Four Shots at Loot?

Compared to the broad swath of content that came before. Yeah. It is.
Essentially the game funneled down into one thing if you wanted to advance your character.

Raid Your Brains Out

The introduction of DA does little to change this.
It introduces a painfully slow "alternative" that STILL ties you to the "Well if you get lucky with random rolls you can make progress, if not tough ****" mechanic. And your only deterministic option is to STILL build everything raw from threads and continual up-conversion of salvage.

Please note my enthusiasm.

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

Thus far:

Astrals
Astrals
Astrals
Astrals
Astrals
Astrals

Noticing a pattern here and pissed off about it.

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

It doesn't always have to be Trials - like so far, Hero 1's story has been told with a TF, and 2 normal mission arcs - while the Clockwork King only appears in 2 TFs at the moment.
The devs just pick the mission type and mission tech that they think will be the best way of communicating the story they want to tell to the players - like the way they chose to explore pre-war Praetorian Earth with solo and standard 1-8 story arcs, then switched to TFs and 8-24 Trials to show the massive threat of the now Well-empowered loyalists.

Except that the beta testing Proved you can get to +3 without doing a single Trial in about a month. As I stated before that is *faster* than you can get fully IOed just doing solo missions, and that is only one test case by one person who seemed to have some really bad luck I honestly think that the overall speed of DA will be faster than that.

You may not be able to get T-4 Incarnate levels too fast in DA, but you really can not get Purple IOs in *any* sort of fast time like you can with Trials, and I still see no real comparison with WoW, it falls flat for *anyone* who has actually knows anything about both games.

In short.

The solo path in COH has *always* been slower outside of the broken broken MA, Go level a character from 1-50, IO fully, and fully Incarnate up vs someone who does the Taskforces to 50, runs the high level TFs for Merits and then Trials up to Incarnate. I am willing to bet the teaming will always have a very large advantage as it has had from the very start of the game.

Unless you're counting leveling to 50, you don't have to do one single mission to fully IO out, just walk into Wentwoth's and walk out in full purple.

22 hours for +3 (Coulomb2) vs 18 hours in iTrials for all T4 (MCM), which requires another full set of T3 and also Very Rare components, that's not slow, that's insulting.

No. It's not. Don't compare this game to WoW; you'll find more parity comparing apples and sheet rock.

Tell that to the devs. MOST of the Incarnate story has been stuck behind the trials.

You got two Empys? O.o

Well, a dimensional war is the place where you'd expect there to be big battles

Yes, but you can tell the story many ways.

There's no reason why the end of Praetoria couldn't have included self-contained story arcs that give other views of the war. You can tell hundreds of different stories set within WWII, some epic large-scale battles and some much more personal encounters. Each of these stories can stand alone by themselves, or they may even hint toward the events that occurred in other stories elsewhere without making them interdependent.

In fact, that's pretty much how we handled the previous dimensional war's storytelling (RWZ). While the Task Force & MSR kinda cap off the story arcs from a leveling-perspective, participation in only one of these playstyles provides a relatively self-contained story and a different window into the events that comprise the event.

You mean like Praetor Duncan's personal story arc that gives us insight into the 'other' side of the conflict? Sure it's mostly about her, but that's still pretty much what you're talking about.

It always is with Domi

Her arc is also written in such a way that it could be played through by a loyalist without them feeling that they were betraying Tyrant - you're helping you master's grandaughter/girlfriend track down and dispose of a runaway traitor.