What in heavens happened to Malta?

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CoV's zones are made with an entirely new design philosophy from Heroes, to be more self-contained and require much, MUCH less zone-hopping just to do regular missions. They also show a different side of the world than Paragon City- they're not in America, much less one big sprawling half-ruined city, and you really feel like you're in a different place. That, and I think having Heroes and Villains essentially invisible to each other is kinda silly.

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Heroes and villains ARE invisible to each other even now. Villains come to rob Paragon City banks all the time, but if you were a hero, you'd never know this. Heroes protect banks all the time, but under completely different settings, and never meet the actual villains. This is a system that's perfectly applicable to a hero-villain shared zone (that's how Ouroboros currently works) where villains meet NPC heroes and police while heroes meet NPC villains and gangs.

Far as the CoV "improvements," I find most of them to be for the worst, such as zone-locks and the world half empty settings. There's no point in being a villain if there are only other villains around to be evil to and there's no point to steal, plot or destroy when the world has already been stripped down and destroyed. Plus, there is the whole "servant of Arachnos" overriding mechanic which wouldn't have had to exist were these villains in a real city, rather than in a sci-fi/fantasy ghetto ruled by an evil overlord.

You can still show a different side to the big city by having villains occupy some of the most run-down zones, even outside the war walls, and it wouldn't have required kicking villains off to their own little island. I will say, without a shadow of a doubt, that making City of Villains into a standalone was a mistake, because that is what required the two games to be entirely separate.

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Well, there's a reason a lot of missions involve coming to instanced Paragon City and trashing it.

At the time, the 'expanshalone' idea was innovative, meaning players could have an entirely different experience if they wanted while saving the developers making a new engine. Of course it didn't work that way in practice, but it was an idea. Either way, it's far too late to change it now.

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Well, there's a reason a lot of missions involve coming to instanced Paragon City and trashing it.

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I think there should be a lot more. We have 9 instances - one Mayhem per 5-level range, except 1-5 that doesn't have a Broker at all. All the other instances supposedly in Paragon City are indoors and don't actually FEEL like it for the most part. Sure, the City of Heroes offices are sufficiently different, but the warehouses are very similar, the sewers almost the same and the blue labs and pink caves are identical. There ought to be more instances OBVIOUSLY in Paragon City in the game.

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At the time, the 'expanshalone' idea was innovative, meaning players could have an entirely different experience if they wanted while saving the developers making a new engine. Of course it didn't work that way in practice, but it was an idea. Either way, it's far too late to change it now.

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And I wish it had worked, but it was both derivative and embarrassingly small. When CoV launched, it had not a third of the content of City of Heroes and borrowed pretty much all mechanics from it, including such that made no sense in a villainous context, like "leading" kidnapees out. Hell, the whole contact system is inappropriate for the supposedly "proactive" villains, but to saddle them with mandatory Mayhems which tend to grate after a while. I don't think there ever was a chance in hell that City of Villains could have made it as a standalone, for which we're seeing the evidence now with "both games" being treated as "the game."

Frankly, I think if they'd stuck with an expansion, then villains could potentially have gotten a lot more.

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So, in an attempt to get this thread back to the original topic: Did they change the spawn rates for Sappers at some point?

I usually don't run Malta missions, but I ran three or four recently with my Brute, and I came across a total of two Sappers.

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For some reason I predict an inevitable argument about the game being too easy.

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Indeed. I use Malta in my first arc and they're the focus in my second. Stay away, blasphemers! I chose them BECAUSE they're vicious. Too bad they're worth 1/2 of Freakshow and KoA are worth like 1/6. [censored] stupid as hell. "Risk vs. Reward" my foot. Anyway...

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Blue: ~Knockback Squad on Guardian~
Red: ~Undoing of Virtue on [3 guesses]~

I've been running Indigo's arc, and that's giving me a much more concentrated dose of Malta than I've had on villainside.

I like them. They're what a high level enemy group should be like.

