What would you do to make Keyes fun?

First off, in Issue 21 Keyes will get an extra completion merit (Empyrean for the first time in a day on a character, Astral for the rest). Personally, I doubt that will be enough to get people to do it on a regular basis.

I think the pulse damage needs to be cut by 50%. Sending players to the hospital in a steady stream isn't my idea of a good time. The Anti-Anti-Matter badge is just being sadistic.

Both the Anti-Anti-Matter badge and the Bunker Buster badge should be awarded when achieved, no later than the beginning of the last phase.

The time stop has to go or a display marker for when it will happen needs to be made. No one likes being held then attacked. I suppose everyone could be phased and take no damage or count against the badges, but that would be trickier to do.

Speaking of the beams (Disintegration), a VISIBLE and separate counter should be put in the info window for this so that players (if they are paying attention) move.

Disintegrations: The player being disintegrated should be clearly marked in the team/league windows so that people healing can have a chance at preventing the player from being defeated.

Time Stop should not freeze people in the hospital, but if they exit, they should be fair game.

Yes, a lot of these impact badges, but even without the badges these should be looked at to make a better experience for the player. Maybe then we will have players actually doing Keyes on some of the smaller servers.

So what would you do to make this trial more fun for you?

Edit:
Okay, yes, there is a counter for the obliteration beam. It gets lost in the interface. I'll revise this request to "there should be a solid (not fuzzy) area for the obliteration beam." There should be an ground to ceiling beam effect showing where the beam is targeting. The Obliteration beam SHOULD NEVER FIRE when Anti-Matter stops time. Antimatter SHOULD NOT STOP TIME when the hold portion of the Obliteration beam's target is being displayed, but not at the "hold" portion (the "run away" bit).

Disintegration beam SHOULD NEVER FIRE when people are being held by the Obliteration beam OR when Anti-Matter stops time.

Alpha and Beta Entanglements should be removed entirely.

Terminals in the power cell phases: Should have a clear aura when they are "locked". Not floating text, a clearly visible aura.

The hospital door timer on the trials. That is simply a failed experiment. It has never done what it was supposed to do: keep players together during the trial.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

Not to flame by any means, but I personally love the Keyes trial as it is. It's hard as hell and takes some real work! The only thing I would change would be to have tutorial runs to teach people what to look for and what does what. There's a lot of mechanics in there but running with people who know how it works makes it loads of fun!

@The Omega Elementress
Currently playing Project Willow lvl 50 DB/WP Incarnate Shifted Scrapper

Have Neuron randomly come through, make some snarky comment, and throw off Keyes' To Hit ability as he temporarily froths at the mouth and takes a potshot at Neuron as he zooms off.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Honestly? I wouldn't do anything at all. I'm not saying that it is perfect. I'm not even saying that I like it at all. What I am saying is that just because I may or may not like some piece of content doesn't mean it needs to be changed. Others do like it, just as it is. So let them have it, and I will just go find some other content that I enjoy more.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frosty_Femme I said "ur" which is not a word. It's a sound dumb people make when you ask them to spell out "you are".

It needs to be more friendly to other AT's othr than the HP oriented group.

As it is, the HP group sails through three of the trials better than almost every other AT.

The pulses are fun, but needs to be reduced to allow other styles of play to participate and actually have "FUN".

Then again...it just means the Melee HP group will be untouchable..which is what I think the people designing it wanted to take into factor considdering they sail through the other trials with ease.

So I guess what Im saying is that yes. Tanks, Brutes, and scrappers are very popular, but the rest of us don't always want to play their game.

So either make it accessable to people who have other styles of play or just stop!

Funny thought though is if you tailored the pulse damage per AT...meaning less for squishies and (more/the same) for Tanks then I bet you would be furiously stormed by people who just can do your Keyes with Ease.

But then they will complain when the healers quit and cannot stop the disintigrate.

Ok...new thought.

No one will be happy ever!

1: The drag Keyes to the terminal mechanic is tedious and boring. You end up doing a lot of standing around waiting for Keyes to get there. Yes, you can greatly reduce the tedium by taking out as many terminals as possible, but if you have players who are new to the trial, or die too much, or don't have all their level shifts, or can't duo War Walkers, or....for whatever reason can't blitz the second and third reactor, you're in for a lot of tedium.

2: The Keyes fight has way too much crap going on at once. Entanglement just needs to go. On all the trials I've been on everybody just ignored it anyway, it's one more obnoxious graphical effect. The green stuff needs to be more visible. Time stop...what does it even do, other than annoy people? It certainly shouldn't affect people in the hospital.

don't run it? That's how i make it fun.

/JRanger to pretty much all your ideas, Snow. Keyes is meant to be difficult and require micro-management of the various tasks while having to deal with a constant threat from the antimatter pulse. With the amount of time the trial spent being run in both the I20 pre-beta and the normal I20.5 beta, if the developers hadn't meant for it to be the beast that it is, they would have changed it. They recognize that it's difficult (and thus, less people play it because it's not OMG easy like BAF), so they've appropriately increased the completion reward.

I personally enjoy the Keyes trial because it's trickier than both BAF and Lambda. It's a challenge. Well, not much of one, really, because it's usually won or lost during the last fight. So your point about the antimatter pulse doesn't really hold up. Sure, players are defeated. But you're level 50; debt does not matter at that point. Besides, between defenders and corruptors, self-heals from powersets and pools, Rebirth Incarnate abilities, and good old fashioned green inspirations, mitigating the antimatter damage is not hard to do. It's only difficult if you go running off on your own during the trial and get in over your head, or people foolishly continue to attack Anti-Matter during the reactor phase -- both of which should be nipped in the bud by the trial leader.

I agree with everything you said, Snow Globe.

