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

You're saying that you have some characters you feel are unable to solo the arc and your friends have some characters that are unable to solo the arc. Ok, we might disagree on whether that is the case or not but assume for a moment that you are correct and your characters are completely incapable of soloing it. That doesn't mean you're locked out of the content. You've helped your friends defeat the arc, surely they would be willing to help you in return? Just adding a second character makes Trapdoor trivial, one player stands there and pounds on him, the other runs around and kills the bifurcations. If the player doing the pounding is a tank you probably won't even need inspirations.

Complaining that you can't solo it and are unwilling to team to do so gets you some sympathy from me. Complaining that you you can't solo it, are unwilling to team to do so but are perfectly willing to help someone else do it doesn't. Heck, next time someone needs help with Trapdoor instead of your Ill/Emp why not take a character who needs the arc as well?

I guess there's not much I can't accomplish with a well-placed Shivan.

No one is expecting sympathy for not being able to solo Trapdoor, but we also don't want to hear about how easy he is and he was "no problem" with this character or that and how you can't understand why people are complaining.

I've done it on just about every level 50 character on my main server. The only one left is a stone tanker who had a heyday around i5 but doesn't get played much now.

The others are all concept or experimental tanker builds that were either made on other servers where I know very few people, or transferred there. I don't think I have a level 50 that's not a tanker or scrapper outside of Victory. So no, I'm not really comfortable logging onto one of those servers and begging for a controller to solo it for me.

The Ill/Emp has a magic bullet that makes the whole arc trivial. This is the flip side of the problem with gimmick encounters. Odds are there's a single power or power type that trivializes it or at least makes it extremely easy. Once that's figured out, players won't do it without it. And, odds are the character you'd rather be playing doesn't have it.

There was a Conan comic back in the 70s in which Conan's girlfriend was carried off by a flying man. Conan gave chase and along the way passed through large area of tall grass in which a herd of huge but placid woolly mammoths were grazing.

Eventually he reached the flying man's domicile, which was a tall tower surrounded by a bed of white flowers. Now, as you well know, Conan, being a Cimmerian, could climb just about anything, but as he approached the bed of flowers the flying man stepped out onto his balcony and, to make a point, dropped some other poor fellow into the bed of flowers, which promptly attacked him and drained him of blood. And yes, the flowers were indeed red afterward.

Well. What to do? Our intrepid barbarian gave the matter some thought and sure enough, INSPIRATION struck. He went back to the herd of woolly mammoths and - Crom be praised! - the wind was just right. He lit a fire in the tall grass, and the herd stampeded in the direction of the tower and trampled all the deadly flowers into so much mulch! Up the tower he went and soon enough, his winged foe was no more.

The moral of the story: Conan did not, even once, consider popping a purple. That's not inspiration. That's Speedy!

Come to think of it, though, Conan's solution is not entirely unlike some hapless hero/villain making a Shivan run because his/her powers can't cut the dev-ilish mustard which he/she has been served.

And yes, this has about as much to do with Trapdoor as Texas law... but it was a really great comic book with Barry Smith art!

Ok that does clarify it a bit. Still, it's not so much a case of finding a controller to solo it for you as finding someone else to help. Confuse is one method of handling Trapdoor but it's scarcely the only method. Simply upping the number of characters in the mission from one to 2 makes a huge difference. All of your problem characters are Tankers or Scrappers, well any of them should be able to tank Trapdoor just fine and deal enough damage to overcome his base regeneration which means a second person can focus on hunting down the clones and for that any character will work just fine.

Eh, it's the internet if you complain about something someone else will feel a need to come in and say how easy it is.

Personally I don't find Trapdoor easy. I tend to favor ATs and powersets that have limited defenses and (frequently) poor single target damage (I love Assault Rifle) so I find most EBs to be very tricky and normally require inspirations and a few tries. He's definitely easier than some Elite Bosses (such as Nosferatu) but harder than others (such as Captain Castillo). On the other hand his difficulty is mostly related to player control as opposed to simple numbers game and that tends to level the playing field between different powersets.

This is part of the reason I like the mission so much. EBs like Nosferatu are annoying, I can beat them but it just becomes a case of stacking numbers. Trapdoor on the other hand does not require as much number stacking but does require me to apply some effort rather than standing there and pressing buttons and I like that.

