Elite Bosses and Arch-Villains in Dark Astoria

Just to be clear, I agree with this.

This assumes that "vegetarian" is equal to "solo and small team".
However, many of the people who would prefer the option of higher difficulty actually fall into that category themselves. We're thus not really catering to all "solo and small team" ("vegatarian") players, but rather a subset of them (vegans?). If those solo/small team players could be satisfied by adding an *option* for higher difficulty, wouldn't that make the zone better targeted to the larger group of solo/small team players?


If the bosses in question were turned into AVs that scale down to EBs, but *not* given *any* extra powers or other kind of re-balancing, how would this affect teams of 5- members set to scale down AVs? Wouldn't this pretty much cover "solo and small team"?



Also, even if they would count as "small team" (which could be debated), couldn't the majority of teams with 6+ members in an Incarnate zone be expected to handle a weaker-than-usual (no PTOD, debuff resistances or extra powers) AV?

If these teams of 6+ *can't* handle a watered-down AV without any particular naughty tricks, how do they manage to get past a mandatory fully souped up AV version of the cowardly Diabolique (which I find to be one of the most troublesome AVs in the entire non-TF/trial game)?

Not if the overall experience is tainted by players recognizing that they are only succeeding at the mission because it was executed at a diminished difficulty.

I have no interest in rationalizing that opinion: its not even an opinion I share. But I know it exists, and its already been expressed directly. The fact that it exists makes it problematic when the intent is to avoid that.

Yes, there are solo players that want higher difficulty. But we know what the majority of solo players are capable of, because we know something about the overall performance of the average player. We know for Blasters, at one time it was that they mostly die, and for everyone else its that they do significantly better but not astronomically better than someone who always dies. The statistical likelihood that the majority of solo players entering DA could or would want more than a moderatly higher difficulty than the standard difficulty of this game is extremely low.

Although I said "solo and small team" I did not literally mean all players who do not team or only team with a small number of people. The game already has a standard difficulty model for solo players: essentially the average game content at +0x1. The devs appear to have decided that the target for solo and small teams should be something only moderately higher than standard difficulty, in keeping with the normal difficulty curve for solo players, and that the missions should be explicitly targeted at that difficulty level by critter design so that players attempting to progress in incarnate ability don't feel they are experiencing watered down content relative to vastly more powerful players.

Across the entire game, that perspective would be impractical. DA is a special case, and one where I have no problem with letting that perspective live. Because if not there, then where?

Snip just a little.

First the bold part. So because some players aren't as good as others everyone gets penalized? Samuel_Tow himself I have seen him on these very boards say that the a great boon to solo game was the AV in Maria Jenkins scaling down to EBs(or something very similar to that). We all know he was never an IO guy or power gamer type and if he can solo these AVs scaled down to EBs it just makes me shake my head and ask why? Why isn't this option in endgame content?

That's the "But eating meat is eeeeevil!" reason I meant before.

Are there any other reasons?


The standard high-level game is already packed with AVs that convert down to EBs. In this sense, having regular AVs would be *the same* as the standard difficulty of the game. Making the DA bosses AVs with EB powers would still be *easier* than the standard difficulty of the game.


Since the players that do not wish to fight AVs are presumably already running with downgraded AVs (either that, or they must be extremely frustrated), it is also quite possible that a large number of them wouldn't even notice a change that made these bosses "upgraded (to AVs) EBs". Of those that do notice, it is also likely that many of them will not care one bit that an option for higher difficulty exists.


Isn't that still the case with the AVs that still exist in these arcs though? If the design goal is to avoid that situation, shouldn't those AVs also be demoted to "pure" EBs? It seems a tad inconsistent to leave *some* of them (including one that's arguably the toughest of them all to beat) as AVs.


Leaving aside the topic of if one should specifically cater to the "If I can't have it then no one should!"-perspective or not for now, there are still a few potential issues here.

Apparently DA is supposed to simultaneously be the part of the game where we are significantly more powerful than in the rest of the non-trial (and 2 TFs?) game (the possibility for 2 extra level shifts), and in large parts one of the easiest high-level parts of the game (native EBs instead of downgraded AVs).

This is of course great for those that want little in the way of difficulty (and specifically don't want others to have even an option of a higher challenge for the same content), but...

Where does it leave the solo/small-team players that actually want some challenge from their end-game content?
I'm quite sure that there are a lot of those.


