Overboard

Session 51-52
Finished the Dr. Quarterfield TF with the team at L44. Mission after mission of just +1 to +2 Crey. To make matters worse, the last two missions spawned -1 and even con. Still not entirely sure how that happened, but it was pretty disappointing.

The irony is, and I almost hate to admit it, but we were so detached we actually team wiped against even-con Crey. In 44 levels, even at times against +6's with DO's ... we never wiped so bad, lol. I'm pretty sure two guys had alts logged into the Hive, two guys were watching TV, I was drinking, the Empath was putting drops in her eyes, and one guy was hanging drywall.

Ok, maybe I exaggerated a little... two of those aren't true

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What's your average completion time for a Paper when you're a full team of eight, I wonder.

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For a paper? We'll have to wait until I8 police bands, or until we roll Team Relentless.

For missions in general... hmm, I havent really tracked it specifically. In terms of experience, we've been doing about 5 bubs per 1.5 to 2 hour session. I could probably dig back through the Herostats logs and find some times for missions.

Edit to add:
Looked up Session 34. We ran three Warburg missions with a team of 7 L37s and 1 L39 against +4's. One of the team members wasn't available, so a member of the SG with a L39 grabbed missions for us. Start to finish times were 9-12 minutes. Total turn around time, ie getting mission, travel ,zone-in ... was 13-15 minutes. We weren't rushing.

Session 50
Ran more of the Dr. Quarterfield Shard TF against primarily +3 Crey. Our Kin/rad wasn't available so we had to adjust buffs and endurance usage, which slowed us down a little bit. Damage wasn't really an issue, as we were only able to generate +3's. Team is L43 now.

Session 48
Started the first Shard TF, Dr. Quarterfield's. First door mission was +3 Rularuu. They didnt give us too much trouble, but detention field on the tank was annoying.

Session 49
Cathedral of Pain trial went live. We decided to run it with our Team Invince toon, rather than figure out which of our 50's to bring. Members of the SG formed up a team of eight 50's. So that was two teams for the trial, 8 L42's on one and 8 L50's on the other.

Trial spawns weren't affected by difficulty, so effectively we were facing even cons after being auto-d to L50. Our SG mates took one pillar, while we took another and we all met at the third at the same time. In the AV room, we went left and they went right. Cleared all the spawns and met at the AV. AV went down in a matter of seconds. Total elapsed time was about 4-5 minutes. Not counting the time for 16 people to zone into the trial map and recover from blue screen crashes.

The reward was the 20% debt reduction IoP. So we went out to monster island to try it out. Took a while for the monster to get a kill, but it does indeed work. We budged the HP bar, but we still dont have quite enough sustainable single target damage to take one down in a reasonable amount of time. We'll try again at L44, lol.

Reformed the TF, and knocked out a few missions. I think most of us are about L42.5

Session 46-47
Finished Tina's Praetorian War arc. The AVs (Bobcat, Shadowhunter, Neuron, Anti-matter) spawned at +2 to +3 and were ~30 second fights. Made about 12 bubs in about 4 hours, putting the team at L42. Need to knockout the Multidimensional mission before we level, so that we can start the Portal Smasher TF against L47's.

Session 45
Ran Tina Macintyre's missions. The Clockwork King AV at +2 levels went down in ~30 seconds. Successfully completed the 10 minute, grab four clicky mission. Ended the night at or near 41.

Session 44
Eden again, this time with the teams regular eight. A little under two hours, but now they're only +3/+4.

A couple observations on the two trials, none of which are really news...

The single largest factor affecting success or failure is the timers. To me, 1.5 hours for the Sewer and 4 hours for Eden doesnt make sense. The two timers should be similar, maybe 2 hours. There's zero sense of urgency in Eden, yet in the Sewer you're rushed and there's no way to speed up the final fight.

More specifically, the problem with the Sewer trial is that the weapons are both unbuffable -and- scale with level. Either allow them to be buffed, or have the damage fixed regardless of level. Apart from maximizing the generator-down window, theres nothing a team can do to speed up the final fight. I think its highly unlikely a team of L38 and less can complete it.

XP rewards between the two trials seem out of balance. I'll have to look up the trial complete reward for the Sewer, but I don't recall it being anything significant. Certainly not on the order of Eden's 120k. The reduction of XP for the hatched krakens remains a glaringly disproportianate change. Overall, the Sewer trial yielded about 1-2 bubs while Eden rewarded 6-7 bubs.

