Enemies ONLY the level I choose?

Yes, because changing the game makes more sense than lowering your difficulty setting if you find it too hard...

Really? Unjustified? Let's see...

You're basically accusing me of having some kind of agenda in trying to earn rewards I don't deserve, in-between suggesting that I'm too weak of a player to suggest something like that. Look, I don't take offence easily, and while this is insulting to my intelligence, it won't keep me from sleeping at night. But can you please stop hogging the moral high ground? You're basically assassinating my character as a tool to counter my argument and then try to patronise me by explaining how "unjustified" my comments are. If you want to argue the merits of the actual suggestion, then I welcome the discussion. If you want to argue my right to make it or my motivation for doing so, don't expect me to respond or read it.

And just to avoid being accused of any more scheming, let me quote myself on my difficulty from earlier in the thread:

Again, if you want to argue the actual suggestion, please ensure that you read the following bullet points detailing my motivations and kindly avoid inventing motivations I didn't specify.

*Spawn size varies, but larger spawns are not restricted to being low level. This means larger spawns can spawn high level, making for a fight that's more difficult than the mission should have.

*I enjoy playing with many enemies of a low level because it looks much better than fighting few enemies of a high level. As such, I need a way to ensure that the enemies are low level, or their increased numbers will kill me.

*I don't give two rats about drops. I care about a game that looks cool and plays well. Wiping out large groups of enemies is what looks cool and plays well for me. All rewards that I'm aware of scale with the enemy strength and level. By refusing to fight higher level enemies, I'm consigning myself to getting less reward.

*I'm asking for an additional option for people who like LESS variety and more predictable enemy strength. Some of us actually don't play for the challenge and would very much like to walk over most of our enemies, and we're perfectly happy to give up our "mad XP" for this.

Let me know what problem you have with my arguments and do try your best to do so without accusing me of being a farmer, an exploiter or some variant poor player.

*edit*
I just want to address this:

Yes, as a matter of fact changing the game does make more sense. I and, as you can see, a few others prefer to play against more enemies of a weaker level. It's what sets this game apart from something like WoW. As such, giving us more control over our difficulty settings is indeed superior, because we can get a game that LOOKS good and still doesn't require too powerful a build to achieve it.

Furthermore, you can easily run the same argument about the option to turn AVs on and off separate of level and team size. Before, you could have argued that an AV spawning with two or more people on the team at difficulty 4 was working as intended and people should just drop their difficulty, but it doesn't change the fact that people liked their difficulty, but just didn't like the AVs. Instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, it makes much more sense to allow people to remove only that one aspect that bothers them, instead of wholesale lowering difficulty to a level that looks bad.

For me, this was bosses. Before, I had two choices - bother with bosses and die over and over again to the more annoying ones, or play on a difficulty setting that was far too easy and, more importantly, gave me far too few enemies for me to have fun. Right now, I can have my cake and eat it, too. I can have my large spawns without them coming with high level enemies, and I can get rid of the irritating bosses that would otherwise ruin my fun. I give up on high-level enemy experience, I give up on boss experience (and large inspirations as a part of the game), but what I gain is a game that's more fun to actually PLAY.

Fun for us, irrelevant to you. Isn't that a win-win?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

A couple of points:

Yes, I'm positive it's not a scaling mission issue. For one, I've seen it in the Architect itself when I KNOW I've set the mission to be flat. Secondly, I've seen this in unpredictable patterns. It's not always frontloaded or backloaded. A lot of times they alternate at random. One room will have +1s, the hallway after it will have even cons, then the next room over will be even con and the next hallway will have +1.

Secondly, I don't think your difficulty should affect your mission. Once upon a time, team size affected a mission without resetting it, but difficulty did not. I'm not sure why that was exactly, but I suspect it was because difficulty set the mission's LEVEL, and then basically treated you as two people, if you picked 2 or 4. Right now, you have similar situation. The level of enemies you've chose will affect the level at which the mission spawns, and you can see this in the Missions window. Picking enemies -1 will actually drop your mission's level by 1 when you start it.

Beyond that, spawn size works, I assume, like how TFs have an absolute floor of people who need to be on, such that even if people logged out, spawns would not reduce in size.

Basically, picking -1x3 will drop your mission's level by one as soon as you enter it, and will make it so enemy spawn sizes never fall below three people's worth, even if you're alone.

There's a bit of a loophole in this, in that if you invite a second person with you, you won't get four people's worth of spawns (i.e. not you*3 + team-mate), but will rather still remain at three peoples' worth of spawns. That's because the game doesn't count you as three people, it just sets a minimum spawn size. You can go ABOVE that and still increase spawn sizes by being on a team of four or more.

All of that said, your difficulty settings shouldn't affect your enemies' LEVELS, as their levels are set to the mission, which you can't alter without resetting.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

huh.....didn't know that one.

Last one, I promise

That's pretty much where I am right now. My Blasters, when solo, are a lot harder to play than, say, my Scrappers or my Masterminds. I picked this difficulty specifically to give them something that was comparable to what my more powerful characters could face easily, yet still wasn't so overwhelming that I was pulling my hair out and punching my screen. And for the most part, it works.

My Blasters (who use no Set Inventions, so please keep your "softcapped defence" comments to yourself, everybody) can handle -1x3 fairly easily, which is to say without dying (obviously) and without being put in a position of having to rest after every single fight. Certain enemy groups are harder than others, but by and large, it's manageable. However, when I get hit with two even con lieutenants plus over half a dozen minions, which is what a standard -1x3 spawn is, things go really ugly, really fast. ESPECIALLY if it's a nasty enemy group like the CoT or the Rikti. Anything with flying lieutenants and/or serious ranged damage is dangerous in this way.

I don't WANT Inventions. I don't WANT a better build. The build I have is perfectly capable of handling he difficulty I've given it, which is -1x3. My build cannot handle +0x3. It was never designed to handle +0x3. Not even with the old difficulty settings would I have considered that, nor would I have been able to achieve it. Not even my Scrappers are designed for +0x3 (though they could probably handle it anyway). I don't want to play against +0x3 spawns. That ought to be kind of evident from the fact that I didn't choose +0x3, but rather -1x3. If I had to go +0, I wouldn't go against +0x2, mirroring the old Tenacious.

As Tenzhi said:

I'm not asking for the game to be made even easier. The difficulty settings I'm being offered are plenty easy enough. I want the game to be made more consistent with the difficulty setting I've chosen. When I pick -1x3, I don't expect to see x4 spawns or x2 spawns, do I? I'd rather not have to worry about fighting spawns that aren't -1, either. Certain missions where enemies can't spawn -1 to me, that I can understand, but when they CAN, I'd really like to have an option to ensure they will.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.