Samuel_Tow

I firmly believe that they need to just hire someone to do that full time. Hell, hire ME! I'd do it for free. There are so many text errors, minor inconsistencies and just questionable characterisation that it would make for one person's full-time job for quite a while.

But herein lies the problem. With Director 11, I was annoyed, but the cogs in my head were turning. What can we do? Can we pin him down? Can we destroy enough mines? Can we maybe leave so he loses aggro and the mines self-destruct? It was an interesting encounter.

Everything else in the TF is "straightforward." It's just the same old slog through masses of tough enemies and kaleidoscope battles with nary an original thought in sight. It's just one long grind from beginning to end, made only LESS epic because enemies take longer to take down. Throwing stats in my face does not an interesting TF make. I'd still take a level 54 AV running around through tripmines than a Portal Corp Courtyard hosting the 2010 robot convention.

I keep hearing people talking about how much the tougher enemies pushed them and required new strategies and were somehow epic... WHAT new strategies? They have more hit points and higher level scale mods. They need more accuracy and higher buff and damage numbers. That's not pushing me in any way. That's pushing my BUILD in any way, but the build I brought to the TF is one I'd prepared earlier. The only way to "excel" at this thing is via Microsoft Excel.

I could roll with that. Call it the streakbreaker of the Shard drops system.

I'd rate that answer as more "simplistic," myself. If she can destroy my character but doesn't want to, how is my character able to destroy her even though she clearly doesn't want that in Harvey Maylor's arc?

Furthermore, it's just another example of developer godmodding. "Har har har! I'm NPC! I'm stronger than you'll ever be!" We get enough of that crap from Statesman and his overpoweredness. The Incarnate arcs seem to be going the right way, but poo that Vanessa has to do THAT. And again - it isn't necessary. As was said before - why not just say she's an illusion and you can't attack her anyway? What does it accomplish, other than to show us that NPCs are still stronger than us even at close to the end game?

And again, WHY VANESSA?!? Why not just keep the regular Ring Mistress of that mission? What does this cameo accomplish?

Can I complain if I don't like PvP, but people are telling me to get shivans or I'm a stupid doo-doo head? Not in those exact words, but it has happened.

You know, once upon a time every mission which had an archvillain in it spawned that as... Well, as an archvillain. As we all know, AVs are really not something that is designed to be soloed and even the people who can solo them anyway will tell you it's largely not worth the time and effort for anything but seeing if you could. None of us expect to walk up to an AV and solo that, not even Johnny Butane, I don't think.

And yet archvillains kept coming up in regular content, and all the damn time in City of Villains. Every time I met one, I had to drop what I'm doing, spend time and effort gathering a team of complete strangers and then ending up leading a team I really didn't want to lead. Allowing archvillains to scale down into elite bosses is, without a doubt, one of the single biggest reasons I'm still here. It meant I was highly unlikely to ever run into another mission I couldn't solo, given enough effort and preparation.

Granted, there were a few elite bosses I couldn't solo, like that Smashing-resistant Ballista on my really crappy Stone/Stone Brute, but that was the Brute's fault more than anything else. You know what the problem was with those? Every time they came up, none of my friends were online. One time I had to yank I think it was EvilGeko off the old Forum Cartel channel, who made a character specifically for the sake of helping me, and I'm still grateful for that. But most of the time when this happened, I had to just invite random people...

And I don't really want to team with random people on days when I don't feel like teaming at all. Here's the thing - some like to talk about social vs. anti-social, but I'm probably one of the most social guys out there. I team when I want to BE with other PEOPLE. I object, however, to teaming for the sole reason of boosting my team size to add more warm bodies to the list. This isn't socialising. This is riding on the bus with random strangers. This is asking a random stranger the time.

In short - if I'm going to team, I want it to be because I want to be with other people, not because the game is forcing me to speed-date random passers by.

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I have nothing against team content, if it's tagged as team content and takes a team to start. But if the game allows me to start the content solo, I should have at least some expectation that I can finish it how I started it.

Or what? Restart the mission? You may or may not have seen the Beta and early Live threads on the subject, but this stands to invalidate a LOT of people's moral high ground.

Pretty much where I stand. I know it doesn't make sense narratively, but then so fix the narrative and don't let the thing go through a full Beta cycle and how long of Live when this was being talked about since the very beginning.

Hey, I have no problem with higher challenges, even if I, personally, will not care to try them on a second time. Provided there's enough variety in very hard and not so hard content for the future, I won't complain.

One thing I do want to say, however, is that I enjoy challenge through interesting mechanics. Much as I hated Director 11, I must admit that the idea with the trip mines was very good. I'd have preferred it if we could shoot and kill the things, but even so, there were a few tactics that could take the guy down. That was clever. What WASN'T clever was the fight with a level 54 beefed-up bobcat who could one-shot every player who ever lived if she felt like it.