Now I'm wondering what it would be like to run an 8 man team set to Invincible against them. After a few full team sized spawns full of sappers and engineers (and their blasted turrets) you'd know you'd been in a fight

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I usually don't run Malta missions, but I ran three or four recently with my Brute, and I came across a total of two Sappers.

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I'm not sure when that happened, but yes, something changed a LOOONG time ago. Say, a couple of years ago, there used to be a Sapper in every spawn, it seemed. Getting my Stone Brute to 50 in I7, that was quite literally the case. Getting a Blaster to 50 a couple of months ago, however, saw barely a Sapper per mission.

Which is all for the best, as far as I'm concerned.

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The heroside is false, as well, because what you've done to "save the world" is the same thing everyone before you has already done. You are, in practice, just a hero, one of many.


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No CoH isn't false. The story arcs is the story of THAT character's career. SuperDuper Lad didn't forestall a second Rikti Invasion, your character did. Other heroes (PC and NPC) are renowned for other things, your Souvenir window is filled the stuff that YOU did. That's the way that the story arcs we play are mapped out. You and your alone (maybe with some teammates along the way) play out the story arcs. You follow all of the different intertwined plot threads to their ends.

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Basically, the rule of thumb for this game is to assume that anything that is instanced is basically a unique, parallel setting. (Each time you start an instance, it's like you just started a new comic book. If you want to reduce the subtle mindf*** involved with this, just imagine your character is being retconned by a new writer. Just hope you don't suffer Frank Miller, though.)

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Blue: ~Knockback Squad on Guardian~
Red: ~Undoing of Virtue on [3 guesses]~

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I usually don't run Malta missions, but I ran three or four recently with my Brute, and I came across a total of two Sappers.

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I'm not sure when that happened, but yes, something changed a LOOONG time ago. Say, a couple of years ago, there used to be a Sapper in every spawn, it seemed. Getting my Stone Brute to 50 in I7, that was quite literally the case. Getting a Blaster to 50 a couple of months ago, however, saw barely a Sapper per mission.

Which is all for the best, as far as I'm concerned.

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When I1 rolled out, Sappers were a minion just like any other Malta NPC. That meant any number could show up in a spawn. It was not unusual to get 3 Sappers in a spawn if you soloed. Imagine getting 6+ Sappers in a spawn when running with a large team.

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I usually don't run Malta missions, but I ran three or four recently with my Brute, and I came across a total of two Sappers.

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I'm not sure when that happened, but yes, something changed a LOOONG time ago. Say, a couple of years ago, there used to be a Sapper in every spawn, it seemed. Getting my Stone Brute to 50 in I7, that was quite literally the case. Getting a Blaster to 50 a couple of months ago, however, saw barely a Sapper per mission.

Which is all for the best, as far as I'm concerned.

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When I1 rolled out, Sappers were a minion just like any other Malta NPC. That meant any number could show up in a spawn. It was not unusual to get 3 Sappers in a spawn if you soloed. Imagine getting 6+ Sappers in a spawn when running with a large team.

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Unfortunately, I didn't have a character into his 40s until I3, so I only heard about this change, but even with the change to only one per spawn, there seemed to be one in every spawn you faced. I got a hero to 50 and spent the next couple of years getting villains to 50 and playing lowbies, so I missed whatever change occurred. However, looking at Malta now, Sappers almost never spawn. You'd see maybe a couple per mid-sized mission, if that.

I suspect this is the result of the spawn changes which returned lieutenants to solo spawns and got rid of the "two white minions standing side by side punching their fists" bugged spawns that kept cropping up even on high-number difficulties (Levels 2 and 4), which should have been spawning between three and five. As I believe Castle put it, everything introduced after Launch had been introduced with bugged spawns. That means everything in CoV that wasn't carried over from CoH, as well as Malta, the Carnival of Shadows, the Soldiers of Rularuu and so forth. For what it's worth, I was seeing it in high-level CoT spawns, as well. If you look carefully, you can still find missions in CoV bugged with the old spawns. Custom maps from more rarely done contacts tend to suffer the most. Many of Scirocco's missions tended to have this.

