UberGuy

There's no question that if you don't have enough mez protection, you're screwed. That's not a design of the trial I like, but until/unless we can convince the Devs to change it, people need to make sure they have enough of something to cover it. The most likely something is going to be Clarion, though a healthy showing of Tactics can help, as it provides both minor Confuse protection and Confuse resistance, which reduces the duration of the effect.

A bad tanker can screw up a lot of stuff.

If you can't find her, which is perfectly understandable in the middle of as many as 24 players, all their pets and whatnot, target her health bar in the Trial window and hit follow. That's what I do.

Are you not heeding the warning messages? Every time it says the Avatar is about to do something, I either get behind it or go stand by Desdemona when it says to do that explicitly. The only time getting behind it doesn't work so well is if I actually have its aggro, which I have done once for a UGT league. In that case, I run away, then come back a few seconds later (with the goal that I don't lose aggro completely).

If you can't/don't do these things, I can see there being a problem. I always did them, and had no problem.

This can't just be "experience", because my UGT experience is mostly on melees and it's contrary to yours with respect to how dangerous the Avatar is to melee characters.

I've never even seen this effect come into play. I've only been on two failed UGTs in about 10, both pugs, and both failed at the WWs, not the Avatar.

Since none of the successes I went on even had an Illusion Controller, I'm pretty sure that can't be a determining factor in success.

Edit: I also don't know where the "it's fatal to melee the Avatar" comes from. Most of the UGTs I've attended have been on a melee character. I find melee with the War Walkers more dangerous. I'm wondering what leagues I've been on are doing right that my experience with the above things is so different.

Edit2: I should mention that I'm not opposed to improving the trial, I just am surprised at some of the things people find hard about it. I think Snow Globe has some great suggestions on how to improve it. I think the (lack of) visual queues part in particular is very important. I think some of the other things are matters of opinion (and SG prefaced all his complaints with that disclaimer). I happen to agree with the escort mission bit, but I seriously doubt there's anything that can be done about that at this stage.

I don't disagree with what you're saying, but tactics that no one really have to talk about are, well, not that worth mentioning. Not unless you're looking to share them with folks who don't know them yet, at least. And that's sort of the crux of the disagreement with RemusShepherd: it sounds like he's pining for the days back before we knew what we were doing.

The thing is, I don't think most of this took most of us very long to figure out what we were doing. There wasn't any grand era of tactical exploration and discovery for myself and people I knew. We figured out the basic mechanics of the AI within the first few months, and we've only had to adapt the resulting tactics when the AI has changed or new gimmicks were added.

Dark Miasma is a toggle-heavy set. Not because it has a ton of toggles, but because the toggles it have are expensive to run.

On top of that, typical solo play for Dark Blast is cone heavy, which means it's EPS heavy. Combine that with two expensive toggles, and you're asking for endurance pain.

Most people do not ED-max their endurance. Most people do ED-max their damage. That means that most people get more DPE increase out of Cardiac than they do out of Musculature, because they mostly only get the 2/3 of Musculature that ignores ED, but probably get most if not all of Cardiac. Slotting Musculature increases DPS as well as DPE, but higher DPS only tips the balance over higher DPE if you're going to run out of foes before you run out of endurance. If you play like me, and charge continuously from spawn to spawn, having larger the larger DPE ends up leading to higher long-term DPS, because I don't normally ever run out of end, where I would if I had lower DPE.

As mentioned, Cardiac also makes it less expensive to spam Howling Twilight, plus things like Judgement.

Now, my Dark/Dark is not a Soul or Dark Mastery, and Dark Consumption clearly changes the equation. I might at least experiment with Musculature in that situation.

I think the issue here is that, for some reason, the way you played before left you thinking you needed to do all those things. That level of planning combat in CoH has never been necessary to the degree you outline above. I and those I played with never did any of these things except target Nemsis LTs last and DE emanators/LTs first, and we essentially never had any problems.

(By the way, I and everyone I play with still tries to defeat Nemesis LTs last, because enough stacked Vengeance on survivors (especially bosses) and they will still wreck you, Inventions and Incarnates notwithstanding. We target Cairn and Quartz emenators, and ingore/AoE the rest.)

Heh. Being familiar with the episode, I didn't actually read the entry. I just dug up a link to it for others to reference. That's neat.

There is no coding involved. This can all be done with the existing powers system. My version is actually less work. The FE change was extremely labor intensive because EVERY power for Scrappers, Tankers and Brutes had to have fire damage added. My version requires only BS powers to change.

Edit: I see other posters have the same misconception. Making BS's BU into a full FE treatment is only conceptually simpler. It's far harder to implement.

