|
Slung Blade posted:This is, and I mean this completely unironically, the best idea to come out of this thread so far.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 06:14 |
|
|
# ? Jun 9, 2024 00:57 |
|
Well, an Incarnate Trial sized mayhem mission would be ONE way to avoid speed runs. "See that timer? Yeah, it's nowhere near long enough to complete this mission. Your only course of action is to Destroy. loving. EVERYTHING! Enjoy the dozen longbow eagles ambushes swarming you at the same time every minute." Bots Mastermind. Aggressive mode. Come to me parking lots.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 06:59 |
|
OneEightHundred posted:Coming soon: Lambda with nothing but fire trolls. Use acids = get kicked from group. If it makes the lovely incarnate grind easier, I am totally ok with this. It would be boring, but so is the original content after you've run it a hundred times. wid posted:Also would be nice if the Flight customization uses the flight pose emotes which are underutilized. And gently caress yes, this is a great idea, why didn't they implement that years ago? Slung Blade fucked around with this message at 07:36 on Jul 19, 2012 |
# ? Jul 19, 2012 07:33 |
|
Slung Blade posted:And gently caress yes, this is a great idea, why didn't they implement that years ago? I think they did and then people whined so they turned it off again, if I recall correctly.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 07:40 |
|
Mind over Matter posted:I think they did and then people whined so they turned it off again, if I recall correctly. What did people have to whine about? It's flight poses.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 08:18 |
|
I just came to a realization... An unslotted Vengeance (LOTG mule) from ANYONE gives you enough +ToHit to remove the int period from Snipes.. and, of course, also run while casting them. Also, Moonbeam is a FANTASTIC ST DPS add for a well-built scrapper. If you're going for Shadow Meld anyway, and have Vengeance as a LOTG mule, may as well pick it up - you're probably not using Dark Blast, anyway. For those 2 minutes after somebody dies, enjoy your amazing single-target blast with a 1.33s cast. It's a shame Spines/Bio is pretty much going to have almost every last power from pri/sec... and no slots to spare.. Edit: Really, REALLY hope that Tough becomes a first-tier pick with the revamp. It's not Inherent Fighting but it'll help a lot. Also, is there a 5th power being introduced to Fitness? Tom Powers fucked around with this message at 09:15 on Jul 19, 2012 |
# ? Jul 19, 2012 09:11 |
|
Carrasco posted:What did people have to whine about? It's flight poses. my TOON would never fly like that why are you forcing them to do so randomly!!!
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 10:42 |
|
PUPPY PUZZLE posted:let us design incarnate trials in AE, i'll make this happen. I maintain the opinion that LOST DOG is the best arc in the game and am totally in favor of gaining incarnate XP from it's sequel.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 12:36 |
|
I like bits amd pieces of the incarnate trials (enough to put up with grinding them) but yeah, they really suffer from 2 conflicting design goals: 1. To offer the "most challenging content in the game", and 2. To still be a "casual-friendly" game that doesn't require people to be super-selective for "1 main tank, 1 off-tank, 2 dps, 2 support" or whatever else those other lovely MMOs do. The solution they came up with is just to have large leagues, where you're statistically likely to either end up with sufficient support, or enough raw dps to make up for it. As a bonus (so the reasoning went), it also could result in a sort of "huge summer crossover event" type of feel. As noted, though, it just results in a big "smear" of indistinguishable players where nobody really stands out. I'd much rather see smaller task force content like Apex or EDEN. Eden is, to me, still the gold standard for what top-end content should be: epic, expansive, exploratory, weird and alien, with the right level of challenge for the group size. poo poo, even non-combat aspects of it (jumpimg down the holes) contribute to the overall feel that This Is Getting Big. I really hope that the Battalion setting is alien enough and can have moments like that, because it sure doesn't help that Praetoria is a relatively mundane setting when you think of all the possibilities of a comic-book universe.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 14:29 |
|
I never got the love everyone has for Eden. "Go kill lots of these guys, grind for inspirations, and whack at 2 walls. Oh here is a big dude that can footstomp you to death. But first kill a few hundred of the same guys you've been killing just to be safe. The end."
