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

I have a buddy who's very much not a n00b at the game who was unable to beat original Trapdoor with an SO'd Fire/Fire Tanker build. I'm pretty sure the build would not be considered optimal, even by the friend in question - the character hadn't been updated in a long time and was in need of a respec. (Thanks to I19 and some good PvPIO drops, that character is now a beast and would probably tear a hole in new Trapdoor.) And when I say "not optimal", I mean as a Fire/Fire Tanker, not in the sense of "don't bring a Tanker."

However, I'm pretty sure of two other factors.

1. He didn't use any inspirations in the fight.
2. When he had trouble, he got help. He was disappointed that his Tanker couldn't pull it off, but he had no shame in dealing with that by getting someone else to assist.

So do I think there are probably people with characters that can't pull this off? Without inspirations, definitely. Do I think there can be those who can't pull it off even with inspirations? I certainly think it's possible, and people have posted to that effect. Do I think that these people have to be able to solo him? No, I don't. And I solo a lot. If you can't solo something, you get help. If needing help means a character falls off your list of viable "mains", well, that's up to you, but it's not the approach I would take.

See for me this is the big clincher. I pretty much consider inspirations standard when fighting any EB. I know there are people who can solo them without it (and I have done it on occasion) but I am, for the most part, a very lazy player so if I'm facing an EB I just instinctively chomp down on inspirations before and during the fight. On a harder EB I might need to make a shopping trip to get specific inspirations but for the most part I tend to attempt it with whatever I have first.

I consider Inspiration usage to be an important part of solo play. Even soloing on x1 you get quite a few inspirations so I tend to use them up. If you crank the difficulty up (mostly once you hit x4 or above) using inspirations up so you have room for more of them becomes an important concern.

Maybe I'm unusual but for me soloing an EB without using inspirations is the exception and not the norm. I can do it in some cases but there's no benefit to doing so so why bother? I'd rather chomp down some inspirations and go to town.

I would say Mender Ramiel's arc is actually pretty hard, but the mission I find hard is not the one I see people complaining about. Trapdoor is (for me at least) pretty simple, he's got one trick and while it is potentially problematic it's easy to counter, my only issue with him is that if you die he doesn't reset so you end up needing to reset the mission.

Honoree and Holtz on the other hand I do consider challenging, especially for low defense characters. Holtz in particular has several nasty debuffs which means if you have low defense he is very nasty (Curse of Weariness in particular is annoying). Honoree is a more generic fight but his high damage causes problems for squishy characters.

My electric/ice tanker breezed through the Trapdoor portion of the arc and never bothered with the bifurcations. Then came the patch. My next tanker went through this:

The Misadventures of Trapdoor in Time and Space

Hope I did that right. First time using an actual image hosting site. Also, this crappy forum software crapped out when I tried to post this reply and this is the second attempt. Thanks, whoever runs this thing.

For that mission, there is another option; if I got hit by the Curse of Forced 5 Minute AFK I wouldn't hesitate to use it either. I think I did once among the many times I've run through this. I ouro'ed out of there and took care of it. For characters without enough native defense, I acted preemptively.

The Trapdoor mission, for whatever reason, cannot be autocompleted. If it's going to be that way, they ought to re-enable multiple strategies for it or fix it by making the clones finite in number.

Please no.

Don't we have enough out there where the challenge of a mission has been gelded?

I mean, look at Infernal. Compared to that mission's former difficulty, with infinite spawns, it is now little more than a joke.

I haven't even seen the infamous CoT portal room that used to be such a chore in years.

Trapdoor is fine the way it is...

On missions that strongly advise you to bring friends, I have no issue with some players not being able to solo it.

Still, I need to try it out with my dark/elec fender now that she's fifty (first need to give her an offensive build, current one is heavily built toward team support, usually when I play her I only use my elec when everything else is recharging, or for Tesla...)

So what, the devs should make Trapdoor's mission auto-completable and then everyone can spend 9 days becoming an incarnate by not doing the arc? What would be the point of that?

The whole purpose of the Incarnate content is to introduce new and challenging content for players who desire that sort of thing. The power boosts associated with it are, IMHO, completely incidental. The main purpose of having them is to limit the rate that people can advance through the new content (in order to give the devs at least some chance to keep up). If you enjoy challenging content then why would you skip the arc? And if you don't enjoy challenging content why bother doing the arc in the first place?

To put it another way, suppose before being allowed to participate in RP you were required to do an "RP-Unlock" arc which required you to RP as part of the arc. I don't particularly enjoy RP so I wouldn't bother to do the arc. I see Mender Ramiel's arc in the same light. It's a challenging arc that unlocks challenging content. If you don't enjoy challenging content then it's probably not worth doing. If you do enjoy doing challenging content, but only on a team, then find a team to do the arc with. Personally while I like challenging team content I actually prefer challenging solo content so I solo'd the arc.

