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I like the Forum Malvanum alert.
smoochan
Posts: 2,567 Arc User
It's true, I like it. Good job Cryptic, I wasn't aware that it was going into the rotation so color me cheerfully surprised.
Champions Online: Be the hero you wish you could be in a better game.
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Handle: @drgmstr
"Embrace your dreams"
Come Check Out My PRIMUS Database Page!
If they tied the Sky Race to be active while the Forum Alert is up in rotation it would be more awesome.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
....
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
Godtier: Lifetime Subscriber
With blissful optimism I switched to the defiance Dex/Con/Int (suprisingly good decision on my part Int) - of course my team mates will be able to handle themselves won't they?
Sigh looks at team - 2 x 15s an 11 and a 30 + me. We are not gonna take down the last two guys! I thought to myself.
Well we got a fair way through - did those 3 hard gladiator types I pretty much solo'd 2 of em and eventulally the other one got pulled to me too. Thank heavens for ADs and miniscule cooldowns (how did I do something so smart?) coz they do hurt even through Defiance and lots of health.
And then failed on the human (viper I think) guys after that. Woulda helped if some nitwit hadn't decided to do force eruption and fling em all over the place. You just don't have time to chase em all down one at a time.
So it's a tough fight toward the end and those cutscenes will make it old very very quickly. I'd guess you really need a premade of 40s preferably who know what they're doing. No problem - an alert that is a serious challenge is kinda welcome.
But here's the rub - you get your reward even if you can't finish it and this trivialises the whole thing.
Here is challenge but it doesn't matter if you can't do it.
So I would prefer it if....
1. All cutscenes to be skippable
2. No win no pay and perhaps an increase in reward
3. Gate the thing
Missed this first time round but getting stuck in now.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
The one who can't shut up formerly known as 4rksakes
About the @handle - it's a long story.
Profound quote.. "I'm not a complete idiot - several parts are missing."
Wait its 3000 Resources for the 5th round? There's not even a half a G difference for completing all rounds? So much for big difference in rewards.
It's worth noting roughly half the time spent in the Forum Malvanum (assuming a high dps team goes through all the rounds) is watching cutscenes.
I'm not sure if it still works this way, but originally if you defeat the last enemy you have a stupidly low chance for costume and action figure drops. If you can't get past Duratok and Ironclad you only get resources.
I had about 60 runs that couldn't get past D&I, and about 18 that did. Never got any costumes, though I did score the Tatycles Action Figure.
[?]Skippable Cutscenes
[?]Better difficulty curve - the challenge ramps up significantly when Duratok and Ironclad appears, and then goes back to normal. Firewing fight is okay.
[?]Its a DPS race and that's bad. Tanks are not welcome. Healers are not welcome. This needs to be changed - add a respawn delay (lets say, 20 seconds) to the timed fights (so that people respect the tanks and let them aggro) and increase the total time limit. This way, people would still be careful and tanking/healing/attacking trinity would be kept but the fight would still be a challenge.
[?]Add more variety to the monsters. I went to the moon to fight creatures from 2000 different worlds - and turns out its Purple Gang, Viper, Argent and PSI? Seriously? Make a new faction or two, no need for new models - just use the costume creator. Or then add the Roin'esh.
[?]Without the cutscenes, the alert certainly wouldnt last very long so add more fights. Make it up to 30 fights, for example, with increasing difficulty and drop chances. Only the absolute best builds with flawless legion r9 gear and lightning-fast keyboard control would make it to fight number 30 where you FINALLY fight against Firewing. And boy, he drops sweet stuff. 100% chance of dropping gladiator pieces plus Nemcon gladiator pieces, cosmic keys, 50 or more resources... (Maybe every 5 fights would be against a Cosmic, like Grond, Qwijibo, even Gravitar...)
[?]Add gates. It looks better
According to Lord Gar when this first went live, that isn't true.
There's a chance to get costume parts and the Action Figure every time you get the reward ring. It starts with a very low chance, and increases the further you get.
@flamingbunnyman in game. Formerly @Roderick in City of Heroes.
Unlike everyone else, I like the cutscene breaks, they're a good breather between fights. However even I have to admit the one at the beginning of the sixth round is too long. I'd trim out one of the screens.
