One thing that I've always found to be an interesting challenge, is to only play with the enhancements that drop for you. You could throw trading with the other teammates and possibly pick your origins to maximize chances of getting something useful, but otherwise, no buying enhancements of any kind. It makes the way you slot your characters interesting, because you often don't have the enhancements to optimally slot everything, so you need to pick the best setup. Plus you can get a lot more use out of the secondary effects that don't get used as often.
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He did mention there was a team wipe and some fights were impossible without redcuing the difficulty. That sounds something like a challenge.
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Problem is ... that only happened twice in 37 levels. We'd be thrilled had it happened -more- often ... much more. Then we could step back and say, 'Ok, how do we tackle this thing.' But as the game is now, we can't push the slider far enough to generate these situations, and the purple patch puts a hard limit at +6.
For reference, the ones that gave us trouble were a +3/+4 Clamor during the 'AV Buff' and a +6/+7 Mary Macomber.
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He did mention there was a team wipe and some fights were impossible without redcuing the difficulty. That sounds something like a challenge.
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Problem is ... that only happened twice in 37 levels.
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OC, how are you going to get your debt badges? 
Debt badges are faster to get at 50. 
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Debt badges are faster to get at 50.
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So true, so true... I hope. I only have the first three. I want them all gosh dangnabbit!
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OC, how are you going to get your debt badges?
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Ironically, I just got the final one on my stormer last week. 
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One thing that I've always found to be an interesting challenge, is to only play with the enhancements that drop for you.
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That's an interesting idea, plus you could rack up prestige. Honestly, I've been wondering how we'd fare if we just stripped out enhancements altogether. (It bothers me to purposely create a sub-optimal build. I'd be much happier if I could increase the difficulty of the game, but...) I think all that we'd need to do is stack two or three more tactics. We're already damage capping the blasters and scrapper with Fulcrum Shift. As Tuxedogin mentioned, some of us dont even have stamina or hasten. My attacks cycle so fast, I can only get through three of them. I dunno ... just thinking out loud ...
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One thing that I've always found to be an interesting challenge, is to only play with the enhancements that drop for you.
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That's an interesting idea, plus you could rack up prestige.
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Yeah, I played this way with my blaster since I was always teamed, and frequently those teams had one or more Kin defenders, so the need for optimal slotting was reduced and I was able to get to almost level 30 before I wanted to buy SOs, and then I had plenty of cash on my own to do that.
Session 33-34
Vacations, etc had us at partial team. Ran Doctors Ally mission, Creys Folly sweep, and some Warburg missions taking us to 37.5. All were +2 con, except the last 3 WB missions where we talked an SG member with a L39 scrapper into taking missions at +4 for us.
Its funny that you should think of somthing like this. About a year or so ago a friend of mine and I decided to come up with an 8 hero team who would play exclusively together with the intended purpose of doing task forces. We sat down and came up with what exact power sets and power pools each hero would have, and what each heroes role would be. Things like squishy protectors (a scrapper who's sole purpose was to protect our squishies when they got in trouble), secondary tanks (should the main tank go down in combat), a designated invisibility/teleporter (for those missions that could be stealthed), etc... We were even going to start an SG just for our team of 8 called Task Force Theta. It wasn't all that hard finding people that we knew who would be down for playing a hero who already had his/her power sets and power pools pre-decided. However, getting 8 people together at the same time on a consistent basis was nigh impossible. It was such a cool idea, and we had so much fun coming up with the concepts, but in the end it all collapsed.
Your idea sounds really cool, and I hope it all works out for you. Just thinking about where we would have been right now with Task Force Theta makes me wish it would have all worked out.....
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Your idea sounds really cool, and I hope it all works out for you. Just thinking about where we would have been right now with Task Force Theta makes me wish it would have all worked out.....
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Sounds like the very same idea. Sorry to hear the scheduling didnt work out, it has been a challenge for us too. Luckily, it was such a blast starting out that its kept everyone interested, but I'm only hoping it'll be enough to keep the team together to L50. A couple other members in the SG tried to put this together on the Villain side and I think they got into the 20's before scheduling broke up the team. (I don't know that they given up yet, I only know that its been a problem.) All I can say is ... try again! It's worth the effort.
Yeah, I think scheduling did us in on the villain side. I had to drop because of work hours and I know everyone else was having problems as well.
