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

I don't think he's saying that he shouldn't ever lose, I think he means that the loss should actually be that - a loss.

Take safeguard missions for example. I've been defeated by the heist crew before, and when it's happened that's usually meant that the robbers win - they have the money and they got away. I lost. Some other missions are like that - ones involving runners (curse you, Crimson!), ones involving objects that you can fail to protect. Or rescue, in the recent opening DA arc. Most you can't really lose because the story requires that you win them. I think Sam would rather that these missions not really have what amount to as save points. If you're defeated and you exit the mission, that's it - you have to try again from scratch. You don't essentially get unlimited lives to chip away at it. And if it's barely possible to do that, the encounter is too hard.*



* I had a discussion about this with someone regarding Civilization. I think we agreed that a good difficulty level was one that you could win at maybe 75% of the time (excluding games where barbarians take you out at oh, 2000BC). You don't necessarily want to win *every* time - there should be some challenge - but you don't want things to be overly difficult, either.

While I have some concerns about some of the things sold in the market (Hi Amplifiers, Hi purple inventions), the devs have stepped up the difficulty noticeably since Issue 18.

That's not the proper solution (and likely not one the Devs had in mind as the intended solution), that's just A solution offered by one player.

Pulling is as effective as it always has been.

I've been able to pull one EB out of a two EB spawn using the Nemesis Staff since it was my longest ranged attack on my Controller and Dominator. Stay at the extreme edge of the Nem Staff's range and move away as soon as it fires.

Some claim that the Knockback will not allow you to use is for single pulls but that's rubbish. I've been single pulling with it since I got it on my Controller and Dominator. On my Blaster, Corruptor or Defender, I have a Snipe to pull with. On my Scrapper, I have Laser Beam Eyes from my APP or the Nem Staff. For a two EB Spawn I'd probably use the Nem Staff with the Scrapper due to the longer range.

SPOILERS for DA. Read at your own risk.








I've used the Nem Staff to single pull Romulus at the end of the Sister Solaris arc in DA. He spawns with the Keres (ParagonWiki claims she spawns as a Boss, but I thought I'd seen her spawn as an EB) and several Minotaurs and Cyclops Bosses in a tight clump. I've used it to single pull the Minotaurs and Cyclops when they spawn in clumps earlier in that mission. I've used it to single pull Reichsman during Max's arc in DA. He spawns with Requiem as an EB.

Use large ones.
That was my advice.

If you're saying you couldn't beat a couple of EBs with a tray full of large reds & purples, I'm doubting the veracity of your statement.


Your main issue isn't the game, it's your defeatist attitude.

Inspirations can't fix that, so I'll leave you to wallow in the impossibility of everything- best of luck!

GR came out well before the marketplace.

And going back in time, there was a HUGE increase in difficulty when they added Outcasts to Steel Canyon, however many years ago that was.

I doubt they were laying the groundwork for the market back in 2006...

The kicker to these situations isn't that they don't have solutions at all. They can always be dropped, if nothing else... I think they can, I haven't checked. It's more that the solutions presented to people who have problems are often... Unpleasant. Now, granted, I'm not one who'd shy away from an unpleasant solution provided it works (specifically for my brand of the problem), but that's only if these problems arise just once in a while. In previous content, they have been relatively rare. In recent content, however, they are far more frequent, and it's starting to concern me that we're seeing content people excused as being intentionally very hard for Incarnates, that's bleeding into the rest of the non-Incarnate game.

There are solutions to most problems, but seeing an increasing number of people resorting to bad once is a concern to me.

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've only ever seen Keres as EBs in every mission they appear, including that one. Maybe they get downgraded if you have 'no bosses' set, but I didn't think EBs ever did that (hence, the several mentions of them in this thread).

</threadjack>

If they get downgraded to Bosses based on those settings then several of the missions must have them hardcoded as EB's. Since the missions don't follow the No Bosses setting for the Minotaur's and Cyclops, I don't see why it would on that one specific Keres in that mission.

You're right. I added a note to the discussion page on the wiki.

Large ones are much harder to come by, and not all players have access to them these days. "Get large ones" can't really be considered a viable answer to a problem in the game when not everyone can do it.

I've played with Baka plenty of times, and he's hardly a defeatist. But it's frustrating when the game ignores or disables the advantages of your character for no good reason.

How loudly would Controllers and Dominators yell if they started putting in ambushes of foes that simply ignore control effects? Pretty loudly, I bet. Well, having them ignore Stalker's stealth (and therefore negate almost everything that makes the class more than a second rate Scrapper) is much the same, but for some reason some people don't see it that way.

Remember how people complained that Marauder was becoming immune to Slash/Lethal, and his 100% resistance couldn't be lowered? He could still be beaten, with planning and the right characters, but it wasn't FAIR to those doing S/L that wanted the badge for taking him down the hard way. So, they nerfed him.

The game doesn't have to be totally fair to everyone, but it shouldn't be painfully UNFAIR to anyone.

I buy them in bulk off the market.
So can you, so can *anyone* who bothers to stop at the market before they log out and throw up a few stacks of lowball bids.

Yes, it takes *slightly* more effort than visiting a vendor.
The massive difference in effectiveness more than makes up for that one extra step.

His posts in this thread indicate otherwise.


Y'all keep ignoring readily available solutions and I'll keep dismissing your complaints- deal?

Really? Damn, I could have sworn that getting large inspirations and using the market required either being VIP or a minimum level of Paragon Rewards. A level you may not have reached before being able to buy access to First/Night Wards.

My bad, apparently?

Could it be that whoever wrote the wiki page for Sister Solaris' arc is... *shock!* wrong?

Possibly.

My memory could also be faulty.

And since I'm not at a computer where I can test it myself I won't make the claim that the Wiki is wrong yet.

