Can you imagine how it would go down if I showed up in one of the harder games you play demanding they make it easier because I'd prefer it?
If your argument was structured in the same way mine is, then I would agree. For example, I have always argued that the dark souls series needs an additional easier difficulty level for more casual players because there's more to the game than just being hard; there's a lot of interesting engaging mechanics and I feel that more casual players are missing out on a great experience because of the difficulty, both actual and implied.
If the argument gets heated, you might call me a "carebear" and I might derisively call you an "ubergamer" but at the end of the day we're just two people who want different things out of the game.
I don't call people names (Unless they're Nepht or Caliga). To be honest, you don't actually appear to know what I want out of the game. Does it really shock you that someone wants action in a game promoted as an action rpg?
Why do you believe that your metric for enjoyment is more valid than someone else's? Why do you believe the game has to only satisfy one very specific minority of players? Why do you believe that the game should not cater to a variety of player types? Is this not something that fits the theme of a game that is so much about customization?
These questions are all based on your philosophy of "Either enjoy the easy or leave" in case you were wondering.
You're going to have to better than simply declaring that the people who are happy with the status quo are "a minority" out of hand for me to feel the need to defend catering to people who aren't clamoring for self-interest driven change.
Ah, this tired old strawman. Nobody said anything about making the game so difficult that it "grinds your face into the dirt". Is that really the depth of your understanding? Games are either laughably easy or punishingly difficult? I think you'll find there is an entire world of fun between those two extremes.
The depth of my understanding is not in question. You have provided no example of the level of difficulty you find acceptable, yet you've chosen a thread that opened with a highly dishonest example of the game difficulty to use as your platform. Maybe you'd like the game rebalanced to provide a challenge for the OP? Who's to say?
Interesting you mention Strider, because that's exactly the level of action I think a game like CO should represent. However, it doesn't. And that's the actual point here that you're skirting. Strider wasn't fun because it was easy; Strider was fun because it was high action.
Except there's no issue to Skirt. CO is exactly as action oriented as Strider. Those enemies all followed a predefined pattern and almost always died in one or two attacks. Your problem is as it was before difficulty. CO is an easy action game. You're not complaining about the inability to backflip down the street or hurl fireballs from your hands while strafing the enemy, you're complaining that the enemies are too easy to defeat.
This isn't that hard to do considering his damage is very low for a cosmic.
If soloing Tako with a squishy dps build would've been trivial, the fight would've been completely pathetic. Luckily soloing like that is not (well... "was not" with the legion gear I had at the time) easy (for CO standards), it was doable when blocking all his attacks.
But indeed, the point of my post was to show that Takofanes does way too low damage. The same goes for Kigatilik and Mega Destroyer.
For Takofanes it should never be able to solo the fight with a squishy dps build, even a tank build should have a very though time without heal support.
For Kigatilik it is silly the dangerous part is his pets, once those are dead it is all easy. But without fully reworking the fight I don't think it is possible to make it a fun challenge.
Mega Destroyer is pretty low level, so I think it should be possible for most level 40 builds (that have a heal) to solo that fight, but it could still use a hefty buff on most of its ranged attacks.
I've solo'd Tako (on PTS) with a squishy dps build (no CON, no AD, for heals only r2 conviction, chained nec. elixirs and potions, and for added defense electric sheat + adv, and R3 block).
The chances of anyone getting to solo Tako off PTS is reserved for few people.
Takofanes is a pinata for the party and you are complaining that you used a big stick and didn't wear a blindfold to beat it up. No challenge at all to rank your block, form, and buff, because you paid to cheat your way to level 40 on PTS with a button press. I'm sure your "DPS build" was rank 3 on damage to. If you want challenge you don't cheat your way to 40 and don't rank anything to 3, actually build something that really is squishy which you didn't describe at all.
How long did that fight take, and how long should a fight like this with maybe ten or more builds better than yours last?
Not everyone is thrilled to tap and/or hold the same buttons at the same target in the same location watching the same graphic effects for more than a few minutes, it also looks really unheroic and is unrewarding if all this firepower isn't effective. Look at all the fuss that happened with Ao'Qephtoth healing himself or the old Purple Reign 'scaring away new players.'
If Tako was murdering the level 40 free forms to provide enough challenge for them, he would be completely destroying anything less. Characters who have not hit the respawn behind Champions HQ have a three or more block run after recovery if they get smashed in this fight. A few trips like that are a huge turn off especially when Tako goes down, while they are respawning outside the event area and get no reward for the extra long extra challenging battle.
The odds of anyone getting to solo Tako off PTS are slim.
Takofanes is a pinata for the party and you are complaining that you used a big stick and didn't wear a blindfold to beat it up. No challenge at all to rank your block, form, and buff, because you paid to cheat your way to level 40 on PTS with a button press. I'm sure your "DPS build" was rank 3 on damage to. If you want challenge you don't cheat your way to 40 and don't rank anything to 3, actually build something that really is squishy which you didn't describe at all.
I don't really know what to make of that. I consider this a pretty squishy dps build, far more so than most of the FF builds people are using. (btw I didn't mention Palliate since I can't use that when soloing bosses)
And what do you mean with I paid to cheat, if you must know, I just copied a character from live, with all the gear I have on live.
I also fail to see why I have to deliberately cripple my build with no return at all, to try to make things challenging. And even if I did, when fighting in a big group on the live server, I would never be able to pull agro so it would't change anything, apart from making the fight last a few seconds more.
About the chances of soloing Tako outisde PTS, that is pretty much the point? Why does that fight need to be so easy a squishy dps build can solo him, when he is pretty much always fought by more than 20 players (at least one or two tanks).
Not everyone is thrilled to tap and/or hold the same buttons at the same target in the same location watching the same graphic effects for more than a few minutes, it also looks really unheroic and is unrewarding if all this firepower isn't effective. Look at all the fuss that happened with Ao'Qephtoth healing himself or the old Purple Reign 'scaring away new players.'
If Tako was murdering the level 40 free forms to provide enough challenge for them, he would be completely destroying anything less. Characters who have not hit the respawn behind Champions HQ have a three or more block run after recovery if they get smashed in this fight. A few trips like that are a huge turn off especially when Tako goes down, while they are respawning outside the event area and get no reward for the extra long extra challenging battle.
I agree it doesn't have to be a long fight, though a bit longer than the 3 minutes it takes now could be nice if they implemented a few stages like with Grav. That would need more stuff added to the fight though. Scaring away new players is a bad reason wanting Tako to be easy as he is. When the Takofanes fight was first added to the game, it was a lot harder, since player characters were a lot weaker back then. In those few years I doubt the average player has gotten so much worse at playing games.
I never said Tako should be "murdering the level 40 free forms". But at the very least to the person tanking should take way way way more damage. As it is even AT dps builds can easily tank him if you use the teamup fuction. You get the auras from anyone in range, even the ones from players not using teamup. Not being in any danger while having agro for any build is just silly and it makes the fight a huge (short) bore. And for the builds who can't take that damage, just make sure you either don't have agro, or block if you do.
No challenge at all to rank your block, form, and buff, because you paid to cheat your way to level 40 on PTS with a button press.
First of all, most of the time I just use a toon from live on PTS. Secondly, the 'push button for level 40' is just avoiding tedium when you're testing something unrelated to advancing a character.
Not everyone is thrilled to tap and/or hold the same buttons at the same target in the same location watching the same graphic effects for more than a few minutes
Hit points aren't really the problem. The problem is lack of hazard.
You're going to have to better than simply declaring that the people who are happy with the status quo are "a minority" out of hand for me to feel the need to defend catering to people who aren't clamoring for self-interest driven change.
Everyone is a minority, and in nearly all cases the minorities overlap in several aspects. This is why making an argument that CO should only cater to any one specific group is flawed.
The depth of my understanding is not in question. You have provided no example of the level of difficulty you find acceptable, yet you've chosen a thread that opened with a highly dishonest example of the game difficulty to use as your platform. Maybe you'd like the game rebalanced to provide a challenge for the OP? Who's to say?
This would be valid... if there weren't 11 pages of conversation that happened over the course of the past 3 days since that OP was made. You can't just ignore everything between the OP and the post you're responding to.
Except there's no issue to Skirt. CO is exactly as action oriented as Strider. Those enemies all followed a predefined pattern and almost always died in one or two attacks. Your problem is as it was before difficulty. CO is an easy action game. You're not complaining about the inability to backflip down the street or hurl fireballs from your hands while strafing the enemy, you're complaining that the enemies are too easy to defeat.
In Strider you had to run around, jump around, climb walls, observe patterns, react quickly.
