Level 53 and weaker than a Hellion

Very true. I'm not a powergamer nor are any of my RP characters 'uber godlike beings' who expect to faceroll every encounter they come across. I like a challenge and it's the nature of the game to be challenged at every level of power.

A civillian with a rock is not a challenge. Even one with a team of psychics who can somehow cause my armour to feel very doubtful of itself. The only time I expect to be taken down by an office worker with a rock is somewhere before level 10 and even then, characters can take a shotgun blast to the face and walk away. The civillians in this trial should be a nuisance, nothing more.

People keep on bringing up comic book lore as an excuse for accepting these trials as they are but which of these scenarios really warrants a team of 24 Incarnates?

1) A mental institution with a host of armoured guards.
2) A military facility and a big guy with an energy drink.
3) A madman powered by three nuclear reactors.
4) A primal demigod of nature that's virtually conquered the planet.
5) A newsroom, a jumped up pistoleer and a horde of civillians with rocks.
6) Another mental institution with a number of powerful psychics.

Out of all of them, only Keyes and the Underground sound like scenarios where more than a small team would be needed. If we can't be expected to fight Galactus every day, then at least scale the teams needed to the apparent threat. Slapping a lame excuse on such as 'But they're Well empowered!' does not make them more epic.

The only time I see teams of 24 heroes fighting someone in comics tends to be for the real world ending type scenarios. Before Incarnates, the only time you really needed a huge team was for either a Hamidon Raid or more recently, the Cathedral of Pain. Both of which were against huge world threats.

I have to agree with the poster who pointed out that the monster in the new tutorial looks and sounds far more epic and threatening than anything in the Incarnate Trials so far (Underground perhaps excluded). It's a shame and I really hope to see a change soon because as I said, I want to like them.

I'm surprised that Lex Luthor hasn't pulled something of this magnitude already; especially under the Public Enemies train of thought:

Using normals as both meat-shields and coup de gras while a couple of heavies pin Supes down with Kryptonite beams.


There are discrepancies between solo and team titled comics; there will be discrepancies here.

The big picture is that, combined, this is a threat to two worlds. And trust me, I understand that 24 seems to be a big number for the threat presented but:

In time, that number can be decreased (with experience (learning to walk and all)

Mechanics and balance dictate creating a challenge that a normal sized team can't learn to steamroll

[CoX population doesn't seem to want to (or can't handle) WW level raiding difficulty]

Yes, precisely, except that the first line never happened. The character just gets defeated by a normal rock, thrown by a normal person, with no explanation presented, and fans are left scratching their heads as to how or why until they read the letter column on the last page. Sure, the explanation is there, in the very same issue, but only if you go looking for it specifically.

But that's the problem. If the threat presented seems too small for the number of people required to tackle it, then that's a failure of presentation. Considering the story can be whatever the writers write it to be, there's really no excuse for presentation failures.

Zwill insists that the writers always have a reason for what they're doing, and I can't really argue that particular point. But one must then ask the question - what, exactly, is this purpose behind the Incarnate Trials? Because I fear there is a growing disconnect with what players expect their progression to resemble and what the writers feel progression should look like.

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.

Please don't change the context of what I'm saying by omission (24 is a big number but not for a bunch of newbie Incarnates; the fact is that you don't need 24 once you come out of your waterwings)

Anyhoo:

I'm more inclined to think that part of it is the intentionally incremental Incarnate progression vs. the player expectations of what that progressions should be.

The Devs want to release this a little at a time; moving fledgling Incarnates towards their realized potential - Players think they're full fledged Incarnates already; criticizing accordingly.

I think one of the biggest errors they made with the Incarnate content was assuming that its playerbase wanted anything incrementally; especially at the increments they are wanting to follow. (Proven by the popularity of PLing and the extents players were willing to go to get T4s despite the knowledge that more options were in the works.)

Personally, I think the Dev focus should've been more solo and small team Incarnate arcs (from a variety of story lines) to ease people into the system (with Trials being released less frequently as longer, harder challenge content instead of them being the core content) and I think that played heavily on how the story came out.

However, with all the Praetoria-hate and want-it-NOW-incarnate drek I've seen on the forums; I can understand how a development team would feel pressure to rush things along... and it shows.

