I have run 10 trials today, I never want to run them again. Am I alone?

wait, what ... I haven't followed your posts in a while ... you have heroes now?

What, I ask, is this world coming to???

I have to agree here, the power...REAL POWER is rather addictive.

You really are hedging your hatred against raids in such a way that, no matter what happens, you can feel like you win.

We've already seen bAss truthfully say he likes running TFs repeatedly with friends and we've already seen yourself and Venture claim he was just mindlessly grinding content. Once again, you seem to put your own opinions above anyone else's and seem to be ignoring the player base that enjoys running TFs/Trials repeatedly to help friends get XP, badges, drops, etc.

Framing this thread as your argument: your opinions that trials are boring/wrong/invalid content is more important than the players who enjoy running them or any TF repeatedly because you have already degraded what they do as a "grind." So even though you have no numbers on either side, you already assume your vocal minority of people angry at raids and anti-raid are bigger than the silent majority of people who are running them. Then you hedged your bets by saying that when that majority is bored, you get to claim most of them are sycophants for your cause even if they have no clue people like you with opinions like yours exist... because they are too busy playing the game.

You are an opinion alchemist, sir.

Because he was just mindlessly grinding content. Whether or not he enjoys doing that is of no account. If the game requires the player (not the character, the player) to get punched in the face 50 times to earn a reward and someone says they enjoy getting punched in the face does that justify the design?

If someone offered you 50 grand to get punched in the teeth 50 times, would you do it? No, because I'm hoping you're smarter than that. Don't tie actual real-life occurrences to a game. Things don't work that way.

Whether it's grinding or not, if the person doing it enjoys it, it stops being a "grind" and remains what it is to that person: enjoyable.

You can call the devs on design all you want, but the trials are 1000% less "grindy" than I thought they were going to be, and from what I've seen hundreds of other players agree. 35-50 minutes to crank out one BAF is way better than anything else I've seen in any other MMO ever.

So how did you get up to 50 Venture? I mean to get to level 50 you had to repeatedly do something over and over and over again. Isn't that a grind? And if it was, then a grind isn't a bad thing, or if you claim it is, then there should be no way you should ever play MMO's, or even RPG's in general - or even table top games since to level up in them you have to - wait for it - punch someone repeatedly in the face until they pop and offer up XP's.

It may be a grind, but a grind is not inherently a bad thing.

Or you know, you could simply not read my post and offer up another godzilla facepalm that only proves that you suck at reading.

Tanks can now FF people... pretty poorly. Even at the Very Rare, Barrier drops to just 'nice to have' levels of defense within thirty seconds or so--doesn't hurt to have around, but it's not going to do much for a squishy with no inherent defense. They can heal people once per two minutes. They can AoE and mezz once per 90 seconds (and the mezz is unreliable), and they can have pets up one third of the time. If I had a Defender who was using a single power from their primary every two minutes or a MM who only had his pets up a third of the time, I'd probably be pretty upset.

The Incarnate stuff gives characters abilities normally associated with other ATs, but with nowhere near the frequency. The only one that really compares is Judgement vs. crashless blaster nukes, and that's not exactly a new situation. Between Lightning Rod, Shield Charge, Archery, and Assault Rifle, 7 out of the 10 non-epic ATs have had some sort of crashless mini-nuke available to them for years. Plus, Judgement ignores recharge buffs and can't be slotted for recharge--most Archery Blasters can lay down Rain of Arrows way more often than that tank can Pyronic Judgement. Tanks and Scrappers have had holds available to them from epic pools for a loooong time, too.

But hey, I mostly play Defenders. I got used to Controllers tap-dancing on my AT's toes about five years ago.

City of Heroes has always been known in the industry becuase of some of its homogeneity. This is why the holy trinity isn't mandatory for teams for this game for the vast majority of content. But it still retains some roles for each AT to full fill somewhat.

This is why for a long time, the hero AT's were more popular and performed better in PVP. While defenders could be offenders, blasters could be blaptrollers, and controllers could be wartrollers they still all had defined roles

Balance is the key! This is why over time the villain AT look more similar to the hero AT's (eg Stalker).

Homogeneity and uniqueness must be in a state of equilibrium.

Now the pendulum is swinging too far to the side of homogeneity. If another nuke is released for example as another Incarnate slot, doesn't that destroy some uniquness of the AT's?

The Barrier buffs are better than FF or Sonic buffs for 30 seconds, as you say. But the recharge is 1:30. So they're better than non-incarnate buffs for 1/3rd of the time, and for 1/3rd of the time they're comparable.