In CO you don't have to do any of those things, all you do is run into range, spam your attack power, repeat. The action becomes even more mundane once you reach the boss... where as in Strider that's when the action was raised up a notch.
CO is nowhere near as action oriented as Strider. Backflip down the street? Why? Strafe the enemy? Why? Do anything but the bare minimum? Why? If I wanted to pretend I'd go play with my nephew, he loves it when I pretend like his punches hurt. I play video games because they have mechanics... not so I can pretend they have mechanics.
A game designer can never afford to utter the phrase, "You're just not trying hard enough to have fun with my game".
I want more meaningful variety in enemy types, and I want more reactive gameplay.
I want NPCs to have attacks where players care that that attack might be targeting them; and no, not because it's a guaranteed one-shot (though those do have their place, i.e. Jack Fool). (examples: Viper Brick Busters, Argent Counter Agents) Attacks that will make your life difficult if you don't deal with them. Too many groups of NPCs are just an arrangement of cardboard cutouts to be aoe'd down without a thought.
I want locational attacks that players need to actively evade; not by hitting Masterful Dodge, but by moving. And no, not the kind of attack where you have to pretend that moving out of it makes a difference. Too many of these kinds of attacks are completely optional to evade, and almost every single one of them is a PBAoE. Gravitar's bubbles are a good example (minus the one shot), as are Fire and Ice's columns (minus the ignorable damage).
I want NPCs who move faster than a snail. One of the best Active Defenses in the game is to simply have your travel power on and run away.
I want more NPCs with Nailed to the Ground, and Crippling Challenge.
I could go on.. but by this point you either get what I'm getting at or you don't. You'll notice nowhere in here was the phrase "Make all NPCs do more damage and have tons more hit points" included, and neither was the phrase "Make NPCs unbeatable to all but the best Free Forms".
Freeform or Archetype, all players have access to the abilities of target selection, blocking, and movement. The game needs to recognize this fact and actually force players to utilize these skills in every single encounter.
There are players who want to create crowd-controllers, but they don't because they know there's no reason to... it's hard to even pretend at this point.
The anti-challenge crowd always seems to want to reduce the conversation to "You guys just want to make this game all about numbers!", when the fact is that once you stop pretending you realize that's all it is about right now. I want that to change.. I want it to be about decisions, actions, and reactions. I want victory to be determined at the battle field, not in the powerhouse or the archetype selection screen.
I'll agree with all of this besides crippling challenge. we should be encouraged to use our block powers.
It'd be the kind of NPC where there's at most one in the group.... so naturally every player in the party would descend on that one NPC like psychotic velociraptors and kill it first. Like the Brick Busters (except when there's 2 Brick Busters of course).
also enemies which apply debuffs like nailed should only apply nailed if the attack is unblocked, and should have a clear tell before nailing you.
Yes. A key component of the whole thing is that everything is avoidable in some way, which creates the kind of observant/reactive gameplay that I want.
It used to be that every little mob in the game had NTTG. It was the most annoying thing in the universe -- absolutely no challenge, but you have to turn your travel power on again every fifty feet.
I want more meaningful variety in enemy types, and I want more reactive gameplay.
I want NPCs to have attacks where players care that that attack might be targeting them; and no, not because it's a guaranteed one-shot (though those do have their place, i.e. Jack Fool). (examples: Viper Brick Busters, Argent Counter Agents) Attacks that will make your life difficult if you don't deal with them. Too many groups of NPCs are just an arrangement of cardboard cutouts to be aoe'd down without a thought.
I want locational attacks that players need to actively evade; not by hitting Masterful Dodge, but by moving. And no, not the kind of attack where you have to pretend that moving out of it makes a difference. Too many of these kinds of attacks are completely optional to evade, and almost every single one of them is a PBAoE. Gravitar's bubbles are a good example (minus the one shot), as are Fire and Ice's columns (minus the ignorable damage).
I want NPCs who move faster than a snail. One of the best Active Defenses in the game is to simply have your travel power on and run away.
I want more NPCs with Nailed to the Ground, and Crippling Challenge.
I could go on.. but by this point you either get what I'm getting at or you don't. You'll notice nowhere in here was the phrase "Make all NPCs do more damage and have tons more hit points" included, and neither was the phrase "Make NPCs unbeatable to all but the best Free Forms".
Freeform or Archetype, all players have access to the abilities of target selection, blocking, and movement. The game needs to recognize this fact and actually force players to utilize these skills in every single encounter.
There are players who want to create crowd-controllers, but they don't because they know there's no reason to... it's hard to even pretend at this point.
The anti-challenge crowd always seems to want to reduce the conversation to "You guys just want to make this game all about numbers!", when the fact is that once you stop pretending you realize that's all it is about right now. I want that to change.. I want it to be about decisions, actions, and reactions. I want victory to be determined at the battle field, not in the powerhouse or the archetype selection screen.
Fair enough. As it turns out that does sound pretty fun, (and OMG I agree!) but a couple of things for the record:
1) I will say that the anti-challenge crowd has never in my experience ever claimed "You guys just want to make this game about numbers!". I have heard "You guys just want to brag about being more hardcore and wave your e-peen around!" and if you're honest, there's often a great deal of pretend selflessness and "this game is dying because it's too easy! We're the only ones looking out for the welfare of the game!" melodrama that comes from the pro-challenge side as well.
2) You can't cite the 11 page thread as a reason I can't pretend to not know your intentions unless at some point in those 11 pages they have been expressed and I've chosen to ignore them. There's quite a bit of snark about players thinking they need to be min-maxed, assertions that the game is too easy and nostalgic recollections from the 8 bit era, nothing about what you actually envision as the ideal scenario until I asked point-blank.
Public Missions like Takofanes are meant to accommodate to (mostly) everyone regardless of skill level and according to a wide level range. Bumping up Takofanes' damage for example wouldn't be fair to those of lower levels and much more squishier statuses. Same goes for alerts, if we're talking about everything but rampages.
If there's any difficulty issue to be addressed, then address Elite difficulty, especially for APs and Comics. Make Elite difficulty accommodate to players with Elite builds and make it a real challenge for them. Replacing henchmen with enemies at minimum master villain ranks, significantly increasing the mob sizes and drastically increasing damage outputs...just a few examples on how to make Elite difficulty more challenging for builds that can handle it.
Why not make elite difficulty more about the skill of the player? What I get from your words is elite difficulty should be only for Xtreem tank characters.
a powerful build is not always defined by survival. a glass cannon can be powerful by merit of its damage alone.
A powerful build in the context of what I was talking about would be defined by being able to survive against extreme odds while still being able to retaliate accordingly and come out of the fight in one piece. A glass cannon outputting powerful damage means squat if he or she doesn't stay on their feet long enough to deal enough damage.
I'm not sure what you mean by "skill of the player" since there aren't really any platforming aspects to combat. You don't actually dodge or jump over an attack to avoid damage. Everything about combat is about overcoming DPS walls either from the player or enemy side. Difficulty has to be about how tough the enemies are in how they deal damage be it from a single or many sources, and also if the enemy is able to mitigate damage towards themselves.
Ultimately builds will matter. Yes, player skill in using these builds effectively is a factor, but the builds will always be more crucial if Elite difficulty is ever going to be seriously jacked up for it to be considered anything "Elite".
The problem is simply increasing the damage of enemies is a poor way to add challenge. Adding additional attacks, debuffs, and reinforcements is a far more fair and interesting way to ramp up the difficulty of an encounter.
I did mention about increasing mob sizes and ways for enemies to mitigate damage.
CO has no tools to offer skill-based difficulty, really. It has very basic AI which is not really possible to improve by scripts only and has no arcade dexterity-based elements (aside maybe of blocking).
The only way you can have a difficulty requiring more "skill" is when map allows you to play with line of sight or it has elements like Hi-Pan and Cybermind alerts. None of this can be done in already existing adventure packs, comic issues and instanced missions - because it would require redoing maps.
The only way you can ramp up the difficulty is making mobs tougher, hitting harder and coming in bigger numbers.
This is demonstrably false just by paying attention to enemy mechanics already in game.
Give master villains and up active defenses and passives, have more debuffs (brickbuster, argent taser) and buff the ones already in place which have become meaningless over time.
It's quite apparent if you pay attention while playing that CO in fact DOES have the tools in place.
Nope. All it does is juggling numbers.
Give villains passives? That's precisely what was mentioned before: dps/defense race. Same about debuffs.
All additional difficulty or lack of thereof you can get in CO is always down to builds and numbers.
This isn't a very skill based game and never was outside of PvP and maybe timing cooldowns during power rotation. Not counting skills in making and using builds. Number crunching.
This is demonstrably false just by paying attention to enemy mechanics already in game.
