Should the signature villains be AV rank?
By
Aura_Familia,
Posted on: 2009-06-16 09:15 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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But wait you say, not everyone plays an illusion/radiation controller with a 3 billion influence build. Not everyone can solo archvillains.
You're right. ANd nor should they be able to. The Freedom Phalanx, and the leaders of Arachnos, and their assorted playmates are the most skilled, most powerful, msot dangerous heroes on Earth. They're the best. If you want to take them on, then you SHOULD have to be the best as well. Not every villain in the DC universe can go one on one with superman. Similarly, not every villain can go toe to toe with Statesmen. The best of the best can; the rest bring their friends.
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So being "the best" involves choosing the "correct" AT with the "correct" power set combos and building the "correct" build with the correct IOs?
Forget you.
That kind of attitude stinks and I shouldn't have to explain to you why.
Following a build you saw posted on the forum or one a friend planned out for you in Mid's that allows you to solo AVs doesn't make you "the best". You're not "the best" for picking an outlier combo on the right AT. Farming and grinding for rare IOs isn't a test of "skill" any more than mowing the lawn with a pair of scissors is.
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No it isnt, but its the investment of time that matters. My point is that in any hobby if you do not put in the necessary time and effort, then you will not be at the highest tier of play. Making sure that anyone at all can do anything not only cheapens the efforts of those who work harder; it also ensures that the game holds no challenge for anyone above the minimum standard. That is a recipee for failure.
And yes, selecting powers and powersets that work well together is a strategic excercise. If you chose to play that Earth/FF controller, you cannot reasonably cry foul when your ability to solo things is eclipsed by an ill/rad controller. That build will make up for that in other areas, particularly on a team, but not all builds are equally good at all things - if they were, what would be the point of having different builds at all?
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No it isnt, but its the investment of time that matters. My point is that in any hobby if you do not put in the necessary time and effort, then you will not be at the highest tier of play.
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And there are some ATs and power set combos that will never solo the majority of AVs in the game, or any, no matter how much time is put into them. Investment of time matters, but sometimes it doesn't matter at all because of unfair limitations beyond your control. So why should those people get less for their time invested because they picked the 'wrong' AT or power set combo?
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Making sure that anyone at all can do anything not only cheapens the efforts of those who work harder; it also ensures that the game holds no challenge for anyone above the minimum standard. That is a recipee for failure.
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It's not a question of a few, unskilled players being unable to do something because they lack the knowledge or skill. It's a question of a number of combos and ATs simply being better, likely not intentionally so. And that's not something we should embrace.
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And yes, selecting powers and powersets that work well together is a strategic excercise...
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That requires very little skill or talent because all the work as been done by someone else long before you.
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If you chose to play that Earth/FF controller, you cannot reasonably cry foul when your ability to solo things is eclipsed by an ill/rad controller.
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Something like soloability is something the developers had in mind when balancing the sets. Ability to tackle an AV wasn't. No one is really supposed to be taking down AVs solo. They were designed with specific gates to prevent that. It's an oversight that some combos and builds can exceed that, and I'm wiling to bet if Castle could magically snipe those outliers to bring them back in line, he would.
So if nobody is supposed to solo AVs, nobody really should. And if a tiny percentage of combos can, that's not a reward for your "skill" at "finding" them.
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This reminds me of a conversation I once had when I used to administrate FPS servers.
The game was Battlefield 1942. On one of the maps there was a glitch that one could exploit to get inside the geometry of the aircraft hangar with a few seconds of wiggling around the bounding box. Once inside, it was possible to see and shoot out without anyone being able to see or shoot you back. As well there was access to infinite ammo and the "entrance" to this glitch was easy to defend since the person inside could gun down anyone who approached it.
The hangar was the natural place the pilots waited for planes to spawn. On this map the planes were critical to win, so naturally, people who exploited this glitch racked up HUGE scores.
This wasn't a well publicized glitch, it was mostly passed knowledge from friends. Once a week or so I'd catch a person or a pair of people doing it when in the first minute of game play their score was ten times that of everyone else.
So one time I was running in admin mode and I caught someone exploiting this glitch.
I auto warned him with the default text message and he kept at it. I was bored so I engaged him direct chat.
I told him he wasn't supposed to be where he was and he should stop because it was unfair to the other players. He said it was fair because if they wanted big scores too they could just do the same thing on another server. I explained that it wasn't intentional that this glitch existed, that the developers would fix it at some point and most players want their score to reflect their skill. He said using the glitch took skill to know where it was. I asked how he found out about it and he replied his friend told him. I replied that I wasn't a very good player and didn't have a lot of skill at the game, but even I could get inside the glitch if I wanted to. I asked why a player with little skill should be rewarded with a large score just for making a decision like that and how was that fair to anyone who didn't want to hang out inside a wall shooting people in the back.
He replied that I sucked so I banned him from the server.
The point is, the attitude that guy had that doing something specific that the developers didn't intend to have that result it did and being rewarded with "the best" score and thinking that's OK and all part of competition is all too similar to the attitude you seem to be expressing.
Is using specific power set combos and builds an exploit? No, but the fact they can solo an AV is something the developers didn't intend and likely aren't fans of.
Should that loophole justify the fact it exists? No, it does not.
