to be led by juvenile 'i'm so hard I eat AVs for breakfast raargh!' types who also invariably were less than stellar leaders. One problem with smsller leagues is that there's less buffer to cope with dropouts. If a BAF starts at 16, teo people drop out (or are kicked by some 'CryMoarNoob' type leader, which I've seen happen), then the trial becomes much harder, whereas on a 24-man if a few dropouts occur it's easier to cope with.
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Do VIPs still have to buy new powersets?
Will be able to buy the equivalent of one of the booster packs, ie all the costume packs and snazzy powers etc, in one go with one payment, and will it be more or less than what we currently pay for them?
Ideally, I'd like my current CoH expenditure (yearly sub plus purchase if any and all booster packs when they cone out) to not change, and I want everything that's available.
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One really memorable epic CoH experience was doing Dalgrhyn's AE arcs The Casualties of War and its twin on my 38 kin/rad. Incredible experience.
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Epic experiences for me:
The Hess TF duo'd with my SG mate.
The Katie H TF duo'd with my SG mate.
Sister Psyche TF duo'd with my SG mate.
The ITF duo'd with my SG mate until we had to give up at the guy on the platform nr the two giant mek-men. We failed the TF but it was awesome fun all the way.
Dr Q TF duo'd with my SG mate u til we could go no further. It's a bit drawn-out but exploring the shard together felt cool.
Frostfire duo'd with my SG mate way back when she was a noob. Frostfire's great
Getting the rocketman badge, duoing with my SG mate.
The Faultline arc, duo'd with my SG mate.
Doc Vahzilok's lab map Big Fight, duo'd with my SG mate.
Hm, there's a recurring them here, I see.
Trials? Epic? Thrrppp, not in the least. They're rushed cluster-runs of attack spams, done with mostly different strangers and with no personal investment.
If I could suo them with my SG mate, they'd likely feel epic and be awesome fun.
Epic is where the heart lies IMO.
Shpuldn't someone post that pic of Spidey takimg on Firestorm around now?
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I see that a lot of the haters here, including some of the most vociferous, have said things along the line of 'it was funny the first few times I saw it, now it's lame'.
This looks like another aspect of 'i was first' leetism, a bit. 'the first few times' might be this week for sb who's only got a 50 recently, or who's resubbed.
My own view is that cutscene bombing is perfectly acceptable as long as the trial isn't failed. I've never considered doing it myself because I've never died in the underground bit of the LAM.
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Quote:You mean like with the AE?Originally Posted by The_Static_Man
as soon as a new system comes out, the old one is left in the dust along with a lot of the content that went along with it.
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Quote:This is utterly cretinous. I always try to give the dev team the benefit of the doubt, but if i said what I really thought I'd be banned from the forums for sure. It's beyond senseless and into negligence IMO.Originally Posted by The_Cheshire_Cat
...the term "Droids" is flagged by the copyright filter, but not "Droid". Also, apparently "Reprogrammed Doomsday Droid" is invalid because of "D Doom". See if you can spot the problem there.
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When just Alpha was available, lots of people stockpiled shards, I hear, and so threads were invented to stop instant Incarnate T4s being crafted on day one when lore, Destiny etc were added.
When Hybrid, Vitae etc get unlocked, surely there's going to be the same potential problem?
Are we going to get Incarnate Fragments, Facets, Slivers, Chunks, Slices, Nuggets, Blobs and Bits as well as the currencies we already have?
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OMG, what a lovely review! Thank you so much, Bubbawheat! I couldn't have asked for better praise. That's made my day.
My GF said "He's obviously a man of impeccable taste".
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Something Zamuel said ingame this evening made me think about sth I wrote a brief outlind for ages ago, but never got round to writing. I bet we've all got 'planned but never written' AE projects?
Mine was a rather horrendously bloated 15-mission epic (lol I know!) exploring the various layers of 'reality' from we players down through our toons to the characters they sometimes take on whilst in the AE (some MAuthors have written arcs that put you in other people's shoes, as it were).
This humoungus tale was not only horribly large, but its narrative was non-linear, and loosely based on a mashup of The Odyssey and Sylvie, the 1853 novella by the French Romanticist Gérard de Nerval.