Give master villains and up active defenses and passives, have more debuffs (brickbuster, argent taser) and buff the ones already in place which have become meaningless over time.
It's quite apparent if you pay attention while playing that CO in fact DOES have the tools in place.
Enemy using debuffs just means lowering the player's capability to do damage be it through things like draining energy, or an actual cut to player damage output, so that the enemy deals more damage than the player in the long run. It all still boils down to damage dealing. CC is in the same vein only that it can stop players from doing damage outright or even any action at all.
Yes, debuffs help change things up a little rather than direct attacks, but at the end of the day it's about enemies either hitting harder than you or hitting you more often than you hit them. Debuffs don't provide that much variety to a fight as you think they do.
One Video from a "Special Individual" Veteran Skilled player who has been in CO since Beta and knows all the Tricks/Combos/Exploits the game has too offer with a Damage-Sponge Fully Justice Gear Build, gives Judgement for the whole game
I don't know about easy, but that video/fight was boring as hell.
Well the whole production aspect of the video is alright, meaning that you went and did all that.
Maybe next time you can make an interesting story with your untouchable character.
Obviously you don't have to worry about dying in the middle of your video shoot.
I agree with this! 5 Minutes of just the player standing... yay ... exciting
Unfortunately Very Few people on YouTube know how to edit and make good CO videos
Reminding me to NEVER make a Damage-Sponge build
It looks incredible Boring to play, Low Damage and it's only useful for Tanking F.R.E.O.N 2 and Gravitar
Except of Ego Boost and Self Achievement... what is the Reason of Tanking the Colossus in Resistance anyway?
Indeed. I was nearly torn apart in a thread on the old forums where someone posted a vid of them soloing that big metal dino thing using the electricity block, maxed regen and apparently lots of patience. They claimed that this was definitive proof of the broken-ness (easiness) of the difficulty across the whole game, despite the fact that such nonsense would absolutely not work against a group of even conning viper mobs containing a single Brickbuster.
I will never understand why there's always some player who's jumped through all kinds of ridiculous gameplay hoops to arm their character to the teeth, only to turn around and complain that there's something wrong with the game because they're too effective.
If the game you are playing is too easy, go and play a harder one.
THANK YOU
that's my main Complain with CO community
along with LET'S PLAY WITH OP/EFFICIENT/BALANCE/ROFL-STOMP FF BUILDS AND THEN COMPLAIN THAT THE GAME IS TOO EASY! I DON'T SEE ANY FLAW WITH THIS STRATEGY
Along with LET'S MAKE A WHOLE BUILD THAT FOCUS ON BUFFING 1 SINGLE ATTACK VIA BUFFS/DEBUFFS AND THEN DEMANDING TO NERF THAT ATTACK flawless Logic 10/10
I made all my Builds Balanced between Survability and DPS (Avoiding stupid op builds, they are boring) to avoid the old days when I used to play only as ATs, seeing my characters getting murdered in Boss Fights
I don't complain about the game being easy just the Enemies' A.I is too stupid
POWERFRAME REVAMPS, NEW POWERS and BUG FIXES > Recycled Content and Events and even costumes at this point Introvert guy who use CO to make his characters playable and get experimental with Viable FF Theme builds! Running out of Unique FF builds due to the lack of updates and synergies! Playing since 1 February 2011 128 + Characters (21 ATs, 107 FFs) ALTitis for Life!
What about powers like Particle mine? Maybe the bad guys could use a ranged version of that to force us to reposition in combat, make us move around more.
EDIT: Actually, what about a single-target melee attack that strips active defenses?
Target prioritization is an element of player skill. The ability to recognize a foe that should be taken out first and then to act on that recognition may not be twitch reflex stuff but it is a tactical skill.
Sure a given group might have the DPS to not need to focus fire a mob healer before taking out the rest of the group but would still benefit from doing so.
The same could be true with mob CC, debuffs, or buffs.
This game is skill based enough that what I said holds true. And you'd be utterly blind to claim that skill doesn't make a huge difference in gameplay here.
But of course, you're the one who claims fire and ice is "real" difficulty so arguing with you over game design is like arguing with a drunk mechanic about the differences between the Edo period in japan and the parking lot next door.
And you're seriously claiming RNG based difficulty requires skills other than build-making skills.
Because I'm not sure if you realise it, but neither F&I or Gravitar are dexterity-based encounters.
Gravitar requires from you a building skill to prepare and gear an all-around survivable toon. This is the optimal setup you can do for Gravitar.
It's down to the build. A number crunching.
F&I also requires mostly building skills. How to build specialised tanks or other roles. A classic mmo tank&spank encounter which becomes easier if it's not attempted in PUGs.
This one is also down to the build. Again, number crunching.
That both encounters have different build requirements does not makes any of them more skill-based (unless, again, it's skill in building and power rotation).
CO is not Dark Souls, CO has no tools nor AI to be Dark Souls. It's a very classic mmo with a more dynamic combat, but it's still a very classic mmo. It always will be down to number crunching and the only way of making it any more difficult is to give opponents even bigger numbers or ability to strip down the player numbers.
Realise it finally.
Oh, and can you recall a Mechanon missions chain? This is where mobs were given passives and even some tricks like self-replication.
How different it's in play, hmm? And, again, adding passives and attacks is basically increasing enemy's numbers. That's the only way you can made CO any harder.
The smarter AI you are asking for would require changing the core game programming. It's not very likely to happend.
Same as you can't really expect maps for higher difficulty levels being different in layout than are maps for the normal mode, so you could use smart positioning with current enemy AI and stronger mobs.
See these guys are just annoying to me. The only times a Brickbuster has caused me real issue is when I first started playing the game (and had no idea what they were) - and occasionally during a Viper mission when carelessness causes me to aggro more than one group (zapped by Brickbuster with two full spawns standing at range laying down hitpoint decimating fire)
Otherwise though, I just groan and roll my eyes. Taser just means I'll be using less of my charge or maintain attacks (sometimes?) And Brickbusters, just mean I'm going to be hitting them with my most unneccessarily powerful overkill attack because they irritate me. Neither one of those enemies make me think "awesome! Interesting!" or "oh crap!"
It's all about Cryptics ability to be lazy in everything they produce, they dont need advanced AI to make the game hard, just give enemies more threatening conditions/builds other than powerbuilder and a crappy blast attack.
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Well i mean this, what if in Very Hard mode, enemies are simply given more powers and conditions to use, it would require no AI tweaking whatsoever. So in this difficulty, some enemies would be wearing a random Aura, or more enemies might have dangerous conditions added to their powers like Crippling Challenge or Roots/Snares.
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Pump up the difficulty bar to Elite and enemies should have much harder conditions added to them, ALL of them. Imagine going into Therakiels Temple on Elite and a Helemental comes up to you with Aura of Radiant Protection at 100% DefenseBonus, Regen at 3k per 3 seconds, Pestilence Aura and Crippling challenge added to his charged Defile,
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and give his Defile the AoE advantage. Hes a better threat right? You would attack HIM instead of attacking sidemobs. Giving enemies more powerful builds would create situations not only of more challenge, but of more strategy, and it would be super easy to add in the game.
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It's just the laziness of Cryptic. There's no reason NOT to give us harder scaled difficulty when loot drops in the game are totally ineffected apart from 1 or 2 end-game bosses like Therakiel for his wings, which are a garaunteed drop. Consider it an achievement.
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Well heres another example then, you go into Viper's Nest on Elite, give ALL enemies Draysha Vapor effect, not just those at the beginning, then add Quarry Passive, then give their Gun Based attacks 40% Defence penetration and apply conditions like Fear and a
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chance to Stun for 0.5 seconds. Viola! More threatening, easy as freekin pie, with NO AI tweek needed. Just modify their abilities and advantages without breaking theme. DONE. MOVE ON.
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No..Archetypes already have their own difficulty..(and game)..to themselves, its greedy for them to complain that they cant do Elite mode when they have gotten as far as they have without paying a penny.
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They have been given an entire MMO for free, if theyre like "Ya got any more?" there comes a time when Cryptic needs to grow a pair, MAN UP and say "sorry you gotta pay, your demo is over" Its no wonder theyre so broke from this game,
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their current marketing strategy is to play a game of poker with 1 card in their hand called 'lockbox', hoping someone feels sorry for them enough to just hand over a donation of a chip or two so they can afford to keep paying the blinds to stay in.
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Whats the point, the changes needed to fix this game are almost effortless to tweak, its just purified, complete and total lazyiness with no excuse, any dev i talk to just logs off whenever i confront them about this and all the other broken junk like god mode,
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duping and the cheatengine script going around which can steal your offerings from trade windows. I wish i fix it myself. Sometimes it feels like im the last person giving a toss when all people do is bicker between themselves
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for up to 5 years and come out with the most false claims i have to go smack in their face with a rolled up video-paper.