Does the the fact that it exists mean those those people are being "rewarded" for using those combos by being allowed to solo an AV and that enabling other people to solo AV is taking that reward away? No it does not because that was never a reward the developers intended to bestow.
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My position has always been:
Stop making AV/EB encounters nothing but hacking away at a massive number of hitpoints.
Countess Crey is a normal human, not some psi blaster. Make encounters that make sense. Yes...Recluse and Statesman are tough and powerful physically and take a lot of damage to bring down...that makes sense. It doesn't with a lot of the foes we fight.
When this comes up...I always go back to my super hero game standard: Freedom Force. Lots of the foes you fought in that game weren't uber tough...and if they were...the environment they were in had interesting ways to bring them down to size.
When all our EB/AV encounters are reduced to pounding on something for however long it takes to drop it's hitpoints and nothing else...it just screams boring and unrealistic(even in a game sense).
If I'm going to take down Countess Crey...I'd expect her to taunt me...then run and hide behind some kind of forcefield while filling the room with special Crey Troops from her personal guard.
Most of the time...big brain villains will set up traps and other 'inescapable' scenarios that heroes have to fight their way around or figure out. It's never always about force on force and/or zerging. That's what lends a comic/epic feel to fights.
I loved fighting Deja Vu in Freedom Force. He was wussy...but one hit from his giant clone cannon would create a duplicate of your hero that you would need to deal with. Plus he was always cloning himself. FUN scenarios make the EB/AV equation less annoying for me. Because I simply stop thinking about them as such...and think about the game and having fun instead.
YMMV.
You seem to have tremendous knowledge of what the developers do and do not intend. Assuming you're not relying on some marvelous telepathic gift, would you like to provide links, by any chance, to the articles or other locations where members of the development team have explicitly stated these intentions?
Building a really high end character requires more than selecting the right powersets. Finessing every last microscopic ounce of performance out of a build is quite a time consuming endeavor - I rolled my first controller years ago, and I've never stopped coming up with minor alterations to try out to perfect it. And thats before you get into the time it takes to actually acquire all the necessary gear. I like hobbies that are time consuming and difficult - if you're as good as you're ever going to be in the first month, then really, whats the point after that? That said, are certain combinations much better than others from the get-go? Undeniably they are. I still don't see anything wrong with that. Anyone who wnts the same performance can create a character using the same sets; its not as if they're being unfairly denied access to it somehow. And despite your analogy, it is not an exploit.
At the end of the day, this is an old dichotomy in any RPG. Obviously, all builds are not equal, and if they were the game would be boring in a hurry. But what constitutes an acceptable margin between the least powerful and the most powerful of characters? Personally I have very little sympathy for people who choose to play sub-optimal characters and then complain that there are some things in the game that they can't do, but obviously the game can't be complelty unplayable to the FF/Elec defender anymore than it can be completly devoid of challenge for the Ill/Rad controller. Its all a quesiton of where you draw the line. Obviously, I feel the line on top tier performance should be higher than you do.
The question, as you point out, is what the developers consider acceptable, and I don't know that any more than you do. I do know that it has been possible to solo archvillains since the day the game hit retail and that no change made in all the years since has altered that. The fact that nothing has been done about it in all that time leads me to suspect that the developers dont have quite such a problem with people recieving that particular reward as you seem to want to believe.
Ultimately it comes down to what sort of playstyle you prefer. I enjoy the challenge and sense (however illusory it may be) of accomplishment that comes with building a character to the highest standards achievable, and accomplishing the most difficult tasks available, and I do not feel week in comparison to any existing content outside of raids (which I think we all agree are, and probably should continue to be, beyond the ability of anyone at all to solo). I therefor oppose your suggestion because I believe it will lower the bar of many encounters, making the game less challenging to play, and decreasing my special-ness compared to others. You (based on what you've said above) feel that the current highest tiers of builds are too powerful and should be either reduced in power or ignored, and tha this will allow things to be more fun for you and others who feel out-classed by current high level content.
As I've said, I have no particular sympathy for your position, but I dont expect you to hav any for mine either (Im starting to sound rather objectivist here - its a little scary). I am fairly sure that Paragon Studios will continue doing whatever they feel will strike the best balance between use of their resources and market appeal. I have hardly done exhaustive market research on the subject, but as I say the fact that almsot all games seem to follow the current CoH model (some more so), where-as no game I am aware of uses a model similar to the one you propose for end-game content leads me to suspect that the current AV/EB system probably has a long and healthy future.
I agree with you entirely. AVs (and a great many EBs) in this game are just roadblocks to me. I either get a team to help get rid of them or just drop the mission.
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My position has always been:
Stop making AV/EB encounters nothing but hacking away at a massive number of hitpoints.
Countess Crey is a normal human, not some psi blaster. Make encounters that make sense. Yes...Recluse and Statesman are tough and powerful physically and take a lot of damage to bring down...that makes sense. It doesn't with a lot of the foes we fight.
When this comes up...I always go back to my super hero game standard: Freedom Force. Lots of the foes you fought in that game weren't uber tough...and if they were...the environment they were in had interesting ways to bring them down to size.
When all our EB/AV encounters are reduced to pounding on something for however long it takes to drop it's hitpoints and nothing else...it just screams boring and unrealistic(even in a game sense).
If I'm going to take down Countess Crey...I'd expect her to taunt me...then run and hide behind some kind of forcefield while filling the room with special Crey Troops from her personal guard.
