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To my knowledge, those scalars don't actually exist in the game as a variable in of themselves. The individual power values are just set according to them.

Correct. You'll notice that warwolves will appear during the day.

This vibe resonated with me a bit too much. I remember feeling the exact same way.

I'm all for brevity, but I can't help but feel like these threads of yours are losing their quality and discussive value, Doug.

Nerf satire.

While I don't think it's appropriate to point fingers, even into an amorphous crowd, it's a significant point that CoH did once have a lot more challenge to it and that that challenge seems to have vanished. Nostalgia is a big driver for why we're playing and it's going to cause issues when the game doesn't mesh with our memories of it. I do miss struggling through some parts of the game. However, I like the IO stuff (And it's only really on Homecoming that I got into it. Heck, it's only here I could even afford to get into it). Maybe it's off-balance, sure, but that level of customisation is wonderful. The incarnate character progression doesn't gel well with me, but that's more because I don't love the limited themes and funnelled storytelling, I think the interface and method for progression is clumsy and not very immersive and I've never been a big fan of cosmically powerful superheroes anyway - but at least it adds more potential for customisation. This stuff is in line with the concept of the game. I say that begrudgingly but it is true. But like I said in the other thread, I do not believe we need to go backwards in order to create challenge. The game is a pretty open field for how it develops. Let's get inventive. I also want to set in stone, as gospel truth in this discussion, that difficulty and challenge does not equate to grind. Grind is only slow. Nobody wants to be forced to do the same thing but slower. That isn't difficulty, just annoying. That said, I also don't think we particularly need to accelerate the game at this point, but that's just me. An old challenge, for instance, was the hazardousness of hazard zones. They were challenging once because you could expect to take a few days or weeks to level past them, Perez and the Hollows took place before you had travel powers, you could get stuck. Nowadays we can outlevel them within a couple of hours and can fly over them without even noticing that they are there. Would it really work to slow down levelling and suppress travel in those zones? Absolutely not. So what could we do to make hazard zones feel hazardous in the new context of the game? How could we incentivise spending time in them in ways that helps players feel like their character is meaningfully progressing? Can hazard zones be given their own sense of story and identity through zone events - some sort of villain group pushback - that takes coordinated team efforts to respond to? Think like how the Halloween banners events needs some team structure to work. How, then, is that rewarded to be a sustainable event? These are the ideas really worth fleshing out and exploring, seeing what people like and don't like. Dreaming big, the game could benefit from new tech that was never there before, like smarter AI. The need to respond to enemies who are responding to you opens up so many opportunities for challenge. The AI has always loved huddling into a nice, cosy AoE-magnet cluster. What if a few of them notice that AoEs are happening and spread out a bit? A tank could need to bring them back in, controllers and blasters could need to lock them down, you could even justify knocking them back into the pile. The game could really do with a pass over how it rewards players, and not even for the sake of difficulty. I think most of the game does feel under rewarding as it is. The game doesn't seem to value its own arcs very much. EXP and Influence are peanuts nowadays. They're measly old carrots. I'd like it if a reward revamp takes difficulty into account, but honestly I'd take anything that makes every aspect of the game feel valuable, rather than a few examples of content.

I think you may be referring to Celestial Wings? They'd be under back detail > Wings. A middlish orange is convincingly fiery. Edit: Or maybe you're referring to the straight up Phoenix Wings that I totally just blinded a little further down the wings list.

We could debate this point (though I'm catching myself umming and erring over how much I do and don't agree. I'm landing somewhere in the realm of 'agree'.), but that's not quite what I was trying to say. More trying to suggest that the kinds of responses folks might get in these discussions may not be doing anything to deflate the issues that they are having with the game.

I was on an LGTF a couple of months ago where the leader set it to +0 with no indication beforehand that would be the case. We were steamrolling the first mission, so someone asked if we could increase the difficulty. The team was in agreement, but the leader refused to. Not even with a reason, that's just the way it was going to be. It got prickly. Two people left the TF. I stayed in because I never leave TFs, but I really do regret that I didn't. It was boring, the encounter between players hung in the air and nobody was talking to each other. That was a totally unique encounter, though, but it stuck with me for how uncomfortable the whole rest of the taskforce was. I think we can all agree that proper etiquette would have been to at least acknowledge what the team was saying, be open to discussing it and be fair with the expectations of the people you're playing with.

