What are you expecting for a solo Incarnate path?

There's also the balance problems that having such a large selection of powers causes - like they have to make content that's more challenging that the current level 50 content, but not so challenging that some ATs and power sets won't be able to solo it, otherwise that could have the effect of some of those players feeling that the game was telling them they had the "wrong" build or AT to solo with.
Trapdoor and Hero 1 on the Mender Ramiel arc are good examples of boss encounters that are easy for some people, but almost imposisble fro others.

Honestly the more I think about this the more interested I am in seeing what they come up with.

It will be very easy for them to come up with something that's too hard for new out of the gate 50s or too easy for tier-ed to the gills Incarnates. Not to mention the AT issues you just mentioned.

Will be interesting to see how they do it.

I think that the AT issue is going to be the biggy. There's just so much variation that making something to challenge an IO'd Scrapper but that is also doable with an SO'd Defender. The general solution is to make things that challenge the player without increasing the numerical challenge but that is tricky to do without making it either gimmicky or trivial (the BM fight in Apex is a good example, the blue spots force you to move and think about positioning).

Yeah, THAT's a good example, and more accepted in terms of the type of difficulty than what Trapdoor is/was.

However, that's almost a given, as you can't do the BM fight in Apex solo . . . well you can, but to be able to even get access to it, it REQUIRES a team.

Had trapdoor REQUIRED a team from the beginning there might have been less ******** about it.

Something scaled down like avoiding what AntiMatter does vs. what the Avatar of Hamidon does?

The avatar fight is a straight up stats fight. Either you have enough confuse protection, debuff and damage to take him down or you don't.

For Antimatter you still do need damage and debuff, but there is also situational awareness.

I'm not sure how they will be able to do it for solo players though.

Maybe, although personally I think the problem with Trapdoor was mostly that the strategy required was unclear. The actual method of killing the clones to slow his regen and (possibly) dragging him into lava for more damage is a reasonably interesting fight but it is not really presented well in game. Once you know the trick Trapdoor is a pretty easy fight (for reference, I did it on an SO'd TA/A Defender using only my Secondary powers, Pool powers and inspirations, and no primary or temp powers).

The real challenge in designing this sort of content is communicating it to the player and to be honest the devs have not shown a lot of skill at that.

No, the Avatar is a stats/awareness hybrid fight. You must have the stats, but even with the stats you can fail if people don't pay attention to the other indicators.

If they make missions with fights that are situational awareness ONLY, or with Very minor stat requirements (that can be made up with Inspirations, or even some kind of buff that you receive unless you have a certain number of +levels perhaps), it will solve this problem.

They absolutely need to do this, otherwise teams will steamroll the "solo path" and it will be glacially slow for soloists to compensate.

Or there might have been more.

Doing that runs the risk of reducing replayability.

You've done the game with Mario, what's the point of redoing the same content with Luigi if the only difference is the color of your hat.

The more focused the task is on player skill and a gimmick, the less different the experience is on different characters. I'd rather an experience that made my broadsword scrapper feel different than my katana scrapper than one that focused on jumping away from patches that made my tank and blaster play fundamentally the same.

Are you responding to the right thing? Eve was talking about making it scale with team size, and you seem to be talking about the situational awareness (dodge the blue patch) stuff.

I'm not sure how making it scale would reduce playability.

It looks like it was a response to both together. Adding more gimmicks for more players.

One way of doing this would be to build climactic encounters around a specific Incarnate ability, while handing each player an emergency substitute for said ability.

For instance: you have an encounter that "assumes" the player has Judgement. Every time Judgement should be recharged, an ambush of trash mobs arrives at the location of the main foe. Now, if you have enough strong AoE or the right tactics (maybe pulling the main foe out of the encounter area) you can give yourself an advantage. In addition, if you click some glowies elsewhere on the map, you can give yourself a temp version of Judgement with a certain number of charges.

A player that is built 'wrong' and doesn't figure out the right tactics may hit a wall, but if they explore the mission, they will find the temp power. In addition, they can also just go and redo the 'you only have alpha unlocked' solo content, which should allow them to earn and slot a Judgement power.

If you for some reason don't want the Judgement power, you go down a different story branch and avoid the Judgement Battle completely.

The Judgement encounter would feel very different for your Tanker and Blaster, but I'm not sure what kind of encounter differences are going to make Broadsword and Katana feel different. Broadsword and Mace, maybe.