Now take a look at other radial buffs. AM has a recharge of 7 minutes. Recovery and Regeneration auras recharge in 500 seconds. Even fully slotted for recharge, these buffs are nowhere near permanent or even 'frequent', as you describe them.

I believe the comparable incarnate ability is Ageless; which is better than AM for 30 seconds, slightly worse for :30-1:00, then recharges in 1:30. That's without any investment in inf, IOs, powers or power slots.

Which would you rather have -- an ability that gives good numbers for 3 minutes out of every 4 *if* you invest in it, or an ability that needs no investment but gives amazing numbers for :30, good numbers for :30, and is then down for :30 before you use it again?

Now what if you were a scrapper, and I told you that you couldn't have the first option anyway?

The incarnate abilities give powers that are every bit as attractive -- and in some cases more desirable -- than powers in ATs who are specialized to those tasks. Proliferation is meaningless in this system; everybody's the same.

I think you're confusing 'grind' with 'replayability'. To have replayability, a game offers the same content with a slightly different twist. In this game's case, every new character is a new twist on the game. A level 50 blaster had a different experience levelling then a level 50 tank.

Even between two characters with identical powers the experience can be different. You may explore different content options, leveling with TFs instead of missions, for example. Or you may role-play the characters differently, and go through a different story even while experiencing the exact same content. All of this makes CoX a game with extreme replayability.

But taking the same character through the exact same content dozens of times? That's a grind. There's no difference in the game experience. There's no role-playing rationale for redoing a story that many times (and if there were, a roleplayer would have to be a masochist to enjoy such a storyline). Grinds are not replays. They are repetition. There's a big difference. And the i20 incarnate content is a grind.

That's a different argument and one I'd disagree with, but ultimately each player has their own preferences. Some may prefer to grind at the same content for thousands of reptitions just to secure a prize at the end. More power to them. I don't play that way, I don't enjoy being forced to play that way, and I think making content specifically for that kind of player is not healthy for this game. It will drive people away and will attract very few if any new players.

From the numbers I'm looking at, they're better than FF buffs for 7.5 to 10 seconds. For the next 15-20 seconds, they're not really as good as having a FF Defender around, and it just goes downhill from there. And that's for the Very Rares.

No, but the character who has those powers also has eight other powers in their pool to help the team with. Once per two minutes, your Incarnate tank can do something Defender-like. Congratulations. An actual Defender can do that constantly.

While I agree that your argument is solid at level 45+, it falls apart for the rest of the game. The awesome Barrier buffs mean Jack **** when you get exemplared down to do a Posi or a Mantis. Ageless doesn't matter when you are helping a buddy unlock their Midnighter's Clb access. At that point, I'll Gladly take an Emp or a Rad with AM because the Destiny buffs do not exist at ethat level. Sure a 50 could quit the team, buff all and rejoin, but that's a bit silly.

And there's one big component of Proliferation you are forgetting- Character Concept. I want Ice powers for Brutes not to make everyone even, but because I want to play a rampaging Yeti. Same with Thermal for Defenders. And I won't quit this game till I see Dark/Dark Dominators! Why? Because I love coming up with new concepts and enjoy the game that way. In fact, that was the biggest hurdle I had to get over in order to enjoy the Incarnate abilities- how does this fit into my concept? Some powers don't, so they are off the table, no matter HOW good they are.

Case in point- my hero main, Bench, is a Inv/ss Tank whose background is a 'normal' human with extraodinary strength and stamina who became a hero. For all of beta and even live.. I considered skipping Judgment because I simply couldn't make it work. Why would a normal strong guy suddenly be able to shoot fire or electricity? I only went Void when I came up with the idea that the power is an extension of his Rage power amped up. (recoloring it red helped) I had to come up with a similar concept for Rebirth before I could do that. Proliferation to me is just more opportunity to tell a new comic story, one I haven't though of yet.

Thank you Arnabas. The above comment so completely describes my approach to CoX over the last 7 years that I just had to quote it.

So far I have attempted one Lambda TF, which we failed. But I've been having too much fun with a couple of lower level alts lately to focus on I20 stuff exclusively. I'll get around to it when I'm good and ready. I'm one of those 'enjoys looking forward to stuff' people. By the time I do get around to doing BAF's and Lambda's the bugs will be fixed and most of my league-mates will have the previous experience with the TF's to make them go smoothly.

You might want to take a look at those numbers again. Remember that the Barrier buffs both resistance and defense. +30 resistance and +30 defense is far, far better than +47 defense from a FF bubble.

