To those who complained Tyrant was too easy...
By
Acemace,
Posted on: 2012-05-31 14:21 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
At this point I would like to note that if the level shifts are supposed to be more pronounced and actually affect the whole league whenever the lights are out, if they fix that, this trial is going to become significantly easier than it is right now.
From that point of view, it could be argued that the current form of the trial is too hard or at least much harder than intended.
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Originally Posted by UberGuy
You may have missed this earlier in the thread, but the Lights do nothing to Tyrant. His regeneration is only a function of his current HP. How many Lights are on have nothing to do with it.
The Lights are supposed to suppress level shifts granted to players, so that when all lights are out, everyone (in theory) is +6. This doesn't seem to be working right. Edit: I have noticed the damage after the visual for the flow lightning fades, and do agree that's quite frustrating. I wouldn't complain one bit if they fixed that. |
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I guess that makes sense... it's not that Tyrant's regen rate is getting buffed, it's that we're doing less damage and our debuffs are less effective due to lack of shifts.|
Originally Posted by UberGuy
You may have missed this earlier in the thread, but the Lights do nothing to Tyrant. His regeneration is only a function of his current HP. How many Lights are on have nothing to do with it.
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If that's the case, then I think the player buff for taking out the lights should last a bit longer (or debuff for leaving them up should be shorter). Something like... you lose one of the 6 bonus level shifts for every two seconds the lights are up, then gain them back each time a light is taken down. That way, instead of a sudden plummet of 6 level shifts, you have a few seconds to prevent their loss.
(And it should go without saying that they need to fix the bug that limits the shifts each light gives to less than the size of a full league.)
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Originally Posted by Nethergoat
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I won't say that the trial or Tyrant is easy.
But, for me, the trial was a lot of fun. When it came out, our server had a couple of leagues going. One was winning it consistently, the other decided to farm it. I find it interesting that I can get about 22%iXP whether I farm it or complete it.
However, only on some of my toons was I able to craft the t-4 and have it ready to be slotted once unlocked. So, I was reluctant to farm it, as the toons need the salvage, may as well just run the trial and finish it.
I do agree that they should make some changes - the level shifts that the player gets for putting the lights out - those should definitely be more consistent.
For me, I must be in the minority, because the trials a lot of you think are busts, they are the ones I like best. MoM, UGT and now this one, because it's over in 15-20 minutes IF the league is able to move when the crackling air message flashes on the screen. If they can't, that certainly drags things out, and makes failure a real possibility.
I understand that not everyone is going to have the same reflexes, eye sight, monitor size and resolution, computer system, ISP, level of sobriety, etc.
But for me, I found the trial procedurally simple to explain. That's very important to me, because it means I won't have to make a zillion macros like I did with ugt. (still run that trial 2 or 3 times a week, succeeding far more often that not, we still run MoM once a week and pretty much had that down, and DD -- we don't run DD, we run MoDD, because the Mo only takes maybe an extra 5 minutes)
There is no doubt in my mind on my server, I'll be running this trial A LOT -- assuming I can find others that want to do the trial. And if I can't, well, I'll have to improvise.
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@Ukase
Just had two runs on Champion, 24 people most are +3/several IOd to gills.
Run 1: Near flawless. We had a team on lights and we finished Tyrant in no-time flat. Level shifts were spread out.
Run 2: Could not drop Tyrant to below 30%...we were a little more spread out this time but used same methods, was quite strange.
Our strat was pretty straightforward:
Smash Stage 1
Smash Stage 2
Stage 3, send a league warning when the Lightning attack occurs, everyone backs off then heads back in.
Assign a Lights team to keep level shifts up.
Slot/Use Barrier Radial so you don't hit hospital.
When Tyrant is around 25-30%, summon Lore Pets and use everything you can on him.
That proved to be enough for a very fast successful run...the first time. The next time the Favor of the Well kept increasing and we could not floor Regen.
