CoH: a game for Introverts, too

Unfortunately the old two choices/sides has become all people of society can handle any more.

Although, to be a bit more fair, I can see someone losing track on your stance of this based on some of your stated rules of design philosophy within this thread.
Not that you have said anything that contradicted your stance on allowing a reasonable solo Incarnate path... Just that some of what you said could be mistakenly read as someone who would prefer it remain team-only.
*shrugs*
They're still mistaken, of course... but I had a few words to type before reaching my quota, so there we are.

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

Much of that could be because you are only nitpicking the arguments of one side and are making absurdly bad arguments yourself.

Actually, I'd say that Tier 3 Clarion Destiny is equally if not more important for soloers, because it allows for a permanent click-based mez protection for things like squishies and human-form khelds. It's incredibly useful. Same goes for Tier 3 Rebirth for chars that don't have a self-heal (like /SR, /Shield) High tier Destiny is reaaaaally useful. Hell, I'd say game-changing.

Perma-Clarion was a godsend for my blaster. It was the final piece of the puzzle that enabled her to solo x8 of factions with mez (instead of x8 of, say, Romans only).

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

How is that different from any solo content vs team content?

team xp is vastly superior to solo xp

That's true, but even by the standards of team xp versus solo xp...it's pretty darn low right now. I still think they'll make an adjustment at some point to make it more (but not -too- much more) comparable.

EDIT: Not worth the mod smack.

Yes, you're absolutely correct. There are several areas of the game that having T4 in all 5 incarnate slots became very helpful. Before incarnate powers, fighting Arachnos at +4/x8 was very difficult. Now, not so much.

Actually, I would argue that the potential of Hami slotting was much greater than being nudged up another level. It didn't give you new powers, but it made existing powers extremely potent. The difference is that Incarnate progression is designed to be coherent and not as heavily random loot roll reliant as Hamidon enhancements were

Obviously, the addition of incarnate powers represents an evolution in the designer's methods. This doesn't mean my correlation is wrong, it simply means that they've found more interesting ways to advance one's character than "bigger, better enhancements."

The level shift thing is precisely what epic level gear tends to do. It makes you more capable of facing more powerful enemies or larger numbers of more typical enemies. You would get big honking super splosions, but they'd be from your existing abilities, not derived from wholly new ones.

Anyway, you're trying to refute an argument I didn't make. I never said Hamidon enhancements represented an identical progression to incarnate slots. What I was saying was that the dev team didn't just suddenly start locking content and character progression behind raids, this was something in the game from the very beginning. What's changed over time is how well the raid/trial rewards have been designed as well as the variety of raids/trials. I also said that fully slotting out with Hamidon enhancements made characters fairly powerful, to the point that facing mobs above them in level was less of a problem than it was for those who didn't have those same enhancements.

Even cheaty trial mechanics that bypass your powers existed in various ways in the Hamidon trial, and have been changed three or four times over the history of the game. The Eden Trial also bypassed powers and required the use of special inspirations to fight the Crystal Titan long before they added inspirations to buff against Hamidon. Altering game mechanics in specific fights is something the devs have been doing in trial content for a long time. I think it's ridiculous, but it's there.

DA isn't solo content. It's group or solo content. You'll have 3 rates trial>DA group>DA solo.

The problem comes that the second 2 are currently an order of magnitude slower than they should be. Not only will you not be able to solo at a reasonable rate, you will also not be able to find a group to do the DA content, since most people not completely devoted to solo will just drop it and go back to trials.

Then they can congratulate themselves on what a good decision it was to hook themselves to the raid train since all those non-raid people didn't really mean it. Funny how data mining is worthless without a good control.

You can.

Only if you live in mommy's basement and get an IV feed to remove those nasty eating delays.

Hardcore people level cap games on 3 day pre-start weekends. That doesn't mean that it doesn't still take the sane people 6 months to do so.

The game has set a baseline expectation for how quick incarnate advancement should be. When the alternate path is 60-80 times slower than that, it doesn't look like an alternative so much as a smokescreen.

It's all about the cognitive dissonance.

