Boss Changes

I think my biggest issue with the new issue is just the sheer number of bosses that show up.
My wife and I were doing some of her mission, she is a illusion/kinetics controller (28ish), and i a Dark Melee/Dark Armor scrapper (27).
She put her mission slider to +1 and we were trolling along in a banished pantheon mission just fine when we hit a red totem. I was like, OK, better drop back a bit and plan this out.

So we start wailing on the boss, she drops phantoms and spectral terror, and i turn on various armors, hit soul drain and start beating on the boss (luckily, it was a solo boss)
It was a pretty harrowing fit, the boss dropped me repeatedly to about 1/4 or less of my hit points, and i am left frantically hitting dark regen or a green inspiration. Thats not an issue for me.

My biggest complaint is that there were something like 13 of the bosses in this mission. I think it took us almost 45 min to do this one mission, and that was after some friends came in, exemplared down, to help us out. 13 bosses in one mission is just stupid, and it really brings the grind into the game.

I wouldnt mind more Lt's floating around with some minions, as a couple of Lt's with mezz'ing can make the fight pretty scary, but i definately dont like the boss frequency.

The toughness is fine, but that is with teaming, i also agree that if the mission is a solo mission, the boss should con white or yellow to the player (-1 and 0 respectively), that way there is the solo possibility. or something along those lines

Edit: also, i would like to point out that the amount of work you developers put into the game is amazing and it shows "in-game". Also, the fact that you explain your thoughts eases me greatly, as your reasoning is very sound.

So keep up the good work, and please keep the player base informed, this player would certainly appreciate it as would his wife.

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Eighth - you've hit the nail on the head! Positron and I were just talking about this; part of the beauty of the game is that you don't need to wait in order to get to fun. I don't want to lose that in the rush to encourage grouping. Like I've said, I'm going to review the missions this week and see how many have bosses at the different level ranges.

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Thanks a lot!

And while you're at it, please consider the missions in a more general manner: my 38 scrapper has done all her missions except kill X (how much more boring can a mission be?) and two missions: a "forced grouping for 4" mish that won't go away even if I do the kill X and an AV that now needs 6 people to kill because he regens too fast.

I've wasted 4 hours on the past 3 days trying to form groups to kill the envoyee of shadow the 3 times it appeared in the story arc. And the battle was neither fun nor challenging: it was just loooong... A scrapper in the last mish even said he regreted not being able to put his powers on auto and I was really tempted to grab my book and do some reading since I had the "rythm" perfectly after 10 minutes of training.

Sure, the AV are unsoloable now. But they aren't any fun at all for groups either.

Hrm...

I've done the TV trial twice... The first time we got wiped in the reactor... reactor go boom... we all died.

The SECOND time we wiped the floor with the reactor. We were all around I wanna say level 26... So pre-I3 I have no problem thinking that there was an 80% success rate.

The only thing people are forgetting is that each class has a role to fullfill... We didn't lose a single person in the reactor...

I was the Tanker, my job was to jump into spawns first and take the damage with a grin, after that it was to taunt the crap out of whatever my team-mates were attacking...

Scrappers and Blasters
They went SINGLE TARGET ONLY on enemies, and they assissted each other while I stood back and kept most of the attention on me.

Controllers: They controlled things.

Defenders: They healed, debuffed, and buffed

In the reactor it was a free for all, we split into attack teams...

Me and a Scrapper would hit one group, the controller would team with a defender and lock down another,

The other Scrapper and Blaster would tear through whatever was being locked down, our other Defender jumped from attack team to attack team healing

We had a 3rd scrapper who's job was to stand right next to the reactor and constantly heal it...

And I think we had one more Blaster who kind of flitted and picked off stragglers that the Controller had locked down...

We never had much of a problem with the mission...

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I wouldn't try the TV reactor with the current changes if my life depended on it. The Bosses take FOREVER for me to drop now it seems. They do seem like they are tougher than +1 sttaes.

How about revamping task forces to make them, I dunno, actually fun instead of a series of normal missions with a worthless reward at the end? When I want to group, I usually do trials, I have a lot of fun with those. When I want to solo, I should be able to do my missions at my leisure. Want more grouping done? Make some cool grouping activities. I've always been interested in having a trial where you fight ALL the Praetorians at once

I apologize if this is a repeat of something someone else has said in this thread (didn't see it looking through).

