The Impossible Mr. Trapdoor and Issue 19's New Theme

It's 3:30 am, i stopped reading around page 15, but I do feel i need to throw out here my take about the new TF's.

Apex beef #1: not the 54's so much as the ambush mechanic itself overused and abused while being paired with the prae clockwork. Ask anyone whose done the old I think it was crimson arc (second kronos, the one on the burning forest map) That map had ambushes out the wazoo, and I can;'t even begin to count the number of times I as the blaster had the ambush deicde i was it's ***** and have gunslingers teleport right next to me and faceplant my toon in seconds, or a zeus launch it's hold spam missiles of doom before i could even see it to target it. Much less fight back.

Now instead of that we have (in my opinion) the stupidily overpowered prae clocks sitting at a perma +4 Which have crazy stupid range and are so aoe tastic there's zero place for a squishie to hide. I Actually died more times during the KR fight then BM because the ambushes came after me before the tank could even think of pulling them his way.

Same thing happened multiple times back in Oct on Mallus Mundi Runs, and those weren't even +4 clocks. Those guys need to be toned down, or the ambush mechanics need to be looked at, one of the two, I'd prefer both.

Beef #2 BM and her puddles of doom, and her ambushes, and the fight in general. Regardless of how easy they are to dodge (or not) I stand by an opinion that when the devs of any game have to resort to this kind of gimmicky cheap one shot trick and try to pass it off as a "challenge" they have run out of ideas. For anyone who played war for cybertron, I'd hold up the zeta prime fight as a shining example of this failure too. There's plenty of ways to make a fight harder then forcing us to play the twitch game, or be at the mercy of lag spikes and server latency. When she spawned that first wave of swords, my older comp's vid card did a total crapout, and this is on settings just barely above minimum. End result, it took me a good couple minutes to even click the hosp button.

Oh and when I came back I walked through the door into a puddle, yeah you can imagine how much fun I was having at that point.

The same when for the first few rounds of this battle I died nonstop because I'd fire off ice bolt and blast, then before i could wonder about the puddle fall or ready a third attack the next thing i knew was a puddle to the face. (Now what was that about run and gun working for ranged?)

Granted after i turned my speakers up and paid a little more attention (and got over the foaming rage) I actually managed to spend the rest of the fight with a 100% puddle dodge rating. In short I did what our elitist friends call "L2P" Or simply adapted to be more diplomatic about it. I timed my attacks to coincide with dodges, i managed to stick and move (and didn't need cheesy meta game tactics like jousts to do it) And I managed to be a worthwhile contributor to the damage on dropping her.

Oh, except for the fact I was relegated to basically just spamming my T1 and T2 attacks with the occasional bitter ice blast when I managed to get close enough.

And the fact I was told not to use web grenade to keep from rooting her in puddles.

And the fact she pretty much ignored caltrops like they weren't even there.

And the fact I play a recharge build based on hammering AV's with double gun drones. Yeah good luck getting one summoned, much less having it live for more then 5 seconds. Forget melee I honestly weep for any MM that tries that fight.

And you know what? By the end I was glad it was over, and I was feeling tried, frustrated and drained to the point where I wanted to just log for the night. And here's the important detail.

Because that fight and that TF was NOT fun in the slightest. It was tedious, it was frustrating, and it was annoying as ****. Personally for those reasons alone I'm in the never doing it again camp, even after knowing how to fight BM. For the simple reason alone that I'd like my power choices to actually be USEFUL in a fight, and not running around like a spastic hamster spamming my quick animating attacks in between something that's tantamount to the devs giving an npc the I win button. While having my entire secondary relegated to useless as well.

I work 4PM - 1AM, my playtime is minimal except on days off, my playstyle is for the most part a mix of casual and powergamer at times. I'm no stranger to everything that coh has to offer either, heck i've even gone back and redone the eden trial twice this month.

But this. . . this, and protean (though oddly enough not Tin mage) Really really reeks of WoW, and that's a direction that I really really hope the coh devs do not take us.

And while we're at it I have to thumbs down the entire Roy Cooling arc, whose bright idea was it to add npcs that floor spped and acc in every spawn, an impossible 5 minute timer mission, and drop after callisto an EB Zeus freaking titan on a map that is for the most part soloable otherwise? I'm not about to run back from the hospital with a new insp tray for one cheap shot, that's when auto complete gets hit. And that's when I never do this arc again either.

Anyway back on topic about the new stuff. I felt the same way about the IO system when it first came out, the big things that appealed to me about coh in the old days were no pvp and no phat lewtz, though we see how both of those turned out. I was afraid we were gonna see a severe divide in the playerbase between haves and have nots, and the content might also split along those lines. That or the devs would make inventions so powerless they'd be a gimmick at best.

But market inflation aside, well they seem to have got it right, mainly because of the creed they held to, inventions are optional. You don't need them to succeed in any of the games content.

Fast forward to now and I have the same fear about incarnate TF's and the future of the upcoming powers/slots. And this time I'm really thinking the devs dropped the ball with the incarnate arc itself (honoree and trapdoor rage) to the new TF's.

