Challenge done right!

I wouldn't call Tin mage boring, but Apex does beat it by a mile on pure fun factor. Apex is a fast paced continuous stream of combat, and you need to stay on your toes for the final battle. Best thing in game imo.

I actually agree that the Sewer Trial is quite challenging, given the "peer" content it was created alongside at the time we got it. I would actually like to run it more often.

But therein is the problem. Everyone I know hates it. There's something about the style of challenge it represents that they consider a slog, and don't want to deal with.

In contrast, things like the Apex and Tin Mage TFs are basically becoming nightly occurrences. (Which I don't mind at all, I like them also, but I'm not the one forming them.)

Slight thread jack so i apologize, but a small question on the challenge deal and end game TF's

What's the real difference between tin mage, where yes it's basically hit 1234repeat on the hotbar to pummel giant bags of hp, and deal with the forced challenge of +4 and super bobcat.

Vs Apex where to me the BM fight is just hit 12dodge34dodge, make the mistake of using any attack that takes more then 2 seconds to animate die.

People say the BM fight takes thinking, but to me it's still just another giant bag of HP with a gimmick that takes longer and is more annoying because of it.

So what exactly is it about apex that people find so fun? To me it's even more tedious then tin mage, which for some reason I find fun, go figure =p

Back on topic though I do wish more TF's were like sewer, but also Eden as well. I've done over this month two edens, gotten my TF commander finally, and last night two back to back ITF's

Eden tromps them hands down. It's actually unique in terms of layout, atmosphere, the timer aspect like the sewer one. The sheer number of mobs and pitfalls that demand a greater level of coordination. Knowing your task when it comes to beating down the walls, making sure everyone has enough ambrosia, and of course the final room which is just an epic amount of DE to clean out, or if you feel insane bum rush the titan and watch the swarm that attacks.

All in all five tons of fun and a trial i wish had it's cap bumped to 50. Beats the pants off a horrible Numina Pug, where the teams idea of working together was "Brute runs ahead and ignores rest of team, squishies mill about or wait behind mobs as the scrapper runs off too, no one works together till brute ports everyone, kill final mobs. Course I think my hate of speed TF's may have had a hand in this.

Same with the ITF's I did last night, auto pilot is an apt term, all i had to do as a blaster was keep targeting, keep firing, and just slog through it all with a steamroller team. The second only had one hairy moment on the 3rd mission when the lone tank decided to go running off from the rest of the team, and I was glad I had devices and purples to play pseudo tank to bunch up mobs for the rest of the team.

His answer? "The canyon kills my puter, I thought it was a speed TF anyway?"

Yeah, anyway, much as I love Tin mage and despise Apex the new TF's don't hold a candle to classic content, enforced +4 ambush waves plus gimmicks aren't challenge, it's dev powergaming against their players, and shows they didn't learn a single lesson about why a lot of players refuse to touch praetoria anymore.

It's totally challenge done wrong.

Here's the thing. None of this stuff is hard. Fundamentally, what people are arguing about are their preferences, which vary from person to person, and to some extent, from group of people to group of people. What's important to remember is that people who tend to play the game together regularly tend to share the same playstyle preferences, or to at least tolerate some playstyle common to the group.

A number of people have expressed satisfaction with the idea that Battle Maiden explicitly disallows traditional "tank & spank", because you can't simply pig-pile the team on her and beat her down, which is a common tactic for teams operating under high-order buffs. It's not important that it's actually meaningfully harder, what matters is that it s conceptually different. (Of course, a number of other people despise it for that very difference.)

I don't find any of these things hard in the absolute sense. The only one I find somewhat challenging in an absolute sense is the Sewer Trial, because you can't actually directly buff the amount of damage you do the Hydra head, and the timer is not actually terribly long compared to the best times you can pull off - one of the only cases of that anywhere in the game.

"Challenge" for most of these tasks is defined almost entirely in terms of elapsed time, with the only risk of "failure" being that the task takes so long that the team gives up, or individual people quit and the team ends up too small to ever succeed. There's usually no true risk of failure except for this kind of essentially self-imposed failure. Trails are unique in that they actually impose a time limit. I find that the time limit is extremely gracious on all of them except for the Sewer Trial.

The problem in my experience is that people don't like a real risk of true failure, because that means they can spend however long doing something and, from their perspective, the time is wasted. I see this regularly with pre-I19 "Master of" badges - most people don't want to do them unless they're all badgers looking for the badge, because the "Master" approach is slower and the time can be "wasted" if the attempt fails.

(It's an aside, but I find the Eden Trial is one of the most trivial fights in the game. Ambroisa is a magic bullet - if you don't have it you're (probably) screwed, but if you have it the Titan is no harder than any other big sack of HP in the game.)

Doctor Aeon said that because of its popularity, the ITF was the template they looked at for the new TFs - which is why they have fewer missions, but bigger maps with large numbers of enemies - like the battle in Kings Row is similar to the battle at Vespillos Pass, and Battle Maiden as an AV with extras attached is similar to Romulus and his Nictus friends.

There are only 5 missions in total for the 2 new TFs, but they're packed with enough enemies and spearate mission objectives to give about an hour of playtime for each TF.

The original intent was for TF's to be more "standard" challenges wiht more/tougher enmies, while Trials required more specialized tactics, no?

Personally I don't mind that kind of challenge, but in order to be fun they pretty much require you at least be on vent or some other voice-chat. These challenges tends to be become restricted to people you know. It's just not fun trying to PUG.

EDIT: Also, I don't think every AT neccessarily needs to be equally useful in every circumstance. BM is the time for ranged damage dealers to shine.

EDIT2: And To some extent, I play COH for the casualness of it, I don't want to have to spend as much effort doing the new Incarnate TF's as I would spend on trying to beat the Vulture Lord.