Finally, the writing is only a small part of the presentation; writers don't create the[] story then watch as gameplay spontaneously shoots out of their posterior. It's a mixed process that involves a lot of things within a short amount of time. Sometimes it gels together nicely... sometimes it doesn't.

Nothing worth getting the torches and pitchforks out over.

I would soooo buy it if it lets me make something like this character.

Well that's easy to fix, just make sure the ones doing the defense draining are blabbing about it, so that the super-above-god-player-immortals stand a chance against the peasants.

Thanks! If you want cheesecake magic, though, you oughta see how fast I can make one disappear...

Yes, that has been one of the primary requests for fixing the situation throughout this thread, as far as I've seen.

I'm going to come down on the side of "don't want".

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

I take offense at this statement. This is how an abundance of POOR heroic fiction works.

Stargate, specifically the Ori Storyline of the last season on the Air: I stopped watching because it was plainly clear that one miserable MacGuffin would make the difference between being able to stop this all powerful force, and utter defeat. Worse yet, even when everyone knew where and what it was, the series was still dragged out for half a season to get us there, for no other reason than to kick everyone around.

Star Trek, specifically the Dominion War: AGAIN, the only apparent way to win was... a disease, I think? Yes, I know there was more going on in the end, but the last two seasons were so poorly written that a lot of fans were turned off of DS9 by them, to say nothing of that ending. And we just won't go into later series...

Star Wars: Uh... what? What improbable plot device? Even in the new, horrid trilogy, the war was completely independent of much of what was going on with the main characters, short of "Order 66" which would have been caught had anyone bothered to READ SOME DOCUMENTATION ON THE CLONING. (Grossly oversimplified, but really, if we get into a Star Wars debate, we've all already lost.)

Independence Day: The problem was solved by a human's primitive computer virus obliterating an entire alien fleet's security. Does anyone, at all, EVER believe this was a good thing for this movie? I honestly believe that the only reason it was in there was because without it, the writers had no way to let humanity survive. Which, you know, was KINDA THE POINT. They had a brilliant opportunity with Area 51, a means of researching the aliens (Which they had been doing since ROSWELL, don't forget), and giving us a way to fight back at the eleventh hour. And what do they do with it? They give the heroes a Taxi to the mother ship.

The good stories are the ones that are hard fought and believable, even if it requires a little suspension of disbelief. The good stories are the ones where the heroes give as good as they get, where they've got victories where they hit the ENEMY just as badly as the enemy's hit them.

Maybe there's a wide array of fiction that requires the use of a MacGuffin to get anything done. That doesn't make it good. More often than not that makes it cheap, uninteresting, and a blatant example of padding out a series and stringing along viewers. And if that's the inspiration that you hope that CoH draws from, I don't want to play the game that you want to play.

I agree that on some level this is a failure of presentation, but that isn't the same as believing that the problem is merely one of insufficient explanation. Some here seem to feel that the Rock Problem would be simply solved with a clearer explanation of what's happening (with the Telepathists).

Well, count me among those who feel that there is no amount of explanatory text or dialog that makes civilian-thrown rocks an acceptible method for bringing down an Incarnate. And I don't care how you couch the Incarnate's Journey, crawl-before-you-walk or we-are-all-goliaths-to-someone's-david or we-all-have-mental-debuffing-as-our-Kryptonite, the degree of disatisfaction it engenders can't just be handwaved away as "Well, superhero comics are full of such dumb, assinine disbelief-suspending nonsense, so what are you complaining about?" The truth is there is a lot of brain-dead plotting to be found in comics and I don't exactly endorse that either.

Ooh, well said. You're on my good side now, have a cupcake.

If you read your status bar the explanation is there. The Telepathists are weakening you to the point that you are quite vulnerable to mundane things.
Cheesy? Sure it is. But it's at least a little interesting.

Going to agree with the lack of interest in WoW style raids. People (seem to) want a butto-mashing fest against the newest, shiniest big bads. And more big bads in costumes with cutscenes. Someone seems to want some of the big bads to have artifically large cleavage too; hopefully War Witch gets us some guys in tights to look at in the near future.

There's a lot of poor heroic fiction, even in people's favorite stories. Someone is always duct-taping a hyper-warp drive, miraculously deciphering some code or ancient text, conveniently bending or breaking some established moral code, showing up in the nick of time (over and over and over again), etc.; in order for the story to have a 99.9% happy ending rate.

