Soloability and End Game

Just to put my two cents in, there does need to be a solo-focused story arc or two introduced that's gated for Incarnates. Something that'll actually be challenging. After all, team books are fun...but the best are the solo titles. And no, to those who want to say otherwise...that isn't in the game yet. It just plain isn't. Whether it has it's own shard reward at the end or not, sometimes you want your character to be the focus of the story, not the team. This isn't groups of adventurers running dungeons; this is Heroes...and Villains...doing superhuman feats of superhumanness. Sometimes that's best shown by being the one guy who takes down the unbeatable foe.

I did some research that is published in another thread on the solo drop rate, I was averaging 1 shard per 10 x5 no bosses (suited my toon at the time, psi bosses make a mess of a spines/fire while they're good at mowing down minions) borea missions.

I also had a period of doing this earning more than 200 V-merits while earning only one shard.

Some rough calculations indicated I was unlucky (worse than 1 in 10 chance), but things would be seriously helped by either of 2 things.

1) Multiply the number of shards required to do stuff, and the drop rate by 5 or 10. This will make your shard earning more consistent.

2) put a streakbreaker in, if you've killed way more shard drop eligible foes than you should have to, next kill drops a shard automatically.

My solo earning is about 1 per 2 hours, in that time I could do 2 kill most ITFs and have 15 shards and 2 components (4 shards worth each). Is it really intended that you earn them 23 times faster on a team ? And that was with me on a damage dealing toon.

hi,
first to a previous post the DEVS DID reduce the street mob xp and number of mobs, to stop the screaming by the players they added the 1/2 debt to missions.

and to a earlier post of mine, if a lot of the content requires larger than normal teams, and you are on a mostly empty server, then that is a bad thing, and no paying for a bunch of transfers is not a solution

Devs need to read Fiery_Redeemer in this post because it would help them understand the range of players in this game.

- A friend of mine *would not team* except with two out of game friends. If we weren't online, he'd solo. Anything. Including an Emp/dark def. (Pre dual builds.)

- Several friends of mine won't team unless half the team is on their global (IE if they're incredibly stupid the PuG element can be kicked and we'll still be fine)

- I will often solo especially at lower levels to learn the AT and with certain ATs because I prefer it (EG my MMs and stalkers). If I'm in the mood I will team/TF; often I prefer a small team. I will RARELY Raid because at least some of them are going to be afk/incompetent/on my global ignore for whatever reason.

- Some SGs mainly Raid

That's a wide range of existing players. These are all people NC should be looking to keep onboard. It's easier to keep a customer than get a new one, remember.

All new content should be available to all of the above. No-one should be forced into a playstyle they don't like because frankly they're no good to anyone. No disrespect meant to anyone by that but if you don't enjoy something the odds are you aren't good at it.

(I include myself in the above. Some days the thought of teaming just ... *hide*. If I forced my solo-ing friend on to a team he'd be frustrated, annoyed and wouldn't have fun. Why pay money to not have fun?)

I see the game moving away from 'you can solo any mission with any AT' to 'you need a team or x gear or both'.

If you find content to easy then by all means turn up your difficulty. It doesn't mean new content should be so hard that others can't do it solo on their character of choice.

(As an aside I do have a worry that as the incarnates unlock that the solo-teamer-speeder will become more of a problem. We've all seen them; join a TF or team and watch the Uber Player zing off, solo all the objectives and leave those of us who are 'normal' in the dust.)

EDIT:
I give another nod to the ignore feature. It gets rid of a lot of the non-contributing posts in this thread.

Maybe I have never considered it a problem, one thing I liked when I read was how the "well" responded more towards the will of a person and didn't care if the person was good or evil, That kind of stood out for me. I liked how that sounded.

The shards? The well has seen fit to drop shards on me, don't really know if its my diff settings or something intuitive coded into the game. Maybe both. Who knows? I have never sought to try to find a pattern of drop rate or number crunch, it just "seemed" to drop for whatever I set out to do. Random.

My thing is I like the solo-ability. I love doing things solo, just as much as teaming, I'm just not in a position to -team- as much as I used to, so making end game content challenging <yet possible for solo> works out well for me. I would like to see this trend continue.

for example, I was about to get a team going to take out Lady winter, just as I got the team assembled and half of them showed up, my brother walks through my front door and I hit the switch on the back of my power supply and I'm out of the house rushing to a RL emergency.

I didn't even get a chance to give a reason for bailing.

If I was running solo, I would have just went afk inside the mission until I got back.

Solo is important to me.

here is another angle for solo

there are times when I want to sit down and really get immersed in gameplay, I really want to sit and read every little detail, go through every cutscene and get my digs into reading whats going on.

that really doesn't sit too well for a large team that is ready move on to the next mob.

I consider anything lvl 50 to be end game content, and that goes for tf's as well. One thing that I would like to see ,-Keep in mind just my opinion-, I would like to see things like the ITF made solo-able. I would really like to take on that challenge. I'm hearing things about incarnates that will allow players to solo av's and the likes, so I dig the idea of soloing an ITF without having to bug people to join a team to get it started. that goes back to what I was saying about getting my digs into an actual storyline instead of "ready for mob #2"

I feel <again just my opinion> that a mechanic like that would do wonders for the longevity of the game as a whole. my angle really isn't about trying to reap the rewards from a solo TF, my opinion: Alot more people would be able to do end game things solo meaning alot more people would be playing, hence...longevity.

/endrant