Too many tankmages.
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2011-08-10 21:26 in Archetypes and Powers General Discussion
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You can always exemp down. That is always an option, and many of the arcs are pretty sweet at lower levels. I think the concern is that generally people do higher level content or even tips for merits (For IO Sets) and many of the fun TF's are actually higher level. It's the stuff you strived for from the beginning for the most part so you can participate in some of these TF's.|
Originally Posted by Nihilii
Gonna second "play at low level / exemp down". I don't see much people running level 10 Praetoria missions on +4/x8, and even less of them steamrolling these.
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So, it becomes a matter of looking at your 50's (Most incarnate that I have seen as it's just pure beneficial to do so and not that hard to begin with) to bring them to the content that you like doing. In my experience people like to run higher TF's, and even an ITF people want to do it at 50, and it's hard to convince people that doing it at 36 is fun. It's because of Recipes and the chance to gain purples which fetch good money on the market...which then allows for IO's you would not normally gain otherwise
This community never ceases to amuse. City of Superfluous Tankmages. Where everyone is overpowered, yet no one feels useful to the team.
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Well thats not where my comments were going at all.|
Originally Posted by SinisterDirge
This community never ceases to amuse. City of Superfluous Tankmages. Where everyone is overpowered, yet no one feels useful to the team.
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I believe that all AT's still shine in one way or another, but the debate on tank mages or mage tanks is a solid discussion.
I was simply meaning that when playing in a group of all incarnates I feel like I should play mine, because if everyone else gets shiny things, then I should play my shiny thing too?
Keeping up with the pack I guess.
I don't know what it is you want. it seems you dont like seeing other peeps on maxed out toons.
Because it is quite easy to find challenges on this game for even the best players. My Brute shango is tier 4 every thing and since he is Def based
i have a very hard time with nemisis on 4/8, i have capped def at all positions. as a matter of fact my mele an ranged are in the 50's without barrier.
you say u dont like seeing toons that can solo most missions. when freedom hits there will be (i hope) scores of new have- nots that u can team with
they wont know how to use inventions or have money to guy top notch gear
and you guys can struggle till your hearts content just leave those of us who have ascended out of the "Nerf" conversation
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ya this is a superhero game nobody wants to be jimmy Olsen we all wanna be superman
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Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison
I believe it was Arcanaville that said it first.
This is a super hero game. The very idea is to be overpowered. |
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... or have more than 1-2 characters at that level. |
Originally Posted by Jagged
I read in these forums of people that have done 100s or trials, but these are extreme players and its not necessary unless you want all the pets and every T4.
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I've got something like 26-28 50s at this point. No, I'm not going after T3-T4 on everything, or even most things, but even doing "Concentrate on one you like on each server," it gets grindy and tedious *fast.* And I don't even have a 50 on each server. Not quite half of them.
Add to that (stepping away from levels of power for a moment) the new, and really nonsensical, other rewards that burn a bunch of merits (I have to run a bunch of iTrials to... faint? Be out of breath? Really? And let's not get into costume pieces) - yeah. Grind, grind, and tedium.
The iTrials are (or can be) fun - once in a while. But if you want to make any progress, they are the *only* way to do so. (Yeah, conversion of shards, blah blah - you've seen the rate of conversion? That's not a serious option in the least.) Which is why *since the beginning* we've had people - including me - asking for solo and small team content. (And yet had people saying that was unreasonable... yeah. Really? Guess what, I love being able to unlock Alpha on my own time.)
My heavily IOd incarnate blaster is still much more blasty and much less survivable than my heavily IOd incarnate tanker. The margin is vast.
Both of them do trivialise most normal content now, and I am hoping for more incarnate content for regular teams.
I think an Incarnate Mode for regular TFs or maybe even 45+ story arcs would be a great method. And playing in this mode would allow incarnate shifts to be used, and would give incarnate rewards (but obviously less than a trial), while providing a real challenge for all our uber builds.
I still love playing them though.
OMG! How like, totally kewl are these characters?!1
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I suggested a while back the powers do just what post-Alpha level shifts do, specifically to *let* the player get more powerful in normal content without being lolfacerolleasy5minuteITF, and letting the powers really kick into overdrive during Incarnate content - yes, "stepped" (if you want to call it that) powers. |
Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
Incarnate powers exist because there is content in existence that makes them not only useful, but almost necessary. Using those powers in content that we trivialized without them years ago is going to make that content even more trivial. What do you suggest? We make the game harder so Incarnates don't feel overpowered? That'll be REAL fair to the people who don't have or want Incarnate powers (yes, they do exist). |
The content that really needs Incarnate level power gets Incarnate stuff at full strength. The content that the Incarnate powers at full strength trivializes? Well, they're not AT full strength for that. Maybe 50% - enough to see a noticable power bump, and yes it makes content easier, but enough that *non* incarnates dont' feel like they're given pity spots or aren't "powerful enough."
