Samuel_Tow

I disagree. Skulls and Hellions stop spawning past level 10 almost entirely, and the rest of the factions gain super powers at levels 11 and above. There's no reason that I can see to make the lowest of low-level enemies any more "interesting." These are the levels where people are first getting to grips with the controls, the powers system and the enemy AI. We shouldn't be throwing "interesting" enemies at them until they're ready to handle that.

It really comes down to degrees of motivation. I could come up with reasons for why an extra-dimensional elder god who chooses to manifest on the physical realm out of boredom cares so much about Praetoria, that much is true. Thing is... I don't want to, not when I have options much easier to write for. If I have to choose between having to write why said god would care about the political structure in a fascist state and not having to write said god interacting with someone else's political structure at all, I choose the latter.

People always talk disparagingly about the original Launch content in City of Heroes, but to me, it is always the most liberating. All it assumes is that you're a hero and want to do "hero stuff." Beyond this, the game never tries to convince you that you WANT to do this or explain WHY you want to do it. Your contacts are just that - contacts. They offer you tips, tell you of things you could be doing and then end on "Wanna?" Neither CoV's nor GR's "contacts" are actually contacts. They're quest givers. They tell a static story where your role as "the protagonist" is set in stone. Sure, you get some choices, but since those themselves are hard-coded in the story progression tree, you still end up having less freedom.

Since the beginning of time, I've been asking for proper contacts in the most basic sense of the word. Watch any older cop movie and you'll see the cops speaking with people on the streets who give them bits of information, "but you didn't hear it from me." Contacts are people who provide information, not people who provide TASKS. I'm aware that in-game metagame systems require NPCs to set our tasks for us, but they should still act as though we're doing something on our own initiative and they're just providing us with the necessary information.

I don't want contacts to drive my story and I don't want canon to define me. City of Heroes, for all its faults, manages to achieve this where both City of Villains and Going Rogue fail by reinterpreting what contacts are.

That's why my webcam is always turned sideways when I'm not using it. My PC may sporadically decide to turn it on for no reason (**** you, L4D2, for turning on my webcam even when you don't need it!), but so long as it's not motorised, it can't turn around to look at me. Nyah!

It is better, yes. What threw me off was you referring to using AVs in the game when the Signature Summon - which I assumed you were referring to - doesn't spawn them as AVs/Heroes, and because of its limited availability, they aren't going to help with anything other than tackling a particularly nasty boss or at most surviving an unpleasant ambush. Definitely not something you can rely on for farming, as I understand farming at the very least.

That's one thing to remember about the in-game consumables from the Store/Rewards system - they aren't game-changers and their availability is strictly limited. Veteran Reward consumables are time-gated and Paragon Store consumables are far too expensive to abuse even if you have money to burn.

Still, Freedom being live... What, the day after tomorrow? That's a good thing. I've played through everything that had stockpiled (that doesn't randomly crash) and I'll be making an evil Scrapper next.

It's really not that big of a deal, it just makes it a tad harder to reply since your entire post blends into one wall of text when I hit quote Or did, anyway, this one is well spaced. I could kind of spot where line breaks used to be by where one sentence is jammed into the previous one, as you otherwise leave two spaces between them. Not a big deal, just something I wanted to mention.

I don't believe "challenge" itself is something that should arise only in the later levels. The matter of difficulty balancing is a game-wide concern. What I believe, however, is that difficulty should match player prowess at the time when it is encountered. Low-level characters lack a sufficient array of tools to handle complex critters, and they lack sufficient stats to truly push the envelope, therefore creating content which requires either at that level range is essentially cheap - players have no meaningful way to counteract it.

I'm a firm believer of a game which should favour the player and make the player feel like the coolest, most awesome thing around. I just came out of a game session playing Space Marine and I'm considering replaying Darksiders immediately thereafter, so I have a pretty solid idea of just how awesome I want to be. Praetorian enemies really don't allow for that. For the most part, they're too tough to give any feeling of power to the player, something which Hellions and Skulls never had a problem with.

This is unlikely to happen ever at all. In any RPG, the reward is part of the fun of the game. When given the choice to pick an easier fight AND better rewards, players will almost always pick the easier fight. Accounting for this is not just a good idea. Developers who don't account for it are very quickly made fools of by their player base. I'm sure Paragon Studios are still trying to wash the egg from their faces after the Architect and the mess that turned out to be.

