UberGuy

Oh, my, is that a radical oversimplification.

Nothing was gated behind them, sure, but they were pretty much the fastest way to getting rewards as fast as possible. As far as the bulk of players seem to be concerned, at least as far as what they do (as opposed to what they say), that's little different than making it the only way to attain those rewards. The biggest difference is that the people who don't follow the crowd are the ones with the choice to do something else. The people who actually ran tons of quick Katies cancel right out.

Nor did I claim it was. What I claimed was that I believe that it's important that the devs continue to support that in ways similar to (but not necessarily exactly like) they have done to date. The need for Clarion in the UGT is an example of them not being terribly supportive of it, as was the need for Rebirth in Keyes, until they significantly reduced the damage pulses. (Rebirth is still very useful in the AV fight, since it helps prevent AM from being healed, but I think the "need" to equip it is less compelling.)

Warning: Wall of Text. TLDR: Don't totally sacrifice the game's existing open-to-everyone feel to create end-game challenge, or its existing playerbase may avoid the end-game.

I personally think that's not such a smart thing to overdo in this game seven years down the road. As other posters have mentioned, this game has a charm of its own, and to my perceptions, one of the most oft-repeated features about this game that made it a haven for people who didn't play other MMOs was the avoidance of the so-called "holy trinity" of character classes. While it may not have been intentional, a team made of all DPS or all "support" or even all meat shields will all do fine at the vast majority of content.

This feeds into what I think is one of the most subtle and unique aspects of CoH - the investment we make in our characters. I don't (just) mean investment in time, money (real or virtual) or other "currencies" - I mean the degree to which we personally become attached to or "invested in" our characters. The vast number of unique combinations available via the game's costume editor and the free-form "background" text box are part of this, as are thing like power choices, slotting and even choice of IO builds, where appropriate. We have the ability to make our characters uniquely our own in a way almost no other MMOs allow, and that allows those of us prone to such things to become very attached to our characters as something we "created".

But how the game actually plays also serves to empower our attachment. It's likely that not all builds are equally prone to this, but the game's relaxed approach to meta-gaming of teams and so forth allows us to take our latest "creation" and go do lots of different things with them, pretty much no matter what it is they actually contribute to a team. If we happen to favor or enjoy a particular character and want to take them on some content, that's probably fine, because they aren't likely at all to be the "one to many" of whatever they happen to be.

All content does not need to be like this for the game to overwhelmingly support it overall. Some content can be such that a bit more care is required in team makeup without losing this nature. Still, the nature of introducing the "end game" creates two challenges I can think of for the devs with respect to preserving this "open" nature of most prior content.

The first challenge is that, almost by definition, harder content is going to constrain this nature of the game. If something is harder, it often takes more planning and care by the players. Planning and care is pretty much the opposite of "take whoever comes". Designing something that requires some attention to team composition without falling completely into the holy trinity approach takes some care.

The second challenge is that, by nature, the iTrials/endgame system are clumped together both in time-of-delivery and in overall concept. If you're taking your characters through end-game progress, it's likely the main thing that character is going to see is a string of end-game content. If this content is all more prone to make people care about what's on their team/league, that then makes the entire ongoing experience perhaps feel more exclusive overall, even though other, more inclusive content still exists.

Combining these two things and you can feel like the focus of the game is shifting away from something that I think ties closely with its open, "play what you like" nature. Taking a character through the end-game can potentially make you feel like you can't just bring whatever you currently happen to enjoy playing, because the challenges in the trial-du-jour might be a poor fit for what your character does. That can be hard to swallow after 50 levels of being fine bringing that character to whatever most of the time.

Now, personally, I don't think the iTrials completely throw the baby out with the bathwater on this. As Arcanaville I believe mentioned up-thread, the design expectation of the leagues is that, given 12-24 people, a league probably gets "enough" of the things that it really does need in a core of something like 6-8 of the people, and the other 6-12 of them can pretty much be anything, at least most of the time. The other thing they helps, in my opinion at least, is the AT-agnostic nature of the Incarnate powers themselves. While people have pointed out (not just in this thread) that this has the effect of homogenizing characters, it also helps make sure that they can, at least potentially, give the league some basic things it might need in the form of buffs, healing, damage, etc. even when the league's AT/powerset composition may not suggest it would be strong in these areas.