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 14:45 |
|
It's all one mission on a HUGE unique map with a gigantic end boss. It has some flaws, like the rescued heroes being worthless and the Ambrosia being a pain to farm, but it's a fairly unique experience pre-Incarnates in a game full of chains of small instances leading up to a human-sized AV.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 15:32 |
|
Cuchulain posted:I maintain the opinion that LOST DOG is the best arc in the game and am totally in favor of gaining incarnate XP from it's sequel. Bah, I've been waiting 3 years now for my trilogy to be made into a top level SF for villains, still hasn't happened yet. (not that anyone plays vills nowadays) #83920: Two Chicks at Once. Longbow has released a cheesecake calendar as a promotion, so what's Lord Recluse to do? Why, put out his own pinup calendar and beat Miss Liberty at her own game! #167567: Curiouser and Curiouser: How can Lord Recluse's latest project be so secret, even he doesn't know about it? What does Longbow want, and who invited Nemesis? #530511: Cat: It's What's For Dinner. A parody of the LRSF. Working towards the final triumph of Arachnos, you find yourself in a alternate dimension, where catgirls are the dominant species. How can you get home... or will you? Choose from two possible endings.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 15:44 |
|
CoP was pretty much the first piece of actually challenging content I've run, and that's only challenging because it's a giant cockblock based on how many copies of Tactics you brought and whether someone has a -500% regen dick-punch skill. The problem with trials is that they're leagues. The traditional reason for big teams in MMOs is to make sure you don't have holes in your team comp, but power sets are so dense that it's really hard to have them. Instead, they're having the exact opposite problem, where they're having to render entire mechanics useless (i.e. defense buffs in TPN, control effects in pretty much all of them) because there are too many of them. They could fix this whole problem by just adding an 8-man difficulty to them. I can't think of a single reason why an 8-man difficulty wouldn't work, but I can think of a lot of things (i.e. the Lambda interior) that would be more interesting with it, on top of making the "tank + warm-bodies" problem go away.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 15:52 |
|
Mind over Matter posted:I think they did and then people whined so they turned it off again, if I recall correctly. I think people wanted them to add them in, but they didn't have a way to do it. Right now they're just emotes you can bind to a movement key or something, or manually type in while flying. They did say they didn't have that in right now, but that it was a cool idea and they'd try it. Tom Powers posted:Edit: Really, REALLY hope that Tough becomes a first-tier pick with the revamp. It's not Inherent Fighting but it'll help a lot. It's not. Take tier 1 or 2, then take tier 3 or 4. Take 2 powers, and you can get tier 5. So you'll be able to go boxing and weave and skip tough if you like. Fitness doesn't get a 5th power, and the travel pools already have 5. wid posted:So what are the cosmetic options for Super Jump other than "no FX"? I'm hoping for a ground crack landing, like the seismic aura. Because it's silly to always have a super dude jumped a hundred feet into the air and landed softly like a cat. Hell, I think that should've been the default effect of landing from a certain height. Tinted normal fx, no fx, and dark fx most likely. Force of Will apparently has a super jump clone in it, so that might utilize a different jump animation. There's already a "wave your hands like crazy" animation that the shadow shard geysers use, and for when you fall off a slanted object. Kinda want that.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 16:14 |
|
I can think of token reasons for a couple trials to be 16 or 24-manners. Lambda's basically two full missions running in parallel, TPN's meant to split the league's attention quite a lot (of course it doesn't though), and the Magisterium is pretty big and grandiose and has you going up against someone with real power. But none of the others have excuses. It probably would've just worked a lot better for it to be like... Lambda: 16-man. Introduction to the big trial stuff, while remaining simple since most of it's just two missions simultaneously. BAF: 8-man, tone down the everything. Yes it'd probably mean nobody ever runs anything but BAFs ever again, but it would also make the thing less of a brain-turn-off snoozefest. Keyes: Either 8 or 16, nothing else even has to change. It'd be easier by default because all the difficulty is in keeping you team from being retarded. Underground: 8-man, slice the lengths of the tunnels by like a third. Bam, the thing's suddenly amazing. TPN: 16-man if it's balanced so that the telepathists are as important to keep on top of as the signal strength. 8-man if it remained unchanged from what it is now. MoM: 8. Hell, it doesn't even have to be 8, it can be 4, it's a small, localised thing. DD: 8 I guess, but personally I'd just make it a TF. It doesn't do too bad with 16 though. Magisterium: 24, bring out the big poo poo for the grand finale. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Jul 19, 2012 |
