[ QUOTE ]
In levels 1 to 22ish, this system works perfectly. Things are about as hard as we wanted them to be. But as soon as players can purchase single origin Enhancements, they rapidly make the above calculations almost irrelevant. A player enters a mission or a zone and can rapidly breeze through +1 to -1 leveled spawns using the calculations above.
A solo player (unless the mission calls specifically for a boss in a spawn override) will create spawns with minions and lts. ONLY. My concern at the mid and higher levels is that a solo Archetype isnt all that powerful. Their inherent weaknesses and strengths really come into play post level 25.
[/ QUOTE ]
Aren't you contradicting yourself here? You first say that a solo player can breeze through a mission, and then you say that a solo player is not all that powerful. A well-built solo player has no problem with +2s and +3s for the most part, and any solo player that could
effectively solo bosses before is not going to have any trouble doing so now, because this game is about enemy neutralization rather than fighting them straight up. Things only go bad for good players when neutralization becomes impossible.
This holds true for pretty much any non-Blaster archetype, as follows:
<ul type="square">[*]Controller - Before pets it can be fairly slow going, but afterwards it's no issue for pretty much any controller to solo enemies. (This includes Mind Control; the experience drain from confuse is greatly overrated.)[*]Defender - A defender specifically built for soloing will take a bit longer than a blaster, but be extremely difficult to kill while doing it, with less downtime. (Rad, storm, dark, and kinetics primaries mainly.)[*]Scrapper - An extremely well built /DA, or just simply a decently built Inv/Regen/SR don't have any trouble at all. Heck, my SR was taking Terra Volta Raider packs by herself with very little downtime during the 20s, and with the exception of the gaping AoE defense hole, breezed through the 30s. And we won't talk about post-Elude, where I can take on maximum sized mission spawns of +4s,
including bosses, just fine if I pay attention to what I'm doing.[*]Tanker - A decently built tanker that sacrifices some defense for offense can start really pounding the snot out of things in the 30s, especially once they get to their 35 and 38 slugger hits.[/list]
Note that all of these are due to support skills, including defenses, debuffs, knockdowns, and the all-important Stamina. That is a large part of the problem with this: The game is too binary right now. You have the support abilities to nullify the enemies, or you don't. That's pretty much it. A /dev or /ice blaster can almost nullify a heck of a lot of enemies. A /fire can't. (Actually, what the crap
is /fire good for anyway?)
So, exactly how do their weaknesses and strengths come into play in the late game? As far as I can tell, my Scrapper can ignore the attacks of 99% of the enemies she faces, including bosses, Monsters, Archvillains, and so forth. It takes either an acc buff, def debuff, or something to hit for more than my maximum hit points for me to give notice. Seeing as how enemy buffs/debuffs are comparitively rare, and only a few Archvillains can even hit that hard, this leaves precious few enemies to pose an even remote threat. Exactly what is my weakness here?
My controller gets the amazingly stupidly overpowered EM Pulse, and with the standard Gravity holds can keep the enemies locked down indefinitely while the sings crush them into paste, while the Rad secondary neutralizes what enemies are not held. I don't consume much endurance doing this, I just sit there and toss stuff out occasionally to pretend I'm doing something. And he doesn't even eat the alpha strikes of most groups, since he pulls the Singularities into the group with SS stealth. Where is my weakness? Enemy Dispersion Bubble, which is nonexistent outside of Possessed Scientists post-35, and Fungoids, which are also almost nonexistent post-35. Beyond that, it takes a ridiculous quantity to even bother me.
The simple fact is that enemy difficulty is still there, it is just that some characters are much, much better at nullifying what the enemies do than others are. If you look at the predominant builds in the game, you'll see that a large majority of the successful soloers nullify a large portion of what the enemies do to a great extent. It's not really fighting the enemies when they can't do anything to you. Look at the laundry list of the most popular builds for higher levels right now: Fire and Illusion controllers. Regen, Inv scrappers.(and as soon as people figure it out, SR too) Fire tankers. /Dev blasters. Etc. All of these can nullify the majority of what the enemy is capable of doing, eliminating a large portion of the risk involved.
It isn't SOs that do it, it's the fact that enemies are outright nullified by the available powers. Increasing boss power doesn't make it any harder except for those characters that have not chosen to neutralize them, and this will further sideline builds that cannot. Don't get me wrong, I like the tougher bosses. I really do. But conceiving that it's going to make a huge difference for anything but the players of the game with lesser builds is a joke. The real solution here is to make the enemies buff/debuff more than they currently do, to offset the neutralization that they receive. Don't just make it more difficult for the average players, make it difficult for the good ones too. (The Council Sonic guns are a step in the right direction IMO.)
Were I in your shoes, I would start looking at the situations that cause this and what can be done to rectify them, rather than attempting to modify the numbers involved.