It was called 'I, Metaman', which is so gigantically pretentious whilst also being a terrible pun, that it still cracks me up.
I'm never going to write it, now, of course. The profanity filter's my excuse lol.
Anyone else have anything that's likely never going to see the light of the AE?
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You can craft a T1 alpha in your first BAF, surely. You get a component, plus 4-6 astrals, plus an empyrean, plus however many threads.
You only need 40 threads to craft the other two components. My SG-mate did her first BAF yesterday and ended up with 41 threads and a common. T1 sorted.
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Quote:it's my experience doing BAFs ion Freedom via PuGing in Pocket D that the only reason people close leagues is to avoid the 5-min delay from the LFG thing. I haven't noticed any snobbery or particular preference for certain ATs/level shifts.Originally Posted by Snow Globe
The thing is, that ever since Issue 20 went into open beta, this attitude has been a driving force for the league locks (ie the attitude of "I don't want to play with people I don't know, because we're not as efficient."), and it has disgusted me since it was brought up. It is getting worse.
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Quote:You can still badge the old way if you like.Originally Posted by B_L_Angel
Silver Gale, I didn't see your reply earlier but it turns out Beefcake hit my worries on the head. I just don't see badging as being fun if it becomes ,"I paid eleventy billion paragon points to get my badge total up."
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Quote:What counts as 'participation'?Originally Posted by reiella
Yes, if your character [individually] fails to participate sufficiently you get a reward table with the option of 10 incarnate threads.
It should generally only show up if you're door sitting or miss a significant portion of the trial. However, 'should' and does are different things, for some characters their playstyles lend the system to think they're not really participating when they really are. The 20.5 patch improved on this a bit, so in theory the 'false positives' should go down.
I personally didn't have a problem with getting past the 10 thread table on my Bots/Traps MM, but I know Snow Globe had more than a few incidents that really ruffled them.
I'm assuming attacking mobs must count. Buffing team mates? Toggles? Use of Sprint/movement powers?
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Quote:There's a thread reward in the end-of-trial reward table?Originally Posted by reiella
Snow was referring to the thread table reward, not threads from defeats in the Trial.
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I don't understand why you didn't get any threads, Snow. I get around 4-6 threads every time I do the BAF, on top of any Astrals and component drops.
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According to a post in the City Life general forum, WNs arc A Friend Indeed is mentioned in PCGAMER this month!
Fame, WN! And rightly deserved!
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Edit: She's not the only one, either Here's hoping more plays result!
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No Pants Day means sth different in Britain
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Edit: I forgot why I wNted to post lol. To the poster whose done 30 trials with not a lot of progress: i've done 17 BAFs and I've got all five unlocked (thru transforming ithreads into iXP) and tier 3s in Lore and Judgement and Tier 2s in the other three.
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Quote:I only have two 50s, one hero and one villain. I'm currently Incarnating my hero. I join PuGs in Pocket D on Freedom to trial ; I haven't noticed any hreat consistency in the Players I'm teaming with - everyone's there to grind, not make friends.Originally Posted by StratoNexus
If you are engaging in the BAF repeatedly with the same character and using the same strategy with mostly the same other leaguemates, then I agree with your assessment.
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Quote:A big difference in the comparitive play experience of a trial/TF and a solo or small team arc or series of missions is that generally you can 'stop and smell the roses' in the latter.Originally Posted by Arilou
I should note that these same issues apply to everything, not just trials. Running the ITF has surely come down to an art-form by now.
The main difference is that trials are generally shorter than TF*s.
I've been of the opinion for a long time that everything in the game should be scaled for different team sizes, down to solo - with comparitively scaled rewards as well. IMO trials should be too.
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And a negative outcome of this IMO is that unless you're lucky enough to be a member of a large SG or get in at the start, it's basically impossible to encounter Phase 1 for a significant portion of the Playerbase.
Try asking a PuG LAM League if they mind if you take 20 minutes to 'explore' and take screenshots nowadays lol.
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Quote:The short 'evolution' of a trial:Originally Posted by The_Hegemon
Part of the reason that trials seem so grindy to me is that there's this community memory effect that favors stencil-strategies like these. It makes every run feel the same.
