Hm, don't think its supposed to be like that, but dont bug it >.>
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Hm, don't think its supposed to be like that, but dont bug it >.>
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Last time you told me not to report the Fire Imp bug and look where that got me!
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Still have yet to give the SF a try (hey, I just realized I've *never* done a SF before! LOL!).
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I have a 41 MM (and quite a few redside lowbies) and have NEVER done a SF of any type. I suppose I'll have to get going on those at some point? 
Mrs. Animal - AKA Asrigoth, Shadow Cruiser, Dr IB Long, Brother Jacob, Smashing Beauty, Katsumi, Bella Mente, Miss S. Ippi, Bella Mente, Brandi Alexander, Pip Toodles, Pip Caldwell, Honey Pip. Red Side Little Ma'am, Rhosa
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I hope the fix is to give us the Dev Tools. First thing I'd do is fix teh ch4t I3uG.
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100025000300What chat bug?
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WHICH [Zones into Talos]
chat [Zones into Dark Astoria]
bug?
~Missi
http://tinyurl.com/yhy333s
Miss Informed in 2016! She can't be worse than all those other guys!
I did both the new TF and the new SF this weekend. We had a full team of 8 for the SF and several of us had Nukes/Shivans/assorted Temp Pets. I think it went really well and I had a good time. I also think that without the aresenal of temp powers we brought along, it would have been much more difficult and less fun. The cut scene was a great addition. (I say that now, before I've seen it 2 dozen times. Damned if you do, damned if you don't with those, I think.) I think it took is a few minutes under or over 2 hours.
The hero TF was actually far more difficult for us. The game will allow you to start with a team of 4 and we went with 6. It took is just a few minutes under 3 hours to complete the TF and I'd say nearly 2 of them were spent in the final mission. I have to say, I was incredibly disappointed in the mechanics of that mission. I love the idea of the guy spawning additional bad guys on us, but the way it happened was not run, it was simply tedious. Beat him down, he spawns someone new and regens all his health. Repeat until you are ready to scream, then repeat at least once more.
I am really fed up with Task Forces that require us to beat up the same person multiple times or for a ridiculously long period of time before we win. That's just plain lazy "I'm out of ideas.... let's keep beating up this one guy over and over"
development. Beating up on nearly impossible to kill guy isn't "epic." It's tedious. Adding ambushes doesn't change the fact that we're still beating up one guy over and over again. I think our Dev team is far too talented to continually be hauling out this type of final encounter.
Mary Macomber, Jade Spider, Romulus, and now this. You can change what the AV looks like, you can add an ambush, you can make us fight in some hazy "dream sequence" fog, make us all turn into pandas, whatever... it doesn't change the fact that we're still beating on the same "invincible" thing repeatedly. New schtick, please.
I liked the end of the LRSF, for example. I very much liked the idea of getting the individual temp powers to use to mitigate different things (Though I agree with those who said it's not the best way to give every AT a role to perform) Those ideas are new and different and provide more of a challenge than "beat the guy up until you bore him to death and then give me a call."
~Missi
http://tinyurl.com/yhy333s
Miss Informed in 2016! She can't be worse than all those other guys!
You don't have to disengage from the final boss during the ambushes on the TF. I'd recommend that you stay on the boss and use your aggro managers to fend off the ambushes while defeating the big boss, and then going after the ambushers. That way you don't let him regenerate his massive health back. Beat him down, he won't rez, unlike Romulus or Jade Spider.
The use of taunt, confuse, and sleep are great for the end ambushers. If you have +def buffers for this TF it also helps alot to be able to keep on the boss while confronted by the ambushers. And if that doesn't work you should make sure you have some vengeance handy.
We were able to finish the TF in 28:44 with a half pug team, using no temps other than the one granted by the TF.
eat some bamboo, you are the panda man
eat some bamboo tonight
Hello, my name is Pum and i exploit TFs w/ SOs.
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I am really fed up with Task Forces that require us to beat up the same person multiple times or for a ridiculously long period of time before we win. That's just plain lazy "I'm out of ideas.... let's keep beating up this one guy over and over"
development. Beating up on nearly impossible to kill guy isn't "epic." It's tedious. Adding ambushes doesn't change the fact that we're still beating up one guy over and over again. I think our Dev team is far too talented to continually be hauling out this type of final encounter.