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Iv read parts of that topic, T4XT linked me to it, its the same poitnless bickering iv been hearing for years and it never ends. All yapyapyap and still no coalition organised asking for good changes. Theyre still just
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biting each others head off like never ending zombies? Some of them havent even logged into the game for years i dont see what they have to complain about or why they still ghost aorund the forum of a game they dont even play.
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They arent changing anytime soon and neither are the devs...kinda sad rly after all these years. Be back in an hour, shopping.
That Princess store comment was sarcasm. I'm under no illusion that I will ever find this game challenging.
But CO could be more challenging / fun if it took ideas from ARPGs. Some of the bosses in Path of Exile and Reaper of Souls are damn fun... Although RoS has a problem with bosses feeling too much like HP sacks. PoE just revamped the Brutus and Merveil fight and they're actually awesome now. These fights are more about skill than how much DPS or defense you have. There are a lot of attacks that you have to move the hell out of the way or take a ton of damage. There are adds that you need to deal with because they block your movement and beat you to death.
Some of the basic ideas from those fights are already in the game, just very much lacking. Those blue and yellow bubbles from Grav are action mechanics. The pillars of snowflake falls in Fire and Ice are action mechanics. The difference is, they are mostly things you can stand in and block. There is very little reason to pay attention during fights and even less reason to move around.
CO could take advantage of block mechanics, but instead prefers to make bosses no longer have that charge up graphic for their power attacks for cheap'n'easy "challenge". I'm pretty sure Frosty has a tell, but can't always see what he's doing if he's covered in player effects. Last time I tanked frosty with a not-a-sniper-tank, I spend the entire time wishing I'd reduced the effects to low because he was covered in so many damn effects he was just a hazy blob.
Some people like to play ATs or choose to remain silver. It doesn't mean they don't throw money at the game. Also: this game is F2P, which means even the company that made it realizes that never paying a dime to play is an acceptable way to play their game. Otherwise it wouldn't be F2P. That whole shaming people for not paying for stuff is stupid. Bonus for a nice display on how plenty of people have no idea how developers go about doing F2P, why they choose to go that route, and the great many considerations that go into monitization decisions. I mean, damn, look at some developer articles or go through the GDC archives. Seriously. GDC Next is this weekend which means the vault is going to be updated with developer talks soon.
People have different wants and desires for the game. What's wrong with making arguments for or against things? I didn't realize that socializing meant having to agree with everything someone else says always.
Making enemies stunlock you till you die is not fixing difficulty it's destroying incentive to play content.
Wow, is this really what people think challenge is? grond help us all.
You mean you might have to resort to having a team and maybe a healer?! Oh no! Oh woe is you! who apparently hath no friends or supergroup or contact with anyone in this mmo! RIGHT?
Get real, you can empty a whole room filled with those enemies in moments with todays builds and you know it, you just wont admit it in the forum because youre anti-any-change-that-isnt-my idea. Just like a lot of you on here have been since you stained the forum with your negative grace, challenging everything through shear bitterness and lack of good comeback reasoning.
You would collapse of old age before you make a decision of wether you want sugar or sweetener in your coffee.
And this is why we can never have any good things.
You just did exactly what a good lil forumite would. Bicker and moan and never shift forward. Stuck in neutral gear for all eternity. What a fine example.
Any challenge starts with the possibility to be defeated.
In CO that starts with taking significantly high damage to make being defeated possible.
With the current balance, any well played well optimized build is in no danger at all on >95% of the content.
Considering hold resistance stacks, all the stuns in the world are not going to change that in any way. Unless of course holds from NPCs are not applying hold resistance stacks, but that would make fights get very annoying very fast. Having holds on many of the NPC attacks would be an annoyance even with hold resistance stacks.
Also, adding a short duration stun to many attacks would make powers like SR, MS, UR, TGM stand out even more than they already do, so not a good idea that.
For changes to make optimized player characters take significantly dangerous damage there are two option:
buff damage from NPCs (either higher damage per NPC or more NPCs)
reduce/weaken survivability options for PCs
My preference would be a combination of the two.
My preferred changes for PC survivability:
start with removing AD/AO chaining
reduce effectiveness on Ego Surge and Ascension
reduce Ebon Void effectiveness
add a stacking debuff from active HoT (and bionic shielding) to incoming secondary heals
add a diminishing return on cooldown reduction at >100%
add a diminishing return on health at >10k
add a cooldown to stealth or stacking debuff to stealth strength that is gained from using stealth
I've my own ideas what changes are needed for the (de)buff and hold mechanic and PC damage, but I won't go into those now.
And it's not that I expect any of this to happen anytime soon if ever.
Any challenge starts with the possibility to be defeated.
In CO that starts with taking significantly high damage to make being defeated possible.
With the current balance, any well played well optimized build is in no danger at all on >95% of the content.
Considering hold resistance stacks, all the stuns in the world are not going to change that in any way. Unless of course holds from NPCs are not applying hold resistance stacks, but that would make fights get very annoying very fast. Having holds on many of the NPC attacks would be an annoyance even with hold resistance stacks.
Also, adding a short duration stun to many attacks would make powers like SR, MS, UR, TGM stand out even more than they already do, so not a good idea that.
For changes to make optimized player characters take significantly dangerous damage there are two option:
buff damage from NPCs (either higher damage per NPC or more NPCs)
reduce/weaken survivability options for PCs
My preference would be a combination of the two.
My preferred changes for PC survivability:
start with removing AD/AO chaining
reduce effectiveness on Ego Surge and Ascension
reduce Ebon Void effectiveness
add a stacking debuff from active HoT (and bionic shielding) to incoming secondary heals
add a diminishing return on cooldown reduction at >100%
add a diminishing return on health at >10k
add a cooldown to stealth or stacking debuff to stealth strength that is gained from using stealth
I've my own ideas what changes are needed for the (de)buff and hold mechanic and PC damage, but I won't go into those now.
And it's not that I expect any of this to happen anytime soon if ever.
It's that easy to start having good plans on changes which would fixup the game! In whichever, or whatever way!
Why does everybody else struggle so fricken much XD
Seriously someone give this person a hi-five. No messin' around, just Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!....next! It aint fricken hard!
Kids these days. I remember when City of Heroes made a tweak to mob crowd control, and created a stunlock crisis that made the game almost completely unplayable for Blasters, who had no inherent CC resistance by design.
Any Boss (equivalent to a CO Master Villain) could chain-mez a blaster to death. Literally, you could walk away from the keyboard the moment the first hold hit, because they'd keep stacking to the heavens, and there wasn't a damn thing you could do about it. Lieutenants (= CO Villains) were dicey, too, because even though they didn't have enough mez attacks to keep you locked, they'd still do a nice chunk of damage to your glass cannon before the effect expired.
"But what about purple inspirations? Couldn't you pop one of those to break free?", you ask. Well, Cryptic added mez breaks to purple chips as a response to blaster chain-mez death. Until then, purple chips only raised your mez resistance to a slightly less ineffectual number greater than zero.
So yeah, some of us have seen some s*** that makes Gravitar's Force Cascade tap spam look like a glitch.
Choose your enemies carefully, because they will define you / Make them interesting, because in some ways they will mind you
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
So, here's a puzzle: is Ao'Qephoth a good or a bad design? In order to beat him, you must do the following:
Deliver enough DPS to overcome his passive healing from Shadowfeast -- or suppress it. This effect is bugged in Burst type alerts, and he is essentially only beatable with Skarn's Bane, but in Grab and Smash alerts it's quite doable (and heal prevention becomes actually useful)
If he uses Lifedrain, block (which prevents the heal). Again, quite doable.
If he uses Devour Essence, withdraw out of melee range (blocking does not cancel the heal from devour essence).
Survive his attacks. He's got solid offense, but nothing unmanageable unless you're trying to tank him with a squishy.
I'm inclined to say that he could be good design, except for three problems:
He's not gated in any way. If Ao' comes up in a Grab, you have a choice between not doing Grabs (which are important to advancement of low level characters) and going up against him, and you have no real clue that he's tougher than the average Grab villain. A group of 15-20s don't really have the tools to take him down.
He's bugged in Burst alerts; only a small number of effects can defeat him at all.
He doesn't have any rewards to reflect the challenge. If he had a high value drop, 40s would queue when he popped up in Grab and the problem would go away.
It's that easy to start having good plans on changes which would fixup the game! In whichever, or whatever way!
Why does everybody else struggle so fricken much XD
Seriously someone give this person a hi-five. No messin' around, just Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!....next! It aint fricken hard!