When I20 launched, the first few runs I did were painful. Eventually, though, the community as a whole started to learn more about the task and what they needed to do to beat it, and runs started to experiment with various strategies for doing so. Some of them even worked! This was the 'sweet spot' of difficulty level. Failures still occurred, but when they happened, there was this 'oh, so close!' feeling afterwards rather than 'well, that sucked.'
Once that 'sweet spot' disappears, though, it's gone forever. The community settles on a strategy that strikes the best possible compromise between simplicity, ease of implementation, and success rate. The vast majority of league members along for the ride are familiar with the most common strategies and they know exactly what they need to do to win. Failure becomes rare because deviation from the accepted methods becomes rare. As far as the community is concerned, the need to adapt to the nonstandard objectives and mob behaviors has been met. The experimentation phase - the 'fun' bit, arguably - is over and isn't coming back. There's no reason to when the standard fare is so efficient and consistently rewarding.
If the Man from Mars gets on an average BAF, his ignorance won't affect things at all. Even though he's a complete newbie, it's still going to be a curbstomp run. With that trial in particular, his knowledge of the how or why of things is almost entirely irrelevant, since most of the rest of the league will know the steps of the dance and there's nothing that any one person could do to ruin the outcome. He's still going to leave with a component, an Empyrean merit, and a handful of Astrals. Really, if he just treated the whole affair as a grand-scale newspaper mission and followed his teammates around spamming his powers, it's unlikely that anyone would even know he was a newbie.
Phase 1: first time run for everyone on the League, exploring, screenies, maybe.
Phase 2: 'exploration' of strategies.
Phase 3: optimal strategy is settled on and that's how it's always done forevermore
is surely inevitable. From launch of a trial, Phase 1 can surely be measurable in hours at most (and it might even be exhausted during beta, since Players present during Beta wil be around on the trials at live launch to show folks how to do them).
Phase 2 takes about a week or two, it seems.
So three weeks tops after launch, trials are whack-a-mole runs being farmed in exactly the same way forever.
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Quote:I am farming the BAF atm in order to get tier 3s slotted in all my available Incarnate slots. I play on an en/en/fire blaster. This is what i do:Originally Posted by StratoNexus
I do not think comparing running 3 BAFs in a row is like playing the exact same hand, its more like playing the exact same game, but shuffling the deck (assuming people actually come and go, if you do it with the exact same teams, then maybe, but outside of Master Lambda/Keyes runs, I rarely see that).
Of course, most leagues I see anymore rotate, doing BAF then Lam (and hopefully one day Keyes gets put in more often, it does seem to finally be trickling in more and more).
If you are not the type to enjoy that, don't do it. I don't. I run five or six trials a week (although oftentimes two or three of those are on the same day(s)). I play Yahtzee, Chess, and Connect Four that much, they are much less dynamic than even BAF.
1. Zone in, activate all buffs/acolades etc.
2. fly to nearest Warwork sand spam attack powers.
3. Fly to Center Court (along with everyone else) and wait for the league's puller to pull NS.
4. When NS is at center court, close to melee range and spam attack powers until she's down.
5. Fly to south choke or north choke depending on where leader sends my team. Drop bonfire, spam attack powers at passing escapees until timer runs out.
6. Fly to center court and wait till league's puller pulls Seige.
7. When Seige at center court, close to melee and spam attack powers.
8. When Seige falls and rezzes, spam attack powers and then alternate between Seige and NS, keeping them at similar damage levels.
9. When they are defeated, grab my reward, 'GJ all' and exit.
Every single BAF is exactly the same. Occasionally, a leader will ask people to congregate at the NW corner of the courts instead of the center, and occasionally, the leader doesn't give any 'team 1 to n chokes , team 2 to s chokes, team 3 to doors' instructions, and then i fly to the south center door/choke and do the escapee bit there.
There is no shuffling of the deck involved in the BAF at all in my experience. I
I'm sure that approach could be used with pretty much any Blaster, but anyone intending to get any AT toon to a fully-slotted Incarnate status will have to repeat the trials over and over with that same toon, and so will soon learn an optimum strategy.
If you want to compare the BAF to poker, it's like a poker game where you're allowed to NOT shuffle the deck if you want.
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What they've done today is a slap in the face to Players who like facial options.
And corsets.
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