Does anyone notice this?

Lack of challenge endgame?

Sometimes it's fun to flip out and mow down legions of enemies. Not much challenge in that, and you get a nice payout.

However, if you want challenge, you can certainly find it. Few people run farming missions against Malta, Carnival of Shadows, or Vanguard, with good reasons!

Check out how the new difficulty settings work.

Hamidon Raid

Eden Trial

Abandoned Sewer Trial

Statesman's Task Force

Master of Statesman's Task Force

Doctor Khan Task Force

Once these become routine, you can adjust the challenge settings to make enemies tougher, or your team less powerful.


And the Mission Architect holds thousands of missions, some of which are very difficult.

And you can always make your own.

Also, using Ouroboros, you can do older mission arcs with some or many very difficult challenge settings in place.

I'm actually a little worried. On your rush to 50, which may or may not have been intentional, you've missed a lot of the fun of the stories of the city. Ouroboros allows you to see those again.

I'd recommend the Faultline and Croatoa arcs for that.

Welcome to the game. I'm sorry that your early experiences were underwhelming, but this community can be welcoming, and challenge is certainly available for those that want it. Expect negativity to be returned sevenfold, and friendly curiosity to be greatly rewarded.

Also, Alt-itis is very common here. With Supersidekicking System, and AT overlap, players tend to have a wide variety of characters available for any particular task.

Defenders can have radically different playstyles based on primary and secondary powerset selection.

I think Westley said...

"I have heals. I heal to defend the team. I am not a healer.
I have blasts. I blast to defend the team. I am not a blaster.
I have buffs, I buff to defend the team. I am not a buffbot.
I am a defender."

I suggest you make a new character, a scrapper or blaster, and have some fun with that. Play the game at your own pace, form your own team, do your own missions, and experience the story and mythology of this amazing place.

"There is no end-game. It is all game."

To the OP: If you got on teams where you're not farming, you'll have more fun.

That is all.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

OP: Everyone has different playstyles, and more power to that, but it sounds like the playstyle you've fallen into isn't actually delivering much fun for you. The good news is that what you've tried so far absolutely isn't the one true way to play CoX, and if you don't like it then there are plenty of other options. If there's one thing that CoX is good at, it's allowing people to play in very different ways and still get involved in the game and the community.

Try some different ATs and powersets. Run some story arc instead of going the powerlevel route. Do some task forces. Play in different sized groups. Fight different types of enemies. Try out villianside. Look for a supergroup/villaingroup which sounds interesting. Try flashback arcs with different difficulty options. Organize some teams of your own so you can run them in a way that's more fun for you.

I hope you'll be able to get yourself into the right place to really enjoy the game. And welcome :-)

aaanyhow, lets answer your question. Outside of farming, the game does hold some challenge, the farmers go so fast because they have pre-selected stuff that poses a lower risk to their specific powersets, step outside of that and they fold hard. fighting a group of dark ring mistresses(a boss unit in the carnival of shadows) can be a humbling experience for a lot of players, as can enemies in the shadow shard, who can cut through defense easily, or pound you with psi damage. So try playing the actual content, and maybe bump up the difficulty.

also, i assume you havent tried a statesman task force, nor a rikti ship raid. I think you will find that rikti magi will fulfill your request for strong enemies. also, have you tried running with a group that has their difficulty up? if the game seems easy, run with a smaller team cranked for 8 players and max levels above you with bosses and then see if the difficulty works for you a bit better. Finally, you should have the oroboros portal by now(the gold power that looks like an infinity symbol), those open mission series that you can customize the difficulty with even further, disabling temp powers, pool powers, and add a time limit and buff enemies, then you can have a real challenge and even get some well designed badges as a bonus.

finally, go to the mission architect and check for some of the "hard" missions, some of them are downright sadistic and will provide you with some real challenge. basically they are the best powers locked together to hurt you as hard as possible.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

lol, didn't know what you were getting into with a posi tf eh?

Ooooookay.

Firstly, you have a whole bunch of character slots on every server. Try EVERYTHING. Try tanks, try scrappers, try controllers, try brutes, masterminds, EVERYTHING. You will learn so, so much about building teams and who needs what buffs and what roles everyone is expected to play here by trying everything! And don't just try ONE flavor of each AT-try them all! Granted, some of them aren't for everyone, but try it anyhow!

Secondly, head on over to http://www.paragonwiki.com. It is the BEST source of information on CoH/CoV that exists. What you can't find there, come back here and ask (but expect to get some snarky answers).