It feels like forced/specific teaming (not everyone is a wonderpug), it feels like they decided to just try to powergame us with +4's locked in. Also cheap shot things like BM and perhaps to a lesser extent super bobcat. And it really feels like they're going overboard with the new toys and leaving a lot of their playerbase out in the cold.

Yes, you don't have to be a keyboard god to dodge BM, but is it fun? and if this is the start, what's the next gimmick wall we're gonna bash our heads against till we bring out the jackhammers? When it's discovered will it be like Hercula describes and we're down to memorization and vent speak more then actual gameplay? Will coh perhaps even spawn it's own leeroy? =p

Or will the devs get it right, and balance things out so everyone can take part? That's the key right there, it can be hard, it should be hard, i hope it IS hard. But there's a very large divide between hard and utterly cheap crap like what I'm seeing now from BM to the fact that every time i've fought protean without fail i'm in a long attack animation when siphon goes off.

If the incarnate arcs of the future lock out anyone. Or divide the players, that's a failure on the devs part pure and simple. Not everyone is as . .ahem . . vocal as JB there about the rage and doom, but I don't exactly have high hopes myself if we go down the road of trying to be like every other mmo, but just with tights. After all not everyone is a forum reader, some might just ragequit or burnout without a peep, least till we see the sub numbers.

Ok ok veering a little into doomcall there, but color me worried about the direction of the game, and unimpressed with a huge chunk of the new content. Tin mage aside, that's what a TF should be.

There are a limited number of battle and plot scenarios that are feasible to be selected.

The use of all available scenarios will invariably cause some similarity to other games.

This is not due to a desire to emulate the other game so much as it is due to the limited selection of battle scenarios available.

In addition, it is the fluff more than the mechanics that make the difference in games.

The mechanic differences come down to some basic systems:

Templates or Point-Based

both WoW and CoH use Templates

Hit Points, Wounds or Status Effects

both WoW and CoH use Hit Points (the other status effects are not the main part of the health system)

Bell Curve or Flat Curve conflict resolution

given the number of variables involved in either, I'd say both use likely the same sort of conflict resolution

The base mechanics are already similar.

Now on to battle scenarios:

sieges, assaults, escorts

everything else is more or less a combination of this

when you are sent to destroy an object while eternal ambushes seek to push you off of it (Infernal, STF, Vanguard missions) then you have combined assault (destroy the target) with siege (hold off attackers)

we have fewer escorts, but we do have many rescues, we could especially use more escorts of the Lady Jane variety where we have to escort the rescuee deeper into mission...provided said rescuee gains a better AI....or else is set to not attack...

there isn't much more than those three scenarios: siege, assault, escort

and even escort is just a siege where you move

this doesn't change from game to game

every game's battles will come down to one of these three

as to the accusation of "gimmicks" that is common as well, gimmicks are used all the time, mostly by the players...

we've used the gimmick of placing the fight where we wanted it to happen (pulls and wormhole), altering the terrain of the fight (locationals), increasing our abilities and decreasing theirs (buff/debuff), stacking numbers (pets), slowing the pace of the fight (aggro and crowd control)

heck, such gimmicks are historical...I'm sure the Persians complained about the whole narrow pass "gimmick" and such

Trapdoor's gimmick isn't even all that annoying....and I dealt with it solo just fine after figuring out that his regen rate was connected to the number of clones he had out

Really, the whole complaint about being "like other MMOs but with tights" is the same silliness tabletop RPGers have been using to complain about D&D 4e being like MMORPGs


when the basic systems and scenarios being used by either set are essentially the same, there will always be overlap and similarity. Usually more similarity than difference if you ignore the flavor surrounding such things.


in order for CoH to not be "like" other MMOs you will have to change either the scenarios used or the systems used

given that no new scenarios have been invented in hundreds of years and we're essentially using the same scenarios used by Shakespeare and even further back, Euripides and the like, that's not likely to happen

changing systems is more likely, but also difficulty....I suppose, instead of XP, you could have a system where every time you use a power, it has a chance to improve...

instead of hit points you could have status effects such as "Injured" or "Disabled" the way Mutants and Masterminds does it...

instead of a random conflict resolution, you could always have a resource allocation method: I put five points in defense and ten points in offense while my enemy puts eight points in defense and seven points in offense, so my attack will always get through but so will his...

similarity is unavoidable

the only thing that can be moderated is the flavor/fluff.

take away the superhero fluff or the fantasy fluff and you basically have one group of people fighting another group of people

any MMO minus fluff is going to look primarily the same as any other MMO

Am i the only one that immobilizes BM and then has a rotation cycle set up so that the melee goes from smacking her face, to shooting her with range attacks, and the orbital lances become pretty much a simple thing to avoid entirely? everyone has their corner of the map, and everyone converges on BM until she nukes herself, then everyone goes back to their corner of the map (rotating corners depending on who gets a nuke dropped on them) then converging back on BM..

It worked wonders on my /traps as poison trap is pretty much a melee debuff, and my /traps can immobilize her pretty easily on her own.

I share Dragonkat's frustration and fear for the future.