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Afraid I am not much help either. About the onlt thing I will attempt to solo Malta with are my Illusionists. Like Siergen I stealth in, confuse the Sappers and Gunslingers and watch the carnage. I never paid much attention to what they did after that I was too busy helping them defeat everything else.

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�We�re always the good guys. In D&D, we�re lawful good. In City of Heroes we�re the heroes. In Grand Theft Auto we pay the prostitutes promptly and never hit them with a bat.� � Leonard
�Those women are prostitutes? You said they were raising money for stem cell research!� � Sheldon

BS/SR Scrapper.

Need a little patience with the Titans, but they all go down eventually.

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QR

I fought Malta a few weeks ago and all I can say is, we need more mobs like this. It felt great actually fighting something that's challenging.

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QR
I fought Malta a few weeks ago and all I can say is, we need more mobs like this. It felt great actually fighting something that's challenging.

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The problem is that it's challenging for something like a power-built Scrapper, and that's a really bad base level of performance to go by. I started this thread when I fought Malta with my Broadsword/Invulnerability Scrapper, and their increase in difficulty was only token. More damage, less damage, it's all the same in the end, as there's little that can scare an upper 40s Scrapper. That's what they were built to combat, in fact.

But then the problem is that that's not all we play. Hero-side, Scrappers and Blasters are all I can play. Tankers are too slow, Defenders too weak and Controllers too late-blooming. Scrappers have precious little problem with anything and despite years of the developers trying to one-up us, that hasn't change. All that HAS happened, however, is that everyone who isn't a Scrapper or, per chance, a Tanker, has gotten shafted by the effort. My Blasters, first and foremost, suffer BAD from all of those "challenging" enemies, because they don't have Scrapper defences and only just about above-Scrapper damage. That's why I mind "challenging" things - they just mean my Blasters need not apply.

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The heroside is false, as well, because what you've done to "save the world" is the same thing everyone before you has already done. You are, in practice, just a hero, one of many.


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No CoH isn't false. The story arcs is the story of THAT character's career. SuperDuper Lad didn't forestall a second Rikti Invasion, your character did. Other heroes (PC and NPC) are renowned for other things, your Souvenir window is filled the stuff that YOU did. That's the way that the story arcs we play are mapped out. You and your alone (maybe with some teammates along the way) play out the story arcs. You follow all of the different intertwined plot threads to their ends.

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Hmm...in some story arcs though - I think more so red-side - it's as if you're in someone else's comic book. Psimon Omega, you're in the middle of his battles vs Romulus and Aurora Borealis. Darla Mavis, it's her vendetta against Aurora Borealis. Willy Wheeler is all about the demise of Willy Wheeler. Timothy Raymond's arc is about Timothy Raymond's memories. Vernon von Grunn, as fun as he is, is about HIS schemes. The story isn't about you - it's about them. Not saying this is good or bad, it just seems to be that way.


re: thread - Malta are a bunch of rat-$@5%@&^s. But a nice challenge.

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Suggestions:
Super Packs Done Right
Influence Sink: IO Level Mod/Recrafting
Random Merit Rolls: Scale cost by Toon Level

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QR
I fought Malta a few weeks ago and all I can say is, we need more mobs like this. It felt great actually fighting something that's challenging.

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The problem is that it's challenging for something like a power-built Scrapper, and that's a really bad base level of performance to go by. I started this thread when I fought Malta with my Broadsword/Invulnerability Scrapper, and their increase in difficulty was only token. More damage, less damage, it's all the same in the end, as there's little that can scare an upper 40s Scrapper. That's what they were built to combat, in fact.

