Eiko-chan

I "got through it" because this character has Rise of the Phoenix. And I took a couple extra hospital trips on top of that. Because the Council alpha strikes kept wiping my pets entirely, while stunlocking me that I couldn't Break Free from because I was also knocked back over the KB protection I've slotted from IOs. Even if we accept that it's okay for The Council* to be this annoying, the fact remains that they are not "on par" with other enemy groups. No other group has the ability to throw out this much control, damage, or knockback. (*Note: I do not accept this premise. The Council are punching bags and it's okay that they are punching bags. That's why they reward less XP/Inf than other groups.)

The only grudge I hold against Jack Emmert is that I think he makes games that aren't fun. Just like my only grudge against JJ Abrams is that I think he makes movies that aren't good.

There are non-nefarious reasons to desire privacy. Introversion is one. Also, trans people, especially early in their transition, often don't really enjoy stepping out from behind their digital avatars. People of all sorts of minorities desire anonymity to spare them from harassment and assault. Don't fall into the trap of "you only want privacy if you have something to hide". It's not true, and it's a deeply harmful and destructive meme.

The issue is that I can solo content designed for 8 players, but one particular enemy group - the fascists with punchable faces that exist in the game, referenced in the game, to have their faces punched - causes a hassle greater than the others. They are not "on par" with the other enemy groups. They were redesigned to account for Incarnate power and then pushed into content for players that do not have Incarnate abilities. I would have just as much issue if the Tsoo rehash from Dark Astoria suddenly started showing up on Talos Island.

-tohit auras? Huh. That explains a few things. Guess the Circle finally finished levelling their Willpower Tankers.

Well, let's circle back around to this, actually. x8 means "this content was intended for a full team of eight players by Jack Emmert, a man that famously thought a superhero should occasionally lose a fight against three minions." That design philosophy was being abandoned even before Emmert left Cryptic, and it was fully discarded by the time Paragon Studios took the helm. The numbers really shouldn't be taken literally. They were defined by someone that thought his general rules of team play applied to all content genres.

Welcome to game design. And capitalism. The trick is figuring out which group is your core audience, and which sector costs you more by favouring the other. It can be a tricky balance to find, but it's not asking the impossible. Literally every organisation that exists has to thread this needle.

I get a bug every few months or so to play and play pretty intensely for a couple weeks, then don't play again for months. I'm a casual hardcore player. Playing on and commenting on a closed beta isn't something on my plate for this game. I have other games I already do that for, both in paid and unpaid fashions.

Suggestion: rework all "defeat X enemy group" badges to work like the Praetorian group badges introduced in Going Rogue do. In other words, you need X points, but minions give 1 point, Lieutenants 2, and Bosses 5. There aren't a lot of defeat badges that this would affect (many are "defeat this one specific enemy name", not a generalised group defeat), but it could be a nice little QoL boost to the ones that would be affected, such as the Croatoa defeat badges.

True, but that same portion of the playerbase also avoids Praetoria and doesn't engage in the contact content that has Praetorian enemy groups either.

Sadly, I can't just remove the Council from the New Praetorians story arc without, y'know, just not doing the New Praetorians story arc.

I got through the Council spawns I had to deal with. But I had less trouble with the IDF spawns, the Arachnos spawns, the UPA spawns. With the exact same character. And the Council was less fun. Please assume good faith.

The funny thing is, despite this being an MMO, teaming up is not the norm for superheroes. There are super teams, yes, but they don't all turn out for everyday threats. The entire team only assembles to face world-shattering threats. Mobs should be getting wiped out incredibly quick by a full team of supers. The team isn't assembled to fight Joker's minions, or even Joker himself. The team assembled to face down Darkseid, Galactus, or the entire Thanagarian military. Solo/duo play is where the individual power of a hero really shines, both in comics and in this game. If you feel like you aren't really contributing in team play, might I humbly suggest trying to play with smaller teams but at the same difficulty?

