Concerned about difficulty, thoughts?

Between nukes, new snipes, and whatnot, I'm somewhat concerned about the future difficulty of the game. At that point, +4 enemies won't be lasting long at all, especially on a team.

The funny thing is, I absolutely love these changes. Turning useless powers into useful is always A+ in my book. But what about the enemies? This game is already widely regarded as fairly easy at high levels, especially on teams. Any easier, and I'm unsure how much fun the game will sustain for me over any extended period of time. Being a superhero/villain is great and all, but not if taking down hordes of villains/heroes is as difficult as punting kittens or playing ping pong with a blind person.

Hyperbole aside, what does everyone think? Is the difficulty too easy? Should it change and if so, how?

Personally, I hope they let us up the difficulty past +4 or something like that. With incarnate levels, we're already maxed out fighting mere +1s in Dark Astoria. I'm all for more difficult factions such as those in Night Ward, but implementing more difficult challenges in this way limits what enemy groups we can sink our teeth into, further relegating old enemy factions to "Council" status (i.e. good for farming, but not any challenge for most).

There's been many times I wished we could lower it to -2 or -3. Or that when we shut off bosses in the difficulty, that it would keep us from facing Elite Bosses as well.

Those are my thoughts on difficulty.

This is what Posi and Synapse do all day. Nothing in the changes are going to make missions easier than they are now. Burst damage numbers may change but they carefully check endurance costs and recharge times to make sure powers are still balanced overall.

Also it's pay to win now.

If anything, the changes are adapting to how the game actually plays, and probably should have been changed years ago.

Yes the highest original difficulty was something akin to +2/x1 or +2/x2 before the new difficulty system...so technically the game is harder now than it has ever been.

archery has had RoA, the other nukes will be similar. If that didn't break the game, these won't either.

the simple fact is that blasters cannot break the game. Corrs, Defenders, and Controllers already can and have for a long time.

a group of 8 fire/kin corrs with speed boost so they can nova every 20 seconds will trivialize almost everything - even without fulcrum shift.

in regards to difficulty i think they should allow us to go beyond +4 by adding another option which adds level shifts on the enemies

so we can do like +4 then shift them another +4 or something like that

if we could do that then there would be challenge to fighting +6 baddies, and or it would also allow the incarnate content to become more challenging once you already have your 3 level shifts

not to mention that lvl shifts are the only way of fighting baddies higher than lvl 54

it could range from -1 shift to +4 just like the baddy level setting so we could go as low as -1/-1 or as high as +4/+4

Now there's an idea. Call it Incarnate difficulty, or perhaps Pandora's Outbreak, and add additional levels of difficulty in which the enemies get level shifts.

I think the difficulty level should be based on your effective level. So if I set it at +4x8 and I'm currently 51 with my Alpha level shift but not going against incarnate content, then the enemies should be level 55. If it's incarnate content and I'm level 50+3, the enemies should be level 57. You know, +4, like I asked for. That said, there's no way I could turn up the difficulty to a REAL +4x8 in incarnate content. But then, that's the intent - a difficulty level I just can't handle.

I also like the idea of having -2 or -3, again based on effective level. You can already use -1x1 to trivialize content on a decent build, so I don't think there would be a good argument about "but then it's too easy to get mission completion rewards". It's something the devs would need to take a look at, though. In any case, I think it would be nice if anyone with any build were able to solo effectively on SOME setting.

DarkSideLeague, I can farm +4x8 Knives of Vengeance just fine on my Katana/Dark Scrapper, I think as easily as I used to farm +3x8 Council on the same character before the incarnate powers and level shifts. But I can't back to back compare, and perhaps memory is faulty. (Edit: and granted, you said +0x8 - no, it's not THAT easy) Talons of Vengeance are a bigger challenge, and Banished Pantheon are downright nasty.

Here's me soloing the final mission of Dark Astoria arc 5 on +4x8 no temps, no insps, no deaths. I got through the first five arcs that way. The sixth beat me, and doesn't look possible on my current build, though the community gave me some great suggestions for improvements. By the way, the video is boring and long and includes pauses waiting for powers to recharge. I don't expect anyone to watch it. Just showing that even +4x8 incarnate content is arguably too easy for some builds. (I did die once on arc 4 and had to redo it. Arcs 1, 2, 3 and 5 all went down on the first try, no deaths.)

http://youtu.be/ZLfLYGwysl4

http://youtu.be/VATfajOsMJU

I find the difficulty pretty adequate while not using incarnate powers or picking the best possible combos. Heck, even when I still used incarnates I found challenges just fine without even touching the AE (which allows for near infinite levels of difficulty), as I don't do big teams much and when I do, I don't care for "hug the tank" or "stack buffs/debuffs" playstyles, generally opting to divide and conquer instead. Twice the aggro, twice the fun.

Steamrolling as the basic playstyle has been my experience with the game since about 2006, which is why I always have trouble to relate with those topics. The introduction of the RSF was the only time the game offered something truly hard for a bit, IMHO - until the endless amount of complaining from most people led to nerfs after nerfs.

Nowadays, seeking a challenge isn't that hard. With AE missions that can get all the way to groups of extreme/extreme AVs, and all the leeway between that and conventional mission difficulty, even the most powerful builds can get slapped silly.

One potential issue is if you're also expecting appropriate rewards for that level of challenge, but the above RSF example shows this can't be solved; if you make rewards appealing for super hard stuff, most of the playerbase will want to be able to beat it, won't, and will become frustrated.

What is fun to me is I have friends who complain about the lack of difficulty, too; and yet when I bring them into situations where the difficulty is high enough we die a few times or struggle a bit to get through, they start to get discouraged, sometimes really fast.

So do people truly like difficulty or do they only believe they do? I lean towards the latter, and seeing the overwhelming majority of folks in PuGs who won't dare stepping inside a mission without eight players or queuing for a trial, even a sewers one, without preforming their league makes it easy to believe most people don't want a challenge.