Samuel_Tow

I don't know where you're getting this, but I've not seen them portrayed as such, or indeed portrayed as anything too specific. It's practically written on the wall who the good guys will be and who the bad guys will be, but it's a continental jump from that to "moustache-twirling evil." You can make a good guy with uncertain motivations and a bad guy who seems to have a point and still retain a very clear picture of who is who. Frankly, where you see precedent, I see a world of reasons to NOT repeat what has been done, partly because very much everyone has complained about it, and partly because there's no point to release an expansion that's a retread of the same.

Practically speaking, double counting is precisely what I'm doing. Just having either on its own may or may not be enough to count, but having both is what cements Blasters as truly damage-focused in my mind. I guess I could just count both as one, but since I'm not actually assigning points and doing a numeric tally, I could count the same issue twelve times and it shouldn't make a difference. Granted, I was going for the dramatic effect of listing a long list, and a few double-counts do swell that up in a largely under-handed way, but I don't believe that particular specificity actually changes the overriding point.

Basically, Dominators lack decent AoEs, which prevents them from effectively dealing with large groups of enemies in a timely manner (e.i. before my AoE controls run out), and they lack a Build Up + Aim combo which would allow them to deliver enough burst damage to turn the tide of battle. Of course, the final and most important argument here is also subjective. Dominators deal damage. A lot of it. But in terms of playstyle, the first thing a solo Dominator wants to do is NOT to deal damage, but rather to control. Hold things first, THEN start killing them, and whenever it comes down to that order of business, that is not something I can accept as damage-centric.

To give an obtuse opening: yes and no. On the one hand, yes, borrowing from later to use today does not increase performance... Not numerically, at least. But from my experience, it concentrates damage in the moments when it actually matters in an OFFENSIVE capacity, e.i. when all my powers are recharged and my health and endurance are full. You see, this may be just a playstyle thing, a multitude of factors mandate that I wait or delay a lot of the time. It could be travel from spawn to spawn, it could be clicking a glowie, it could be just exploring or it could be something as simple as getting up to visit the loo. These are waiting times during which I WILL wait regardless of anything else, and times when doing damage is out of the question. However, even during these times, my powers still recharge.

In actual fact, I AM taking damage from one place to pile it up in another, but where I'm taking damage is a place where it isn't useful anyway. If damage were a tangible resource like, say, gold, then I trust you will agree with the following assessment: as long as there are times it's going to go to waste anyway, it makes sense to take it away from those times and use it at other times when it WILL make a difference.

Here's how things go, for me at least - I say Build Up and Aim are up every couple of battles, but that assumes I go from battle to battle to battle. I do not. At the end of each battle, I typically spend some time sitting on my hands, appraising the situation, some time exploring the fog of war, some time travelling, some time scanning through the enemy ranks, some time thinking, and possibly some time resting. By the time I'm done, Build Up and Aim are up and ready to be used again. Purely numerically, mine recharge in around 50 seconds (I think), which would give them an uptime of 1 in 5 (less, in fact, since they take some time to animate, but not by much). In actual practice, however, Build Up and Aim are up for over half the time I'm actually in battle and doing damage. To me and how I play, they are a MASSIVE boost to outgoing damage.

Just today, I have been able to afford to start over 3/4 of my fights with Build Up and Aim going, and I have been able to finish at least half of my fights before they have expired. It may be aberrant, it may be a bit wasteful, but for what I see them do for me, they are a SERIOUS boost to my damage, far greater than a small, consistent buff would be. Yes, a consistent buff is consistently buffing, but since I'm not consistently fighting, a lot of that goes to waste. Build Up and Aim almost never go to waste unless I do something remarkably stupid and end up held with no break frees while they time out in neutral gear.


