Trapdoor is getting harder.

And this is why one teammate or pets can make all the difference. Someone needs to dedicate themselves to killing his clones as quickly as they spawn and it is over fast.

150 merits for an entire ship raid? ...are you on ship raids by yourself? LOL....

Last raid he was on, my Tank netted 800+ Vanguard merits from two back-to-back runs. There were people in the zone saying they had netted 1000.

For best results you find out when "raid night" is on your server, you show up and you raid - with breaks in between - until everyone is worn out or the fat lady sings, whichever comes first. You need a full zone with people actually working, not lying around dead, and you too can net 800+ Vanguard merits for an hour or so's work. Easy peasy. This is also a great way to level 45+ alts; a few raids and you're 50 before you know it.

I would say you would get that much if the raid went horribly wrong.

Say what? Brought back down? He just isn't that tough. When you compare him to Nosferatu, who has been in the game for YEARS, Trapdoor is not at all overpowered or unreasonable.

*THAT* is the status quo - occasionally you'll find an EB who is genuinely tough and who many people can not solo.

Wrong. If you have not done the arc, you can not earn Vanguard Merits.

ParagonWiki states:

The increased difficulty of the end game content is not incidental, its the reason for the existence of the end game content. The whole point to having end game content is to have content that is more difficult and more complex than the standard content. Asking for status quo end game content is actually a contradiction in terms.

Not everyone will want or appreciate the higher difficulty, just like not everyone wants to team for task forces, or PvP, or participate in raids. The end game is going to be another optional element of the game you can choose to participate in or not. But just like it would be odd to ask for the devs to design the raid content so it can be soloed, it is equally impractical to ask the devs to make the end game content have status quo difficulty and complexity. That's a failure to recognize what its purpose is. A soloable raid is theoretically possible but highly impractical. End game content indistinguishable from the rest of the game is also theoretically possible but equally pointless.

If anything, Trapdoor represents the very beginning of the incarnate difficulty curve, not the middle or end of it.

Since it's a multiple of 10 I'm going to hazard a guess that setting a bomb (which awards 10 merits) awards merits to people without the badge in at least some situations.

Telling someone they are getting a low number of merits in one run by comparing it to what you get in two runs is rather silly.
How many runs of the raid are people doing when they say 500-1,000 per raid? I remember being able to pull 250-500 merits per run and usually doing 2 raid runs per raid event, so I can easily see 1,000 merits per event but I'm a bit skeptical of 1,000 per run.

Depends on the server. On Freedom/Virtue I (and others) have come away with 500-800+ vangaurd merits. Yes, that's a single raid.

It is not only possible but happens more often than people think.

1000 is not 500-800. I go to raids where 700-800 is pretty common. People have reported 1000 at them, but I do not have first-hand experience with it from anyone I know personally, and people saying numbers that high has been very rare. And I'm talking about 1000+, not 500-800.

It'd be nice if some of those TFs were available in Ouroboros, like the old Posi is now.

You know, for those who might like to try soloing them. I mean, I know in some cases, I'm pretty sure I'd've been better off WITHOUT teammates than with them...

After what we got for unlocking the Alpha Slot, I'm REALLY hoping that next issue, we'll see some more incarnate story arcs.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

I said I was.

You missed the middle part of the thread, then.

Pulling isn't the only way to beat him. I hope the Devs take away using temp powers and temp pets, too. That way the rest of you can see why other players are annoyed at having pulling removed.

If you watched my video, you'll know I soloed him at +2 with no temp powers. I also didn't use any inspirations.

I'm not sure why you'd want them to remove one of the only ways you might have of soloing him. If they removed them, it wouldn't particularly harm me at all.

Wasn't aimed at you, it was aimed at all these yahoos who keep saying "Just get a Shivan!" or "Just get a robot!" "Use Envenomed Dagger, problem solved!"

The way you did it was fine. It's these other people who keep saying that pulling is a cheap trick while insisting that using an overpowered temp pet is perfectly reasonable. As I said earlier, using the stupidly overpowered walking Jell-O mold doesn't make your character Incarnate-worthy. It makes the green guy Incarnate-worthy. Pulling, on the other hand, is using your brains and your character's inherent abilities.

Remember when the NFL disallowed the no-huddle offense by the Bengals? They were trying something new and succeeding wildly with it, so they outlawed it. But they weren't breaking any rules when they came up with it, they were thinking outside the box. "Get a Shivan" is the same thing as telling a football team "Just hire John Ellway and Jerry Rice for this one game because you mooks are too sorry and your coaching is too lame to win the game."

