UberGuy

It will no longer buff defense. It will still buff end reduction.

Do you really believe this? How much back-and-forth movement do you think there is? I think most characters moved in one direction and never went back. New characters are created now with the alignment of choice, because there is no barrier to what AT starts on what side.

Some heroes go redside then back to get Patron Pools. That's still a minority, since not all ATs get Patron Pools worth the trouble of doing that for.

The only people I know of who migrate the same character back and forth more than once are hard-core badgers and some role players. I'm a borderline hard-core badger, and I only ever move one character back and forth more than once.

So are you really complaining that they're catering to the other 99%? That seems sensible to me. Or do you just object to them actually monetizing it?

So what I'm getting here is that there are no ideal solutions. It's a matter of "pick your poison". Some people hate having a story that it doesn't make sense to repeat, some people hate having content that is effectively detached from progressing a story.

There's room for both, but I don't think anyone is going to get something they'll think is great, because most MMOs are fundamentally about repeating content on some scale or other.

That's a pretty far cry from what I think most people imagined. Interesting.

Bluntly and very honestly, I do not expect you to run that content.

You are deigning to run that content only because the system now makes it mechanically convenient. You still don't want to interact with those other people. Now, though, you don't have to interact with them to get invited, so you'll take that route to get in now that it's an option.

Your dilemma isn't alien to me. Historically, I was a pretty dedicated soloer from the time they introduce the very first purple patch (which badly broke teaming and lasted several weeks*) onwards. I didn't do much in the way of TF or old-school trial content. If I did it, I did it with friends or sucked it up and asked to join people I didn't know and who didn't know me.

Don't get me wrong. I don't begrudge people the LFG queue. It's going to empower the one-off players to join other groups. What I don't like is the proposed notion that because this exists, pre-formed teams need to be deprecated.

My default mode is to solo. If I don't solo, it's because I do want to team with people I know and like teaming with, or because I have to team. If I have to team, I always prefer to do it with people I like to team with.

So of I am teaming only because I want to team, I'm going to be teaming with people I know. By definition, that means I'm not going to want a group of random teammates. Random people may be welcome, but only after I've already ensured the people I actually like to team with are guaranteed a spot in the mix. That means I'm preforming a team.

If I am teaming because I have to team, there's still a very good chance I am going to want to do that with people I know. I don't like to join pugs. I do it in iTrials because I often have no choice due to the size requirements. But for other content, where I can get away with teams of 2-8, I'm simply more picky. It's not because I don't think a team of random people can't finish, I don't know, Manticore's TF. It's because I tend not to enjoy how most PuGs go. The people I do like to play with tend to share my playstyles. So, again, I'm always going to try to pre-form a team with them first. If the content is actually hard, then I also care about what I invite, not just who, so again, I'm going to preform the team, at least a little.

Finally, and related to the last point, even if most non-iTrial content can be completed by an arbitrary team, there are worlds of difference in how random teams can end up performing related to ones formed with some forethought. If you're the only 50 who joins an ITF, and everyone else is, say, 35-40, that's a whole different experience than having a core of 50s, and not one I personally enjoy. If you hop on your Force Field bubbler and join a Kahn with four Tankers, an Empath a Blaster and a Peacebringer, the end fight is going to take a whole lot longer than one where someone brought a debuffer. There's a difference in what's possible and what's desirable, at least for me. I always want control over that.

* For those who weren't here back then, the original purple patch made fighting +2s more like fighting +4 today. This was in the days when very few people were over level 20, you Sidekicks were per-character (no SSK system) and IOs weren't even a gleam in anyone's eyes. About all you could reasonably fight was +1s, but it was easy to end up facing foes +2 or higher to you if you weren't exactly the same level as the team leader. I stopped teaming and started soloing, and pretty much never looked back.

And how would it distinguish between using it with a fully pre-formed league, and joining such a league as a single person from the queue? Would the single person get the bonus? The whole league? No one?

People are going to use the interface. Just being able to start up a TF from any zone is reason enough to do that. What some of us are not going to do is hope for fully randomized teams, made of nothing but people who all hopped in the queue together.

Just to be clear, is that "all new" as in "only new"?