Controls expire, endurance runs ever downward, health gets drained and the enemies just keep on shooting. Any Blaster that I have fought has always been on a death clock. Some have a death clock much more lenient than others, but they all have one. Where a Scrapper can basically fall asleep in a spawn in a lot of cases, a Blaster doing the same is going DOWN. You can't out-control the enemies, only slow them down. Sooner or later they WILL overwhelm you, and the only way to beat them is to kill them fast. Any Blaster I have every played has suffered and suffered hard if a battle drags on, to the point where if a battle runs much longer than 10 seconds and I'm not down to a couple of minions or a straggler lieutenant, this immediately rings alarm bells in my head and I look to save my *** RIGHT NOW.

A couple of points here. First of all, and this probably comes down to difficulty settings, but in my experience, almost all Blaster combos are capable of full spawn wipes, just not all as early as Fire Blast, and not all quite as easily. But any Blaster that has two AoEs, when slotted well and under the influence of Aim and Build Up, will either spawn-wipe, or get close enough to it that it doesn't matter. This doesn't have to be done as simply and directly as cycling AoEs, and I've found it works best by opening with a control or insta-kill power, but it works.

Secondly, yes, I fully realise that such massive AoEs are problematic if you want to give the AT a little more survivability. But it's a self-sustaining problem. Blasters lack survivability in a BIG way, so they NEED those AoEs to compensate. If they had survivability, they wouldn't be as reliant on AoE and I, at least, wouldn't be THAT heartbroken to have them tightened up. Not removed, mind you, just tightened up. And going from Fire Breath to Breath of Fire IS removal. That's why, whenever I re-suggest my Ranger AT, I always go for Assault/Defence. Without the massive AoEs, what the hell is such an AT going to do that a Scrapper isn't already doing?

The problem, if I may say that, is that Blasters were built as "glass cannons" in a game where they ended up being the only ones made out of glass. As such, they had to carry the biggest cannons, or their whole AT design was pointless. Which it was, until the Defiance changes, and its point is at best mediocre even today. And I say this as an avid player of Blasters.

Incidentally, how do you feel about what I like to refer to as the "garbage filler" in Blaster secondaries? Things like Burn or Smoke Grenade, just to pull two names out of a hat. I have no provable reason to feel that way, but to me it just feels like they ended up with too few powers and jammed in whatever fit the theme, leaving a lot of Blasters with a lot of powers that don't do much to help them, yet with the need of some extra help.

Yes, they would. They'd just get there with tools that would get them there without creating balance problems, but are too dangerous to give them so long as they *do* have those AoEs.

(For example, they should gain more for self-damage buffs and have higher damage caps, but AoEs make that too dangerous. AoEs come up so often in balance discussions that if I could simultaneously make the playerbase forget that they ever existed and thus never miss them, I *would* snap my fingers and make them go away in their current form, without further discussion or reservation. I don't say that lightly.)[/QUOTE]

Hurricane does not knock back, it does repel, which is much less disruptive. Hand Clap is a Player-based AoE knockback, and it has garnered innumerable complaints for this precise reason, with many, myself among them, suggesting it be turned into knockdown. Simply scattering enemies surrounding you is remarkably unproductive, specifically since it neuters your sets' actual AoE ATTACK - Footstomp - so the only use you'll see Hand Vlap get is by people who stand back from a spawn and try their best to knock everyone in the same direction.

And Tornado is a pseudo-pet, and is so disruptive that last time I heard anything about it was the Satanic Hamster discussing ways to grief your team with it, and I THINK he was joking.

Or blow everyone all over the place in an amazing scatter as your team-mate's faces switch seven shades of red. Here's the thing - if knocking your enemies away in different directions is your objective, what's stopping you from just walking around them to do it? Especially with an AoE, you don't need much distance to achieve it.

Err... A self-damaging power that doubles as a rez is remarkably dangerous, if for one simple reason above all others - if you kill yourself with it, you just expended your own resurrect power. Oops? This is a situation that will see a lot of people's heads explode, and I'd really find it prudent to just avoid the possibility of it.

