Besides, in comics, henchmen only:
1. Slowed the hero down.
2. Tire/exhaust the hero.
3. Distract the hero while the Villain (get's away, or sets up to one-shot the hero).
It sounds like most players are too busy or too easily annoyed (or bored) to fight henchmen. So just remove them.
Taking away something that some people enjoy when those who don't enjoy it already have the option to bypass it seems like a bad idea to me.
Something that henchmen in the comics generally dont do (as I recall) is remove Superman's ability to fly, Spiderman's acrobatics, etc (obvious exceptions being capture scenarios).
Because part of the genre is mopping the floor with a bunch of jabronies.
Another part of the genre is when those jabronies equip themselves with big guns that shoot special "hero-busting" bullets and suddenly the hero can't mop the floor with them anymore.
Also crotches with little to no defenition.
Champions Online: Be the hero you wish you could be in a better game.
Some ideas to address the desire for more challenging content:
1. Normal - stays as-is.
2. Hard - replace 1 henchman per group w/ a specialized villain, which has a heal or buff other and some sort of crowd control power that it uses on players.
3. Very Hard - as "Hard" above, plus it scales 1 villain up to a master villain, (per group).
4. Elite - as 2 above, plus all enemies are scaled up 1 category, (henchman -> villains, villains -> master villains), and have all spawns count as having 1 more player than is actually on the team.
For instance, Argent could get a new unit that uses pulse beam rifle, applies bionic shielding to its allies, and uses tractor beam on players.
<::::::::::::::)xxxo <::::::::::::::)xxxo <::::::::::::)xxxxxxxx(:::::::::::> oxxx(::::::::::::::> oxxx(::::::::::::::> "Is it better to be feared or respected? I say, is it too much to ask for both?" -Tony Stark Official NW_Legit_Community Forums
Some ideas to address the desire for more challenging content:
1. Normal - stays as-is.
2. Hard - replace 1 henchman per group w/ a specialized villain, which has a heal or buff other and some sort of crowd control power that it uses on players.
3. Very Hard - as "Hard" above, plus it scales 1 villain up to a master villain, (per group).
4. Elite - as 2 above, plus all enemies are scaled up 1 category, (henchman -> villains, villains -> master villains), and have all spawns count as having 1 more player than is actually on the team.
For instance, Argent could get a new unit that uses pulse beam rifle, applies bionic shielding to its allies, and uses tractor beam on players.
Along the same line, but maybe easier to develop and more versatile--an easy way to make things like solo Unity missions at least challenging enough to keep you awake would be to copy CoH by keeping the existing Normal-through-Elite settings, but also ad a setting where you can choose to be treated as a 1-5 person team.
I used to kill a lot of time on CoH running 4/8 (4 levels above you and set for a team of 8) radio missions against the hardest villain groups. It felt epic as hell to be just swarmed by bad guys and still fight your way through, and if I screwed up badly enough (pulled three groups at once), I could still die, which kept me awake.
And, it's completely scaleable, so you just set it where you want to have fun. Honestly, this change alone would have me soloing this game much, much more often. It would take pointlessly easy content and make it worth playing.
And if they also added something to the Normal-through-Elite mechanic that ratcheted up the villains level for each step, that would make it even better. If I could fight a Unity mission set for a 5 man team at Elite with all of the villians four levels above me, I'd be in hog heaven!
Edit: Oh, but as far as villain groups, I want to second bioshrike's suggestion to ad more buffer-debuffers. This makes gameplay more challenging and fun by making you "learn" how to handle each group. There is some of that in CO, but not much, and I can handle most groups the exact same way. Whereas in CoH, there were groups that I could not beat till I figured out who to kill first and what order to follow, and whether to group them or spread them out, etc.
Edit: Oh, but as far as villain groups, I want to second bioshrike's suggestion to ad more buffer-debuffers. This makes gameplay more challenging and fun by making you "learn" how to handle each group. There is some of that in CO, but not much, and I can handle most groups the exact same way. Whereas in CoH, there were groups that I could not beat till I figured out who to kill first and what order to follow, and whether to group them or spread them out, etc.
This would be really cool. A big part of the reason viper is the most dangerous group is because of those brickbusters (in particular) and one or two other types that debuff. In packs it can get really nasty and knowing which ones to take out first is very helpful.
I wish more groups had these sorts of powers. Just, not an obsession with holds please.
This would be really cool. A big part of the reason viper is the most dangerous group is because of those brickbusters (in particular) and one or two other types that debuff. In packs it can get really nasty and knowing which ones to take out first is very helpful.
I wish more groups had these sorts of powers. Just, not an obsession with holds please.
Yeah,it defenitely gets old just spamming an aoe power on every group. I for one like holds! Not an obsession with them... but groups that have a mob in it designed to throws holds at the person with highest heal aggro would be deviously amusing.