Session 35-36
Ran a few more Warburg missions to get one of us to L38 for the Sewer Trial. Cleared the 150 Rikti. Team is now 1 L36, 5 L37, and 2 L38. Started the trial despite knowing the tank was having frequent disconnect problems. Pulled the first Kraken upto the entrance tunnel. It was L42, and the fight took about 5 minutes and rewarded about 3600 xp to the L37's. I knew it had been reduced from the Kraken farming days, but considering that a Rikti boss gives about 2200 xp I think the reduction was excessive. The tank disconnected, and we waited some 10 minutes for him. He didn't show, so we continued down the shaft. One of the controllers disconnected for a while, so the remaining 6 of us struggled on. Both managed to reconnect long enough to grab weapons, but we didnt get out of the shaft until the timer was down to 50 minutes. Knowing that the remaining Kraken fights alone would take 20+ minutes, things weren't looking good. The tank kept dropping in and out, but we managed to get the generators down with about 12 minutes to go. We hadnt cleared enough of the tentacles but gave it a go anyway. That proved fatal, though its unlikely we would have had enough time to clear the tentacles and take down the head. We're confident that had we not suffered disconnects (these were personal ISP problems, not game groblems) or had we been a bit more efficient managing our time, then we would've been successful with this +4, +5 con Sewer Trial. We'll try again next week.
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Session 35-36....We're confident that had we not suffered disconnects (these were personal ISP problems, not game groblems) or had we been a bit more efficient managing our time, then we would've been successful with this +4, +5 con Sewer Trial. We'll try again next week.
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This trial at +5 is the most challenging thing we've faced so far. Honestly, even without the disconnects..assuming we would have had an extra 10 minutes at the end...I still don't think we would have beaten it in time. When we were using the cannons on the head, it really felt like we were hardly denting it. In the past, we've taken the head down to roughly half on the first go. This makes me think that we may have to drop generators more than 3 times to kill it and thats what eats up lot of time.
Next time I will be 38...I think +4 instead of +5 will make a noticeable difference in how fast I can bring down a boss. Also we need to bypass as much of the shaft as possible...especially the Krackens. We should use stealth and pick our fights...grabbing the blinkys and dropping down as fast as we possibly can. If we can get the 4 Krackens down at the bottom and clear the tentacles with 35 - 40 minutes to go...I think we got a good shot at beating this.
For all the times I've done the sewer trial, its always been either defeat or the easy win. To beat it fair and square at +4 will be really gratifying.
Oh...and the way they nerfed the XP on this trial is an absolute joke. We killed loads of +5 Rikti bosses, 5 Hatched Kracken monsters...and I picked up less than 2 bubs 
Jack's always saying risk = reward. Well...the reward for the sewer trial does not even approach the risk.
I think you have proven one thing based on what you and other team members have said.
Running through CoH with the "perfect" team will become tedious and boring.
Since many people who have 50's say it is boring after the second or 3rd time thru I guess I'd prefer the way I am getting thru the game. A lot of Soloing and most of my grouping in the supposedly dreaded PUG's, the other grouping with my 2 SG mates.
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Session 35-36
Ran a few more Warburg missions to get one of us to L38 for the Sewer Trial. Cleared the 150 Rikti. Team is now 1 L36, 5 L37, and 2 L38. Started the trial despite knowing the tank was having frequent disconnect problems. Pulled the first Kraken upto the entrance tunnel. It was L42, and the fight took about 5 minutes and rewarded about 3600 xp to the L37's. I knew it had been reduced from the Kraken farming days, but considering that a Rikti boss gives about 2200 xp I think the reduction was excessive. The tank disconnected, and we waited some 10 minutes for him. He didn't show, so we continued down the shaft. One of the controllers disconnected for a while, so the remaining 6 of us struggled on. Both managed to reconnect long enough to grab weapons, but we didnt get out of the shaft until the timer was down to 50 minutes. Knowing that the remaining Kraken fights alone would take 20+ minutes, things weren't looking good. The tank kept dropping in and out, but we managed to get the generators down with about 12 minutes to go. We hadnt cleared enough of the tentacles but gave it a go anyway. That proved fatal, though its unlikely we would have had enough time to clear the tentacles and take down the head. We're confident that had we not suffered disconnects (these were personal ISP problems, not game groblems) or had we been a bit more efficient managing our time, then we would've been successful with this +4, +5 con Sewer Trial. We'll try again next week.