I suppose if your idea of fun is taking years to level up to any decent level, I could go with that, and I know some people don't mind, but I'd bet my metal tipped tail that a lot of people WOULD have the most fun if it coincided with a decent levelling speed. The Architect, its abuse and its loss of activity ought to be evidence of that. I have fun with the game itself as much as the next guy, or I wouldn't have stuck with it for coming on six years, but when I get stuck on the same character at the same level day after day, week after week, I start to smell a big fat rat.

Fun doesn't have to equal efficiency, but fun very often equal progress, and some characters played alone will NOT give you much progress.

No, nothing of the sort. This is assuming few people only ever play on teams and never, ever, ever solo. Since you are solo when you log into the game and you have to actually DO something to not be solo, I'd wager that many do solo from time to time. You have to do absolutely nothing to be solo, and there is NOT A SINGLE SITUATION where you cannot be solo. There are only situations where you ARE solo, but the game won't let you progress, which I would describe as universally unpleasant even to those who don't mind them. I have a really, REALLY hard time imagining someone going "I can't do this alone? Yes! Cool! Man, if I were able to do this by myself, this would have sucked so much!" I've nothing against wanting to team, I have nothing against disliking playing alone. I don't get WANTING to be unable to play alone.

That depends on what you define as a "tactical game." Because from what I've seen, the majority of people here seem to define tactics as "follow this guide I read/wrote for this particular situation." While that may indeed fit the dictionary definition of the word (it may, though I haven't checked), I would define this as "a job." Tactics, to me, is situational awareness - the ability to decide how to react to a given situation AS IT OCCURS. In this case, I very much view this as a tactical game, because I do my best to be constantly aware of my environment, my enemies and my allies. It is also why I avoid large teams because the chaos and sheer numbers make it impossible to for me to keep a sense of everything, so I'm reduce to just punching what's in front of me, having kicked tactics in the teeth as soon as I entered the mission.

Furthermore, I don't define as "tactics" any of the approaches that are, essentially, "let's take 10 minutes per enemy group because it's safer that way." Constant pulls, constant minefields, constant waiting for this, setting up of that, preparing this other thing... If I'm going to be sitting on my hands while someone else "prepares," then I might as well go have lunch, and if I go have lunch I'm not exactly making much of my play time, am I? This is the big problem with both a lot of teams these days, as well as with a lot of "advice" people tend to give out. It always involves taking bloody ages to do even the simplest of things, and when you get to that point, you've already lost before the fight even started.

Doing this nets you next to nothing. Yes, you complete the mission in a fraction of the time, but you get an even smaller fraction of the total reward. I'm not going to get involved in the argument on stealthing missions, but when you try to define "fun" in this context, you tread deep waters that there is no escape from. Yes, it's fun. Hanging out in Pocket D, chatting with friends, racing, hunting for badges and so on and so forth - all of these things are fun for somebody, but they're hardly things that either the combat system in particular or the game in general ought to be balanced around. Much as it surprises me to be the one to say it, balance revolves around progress, with progress being defined as the game's ultimate goal. You can always make your own fun in the game, but if you're not progressing at a decent pace, something is wrong, as ultimately, design should strive to let people advance while doing what they enjoy.

There is one and only one way to advance in City of Heroes - kill stuff, either directly or by teaming with someone who does. Everything else, even things that reward, is secondary to this. OK, caveat - Inventions. So let's rephrase it like this: two ways to progress - gain experience or garner drops. The only actually reliable way to gain experience is to kill stuff, by far and wide. A variety of things grant experience rewards, but none of them are as potent as killing stuff, not by a long shot. Not unless you find a specifically exploitable mission. Drops you get, once again, from killing things, or from completing specific tasks which, once again, require killing stuff for the most part.

You can make your own fun, but as long as we're looking at an actual in-game system with its own balance, then the we HAVE to fallback on either the trite "risk vs. reward," or on the much more realistic "time vs. reward." You don't have to play for the rewards if you don't want to, but the game HAS to be balanced for them, or it creates a variety of unpleasant problems.