If there are more solo/small-team Incarnate zones on the way (and by Tielekku I hope there is, because as previously mentioned I feel that the new DA is awesome) I am absolutely fine with DA remaining an easier alternative (Incarnate-lite if you will). However, if this is the *only* (significant) solo/small-team Incarnate content we're going to get (for the foreseeable future), then does it really make sense to limit the solo/small-team players who want a challenge simply in order to appease the (hopefully smaller) number of people who consider it imperative that others may not have the option of getting a higher challenge than they themselves are able to handle?

In this specific case, yes.

This conclusion confuses me immensely. Perhaps that's because it is an inherently irrational position by those players you refer to, but it confuses me on two counts.

(1) Anyone who plays on difficulty settings of, say, +1/x1 is already playing under those watered down conditions. They happen to be the default. (I think having the manageable settings be default is important - having to turn your difficulty down below the default strikes me as likely more distasteful than just not increasing it.)

(2) Anyone who has played the non-DA game has to know that they are experiencing content that actually is watered down compared to a lot of 40-50 content, even on default difficulty. Many of these DA EBs are comparable to things modern but non-Incarnate content stopped throwing at us around level 30. (Unless you started in Praetorea. Wouldn't it be amusing if DA were easier than 1-20 in Praetorea...) If future content, especially non-Incarnate content continues this trend, then that sense would go away. Based on fairly recent content though, it definitely feels watered down to me.

I agree 100%

As I have read any times, the 'exceptional difficulty' is justified by the reward rate being higher than solo/small team.

I also agree. It would be a shame if things were messed up for solo and small-team play.

It is however not clear to me how changing it so that teams of 6 or more players would face AVs, with *no changes whatsoever* for teams with 5 players or less, would be able to have this effect.

Would you be willing to have everything I specifically judge to be irrational eliminated from the game, and conversely everything I find to have a rational justification for being included added to the game?

Preferences are unlikely to appear rational to most other people that don't share them, but the real question is does a preference have to be rationally justifiable to be addressed by a subset of the game content.

In most parts of the game, you have to balance the needs of the majority of players. But if you do that everywhere, you end up with tyrannies of the majority. Setting aside areas explicitly intended to defy the majority is not a bad thing. Its not a good thing either: its just a thing. But its a thing that is entirely in keeping with how the devs have designed and implemented this game from day one. They didn't just say "ok, we have an end game trial system, now lets go make a non-trial incarnate area." They responded to some of the critique about the trial system, decided which areas they would focus on, and then created something that was the exact opposite of the trials in those particular areas. Its more story-driven, less difficult, more accomodating to a wide range of characters and team compositions. Its much more casual, and much less power and ability hungry. Some people want that. I don't see the benefit of tampering with it in general.

And actually, holding the line on that doesn't mean I disagree with Aeon's open discussion regarding scaling. Far from it, I believe that the easiest thing to do would have been to flip the switch and toss AVs in there: by holding the line on *not* doing that, a creative solution may result.

A creative solution that isn't just a matter of making the current difficulty a scaled down version of an AV class scale up version would be exactly the sort of benefit I would expect holding the design line would promote.

There is content that caters to the IO crowd. It's called the Incarnate trials.

What I was saying was irrational was that solo players might feel they are facing "watered down" content, presumably if they got "downgraded" foes. My pointing out that I think that such a position is irrational was not done in defense of changing anything. It was pointed out to explain why it confuses me to see that observation used as explanation of why the devs created DA the way they have.

It confuses me because I don't understand how that particular concern has been addressed. How is fighting content that's "watered down" by design going to avoid that feeling by players? Do we really think that players don't recognize that the content is easier by design? It seems to me from most approving responses that they do realize it. I think most of them who like it are very much not worried about "watered down" content, whether it's by design or via some switch they could (or didn't) switch.

My point was not "that's irrational so they shouldn't have done that'". My point was I don't understand how that reasoning for doing it follows.

Yes, that's exactly what happened.

Now, that's certainly a good thing, but the issue is that now we have both extremes being catered to with incarnate content, but nothing in the middle. Which leads to three possibilities for the future:

1) The middle ground never gets filled and incarnate content is always "challenging", super large team trials or casual, small team story. And players have to pick one or the other.
2) We get entirely new content focused on the middle ground.
or
3) Some of the existing content gets adapted to cater for the middle ground more.

People in this thread have been mostly arguing for 3 because 1 is obviously undesirable and 2 would require a large amount of resources devoted to it. So 3 seems like a quick and easy solution.

Personally, I'd quite like to see some of the trials be completely revamped so they could be started, and completed, by a team of 4. MoM is one that springs to mind.
That would achieve the effect of catering to the middle ground just as well as adding AVs to DA would.

Ultimately, the only option I don't want to see happen is 1.