What bothers me about the recent changes is not the individual difficulty of the boss changes but the level at which they spawn in Task Forces, both numerical and relative level. I have seen many times now TF missions spawn exclusively +3 and even +4 bosses (in addition to minnions and lts.) to the highest lvl character in numbers of up to 6 per group for an 8 man TF set at the default difficulty level. Worse yet is that the TFes sometimes don't spawn at this difficulty level until you are multiple missions into the TF, giving people a huge sense of lost playing time and frustration.

This behavior exaserbates the problem of the "one shot kill" in my opinion. If two bosses attack a character at the same time for 1/2 damage, 3 at 1/3, etc. it essentially still creates the problem of insta kill. Given the difficulty and number of bosses spawning it is a rarety that this does in fact NOT occur. Even tankers and scrappers can suddenly find themselves dead if 2 or more bosses attack them at the same time.

My experience with this comes specifically from the Bastion TF and the lvl 24 respec TF both of which I've seen this occur in multiple times now. The Bastion TF is esspecially bad as most of the TF is resolved to tunnel fighting around blind corners and small spaces.

I've bugged this at least once, but it would be nice for someone to acknowledge this behavior either as intended or as a bug.

statesman why didn't you just scale boss hp and dmg in line with the mission slider??

that way people can play pre-issue 3 if they want. At the same time why don't you incentivize by boosting xp for those higher up the slider, ie mission reward xp mainly and reduce it for those playing on the lower end of the slider.

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Like I've said, I'm going to review the missions this week and see how many have bosses at the different level ranges.

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Statesman, please read this! This doesn't help any if the missions are randomly intermingled. Please have a separate listing for the group missions on the contact's mission screen.

The key here is not "I want to solo X% of the time in the life of my character", it is "I want to solo when my friends aren't on, and group when they are".

I think we're using two different concepts for "bosses" here. There's the named, end of mission/story-arc "boss" that it seems Statesman is wanting to buff. Then there are the generic "bosses" lilke Freak tankers and CoT mages that are regular parts of random spawns. I'll only get a "named" boss in missions that indicate that. However, those non-named, generic bosses can, and do, show up in regular missions at nearly all levels of play. The non-named, generic bosses also become more common in random street spawns as you progress to higher level zones. This is causing a problem for me as Statesman has said that "street sweeping" is for the soloist. Fine. Then why are there greater number of these "bosses" in the street spawns if he doesn't want people to solo the bosses? Heck, I've seen groups in Steel Canyon and Skyway City that were composed of lts and "bosses" with no minions. According to what I'm hearing now, we're not intended to solo spawns like that ... except they are street spawns which are supposed to be for the soloists. I don't have a problem with multiple bosses in a spawn in hazard zones. There just seems to be too many bosses in the regular city zones and "solo" missions and story arcs.

So, are we supposed to be able to solo via street sweeping or not? Are we supposed to be able to solo multiple bosses at a time or not?

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there are a few missions that have multiple bosses in a single spawn and a few more that have multiple bosses spread throughout the map. The vast majority of boss missions have a single boss appear (no matter what the team size) in one of the end rooms.

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And SOME missions have 2 bosses in the end room. Case in point, I got a mission to investigate a "nearby" troll hideout that the Tsoo were seen going into. I accept the mission, get there and learn that I must "Bust gang leaders, their crews, rescue 3 office workers."
Well, I rescued the hostages and found the gang leaders... a Troll boss and a Tsoo boss together. With inspirations, I was barely able to do 1/3rd damage to the Tsoo boss before they both kicked my defender's behind.

I realize this doesn't fall into the "vast majority" of missions to which you are referring to... but what the heck do I do? Not play until my friends are on to help me? Pick up some random teammates that might get me killed again? Or just hammer away at them, get defeated, and run back and try to hammer away some more before they heal up... and keep repeating until they are "arrested" or I reach my debt cap?

It all seems rather unheroic to me and I am not having fun.
I am not having fun. You fail to deliver the fun I am paying a monthly fee for. Give me fun, or else...!

Oh, and even less fun is the frequent disconnects I've been experiencing kicking me out and further negating my progress by resetting the mission so that any progress I've made is erased... but not that debt. I never see a rollback on my debt! And in case you couldn't tell, I'm not one of those freaky debt junkies that enjoys being defeated because its "challenging" to be defeated several times before I manage to overcome. Suck, suck, suck, suck!!

