halfflat

I note it is very convenient for those who are barely or sporadically affected by these downtimes to assert that their timing is for the best.

The fact that they have to have a regular weekly maintenance downtime at all is an indication of their failure to make a stable system. Updates, emergency bug fixes and spontaneous hardware existence failures are, of course, another matter.

If they regularly screw-over a particular segment of players, then they are ultimately going to lose a proportion of them. But more than a purely capitalist calculus, it is also intrinsically unfair. It is, in effect, NCSoft saying: we'll take your money, sure, but don't expect the same quality of service.

Sometimes being fair requires more effort. It is sad that NCSoft feel no compunction about taking the easy, unfair route.

I've been on three so far. Twice with a kinetics defender, and once with a fire/rad controller. All of the trials succeeded, but I'm never doing it again.

+ Bizarrely and arbitrarily complicated mechanics.
+ General chaos in execution.
+ Lots of arbitrary and meaningless defeats.

In all three attempts, it ended up being a zerg-rush from the hospital for squishies. If you don't have a lot of HP to begin with, a >50% damage pulse and a random attack from some mob means you're back in hospital again. Most of the time is spent running around trying to dodge damage and heal back up to full before the next pulse. It's both tedious and disheartening. It would be more bearable if it felt there was a coherent plot and sound reasons for the objectives and the obstacles, but instead they all seem ad hoc post facto justifications for the mechanics of the trial.

I'm hoping that the threat of VR drops only from Keyes' is just a bad joke.

In the random chaos of a trial with many characters running about doing all sorts of things that may or may not be on task, it is easy to feel uncomfortable even without having a particularly bad response to the stresses in it. On one hand, it is hard to know if one is meeting one's responsibilities: when things go well or go poorly, it is based more on some sort of group average ability than the efforts of any one individual. On the the other hand, this same issue makes it hard to judge how well everyone else in the team is doing or not doing. For me, it seems that these trials (and some 8-player TFs, too) encourage either strict micromanagement by leaders, or a sort of hazy follow the crowd and look out for yourself approach, neither of which are terribly satisfying to me.

Recently I ended up as leader of a Lambda trial league (post trial attrition, and I was left with the star.) So I wanted to try something different. I recall, before acquiring all the incarnate level bonuses, how demoralising the collection phase was. Typically everyone would power ahead, leaving squishies behind, who in turn would spend most of the time legging it back from the hospital and being reminded of how useless they are in that phase as all the items were collected regardless. This time, after checking that everyone in the league didn't object, I wanted to try making the collection phase a clear-all.

The idea was: each team sticks together; any foe encountered on the way to a collectible is defeated, as a group; no team member needs to go to the hospital. Could this be done, and still meet the objectives?

It turns out, yes! We had a mix of Lambda trial veterans and newbies, and this was the first time any of us had tried this approach, and certainly the first time I'd ever tried leading one, and we ended up with all the pacification grenades (though it was very close) and nine of the acids. We defeated Marauder handily. Some league-members said afterwards that this was the first time they had felt useful in the collection phase, and the first time they didn't spend half the time back and forthing from the hospital. I think everyone had a good time.

We didn't get all the possible merits. But we did have some massive fights against nigh-overpowering foes, which we won! There was no frantic running away, or scrambling chaos. It felt ... heroic.

I want to recommend this approach to others who run Lambda. I don't know if a similar aesthetic can be brought to bear on Keyes.

Just in the interests of representing dissenting opinion, I did not enjoy the Keyes trial much at all. I found the health mechanic annoying, the chaos exasperating, and the constant stream of people returning from the hospital disappointing.

Honestly happy that most people seem to be really getting in to it though!

This is by far my favourite morality mission — I take it every opportunity I can. And I've submitted in-game feedback to this effect, which I hope made it to somebody!

It might, in fact, be my favourite mission in the whole game.

My only criticism would be that the first time I did it, it was not at all clear where these Fortunatas were lurking.

I've been frustrated by the following for years, and it's getting to the point where I just don't want to play my /regen scrapper anymore. This is a rant post, but I am hoping that there may be some tiny chance that it effects some change for the better.

Issue #1: No -regen resistance.
And consequently, most fights are either nigh-trivial, or instantly deadly. Fights against longbow are especially annoying. Even Instant Healing is no use against the -regen that comes out. Regen has exactly one defensive trick, and -regen completely neuters it.

