Will of the earth mission arc, can we please STOP with the impossible spawns?

Those four screen shots are from the level 29ish will of the earth arc, the last two missions have you destory special object crystals now. Only catch is when I'm playing on 0/0 bosses solo. I hit the crystal, then suddenly I have spawn on top of me at point blank range at the very least 6 minions and 2 LT's. All of which proceed to chain stun and melee me to death all but instantly. The first screen shots above part of that mess.

MM friend offers to help, we go in, screen shot 2, the spawn size istantly doubled, made the problem even worse, we're suddenly dealing with a room full of DE that ignore the bots and proceed to trash us.

Drop the mission, move on to next, oh look more crystals, controller friend offers help. We counted before dying TWENTY SEVEN mobs insta spawning around the crystal for a 3 man team, my screen lighting up with stuns, and De eminators, and a crystal that's casting healing aura on all of them!

You know normally I try to be civil but in this instance I want to just tell the devs one simple thing they obviously didn't learn in praetoria either between the seer mission and Shen. Or the fifty million arachnos that spawn on the miss thystle tip mission.

EXCESSIVE AND STUPIDILY SIZED AMBUSHES ARE NOT FUN!!!!!

I'm really getting fed up with some of the new mechanics really boiling down to, "Hey how many mobs can we simply throw at a player to tick them off?"

Well good job, you succeeded in making me mad enough to ragequit for the day on coh, and I'm going to seriously hope this is a simple bugged mission. Because if they meant that to be soloed or doable on a team without requiring me to go find a tank then I'm going to need a bigger tray, it took a good 3-6 purples for each crystal solo just to beat through the mobs without dying.

Is this a special "end of arc" mission or maybe a bugged mission?

Ambush size in this game sometimes gets really wacked, regardless of difficulty settings. Sometimes I believe they're intended to be simply death squads, and the characters that can handle them are actually the exception. There's another one which is much lower level, early teens, involving Skulls. The game never throws less than 10 at you at once for that particular mission, part of an arc. (I actually sent in a bug report on it once long ago, and got the reply that it was WAI. Death squad I guess.)

Then you have the costume missions Hero-side, where at 20 you're likely to get 10 Tsoo thrown at you...and at 30 you get like *two* Crey. I still haven't decided if it's bugged or if someone was having a laugh and did it on purpose.

That mission has been like that for 5 years. Is it too much? Maybe. I've been on teams what wiped right there in that cave and on others that plowed through it.

I do agree that the new difficulty settings are "bad" and that many ambushes are excessive. I dropped a tip mission last night because of the Malta ambushes. BUT what I didn't think about at the time is that I was set to +0/X4.

Quit team, changed slider to -1 and no bosses.

For some reason the crystals then only spawned 2 minions and an LT, or only 3 minions.

I think there is a bug in there somewhere, maybe with bosses while solo setting?

Either way at least it was doable then, but I really really still wish the devs would learn that ambushes aren't fun, all they are is tedious and annoying.

To be honest, that actually looks like a fun mob to be surrounded by.

Defeating all of them, is another matter....

The crystals spawn defenders at 1/2 HP, and then again at 1/4 HP. Not all at once.

Those robots are the worst ones. Every time I bring a Mastermind into one of my missions we get hit with groups of five at once trying to block our path.

Believe it or not, the Will of the Earth mission used to be worse, with a much higher level Sentry popping up in some of the ambushes. And that purple lieutenant just kept chasing you...

I've been skipping that arc for a long time.

I agree with LL. I'd like to see smarter ambushes instead of the elimination of them. I'd like to see more varied bosses and EB/AV's/Heroes, and I'd like to see older missions and arcs revamped even more.

Sorry, the instant I scrolled down to this, I just had to laugh...



...This is exactly how I feel about everything in Praetoria.

My sympathies, we've all run into Death Squads here and there, and I agree that there is nothing even remotely fun about them. What contact gives this day at the beach out?

Been three months or so since I've gotten a character to that level, but yeah, it was consistent enough for me to have a strategy for dealing with it if I was on a character that couldn't handle big spawns. Basically I'd get to a height where only the Ancestor Spirits could show (and if there were a bunch of them I'd head for the drones), then deal with the remainder afterwards.

Could've been just lucky me, and fixed in the interim, will run my newly-Heroic Bots/Traps through it and see.

I don't want to act as if I'm somehow better than people, but that does look like fun to me. Just so nobody goes around acting as if nobody finds that fun.

edit: What a waste of a 14,000th post.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

I am playing the game, just the same as I have been since the day I first created an account - despite the occasional Death Squad. I was in someone else's Malta tip mission earlier in the evening, and had a large squad of Malta spawn literally on top of me. Instant death due to hold. Some may find it fun, I admit I'm not one of those industrial-strength souls but hey.... the things we do for special merits.

Now am I in Praetoria....? No. Still no. Due in part to the fact that I don't have anyone new I want to roll at this time. But if I do, they'll be skipping Praetoria.

Different strokes.

Show of hands: how many people who face gigantic ambushes are set to +0x0? I'm asking, because this is something the game defaults you when the character has not had his or her difficulty altered since creation or the introduction of the new difficulty setting.

It SHOULD act like +0x1, but maybe it isn't and is instead getting occasionally tagged as something else? As a general rule of thumb, I always try to set my difficulty manually, even if I'm just reaffirming what a character is created with, just to avoid doing this. I'd suggest people who face absurd ambushes try that and see if anything changes.

Quote:

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.

Unless something has happened in the week since my Stalker ran that arc I don't know what the OP is going on about. I never saw spawns or ambushes that big on +0/x1.

Nor was I stealthing, I cleared every map. Gotta get my tips somehow.

I've seen a few posts like this in the past few days and every time I scratch my head and wonder, "do people really get that upset over a video game?". So you got beat... that's a little debt and a small bump in the road on your character's progression. It takes all of a few moments to get out, and other than time, there is really no penalty for dying.

Ragequit and post seems a little excessive. I've been wiped, but I actually like it when that happens. Means I'm pushing the envelope of my character, which makes the game challenging.

So keep the ambushes for me, and if they aren't always fair, that's ok too.