A fight against incredibly strong enemies that most ATs won't be able to beat on their own.

Indeed. There are some things you just cannot code for, as everyone is different, whether it's by build, skill level, etc.

Absolutely not. I may be the type of player that wants 'easymode' whenever possible, but even I recongize how ridiculous that would be. The ability to bust an AV down to minion would be anti-climatic for many story arcs, not to mention practically lore breaking. If I was coding such a system, I would make it so that the Bosses/EBs/AVs could only be downgraded once each.

No. I use something called 'target priority' when dealing with certain mob types. Unless I am in a team, I analyze what mobs are in each group and prioritize which ones to take out first. In your example, Sappers would be 'first to kill' every time.

As eluded to before, I may be something of a carebear in my playstyle, but I do try to play intelligantly/cautiously: I don't go rushing in blindly, if I had choice in the matter (unlike that boss fight in the second mish of the Magicians Arc where I got jumped before I could take full stock of what I was up against)

You're right. but the standard difficulty (0/0) should be set with the average player in mind.

In a balanced RPG "adventure," this means that the average player at the baseline level of difficulty should feel challenged but not overwhelmed, and should be able to complete any given goal with a minimum of frustration so that they can enjoy the experience of the game and (here's the most important point) continue playing.

With some of the game advancements coming from the development team these days, I think they may lose sight of that sometimes.

(edit: Thinking about it, the standard RPG model may not exactly fit the newest evolution of the F2P model, since the earning is based on micro-transactions and not loyalty purchases as much. The jury may still be out on that as COH keeps evolving. I'll still let my comment stand for basic RPG adventure design though)

It's 106 miles to Grandville, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing faceless helmets

... Hit it ...

Everyone in the game has options to overcome these "impossible" missions- there's only so much hand-holding the devs should be doing.

Option One:
Recruit help.

This is what we did back in the day when an AV popped up in our story arcs- "any 50's want to help me clear an AV mish?"
People were generally happy to help, as they remain today.
Yes the situation is a bit different with the changes to sidekicking, but even so a fully kitted 50 should be able to make short work of any lower level EB in the game.

Option Two:
As I noted earlier, fill your tray with giant inspirations. I dimly recall in-game advice to the effect that inspirations can help you past difficult situations. It's true! They're great! It's amazing what short work*any* character can make of an elite boss after popping five or six big Reds backed up by a steady stream of big purples, along with break frees as needed for the squishier ATs.

Option Three:
Autocomplete Mission.
The ultimate in frustration avoidance.
I generally burn them on annoying fedex's to distant zones & ridiculous Hunt mishs, but if you really, really, really hate tough fights, save them for that.


All three are reasonable responses to a mission you feel is beyond the scope of your character. All three are simple to impliment. One of the three should work for pretty much anyone who finds themselves facing a too-tough boss.

And I agree wholeheartedly on those options to get around a "sticky" issue. But the standard difficulty should still use the average player as the baseline. the difficulty should be able to be raised for more experienced players, or lowered for players facing some issues with the understanding that these settings are optional shifts away from the "standard" level the game is developed for.

If an individual player is at the bottom of the scale and it's still too hard to complete (or to be fair, the top of the scale and it's still too easy) then it's really not the game, it's the player. However, if many players are doing a mission and having to set things to the lowest setting just to succeed - even though you or I might not have the issue - then it's not hand-holding, it's an issue that needs to be looked at and possibly adjusted to fit the average player.

If I run a table-top RPG game for a group and after the first couple of encounters they as a whole keep wiping, I modify the adventure. Not that I think or don't think that it's too easy (my opinion really doesn't matter at that point), but because my player base is playing at a different level, and I want them to keep playing.

If it's just one guy, then we work together to find out why the one player's having an issue.

It's 106 miles to Grandville, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing faceless helmets

... Hit it ...

I think they are already set below average. I would consider myself a below average player. I'm ageing, my reactions are slow and my coordination poor, I don't spend all that long playing, I don't use keybinds, my builds are whatever-takes-my-fancy, I'm usually assisted by at least one cat - and yet I didn't find Night Ward difficult. That's why I am so surprised that people find that stuff difficult.

If your table top RPG players had options at hand to largely nullify/avoid/defeat a troublesome encounter and they *kept wiping anyway*, that's not the fault of the GM and altering your scenario to cater to a group of incompetents would serve neither the GM nor the players best interests. It's like your dungeon party had in their possession a satchel full of mighty potions to augment both their damage and their survivability, plus the ability to call on a Hero of the Realm to aid them in their quest AND a Sigil of Power with the ability to overcome any encounter and whos potency was renewed every few days.