# ? Jul 19, 2012 16:19 |
|
Yeah, in theory I really like the "split up to achieve separate but intersecting goals" setup, but it's either been done badly (TPN) or can easily be done with 2 groups of 4 (thankfully Lambda d allows this but I'm sick of it). If the problem is that they "want challenging content" then there's no reason you can't build a 4 to 8 person TF like that, especially with the ludicrous power levels afforded by IOs amd the incarnate slots. The devs just need to remember how pubbies once whined about how hard the ITF, LRSF, and STF were when they first came out.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 16:46 |
|
Cleretic posted:BAF: 8-man, tone down the everything. Yes it'd probably mean nobody ever runs anything but BAFs ever again, but it IMO the problem with Leagues is they were designed (And continue to be updated) for the lowest common denominator. Tommy, while AFK, contributes more than a lot of people trying really, really, hard. There's never going to be a solution to it, and they'll never put forth any fixes. If I had to suggest one, it would be to simply add more interesting mechanics. If you break it down, the idea of "Two missions running parallel" - Lambda - is really pretty great. Then you consider HOW EASY THEY BOTH ARE.. and you can see the issue. So, they're designing this stuff to be possible for almost everybody, and infrequently introducing new things to run. It's either going to succeed or not, no real challenge.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 17:40 |
|
PUPPY PUZZLE posted:let us design incarnate trials in AE, i'll make this happen. Yes, because what we need is to have a bunch of LOLFIREFARMITRIALS. Realistically, if we let you design iTrials, people would probably *expect* to receive Incarnate Rewards. This is a slippery slope that I'm fairly sure the dev team does *not* want to travel down. I can't say that with certainty (I'm not a designer) but even my non designer mind can see that pitfall a mile away.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 19:13 |
|
i'm just sayin, you let people farm everything else to their heart's content, and the people who farm don't even like trials in the first place. just make them drop incarnate tickets or something and you can use them like a weaker astral merit where you need like 5x the amount to do anything useful with them.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 19:24 |
|
Hold a design contest. Every drat player has their own idea of what to expect from Incarnate content, might as well get them to put it on the table. Set simple parameters: "plot, setting, dialogue, major encounters" and go from there.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 19:54 |
|
Plot: My otherkin bladder-control blaster has been kidnapped; and it's up to Paragon's finest to save him (And Statesman)! Setting: Pocket D Dialogue: ((No OOC//FUTA FRIENDLY)) Major Encounters: Absorbant Man, the Dark/Dark Corruptor, and Brick Brown, the Stone/Stone tanker.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 20:08 |
|
Plot: I want purples. Setting: Caves. Dialogue: You can't take our purples! Major Encounters: Fire trolls.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 20:16 |
|
Hah, I must have missed this last week, when they were bogged down handing out Kirby Kodes:
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 20:44 |
|
Evil Z posted:Yes, because what we need is to have a bunch of LOLFIREFARMITRIALS. People already farm the gently caress out of BAM, LAM, TPN, and Magi. Honestly, what's the difference? At least with AE incarnate content there would be a little variety, you know? It's not our fault the designers made us run all the itrials a couple dozen times to max out our slot powers. The trials can be fun the first time or two you run them, I will grant that. Magi can even be fun after the 5th time because it's fairly short and you get to beat on an egomaniac in a doofy costume (and photobomb his stupid hissy fit). But I don't think you can argue that most of them are fun after 3-4 runs. After that, they're just a stupid grind. If we can't design our own, at least make some task forces for it instead. The old task forces, because you're with small groups of friends, can be an absolute blast. Mostly because you can actually TALK to each other, make jokes, you know, socialize in this social game. Things like taking new people on ITFs will never get old (HOLY gently caress GIANT NAZI ROBOTs yaaaay). Especially the reworked TFs, they're fun as hell, and there's a lot of variety to choose from. In the huge leagues everyone is too busy not making much of a difference or making the same lame Bieber jokes when Maelstrom prances on screen. Either that or everyone is yelling at that one retard who thinks he knows what he's doing but because there are so many effects going off he gets too distracted by all the blinking lights to pay attention to league chat. If we had a series of 8-people-and-under incarnate task forces, I think a lot of folks would get a lot more out of the game. Anything is preferable to seeing Marauder going through the same lame little diatribe 40 times.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 20:53 |
