Tf / sf

Right now, it's a full 3 minutes between each wave, and the last two are 4 and 6 minutes each. Even a gimped team still has to wait for the next spawn.

Now that the difficulty settings work again, we can just set the difficulty a little higher and try to fill in some of the extra time y fighting harder foes, but even that can get easy on an optimized team.

I can get behind your idea to "force" the next wave. Maybe instead of putting them on a fixed scale timer, make them appear 30 seconds after the previous wave is defeated. This would still allow for downtime inbetween to re-shield or rest, and let the users control when the next wave comes. That should accommodate ANY team makeup.

In the meantime, I actually have a little digital kitchen timer that I use to keep track of when the spawns are coming so I can inform the team how much time they have to go to the bathroom or get a drink inbetween waves. lol

Making it like the Katie Hannon waves as you said is one of the most popular ways of speeding it up. Another common one is to just have a smaller number of waves. Another is to make it like the Croatoa arc finale where you defend for 10 minutes and each time you defeat a wave the next begins.

Just because it's faster doesn't mean it has to be harder. =)

I have no problem with the Sewer Trial being failable. I do have a problem with the rewards being useless.

The Eden Trial is perhaps one of the most borked "things" in the entire CoH universe. Meaning mission, trial, taskforce challenge, raid, etc. When speeders can finish in under 10 minutes and average teams need over an hour and/or regularly fail the thing is colossally broken. Broken beyond anything but the henchmen exploit from AE. Tweak it to keep the fun and the challenge, but scale back the speeders so that the rest of us can get a reward out of it. Seriously.

In both cases it is the challenge vs reward that needs revision.

What's your point? Yes, one thing needs to be fixed. He was suggesting the entire trial be revamped. To which I say, "Hell no."

Oh, well, some of us still do things for the content or the teaming. It's not all about the rewards. You know, like doing arcs with someone even though it means only the arc 'owner' will get any merits.

The Eden trial has had this issue for a long time. It also could use a revisit to its merit reward, and its special enhancement in general(AFAIK, made as the original HO, and out leveled like a joke). Same applies to the Sewer trial's enh.
Without a proper reward for the task, it's a lot tougher to get a team together for it. Yes, some will do it just to play it, but not all. I'm not talking complete make-over, just some polish to a little dulling.

Doesn't the respec trial always spawn enemies at the full level? In my experience the players that most desperately want to run the trial are new players with severely gimped characters and they want to do it as soon as they qualify. Now imagine a whole group of people like that.

That was our supergroup the first time we ran it. Not only had we made all the usual noob mistakes on our builds, we only barely understood the game. We were fighting red and purple-con enemies for the entire trial. The ambushes were overwhelming us and eventually one spawned on top of another and we team-wiped. I feel like we must have fought 20 ambushes before we died but I know that can't be right. I have no idea how far we made it but I think we were pretty close... just not close enough. If they had spawned faster then the second ambush would have been the end. I guess that would have saved us some time but that's cold comfort.

Granted a year later it was a breeze with SSK and only one person on the team was new and actually needed the respec... but I'd still prefer that final room was not made any harder than it already is. It's for gimped teams to get a desperately needed service. It doesn't have the same design goal as other tf-type content.

However, I wouldn't be against a mechanic that made each wave come 1 minute after everything in the previous ambush is defeated. It could even use the current timer as a maximum wait. But don't just reduce the time between ambushes.

I have never run a villain respec but I've heard some horror stories and I think that is sad. If true then someone lost sight of the purpose.

It used to spawn at the level of the highest person on the team. If that person happened to be a lvl 50 helping out, then yes.. the foes would be very hard unless those people were EX'd before the start of the TF and never unEX'd the entire time. I remember several horror stories of that TF in the past as well.

That policy is outdated now with the SSK rules. It should spawn at the level of the person hosting the TF, then add that person's difficulty rating.

A team of "gimps" should still be able to take out a couple -1/+0* mobs within 3 minutes with plenty of time to spare. You don't realize how quickly a mob goes down until you have a timer sitting in front of you. haha. On top of that, the 4 and 6 minute wait for the final 2 waves is even worse.

*(I realize the -1 setting does not work on TFs, but some of the spawns on this trial are defaulted to -1 and even -2 at times, so even setting for +0 will give you a few really easy foes.)