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Sadly, there isn't a lot of variety available here. Sure, there are probably many creative ways to do the same thing, but most significant challenges in the game are going to be geared for teams of 4 or more. And all of them, inevitably, will boil down to beating something up. A vast majority of our "powers" fall into 2 categories, dealing damage or protecting from it. That kind of limits what you can do with any given encounter. I would like to see more creativity in the final confrontation, but I'm not sure how likely it is that we'll see it.
Here's a few quick, off-the-hip ideas of my own:
A massive robot or similar construction that you have to beat the layers off of to get to the chewy opponent inside. It's still really just a big bag of health, but at least it can be presented in better parts without a full heal occuring. And hey, everyone likes beating up giant robots. 
An opponent/group hidden away in a base with several layers of defenses that you have to overcome. Lots of potential to use the roles of the various ATs here, and in some cases, even powersets. Unfortunately, with things like Team Teleport, there are lots of loopholes to be aware of as well. Requires multiple paths to completion since team makeup can vary so much, which increases the creation time and complexity by more than a minor amount. Pretty much like the giant robot, except it doesn't move and it's the entire zone.
An opponent/group that copies himself and spreads those copies out on a map, with only 1 being the real one. Determining the real one (which is random each time) requires brainwork, not power mashing. Or you can just beat all of them I guess, which is where the flaw comes in, particularly if beating the copies can earn you more "stuff". This type of thing would become routine pretty quick though, since even when random, there would be limited configurations.
An opponent/group who stages a running fight with the team over the entire duration of the TF/SF, where his powers and/or allies change randomly each time, and each time it is a different AT that can end the fight quickly (varying weaknesses).
An opponent/group that can only be defeated by creative use of terrain as a weapon.
An opponent/group that isn't defeated, but instead avoided in the process of reaching a goal, such as a rescue. This could involve stealth, control tactics, as well as "tanking" as a distraction.
An opponent/group that attacks a fixed position that the team must defend using their own powers as well as defenses at the fixed position.
An encounter that begins with each team member separated in a different portion of the map and fighting to regroup and/or escape. Again, teleport powers make this a non-starter unless disabled.
I think the devs made a big mistake with the AV buff (troller nerf) in i5. In essence when they bumped up the AVs resists to debuffs it essentially made the end game bosses a matter of doing as much damage to them while killing their regen rate, and surviving whatever custom attack they have or ambushes etc.
Slow, confuse, fear, -end, and -acc debuffs really don't help much against AVs, which takes away the variety that you used to be able to bring to defeating end game NPCs.
So now it's all custom coding to poke holes in the standard TF/AV template in order for underperforming sets to feel useful.
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You don't have to disengage from the final boss during the ambushes on the TF. I'd recommend that you stay on the boss and use your aggro managers to fend off the ambushes while defeating the big boss, and then going after the ambushers. That way you don't let him regenerate his massive health back. Beat him down, he won't rez, unlike Romulus or Jade Spider.
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I'm sure this is possible with a fairly balanced team of 8, but with the team of 6 we had, it was not. We did try and it resulted in wipes, which also meant total regen on Reichsman. We lacked the aggro management needed to keep two AVs busy and damaged and Reichsman did his "Unaffected" thing several times. I don't blame the mechanics of the TF for the difficult time we had, but I think the "start" information is misleading.
I'm really surprised this TF will allow people to start with as few as 4 people. While I wouldn't go so far as to say it would be impossible to complete with 4 people, this isn't like completing Synapse with 4 people. The team build with 4 people is going to have to be pretty spectacular. It might beetter if the text said something to hint about that, allowing for a team of 4 to do the TF as a real challenge, but definitely encouraging players to go with a team of 8. There's plenty of precedent for that in missions with EB/AVs that say, "You may want to bring some friends" or something similar.
Good design is also about establishing good expectations. The problem with the TF expectations is that the base level expectation is all over the board. Some are easy with 4, some are EASIER with 4 (Hello, Positron), and some are going to be extremely difficult. If you set the expectation that a team of 4 can do the mission, then it does not go without saying that "A small percentage of teams of 4 will be able to complete this TF." If it's going to be that difficult, it needs to be said. Allowing a minimum of 4 to start without any warning should mean something closer to "Teams of 4 may be challenged, but it's certainly possible." I'm not suggesting they spoon-feed us information about how to create a solid team, but that they give us a fair expectation of what to expect so that we can plan accordingly on our own. Right now I believe that the expectation level is not set to match the actual level of challenge.