To reiterate, that post wasn't aimed at you.

Bearing in mind your clarification that you weren't addressing me, I did want to respond to this.

I think there's a tendency to interpret the "worthiness" of our character becoming an incarnate on the notion that they are already inherently very powerful. In this game, the primary direct metric most people use to determine "powerful" is damage output. But in the lore of the Incarnate arc, no matter what one may think of the arc itself, there's no indication that the Well of Furies seeks out only those with the best DPS. During the cutscene in the last mission, Mender Ramiel says the Well "responds to power and will alone".

I would agree wholeheartedly that showing our characters are innovative in problem solving is a satisfying way of illustrating their will to achieve something. I objected to the part of this patch that removed pulling, and I still do. But I also feel that going out and obtaining some tool to get the job done when our characters' lack the raw brute force to succeed shows will. They have the will to do what's needed to win out and take that artifact from Trapdoor, and essentially show the Well they are serious. I don't see that as showing lack of worth. I just see it as not as gratifying in the sense of expressing that worth as raw power or wit. I would prefer a more gratifying route, certainly, but I don't dismiss the other as valid.

Sorry, missed that part or didn't see where you'd stated that. Hmmm, your vanguard merits seem really low to be teamed on a raid. I got 570 on the last one I was on, and there was really nothing special about it. Odd.

I wouldn't say pulling is a cheap trick: in fact I used to teach pulling back in the day and at one point I was responding to every single "you can't pull like that" post by figuring out how to pull like that and posting my results. I figured out how to pull bosses apart, which is supposed to be impossible, just on a dare.

But having said that, there's the converse question of whether pulling in this case was a tactic exploiting a weakness Trapdoor was intended to have, or exploiting a weakness in Trapdoor's implementation he wasn't supposed to have. It seems apparent that the original intent of Trapdoor's design conceptually was that Trapdoor would be stronger if the bifurcations lived. *How* that was implemented allowed for pulling. But that's a game engine limitation being exploited, not an encounter weakness specifically or implicitly but there by design. The devs could have simply made the Bifurcation buffs map-wide, which would mean there was no way to pull them out of range, because the Bifurcations would have no range limits. Its also clear the Bifurcations spawn at specific locations so the devs don't have to worry about them accidentally spawning in places the players can't easily reach or shoot at. By saying the devs aren't being fair in taking pulling away, the players are saying the devs should have just said screw it and let them spawn where ever they wanted to spawn and with zone-wide buffs and said here, you guys go figure out how to kill them.

The compromises that go into engineering this sort of encounter mean that sometimes, either for performance reasons or because of design limits, the encounters may have weaknesses that aren't just unintended, but actually contrary to intent. Its one thing to defeat something in a way other than what the devs intended. Its another thing to defeat something in a way the devs intended to be conceptually impossible.

I do not believe in the meta game principle that says if the devs make a mistake, the players should be allowed to exploit it freely without correction: that the players should be free to defeat the devs rather than the critters. Because if that principle was to be honored, it would force the devs to design around it. In doing so, encounters would be forced to live under much harsher limits, and what little latitude we now have to find alternate solutions to game challenges would go away. I can tell you this: if I were to design an encounter that was intended to have only one way to beat it, it would have only one way to beat it, period. I wouldn't rely on implicit game features to limit all other ways: I would just negate those other ways explicitly in the design. Nobody wants that, but in crying foul every time the devs correct something like this a lot of people are implicitly begging for it.

I think where the line is drawn is that I think its perfectly acceptable to tell the devs you want encounters with more variety in accomplishing the tasks. Trapdoor's basic "problem" is that you have to deal with his bifurcations, because each one of them makes him stronger. If he was explicitly designed so that holding the bifurcations would also shut off the buff, you could argue that is consistent with the design of the encounter but also provides an alternate method of defeating Trapdoor that isn't massively easier. Or maybe if each Bifurcation that occured reduced Trapdoor's max health by a small amount, the players could either try to defeat Trapdoor head on or simply survive him and take out enough clones to eventually weaken him to the point where he was easier to take out (in fact, it would seem to make sense that there would be some critical weakness to Trapdoor's incarnate power, since its not supposed to be perfect - but his clones are actually a pretty darned good power when you first meet him). But these would be not just mechanical trickery: they would be rooted in making a design for Trapdoor that made sense logically. Deliberately designing Trapdoor so he has the special incarnate ability to make clones half a mile away from himself that don't help him at all while he stays away from his massive power source and chases the player over a cliff is not logical. That sort of thing should only happen unintentionally, and be corrected whenever possible. And in this case, its possible.