And just a generaly higher level of creativity.... it would be neat if say there was a debuff that certain npcs from certain groups would put on you that makes it so that the other players in your group as well as all friendly npcs are suddenly skinned as enemy npcs, so you don't know who is what, and you rapidly start losing health unless you start hitting people. If you're observant, you'll know who is an ally and who is an enemy...those squishy dps people in your group who can't afford to wait and look might suddenly become very dangerous! Especially amusing if you include friendly npcs that you shouldn't kill, since they would be much more difficult to differentiate.
The sad thing is that Cryptic would get a lot more leeway from its players than another company that's not in the super hero genre would. Here, we're willing to accept mechanics that have already been done elsewhere, because it's super heroes. They wouldn't even need to show a high level of creativity, though we would certainly enjoy it. Instead, they've taken this leeway as a sign that they can use no creativity whatsoever with their game mechanics, because we'll keep playing... cause it's super heroes.
Champions Online: Be the hero you wish you could be in a better game.
Elite lairs = Give every single enemy conviction, ability to break blocks every single attack of theirs applies Trauma!
You're not too far off. The biggest difference between most Freeforms and Archetypes has to do with self-healing capability. Only a few archetypes can self-heal; if the enemy NPCs did this? Oh wow, yeah you'd find you need a team more often for hard content, or at least renewed emphasis on charge attacks and AoE attacks (for the past year the focus has been primarily single-target or AoE maintains).
As much as some people hate him, Ao'Qephoth is actually an example of how self-healing really increases the challenge level (remember however that Ao has the following Achilles' Heel weaknesses too: pet spam, high DPS, blocking his lifedrain, Trauma debuff, and Skarn's Bane)
Especially in single player PVE, bigger numbers are needed. Because when I can 2-shot the end boss of what's supposed to be a major story arc (Mindslayer in Canada, for example - 1 shot even, if you use Shadow Strike) there's something wrong.
Though there is a bit of truth to what Smooch is saying as well. The reason Harbinger is so blase compared to someone like Gravitar is not that his 'numbers' are any lower. He's got as much health, and can land hits that can pretty easily wipe out a DPS character. Problem with him is that he hits slower, in much smaller areas, and takes ****ing forever to kill. He's not engaging; he doesn't keep you on your toes at all, and he's basically a block of health to slowly whack away at.
Indeed, and speaking of blocks of HP to slowly whack away at; Mega D, Takofanes, and Clarence should be included too.
I'm all for it for introducing new enemy types that vary up the flow of gameplay, but when it comes to the basics of the game, higher numbers are going to be needed to counteract the fact that every character can now dodge and critical hit easily.
Not every, but many. The distinction is subtle, but should be noted as you want to make slight changes, not drastic sweeping changes that break other mechanics or make the game practically unplayable.
Since I mentioned Ao'Qephoth a moment ago, he's an excellent example of unintended consequences. He's perfectly beatable with a good team except if you encounter him in Radiation Rumble where the Rad Power buff and Legendary rank together makes his self-healing ungodly powerful.
In short, if something needs to change, do the small tweaks over time enough to see theri effects in full, not huge & rapid changes on a whim, IMHO.
The problem is archetypes. Everything has to be made so it can be solo'd by the weakest archetype, so numerically they're rather restricted, especially when it comes to mission content.
Yes & No...
Yes, this game has been trending toward not only not encouraging subscription sales, but actually taking step to discourage.
No, because archetypes are not as restricted as they used to be, thanks to the pay-to-win nature of certain legacy devices or vehicles.
i.e.: Doesn't matter if you're an archetype if you're packing a Teleiosaurus Pheromones, a Neuro Pulse Generator, a Psionic Accelerator, a Necrullitic Elixir, and an Ice Grenades devices. And if you're in a Zone, if you have a Black Widow gravbike fully armed & armored with R6 vehicle mods and a Mark 2 AoE weapon of some kind, you're pretty much guaranteed easy mode in any Zone.
In short, you can match the DPS power of a freeform as an archetype with the top-of-the-line devices. Definitely a reason key sales remain strong if you ask me.
While Gravitar was a success in many ways, the one place it failed is general accessibility; which would have easily been remedied by emphasizing the random force cascades less and emphasizing the bubbles more, in other words lowering the demand on character survivability and raising the demand on player reaction.
This is a great idea! Yeah more bubbles and less target-less random tap-spams from her force cascades would smooth things out nicely.
With Harbinger, I said it before, the only fun part of that whole thing was chasing the Exocets around. The portion where you stand in place and spam damage at Harbinger was about as action-oriented as typing a paper.
While I agree with you, I'll point out and remind you that there was some very vocal complaining from a few people that it was "impossible" for them to catch the Exocets.