And I still say that beating up the same guy multiple times or for any extended period is a cop out in terms of story and mechanics. Doing it once or twice makes sense; there's always got to be some incincible guy out there. But I think this game has resorted to that ploy too many times.
~Missi
http://tinyurl.com/yhy333s
Miss Informed in 2016! She can't be worse than all those other guys!
I'd rate the difficulty of this TF in line with itf. In the beginning it was difficult to take on Romulus and his Nictus helpers, but over time better understanding of the mechanics of the end encounter made it easier to overcome.
I'm not sure what type of scaling the new TF has with respect to the end encounter as you lower the number of participants. I always try and fill out the team with 8 people just to make things are more fun and to give people outside of my core group of friends a chance to jump around and become veng bait.
In terms of balance, I never dictate what toons people should bring to a TF, I always try to remind myself that no kin and no rad usually means slower and more difficult end encounters.
I suppose I can run a 5TF with 4 people to see what's different. Did you only have 2 AVs at the end, plus the boss? If you did it would imply that the number of AVs at the end are one of the main determining differences for the end encounter with 6 team members.
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I think the devs made a big mistake with the AV buff (troller nerf) in i5. In essence when they bumped up the AVs resists to debuffs it essentially made the end game bosses a matter of doing as much damage to them while killing their regen rate, and surviving whatever custom attack they have or ambushes etc.
Slow, confuse, fear, -end, and -acc debuffs really don't help much against AVs, which takes away the variety that you used to be able to bring to defeating end game NPCs.
So now it's all custom coding to poke holes in the standard TF/AV template in order for underperforming sets to feel useful.
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Hmmm, as a programmer, I certainly hope "custom code" isn't required to deviate from a standard AV template. That's a very hindered design if that's the case. Being able to make AVs with specific weaknesses (don't we see this in comics ALL the time) would seem to be a requirement. That doesn't mean making them so weak that an encounter becomes non-challenging though. Given that team makeup can vary so much, building weaknesses into an AV/encounter can be problematic anyhow. If you have multiple players with a key attack, the encounter may indeed become too easy. But at the same time, you don't want it to be too hard for any teams lacking the power. At least, that seems to be the design goals of Paragon at this point. Many games have encounters that aren't winnable (or become exceedingly hard) except with key elements... but that sort of thing doesn't seem to go over well here.
I imagine MMO content must be a PITA to design for, particularly when the underlying game itself changes so frequently and, in some cases, radically. The more content you amass, the more you need to tweak for any givien game update. It's a pretty vicious development cycle really. I've seen the end-game content in a few other MMOs, and they all follow similar design patterns. To me, there isn't a lot of innovating going on in that area in any game. I like the more casual feel of CoH, and the game has a strong enough base, that I think the developers should feel able to stretch the boundaries of this type of content a bit. As MissI said, the goal should be fun, and pounding on a pile-o-health is only fun for so long or so many repetitions. Though I expect, if the developers did try a few radical departures in encounter design and didn't pull it off (good luck defining "failure" in that case), the fallout would be worse than the "been there done that" feedback they get for being consistent, if somewhat boring.
I was really hoping that the TF might be a takeover of the volcano in Striga and the 5th reclaiming the giant robot. Having that thing slowly animate as you fight your way up to the top and the 200' tall [censored] flying up and out of the volcano would be so awesome. Just put glowies up the scaffolding to force the players to creep up it instead of ignoring the groups and slow down that last mission, then give me a GM-style fight to take down a huge nazi mecha. YES PLEASE!
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3. The SF has an escort. Since villains are already scarred from the RSF technician, I guess someone decided to flog the villains some more by inflicting another NPC that can and usually does get lost and vator freaks. Can someone please fix this annoying issue? Of course both the RSF and this escort have massive Longbow spawns so it is quite easy to get team wiped since you are not able to use stealth/AoE stealth to your advantage.
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I'm not sure about this, we will need to check it on another run, but it looks like you don't need to lead escort to Numina's room. Our escort was lost in elevators, ran outside the map, etc., but I was able to click on glowie in Numina's room and trigger cutscene.