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States, it has been the experience of a great many players (mentioned on other threads) that *multiple* unnamed bosses show up on missions that they entered alone.


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I'll check this!

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I'll testify to this. I just did a solo mission with at least 6 unnamed bosses in it - there may have been a couple more, but I'm positive a minimum of 6. There were 4 in the last room alone, albeit spread out enough that I could do them one at a time. Granted, it was the end of a SA and I play on Unyielding setting, so I kind of expected that, but it was still a bit painful to say the least. On the other hand, I did manage to get my way through it solo, although those Rikti Magus were seriously nasty business, and required more than a little preplanning and luck to take down.

He said the problem was that bosses were too easy for teams.

I still don't understand why there was not a bump to bosses when facing teams, and why the change had to be across the board.
Now there's a problem for solo-ers, and I guess, no problem for teams (although I doubt that very much).

Also if I'm facing a boss that is 31 but fighting in every respect at 32, why not just have the boss be 32nd level?
Am I really missing something here?

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States, it has been the experience of a great many players (mentioned on other threads) that *multiple* unnamed bosses show up on missions that they entered alone.


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I'll check this!

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Please do. I've had this happen multiple times when soloing just in the past few days, in fact.

I even had one mission with no warning of a boss -- it was one of those missions that you get after ending another mission -- that spawned a lv. 30 Rikti boss. I was soloing as a lv. 28 scrapper.

So that Rikti boss was a *lovely* shade of purple that I got to enjoy as it danced on my corpse.

I've got a screenshot of that mission, if you'd like to see it. But it is just a symptom of a systemic problem -- lots of bosses in missions that we've been told shouldn't have them.

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A solo player (unless the mission calls specifically for a boss in a spawn override) will create spawns with minions and lts. ONLY.

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I think this may be accurate as far as dynamic in-missions spawns go. (It also explains why getting the Legionaire and Banisher badges is a pain without a group!) As others have mentioned, though, there are a LOT of static boss spawns in story arcs and other missions that appear regardless of group size. I'm very glad to see you'll be looking into that; thank you.

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As for why we put Bosses in missions at all – in other words, why isn’t everything solo-able – the answer is simple. We want gameplay that encourages the best part of the game: teaming up. Soloing is fine, but a MMP really shines when you meet other people and play alongside them. I’ve made many good virtual friends through other MMP’s that I simply would not have done if I could solo everything all the time. I admit it: I’m anti-social. It’s hard to get me to group up with strangers. But after I do it, I always wonder “why don’t I do this more often…” I might still be anti-social in “real life”, but in MMP’s I’m a social butterfly (I have no doubt that this will appear in sigs for years to come…)

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I can't quite decide whether to agree that teaming is the best part of the game. Going through a good Task Force in a good team is definitely up there...but I would say that "story" is a pretty big contender as well.

And that's my real problem with unsoloable missions. Teams don't want to pause for people to read the clues. Teams don't want to do missions from one person's story arc consecutively. Teams wind up having to do the same mission over and over because every member of the team has to get it cleared. If I want to get the full experience (in the non-XP sense) from a mission, I really have to solo it.

Task Forces and Trials are different. The whole team is there for a single arc. There's no sense that you're imposing on anybody just to help *you*. There's no arguing over whose mission you'll be doing next, and there's no need to kill the Clockwork King eight times because everybody's stuck with copies of the same mission. There's still some problem taking time out to read the story, but at least everyone can see the clues (I wish there was a way for everyone to see the contact's mission complete text). Teaming up for Task Forces and Trials is a blast.

Begging for help on a single mission is not a blast. It's not a group of people all going through an interesting story; it's me, imposing on other heroes so that I can get further in my own story. That really makes me feel like a total jerk. It's moderately fun to help other people out on their missions, but without the storyline behind it it's no better than street hunting. Teaming for individual missions means I go from spending all my time progressing through story, to spending 1/8th of my time progressing through story and 7/8ths of it killing random mobs in an unknown context....and that's assuming that the group even gets around to doing any of my missions, which is by no means a certainty (especially if some members of the group are higher than me). It's just not fun.

(One suggestion I've seen that would make it better is to allow team members to consolidate identical missions; that way, if you find two or three people with the same story arc/mission set, it's more like you're doing a mini-Task Force than a round-robin charity. That seems like it would be rather difficult to implement, though.)