Most of the time...big brain villains will set up traps and other 'inescapable' scenarios that heroes have to fight their way around or figure out. It's never always about force on force and/or zerging. That's what lends a comic/epic feel to fights.
I loved fighting Deja Vu in Freedom Force. He was wussy...but one hit from his giant clone cannon would create a duplicate of your hero that you would need to deal with. Plus he was always cloning himself. FUN scenarios make the EB/AV equation less annoying for me. Because I simply stop thinking about them as such...and think about the game and having fun instead.
YMMV.
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Quoted for Truth!
Much as huge damage and hit point numbers are an obvious and effective way to make an enemy badass and extremelly challenging, they're probably not the most interesting ones.
Recent AV fights seem to lean heavily towarsd involving lower class mobs as ambushes and such things, but there is a certain uniformity to all CoH fights (AV and otherwise) that gets old after a while.
AE has helped this a lot, allowing for mobs and AV/EBs wiht truly powerful effects not seen before in mobs. But some really unique effects would be interesting.
Ironically, I suspect that would be hard to balance to fit all comers. For instnace, a unique challenge for me as an illusionist might be a boss that ignroes taunt effects, so that his agro will transfer to me if I am out-damaging my decoys. Since I would have to fight without being able to hide behind my pets (which essentially the whole point of the illusion set) that would be a very difficult fight for me and a tactical challenge I've never before had to face (outside of PvP where your enemies, as a rule, can both deal and sustain considerably less damage). But then, for a tank that would be horrible - essentially making him completly useless - and his blaster team-mates probably wouldn't appreciate it either.
Trying to find unique things for bad guys to do to you that won't be unbeatable to certain characters but insignficiant to others would be the major hurdle of this sort of thing aside from actually programming it.
Still, all that being said, I whole-heatedly agree with you. I'd love to see some more variety injected into boss fights too. I just dont think making the bosses whimpier is the way to do it.
Regarding what the devs consider acceptable for outliers, and what they should and shouldn't be able to do, go back and read the developer commentary during the Energy Melee nerf.
As for:
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The question, as you point out, is what the developers consider acceptable, and I don't know that any more than you do. I do know that it has been possible to solo archvillains since the day the game hit retail and that no change made in all the years since has altered that. The fact that nothing has been done about it in all that time leads me to suspect that the developers dont have quite such a problem with people recieving that particular reward as you seem to want to believe.
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Head to the current test server and I15 Beta forums and read developer comments about the recent nerf to Psychic Shockwave, where, in response to your exact argument, Castle directly states it was a well known bug that they just didn't feel needed to be changed until they were ready to address the rest of the problems with the AT.
There's a very interesting and actually one of the better 5-man instance dungeon bosses in WoW, the mechanic turns up twice.
It's a 5 man team, literally designed in the same way the standard player 5 man band for doing the instances would be.
The first version (quote from WoWwiki):
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These mobs behave like a pvp group with a mage, healer, warrior, rogue, and sometimes a dynamite tossing goblin. Can't taunt them so they go for healers. Not too hard if done with a mage. Every enemy who fights with theldren is immune to a warrior's taunt, so crowd control is a must.
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I've done this fight once and I have to say it's probably the hardest fight in that instance because of the reasons above, the traditional crowd control method of taunting the mobs just doesn't work but other classes with CC abilties would HAVE to use them otherwise the healers would be killed far too quickly and it made everyone work for their loot. The NPC healer would heal intelligently as well, when his whole group was low, he'd throw up an area heal, when a specific target was getting hammered he would throw out heals to that target, meaning he had to be the first to die.
The second version:
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All 5 of them must be defeated to beat the encounter. The style of fight is similar to an arena 5v5 match. Fears, Freezing Traps, Stuns, and Disorients work on any of the NPCs. Individual NPCs are crowd-controllable in additional ways, as listed above. However, they are all immune to Taunt, Enslave, Mind Control, and Seduce. The NPC pets can be affected by Taunt, and seem to follow normal aggro rules
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The group had a random makeup, it was always a healer as the main boss with 4 mini-bosses randomly chosen from a pool of 8.
Again that fight was normally harder than the end boss just after it due to the fact that you had to focus on every crowd control method but the standard one of just letting the warrior take the beating and often became 1v1 situations where other classes would take out their opposite number (lord know why when the ranged should target the melee and melee target the ranged, I think it's a personal matter of pride honestly, I know I would always aim to take out the NPC hunter in a one on one fight and have my pet tank his pet).
I loved those two fights because the mobs were actually on equal footing with the players, I could DPS down the enemy hunter by blowing all my cooldowns at once, he WOULD use his crowd control ability on the healers even with me holding aggro.
Those mobs weren't big sacks of HP, they didn't have any ability the players didn't have but thanks to the way their aggro worked, made the fights very memorable, more so than any other encounter in that particular instance in the second variants case.
That's what I like to see more of here.
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Regarding what the devs consider acceptable for outliers, and what they should and shouldn't be able to do, go back and read the developer commentary during the Energy Melee nerf.
As for:
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The question, as you point out, is what the developers consider acceptable, and I don't know that any more than you do. I do know that it has been possible to solo archvillains since the day the game hit retail and that no change made in all the years since has altered that. The fact that nothing has been done about it in all that time leads me to suspect that the developers dont have quite such a problem with people recieving that particular reward as you seem to want to believe.