That will not happen so long as you cannot see what you're getting. For example, I am not going to join something like the UGT or MoM with a random group of people who I cannot tell their powersets or level shifts.

Hm, that's a bummer. I didn't catch that part of it before.

I think they said there will be an echo. I may be misremembering that, though. Someone can likely correct me if so.

While I acknowledge my anecdotes can't be taken as representative of the playerbase, this was never an issue for me. I and may other players on Justice ran TFs and SFs many, many times for Reward Merits and general entertainment. I suspect, but cannot prove, that this was extremely common behavior visible in data mining, which led to the impression that people were going to be satisfied with running iTrials over and over.

Even if that's what happened, I don't think they did a great job what with the rush of people that burned themselves out on BAF and Lambda. I think there was too much repetition there, even for most people who liked re-running TFs.

While this is a valid point, I don't really understand why we'd start asking that question now. We've been faced with that plot loophole pretty much since Task Forces were made repeatable. Back when you could outlevel them, it wasn't so noticeable, but that changed ages ago.

The more intricate the story behind any given content, whether it's the story of our characters going through the missions or just the backstory leading up to the missions, the less sense it makes for repeating it to be a case of facing down the same villains trying to do the same thing again. Facing Arachnos robbing the bank in a Safeguard mission over and over sort of makes sense (though bank robbing seems a bit mundane for Lord Recluse...), but uncovering and then stopping an intricate plot to poison the city's water supply stops making sense pretty much the second time you do it. You would know what Dr. Vahz was doing and just go straight to stopping him. How many times can we kidnap Ms. Liberty from that base in Nerva and beat up the Freedom Phalanx? How many times is Reichsman going to try and form the League of Evil People Who Don't Want to Help Him?

Let me be clear that I'm not so much defending the way things are as the best idea. All I'm saying is that the water is way, way under the bridge. As a player base we were all pretty pumped back when TFs were made such that we could exemplar down and run them even if we had out leveled them. Everything sort of snowballed from there, and we have mostly quietly accepted repeating content, even if the repeating makes little narrative sense. Building the iTrials on this model was mostly a case of the devs taking something that seemed to work and running with it.

The only reason I think anyone is complaining is that the iProgress requires such focused iTrial repetition. It's not like normal leveling where you can do a TF, then go do missions or something for a while before even touching another TF. I22 will hopefully help significantly with this, but right now, it's pretty severe.

I can't tell if you're serious about 1000 iTrials that you could each only ever run once, but I sure hope not. That sounds terrible.

Oh, I agree that, if the goal is typed defense, ToDs and Oblits are suboptimal. I have them in my build because I want typed.

My experience disagrees, but I'll concede the difference is slight. The problem I find is that, when soloing large spawns of arbitrary foes, there's quite a lot of ranged exotic damage in the game. There actually was a decent amount of it coming from some fairly (at this point) old school foes, such as Arachnos Mu dudes and Council/5th Vampyres, for example, but these days we get fun guys like the IDF and War Works throwing weird damage types around, too.

When I have tried to put together my own Regen builds, I haven't been able to get all of E/N/F/C defense, or even just E/N (which is probably more important) up where I'd like them when I build for L/S defense. This isn't a universal thing - it does depend on powerset. I've built DM/Regen, DB/Regen and MA/Regen (Stalker) and generally go better all-around protection from positional rather than typed. (As a counter example, I tried to build for positional on a Stone/FA Brute and got nothing I liked, and so got better all-round results from typed defense.)

IMO, the consideration is compounded by the fact, given that most Regen builds include Tough (and have for ages), L/S damage is actually the one damage type they have any particular specialty in being able to absorb. So anything else comes it full-strength.

The build I posted up-thread isn't any panacea of ranged defense, but it's got about 8-9% more to ranged defense than yours achieves for E/N/F/C. Mine is about the same on AoE as you are on E/N/F/C, which does weaken my position some, but outside of iTrials and AV/GM fights, Ranged defense seems to generally be more valuable than AoE defense.

The one condition under which I'll concede that a L/S build is going almost universally better is going to be when facing bullets that deal -def. Unfortunately, that's probably mostly academic on a DM/Regen, since one hit will start tearing down defense and the cascade will take over very quickly. Of course that's why we have MoG and (maybe) Shadow Meld.