Cobalt Arachne

The only change there is a patch note change, since so many people seemed to think that note meant the raid could be solo'd.

This has been dropped from the patch note description since Build 2. That'd be the responsibility of the power team's devs; I'm not involved with that part of the game, I have no authority or ability to make any changes to any player powers.

Most welcome! It won't be the immediate next build, because we're changing the Minotaur's HP scaling to work dynamically based on the players in the zone and I'd like testers to have the beta playtest powers to make sure everything with that is functioning correctly and as-expected first, but the build after, they'll be disabled. I'll also be announcing and leading a scheduled test raid myself open to anyone who can attend on Brainstorm once they're disabled. It would be good to get at least one large-scale raid organized for close-to-live test data while it's in open beta if we can.

In an upcoming build, we're planning to disable the usage of beta playtester powers in the Labyrinth, which will help prevent people who are using them right now to insta-kill the Minotaur which is the main reason he's dead so much currently. Otherwise, the zone can be manually rebooted by a GM or myself on Brainstorm, shoot me a DM when you plan to do testing and I can try and ensure the zone is in a fresh state for you.

Working as intended, that floor has a gimmick in the # shaped area where half the doors loop the hallway around.

There are great ideas! The Labyrinth of Fog, like the City of Heroes game as a whole, will continue to see tweaks, adjustments, and additions, moving forward. I'll see what I can't do about adding some more flare to the zone later on! 🙂 This is a good suggestion, I'll look into adjusting the Gladiators so they're selectable and then activated by clicking on them instead of a proximity.

The idea was that solo players could find Malevolent Fogs and contribute; But the Malevolent Fogs are over-tuned when I made them chunkier so that Leagues didn't make them evaporate just by looking at them. Will look into a better balance here. With solo-able Malevolent Fogs, their being worth Reward Merits, a Draught of Fog inspiration, and a zone-wide Level Shift, should allow solo players to contribute more and get rewards more reasonably for their time.

I'm thinking perhaps a scaling-HP solution for the Malevolent Fogs, so they're very chunky with a huge group, and reasonably lean if solo. I want them to be doable solo, but they need to have enough thickness that they survive long enough for Leagues to get everyone in for credit. I'll look into this.

This was more intended to be 'You can explore the zone by yourself and find secrets without a team.', it was not meant to be read as 'the League raid mechanics are designed to be soloed', they're not... They're designed for a League, players will find them very dangerous solo. Perhaps that patch note needs clarifying if it's being incorrectly read and people are taking it as the raid was meant to be soloed, which is entirely contradictory with it being a raid.

Separate from the True Core, there are seven secret '???' areas total, which includes the Endless Colonnade. I don't expect them all to be found before we go live, they give no special rewards except the special views and the exploration for any and are, for the most part, more hidden than the motes.

Check your prestige costumes... Looks like the unlock reward needs a bigger notification. Also, well done on solving the Labyrinth so quickly! Very nice! 😄

Just doubled the time that the hint displays for in response to this, hopefully that should make them more useful as hints.

I'd be interested in discussing elements like this, it would be a question of how and what in a way that works well with City of Heroes gameplay. At one point I debated a currency only found in the Labyrinth, that corresponds to a vendor with rewards and Labyrinth-only powers as a means of 'progress' but I don't imagine that's what you're meaning with your suggestion. Thinking now, how deep could we go with Inspirations to simulate rogue-like elements? Hmm. At this point, with how close Labyrinth is to release, most of this discussion is likely to be applied towards my next big project (Page 3 or 4 at the earliest) since it is a structured, more accessible game mode that is much more built to support rogue-like mechanics.

This is pretty much the case... Here's some out of bounds shot of the zone from the map editor; It's a massive sprawling 3D assembly, it wouldn't be possible to make a singular map where all the players positions are correctly displayed in a way that would be helpful to anybody trying to locate them, especially with how the doors do not connect in any sensible manner. Also for clarification; OP's map is just showing the Endless Colonnade secret area's puzzle solution. That's not a map of the entire Labyrinth of Fog zone, that's just a single non-combat floor.