But then the problem is that that's not all we play. Hero-side, Scrappers and Blasters are all I can play. Tankers are too slow, Defenders too weak and Controllers too late-blooming. Scrappers have precious little problem with anything and despite years of the developers trying to one-up us, that hasn't change. All that HAS happened, however, is that everyone who isn't a Scrapper or, per chance, a Tanker, has gotten shafted by the effort. My Blasters, first and foremost, suffer BAD from all of those "challenging" enemies, because they don't have Scrapper defences and only just about above-Scrapper damage. That's why I mind "challenging" things - they just mean my Blasters need not apply.

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Then find a team or pop inspirations.

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QR
I fought Malta a few weeks ago and all I can say is, we need more mobs like this. It felt great actually fighting something that's challenging.

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The problem is that it's challenging for something like a power-built Scrapper, and that's a really bad base level of performance to go by. I started this thread when I fought Malta with my Broadsword/Invulnerability Scrapper, and their increase in difficulty was only token. More damage, less damage, it's all the same in the end, as there's little that can scare an upper 40s Scrapper. That's what they were built to combat, in fact.

But then the problem is that that's not all we play. Hero-side, Scrappers and Blasters are all I can play. Tankers are too slow, Defenders too weak and Controllers too late-blooming. Scrappers have precious little problem with anything and despite years of the developers trying to one-up us, that hasn't change. All that HAS happened, however, is that everyone who isn't a Scrapper or, per chance, a Tanker, has gotten shafted by the effort. My Blasters, first and foremost, suffer BAD from all of those "challenging" enemies, because they don't have Scrapper defences and only just about above-Scrapper damage. That's why I mind "challenging" things - they just mean my Blasters need not apply.

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If you don't have a mez power from your primary or secondary, choose an APP that has one. Avoid playing on challenge level 2 or 4. Make sure you have plenty of inspirations for the boss fights. And be careful.

They are doable with Blasters. I've fought Malta on Invincible with my AR/Fire, which is possibly the worst combo to fight them with, and I've done ok. I maintain that we need the challenge. My Blasters tear through just about everything else in the 40s. Malta, Rularuu and Vanguard are the only things that aren't easy mode.

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Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper

Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World

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They are doable with Blasters. I've fought Malta on Invincible with my AR/Fire, which is possibly the worst combo to fight them with, and I've done ok. I maintain that we need the challenge. My Blasters tear through just about everything else in the 40s. Malta, Rularuu and Vanguard are the only things that aren't easy mode.

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They're doable, yes. They're just a PITA and take AGES and they're STILL not a meaningful challenge to a Scrapper who can think on his feet. Or a Brute or a Mastermind, for that matter. They're meat on the table, same as everything else. This is why I don't like balance by obscene difficulty. It's never going to be truly challenging to the ones most in need of a challenge, but it can make life extremely unpleasant for everybody else.

Blasters were playable before the Defiance changes, too. It sure as hell wasn't fun, though.

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They're doable, yes. They're just a PITA and take AGES and they're STILL not a meaningful challenge to a Scrapper who can think on his feet. Or a Brute or a Mastermind, for that matter. They're meat on the table, same as everything else. This is why I don't like balance by obscene difficulty. It's never going to be truly challenging to the ones most in need of a challenge, but it can make life extremely unpleasant for everybody else.

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So... Because the challenging mobs aren't challenging, we may as well say nuts to those that want them as they are?

Great idea, let's send them to AE! Wait, there are people demanding AE be given kid's gloves too, using the same arguments...

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Blue: ~Knockback Squad on Guardian~
Red: ~Undoing of Virtue on [3 guesses]~

um. Malta have always sucked.
I dont understand this thread title.
11 pages of people chatting about malta >.>
Oh ya a sapper...
Oh neato cheeto a gunslinger...

clap clap clap

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So... Because the challenging mobs aren't challenging, we may as well say nuts to those that want them as they are?