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Head to the current test server and I15 Beta forums and read developer comments about the recent nerf to Psychic Shockwave, where, in response to your exact argument, Castle directly states it was a well known bug that they just didn't feel needed to be changed until they were ready to address the rest of the problems with the AT.
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Perhaps you're right then, and they will eventually nerf high performance builds tha can solo archvillains. But I haven't seen statements to that effect, and as I say, I certainly havent seen evidence of it in their actions.
That actually sounds like fun, Mechano. I must no resist the violent temtpation to reactivate my WoW account (I succeed only by reminding myself that no matter what the merits or flaws of its game-play, the hidiousness of my character's model will surely ruin the experience).
You must admit though that making every fight (or even every boss-fight) like that owuld sort of make it pointless to have a tank in your party.
Actually it didn't.
While yes they were immune to taunt they weren't immune to the various aggro management abilites.
Warriors had to use sunder, which reduces armor but gives out a lot of aggro with each application. Hunters could use Misdirection which caused the aggro generated from the next three shots to be dumped onto the team mate they cast it on.
While we lack the aggro management skills in City of Heroes we do have an aggro system, so while tankers would be unable to use taunt on some encounters (I don't mean to say ALL encounters should be like this otherwise the uniquess of the mechanic is wasted) they could still go in and build threat using their AoEs and smacking the hardest hitting target out of a group (and with the fact Tankers attacks generate more threat than other ATs) before the rest of the team begins blasting away at their respective targets. The tanker would tie up that mob for the duration of the fight so it wasn't wandering around beating the hell out of the squish team members.
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You seem to have tremendous knowledge of what the developers do and do not intend.
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I don't have to dig up a quote. Likely one has been said long ago and lost to the dozens of board purges since.
It's safe to assume that AVs were, and still are, intended for teams, which is why they spawn for them. Their high regeneration/ressitance to injury seems designed to act as a gate for ATs with lower damage and high defenses from defeating them. Conversely, their high damage output and purple triangles seem intended as a gate for ATs with high damage/holds and lower defenses.
Then there's the fact that AVs are much more removed from an EB than they would be if they were simply the next level of challenge. For example, I have several characters who solo EBs very well and don't come close not being able to exceed an EB's regeneration rate. They can also solo well on Invincible. Yet none of these are capable of even coming close to exceeding regeneration on the AV version of that enemy. That's not something that suggests the curve was intended to be what you say it is. if it was, more people would be able to solo AVs than do, especially those who are very well capable of otherwise soloing on Invincible.
If you want a dev to come in here and explicitly say this isn't true, there is just as much chance of one coming in here to say it is.
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Building a really high end character requires more than selecting the right powersets. Finessing every last microscopic ounce of performance out of a build is quite a time consuming endeavor
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And I have several characters who can cap their damage and recharge, survive the damage being thrown at them, and are still unable to defeat any of the AVs they've faced.
Your argument that one just needs to try harder means little to me when faced with these facts.
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At the end of the day, this is an old dichotomy in any RPG. Obviously, all builds are not equal, and if they were the game would be boring in a hurry.
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Equal can mean different. Difference can exist without some set combos being able to tackle content designed for teams as an accident.
The fact is, the majority... the vast, vast, vast, majority, of characters rolled will never solo an AV no matter the effort expended. Rolling the very few specific combo just to reach a goal they're not really supposed to reach is just as stagnating in my opinion.
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But what constitutes an acceptable margin between the least powerful and the most powerful of characters?
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Here's the litmus test:
"Dear devs, please buff [insert AT/power set here] so it can solo AVs"
If you're laughed at by them and the other forumites, it's likely that players are NOT intended to solo AVs.
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Personally I have very little sympathy for people who choose to play sub-optimal characters and then complain that there are some things in the game that they can't do
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And as I've said before, there are a lot of characters that are well built enough to solo on Invincible very well... UNTIL they hit a brickwall with an AV. Anything that gets by on Invincible should not be considered "gimp" by any means and the idea of an "optimal" character is just as wrong as saying there's only one "right" character or AT and playing anything else is "wrong".
In my opinion, the number and variety of builds and combos this excludes is far too great for something as arbitrary as saying "You're allowed to solo on Invincible...until you hit a mission with a bad guy at the end that you wont beat no matter how hard you try. So retreat defeated like a wuss, and try again on the 'kiddy' setting or get the "right" AT and combo and play with the "real" heroes."
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I do know that it has been possible to solo archvillains since the day the game hit retail and that no change made in all the years since has altered that. The fact that nothing has been done about it in all that time leads me to suspect that the developers dont have quite such a problem with people recieving that particular reward as you seem to want to believe.
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Actually, the developers have always tried to keep a reign on how powerful we are. ED, GDN? Hello McFly?
The developers had done nothing about Energy Transfer for years and then...bam! Nerfage!
The one thing I've learned about this game, and what I should keep reminding myself, is that just because they ain't done nothin' yet about somethin', don't mean they ain't gonna do nothin' about it ever.
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You seem to have tremendous knowledge of what the developers do and do not intend.
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I don't have to dig up a quote. Likely one has been said long ago and lost to the dozens of board purges since.
