Honoree mission Awful

Soloed the arc with my Tank, who had a few tricks up his sleeve after having been warned by SG mates.

He'll be the only one soloing it, I can tell you. My squishies cannot take down two AVs solo, even level 50 squishies, even if the AVs are pulled apart. The Tank got two AVs on +0/0. Truly: what. the. hell.

I am one of those who finds beating on things for ten minutes apiece to be the antithesis of fun. If I have to break off the fight to go get more inspirations and then return, its even less fun.

If the Honoree mission is droppable, next time I will be dropping it. If Trapdoor were droppable I would be dropping him too. This whole thing is no fun, for the same reason Reischmann is no fun. Its a thing I *have* to do, a barrier in my way to what I want. A fun challenge, it aint.

That's just me.

Is this mission hard? Yes. Is it harder than the ones before it and following it? Yes.

Even knowing how to beat them I still have died doing it in beta and now on Live. So I go to the hospital, get some inspirations, go back and pull one of them away from the other and beat that one then go after the other.

It seemed fair to me that getting to become an incarnate would be difficult but I don't find it any more difficult than some other EB missions already in the game.

I even helped someone struggling with Trapdoor which I had never had any trouble with (I didn't even know there was lava below).

Our mileage will vary by our AT, powersets, abilities and approaches in these missions but as Arcanaville mentioned I was one of those who didn't have any clue the first few months and struggled so badly I almost quit until I found out how to win. So I suggest anyone who is having a problem with this mission should try to relax and approach it like a puzzle to be solved and not get frustrated.

I'm very casual. I started CoH at the end/Open Beta... played for a bit with friends and left with friends to many different games. I came back by myself this summer.

I have 2 level 50's, one which I do not really play.

My main is a Mind/Kin/Psi controller with zero purples. I've not even done all TFs with my main (hasn't been 50 all that long either).

With very little info about this new mission series I headed in. Trapdoor (whatever his name is, the very first EB) was easy for me, I died once from being stupid then took him out easy without the whole lava thing... which I didn't know about or think of.

I got to the Honoree room easily and knew that portals are bad, so I took them out and cleaned up the little bit of Rikti mess. I pulled the first EB and took him out pretty handily and then got ready for Honoree. I think I died 4 times (always re stocking on inspirations) and I simply could not dent his health. IF... IF... If... if the solution is to somehow engage him and scratch his health pool and run away, and go back and scratch him and run, and so on for ever and ever... I guess it's possible I could take him, but I'm not sure.

On my main, I can and have taken out level 50 EB's in solo missions... challenging and fun enough... this encounter sucks for me. I'll auto complete it again, if I ever do it again.

Sure, maybe I suck that bad, but it sure seemed impossible for me to do any real damage to Honoree at all.

All the elites here that have done this encounter four hundred times with new 50's zero IO can make sure to put me on your "no group" list, because I clearly suck and would hate to spoil your fun by ever grouping with someone as skilled as you are.

Was able to solo the Honoree mission part with my lvl 50 elec/elec blaster. Was able to draw Honoree out without agroing the rest of his fun time Rikti crew. Then blasted him with lightning field, god I love this attack, reduced a good chunk of his end. Then other attacks wasted what he had left, another jolt of lightning field here and there to keep his end down close to zero. Had a great time, laughed when I saw his end bar down to nothing as I was blasting Honoree and watching him stand there wishing he had the strength to left his arms to fight back.

OK, just ran it on my Dark Dark Defender, solo at +2/x4 no AVs. I totally crushed Trapdoor. I was surprised - I creamed him on my 1st solo Incarnate run on a Scrapper, but a friend of mine had some trouble with an SO'd Fire/Fire Tanker. I figured my well-IO'd Defender would be somewhere in betweeen, but it was actually closer to my Scrapper. I died once to a spawn of +3 Arachnos+Council who hit me with a web grenade while I was right above them in one of those vertical shafts.

I died once to a +2 Rikti ambush because I tried to wait out a stun rather than use a BF.

I did this while on phone calls, and I had to stop playing at a point where the Rikti portals had already spawned. As a result, each one had about 3x the aggro cap on it by the time I was able to poke them. I killed every summoned Rikti around one portal closest to the side the player approaches from. That cleared a visible path to the EBs.

I snipe pulled Holtz, and basically cleaned her clock. She landed Curse of Weariness on me once, but I was prepared and had a Cursebreaker on hand. (I learned about that trick when I ran the arc on my Scrapper.)

I died once to the Honoree because he stunned me. I could have broken free, but I sort of wanted to see just how stunarrific he was, and he kept restunning me and took me out after about 5 attacks. (He missed with some.) I was quite surprised to discover that his ranged energy blast attacks had stun chances attached. I had expected that I could avoid most of that by trapping him on the floor with Tar Patch and hovering above him. After using a couple of smaller BFs I went for broke and used a Tier 3 "Escape" brand BF. They last 3 minutes. This resulted in the satisfyingly climactic outcome that I became stunned while the Honoree was suffering my damage DoTs, which happened to push his HP to the level that he surrendered moments after my Escape expired.

The only inspirations I used were the BFs. Clearly, I am not so foolish as to think all other squishies operate with the benefit of the mitigation levels a Dark Defender has, but I felt this was appropriate for "epic" content against a squishie. Especially given the settings I played it on.

Edit: The full powerset list for the character is Dark Miasma/Dark Blast/Power Mastery.

The problem is the soloability of this can be dependant on as little as one power choice.

In this case water spout completly and utterly nullified the Eb's.

What in the heck is that? One power turns this from a painful slog to a joke.

But this is bowling where the player is depending on powerset given a lopsided ball and asked to knock down one pin while blindfolded.

Or given a ball that takes up the entire lane and cant possibly miss.


Ive never said this was impossible, I said success or failure is determined at character creation, not at the time of accepting the mission.


Allright let me edit this.

Its not success or failure thats determined at character creation, its if this mission is done with a lopsided bowling ball with a blindfold or a bowling ball with target acquisition. Its difficulty, thats determined when you make your character.

So with one you need a ton of practice and still might never get it, and the other you just throw it widly in something resembling the direction of the baddies and they all die...

How is this balanced?

The problem is honoree has stupidly high acc, a stupidly high hold, insane amounts of hold resistance, and he does enough damage to 2 shot squishies.

Okie this leads to the problem, he will hit you right through purples, stun you right through break free's and 2 hit anyone without high resistances, also he is darn near unholdable.

Now that being said, he has almost no immob res, almost no knocback resistance.

Starting to see the problem, you cant play to your strength thats a dead end, you have to play to the enemies weakness and pray you have a power to deal with it.