Trapdoor is getting harder.

Last night I found a few moments to take Trapdoor on with that Fire/Fire/Pyre Blaster of mine and I made it a tussle....
but my squishy blaster ended up showing his glass chin once again and got sent to the hospital twice
Like John Travolta playing Nicholas Cage in the movie Faceoff stated...
I need "... fresh tactics!" LOL

I agree with them removing the pulling trick from working. Because of the back story of how Trapdoor's regen works, the pulling trick didn't make sense.

Removing temp powers wouldn't make sense.

Now, if Trapdoor's regen was owed to some kind of generator or something similar in that room, then I'd agree pulling him makes sense.

Don't the clones also attack the player(s)'s character(s) as well?
When they're in range, of course.
I agree with you, Arcanaville. I just have one issue with the fix the Devs came up with. My Ar/Dev blaster, who uses the tactic of pulling the "bosses" onto a pile of trip mines, is neutralized before she even gets to the do the arc. I use a crap load of pre-combat set up with this one character. That's her "concept" if you will. Unfortunately, I'll have to find somewhere else to pull Trapdoor to, where he will actually go to. Hopefully, before he pops out a dozen or more clones.

I do know that 21 trip mines will take down Lady Winter near instantly. Of course, that was with an acid mortar tossing out -res. 15 Trip mines should put a serious dent in Trapdoor's health, if he would have the decency to wander into the mines before they self destruct and before he puts out too many clones. If I'm busy taking out his clones as he bifurcates them, then he's not going to go where I want him to go. Which is on the pile of trip mines that I spend a couple of minutes putting out for that purpose.

Same thing goes for my DP/Traps Defender. Granted, I'll have access to poison trap. But, that will only work as long as I can get him to trigger it. Which, involves him going where I want him to go. Which, involves me pulling him. Which, I have I have to work at more now, because I can't funnel him into the hallway any more. Yes, I know. toe trap him. While he sends a devastating melee attack my way.

Other than that, I don't really have a problem with the mission as a whole. Maybe it'll be different than how I'm envisioning it will be. Maybe, I'll just get lucky. Maybe, I can win the lottery too.

Just to reiterate. I am not disagreeing with you, arcanaville. I'm disagreeing with the method that the devs used to solve the problem. I agree that they overlooked that bifurcation issue when Issue 19 went live. I just think they could have come up with a better solution for it. But then, I'm not a game developer. I don't know what all they have to deal with in fixing the horrid code that was left to them from their predecessors.

I've gone past 1,000 once, possibly twice. Did not know that raid durations could be extended with the planting of more bombs. This was before the last year's patch which seems to have made the raids more lag prone.

Now I can't tell how many merits I get because I never let them get below 9300 or so before raiding again. Most raids I will cap out again somewhere between half time and 2/3 time of the shields being restored. This is with 1 set of bombs only.

Knowing that the raid time can be extended I can easily see 1200-1500 vmerit raids being possible within a single raid.

Here are some handy tips to vmerit stacking on a ship raid (assuming you have done the vanguard arc).

1. Team up. Your teammates actions can earn you vmerits, although I'm not sure of the distance from your teammates to get those vmerits.

2. You only need to do damage to a ship borne rikti to count for a vmerit when it is defeated. 1 damage (or >0) is enough.

3. The corollary to 2 is that you should only let yourself do the minimal amount of damage to any rikti before moving onto the next. While this may be raid defeating in the end because if no one does enough damage to a rikti it will never be defeated, in practice it seems to work well enough.

4. Always bring a HVAS once you can afford it. Given that you can earn lots during a raid, your HVAS is the equivalent of another teammate on your team. Spawn the HVAS in the bowl if you can't be sure that the raid won't get you or the HVAS killed beforehand.

5. Learn how to control your HVAS. Know what the tether limit is to making it move and ignore mobs and how far it needs to be so you can place it where you want it.

6. Buff your HVAS like you would any other teammate, or your teammate's HVAS. Kinetics and FF/Ice are worth their weight in gold.

7. Make sure you have a bubbler of some kind or FFG to protect the squishies. Once you've established your kill zone people should pull as many rikti as possible to the kill spot.

8. Encourage people not to establish their own herd spots away from the central kill zone. This way all the rikti get defeated faster. It also supports point #3.

9. Make sure you have a dark or two with Howling Twilight. I've seen raids where Stone Tanks have been stunned because too many magi appeared and were going nuts. I lost count at 15 of them.

10. Make sure the raid leadership is competent. Since you can't control this part other than leading it, perhaps you might want to get good at it.