How, given those tools, would they KEEP FAILING?
And how would any GM intervention on their behalf be anything but divine hand-holding and coddling?

The game provides ample tools to deal with problem encounters, and in any case such encounters are rare as hen's teeth considering the breadth of content available to the soloist.

The game is generally speaking really easy.
I disagree with allowing players to opt out of what minimal difficulty it does possess.

Run on SOs and your wish will be granted for greater difficulty.

What's really interesting to me:

I have a friend, who posts here. She and I both play CoH. I frequently find things maddeningly hard in CoH, which she regards as generally a very easy game. She consistently does things with casual ease that I consider Way Too Hard.

We also both played another MMO for a while. In that MMO, she was constantly frustrated by the difficulty of completing tasks in a reasonably painless manner -- while I find it relaxing and fun.

So it's not just a matter of relative competence in some general gameplay sense; people can be tuned to suit different MMOs, I think.

You seem to be taking this thread personally. I'd advise you to distance yourself just a little bit.

I'm not worried about EBs. I can solo EBs on any of my characters.

The new arcs however are not content with one EB. They seem to be trying to one-up one another in terms of difficulty now. In First Ward, there was an EB who constantly refreshed his health for no reason other than "EBs weren't hard enough."

This was annoying, but beatable.

In Night Ward you have multiple instances of Elite Bosses either refreshing their own health or summoning help, or just having multiple, spooled-up bosses showing up in the level (that can see through stealth, might I add).

The last fight in Night Ward involves an extremely strong Elite Boss who not only refreshes some of her health but also calls in a second Elite Boss to help her.

These are all in missions that they're expecting players to take on their own since they're so heavy on narrative, but they gear them towards about a quarter of the game's total AT count.

Anyway, I'll just ask this: PRAF, sir, please stop with the hyperbole. I'm complaining about multiple, health-restoring EBs showing up in missions, not wanting to "turn AVs into minions."

Yes, I remember when AVs showed up in arcs. You get seven friends and you take them down. That was how the game was back then: Group-oriented, MMO fun with friends.

I was okay with that, in fact I loved that.

But the game has changed. They're making very big, very detailed zones and arcs with a LOT of narrative in them that are meant to be experienced by one person at a time. This is appropriate because you are a superhero, but they seem to believe that "Superhero" ends with "Superman" and so go on throwing huge, powerful enemies at players, forgetting that there are some who don't have the defenses to deal with Titan Weapon EBs or the damage output to deal with Health-Refreshers.

Your suggestion that the content is perfect and I just shouldn't play it is a bad one, but I'll let you try to puzzle out why on your own.


Also, yes, I'm aware that I can pop inspirations to max out my defenses and become unkillable (woo challenging, everyone) but it doesn't work in cases where 1) The EB can weather my DPS to the point where my inspirations wear off and I die or 2) The EB gets a lucky strike via RNG and I die.

Yes, I can invite other players. Unless, you know, it's late and I can't find anyone in the zone, or anyone who wants to travel all the way to the zone to help me kill two EBs. But that isn't the point. Why should I have to summon help for a mission intended to be experienced by one player?

What on Earth are you talking about?

The better question is:

Why should we expect to be able to beat everything we run across the first time without help?

-or-

Why should we expect that nothing in the game should ever pose a real challenge to us?

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

That's not entirely true. Sure, you can't control the number of ambushes... Even though that ought to be possible... But let's say for the sake of argument that you can't control the number of ambushes. You ought to still be able to control their size. In pre-Praetoria content, this was always the case, as an "ambush" was essentially a regular spawn with some special AI instructions. When the Architect came out, missions were allowed to set special spawns to be "easy," "medium" or "hard," which I believe just meant "xDifficulty," "xDifficulty+1" and "xDifficulty+2." I've observed these spawns, and from what it looks like, it seems that if I'm playing at +0x2, an easy spawn would show up as +0x2, a medium one would show up as +0x3 and a hard one as +0x4.

Now, maybe I'm misunderstanding basic mission design intent, but it seems to me like medium difficulty spawns and ambushes should be rare and hard ones special, and yet it feels like just about half of what I've fought in Dark Astoria and for Belladonna Vetrano has been hard spawns because I played at -1x2 and the spawns I saw looked more like -1x4. Having the Olympian show up with a hard spawn at the end of a Hero's Epic, that I can see. It's a signature fight and it's supposed to be damn hard. Plus, it's ONE fight, which is exactly where heavy use of inspirations is appropriate and where expending lots of time on complex, intricate and time-consuming strategies is justifiable. One tough fight per arc... Hell, one tough fight per mission, I can freely admit to enjoying. Sure, it can take a long time and tax me, but that's good to have, occasionally. That's why I'm not actually that concerned with the "four elite bosses fight" unless it's like Mender Tesseract's TF where the mission resets if you leave it.