I agree with you. Except...the entire team has those abilities. If the team is using their incarnate abilities to buff, debuff, heal, and nuke, what's left for support characters to contribute? I think most teams would rather have another scrapper, who brings damage and another incarnate buff, than a defender whose buffs are no longer needed and whose damage is paltry.

It doesn't help that resurrection is useless because the hospital is inside each trial. That's another bad design.

Face it, incarnates do not need support. That's a radical change from the non-incarnate parts of the game.

Welcome to.... 2008, I think it was.

I have quite a few heroes in my stable of current favorite alts.

But basically having a lot more than 2 trials available at the release of the endgame content means less staleness.

Absolutely as tastes vary wildly.

This is why I find it humorous that people are going back and forth in threads trying to change people's personal tastes.

/grabs more popcorn

Mindlessly? I'm offended good sir! I'll have you know that at all times I was very mindful of my surroundings, when my powers were done recharging, my team mate conditions, and the current mission goals at hand for all of the fun I've been having!

Unless I'm doing something horribly wrong, in the absence of high ToHit/Accuracy buffs on the enemies or high -Def debuffs, 45+% defense is more total mitigation than 30% resistance to all and 30% defense to all.

Here are the total mitigations I get:


(Formula I used for mitigation:
1 - ((1 - player resistance) * ((enemy level acc bonus * enemy rank acc bonus) * (0.5 - player defense)))

More simply, total mitigation = 1 - ((1 - resistance) * (chance of getting hit))

Granted, if the player has pre-existing defense, which isn't rare, the mixed bag starts pulling ahead. And really, Forcefield is the hardest hit by this by far, which isn't exactly new--it's had some issues with endgame desirability ever since softcapping became all the rage. Nobody's going to be providing better healing than an Empathy Defender by dropping Rebirth every two minutes.

The hospital also has a timer before you can get out, plus a walk back, which can be dangerous and relatively long in the Lambda labs/warehouse phase. I've seen several raids get into rolling team wipe situations, where half the team is in the hospital and the other half is slowly dying at any given point. On most of the worse BAFs I've been on, I'd kill for Howling Twilight.

Plus, Destiny only covers certain buff types (no +damage, +ToHit, or stealth, for example), and the debuffs from Interface have a stacking limit, which leaves most debuff sets in the clear.

If your team has a lot of coordination and can stagger their powers, this might be more of an issue. In my experience, people basically just all fire off their Destiny powers before big fights and ignore them the rest of the time. My survival has been considerably better in trials with defenders and corruptors around--even with stacked Barriers, it doesn't take long at all for a few unmezzed level 54 bosses to kill a Dominator, and no kindly tanks were running up to spot-heal me with their Rebirths in the middle of fights. In the end, this whole thing just seems to be a slightly newer version of 'you don't NEED any specific AT.' But they're all sure nice to have.

Ageless provides debuff resistance.

Thanks, I missed that, since it's only on one tree. Fixing the post.

Point I was making, regardless of frequency, is that in these trials I see the melee resist or defense bases crowd being the ones who can obtain with the best results, tank mage status. If you offer everyones tricks to everyone, then the logical decsion is to incarnate something with more HP.

Sure your FF might not be as good as my ff, but something has to be said that when I do these run the majority is Scrappers Tanks and brutes.

So when I make my observation all I see is the less squishies (Not all but most) getting all of the goodies, and finally, after all these years, this game is HP based.

I don't care if controllers tap danced on your behind...I don't. What I am saying is that the AT structure that defined the game is comprimized ,and that...is dangerous. You wont convice me otherwise, because I have watched and beta tested too many games that died before release because of this.

You take away a mages fireball and give it to an HP warrior, and you just end up with HP fireball warriors. It's how it will be...and until this company realizes that they cannot offer powers that made AT's unique to others..then we will finally see tank mages. Which will literraly be tanks throwing fireballs.

If this sounds mean Im sorry...It's just how I do feel about these changes. It's to quick, and it's to game breaking.

The light side can tempt even the most evil-hearted villain

Here we have the same argument again. As I have already stated, we have heard it before. It was wrong then, and it is wrong now. Some people will build for the numbers, the majority will continue to build for concept. Just like in table top games.

An example is in order. I have known for years that Fire/Kin controllers were awesome at generating income. I have still not made one, because they don't fit my concepts, and they just are not fun to me.

You still seem to miss the point that this (what is in your post) doesn't happen till the late game. There are still 50 levels where there is a distinct division in AT design.