Samuel_Tow

Again, that's every REWARD, not every TASK. Certain tasks are simply designed in such a way that they really couldn't be soloable even if you let AVs scale down. The Hydra Trial comes to mind - you can't break the generators fast enough to give you enough shield-down time on the head if you're working alone. I don't believe Romulus would be doable even as an EB, simply because you'd be fighting four EBs at once, and pretty cheap EBs, to boot.

Not all tasks can be soloable even if the developer chose to apply solo rules to them. That's just how it goes. However, all rewards need to be soloable in SOME way that can be described as more efficient than hunting down that one Infected that spawned in the train station in Recluse's Victory once in a blue moon. That's all I'm sayin' and, so far, that's what they've been doing.

*edit*
I just hope we get Incarnate story arcs in addition to the TFs. I'd hate to think that Incarnates aren't strong enough to do anything meaningful on their own.

Some tasks, yes. Some REWARDS, no. "MMO" as a term gets thrown around willy-nilly, but all that means is a large, persistent world that we all share. The term does not inherently assume that we have to interact with each other, and the decision to FORCE interaction is development prerogative. The decision to EXCLUDE solo play is just the same.

I have no problem with TFs and SFs as a general concept, unless they wholly and exclusively gate certain rewards. Right now, I can get everything I could possibly want from the Market, even if it's normally restricted to team-only content. Can't run Hamidon raids? That's OK, I can still buy Hamidon enhancements off the Market. Shards are this mechanic for the Incarnate system, and you'd THINK that solo-friendly, until you remember that it takes a fairly serious arc to unlock this.

The Mender Ramiel arc is not a side TF that you can do or skip and which only provides a better, faster route to most rewards. It is the quintessential lock behind which THE ENTIRE INCARNATE SYSTEM resides. This arc will be attempted by absolutely everybody, of that you can be certain, and not everyone will be able to walk right over it. This will reflect in the numbers and the datamining, just as it always has.

The TFs themselves are unlikely to be made any easier. Those are, after all, the challenges for which the Incarnate system is designed, so difficulty is their point. The Ramiel Arc is NOT one of those TFs.

I'd almost forgotten about Longbow bases. I used to hate those before I swapped video cards. These seem to have a few rooms with hideously unreasonable framerate drops, mostly the narrow tall room with a double staircase.

I'm not quite in the same boat, but I'm still in a similar position. I had a Brute who was at I think 35 or 36 at the time, and I've been playing her ever since. She's 45 now and I intend to make her my first Incarnate. Makes sense to try it with a character I've had recent experience with, right?

From how the system looks and feels so far, I'll be playing my alts an may, in fact, reach the end, as well. I'll only know once we see the rare and very rare slot requirements. If those are ballcrushingly impossible to do solo, then yes, I'll be playing my alts and never log a 50 in again. If they're attainable, I'll split my time as I always have.

The Curse of Weariness is the game's single biggest dick move, in my opinion, easily topping things like Sappers, the Mask of Vitiation, the Incarnate TF debuffs, setting RSF and STF enemies at 54, the Vahzilok Disease and even including AVs showing up in solo missions before you were allowed to scale them down to EBs. This is, simply put, a power which has no right to exist.

The Curse of Weariness is not intended to cripple you in the fight with that one Sorcerer who slaps it on you. You can just chug inspirations and muscle through that. The curse is intended to FORCE downtime on you, and for quite a while, too. It's intended to make you suck for five minutes unless you go out of your way and BUY a power needed to break it. That's pretty much the texbook definition of a dick move.

The curse of Weariness needs to be brought down to the duration of the Mask of Vitiation, or at 60 seconds or thereabout, and the Cursebreaker turned into multi-use protection from it that lasts, say, an hour each use.

Everything storywise, sure, I can buy that. Everything mechanics wise... Why not? Why must certain rewards have a "You must team with other people" component appended to them when some of us are perfectly fine earning team-centric rewards solo at a very reduced rate? Why do you require that I don't have something in particular?

Please, developers, hear my cries and make the new TFs and Mender Ramiel's Arcs much easier. I understand you don't want to alienate your hardcore players, but for once please do not relegate me to getting help for the good stuff. Make just a few of the really cool things available to me without having to meta-game, power-build and get a team. I realise you can already get Incarnate Shards while solo, and I applaud you for that, but please make the unlock more solo-friendly, too.

Yeah, that was easier to compose than I thought.