If I would change anything:
-Look at the Regen
-Put a text warning: "Use Quills of Jocas on Lights of the Well to weaken Tyrant!"
-Have Level Shifts apply to entire group...in both our runs only a third of us had any going.
-Add some Astral Merits somewhere, two Empyrean for that whole thing? Eehhhh...Keyes/TPN/MoM much better reward for time ratio.
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I would agree with that. And if groups want to avoid the lights, more power to them.
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Originally Posted by StratoNexus
At this point I would like to note that if the level shifts are supposed to be more pronounced and actually affect the whole league whenever the lights are out, if they fix that, this trial is going to become significantly easier than it is right now.
From that point of view, it could be argued that the current form of the trial is too hard or at least much harder than intended. |
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Since it is highly dependent on DPS, there may be some subtle things that vary from league to league and lead to dramatically different results.
- Too many low-shifted characters. In many ways, despite having extremely high shifts on Tyrant, the Lights of the Well (when they work) make this trial more forgiving for less shifted characters than any of the new ones. (The first four AVs are still rough, though.) However, if you aren't +3, even when you have all six Notice shifts, you're facing a +1 to +3 AV, which does reduce your DPS. This isn't normally a big deal, and I don't think it's a big deal here in general, but it might be enough to keep a league under the DPS envelope they need.
- Too much melee. I'm not one to complain a lot about the "run away if you know what's good for you" effects we get a lot of these days. Clearly, that affects melee characters more than ranged ones, but I don't mind that as much as some folks seem to. However, if too much of a league's DPS is melee, having them have to run away may mean Tyrant gets to regen too much while they're off fleeing. (The problem isn't that you have to flee, per-se, but that there are usually lightning flows near Tyrant, meaning you can't get back in melee with him. A good taunter can help a lot here by pulling Tyrant out of the flows.).
Bullet two is subtle - it may not be obvious to all league leaders whether it will be a problem for their particular league. I'm hardly suggesting that people should eschew melee, though I fully expect some leaders to do that. If they have a lot of melee, though, they should have someone try to taunt Tyrant out of the place he was when he summoned his lightning. I've been on leagues where taunters did this, and it does help.
Resistance debuffs and +damage can be important on this trial. Tyrant is highly resistant to regen debuffs, and large regen debuffs are a frequent means of winning DPS-vs.-regen contests. (In beta, this was used to crush him even going for "The Really Hard Way" badge, and so it was adjusted so that was harder to do.)
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Your tactic is one that most of our runs use except this. We tend to prefer if people brought Ageless or Rebirth.| Slot/Use Barrier Radial so you don't hit hospital. |
Also after the lightning strikes you can use all your heavy hitting attacks [which is when people are +9s usually] until the first eye beam, then you switch to fast animation attacks as the lightning is then usually 15 seconds after the first eye beam.
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If that was the design goal, either they completely missed the mark, or there is something wrong. I am starting to believe that the problem lies in the [Notice of the Well] power, which presumably is what gives the league level shifts after defeating the pillars. This power is broken because it only applies to 16 targets in a league that can have as many as 24 players. If pets count as "targets", and it probably does, then the problem is greatly magnified by having lore pets, MMs, and most controllers and dominators.