Expecting players to seek out "better" gaming which progresses them slower is counting on their good nature, and this is not something a development team can afford to do, any more so than a government can afford to disband law enforcement, counting on people's good nature that they wouldn't commit crimes and instead want to leave a peaceful, altruistic life. Any content which does not balance its reward to its speed of progression is badly designed content, especially if it's "not worth it." There will always be favourites, of course, but if content is kept within a certain narrow bracket, then people like me can pick what we like without feeling like dunces for doing so.

That's wholly separate from the issue that I just don't like fighting things in Praetoria. It's just not fun, AND it's less rewarding. I ain't doing that again.

Even so, Hellion and Skull lieutenants have all of one power and their minions have all of two. So do Trolls and Outcasts and all the other low-level enemies. Wolf Spiders at the beginning all have two powers - a pistol attack and a pistol whip attack. Longbow's early Guardians are the same. The Council's early guardians are the same, as well, and the 5th Column troops retain their two powers per minion until level 50.

And even if you didn't mean attacks, many attacks is still what most Praetorian critters have. One of their greatest strengths is that they have significantly higher DPS than low-level critters in either Paragon City or the Rogue Isles. They don't so much "hit hard" a they hit very often, and that honestly IS overpowered.

I haven't noticed Troll lieutenants being resistant to holds, but even then - they get this after level 10. A pre-10 Troll boss is the same as a post-10 Troll lieutenant. And, yes, Troll bosses are nasty, but they and their faction only start getting nasty after you've had a chance to at least get some DOs. The Destroyers have Big Dogs pretty much from the start. The earliest I know for a fact that you can get a mission with a Big Dog in it is level 8 from Jessica Flores, and I suspect it's possible to get one even earlier.

The Circle of Thorns have Char on Fire Thorn Casters who show up after level 30 and Longbow Equalizers only develop their stuns and debuffs after about level 25-30. I know they don't have their Sonic Grenades until at least level 30, possibly until 35, and I haven't really seen their Beanbag much earlier than 25 anyway. Family Consigliere don't develop Singularity until at least level 30 where they stop spawning in City of Heroes.

If we're speaking of status effects, the only ones you can really cite pre-20 are Lost Anathema, who are bosses and somewhat rare, and Tsoo Yellow Ink Men who spawn from 15 to 20 and SUUUCK! I hate the ******* and they were the bane of my existence when I played Blasters. One slip up and they'll keep you permaheld until you die, even if you have to die of old age. I honestly can't think of anything beyond that in the low levels.

I, on the other hand, HATE stealthing missions. Every time I join a TF, I am immediately reminded why I never join TFs - because I'm asked to stand at the door while someone walks to the boss and teleports me so that I can spend all of 30 seconds doing something in the mission. That's not what I signed up for. Not counting simu-click missions (the bane of my existence) and running boss missions (the second worst mission type in the game), my least favourite one is the last one from The Strange Case of Benjamin A. Deckar, where you have to click four glowies and expressely NOT kill the Foreman or the Security Chief or the mission fails. Not killing things is not what I signed up to do. It's like buying a dance game and having a level which forces you to sit down and listen to music and fails if you stand up and dance.

To my eyes, missions that have you leave within 2 minutes of entering them are a waste of my time. Let me give you a sideways example - when I'm given a hunt mission, people often offer to do the hunt against enemies 10-15 levels below me because it's faster. I always refuse and instead choose to do my hunt against even cons. Yes, it takes longer, but I'd rather spend longer having fun than spend a shorter amount of time not having fun. A mission which expressly instructs me to not fight things is, therefore, wasting my time with dead air. I came to this game because my old childhood action figures don't look all that good in action, whereas here they could kick *** AND look good doing it. The last thing I want to do is spend 15 minutes reading contact dialogue, then mission clues, then conversations, then more mission clues, then pop-up windows then a debriefing.

I like a good story as much as the next guy. Hell, I'm usually the one chastising people for not reading their mission briefings even when they've read them before. And even I'm going to tell you that I lose patience with Going Rogue bogging me down with non-combat activities. When I find myself saying things like "I don't care, just let me hit something!" then something is horribly wrong. I can easily deal with these things the first time around, but when I'm doing it for the fifth time, I vastly prefer a mission that's just briefing -> action -> debriefing. City of Heroes is not Mass Effect, and trying to be is just wasting my time.