Prior to the Defiance changes, I completely agree. Post the defiance changes... They actually kind of can, and I can say this as the owner of quite a few. It's not safe, it's not easy, it's not pretty, but it is, at least in theory, possible for all Blaster combos, and I've tried everything short of Sonic. And it's no just a question of unloading all your damage and crossing your fingers. Some approaches work remarkably well and some approaches have the nasty tendency to kill you before you realise things aren't going very well.

You know, Arcana, I've followed your numbers from the old days, and while I tend to unconditionally agree with them for the most part, I continually feel like you constantly neglect the benefit of pure, large-scale burst damage. Your description of it (which I lost track of to quote) sounds kind of out of scale with what I've been doing... Pretty much all day today. Yes, you can use Aim and Build Up to quickly reduce three enemies into two. If that's what you choose to do with them. I tend to use them to reduce 8 enemies to... Maybe 2. And I know I'll be kicked in the balls for saying this, but every Blaster combo should be able to do this, with the possible exception of Psychic Blast not paired up with Mental Manipulation thanks to a bizarre design choice to migrate the Psi cone from primary to secondary.

The reason I've been bringing up burst damage over the years is that, yes, it doesn't really help all that much over time, but for Blasters more than for anyone else, "over time" metrics are comparatively a lot less meaningful. Especially for powers on a 90 second timer. As far as I've seen, if a solo Blaster allows a battle to last too much longer than 10-20 seconds, he's already in deep trouble before these metrics are even considered, because for it to have gone so far, something must have gone wrong. A Blaster who's on the ball can end a fight without suffering more than one attack from most enemies, which Blaster hit points can generally absorb with a good degree of comfort.

And even if you don't feel like just cycling your AoEs every time, Aim and Build Up with the proper power choice can still pot-shot quite a few enemies before they run out. For instance, with a Fire/Fire Blaster, I can take down at least three enemies in 10 seconds, leaving at least three more within an inch of their life, to be one-hit-finished thereafter anyway. It comes down to proper application of firepower, and while it is NOT safe and NOT easy, it's not exactly rocket science to replicate fight after fight. And even basic slotting can give you Aim and Build Up back every other fight.

Burst damage matters, especially in the hands of Blasters, and in their hands, it is a force of nature. I will say that, without a shadow of a doubt, NO ONE possesses as much burst damage as a Blaster at full tilt. Not even remotely in the same principality. THAT is a big ace up the sleeve.

Well... I've heard that said a lot, and I can kind of agree, but then I kind of have to disagree. Large-scale AoE in terms of Blaster damage is something I see as being on the order of Scrapper complete soloability and performance. It was never intended, but I'd really have to roll my eyes backwards to describe it as a bad thing. Specifically since it has painted Blasters into a corner that has denied them direct self-protection of any kind for fear of the tank-mage boogie man. I, personally, enjoy Blaster AoEs not because they are some kind of instant I Win button (which they actually aren't), but because they give a lone character who is otherwise completely unprepared to deal with large amounts of enemies a tool with which to make progress. And that counts for a lot in my book.

Frankly, Blasters wouldn't be the "kings of damage" without this. At best they'd be able to slightly out-match Scrappers in damage output, and at worst they would be (and were) just Scrappers but without the defences. Even today, with all the buffs, Blaster single-target damage isn't all that, and their single-target burst is still not that impressive compared to Scrappers. Yes, yes, they do more, but the difference isn't as big as the difference in survivability. What Blasters have is the ability to make spawns disappear under the right conditions, and that Scrappers CANNOT do. If you remove large-scale AoEs from the equation, you remove the point to having Blasters to begin with. I guess that might lead to something cooler, like an Assault/Defence powerset, but the raw power of Blaster destruction is one serious draw to the game, at least for me.

