Discussion: Dev Diary on Issue 19 Task Forces on Massively.com

I was kinda scared at first when he mentioned what to take from the Reichsman T/SF, so I was doubly glad to hear we won't have a fight that involves "boiling down to 10 minutes standing around and hitting an enemy".

I also like hearing that they want the new TFs to be challenging without encouraging cheap tactics. That's one thing that always bothered me about the LRSF, the way it seemingly forces the players to either embrace strategies that completely neuter all difficulty in that fight or fight 'fairly' but end up with a nigh-impossible fight.

I like the way we have to help out both Paragon City and the Rogue Isles - that's one of my favorite parts of the RWZ arcs, the way we go to locations on both sides to help fight off the invaders.

well personally I don't like having to have a special temp power to beat the bad guy(s).

we will see how this goes, and by the way on a LRSF,stalkers usally get the pity spot on the team, would really hate that certain powersets or ATs are either needed or excluded .while the TF may be fun, failing it is not, and all teams will want to have chars and such to give them the most possibilty of success.
so if this TF will take about 1 hour to do so it will only give about 12-15 merits?

I am a bit skeptical of this. Practically every end game encounter is the same, tank and spank. To prevent us from debuffing the critters into uselessness cheating tactics are added. Such as Statesman/M.Bison/Hero-1 perma unstoppable or the 100 mag hold GW has, if the devs truely mean what they say on this then we better have no cheating of NPCs abilities. Make up for it with better AI instead. Like how about having the mobs go after the healers/debuffers/buffers for once instead of being glued to the tank.

Pretty good article overall. It really tells us nothing about the Strike/Task Forces but still serves to get people excited. I found the comments below the article to be almost as illuminating as the article itself though. I hope the Dev's read those, since that is likely what new players will be doing to check out this game before deciding to buy it.

Is the article posted anywhere else? Can't get to Massively through work..

The idea of making the toons with the least amount of HP and resistance/defense also the one gaining the most aggro is very, well, it won't be fun at all for people playing those toons.

Maybe debuff-heavy Defenders and Corruptors might be able to deal with that, but most buffers buff, you know, the rest of the party, not themselves. So we have an AT with powersets that are meant to make others more resilient and more capable at taking and dishing out damage, and then make it all useless because the enemies will focus on you anyway?

It may be smart or realistic or what-have-you for enemies to focus on the team's buffers and debuffers first, but it will make those ATs a lot less fun to play. Of course one might say this simply requires a change in tactics, like killing the entire mob immediately before the Defender dies, but who really likes fights that last five seconds? Or instead of a Tanker we just get two or three Controllers and lock down those mobs, but then we're at the same position where enemies cannot do any reasonable damage against the team, it just changed from only attacking a nigh-invincible AT to not being able to attack at all.

So what do we do know? We can just make every enemy a lot more mez-resistant and make Controllers and Dominators another priority target, but then we just neutered another couple of ATs to make things realistic and intelligent or whatever. More useless ATs to make the game more challenging, brilliant design.

Now don't misconstrue this as me saying that challenge is bad. Far from it. It's just that this idea of challenge isn't fun. Instead of making Tankers useless by having enemies ignore them and making Defenders useless by having them get killed immediately, why don't we give enemies more AoEs? Many buff-sets have PBAoE buffs and buff-toggles requiring them to be close to their melee compatriots. It could make it so that position becomes more strategic, like say, this enemy group has lots of cone attacks, so it's best to buff your buddies from behind enemy lines, whereas the other group uses PBAoEs so now the Defender wants to stand as far as possible from the enemies while still being close enough to sufficiently buff their buddies.

Of course even that would have several flaws, but I'm just throwing out ideas here. What I'm trying to say is that challenge is good, but challenge should promote proper team-synergy, rather than by changing combat mechanics in such a way that several ATs get neutered and we're left with the bare-minimum to defend ourselves.

Put differently, you can make the game more challenging by giving us tougher foes, so that we feel more powerful ourselves for toppling them, or you can cripple the players, at which point we'd just feel frustratingly weak and derive significantly less joy from the challenge.