Like I said - they do it with level shifts, why NOT with the other powers?
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/This. Why not simply get a group together on your server who wants to play as you want to play? There are a lot of groups who run as all one AT or hardcore, etc., so why not start your own not-incarnate group (or whatever)? There are plenty of people who don't have any incarnate toons at all and lots who have only one (I have only one, for instance), there are also a lot of people who still don't use the invention system (at all. ever.), so it shouldn't be too difficult to find people who want to play as you do. Tell people you run with, or people in your sg, or post something in your server's forums to let people know you're starting such a group and run with it.
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Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
So don't play that way. <snip>
Find others that play the same way. Have fun with them. |
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Well thats actually quite a lot of characters. So I am not surprised your finding it tedious. It would take an awful lot of content for it to be otherwise and this is all still "new".
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Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
I've got something like 26-28 50s at this point.
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This is a song about a super hero named Tony. Its called Tony's theme.
Jagged Reged: 23/01/04
Whatever you're smoking?
I want some.
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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.
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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
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Eight Stalkers. One team.|
Originally Posted by Tahliah
/This. Why not simply get a group together on your server who wants to play as you want to play? There are a lot of groups who run as all one AT or hardcore, etc.
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/thread
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Now you've done it. You've gone and summoned her.|
Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison
Arcanaville
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Oh wait, It's Troy Hickman that we want to avoid calling, isn't it?
@Roderick
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Originally Posted by Giant2005
I have played a lot of mmos that require the perfect team to be able to compete.
I absolutely love the fact that CoH has changed that formula and made it so we are all capable of soloing everything in the game. If I want strategy I'll play something else, if I want to feel like a God I'll play City of Heroes. CoH offers something no other mmo does, why would they want to ditch their niche and become another generic mmo? As a side note, if your characters are too powerful for the content of the game, take them to a PVP zone. I assure you fighting other characters that are too powerful for the content of the game will always be challenging, choosing to ignore the most difficult content of the game seems to be a flaw in most of the CoH playerbase. |
Also.. I personally made an MA arc with custom mobs and a good story that will be a challenge even to incarnates! If you can do this one on a high repp and say it was easy... let me know!
And I know there is more content that is hard enough for even incarnates.
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Average - A new race of aliens arrives on Earth. And Vanguard has you investigate them!
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Advanced - Go back in time and witness the birth of a vampire. Follow her to key moments in her life in order to stop her! A story of intrigue, drama and horror! Blood & Violence... not recommend to solo!
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And really, we are just talking Judgment, and to a lesser degree Destiny and Lore. Even though they are significant bumps in power for certain builds, no one feels trivialized by Alpha or Interface.
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Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
The content that really needs Incarnate level power gets Incarnate stuff at full strength. The content that the Incarnate powers at full strength trivializes? Well, they're not AT full strength for that. Maybe 50% - enough to see a noticable power bump, and yes it makes content easier, but enough that *non* incarnates dont' feel like they're given pity spots or aren't "powerful enough."
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This.|
Originally Posted by streetlight
I'd recommend exemping and/or running at highest difficulties with fewer players. Beat the STF in record time? Try it at +4. Handled that? Use placeholders to start the TF and go with fewer team members throughout.
You can do a lot to create your own challenges. |
Also, I hear TankMages, but I never hear about people just kicking butt on 4/8 Rularuu missions.
Change up the enemies. Oh yeah, those 4/8 AE missions sounds impressive, but they're built to cater to a character's strengths.
My SS/FA taking on 4/8 AE Fire Farm is no where near as impressive as if my SS/FA tanking on a 4/8 Cimorians (it can't).And those Incarnate that make some of the non incarnate content look simple. Yeah? So? They're not making the incarnate content look simple on their own.
To use a simpler example. It's like complaining that a regular lvl 50 is going into Boomtown and making all those enemies look like a waste of space.
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The BrandX Collection
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1. You ignored the fact I only actually "work on" one per server. So, there are perhaps four characters (maybe five) I've done any real "work" on. (And one of those finished quickly.) |
Originally Posted by Jagged
Well thats actually quite a lot of characters. So I am not surprised your finding it tedious. It would take an awful lot of content for it to be otherwise and this is all still "new".