Its nothing new and not limited to the examples you're choosing to lean on; even within the same set of series. Its a consequence of maintaining an episodic series with the same characters over a long period of time and its been around since Lassie and the Lone Ranger.

Stargate SG-1 pulls this almost every episode. Star Trek's been doing it since Scotty was the engineer. Star Wars (Han Solo showing up out of the blue to shake off a 'dark side of the force' Incarnate so that neonate Luke can make a single lucky shot that blows up a moon sized battle fortress). Smaug having an arrow-sized patch along his underside. If you're slamming Independence Day; then you're also slamming War of the Worlds (of which it's a blatant rip-off of; down to the 'virus'). GI Joe always beating COBRA no matter what the plan is. James Bond is the plot device. The list goes on and on.

This is why I usually root for the bad guy; they tend to have the better planning, power and resources but always get foiled by some 'MacGuffin' b-s.

Its the very definition of most televised, motion picture and gaming heroic fiction.

And you don't see the double standard there?

By a lot of the arguments I've seen here, my ninja girl, Lady Tsukira, shouldn't be allowed to hurt demons and robots with her ordinary steel swords just because she's otherwise a completely ordinary "normie." It's a ridiculous assertion that you should be able to be instantly invulnerable to something just because it doesn't match your concept of being an uber elder god from the center of the galaxy, forgetting entirely that this is a game based on mechanics to ensure balance and challenge for those whom are playing it.

Except you're not "inherently" weak, it's just the telepathist Pacification debuff that's making you weak. That's the exact opposite of "inherent." In the words of Inago Montoya, you keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Furthermore, UberGuy posted about experiences counter to yours concerning ignoring the telepathists where the whole trial went to hell. And you even admitted to experiencing a few like that when responding to him, so clearly such claim that ignoring the telepathists produce "a higher rate of success" as universal is very FALSE.

Furthermore, you have to change buildings, and as you continue to ignore the telepathists, you still have to deal with the angry civilians and more of them than there should be.

The buff icon is still an indicator of its active status, regardless of FX. Hell, some people in this game actually complain about too much FX. Imagine how annoyed they be if everyone or everything was glowing with the debuff.

Remember, your "strategy" is not universal in its success. But what I really read from this is that you're frankly too afraid of rocks to try it, forgetting that there will be less rocks with less telepathists to convert civilians.

Oh yeah, Captain America can only be brought down in a much less retarded way: an almighty Ordinary Bullet!

Go pound sand.

You sir, said it perfectly. There has to be balance in the story, good and evil pushing back and forth against each other. I'd say the best arc written for that so far was the RWZ finale. You start out discovering that Nemesis started the rikti war giving you a huge weapon to use against him. While searching for hard proof Nemesis has Sefu murdered (even worse it's implied that one reason for that was Sefu was black, he's a bitter evil ex-confederate southern gentleman after all). In retaliation you storm one of his main bases, tear the whole damn place apart in a fit of rabid vengence and get the hard proof you need. Nemesis is now exposed and you have to rush and save a defecting rikti high general. Once you have her though the rikti hordes decend but longbow storms in as reinforcements. (Yeah, I was shocked too, they actually do something in a story) Then it's off to the final battle, after defeating the Rikti's leader Nemesis shows up, allowing you to vent the hate you've had building the last 8 mission on his shiny ***.

In contrast lets add up how the praetorian war has been going by how the end results were.

Apex: King's Row badly damaged, insane casualties for the PPD and longbow, Battle Maiden topples statue in steel. Battle Maiden escapes alive.

Tin Mage: Nerva badly damaged, Longbow and Arachnos sign treaty (which has never been spoken of since), portal corp badly damaged, Neutropolis portal stalled, bobcat and neuron escape alive.

Lambda: Two floors of supplies damaged, marauder escapes alive, lambda remains in praetorian hands.

BAF: No prisoners actually freed, a few hundred mindwashed resistance killed, siege and nightstar temporarily taken out of action. BAF remains in praetorian hands.

Keyes: Reactors saved, anti-matter escapes alive, reactors....remain in praetorian hands.

UG: Vanessa DeVore killed, Desdemona takes mask, avatar of hamidon killed throughly pissing off real hamidon, Cole's secret learned

TPN: Maelstrom escapes alive, TPN secured to transmit secret.....rendered moot because at this point in the story Tilman turns everyone into mindless slaves making holding theTPN pointless.