In my opinion it's only slightly harder than the hero respec, although it does need a little more teamwork and coordination in the vine room. I've never been on a team that failed it.

I vote yes on speeding up the timer or reworking the reactor room on the hero respec. That last bit it seriously boring.

Finished Synapse in a little over 2 hours the other day. What's wrong with that?

-MT

In the past, I've only done the Villain side Respec with archetypes that didn't have mez protection. It was tough for these characters because the Tree AV has a massive kill zone in front of it that I couldn't do anything about. If I strayed into it, I'd be immobolized or held and then watched my hitpoints DOT away in big chunks. If there wasn't a very aware team mate who could heal and cast an anti-mez on me immediately, I was pretty much dead.

In addition, once the Vines are cleared and I could attack the AV, it was almost guaranteed that I'd be held at least twice during the beat down (or more if the beat down took longer). I saved my Break Frees just for these moments and chose to accept the accidental defeats out in the kill zone earlier. This was because, aside from the Tree AV's DOT, the overlapping COT ambush waves were right behind us adding to the incoming damage. The practice then was to ignore the ambush to try to take out the Tree AV first so I really couldn't just try to ride out a hold.

Now recently, I did the "Treespec" as a Brute and what a difference! I could saunter up to the Vines directly in front of the Tree AV without missing a beat. That said, overall I got the impression that it seemed easier. Of course, I'll have to try it again as a squishie. The timing of the COT ambush seemed to have been changed. They weren't occuring during the AV fight, but showed up after it was defeated. Also, the "heroes doing the STF" that used to be in the previous chamber before Tree AV's were missing. They were used to be pretty tough (before the speed runs just skipped them).

I also finished it in about two hours, 1:45 the other day.
My issue is the utter repetition of the missions. You start out with four defeat alls, get a few patrols then some boss missions then the Babbage spawn (very nice) and end with the King.


Truly, they could cut a few of the defeat alls from the start and perhaps one of the boss defeat missions. There's also a Defeat 30 Clockwork which is fairly fun, but with the experience/influence/prestige awards removed from those tasks, less is more these days.

Synapse TF seems egregious to me (along with Citadel, I'm looking at you) for having seemingly cut and pasted missions along with a little dialog to go with it. With the new model being "Less time-consuming" it might not be a bad idea to revisit Synapse.

The model I'd like:

1.Defeat all Clockwork in office
2.Defeat 30 Clockwork
3.Defeat all Clockwork in substation
4.Patrol for Clockwork activity
5.Defeat Bertha, Long Tom & guards (Integrate these two missions into a single one...)
6.Patrol for Clockwork Lord's location
7.Rescue workers from Clockwork
8.Defeat Clockwork Lord
9.Immobilizer obtained from Positron/Babbage spawn
10.Defeat Clockwork King and his minions.

You lose two defeat alls, you combine the "Boss" missions into a single one, perhaps chaining objectives so you can't fight both at once. You them do a patrol, have a more time-consuming task with the rescues, a ghostable Clockwork Lord and Clockwork King mission AND Babbage still appears to spice things up.

Having to do these Phalanx TFs for multiple characters needed TFC is quite monotonous. Synapse is one of the few (if not only) Phalanx TFs I dread doing because of the multiple defeat alls. It's not so bad on a 4-5 person team...but then that seems like curtailing the intent, that these are team activities.

"The trial will spawn enemies at the maximum level every time"

from the Trial Mission Wiki Page

It's not true. I removed that line and am reworking the section.

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.

I'm crushed! My faith in the wiki is irrevocably shaken! *Shakes fist at sky* Damn you! Damn you all to...

huh? oh sorry... I'm actually glad to hear that is true.

Eden's merit rewards will not get fixed until data mining shows people can't finish it in 10 minutes or less. Therein lies the problem and why a small polish won't fix it. I have no idea what the Dev resistance to tweaking out the special enhancements is. I'd think it would be a tiny change to make them drop at your level the exact same way SOs that drop from AV defeats do.

Sewer Trial would really only need a small polish as you say.

Thanks for the backup Aggelakis. I probably should have noticed that and fixed it myself a while ago, but usually other people beat me to it, so I don't go looking for too many corrections to make on the site. lol