My biggest beef with the trial still has to do with the "time freeze," though. If he's freezing time, how come the clock keeps going, his DoT attacks (and especially Disintigration) still do damage to us, and his stupid space ship can still nuke us with Obliteration?

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Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

I like your ideas Snow Globe. Perhaps I might be persuaded to do Keyes again with those suggestions in place.

If not, then I doubt that I will ever run Keyes again. If ever a trial was designed to make a so called semi godlike hero feel like the total opposite this is it.

Perhaps fun for tanks, but for squishies? No thanks.

I don't get why anyone thinks the trial is somehow easier for melee characters. Are you saying your squishy would be able to charge headlong into swarms of Warworks if not for that pulse? And you do realize that all the million overlapping "move out of the way" effects during the Anti-Matter fight are actually more detrimental to melee, since there aren't really a lot of places they can stand and still actually do anything. Heck, even the Apex TF has swarms of goons and disembodied swords melees can entertain themselves with if the area around the AV is under a "do not go in there" effect.

For the most part, I like Keyes. I think it's a challenging trial that requires a bit more coordination than the others at the moment. However, I realize there are a lot of people who dislike the trial or otherwise refuse to run it. Considering Lambda used to get a similar reaction but became fairly accepted (To the point of being almost as regularly run as the BAF despite generally being harder) by the time Keyes came out, it's a bit concerning that Keyes hasn't become similarly accepted now that a fourth trial is on the way. Thus, I think that the trial does, in fact, need a little adjustment in order to make it more appealing. Increasing the reward is certainly a step in the right direction, but there are some things that I think would make it more fun while still, for the most part, retaining the difficulty that made it worth two Empyrean merits instead of just one.

I think the most important thing to do (Because I think it may be the chief reason people seem to hate the trial) is to cut the anti-matter pulse's damage considerably. Players with low health and without self heals have a lot of trouble staying alive with the pulse going even if Anti-Matter is relatively uninjured. I haven't tried going for Anti-Anti-Matter, but considering it essentially involves keeping him at 10% health for most of the trial, I imagine that means that it'll come close to one-shotting characters constantly. Considering the damage is unresistable, impossible to dodge, and continuously happens throughout the trial, this means that only a select few characters will not be dying constantly. Personally, I would make the current starting strength of the pulse (lose 50% of your health every time it goes off) be the strongest the pulse can be. Perhaps it could start at 25% instead, which is generally easier to recover from even if your character is not set up for quickly recovering health. Heavy damage that cannot be avoided or resisted in any way is not fun, in my opinion. Looking aside from individual abilities to handle the pulse, it also limits the use of characters that provide resistance or defense to their league mates and puts a lot of pressure on characters with healing abilities that now have to run around and heal their league mates, who may be on a completely different level of the reactor.

I also agree that Bunker Buster and Anti-Anti-Matter probably shouldn't wait to be awarded until the end of the trial. It keeps the players wondering if they did it right throughout the last two phases for no particular reason.

I already like the fight with Anti-Matter himself, but I will say that Time Stop should phase the players as well as hold them. Otherwise, getting the "Avoids the Green Stuff" badge can end up being luck based as the Obliteration cannon hits players even as they're helpless due to Time Stop's effect. As for Disintegration, I think it's something that perhaps could use a better indicator but as it is now, it encourages a little awareness on the part of the person that's being disintegrated while encouraging the league to communicate. The fact that everyone is in the same area makes it fairly easy to reach the person to help them out, even if it's just passing them green inspirations. I'm fine whether they change it or not, really.

After having run this on several "good" teams, and several standard 'bring your favorite" teams (i.e. often mostly blasters, tanks, and scrappers) It seems fairly clear that this was designed at least partially to give healers a place again. The 70% unresistable, auto-hit blasts simply scream "you'll need green numbers here." But I hate to say it, this makes the trial needlessly difficult for a team without healing. It's also deadly to defense-based characters, especially without healing.

What I'd do: reduce the pulses' initial damage, so that it only ramps up when antimatter is damaged. This makes things easier on low-heal or no-heal teams playing smart, but gives full punishment to those pounding on him. make pulseshave high tohit, rather than auto hit, so that the defense-based characters have a way to stay unhurt, though it would be difficult.

Add a disintegration scrambler terminal to the final fight, far from the battle. Without healing, the disintegrated target can run to the terminal and get out of the death card.

All in all I'd say this would be the goal:
A full league, playing smart and of ANY archetype/powerset mixture, (including no ally healing powers, or even without buffs/debuffs) could conceievably make it through the entire trial WITHOUT DYING, should they play smart.

As others have said, it's fine as is.

The only thing I'd like to see is to have whoever is being Disintegrated show up in the trial UI so that the empaths/pain doms./thermals/etc know who to heal faster.

A timer for when the Disintegration will happen again would be nice too but...meh.

I would change the pulses to be 25% of current HP so you can't die to a pulse after a random crit/cone/aoe that you can't avoid.

• Less pulse damage.
• One less reactor drag (IE You only need Keyes for one reactor terminal thingy).
• Explain what the heck is going on with Entanglements.
• Give us temps to ward off some pulse damage, similar to the Hero Respec trial.

Keyes is already fun - and it's got one of the best cutscenes so far

I'd make it so that people don't split up and race all over the place, making it impossible for anyone to get healed by characters with healing powers (not that I ever see more than one character with healing powers per Keyes, anyway). Like too many other "challenging" things in the game, it's something where a few characters essentially do all the work and get all the fun and glory, while the rest die over and over and over again.

Now, if you carry a full tray of green inspirations, can solo a War Walker And Friends, and have full invisibility, it's fairly enjoyable. It also has a great Maniacal Villain Rant. On that note, it's one of the few points in the game where I actually feel like the antagonist is really a "supervillain."