Elite Bosses and Arch-Villains in Dark Astoria

Hardly anyone is fussing it's too easy for large teams. I'm certainly not.

I'm fussing it's to easy on incarnate characters while playing solo or in small teams even with all the difficulty sliders up to simulate being on a large team!

I lied, the best part was when I came in and implied I don't end up doing that, like, every day.

For some, I'm sure it is... But please remember that not all builds are capable of doing what yours do. If the Astoria EBs are changed to "downgraded AVs" like they tend to be elsewhere it in the game to accommodate AV-soloers, the purple triangles on top of the later one's level shifts could become an issue. Not everyone going through there is going to be a fully kitted-out +3.

Of course performance depends on your powersets, and your level of incarnate. I've only ran missions in DA with my 3 mains so far. Set at even conning white minions (with bosses) at x8 my +3 brute just rampages through. My +3 Dark/Dark corr takes it a lot slower but she can hold off 2 full spawns almost indefinitely (Clarion helps) while slowly working her way through. My fire/pain corr is easily the one with the most trouble. But I don't run her at such large spawns solo (usually x3, or x4). Even con at x1 is still way to easy though.

All the unstoppables slowed us down a bit yes, but we just dragged them over into the next spawn and let them be killed by AoEs or waited for the unstoppable to crash wichever happened first. God modes on enemies are imo a very poor way to create challenge. Most of the time they just slow you down without actually making anything harder. Valkyrie's "Moment" of Glory anyone?

That mission was by the way an excellent example of the anticlimactic situations I was talking about earlier. In the 'boss fight', by the time I had cast Clarion and summoned my pets my duo partner on his brute had already stomped Romulus and the boss standing with him into pulp while the Talons EB was running away from us in a panic. It was over in 5 seconds or so. Yey, epic ... Not.

Oh, I agree there's something to be said for lording it over Romulus like that. However the effect isn't achieved by you actually being that much stronger then when you encountered Romulus previously in game, but by putting a nerfed version of him for you to stomp on. Because of that, for me, it doesn't create the 'feeling epic' effect I'm sure the devs are aiming for. Especially since, at least for a duo of me and my brother, we are that much stronger than Romulus in his AV form (he doesn't amount to much without his three Nictus allies and respawns).

I play with bosses always on too. One of the first things I do on new characters is put on the 'always fight bosses even when solo' option. I don't recall a situation were I ever turned that option off. Again, because just steamrolling someone who is supposed to be a big badass, doesn't make for a satisfying experience imo.

It is nonsensical because you're (or at least johnny is) taking two different situations (adapting content designed around coordinated (multi)-team efforts for solo play and changing what are standard mission arcs with standard mechanics to hinder/discourage large teams) and equating them, tying them together in a "if the devs wont do one they shouldn't do the other" argument. As if those things are even remotely tied together in any way.

Also 6-7 players still counts as a large group for me and is at any event a far cry from being able to solo it. I don't see a lot of people soloing the escapee part (If you're going to scale down the spawns'n stuff for very small teams or solo play, the number of escapees required to fail should be scaled down too, to keep things fair.) BAF is also the simplest and easiest of the iTrials.

I'm completely neutral towards the minimum player requirements of TFs and such. Don't mind that they're there, wouldn't mind it if they're removed. They're not a factor in this Incarnate content debate as far as I'm concerned.

This

I don't want to run Trials. But I might want to fight AVs with a couple of friends. Where's my choice?

AE
Cimerora
PI missions
Monster Island
Ouro



Thus concludes my nightly dose of smarminess.

*For the record, I see no reason AV's shouldn't work in DA for those that want them.

Well, he DOES have his mag 100 Stun Blast.

Originally Posted by Shubbie Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Architect_Entertainment



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Pretty much the rest of the game.

I dont see whats so special about DA that makes that not possible.

Well, since you've gone there, why isn't that the solution that works for you? Why can't you go to the AE, pretend your tanker is on par with Clark-El, and free us all from your attempts to argue that your view of what the game should be is so superior that we shouldn't even have the use of pre-existing in-game technologies to make our Incarnate progress experience more challenging if we want to?

Of all the people in this thread, JB, you're probably the one with your head most deeply buried in the sand with respect to this game's nature and experience. From what I can tell, your viewpoint in this thread is just a small part of that. That you should be in here telling anyone else that they should get their way via the AE is a very deep irony to me.

True, but I see that as far less of a barrier to defeating him solo than his having 120,000 HP or whatever his Khan/Barracuda version has. Don't get me wrong, it's still an extremely dangerous ability, but of the two, its the one I'm pretty sure I could actually find a way to deal with as a solo player.

This.



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That's no reason to prevent the EB to AV function from working there.

The question would be: why should the ability to also do that in DA be excluded? The argument that it's a place where we should "feel more powerful" has been answered many times already.

• DA is not solo content, it is non-trial content. Team considerations are included in DA, and EBs are speedbumps to even small teams.
• The ability to fight AVs would not prevent anyone from still fighting EBs. Actual soloists would not be meaningfully affected.
• While some people feel empowered by being able to curbstomp an EB, others feel it cheapens the supposed experience of actually being more powerful, rather than the game simply throwing weaker foes at you than it could. Arguing that only one perspective is valid when the tools to service both are available is very childish.

That's what I said... only not as clearly. There's nothing special about DA that warrants the inability for AVs to spawn in place of EBs if the player wants it that way.

Setting your difficulty to +4/x8 with AVs enabled and running any high level content OTHER than DA comes closer to Incarnate level group content than most of DA at the same settings. I dont see any reason why not, and pleny of reasons why the option should be enabled.

Now go clean your face.

There's two Dark Astorias. The echo is the original flavour. The not-Echo, accessible via PI and GV is the one not for little 25s.

Thank you for that. I wondered if that was what "Echo" meant, as in, an echo of the past.

There's also an echo of Galaxy City you can access too, if you want to get the bagdes and plaques there.