I really wish you: (a) level-gated it at 35; (b) added about 15 seconds to the Durotok/Ironclad fight (or added some major damage boost orb drops or some other equalizing mechanic for non-DPSes), and (c) changed the penultimate round to another villain/new monster encounter (it feels anti-climactic after Durotok/Ironclad). Reward boosts would be good as well.
Anyhow, my two cents.
Here we are now going to the West Side
Weapons in hand as we go for a ride
Some may come and some may stay
Watching out for a sunny day
Where there's love and darkness and my sidearm
In game as @forgemccain
Agreed, agreed, agreed, and agreed. Go hire this guy, Cryptic.
Razira's Primus Database Page
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@flamingbunnyman in game. Formerly @Roderick in City of Heroes.
With Warlord, the mobs were harder than the boss itself but at least most groups got there.
This one? Gets cut off at the middle most of the time for me.
Yep, the first time it was fine, after that those cut scenes got old. I still think that Red Winter's was more entertaining.
However, even though I've been gone a while, I think this alert was a step in the right direction - do wish there was better difficulty adjustment for lowbies in the mix.
It's still a stupidly low chance to score an AF after 10 successful rounds.
Just go ahead and put the AFs in the Q store so I never have to run this POS with lowbies ever again. :mad:
People are broken. - Lum the Mad
It goes from like 0.00001% chance to 0.1% chance of getting the AF to drop.
Lets put those things in the Q store already.
Just please! Either lower the difficulty or make the costume piece drop rate 50% at least!
Thanks for the clarification, I didn't know that!
During the Play Test we discovered that a big part of the reason teams fail on Durotok and Ironclad is that the 2 minute timer starts during the cutscene so you have only about 1:30 to actually fight them. Somewhere int he test threads is a post by Trail Turtle relaying that the Devs are aware of this and it's working as intended they don't plan to change it.
Boy does this need level gating, my latest effort bears eloquent testimony to this. I went in with a level 40 Quarry, Cyclone, Storm of Arrows + Reapers Embrace build, Azure Blade if you're interested (and quite a hotty btw)
Hastily looks at team roster, 2 x level 7s, a 20 something and a 30. Just in time for someone to say the equivalent of "We're f*cked". No sh*t I helpfully added (in a heroic manner) before leading the doomed charge(s) into the foe(s).
Why didn't I just quit the instance? I mean two of em dropped out at some stage, I missed exactly when coz I was kinda busy. Because, because, because damnit I wouldn't want folks to think I'm a quitter and hey let's see how far we can go and what the hell, heroic death is what I do.
Did the three big gladiators after one wipe, stupid tanks fault ofc - hey no it couldn't have been me I'm a dps build. But yeah we did em somehow... pressing BCR/RR and Conviction every time they lit up and active defence + offence whenever well whenever they were up basically I mean I did try and save MD for special occaisions but you wanna breather to get your health back or not? Oh yeah and I suppose I must've done a bit of sword cycloning in between somewhere.
That was as far as we got ofc, easier to deal with one (actually 3) big threat(s) than loadsa smaller ones and we ran outta time on the first timed challenge. I guess there was no other outcome possible for that team.
Lolz what a total waste of time but hey it made me laugh and I got 3000 globals and a coupla silver recogs for it.
So what shall I spend this vast fortune upon?
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
The one who can't shut up formerly known as 4rksakes
About the @handle - it's a long story.
Profound quote.. "I'm not a complete idiot - several parts are missing."
I was on one that completed it the first day it came out. Not once since have I gotten past the big two.
I suspect that may have produced the quickest victory over Duratok and Ironclad ever. But it was worth it.
I don't think it's even possible without premading or having a really exploitative build.
...I just recently realized something really disturbing. We're all eating Sodapop3's "humble pie."
I don't run parsers so I can't give numbers. But an unleashed AT with heroic gear and mark 5 mods is quite capable of putting out enough damage. I know this as on two of my succesful to the end of the last wave runs I was the second highest damage dealer (measured by watching how fast durotok died when I was attacking and when everyone but me was attacking). On others I was way behind the curve hahaha, there's some really nasty freeform players out there.