MoM: Aurora freed, Yin freed, seer network destroyed, Malaise DEAD, -TILMAN KILLED-!!!!!

It's taken us 2 iTFs and 6 Trials to finally get a victory over praetoria that we can count as an actual tactical victory thats more than just a stalling tactic. Over the last year they've just been trashing us. Have we gotten to hit back just as hard yet? No, and at this rate I doubt we will.

As this thread develops, I'm coming down more heavily on this side, but that wasn't my original position. If the civilians had managed to "raid" a warehouse (read, been given by the Praetorians) and gotten a cache of weapons and were then being directed to attack by the Telepathists who debuffed us, I'd shrug and say "ok, it's crap writing but I can understand it."

But it does seem that there's a massive disconnect between what Incarnates claims to deliver and what it actually does. We're promised the opportunity to become godlike, and against existing content that's very true. Stuff that was once a challenge is a pushover for an Incarnate team. But as we progress through the iTrials, we fail to win squat, (as Elemental Fury points out above) and yet our enemies become tougher.

Zwillinger's position of "learning to run before we walk" is actually very condescending in this context. That's what the first 50 levels are for and we're at least half-way through the whole Praetoria thing. If by this time teams of 24 Incarnate heroes with three level shifts apiece are being felled by normals with stones, even with the debuffs from Telepathists, That doesn't tell me this is a challenge, or that it's story progression. Rather it tells me the Dev story team has lost the plot and is bereft of ideas and have to bring in yet another cheat mechanism to meet their perception of "exciting."

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

Would I have brought up the point of Archery and Martial Arts if it had slipped past my notice? As I said those concepts stand to err in favor of the players because it creates more enjoyable avenues of play. Of course, there's a double standard because we play the game for the experience of being a superhero, something which should entail facing off against super powered threats.

There's the difference between application and perception. Are we inherently weak? No. Does it seem that way? When a hero is laid low by a rock, yes. Could it be presented in a way which more clearly represents the Seers effects on the league? Certainly.

When someone walks into the TPN for the first time, how many are going to notice a new icon in the midst of a dozen and a half already existing on their buff bar? (I use numerical stacking, god help those who don't.) When the Seers appear we're suddenly weaker with a only metagame indicator telling us why. There needs to be a better indication of what is going on and it needn't even be a power effect on the players. A simple cutscene when the Seers first appear would suffice. I know in my first run I had no idea why I fell so quickly. It wasn't enough to sour the entire experience for me, but many people will simply walk away after that kind of defeat.

Because it does not produce success 100% of the time does not mean it fails to produce higher rates of success. Uberguy's experience and my own are both simply points of data. If the method produces success 80% of the time, compared to 50% success in eliminating the Seers, that is a higher rate of success which is what my experience suggests. (The failure in question was simply that, a singular failure using this method.) I cannot speak for the experience of every player, however. Only time will tell and the more successful method will gain widespread adoption. Currently, I see the method I described occurring more often.

Also please re-read my posts and you will see that I do not often speak in absolutes. Note that I have stated these things are "in my experience". My experience is not absolute empirical evidence nor have I suggest it to be.

That's quite a stretch. A better accusation would be that I want to take the path of least resistance to the rewards. I can at least cop to that to a degree. In the grander scheme, being defeated individually or as a leaque, is generally unenjoyable. Why would I not veer away from those things?

And suppose fighting only cosmic entities at high levels doesn't fit with some of our concepts? Should we just stop levelling period, because at some arbitrary point the game becomes "Gods allowed only?"

Malta may not be superpowered, but their anti-super conspiracy seems perfectly appropriate for high levels. Powerful psychics pounding away at your defenses and resolve to make you submit also seems perfectly appropriate.

I'm sorry, but I'd have to agree with Zwill. A fight with Galactus all the time would get boring. Sometimes Lex Luthor and his Kryptonite-powered weapons will suffice enough.

Well, since clearly in this case that the Viewers are *mumblemumble*, I have suggested captions.

I'm often looking at buff bars. Sometimes it reminds me to turn on a buff (especially if someone isn't in direct view and I can't see its more obvious effect).

Cleeeaarly. (Emphasis was mine.)