When you just tune the numbers higher, you leave a lot of players behind, and with how little actual content we're getting it has to be accessible to as many people as possible; but it still has to be fun.
Yes, this game has been trending toward not only not encouraging subscription sales, but actually taking step to discourage.
No, because archetypes are not as restricted as they used to be, thanks to the pay-to-win nature of certain legacy devices or vehicles.
i.e.: Doesn't matter if you're an archetype if you're packing a Teleiosaurus Pheromones, a Neuro Pulse Generator, a Psionic Accelerator, a Necrullitic Elixir, and an Ice Grenades devices. And if you're in a Zone, if you have a Black Widow gravbike fully armed & armored with R6 vehicle mods and a Mark 2 AoE weapon of some kind, you're pretty much guaranteed easy mode in any Zone.
In short, you can match the DPS power of a freeform as an archetype with the top-of-the-line devices. Definitely a reason key sales remain strong if you ask me.
No, just no. Using the argument that an AT *can* get suped up vehicles and devices, thus can trivialize content, is still not enough of a reason that NORMAL content should be made challenging to them. Keep normal as-is, and look to the difficulty settings for your answer. The last thing we want to do is turn off a bunch of new players who have no devices, vehicles, or high end gear, just because they chose a DPS AT.
Do whatever you want to the enemies in those other difficulty levels, but perhaps some people want a more relaxing gameplay experience, or don't want their "meager" ATs, that are only equipped with whatever gear dropped randomly for them, to be able to actually succeed...
<::::::::::::::)xxxo <::::::::::::::)xxxo <::::::::::::)xxxxxxxx(:::::::::::> oxxx(::::::::::::::> oxxx(::::::::::::::> "Is it better to be feared or respected? I say, is it too much to ask for both?" -Tony Stark Official NW_Legit_Community Forums
Comments
Because some people do enjoy fighting them. Even those that sometimes opt to bypass henchmen through teleport enjoy fighting them other times.
Taking away something that some people enjoy when those who don't enjoy it already have the option to bypass it seems like a bad idea to me.
Something that henchmen in the comics generally dont do (as I recall) is remove Superman's ability to fly, Spiderman's acrobatics, etc (obvious exceptions being capture scenarios).
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
Because part of the genre is mopping the floor with a bunch of jabronies.
Another part of the genre is when those jabronies equip themselves with big guns that shoot special "hero-busting" bullets and suddenly the hero can't mop the floor with them anymore.
Also crotches with little to no defenition.
Champions Online: Be the hero you wish you could be in a better game.
RIP Caine
Yeah, solid plan!
Honestly, both are needed - the numbers up for henchmen-villain dudes, and a more tactical approach to supervillains+
Because Archetypes.
Champions Online: Be the hero you wish you could be in a better game.
1. Normal - stays as-is.
2. Hard - replace 1 henchman per group w/ a specialized villain, which has a heal or buff other and some sort of crowd control power that it uses on players.
3. Very Hard - as "Hard" above, plus it scales 1 villain up to a master villain, (per group).
4. Elite - as 2 above, plus all enemies are scaled up 1 category, (henchman -> villains, villains -> master villains), and have all spawns count as having 1 more player than is actually on the team.
For instance, Argent could get a new unit that uses pulse beam rifle, applies bionic shielding to its allies, and uses tractor beam on players.
"Is it better to be feared or respected? I say, is it too much to ask for both?" -Tony Stark
Official NW_Legit_Community Forums
Along the same line, but maybe easier to develop and more versatile--an easy way to make things like solo Unity missions at least challenging enough to keep you awake would be to copy CoH by keeping the existing Normal-through-Elite settings, but also ad a setting where you can choose to be treated as a 1-5 person team.
I used to kill a lot of time on CoH running 4/8 (4 levels above you and set for a team of 8) radio missions against the hardest villain groups. It felt epic as hell to be just swarmed by bad guys and still fight your way through, and if I screwed up badly enough (pulled three groups at once), I could still die, which kept me awake.
And, it's completely scaleable, so you just set it where you want to have fun. Honestly, this change alone would have me soloing this game much, much more often. It would take pointlessly easy content and make it worth playing.
And if they also added something to the Normal-through-Elite mechanic that ratcheted up the villains level for each step, that would make it even better. If I could fight a Unity mission set for a 5 man team at Elite with all of the villians four levels above me, I'd be in hog heaven!
Edit: Oh, but as far as villain groups, I want to second bioshrike's suggestion to ad more buffer-debuffers. This makes gameplay more challenging and fun by making you "learn" how to handle each group. There is some of that in CO, but not much, and I can handle most groups the exact same way. Whereas in CoH, there were groups that I could not beat till I figured out who to kill first and what order to follow, and whether to group them or spread them out, etc.