Empathy defenders are fairly useless on a team of fully IO'd out folks who are farming at -1/x8 difficulty, but get a group of folks together and try to keep them alive through a Hess, Imperious, or Statesman Task Force, especially if some of them have no idea what's going on. Or a Lady Grey. Try soloing on your Emp toon-it's not easy. And don't ignore the value of your buffs when it comes to teams. They will do SO much more for the team than your heals will if you use them right, and they will allow you to use your secondary more often to assist the team by blasting/debuffing/etc.

If you like to solo, try a scrapper or a tank. If you like to buff/debuff, and prefer team play, try a controller or a defender. If you want to deal massive amounts of damage, try a blaster or a scrapper. However, don't expect any team to absolutely NEED a certain build. ANY team can take on ANY challenge in the game with enough wits, skill, and determination.

And if you've just come from WoW, remember that CoH/CoV is a whole 'nother ball game. Forget everything you know about MMOs and relearn it from the ground up in City of Heroes. A lot of the things you think you know don't apply here.

It's not end game, it's all game, as long as you're game enough to give it a good go.

Good luck, and hope you start having fun!

Lotta people been stomping the original poster.

I'm going to try a slightly different tactic. Admittedly, with roughly the same aim...

Here's how the game works. If you take a Blaster with no defensive powers, and you heal them for their entire HP bar every fight, you make them twice as tough.

If you give them 75% Damage Resistance you make them four times as tough.
If you give them 45% or more Defense you make them ten times as tough. (oddity of the game math- Defense basically counts double.)

So you can play "Whack-a-mole" with health bars, honing your razor reflexes, and never seeing the rest of the game... or you can use buffs intelligently and the health bars don't move very much, leaving you time to do useful things like bump up the team's OFFENSE.

Did you notice that Fortitude gives someone (if you slot right) 21% Defense and about +30% damage ?

Come to think of it, did you notice that if you don't slot your "lolenergy" blasts for damage they do about half as much as they could?

Farming in this game is something I don't understand. People get good at the game and then they set it EASIER. Not my style.

I hope your future experiences in the game are more interesting and more balanced. Cause there's stuff in the upper game that, if you don't know what you're doing, will eat you for breakfast. And Freaks and Council aren't it.

Ran across a lolhealer who had every heal he could get his hands on, no Fortitude, no Clear Mind, no Adrenaline Boost, no RAs.

What he had was: Healing Aura on autofire, Heal Other, Aid Other, and TWO rezzes.

I asked him why he ignored half of his primary and he replied: "Oh, I 6 slotted my rezzes, I'm a rezzer."

I happened to have the star at the time....guess who wasn't on the team anymore?

OP: This game is not what you seem to think it is. Healers are NOT the only line of defense between damage and your teammates. Preventing the damage is 100% better than healing it back.

There are things that are difficult in the game, Master of Statesman's Task Force comes to mind, which is something a good Empathy defender is almost mandatory for. You have to complete one of the most difficult TFs in the game with no use of temp powers and ZERO deaths.

Rikti ship raids are pretty challenging to be successful at. Hami raids are difficult, but don't happen very often these days.

Some solo stuff is very challenging as well. If you go to the scrapper forums you'll find dozens of threads about people deliberately making things as dificult as possible for themselves.

The RWZ Challenge srings to mind. A solo scrapper must defeat a full spawn of level 54 Rikti, which must contain a minimum of 3 bosses. No temp powers or inspirations are allowed. You must maintain the agro of the full spawn at all times, no pulling is permitted.

AV soloing is another thing people challenge themselves with. Many self impose a no temps no inspirations rule, but as long as you do it by yourself with no outside help it still counts.

PvP is extremely challenging, but is not for everyone. The rules are different from PvE, and it can take some getting used to. I enjoy it because a human player is much less predictable than computer AI. It takes quite a while to get good at it. I still have a lot to learn myself.

You can make the game as easy or as challenging as you want through difficulty settings and team make up.

I took part in an ITF run that was all scrappers. It required teamwork at the end of it, because some powersets can do things others can't, and there was almost no debuffing happening, so we had to win through sheer damage output and tenacity. It was one of the most enjoyable things I have ever done in the game.

Am I too late to add to the dog pile on the OP?

Me and Burner24 formed a team to complete his (spoiler!) Vanguard Traitors missions. You want a challenge? Try taking on Vanguard with a melee hero or villain.

THEN we tried to fight Sefu Tendaji. URGH! Hits like a truck, HP like a tank, and KB effects that shove through Shield Defense Mez resists.

Yeah, we found a challenge.

You know, been playing for a while, and I was actually glad to get my butt handed to me. Forced the team to shape up and work together. Met some good people as well.