The Myth of "Hard" raids.

I decided to run a few Raids as the solo content is not out yet and I wanted to get my 50 Blaster up to tier 4 Alpha.

First of all the raids aren't Hard. They have some gimmicks that if you have run the Apex trial you have seen before. Glowing spots on the ground - check - unresisted damage DoTing you to death - check.

The BaF I ran last night and the prisoner escape sequence is flatout silly. I found within 20 seconds they ran a pre-determined path. I stood at the end of the path where they turned - with Chilling Embrace on and using Shiver and Shockwave and not a single prisoner escaped.

It wasn't even close. Then the hard part take down 2 AV's at the same time. Well since we herded them together and we were spamming them with AoE's it wasn't until they had 25% health left we even had to worry about it. Then it was figure out which one we were killing easier and kill the other one first.

Bingo - done in less than 15 minutes.


Then a nice stroll on a Lam - in which the only threat was lag - I died once due to a lag death otherwise we had zero problems - except due to not enough debuffs we had to use a couple grenades. So no badge since we used 3.

If you can read - the trials are easy. It says in big letters - this is now happening - then it happens. I was actually interested in seeing what everyone found so hard, I don't see it. They were not even in the same realm as trying to solo a Purple level Proton. He is far harder and requires some planning.

Color me not impressed. I would prefer a larger critter with a few effects that make the fight interesting to power spamming.

BAF and Lambda are utterly trivial these days with so many +2 and +3 level shifted.

Now go try TPN Campus and Minds of Mayhem.

Speaking as a veteran wow player, the trials aren't very complex or difficult mechanically, which in my book is very welcome compared to super gimmicky scripted encounters. However if you don't have enough level shifted characters or people aren't paying attention they are definitely possible to fail.

There's also the fact that everyone is buffed to the gills. Capped dam-res, softcapped, huge damage buffs...

The hardest part of any trial is having the patience to sit around doing nothing while waiting for it to start.

I've posted before about how "hard" in CoH is mostly about not knowing the script, and having to figure it out, with a dash of character attribute comparison to the enemies.

You're coming into these trials long after they have been introduced. Pretty much everyone else knows the "script" by now, and can execute the counter steps by rote. Moreover, lots of players have characters with stats now elevated by previous successes at the trials.

So you have (probably lots of) people on league who are much stronger in the stats contest who mostly know what to do by rote. Of course that's easy. All CoH content is easy in that scenario. Yes, even the MoM trial.

I know TPN was mentioned, but TPN is very much about knowing the script. Once you know its script, TPN isn't hard at all, IMO. Some individuals may get creamed by the AV while moving from building to building, but the league overall rarely suffers much because of that. (That's one reason I find that mechanic annoying - it's no fun for the people getting killed, and it really adds nothing to the league's overall experience of challenge.)

UGT and MoM are "harder" than the others because (a) their stats challenges can be rather severe, and (b) parts of their scripts are harder to learn from replay than most others.

Everything was "Hard" when we didn't understand it. I remember when the STF was OMG IMPOSSIBLE!

Yeah OP is a bit late to the party if he thinks the "this is hard" crowd is talking about the first two or three trials. LOL

Those haven't been hard in MONTHS.

Once you learn the patterns, ANY scripted encounter that doesn't have variations to it is going to become "easy" ...

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

Dear OP, I'm guessing that you're coming from WoW so I'll put this in terms you'll understand. You were running Molten Core and most of your team was probably in Blackwing Lair gear. Of course it was easy.

The harder Trials DO give better rewards. Keyes and TPN have a higher chance of a rare or very rare as a reward, Underground and I believe the Mother Mayhem trial awards one rare or very rare upon completion and the Underground gives a substantial amount of threads.

These aren't WoW raids, WoW raids, even if the content is on farm can still take 2 hours+, the raids we have, I think the longest is Underground which takes about an hour, hour an a half max (hence the higher reward).

If you want a proper gear treadmill, which is what you seem to be suggeting, head back on over to WoW or any number of its clones, CoH, althought it has 'raids' is a slightly different sort of endgame.

Also you'll notice that most iTrials are not formed of dedicated supergroups like you do in WoW, there are no 'progression supergroups' or even 'raid supergroups'. CoH has a far more casual PuG based audience (and has since the start) than those and it pays the devs to play to their audience.

Most iTrialers will do several trials in succession, yesterday I did Keyes, MoM, Lambda than just one and then log off.

To use the WoW analogy BAF and Lambda are the equivilent of WoW raids on 'farm' status, almost everyone on the server knows how they work.

Trust me, when they first came out, failures on the BAF and Lambda were quite high, heck Union was probably the first server to get people the Master of BAF badges regularly because due to a smaller population who were doing them several times a day the strategy was nailed down fairly sharpish.

Infact the strange difference between Union and the other servers is that a Master run is considered a 'normal run' while the 'pull AVs to the tennis courts' is considered a 'easy run'.