Is the MoM supposed to be completable by a PuG League?

Nice post. I just want to emphasize that alot of the kind of stuff that is in itrials has also been present in the preincarnate content as well.

I remember when the LRSF came out (when the vindicators were lvl 53 and the FP was lvl 54). It has HARD as heck, and with no IOs back then I'd probably say it was harder than any itrial we currently have. What's the difference between that and now though? Everyone worked super hard to complete that tf. It was hard and eventually nerfed to a reasonable level, but no one complained about it like they do to the itrials. The iTrials are just an easy target, most because the community has made it so, and now even though people are completing these trials left and right the stigma still exists.

RiP old LRSF you are still missed

Excellent arguement

Yeah, I'd love to have the chance to do old LRSF again somehow, just for sake of fun.

You totally still can. Get together 7 random people to fully simulate a PuG rsf team. Have everyone respec out of every single IO they have, as well as removing incarnate powers. Fill up the toons with SO's, run rsf with buffed enemies to account for the -1 level difference.

I am sure people will be lining up for that.

Sarcasm aside, I agree with you. It was a great feeling of accomplishment when I finished my first rsf, even more so when I 'tanked' it for the time.

Yeah you *can* do that... though I was more thinking along the lines of old RSF except with IOs, just to see what it'd be like. Ya know how the most difficult piece of content from the past would stack up to the new power levels we have access to now. I don't think it's codeable but it would be cool if difficulty affected the lvl set AVs, so if you were on +2 the freedom phalanx would be lvl 55.

At one point myself and other people I usually run with put together a +4 RSF with buffed enemies, debuffed players, no enhancements, all the challenges set. Even with the most stacked team imaginable for such a situation (I think we had something like 2 colds, 2 therms, 3 kins, and 1 melee).... well to say the least we weren't even able to kill Agent Crimson in the first mission, haha.

And yeah first RSFs was basically your rite of initiation into manhood

*ahem* as much as I like reminiscing, getting off topic xD

The answer is . . . a lot

Nearly every character has a mez available to them, and there are numerous temp powers that provide holds.

Your sarcasm isn't helping the discussion.

I had a thread: What would you do to make Keyes fun?

Guess what? Several of the changes suggested in that thread were adopted and more players do Keyes now.

Actually, and people have said this from the pre-beta, this trial is made more difficult due to the fact that there isn't much recourse for the league if a player DCs with one or more temp powers, refuses to use a temp power, doesn't know how to look for a temp power, pulls the AV out of the area, or enters the sabotage phase before the rest of the league is ready (and Positron acknowledged the last point himself).

Underground has a lot of issues with it, and not only because of its length? I started a tread about this trial's issues back in October: What would you do to make Underground better?

To be honest, the TPN has greater issues than just the auto-kill "feature". One thing about that though: the developers invested time and resources to put in a feature into the game to specifically prevent 1-shots from killing players, because of player requests. To back track is a waste of developer time and effort. Not only that, but that isn't the only auto-kill that Maelstrom has at his disposal. He can do upwards of 2,000-3,000 damage with his other attacks.

Oh yeah, it is also repetitive in the extreme.

The MoM trial has far more issues than just the death penalty, it is just the most obvious.

Actually, that isn't so much of a problem. The problem is that the "limited death" clause and the hard to spot graphic effects.

Yes, because they take their own experiences with min-maxed groups or larger servers and try to make it fit all players.

And those showing that there ARE problems are getting instantly shouted down with "well it isn't that bad because i say so" too. Every single time. Even from people that aren't subscribing.

I do that already. I've done it with Keyes and Underground. I'm happy to say that the Keyes thread was actually successful in promoting changes that made the trial being run more frequently.

I wait to do the trials a few times before I make those threads though. However, I continue to get the same people that you see here saying "nothing is wrong". People that are self-blinded to the possibility that a mechanic might be improved resulting in a greater trial acceptance aren't doing themselves or others any favors.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

Survivability wasn't an issue with the amount of support we had, the issue was dps, mostly because we had no enhancements. No enhancements is the most brutal challenge setting by far. Without that set we would have probably completed it quite easily.

Wrong. My blasters dont. My scrappers dont. My corruptors dont. Sure i could go and change my builds to get the epics that'ld include a mez but they dont suit my characters.

Maybe a bit of sarcasm but surely all the points i made about the other TFs/trials are valid yes? Arent all the points i brought up from those taskforces more difficult than the current trial mechanics in some form or another?

So in other words like other taskforces ingame currently that requires players to use powers, such as Khan tf?

We discussed the issues of the high attack he does in the other thread, but repetitive i dont agree with. There are multiple teams within that trial, if your league decides to go everybody inside then yes it will be repetitive, not the trials fault . . . its the leagues tactics fault if repetitive 3 different TPN runs in the last week, i was twice on the ST tele team and once on the inside team.
If anything, Keyes is the most repetitive trial of them all.

Examples please? The devs stated before making all these trials that they wanted to make them to make players use powers that were previously hardly used. How many times pre-trials did you see a granite tank? Almost every team. Now we have tanks of all varieties all over the place due to the [as an example] psi attacks that this trial does.
Im mentioning psi damage because i remember people complaining that a trial has a damage which a lot of ATs have little/no resistance too, which by itself i find laughable because its almost like you want purely smash/lethal because it'ld be the easiest to resis. There are powersets from buffers that'ld help this too remember . . . . not to mention debuffers.