Many of those points have been brought up quite often in the past, though, and it usually results in nothing happening on the dev's side and just another huge debate about balance erupting on the forums.
At this rate, I'd rather have a CO2, so they have a fresh start on things like balance and the gameplay/world engine (+a fresh start means easier to implement a Foundry as ya go). Never gonna happen, though.
So, here's a puzzle: is Ao'Qephoth a good or a bad design? In order to beat him, you must do the following: -snip-
Imo, s/he needs a better tell on the DE, aside from the anim. Its far too powerful an effect to have no warning, and results in the fight taking much longer if ur 'tank' is melee. In the past its been suggested Ao grows in size to make identifying it easier- but its a similar problem atm to ice daggers and cascades: no tell.
(all likely cause they are instant and the engine hasn't been coded to have move indicators work on AI moves that lack charges- and that's dumb)
Public Missions like Takofanes are meant to accommodate to (mostly) everyone regardless of skill level and according to a wide level range. Bumping up Takofanes' damage for example wouldn't be fair to those of lower levels and much more squishier statuses. Same goes for alerts, if we're talking about everything but rampages.
A fair point; open missions do need to be accommodating especially when it's an event for all levels. That's why increasing damage output would never be the way to go. Instead, adding something to the fight for players to do other than crowd around Tako and spam attacks would; things players can do no matter what level or build they are.
If there's any difficulty issue to be addressed, then address Elite difficulty, especially for APs and Comics. Make Elite difficulty accommodate to players with Elite builds and make it a real challenge for them. Replacing henchmen with enemies at minimum master villain ranks, significantly increasing the mob sizes and drastically increasing damage outputs...just a few examples on how to make Elite difficulty more challenging for builds that can handle it.
Increasing damage outputs is fake difficulty though, and doesn't actually make the content more interesting, it just restricts it to a narrower range of builds. I want challenging content that challenges "elite" players... not "elite" builds.
I'm not sure what you mean by "skill of the player" since there aren't really any platforming aspects to combat. You don't actually dodge or jump over an attack to avoid damage. Everything about combat is about overcoming DPS walls either from the player or enemy side. Difficulty has to be about how tough the enemies are in how they deal damage be it from a single or many sources, and also if the enemy is able to mitigate damage towards themselves.
This is a very narrow view of the mechanics available in this game, as well as a very narrow view of how this game can provide challenge.
CO has no tools to offer skill-based difficulty, really. It has very basic AI which is not really possible to improve by scripts only and has no arcade dexterity-based elements (aside maybe of blocking).
Target prioritization is an element of player skill. The ability to recognize a foe that should be taken out first and then to act on that recognition may not be twitch reflex stuff but it is a tactical skill.
Sure a given group might have the DPS to not need to focus fire a mob healer before taking out the rest of the group but would still benefit from doing so.
The same could be true with mob CC, debuffs, or buffs.
Because I'm not sure if you realise it, but neither F&I or Gravitar are dexterity-based encounters.
When someone references those fights, they are referring to the parts where you have to react quickly and move out of locational hazards. Yes, you can build to survive these hazards, or you can move out of them.
CO is not Dark Souls, CO has no tools nor AI to be Dark Souls. It's a very classic mmo with a more dynamic combat, but it's still a very classic mmo. It always will be down to number crunching and the only way of making it any more difficult is to give opponents even bigger numbers or ability to strip down the player numbers.
The smarter AI you are asking for would require changing the core game programming. It's not very likely to happend.
Dark Souls AI isn't anything impressive you realize. Enemies in that game aren't particularly clever, they're just aggressive and programmed to randomly back off and not attack for a few moments to "psyche you out". They randomly throw out whatever attacks they have according to if you're in range of them or not. They're not all that different from how CO npcs function. Changing core programming isn't required, just creative use of what's currently available.
See these guys are just annoying to me. The only times a Brickbuster has caused me real issue is when I first started playing the game (and had no idea what they were) - and occasionally during a Viper mission when carelessness causes me to aggro more than one group (zapped by Brickbuster with two full spawns standing at range laying down hitpoint decimating fire)
Otherwise though, I just groan and roll my eyes. Taser just means I'll be using less of my charge or maintain attacks (sometimes?) And Brickbusters, just mean I'm going to be hitting them with my most unneccessarily powerful overkill attack because they irritate me. Neither one of those enemies make me think "awesome! Interesting!" or "oh crap!"
See the point isn't to make you yell out "awesome! interesting!", The point is to give you a decision to make. It doesn't have to be some in depth long term branching decision, it just has to be one of a few decisions you could make. The issue that needs to be addressed is that currently with the majority of the game's content, there is no decision making the player needs to make: just do the same thing, every time, in the same way. That's why many players have fun for a short while, then once they're over the style, they leave because there's no substance.
What about powers like Particle mine? Maybe the bad guys could use a ranged version of that to force us to reposition in combat, make us move around more.
EDIT: Actually, what about a single-target melee attack that strips active defenses?
So, here's a puzzle: is Ao'Qephoth a good or a bad design? In order to beat him, you must do the following:
Deliver enough DPS to overcome his passive healing from Shadowfeast -- or suppress it. This effect is bugged in Burst type alerts, and he is essentially only beatable with Skarn's Bane, but in Grab and Smash alerts it's quite doable (and heal prevention becomes actually useful)
If he uses Lifedrain, block (which prevents the heal). Again, quite doable.
If he uses Devour Essence, withdraw out of melee range (blocking does not cancel the heal from devour essence).
Survive his attacks. He's got solid offense, but nothing unmanageable unless you're trying to tank him with a squishy.
Ao'Qephoth is great design, and all of the things you listed are why. He requires players to use all of their skills, their actual player skills, to defeat him. Players can also use build to defeat him.
Yes, players have failed Ao. Oddly enough, the only issue with those failures is that often players will continue throwing themselves at him long after it's been established that they won't win.... so the only real problem with the Ao fight is that you can't actually lose in this game due to infinite respawns dat irony.
It's okay though because you don't have to beat him to progress. In fact, after one of those "throw yourself at him" attempts, once you leave the alert you'll usually find he's cycled out in the meantime.
So, here's a puzzle: is Ao'Qephoth a good or a bad design? In order to beat him, you must do the following:
Deliver enough DPS to overcome his passive healing from Shadowfeast -- or suppress it. This effect is bugged in Burst type alerts, and he is essentially only beatable with Skarn's Bane, but in Grab and Smash alerts it's quite doable (and heal prevention becomes actually useful)
If he uses Lifedrain, block (which prevents the heal). Again, quite doable.
If he uses Devour Essence, withdraw out of melee range (blocking does not cancel the heal from devour essence).
Survive his attacks. He's got solid offense, but nothing unmanageable unless you're trying to tank him with a squishy.
I'm inclined to say that he could be good design, except for three problems:
He's not gated in any way. If Ao' comes up in a Grab, you have a choice between not doing Grabs (which are important to advancement of low level characters) and going up against him, and you have no real clue that he's tougher than the average Grab villain. A group of 15-20s don't really have the tools to take him down.
He's bugged in Burst alerts; only a small number of effects can defeat him at all.
He doesn't have any rewards to reflect the challenge. If he had a high value drop, 40s would queue when he popped up in Grab and the problem would go away.
I think more Alert bosses should have unique, dare I say, gimmicks that make them harder to beat and unique.
Ao' leaves enough of an impression in a players mind that they probably failed once and really don't want to go against him ever again, as he's the most lamented Alert Boss.
We need to raise other bosses up to his level. And I don't just mean give every boss super regen.
Draconis PFF needs to be fixed, his PFF apparently isn't scaled to him like Sapphires or Crushers is, and is pathetically weak.
Increase the difficulty to on-level and r3 mobs and lower the spawn rate of Mr. Gemini's clones, or give them resistance to AOEs, since most of them just die when they spawn due to AOE spam.
Let Viper-X summon a gaggle of VIPER Minions.
Give EVERY Melee boss the ability to deal with flying heroes. It's pathetically easy in some Alerts to just fly out of melee range and just laugh at the boss that can't hit you with anything but a weak lunge while you blast them.
Increasing damage outputs is fake difficulty though, and doesn't actually make the content more interesting, it just restricts it to a narrower range of builds. I want challenging content that challenges "elite" players... not "elite" builds.
The only other method of challenge I can think of is implementing platforming mechanics. However since I was talking about the current APs and Comics, this would mean modifying them. Since modifying them to do that is pretty much out of the question, then the only way of making enemies in them more challenging is to increase their damage output and their mob sizes / ranks.
This is a very narrow view of the mechanics available in this game, as well as a very narrow view of how this game can provide challenge.