In fact, it is this single-minded focus on large-scale destruction that keeps getting me to put up with all the niggling problems, all the annoying deaths, all the close calls and all the trudge and toil that come with playing a Blaster and just stubbornly keep playing them. Yes, it makes me want to tare the hair out of my nose a lot of the time, but one well-executed devastation and it all goes away in the face of self-satisfaction.

The mission is bugged in that the Ballista always spawns at level 40 even though you can take the mission at level 35, making him a +5 EB before difficulty settings. Ghost Widow having boss stats, however, is not a bug, it's cheeky design. For a while now, the developers have used class tags to lie to our faces, tagging NPCs as Archvillain or Hero when they are, in fact, simple bosses. Ghost Widow suffers from this, as does WMD, but the one most people should remember is Kadabra Kill. He's tagged as a Hero, but he is a boss. Yes, really.

Well, on a purely personal level of purely personal preference, certainly. Everyone I play with will pretty much tell you that nothing ever does enough damage for me. But that's not the point in the long run, so much so as the ability to deliver this damage quickly enough to have a steady pace of progress and the ability to not die before doing so, and preferably not get hurt to the point of having to rest before Rest is recharged. Not all ATs can actually measure up to this, at least not from what I've seen.

Other than Blasters. I'm looking at my Fire/Fire right now and, unless I'm missing something, I can't see much else.

When I say "win," I mean "get through to me." There are certain things I'm open to being convinced about, and there are certain things where I'm simply immune to it. Concept tends to be one of those. In this case, it's theme. Dominators hold THEN kill. Blasters just kill. I pick Blasters for the job.

[/quote]I disagree that Doms aren't damage-centric. Castle even said he was worried about suggesting the Dom change because the numbers he was suggesting would basically mean that Doms have two primaries. Secondaries are usually built to be weaker and to augment the primary, but in the case of Dominators, they have the highest base damage of any toon you can make redside. If that makes them "not damage dealers," I don't what to say.[/quote]

Dominators are damage-dealers, but they are not damage-centric. This isn't a criticism of the AT, and it's hardly the reason I stopped playing them, but insomuch as it concerns the concept, it's the clincher. Dominators are control-centric, with the ability to deal decent damage, but unlike Blasters, they cannot survive on their damage alone. For one, a lot of them lack Build Up, and ALL of them lack Aim + Build Up. they have a lower damage mod than Blasters, especially on Ranged attacks, and lower by a not-insignificant amount. They have lower damage still by lacking Defiance, which I've found can contribute quite a bit if try to use it. They fall farther behind when you consider that they have far fewer direct attacks than Blasters, and that the bulk of them are single-target or small AoE. Blasters, by comparison, tend to have one, two and sometimes even more AoEs, all with gigantic areas of coverage and all with decent damage, to the point where most Blasters can insta-wipe minion spawns with them.

Dominators also suffer from Defender hit points, which makes reckless abandon and direct offence a LOT more dangerous, to a degree that I was AMAZED at. You wouldn't think something so simple would make such a difference, but it does. Dominators can be survivable, but as I examined mine and asked for help with it, the recurring feedback was that I should focus less on my attacks and more on my controls, and possibly even leave attacks for later in the levels. Let me put it this way - having to pull slots out of already underslotted attacks just so that I can survive is not something I will do, and any AT which requires me to do so is not an AT I want to play. That, and being continually advised to tweak my difficulty so I was fighting fewer enemies but higher in level, which I consider a massive step DOWN in terms of visual appeal, is what caused me to delete my Dominator when I ended up needing the slot, though what I needed it for I don't remember. Another Mastermind, most likely.

I played one up until level 31. And, yes, I'm aware of level 32. I have a friend who took the time to gasp at the stupidity of that choice on at least three separate occasions, but I had my reasons. For one, no AT that I despise playing for the first 32 levels is worth the remaining 28. For another, I'm not looking for just a single character I can play if I pick exactly the right powerset combo. I'm looking for an AT I can play with most any combo, and when I realised how much I did NOT look forward to starting a new one, I realised that I didn't want to stick with the AT. It deals damage well enough, certainly, but that is still overshadowed by the need to also dish out control, meaning it cannot be played like a Blaster (something that Dominator players told me probably a dozen times over), which is exactly what I was looking at them to replace CoV-side. These days, I don't need to bother, since I'll be able to just take Blasters CoV-side and will be able to stop shoehorning characters and playstyles in an AT that doesn't fit.