11. Use your inspirations. Break Frees and Lucks are probably way more in demand than most other insps.

12. AoEs are your best bet to getting lots of vmerits. Single target attacks aren't. Rain powers and healthless pets work great since they are pretty much fire and forget.

13. Shivans, while nice, don't get you much because they despawn too quickly.

14. The HVAS will despawn after touching the shield more than once. Still trying to confirm this 100%.

15. The good raids tend to have more lag because a whole lot more is going on. Knockback and push powers have a lot to do with this, and mobs jumping/falling.

16. Target the headman gunners if you are a herder. They have a much faster way to travel with teleport so it is easy to go beyond aggro cap when herding to the bowl.

17. Be kind to your herders. Buff them and hug them. Usually they are making fewer vmerits because they are gathering the mobs to you and they can't have pets out (for long before wandering solo into a mob).

18. You can only have 1 HVAS out at a time. Using an HVAS power while you have the HVAS pet currently spawned will waste the power. However, spawning an HVAS and then crafting another HVAS isn't a bad thing at all because it gives you the opportunity to earn the vmerits back to strength without having to buy another HVAS at the end of the raid. Alternatively it allows you to replace your HVAS on board the ship if the HVAS somehow gets defeated (only likely if your HVAS is not getting buffed).

19. Different toons have different merit earning abilities. Toons with a lot of AoE powers will inherently be better at earning merits than single target powered toons. The HVAS pet equalizes things somewhat.

As someone else pointed, it makes about a billion percent more sense than him just standing in lava and letting you wail on him. "Hey Trapdoor! You're ugly and your mother dresses you funny!" "Yeah, you aren't fooling me with that line." "Your mom said you'd say that... when I was with her last night." "Why you...! Arrr!"

Makes as much sense as anything else. Just wave a magic wand.

"Trapdoor wants this encounter to be just you... and him."
::: Trapdoor casts spell to keep anything other than your powers from working :::

Is he Magic? Doesn't matter.

::: Trapdoor activate stolen Mender way-in-the-future superscience... thing... that keeps anything not from you out of the cave :::

The problem seems to be that the Devs appear to be approaching encounters like this from the viewpoint of a few specific characters. When my AR/Dev Blaster went up against Trapdoor, she got spanked, hard. I had to get help. Once you add a second person to the encounter, it becomes trivially easy. Too hard and too easy are both incredibly boring. Making my AE arc, I tested it with my weakest and least-capable characters to ensure anyone could play it. I don't get the sense that happens when encounters like Trapdoor are designed.

When less-capable characters use a perfectly valid tactic used in the entire rest of the game, removing it just comes across as specious. If it were designed the way you would do it, no problem. But changing stuff mid-stream -- things that should have (and probably did) come up during beta -- does annoy people.

I notice you're credited in GR. Use some of that clout going forward.

The first time I played the arc was with my energy/energy blaster. First, I went in cold - no proactive insp use - just to see what the worst it could get was, and of course I got bonesmashered to death. Second go around, I bought two break frees, six lucks, and four respites, shot the bifurcations as they spawned, and took him out just fine.

This is advanced content, and smart inspiration usage is considered a reasonable expectation from the players. Only if that fails completely do I think the players have a legitimate difficulty-based gripe.

When you say pulling is a perfectly acceptable tactic, it is - BUT not always. The exact same thing happened in the STF with Lord Recluses and the towers. The design was not intended to allow him to be pulled completely out of sight of his buffing towers, but the critter AI isn't sophisticated enough to program the behavior they intend. So they added the teleport bungies. Knockback is a perfectly acceptable tactic, but the devs don't allow us to knock mitos out of the way. Slotting range into melee attacks used to be *possible* due to a game engine limitation but clearly not intentional, and when the tech became available to fix it, it was fixed.

It would be nice if the devs never made design mistakes like this or could prevent them from occurring at all, but my clout with the devs doesn't really have enough pull to order them to not make mistakes anymore. It certainly isn't strong enough for me to convince them not to fix them any more.

Honestly, when I test things I test them with the full knowledge and awareness that not all players are as knowledgeable as me, and not all players build characters as strong as I can build them. So I rarely test with optimized characters, and I'm always looking for potential problems that could hang average players with average characters. My evaluation of Trapdoor is that its advanced content: the average player will have difficulty completing it on the first try, but few if any characters that are at least average in solo capability will be unable to complete it with smart inspiration usage. If you can give me a powerset combination that you believe cannot complete Trapdoor with just smart inspiration usage and no temp powers, let me know. If I can figure out a way to test that combination in some fashion, I'm willing to try eventually. Keeping in mind that testing will be difficult and may take time, because at the moment you can only run it once per 50, and my supply of 50s is not infinite.

