Random PuG vs. +6 AV. Should that be possible?

I spent most of last night on a random PuG that was running the Maria Jenkins missions. The team leader was a level 48 or 49 Staff Brute and we were fighting mobs that were +3 to that person. I spent the whole night fighting as a 48, myself.

Except that during one of the missions, we ran into a room of level 54s that included the AV version of Nightstar. During that specific mission, our team was weighted heavily for Control and support, with just a pair of Brutes doing their melee thing. There were a /Kin, a /Time and a /Cold at least, though I was a bit too busy to check who else was doing what (Maybe a /Rad and a /Dark?)

We had a near-wipe from the surprise of finding the AV in the pile of other stuff were were killing and the sudden jump in difficulty, but after we regrouped and gave Nightstar all our attention, we were never really in any serious danger again.

The fight took about 15 minutes and I'm sure we would not have been able to do it at all with many group compositions, but the fact is that we took down an AV that was beyond the purple patch. All of the modifiers should have been in the AV's favor. The team hadn't worked together before, but we didn't even try to plan. It bothers me that we were able to do that. It's not like we were operating as a superteam or some other purpose-built configuration for taking down +6 AVs.

I'm also a bit bothered by the fact that something spawned as a 54 in a sub-level 50 mission, but I've seen that happen before.

Is the game just too easy now? Were we just that awesome? Has this ever happened to anyone else?

Cold, Rad, and Dark all have fantastic debuffs for doing AV fights. They are pretty much the perfect sets for doing them.

Having one of each, assuming you are correct in remembering what you had, meant you WERE a superteam capable of doing it, even if configured as such by accident.

Kin, Time, Cold, maybe dark, maybe Rad? That's a sweet combo. Lots of -resist, +recharge +regen +recovery - all of those have some -regen for the AV. Really teams do better with 5 support and 2 damage opposed to 5 damage and 2 support.

I have a bit ofa rambling reply.

My feeling is that when people call City of Heroes "easy" that they are referring to meeting the literal objectives and not the much more dificult and complicated meta-game. The literal objectives of City of Heroes simply requires you to make the "Mission Complete" screen come up a lot. The meta-game is much more complicated, and I will even go on record as calling it possibly somewhat hard.

Meta-games are hard to define, but one possible example of part of one might be measuring yourself by how often you feel you are sent to the hospital in iTrials relative to expectations. I personally have a threshold of about three visits; if I end up there that often, I start feeling like I'm failing to do well, whether the iTrial ends in "success" or not. It's because of this sort of meta-game that you will see players make comments like "I don't feel like I'm doing much," or "I died a lot and it was frustrating," which in this game are much more common marks of failure than "I can't win a mission."

There are a subset of MMO designers who a few years back stopped referring to their games as "games" and started referring to them as "places." In that view, City of Heroes is a place where games happen, but is not in itself a "game." The game part comes when the players show up and interact with the environment. A very reductionist view might simply boil this down to a measurement of xp/time or the length of pylon kills, but IMO most players innately recognize many kinds of games going on.

Just to speak of my preferences in particular, my requirement for defining whether something is playable or not for me has less to do with its "power" and more to do with level of interest. Over the past two decades I have sent probably billions of electronic enemies to their deaths. The real question for me now is are there ways to make that interesting? If each character is a game of its own, then worrying too much about which ones are more powerful than others isn't really necessary; after all, I don't worry that Mario has less hitpoints than Sonic and lower DPS than Ryu, because they are all different games and even different meta-games.

That said, you will still see me comment about some powersets being underpowered or overpowered. Mostly this has to do with my view of gameplay experience: the worst thing a powerset can do is be an exact copy of something else but inferior, or worse, a set that manages to be both overpowered and uninteresting or even painful to play. The old Kinetics set, prior to team-wide buffs, crossed this threshold for me, for example.

Anyway, in the specific vein of AVs, I consider them not very well balanced. -Regen is too important. I'm glad its not my job to balance that stuff. My general feeling is that AV -Regen should be only partially debuffable instead of allowing you to floor it completely, but I'm not motivated enough to push for that sort of change, given the other agendas on my plate.