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Like I've said, I'm going to review the missions this week and see how many have bosses at the different level ranges.

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Please, also consider the way that even a relatively small number of unsoloable missions can "clog" your contacts, preventing you from continuing a story arc or from being offered any more soloable missions until the unsoloable ones are cleared.

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States, it has been the experience of a great many players (mentioned on other threads) that *multiple* unnamed bosses show up on missions that they entered alone.


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I'll check this!

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Crey missions are a great example of this. Named Bosses are typically a Power Tank, or just an unnamed Power Tank at the end of the mission. And then you can get a few Paragon Protectors along the way -- even Solo.

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I liked City of Heroes for one reason mainly. I could play solo. I am a Dad and when things come up with the kids and the wife I MUST leave the computer you just can't REASONABLY stress reasonably do that in a group. Its not fair to the group. You say MMP shines with a group that may be true. But yours was different it finally was a place solo players could fight solo and just chat with other people. You did not have to fight as a group. But as time goes by each change seems to move away from that. I just feel you are working against me now. As a dad I may need to look elsewhere for an online game.

Terry Bailey Sr.

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I could not agree more. This is my exact situation. COH is the only MMP I've every played, ever had a desire to play. I love the source material and the pick it up and have fun with it whenver nature of the game made it a perfect match for my life. I actually prefer to group, but the sporadic nature of my play makes it hard to do so (folks you've gotten to know will understand, pickup groups don't and shouldn't be expected to). The group of folks I hang out with now is starting to pull out of sight (my main just made 30 and they are mostly 35+ now) and finding teammates is getting increasingly difficult. I'd love to play a Kheldian, but the thought of getting to 50 is, well, unthinkable.

I'm not going anywhere and I still have tons of fun creating ALTs, but I think the game has just gotten next to impossible for my main. I want to experience the content, I just can't touch most of my missions now (and street sweeping is booooorrrrringgggg).

Maybe now that the respec is on Live I can rework my Inv/Nrg tanker and make the push for Striga - from what I've seen looks like a fun place to play.

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I think my biggest issue with the new issue is just the sheer number of bosses that show up.

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Last night me and two friends (scrapper, blaster, defender) were doing a Devoured end-of-arc mission that had 2 bosses in pretty much every other room (and there were lots of rooms). About half were +1 (mission was HardBoiled).

Mission took forever and the blaster finally gave up in frustration (she got one-shotted once and two-shotted about 6 times - this with force fields). Maybe there's something special about Devoured, but they tended to gun for the Blaster and Defender (didn't seem to matter how long my scrapper solo'ed the boss - one or two blasts and it'd switch to the blaster).

I really enjoy the new difficulty in 30+ missions and I'd hate to lose that. But there's gotta be a happier middle ground.

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What bothers me about the recent changes is not the individual difficulty of the boss changes but the level at which they spawn in Task Forces, both numerical and relative level. I have seen many times now TF missions spawn exclusively +3 and even +4 bosses (in addition to minnions and lts.) to the highest lvl character in numbers of up to 6 per group for an 8 man TF set at the default difficulty level. Worse yet is that the TFes sometimes don't spawn at this difficulty level until you are multiple missions into the TF, giving people a huge sense of lost playing time and frustration.

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I ran the second Striga TF three times in the past three days.

First TF: Got wiped from three wandering bosses in the second mission. Two people dropped (leaving five); we finished the TF in about three hours.

Second TF: I believe one person dropped, leaving us at six or seven. A couple more dropped on the second to last mission after repeated deaths. The TF took us about four and a half hours.

Third TF: We had trouble getting enough people for this, so we recruited one guy just to get us over the limit (he dropped immediately). We lost an exemplar on the first mission (down to five), and another to connection problems about halfway through (down to four). All squishies; I was the only one who'd done the TF before. We finished the whole task force in NINETY MINUTES, mainly because the only bosses we encountered were end-of-mission bosses.

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Eighth - you've hit the nail on the head! Positron and I were just talking about this; part of the beauty of the game is that you don't need to wait in order to get to fun. I don't want to lose that in the rush to encourage grouping. Like I've said, I'm going to review the missions this week and see how many have bosses at the different level ranges.