This is correct, the whole zone is static, the doors were seeded randomly once, then the zone assembled from the results. If you enter the Yellow portal from the lobby, hang a left and take the elevator door, you'll always end up on the same Green Praetorian Lab floor. It was never meant to be secret, and as you can see from this post, it won't be for very long... 😛 Players creating their own maps was something we did expect / didn't want to discourage, players who don't want maps, can ignore them and find the secrets on their own.

Primarily two reasons: 1. The zone was concepted as an open raid zone. This means the zone is consistent and a space shared by all players, it's not locked off unless the zone caps players. This is a contrast from when a player owns an instance, they feel more secure within it, as it is their personal space to play around in and complete. On the flip side, an open zone belongs to nobody, is more vast and unknowable, and that leads to a better fit for the 'vibe' of the zone, which is to encourage exploration and keep the anxiety of the Minotaur present, which is accomplished more when the zone is not owned by anybody, and you're venturing into the unknown blindly. It also encourages players to team up, since you're in a maze together. Why this matters is that open zones don't have any interior maps, they have a singular zone map (there was no logistical way to realistically draw/map 40+ floors onto a single image), so instead the zone was designed to be a liminal maze with no map, because... 2. Specific locations don't matter for the raiding. Players are given a free teleport tool power that allows them to recall themselves to any target on their Team or League with a 1 second cool-down. This means it's trivial to stay together with your group, and the raid's goals in the Labyrinth can be accomplished from anywhere within it. There are Elite Boss mobs everywhere, so being in any specific place matters less for the raid, with the exception of those hunting for Malevolent Fog, which is a raid sub-task that will appeal to explorers, much akin to the way during Halloween leagues will often have a few scouts who go out and teleport the League to Eochai / Jack In Irons for Merit income. Lastly, the Minotaur raid boss will come to you, so you don't need to go out and look for him, just prepare your raid to challenge him, then pick a spot and stand your ground. For these reasons, the map wasn't required as the elbow of all organization, the idea was that players would actively play and stay with their groups while they're undergoing Labyrinth runs, this also plays into the Minotaur's mechanics, and they're more than happy to say hello to players who are going AFK while inside.

No problem; I have very little attachment to any badge names; If you have a better alternative, I'm happy to swap it out, a lot were first-thought placeholders that nobody commented on so they ended up going out as they were.

Per an earlier suggestion in this thread, I wrote up a short intro to the zone, it will be included in the next set of patch notes. That being said, there's a lot more lore to this zone to be discovered beyond this:

Gladiators ignore combat mods, so they always fight you at +0, no matter how many shifts are in the zone. There's also a secret that can be discovered (more a solo player discovery) that will cause 100% of the Gladiators to become hostile to you every time, that's a trigger you can set with every trip to the zone. It involves the motes.