The one biggest regret I have about not being able to jive with Dominators is that Control sets are the last thing in the game that I have never, in five years, had access to, courtesy of lacking an AT I could play that had them. Everything else I can get on the cheap. Melee, defence, blast, manipulation and summon are obvious, and I get support via Masterminds, but I just can't get a control set, as both control ATs play in a way I do not enjoy. Of course, I also lack access to Ice Melee and Ice Armour due to my dislike of Tankers, but that's one powerset combo, so it's not THAT big a deal, even though my first and favourite Brute started out as Ice/Ice in Beta.

I think the only AT I haven't even tried playing seriously was Controllers, the prospect of which I just detest. Everything else I've played to some level, with Defenders and Corrupters not holding me for too long once I realise how many powers they have that I can't use on myself. I'm still trying to make peace with Mastermind resurrection powers. On the one hand, I don't want them, but on the other hand, needing one on the off chance I team and not having it both sucks and kind of puts me in an awkward position.

That's pretty much the take I have on this. This idea that, just because this is an MMO and "should" be team-centric, then let's cut the legs off from under everyone so they have to prop each other up is one thing I've always found despicable, and one thing that has, for the most part, kept me out of other MMOs over the years. I've always felt that teaming should be a choice, not a mandate, and while I have nothing wrong with fat, slimy rewards hung in the distance to softly coerce me into teaming without me realising I'm being led by the nose, I do take slight when this is done via "your money or your life" mechanics, which is to say "team or die." It's a choice in the purely technical definition of the term, but no, it actually isn't a choice in the slightest.

This brings me back to a recurring question - why must teaming be emphasised by restricting people from not teaming, rather than by rewarding people for teaming. Again, City of Heroes is probably the most lenient MMO I've played when it comes to this, but it is STILL designed with that in mind. And it's actually a pretty paradoxical design at times. Often, I see things thusly:

Option 1: Hey, you there, team-centric dude! Yeah, I know you're having a hard time soloing, but with the way difficulty scales, you'd be incredibly more powerful than the sum of your parts if you got on a team and took on things other people couldn't handle without you.
-This is great, now I just need to find a team!

Option 2: Hey, you there, soloist thing! Yeah, you're really cool fighting things on your own, but I'll bet that eight of you can't handle eight people's worth of monsters unless you bring along someone who doesn't solo as well but multiples your power!
-So? How likely am I going to fight more peoples' worth of monsters if I don't team with more people?

The gist of it is that, yes, "teamers" are designed to start low, but be a great asset to a team, whereas "soloers" are designed to start high, but peter out against some of the team-specific challenges. But here's the thing - a teamer needs to alter the status quo, find a team, scale the difficulty and only THEN become truly needed. A soloer has to go out of his way to NOT be needed, which strikes me as a deceptively backwards design which came close to sinking Scrappers at some point in the ancient past, and actually sunk Stalkers before they were altered.

Tangent aside, offer rewards rather than taking away ability.

Then I have to pull the powerset card. Yes, Electrical Manipulation does have some nice tools to "blap." Devices does not. Assault Rifle/Devices has very little. Fire/Fire has a lot of damage, but no control, and a few garbage powers. Certain powersets do work. Certain powersets fail spectacularly. The point, however, is that before Defiance, Blasters were simply not tough enough for the damage they did, and I've seen more than a few instances of Scrappers consistently out-damaging them.