See my reply above. I didn't make the claim they were exactly the same thing. I said they were in the same category of thing. What you're describing isn't that incarnate rewards are anything new. They're simply much improved rewards over what's been available in the past, and some (not all) of those rewards are relevant only because certain past rewards (or powersets) were nerfed.

Does your forum join date reflect the time you started playing as well? I may be talking about a period of time you simply didn't experience, which means you don't know what it was like and what characters with full Hamidon slotting under the pre-enhancement diversification, pre-Hamidon enhnancement nerf, and pre-global defense reduction were capable of.

Hamidon enhancements were nerfed so IOs would be meaningful, or at least that's the explanation that was given at the time, despite IOs not being around for some time after (I forget the exact interval). A lot of people did find them appealing and went to great lengths to fill out some of their characters with these enhancements because the comparison to not having them was rather immense. You are right that incarnate slots are more appealing but this doesn't refute my argument at all.

I'm fairly certain it's documented fact that Hamidon enhancements represented character advancement beyond the limits of the game outside attending Hamidon trials, and such advancement actually made it fairly trivial to fight +4 mobs. The game's changed a lot since that time and the dev team is much better at designing rewards, or at least has more freedom to design better rewards, than they did then. It's not a matter of opinion that CoH had options to make your character significantly more powerful from launch.

DA gives soloers +3 in about 3 weeks.

And I can get 6 T4 incarnate powers in 5 days doing incarnate trials. :S


I plan to do the DA content occassionally late at night when people aren't on to do trials, but the progression rate won't be remotely comparable to how fast you can incarnate out a toon via trials.

The point is that I was saying (and believe) that the Incarnate Rewards are specifically very different than any other previous reward that was gated strictly behind teaming.
I do not agree that the previous Hami-O scenario qualifies your previous statement that the Incarnate Trial progression was an established design philosophy for this game.

The only pre-existing rewards that I think compare to Incarnate Powers are leveling from 1-50 and the Epic and Patron Powers.
This is why I felt all along that various paths there would be best for the broad playerbase.

For the record, I am aware of the history of the game and I was around before IOs and when the Hami-Os were the pinnacle of loot. That does not compare to the appeal, nor the nature of, the Incarnate Rewards.
Citing the Hamidon Raid and Hami-Os as being evidence of any such established design philosophy could lead one to say that the Mother Ship Raids are also such an example. After all, they reward costume parts (just like the Astral and Empyrean Venders) and some rather hefty powers.

You seem to be exceptionally focused on the game mechanic/numbers aspect of these rewards. There's nothing wrong if that is your personal appeal, but there are far more aspects to these rewards than simply the numbers.

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

Well of course not, that'd be tantamount to saying you're wrong.

They're an evolutionary advancement over Hamidon enhancements. It's the same concept of trial rewards, but vastly improved so people will be more willing to spend their time getting them.

Do you think I'm arguing against the idea of various advancement paths?

Of course they don't, because they weren't really all that well designed or implemented. It took years for the dev team to improve enhancements to make them more interesting than "slot them in a power and improve that power's numerical statistics." They were also balanced poorly with how most existing powers actually worked.

The Mothership raids are also such an example, but much less restrictive than the Hamidon raids were. Open world raids (which technically both Hamidon and Mothership are) are not a new concept in MMORPGs, nor are they particularly considered to be entirely different beasts than instanced raids.

Both are currently designed to be accessible and fast, which is part of CoH's design philosophy.

The philosophy I'm using Hamidon enhancements to support is the idea of having superior rewards for raid content. That's it. And in that regard, incarnate rewards were not a change from past design. Incarnate rewards are handled differently from past awards in that you need XP to unlock the the incarnate slots and you need shards (for Alpha) or threads (for any) to build the powers you put in those slots. They're also not tradeable, can blur the lines between ATs by giving everyone access to self-buffs, team buffs, and pets, can boost existing powers in effectiveness just from the alpha slot, and in general are much more interesting and fun than trying to slot 6 nucleolus exposures in every attack.