And once I do get a chance to test it I'll edit the Wiki if I verify that it's wrong.

I'm not at a point that I can test this myself right now, but can Premium players get Large Inspirations from Merit Vendors?

I'm not even sure if my Premium account's characters have earned any Merits. I know it's only at Tier 3 in the Reward shrub (I think it's filled Tier 3, but I would have to look to know for certain).

They gated the market?

I knew the IO system was limited to VIPs and tiered vets but didn't know they put basic market access behind a wall...lame. My apologies for making uninformed assumptions.

Strike all my previous comments on the subject of inspos then, I thought everyone had equal access.

Assuming email hasn't also been limited to paying customers, drop me a line in-game and I'll be happy to send along as many big inspos as you need- @nethergoat

Yep, the market is gated. I think email may be too, but I'm not sure on that one.

I'll agree that large inspirations are a way past many problems (and one I'll use myself). But we can't assume that everyone has access to them, the market, or anything else gated behind a certain level of rewards or VIP status.

(Excluding Incarnate content, naturally. If you're playing that, you're VIP and have full access.)

Nope.

But you'll notice I never complained about them.

I'm not complaining about content that has been in the game for six years.

A brute and a tank? You don't say.

Kudos on the blaster, though. Tell me more.

Because I'm complaining about "everything."

I've already beaten Night Ward, so I can't really put those solutions into action.



Look, maybe I should reiterate my argument.

It's not that the game itself is challenging, it's that Night Ward (and quite a bit of the new content) is poorly-calibrated for the game at large.

The dev team seems to have forgotten that classes without defensive powersets exist. All of the Ward content comes with a lot of high-damage enemies and no shortage of crowd control. They love tossing in Bosses and Elite Bosses with the thought "lol, well nobody's coming through here on a defender" (And before you say anything, if they didn't intend for Defenders to have some solo capability then they wouldn't have buffed Defiance).

It's even worse for poor Stalkers. Nearly every "epic boss fight" could see me through stealth. There goes my Assassin's Strike. Placate might work, except when I'm fighting three boss-level Malaises. And if it does, it won't be long before I'm spotted again.

Okay, so there are times when I'm going to lose in this game. I accept that, I lose plenty of times.

The problem comes from when you work so hard to make something so atmospheric and involving for the player, only to pull them right out of it by springing a surprise three-boss ambush on them and forcing them to resurrect in a hospital ("We're running out of time, you have to save us! ...Oh, but, don't worry, they'll still be here when you get back"), scour the market for large inspirations or call up someone from somewhere else to come in and help them.

It just feels sloppy to me. Save the Tag-Team Elite Bosses for the arcs where there isn't a sense of supreme urgency or a desire to bring the player into a narrative.

I'm not a fan of harder content for its own sake myself- a large part of my ambivalence toward GR was the general difficulty. Sure I could beat it, but I wasn't really enjoying myself- it played too fast and loose with the rules of engagement I'd spent years living with in the regular CoH-verse.

That said, I haven't gotten that feeling from the Wards yet. Also, generally power levels across all level ranges have been increasing for years so it makes sense that content *generally* would get tougher. Stuff like 'surprise' bosses I would still take exception to, but tough bosses as a component of a story arc, suitably labled, wouldn't bother me, whether I was playing my tank or my blaster or my corrupter.

I don't generally play defenders, as I view them as a team oriented AT and I seldom have time to team. And as noted on the main site,

Not that I don't think they should be able to solo, but I view this the way I view tough boss fights- if you've been warned about it, that's fair play.

The game is very up-front about the defenders support focus.

The ability of many mission encounters to nullify a stalker's primary defense has bothered me *long* before the introduction of "tougher" content. With the recent buffs I find it doesn't irritate me as much, but it's still offputting how many situations render my especiality a moot point.

While I don't at all mind reloading after a defeat, or recruiting more firepower, I don't think that tough bosses should ever be a surprise in any mission.

Have you beaten both yet? They're manageable up until they decide they want to make things "epic" at which point they toss bosses/Elite Bosses at you whether you have them turned on or not.

And either I missed the warning or, for the most part, they don't actually warn you when an Elite Boss is going to show up. It's not that I wasn't expecting a hard boss, it's just that I wasn't expecting three hard bosses at the same time, and oh they can see me no matter what.

While yes, Defenders are more team oriented, the dev team acknowledged that they have the capability for solo play which is why they received a buff to Defiance.

Pretty much this. I wouldn't have so much of a problem with a difficult encounter if they couldn't see me and begin attacking me as soon as I showed up (in one case as soon as I left the stairway).

I even took a Stalker through Praetoria, and despite every multi-Lt. Ambush homing in on me and commencing their attack as soon as I was nearby I managed to have a good time, escape Praetoria and even avoid making a thread on the subject.

Night Ward was doing great up until the bosses.

This, too. I never enabled bosses on the Stalker I took through Night Ward, but the game decided to throw them at me anyway.

And because I didn't have bosses enabled (which is the default), all of my NPC allies were useless.

Admittedly, I didn't know at the time that I could turn my allies into something useful with this feature, but at the same time I shouldn't have to.

It feels like nobody actually ran any QA on these arcs (Or if they did, they ran it once on a TW/WP Brute and gave it a stamp of "perfectly balanced").

After I got home I tested on my Premium Account. That account has only earned 5 Reward Tokens and has filled Tier 3 with nothing in Tier 4.

Even though he had earned Reward Merits before the change to Freedom, clicking on the Merit Vendor does not bring up any dialog box at all.

So apparently until a Premium account fills Tier 4 (8 Reward Tokens earned) they cannot even spend any Reward Merits they have earned previously.

Interesting. Thank you for testing this.