I don't mean to come off as disrespectful to your preferences. If you like Going Rogue for doing this, then more power to you. I, however, don't, and I have no intention of going back there until at least a few of the things that bother me get fixed.

Oh, I'm aware. That's why Roy Cooling's arc is so horrible. It wastes my time with mountains of text to explain what is at once a very basic and yet completely incomprehensible story, and it constantly interrupts my gameplay with gimmicks. It may stand out from other MMOs, but so would the game disconnecting me every hour on the hour and I don't want that to happen. Because that's what these feel like - like the game preventing me from playing it until I fill in the proper forms, reading a story that's both not worth reading and which I've already read and written about at length.

At the end of the day, City of Heroes is not an interactive book. It is still a game that I want to play. Some balance must be struck between gameplay and narrative, and in Praetoria, the narrative outweighs the gameplay by quite a margin. I realised this after doing something like three filler mission back-to-back until I could get to one where I take the character I built against the game's enemies - the point of it all. Call me irreverent, but I care about what I made and wrote vastly more than about what the development team made and wrote, yet Praetoria constantly ropes me into its own story.

No, not surprised by much, but this really isn't subject of debate so much as of personal preference. I, personally, hate James Bond undercover conspiracy stories. I find them dull and uninteresting when they're at the centre of the plot. The recent Human Revolution managed to avoid that for the most part by shifting focus on an ethical debate instead of focusing on Illuminati and hidden conspiracies, but even then those still had to be crammed in, making me roll my eyes every time the subject came up. I simply prefer plots that handle their story more directly and up front, so I can instead focus on the actors involved. And in Praetoria, everyone is a pawn to its momentous twisted plot.

To each their own here. For my part, NONE of my characters make sense to start in Praetoria, because to start there, they have to CARE about Praetoria, and they don't. They don't because I don't. I don't care about the in-game canon enough to write it in my own bios, because I like what I come up with far better. In Paragon City or the Rogue Isles, my past never comes up. I could be in it for the money, in it for the fame, in it for the evulz, in it to destroy all humans, in it to be a stooge for Arachnos or in it for reasons my characters can't comprehend and the game still works. If you're in Praetoria without actually caring enough to make decisions about Praetoria's future, though, you may as well not even be there in the first place.

I don't think bosses themselves are the issue, but rather that all enemy groups have almost the same spawning patterns - either many minions, or fewer minions and more bosses.

Take, for instance, the Knives of Artemis. Their description says that there are fewer than 100 of them world-wide, yet we can sometimes take out more than 100 in a single mission if the map is large enough. And by "we" I mean "I," as in solo. An 8-man team can probably take out 100 within a few regular rooms. If these girls are supposed to be highly-trained deadly assassins, then why not make them an entire faction of nothing but bosses? I get why this was done back at Launch when Jack Emmert was stomping his foot and insisting that bosses shouldn't be soloable, but these days they are anyway.

Suppose the Knives only ever spawned single bosses? No minions, no lieutenants. Just bosses, all of them named. Or how about the Warriors? These guys shouldn't be all that popular of a cult, and they keep naming themselves after Iliad heroes. Shouldn't they be all bosses, just a bunch of few but really strong men and women?

Contrariwise, take something like the Ghouls. Wouldn't it make sense for these guys to be almost entirely just minions? They're a zombie apocalypse, more or less (yes, I know the story), but still, wouldn't it make sense to fight hordes of smaller ones most of the time?

I know it's possible to make up all ranks of enemies for all factions, but should all factions have similar numbers of all ranks in regular spawns?

I mean no disrespect when I say this, but yeah, that's been my impression of PK for... What, the last couple of years? He returns for a short while, doesn't post all that much on the forums and then leaves over something like that. There was a time when he was an active member of the forum-posting population, but these days... I don't know, maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but I've seen more of Shubbie than I have of PK.

Let me put it this way - if I refused to make a fake Facebook account just to get the Faceplam emote, I'm not going to go out of my way to make fake characters on a server I have no intention of playing on. I don't react well to coercion and incentive. I play this game how I want, when I want, and this is not going to change any time soon.

Luckily, all of this is rhetoric. The developers know better than to turn Exalted into Club Snob by making it "better" than the rest of the game. This is a publicity stunt, a stress test and a way to get at least some population on the server right out the gate so people don't start characters on it and find it's just them and five other people. That much is understandable, and I have no problem with it. After so many years of US-only out-of-game contests, what's a few more I won't participate in?