Signature heroes and villains often appear in Tip missions.

I am currently levelling a Demon/Pain MM. Key phrase: levelling. This is not a 50. This is not an Incarnate. I imagine that once I have Clarion Destiny, the difficulty bump with ramp down a lot, but at current level (47 as of this post), this build is handling UPA, IDF, and Arachnos x8 spawns with less difficulty than Council spawns. Knockback has always been a sort of soft-counter to MMs, especially area knockback, but the Council revamp is taking this to extremes that not even Fake Nemeses are matching.

I posted in the Suggestions forum because I was literally told to do so by a GM. This moderation action is in direct violation of what the GM told me to do.

Mayhem Missions are awesome. Safeguard missions are, in fact, gutter content. They aren't comparable. Safeguards were a bone thrown to Hero players that were mad Villains had something cool, but it wasn't a very good bone.

Okay, we don't play the same game, because I don't even DO radio missions. I do contact missions, and many of the new story arcs (both PS Freedom stuff and HC stuff) feature the Praetorian-era enemy groups.

Do we even play the same game? Malta and Carnival have never been the most annoying groups, at least not since Going Rogue. The groups added in Praetoria were the gold standard for toughness, and the new Council outstrips even them.

The high-level revamps are not a good thing. The changes to bring the Council "on par" with other enemy groups went too far. The high-level Council is not "on par' with any other enemy group; they are far above everyone now, having more toughness, control, knockback, and damage than any other enemy group. Compared with groups like the UPA, the IDF, Arachnos - the groups that were "hard-hitters", heavy control and so on, the Council exceeds them in every capacity. This correction was a huge overcorrection and needs to be dialled back. I'd also really like to see you un-"fix" the Rikti. The reason Communication Officers were worth Lieutenant XP was because their summons are not worth XP and do not die with them. It is not frivolous to eliminate every Communication Officer in a spawn (or multiple spawns) before they can open a portal, and the small boost of XP and Inf they granted was the balance for the added spawns they could produce. (And has the issue with their battle portals spawning endlessly and spawning bosses been fixed yet? That's also a bad change.)

If you were playing pre-CoV, then you were probably used to the game before Enhancement Diversification, which does mean that yes, there were substantial balance changes made by both Cryptic and Paragon in the intervening years. In my case, however, I was playing the game up to shortly before the shut-down, so this is definitely something HC did.

This is factually incorrect. I solo /x8 with almost all my characters, because that is what I build for. The character I am currently working on has not had the problems with Arachnos, IDF, UPA, or any other enemy group that I am having with the Council. They are not on par with anyone. They have been tuned into the stratosphere for absolutely no goddammed reason. They now have more toughness, more control, and more knockback than any other enemy group I'm running against. Even the new Circle hasn't bene tuned this hard. Whatever was done to the Council was a gross overcorrection.

Sweetie, I beat the original 1989 Prince of Persia. In 1989. You should probably assume people playing this game are very, very old, not very young. As for my failing hand-eye coordination and memory? No, those are not things I can work on, because their degeneration is related to age. Any exercise of those faculties is maintenance at this point, not growth. But none of those are the reason I'm running into problems with Council enemies and I think you actually know that.

This is the sort of attitude I'm talking about. While there has always been some skill aspect to gaming, the idea that someone's lack of enjoyment of a game is a "skill issue" is largely a newer idea. The idea that someone needs to "get good" to enjoy a game has not been the prevailing view of humanity, nor has it been the prevailing view for the entire history of video gaming. Most gamers are casual gamers. Most people that play video games are seeking to overcome obstacles, but are not necessarily seeking to establish "leet skills" or high degrees of intricate system mastery. Most of us just want to have fun, and bashing our heads against a wall isn't fun for most people.

There's a good reason I don't play most games. At some point (I blame pro-gaming, personally) playing a game to have fun stopped being a thing developers really designed around.