This also goes down to speed of progress. Yes, sometimes you need to think the herd, which takes bloody ages. If you end up having to think the herd too often when a Scrapper never has to AND does the same damage as you BUT is several times more survivable, you start, or at least I started, asking myself the simplest of questions - why bother playing a Blaster when Scrappers were faster, hit harder and survived longer? The answer to that question was Defiance 2.0, but prior to that, the answer was a shrug.

To quote Yhatzee: "OK, a dodge move that can't dodge ****. Yeah, I guess that would make for a hard game, but it doesn't seem like I'm being given much of a chance here." Essentially, yes, it's possible, yes it's doable, but no, it is indeed not in the slightest very much fun. Defiance 2.0 fixed that, but only just. Which I suppose was the point.

Your math is off, because you seem to have missed the point. In fact, you're just retreading ground I specifically wanted to get AWAY from. This notion that each character has 100% and that has to be divided between damage and everything else. Why? I realise "damage" is not the same as "combat prowess," but let's go with damage for simplicity.

Why have 75% damage, 25% everything else? Why not have 1.0 damage between everyone, and then have 100% everything else divided by what else the other classes can do. Let's say...

Damage + 50% survivability +50% control
Damage + 100% survivability
Damage + 100% control
Damage + 50% control +50% support
Damage + 50% support + 50% survivability
Damage + 30% survivability + 30% control + 30% support + 1% extra
Damage + 20% pets + 80% support

See what I mean? Not damage (again, let's just roll with damage for now) at the cost of something else, not damage as one perk. Damage AND something else. Once you stop trying to wiggle damage in as a balancing parameter and just standardise it among the classes, then it becomes a basic game trait. You know, like the ability to run and jump. You still have classes, you still have specializations, you still have diversity, it's just over things OTHER than damage.

And again, this isn't just about damage, but I picked that as the easiest example just to make the numbers work. And, no, I've no idea if this would be balanced, and it most probably would not be. It's just an example an an illustration, not proof of thesis.

We're talking about concept here. "A single target hold from an epic with a long recharge" isn't exactly concept, now is it? A Dominator is not a dedicated damage dealer. I've played Dominators, and they are not damage dealers. Yes, they deal damage, but their focus is not damage. Nor are their damage-centric abilities all that impressive, either visually or practically. And if I want someone to reign destruction, I'm going to want massive fireballs and fire from the sky, not smoke and fire cages.

You're not going to win this one. It's my concept, I choose what it should be. Doubly so, since I'll be able to have my cake and eat it, too, very soon, so I don't see why that remains a problem.

Nowhere in the manual have I seen it explained that I am mandated to play with another person ever. It just suggests that I might want to. But just because other people exist in the game doesn't mean I have to team with them. Just because I CAN team doesn't mean I HAVE to. And, no, the game has not been dumbed down nearly enough.

Except, in this game we too are super beings that shouldn't be easy to wipe, yet that is exactly what you suggest the enemies do to us. The game does very much NOT need any toughening up. If you want it to be harder, you are welcome to increase your difficulty setting. You keep your hands away from MY difficulty settings and kindly avoid telling ME how hard MY game "should" be. I don't play it for the challenge, but I fail to see how that is any of your business.

GMs and AVs are more than tough enough for what they represent. Maybe you enjoy a game that constantly reminds you your character is an insignificant gnat and he needs the help of seven other people just to tie his shoes, but I do not. I enjoy the game when I am the hero of my own story, when I am strong enough to take care of myself and where THEY need to band together take on me, not the other way around.

Your opinion is fine and all, but I fail to see why you can't have that now, when this is expressly why the difficulty settings were expanded upon.

That's odd. I've seen the Hero Con movie and I remember no such thing. I do know they talk a lot about revamping the 1-20 experience, and they do say that, at level 20, you have to choose whether you'll side with the Resistance or the Loyalists, but I remember nothing about going to Primal Earth. Since it's a 20-minute movie that I've already seen several times, I'm somewhat disinclined to watch it from beginning to end all over again, so if you can point me to at least a rough time of when this is said, I can have a look and see if I didn't miss anything.