You know... This entire thread could have ended right there, 'cause ain't nothing gonna' top that, including lumpy butts.

"When you get right down to it, isn't the point of real life to amass a fortune without getting killed?|
-The Spoony One

Power creep is a genuine concern, but I find it isn't relevant here. To me, City of Heroes has always been a game of scale, not a game of size. While functional difficulty may not vary by much and everything may scale up to you, it is the scope of the system that gives you the illusion of size, while your character remains to scale with the actual game mechanics. At level 1, you're fighting thugs with baseball bats and stolen pistols. At level 50, you're fighting all-powerful space aliens, giant robots, supermutants and GODS. The actual fights may not have become too much harder mechanically - they are still to scale - but the story has become much, much larger.

I, personally, don't need Incarnate content to be any harder, numerically, than regular content. More complex, more intricate and more intelligent, yes. More out of scale... Not necessarily. What I need Incarnate content to make clear is the comparison between itself and old content. I was, for instance, fighting the Rikti way back when. Now that I'm an incarnate, they're too weak to threaten me. NOW I'm fighting, say, the Batallion, or the Rikti super elite super soldiers from the homeworld who are vastly more powerful than the Chiefs we see on Earth. Their science would not have stood still for eight years, after all.

I have a very serious problem with what I like to describe as anti-power-creep, or the "Diablo 2 effect." It's a game system designed such that enemy strength increases faster than your own powers do, so as you level up and progress through the game, you actually get WEAKER in comparison to your environment. This is a very real danger with overbalancing Incarnate content, in that the game could suddenly become so hard that once might heroes would, even with the proper Incarnate boosts, find themselves weak and helpless, only ever able to do anything by ganging up.

Personally, I want whatever new challenges we get to keep within the scale of the power we receive from our boosts. I have no problem with Incarnate content MURDERING non-Incarnate heroes and villains, but when I DO become an Incarnate, I hope I'm not still too underpowered to do anything by myself.

Does it? Because it seems to me that if they'd focused on JUST opening up old animations for additional powers instead of dicking around with making exact copies of them and only adding those would have, in fact, taken less time and less work.

OK, analyse my setup: I have between 8 and 10 50s. The reason I can't remember how many I have is because I haven't played most of them in a year. Some I haven't logged into in over four years. Remind me again what my character's limits are? Because I seem to have forgotten. I rarely even remember what my binds do.

"The average player with a 50" made alts when that 50 reached 50. When those alts reached 50, that average player made more alts still. Now more 50 content comes out, so OF COURSE "the average player with a 50" will log in with that 50 and try the content. That's what it's there for, after all.

Of course, I'm not saying that Incarnate content should be made so easy that I could do it if I woke up from a five-year comma five minutes ago and were plopped down in front of a computer. Obviously. But what I AM saying is that assuming the average is people who have been playing their level 50 characters consistently and seriously ever since they got to 50, even though there was no end game to speak of, is simply not founded. In fact, the reason people are flabbergasted that they're seeing so many 50s all of a sudden is just that: Players who were playing other characters took their favourite 50s out of the mothballs and converged on the new content.

Ah, and here's the perfect quote to attach this Penny Arcade strip to.

*edit*
And on the topic of trying to be Eric Clapton: I don't get paid nearly enough to play this game that I'd want to abandon the fun and become a professional. This is neither a job nor a sport and should not be treated as either.

Speaking of which, I feel Psi Blast was a huge missed opportunity. I'd have LOVED to see animations for that powerset that just had your character do NOTHING but glow at the head. You know what I mean, right? You stand in place, focus your mind and people around you drop dead. No need for arm flailing or pointing or yelling. You kill people WITH YOUR MIND. I can't imagine that would take more development time than the absurd new animation that most of Psi Blast got. HOLY HELL is that one bad!

JUST new animations added to the pool is what's limiting. There are a total of something like five or six new animations, to be spread over something like 30 or 40 powers. It's limiting, because the result is a lot less interesting than what it could have been, and a lot less expansive, to boot.

Just as a random instance: Why don't any nukes have new animations? Oh, but what could those be? Why not a Nova Ground Punch? Why not an Inferno Fire Sword Circle?

Just as another random instance: Why doesn't Power Blast have a new animation? Why doesn't Power Push? Why doesn't Explosive Blast? Maybe none of the new animations fit, maybe it was to avoid being too repetitive, but still, why not reuse some OLD animations? Hell, the Teleport animation with an emanation point at the chest would have been perfectly acceptable.