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More Trials/TF's/Missions in the game need to be timed and or have objectives in them other than mind numbing mob killing. That's what's ruining this game and the devs don't seem to get it yet. I would personally love to see DDO style quests merged with CoH missions to create a hybrid full of mobs, traps, secret doors, optional objectives, larger team size for certain missions, etc.
90% of everything in this game is killing mob after mob to complete a mission with no variety. You approach almost every mob knowing exactly how they're going to react and what you need to do to defeat them. There's no thinking involved anymore which imo has greatly diluted the skilled player base and made this game way too juvenile. I couldn't even begin to count the number of friends that have left this game because of the lack of challenge, frustration with devs, and game bugs. If the devs would take the time to listen to the player base and what they want in the game, Coh/Cov could be a big as WoW and some others.
The simple facts that knowing the Sewer Trial, which for the most part is the only thing to come close to a challenge because of it's uniqueness, SS TF's, and that almost all 8 of us have played and known each other since beta or shortly thereafter have kept us going.
Alot of people still play this game because the base concept of it is very sound and entertaining. Combine that with the amount of flexibilty in character creation and it's almost enough to keep player's interest and look past it's flaws...... Almost......
Session 37
One member couldn't make it, so we took the opportunity to PL-up one of the blasters that had fallen behind by a level. After which, the team is L38, with both blasters at L37.
Session 38
Sewer Trial Round 2 with L42 mobs and four players on Teamspeak. We did the weapons grab in about 25 minutes, with each player taking one. Then we cleared the 4 Krackens and Rikti spawns at the generators in about 20 minutes. We errored on the tentacles. The DA scrapper was more than able to take down the tentacles solo, but the rest of the team tried to assist with the thermite cannons. The range on them is too short, and we only succeeded in drawing aggro off the DA scrapper and wiping all the squishies. Somewhere in that 15 minutes, unbeknownst to us, a Rikti boss wound up near the hydra head while we did the generator take down. Also, we wasted a little time organizing the the coordination of the generator take down. Coming back to the head, we laid into it with the particle cannons. Only to discover the unexpected boss that proceeded to one-shot two or three of the team. Yeh, we blew that. The next round of generators went smoothly, and we had a long window to attack the head. Still, we barely put a dent in it, having only done maybe 15% of its health. With 8 minutes to go, we could've done another round but we knew it wouldnt be enough. So, we punted. 
Some observations ... none of us could see the graphic indicating the shield was up. Presumably this is a bug? We had to watch the combat logs. Also, for L38's the Particle Cannons ticked for 42 damage, and for L37 they did 28. Does anyone have any numbers for this? The random weapon assignment was problematic as it prevents or at least complicates working out a strategy beforehand.
What we can do next time...
1. Try to get all of us on Teamspeak.
2. Save 5 minutes during the weapons grab by hustling.
3. Have only 4 toons grab all 8 weapons, probably blasters, tank, and scrapper.
4. Pre-assign generator responsibility for faster coordination.
5. DA Scrapper and Empath take down tentacles while rest of team does generators.
6. Pull and nuke subsequent rikti spawns rather than use single target attacks near generators.
None of these are particularly innovative ideas, and we've all used them before in this trial with regular teams. We simply underestimated how much more efficiently we needed to manage our time and have no excuse for not employing these. I'd really like to beat this thing at +4, but in the end we're going to be limited by the damage of the particle cannons. At our rate last night, we would have to do 7 generator take downs. I'm fairly confident we can improve that, but even at 4-5 its going to be very tight on time.
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Do you want awesomeness or challenge? If you want the second, I'd say un min-max a bit. One tank and 7 fire blasters running on invincible could be interesting. A lot of defenders or trollers will make things easy.
Heck, one tank, 6 fire blasters and a TA/A on invincible sounds like my kind of fun.
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Why bother with the Tank or the Defender? Everything would die within the first few seconds.
I remember running a team with two or three Fire Blasters and two other Blasters. As a Scrapper, all I really did was mop up the bosses. Everything else was on the floor before I could even jump into the spawn.
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Reminds me of EverQuest, where the baddest team I was ever on (as a necro) was 4 necros, 1 mage, and a paladin who mostly sat around healing himself. We were high teens and were pulling cyclops after cyclops in Rathe Mountains by the gypsy camp. Only the level 45 named Cyclops drove us away, and that was after we got it down to half health. Live is very good when you have 5 pets on the thing and just spam up a new one when one dies.