On the other hand, I've also seen a guy with 3 teleosaur pheremones and lots of fire powers basically solo the whole thing with the rest of us just acting as meatshields for him and spending more time dead than fighting. He got us a complete victory pretty much solo. I tried to give him my three gold as a thank you but he just laughed.
So the damage requirement is reasonably high (Unleashed is one of the top ATs and more damage than many freeforms), but can be met by one overpowered player.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
I think it's something like 8k sustained aoe. That's for the group total, not per individual.
This alert is actually a good example of how to do a particular type of "difficulty" correctly in this game, in regards to rewards.
Finishing the alert doesn't require anything special from the group, since once you've beaten all the non-timed guys, you have technically successfully finished the alert; go turn in your quest, congratulations. Everything after that is a challenge, and players will have varying degrees of success depending on how well they meet that challenge.
I will agree with everyone else that the reward for this alert is a bit lacking... then again, that puts it perfectly in line with all the other custom alerts and their rewards, and also removes a lot of the sting that comes from not being able to complete the extra stages.
Now, granted, "dps this brick wall" isn't the specific type of challenge that I was hoping for; the timed portion of this alert is most certainly a "build challenge" moresothan a "tactics/play challenge" (though tactics can come in handy with all those swarms of mobs). I would have like to have seen some architecture in the arena itself that could be used for more tactical play, but I did manage to have some fun with it while on my "squishy aggro-ripping dps ranged" character. It's one of the more fun alerts I've done, and I'll be happy if they continue on this path.
If what I've heard of the final phase of our current event is true, they're finally moving past dropping a bag of hit points in front of us.
Champions Online: Be the hero you wish you could be in a better game.
An unleashed isn't going to put out enough damage to make this possible alone, though the lack of diminishing returns and defense penetration will help prop the group up a bit. A person spamming Pheremones is pretty much as exploitative as you can get, and it's really not surprising they'd be able to more or less make it soloable, at least considering they're probably running a really broken build on top of that. Read my signature for my thoughts on that crap.
I've been running a parser and it seems like to complete it the entire group would need to be doing 800-1000 measured DPS (basically, around 2800+ in a Powerhouse test) which is really unreasonable considering the average "knowledgeable" player does about half that, and many are lucky to hit about a quarter of that. Considering my higher damage concept builds barely break where I think the required DPS rests and I see a lot of the veteran players running builds that do around the same damage I'm guessing they more or less based their damage off PTS users and thus this skewed the results well above where it needs to be.
Here's an example of one of my better runs:
http://minus.com/lPC5snfDJNzBi
IIRC most of the players here were 40, I'm (in turn with Janie) outdamaging everyone here, and doing half the tanking. This isn't even typical, it's not uncommon there's several people doing sub 300.
Maybe things will improve when they update things to run at level 40. But I doubt it as when they make new content that new content will be balanced around the new SKing tech having everyone at level 40, and thus, again, they'll be basing balance off the performance of well above average players.
...I just recently realized something really disturbing. We're all eating Sodapop3's "humble pie."
Actually, the final fight against DuraClad was pretty much pushed straight through PTS, despite most of us asking for a 10-15 second increase just for a buffer zone on those who weren't built to absolute prime.
It was basically posted on PTS, then they fixed up the movie...Er, 'cutscenes' and then off to Live it went.
Deliciously nutritious!
This doesn't surprise me, but it still doesn't change that they likely based their numbers off what performance they saw there to begin with. If anything it just further supports their MO really hasn't changed much over my hiatus.
...I just recently realized something really disturbing. We're all eating Sodapop3's "humble pie."
RIP Caine
Trailturtle has stated multiple times that they took the cutscene into account when the timer starts.
They couldn't get the timer to start after the cutscene, so instead they increased the timer with the amount of time the cutscene takes.
Yep. The timer's still quite inadequate, IMO, but it's not the cutscene's fault.
Exactly. Another 10 seconds would've done wonders with making the run more worth it.
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I still can't beat it all the way through, but it is fun nonetheless! The rewards aren't what I'm playing for, so that is irrelevant. At the moment, I just want to actually win the thing.
Or is it just my luck with random groups? Every PUG I've been in has had at least 2 pre-level-10s in the group for... some reason...
All the more reason premades are super important.
I think the nerfs to certain powers between this iteration and the initial event have definitely been felt.