Praetoria - A hard fight.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice that the difficulty in Praetoria is rather harsher than the beginning difficulty in Paragon/Rogue Isles. Thinking on it, I've come up with some main points for me as to why these enemies are seeming tougher and harder than their vanilla game counterparts.

((Edit: To state, my two mains currently are a Kinetic Melee/Willpower Scrapper, and a Robotics/Traps Mastermind. Levels 12 and 10, respectively.))

1: There are frequent +1 spawns.
A lot of missions I've done, +1's are the norm, while Even Level enemies are the rare exception to the rule. At low levels with few enhancements (TO's at that), this puts the pressure on in fights, with them hitting harder, more accurately, taking more damage and being harder to hit.

2: There are frequent 4 Minion Mobs.
Some groups, especially Destroyers and Resistance, come in groups of 4. Sometimes, they come in groups of 4 while being +1. More enemies mean more damage taken, a longer fight, more endurance used, which leads to the next point.

3: Downtime is excessive.
There is no out of combat Regen/Recovery bonus like some MMO's. There is quite a limited inventory for inspirations, especially early on. Rest is on a 3 minute recharge timer. This means if I get taken down far enough in the End/HP stakes during a fight, I either have to rest, wait for rest to recharge, wait for the bars to recover on their own, hope I have Blue/Green Insps or enough to combine. At baseline, it takes 59.5 seconds to recover endurance from 0% to 100%, and 239.5 seconds to go from 0% to 100% health.

Take into account you'll be getting more damage and using more endurance per group due to size and enemy levels, and this can mean you'll spend a fair amount of time waiting rather than doing.

4: Enemies do more varied, and harder to deal with effects.
-Regen, -Recharge, -Def, are some of the main pains I've noticed. -Regen means it takes even longer to recover, and that mid combat natural regen is even slower. -Recharge increases the time it takes to defeat enemies, meaning you take more damage. -Def means you take more hits, leading to more damage.

5: Ambushes pile on the pressure and reduce time/means to recover HP/End
With plenty of ambushes cropping up in the missions, and long waves too, your time spent resting may get interrupted. You may not even have the time to rest. Stealth does not prevent ambushes tracking you (if they're not set to go to a location) meaning the Shadowy Presence power is useless. If you lack inspirations or combinable ones, this requires either lots of running to try and put enough distance between you and them to get some HP/End back, which may not be possible, or a trip to the hospital.

6: The new content and methods of interaction make missions more appealing to solo to experience.
With team mates missing out dialogue from conversation windows, and the quicker running of missions/gaining of EXP from team played content, I find this discourages me from teaming as I want to experience the stories. If I were teaming, I'd miss some of the great information and interaction simply due to not being the team leader. This has left me planning to do most of the content solo on some characters, with others less soloable teaming with scant regard for the new content provided. This may just be a problem that I experience, with the viewpoint that the storylines and missions, as branching and personal as they are, aren't suited to team based gameplay.

That's about it from these points. Don't get me wrong. I love GR, and haven't had this much fun in the game for a while. These are points that just niggle at me, and I wonder if others would agree or disagree. Comments are always interesting, and I also wonder what could be done to deal with some of the points.

Challenges make you stronger, citizen - and strength brings security.
You do want security, don't you, citizen?

Point 6 is really what kills it for me. I want to solo the content (at least the first time, I would probably skip it on later Praetorians if I made them) but the game seems to be trying its hardest to punish me for it.

Actually, the game goes so far as to force you to solo cetrain missions

And it even punishes you on those!

The devs here, like all MMO devs everywhere, know that punishing the players is the best way to run a game.

That's why CoH is the superior MMO - it's taken the idea of player punishment to the next level.

Lack of end mitigation is the big kicker for me. With Stamina not being available until level 20, the END of Praetorian content, all there is, is insps and endrec enhancements; which at TO and DO levels, suck.

[Post removed by me due to other posts being removed. Fell afoul of the new rules of the management! - Z]

It punishes certain AT's and powersets. The more solo based ones do fine, but since you're asking late blooming power sets or team based AT's to do Solo missions it probably shouldn't be so agonisingly slow to plough through them if I want to play a Defender.

Up the regen out of combat, or just give Stamina and Health free already, they're boring picks when levelling and yet by far the most common powers for people to have. Not a good combo.

Looks like I'm going to be in the minority on this but I enjoy soloing in Praetoria. To me the content was challenging but not insurmountable. I have felt this was a nice change from the rest of the game where the devs made everything far too easy and as a result boring.

I do however respect the opinions of those who aren't pleased, and I hope you don't give up on this.

I've had great fun on my Brute. The Dominator on the other hand, is not so rosy.

There was quite a good (in myopinion) suggestion to reduce or even eliminate the recharge on rest. It wouldn't really effect the difficulty of anything (since if you could have used rest, you could have just stood their waiting), but there would be less waiting.

I really like OP's point #6. It'd be nice if, whenever the leader picks a mish (in any location), you get a large pop-up window and can read the mission or close it if you don't want to. Maybe even have it like those help pop-ups (exclamation points) where if it comes up you can close it and read it later. That way you know what's going on and feel much more immersed in the CoX world.

I've had great fun on my new Dom so far. My tank has been fun too, when on a team. His first Morality mission last night was an exercise in pure frustration. It simply took too long. I was playing a low damage team-oriented AT and I was being forced to solo a mission while still in the TO range. It was the most boring time I've had in game in a while. Punch, punch. Wait. Punch, punch. Wait. The mobs weren't really doing a lot to me, but then I wasn't doing a lot to them either.

And what is up with there being nowhere to adjust our difficulty in Praetoria? Being able to set mob spawns to -1 was a big boon for lower damage AT's. Why the heck is it a good idea to take it away from us in the shiny new content?

I've played a Grav/Rad Controller and a SS/WP Brute and not had any problems solo. Been fun actually. Will admit that it is a bit more challenging than Paragon City, but that makes it more exciting for me; admittedly though I'm very good at games, especially this one. I know how to make the most of what I've got and also use the environment to my advantage. (Quick Tip: If you get ambushes, use LoS to draw them near you so you can ambush them.)

Also I haven't used any Vet powers, before anyone throws that at me ;-)

On the topic of endurance I once again have no problems. Nothing that a 'catch a breathe' couldn't fix anyway. Somehow I have this vision of people fighting with sprint on, and using their powers inefficiently, like using Knockout Blow on a minion with 20% health instead of waiting 1s for Jab.

All I would suggest is that everyone looks at their own playstyle and see how they can improve. Players have a habbit of blaming the game sometimes a bit of reflection and improvement would suffice better.