Okay I'll concede that there can be opportunities to introduce mechanics that simulate actual dodging of attacks or cancellation of damage altogether. If Cryptic manages to pull that off for future content, more power to them and us.
Yes because being able to take on more than a couple tough mobs at once is such a terrible thing.
Some of us actually enjoy being able to create reasonably powerful heroes rather than police officers on a small dose of steroids.
It is fine to want your hero to be powerful, but none of those points makes taking on a huge number of mobs impossible. You might need to make meaningful concessions though, I don't see anything bad with that.
It will however stop a fairly significant part of the huge differences in performance of builds (that needs more things changed of course). Which is a hard requirement to ever be able to even start making challenging content or interesting fight mechanics in which all (or most) player can meaningfully contribute.
CN can add all sorts of fancy hoops to jump through to keep combat fun. But if players can just ignore them because the resulting damage is just not dangerous, all that work is pretty much wasted when there is one high performance build in the team. The other option to make the hoops so dangerous it challenges the higher performing builds is also not acceptable, that would disqualify many other builds from being able to play, or at least makes the required player skill much higher.
The other options is to add lots and lots of one-shotting (regardless of how tanky you might be) to CO, that also equalizes builds performance.
Many of those points have been brought up quite often in the past, though, and it usually results in nothing happening on the dev's side and just another huge debate about balance erupting on the forums.
But not all of them
And a topic with the title "co is too easy :P" bound to turn into a balance discussion.
Comments
False.
And the crux of your side of the argument always seems to be "Your boredom is irrelevant, just leave". Constructive.
False.
You're against the thing you think I want done to the game, which you're wrong about.
If your argument was structured in the same way mine is, then I would agree. For example, I have always argued that the dark souls series needs an additional easier difficulty level for more casual players because there's more to the game than just being hard; there's a lot of interesting engaging mechanics and I feel that more casual players are missing out on a great experience because of the difficulty, both actual and implied.
I don't call people names (Unless they're Nepht or Caliga). To be honest, you don't actually appear to know what I want out of the game. Does it really shock you that someone wants action in a game promoted as an action rpg?
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
You're going to have to better than simply declaring that the people who are happy with the status quo are "a minority" out of hand for me to feel the need to defend catering to people who aren't clamoring for self-interest driven change.
The depth of my understanding is not in question. You have provided no example of the level of difficulty you find acceptable, yet you've chosen a thread that opened with a highly dishonest example of the game difficulty to use as your platform. Maybe you'd like the game rebalanced to provide a challenge for the OP? Who's to say?
Except there's no issue to Skirt. CO is exactly as action oriented as Strider. Those enemies all followed a predefined pattern and almost always died in one or two attacks. Your problem is as it was before difficulty. CO is an easy action game. You're not complaining about the inability to backflip down the street or hurl fireballs from your hands while strafing the enemy, you're complaining that the enemies are too easy to defeat.
What do you want done to the game?
If soloing Tako with a squishy dps build would've been trivial, the fight would've been completely pathetic. Luckily soloing like that is not (well... "was not" with the legion gear I had at the time) easy (for CO standards), it was doable when blocking all his attacks.
But indeed, the point of my post was to show that Takofanes does way too low damage. The same goes for Kigatilik and Mega Destroyer.
Takofanes is a pinata for the party and you are complaining that you used a big stick and didn't wear a blindfold to beat it up. No challenge at all to rank your block, form, and buff, because you paid to cheat your way to level 40 on PTS with a button press. I'm sure your "DPS build" was rank 3 on damage to. If you want challenge you don't cheat your way to 40 and don't rank anything to 3, actually build something that really is squishy which you didn't describe at all.
How long did that fight take, and how long should a fight like this with maybe ten or more builds better than yours last?
Not everyone is thrilled to tap and/or hold the same buttons at the same target in the same location watching the same graphic effects for more than a few minutes, it also looks really unheroic and is unrewarding if all this firepower isn't effective. Look at all the fuss that happened with Ao'Qephtoth healing himself or the old Purple Reign 'scaring away new players.'
If Tako was murdering the level 40 free forms to provide enough challenge for them, he would be completely destroying anything less. Characters who have not hit the respawn behind Champions HQ have a three or more block run after recovery if they get smashed in this fight. A few trips like that are a huge turn off especially when Tako goes down, while they are respawning outside the event area and get no reward for the extra long extra challenging battle.
I don't really know what to make of that. I consider this a pretty squishy dps build, far more so than most of the FF builds people are using. (btw I didn't mention Palliate since I can't use that when soloing bosses)
And what do you mean with I paid to cheat, if you must know, I just copied a character from live, with all the gear I have on live.
I also fail to see why I have to deliberately cripple my build with no return at all, to try to make things challenging. And even if I did, when fighting in a big group on the live server, I would never be able to pull agro so it would't change anything, apart from making the fight last a few seconds more.
About the chances of soloing Tako outisde PTS, that is pretty much the point? Why does that fight need to be so easy a squishy dps build can solo him, when he is pretty much always fought by more than 20 players (at least one or two tanks).
I don't exactly remember, but quite a while, he does have a lot of health for soloing.
I agree it doesn't have to be a long fight, though a bit longer than the 3 minutes it takes now could be nice if they implemented a few stages like with Grav. That would need more stuff added to the fight though. Scaring away new players is a bad reason wanting Tako to be easy as he is. When the Takofanes fight was first added to the game, it was a lot harder, since player characters were a lot weaker back then. In those few years I doubt the average player has gotten so much worse at playing games.
I never said Tako should be "murdering the level 40 free forms". But at the very least to the person tanking should take way way way more damage. As it is even AT dps builds can easily tank him if you use the teamup fuction. You get the auras from anyone in range, even the ones from players not using teamup. Not being in any danger while having agro for any build is just silly and it makes the fight a huge (short) bore. And for the builds who can't take that damage, just make sure you either don't have agro, or block if you do.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
Everyone is a minority, and in nearly all cases the minorities overlap in several aspects. This is why making an argument that CO should only cater to any one specific group is flawed.
This would be valid... if there weren't 11 pages of conversation that happened over the course of the past 3 days since that OP was made. You can't just ignore everything between the OP and the post you're responding to.
In Strider you had to run around, jump around, climb walls, observe patterns, react quickly.
In CO you don't have to do any of those things, all you do is run into range, spam your attack power, repeat. The action becomes even more mundane once you reach the boss... where as in Strider that's when the action was raised up a notch.
CO is nowhere near as action oriented as Strider. Backflip down the street? Why? Strafe the enemy? Why? Do anything but the bare minimum? Why? If I wanted to pretend I'd go play with my nephew, he loves it when I pretend like his punches hurt. I play video games because they have mechanics... not so I can pretend they have mechanics.
A game designer can never afford to utter the phrase, "You're just not trying hard enough to have fun with my game".
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
I want more meaningful variety in enemy types, and I want more reactive gameplay.
I want NPCs to have attacks where players care that that attack might be targeting them; and no, not because it's a guaranteed one-shot (though those do have their place, i.e. Jack Fool). (examples: Viper Brick Busters, Argent Counter Agents) Attacks that will make your life difficult if you don't deal with them. Too many groups of NPCs are just an arrangement of cardboard cutouts to be aoe'd down without a thought.
I want locational attacks that players need to actively evade; not by hitting Masterful Dodge, but by moving. And no, not the kind of attack where you have to pretend that moving out of it makes a difference. Too many of these kinds of attacks are completely optional to evade, and almost every single one of them is a PBAoE. Gravitar's bubbles are a good example (minus the one shot), as are Fire and Ice's columns (minus the ignorable damage).
I want NPCs who move faster than a snail. One of the best Active Defenses in the game is to simply have your travel power on and run away.
I want more NPCs with Nailed to the Ground, and Crippling Challenge.
I could go on.. but by this point you either get what I'm getting at or you don't. You'll notice nowhere in here was the phrase "Make all NPCs do more damage and have tons more hit points" included, and neither was the phrase "Make NPCs unbeatable to all but the best Free Forms".
Freeform or Archetype, all players have access to the abilities of target selection, blocking, and movement. The game needs to recognize this fact and actually force players to utilize these skills in every single encounter.
There are players who want to create crowd-controllers, but they don't because they know there's no reason to... it's hard to even pretend at this point.
The anti-challenge crowd always seems to want to reduce the conversation to "You guys just want to make this game all about numbers!", when the fact is that once you stop pretending you realize that's all it is about right now. I want that to change.. I want it to be about decisions, actions, and reactions. I want victory to be determined at the battle field, not in the powerhouse or the archetype selection screen.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
It'd be the kind of NPC where there's at most one in the group.... so naturally every player in the party would descend on that one NPC like psychotic velociraptors and kill it first. Like the Brick Busters (except when there's 2 Brick Busters of course).