If we must have difficulty, then make it the Imperious TF style of difficulty. Make it the Hydra Trial style of difficulty. Less throwing large numbers in my face and more putting in interesting power mechanics. Like Protean and his Power Syphon, like Siege and his space laser, like the Hydra Trial and its forcefield generators. The entire Tin Mage TF held precisely ONE interesting encounter. Everything else was a deep purple mosh pit, and that is the most disappointing part of it.

I don't need to read anything past this post, because this is exactly how I feel.

I am sick and tired of pseudo-comedy arcs in the Architect. No, the Freakshow are not cute. No, Dr. Aeon's antics are not funny. No, I don't want to hear debates about "arrest vs. kill." There are few things I like less than overt comedy, and it seems like that's most of what's out there. What has ALWAYS been out there.

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On the other side of the discussion, getting arcs played isn't just impossible now. It's been impossible for me since day one. I have a couple sitting at four stars, who've had a combined total of less than 30 playthroughs since the Architect came out, and most of those are people I specifically asked to try them. I don't think they're bad, because I usually get good responses, but there are probably ten times as many arcs as there are actual players, and I don't blame anyone for not bothering to rifle through the pile.

The Honoree himself isn't difficult, and I didn't find Holtz (the text calls her "he" but she's using a female model) hard to kill, either. I even stepped in and wiped out all the portal, then proceeded to smack down what must have been around 80 Rikti that had spawned by that point.

What I was trying to say is that every time someone in Beta complained he couldn't fight the portals, he was told "You don't have to! And if you try to and can't, you're stupid!" This would all turn on its head if the mission were changed to where you DO have to fight the portals. Which it just might.

Well, one per two days in addition to those dropped seems interesting. However, I have sort of a problem with this: It means all people will play will be morality missions if they and they alone offer a better drop rate, and there really are only about 10 of those in the 40-50 range. Even if they're more, they're not that much more. Ideally, I'd like to see something somehow tied either to existing 45-50 story arcs, or otherwise tied to more general missions. Maybe a relatively high chance to drop a shard from mission complete? How about a chance based on kills inside the mission like you get Architect tickets?

Again, I don't know.

"Soon" is a relative term considering how fast they've been moving lately and, moreover, how long it will take to unlock the level shift boosts, which I assume will be "long." Moreover, a +3 punch isn't too much less cheesy than a +4 punch when it comes from a minion I've been fighting with no trouble since level 40.

You can pull him THROUGH the Lava, but he doesn't seem to want to stay there. At least he didn't for me.

Um... No, nothing of the sort. Only very few stories actually tell YOUR story. Off the top of my head, those can be narrowed down to the cape mission, the aura mission, Time After Time, Automatic Villainy and the Dean McArthur -> Leonard storyline. I'm probably forgetting some (like the alternate world that the alternate you destroyed) but most of the arcs available out there do not, in fact, have anything to do with out characters other than by the proxy of player. Division: Line, for instance, never really claims to do anything to me, require anything specific to me or change anything about me.

Furthermore, Task Forces cannot be argued to be "your story" simply because of how they're written. Not only do contacts only ever address the Task Force in general and never people in particular, but none of these Task Forces give you clues explaining what "you" did and what happened to "you." Yes, the Respec trials do have "you" exposed to radiation, but that's a side effect of the story.

The Incarnate arc is, in quite a few ways, a hero's journey. It's a personal arc revolving around the acquisition of personal power. I'm not against people doing this arc in teams - to each their own. But to each their own, I would rather like to not HAVE to bring other people if I didn't want to.

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Let me put it like this: Evil Geko has been going around the threads, telling people that they don't have to fight the spawning portals, and can instead pull Holtz and the Honoree out of the room. That as a solution to people who didn't like and couldn't fight huge swaths of endlessly-spawning Rikti. The whole idea was that this was a place where people are supposed to be "smart," not where they'd need a specific build.

Now imagine if tomorrow the developers decided that they didn't want that to be possible and made neither Holtz nor the Honoree able to leave that room so you HAD to fight them amid the portals? I'm sure at least a few people will slam their dicks on the table and proclaim "YES! FINALLY IT'S HARDER!!!" like always happens no matter the change, but it would indeed render quite a few arguments FOR the arc obsolete.

I have nothing against the Tin Mage TF or TFs in general, even if I don't really want to do them. I just ask that not every damn thing to do with Incarnates be turned into a Task Force.

All this proves to me is you didn't actually read the thread before posting your character assasination on me. Here, let me save you the leg work:

Trapdoor's difficulty is not and has never been surviving. He's not that tough an EB one on one. The problem is killing him while he's being healed by his bifurcations, which was easy to do when you could pull him away from them. Having to fight him WITH the things healing him, however, creates the problem of how to even kill him at all. He could stand still and not move and that would still be a problem.

How many? I could see this working, I guess. Aren't reds, like, 7.5% damage buff, tough?

This doesn't seem to work, as he summons them very fast, or at least was when I fought him.

So, "get a Shivan?" I thought we done with this.

If one is available, and again - how am I proving my strength to the Well if I simply have someone else do it for me? That's my biggest problem with the "get a team" suggestion, second only to "suppose there's no-one online that I WANT to team with?"