Trial enhancements should be revisited. The lower percent compared to SO's, and the issue of out-leveling them renders their utility marginal despite their multiple effects. If it wasn't an issue before, it certainly is now ... with enhancement diversification. They need to be brought upto SO percents to make a tangible and more generally useful reward.

Session 43
Ran the Eden trial on the spur of the moment. Our Ice blaster wasn't available, so we picked up a L38 or L39 Peacebringer. Halfway through he says, "You guys are like a machine!". Thanks, lol.

The regular spawns were L43 and L44. I a few L42's but I think those were only the boulders and shards that 'spawn on defeat'. Both walls conned L44 (+5 to entire team), as well as the ambrosia bridges. So, we were quite disappointed to find the Crystal Titan was only L43 (+3/+4 as a few of us had leveled enroute). The generous timer allowed us to take our time, clearing all three bridges while the Peacebringer was afk, though we had enough ambrosia after the first two. We also cleared the entire Titan room. The Titan fight itself was uneventful, other than lucky back to back hits on me while I was clearing my enhancement tray. For a L39, the Titan was worth about 23k xp, and the trial completion about 122k. Nice.

Great run, we'll do it again with our Ice blaster.

Session 41
Attempted Sewer Trial again. The patch caused some stability problems for one of the controllers. He disconnected three times while collecting weapons before giving up. In the confusion, we fumbled a fight with a Kraken and didnt get out of the shaft until 50 mins left. We took a shot at the Hydra anyway, to test the weapons at L39. We were able to do about 25% in each generator takedown, but obviously we didnt have enough time to do four with seven players. Controller reinstalled the client in the meantime.

Session 42
Woot! Sewer trial completed with team of seven L39's and one L38.

We got the four particle cannons with about 12-15 minutes elapsed. We were about to drop down when the scrapper discovered his particle cannon had disappeared. Turned out, for some reason the previous nights weapon was still in his inventory when we started. When it was removed, both were removed, or so we theorized. Rather than attempt it with only 3 particle cannons we opted to restart. That of course required a trip back to Founders Fall.

Round two weapons collections was again completed with about 75 minutes remaining. Cleared the generator spawns and four Krakens. With about 50 minutes remaining, the scrapper and the empath started on the tentacles while the team took down the fourth Kraken and wore down the generators. The thermite cannon was useless, regular attacks were sufficient. First assault on the Hydra started at just under 40 minutes remaining and we did a little more than 33% of its health. Second assault triggered the half health rikti spawn early in the window. With four of us locked in the long particle cannon animation, we suffered a couple losses, but were able to regroup out of sight of the hydra. Cleaned up the Rikti and started third generator takedown. During the third assault at 25 minutes remaining, the timer of the tanks first particle cannon expired and both particle cannons were removed. I checked my timer and only had 2 minutes left. At the same time, I took a oneshot hit from the Hydra. Uh oh. The empath was on her game and propped me back up immediately. Fired again and we got the second rikti spawn. Knowing the weapons would expire at any moment, we chose to ignore the spawn and fire away. The two trollers rocked those Rikti like they were Hellions in Perez. We dropped the Hydra and gang-nuked the Rikti. Somewhere in there my particle cannons disappeared.

Trial complete with 20 minutes to spare.

Session 40
Ran some regular missions on Invince for 5 bubs. Nothing noteworthy.

Session 39
The team decided to postpone the Sewer Trial until L39. The general opinion was that the scaling of the weapons with regards to level was the only limiting factor. We had already cleared the mission twice against +4/+5 spawns. So, we left the Sewers. Those of us that hadn't already, trained up and bought L40 hancers.

We ran the Envoy of Shadows arc from start to finish in about 1 hour and 45 minutes. Spawns were primarily +2 and +3. We took down the AV all three times, once at +3, once at +2, and I'm not sure of the third time. Made about 5 bubs.

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The scrapper tries a different scrapper primary, as to him that's wildly different.

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If I had the time and character slots, I'd probably level nearly every combo of scrapper primary and secondary.

Btw, I have to quote your sig ... perfect.

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Ahh, "invincible" at level 5. Life is fun again. In most games, the toughest you'll ever be relative to the bad guys is level 1. Here, with invincible, it's the hardest the game will be, and it gets easier as you level.

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Session 37
One member couldn't make it, so we took the opportunity to PL-up one of the blasters that had fallen behind by a level. After which, the team is L38, with both blasters at L37.