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You also have to consider that if the Bosses are now +1 coupled with the fact that bosses could already spawn on missions at +1 you end up with a Boss now effectively spawned at +2. I've had this happen a few times since the patch.

i'm sorry Statesman but I think you are wrong for forcing us to team up to fight bosses. People will team up no matter what. But I want to be able to do missions on my own no matter what class i'm playing even if there is a boss at the end.

I tried to do a mission solo as a L33 Blaster. It was actually a set of chain missions about the Council Robots.

There was a Boss on everyone of the 3 missions. Boss had one other Bot to support it in every mission. First two Bosses coned orange and the third Boss coned RED.

Each of the first two Bosses killed me twice before I could drop them. Thanks to Awaken and Rest. The last Boss killed me 3 times and I never got it down below half.

The Bosses were killing me in two shots. After the first shot I was reduced to using influnence to keep myself up and it went down hill from there. Their Range attacks were hitting me as hard as their melee..so it didn't matter if I tried to keep the distance. Their attacks cycled as fast if not faster then mine. Even Nova enhanced with 2 ACC, 2 Dam SOs and Aim and Build UP, and TWO Damage influence failed to even reduce the Boss down to half.

After all those deaths I logged in total dispair and disgust and over 60K of debt.

Like a previous poster, I also am an adult and was attracked to your game because it was different. But mainly cause it allowed me to log on for 1 hour and feel I had accomplished something. If I wanted to be in a team, I had that option. But now with the missions that generate a Boss or two...it's no longer an option. If I wanted to continue the story I had to now waste part of that hour Broadcasting and Spaming looking for ppl that might want to help me out.

A Blaster's defense is a hard hitting offense, but when they come across a Boss they are just meat to be eaten by that Boss, for they now can't even take down a Boss of the same lvl or even one lvl less.

Don't FORCE ppl to do what they don't want. Ppl came to this game because of the difference from all the other games out there. I don't have to have 6 hours available to have a chance to get something done. And since this game is mainly about combat..looking for a team to fight a mission is one thing..but it gets old with nothing to do on the side as one waits.


Mystro - L35 Controler
Phazer - L33 Blaster

i walked into a clear out the warehouse of "the family" mission with my difficulty set on "rugged". I readthe mission description and it said nothing about needing help or bosses in any way shape or form. I get to the last room and the next thing i know im held then dead.

So i go to the hospital hit a contact buy 6 of those resist hold effect inspires 3 lucks 3 dmg and 3 respites. Go back pop them all kill all the minions start hittin the boss. Get held then haymakered and dead.

Now this is from the ONE boss in the game i was NEVER even mildy afraid of originally. 2 deaths for like 18k debt in less then 5 minutes. I ended up pullin in a lvl 35 buddy of mine to kill this punk which was a complete and total waste of his time.

Another mission i had said there would be a boss so i got help from a controller friend of mine. We get to the last room to find a COT boss mage and a freak tanker standing next to each other. to say the least we were both dead in about 15 seconds. Both ONE SHOTTED by the tank after being held by the mage. YES ONE SHOTTED not combod like someone above suggested.

Now i LOVED this game when it first came out. I loved the fact you could solo or team with no problems. But this boss beef is so completely and totally uncalled for its not even funny. In all seriousness the dmg needs to be nearly halved and there accuracy dropped a bit as well. Bosses should take a while to kill so either uppinthere HP or resistances is understandable. But you must have almost DOUBLED there damage.

Statesman--

I believe that in your desire to furthur "encourage teaming," you've overlooked something. The fact is that COH already encourages teaming. This is simply the way it's designed: you log on, you start running around, and either you start looking for people on the Team tab or you simply ask the people you see to join up. It's a little more complicated for specialized or high-level missions, but essentially, COH teaming is very simple. This is in part because, other than buying inspirations and updating enhancements, there's not a great deal to do for team prep other than putting together the right balance in the first place. I used to play Anarchy Online, and I swear that it used to take an hour sometimes for people to get together and actually do a simple mission. The ease of teaming in COH is one of the first things I noticed when I started--instead of having to wait for people to fiddle endlessly with equipment, buffs, etc., you can pickup a team on the street. Even teaming with other zones has been pretty easy, and I've never had to wait an excessive amount of time for everyone to be ready. Yes, there've been some bad teams, but on the whole the experience has been very positive.