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2. Even on *one* character it gets tedious and boring VERY fast.
The Alpha slot had the right idea, frankly - sure, it can take a bit, but shards drop from... well, pretty much everything. I can do whatever I want - task forces, trials, missions, newspapers, go help friends, exemp down, whatever and I still make progress. And with the WTF, something new gets highlighted every week to keep things fresh.
Every other slot? Baf, baf, lam, lam, baf, lam, key... wait, nobody wants to run that. (Seriously. The common response across several servers to anyone suggesting Keyes in my experience has been "lol, right.") Baf, baf, lam, baf, lam.... Even just doing 1-2 a week it's more of a "I have no choice in running this." Short of completely ignoring the system, that is.
And that's if I'm not playing at 2-3 AM (not uncommon.) Or coming in between trials, where it's me and one other person that just got to the zone too late. I'd love to burn that time making SOME progress.
NOT having SOME sort of non-trial Incarnate content to make progress on these slots - even some sort of option in the WTF for threads or some such - was shortsighted, and all we get when that's mentioned is a sort of vague "we're considering having a meeting to discuss possibly looking into forming a committee to consult on possibly brainstorming something someday." (Which is, admittedly, more than the PVPers get.)
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If you are willing to go down the road of min/max then you will eventually hit the point where things are too easy.
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Originally Posted by pomo
I don't personally see that as a solution. It used to be a lot of fun tweaking a build as much as humanly possible to get it to perform above and beyond. Now anyone willing to slug through incarnate system can do what those toons could do and more with almost no effort.
For someone that likes putting a ton of effort into their toon to extract every ounce of performance turning and telling them to purposely handicap themselves isn't much of a satisfying solution. But it isn't like min/maxing has disappeared with incarnates, there is still a world of difference between a crappy incarnate build and a min/maxed one, but it barely matters because both of them can blaze through pretty much anything the game has to offer. |
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You get the option of 40 threads with every WST.
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Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
1. You ignored the fact I only actually "work on" one per server. So, there are perhaps four characters (maybe five) I've done any real "work" on. (And one of those finished quickly.)
2. Even on *one* character it gets tedious and boring VERY fast. The Alpha slot had the right idea, frankly - sure, it can take a bit, but shards drop from... well, pretty much everything. I can do whatever I want - task forces, trials, missions, newspapers, go help friends, exemp down, whatever and I still make progress. And with the WTF, something new gets highlighted every week to keep things fresh. Every other slot? Baf, baf, lam, lam, baf, lam, key... wait, nobody wants to run that. (Seriously. The common response across several servers to anyone suggesting Keyes in my experience has been "lol, right.") Baf, baf, lam, baf, lam.... Even just doing 1-2 a week it's more of a "I have no choice in running this." Short of completely ignoring the system, that is. And that's if I'm not playing at 2-3 AM (not uncommon.) Or coming in between trials, where it's me and one other person that just got to the zone too late. I'd love to burn that time making SOME progress. NOT having SOME sort of non-trial Incarnate content to make progress on these slots - even some sort of option in the WTF for threads or some such - was shortsighted, and all we get when that's mentioned is a sort of vague "we're considering having a meeting to discuss possibly looking into forming a committee to consult on possibly brainstorming something someday." (Which is, admittedly, more than the PVPers get.) |
BrandX Future Staff Fighter
The BrandX Collection
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aside from converting the notice of the well to 40 threads as BrandX said, you can also convert shards into threads as well|
Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
1. You ignored the fact I only actually "work on" one per server. So, there are perhaps four characters (maybe five) I've done any real "work" on. (And one of those finished quickly.)
2. Even on *one* character it gets tedious and boring VERY fast. The Alpha slot had the right idea, frankly - sure, it can take a bit, but shards drop from... well, pretty much everything. I can do whatever I want - task forces, trials, missions, newspapers, go help friends, exemp down, whatever and I still make progress. And with the WTF, something new gets highlighted every week to keep things fresh. Every other slot? Baf, baf, lam, lam, baf, lam, key... wait, nobody wants to run that. (Seriously. The common response across several servers to anyone suggesting Keyes in my experience has been "lol, right.") Baf, baf, lam, baf, lam.... Even just doing 1-2 a week it's more of a "I have no choice in running this." Short of completely ignoring the system, that is. And that's if I'm not playing at 2-3 AM (not uncommon.) Or coming in between trials, where it's me and one other person that just got to the zone too late. I'd love to burn that time making SOME progress. NOT having SOME sort of non-trial Incarnate content to make progress on these slots - even some sort of option in the WTF for threads or some such - was shortsighted, and all we get when that's mentioned is a sort of vague "we're considering having a meeting to discuss possibly looking into forming a committee to consult on possibly brainstorming something someday." (Which is, admittedly, more than the PVPers get.) |
yes its a little slower, but its still progress, and it doesnt force you to run trials, since doing that route is the "gotta have it NAO" mentality
To me, going thirty times slower is not "a little" by any stretch of the imagination.