Session 38
Sewer Trial Round 2 with L42 mobs and four players on Teamspeak. We did the weapons grab in about 25 minutes, with each player taking one. Then we cleared the 4 Krackens and Rikti spawns at the generators in about 20 minutes. We errored on the tentacles. The DA scrapper was more than able to take down the tentacles solo, but the rest of the team tried to assist with the thermite cannons. The range on them is too short, and we only succeeded in drawing aggro off the DA scrapper and wiping all the squishies. Somewhere in that 15 minutes, unbeknownst to us, a Rikti boss wound up near the hydra head while we did the generator take down. Also, we wasted a little time organizing the the coordination of the generator take down. Coming back to the head, we laid into it with the particle cannons. Only to discover the unexpected boss that proceeded to one-shot two or three of the team. Yeh, we blew that. The next round of generators went smoothly, and we had a long window to attack the head. Still, we barely put a dent in it, having only done maybe 15% of its health. With 8 minutes to go, we could've done another round but we knew it wouldnt be enough. So, we punted.

Some observations ... none of us could see the graphic indicating the shield was up. Presumably this is a bug? We had to watch the combat logs. Also, for L38's the Particle Cannons ticked for 42 damage, and for L37 they did 28. Does anyone have any numbers for this? The random weapon assignment was problematic as it prevents or at least complicates working out a strategy beforehand.

What we can do next time...
1. Try to get all of us on Teamspeak.
2. Save 5 minutes during the weapons grab by hustling.
3. Have only 4 toons grab all 8 weapons, probably blasters, tank, and scrapper.
4. Pre-assign generator responsibility for faster coordination.
5. DA Scrapper and Empath take down tentacles while rest of team does generators.
6. Pull and nuke subsequent rikti spawns rather than use single target attacks near generators.

None of these are particularly innovative ideas, and we've all used them before in this trial with regular teams. We simply underestimated how much more efficiently we needed to manage our time and have no excuse for not employing these. I'd really like to beat this thing at +4, but in the end we're going to be limited by the damage of the particle cannons. At our rate last night, we would have to do 7 generator take downs. I'm fairly confident we can improve that, but even at 4-5 its going to be very tight on time.

Session 35-36
Ran a few more Warburg missions to get one of us to L38 for the Sewer Trial. Cleared the 150 Rikti. Team is now 1 L36, 5 L37, and 2 L38. Started the trial despite knowing the tank was having frequent disconnect problems. Pulled the first Kraken upto the entrance tunnel. It was L42, and the fight took about 5 minutes and rewarded about 3600 xp to the L37's. I knew it had been reduced from the Kraken farming days, but considering that a Rikti boss gives about 2200 xp I think the reduction was excessive. The tank disconnected, and we waited some 10 minutes for him. He didn't show, so we continued down the shaft. One of the controllers disconnected for a while, so the remaining 6 of us struggled on. Both managed to reconnect long enough to grab weapons, but we didnt get out of the shaft until the timer was down to 50 minutes. Knowing that the remaining Kraken fights alone would take 20+ minutes, things weren't looking good. The tank kept dropping in and out, but we managed to get the generators down with about 12 minutes to go. We hadnt cleared enough of the tentacles but gave it a go anyway. That proved fatal, though its unlikely we would have had enough time to clear the tentacles and take down the head. We're confident that had we not suffered disconnects (these were personal ISP problems, not game groblems) or had we been a bit more efficient managing our time, then we would've been successful with this +4, +5 con Sewer Trial. We'll try again next week.

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Your idea sounds really cool, and I hope it all works out for you. Just thinking about where we would have been right now with Task Force Theta makes me wish it would have all worked out.....

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Sounds like the very same idea. Sorry to hear the scheduling didnt work out, it has been a challenge for us too. Luckily, it was such a blast starting out that its kept everyone interested, but I'm only hoping it'll be enough to keep the team together to L50. A couple other members in the SG tried to put this together on the Villain side and I think they got into the 20's before scheduling broke up the team. (I don't know that they given up yet, I only know that its been a problem.) All I can say is ... try again! It's worth the effort.

Session 33-34
Vacations, etc had us at partial team. Ran Doctors Ally mission, Creys Folly sweep, and some Warburg missions taking us to 37.5. All were +2 con, except the last 3 WB missions where we talked an SG member with a L39 scrapper into taking missions at +4 for us.

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One thing that I've always found to be an interesting challenge, is to only play with the enhancements that drop for you.