At the end of the day, I trust the development team will still value and respect their subscribers regardless of where they happen to prefer to play.

You can do multi-quotes by tagging posts you want to quote with the milti-quote button at the bottom of the most, next to the Quote and Quick Reply buttons. Tagged posts will be dumped as consecutive posts encased in quote tags in the order in which you tagged them, and this even persists between pages, surprisingly enough. When it comes to splitting a post down in separate pieces, though, the best way I've found is to do it manually - copy the full opening quote tag of the post you're quoting, then paste it at the start of every subsequent quote block.

Also - and please don't take this as a cheap shot - I would very much appreciate you leaving a couple of empty lines at the head and foot of your quotes. Your text came out looking good in your post, but when I hit Quote, it came out in one giant chunk. I suspect you may be using a forum skin mod or some such, but even so - when someone quotes you, quote boxes disappear and the forum software inserts absolutely nothing in there.

There's nothing functionally wrong with difficult content. However, as I mentioned before, Praetoria is not a choice. Any new player was forced to start there before he could do anything else. Freedom seems to have fixed this (I can't say, since I'm not a new player), but I will bet my metal-tipped tail that this will just give a whole bunch of people the excuse to never start there again while giving no real incentive to start there which didn't exist before.

There aren't so much "methods" to make low-level content as there is an expected level of performance from low-level critters. A certain amount of DPS, a certain amount of critter resilience, a certain amount of "cheap tricks," that sort of thing. It doesn't really matter how this is achieved, but so long as it IS achieved and players experience the same relative level of difficulty, the job is done. Praetoria not only violates a lot of these rules by making enemies stronger, tougher and cheaper, but Praetorian mission design also overrules mission difficulty settings by artificially forcing the player to oppose greater numbers of enemies than mission difficulty itself entails.

This is high level content, pure and simple. The high levels are the time when player characters are strong enough to defeat their base difficulty handily, and when alternate means of challenging the player come into the picture. Debuffs to counter the buffs players use to make themselves strong, control effects to make certain enemies more dangerous, higher stats to counteract player stats, greater enemy numbers to tax a strong build an so forth. All of these are tools to counteract the player advantage, which doesn't really exist in the pre-20 game.

Furthermore, AT mods scale with level until level 20. At level 1, almost all ATs have almost the same mods for almost everything. Designing level 1 to level 5 content, therefore, isn't as much a magical science as most characters are basically the same. And even up to level 20, most characters don't have most of their powers, so they can't be expected to be very strong. The need for "challenge" comes towards the end of the game where specialists excel at what they specialise at, and then are able to excel at a few other fields, as well.

Designing harder low-level content as an answer to an easy game is akin to instituting a flat tax on the community because fifteen people are incredibly powerful. It is, as a point of fact, akin to the I4 boss buff. The result was that the people who could solo bosses could still solo bosses, just with a bit more difficulty and the people who couldn't solo bosses before were now completely and utterly ******. The low levels need to be designed as low levels where players are just now learning the ropes and getting to grips with the game.

The actual thought was more along the lines of "We're making 40-50 content to set up our end game... What do you mean we're making low-level content?!?" These are high-level enemies with their levels dropped. These are Malta, these are Rikti, these are Crey. And the high-level Crey, too, where every minion has 50% smashing and lethal resistance.

Here, you are simple wrong. Aside from the Vahzilok, what low-level minions and, hell, what low-level lieutenants have "three to five attacks?" Blood Brother Sluggers have a Baseball Bat power an a Revolver power, and they only ever use one of those in a cycle depending on whether they're in their ranged or their melee state. It's the same with Skulls, the same with low-level Trolls and Outcasts - they have ONE attack, and on a fairly long timer. Lieutenants, by contrast, have one attack period, either a shotgun or an uzi. Even in the 10-20 range, Trolls have a single punch plus a single ranged attack, that they again do not use together, and Troll lieutenants have I think two punches and a hurled rock. The Nemesis Army soldiers don't have three to five attacks. The Rikti minions don't have three to five attacks. Hell, Malta commandos don't get up to five attacks - they have Brawl, Burst, Taser and Web Grenade.