So, following this winding road back to the part of your post I quoted, I do not want to see a greater shift towards a need for "strategic" composition of teams or leagues. I believe that could undercut one of these game's greatest niche attractions - that you can play whatever you want most of the time. I'm OK with the iTrials being harder, and therefore almost certainly requiring some attention to league composition. But I believe the devs have a fine line to walk if they want to avoid the "end game" and the rest of the game having two radically divergent philosophies about being able to bring your favorite characters on "anything". I believe that, as much as possible, the end game should try to preserve the things that kept so many people involved in it for so long to date. Doing so will help make the end-game environment richer in players and more healthy as a result.

There are a lot of things about the iTrials and incarnate system in general I think are flawed. The degree to which they are "grindy" is part of that. I have to wonder if the whole system wouldn't have been better received if we had gotten at least four trials plus a zone like DA up front.

But you seem to think that grinding for progress as its own sake is something new around here. It's not. While end-game raiding has not been a core of this game, grinding for loot has been a large subtext for a long time. Ever since Issue 9, and inventions. And frankly, a lot of people do enjoy that. I am quite certain that, without that long-term goal to chase, I would have wandered off a long time ago - not to some other MMO, but to spending more time on "real-life" hobbies and entertainment. Not all my friends and acquaintances in game share that with me, but most of them do pursue IOs, and most of them do consider it a mini game that provides its own end, not purely a means to other ends.

Chasing IOs isn't something you do for anything but its own sake. No character needs the benefits of IOs, but for a lot of us, they sure are fun. What do you do with the benefits? For me, its to keep chasing more IOs, of course.

I think the devs are not blindly chasing the orc and elf paradigm. I suspect they are, to some degree, making a logical (if extreme) extension of things they have found a significant chunk of their players did enjoy. Whether or how the iTrials achieve that is a topic with a lot of room for discussion, complaint and even some praise, but I really don't think it's something they bolted on completely out of the blue.

Trapdoor is never an AV. He is always an EB.

Reading this, I'm not sure if you realize this, but just in case... as long as you activate the power before you're confused it will affect the correct targets, even if you get confused in the middle of going through the activation animation. It's only if you end up firing it after being confused that it would go after your teammates.

By the way, what happened there was not likely your fault. It sounds like there was not enough Clarion on the league, or possibly enough level shifts overall. That really has to be on the head of the folks that put it together. I'm far from nuts about the confusion mechanic in that room, but given that it is what it is, leaders forming leagues need to account for it.

On the upside, if you got all the way to the end, the trial probably did get you a ton of unlock progress.

More likely it is borrowing from Titan Weapons with its "momentum" mechanic - they've even said it's using that tech to make AS behave differently depending on how much focus you have built up. It seems likely though that momentum, Street Justice's combos and even Dual Blades' combos all share a common thread of evolution in CoH game mechanics. It's the swapping out of core attack stats like activation time that's what's really new with TW.

Whut?

I can't speak to the debuff resistance, as I haven't tired it. (I did think about it.) But especially on a Regen build that has Shadow Meld, Ageless is definitely interesting because it allows you to cycle MoG and Shadow Meld even more quickly. Especially if Ageless is available early in a fight, the immense +recharge boost if offers early means your first recycle of MoG come noticeably faster. (The optimal use assuming you can absorb the Ageless activation time is probably SM, MoG, Ageless, SM, MoG, etc.)

Since Scrapper (or Brute) Regen would not usually need the +recovery, the debuff resistance from the Radial side might be a more practical mix-in. The only downside is that the Radial side caps out at 90s duration.

That doesn't make sense with Sam's suggestion. Not unless I'm missing something. His suggestion was for AS from Hide to be fast and uninterruptable and AS outside Hide be slow and interruptable. I don't see where Assassin's Focus fits there.

Edit: I see it now, I missed what the next line was doing on the first read through. I have to think about that more.

I don't understand how that's not degrading, potentially to both systems. Do you "spend" focus on crits? Does your bonus crit chance depend on how much focus you have built up? Doesn't using AS then "spend" that? I think I'd need an example.