|
Evil Z posted:Yes, because what we need is to have a bunch of LOLFIREFARMITRIALS. What are your thoughts on more TFs like Apex/Tin Mage though? Those were the GO-TO TFs if you wanted to get your alpha slot when they were new. Those TFs are still regarded as some of the most fun in the game. I would LOVE if they added new TFs that utilized the newer zones to a better extent (or any extent at all). I know I am far from the only person that feels this way. Especially since trials not only feel like a grind, they actually are. That was one of the simple beauties of this game...it didn't feel like a grind (even though it is). The whole "everyone circle jerk in DA1 and lets magically teleport to a trial" thing is convenient. That's about it.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 21:04 |
|
I don't think they're so deeply flawed that they need player intervention, they're pretty well-designed as far as pacing and things to do are concerned, the problems all boil down to league size and the general lack of difficulty (i.e. completely ignoring telepathists). The latter is, incidentally, largely a product of the former.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 21:11 |
|
Bieeardo posted:Hah, I must have missed this last week, when they were bogged down handing out Kirby Kodes: It's worse this time around. From their end, at least they don't have to spend two business days having a guy comb through retweets and send out the codes (privately!). But now codes disappear or are unavailable within 30 seconds. And I had 5 codes give me an 'cannot be used to make new accounts or used on existing accounts' error
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 21:15 |
|
I'd like to see the Shard revamped as Incarnate level stuff. Or anything in the Shard really as opposed to more new zones that I will never do content more than once in. But the Shard feels epic, and it's huge enough to support a lot of different epic-level TFs and arcs and such.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 21:23 |
|
Pez posted:I'd like to see the Shard revamped as Incarnate level stuff. Or anything in the Shard really as opposed to more new zones that I will never do content more than once in. But the Shard feels epic, and it's huge enough to support a lot of different epic-level TFs and arcs and such. I wouldn't mind seeing the Shard given something of a Siren's Call treatment, just making certain areas flare up into Rulaaru hotspots that give iXP and no better than Uncommon rewards while they last. Save the iTrials for your Rare and V. Rare salvage.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 21:38 |
|
Pez posted:I'd like to see the Shard revamped as Incarnate level stuff. Or anything in the Shard really as opposed to more new zones that I will never do content more than once in. But the Shard feels epic, and it's huge enough to support a lot of different epic-level TFs and arcs and such. I agree with completely with this, but I thought the shard was on the radar of things to get "done up"? It is by far one of the coolest zones in the game and one of the most underutilized too. Anyways, trials are the quickest way to burn out on this game right now. I quit for a year because of trials and I am very close to doing so again. The thought of playing these new sets is GREAT until I realize I have to grind out trials to get what I really want out of them.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 21:39 |
|
Dinictus posted:It's worse this time around. From their end, at least they don't have to spend two business days having a guy comb through retweets and send out the codes (privately!). But now codes disappear or are unavailable within 30 seconds. I imagine last week's 'retweet for a code!' nightmare was a response to people complaining about this approach when they started last week. It's terrible either way-- one of them has to bust his rear end cutting and pasting thousands of codes, or we just about need to have two different windows open simultaneously and hope we can type faster than everyone else. Much as I don't really like Facebook apps, they probably should have taken the /facepalm approach. Oh well, at least it's only for one of those full-body costumes and not something you can incorporate into a set.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 21:55 |
|
