seebs

$15/month gets you access to the game, same as it always has. Plus some points. You could buy those points for $5. I'd call it $5 worth of points.

Yeah, they do that a lot. The Acer I got has a 540M, everything else in the product line is just the Intel HD.

Not Always Right.

What about:
3) SSA auto-scales up to 50 with you.

It's not as though "missions which can be played at higher levels" are a technology unknown to the game.

Heh, looks like my BS/WP scrapper is gonna be respeccing. I didn't really pay close attention, I just followed my usual pattern of "take the slower but higher damage power because it'll be useful once you have a ton of recharge".

Oddly, this has not been the case for me so much. My usual preferred style of play is cautious setup. I like stalkers, and I like characters with stealth. Two of my most-played characters are nrg/dev and dp/dev blasters, and I'll happily spend 2 minutes trip mining to kill a spawn rather than 30 seconds shooting.

... So farming's really way off in lala land compared to what I otherwise do.

The goal here is not reducing difficulty, but ensuring that everything but TFs is by-design soloable for all ATs/sets. That doesn't necessarily always mean lower difficulty; what it does mean is avoiding things that are utterly fatal to some sets and harmless to others.

Right now, there's a lot of content which is punishingly bad for, say, stalkers or blasters, and people who like melee sets are laughing at it.

Imagine that we introduce a dramatic moment where you're hit with mag 50 immobilize, and an enemy stands 22 feet away from you plinking away at you with the equivalent of a T1 blast. All the blasters laugh and giggle, and all the melee sets say "this mission sucks". Or how about an enemy who can one-shot anyone in the game, but has no mez protection, so the controllers gigle and laugh, and everyone else says the mission sucks?

Player-targeted ambushes are, I think, a basically bad idea. I think they should be player-location-at-spawn-time targeted. The existing design is game-breaking for some ATs, and also utterly incoherent; it makes no sense for people to hear combat, and run directly away from it to attack someone who left the scene before they got into view of it.

They shouldn't.

Keep in mind, I don't handle teams well, but that doesn't mean I'm bad at the game. My general experience with MMOs is that if thinking can affect outcomes at least as much as twitch can, I'm usually quite a bit better than average. If it involves numbers, I'm probably good at it. If thinking of strategies helps, I can do that.

The word "easily" is not part of my claim. I just think missions should be basically winnable for all ATs/sets at default difficulty. I said nothing about it being easy.

Keep in mind, the game has difficulty settings for a reason. If I'm on a character whose build sucks, I might play at -1. On a lot of characters, I'll play at +0/x3 or +1 just for normal content, and maybe +2/x8 once I've got my build together.

All I'm complaining about is fights which by design are punishingly hard or impossible for some ATs, and trivial for others.

Okay.

It does for me. I have social stress issues when dealing with strangers. Not all autistic people do. Of the other autistic people I hang out with in MMOs, two can't handle strangers even as well as I can, and one will raid with strangers all day every day without the slightest trouble. (But I can talk to strangers on the phone, and she can't. Go figure.)

I'm fine with dying occasionally. I'm not fine with missions I cannot complete even repeatedly retrying them.

No, it wouldn't. What makes an MMO interesting for me is stuff like the market, and social interactions.

Well, yes, that would be the point; any AT and primary/secondary ought to be able to clear missions that aren't TFs. Missions which can't be soloed are buggy.

Look, maybe bring a friend is always an option for you. It's not for some of us. Me, I'm autistic. I would guess that, for every three days in which I spent over an hour in CoH, I team with people maybe one of those three days. For at most a third of the time I'm on. It ceases to be fun if I have to group more than that -- and that assumes I'm grouping with people I know and get along with. Strangers? It is never non-stressful for me to group with strangers. It can't be. The idea of non-stressful interaction with strangers is not one compatible with my experience of the world.

Now, sometimes it's fun, and sometimes interacting with strangers is a part of the path towards them becoming not-strangers. But most of the time, I do not want to group with even my friends, let alone strangers.

Furthermore, the entire point of the signature arcs is to show off a story, right? I can't follow stories on teams. I had done the Faultine mission arc probably four times before I had any idea why it gave me an O portal. Why? Because I had no clue what was going on; I was too busy trying to track green arrows on a map to actually read all the stuff. So eventually I did it slowly with a friend who was willing to sit around while I read stuff and answer questions about the story stuff, and this resulted in me finding out what the story was.

So...

Yes, a mission that is not a TF, which can't be soloed by any AT and primary/secondary at +0/x1, is buggy.