This would be really cool. A big part of the reason viper is the most dangerous group is because of those brickbusters (in particular) and one or two other types that debuff. In packs it can get really nasty and knowing which ones to take out first is very helpful.
I wish more groups had these sorts of powers. Just, not an obsession with holds please.
Yeah,it defenitely gets old just spamming an aoe power on every group. I for one like holds! Not an obsession with them... but groups that have a mob in it designed to throws holds at the person with highest heal aggro would be deviously amusing.
And just a generaly higher level of creativity.... it would be neat if say there was a debuff that certain npcs from certain groups would put on you that makes it so that the other players in your group as well as all friendly npcs are suddenly skinned as enemy npcs, so you don't know who is what, and you rapidly start losing health unless you start hitting people. If you're observant, you'll know who is an ally and who is an enemy...those squishy dps people in your group who can't afford to wait and look might suddenly become very dangerous! Especially amusing if you include friendly npcs that you shouldn't kill, since they would be much more difficult to differentiate.
The sad thing is that Cryptic would get a lot more leeway from its players than another company that's not in the super hero genre would. Here, we're willing to accept mechanics that have already been done elsewhere, because it's super heroes. They wouldn't even need to show a high level of creativity, though we would certainly enjoy it. Instead, they've taken this leeway as a sign that they can use no creativity whatsoever with their game mechanics, because we'll keep playing... cause it's super heroes.
Champions Online: Be the hero you wish you could be in a better game.
You're not too far off. The biggest difference between most Freeforms and Archetypes has to do with self-healing capability. Only a few archetypes can self-heal; if the enemy NPCs did this? Oh wow, yeah you'd find you need a team more often for hard content, or at least renewed emphasis on charge attacks and AoE attacks (for the past year the focus has been primarily single-target or AoE maintains).
As much as some people hate him, Ao'Qephoth is actually an example of how self-healing really increases the challenge level (remember however that Ao has the following Achilles' Heel weaknesses too: pet spam, high DPS, blocking his lifedrain, Trauma debuff, and Skarn's Bane)
Indeed, and speaking of blocks of HP to slowly whack away at; Mega D, Takofanes, and Clarence should be included too.
Not every, but many. The distinction is subtle, but should be noted as you want to make slight changes, not drastic sweeping changes that break other mechanics or make the game practically unplayable.
Since I mentioned Ao'Qephoth a moment ago, he's an excellent example of unintended consequences. He's perfectly beatable with a good team except if you encounter him in Radiation Rumble where the Rad Power buff and Legendary rank together makes his self-healing ungodly powerful.
In short, if something needs to change, do the small tweaks over time enough to see theri effects in full, not huge & rapid changes on a whim, IMHO.
Yes & No...
Yes, this game has been trending toward not only not encouraging subscription sales, but actually taking step to discourage.
No, because archetypes are not as restricted as they used to be, thanks to the pay-to-win nature of certain legacy devices or vehicles.
i.e.: Doesn't matter if you're an archetype if you're packing a Teleiosaurus Pheromones, a Neuro Pulse Generator, a Psionic Accelerator, a Necrullitic Elixir, and an Ice Grenades devices. And if you're in a Zone, if you have a Black Widow gravbike fully armed & armored with R6 vehicle mods and a Mark 2 AoE weapon of some kind, you're pretty much guaranteed easy mode in any Zone.
In short, you can match the DPS power of a freeform as an archetype with the top-of-the-line devices. Definitely a reason key sales remain strong if you ask me.
This is a great idea! Yeah more bubbles and less target-less random tap-spams from her force cascades would smooth things out nicely.
While I agree with you, I'll point out and remind you that there was some very vocal complaining from a few people that it was "impossible" for them to catch the Exocets.
QFT. I agree this is important.
Consolidate the currencies! (Please!)
Does your Champion have a theme song? (share it!)
Got a funny in-game screenshot? (share it!)
Please fix the Overdrive energy unlock! (Should help promote thematic build diversity!)
No, just no. Using the argument that an AT *can* get suped up vehicles and devices, thus can trivialize content, is still not enough of a reason that NORMAL content should be made challenging to them. Keep normal as-is, and look to the difficulty settings for your answer. The last thing we want to do is turn off a bunch of new players who have no devices, vehicles, or high end gear, just because they chose a DPS AT.
Do whatever you want to the enemies in those other difficulty levels, but perhaps some people want a more relaxing gameplay experience, or don't want their "meager" ATs, that are only equipped with whatever gear dropped randomly for them, to be able to actually succeed...
"Is it better to be feared or respected? I say, is it too much to ask for both?" -Tony Stark
Official NW_Legit_Community Forums
More PvE holds! Make +HoldResistance worth something