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That's an interesting idea, plus you could rack up prestige. Honestly, I've been wondering how we'd fare if we just stripped out enhancements altogether. (It bothers me to purposely create a sub-optimal build. I'd be much happier if I could increase the difficulty of the game, but...) I think all that we'd need to do is stack two or three more tactics. We're already damage capping the blasters and scrapper with Fulcrum Shift. As Tuxedogin mentioned, some of us dont even have stamina or hasten. My attacks cycle so fast, I can only get through three of them. I dunno ... just thinking out loud ...

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OC, how are you going to get your debt badges?

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Ironically, I just got the final one on my stormer last week.

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He did mention there was a team wipe and some fights were impossible without redcuing the difficulty. That sounds something like a challenge.

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Problem is ... that only happened twice in 37 levels. We'd be thrilled had it happened -more- often ... much more. Then we could step back and say, 'Ok, how do we tackle this thing.' But as the game is now, we can't push the slider far enough to generate these situations, and the purple patch puts a hard limit at +6.

For reference, the ones that gave us trouble were a +3/+4 Clamor during the 'AV Buff' and a +6/+7 Mary Macomber.

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You have a team of eight experienced players who are online regularly enough to make this work. I hate you.

</envy>

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Lol, well ... initially we had maybe 12 interested and during the course of this we had to make two roster changes due to scheduling. Although, the second change brought back the guy who left in the first one.

Maybe its worth mentioning that we effectively lured two players back from DDO and WoW when we proposed this idea. Let me emphasize, two players from beta with multiple L50's were willing to come back to CoH to do the same missions merely for the anticipated challenge of an eight player invince team. Semantics aside, Cryptic could effectively create content by removing the 'purple patch' and letting us push missions far beyond +2.

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We need at least one, but preferably two new mission difficulties to allow us to fight +4s and +5s and have decent risk vs. rewards. In addition to the lack of endgame for COH, there is a lack of interesting content in the 35+ range. Striga (Issue 3) and Croatoa (Issue 5), helped to fill out the 20-35 range nicely, but it is definitely time for a new zone or something for the 35+ characters. The 35-40 game has been a problem for casual/solo players for some time now. The Shadow Shard is there for the 40+ game, but it’s not enough.


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While not really new, or as interesting as Striga and Croatoa ... the L40+ Malta and Carnie arcs might be entertaining with an expanded mission slider upto +5. I suppose we could PL one of the toons up 2-3 levels and lock one of the L40-45 arcs in at about L42. At least then we'd get +5's to 7/8 of us, but it ruins the fun for one person.

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Do you want awesomeness or challenge? If you want the second, I'd say un min-max a bit

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Point taken, but we want -both- to be honest. Imho, the game itself should be able to present a challenge to the most awesomeness of teams. We did carefully min/max the first 11 levels. Having only Trainings and very few powers made each team members choice of powers important. After that point, it became less crucial. In fact, there's a number of things we could change to improve the combo ... for instance, we all took the fitness pool but with all the +end recovery buffs on this team, its really unnecessary. In other words, there's room for improvement, but why bother? We're rolling over +5's. We're half tempted (or at least I am) to rip out our enhancers and see how we do.

(edit to add: Forgot to mention that most of us did push Stamina back into the mid 20's to make room for more necessary powers earlier.)

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A human-form Kheld would've been interesting in place of one of the Blasters or something. With a "perma" 8-man team, they'd always have the inherent buffs.

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We strongly considered that team build. Figuring it would be one of the few opportunities to really exercise the human form, plus it would generate the Quantums, etc. Ultimately, we scrapped it because of the knockback. In retrospect, it might have been worth it just for the variety.

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This was very cool. Thanks for posting it. I this idea. Kind of like a league night.

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Start a team up with your SG, or post on the Freedom boards (or whatever server you're playing on now). Despite the problems I've cited, this is hands down the -most fun- I've had playing CoH. I just think they should loosen things up, and it'd be even better.

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sounds like fun what server you on I'd like to join. Is your Kin fender any good I like playing kinetics

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He's a little slow with FS sometimes, and a bit of a control freak.

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This is true for just about any team of eight -- eight defenders (excepting empaths), eight scrappers, eight tanks, eight controllers (those are fun teams), eight blasters ... well, okay, eight blasters would live right on the edge, but the point still remains.

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I've tried to talk some people into a team with nothing but pool powers and no enhancements, but that idea wasn't as 'well received'.

I guess what I'd like to see is a broadening of the range of enemies for which its worth the effort to engage. In conjunction, a significant increase in the number of difficulty settings for missions. A much larger breadth inorder to accommodate team size/makeup, player experience, and team experience.