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How... The hell did you read that from what I wrote? No, they aren't "challenging," that's the point. Not to the people the developers were trying to challenge, anyway. Malta are like the I3 Boss Buffs that lingered around. Remember those? Back then Jack and company decided they'd had enough of people soloing bosses, so they buffed them to ludicrous levels. The problem? The people soloing bosses left and right were Scrappers and some Tankers. The change had little effect on them. I can only speak for Scrappers, but at the time, bosses became only trivially more difficult for my Scrapper.

The problem? The people who were ALREADY struggling with bosses - Blasters, to name the ones I had experience with at the time - were the ones that the changes hit the hardest, even though they weren't actually the ones targeted by them. And then Jack went around promising a system that would make these "unsoloable" bosses display warnings in contact briefings. That's why the changes were repealed - they didn't affect the people they were targeted at, but they DID screw just about everyone they WEREN'T targeted at over BIG TIME. That's why "just buff the enemies" never worked as a form of balance, and that's why Malta don't work as a challenge.

Malta are not a challenge. Not even in the slightest. They are merely a "Blasters need not apply" the same way the Fonts of Power in Mako's second arc ending are "Masterminds need not apply." When something is a challenge to a Scrapper AND not total PITA to a Blaster AT THE SAME TIME will I accept arguments about adding more challenge. Until then, I will maintain that there's no such thing as challenge, only enemies that certain ATs cannot fight. Strange that there hasn't been an enemy any Scrapper I've ever played hasn't been able to take on.

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Strange that there hasn't been an enemy any Scrapper I've ever played hasn't been able to take on.

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*grin*

I could probably take you up on that, Sam... if you want hair-pullingly difficult for Melee ATs, while only being marginally more difficult for Ranged ATs... pop out a heavily Dark-oriented set of baddies. Get a bunch of 'em running Chill of the Night or whatever, and watch Scrappers whiff until their arms fall off while the Blasters sit back and plink away to their heart's content.

Yeah, kind of found that one out by accident when playtesting a MArc on my Blaster... then a friend ran it with a Scrapper and I got an earful

Another fun one is Electric Blast/Energy Armour baddies. Run up and watch your blue bar go bye-bye! *evilgrin*

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"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head." Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates

MA Arcs: #12285, "Small Fears", #106553, "Trollbane", #12669, "How to Survive a Robot Uprising"

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I could probably take you up on that, Sam... if you want hair-pullingly difficult for Melee ATs, while only being marginally more difficult for Ranged ATs... pop out a heavily Dark-oriented set of baddies. Get a bunch of 'em running Chill of the Night or whatever, and watch Scrappers whiff until their arms fall off while the Blasters sit back and plink away to their heart's content.

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Been there, done that Yeah, it sucks, I will admit, but the stuff that usually has this - Spectral Demon Lords, tends to also have Midnight Grasp and be able to fly. Let me just say that I've lost more Blasters to Ghost Slaps than I have to Malta, though largely by virtue of fighting CoT that much more often.

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Another fun one is Electric Blast/Energy Armour baddies. Run up and watch your blue bar go bye-bye! *evilgrin*

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Don't those suck for everybody? I mean, sure, the melee endurance drain aura sucks extra hard, but their hideously draining blasts aren't really all that much more forgiving. I actually abandoned an arc with half the minions being Electrical Blast or Electrical assault because it plain wasn't worth the pain.

Custom Critters are always nasty, and people tend to have no concept of just what it is they are putting their players through.

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Another fun one is Electric Blast/Energy Armour baddies. Run up and watch your blue bar go bye-bye! *evilgrin*

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Don't those suck for everybody? I mean, sure, the melee endurance drain aura sucks extra hard, but their hideously draining blasts aren't really all that much more forgiving.

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Depends what you're running, I suppose- if you make it minions with Electric/Energy Aura, anything with respectable AoE will erase them and probably barely notice them as being a problem. Melee, on the other hand... hehehehe...

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"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head." Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates

MA Arcs: #12285, "Small Fears", #106553, "Trollbane", #12669, "How to Survive a Robot Uprising"