Praetoria - A hard fight.

The new difficulty is great but at level 6 a fight with an orange LT can be death if he doesn't miss you at least once. I had the same LT drop me twice in a row last night. Considering the setup of the mission he may have been a scaled down boss.

I feel sorry for the new kids who don't realize they have a rest power they get at level 2.

Just wait until you people meet Noble Savage - he'll teach you the ture meaning of "difficult enemies"

I'm finding it challenging, but not excessively so. As noted above, Primal Earth has its share of nasty low level enemies - CoT, Vahz, Clocks - the main difference being that there are also squishy soft Skulls and Hellions to fight at the low levels, and we already know to pick on the wimps. Praetoria is more consistent in its difficulty across factions - I've been pressed to some degree by everything I've taken on so far.

It may also be that Praetorian content is designed around the fact that inspiration vendors are a lot more accessible - your contacts sell the full gamut immediately, and there's a nurse in the hospital who will sell them too.

Hey, Going Rogue is about change, right? (Sarah Palin joke here) I guess this is just one of them.

I originally made a Dark/Dark corruptor to start the show. But I immediately fell victim to the harsher difficulty setting.

Ghouls are my biggest concern. With their ability to heal Ghouls around them, it really hurts my AoE attacks on my new character: Rad/Nrg Blaster. So I get an Irradiate in.. I defeat one of the ghouls, then he heals the other 2-3 around him, negating my AoE attack.

The -regen on the ?Clockwork? and ?Police? powers are making me RAEG. It doesn't hurt too bad but why would you ever make another Vahzilok for early game? I thought the first thing the devs would have said when making new powers is: "Ok, the Vahzilok are brutal in the early game, lets stay away from that". I was wrong.

Other than that, the game seems to run smooth. I will agree that the difficulty is a notch higher than in Paragon or on the Isles.

So basically all the same points we made in beta? I agree now as I did then. The difficulty for me is not insurmountable by any means, it's just *slightly* higher than it needs to be. And it mostly equates to more standing around. Praetoria feels like a 20-40 zone that just had its range changed and nothing else.

In truth I wouldn't have any problem at all with it if there was just a difficulty adjuster available. Personally I much prefer dialing things down a level and then increasing their numbers, -1/x3 is ideal for most of my characters until 22.

Each enemy group isn't too difficult on their own.

But against certain powersets, they can be brutal.
Clockwork kill regen. Destroyers can shrug off mez. Seers are all psychic...

Teaming helps you cover all your bases though. ...Though Ghouls are tough on teams.

I find that /Regen helps a lot. I had read somewhere a persons opinion that Willpower was a lot better than Regen because Regen is a lot of clicks rather than the toggle-and-forget wonder that is Willpower. But I think that Willpower's benefits kick in later levels than Regen.

Regen's endurance mitigation with Quick Recovery at level 4 makes up for a lot. And with just Fast Healing as my main defense I felt more confident taking on the harder content of GR with my KM/Regen scrapper than I ever did with my KM/Willpower scrapper.

Regarding regen/endurance problems early on, I'll just restate the suggestion I've made over and over again.

Remove the recharge on rest. There. Problem solved. Move along, citizen.

An open letter to NCsoft

I'll admit, the difficulty in praetoria is definately what I'm not used to in the lower lvls. My only concern is, if this is supposed to attract new players, why on earth would they make so many tough enemies. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to scare away any new people with these mobs.

I know for me, life has been TOUGH for my Kin/SR scrapper. Absolutely ROUGH! What I've come to notice is that solo or smaller teams seems to be the way to go here in Praetoria. After tonight, no more 8 man teams for me, mobs are just way too nasty.

1. Remove rest recharge.

2. Add way for teams to read dialogue and what the leader clicked.

That resolves most of it right there.

Actually, if this hasn't been changed from the beta, then all team members can click on NPCs when you have the option to talk to them - for example, anyone on the team can talk to Noble Savage in the misisons he apepars in, not just the team leader - and the wackiest part is that anyone on the team can then select the text responses.

I was actually discussing this topic last week on the Beta server after it opened up to Pre-Purchase customers. It almost seems that that the content was originally designed for high level characters and then they used scaling to scale the levels down. As you may know, this often results in a harder fight, even if damage and defense/resistances are scaled down. The simple fact of not having as many powers available to use to attack/defend/resist/heal/whatever is a hindrance.

On the other hand, the content could have been designed with us long-time players in mind. We've been through the low level content and learned our way around the ATs and powersets (except the new ones of course). Maybe they just thought we might like a bit more of a challenge, especially given the fact that many of us run around with our settings on +2/x2 or higher at low levels in the older content.

Finally, consider that their objective was to get players from 1 to 20 within the Praetorian content. They needed to be sure that the content was difficult enough that it would yield the XP needed to reach level 20 without risking people running out of content. This is particularly true since some of the missions allow you to skip most or all of the combat.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frosty_Femme I said "ur" which is not a word. It's a sound dumb people make when you ask them to spell out "you are".

This post was anticipated and we made many suggestions in beta to alleviate this. If this is what existing players are experiencing, I think newer players must have it that much harder.

I'm hoping the devs will consider making some changes.

I find the enemy groups in normal circumstances to be of pretty good difficulty, though there are some cases where they could be toned down.

The only parts I definitely feel should be toned down are the occasional extreme ambushes, like the Ghouls in Dr. Steffard's arc. I don't know how those got through beta untouched, because they're literally insane. I can't imagine more than 50% of players live through those types of missions, that one in particular. But then, I'm not the one with the data.

So I'd say, tone down the ambushes ASAP, but the general difficulty of Praetorian mobs, though more difficult than the vanilla game, I find well done for the most part.