I'd say a buildup of angry citizens and a psychic debuff offer a LOT of resistance, but that's just me.

I'm afraid that's a point we won't ever see eye to eye on. In fact, I feel one thing City of Heroes has done far too much is utilize paramilitary groups or goons with guns (Malta, Council, the 5th, Nemesis, Sky Raiders, a large portion of Praetoria). Rularuu are one of my favorite groups because they present an otherworldly threat. I also like the Outcasts, a group with legitimate super powers that I feel comes and goes too quickly. I was hoping that the Incarnates would lead us to more actual superpowered threats.

It's a good practice to do. As I play support ATs a great deal, I'm used to not only looking at mine but my teammates as well. Unfortunately, the default settings aren't very conducive to relaying important information. Numerical stacking goes a long way in cleaning up the clutter as does turning of notification for auto-powers.

A word of advice: attack your opponent's points not your opponent.

When I say "presentation," I don't mean "explanation." The game's presentation is the way in which it uses its theatrical tools to weave its practical mechanics into a story. "Presentation," thus, is the story that is being told and the tone it is being told in, as examined separate from the game's mechanics. In other words, if I were completely illiterate of the game's underlying engine and only ever understood the story as it was being told to me, then I would be subject solely and only to presentation.

The solution to a case of bad presentation is not to excuse it or explain it, though that sometimes helps. The solution is to fix the story so that it better represents the characters taking part in it and better presents the events taking place. If players are unhappy with a certain mechanic - say the I4 Boss Buff - you can try and explain to them why you feel it's the right thing to do, but if they simply don't like it, then eventually you end up having to change the mechanic, because it's either that or Henry Ford's "You can have it in any colour, as long as it's black." Fixing presentation goes much the same way - explain as far as you can, then start changing things around.

I wouldn't call it condescending so much as wrong-headed. I know that Zwill isn't on the writing team and from his comments I infer that he's not actually "in" on why the story was written as it was. What we're seeing is his own self-justification for the way things are. In a sense, he's in the same position we are - that's how the story is, that's what was written, figure out a way to deal with it. This is his: The Writer moves in mysterious ways, and we were probably intended to be humbled by the experience.

At the same time, his comment is missing the problem people have with being stoned entirely. The rocks aren't the real problem. They're just a symptom. People could have taken us down with knives or pistols or their bare hands and it would have been just as bad. The problem is that people expect a progression of respect that the game shows them, they expect to be done learning to walk, run and super-speed and for the Incarnate system to let them do something more. The entire point of this whole idea was to take us one step beyond, to exceed anything we've done so far, to bring our powers up beyond what we had and send us on adventures like never before.

Players expected "more" from the Incarnate system, and they're getting "less," instead. That's the fundamental problem at the bottom of the stack, and it's a problem that cannot be explained away. The key mistake, I think, is seeing Incarnates as essentially a whole other game that you start from scratch when you reach level 50, and it shouldn't be seen that way. Incarnates are a continuation of our hero and villain careers. It is not a new start or a new beginning, it is merely the next stage, and we should NOT be treated with less respect on the next stage than we did on the previous one.

There is no learning to walk. We already learned to walk. Build on what you have, don't sidestep it and start over because "fighting god would be boring." Fighting gods is the whole point!

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.

Well, unfortunately Malta, the 5th Column, and Nemesis are among my favorite enemy groups and you can only have them when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers.

I think there is only a double standard if one takes the position that heroes like Daredevil should be fighting villains like Galactus. Or that heroes like ninja-girl Lady Tsukira should be fighting villains like Rularuu or Tyrant or the Hamidon. Hint: they shouldn't. Once you realize this, there is no double standard to defend (which I don't).

Gritty, "street-level" crimefighting is a sub-branch of superhero comics. Characters fit for that narrative environment are not fit for cosmic level threats like The Avengers fight. And even with characters like Captain America, the writers are forced to contrive plot elements for him so he can still "fit in" and contribute and not get turned into a fine red mist at the first blow from a villain like The Destroyer. Anyone with half a brain rolls their eyes at such contrivances, and we mostly try to overlook it. But that doesn't grant comic writers license to extend that same kind of absurd contrivance the other way around, in which a mind-controlled Aunt May is suddenly gifted with enough handwavium to lay the Hulk low with one swipe of a butter knife.