That seems to me to make AS from Hidden status the damage delivery focus. But I find Hidden status problematic, because AoEs are anathema Hidden status. For example, plenty of critters use DoT damage patches, and even when these are not auto-hit, and even at the defense softcap, even one tick will ruin your hidden status. In large team or league content these are often stacked multiple times. Cimeroran Engineers. WarWorks and their toxic fire patch. Knives of Artemis. When fighting foes like these I find I just can't stay hidden, because I'm constantly being pecked by damage.

Even if mechanics are added to rehide you more easily, you won't remain hidden around foes like this. If you aren't operating at the softcap, which certainly shouldn't be the focus of the AT design, this becomes more pronounced.

I'm sure this sort of thing is why the devs added scaling critical hits. They were trying to give Stalkers a damage mechanic that wasn't reliant on Hidden, because Hidden is hard to maintain.

I see the new mechanic as another variation on that. I think it's a good direction, not because I want Hidden to be watered down, but because Hidden doesn't seem to work well in the context of the other game mechanics in play.

I'm worried that your suggestion would be even more confounding, because if you're being kept from being hidden you don't get uninterruptable AS, but if you're being unhidden by damage you're also being kept from delivering the longer-activating, interruptable AS while unhidden. So the suggestion above sounds like a double whammy in content rich in incoming AoE damage.

Edit: Can I ask why we want to remove scaling crits? I don't think I like the idea of people asking for a performance improvement, no matter how modest, to be removed because they don't find it thematically appealing. I happen to play a lot of content where I suspect it comes into play - team dogpiles, either on AVs or on large spawns. Assassin's Focus only improves single-target DPS. If you have a powerset with AoEs, scaling crits improves that also.

Extreme burst damage is still useful, especially solo. I use it to obliterate problem critters before they know I am there. That's not possible with the combo, not to an extent that absolutely prevents the critters from using problem abilities, like Sappers, IDF Scryers and Rikti Guardians (who all like to open with problematic or debilitating powers).

It's not an immense advantage, but it's not one I would want to lose, and it's one I would still use regularly.

I don't agree with what I think is the overall sentiment here. The aggro control facility of Placate is I think its strongest feature - already more useful to me than its contribution in DPS overall. This is so true for me that I miss having it when playing Scrappers with similar powersets to my Stalkers, and to the extent that I took it on my melee Widow after inherent Fitness freed up powers that didn't need a lot of slots, not because my Widow needed more general mitigation or the burst damage (though those are nice) but because I consider the ability to complete turn a foe off for a while too valuable to not have in my build

Heh.

Yeah, I do remember that. My own dislike for it was for how much less effective it was against low-end targets. That mattered more to me at the time, because Stalkers had not yet gotten some of the more across-the-board damage buffs they have now (higher base damage, unconditional crits). I think they could have done some more complex things there with scaling only against say boss or higher rank foes and just large damage against lesser foes, but I think the ease with which Stalkers could melt big things would have remained problematic.

They could still somehow make Stalkers do more damage to high-rank critters, but I'm not sure that is actually something that would get them on teams, for example. I wouldn't hate it, but there might be more interesting options.

Sort of. If I remember correctly, it was straight up %health as damage. I believe it may have been the first place we saw damage that was a strict percentage of a target's health in play. (Now of course it's fairly common in the new end game.)

It tended to nerf AS badly against minions, nerf it a little against LTs, and start to go nuts from there. If you could take the heat (or get someone to soak aggro for you) it was extremely easy to put down a Rikti Pylon with it, for example, which was quite something at the time.

Neat. I like that.

They could throw us all for a loop by killing off Citadel and replacing him in Talos with BaB.

Eh, I'm not sure I agree here. The distinction I think the CoV devs were looking for was a combination of strong stealth, which other ATs can have, but usually only with more investment in powers or slots. No SoA gets perfect stealth against most PvE critters "out of the box". But in addition to that stealth, they gave Stalkers mechanical advantages that are uniquely tied to them being in a stealthy state. Sure, Banes and Widows can deliver critical hits from a hidden state, but they are noticeably weaker (+2/3 instead of +100% base damage). While it was not always this way, a Stalker's hidden status returns much faster. And then there's Assassin's Strike.

I play both a Stalker and a melee Widow, and I really notice how much more effective the Stalker is at leveraging hidden status for critical hits. SoAs definitely impinge on the Stalker role, but in limited ways.

