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

The variations in power are too extreme in this game. I don't think there's a problem with large variations, that gives you a place to reward your players. But yes, the ability to build functionally immortal characters able to do obscene damage is a bit much.

No, of course, we can. We just need to have appropriate content for those with IOs and purples. Incarnate powers DO have content appropriate for these types of characters. The base difficulty of the BAF, Apex, Tin Mage isn't +0/x1 scaled to the team.

Now you might be right, the playerbase might not even accept that content.

That's a good idea.

I guess, I just disagree. I've played at least 10 MMORPGs, many of them you faced a REAL possibility of defeat prior to level ten (on a 50+ level game). Some of that was from the team-centric nature, some because you have to learn. It's not like every encounter needs to be wickedly hard, but there's no problem with a few being that way.

Dealing with ambushes is something to learn as well. Kiting, using cover, manipulating the AI, these are all things you can learn even in a mission on +0/x1.

I would hope that a new player learns not to just stand there and accept the ambush and instead DOES something about it.

You can't learn anything from ambushes that home in, follow you, and ignore stealth. Except maybe how true 'The Computer is a Cheating Gobshite' is.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I doubt I'll lose much sleep over it. I have a fundamental problem with increasingly strident calls to dumb down the game and make it easier. I love Praetoria exactly the way it is precisely because it is a challenge. It's not the simple steamroller that Paragon and the Isles is.

I really don't want to see anything changed to accommodate the insistent soloers. I like the fact that sometimes we have to run and regroup and actually think about our tactics in a mission instead of just defeating all mobs on arrival.

Yeah and sometimes I get defeated doing it too - in which case I go to hospital, stock up on insps, go back and try again. If that proves difficult I get a team together and we do it that way (assuming I was solo in the first place.)

You want to be spoon fed and I want to be challenged. You have places where you can be spoon fed and your voice and interminably long posts are a strident minority that's getting far too much airplay IMO. It ain't broke, it don't need fixing.

There's only 20 levels too - and low levels so it's not even half of the game, in level terms, in XP gain, in anything. You can easily rinse it out in 2 days if you play smart enough. Leave my lovely challenging levels alone and play the "perceived" easy version instead. There's nothing wrong with Praetoria!

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

You can learn a lot about the game from that. Let's assume you are playing a Stalker. You can learn:

• How to position yourself and use cover so that the NPCs must close to melee range;
• How to cue up an attack while the NPC is closing to melee range so that you get the Assassination bonus;
• How to kite the mobs so that you don't get overwhelmed with TOO many in melee range;
• Using lucks to allow you to get back into stealth/AS.

There's more but that's off the top of my head. There are things you can do besides just stand there and die.

Well I know *I* didn't get discouraged soloing a Blaster back in the day. I know *I* didn't think they were weak. I know *I* could run on Invincible against Malta with Assault Rifle. So why did we get all those Blaster buffs? Why were Blasters being touted as the AT that faceplants the most? Oh right. Our experiences may not be typical of the playerbase as a whole.

You're probably more typical than the "I'm already on +4/x8, CHALLENGE MEH!" crowd.

It would be interesting if the devs could datamine what difficulty the majority of players run solo missions on, and give us that information. Maybe it would bring home the point that many of us are far from typical.

/agree. Last nite i experienced this with my lvl 14 brute...8 man team - 1 dom been around a while, 6 brute/scraps major vet badges and 1 corr who was a new player(lack of vet badges(sure it could be a 2nd acct) and the way they spoke about the game told the tale). Bad pulls by the corr, rushing ahead and engaging 2nd grps while the ambushes were inbound and in sight...several team wipes later the corr was still having a blast...the team leader and several vets were getting a ticked...i decided to take ownership of the pulling with my brute and instructed the corr to not engage until i had the agro and was surrounded...the wipes vanished and so did the waves of ambushes. once we moved past the basic communication methods that the corr was not hearing all was well.

Now after the epicly long mish the team leader decided his will to live was gone and needed a break...told him i understand and no worries. Having fun while dying is part of the game...it dosnt last forever...if the team is dying take ownership and fix the problem...keep the faith and have fun...if a new player see's that peeps are having fun even while dying just wonder what they will say when see teams that are steamrollers?

Yes dealing with STANDARD ambushes. Not waves and waves of clearly bugged ambushes that don't spawn correctly.

I almost always play at base difficulty. On tanks and brutes, I might increase the number of enemies a notch or two, but never the level.

I did. I was on a trial account, and misunderstood the intro text, thinking that once I'd started Wincott's arc, I was stuck with him. Luckily, I was griping about it on another forum, and someone explained to me that I could leave and get missions in other zones if I wanted. Otherwise, I might've quit right there.

I could turn up the difficulty with ease on many of my characters, but I don't. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Datamining wouldn't tell you the whole story.

Then what is the point of a difficulty slider?

Uh, who's comparing the difficulty of the old Hollows with Praetoria?

I was saying, dying a lot is not going to push away new players. A game that isn't fun will tho.

If there is a bug it should be fixed.

I'm trying to make the point that dying a few times from high con enemies that you didn't watch aggro on in a Hazard zone is just a part of the game as it is, and WAI.

