Going Rogue - a year later

I love GR from head to toe
Only a few little cosmetic things dissapointed me:
Destroyers, hate those costumes. Compared to the other GR enemies they are a running joke.
Costumes for some NPCs and contacts. I think there should be more variety and better taste to design them.
Also, would had love new looks for Dominatrix, Diabolique, Anti-Matter, Chimera, and better looks for Bobcat or Black Swan.
The other upgraded Praetorians look awesome (Mother Mayhem, Nightstar, Neuron...)

I hardly ever use Praetoria anymore as it blocks me from getting two Mayhem missions.

Nice shiny content though.

There is also the fact that Praetoria is a horrible place for new players just starting in the City of Universe to start in. There are so many references to Primal versions of characters that they would never really get it on the same level as someone who has played blueside for even a few weeks.

I'm not saying veteran players are better than n00bies, but in this case, Praetoria is written as one big "What If?" Marvel-style so thoroughly that having prior knowledge of the characters involved is practically required.

Until villainside gets mayhems in oroboros, I am not making another vside praetorian.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neuronia I hardly ever use Praetoria anymore as it blocks me from getting two Mayhem missions. Nice shiny content though.

Now it was pointed out to me by someone (I think Arcanaville) that my 'theory' as to why we're going the Freemium route now, which was that Going Rogue failed to pull in the numbers expected, was dismissed because the devs have been planning Freedom along with Going Rogue.

Fragmenting the player base for a THIRD time was a silly move and like others I honestly believe Praetoria was meant to be a 40-50 Expansion when originally designed. It fell short because it WAS unfinished, Going Rogue was meant to have the Incarnate system in place.

Judging by what appeared on Test during a muck up where Beta players could access the 'closed' Test server and see the Incarnate powers up to the ones we have now (Alpha, Lore, Judgement, Destiny, Interface) well before they were announced that they system itself was ready to go but a design choice at the last minute decided they wanted to be more like other MMOs and include endgame grinding of certain raids.

The Praetorian mobs are incredibly poorly tuned for low level, as mentioned, mobs with mez protection while Controllers and Dominators still only have access to single target holds and little else, huge AoE damage well before things like Super Reflexes gets its AoE defense. Psi users out the wazzoo well before sets with a weakness to Psi have the HP to soak a few attacks before slumping to the ground.

The mobs are blatently tuned for endgame and then scaled down, badly.

I will say that even the endgame content feels rushed, releasing with only 2 raids was a pretty poor idea since now everyone and their dog has mastered those two raids, why bother doing the more difficult Keyes and Underground when you can do a BAF and Lambda with ease. It's all very well going "Oooh these are HARD, yeah, for teh hardcore elites playas yeah!" but when you've got 2 other trials that have been out long enough for the general population to have all it needs to know burnt into its memory, its not going to matter how 'hardcore' you make the 2 new raids, most won't do them more than once accept for badges.

You know its telling, when asked about the fact we're not getting new Incarnate slots for what seems like quite a while now and the person who has tier 4 in every slot sees no reason to run the trials anymore, Zwill and Dark Watcher responded simply, "haven't you unlocked everything? Go unlock more stuff!"

Well I'm in that boat, I have ONE character I'm making an Incarnate, I don't WANT to unlock more stuff, I'm perfectly happy with the tier 4's she has. It was a big enough pain in the backside to get her to that stage, you can bugger off if you think I want to go through that 20 times to every single tier 4. I got what I wanted out of the costume rewards in the very first day they were released, I have no interest in grinding out content for the Ascension armour so that means I'm simply not playing the Incarnate content, adding new trials does absolutely nothing for me.

Issue 21 as a whole is a 'meh' for me, it's not got new Incarnate slots, it's got 20-30 content in it which I may run...twice...if I'm levelling up an alt since I know that they're using Praetorian mobs and thus they will be a PITA to fight due to overtuning. The sets I want either aren't ready yet (Titan Weapons) or are being held back from some odd reason despite being ready to go (Street Justice), which leaves Beam Rifle...which I was very 'meh' to and Time manipulation...which is a buff/debuff set when I rarely play ATs that use that.

Issue 21 brings me, personally, nothing.

Erm...you do realise there was a good...what was it...six months after the release of the Alpha slot before we actually saw anything that used those locations right?

That's six months of planning to make the two new trials. So yes, it was a design descision to pull the Incarnate content they had planned in order to delay to add raids and then look at what they could use to make raids from, so they pick the BAF, which actually does look like a raid zone (big, sealed off from eveywhere else etc.) and then Lambda which was just background scenery for the most part until it was given a fully fleshed out story by the raid.

Infact I wouldn't be surprised if originally it was all based around normal team sized content and not huge multi-team raids.

GR, I still think it was a real dumb idea to make an expansion low levels.. huh? the part of the game people get threw in a weekend and I'm being generous. I probably would have loved it if it was 40-50 content.

As it stands the only reason I bought GR was cause it was the only way I could access incarnate stuff. Side switching is nice too.