As many folks have observed, the most discussed problems relate to whether those advantages really do much for a team, or even for a Stalker themselves when on a team. Does anyone care how much SoAs impinge on the Stalker's role, if it's a role that's not particularly valued?

That's definitely an interesting idea. I'm not sure how it would play out, simply because critters' AI seems, over time, to have been adjusted so as to use mezzes as opening moves. An unprotected Blaster is therefore almost always looking at starting an engagement against mezzing foes with being mezzed until they can build up enough protection to break loose - which is probably harder with just their 1st two attacks to build protection with. They also have the challenge now of staying alive while being unable to move, the ease of which depends on a lot of things. If you're solo, it's a lot harder. Depending on how this protection decays, it could lead Blasters (particularly solo ones) to want a run-and-gun playstyle, sort of like what Brutes and Dominators have now. Both those ATs, though have fairly strong mitigation tools, so I'm not sure how well that would work in practice.

But it does sound interesting.

That's painting it with too broad a brush, IMO.

Anything that has social networks in them (by which I mean networks of people interacting, not things like Facebook) have feedback mechanisms. When making changes to these systems, you have to be aware of the existence of those feedback mechanisms, and be cautious that changes don't precipitate big, unintended shifts due to how feedback magnifies small effects.

If appropriate, try to look beyond personal biases for team content and against trial content. Look at it just as networks of people. You have a fixed number of people, and you're giving them more things to do. If one set of things is easier than the other and gives the same reward, what do you think most people will do?

This was exactly the BAF/Lambda vs UGT problem. Same reward, but one was harder/longer, so pretty much no one did it. There were people who really did like UGT, but the reward/time imbalance meant they couldn't often get a league to run it, because they all wanted to run BAF instead.

Posters in this thread have indicated that there really is a part of the CoH player base who wanted more "raid size" content. So there are people who want something like the iTrials, even if they may not be fans of the story or the particular mechanics in any given trial. By definition, they need people willing to participate in the raid-sized stuff.

We also know there are people who don't want to do raid-sized stuff. They are very vocal, and have been asking for a "solo"/small team Incarnate path ever since the first iTrials appeared. Until DA comes out, if they want iProgress, their only choice has been to run the thing they don't want - a raid-sized league. Now at last they're getting something that (hopefully) will match their desire for non-league-based iProgress.

But I suspect that most players don't care. They don't love raids or hate raids. They'll run whatever is handy. If there is a league forming, they might do that. If their friends are forming a DA team, they might do that. They aren't super picky. But if running stuff in DA gives them three times the Incarnate Salvage drops per hour as waiting on an iTrial to form? Guess what they'll do more often? And that creates a feedback loop, where people who want to raid have to take longer to form leagues, which eventually dissuades the least dedicated of them and converts them to running DA arcs, and so on until the raid system croaks.

Edit: The key here is that this isn't a symmetric problem, because raids need more people, but the "solo" path needs only one person. So the solo/DA stuff can never "die off" - one person can go off on their own and make use of it. But the Trials need more people.

The goal here is to keep the different ways of doing things balanced such that most people won't distinguish between them. If forming a league and running a trial takes longer, then it needs to be rewarding enough to make that worth while. If it's not, the everyday players who aren't super picky will start to notice that they make less headway running trials, and will eventually stop.

You have to be careful, here. A lot of people I know actively enjoy most of the Underground trial. A lot of those players aren't nuts about the massive confuse effect, but enjoy the rest of the fighting through the tunnels. Some feel it could be a bit shorter, but we're talking about looking for tweaks, not massive revamps.

But before recent changes, all of them agreed that it just didn't make sense to run it for iProgress unless you needed Empyreans. Spending that much more time than a BAF/Lambda didn't make good practical sense even if you enjoyed it.

See, in my experience most people aren't playing games like this for pure, abstract fun. They want it to be fun, but they also want a sense of progress. In the Incarnate System, for better or worse, a significant part of progress is how many Rare or better components you can get as drops.

It wasn't that everyone hated the UGT. The biggest problem was that the UGT just didn't give enough reward return on time invested.

(Some very good posts have been made in other places about what I think are some real problems with the nature of the challenges in the UGT. Despite that, they seem less hated than Keyes used to be, despite being technically harder {IMO} to overcome.)