Two minds about First Ward

I love First Ward. The Shadowed Paths are extremely cool, the varied atmospheres of the zone are all great in their own wzy, and the storylines are interesting and the new enemy groups are original and look great.

I hate First Ward. The enemy groups are annoying to fight and seemingly far too difficult for squishies, the NPCs spend an unbelievably long time waffling via multiple walls of text that make my eyes glaze over, I spend ages whittling bosses down, dying repeatedly only for them to 'give up' and grant me no xp, and the Street Hunt and zowie missions push me into contact with orange-level mobs that I can't reasonably beat.

It's the sharks that make it an overall win for me, though

Eco

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

So far, soloing it with a Traps Defender I love the place. It's an incredibly interesting zone with loads of rather interesting groups in interesting dynamics. Haven't found anything too difficult to fight yet personally, but I am a Trapper.

The one criticism I'd have is that Nobel Savage is too much of a Mary Sue on missions. He hits ridiculously hard and totally removes the challenge on a few missions.

My jaw actually dropped when I looked up while ninja-running through the shark infested ruins in the middle of a map and a giant shadow fell over me... (followed by all my End suddenly leeching from me as I frantically tried to escape).

Oh, the fact /sea is bugged is really annoying too, and the lack of teams in it is a bit disheartening for such a cool zone and storylines.

Agree with the posters above. Its not perfect, but its pretty darn close.

Some issues and observations:
1 - The seed GM, i have never seen anybody on X trying to take this down. Is the carrot no good, is the GM too hard, is X at EST prime time low on toons? I personally think its better if something is farmed than ignorned. See RWZ ship raid for example. I dont even know what the rewards for this GM are, but I assume they are poor since nobody bothers.

2 - Talking only missions. They need to replace these with cutscenes at the end of the previous mission. Yeah its more work, but go here and to talk this dude is lost on everybody when teaming. You pretty much have to solo First ward once just to know whats going on. The skip the cutscene tech from the BAF would be nice.

3 - Carrots vs Risk - First ward at 20-30 is harder than 8 man radios at 20-30 because of the mobs in first ward are stronger than council. This and problem 2 makes first ward not even close to optimal to level in and thus it will be hard to team up here once the newness of it is gone. Maybe a first ward XP bonus or something? I hate to see this zone empty.

My two primary problems in the zone:

1: It's murder on squishies.

2: The walls of text combined with ambush-o-rama is ****ING ANNOYING AS HELL! Running through it for the first time, I want to actually READ some of the dialog in these arcs. The problem is, the ambushes begin the minute you either:

1. Click on the contact
2. Or midway through the reading

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

One thing which struck me as odd, and irritating, was how often, a 'speak to me now' boss would speak lines in speech bubbles at the same time as guvi g me a briefing window with info. I was told it's so my team can get the bare bones of what's being discussed while I read the 4 or 5 walls o text. As a soloer, I don't much care for it.

As regards reading vs smbushes etc, at times I get the i pression that the devs dont playtest the arcs they write. It's like maybe one test team is told 'read all these bits of text and make sure they tell a story' and a quite different test team is told 'play this arc, ignore the text, just see if the mechanics work'

Separately, both sysyems work but together they're often annoying.

Eco

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

I've only run a few of the arcs in First Ward on my EM/EA Brute, but I really love the zone. I don't remember a lot of trouble with the mobs, but I also went in at like 24 so that may have made a difference. Haven't tried to take down the Seed, like most of you have said, times I've been there the population has been low.

I went in at 20 as a squishy controller, fire/time. I play at stock 0/0 and have not had a hard time at all. The few times I bit it was because I got overly ambitious and tried to take more mobs on then I could kill at a time. Simply being more reasonable got me through without a problem. I take it slow and easy and eat candy wherever possible, and use my vet reward attacks _all the time_. Screw containment and that junk. My vet powers do tons more damage. And holding something? Sorry, at this level, killing faster is better than dying slower. I only have so much end, and it goes quick.

1. I love First Ward. The construction and layout and ambience of the zone is awesome!

2. I soloed my time/beam defender because I wanted to read the missions and story arcs.

3. I hate First Ward and will never run through it again. The only reason I'll go is to get a specific badge or join someone who's teaming.

--NT

I played through First Ward starting at level 20, on a Mind/Psi Dom which makes it pretty easy on +0/x0. I only died a handful of times, mostly from getting careless, trying to stealth missions with Sleep and not paying attention. For the final encounter, I just downed a boatload of insps.