That's one key problem with Praetorian NPCs - they have a zillion powers, and all of them nasty. Fight a bunch of Hellions or Skulls and note what they spend the majority of their time - nothing. They stand in place, waiting for their attacks to recharge. Now watch what a level 2 PPD minion will spend his time doing - he'll cycle between two or three different types of punches CONSTANTLY.

What you describe in the above quote are some of the worst, most dangerous high-level enemies, like Malta Gunslingers or Vanguard Lieutenants or, hell, Carnie Ring Mistresses. These have no business showing up in levels 1 to 5, or indeed showing up before level 30, if not 40. The Vahzilok, the low-level's single strongest enemies, are so strong specifically because their minions have THREE attacks. None of these attacks alone are all that strong, but when you get five zombies to spit at you, puke at you and backhand you in quick succession, your health takes a dive. The Vahzilok are notorious in the low-level hero game for being exceptionally difficult, and the only reason they're not notorious villain-side is because they show up in all of three missions post level 10.

The game has a sum total of ONE "long" control power - the Stun Grenade that's shared between Malta TacOps and Knives of Artemis bosses, I forget they're called. Possibly the Chief Mesmerist sleep could count, but this is "long" in the sense that Mesmerists will chain-hold you, not that their controls are long on their own.

And, yes, this very much DOES make them perfectly comparable to high-level enemies. They are using the high-level critter design template. Praetorian critters are not some kind of breakthrough in enemy design or novel concept of the future as you seem to describe it. They're run-of-the-mill 40-50 critters with their levels dropped.

The latter every single time. I love large maps, I love defeat all missions since that's what I do in my instances every time, and I love simple objective designs. This is a game that's intended to be replayed, and many times over. More often than not, Praetoria's awkward, complex, fiddly missions are more annoying than they're worth. They kill me in cheap ways that I can't prevent and they waste most of my time with clicking on objectives, reading clues and leading conversations, none of which progress my character and none of which feature combat, which is what I'm here to do.

Ambushes are not an exception. They're just as annoying, since they feature less combat and more me exiting the map, resting on the side of the street and re-entering the map because I can't handle 10 waves of 5 enemies in a continuous fight at level 7.

The game worked just fine back in 2004 when entering an instance to kill everything you could target was all we could do, and these missions work just as much now. In fact, I'm having to go out of my way to search for them now, because apparently simple missions are no longer complex enough to qualify for being made. Why have a simple mission when you can have a gimmick mission? Why have a mission that plays to your strengths when you can have it fail if someone runs away, someone dies or a 5-minute timer counts down, if an objective breaks or doesn't break or just make it unwinnable because the sequence of events is so complex it never worked properly?

I would have pointed this out if I had known it had happened. Considering I have no reason to start in Praetoria, I didn't know. There are only so many times I can get repeatedly killed by an ambush spam that seems to number higher than I can count before I give up and go play the side of the game which doesn't kill me all the time and where I can feel like a legitimate meta-human from the word go.

Also, if I had to make a guess, I'd expect that endurance drain + chain stun attack on Menders to have taken a hit, because that alone made the whole faction ten times worse than it had to be, making my low-level Scrappers feel like Blasters.

The writing itself in Praetoria is very good, I never claimed otherwise. However, it is good DESPITE all the endless references, not because of them. If Praetoria were allowed to be a self-contained story that didn't come with seven years of Primal Earth baggage, it would be significantly better, in my opinion.

And, really, if there's anything bad about the Going Rogue storyline, it's the iCrap stories, not the 1-20 Praetorian Earth ones. The world of Praetoria is a rich, nuanced place with a lot of hidden backstory, so it's a right shame that it's reduced to something even MORE of a parody with Incarnate content than what it was back in 2004 when it was first added. Praetoria suffers from a general disregard of story continuity that's epidemic to the entire game, not just endemic to that one alternate dimension.

At the end of the day, though, I'm not interested in conspiracy theories, invisible wars and politics. A lot of my characters are far too self-contained, or - in the case of a few children - far too basic for them to be politically active. And there's no way to play a character in Praetoria without it being politically active and taking sides. I can play a hero who's just out to do the right thing and I can play a villain who's only out for himself, but I can't do that in Praetoria because it's always Loyalists or Resistance. I didn't want to kowtow to Arachnos in I8 and I don't want to kowtow to the Resistance or the Loyalists in 18 and beyond. The Praetorian "morality" system isn't about morality at all, it's about faction politics and loyalty. I suppose with a system built around Resistance vs. Loyalists, they HAD to shoehorn them both regardless of the context of the decision, and indeed regardless of whether both sides were even involved in the story up to that point.