It's not challenging. It's obnoxious, annoying, and tedious to the extreme.

One person's challenge is another person's tedious, personally I enjoy the arc.

Now I do think the devs had left in the original option of unlocking the slot through one of the level 50 TFs. I think that would have eliminated 90% of the complaints.

yes, the most tedious two hours I ever spent (speaking as a solo-er who periodically forgets the game is running behind his writing projects)

Indeed, if you don't like the content of the intro-arch, don't play it, because the implication is that the rest of the content coming out of that will be modeled the same.

This sort of reminds me of a law in Texas that changed the way kids could get into advanced classes.

First it pretty much said you couldn't call them honors classes. Then it said any kid could get into it without testing to see if they met an advanced level of ability.

This was all well and good until the students started complaining that the content was too hard and, instead of pulling their kids out and putting them in normal classes, the parents would complain and eventually, instead of small classes of hard pushing, serious students, we have over-crowded honors classes filled with kids that want the weighted scores (a B in an AP/AP-Prep class is worth more than the same B in a regular class) to put them higher up in the ranks, or kids that want to hang out with their friends, and only about one kid in five that actually wants what the honors/AP classes are supposed to provide.

The situation is analogous.

Incarnate content is not supposed to be the same as the rest of the content. It is supposed to be more difficult and require new ways of THINKING more than higher power levels.

In fact, the real attraction for me and the people that the Incarnate system is aimed at is not the powers but the unconventional tactics that are necessary to win.

The powers are like experience and levels: an interesting side effect of a cool story and tough challenge.

Not for trapdoor, and its that logic that makes it hard. Once you realize that his bag of hitpoints just keeps refilling unless you kill the clones, it becomes a piece of cake.

Here's the trick. Kill the clones and he is a regular EB, but while you are fighting him, he's making more clones and if you don't have the damage output to make it quick, you find yourself fighting an AV. Oh and while he's held and immobed, he's still making clones. After you die and port to the hospital, he's still making clones. If you don't kill him in the first strike you can be looking at a dozen clones. Even while he is in the lava, he's still making clones. I saw the damage ticks get lower and lower as he continues to make clones while in the lava.

I begin to understand why you like Trapdoor so much.

He pops a clone once every 30 seconds, undebuffed. If you debuff his recharge, its even longer between clone spawning. If you seriously can't kill a minion level mob, once every 30 seconds, while doing 3/4 of an EBs hit points, then its really a pebkac error and not one with the mission design itself.

Kill the clones first. Then beat on trapdoor. If fail the first time, grab some inspirations, pretend trapdoor doesn't exist, and clear the clones. Then beat on trapdoor some more.

If that doesn't work, either get a friend, OR use a envemoned dagger. The -regen itself is enough to counter an infinite number of clones, due to the fact he has 0 -regen resistance. So, throw a dagger in his face, and just continue to pound on him. Problem solved.

So...when in doubt, get a team or a trick, because if you don't have the damage, he's too hard to solo.

This is where inspirations come in. For high damage ATs the clones aren't a huge issue but low damage ATs (Defenders, Controllers, Corruptors and Tankers) should really chomp a few reds during the fight and try and lure him into the lava. The reds allow you to kill the clones in fewer attacks and the lava increases your damage.

The one case I can see having problems with the clones are MM primaries that have melee focused pets. The pets do not do a great job navigating the room to attack the clones. It's not a huge deal for ranged pets since they only need to get line of sight but I can see it being an issue for melee centric pets.

I do consider this to be a flaw in the design of the mission. I very much doubt that the devs intended this but at the same time I'm not sure if they can fix it. Ideally he should completely reset if everyone leaves the mission (I would say reset if you die but people with self rezzes would not like that) but I think the standard code rant probably applies to having that actually implemented.

So what? The lava is a means of increasing the damage he is taking, it's not supposed to reduce the number of clones he makes.

I guess I have some characters that are locked out of the new content. Time to strip and delete, then.

It's only challenging for melee characters who lack the DPS to brute force it. If you have the ability to stack confuse, it's utterly trivial.

The controller I turn to when a friend needs Trapdoor soloed is ill/emp. That controller finished the arc in record time, even after the patch. Stealthed everything. Confused Trapdoor is helpless. Confused Holtz takes out the Rikti and beats on Honoree. Confused cow waits for the pets to beat her down. I may never get an alpha power slotted on that character --- not a main by any means, and I tend not to enjoy controllers all that much --- but it was trivial on that character as it was tedious on a tanker.

Now you're finding that new way of THINKING!

Do you consider inspirations tricks too? Because temp powers are like bigger inspirations that do stuff.