Now this is why people complaining confuses me (and I mean that literally, I'm not trying to be insulting). The dev's intent with the incarnate content (based on this arc, and both the new TFs) seems to be to introduce content which requires effort from the player as opposed to being a simple numbers game, Trapdoor is simply the introduction to that. Now if you hate that sort of content that's fine, not everyone likes the same thing. But if you hate it why are you bashing your head against the wall doing it?

The hyperbole is strong here.

The main trick that trivializes Trapdoor is available to an awful lot of characters. That trick is called DPS. DPS kills Trapdoor, and DPS kills his clones. What you found is a trick that's certainly handy for people who have low solo DPS, but do you know what's even more handy for most people than an Illusion Controller? Er, no, besides inspirations. Getting a team.

I'm a fairly avid soloer. I don't get on a team for normal content. I get on teams for TFs and raids, or to help my friends with their content. I almost exclusively do my own characters' content solo. But when I am faced with something I can't solo? I break out the big guns, and see if that works. Inspirations, accolades, temp powers, the works. If I still can't do it? I ask for help. That's always done the trick.

Seriously, the idea that Confuse/Deceive is somehow going to become the FotM for defeating Trapdoor is just silly. He just doesn't call for that kind of tactical specialization, because there are too many other ways to take him out, and in an MMO, "get a team" is probably going to be the normal one.

There have been people with builds that can't solo EBs for ages. I think the only reason this case of it is even being discussed is because we can't drop his mission. Acknowledging that that doesn't mean I think being made able to drop the mission is the right solution to the larger problem. Being able to skip content you find too hard is, frankly, probably part of why people even have characters that they would try to solo through this kind of thing. I am starting to think that ability to drop missions has accidentally created a sense of entitlement about the degree to which we are expected to solo anything with anything that's never been intended, and I think it's gotten to the point that it's kind of ridiculous.

Because it's supposed to be the test that determines whether your character has a future in the game, or will be put out to pasture.

So far, I have seen an arc with a character that is tiresome to beat with a tanker. If you dump your tray and fill it with reds, and jump around from clone to clone getting maybe one or two shots on the boss in the interim, and if you chew through your tray of reds without beating it you're better off just resetting the mission. This is why I'm happy to get on my controller and solo it for you if I'm not otherwise busy. It's a tedious, unfair, and unfun chore.

And, we also get two new task forces where the optimum number of tankers on the team, and for that matter the optimum number of melee characters, is zero.

If this is a new direction for the game, it's been a great six years, but so it goes.

They could say it today and it would still be true.
You can absolutely do Ramiel's arc with SO's.
You can also do the Apex and Tin Mage TF's with SO's.

Got it. You have decided that you're not going to unlock the alpha slot on some of your 50's, therefore you're going to strip and delete them. They're your characters so you can do whatever you want with them. Not seeing a problem here.

Tedious and unfun are pure opinion. My opinion is different. 'Unfair' is, flat out, BS.

Well first off not completing the arc doesn't mean your character will be put out to pasture, it simply means he won't be able to run all of the newer content. Now this brings me back to my original point. The Incarnate arc and the new Incarnate content is designed to have missions which require player interaction as opposed to simply being a numbers game and I don't see that changing. If you really hate content that is designed that way why are you doing it? There is plenty of other content that is simply a numbers game and I doubt the devs will stop adding to it (issues 17 and 19 included a total of 6 new arcs that don't qualify as end game content). Personally I love the player interaction content, the fun bits of Apex and Tin Mage are the BM and Director 11 fights, the rest is pretty much exactly what we've seen before.

Not every piece of content in the game is going to appeal to every person, so I tend to say pick the content that will appeal to you. If you don't enjoy Trapdoor you probably won't enjoy the rest of the incarnate content. If you don't enjoy the Incarnate content why are you doing it?

That applies to every piece of content in the game, the optimum team consists of 8 Fire/Radiation Controllers.

The second time I ran Apex we had (IIRC) 5 melee characters on the team, and it went fine (in fact my defender died the most, because for some reason I just could not dodge that night) and I know people have done it with all-melee teams. In many ways I think Apex represents a reversal of previous trends. Melee characters get slightly batter base damage since range is supposed to be defensive. The devs have, over the years removed most of the defensive benefits of range so Apex tweaks the balance back a little bit.

I'm wondering where you've been for like... the last four years.

Seriously, you're looking through this though ridiculously narrow lenses, and they're doom-colored lenses at that.