(In fact, its on my list of things to bug someone about: getting the arc put in flashback minus the incarnate rewards so it can be retested by people like me)

I would like that very much.

What makes this content unacceptable is the lack of the ability to auto complete it.

There's a choice attached. It seems likely that one's decision in that choice is stored and will matter again later. There's almost certainly no extant means for the mission auto complete function to offer you that choice outside the context of the mission.

In fact, I'd say that it WILL matter - as mentioned in the following mission.

"I can't solo him on my incredibly low-damage character with a team-oriented primary!

What? Get a team for this team challenge? How dare the devs refuse to fuel my anti-social attitude in a massively multiplayer video game?! "

I think this post would have been better with just the first line.

People like you make Santa Claus sad.

Good going, Santa-hater.

I think it'd be very cool if he showed up in some later Incarnate content as either a friend or an enemy, depending on if you were nice or horrible to him during Ramiel's arc.

Why do people constantly think that "MMO" means "YOU MUST TEAM!" Or that people that don't want to team up are somehow anti-social trogs?

I personally don't like to team up, *especially* with PUGs. I've tried it, it's not fun. Aside from my nearly supernatural ability to join groups lead by Build Nazis, I have a very low tolerance for juvenile behaivior. Player X may think that "off color" comment or that macro that makes their character look like they're air-humping are funny. I think they're usually a good reason to use /ignore.

In any case, if the devs wanted to FORCE people to get a team for this arc, it should have been a TF. Since it isn't, people have the expectation that it should be possible to solo it. I haven't run this mission since the last patch that changed it. The two times I have run it, I had to use both of the tactics the devs apparently decided were "not working as intended." IE, pulling him out of sight of the clones, or focusing on killing clones until they simply stopped spawning, *THEN* dealing with Trapdoor. Neither of my characters that has ran this mission appears to be capable of killing clones faster than they can spawn, so attacking Trapdoor directly proved pretty pointless both times. And for my zombie Mastermind, trying to get him into the lava would have been counterproductive - zombies are a lot more flammable than Trapdoor is.

It doesn't matter though. I don't intend to try running the mission again. It's clear that the devs don't want "players like me" to participate in the Incarnate system. The Alpha slot is only barely possible to do solo in any case. I'm sure that they will follow the same bad example as "that other game," and that future Incarnate slots will flatly *require* a TF to unlock. (And quite probably that each one will require all the Incarnate slots that have been released up to that point to even attempt.) I already quit another more popular game, precisely *because* that's how the entire endgame worked.

I find it mildly ironic that the one thing that looks likely to cause me to quit playing CoH is the "new endgame" content that is supposedly meant to give "veteran" players more to do.

And yet, in all the test, you don't explain why the opposite must be true.

And you start ranting and making assumptions about what is going to happen.

Its funny that people keep trying to compared this system to other endgame systems and content. They would laugh in your face at how easy and simple it is to get all the 'endgame' stuff that apparently is so hard for a few people.

And if people are so against "endgame' stuff, why are they so intent on making sure they can do it if they don't want to do it because it offends them that it is part of an 'endgame' system? They told us that this stuff is for people that want more challenge and endgame content, so if you aren't intreasted in it, why are so you intent on complaining about it? I guess the rest of the game is gone now the system is in place and we didn't get ANY non-incarnate content this Issue.

All I have to say is this, "Adapt, or Don't Do it" and the D0000M about future content is amusing.

IE. and its rich that the example is an MM having trouble, one of the Kings of soloing, I'm sorry if you can't do it on an MM, its not the content, its you.

The opposite of what?

I'm not ranting. I'm simply tired of attempting to explain my point of view to people who will ignore most of what I say. And it's hardly a baseless assumption that would be how future Incarnate slots are going to work. Aside from a recent mention of "Incarnate trials" in one of the dev posts or announcements, it's how pretty much every other MMO does it.

We got very little non-Incarnate content in this issue. A handful of Tips missions, several of which bug out on me quite often. And Inherent Fitness. And a handful of buggy Zone Events in Praetoria, I suppose, although I don't have any characters for whom those are relevant at this point. I'd be willing to bet that Issue 20 has even less, and that if it includes new costumes at all, they'll be TF unlocks for the new Incarnate trials. I'm not expecting any content that any of my characters can actually use until at least Issue 22 at this point.