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Act three: Players tune the difficulty to their needs Finally, the players fight Tyrant. This fight held some big expectations we had to live up to. We needed to sell the climactic final battle feel we wanted. Fortunately, the environment artists who worked on post-nuke Nova Praetoria did a phenomenal job of capturing the fresh nuclear explosion ambience there. Now we could set up a battle with a soul-engorged Tyrant in the crater of Nova Praetoria's central plaza! A fight against a nigh-invulnerable modern god wouldn't be complete without giant pillars of lightning from the sky or a ground-pound capable of knocking down even the staunchest of super-powered beings. We built Tyrant's powers as numerous, flashy, and hard hitting, and his incarnate power of Tartarus gives him control of a character's soul, should one of his powers defeat that character! (What control of a character's soul means here is that a defeated character needs to fight his or her way out of an astral limbo -- otherwise Tyrant tries to use that soul as fuel.) We had some clear goals for this fight. We wanted to make Tyrant immensely powerful right out of the gate, but we also wanted to make sure the fight could be completed by pickup Leagues as long as they all met the entry requirements. To do this, we gave him high base levels of power, but we then gave players the option to sever his connections to his power source. This flexible power baseline made for a truly epic struggle against a cosmically powered being. It also let players set the difficulty of the encounter during the fight itself! |
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Wouldn't be the first time that MM pets have caused issues with trials, Green stuff badge in Keyes, for example.|
Originally Posted by Bionic_Flea
If pets count as "targets", and it probably does, then the problem is greatly magnified by having lore pets, MMs, and most controllers and dominators.
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Also, I've not had a chance to notice, been too busy trying to stay alive, but are lightning flows spawning on pets, or just league members? If the former, that'd be another strike against pet users.
And I'm hoping that the 16 target cap on the Notice of the Well is either a display glitch or an oversight, because if it's WAI, I'm not imressed. All it'll mean is that the Magisterium will not be run as a full league by those who know about that wrinkle.
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The above post may contain Cynicism, sarcasm and/or pessimism. If you object to the quantities contained, then tough.
My guess is that pets are either not targeted or immune to the Flow Lightning, as my Vicky lore pet seems to last a pretty long time (provided that I do).
50s: Inv/SS PB Emp/Dark Grav/FF DM/Regen TA/A Sonic/Elec MA/Regen Fire/Kin Sonic/Rad Ice/Kin Crab Fire/Cold NW Merc/Dark Emp/Sonic Rad/Psy Emp/Ice WP/DB FA/SM
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We had one person suggest that the reason we couldn't beat Tyrant was too much melee. No, the issue was that folks were dropping the Lights fast enough or getting out of the way when the warning about the Lightning Flow came up. It's a matter of pure incompetency on the player's part. Just like how Keyes in the first week was supposedly nigh impossible and caused players to weep.|
Originally Posted by UberGuy
Since it is highly dependent on DPS, there may be some subtle things that vary from league to league and lead to dramatically different results.
Bullet two is subtle - it may not be obvious to all league leaders whether it will be a problem for their particular league. I'm hardly suggesting that people should eschew melee, though I fully expect some leaders to do that. If they have a lot of melee, though, they should have someone try to taunt Tyrant out of the place he was when he summoned his lightning. I've been on leagues where taunters did this, and it does help. Resistance debuffs and +damage can be important on this trial. Tyrant is highly resistant to regen debuffs, and large regen debuffs are a frequent means of winning DPS-vs.-regen contests. (In beta, this was used to crush him even going for "The Really Hard Way" badge, and so it was adjusted so that was harder to do.) |
Because for whatever reason, no matter how you give instructions, people will NOT listen unless they feel like it.
@Bionic Flea: To my knowledge Pets are immune to Lightning Flow completely. I've seen multiple sets of Mastermind Pets sit in the DoT. It's the same way as MoM functions. Pets are immune to the patches.
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I'm pretty sure they're Immune or massively resistant to the Flows, however if they're getting targeted, then that has a significant impact on the encounter.|
Originally Posted by Bionic_Flea
My guess is that pets are either not targeted or immune to the Flow Lightning, as my Vicky lore pet seems to last a pretty long time (provided that I do).
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If they're immune but targeted then they can stay in and do damage, but none of the other melee player characters can, since there'll be Flows under Tyrant's feet, and commanding pets to move in the time available is not going to happen on most leagues.
If they're not targeted then I can blame players rather than pets for the flows under Tyrant's feet
The problem I have is that there are at least two competing equally important demands in that fight. 1) do as much damage as you can, as fast as you can. 2) be able to move fast and far on a moments notice.