The optimum number of Tankers on a team has been zero ... I don't even know since when. Probably since release. If you don't have an optimum team, the optimum number of Tankers for a non-optimum team almost always caps out at one.

We have one new task force where melee is non-optimal with one foe in one mission. I won't be terribly surprised to see the same trick used a few other places, but I seriously doubt they are reworking the game so that melee is teh suck going forward. Edit: if you include Proteus, it's already been used once before, but I really didn't find him any problem on my melees.

Do you know what the optimal number of characters who deal lethal or smashing damage is on the LGTF? Zero. When did we get that TF, Issue 11? Eight Issues ago? For the record, I am not a fan of that example, but the point is that this isn't somehow new where some content marginalizes some characters, and in my own experience, Battle Maiden in the Apex TF marginalizes melee way less than the Honoree marginalizes L/S damage. (That experience, by the way, includes having run the Apex TF several times a week since it came out.)

This isn't the new direction for the game, it's the direction for a small percentage of content.

Not the entire game.

The rest of the game has the same sort of missions we've always had. Look at tip missions, those are all rather straightforward missions the only thing different about them is their story.

Incarnate content, even when we get to the tenth slot, is likely not to even reach 1% of the total available content.

We're still likely to get more tip missions, hopefully more scanner missions, I'd like to see some revamped classic missions too..

my only real problem with the Incarnate stuff is that it makes the likelihood that Dark Astoria, Boomtown, Terra Volta, Perez Park and Eden will continue to be overlooked for revamping a la Faultline and Rikti War Zone

I had trouble with Trapdoor too, but the lava is right there, and even though I don't have 90% fire resist anymore, that's the same way I dealt with Tyrant.

I also helped an Empathy/Archery defender: the defender chased after the clones and I kept Trapdoor busy. It was a quick fight.

If you have one guy looking out for clones, you can usually drop him in under a minute, I've noticed.

Just tried the Apex TF. I was going to take my WS, but nope, she didn't have anything equipped in her Alpha slot. So it was either my Widow or my Electric/Ice Tanker. Already had a tanker on the team, so I went with the Widow. We did well until the last mission. Yup. Melee-heavy team, couldn't get in enough damage while simultaneously dodging the blue crap. Inspirations proved useless - one wrong step and splat. My Widow died once while not even in a blue spot. Someone said it was in the air above her, that it spawned there because someone had been flying. So she was killed by a blue spot I couldn't even see. Joy.

Even more fun was stepping out of that door after a trip to the hospital and dying instantly. Especially the second time, after the team had regrouped on the roof and we all went down together - oh, we're gonna show that BM what for this time! - and two of us died as we exited the door. Eventually it became clear we were not going to get through this one. What started as a fun evening with friends getting together to play their favorite game wound up with everyone quitting the TF frustrated and unhappy.

So, yeah. Good one, Posi. Good one. Keep it coming.

He will

Of that I have no doubt.

Which makes me smile and be happy! I took yet another complete PuG of people I had never met and succeeded tonight. It's an awesome encounter and if it's just the beginning, can't wait!

Some of my characters

Don't weep - not every new Incarnate Trial in I20 will have magical space sword bombs

There are three badges that none of my characters have ever gotten, and it is unlikely they ever will.

• Cathedral of Pain trial;
• Apex task force;
• Tin Mage task force.

I've tried them all several times, never succeeded, and am not really eager to experience them again. At this stage my chief concern is that i20 will be adding content that is gated through this particular content. Rather than more of this, maybe three more PvP zones?

What server are you on? If you're on Pinnacle, I could run the new TFs with ya.

I just ran this again, this time with my EM/INV tank. It was basically an exercise in maneuverability (and thank goodness I swapped in Combat Jump when I rebuilt for I19). How fast can I locate and down a bifurcation (and actually LAND on the platform where it is) then relocate Trapdoor. Early on this went well, as the bifurcations spawned in the same area. I had him down to about 2/5 health and thought he might give up in just a few more hits. He bifurcated and I made the mistake of not going after the bifurcation immediately.

I realized my mistake too late; delayed on that clone set me back on the next, and then they started spawning where I had to find them. Slow on a couple more and he was right back at full health.

After a few of minutes of this (some might call it battle, some might call it...tedium), I happened into the lava and he followed me. I figured what the heck, I'll just stay here. Otherwise I might be at this forever. Managed to get him stunned and that was about it.

Final bifurcation count: sixteen.