Yes. A key component of the whole thing is that everything is avoidable in some way, which creates the kind of observant/reactive gameplay that I want.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
Fair enough. As it turns out that does sound pretty fun, (and OMG I agree!) but a couple of things for the record:
1) I will say that the anti-challenge crowd has never in my experience ever claimed "You guys just want to make this game about numbers!". I have heard "You guys just want to brag about being more hardcore and wave your e-peen around!" and if you're honest, there's often a great deal of pretend selflessness and "this game is dying because it's too easy! We're the only ones looking out for the welfare of the game!" melodrama that comes from the pro-challenge side as well.
2) You can't cite the 11 page thread as a reason I can't pretend to not know your intentions unless at some point in those 11 pages they have been expressed and I've chosen to ignore them. There's quite a bit of snark about players thinking they need to be min-maxed, assertions that the game is too easy and nostalgic recollections from the 8 bit era, nothing about what you actually envision as the ideal scenario until I asked point-blank.
If there's any difficulty issue to be addressed, then address Elite difficulty, especially for APs and Comics. Make Elite difficulty accommodate to players with Elite builds and make it a real challenge for them. Replacing henchmen with enemies at minimum master villain ranks, significantly increasing the mob sizes and drastically increasing damage outputs...just a few examples on how to make Elite difficulty more challenging for builds that can handle it.
A powerful build in the context of what I was talking about would be defined by being able to survive against extreme odds while still being able to retaliate accordingly and come out of the fight in one piece. A glass cannon outputting powerful damage means squat if he or she doesn't stay on their feet long enough to deal enough damage.
I'm not sure what you mean by "skill of the player" since there aren't really any platforming aspects to combat. You don't actually dodge or jump over an attack to avoid damage. Everything about combat is about overcoming DPS walls either from the player or enemy side. Difficulty has to be about how tough the enemies are in how they deal damage be it from a single or many sources, and also if the enemy is able to mitigate damage towards themselves.
Ultimately builds will matter. Yes, player skill in using these builds effectively is a factor, but the builds will always be more crucial if Elite difficulty is ever going to be seriously jacked up for it to be considered anything "Elite".
I did mention about increasing mob sizes and ways for enemies to mitigate damage.
The only way you can have a difficulty requiring more "skill" is when map allows you to play with line of sight or it has elements like Hi-Pan and Cybermind alerts. None of this can be done in already existing adventure packs, comic issues and instanced missions - because it would require redoing maps.
The only way you can ramp up the difficulty is making mobs tougher, hitting harder and coming in bigger numbers.
Nope. All it does is juggling numbers.
Give villains passives? That's precisely what was mentioned before: dps/defense race. Same about debuffs.
All additional difficulty or lack of thereof you can get in CO is always down to builds and numbers.
This isn't a very skill based game and never was outside of PvP and maybe timing cooldowns during power rotation. Not counting skills in making and using builds. Number crunching.
Enemy using debuffs just means lowering the player's capability to do damage be it through things like draining energy, or an actual cut to player damage output, so that the enemy deals more damage than the player in the long run. It all still boils down to damage dealing. CC is in the same vein only that it can stop players from doing damage outright or even any action at all.
Yes, debuffs help change things up a little rather than direct attacks, but at the end of the day it's about enemies either hitting harder than you or hitting you more often than you hit them. Debuffs don't provide that much variety to a fight as you think they do.
Yes OP
One Video from a "Special Individual" Veteran Skilled player who has been in CO since Beta and knows all the Tricks/Combos/Exploits the game has too offer with a Damage-Sponge Fully Justice Gear Build, gives Judgement for the whole game
Meanwhile on Alerts...
I agree with this! 5 Minutes of just the player standing... yay ... exciting
Unfortunately Very Few people on YouTube know how to edit and make good CO videos
Reminding me to NEVER make a Damage-Sponge build
It looks incredible Boring to play, Low Damage and it's only useful for Tanking F.R.E.O.N 2 and Gravitar
Except of Ego Boost and Self Achievement... what is the Reason of Tanking the Colossus in Resistance anyway?
[CUE EVIL LAUGHTER]
Yeap keep Inflating his Ego even More
Why don't you marry him if you Love him so much?
THANK YOU
that's my main Complain with CO community
along with LET'S PLAY WITH OP/EFFICIENT/BALANCE/ROFL-STOMP FF BUILDS AND THEN COMPLAIN THAT THE GAME IS TOO EASY! I DON'T SEE ANY FLAW WITH THIS STRATEGY
Along with LET'S MAKE A WHOLE BUILD THAT FOCUS ON BUFFING 1 SINGLE ATTACK VIA BUFFS/DEBUFFS AND THEN DEMANDING TO NERF THAT ATTACK flawless Logic 10/10
I made all my Builds Balanced between Survability and DPS (Avoiding stupid op builds, they are boring) to avoid the old days when I used to play only as ATs, seeing my characters getting murdered in Boss Fights
I don't complain about the game being easy
EDIT: Actually, what about a single-target melee attack that strips active defenses?
Sure a given group might have the DPS to not need to focus fire a mob healer before taking out the rest of the group but would still benefit from doing so.
The same could be true with mob CC, debuffs, or buffs.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
And you're seriously claiming RNG based difficulty requires skills other than build-making skills.
Because I'm not sure if you realise it, but neither F&I or Gravitar are dexterity-based encounters.
Gravitar requires from you a building skill to prepare and gear an all-around survivable toon. This is the optimal setup you can do for Gravitar.
It's down to the build. A number crunching.
F&I also requires mostly building skills. How to build specialised tanks or other roles. A classic mmo tank&spank encounter which becomes easier if it's not attempted in PUGs.
This one is also down to the build. Again, number crunching.
That both encounters have different build requirements does not makes any of them more skill-based (unless, again, it's skill in building and power rotation).
CO is not Dark Souls, CO has no tools nor AI to be Dark Souls. It's a very classic mmo with a more dynamic combat, but it's still a very classic mmo. It always will be down to number crunching and the only way of making it any more difficult is to give opponents even bigger numbers or ability to strip down the player numbers.
Realise it finally.
Oh, and can you recall a Mechanon missions chain? This is where mobs were given passives and even some tricks like self-replication.
How different it's in play, hmm? And, again, adding passives and attacks is basically increasing enemy's numbers. That's the only way you can made CO any harder.
The smarter AI you are asking for would require changing the core game programming. It's not very likely to happend.
Same as you can't really expect maps for higher difficulty levels being different in layout than are maps for the normal mode, so you could use smart positioning with current enemy AI and stronger mobs.
See these guys are just annoying to me. The only times a Brickbuster has caused me real issue is when I first started playing the game (and had no idea what they were) - and occasionally during a Viper mission when carelessness causes me to aggro more than one group (zapped by Brickbuster with two full spawns standing at range laying down hitpoint decimating fire)
Otherwise though, I just groan and roll my eyes. Taser just means I'll be using less of my charge or maintain attacks (sometimes?) And Brickbusters, just mean I'm going to be hitting them with my most unneccessarily powerful overkill attack because they irritate me. Neither one of those enemies make me think "awesome! Interesting!" or "oh crap!"
But CO could be more challenging / fun if it took ideas from ARPGs. Some of the bosses in Path of Exile and Reaper of Souls are damn fun... Although RoS has a problem with bosses feeling too much like HP sacks. PoE just revamped the Brutus and Merveil fight and they're actually awesome now. These fights are more about skill than how much DPS or defense you have. There are a lot of attacks that you have to move the hell out of the way or take a ton of damage. There are adds that you need to deal with because they block your movement and beat you to death.
Some of the basic ideas from those fights are already in the game, just very much lacking. Those blue and yellow bubbles from Grav are action mechanics. The pillars of snowflake falls in Fire and Ice are action mechanics. The difference is, they are mostly things you can stand in and block. There is very little reason to pay attention during fights and even less reason to move around.
CO could take advantage of block mechanics, but instead prefers to make bosses no longer have that charge up graphic for their power attacks for cheap'n'easy "challenge". I'm pretty sure Frosty has a tell, but can't always see what he's doing if he's covered in player effects. Last time I tanked frosty with a not-a-sniper-tank, I spend the entire time wishing I'd reduced the effects to low because he was covered in so many damn effects he was just a hazy blob.
Some people like to play ATs or choose to remain silver. It doesn't mean they don't throw money at the game. Also: this game is F2P, which means even the company that made it realizes that never paying a dime to play is an acceptable way to play their game. Otherwise it wouldn't be F2P. That whole shaming people for not paying for stuff is stupid. Bonus for a nice display on how plenty of people have no idea how developers go about doing F2P, why they choose to go that route, and the great many considerations that go into monitization decisions. I mean, damn, look at some developer articles or go through the GDC archives. Seriously. GDC Next is this weekend which means the vault is going to be updated with developer talks soon.