My beef is with missions and arcs where every fight is like that, or at least over half of them are, and that's not just Incarnate content any more. This is sort of Praetoria, take two, and in more ways than one. When Going Rogue came out and we started commenting on the damn depressing storyline, people argued that "That's just Praetoria." And I'd have bought it, if the same damn depressing storylines hadn't started showing up on Primal Earth. Similarly, Praetoria was... If not the first, then one of the first places to use the absurd ambush spam in every mission, making players fight several times their chosen difficulty, not mention the considerably stronger low-level critters there. Again people argued that Praetoria is "hard mode," and I'd have bought it, except that sort of design has spread throughout all of the game's new content.

As for never being able to do anything "interesting" without making missions very hard... That's a very narrow definition of "interesting," consisting essentially of "ambushes" and "large spawns." If that's interesting to you, you can always make your spawns larger - that's what the difficulty settings are for. You'd think I could make mine smaller the same way, but that doesn't work like these. See, what I want isn't high or low difficulty, it's CONSISTENT difficulty. When a mission, an arc, a whole zone has a consistent difficulty level, then I can tweak my settings and adjust it to just the level I want. But that's not the case. If I drop my difficulty, then regular spawns become trivial and uninteresting. If I up it, then special spawns become nearly impossible. There's no longer any good balance point because enemy difficulty varies so much it makes difficulty settings irrelevant. To me, setting my difficulty so I'd fight four or five enemies simultaneously yet routinely being jumped by 20 enemies at a time or by multiple bosses is not terribly different from having a mission that can spawn enemies anywhere from -4 to +4 to the mission level. Just where the hell do you set your difficulty to with that?

If the game is to be made "interesting," then this has to be done within the context of the tools it gives to players. Arguing that it's too damn bad the game is too hard for some and they should get help is no better than arguing that if the game is too easy, just stop using enhancements and respec into a ****** build. And, yes, I've heard this argument used in all seriousness.

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.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Have you played a single player game lately? Seriously, almost any major title in the past few years. Take Blizzard's recent release: it's designed to win itself without your input. I find it extremely believable that this has planted an expectation of inevitability in many players.
You mean on the same page of this very thread? Yes, someone did just say that to me.

Anyway Sam, I don't believe that City of Heroes should be giving Dark Souls a run for its difficulty or anything. What I want is simply variety. When the bulk of the solo content of a game has been as easy as it has here for so long, variety is pretty much going to mean increased challenge. Honestly I wish they'd listen to Arcanaville and just revamp basic critter AI to turn it into a pitiless killer, but I think the player response to that should be rather obvious given the outcry from a couple tuned-up missions.

Perhaps a more productive response to perceived excessive difficulty would be suggestions of ways to produce similarly novel encounters without picking on any specific builds, but I'm not convinced that anyone has shown that the new content does pick on any specific builds.

Are we even playing the same game? Because where I come from, finding a team is an investment of at least a half hour. Nigh impossible if you're a villain. I fail to see where people are getting the notion that this game is still populated enough to snag passersby for a quick mission.

Well shoot, why not just drop Shivans and Warburgs on it while we're at it. There's a difference between strategy and gorging yourself on purples and reds, which given the calibur of NW content would be consumed like a fat kid sucks down Skittles.

I shouldn't even have to tell you why this isn't a solution. But apparently I do, so here it is: I want to play the game, not hit a button to not play the game.

Going back to the root problem: The Notoriety system is borked, we want it fixed. This should not be an unreasonable request. The "Cottage Rule" applies to more than just powers, you can't go and randomly change game mechanics and make the player's difficulty settings invalid. The devs PANCAKEd up, the Notoriety system is broken, it needs to be fixed. The end.

I honestly don't like this argument, because the game hasn't been easy since I18, possibly since I17 when Mercedes Sheldon started throwing in a boss with three boss ambushes, one of which had three boss ambushes of its own. I get the call for variety, but we're coming on... What, three years now since going Rogue? Two at the very least, and the game hasn't been "easy" for a while. When I go down the list of missions any of my heroes or villains can do, the only really easy ones I can think of date back to four years or more, and they're easy because there's nothing custom about them - just a warehouse of enemies with a boss at the end.

