What are you expecting for a solo Incarnate path?

Never said I want easy.

There is challenging, and then there is chipping away slowly at a granite block while the enemy drops you to 1/10th your health in one hit. Honoree is little more than an example of the bag of HP's that does massive damage and there's nothing you can do about it to mitigate short of popping insps and praying for the best. That type of boss is a nod back to the old school triad of tank, healer, dps where someone soaks up damage, gets healed back up and the rest dps.

IMO, challenging in a solo setting would be finding what works to avoid said damage while still being effective against him. Finding a weakness, so to speak. Honoree has no such weakness that I saw. He can even fly quickly to close if you try to kite and he seems to break CC so quickly, it's ridiculous. For every advantage an AT has, he seems to have an 'I win' counter to it. Those type of encounters feel like slamming your head against a brick wall over and over to knock it down because you have no tools.

Thanks to the ridiculous amount of portals that start out active in the room, as noted by those above me, you often cannot even pull him without dragging multiple Rikti. So now, you have a whole bunch of highly damage resistant mobs pinging you in addition to the EB and since Rikti all have highly dangerous ranged attacks with stuns and melee knockdowns, even if you manage to CC some of them, you're still screwed in many cases because some AT's have little or no way to handle such a barrage.

If you're going to throw massive amounts of adds at us, then make the EB a bit on the squishy side to accommodate, and vice versa. Honoree is so difficult on his own that Rikti pouring out of active portals feels downright sadistic and overkill. I'm talking from the solo perspective, mind you. A team has many tools in the form of varied AT powers to handle boss + adds. A soloist has much fewer options so a challenge to them is another animal entirely.

I really don't feel 'kill a few adds and die, buy more insps then rezone and kill a few more adds and die, buy more insps and rezone and then try to down the boss' is much of a strategy, is it? It is a strategy, granted, but it's not a good one and I just feel grateful the encounter is over and done once it's finished and that's not really a good feeling to me.

Yeah, thats what we ended up doing because my tank was teamed with a blaster. But my problem with that encounter is that it is was harder with two. Solo I could run in and stand in the middle of the group fighting the 17-at-a-time that would notice me. But if I did that and my blaster friend joined in, he would get the rest that were currently tanker-blind. So the only become snipe-pull

For any other situation it would be a valid tactic for the tank to grab all the attention and the blaster to snipe or nuke from a safe distance as they felt appropriate. But in this situation that would fail. And fail NOT because the tactic was suddenly bad but because an artificial mechanic made it so. I consider that bad design.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

If you have a confuse, confusing a portal will confuse all Rikti it spawned - The Honoree cannot be confused, but Holtz can (and should).

Originally Posted by Shubbie Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I disagree. I think it is always a bad tactic to blast a spawn that is double the aggro cap of the tank. I would target through the tank and make sure my running shoes are on. Or use the good old fashioned pull the buggers to me tactic, which although runs counter to tank and spank, is at least as old and valid a tactic as tank and spank.

Honestly, I feel almost opposite. I tend to find that most MMOs give this feeling, just to varying degrees.

My Fury Druid in [game name omitted] can poor out damage and survive things that are very reminiscent of CoH.

My Jedi Consular/Sith Warrior in [game name omitted, but I bet you can guess ] feel very much like their movie counterparts.

My Sorcery Healer in [game name omitted] can lose to Random Mook 3918732 though. Darn SOE.

Or apparently cross dressing is allowed in the upper echelons of Rikti society

How would targeting through the tank help?

Sith Warrior, maybe, but I don't really find the Jedi mature into "epic" classes. They are the Peacebringers to the Sith's Warshades.

Neither *ever* reach the ridiculous levels of power we do here, or come even close. A Katana/Invuln scrapper is probably, relative to content, three times stronger than even the tankerish force-based classes. You scrapper-lock in that game, and given how health recovery works you're going to be calling the drones in no time.

Well for one, Hopefully anything I blast he already has aggroed. The key part is the running shoes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09n0qd_n4c0

Check out 2:30-2:41. That was me last weekend!

Learn 2 Sage!

Hmm.

I'd say.

1 repeatable contact for heroes, 1 for villains, with 5-6 different missions (not the *3* First Ward had for each 'alignment' contact) mobs can drop shards/threads, mission completion rewards a thread or three.

1 4-5 contact zone arc, each with 4-8 missions apiece. 3/4 of them offer Astrals for completing the arc finale, the remainder (the final contact arc or two) offer an Emp or 2 for completion. The finales also contain EBs that can drop salvage. Maaaybe optional objectives within missions that can offer rewards, but making them somewhat difficult (Ex: 4 min. Timer at mission start, if you complet the objective, get an Astral, but it has no bearing on mission completion/failure otherwise).

1 Giant Monster that offers a badge and either an astral or an Emp once per day.

1 zone event with a choice between hero or villain with a rewards table for completion.

A co-op task force

Someone has clearly never watched the Original Clone Wars cartoon.
The one where Yoda pulls LARGE SPACE SHIPS OUT OF THE SKY AND SMASHES THEM TOGETHER, or Mace Windu using FORCE HEAD CRUSH JUDGEMENT ON AN ARMY OF DROIDS THEN SWEEPING THEM ASIDE.

Admittedly, some people critique that Cartoon as being way too over-the-top for Star Wars and being the Exalted to Star Wars' DnD 3.5.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Clearly. My point was that it is a good strategy right up until the tank hits the aggro cap, which is an artificial game cap and not something we should need to know about. For most of the game you don't need to know about it but this mission seriously breaks the spawn rules. In fact its a fine strategy for above the aggro cap too, its just that these spawns are so far above the cap that the slightest aggro from the Blaster drags 17 for him to deal with and there's nothing the tank can do.

I don't object to artificial game caps per se, but I think this one is bad for the game because in this particular situation it makes Duo'ing harder than soloing. Its one of those things that exists to stop power leveling but makes the game worse for those of us that are trying to play the game "normally". I always felt the AoE caps were enough. This was implemented back in the days when there were 3 fixes for everything but 1 would do

Also your tactic of targeting through the tank would only work if your blaster limited him/herself to single target and I am not sure even then. So you are left with pulling. Meh.

No problem with that either. But I'd rather it was because of some "real" environmental condition rather than because an "artificial" threshold has been breached.

Please excuse the use of "real" and "artificial" in a discussion about computer-make-believe but I am sure you all know what I mean

First and foremost, something I can actually DO while solo without having my intelligence insulted with lrn2ply or rtfm. That's a starting point which has to happen if anything past that point will ever work.

Assuming the solo content isn't designed to exclude most solo players anyway (fingers crossed), what I want beyond that is at least enough content for me to unlock the slots it covers before I run out. Ideally, I'd like to see enough content to get me at least to T1 in those slots, but that's being optimistic.

Beyond that, I'd like to see both repeatable content of a Paper->Mayhem variety or Tip->Alignment variety, plus the ability to repeat arcs I've already run, including Ramiel's.

Overall, I'd like to see this content give me a path to T1 Incarnate boots in most if not all slots fairly easily and quickly, access to T2 in a reasonable amount of time with repetition, access to T3 in a fairly long amount of time comparable to progress through the high levels, and access to T4 either not at all or with the same accessibility as rares if not purples. I'm trying to not be greedy here.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

So it is more difficult for you to duo it, but I am pretty sure the blaster was happy to have you there. I think it would take much different tactics for the blaster to manage the room solo than for him to just pull.

Like inferno hitting the target cap even if there are 50 mobs in range?