I specifically focused on the numbers aspect because people were saying that "nothing like level shifts existed before," which is incorrect. Despite the lack of an explicit level shift, enhancing one's powers will have a similar net effect of enabling one to fight against higher-level enemies with fewer complications. It is true that no explicit level shift mechanic has existed before, but similar outcomes were achieved in the past via other means. How am I supposed to explain my position on this without referring to game mechanics and numbers?

Oh, goodie. Now we've moved from "days" as your scale to "weeks". Still far away from "hours" of actual play time which would be meaningful for someone not trying to be manipulative with misrepresented data points.

Wow, that's rather obnoxious. I was going to add some more replies to this in order to continue an actual discussion, but I'm not going to waste my time with responses like that. You have no idea who I am to assume I'm some *** that wouldn't admit being wrong.

You and I disagree about this, mainly because we're looking at it differently. It was basically a miniscule point of difference that I thought could easily be acknowledged by both parties, but... anyway. I come here for feedback and interesting conversation.
Comments and attitudes like that won't bring anything worthwhile.


EDIT: This has been cleared up and all is good!

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

3 weeks = 21 days

Although, going by the DA testing, it loks like +3 should come sooner than that.

And if you want to break it down into hours, then soloing DA isn't too far from the Trial pace - it's the 20 hour cooldowns that spread it out - the solo path doesn't involve spending hours each day playing the DA content - it only needs about 45 minutes each day.

As much as I like to solo at times, "hours" is a terrible idea.

TERRIBLE. TERRIBLE TERRIBLE TERRIBLE.

I am SO NERDILY EXCITED for solo (or small team-optional) Incarnate content, but the rewards SHOULD be crappy compared to what leagues see on trials. Even Golden Girl's quote seems a little over-generous to me.

Oftentimes I solo because I DON'T want to power level myself to the stars in one evening. Oftentimes I TURN XP OFF when I join teams to prevent myself from out-leveling all the content at my current level (do not even mention Ouroboros, it's just what power gamers suggest to those of us who are actually invested in the game universe).

I don't think Paragon Studios will ever give this to us anyway ("this" meaning "hours"), but I just want to make it clear that not all "pro-solo" players are begging for "solo farms".

Sorry, that comment didn't come off as I wanted it to. I wasn't trying to be insulting, and I am sorry that I came across as insulting or trying to say you're some *** who wouldn't admit to being wrong.

That's in retrospect. What would you have told the players back then, who said that Hami enhancement was the only end game progress this game had, and it was locked behind participating in a huge trial they didn't want to participate in. Because there were players making that argument then. Would you honestly have told them that no, in fact this isn't really end game progress and so they had no foundation for their objection?

While the Incarnate system is definitely a much more developed and intricate system, that's a matter of detail. The question for the players themselves has always been is there an identifiable end game progression mechanism, and is it gated? Its clear to me that HOs do satisfy the notion that the devs were willing to tell players that some elements of the end game would be gated behind teamed content. That willingness to say it is the best indicator of their design philosophy, not the comparison to raw numbers.

Moreover, they said it more clearly when the LRSF was released. There, they actually used the words end game, and stated that while this game (at the time) was not a game with an involved end game, they felt it was reasonable to have some end game content for the highest performance players, and that end game content was going to be teamed as that was the most obvious way to create high end and high difficulty content at the time.

If people are looking for proof that the devs in the past have been willing to lock what they call end game content behind teamed tasks, the LRSF is unambiguous proof of that. The incarnate system is vastly larger and qualitatively different of course, but that doesn't change the fact that the LRSF was proof the devs were *willing* to lock some end game stuff behind teamed content. And until the markets showed up the only way to get HOs was from large raids or teamed task forces, or have someone give one to you. There was no way for a solo player to get them on their own.

That means the sum total of the Hamidon encounter and the LRSF and STF are proof the devs have in the past have been willing to create an end game, albeit a small one, which was predominantly locked behind teamed content. Whether that was the right decision or not doesn't change the fact that they did make it once before.

That is how time is measured, sorry if that bothers you. If you want to break the examples down to minutes or seconds, so much the better for comparative purposes, but "week" is worthless, because it gives virtually no information in regards to how much time is spent playing.