new posi TF review/merit whine
By
Another_Fan,
Posted on: 2010-05-24 13:36 in The Market and Inventions
What Nethergoat said. I run Ernesto Hess simply because I enjoy it and I run STF because of the challenge, the reward merits from those two are just a bonus as far as I'm concerned.
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Varies a lot, then. I can't find any hard numbers on mission complete bonuses, and I haven't paid much attention to them on teams, but my own experiments with them solo showed that they were usually comparable to the XP from killing a spawn or two.
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Originally Posted by Stormfront_NA
But, it had been proven to me, amuzingly by a Stalker, that nearly half of the exp in a mission is given by the completion bonus.
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Having Vengeance and Fallout slotted for recharge means never having to say you're sorry.
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Good point there, so there is a fourth view, from your vantage point as an enjoyment player, do you support a position of kill all regardless, or a mix of kill all and ghosts, or does it matter?|
Originally Posted by Nethergoat
You're ignoring the folk who run it because it's fun or they like the story.
Non-reward driven players count too, you know. Also there's no such thing as an "overpriced" recipe, stuff is worth what the playerbase as a whole decides its worth. Some folk don't want to pay what things are worth and prefer to grind and buy directly, but that doesn't make the item in question 'overpriced'. |
Stormy
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My team went with a "kill most" approach.|
Originally Posted by Stormfront_NA
Good point there, so there is a fourth view, from your vantage point as an enjoyment player, do you support a position of kill all regardless, or a mix of kill all and ghosts, or does it matter?
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We fought our way to objectives, but didn't go out of our way to clean out whole maps. We weren't maximizing exp or maximizing efficiency, we just sort of muddled our way through it.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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Having over 36 alts at level 50, I have not really worked on lowbies with any great intensity, while I have leveled in the past few months a couple, I really had not cared how fast they have leveled; in fact I have chosen to simply enjoy the leveling experience. As a result I really have not paid attention to the end of mission bonuses, nor what mob type gives better exp than others, even which mobs drops what kind of drops as well; but my annecdotal experience dates back to the days when CoV was introduced; it is quite likely that devs trying to slow down leveling may have dramatically decreased the end of mission bonuses. Gonna have to make a new lowbie and check it out, not only at low levels but through several ranges as well.|
Originally Posted by Kelenar
Varies a lot, then. I can't find any hard numbers on mission complete bonuses, and I haven't paid much attention to them on teams, but my own experiments with them solo showed that they were usually comparable to the XP from killing a spawn or two.
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While in general, I am very much merit earning oriented, after all of my 36 level 50 alts, I only have optimised 23 of them, with multi billion builds; I got a long way to complete my quest to make them all great, so the temptation to merit TF is great. Yet there are a few TFs I really enjoy, and do try to savor: Hess is one of them, and Silver Mantis is the other for each side respectively.
Stormy
NECROGOAT!
Had occasion to run Posi again last night thanks to a perfect storm of unexpected free time (the baby went to sleep early), a random invite and a low level character I wanted to get a few levels for.
The team was quite a bit "better", in the sense that we had a nice balance of ATs going (two blasters, a couple of defenders, some controllers, a good tank and a squid).
The merits still stink. =P
But again, it was a fun time. It was a nice crew, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and I went from level 10 to level 14, so mission accomplished there. I think our final time was 1:25, quite a bit faster than my first go-round, which I attribute to much better mitigation in the form of our earth and cold controllers.
I was on Burn Rate, my fire/fire farming blaster. Before rolling this character I'd have thought I had a pretty good understanding of 'fire blasting', having taken my fire/ice up to the mid-40's. But this gal plays VASTLY different.
Fire/fire brings exactly one thing to the table- aoe damage and plenty of it. Where ice delivers excellent survivability and mitigation, fire gives you aoes, some aoes and then, just for good measure, more aoes. Which was great on this team- with the tank locking down most of the aggro I was free to lay waste until my blue bar hit Empty.
So while the 'content' was the same my experience of it was very different, even playing the same AT (ar/dev vs fire/fire). I think about this quite a bit as people harp on how 'repetitive' the game is. While any MMO will be repetitive in the sense that there's a finite number of missions to run and foes to defeat, CoH provides a really wide variety of play experiences within that framework depending on what you're playing and who you're teaming with. So new ATs are content, powerset proliferation is content, anything that alters how you interact with the existing mission framework provides content.
Just some random thoughts.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
Stop using Howling Twilight on the Market Forums. This is like the 3rd necro'd thread today! Just stop! The smell is starting o get to me!! 
