Hardcore Weekend

everyone has the defense of a blaster and the power of a defender, TAKE COVER

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XP and Inf as normal. triple debt, no inspiration drops, all missions are shifted two degrees of dificulty up, all enemies count as if they were two levels higher than they are, prestigue and salvage drops are increased by half.

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You forgot to put an AV/GM in every spawn. I mean if we're going to be fighting stuff well inside the purple patch then we might as well have AV/GMs too

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Another thing I'd like to see would be "double XP in [zone]" weekends -- particularly for the Rikti War zone -- and "double XP for Task and Strike forces" weekends.

[/ QUOTE ]Hunting outdoors is usually faster anyway, especially in RWZ. But yeah, I could definitely support both of those ideas.

Honestly playing around with hiking up rewards is an incentive for people to play (or to play in a certain way, in the case of your latter 2 suggestions), which is what the Devs want - but they're not about to run events that make the game significantly tougher for everyone - there are still people who struggle on Heroic/Villainous (yeah, it surprises me too, but there are - I've met them).

I must admit one of the things I do like about CoH/V is being able to pick your own challenges - outdoors you can find mobs up to L54 (and a +4 is a pretty good challenge, especially in a hazard size spawn), and if you mainly duo like me or solo or any small team then you can pick difficulty based on spawn size/content too when in hazard zones - so we can already pick our own risk to some degree, even over and above the mission scaling.

Although talking about the mission scaling, it definitely needs at least 3 more difficulty/rep settings - one for Invincible/Relentless with larger spawns, then a couple at +3/+4 level settings beyond that (one of them with normal spawn sizes and the other with the larger "+1 player" setting again).

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there are still people who struggle on Heroic/Villainous (yeah, it surprises me too, but there are - I've met them).

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Met them? Heck, I've been them. And, yes, a general "across the board" increase in difficulty wouldn't be good. But a weekend when, say, Freakshow mobs and Crey's Folly were announced to be "extra hard, extra filling"? That might be fun.

A 'hardcore' weekend with halved xp, inf and drop rates would not make the game harder or more challenging, it would just make it twice as boring. No thanks.

Val, you haven't played with me, have you? I can turn any AT (regardless of powers) into a Squishymon...

Of the toons below, the ones I've only been able to play outside of Heroic/Villainous were my Scrapper and my Brute...

Everyone likes a different challenge, that's why I wish we could tailor the mission difficulty a bit better than we can at the moment. I'd rather have more control over the difficulty settings than any kind of "hardcore" event/weekend. The challenge I tend to prefer is larger spawns and more bosses/EBs, not higher level mobs (+1/+2 or +2/+3 is fine by me - I usually stay on Ruthless/Unyielding tbh) nor slowed progress through xp penalties.

With more adjustable difficulty settings most of my characters could face larger spawns. My teams, and my stalker solo, could get more EBs/Bosses than Minions/Lieuts (because minions/lieuts often melt away too fast to be a challenge). My Warshade and Crab Spider could have had significantly larger spawns (with fewer bosses than you usually get in big hazard-style spawns) to suit their AE natures. And my poor old Mind/Psi dom could avoid EBs altogether (I spent 15mins taking down a Ballista with him the other day - then confuse missed twice in a row and, with a sliver of his life left, the Ballista two-shotted me and I had to do it all again, heh).

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Val, you haven't played with me, have you? I can turn any AT (regardless of powers) into a Squishymon...

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I don't think I have - I don't recall teaming with any suicidal Hares/Rabbits - and you're not exactly convincing me that I'd want to