Any News on the return of non-wimpy TF/SF's?

Wasn't sure which forum this belonged in but I guess the original cause is a bug so, meh.

Questions in the title, it's getting a little uninspiring running TF's on mega wimpy difficulty and while it's still possible to run normal content or flashbacks the TF's made for a nice session of play where we knew pretty much how long people needed to commit for, we got a nice merit reward at the end and it made a good SG event at +2-4 mobs or even running a max difficulty run to really give our toons a decent run out.

At the moment though a half decent team sleepwalks though them, if your team happens to contain a high powered poewerset combo or heaven forbid a heavily IO'd out character or two then it's rare you even see anyone take damage of note, let alone be defeated.

Has there been any word of a fix on this? Combined with wacky AV's levels in regular/flashback content it's hard to find content that sits at the right difficulty (ie not one shotted by shield charge and not containing a +4 AV)

Agreed. I'd also like to see higher merits for harder settings, but that can wait.

Choose foes buffed and players debuffed. That'll wake up your team.

The members of our SG eagerly await the return of tough difficulty TF/SFs.

We used to run max difficulty LGTF races, with two teams trying their best to complete it as fast as possible, but with the difficulty of Purple mobs pounding on you.

Seeing white and yellow mobs all the time is getting boring on tfs now.

I can understand stopping people doing TFs at -1, but not allowing us to do them at tough difficulties is just plain annoying and dull.

As I recall, you can still set Players Debuffed, Enemies Buffed, No Temp Power, No Pool Powers for additional challenge. The TF difficulty panel still works just fine.

True, but the rewards aren't there so why bother?

So, I had a look at the challenge settings and to be honest they really aren't that useful. The buffs don't seem to effect enemy survivability so the same attacks that dropped the wimpy white conning mobs still drop them, they hit a bit harder but without the buff of being higher con to weaken our effects they don't survive.

So I turned to the debuff players challenge setting in the hope of helping, -ACC, -Dam, -Mez in hefty chunks. Some builds are going to virtually ignore this, 50% global accuracy buff is far from unreasonable so the IO'd toons are fine but at lower levels and/or on an SO'd toon -50% can be absolutely devestating.

The problem is that it's so binary at 50 with a high powered toon the challenge settings create very little change against everything but AV's and at lower un-IO'd levels it's way too much, far more than the difference between a +1/+2 mob. It's not just enhancement levels where the difference comes in, a team backed by an Emp/bubbler is fine, if they're relying on control or to-hit check buffs/debuffs they can be crippled.

I don't think it's impatience either, it's been a while since this "temporary fix" went live (it went on training room a month ago but I don't know when it went live) but i've watched and heard the interest in TF's drop in that time because of the lack of challenge and the nature of the buffs debuffs mean that unless you start cherry picking what members/toons can sign up the odds of at least some members getting frustrated as the debuff turns them into an observer increases.

They aren't even a stopgap measure due to their nature and inability to be adjusted. +1/+2 mean that a non-optimal team could have a decent challange without worrying about composition. Now you either have to be bored by +0's, or start dictating team composition. The sliding scale of difficulty was one of the best things about the game, you could tailor your experience to the power of the team and the game is severely lessened by losing it on TF's.

Yeah they did, and life was really good for a while there, more lower TF's were being run by people above the level range still getting XP and we had an increase in TF activity, we had a 50 ding on our first Posi run after the changes but now you can end up on a TF for example with a max level with +5 levels of powers on top fighting +0's who is on cruise control. Do you debuff yourselves and buff enemies for those people while potentially nerfing a chunk of the team to observers or just let them practically solo the TF?

Difficulty settings on TF's are, I will go as far as to say, essential, to the point that now where I would sign up for events and respond to PUG TF's I find myself wondering what else I could be doing and logging off as the challenge and thus entertainment will be limited due to enemies who pose virtually zero threat.

So seriously anything on this? Devs? Anyone?

This is starting to look like a non-temporary solution and it's having a massive effect on the number of people interested in TF's. Can't we at least get the old settings back for TF's?

When you introduce a system like inventions where toons can solo high plus con 8 man spawns and give them 5 extra levels in exemp power having TF's that can only be run at +0 is hugely insufficient.

Flashbacks are working, great, but the TF's and SF's were ideal events for casuals and this locked difficulty thing is butchering interest from SG's and randoms alike.

Yeah I'd love a dev comment on this, even if it's just 'we're working on it',

Soon(tm)

I thought this did work for a short bit but I just ran a +2 (or tried to) and got +0s.

Here's GF on the -1 TF problem:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...28#post2397828