I like Praetoria's story as a story, and would probably watch a movie about it. However, it ties my hands behind my back when it comes to writing for my characters, and this I simply don't like. The thing is too hard to play through and too restrictive to write form. I'm glad I won't have to, in a couple of days.

Or that, yes. Bosses (who don't summon hordes of minions) really aren't all that susceptible to AoE. This was Assault Rifle's biggest failing - once you had to face a robotic or armoured boss, you were SOL, because all of your AoEs just drained your end faster.

Players who wanted a greater challenge very much had an option - the difficulty slider. What it "admits" is irrelevant. If you want to fight harder enemies, up enemy level. If you want to fight more enemies, up enemy numbers. You had that option. Did you use it?

Furthermore, Praetoria is not an "option" for new players. Every person who bought Going Rogue as their first foray into City of Heroes has no option but to make a Praetorian before making anything else. Thrusting a brand new character still largely unfamiliar with the UI, terminology and basic setup, and quite possibly not familiar with MMOs in general like I was when I first got City of Heroes is just asking for disaster. Hell, seven year vets were having serious problems, so you have no leg to stand on here.

Yes. There are standards for low-level enemies. They don't have strong status effects before the average melee character can have status protection, they don't have debuffs before the average character can acquire buffs or at least decent enhancements, they don't have strong status protection before the average status-dependent character can have the tools to deal with this. They don't have high-level critter DPS on a low-level enemy when low-level characters have no meaningful way to deal with this.

Exceptions exist, obviously - the Vahzilok have huge DPS thanks to the zombies having access to three attacks, as opposed to the one most minions have at the time, and the Morts and Reapers have debuffs on them. This is because the Vahzliok were originally intended to be an exceptionally difficult enemy faction that you were supposed to pull one by one, which is why zombie AI makes them so dumb and easy to pull. This also comes with a significant increase in rewards given upon defeat, something no Praetorian critters have.

Your claims are no excuse for bad design, because it's better to reuse old assets that worked than to use new assets which effectively break the game for new players.

A great way to make an expansion unappealing is to have it kill players repeatedly without giving them a chance to fight back.

"Genuinely novel challenges" my ***. They stuck stats, status effects and debuffs on low-level characters and put in a lot of ambushes. Neither of those were novel. I've fought Malta before, I've fought Cimerorans before, I've fought Arachnos before. Nothing about the Praetorians is new, it's just the old stuff dumped into low-level enemies. All it does is skew the difficulty curve all over the place, and make the low-level game unnecessarily difficult.

If you're looking for challenge in the low-level game, you're barking up the wrong tree. The existing low-level game is already plenty challenging. The weaker critters are offset by our weaker characters and by the fact that player power doesn't actually outstrip game balance until SOs and later on. The 1-20 game is and has always been soundly balanced because players simply never had the opportunity to break it.

Which matters how, exactly? Praetorian raid content is not the sole end game in City of Heroes. Other high-level factions exist who are similar to the low-level Praetorian enemies, factions like Malta, the Soldiers of Rularuu, the Rikti, the Carnival of Shadows, 45-50 Crey and so forth. And besides - I've fought the IDF, the War Works, the Clockwork and the Seers as regular critters in Maria Jenkins' and Tina McIntyre's arcs. They're not as hard as you make them out to be. Yes, they have debuffs. Yes, they have nasty attacks. Yes, they resist a lot of things. But if I'm playing a 40+ character, I can handle this. Malta are still much worse thanks to their Sappers and the absurd damage on their Gunslingers and the Soldiers of Rularuu are still in a league of their own. In this game, I've had my Scrappers one-shotted from full health a total of three times, once by a Knives boss on a critical hit with Head Splitter and twice by the Soldiers of Rularuu - an Overseer chomped me for 1000+ hit points and a Noble Brute hit me for 1200+, though Elude both times.

Nevertheless, the Praetorian critters are well comparable to high-level critters excluding iCrap cheapness. They're simply much lower level, which makes them worse, not easier, because low-level characters don't have the tools needed to fight that.

