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Session 35-36
Ran a few more Warburg missions to get one of us to L38 for the Sewer Trial. Cleared the 150 Rikti. Team is now 1 L36, 5 L37, and 2 L38. Started the trial despite knowing the tank was having frequent disconnect problems. Pulled the first Kraken upto the entrance tunnel. It was L42, and the fight took about 5 minutes and rewarded about 3600 xp to the L37's. I knew it had been reduced from the Kraken farming days, but considering that a Rikti boss gives about 2200 xp I think the reduction was excessive. The tank disconnected, and we waited some 10 minutes for him. He didn't show, so we continued down the shaft. One of the controllers disconnected for a while, so the remaining 6 of us struggled on. Both managed to reconnect long enough to grab weapons, but we didnt get out of the shaft until the timer was down to 50 minutes. Knowing that the remaining Kraken fights alone would take 20+ minutes, things weren't looking good. The tank kept dropping in and out, but we managed to get the generators down with about 12 minutes to go. We hadnt cleared enough of the tentacles but gave it a go anyway. That proved fatal, though its unlikely we would have had enough time to clear the tentacles and take down the head. We're confident that had we not suffered disconnects (these were personal ISP problems, not game groblems) or had we been a bit more efficient managing our time, then we would've been successful with this +4, +5 con Sewer Trial. We'll try again next week.
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More Trials/TF's/Missions in the game need to be timed and or have objectives in them other than mind numbing mob killing. That's what's ruining this game and the devs don't seem to get it yet. I would personally love to see DDO style quests merged with CoH missions to create a hybrid full of mobs, traps, secret doors, optional objectives, larger team size for certain missions, etc.
90% of everything in this game is killing mob after mob to complete a mission with no variety. You approach almost every mob knowing exactly how they're going to react and what you need to do to defeat them. There's no thinking involved anymore which imo has greatly diluted the skilled player base and made this game way too juvenile. I couldn't even begin to count the number of friends that have left this game because of the lack of challenge, frustration with devs, and game bugs. If the devs would take the time to listen to the player base and what they want in the game, Coh/Cov could be a big as WoW and some others.
The simple facts that knowing the Sewer Trial, which for the most part is the only thing to come close to a challenge because of it's uniqueness, SS TF's, and that almost all 8 of us have played and known each other since beta or shortly thereafter have kept us going.
Alot of people still play this game because the base concept of it is very sound and entertaining. Combine that with the amount of flexibilty in character creation and it's almost enough to keep player's interest and look past it's flaws...... Almost......
Hey guys, sorry to back out at the last minute, but I just got home from Philly & am feeling like total crap.