Incarnate trials are a giant mob fest with so many buff/debuffs flying around IOs become irrelevant. They cater to a lot more people then just the IO crowd. The IO crowd just flocks there because their all about getting more power(mostly) threw any means necessary IOs or other wise.

Preferential reasons, as I mentioned earlier, are not necessarily rationally founded. Preferences are not something people logically conclude they have, they simply have.

But if you want a psychological foundation for why people could believe the above, its well known through experiments that human beings are far more loss averse than they are gain-sensitive. Humans make a distinction between the *appearance* of losing something rather than gaining something. For example, experiments have shown that people statistically make fundamentally different decisions if you give them a way to win $20, and alternatively you give them $20 and then force them to choose a course of action that could cost them that $20, even though the two situations are numerically identical.

The satisfaction people gain from a situation where they are told "this is as good as it gets" is fundamentally different from one in which they are told "there are two options, pick the one you want" in non-trivial ways. And these ways do not follow rational lines of thought. They are unconscious and unavoidable compulsions.

That follows, but I think it still must require a very different viewpoint than my own. To me, that DA has foes that are easier at their worst isn't really a clear case of "as good as it gets" because there are so many counter examples. It's "as good as it gets" in a very limited context. That's why I mentioned earlier that if the devs produce more and more content designed in this way, that perception of mine will fade, because DA would cease to be this island of easier foes in a sea of more difficult ones. I would not like that outcome, but it would make more sense to me.

I'm not sure I would agree that DA is always easier than standard content, exempting the EB->AV conversion. I think it can be when a character is allowed the full leverage of all three level shifts, something you don't get to do anywhere else except on trials, but standard content even in the 45-50 range doesn't actually have even EBs all that often. And it can be a lot more mez-happy against squishies.

But setting that aside, its also both possible and even likely that either DA will eventually get higher scaled foes in isolated areas or in future story content, and that future content will introduce more incarnate-class zones and instances. Having planted a flag at the high end with the trials, and at the lower end with the solo DA path, the devs will, if they remain true to form, start filling in the middle over time.

The Coming Storm, for example, almost certainly will have a lower level set of story arcs, and then a higher level set of story arcs and content explicitly designed for Incarnates. If I had to guess, I would guess the trial side would be comparable to the higher trials, and the non-trial side of the incarnate content will be a step up from DA - basically to give people who "graduate" from DA a next step to progress to.

If DA is the start of the non-trial incarnate path, its explicitly intended to be targeted at even non-incarnates who have made zero progress in incarnate paths, and there's also no presumption of any strong invention building. It should be accessible to someone who hit level 50 two minutes ago. The difficulty of DA is almost certainly a reflection of the large number of complaints they received that Ramiel was far above the minimum difficulty level it should have been. DA is designed to circumvent that complaint. Future content can build upon that base, however, because future content can presume the player passed through DA and has at least some incarnate advancement, and probably some additional build strength.

I agree with this in broad terms, because the non-AV/EB critters are, like many recent critters, comparatively rich in "exotic" damage types, debuffs and exotic mezzes.

I am definitely trying to keep the perspective of someone going into all this with no shifts. And some of these critter factions are fabulously dangerous on high level / team size settings, because of stacking debuffs. It's actually from this perspective that I find the EBs so anticlimactic - when you're fighting for your life against the standard spawns (possibly because you have unwisely turned them up), and then the named opponent at the end is an EB no matter what your settings, it can be a bit of a let down.

Ehh. I am playing that Mind/Rad through Tina Macintyre's arcs, and I'm not so sure of that. Maybe it's not so concentrated for all the other content - the rate of EB/mish isn't quite so high (discounting the small army in Cimerora since it blows the curve hugely), but they are there aplenty in my estimation.

Then I'd argue that the mobs in DA either need to be buffed or the EBs need to be buffed somehow. I don't agree then that you just stick AVs in there.

I would not mind if the option to upgrade the EBs to AVs were in there, but with the explanation given I can see why the devs choose what they did now.

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.

The problem isn't that "it" is too easy. (Where "it" is the EBs we meet as key opponents along the way.) The problem is that "it" cannot be made harder in a way that scales appropriately to teams. Extremely potent soloists are an interesting subset of folks looking for tougher foes, but the more practical complaint is that the EBs are fodder for teams, and there isn't even an option to make them harder than EBs.

So it's fine that the EBs are "easy". The complaint is that "easy" is the only mode the EBs have.

And like I said in Doc Aeon's thread, I feel the solution isn't the make the EBs "harder" but rather to make the content surrounding them more engaging. I'm obviously biassed in that I don't value numerical challenges very highly, but it honestly doesn't seem to me like much is gained if you simply up the hit points and damage scales on an enemy.

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.