EDIT:
Another way of working this is to have elements of a given encounter that are random (or which depend on choices made previously by the player). For instance the climactic encounter of a mission could randomly be a blaster version, tanker version, or controller version of the same foe, either randomly or based on what glowies the player activates/destroys before spawning him. For example, maybe you examine wreckage in his wake, and based on the dialogue tree choices you make, you 'discover' that he is a living inferno, a living juggernaut, or a living nightmare.

As far as I know, the tech exists to do that now, although it might be a bit kludgey in execution. They already have tech that scales EBs up to AVs based on team size, and certain foes that only spawn based on your Archetype.

Another choice would be to time gate certain rewards.

Datamining can tell them the average speed at which rewards are earned in iTrials by the average player in a 20 hour period. They then time gate certain drops in the solo path to a proper percentage of the above.

Of course, I think the iTrial rewards should be time gated also. Repeating the same content should be rewarding, but not so rewarding that it encourages burnout.

This is what worries me, to be honest. My scrapper is only partially IO'd out. I had left the game before I finished and now don't even remember where I was going with the build now and she feels a bit broken and taking more damage and missing more than I remember.

Honoree wiped the floor with her several times in the Ramiel arc until I just said Screw It and popped a bunch of purples and oranges and straight out dps'd him down. Even then, it was touch and go. And he was only EB level. =/

I'm not even bothering unlocking the Incarnate stuff with my other Heroes. They're only using generic IO's or SO's for the most part and if my scrapper had so many problems, there's likely no way my other alts can do it solo.

If the solo Incarnate stuff starts out at a much higher level difficulty than that, ie making us deal with AV level mobs, that's pretty much beyond my woefully lacking theorycrafting attempts.

That is really, really hard to do. Or rather, its really really hard to do correctly.

NPC helpers can help to an extent, but they aren't a panacea and its different in the end game. In the standard content, helper NPCs can be very powerful because they are used sparingly. They can practically solo the content themselves, and that's fine because in the standard content that's not a big deal. But in the incarnate solo path, if the player isn't doing most or all of the heavy lifting, its a meaningless trajectory.

The only way I can see making a meaningfully interesting (in terms of difficulty) solo path that is actually soloable is to make every mission have a quick and hard path, and a slow and easy path, and let the player decide how steeply uphill they wish to go. Sort of like farming for EoEs, you could make the incarnate solo path something where its extremely difficult, but there are ways to spend time gathering resources that will make it easier. If that gathering must be done by the soloer themselves and the work cannot in any way be transferred, everyone could solo at the pace they are capable of soloing at: more powerful characters quicker, less powerful characters slower. And separate from raw power, if a mission requires something you don't have, there should be ways to earn it with side tasks.

In effect, rather than scaling the critters with gimmicks, you leave them at full strength and let the players scale themselves upward with gimmicks instead. Temp powers, special buffs, ultimate inspirations, there are lots of ways to allow players to temporarily build up enough power to take on a specific task solo.

That takes a lot of load off of the game engine to try to scale content upward for teams. Instead it only has to scale content upward in simple ways, and the players scale themselves upward in more complex and optional ways, and the difficulty ramp meets in the middle.

Unlocking NPC helpers could be one way for solo players to scale themselves upward to face harder tasks, but it can't be the only way or even the primary way in most cases, because it detracts too much from the player actually accomplishing anything.

I think that depends on how they're unlocked - like if the unlocking is based on something quite challenging - like getting a Shivan when you solo the meteorites and gun turrets/bunker, then the unlock becomes an achievement, and the NPC helper is just a bonus from that achievement.

you do realize you can spend 5 astral merits to get a certificate that lets you unlock the Alpha slot and completely skip the Mender Remiel arc on other characters, right? And it might take a bit, but if you don't want to run trials, you can run the SSAs and get Astral merits.


As for Blue Steel, the Devs said there's the potential to fight him. I'm thinking it might be a Zone event like in Praetoria, where you have a choice of how to do the event and one side ends with you fighting Blue Steel.

The issue is not the act of unlocking, but what the NPCs do when they are unlocked. If the solution to most problems is "find someone else that can do it for you" that will get old pretty fast. It won't seem like progress to most players if their trajectory through the solo incarnate path was mostly unleashing NPCs against the content.