If people like the new TFs and want even harder ones, fine. Have fun. I don't care. What I DO care about is being excluded from new powers and content entirely. The rest of the game doesn't cease to exist, but from my point of view, any content that requires an Incarnate TF to unlock is irrelevant. So in Issue 20, I expect to have exactly nothing to look forward to at this point. I'll most likely never get any of the interesting new powers that it looks like the later Incarnate slots will offer, like special AoEs and pets and whatever else, so I can't even enjoy playing around with them in normal missions.

Some Masterminds are decent at normal content. Tankerminds might even be good at it, although I wouldn't know. I hate the playstyle required to make a Tankermind work, so I don't have any. Masterminds don't steamroll EBs though, especially not melee EBs that can wipe out the entire Tier 1 with a single AoE attack. In any case, I'm clearly not as awesome as you, so I should just uninstall the game right now, right?

Ok, I've gotten fed up with people saying they can't solo him on a Defender so I decided to do a test. I have a TA/A defender I never play. He hasn't been IO'd beyond a -kb IO and a kismet IO (I tend to toss both on all my characters to aid in leveling) and has a pre-I19 build (so no inherent fitness). I decided to see if I could solo Trapdoor with no temporary powers and without using my primary at all. The answer was yes I could.

I went in with 6 reds, 8 purples and 6 greens. I used 3 purples and 2 reds immediately and used another set of 3 and 2 when those ran out. I didn't need to use the third set. I lured him into the lava (no need for knockback, I just broke LoS and he followed me) and killed the bifurcations as he spawned them. It did take me a few goes but it wasn't particularly hard.

Now admittedly Archery does have slightly better DPS than some secondaries but I was getting nothing from my primary at all, even the two worst soloing primaries (Empathy and Force Field) would get something (healing and defense respectively) and as such could reasonably trade in some of the inspirations I used for more reds to deal with lower damage.

Now I don't honestly think anyone who hates the mission is going to magically change their mind but to me this closes the argument. If a Defender can solo it without using their primary there is no excuse for anyone else.

The MM in my sig is by no means a tankermind, mostly SOs slotted. Yet he was the easiest of my 3 50s to get past Trap. Throw darkest night on Trap, henches in BG, attack Trap. Henches retaliate when he hits me. Trap spawns clones, send off GKs to deal with em. Repeat as needed, support henches with secondary. Profit.

That same MM, again still not a tankermind, did and does steamroll EBs. Most MMs i've seen can. Sure, the ones with aoes are a bit of bother...but saying that MMs cant steamroll EBs is flat out false.

This a hundred times.

Insps are there to be used and they drop like rain. If you choose not to use them, it's not the devs' fault that you can't complete this mission solo. I think it is completely fair to raise the minimum requirements for end-game to decent player skill, i.e. smart inspiration usage and self-positioning.

But, it's not a team challenge. As has been stated earlier in this thread, that you, obviously haven't read, once a single additional teammate is added, the mission is trivial. It is only a challenge to those who solo it, and even not to everyone that solos it. Generally, only the low damage types without mezzing abilities (or knockback) have issues with this mission. So, your second sentence made absolutely no sense in regards to this topic.

In addition, many people consider the Multiplayer portion of the game as a chatroom with entertainment. Obviously, you disagree. However, your opinion means absolutely nothing to them, and me. There are very few people that I will team with on a regular basis, and that's usually one day out of the week. The rest of the time, I tend to solo. Mainly, because I get very irritated with the Tank that will quit the Respec Trial (Hero side) because he was defeated once, in the last mission. Or the Defender will go AFK when we enter a mission and come back just about the time we finish it. Or several other pug issues that I've run into. I really don't like relying on someone that is unreliable. So, your last sentence was totally irrelevant for most of this discussion. Especially, since this arc does not require you to have a team to start. This arc is solo-able content. Not Team content.

Most of us have stated that we were disappointed with the Devs removing a tactical option in completing this one mission. We have given our reasons for that. And, as a result, have had to defend our playing experiences from people like you, who seem to think that the only playing experience in the game that is correct is yours. Which is why most of us, who are "anti-social", dislike teaming. We are not you. For which we are profoundly grateful.

I could probably go off on a long winded (worded) dissertation on how they're narrow-minded individuals who were shunned as children and look for acceptance where ever they can. But,I won't. Because that would be shoving all of them into one mold. Rather like they tend to do to those who would rather not team with the likes of them, and I won't stoop that low. Or, did I just do that?

Or, maybe, not everyone has the same play-style with the same ATs. I can play any AT and any Power-set combination without having to resort to Stamina.* However, I'll bet that you needed Stamina on every single character you ever created. Obviously, you were doing it wrong. Since you needed Stamina.

*this was before Issue 19 where Stamina is inherent.