UberGuy

That was always "original" Regen's primary weakness, sometimes touted as it's "kryptonite" comparable with Invulnerability's weakness to Psionic damage. (And back then, Invul was vulnerable to Psi and Toxic and not much else.) People who look for a return to old school toggle IH are basically looking at a return to that vulnerability, whether they think about that or not. Of course, back then you could keep MoG running a lot longer. Depending on how far back you're going, that was either ridiculously good, or ultimately very dangerous.

Actually, I thought I remembered Werner kind of liked the Rebirth ideas people were bandying about. But I should probably leave that to him - it's not like he's left us, as far as I know.

I agree with everything Elegost said, except one part.

I'm going to toss out a counter vote on the positional vs. damage-typed defense. My finding is that when I have damage-typed defense, I can't get enough non-L/S defense, and I have low defenses against "pure exotic" attacks. Examples are Gloom, Fire Blast, and various Electric and Rad Blast ranged attacks, all of which are quite common among high-level NPC factions. As a result, I find a Regen build with high lethal defense works great against some old-school foes and maybe Longbow, but suddenly feels weak when faced with something like a Mu boss or lots of Council Vampyres and Galaxies. This is compounded by the fact that most Regens shore up their L/S resists with Tough, but (currently) have nothing to grant resists to the "exotic" damage types outside of Toxic damage. (This will be somewhat better in I21, with (edit: un)slotted Resilience becoming around 9% "Res(ALL)".)

The tradeoff you have to consider is whether you are willing to be more likely to take L/S hits, which may stack defense debuffs on you, or be more likely to be hit by everything else. It's breadth against more foes rather than greater depth against some of them. My own playstyle was better served by giving some decent attention to ranged defense (though melee got priority for sure) and using high-order defense buffs in Moment of Glory and Shadow Meld to ride out the debuffs imposed on me.

Pretty much all the challenge available in this game comes down to two things, very broadly speaking.

• A sequence of steps you need to complete to succeed. Most of the time there can be multiple ways to approach this, but most server communities or server subcommunities settle on a few popular sequences of steps to execute
• A set of powers wielded by foes that players must answer with their own powers

As folks have mentioned, the community has figured out steps that work very well for the iTrials, and a great many people now know at least one variation of these steps. This means that leagues can perform the high-level steps almost by rote. The biggest risk is that people will auto-pilot into incompatible variations and make a mess of the current step.

Powers are an arms race of sort between the devs and the mobs. The IDF and WarWorks represent a continuation of previous "scary" NPC factions we have seen such as Arachnos, Longbow and Vanguard. By themselves, however, even given the boss-heavy spawn patterns in which they appear in iTrials, they really are no match for leagues - especially once people on those leagues start getting level shifts, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Incarnate powers themselves.

The iTrials try to counter some of this with tactical challenges, such as pretty much forcing Leagues to split up in Lambda, and recommending it for maximum merit rewards in BAF. There's also things like the cascading buffs the 9CUs get. But these also fall broadly into the "script" people have learned - everyone knows they should probably to split up for the Lambda collection phase, and most people know they can't leave 9CUs laying around.

The iTrials, and the Praetorean TFs before them. mostly innovate because they mix these two things - the script and the powers race. The major AVs in these contests have, for lack of a better way to describe them, "scripted powers". You can't reliably counter these powers with your own, but you can counter them with consistent reactions. Back away from Nova Fist. Let someone else take aggro with Sequestration. Don't stand in the nanite patch. Don't defeat Bobcat before Neuron's health is below a certain point, or if you do, wait for his buff to wear off.

For the most part, I don't think there's anything the devs can to avoid this way of designing "challenge" for us - and the then inevitable way in which we find it easy once we become familiar with it - other than to require us to greater and greater levels of coordination. As others have mentioned, this game does not support complex multi-team interactions very well. It doesn't have built-in voice comms (which is fine with me) and it doesn't really support any useful text communications binds - people have to make those for themselves. Some leaders are willing to do that, but most people in pugs - which is what the vast majority of iTrials are by necessity - are not.

If the game is going to require complicated team/player coordination to introduce complexity, it needs to support the means to do so more directly - the challenge should exist because of the need for coordination, not because the game actually makes coordination difficult. Barring that, it will likely continue to introduce "scripted" complexity, and we will learn the scripts by heart and things will be much easier until the next, new script comes along.

I have run close to 400 trials. I'm not interested in anything that makes any of them produce the drops per time that the Keyes offers. Outside the actual Rare or Very Rare component (which is the progression-related goal people want Empyrean Merits for), we need 300 Threads worth of common drops to craft a single Very Rare. We don't need to make Very Rares, but why would we want the baseline progression to obtain them to at least double?

On top of that, I actually find both the Lambda and the BAF trials fun to run. I'm tired as hell of running just them, but at least I actually do enjoy running them. Not only is Keyes worse reward/time in terms of completion time, but I do not enjoy it. Even if somehow the reward per time of the BAF and Lambda were worsened to match that of Keyes, unless that was done in a way that majorly restructured the way they play now I would still play them to the exclusion of Keyes, because I do not think the Keyes trial is fun.

I would be a lot more interested in them doubling the number of random table shots we get at the end than I am in two Empyrean Merits. But no matter how much they butter up the carrot, I still don't enjoy the trial.

Edit: Actually, I went back to check and I'm closing on 500 trials run, not 400. 227 BAFs and 213 Lambdas, with about 20-25 additional trials for which I lost my records.

I'm having a hard time telling if that's a serious sentiment.

I totally agree. It wouldn't make everyone who's active now incredibly rich. It would make a few people who are willing to devote plenty of time to ask probably a whole lot more per item sold.

What Roderick said. It's an AoE hold, and it's the only effect in the BAF that will apply a hold.

Edit: Here is its data from RedTomax. It's interesting, I wondered if it tailed off in magnitude like that. That should mean you can end it early by casting Clarion on the mezzed people, so that the peak of Clarion's benefit overlaps the mag 20 and mag 3 portions of the Sequestration effect.

I have hated "respawn gates" in every FPS game that ever had them. I dislike them here. I actually really think the devs thought people would need to rebuff and buy inspirations and stuff - that the pause would help instead of hurt. Like everyone else, I have never seen the delay in getting back into the action help anyone. I have never seen people gather up in the hospital. They just gather up outside, or, much more often, don't bother to regroup at all. If like 1-3 people die such that they're in the hospital at the same time (which is normal unless the whole trial is going to hell), they aren't going to "group together" in any useful way. Even if they tried, there's no guarantee that they are ATs with powersets for whom that's even helpful. Everyone just charges back to the main group.