Interesting. I wonder if that derived from the Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life", where a child with godlike powers would "wish [people/things] away to the cornfield" if they displeased him. IMO, it was an extremely dark episode, even by original Twilight Zone standards.

I soloed the whole arc with IO'd characters, but my support ATs soloed it at +2/x6, and the only inspirations I used were BF-types in the Hero-1 mission. (There are lots of mezzes with all the Rikti, plus The Honoree having stuns in his ranged attacks.)

I even posted a YouTube video of my Dark/Dark corruptor's fight with Trapdoor.

Er... again, as someone who's been here since day negative three, I don't know what you're talking about. There have are only ever been two ways to complete door missions in CoH that I can think of: click on something or defeat/destroy something. Your choices in achieving those goals are: fight to the objective, and then do the needful, or stealth/leeroy past foes to the objective and do the needful.

If you have examples of alternatives to those "strategies" I'd like to hear them.

I have to say, I'm with Sam here. I've been playing CoH since pre-release, and I don't remember missions taking strategy, ever. The hardest mission I can think of back in the day was the "rescue friendly Oranbegans" map full of Malta, and that was only hard when you took a large team in. The only "strategy" we ever used on that was to try and not aggro multiple groups, the risk of which was the thing that made it hard to start with.

I always remember laughing at the time limits we were givin on missions. They were beyond generous for even my most limited soloers. And I have been in the habit of clearing maps, even when I don't have to, since before ED. (Then again, I didn't try to run missions solo with anything that wasn't picked because I knew its AT or powerset choices allowed it to solo with some facility. Dark Miasma and Rad Emission Defenders soloed more easily than Empaths, for example.)

This answer may be easy, but I don't think it was very effective. That outcome doesn't establish parity between the character and an army division. The army division was likely a response to the escalation that would have occurred had the hero failed. It doesn't imply that the character could have achieved the same thing the army could have.

Even if we assume the character could have matched the sheer output of an army division, that further serves to reinforce the point. This is a fairly low-level hero running that arc - someone with only a fraction of the in-game power of an Incarnate-infused level 50, and they were the right power level for the job. If they were on par with an army division, what's that imply about a level 50 Incarnate?

You're assuming that there's downtime. That level 50 heroes get time between epic contests for the safety of the multiverse to go stop the local Hellions with Pyronic Justice applied in passing. A realistic plot isn't going to be stopped by blowing up some guys stealing a purse on a street corner. If the level 50 isn't functionally omnicient, they have to find out where to go to light the right Hellions on fire, or it won't be effective. They don't just pop in, they need to effectively run a mission and click glowies to find clues. Do they have time to do that while the Rikti, Nemesis, Praetorean Earth, and a litany of other things that actually specifically need level 40+ characters to tackle them are going on? I wonder.

I don't ignore the meat of your posts. I recognize it as not accepting that the game doesn't actually, mechanically work that way. If you take 8 player characters who can solo any given, say, 10 AVs one at a time, and build a sensibly composed team of those player characters, they will crush the 10 AVs even if they are faced all at once. Well-assembled player character teams are significantly stronger than their constituent parts alone, and every part of the team we're talking about can take down these AVs by themselves. There's a reason why the RSF AVs are over-level. That was their limited gimmick at the time, and player characters were also less powerful. But we grew past that gimmick - the RSF is a breeze these days for teams of people who can solo AVs, and so the devs escalated the tricks they give AVs today.

Sure, now I said 10 AVs, and 10 is a very specific number, and we don't have to stop there. Eventually, if you pour enough level 54 AVs on our heads, yes, that is a problem a team won't steamroll. The devs could possibly build trials around that. Would it "work"? I don't know. I would probably enjoy it if it did, and it would definitely add variety. I am not sure I specifically consider it superior to 1-2 "big scare foes", just as my own opinion.

I really have no idea why anyone on your team phases out. Thus my question.

No. They are in the same zone as you for every other purpose.

People only get out of phase when they are far apart. Thus, no, they can't see you (or vice versa), and you can't see the same NPCs, because you're too far apart, phasing notwithstanding.

This is a wholly unsubstantiated claim.

For better or worse, Sam, I don't think you'd be able to do that if that's all the game offered. It's the height of speculation on my part, but I doubt the game would still be here if that had been all it offered after all this time.

Maybe it doesn't, but that's not common knowledge, and if you're not there for a mission, it's not likely anyone will set one.

There are a lot of things I wished worked like this. Especially when it's how it works for players. The Phantasm summoned by Master Illusionists comes to mind immediately. I hate when that thing locks a hostage down. (Caltrops do that too.)

"Assuming you're soft-capped to start with" is simply not a safe assumption.

Yes, it does. I meant to mention that and forgot to, so thanks for bringing it up.

War Witch was portrayed this way back in the old, original CoH comics.