Dying because you dared to fight an even con LT and minion, or got ganked by mass ambushes, all in a standard mission set to +0/x1 is not what I would call balanced OR fun.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I used to turn difficulty settings up, but I seldom do now. In my mind the relative rewards for doing so have changed, and don't really make it worthwhile.

Pre-inventions, the main reward to be had was XP. So the goal of course was to get XP faster/more efficiently. Especially if a toon was suited for ST damage or could lock down a +2 just as easily as a +0. This helped speed things up in a time where there weren't radio missions and there were more gaps in the content (and before leveling was smoothed out).

Post-inventions, taking out higher targets didn't make as much sense. More mobs equal more drop opportunities, or rather more drop opportunities per level.

A-Merits made this even worse; there wasn't only a reason to get through more mobs per level, there was also a reason to get through more missions. Why go through 600 mobs to complete 10 tip missions when you could defeat 300 (or, defeat 600 on two characters, completing 20 tips)? Why earn one A-Merit per level when you could earn two?

If you get strong enough where defeating 5 or 10 foes really doesn't take any longer than 3...then yeah, no reason not to up team size at least. But before then, not really.

Sooo dying even though you have a fighting chance is somehow more depressing than dying when you have 0 chance because the high level mobs will alpha-gank you before you can react?

Or are you implying these ambushes give you 0 chance of success?

The Praetorian ambush situation on live now is definitely an improvement over the problems they had in beta, but there's still some weirdness going on with them. My own solo Mind/Psi dom had two distinct ambushs come in on her last night at exactly the same time, so Sam isn't imagining the bad-timing thing. (I actually saw both of the groups spawn, since they popped up in the same room, more or less right on top of Davi, the instant she engaged the end-boss/minion pair-)

That said, I've taken a trio of stalkers through Praetoria solo now, and I know the content *can* be handled with that AT in spite of the lingering bugs and actively hostile mission design... But it's not exactly what I'd call fun at times, or in any way easy, or even particularly "stalkery". It's mostly just a matter of seeing the ambush dialogue (If they have any. A fair few Praetorian ambushes don't give text cues-) and knowing that until they're handled, you're basicly stuck playing a squishy, not-terribly-dangerous scrap. o_0

I should point out that I've been conducting an experiment. I've been revising some of my main alts' builds to money-is-no-object-no-seriously I19 builds incorporating inherent fitness and the gross national product of Italy. That means my MA/SR scrapper is now reaching the limits of SR survivability, and my Ill/Rad is approaching I4 power again. With my En/En Blaster I decided to perform a very very expensive experiment. We know that blasters fail your assertion for the current playerbase. Blasters, at all levels, under all solo and teaming conditions were vastly underperforming the average performance of the average player for all powerset combinations, primarily because they were being defeated far more often. Even at standard difficulty. Now, perhaps the average player is just so incompetent that they just don't count as legitimate players at all under your assertion that standard difficulty is not appropriate for "anyone." But among our players, standard difficulty kills blasters, teamed or solo, low or high level, DOs or SOs. How does an Ice/Ice blaster die at level 30 on standard difficulty? I'm not actually sure.

So I set out to find out. I've been a blapper too long: more than six out of the seven years I've played blasters. Blapping requires significantly more skill than the average player likely has, but it pays significant dividends especially and ironically when it comes to surivability, because blappers build for and use the highest levels of mez blasters possess. They sort of have to, or else they'd be dead while consistently in melee range.

My new I19 build is not a blapper build. It is a complete sell-out to the concept of the ranged blaster. And because I13 basically said "your defense against mez is you can use your tier 1 and tier 2 attacks (plus tier 1 secondary) I went all out on global recharge, so I could use those powers as fast as possible even when mezzed. I still have bonesmasher and total focus, but I don't use them often because I'm shooting from range. I do have range boost, so I can engage from maximum range. And its perma in theory, so I can attack from that enhanced range indefinitely. The theory in I13 was that being able to attack while mezzed would save ranged blasters and blasters in general. I have nearly a full attack chain while mezzed with just bolt and blast: very few blasters have higher damage output than I do while mezzed, so if this is supposed to be a game changer, I will see it if anyone will.

What happens when you become an all-range blaster without air superiority and aid self? You die. Even at standard difficulty accidents happen and you die, or your health slowly whittles away and you either have to wait for Rest to recharge, or you start a fight with less than full health and you die. At standard difficulty with bosses off, it doesn't happen often to me, but it does happen, and with my older circa I9 blapper build that cost less than what one pretty good drop sells for these days it was literally *impossible* to kill me on standard difficulty. Set me to 0x1 and no bosses, and I would have to be asleep at the keyboard. I normally played at the equivalent of 0x2 with bosses on with that build. Which is low for the average level 50, but high for a blaster. Ranged blasting with partial mez immunity is so hazardous that even several billion inf cannot save the tactic.

And I'm not the average player. If 0x2 can kill me, it will kill over 90% of the players in a similar situation. I'm sure there exist players that are better than me at ranged blasting, but I'm pretty sure anything that can kill me occasionally is going to kill the average player constantly.