Issue #2: Revive leaves one vulnerable
So after being defeated by -regen, what can one do? Revive, and get back into battle? No, because between Revive firing and one being able to do anything, there is a period where one is nothing but a sitting duck, with all toggles down, ready to be slain by whatever defeated us in the first place. Even if you survive that, there is no grace period in which one can toggle back on Integration or any other defensive toggles, or invoke Dull Pain, or anything of the sort. The only time Revive is safe to use, is when you don't need to do it.

Regen has been made into a clicky, reactive set, very different from its origins. Latency doesn't help any, and any sort -recharge makes things a lot worse. But even when one can use judgement to prepare for a fight with Instant Healing, say, it doesn't matter if the foes have -regen. When latency means you don't get that DP off in time, Revive can't help you. [And even if it did, chances are DP or MoG triggered and is now unavailable.] It's infuriating. Let's see it fixed.

So happy about these changes.

It won't make my kin defender significantly stronger — on large teams, where this change makes a difference, the vast majority of her contribution comes from speed boost and fulcrum shift — but hugely more fun to play. Trying to keep speed boost up on a team of size 5 and up with wandering blasters and solo-happy scrappers was like trying to herd cats, but I am acutely aware that SB is a significant part of my contribution to the team's effectiveness.

I imagine that once players get used to the new buff mechanics, it will make the kineticist's life even easier: other players will want to be within thirty feet, which in turn will make it more likely they'll be in range of heals and FS.

Also, this change is making me consider respecing ID back in because until now, it completely wasn't worth the buffbotting required to make the resistance bonus useful.

Just as an aside, I don't know where the notion of kinetics being overpowered comes from. It's certainly a good set, but on-par at least with dark and rad. It has come into its own with the greater defensive power and overall survivability of large teams these days — it has next to no control and is relatively weak with defence (especially pre-FS), and soloing with kinetics is more 'exciting' than safe.

The fundamental problem is that the other Interface powers are not nearly as good as Reactive.

Personally, I'd like to see Interface effects extend to buffs and debuffs — as it stands, Interface extends the divide between damage and support classes. (Though I guess blasters need all the help they can get!)

I've heard that the tank-mage justification for no self-buffing or healing many times, but I can't put any credence in it. If defender self-buffing were that overwhelming, we'd be prohibited from making teams of 3 or more defenders. If defenders buffing defenders is working-as-intended, defenders buffing themselves can't be so terrible.

The whole game though, as far as I know, contains no instance of single-target buff that can be applied to allies or to oneself. So I suspect the true, underlying reason for the lack of self-buffs of this sort is purely code related. Changing it probably would entail more work than can be justified. Of course, there are excellent non-single target buffs and heals that some defenders enjoy right now. This does relate too, of course, to the long-standing debate about click buffs versus some hypothetical PBAoE-style replacement.

Now with the incarnate destiny buffs providing superb self (and team!) bonuses, there is even less weight for the balance argument.

/signed here too.

I love the thematic idea of the regen self rez. Bitterly disappointed that I get to use it successfully in very few circumstances. As it is, I wait until Moment of Glory is ready to fire, but even queued up, whatever defeated me in the first place is usually hanging around just waiting to do it again, when I'm on reduced hit points, immobilized, and with all my toggles off. I rarely get MoG off, and when I do, there's still an even chance that it comes too late to save me.

All it needs is a little period of invulnerability, to give us a chance to get a toggle up and a heal off. If we have to keep the only partially-healed aspect, how about a short-term big +regen boost to help tide us over the waiting counter-attack?

It's tier-8, has a 5 minute recharge, and requires you to be defeated before you can use it. It should have a bit of oomph to it!

Next time a rare drops in a trial, I will happily inform everyone that I received a [Dynamic Sugarcane]. The very rare, of course, will be the [Omega Waffle].

Got to agree with the sentiments of Dispari and UberGuy. Why punish players for failing to perfectly negotiate a completely unnecessarily complicated crafting system? There's no strategy to getting a very rare, it is simply a matter of running the two trials over and over and over until one drops. At which point you have to decide, then and there, exactly which one is going to help you get the T4 you want, or else pay 150 threads later.

What makes a game mechanic or design decision good or bad? It should come down to two things: does it further a given game-related goal or behaviour? and is that goal or behaviour going to be more fun or engaging?

This complexity, random reward lottery and player punishment must all be aimed, speaking charitably, to some end desired by the developers. To me, the only apparent expected outcome would be to make people farm the trials even more and spend more time planning out builds through scrutinising the various build trees and power descriptions, the latter of which are terribly under-documented in the game itself. If the goal was to have players spend more time trialling and more time reading web pages, then it is probably successful. But is this fun and engaging for most players?