If I'm on melee (so far my Katana/regen scrapper's done it), I can either be doing max damage output or I can be doing more conservative damage output and ready to move NOW. (I also have a third demand which is to try and stay alive in melee against the ground punch of doom). So I'm not doing as much damage as I could because I'm watching, ready to move, and I'm doing less damage again, because I can't stay on the target 100% of the time. I'm not really enjoying that fight as melee
This situation feels a little to me like the debacle of the AV regen change way back when it was still Cryptic. I'd have thought that the lesson that the player base don't really enjoy fighting massive sacks of HP with huge regen values would have stuck, but maybe that's my natural cynicism coming through. Also, please note I know this is meant to be difficult, the final showdown against Tyrant etc. etc. but it's not feeling like fun to me right now.
Warning:
The above post may contain Cynicism, sarcasm and/or pessimism. If you object to the quantities contained, then tough.
Just another thing I've noticed in the last two Mag. runs I've been a part of.
The last two runs, when we were fighting Black Swan it took us 3 portal/rift spawns to take her down; we never beat Tyrant (came close, one time got him down to 17/100).
The times we've beaten Tyrant? We've taken Black Swan down after 1 portal/rift spawn (2 at most).
So maybe if the damage isn't high enough (or not enough debuffs) for Black Swan, you may not be able to defeat Tyrant. *shrugs*
Like I said, I'm not saying to abandon ship if you take 3+ portal spawns during the BS fight but....just something to think of/take note.
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I really don't think it feels like that, though. A massive sack of HP has a HP bar that just creeps along. At risk of making it sound like a jovial thing, this feels more like tug-of-war. You can get Tyrant's HP to the 30% mark pretty easily, and then it bounces around between around 20% and 40% as you continue to fight him. Yes, the fight can be long, but it's much more manic than just beating on something with tons of HP.
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Originally Posted by Canine
This situation feels a little to me like the debacle of the AV regen change way back when it was still Cryptic. I'd have thought that the lesson that the player base don't really enjoy fighting massive sacks of HP with huge regen values would have stuck, but maybe that's my natural cynicism coming through.
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But it makes failures extremely frustrating, which is why so many people saying they will never run it again. |
Originally Posted by UberGuy
I really don't think it feels like that, though. A massive sack of HP has a HP bar that just creeps along. At risk of making it sound like a jovial thing, this feels more like tug-of-war. You can get Tyrant's HP to the 30% mark pretty easily, and then it bounces around between around 20% and 40% as you continue to fight him. Yes, the fight can be long, but it's much more manic than just beating on something with tons of HP.
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Also why so many people are bailing on full runs, cant find a farm, join a full run and bail.
Makes perfect sense.
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It doesn't seem to be a display glitch. The level shifts are being given randomly.
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Originally Posted by Canine
And I'm hoping that the 16 target cap on the Notice of the Well is either a display glitch or an oversight
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Because people are so reasonable about other things they can fail, right?|
Originally Posted by Shubbie
But it makes failures extremely frustrating, which is why so many people saying they will never run it again.
Also why so many people are bailing on full runs, cant find a farm, join a full run and bail. |
The only difference here is that it's also so easily farmed and the only thing that gives Hybrid XP. If there was a reason for people to have farmed the Underground, people would have in a heartbeat.
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Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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Im saying in general give players any reason and they will act like jerks.|
Originally Posted by UberGuy
Because people are so reasonable about other things they can fail, right?
The only difference here is that it's also so easily farmed and the only thing that gives Hybrid XP. If there was a reason for people to have farmed the Underground, people would have in a heartbeat. |
Its just the way players are..
I joined a full run yesterday to give it one more try and 6 people left after the first 250, even though at that point I was starting to come to the conclusion that smaller trials might be easier because of the way the buff is being handed out.
The leader didnt see it that way and called the trial.
Boycott Ncsoft if they close down Coh.