Of course, even though that was logically the best type of group for battles (lots of throwaway tanks + decent blaster backup) it was hard to get together such a group given most people weren't playing pet specialists.
Those were the days you could give your pet daggers to speed up their attacks to dagger speed. "Warriors" running around hoping for god drops that were half as good as a pet's slices for 80 damage at dagger speeds.
"Hey! You knocked generic cola all over your precious D20 books!"
ED: Now I know how Nancy Kerrigan felt: "Why...?!? Why...?!?"
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As a team we chose the power sets we thought would be best, and then we picked the characters we wanted to play. For most of us it was to try something different, for example this is my first tank, overboards first blaster, our scrappers first DA scrapper, etc.
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Hehe, once you go scrap, you never go back.
Everyone on the scrapper boards would smile at your comment, as it's almost an in-joke over there. Everyone tries something different. The scrapper tries a different scrapper primary, as to him that's wildly different. 
"Hey! You knocked generic cola all over your precious D20 books!"
ED: Now I know how Nancy Kerrigan felt: "Why...?!? Why...?!?"
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The scrapper tries a different scrapper primary, as to him that's wildly different.
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If I had the time and character slots, I'd probably level nearly every combo of scrapper primary and secondary.
Btw, I have to quote your sig ... perfect.
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Ahh, "invincible" at level 5. Life is fun again. In most games, the toughest you'll ever be relative to the bad guys is level 1. Here, with invincible, it's the hardest the game will be, and it gets easier as you level.
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Session 39
The team decided to postpone the Sewer Trial until L39. The general opinion was that the scaling of the weapons with regards to level was the only limiting factor. We had already cleared the mission twice against +4/+5 spawns. So, we left the Sewers. Those of us that hadn't already, trained up and bought L40 hancers.
We ran the Envoy of Shadows arc from start to finish in about 1 hour and 45 minutes. Spawns were primarily +2 and +3. We took down the AV all three times, once at +3, once at +2, and I'm not sure of the third time. Made about 5 bubs.
Session 40
Ran some regular missions on Invince for 5 bubs. Nothing noteworthy.
This is really interesting! Thanks for posting this stuff you guys!
Session 41
Attempted Sewer Trial again. The patch caused some stability problems for one of the controllers. He disconnected three times while collecting weapons before giving up. In the confusion, we fumbled a fight with a Kraken and didnt get out of the shaft until 50 mins left. We took a shot at the Hydra anyway, to test the weapons at L39. We were able to do about 25% in each generator takedown, but obviously we didnt have enough time to do four with seven players. Controller reinstalled the client in the meantime.
Session 42
Woot! Sewer trial completed with team of seven L39's and one L38.
We got the four particle cannons with about 12-15 minutes elapsed. We were about to drop down when the scrapper discovered his particle cannon had disappeared. Turned out, for some reason the previous nights weapon was still in his inventory when we started. When it was removed, both were removed, or so we theorized. Rather than attempt it with only 3 particle cannons we opted to restart. That of course required a trip back to Founders Fall.
Round two weapons collections was again completed with about 75 minutes remaining. Cleared the generator spawns and four Krakens. With about 50 minutes remaining, the scrapper and the empath started on the tentacles while the team took down the fourth Kraken and wore down the generators. The thermite cannon was useless, regular attacks were sufficient. First assault on the Hydra started at just under 40 minutes remaining and we did a little more than 33% of its health. Second assault triggered the half health rikti spawn early in the window. With four of us locked in the long particle cannon animation, we suffered a couple losses, but were able to regroup out of sight of the hydra. Cleaned up the Rikti and started third generator takedown. During the third assault at 25 minutes remaining, the timer of the tanks first particle cannon expired and both particle cannons were removed. I checked my timer and only had 2 minutes left. At the same time, I took a oneshot hit from the Hydra. Uh oh. The empath was on her game and propped me back up immediately. Fired again and we got the second rikti spawn. Knowing the weapons would expire at any moment, we chose to ignore the spawn and fire away. The two trollers rocked those Rikti like they were Hellions in Perez. We dropped the Hydra and gang-nuked the Rikti. Somewhere in there my particle cannons disappeared.
Trial complete with 20 minutes to spare.
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So what I seem to be gathering from this thread is that with a well built, well organized team, City of Heroes is not able to provide a fitting challenge, even when you do everything you can to make it as hard as possible?
Very interesting....
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He did mention there was a team wipe and some fights were impossible without redcuing the difficulty. That sounds something like a challenge.