This being a TF, I had no idea what was going on since I didn't have time to read the briefings, what with all the kaleidoscope fights I had to try and figure out. Plus, the TF is still not up on ParagonWiki. So, who knows? I mean, I can accept the War Works being much stronger than they were in, say, a Hero's Epic, since they ARE billed as a major threat.

But Malta? What in the world could make them this much stronger? I can maybe see Director 11 if he was really special and all, but why were HIS MINIONS level 54? Why is an Operations Engineer this strong? With his PUNCHES?

It just really cheeses me off when the "epicness" of a task comes not from the epic storyline, but rather from the "epic" enemy starts.

I would be VERY hesitant to suggest separate, higher drop rates for solo play or small teams, because of one very sinister danger: The feeling that getting on a team is actually penalising your income. Consider Inventions and how they drop (or did at one point). Any time an Invention tags to drop, it drops for only one person on the whole team. That means that even when the RNG gives you a drop, you still only have 1/8 chance to get it on a team of eight, versus a literal guarantee that you will get that when solo.

Granted, teams do indeed kill more than most people can solo, but I'm not sure how the numbers go, and I highly doubt the increase in drop rates makes up for the decrease in distribution rate. And even if it does, you end up on level ground - alone or teamed, your drops are roughly the same, which flies in the face of the multiplayer aspect. I'm as devout a solo player as you're likely to get, and even I wouldn't want to create situations where people would want to AVOID teams.

In fact, when the Inventions system first came out, these were exactly the complaints we were seeing. "Why would I team when I can grind faster solo and other people just slow me down?" And they had a point. Certain builds could just let rip and kill stuff by the hundreds, whereas if they got on a team, they had to contend with waiting times, organisation, slower companions and so forth.

The obvious "solution" is to go the experience or Inventions drops route of giving a decent solo rate and applying penalties to larger teams so the faster kill rate is counter-balanced. I say "solution" in quotes because it's both far, far, FAR too late to do that and it's not really a good solution, anyway. It creates a system where, when on a team, you have to work harder for the same benefit, and indeed all people have to work harder because if a team-mate slacks off, that's cutting into YOUR profits. One fighter and seven door sitters is a horrible team for the fighter because he's fighting as hard as he ever did, but he's earning far less than if he were soloing a mission set for eight.

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I don't know if an actual, real solution even exists. I keep suggesting solo(able) arcs to try and capitalise on a fairly uncertain factor: A source of shards that's still better than just solo grinding, but which is still far and away inferior to a good 8-man team cleaning house. That way, solo players would be able to have something less demoralising to work with while team players would do what they do anyway, since their solution would still be better.

I kept thinking that certain story arcs should perhaps be allowed to drop at least one shard on completion. Maybe not The Pilgrim's introduction "arc," but at least something long and significant like World Wide Red, A Hero's Epic, To Save a Thousand World, to Save a Soul or so forth. I mean, these things are 20 missions plus.

Another thing that keeps popping up into my head is something along the lines of Crimson's "missions," which always consist of at least three separate instances even when they're not part of an arc. Dispensing these like paper missions, possibly given out by Ramiel himself, with a single shard at the end of, say, a four-instance chain seems somewhat reasonable, though I guess it would depend on how farmable this is.

The key problem with finding a solution, as it were, is to find one that doesn't replace TFs and large teams and does not make people any less interested to use them as the fast-track path to Incarnates. The large-team drop rate is already far higher than I'd personally want to see it, and the LAST thing I want is to provide an even faster alternative.

I agree that pulling him out of his room is not just a cheap, but a contradictory mechanic given how that's explained. The bifurcations are supposed to be Trapdoor resting WHILE he's fighting, so his bifurcations shouldn't need line of sight. They ARE him in a different location sitting down and resting.

That said, "outdamage his regen" is not a very much better mechanic, and if this has to be a complex gimmick fight, I'd have liked to see a complex gimmick solution to it, not a straight up stat tug of war.

Reichsman's dimensional grounding ray, basic as it may be, sounds like a good idea. Wouldn't it make sense for the Council to have developed a tool to contain the guy in case he became uncooperative.

All I'm saying is that "lrn2ply" is not a good excuse for lazy design.

That's part of my concern, though. The newer Boosts will probably get absurd Shard costs to account for the absurd drop rate on TFs.

The Catch 22 here is that the TF drop rate HAS to be absurd or the solo drop rate would be far too low, but the solo drop rate can never be decent because then the TF drop rate would go through the roof. As the drop rate is balanced right now, I feel BOTH solo and teaming solos.

I guess I could do something middle-of-the-road and run teams of four, but these I'd have to put together myself, whereas 8-man TFs and one-man solo are things that happen on their own. Maybe some day when we get an auto-team option...

That's a bad thing to make unsoloable, being that it's something that not only tells MY story, but is, in fact, startable solo. What I said in that unnecessary quote talked about team-only content in the form of TFs and Trials, things that require a minimum number of people to start to ensure that you can finish them. This is not one of those things.

Which of those options will help me outdamage the regeneration from his bifurcations?