It's safe to assume that AVs were, and still are, intended for teams, which is why they spawn for them. Their high regeneration/ressitance to injury seems designed to act as a gate for ATs with lower damage and high defenses from defeating them. Conversely, their high damage output and purple triangles seem intended as a gate for ATs with high damage/holds and lower defenses.
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If that is true, then it begs the obvious question: why is it possible to spawn them solo? If the developers were not only certain it was impossible to defeat them solo, but specifically WANTED to ensure that no one ever defeated thems solo, thenit seems to me that the unbelievably simply solution would have been to have them spawn as Elite Bosses for any solo player, even on invincible. The fact that it is possible for a single player to spawn them, and that, in fact, it was specifcally coded that way when EBs were invented, seems to me strong evidence that the developers know full well that while difficult it is not impossible.
You go on to saythat its not fair that you can solo on invincible but not solo th archvillains that spawn on invincible, and that this is an oversight on the developers part, but once again I am forced to consider that this would be an easy problem to fix. The most likely explination is that archvillains are meant to be part and parcel of the extreme challenge invincible is, theoretically, supposed to entail.
And saying "I read it somewhere but I can't remember the link, and it may not exist anymore" is not evidence. In the words of some internet jerk somewhere: pics (links, in this case) or it didn't happen.
QR
Again, I'm simply tired of building a "super-hero" who, regardless of how much care and time I put into him, is in no way comparable to any of the villains he fights. I'm tired of it.
Are we building superhumans or not? Seriously... 'cause it strikes me that, given everyone we interact with in the game, we're average at best.
Brother of Markus
The Lord of Fire and Pain
The Legendary Living Hellfire
Fight my brute!
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Actually it didn't.
While yes they were immune to taunt they weren't immune to the various aggro management abilites.
Warriors had to use sunder, which reduces armor but gives out a lot of aggro with each application. Hunters could use Misdirection which caused the aggro generated from the next three shots to be dumped onto the team mate they cast it on.
While we lack the aggro management skills in City of Heroes we do have an aggro system, so while tankers would be unable to use taunt on some encounters (I don't mean to say ALL encounters should be like this otherwise the uniquess of the mechanic is wasted) they could still go in and build threat using their AoEs and smacking the hardest hitting target out of a group (and with the fact Tankers attacks generate more threat than other ATs) before the rest of the team begins blasting away at their respective targets. The tanker would tie up that mob for the duration of the fight so it wasn't wandering around beating the hell out of the squish team members.
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So just have actual taunt powers not work, but leave effects with high agro modifiers (including anything launched by a tank under the effects of Gauntlet) still do their thing normally? That'd be interesting. Im starting to like this idea a lot!
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QR
Again, I'm simply tired of building a "super-hero" who, regardless of how much care and time I put into him, is in no way comparable to any of the villains he fights. I'm tired of it.
Are we building superhumans or not? Seriously... 'cause it strikes me that, given everyone we interact with in the game, we're average at best.
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I agree, believe it or not. But I find this problem is best exmeplified by minions, lieutenants and boses rahter than archvillains. While archvillains should represent the absolute cream of the crop - the most skilled and dangerous beings on the planet - minions should be, well, exactly what it says on the tin. Superman, and the Silver Surfer do NOT quake wiht fear and choose a different story arc because some guys with special forces training show up, no matter how tricked out their hand guns are. I remember there wa a sugestion some time ago that, while it has obvious logistical prolems, was quite interesting in principal, to add a significant number of underling class mobs to any given encounter to allow the player that feeling of fighting their way through whole armies of mooks, casualy obliterating them,a nd/or laughing off their puny attacks.
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If that is true, then it begs the obvious question: why is it possible to spawn them solo? If the developers were not only certain it was impossible to defeat them solo, but specifically WANTED to ensure that no one ever defeated thems solo, thenit seems to me that the unbelievably simply solution would have been to have them spawn as Elite Bosses for any solo player, even on invincible.
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EBs were introduced before ED at the same time as the Notoriety system. They were intended for characters like Frostfire and Atta. It's likely at the point they hadn't anticipated ED and GDN and scaling down player abilities so that not that many players would actually be able to solo AVs anymore.
Let me ask you this: If players were intended to solo AVs, why are only such a small handfull of combos and builds capable of this, and even then, largely due to IOs which came along fairly recently?
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You go on to saythat its not fair that you can solo on invincible but not solo th archvillains that spawn on invincible, and that this is an oversight on the developers part, but once again I am forced to consider that this would be an easy problem to fix.
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Not really. Two sets that are balanced on their own yet become an outlier when combined are a tough cookie. Nerf either and they can become an underperformer when paired with another set. Not to mention IOs. What if IOs are what push the combo over the edge? Do we then nerf two sets based on what they can do on IOs?
If balance was as easy as you say, and sniping outliers wasn't problem creating, Castle wouldn't be pulling his hair out half the time and rockin' the spreadsheets. Arcanna would be powerless.
And again, I remind you of the golden rule: Just because the devs haven't done something yet, doesn't mean they wont. That includes changes to the Notoriety system, outlier combos or AVs.
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To answer your questions in order...
THe fact that it is knowna nd intended to be possible does not mean that it is known and intended to be easy! I would conted that the fact that AVs spawn on invincible is meant to give players the option to face them solo (which obviously contradicts your contention that they 'should' be unsoloable). It does not meen that it was meant that every single character should be able to do it.