People have different wants and desires for the game. What's wrong with making arguments for or against things? I didn't realize that socializing meant having to agree with everything someone else says always.
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
You mean you might have to resort to having a team and maybe a healer?! Oh no! Oh woe is you! who apparently hath no friends or supergroup or contact with anyone in this mmo! RIGHT?
Get real, you can empty a whole room filled with those enemies in moments with todays builds and you know it, you just wont admit it in the forum because youre anti-any-change-that-isnt-my idea. Just like a lot of you on here have been since you stained the forum with your negative grace, challenging everything through shear bitterness and lack of good comeback reasoning.
You would collapse of old age before you make a decision of wether you want sugar or sweetener in your coffee.
You just did exactly what a good lil forumite would. Bicker and moan and never shift forward. Stuck in neutral gear for all eternity. What a fine example.
In CO that starts with taking significantly high damage to make being defeated possible.
With the current balance, any well played well optimized build is in no danger at all on >95% of the content.
Considering hold resistance stacks, all the stuns in the world are not going to change that in any way. Unless of course holds from NPCs are not applying hold resistance stacks, but that would make fights get very annoying very fast. Having holds on many of the NPC attacks would be an annoyance even with hold resistance stacks.
Also, adding a short duration stun to many attacks would make powers like SR, MS, UR, TGM stand out even more than they already do, so not a good idea that.
For changes to make optimized player characters take significantly dangerous damage there are two option:
My preference would be a combination of the two.
My preferred changes for PC survivability:
I've my own ideas what changes are needed for the (de)buff and hold mechanic and PC damage, but I won't go into those now.
And it's not that I expect any of this to happen anytime soon if ever.
It's that easy to start having good plans on changes which would fixup the game! In whichever, or whatever way!
Why does everybody else struggle so fricken much XD
Seriously someone give this person a hi-five. No messin' around, just Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!....next! It aint fricken hard!
Any Boss (equivalent to a CO Master Villain) could chain-mez a blaster to death. Literally, you could walk away from the keyboard the moment the first hold hit, because they'd keep stacking to the heavens, and there wasn't a damn thing you could do about it. Lieutenants (= CO Villains) were dicey, too, because even though they didn't have enough mez attacks to keep you locked, they'd still do a nice chunk of damage to your glass cannon before the effect expired.
"But what about purple inspirations? Couldn't you pop one of those to break free?", you ask. Well, Cryptic added mez breaks to purple chips as a response to blaster chain-mez death. Until then, purple chips only raised your mez resistance to a slightly less ineffectual number greater than zero.
So yeah, some of us have seen some s*** that makes Gravitar's Force Cascade tap spam look like a glitch.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
- Deliver enough DPS to overcome his passive healing from Shadowfeast -- or suppress it. This effect is bugged in Burst type alerts, and he is essentially only beatable with Skarn's Bane, but in Grab and Smash alerts it's quite doable (and heal prevention becomes actually useful)
- If he uses Lifedrain, block (which prevents the heal). Again, quite doable.
- If he uses Devour Essence, withdraw out of melee range (blocking does not cancel the heal from devour essence).
- Survive his attacks. He's got solid offense, but nothing unmanageable unless you're trying to tank him with a squishy.
I'm inclined to say that he could be good design, except for three problems:Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
At this rate, I'd rather have a CO2, so they have a fresh start on things like balance and the gameplay/world engine (+a fresh start means easier to implement a Foundry as ya go). Never gonna happen, though.
Imo, s/he needs a better tell on the DE, aside from the anim. Its far too powerful an effect to have no warning, and results in the fight taking much longer if ur 'tank' is melee. In the past its been suggested Ao grows in size to make identifying it easier- but its a similar problem atm to ice daggers and cascades: no tell.
(all likely cause they are instant and the engine hasn't been coded to have move indicators work on AI moves that lack charges- and that's dumb)
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
And thats CO's biggest problem both on forum and in the devs minds.
'Debate' is Politicians word, for "Do Nothing"
Like when something goes wrong people just say "an investigation will be launched" and its never heard of again.
A fair point; open missions do need to be accommodating especially when it's an event for all levels. That's why increasing damage output would never be the way to go. Instead, adding something to the fight for players to do other than crowd around Tako and spam attacks would; things players can do no matter what level or build they are.
Increasing damage outputs is fake difficulty though, and doesn't actually make the content more interesting, it just restricts it to a narrower range of builds. I want challenging content that challenges "elite" players... not "elite" builds.
This is a very narrow view of the mechanics available in this game, as well as a very narrow view of how this game can provide challenge.
It actually does. Movement and target selection.
This does not ramp up the difficulty, it only restricts the number of builds that can effectively participate.
^ all good stuff.
When someone references those fights, they are referring to the parts where you have to react quickly and move out of locational hazards. Yes, you can build to survive these hazards, or you can move out of them.
Dark Souls AI isn't anything impressive you realize. Enemies in that game aren't particularly clever, they're just aggressive and programmed to randomly back off and not attack for a few moments to "psyche you out". They randomly throw out whatever attacks they have according to if you're in range of them or not. They're not all that different from how CO npcs function. Changing core programming isn't required, just creative use of what's currently available.
See the point isn't to make you yell out "awesome! interesting!", The point is to give you a decision to make. It doesn't have to be some in depth long term branching decision, it just has to be one of a few decisions you could make. The issue that needs to be addressed is that currently with the majority of the game's content, there is no decision making the player needs to make: just do the same thing, every time, in the same way. That's why many players have fun for a short while, then once they're over the style, they leave because there's no substance.
This is the kind of thinking I like to see.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Ao'Qephoth is great design, and all of the things you listed are why. He requires players to use all of their skills, their actual player skills, to defeat him. Players can also use build to defeat him.
Yes, players have failed Ao. Oddly enough, the only issue with those failures is that often players will continue throwing themselves at him long after it's been established that they won't win.... so the only real problem with the Ao fight is that you can't actually lose in this game due to infinite respawns
It's okay though because you don't have to beat him to progress. In fact, after one of those "throw yourself at him" attempts, once you leave the alert you'll usually find he's cycled out in the meantime.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
I think more Alert bosses should have unique, dare I say, gimmicks that make them harder to beat and unique.
Ao' leaves enough of an impression in a players mind that they probably failed once and really don't want to go against him ever again, as he's the most lamented Alert Boss.
We need to raise other bosses up to his level. And I don't just mean give every boss super regen.
Draconis PFF needs to be fixed, his PFF apparently isn't scaled to him like Sapphires or Crushers is, and is pathetically weak.
Increase the difficulty to on-level and r3 mobs and lower the spawn rate of Mr. Gemini's clones, or give them resistance to AOEs, since most of them just die when they spawn due to AOE spam.
Let Viper-X summon a gaggle of VIPER Minions.
Give EVERY Melee boss the ability to deal with flying heroes. It's pathetically easy in some Alerts to just fly out of melee range and just laugh at the boss that can't hit you with anything but a weak lunge while you blast them.
The only other method of challenge I can think of is implementing platforming mechanics. However since I was talking about the current APs and Comics, this would mean modifying them. Since modifying them to do that is pretty much out of the question, then the only way of making enemies in them more challenging is to increase their damage output and their mob sizes / ranks.
Okay I'll concede that there can be opportunities to introduce mechanics that simulate actual dodging of attacks or cancellation of damage altogether. If Cryptic manages to pull that off for future content, more power to them and us.
What Gradii MEANS to say is,
"THOSE ARE MY EXPLOITS, I MUST FLAME THE TOPIC NOW BEFORE ITS TOO LATE"
It is fine to want your hero to be powerful, but none of those points makes taking on a huge number of mobs impossible. You might need to make meaningful concessions though, I don't see anything bad with that.
It will however stop a fairly significant part of the huge differences in performance of builds (that needs more things changed of course). Which is a hard requirement to ever be able to even start making challenging content or interesting fight mechanics in which all (or most) player can meaningfully contribute.
CN can add all sorts of fancy hoops to jump through to keep combat fun. But if players can just ignore them because the resulting damage is just not dangerous, all that work is pretty much wasted when there is one high performance build in the team. The other option to make the hoops so dangerous it challenges the higher performing builds is also not acceptable, that would disqualify many other builds from being able to play, or at least makes the required player skill much higher.
The other options is to add lots and lots of one-shotting (regardless of how tanky you might be) to CO, that also equalizes builds performance.
But not all of them
And a topic with the title "co is too easy :P" bound to turn into a balance discussion.