I thought the storyline was a pretty decent RPG game in parts (although I enjoyed the first half more than the second half), but maybe not such a great options for teams. Rather too many talkie missions chained together early on, and a fair few missions later where you have to bounce between contacts to talk to them, which drives me NUTS when I HAVE THEIR PHONE NUMBER. I would've liked the gamer guy a lot more if I hadn't had to keep running to his tower to see him.

yeah all the time I've played I've never seen anyone attempt to take down the Seed.

I think part of it is because it *requires* a coordinated effort, as big and out in the open it is, you won't see people just trying to dog pile it because you need to take out the Seedlings and then nail it.

And the relatively low population helps it too.

And ya, the reward doesn't seem stellar >> You get 5 merits, a badge, and a temporary +15 XP/InF boost for 30 minutes.

I mean, not bad, but it seems like a much bigger effort is required compared to some of the other GMs. Then again, I've never taken part in taking down a GM (Though I've only been in the game about 2 1/2 months. I've at least seen Kraken and Scrapyard >>)

Pretty much what Aura said. GM's in this game are fun to take down the first time, but after that the reward for fighting them isn't really worth the time it takes to fight them.

I had quit playing when GR was introduced, so I got to finish up the Going Rogue content and then travel to First Ward. From a role playing perspective, it amuses me that my character simply shrugged off the decision to become a villain or a hero and instead just ran off into the wilderness.

I’m glad I read this thread because I must admit, I’m having a bit of a love/hate relationship with it too.

On the plus side, the zone is utterly amazing. The art team have truly surpassed themselves creating a bleak yet varied zone with different environments and enemies. Extra credit definitely goes to the sound design for the noise that the Seed makes as it floats around. I’ve been happily travelling or talking to a contact when that noise rises across my speakers and I feel a chill knowing that it’s coming. Wonderfully creepy. I normally despair over the sound design in CoX but in this, they really have excelled. Also, the stories are good and I don’t feel like a complete twit all the time like I have done with some of the newer story arcs that have come out. I also like some of the challenges, such as capturing the Apparitions while still in their hosts. Makes you appreciate Brawl.

On the downside, the story to First Ward is actually quite simple and yet it seems to take forever to get to the meat of it: what are the Apparitions? What is to be done about them? I went through three, maybe four contacts fighting these foes before those questions got answered. The contacts are terribly verbose and I do believe that a good story editor could have cut down the waffle tremendously. I like a good story, I love the CoX world but I can’t help but think sometimes the writers need to trim some of the fluff. First target would be Papa Smurf in Ouroboros though for that.

Not sure about hard on squishies, I’ve been soloing my Kinetics/Sonic Defender through it with no real issues and as it is, I like a challenge every now and then. Too many parts of the game are a cakewalk these days.

However, I did not know that /sea was bugged. I was expecting the place to be crawling with teams but I haven’t seen one since I’ve been there. That puts paid to that mystery. I’d love to have a bash at fighting the Seed but like others, I’ve seen no-one fighting it or even rounding up teams. Perhaps the difficulty in getting a team in FW is the problem here.

I've gone through First Ward twice now... Once solo with a claws Stalker and once as the support half of an SJ Stalker/Time Defender duo. I didn't find it excessively difficult with either character, but there are definitely some annoying bits.

The agressive NPCs in the graveyard full of distractions is certainly one... Officer Orb being completely unable to follow my Stalker in Hide was another... The constant ambushes are just something I've gotten used to (They seem to be the default mission design in Praetoria. <_<), but having them run up on me before I was even half-way through reading the first of several text screens was *not* a Good Thing... And, yeah. I got a little weary of having to dodge the space-whale and his vicious little seedling friends while I flew back and forth between the tower and the multiple people who were determined to send me there over and over and over again.

That said, I liked the story itself. The sharks rule and the zone has an incredible amount of detail in it... The little fish jumping in the shallows, the hollow Seed shell (With a badge in it! XD) and the tumbleweeds that we can actually knock around and play with are all personal favorites. I squeed about all of those things when I found them.

I really enjoyed the first ward, but because of the way it ended, I can't play the character I ran through the arcs again, not until I can do something to fix things.

I don't need to make the first ward perfect, I don't need to solve all the problems, but I need at least one more mission for Katie.

Katie might need to be still in the asylum for the Mother Mayhem Trial