Yes, some of those would have to be tweaked, slowed down, sped up and on and on and on. Yes, I know. So do it. Delay them another Issue if you must, but do it. Don't advertise changes to every Blast set only to release a half-finished product that's just going to make people go "meh."

I'm not saying new animations is more limiting than no new animations. I'm saying JUST new animations is more limiting than new animations AND old animations. They didn't need to exclude old animations from the rotation. And, on the other hand, the new animations didn't need to be almost exactly the same as the old one. Trust me, I won't pause the game, put a compass on my elbow and decree that this animation has five degrees more forearm deflection than this one which otherwise looks exactly the same. We don't need twelve eye blast animations. One will do, because there are other entire THEMES that could use work.

You seem to have forgotten what I actually said:

So, no, this does not contradict my post in the slightest. If anything, it vindicates me, because Stamina has indeed made endurance management much less a part of the game, and I couldn't be happier about it. Now, finally, my performance will be limited by my ability to survive, not my ability to not suck wind. Running out of breath before I drop dead has always been the single most irritating aspect of the game, and I'm glad this is no longer as meaningful.

As far as your anecdote goes, it is irrelevant, because you keep changing the subject. I said MY character had endurance problems as I played her, and that Stamina would fix that. My character did indeed have serious problems, and Stamina did indeed fix her. Your character doesn't matter in the slightest because that's your character played as you play it. You lambasted me for daring suggest that Stamina would fix all my problems - which id did - and for having the temerity to complain about endurance problems - which I had but no longer do - because they could be solved in other ways.

You were, in fact, wrong, if only because what I described turned out to be completely correct. This character who was TERRIBLE for endurance, who forced me to rest between every two fights, who forced me to run away from combat because I had no endurance or blues left, who kept dying because her toggles dropped, is now JUST FINE, thanks to Stamina and perhaps in smaller part to Health. Nothing else in her build changed. You told me this wouldn't happen and it happened.

And I know why it happened, which you could have pieced together, actually. I'm playing a Brute, a character who has terrible endurance efficiency on base damage, but who gets more efficient with sustained and maintained Fury. To maintain Fury, I would need to fight faster and fight more frequently. I didn't have the endurance required to do that, which meant my Fury bottomed out between every two fights, even with the I18 changes. Now that I have more endurance - enough to go from one fight to the next without too much of a gap - that in itself gives me more endurance still because my Fury remains consistently high. Not only that, being able to kill things faster also ensures that my health stays high, as well.

I really don't know what you're trying to prove here and, to be perfectly honest, I no longer care. And that's not because I'm a jerk, but because I got what I wanted. That's all I cared about before the changes - that this one character not suck. I got that. Whether your character or anybody else's benefited as much is academic to me. Yes, no, maybe... I don't know. I got the one character who needed extra endurance the most to have more endurance. I know all the rest of my characters will be even better still. There's really no point in asking for anything beyond that.

See, what gets my nether goat isn't really that people play a different way than I do. I mean, I wouldn't make characters if I didn't intend to take them all the way, but I've nothing against people who do. It's when I'm told I'm wrong and I should expect the game to kick me in the nuts and thank it for it because I'm playing the "wrong" way that the veins in my forehead tend to pop up.

Ideally, I'd like for all of us to play how we like without necessarily having to talk down other people because their playstyle is "unsupported," especially when it's not actually out of the supported norm.

Hell: PATROL EXPERIENCE!!!

People have always been willing to put in the work. We didn't get multiple 50s by sitting on our hands, after all, and no, we didn't get them from monkies, wolves, freaks or what have you. I know I got mine there the hard way.

However - and I will say this again - to claim that Incarnate levels "should not be diluted" to account for people maybe possibly wanting to play another character again in their lives is unreasonable. It runs contrary to the whole rest of the game. It makes no sense for the game to encourage the making of alts if the game won't actually allow you to use those alts all the way to the end.

You assert that the game should be built around focused-character players, when the fact of the matter is it isn't. It never was. New systems, therefore, should not be built with the expectation that people will, in fact, abandon their alts that the same game encouraged them to make.

If anything, the baseline assumption should be that the new system SHOULD be kind to alts, if in no other way than not being openly hostile towards them. At this point in time, it's harder to make the argument that the system should be padded to account for people who will only ever play one character through it.

This is out level cap increase, even if they don't call it that.