What would you do to make Keyes fun?

Just ran a Bunker Buster/Avoid Green Stuff attempt on Pinnacle (we got Buster).

Trial starts out fun, great opening monologue and has a brisk pace but really breaks down around the third time you have to clear a reactor; if you didn't have to drag Anti-Matter around for two reactors it might be a little more palatable. The pulse gets old after the first few minutes as well, not sure how you can allay that without lowering the pulse damage or adding a little more time between pulses without making the encounter more trivial.

Overall it is fun, just seems a lot more tedious than the other two and a lot more work than the other two as well.

Two changes would have to happen for me to touch Keyes.

1. The pulse has to go. Period. That's not "challenge", it's fake difficulty - making the game arbitrarily hard by adding the biggest DoT effect in any MMO on the market. This leads to a lot of RNG deaths when coupled with all the other damage effects flying around throughout the trial, which go directly against any concept of "fun".

2. The timefreeze and Keyes' other gimmicks need to lock each other out. Again, RNG deaths and no fun to be had. The number of mechanics in the fight is fine, IMO, but randomly screwing people out of badges and whatnot by combining them in unsurvivable chains is anything but.

I'd just be happy to see the Pulse go. That's not challenge, not in the slightest. It's just cheap. And cheap is never fun (in games)

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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.

You know, I'm confused by the fact that people are angry with the Keyes fight. I've never died when fighting him. (obliteration beam is easily avoided, entanglements are weak and disintegrate is easily solved by greens)

The problems I've had has always been with lack of tanking skills.

I've done the Keyes trial exactly one time, on launch day, on Virtue, using my heavily IO'd and Incarnate-slotted storm/elec/elec defender. Skjor is simply a monster, as some of you may have seen if we've teamed. She's designed and played as my card-carrying thunder goddess, and she lives up to that billing.

We succeeded at the Keyes trial easily, despite most of us going through it for the very first time in that run, having skipped the beta for once. We had leadership who communicated what we were looking for at each stage of the game and we knew where to go and what to do/not do. Hell, I don't think anyone even died once it came time to fight Keyes himself.

For more than a few of us, it wasn't fun though. At all.

I can accept being defeated by masses of enemies or powerful AVs. I can accept that my characters aren't really meant to do the things they often do, and that I can get in over my head with them if I'm not paying attention. I can accept that Skjor can be defeated if I'm not bringing my "A" game that day (and sometimes even when I am). That's part of the game.

What wasn't fun was exiting the hospital only to lose half of my hit points on several occasions to auto-hit, unresisted pulses of damage. Or being hit while in the Hospital. Or being held while in the supposedly safe zone of the Hospital.

It told me that the devs realized too late (or didn't realize at all?) that they'd make us completely OP'd with the use of Incarnate powers and now had to resort to cheating and doing things outside the game mechanics to provide a challenge. If they have to do things that break the game's previously established rules to create any kind of challenge for players, they've made some egregious errors long before reaching this point IMO.

As far as raising the rewards goes, if it's less than triple-digit Emps (yeah, seriously, call me when it's awarding 100+ and maybe I'll join a few), I won't do this Trial again without a really good reason. I play to have fun and for me, this ain't it.

I see tons of BAFs and LAMs being run but I rarely see anyone on my server attempting Keyes. I did keys twice when it first came out and have not since then.