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Well, after what I've said, we got the Really Hard Way tonight (see other thread here - http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?p=4258548 ).|
Originally Posted by Shubbie
Im saying in general give players any reason and they will act like jerks.
Its just the way players are.. I joined a full run yesterday to give it one more try and 6 people left after the first 250, even though at that point I was starting to come to the conclusion that smaller trials might be easier because of the way the buff is being handed out. The leader didnt see it that way and called the trial. |
We then tried again afterwards with a modified league after people had alted, and could only manage Hard Way. (only?!? sense of perspective, what's that?)
First run I was on a Corruptor, Sonic/Cold. Still under Tyrant's feet, but stayed alive. Second I was on my Katana/Regen. Planted HARD several times.
I'm still not enjoying it as melee, but with a massively focused league, it should be doable. Even more so on a less squishy toon than my not really IO'd Katana/Regen (who was getting instagibbed (and not by Flow Lightning) through capped MaxHP... not fun)
The stated design goal of 'any PuG that meets the entry criteria should be able to do it'? I'm not sure it meets that, but to be fair, it's still too early to tell. Ask me again in a month or so, when people are more used to it.
Myself, I'm never going to run a Farm Magisterium. I'll get Hybrid on my alts the 'real' way, thank you very much.
Warning:
The above post may contain Cynicism, sarcasm and/or pessimism. If you object to the quantities contained, then tough.
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I am extremely doubtful that 24 +1s or 50s (Remember, you only need Destiny and Lore unlocked and not slotted to participate) running SOs (some red, since not everyone has fresh ones) and at base HP at 50 would succeed this trial.|
Originally Posted by Canine
We
The stated design goal of 'any PuG that meets the entry criteria should be able to do it'? I'm not sure it meets that, but to be fair, it's still too early to tell. Ask me again in a month or so, when people are more used to it. |
Of course, that' a pretty narrow field but it sure looks like 50+3 and slotted Lore/Destiny (and IOs?) are needed, which creeps more and more away from "any pick-up group can beat this."
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Oh almost certainly, a league of 50+1s in this trial would have next to no chance in this trial. Not saying it couldnt be done, but would be very suprised if they did.|
Originally Posted by Neuronia
I am extremely doubtful that 24 +1s or 50s (Remember, you only need Destiny and Lore unlocked and not slotted to participate) running SOs (some red, since not everyone has fresh ones) and at base HP at 50 would succeed this trial.
Of course, that' a pretty narrow field but it sure looks like 50+3 and slotted Lore/Destiny (and IOs?) are needed, which creeps more and more away from "any pick-up group can beat this." |
However as long as the majority has the level shifts needed, then i think [given time] PUGs can complete it. The hard way/very hard way badges though are a VERY different matter. I actually found that IO set bonuses are really not needed in this trial though, def does NOTHING against his attacks so as long as a player has their slots slotted enough for damage/acc/rech [which SOs should be] then they are on an equal playing field as IO users on this trial . . . imo
Edit: Just to add that in our really hard way run, not everybody was +3 as a few people had to alt around so we had enough dps/debuffs, though most obviously was.
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Actually the first few days most of us were more interested in Interface/Destiny than Judgement/Lore so we tried Lambda first - and found that the final battle was nigh-impossible without any incarnate shifts or judgements (it was FFG stacking overload - the Battle Orbs kept boosting Defense to an almost infinite amount) so we just farmed the outside stuff to get iXP since we had run BAF about 9000 times each.
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Originally Posted by tanstaafl
That was pretty damn rare. **Referring to Lambda farms of outside mobs**
Not like the common place Magi farms. |
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Originally Posted by Shubbie
Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.
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Me no likey new trial :C some people don't have billions of inf to totally max out their builds and with things on beta being so damn cheap I'm sure people spruce up builds there and it's easier for them. Thanks a bunch of making the devs buff tryant ._. So far 1 out of 10 attemps have succeed... BARILY....
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