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I suggest you mask it with the smell of BURNING INF.|
Originally Posted by Misaligned
Stop using Howling Twilight on the Market Forums. This is like the 3rd necro'd thread today! Just stop! The smell is starting o get to me!!
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=P
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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That will get fixed eventually, when they've finally data-mined it enough and make another adjustment pass through all the merit rewards. I fear that day though.|
Originally Posted by Nethergoat
The merits still stink. =P
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On the global channels I'm in, people run a lot of ITFs, and a 25 minute one is considered slow. That TF is going to get hammered hard in the next round of adjustments. That's really too bad, as it's the only TF in the game that's so inclusive. It will be a sad day when it's hard to put one of those together anymore.
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I think that's been one of the biggest things about this game for me. In another MMO I used to play, I'd Learn The Fight, on whatever character got there first, and then I Knew The Fight. It would not be different in other roles; I mean, the details would be different, but I'd always know what the details were for all three roles, there were only three roles, and you always had to have roughly the same mix of roles to even have a reasonable shot at it. Unless it was content you outpowered, in which case there wasn't much strategy.|
Originally Posted by Nethergoat
So new ATs are content, powerset proliferation is content, anything that alters how you interact with the existing mission framework provides content.
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Here, every character I have plays substantially differently, which is a start, but it's also that every team I'm on plays differently. My traps/sonic def plays differently on a team with two tankers than on a team with no tankers. A LOT differently. A group with multiple controllers plays very differently from a group with multiple defenders, and that stays true no matter what role I'm playing. Scrapping with three defenders is not like scrapping with no defenders.
And that really does mean that there's a lot more new-experiences, even without more new-stories.
Hey hey, finally got to run Part II of the Posi TF with my 88'er tank Crafticus.
Lots of fun, in spite of the continuing predominance of super irritating low level enemies. The battle at the Faultline dam against Doc V was suitably epic (it'd been so long since I saw him last I'd forgotten he was in the game), although it was REALLY TEDIOUS working our way back to him after a couple of team wipes.
We were a little undermanned as a flaky kid (wild guess based on his blathering in broadcast as we were trying to get underway in Steel) took off after the second mission.
Merits stunk, again, but the missions and the storyline were a lot of fun. The revamped TF is about a billion times better than the old one, and a great introduction to 'epic' content. If this had been the first TF I ran back in the day instead of the old one, I'd probably have a better opinion of the things. =P
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
So, a bizzare confluence of events led to me having nearly the entirety of yesterday to play CoH. I ended up running two TFs, our old friend Posi Pt1 and also, for the first time since they introduced merits, Katie Hannon.
Posi went smoothly on low difficulty with a solid team that was a bit underpowered damage wise (one fire blaster, one scrapper, everyone else controllers, defenders & tanks- very safe, but not particularly fast). Took us a bit less than 2 hours, not really speeding but not killing everything in sight either.
Katie was pretty slow given my previous experiences- nobody except me and the guy leading it seemed to know what they were doing, which led to plenty of mishaps. Only the final mission went the way I expected it to and we wrapped up in a bit over an hour.
Posi reward: 11 merits
Katie reward: 9 merits.
If we'd had even a SEMI efficient team running Katie the reward disparity would be even more ridiculous (30 minutes is my benchmark).
This'll be my last trip through Posi I. II is a lot more fun, even if the merits are similarly lame.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
It does make me sad that Posi and Katie are so low. Eden Trial I can kind of understand, since I've been on teams that zerged it. But Katie and especially Posi take just a bit longer to complete.
my lil RWZ Challenge vid
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I don't know what the fastest possible time for katie is, lowest I've seen is 19 mins since you haven't been able to fail the first mish (8 mins wasn't difficult then), but ITFs have been done in not much more for 3x the merits, katie could do with a lift.
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Originally Posted by Organica
It does make me sad that Posi and Katie are so low. Eden Trial I can kind of understand, since I've been on teams that zerged it. But Katie and especially Posi take just a bit longer to complete.
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It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba
As I have said so many times, TFs and merits make an uncomfortable bed partner...
I say this for a simple reason, there are three reasons people will do a TF:
1. Get exp to level
2. Get badge for Accolade
3. Get merits for over priced recipes at WW/BM
Non-reward driven players count too, you know.
Also there's no such thing as an "overpriced" recipe, stuff is worth what the playerbase as a whole decides its worth. Some folk don't want to pay what things are worth and prefer to grind and buy directly, but that doesn't make the item in question 'overpriced'.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone