How many times must I die to ambushes before I can re-complain?

Sure it does. On a TF you have the other 7 people to think about. EG may love the hard stuff, but there's other people who may not.

There are also other people who do, or the difficulty slider wouldn't need to go so high. If the other people who like hard stuff are so few and far between that you can't find seven of them to run a TF with you, then that just proves our point that these difficulty increases are a bad idea.

Nonsense. When I'm on a TF, there are 7 other people who normally wish to complete the content. Plus you can set other challenge goals, like finishing in 30 mins. or so.

But when people are just looking for some merits and now a Notice, I'm not going to impose my view of difficulty on them. It violates the unwritten rules of behavior, the norms that have developed.

I like Apex and Tin Mage because you don't have a choice, but when you do, it's a group decision.

No it doesn't. That's my point. On the base difficulty, the Praetorian missions aren't too hard and neither are the DE tip missions. You all keep talking about content where you purposefully make it more difficult and then want to make it easier to compensate for your making it harder.

That's what doesn't make any sense.

I think that there should be some boundaries on the swing that a given group causes a character. Let's say you have a character that's got an intentional design target of being able to solo "normal" content. If you play that character at +0/x1, and you normally do fine doing so, I think it's reasonable that no "normal" content should strenuously compel you to lower your difficulty, no matter what your powersets. That does not mean that you might not find some opponents harder than others, but I think it does mean that you should be able to absorb that difficulty with some small changes in how you tackle them - maybe a bit more kiting, or an extra inspiration here and there. You might decide to lower your difficulty to deal with them, but I think the goal should be to avoid making that the most compelling way to proceed.

By saying "normal" content, I mean stuff that's meant to be available to a solo player and doesn't have some big label on it saying "go get help". I also consider anything that's pervasive, such as an entire mob faction that you meet consistently during a contact's story arcs or an entire level range, should qualify this way. I think it's poor form to make someone question the worth in experiencing a broad swath of content because of their powerset choices.

Now, if you design your content this way, allowing for some variation in challenge but trying to keep it within a certain band, then I think something mostly predictable happens when people scale up their difficulty. Multiplying how hard everything is by, say, a factor of 3 should (as a first order approximation) make the allowable band between things that are easy for someone and things that are hard 3x wider. Playing that way might force someone to lower an elevated difficulty to take on foes they just found a bit harder at +0/x1.

This simple analysis breaks down, though, when the reason mobs become harder grows too non-linearly with elevated difficulty. This was part of the old problem SR faced with over-level foes gaining +toHit. It becomes very hard to balance impacts across powersets when changing something by +X affects some powersets by a factor of (1+X) and others by a factor of, say, 1/(1-X).

That was one of the major benefits of normalizing most stuff on 50% base-toHit scaled by accuracy. It wasn't because it made Defense "better", it made Defense's average performance at least be remotely compareable to that of the game's other major damage blocking system: Resistance. That made it easier to ensure making something harder by making it better at hitting players didn't become harder for a character with strong reliance on Defense as mitigation wildly faster than for one who relies on Resistance. It simplifies managing the difficulty band I talked about before.

It doesn't mean there should never be exceptions, but if they become the rule, you're back to finding it difficult, if not impossible, to manage the size of the band.

The norms have developed because the speed-run culture promoted by people like you made them the norm. You've already imposed your views on them, to the point that when people choose to kill things for XP there is often that ******bag that TPs everyone to the end anyway.

Aren't you the one that said my not doing speed runs sends jobs overseas and kicks puppies? I'm pretty sure it was you. So don't blame seven other people for supporting a choice you yourself publicly endorse.

Ah, I get it, it's ok when the devs impose difficulty on everybody, including people who don't want it, because given a choice people will choose to do what's easy....and you want hard content but can't have it because everybody else will choose to do what's easy unless the devs step in and force them to increase their difficulty? Or do you just like shooting down everyone who doesn't do everything exactly the same way you do?

I heard a story about Geko being defeated by Pohsyb's Ice Tanker in PvP being the catalyst for the GDR. I have no idea if that's remotely true, but it's funny.

That argument went the way of the dodo when the developers decided to implement difficulty adjustment in lieu of actually balancing the game. If the developers want everyone to play at base difficulty then they need to prevent people from building characters that can play at higher levels, and we both know that's not going to happen.

That's nonsensical.

0/x1 is base solo difficulty. The game's content has been tuned so that anyone and everyone, regardless of build, should have a reasonable expectation of soloing at 0/x1. That's baseline, not the norm. Some ATs, some builds, and some players are able to run at higher levels. Great, that's more challenging. But if you fail that challenge, then that's entirely on you, because you opted to run at that higher level. The only guarantee is at 0/x1.

This post makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Are you actually arguing that the devs should remove the difficulty slider that it took so long to get them to implement?

e: No, you're suggesting they should remove IOs (or at least sets) and presumably the Incarnate boosts so that everyone is 'forced' to be at the same effective power level? Even ignoring the fact that different set combinations perform wildly differently even before you factor in enhancements, that's never going to happen. It would be a step back and invalidate who knows how many thousands of man-hours of development.

No, he's saying that once you choose a difficulty setting there shouldn't be such extreme swings in the difficulty of content that you have to keep running back to the NPC to keep adjusting your difficulty for every mission.