Personally I find the arbitrary complexity, lack of strategy, punishment for errors in an environment with insufficient information and the farming of trials all tiresome and frustrating. But perhaps I'm in a minority.

Mmm, just occured to me. What if Repel were replaced with a PBAoE toggle that did -damage and slow, but had an Afraid component. Like Hot Feet, but with debuffs instead of damage. Would have similar effects in terms of foe movement, while being more thematic, avoiding problematic issues of knockback, and also providing a bit of safety.

I like Kinetics, but it does have flaws. There are almost certainly sets that deserve attention first, but nonetheless it would be nice to see them addressed.

There are two major issues: one is the buff-bot aspect, with Increase Density useful only situationally given its very short duration, and Speed Boost on a full team being a significant and needlessly repetitive fraction of play time; and the second is the lack of self-protection in a set which by design has the defender both near the action and drawing a lot of agro.

There is also the inconsistency of Repel: it doesn't fit thematically with the set, and acts against the nature of the set, which encourages the defender to be close to enemies. I'm sure some people love it, but to me it shouldn't even be in the set.

Before Siphon Speed was given a +recharge component, it was a disaster of a power. Temporary superspeed and single-target slow without stealth, with a long recharge, requiring a to-hit, which drew agro. It was debt in a can if used for travel, and woeful as a slow power. When people take it now, it is because of the +recharge.

Many suggestions have been made to improve the quality of life issues associated with keeping SB up on a team, and many of these replace it with some variation on a PBAoE power. Let's do that, making Siphon Speed redundant and saving buffing grief (I don't think most people enjoy the mechanical aspect of incessant single-target buffing. Someone referred to it as balance-through-tedium.) Siphon Speed is then freed to be an intrinsically useful power, rather than a sop to the inability for kinetics defenders to Speed Boost themselves.

The lack of self-defence is a real issue. Transfusion, Transference, Siphon Power, Fulcrum Shift, Siphon Speed — they all attract a lot of unwelcome attention. Yet the debuffs from these powers are nowhere near enough to deal with the consequences. As described above, Siphon Power's not much of a damage boost power, and its damage debuff ability is single-target and not enough without stacking to help much with survivability even with a single opponent. The stamina drain of Transference is not backed by any -recovery. The -regen with Transfusion is small (it would be nice to see this boosted to match some of the other defender primaries!) and not relevant to survivability. Siphon Speed is a single-target slow with a long recharge, that doesn't debuff recharge. Only Fulcrum Shift has the ability to make a measurable impact on incoming damage, and it is still insufficient to protect the defender.

My wishlist includes: remove the needless repetitiveness of the buffs; distribute -recharge and slows in various enemy-targeting powers to assist thematically in self protection; improve Siphon Power (e.g. with -recharge and slows!); add some -recovery to Transference and more -regen to Transfusion; add some -recovery and -recharge debuff protection to the buffs. Of course, fixing the issue with defeated foes would be very welcome, especially in these fairly laggy new trials.

EDIT: My mistake, Siphon Speed does indeed debuff recharge ... but only by 20% (on a single target, and barely stackable given the recharge time.) Certainly never noticed it making a significant difference in game play.

Certainly agreeing with many of the suggestions above. Especially the separation of body design from clothing design.

What I'd like in particular though, and this would solve many of the matching and transparency issues mentioned by others, is to have proper control over the materials in each clothing item. Currently we can select: zero to two colours from a palette, which allows one low-saturation option per colour value; and a model, which includes a fixed texture, which incorporates glossiness, bump map, some uncustomizable colours, and I think also some coloured textures which are blended with the customizable colour bits.

Suppose instead we could, for each model texture, select not only the full gamut of colours for each incorporated material (up to and including transparency), but also define the other material qualities. For example, one could then match the martial arts shorts with one of the tops; there would be no need for a special glossy tights option, and so on.

For interface, I imagine that one, as now, would first select the clothing item. But then instead of selecting primary and secondary colours, one would select primary and secondary (and ideally, ternary etc.) colours and materials. The materials could simply be a fixed list of the currently extant combinations of material texture, glossiness, and so forth. Full customization might be nice, but this fixed list option alone would allow a huge number of new possibilities, and allow us to mix and match components so much more successfully.

As said above, Rad does come with some good tools already ...

For my Kin/Psy, it was excruciating fighting some groups until the EPP, where I could grab Mass Hypnosis and Dominate. A group sleep and two mezzes (Dominate and Scramble Thoughts) finally tipped the balance, especially given that Dominate works on pretty much anything.

TLDR version: choose a helpful EPP.