UberGuy

Everything seems to be back.

As mentioned, it doesn't have to cost you any inf. If you're patient and/or willing to run a fair number of iTrials, you will get everything you need as drops.

I have run 10 characters through the iTrials enough to get them to either 3 VR and 1 Rare, or four VR abilities, not including Alpha which I had already gotten to VR status before the iTrials came out. Doing so required around 50 iTrial runs per character. Some were less, some were more. This was without spending Empyreans or down-converting any VR or Rare components. (When I was lucky enough to get spares, I held on to them and used them to make other abilities.)

If you get unlucky or impatient, and I did a couple of times, the only inf-based cost I was willing to spend on progress was the 25M inf investment to convert four Uncommon components and 100 Threads into a Rare. For most purposes, I don't think the 100M option for a Very Rare is worth it, not at least because it also requires four Rare components

I don't have a strong opinion, but I will convey that I think taking a "squishy" on iTrials is fine. Just let more durable characters soak the alpha and/or take aggro, then go to town. The most useful thing you might not have that I would recommend, especially if you go on any Lambda trials, is some sort of stealth. This helps keep nasties off of you when no one else is nearby to take aggro for you.

FWIW, I have run hundreds (really) of iTrials on Dark Miasma Defenders and Corruptors, and once I get up to two level shifts, I have done things like solo Lambda crates or taken the Alpha on the idle spawns at the start of a BAF. Like you, my characters have high recharge and fairly modest defense (20-25% ranged, mostly negligible to other vectors), so I suspect a Rad Emish character of the sort you describe should be capable of similar things.

So, to try and wildly oversimplify what Arcanaville is saying, some of the defense/resistance treatment imbalance is due to an honest-to-goodness asymmetry in how they are implemented (despite there being some mathematical symmetry in what they do in limited comparisons), and some of it is due to what the devs have done with the tools the mechanical asymmetry offered them in the defense space.

I despise the door penalty. I have always hated this mechanic. I have encountered it in other games before. They were FPS games, and I ended up not playing them because it was a central mechanic of the game. I played team combat games where you were allowed back into the action immediately, and they didn't suffer any undue balance issues because of it.

It sounds from ZM's history on the matter that this was probably designed heavily around the BAF's map structure. The BAF hospital is right there, within a super-powered hop/skip/jump from the furthest possible combat zone. Designing in a penalty also has relevance to outdoor phases of the Lambda trial, which also allows fairly immediate return to combat.

Beyond that, I think someone among the devs had a pointy stick somewhere dirty that they felt an additional defeat penalty is necessary than the loss of time spent in the action. Traveling back into the depths of Lambda's collection phase is plenty of time penalty. Even with the hospital teleporter system in the UGT, if your league has moved deeper into the current map section you have to run through the map to catch up to them, and in some sections, that's not a trivial amount of running around.

Lets not forget that these trials are possibly the deadliest CoH/V content ever made with the possible exception of the AV fights in the RSF and STF. They are radically deadly by design, where the AV fights are replete with unresistable damage, multi-hundred mag mezzes, and effects that remove fixed percentages of your health in steps designed specifically to kill you if you don't get healed. The non-AV content is overloaded with boss and EB rank critters, mostly picked from some of the most dangerous critter factions yet presented to us - critters who are well stocked with "exotic" damage types, uncommonly resisted mez effects, and various dangerous debuffs. In short, it's meant to kill you fast and frequently unless you're buffed to the gills and paying attention.

I'm not afraid of these challenges. I don't dislike them. I'm usually buffed to the gills, and I usually pay attention. I've seen, though, what they can do to some people's characters. The challenge level of the iTrials can mean those people spend a lot of time in the hospital. If I end up on a league of too many of these people, I can spend a lot of time in the hospital too - having a lot of experience and a tricked out character only means so much if the league keeps dying, leaving you alone facing something meant for 10+ people. Spending time traveling back to a fight is not particularly exciting. Spending additional time just waiting to leave the hospital before even getting to travel back is just plain frustrating.

I'm glad they didn't implement the other ideas they had for how to do this, because they sound spectacularly awful. That doesn't mean that I have to like what they did give us.

Congrats.