And you've missed my point on the second part. I wasn't saying that its easy to balance architypes. I was saying that if archvillains were an unintended obstacle to soloing on invicnible then it would e easy to remove thema nd have them ALWAYS spawn as EBs for a solo player.
You are right that the scaling system was created before enhanement diversification, however that only reinforces the point that when it was created the develoeprs must have known it would be possible for people to solo the encounter (otherwise why put it in).
If your argument is that it should be scaled back now that EB has made that impossible, I would say that I might have agread with you before IOs. IOs have raised the bar back up again, and made many things possible that were not previously possible since the advent of ED. The differnece, of course, is cost - IOs are a lot more expensive than SOs (its sort of arguable whether they're harder or easier to get than HOs since there was no market back then). Accounting for the effects of the great controller nerf, which was a differnt thing than ED, I'd say I have about the same levle of power now as I did then. It just took a lot more time and hard work to acquire.
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If that is true, then it begs the obvious question: why is it possible to spawn them solo? If the developers were not only certain it was impossible to defeat them solo, but specifically WANTED to ensure that no one ever defeated thems solo, thenit seems to me that the unbelievably simply
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If my memory is correct...
Originally the AV->EB system was such that AVs never spawned solo. However, players with builds capable of, and desired to, solo AVs, complained that they had to get additional teammates to pad their missions in order to spawn an AV. So it was changed such that AVs will appear on the highest difficulty setting.
This doesn't indicate that the devs intended for people to defeat AVs solo, but that they were willing to allow people who to make a choice whether they want an AV or an EB in a solo mission.
But it doesn't mean that they don't intend people to defeat AVs solo, either. dev intention has changed over time and I think the current state is acceptance that IOs and powerset selection can create AV-killers.
I think most AV fights are stupid and boring. My main gripe is stupid AI and lack of challenging fights. Instead we have the brute force "bag of hp with big damage". The same "bag of hp with big damage" is what causes people to dislike AVs for making player characters feel third rate, because no matter what, you know your tanker's handclap isn't going to be hitting for hundreds of hp damage...and your defender isn't going to be hitting like 10 blasters combined...
If we have better AI and better designed fights, we can do away with the whole AV mechanism. It'd be probably more difficult to fight a bunch of smart EBs with different powers, than one dumb AV. Win-win for everyone. People who can't solo don't feel outclassed because they were outnumbered, and people who can, get a higher sense of satisfaction at beating a more difficult challenge.
"Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty." -- Plato
Playing Gods (51106) - Heroic Lvl 5-20
What Rough Beast (255143) - Villainous Lvl 40-50
This post really disturbs me in how close it comes to butting me off the game. A couple of things that caught my eye:
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I like hobbies that are time consuming and difficult - if you're as good as you're ever going to be in the first month, then really, whats the point after that?
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Ugh! I HATE hobbies that are time-consuming and difficult. They're not fun, they're work, and I happen to do enough of that in real life to want to do more of it to have "fun." I LIKE games where you're as strong in the beginning as you're ever going to be, because that just means you have all the tools you'll need to triumph and the game can thereafter focus on making you use them RIGHT. Take any fighting game, for example, from the simplest Street Fighter II: The World Warrior to the overcomplicated Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes - all they ever give you is a fighter, and that's it. You gain nothing for playing that fighter more than the knowledge of what he can and how he should do it, as well as the skill required to actually pull it off.
See, what I have no respect for is a loaded battle that's decided before it even starts. I have no respect for people who brought victory from home. I don't care what kind of struggle and hardship they went through to get there. I wasn't part of it, I didn't play that game, and I refuse to be an NPC to forward their sense of self-esteem. I don't play games to pump other people's egos, I'm afraid. I play them to pump my own.
The only way I can truly enjoy a game and be engaged in it is if everything crucial to the encounter happens before my eyes, either IN the encounter itself or via a choice made immediately before it. I like fighting games because I can pick any character and beat any other just as long as I know what I'm doing. Grinding and working for hour after hour for a significant edge so that the encounter itself can play out like a battle on My Brute is not something that interests me.
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I therefor oppose your suggestion because I believe it will lower the bar of many encounters, making the game less challenging to play, and decreasing my special-ness compared to others.
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I DESPISE contests of "special-ness compared to others" because for every winner, there is always a loser. And it doesn't have to be. The game can just as easily make us feel special against its own enemies in an immersive, moving way, and I dare say much more so than it can by stroking the ego by letting us step on other people's sense of pride and accomplishment. I've always had more fun in single-player games that focused around my character and allowed him to be "all that and more" and had people complimenting him and cheering on him and making him out to be the biggest thing ever... Than I've had in your typical "you are a grunt" MMO. I don't play my games to work hard and compete with other people. That's exactly what I play games to AVOID. When I play Battlefield 2142 and my team gets walked on without a chance to do anything and all I ever did that round was die, I don't feel like I've had fun. In fact, it was an ugly, frustrating experience. And I can't blame the other team - they were just better. It doesn't change the fact that it was a horrible, rotten experience.
I'm never going to have any tolerance whatsoever for for people making themselves feel better at others' expense, nor will I ever be a fan of engaging in it, myself. I prefer to have an environment where everybody can have fun together. You'd THINK that would be a given in a largely cooperative game, but apparently not.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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This post really disturbs me in how close it comes to butting me off the game. A couple of things that caught my eye:
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I like hobbies that are time consuming and difficult - if you're as good as you're ever going to be in the first month, then really, whats the point after that?