The shard is cool as it stands now, but holy gently caress those TFs need reworking. The portals are neat in concept, but they feel really sterile and boring in practice. If there were a fake monorail system with like Longbow transports floating around and landing on platforms waiting to take you to the other zones in the Shard, that would be great, think how cool it would be to see things like that buzzing around. I mean, yeah, it would just be a reskinned monorail, but it would be a lot more interesting and fun than a spinning electric anus. Hell, if you had a 2-3 second scene of your character sitting in the passenger bay looking out over the place like you're being flown to some hot LZ in the 'naam, it would be even cooler.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 22:19 |
|
The bad news is that, going by in-game hints, we probably won't see anything to do with Rularuu until the Battalion storyline wraps up. The good news os, apparently according to the recent chat, there'll be an "Incarnate something" and it's not a trial or a power (there may be a new slot, but it's not what they were thinking of when they said that), so possibly new story arc or TF style content, maybe. At least the Battqlion story will offer some novelty, and maybe some good epic/alien settings.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 22:45 |
|
OneEightHundred posted:I don't think they're so deeply flawed that they need player intervention, they're pretty well-designed as far as pacing and things to do are concerned, the problems all boil down to league size and the general lack of difficulty (i.e. completely ignoring telepathists). The latter is, incidentally, largely a product of the former. This. Z, this is the big mistake the Devs made when creating the iTrials.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2012 23:08 |
|
Brave New World posted:This. Z, this is the big mistake the Devs made when creating the iTrials. If you played the trials in beta you might remember them being a bit more difficult. CoH has a very particular audience, one that's grown used to complete customization in every aspect of their gameplay. Whether it's costumes, missions or task forces, players like to be able to tune their own difficulty. This isn't (exactly) possible in Incarnate Trials. I know it's something we've talked about, but for now, it's not possible.
|
# ? Jul 20, 2012 00:04 |
|
I, personally, like to set my costume difficulty to maximum. 8 mans are alright, but I do like some of the smaller team content though. It's cool to be able to be a support character in, say, the Summer Blockbuster stuff, and be the one thing keeping a group from wiping or succeeding. Sucks for a lot of people though when the team comp dice aren't rolled in their favor though, and I've joined way too many in progress events where everyone just abandoned the event at Silvia because they didn't have enough damage or -regen to beat her.
|
# ? Jul 20, 2012 00:30 |
|
Evil Z posted:CoH has a very particular audience, one that's grown used to complete customization in every aspect of their gameplay. Whether it's costumes, missions or task forces, players like to be able to tune their own difficulty. This isn't (exactly) possible in Incarnate Trials. Even if you don't have an explicit scaling mechanism like notoriety contacts, you could still add optional objectives (including ones that make existing objectives harder), which seems completely feasible with existing mechanics. e: At the very least, mechanics probably shouldn't be completely ignorable. The fact that TPN can have several people AFKing and nobody touching a telepathist ever and still poo poo out more threads than any other trial with no risk of failure is kind of pathetic. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Jul 20, 2012 |
# ? Jul 20, 2012 00:48 |
|
I kind of think a little more forced difficulty would do the playerbase good. Not "You must have x tankers and y empaths and z cold corruptors" or anything like that. Just something that can't be AFKed through. I suppose that would just lead to whining on the forums and/or the content getting ignored, though. Never see Underground being run after all. drat shame. I personally like the incarnate trials, but I do understand the gripes with them as well.
|
# ? Jul 20, 2012 00:54 |
OneEightHundred posted:If that isn't possible, then doing some of the badges that would actually make them challenging should probably offer better rewards. Nobody wants to risk failing BAF for Gotta Keep 'Em Separated over one astral merit. Most elegant way to do that is probably to track whether a run would award the Master badge and give some kind of bonus based on that even if you already have it.
|
|
# ? Jul 20, 2012 01:04 |
|
|
# ? Jun 9, 2024 00:57 |
|
minimalist posted:At least the Battqlion story will offer some novelty, and maybe some good epic/alien settings. I just hope they're better written than the I23 content. Some of that poo poo is really terrible, and even the good stuff ain't that great.
|
# ? Jul 20, 2012 01:33 |