Its a good feature imo, ran it 4/5 times on a league that was to try and complete it [not including the leagues where we were +0/+1s to test] and on none of them did we even get to 1/4 of the deaths allowed, infact most of them were 0 deaths.
There arent any tough enemies to face during that round so as long as the league has any sort of construction to it, it'll be a walkthrough that stage. [A lot of us said that was the easiest bit of all the trials]

Isnt this what your doing though? Your basically saying X is broken because of all these experiences i've had. Which is fair enough, we're all saying its not nowhere near as broken as you say it is because of OUR experiences.

Because of examples like i gave earlier with a poster being against the DD trial without actually running it. It instantly creates a bad vibe towards a trial which is downright wrong when they havent even run it.
If you run a trial and dont like it then fine, more power to you. I myself cant stand the UG trial and always say it, what us trialers [we are a cliche now! xD] do expect though is for people NOT to go around bad mouthing things with zero evidence apart from word of mouth.
With the "isnt that bad because i say so" , i've actually gone on to other servers and in that thread in beta there was a pretty good discusion stating about how varied tactics are on all servers. Even as a basic trial the baf, that had so many different tactics on each server.

Great that those kind of threads do make positive changes, but there is a very fine line between what everybody is asking for.
People like myself are asking that there are indeed easy/medium and hard trials to suit all players needs, which is what we now have. But the vibe that is constantly being shown from the same posters is "we only want baf/lam level difficulty trials", because thats what the amount of nerfs people against the trials are calling for

Threads which you made [like the one in the beta forum] where constructive feedback/improvements are suggested are great, you'll hardly see anybody be so much against you. But say your a new/unsub'd player looking at a random thread like this, they'ld look at all these anti-trial posts and be put off it wouldnt they?

And there are plenty of temp powers to get around the LGTF situation, which does allow temp powers.

Not really.

The temp power in Khan requires a single use by anyone on the team, and everyone in the previous mission is granted 10 charges. So no, the comparison isn't valid.

I've given examples about MoM specifically. In this thread, not to mention others.

• Awakens in the Penelope phase.
• Too many auto-hit Psi damage in the Penelope phase.
• Graphic "fuzz" in the Penelope phase makes it hard/next to impossible to see the "safe" zones.
• The storm voids have an issue with being taunted.
• No visual clues as to if you are in with Aurora or not.
• Can't get close enough to use AoE heals on the rifts.
• Some of the Nightmares are overpowered (Rularuu, Avatar of Hamidon) and will cause many team wipes.

There are some other spots, but those are some of the more annoying problems.
And if you can't get enough psi protection for the league, you're screwed. The developers often go overboard when they produce things.

Empathy, Thermal, Cold, Radiation, Sonic, Storm, Kinetics, Traps, and Trick Arrow all lack Psi protection. Dark Miasma, Force Field, and Time all have a tiny bit of Psi protection. And you can't debuff a zone wide auto attack.

Partially, yes. However I'm also looking at not only what I would like, but what could get people to actually run the trial when they would normally avoid the trials in the first place. The people saying that things are working fine, despite being frustrating enough for players to avoid a trial, are only speaking for themselves.

Have you considered that some mechanics might need to be changed for the trials to have wider adoption?

As I've said, I've run the trials before slamming them.

I liked the Underground. I liked it until I witnessed the many ways the trial doesn't work well. Also, the last time I seen it run was back in November.

And I've had players from Union come to Triumph, and find out that what they do on Union doesn't work so well on Triumph. That player, despite feedback, pulled the AVs in BAF to an unfamiliar place expecting people to know where they were talking about.

There are people demanding a level of difficulty that would see around 1% of the players be able to marginally able to complete the trial, there are others that want to see that 99% of all trials succeed.

Personally, I'm somewhere in the middle. However I don't want to see 50%-90% of the trials fail because of 1 or 2 people on the league. UGT, TPN, and MoM all fail at this test.

Actually there are a few posters in this and other threads that don't want any of the trials being easy/medium.

Yet I see the same 5-10 people, including a few that aren't even subscribers, on a consistent basis whining that ANY change is unwelcome.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

This has been done repeatedly already.

Just going to lump the rest of my response into one run on paragraph: The trials are what they are. IMO they are not very good. They are not as bad as what I have seen in other games. They are not, however, landmark material I think is worth being exported. Some of their specific mechanics are worldclass terrible. CoH was a bad candidate for a game to hide end game rewards behind teamed content. Existing TFs aren't good related examples because they have never played the role of primary arbiters of rewards. The trials do not meet their original goal as being similar to zone events. Some time ago there was a huge battle over even getting the ability to lock a league, because this content was, allegedly, open to everyone. Now we've swung 180 degrees the other direction, seemingly by accident. Rather than being something I tell my friends about when recruiting them to this game, I keep what I know about trials a secret before filling them in once they are hooked, because the content is overall poor, the manifestation of a tacked on end game on top of an aging combat system that wasn't up to the task, as well as a misfire in terms of design goals, which originally prioritized "openness" over all else. Level shifts are a particularly awful way to differentiate incarnate progress. I still like this game overall anyway.

Well, there you go.