If this were just from this Issue or from the last, I could agree it's just variety. If it were just in Incarnate content, I could see it as the expectation that Incarnates will be stronger. But it's not. It's everywhere and in every instance of new content. I'm pretty certain that somewhere around the I16-I17 time frame, we swapped mission designers, and the new one fell in love with ambishes and huge spawns and lots of bosses. I don't mind variety, but "easy" is part of variety, too, and I kind of want to see more of that, as well.

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.

You find it impossible to recruit a single other player on Virtue? I also play on Virtue and the only way I could see this being the case is if you're unaware of /search and /tell. You can't even tell me you play at odd hours because I know there are loads of French and German players on when North Americans are more sparse.
Haven't they still been adding "easy" content though? Take the Night Ward repeatable contacts, Fireball or Trilogy. Or even the other main arc contacts apart from Ward and the Magician. Nobody has tried to say that all of Night Ward is too hard, which I think is because it clearly isn't. It's true that you can't run through all Night Ward content without running into the harder missions but they hardly comprise a majority of what was added in issue 23. In fact, Belladonna's arc was also quite easy, the hard part being completing the optional story mission without causing the mapserver to explode.

Play on the second most populated server in the game
Unable to find help within short notice
Apparently has no friends

Not sure if serious...

Beladonna's mission is "simple," but it has more than a few instances of +++ Spawns, especially towards the end. I played it at x2 because any less than that and the IDF are a complete joke. I mean, seriously - three BCUs? Were you hoping I might trip over their mangled bodies and skin my elbow? However, at x2, the final mission had me fight through what must be around 8 spawns all set to twice that, consisting of a War Walker, two lieutenants - usually one who summons an Orb and one who deals psychic damage, and four minions. Most of those guys are considerably more resistant to giant swords than anything I'm likely to run across in Dark Astoria, and they deal quite a bit of damage and debuffs, too.

One of the reasons I keep saying I'm not worried about Night Ward is I haven't run Night Ward yet, so I can't comment on that. However, I ran a basic repeatable mission from Ephram Sha the other day and a simple glowie spawned three medium-sized boss ambushes on me.

Honestly, I had the most fun in Dark Astoria when the game told me "OK, now go beat up Diabolique on the other end of the map. I promise I won't mess you until then." Sure enough, what followed was a whole mission of regular spawns in a relatively regular map with no ambushes, no "special" spawns and... OK, and one special hostage rescue. And I loved it. The difficulty was just where I'd wanted to set it, and it was quite enjoyable. I wish more missions could be like this.

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.

I can tell you haven't tried soloing a stalker through First Ward yet...

In all seriousness, while Praetoria in general (and First Ward in particular-) aren't *impossible* for stalkers, they're not exactly what I'd call fun, either. A ton of character-targeted ambushes involving larger-than-average groups, escort allies that can't see through Hide, critter factions that make Assassin's attacks utterly useless... It's a real pain in the butt, and problematic in ways that just don't hit other ATs.

Sure, it CAN be done... I ought to know. I've gone through the whole Praetorian song and dance with three now... but at this point I really am convinced that the devs who designed First Ward had something against sneaky folk.

Like Blasters, how well Stalkers do really depends on the kind of missions they're asked to perform. This really isn't the case for most other ATs - a Brute can just muscle through most content, just with various degrees of difficulty. A Stalker, however, can and often does meet situations that disable a large part of the Stalkers' tools. The I22 Stalker Changes served to mitigate this a great deal by making Stalkers play less like... Well, less like Stalkers, but you can still feel the design just the same.

The problem with Stalkers and Blasters being so dependent on the missions they're running is that whoever's making these missions REALLY has no regard for who will be running it. That's why playing an AT which relies on specific circumstances to do really well is so tricky - mission designers just toss whatever they come up with at you and let you figure it out.

That's actually the side of "challenge" that bugs me the most - when it screws only some characters only some of the time, making for badly inconsistent difficulty.

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.

It's not just stalkers. My TW/Energy Aura scrapper apparently bathes too regularly for Coyote to follow him while cloaked so I just left him at the start of the mission, cleared to the end, went back, turned off energy cloak and then slogged back the the end of the mission again.

With Energy Cloak and a stealth proc he should be able to tap dance on anything short of an eyeball or drone. (They didn't give stalkers TW so I made a TW stalker out of a scrapper.) I also have a DP/Dev blaster with cloaking device and a proc that should be as invisible but lately content has been saying no stealth for you. Marshal Blitz seeing my DP/Dev with 65' of stealth before being able to get into smoke grenade range was sorta the last straw for that character.