If you disagree, feel free to send me 97% of your monthly income to prove your point. We both could call this a win.
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Well, I was already here. And I have said in the past, that relative to normal MMO conventions we should all be at least a little overpowered in a superhero game.|
Originally Posted by Roderick
Now you've done it. You've gone and summoned her.
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That doesn't mean game balance gets thrown out the window, but it does mean that we had a justification for easy soloing when the conventional MMO wisdom was that if you make it too easy to solo you'll make the game too boring. It means things like inspirations can be immensely powerful in this game relative to other games because it fits the narrative that our characters can temporarily gain transcendent power to deal with a particularly sticky situation. The same sticky situations that often force teaming in other MMOs, actually.
There is such a thing as too powerful even in City of Heroes, but this game tolerates otherwise "game-breaking" levels of power better than most MMOs, I think, because unlike most MMOs such ability is actually expected by the players that approach the game.
Possibly the most beneficial mistake the devs ever made was that they were so good at handing out game-breaking levels of power at launch (by misunderstanding, by improper judgment, and even by typo) and so bad at figuring out how to reign it in that by the time they figured it out and gotten their arms around the problem around I6ish, they had over a year and a half to observe how the City of Heroes playerbase dealt with such levels of power. And they discovered it wasn't as detrimental as they thought it would be. It did hurt the game in some areas to be sure, but it wasn't MMO poison like conventional wisdom said it would be.
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One of the things that I like about CoH is that soloing is much more practical than in a lot of other MMOs so in general I agree that the slightly overpowered nature of the game works there.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
That doesn't mean game balance gets thrown out the window, but it does mean that we had a justification for easy soloing when the conventional MMO wisdom was that if you make it too easy to solo you'll make the game too boring. It means things like inspirations can be immensely powerful in this game relative to other games because it fits the narrative that our characters can temporarily gain transcendent power to deal with a particularly sticky situation. The same sticky situations that often force teaming in other MMOs, actually.
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However, the bit I do find annoying is that teams tend to be a bit to overpowered even before you factor in incarnate abilities and IOs. I think that part of the problem is that the nature of the ATs (some are force multiplier some are force adders) make it very hard to estimate the strength of a team so the game errs on the side of making any team combo work. While I do like that attitude I've always been a little annoyed by the restrictions it places on difficulty.
If I were in charge of making CoH2 what I would try to do is make all characters "tank mages" to some degree by giving them all relatively similar damage and defenses plus force multiplication abilities (I think this can be done while avoiding the issue of every character playing the same). The goal would be that the power level for a team is more predictable for a given team size and less dependent on the particular mix of characters. I'd then change the spawn rules for teams to provide more levers for adjusting the difficulty than simply adding more enemies. I'd still scale up the spawn sizes but I'd also increase the difficulty of individual enemies. The current game does that somewhat already (more bosses and Lts as you increase team size) but I'd like to take it a step further by increasing the core stats of enemies as team size increases (damage, to hit, defense, hit points).
The end goal would be to try and avoid the current situation where a solo player can successfully fight at x8. Not because I have any particular objections to them doing so but because it means that a full team of 8 is not really facing a challenge.
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It's not just people that refuse to do Incarnate Trials. Of all my 50's, only 2 are actually going through the trial slog. I MIGHT take another through. Maybe. Other than them, the rest of my characters don't even have the Alpha Slot unlocked, and probably never will. I would be kind of upset if Incarantes became mandatory, and the characters I had that weren't Incarnates, (which is a huge majority), suddenly found themselves unable to participate until more trials were grinded through.|
Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
What do you suggest? We make the game harder so Incarnates don't feel overpowered? That'll be REAL fair to the people who don't have or want Incarnate powers (yes, they do exist).
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Basically, if the "normal" game was made far more difficult to accommodate the Incarnates, then many of my 50's would go from "pretty powerful" to "pretty useless" in one issue. It would, in essence, be a giant nerf to all my non-Incarnate 50's.
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I'd recommend exemping and/or running at highest difficulties with fewer players. Beat the STF in record time? Try it at +4. Handled that? Use placeholders to start the TF and go with fewer team members throughout.
You can do a lot to create your own challenges.