Now, having said all that, I can prove "standard difficulty is total crap" is not true for blasters. The question is whether blasters are the sole exception. And I believe anyone that doesn't logically conclude that blasters are the exception without having to have it demonstrated may be overestimating the skill level of the average MMO player, or at least the average City of Heroes player. Which means blasters may not be the weird exception to that statement. The same datamining showed that no other archetype was similarly afflicted so universally, but the devs did not say what the average difficulty setting was. If everyone had to play above 0x1 from the 30s on, its not certain that other powerset combinations or other archetypes might not become similarly problematic, which means even if 0x1 is easier than they can take, 0x2 might still be more than the average player can always handle.

Before anyone states what the average player can do or what all players can do, I believe they need to make sure their theories of player performance can account for players having difficulty with *all* powerset combinations of blasters at *all* levels including past the point of SOs, solo and teamed. If they can't they need to revise their understanding of the average player.

errr you used the Hollows. Not us.

I didn't die alot in the Hollows. At all.

I have died SOME to the bugged ambushes that's the difference.

I don't expect any new player to have trouble with the Hollows. Praetoria is a different story.

Dieing a lot is not the issue. Dieing a lot to something that is clearly bugged could be.

High level mobs can be completely avoided in the Hollows. The Hollows haven't been dangerous since War Witch herself went in a few years ago and made the aggro range based on mob placement waaaay better than it used to be.

Comparing it to waves of waves of ambushes that can quicly cascade to fill an entire room (that's the part I say it most probably bugged, as ambushes don't happen like that in most other parts of the game. There is definite space between them. In fact the devs just fixed a malta missh with ambushes, so something tells me the times it happens in Praetoria IS NOT working as intended. In fact as someone pointed out it was WORSE during beta and the devs fixed it shortly after GR launch then.) is a silly comparison.

Honestly I would not take issue with it IF new players were not FORCED to make a new character in Praetoria. The only thing wrong with Prae is the silly ambush cascade bug.

(Ofcourse us vets know the easy workaround for that is to make a lvl 1 pointless character then log back out and make a new one which you intend to play in any of the three starting areas.)

Apparently, by deliberately not using all the tools at their disposal, like you did.

One thing I'm curious about, since you mentioned needing to wait for Rest to recharge: How did you handle inspiration usage? Did you ask yourself "what would the average player do?" (die with a full tray, from my experience) or just do what made sense to you?

I ask because my first Blaster was pretty much all ranged. Granted, I had Beanbag and later Cryo Freeze Ray, but my melee attacks most certainly didn't have mezzes attached and were as likely to get me killed as not. There was no defiance and Blasters had fewer HP back then, AR had ridiculously long animations and I was suicidally addicted to the longest one of all, and I don't remember it being nearly as bad as what you describe.

Besides giving me a rare opportunity to vent unabated without generating too many casualties, there's lots of generally valuable and interesting things to come from this thread. Even things I disagree with in total have kernels of truth in them that are much more universally agreeable and I think represent valuable critique of the game in general.

I don't agree with EvilGeko (and Venture to an extent) that the game would arbitrarily benefit from being just plain harder. But having the option to have more difficult and more complex play does make sense, and it does make sense for difficulty to ramp up in certain parts of the game. The end game, for example. And you can't have an easy game, followed by an easy game, followed by an easy game, followed by a nightmarish slaughter. The players have to be eased into the more difficult and complex play, and the 1-50 game doesn't do the playerbase any favors by making it too easy consistently. It does get harder to some degree in the late game, but it doesn't get more complex in its difficulty, and that is a potential problem.

I don't agree with Venture that the game difficulty has to be completely homogenous to be well designed, but I do think that wild variations on the level of entire missions is something that should be very uncommon. Right now, we have whole missions of psionic foes and whole missions of high tohit foes and whole missions of debuffers. We don't throw the occasional kryptonite bullet at players, we randomly throw them onto that kryptonite island from Superman. And no one wants to be reminded of that.

Ambushes should do one of two things. Be a surprise threat the players have to deal with and dispatch, or be a controlled time sink in which instead of the players running through the mission defeating foes, the foes come to the player. Weak but continuous ambushes, or one or two strong ones. Not ten strong ones each capable of defeating the player at low levels. I know this, and yet the devs took long strings of ambushes away from me in the AE because I might abuse them, and gave them to the mission editors who went completely nuts with them. They need to put fearghas on this one.

And the devs need a crash course in how to create low level content. They haven't done it in so long, they forgot how many powers low level critters are supposed to have, how strong they are supposed to be, and which ones are the most problematic.

And seriously, Praetorian DE.

I would go one step further and actively discourage new players from making their first characters in Praetoria. The only reason you'd want to push new players in that direction is the shiny. From a storyline perspective it's backwards. Even without ambushes the enemy groups are still "hard mode." The world overall is less developed than Primal earth, and far more limited. It would be a lot like dropping Croatoa to a level 1 zone, and starting new players there; you get an in-depth view of a small part of a huge game world, rather than a broad sampling of everything, and if that small part isn't to your taste you have no incentive to explore further.