Level 53 and weaker than a Hellion

I must admit, I had to do a double take at the TPN - a major WTF, then laughed out loud. Then I scratched my head and looked at what was going on.

Many months playing at level 50, slotting IOs and being the best I can be, then getting three level shifts as an incarnate... only to find that civilians in Praetoria can defeat me by throwing a rock at me.

Seriously? Hellion's don't get defeated by civvies in Primal Earth but the civvies from Praetoria get to beat those who will inherit the legacy of Statesman with a bit of mental mumbo jumbo from a seer and a rock.

The very best of Primal Earth, laid low with a stone. It's like David & Goliath in reverse, where we are the bad guys. Worse, it's totally immersion breaking - because half a dozen of these mad mentalists and a few Warworks in Atlas and the heroes of PE are toast. Game over.

This to me leapt off the page as one of the singularly worst pieces of story telling in the game and is laughably ludicrous. It makes all our journey from level one to Incarnate almost superfluous.

Let's just go back to the old Outbreak and let the Contaminated throw a few rocks at us til we die. That'll save a whole lot of bother!

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=258913

Fear the [rock].

Nothin' beats rock.

Quote:

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

And can't you just see this coming, then??




NEW IN THE PARAGON MARKET!

The PAPER POWER!

The only power that can defeat the Rock thrown by those helped by the Mad Mentalists!

1600 Points (Bargain!)

Coming soon-- the SCISSORS POWER!

Ah, but see, the rocks are empowered by the Well. So therefore it totally makes sense.

It is really stupid. Maybe there's some in-game explanation for the civilians being so ludicrously overpowered? Do the Mentalists imbue them with Incarnate power, maybe?

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."

You have 6 pyshics simul-attacking you pretty much negating any soft-cap Defense you have. So... in those situations, rocks and fire are bad.

I've been staunchly against investing in Incarnate powers that did not fit the specific character's that I was playing. My Ice Blaster's concept has no room for any Destiny nor Lore powers, so I have been a (at best) +1 on every trial so far. The TPN trial gave me a shock of reality: to craft the Destiny and Lore slot powers purely for the level shift (never using them) because I was dying at the hands of Praetorians. And not even an Incarnate-Potion-Powered-Marauder, no, regular ol' citizens were taking a chunk of my health (and still are even being +3 now).

I happen to very much like the TPN trial, considering I am not a huge fan of Incarnate trials in general. I can hop on one once a week and make nice progress towards unlocking slots and crafting powers. But it is bad enough to be smacked around by the same guy I smack around in tip missions, but I also lose a chunk of xp to a rock and a Molotov cocktail?! Yeah, THAT'S making me feel like I have progressed in power...

*picks up and analyzes a bottle of Enriche the TPN civilians were drinking just before they beat up the latest group of Primal Incarnates*

"It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into their precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works."

I approve of this thread.

While I totally agree with the sentiment that the civilians should do less damage than they do now; part of the reason why they hurt so much is that the 6 Telepathists combine to do like -60% def. debuff zone wide.

So no one has any defense to speak of (that is if the Telepathists are out for any period of time).

I personally see it as the closest way the game can represent the power of an angry mob. The engine can't even come close to displaying a true mob of hundreds or even thousands of individuals.

Also, we're in Cole's back yard, at a facility founded by Tilman. There's probably a lot more to those civilians than what meets the eye.

As for power Incarnate Power concepts, I've had no problems conceptualizing any of the incarnate abilities into my 50's. I even have a pretty good idea how my low-level characters will evolve into their Incarnate abilities. Since we're not directly drinking from the Well, there's some handwavium that can be used to explain where our advanced powers are coming from. It's speculated that these powers arecoming indirectly from the Well, but that theory could be wrong. I envision it as tapping into some other source of power, a source further-up the chain than even the Well itself. But since we're bypassing the Well, we're forming our own link with that power, and thus how it's taking us much longer to gain it, whatever it is.

I can't think of any other MMO's that are exempt from this, and many that have this problem even worse - like a recently released MMO in a galaxy far-far away has even worse immersion-breaking moments, especially with the light-stick wielding professions.

At least CoX doesn't break immersion nearly as much as that other game. That's why I'm here and not there.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane This is more of the same problem that's plagued the game from day one. There's no sense of power progression, the devs insist making the mundane threatening to high level superheroes and common sense is tossed out. At level 25 I can stand in front of an anti-aircraft turret and shrug it off, but guys with swords can still cut me up. At level 50, they pit us against non-powered humans with guns and blue cowboy hats. Getting hit by someone with superhuman strength that's powerful enough to shake the earth by stomping their foot should turn them into a fine red mist with one punch, but we can't even knock them over half of the time. An Incarnate 'demigod' gets taken out by a rock thrown by some clod. And so on, and so on. That is BULL**** The developers are unwilling to design suitable, cosmic scale threats for Incarnates, so they resort to cheating mechanics, uber-powerful guard towers, War Walkers with bloated HP and regeneration and irate grandmas throwing stones. And then they feed us baloney like Director 11 and I'm absolutely sick of it. Listen, if Praetoria wants to win the war, just take whatever non-targetable, invincible, invisible weapon they have on the guard towers at the BAF, mount it on treads and roll it into Atlas Park. I'm sorry, but the promise of Incarnates was to deliver us content worthy of demigods, but it's more of the same mentality that sends me against blue cowboys, but this time with added cheating mechanics and dodging of colorful puddles. That's what I thought the whole point of making us Incarnate demigods, so we would be operating on a grander scale, but I guess the point was a drawn out, pointless 'war' with irate Praetorian citizen/sheep beaning us to death with rocks and running from guard towers instead of smashing them to atoms.

Can you smell what the ROCK is cooking!?!?!

What's so outrageously bogus about getting one-shotted by a civilian is that a few seconds later we're in the building shrugging off energy blasts and RPGs while still "Pacified."

If the Telepathists have debuffed us so terribly that simple rocks can kill us instantly, the RPGs the IDF are launching at us should be rending our constituent atoms to plasma, leaving us not merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.

I'm confused. The civilians are killing you?

I've run the TPN probably a half dozen times and the civilians barely hurt me at all. Granted, I'm on a tank but someone said they were two shotting tanks.

Are you letting telepathists stack?

Well, they ARE the 99%.