I like pioneering new tech (primarily Lua right now) so we have a wider variety of methods and tricks we can use to create better content. There's no 'sinister master plan' here with new tech other than it's more interesting for me to work on personally, and it pays higher dividends to the team over time with the tech I come up with they can re-use and adapt later. There's not much room for actual conversation if you so heavily taint your response with layers of bias and mistrust. We're not evil people trying to ruin the game. We as individual developers pitch our projects to the whole team and then we approve them based on their individual merit after discussion, and if approved, the pitching developer is responsible for seeing their project to completion. I have a passion for content that forces Teams to actually work together as teams and pay attention, that's how the game HAD to be played when I got into City of Heroes as a kid in early 2005, and it's the style of gameplay that crashed and died the hardest when IO's and Incarnates were introduced later on and then, bizarrely, people started attacking the notion that this game could be one that had content where you had to actively play. So yes, I have a personal interest in making sure the style of content I enjoy actually exists in the game somewhere. I've been working on the Labyrinth of Fog (by myself, it was a personal dev project that didn't pull anyone else on the team away from anything else) since August 2023, and it started as an experiment on liminal space maps. It will likely total over 12-months of work before the Labyrinth sees release. The Aeon Strike Force took me 10 months. I'm not paid to do this, I work on what interests me because I'm donating thousands of volunteer hours using my personal free time to strive to create production-quality content. If at any point, we start to hate our work, then we slow down or stop working. The only compensation we get for our work is the appreciation of fans of our content, and we do have fans, I've had people send me personal messages thanking me for the Advanced Mode content because it got them to join an active super group and it helped them meet a bunch of their current friends they play the game with. This is the core reward for me, seeing people have fun and make new friends. The above reason is exactly why I do this content, and it's been a success in that, even if niche. I've spent a large amount of time adding enormous breadth and span of content that benefits all kinds of players, not just Advanced Mode players. The game had thousands of missions worth of easy content, but very little for those who want to actually engage with the game in a meaningful capacity. We aren't just robots who work on whatever we're told, we're driven creative individuals with our own focuses, interests, and ways of enjoying the game and we hope to pass that passion on with the content we create. I hope people can understand that at the end of the day I consider myself a servant of the game and the players who enjoy my work, I barely find time to play the game because that time ends up going to development work instead 9 times out of 10. I'm also not the only developer, sure Cobalt projects end up favoring certain things, but there are a dozen other developers all adding things to the game and deliver completely different stuff from my own style of content. I don't disagree, and that's why it was a priority to ensure it was here in the Labyrinth. If you have alternative ideas on how to implement narrative/story elements into an open raid zone with no contact or story arc text, I'm open to suggestions and other ideas.

The Draught of Fog inspiration only provides a Level Shift while inside the Labyrinth of Fog; Outside of the zone, it cures and provides immunity to the Diseased debuff that all Minotaur enemies inflict with their breath attacks, so players could potentially use it while running ITFs if they really hate that debuff. It cannot be stacked with Ultimates. The hope is that people will use Draughts of Fog instead of Ultimates, since the Draughts last 15 minutes each instead of 5, and are far easier to collect than to purchase/stock many Ultimates from Luna.

There's a known issue right now, where mobs are not correctly displaying their actual Level Shifts until they are interacted with. We're looking into a solution.

I'll double check that the descriptive text on the inspiration alludes to it, it was something added later in development as response to asking for hints to the maze.

These are all really just one thing, and well, meh. I figure it's the same as every other hardmode TF, just open world, and those aren't fun, so why would the new zone be? The Labyrinth of Fog is not advanced/hardmode content, it's not even Incarnate content, no more so than something like a Hamidon or RWZ Mothership raid is considered as such. The Labyrinth of Fog is more... another style of group content aimed at providing a similar format of consumption to that of the popular Halloween leagues + GM hunts combined with a 'once a day per character' raid boss payout to engage with/target, and a variety of rewards that can be prioritized/optimized by the individual raid leaders. It's not meant to be difficult, it's meant to be engaging. But the zone is also a liminal space maze, with a variety of sights, discoveries, lore, stories, and prizes to discover that encourage exploring, a lot of which was designed to be doable solo with some stealth, independent of raids going-on. I encourage anyone curious to give it a try, it's pioneering a lot of new approaches to things. As with everything we create, there will be fans and those who decide it's not for them, which is normal for any work. At least for me, I'm always looking to explore the horizons of new experiences, but I understand some prefer less complex experiences and that's okay too.

I like this idea! I'll look into writing something up for an introduction for the next patch notes. There is a lot of lore to the Labyrinth, but parts of it are hidden, and those who want all the answers will have to look for it. I wrote a lot of extra lore and details specifically for descriptions.... Powers, inspirations, badges, buffs; If it had a description, I snuck lore in!