Testing Shards to Incarnate Progression

You and I must be playing different games, then.

I'm playing the same game he is - my Insps drop like Chiclets. Soloing, I almost never have to enter a fight without a small purple buffing me.

I agree with the +4 level minimum, and with the Bosses required. I can't say I personally would be happy with the AV tag being required.

Sans -regen and highend-DPS, solo AV fights, while enjoyable to some, are extremely long and tedious when even possible [failure due to inadequate single target DPS to overcome AV regen is very possible].

So, personally, I would like an alternative that included EBs instead of AVs. Maybe the EBs would need level-shifted (or whatever) if they weren't deemed to be hard enough, and I would be ok with that. Those that want AVs could then still have them.

This is part of the discrepancy.

They drop liberally in general but on a team they are split among all 8 members.

For this reason there are lots of things I can blitz through solo but can't run off on my own on a team and do the same, even against the same enemy.

Is there any existing standard content that isn't theoretically possible to solo with any AT and powerset combo? I did not say easy, nor did I say possible for every player. I'm sure some EBs might be mathematically impossible. Otherwise, I fully expect any claim that "this is too hard" to be followed up by someone soloing it on an FF/Elec defender running on SOs.

AVs aren't solo content.

Thus the solo(ish). Remember that incarnates are doing this content. Much like a TF, an AV becomes standard fare.

Still, though, they're story arcs. If you can't handle him on your own, bring a friend or two.

Because multi-team set ups allow the devs to have the enemies pull all kinds of tricks that a solo player wouldn't be able to handle.

Try me.

They are not solo standard content within the definition of standard content difficulty. However, while asking for a soloable path to at least some incarnate progress is likely asking for the eventual, asking for a solo standard content difficulty path to reasonably efficient incarnate progress is asking for the incredibly unlikely.

Why large scale team stuff? Is it not possible to design 4 to 8 man team content with incarnates in mind? Are the rewards limited to raids solely because if they were not, people would avoid the raids? When these supposed people left and filled out the form saying they wanted more end game stuff, did they mean raids or would they have been fine with lots of interesting level 50 task forces?

This. It's not just solo content people are asking for, but solo Incarnate content. Expecting it to conform to vanilla difficulty rules is....unrealistic, at best.

Seeing as we didn't have an endgame at all, it's guesswork to try and parse what people meant without actually seeing the exit surveys. I don't think it's unreasonable, (seeing as it's something we didn't have outside of hami and the mothership) however, to surmise that yes, multiple-team raids for endgame progression was something that showed up a lot on those surveys.

I'm not asking for a standard difficulty path. I fully expect higher difficulty. However, AVs are essentially a gear check. Either you can kill it before it kills you or you can't. Even if you can, it's pretty boring. I would hope that Incarnate content would present an actual challenge besides "can you beat down this giant sack of HP."

Fair enough, but AV's aren't something I think is fair to say are off the table simply because they're "not solo content" when we're talking about Incarnate progression. Besides, I'd highly doubt that any non-trial advancement content would be solo *only*, but instead, solo-attemptable.

We didn't have raids (outside of the two you mentioned). But the STF, LRSF, LGTF, Kahn, Faathim, Sara Moore, and ITF were to varying degrees different from regular content and many people seemed to consider them enjoyable enough to repeat. Apex and Tin Mage seemed workable. Adding a greater variety of task forces could have been plausible. OTOH, I do know a lot of peeps were interested in raids too, I just did not expect raids to the exclusion of lvl 50 task forces.

Right we did have them, and many people were content to run them, but I thought you were talking about the exit surveys. Endgame multi-team content is the one area CoH is pretty light on and I'm sure that was reflected in a lot of exit surveys. I expect that once they get a few in to shore up that gap, they'll expand the Incarnate storyline to TFs and other non-trial content.

So can you hook me up with the lotto numbers for whatever month of 2012 you're apparently living in?

Everyone's definition of challenge is pretty varied, and often mutually exclusive. What I find a challenge might bore you, what you find a challenge might be uninteresting to me.

One problem intrinsic to making challenges for CoH is the issue of time. Combat is designed to be usually extremely fast. Short combat therefore eliminates most opportunities for challenge. And when the devs try to extend combat, they are usually accused of cheap cheats.

If I was designing challenges, I would make challenges designed to be circumstantially unstable; basically the solution to the challenge would be dynamic depending on variables that were difficult to control and often partially random. The solution would always have a logical way to determine, but pure repetition would not work. That would require new tech.

However, players would probably complain they were too difficult specifically *because* a single strategy didn't always work, or alternatively that overcoming the challenge required changing their normal tactics. Man, you should have seen the debates that occurred in CO beta when CO introduced the simple concept of blocking. Personally, I think its one of the best things they ever invented: it opens huge tactical doors. But would it be accepted here? Hard to say: it could also be accused of opening the door to twitch gaming.

There is no tactic that cannot be accused of being a cheap trick by someone who doesn't value the tactical option. When you get down to it, all of MMO gaming is pushing a button at the right time. Its more than that only if you choose to think of it as more than that.

It doesn't take much to work out how they plan to tell their cosmic level stories

It doesn't take much to post baseless speculation.

Are you talking about Belle? Did I miss out on a heated argument about this? Since this confusion keeps popping up about once a year even though it's been years since this issue was settled, here. I wrote a wiki article on my personal page specifically about it. Now instead of explaining all of this over and over each time, I can just post a link and be done with it.

The Coming Storm is an even bigger threat than Tyrant and his loyalist henchpeople, who we confront in Trials, because they're such a big threat - so an even bigger threat will ned even more epic Trials to defeat it

Not exactly baseless as Prometheus basically tells us that we need to defeat Cole then we'll get to handle the Coming Storm. Whether that basis is sufficient proof for you I cannot say, but it's incorrect to say it's baseless.

The devs have also strongly suggested that the Praetorian/Tyrant storyline is approaching its end (reaching a climax) and they've also said they were planning to continue to expand the incarnate system and add more trials. Logic suggests therefore that trials down the road will be based on a different storyline than Cole, and a reasonable inference is that it will involve the Coming Storm.