No, but the plot without the references isn't very interesting. No-one cares about Paolo Marino, because you see him all of one time. No-one cares that Pia Marino is dead, because she's nothing more than an offhand comment. Simon Omega's existence is pointless, because there's no build up to it and no payoff afterwards. At least half of Praetoria's story is a case of "Would you like to know more?" Where the story shines is when it resists using and abusing alternate versions of Primal Earth people and focuses on Praetorian originals like Reese and his gang, Mr. G, Tunnel Rat, Robert and Jessica Flores and even IVi.

The story of Praetoria isn't bad in the slightest, that's the one point where the expansion really, really excels. However, because the City of Heroes development team have a compulsion towards adding reference and homages, the story ends up being less than what it could have been had we actually been given reason to care about these cameos, rather than relying on Primal Earth knowledge as a reason to care.

Obviously? I've never seen this on either Victory or Pinnacle. OK, I may have seen this a couple of times, but I've seen it fewer times than the years I've been with the game. I've been asked "bridge?" more often than that.

I don't know... If we assume that the point of AoE is to throw a Fireball and a Fire Breath and have THAT be your AoE hell, then reducing their effectiveness would indeed curtain the feeling of overwhelming power. On the flip side, if all or most of our attacks did some form of multi-target damage, then the overall feeling would be kept.

When I say these things, I'm thinking of games like Devil May Cry and God of War or even Darksiders where pretty much everything you do clips a while bunch of enemies in the general direction in which you're aiming. No one single attack is the be-all end-all of are effects, but the feeling of cutting through veritable hordes of enemies remains when you can effectively take them all on and still win without having kill them one at a time.

The problem is - and I agree - that a disparity exists between those who can only hit a single target and those who can hit multiple, specifically because there's a very low threshold - two or three targets - where AoEs become functionally better than single-target attacks. I still say, however, that it's possible to get rid of this disparity without getting rid of AoE. Get rid of single-target, instead

Pretty much. I'm not interested in Facebook, so I can live without a Facepalm emote. Look at it this way - I'd rather be unable to facepalm if I had no reason to do so.

... What?

I've gone through Praetoria about 10 times now. It didn't make the vastly superior critters attacking players in vastly larger numbers any easier to deal with. It just made me not want to bother since I knew exactly what I was in for. No amount of knowing your enemy can stop 10 waves of ambushes from seeing through Stalker stealth, no amount of knowing your enemy can keep Clockwork from stunning you and resurrecting their allies, no amount of knowing your enemies can make those 30 or so Ghoul ambushes any fewer or any less deadly.

Here's the thing - at level 20, I get sent to Primal Earth, and regardless of what I fight, the difficulty of the game drops sharply. Suddenly, I go from feeling like a loser and a winp to feeling like a champ, because everything dies much easier and I don't get killed nearly as much.

If I were looking for a "challenge," I am well capable of increasing my own difficulty settings. Not only am I NOT looking for a challenge, but this challenge doesn't actually grant proportionate rewards. If base difficulty in Praetoria is intended to be so much harder than base difficulty everywhere else, then enemies and missions should grant much more experience the way Rikti Comm Officers do. They don't.

As long as I have the choice between a side that kills me constantly and doesn't compensate me for it and one which DOESN'T kill me constantly, I'll pick the latter. Praetoria is not and should never have been a beginner's experience. Years ago when the Hollows was first introduced, low-level Hellions were given elemental attacks and even Imps/Jack Frost. At the time, the development team had the good sense to realise a level 5 character wasn't up to the challenge of fighting a full-fledged boss with imps, so they gave them "Hellion powers," instead - clubs, axes, knives, guns. It wasn't until level 10 that Hellions got their elemental powers back. Praetoria is this, only no-one ever realised this IS NOT low-level content, regardless of what the level number on the NPCs says.

That's possible, but they still look really cool. For instance, the Soldiers of Rularuu are always a pain in the *** to fight, but even seven years down the line, I still LOVE their designs Much as I may poo-poo Praetoria, the one thing it never failed at is being pretty, and the new zone and the new factions are very pretty.

Technically true, but we (I) didn't know that until the message came down the grapevine that the set was being pulled. I'm not angry about it, it's just... Disappointing that it's exactly the ONE set I really wanted that got pulled. Let's hope it's not delayed by too much.

If it's a Facebook exclusive, they could give it away a million times and some of us still won't get it, I'm afraid. At least it's not an Incarnate Astral purchase.