That's what you're saying. Venture said nothing of the sort.

Ok, fine that's what I'm saying. Venture said he doesn't like running to the NPC.

Actually it's exactly what I said.

No, this is what you said:

I assure you I am not mistaking anything for anything, from first hand experience.

But you can't expect that. Take Longbow, which no one has been arguing about. When you start getting bosses in spawns (around x3 or x4 players) then you start having the difficulty ramp up considerably because Wardens have buffs. There are other groups that are similar.

Powersets are not balanced around the assumption that any given player will be able to handle +2/x3 to +3/x6 solo. We know that some powersets can do that and more in the hands of a reasonably skilled player. But that's not the expectation. The expectation is that +0/x1 should be a reasonable challenge for a solo player. Castle said at one time that the base difficulty is not intended to be "easy mode." It's intended to be the standard difficulty. There should be SOME risk of defeat at that difficulty level. We all know that in practice, some characters who are well built by their player, are effectively invincible to that setting.

The standard difficulty should offer some risk of defeat. The Praetorian missions offer that. A player with little experience will face defeat and often. There's nothing wrong with that. You don't learn anything from winning all the time, you don't improve. A player tested in the fires of Praetoria is well suited to handle what the game throws at them later. IMO that's a good thing.

There was (and probably still is) a specific bug regarding Placate if you attacked a target [i]while it was in the middle of executing an attack. The act of the target attacking broke its own placate effect.

Not exactly, but close. I believe they were designed by people whose experience was primarily in designing late game content, and didn't fully appreciate that there are scaling rules for lower critters separate from the modifier tables.

No one's designed a Hellion in a long, long time.

I couldn't agree more.

I don't see what the big deal is if a mission is incredibly hard to solo at +1/x4. That is just the way it goes.

Also, I don't mind DE and their cheating. Those are easy enough to get around using various tactics. What I have the biggest problem with is Nemesis and their stacking vengeance.

Yes and no. I never talked to Geko directly about this, but I did talk to Jack. I don't think they set out to screw defense, but I do think their attitude towards defense made them deliberately do things that made no sense, but they didn't fully appreciate.

Here's an example. When I told Statesman that it was not really fair that higher ranks get tohit increases, and higher levels get tohit increases, and half the attacks debuff defense, he told me, and I'm only paraphrasing slightly here, that "that's how defense works: sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't." Statesman thought that when defense "worked" the target misses completely, so it has to "not work" sometimes, by being negated. It didn't occur to him until much much later that even when defense "works" sometimes you get hit and sometimes you don't, so there's no need to actually turn it off all the time.

If that reflected the same attitude Geko had, and it may have given a lot of things that happened, that explains a lot.

It was not until this post that I finally realized you guys haven't been talking about EvilGeko.

Well, I saw their second attempt first hand. Experience doesn't seem to help any.

Quick: what game am I describing at release:

Defense doesn't work, except in a few corner cases where it works very well, so its paradoxically nerfed on that basis.

Invulnerability is way stronger than the devs think, because it works differently than they think it does. Players figure this out before the devs do.

Regeneration is set so ridiculously high, they have to nerf it twice.

There's an exotic protection set that would work great, if all its powers were allowed to work at the same time.


That's right: I'm describing every game Cryptic has ever launched.

There are two points under discussion here. One is the highly subjective matter of what level of difficulty is enjoyable. This matter not only varies with player, it also varies with character level, because what our characters can survive is a function of level. You and I might enjoy wildly different stresses on our characters at level 10 and comparable stresses at level 50. We can all argue all day about what we individually enjoy, but ultimately we all have to hope that the devs pick something close to what we like.

There's another matter though, that I think is far less subjective. Arcanaville already mentioned this. Praetorea's difficulty doesn't really match either other starting "territory". If Praetorea's difficulty was internally self-consistent, and it was another fully self-contained option like CoH or CoV, that would be less meaningful. Because it's instead only offers 20 levels of content and then dumps you in one of the other two territories, I think that's a problem. For people who enjoy its difficulty, it's going to set the expectation for content that's harder and then the other territory won't deliver. For people who dislike its difficulty, they're going to prefer the other territories. To some extent, CoV has a different difficulty than CoH, especially in the 30-40 level range, but that's less important, because it doesn't have big discontinuities in its own, CoV-specific graph of difficulty vs. level. This discontinuity between L20 Praetorea and either L21 CoH or L21 CoV meshes poorly with the decision to funnel players who buy GR into Praetorea by default.

Agreed. The entire point of higher difficulty setting is that some characters find the normal difficulty 'too easy'. If you can roll on a higher setting then good for you, but if you can't it doesn't suddenly become some sort of penalty.

Funnily enough, I soloed a DE tip the other day (the one about defusing bombs) at lvl 50, +0x8. My MA/Inv has pretty good defense (roughly 31% S/L and 35% E/N/F/C before factoring in Invincibility) but at that setting I was seeing up to 3 Guardians per spawn. I did get beaten down once (mostly because I was getting cocky) but I finished the mission, because as annoying as the emanators are there are ways to negate them (kill them first, drag mobs away from them, etc). But then again that specific character is extremely tweaked for performance, and not many characters that haven't had 1.5 billion Inf* pumped into them could have done the same. Being able to do that is the 'reward' for spending so much time/Inf* kitting out one character, as I see it.