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Ugh! I HATE hobbies that are time-consuming and difficult. They're not fun, they're work, and I happen to do enough of that in real life to want to do more of it to have "fun." I LIKE games where you're as strong in the beginning as you're ever going to be, because that just means you have all the tools you'll need to triumph and the game can thereafter focus on making you use them RIGHT. Take any fighting game, for example, from the simplest Street Fighter II: The World Warrior to the overcomplicated Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes - all they ever give you is a fighter, and that's it. You gain nothing for playing that fighter more than the knowledge of what he can and how he should do it, as well as the skill required to actually pull it off.
See, what I have no respect for is a loaded battle that's decided before it even starts. I have no respect for people who brought victory from home. I don't care what kind of struggle and hardship they went through to get there. I wasn't part of it, I didn't play that game, and I refuse to be an NPC to forward their sense of self-esteem. I don't play games to pump other people's egos, I'm afraid. I play them to pump my own.
The only way I can truly enjoy a game and be engaged in it is if everything crucial to the encounter happens before my eyes, either IN the encounter itself or via a choice made immediately before it. I like fighting games because I can pick any character and beat any other just as long as I know what I'm doing. Grinding and working for hour after hour for a significant edge so that the encounter itself can play out like a battle on My Brute is not something that interests me.
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I therefor oppose your suggestion because I believe it will lower the bar of many encounters, making the game less challenging to play, and decreasing my special-ness compared to others.
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I DESPISE contests of "special-ness compared to others" because for every winner, there is always a loser. And it doesn't have to be. The game can just as easily make us feel special against its own enemies in an immersive, moving way, and I dare say much more so than it can by stroking the ego by letting us step on other people's sense of pride and accomplishment. I've always had more fun in single-player games that focused around my character and allowed him to be "all that and more" and had people complimenting him and cheering on him and making him out to be the biggest thing ever... Than I've had in your typical "you are a grunt" MMO. I don't play my games to work hard and compete with other people. That's exactly what I play games to AVOID. When I play Battlefield 2142 and my team gets walked on without a chance to do anything and all I ever did that round was die, I don't feel like I've had fun. In fact, it was an ugly, frustrating experience. And I can't blame the other team - they were just better. It doesn't change the fact that it was a horrible, rotten experience.
I'm never going to have any tolerance whatsoever for for people making themselves feel better at others' expense, nor will I ever be a fan of engaging in it, myself. I prefer to have an environment where everybody can have fun together. You'd THINK that would be a given in a largely cooperative game, but apparently not.
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Wow, you've been playing an MMO for a VERY long time for someone who just stated that they essentially hate the MMORPG model.
"the reason there are so many sarcastic pvpers is we already had a better version of pvp taken away from us to appease bad players. Back then we chuckled at how bad players came here and whined. If we knew that was the actual voice devs would listen to instead of informed, educated players we probably would have been bigger dicks back then." -ConFlict
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Again, I'm simply tired of building a "super-hero" who, regardless of how much care and time I put into him, is in no way comparable to any of the villains he fights. I'm tired of it.
Are we building superhumans or not? Seriously... 'cause it strikes me that, given everyone we interact with in the game, we're average at best.
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I agree, believe it or not. But I find this problem is best exmeplified by minions, lieutenants and boses rahter than archvillains. While archvillains should represent the absolute cream of the crop - the most skilled and dangerous beings on the planet - minions should be, well, exactly what it says on the tin. Superman, and the Silver Surfer do NOT quake wiht fear and choose a different story arc because some guys with special forces training show up, no matter how tricked out their hand guns are.
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Neither Superman nor the Silver Surfer are examples of the sort of power levels characters in this game should be able to attain.
To those who feel average I'll say that's because you are. It's called City of Heroes, plural. The Heroes in this game aren't earthbound gods - they're cops with capes. On a busy night in AP you'll see more heroes on the streets than you'll see in any Marvel or DC story outwith the most bloated crossover event. I don't care what your back story claims - you are NOT that special.
As for not doing a mission because you're scared of Malta - neither my Scrapper nor my MM shy away from them. In fact I like them, because unlike most other high level enemy groups they present a reasonable challenge to those characters.
I'm a big believer in making content soloable, but not every AT and powerset combination should be able to solo Malta missions on the higher difficulty settings and I see no reason to weaken one of the few genuinely dangerous enemy groups in the high level game just to stroke the ego of people trying to solo them on characters that aren't built for that.
Invincible/Relentless is overrated anyway. I prefer to play on diff 4 (or 2 in the lower levels) - no unbeatable AVs, and the spawns are a bit more varied than the 3 minions or 1 lt and 1 minion that make up the vast majority of the spawns on diffs 1, 3 and 5.
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I remember there wa a sugestion some time ago that, while it has obvious logistical prolems, was quite interesting in principal, to add a significant number of underling class mobs to any given encounter to allow the player that feeling of fighting their way through whole armies of mooks, casualy obliterating them,a nd/or laughing off their puny attacks.
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I hate this idea. Hordes of underlings would be an irrelevancy to anyone with an AoE or two, and an irritation to anyone with mainly single target powers.
