Honoree mission Awful

Wait...this thread is serious? People are complaining about the difficulty of an arc to start you on the path to semi-godhood? You think the incarnate stuff was going to be easier than other content? I didnt play this in beta and it took me one hospital trip on my low damage fortunata to figure out a new plan.

After that all my alts have breezed through...even my common IOed blaster....lower your settings or buy more insps, if you still cant complete, youre doing it wrong. Try something else.

--Frog

As others have said, use insps, use shivans if you have to, really is not difficult, a load of purples and BFs on a mish set to -1 should be no problem.

I see "challenging" and "difficult" being thrown around about this arc.

I didn't find it challenging. I didn't find it difficult. I found it tedious, a bit frustrating, heavy-handed, and poorly designed.

Mission 1: cute, novel, will be "stealthed" by most people after their first or second pass, I bet. Nice map. Eye candy, basically.

Mission 2: Two ways to "solve" it, that I came up with. What should've been the neat solution turned out to be a tedious, aggravating experience, which I blame on design. The boring solution worked well enough, but was, well... boring. The entire map can be bypassed with stealth.

Mission 3: Nothing challenging here. One opponent, in terms of power level, was simply way outside the scope of the rest of the arc. Again, that's not "difficult". It's just lazy design, uninteresting, and easily countered with a temp power and/or a serious inspiration load-out... which I'd rather not resort to, but there it is. Point is, that's not really a challenge.

One particularly bad thing about this mission is the portals. They don't appear to stop spewing mobs. That's something that can choke lesser systems, and cause game-affecting lag in better ones. Again, poor design. Real poor. Personally, I didn't notice too much of a drop in performance, but my system's fairly new and spiffy. When I helped a friend, though, their game was reduced to a slide show. And yes, that was while being well outside the room. "Lots" of mobs would've gotten the message across well enough. Making them endless was unnecessary, thoughtless and, dare I say it, amateurish. This really should be fixed.

Mission 4: Nothing challenging here, particularly the fella at the end, so it was quite anti-climactic. Pretty effect on the last room, though.

I went into this arc expecting something interesting. What I got was radio mission drudgery peppered with a few cheap stunts. In my opinion, this arc doesn't hold a candle to the Praetorian content... or much of anything else that's come out since Ernesto Hess. Not in terms of quality and certainly not in terms of challenge.

I mean, c'mon. A big, fat, overpowered mob you have to pull out all the stops to put down? Yah, we haven't seen that a hundred times before.

And this is a glimpse into the future of CoH? Really?

Also, this arc has a very personal delivery. I can't blame anyone for expecting to be able to solo it, because it's implicit in the presentation that it's a solo adventure. Frankly, given the impact on the character, it should be a solo adventure. And the sad thing is, it pretty much can be... except for this one odd spike in "difficulty" embodied by one single opponent, who's apparently only in there to make the arc "a challenge".

Off the top of my head, I can think of a half dozen ways in which this arc could've been made genuinely challenging. As just one example, with the use of 'echoes', very scary mob combinations could've been devised. We all know which enemy types cause the most problems. Why not put them in one group?

It also would've been nice if there had been something in the 3rd mission that could've been used to weaken the Big Bad. Something that, if you wanted to employ it, you had to lead him to it. That would've been a tricky thing, but probably fun. And it would've given the non-damage oriented characters a different option from the same ol' same old ('get a team', 'get inspirations', 'get a temp power').

Anyways, I'm sorry, but I have to agree with the OP's chosen word for this arc: Awful. And a lot of the excuses getting rolled out to defend it aren't cuttin' it with me. It's just bad... and so below the bar when compared to anything in GR.

I think this arc is a very, very poor introduction to a system that's allegedly going to command a lot of developer attention in the coming months. Sadly, seeing as it took six years to revamp the Positron TF, I assume we're stuck with this embarrassment... but I believe it'd be a good idea to retool it ASAP if at all possible.

Ultimately, though, I'd say the same thing about the whole of the Incarnate system, so I guess it doesn't matter.

Mood: disappointed.

I found this mission hilarious. I thought you had to click to Honoree's body or something. So I charge in, trying to click his body. You can imagine my surprise when he proceeds to jump up and punch me in the face! So I got Honoree flying around punching me, Holtz doing whatever he does and 6 portals spawning Rikti.

Was under major pressure and ended up using a single green Insp.

Thats a big deal for a 4 billion inf build!

I did it today easy on a thug/dark. When I pulled the 1st eb round the corner no rikti followed however he is a pain to hold and I had a bit of luck when he stopped and turned around before running back. When I pulled the honoree only a few rikti followed and he was pretty easy to take down.

I should mention that I had it set on -1/1

I sincerely hope this one goes the way of the Cape mission and the Respec trial, myself. That is all.

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.

I'm confused by the talk of endless no reward minions. They always stopped for me once I took out the portals.

Here's my question, and this applies to all spawners such as Behemoth portals: How do they work? I know it's an entity that repeats a summon power, but under what conditions? To structure my questions in a more logical way:

1. Once the "portal" has spotted you and started spawning, will it stop for ANY reason, such as if it loses sight and/or aggro of you?

2. Is there some limit of enemies beyond which the portal will stop spawning, or will it keep spawning until it crashes the server?

3. What determines how many enemies it spawns?

4. Do ALL portals scale down to lieutenants if they were originally designed as bosses?

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.

I got squashed a few times today on my favourite fire/devices blaster trying to do this; is there a tactics guide anywhere for this? Am I better starting on the Honoree first or the other chap?