City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Barracuda SF Review: Too Gadgety?

Kelenar

By Kelenar,
Posted on: 2009-07-01 06:39 in CoH and CoV General Discussions

 

Posted

I was in a pick-up team last night that ran the Barracuda SF. We were successful at 2 hours and 9 minutes, but I credit that to the fact that we had one of every AT and a good group of experienced players. Also, we had at least one person on the team who had tried the SF before, so we had a heads up on a few things.

Up until the last mission, it's a pretty vanilla SF, with the notable exception of the cool cut-scene. The final mish obviously got the most time and attention of the devs.

What struck me during the last fight was that I would have had no idea what to do unless we had someone who ran this before. I've seen boss fights like this in other MMOs, and it seems that they give a lot more direction to the players. In this one, the game drops five powers on you, and you're off to the races! I was playing a Stalker, and I got 5 auto-powers; from what I could tell from the tool tips they just buffed my resistance and damage output. Thinking about it now, I could have looked at the more detailed power display, but that didn't occur to me at the time. Perhaps the full description said that I could go in the side rooms and explain what the fail safes do. As it was, I only knew about them from the player who ran the SF before.

It seems that the only essential power for this is the one that breaks Reichman's phasing. We had two Doms on our team and they were handling the ambushes pretty well, plus whoever had the "red lightning holds the whole ambush" power was using that a lot, and I ended up using all the fail safes (probably wasted the first two... the fight lasted longer than I thought it would).

The most important thing seems to be coordinating the use of the temp powers at the end. If I pop a fail safe at the same time the Mega Hold is going off, then it's wasted. The same might be true for the anti-phasing power, if more than one person had it.

In the final analysis, I had a lot of fun with this SF, but I can totally see the frustration expressed by some players at the difficulty of the last fight. I don't think anything about the actual mechanics of the encounter needs to be changed, but there has to be more overt direction in terms of what power does what.

Agua Man lvl 48 Water/Electric Blaster


"To die hating NCSoft for shutting down City of Heroes, that was Freedom."

 

Posted

The heroside one has a similar but smaller problem, as far as no in-game explanation of the powers... after successfully running it, I still don't know what exactly the guns you get are for. If I recall, the description just says that they 'weaken' Reichsman. ... okay. So is that -regen, -dmg, -recharge, -acc, -tohit, -defense, -speed, -perception, -heal, -special, -resistance, -range, a toggle drop, or something else entirely? Fortunately, 'just run in and hit him and somebody zap him now and then' seems to work; I imagine it's rather more annoying v-side where use of the powers is much more integral.

Having Vengeance and Fallout slotted for recharge means never having to say you're sorry.