Besides, the minions of most enemy groups can be casually swept aside. If my scrapper focuses all of her attacks on the boss just firing off Spin and/or Shockwave a few times will ensure that by the time the boss goes down the minions around her are either defeated or close to it.
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Wow, you've been playing an MMO for a VERY long time for someone who just stated that they essentially hate the MMORPG model.
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This is the only MMO I've ever been able to play for more than a week exactly BECAUSE it doesn't follow the "MMORPG model" to the letter. I like this game IN SPITE OF it being an MMO, not BECAUSE of it. If I wanted the hardcore Korean grindfest MMO experience, I'd go play WoW or Lineage II or 9Dragons or any of the other games to that effect. I picked City of Heroes because it WASN'T any of these things.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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I thought we were done wiht this debate years ago! Ahh well...
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AVs do not overshadow my brute!
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This. I have yet to meet an archvillain I cant solo. Ussually with jsut the powers at my disposal. On rare occasions (multiple AVs at once - AVs with massive resistance to my damage, AVs who summon endless haords of bosses), I may need to summon a shivan, or otherwise dip into my bag of tricks a bit to make the fight end in a reasonable amount of time (under 10 minutes or so). In point of fact, Ive aced a few GMs solo as well. I dont feel the need for Statesman to be nerfed lest he overshadow me - he doesn't overshadow me. My character is already more powerful/skilled than he is, and I can kick his [censored] if necessary to prove it.
This is a VERY easy game. It does not need to be made any easier. It might expand this fellow's e-peen to knock AVs down to EB status, but it would put me to sleep.
But wait you say, not everyone plays an illusion/radiation controller with a 3 billion influence build. Not everyone can solo archvillains.
You're right. ANd nor should they be able to. The Freedom Phalanx, and the leaders of Arachnos, and their assorted playmates are the most skilled, most powerful, msot dangerous heroes on Earth. They're the best. If you want to take them on, then you SHOULD have to be the best as well. Not every villain in the DC universe can go one on one with superman. Similarly, not every villain can go toe to toe with Statesmen. The best of the best can; the rest bring their friends. But that level of power IS attainable to the player characters, assuming you put a lot of effort into it.
Some may cry that any noob who just hit 50 this minute shiuld be able to ace Lord Recluse alone, and that you shoudln't ahve to put a lot of time and effort into a fake virtual game, but to them I say (when I dont just insult them) that gaming is like any other hobby; if you want to be the best, it takes effort. That guy you golf with some time who shoots about 20 under-par and always finsihes any given hole in half the time you do? He spends a lot of time at the driving range,a nd at putting practice, and probably at some cheap public courses perfecting his technique. If you want to get good at golf and beat him, you have to do the same. If you want to get good enough at gaming to run with teh really big dogs of the setting, that takes time too. Thats not a failure of the developers; thats how it SHOULD work. If the entire game is easy enough for anyone, using any build, of any level of experience, to solo all of it, then there's nothing at all to challenge or interest people who are better than that (except PvP, and conveniantly enough, CoH has some of the most broken and least relevant PvP dynamics of any game on the market). That may be a game you want to play, but its not one that interests me. Judging by the fact that pretty much every succesful MMO ever is predicated on the idea that to get to the top tiers of performance and face the top tier challenges you need to invest a great deal of time and effort, the people who produce these sorts of games seem to have reached the conclusion that thats the dynamic that appeals to the majority of players as well.
But just in case the above arguments ahven't convinced anyone to embrace online elitism in all its glories, consider also that the problem of unsoloable bad guys who make you feel week was solved a long time ago by the invention of Elite Bosses. If your force-field/electricity defender doesn't quite do enough damage to beat an archvillain, turn your difficulty down and he will spawn as an elite boss, which any half competant player should be able to flatten like a pancake wiht the right tray of inspirations. On large teams they still spawn as archvillains, tahts true, but that is for balance reasons. A team of 8 against an elite boss (or even several elite bosses) is a cake-walk of epic purportions, as anyone who's ever run the ITF can attest. Making them tougher than the average player individually make make low-med builds feel like they dont measure up, but making them so easy any one member fo the team could kill them alone would lead to archvillain battles that lasted about 7 seconds, and left no one feeling as if they had accomplished anything remotely significant. If Tyrant is really that big a whimp, who cares that you just defeated him. I know, you say, there will be many EBs in a battle agains thte tema, thus making it balanced, but I maintain that even if you spawn an EB per player, a good team will mow through them. Ebs just dont have the massive damage, or survivability to really threaten a well-put-together team. Ironicaly, this suggestion would be most likely to hurt large but less optimal teams, making it harder for non-optimized groups to complete high end content, rather than easier, where-as for the real Min/Maxers it may pose a slight atleration of tactics, but no significant obstacle.
Finally, assuming that that argument too ahs failed, consider this: implimenting this system would require alterning hundreds - probably thousands of exisitng misions in massive ways to justify the inclusion of additional Elite-Bosses in high level fights and to actually code said edition into the mission. Additionally ti would require teh creation of new programming in the game to automatically change the numbe of elite-bosses in final encounters depending on the size of the team and difficulty settings. Never say never, and all that, but given that recent issues have featured a consistant (and welcome, at leat to people like me) trend towards tougher and tougher archvillain battles, it seems highly unlikely that such a large amount of resources will be put into nulifying that work and implementing this suggestion instead.
And no, I havent read any of the posts between the first one and now. I dont plan to either.