This being the case, I'm afraid I can't see this latest "encouragement" as anything other than coercion. Yes, a good MMO should have good, even great MM elements, but there are going to be times when people just don't want to team up (and other posters have already given examples of these). If you attempt to encourage grouping by discouraging solo play, you risk losing those players to other games at least some of the time. Look at it this way: would you rather have people log on to COH to hang out and solo a few missions when they don't have time or the inclination to team, or would you rather have those people go play something else, potentially at COH's expense? While we're in the game, we're reminded of how much we like it and how much we'd like to go on subscribing. If I have to save my gametime for the occasional weekend teamfest, my interest in the game itself may gradually wear away. This isn't some kind of threat to unsubscribe, btw--just an expression of my earnest desire that the game will remain accessible and enjoyable to my style of play.

Finally, in terms of leveling, archetypes, and the conceit of the game: COH promises a superhero experience. I don't mind being support of whatever kind for my group--in fact, it's thrilling when a group works well because you and the others have played your roles well. But sometimes I want to go out and do my Dark Knight kind of thing, and having to comb the city for low-level minions and avoid my own missions (which I've had to do increasingly often) is a big letdown in terms of game concept. Please don't assume that there's only one way to enjoy the game. I do enjoy and look forward to group content, but please, allow me my solo, I-can-only-be-on-intermittently-between-real-world-tasks gameplay too.


--Robyn on Triumph

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You say above that the spawn override takes place when a mission calls for *a* boss - does this mean that ordinarily, missions entered by a single player should not spawn more than one boss?


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Typically, yes.

But...there are a few missions that have multiple bosses in a single spawn and a few more that have multiple bosses spread throughout the map. The vast majority of boss missions have a single boss appear (no matter what the team size) in one of the end rooms.

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Well, this really depends on level. When bosses get the toughest, in the late game, especially 40+, you can get some missions with a dozen bosses. I remember a mission in the World Wide Red arc where I dealt with 10+ malta bosses - Zeus titans and Gunslinger types - in the one mission, include a pair of titans.

I like grouping. Forcing me or anyone to group is gonna kill your bottom line Statesman. Forcing us to group against an AV is acceptable, they are the toughest of the tough. Thats comic book, and even those of us that may not like comics so much will not call you a git for that. Forcing us to group so we can take on a couple of minions and a lt? Theres words for that. Isnt there enough games on the market for that...wasnt there a game that when you hunted the lowest of the low you only had a small chance of winning? If I/we wanted that game we could play it, and pay elsewhere. Change it back, let the slider take care of the work. Then you can datamine how your favored scrapper/blaster AT is doing against the rest of the crowd.

"How do I put a Signature in this thing saying I hate Statesman?
Mad dog Krieg of house goliath

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As for why we put Bosses in missions at all – in other words, why isn’t everything solo-able – the answer is simple. We want gameplay that encourages the best part of the game: teaming up. Soloing is fine, but a MMP really shines when you meet other people and play alongside them. I’ve made many good virtual friends through other MMP’s that I simply would not have done if I could solo everything all the time. I admit it: I’m anti-social. It’s hard to get me to group up with strangers. But after I do it, I always wonder “why don’t I do this more often…” I might still be anti-social in “real life”, but in MMP’s I’m a social butterfly (I have no doubt that this will appear in sigs for years to come…)

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I'm currently a stay-at-home dad. I play when my daughter is asleep, and I log off when she wakes up. I don't group very often because I don't want to have to log off in the middle of a mission and leave people hanging. Therefore, I solo my missions. I enjoy the storyline, and when I do get the time to group, I choose to do TF's.

You already have methods to encourage grouping. Archvillains (which do show up in core storyarcs at level 35+). Task Forces. Respec trials. The pure soloer already misses out on 25% on the game because of this. Don't reduce the soloer to monotonous street hunting - there's no chance to enjoy CoH's story that way. Your statement is trying to tell me how I should play the game. That's the wrong attitude. The goal should be for as many people as possible to enjoy the game, in whatever manner they choose.

I think the problem is that you're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. People want to be able to solo a boss. Maybe with difficulty, maybe requiring good tactics and inspirations, but 1 boss should equal 1 hero, assuming the same level. Requiring a team to take down one equal level boss doesn't make people feel heroic. Requiring a team to finish a storyarc isn't friendly to those who bought CoH to log on for a 1/2 hour, play one mission, and log off.

To sum up, the easy solution is to change the math. Make 1 boss = 1 hero.