To those who want more challenge: I hear you. But there are good, well meaning suggestions coming from folks on how you might spend your game time. Please do discuss them, explore them, reason with what might and might not mesh with you. Give serious time to the ideas around how you could challenge yourself in the current circumstances of the game and try it. It will not be the path of least resistance and you will be in opposition with the nature of the game, but that's kind of the point. There are examples of challenge within the game. Challenge and Difficulty are nebulous subjects and are hard to put into words, but take the time to reflect on whether your feelings are well communicated. I personally make each character fund themselves (Except for a small loan of 1 million influence), buy only recipes and salvage or use merits to extend the progression of characters for longer. I try not to repeat content on one character, so I make sure it counts when I do. These things do work to help you sustain your interest, but it often means ignoring conventional wisdom and staying away from the status quo. To others: Please assume that those suggesting that there be more challenge are coming from somewhere well-meaning. Difficulty of the game is an impossibly intricate and incomprehensible topic to understand in its entirety, so please do not take the ways it might affect you personally. It may well be that the ease of the game is unsustainable to maintain a playerbase, as suggested. Or possibly not: we don't have the kind of data to conclude this. But nonetheless, it's a perspective, coming from peoples' experience that is worth taking seriously. Imagine the tables were turned for a moment and CoH was a ubiquitously difficult game (it shouldn't be - but bear with me). You ask on the forums how you can have a more casual time to suit you, but you are just told that it isn't that sort of game, to get good and that if you want a casual experience, run synapse - that's nice and easy. That kind of answer will do very little to nourish you. Surely there are other players like you who would benefit from more casual content. The game should aim to appeal to a wide range of tastes. Please don't assume the motivations of others in this subject. It may come from wanting a sense of superiority, sure. Maybe. But I doubt it. Rock climbers don't train hard to climb impossible cliffs to feel like they're better than people. Nobody plays tough cryptic crosswords or sudoku puzzles to feel like they're better than other people. And certainly few people play goddamn MMOs to feel superior to other people. That's not what challenge and difficulty is about, it comes from somewhere much more intrapersonal and much more humane than that. Games are somewhere we often expect to find challenge and difficulty, so surely it is understandable to get discontent when a game doesn't apparently deliver. I think it's far more likely that it comes from the experience of levelling, progressing and outfitting a character only to find that there is very little to do of value for the character. At least that's what I found and it is a disappointing discovery. I mostly play 1-35ish and I fantasise about what the game could do to make me want to bother progressing onward. If that experience is endemic to many players (again, no data to prove nor disprove this), then it could be something worth developing.

I'd like it if the medicine pool has a less 'devicey' option. Something distinct from empathy, but could be suited for magical or less technological powers.

I just sat down with my bots/FF mm. It's so good to be able to strategise without my henchmen hurling themselves out of safety. Best time I've had with them. Thanks Devs!

Since that topic was locked, let's not bring the discussion of who is trolling who to here. Having said that, definitions of challenge are significant and welcome. We're bound to disagree on the nature and appropriateness of challenge in this game, but it should all be good discussion.

I'm always disappointed if I find a TF is +0. Even more true if it is a longer one. The time is quite a big commitment, and it feels like a waste if there's no substance to play. +2 is a better sweet spot for game and time for me. I've been on LRSF speedruns - actual speedruns - that weren't advertised as such. I think that was a bit rude.

Take a look at some of the individual ideas that have come up in the thread. Granted there have been a few NIMBY posts, which is fair. There is still a lot of discussion about how we can achieve teamwork, strategy, and challenge in the context of the game's current state. I agree that the game - at least the endgame - makes every character either generic or substandard, which is entirely against the grain of how it should feel. Simplicity in the circumstance calls for simplicity in the characters. But I am not at all pessimistic that the opportunities for the game to feel diverse again are possible and I don't think it need be done by going backwards. It's also something that will take a lot of solutions rather than one silver bullet. I do not think that powerfulness and challenge are opposed goals. I also believe that challenge can be increased by altering or redesigning factors external to the players. A large part of this, however, is risk:reward. With both inf and exp lacking in much meaning, the incentive to increase risk even is quite flat. This is a tricky balancing act - How to provide sustainable reward to higher challenges without alienating those who want/need an easier, casual game.

I think this thread has largely been very well behaved. The topic is quite a prickly one by nature, and can easily meander into territories thay make people uneasy about the ways the game could change. It's good that those boundaries are clarified. We definitely don't need to try to assess the psychological state of other posters, though. A forum post does not provide anywhere near enough resolution to intricately understand the poster.

I know the design goal is for Sentinels to be sustained DPS rather than burst, but this would be pretty sweet. Opportunity definitely needs another look at. I say this as a Sentinel main. I totally ignore the mechanic.

I was under the impression that you obsessively hang on to every word I say.

I think dramatic rebalances to players is way too deadly to the ecosystem to change. I stay well away from those sorts of conversations. Maybe in hindsight, the game could have had different player values in the first place, but it's way too late to change them. I voted for the option "feel that only certain parts of the game need to be looked at (IOs, Incarnates, etc)", but thinking neither IOs nor Incarnates should be changed. More in that 'etc' bit. And for a lot of it, adding challenge just means bringing the elements that totally lack challenge or reward up to standard, rather than excessively difficult. Like streetsweeping. I'd also like to draw a distinction between challenge and difficulty, where difficulty is the balance and the relative level difference between enemies and players, which is set by notoriety. The game is difficult enough for me. Heck, I usually play on +2 for the sake of speed. Challenges are more like unusual encounters, need for strategy, making clever use of powers, obstacles or even just storytelling gimmicks. The older content of the game sucked at this and has aged badly. So it's finding ways to make some of that old content feel more interesting via challenge and reward. This is also where finding opportunities for control and support classes comes into it, though that's still quite a nebulous aspiration.

Nothing. I'm not in the corner of radical changes to the existing game, even less so from reading this thread. But there are underplayed, outdated or even obsolete parts of the game that could have a lot more value. Grind ≠ difficulty Grind ≠ challenge I've seen very few people, if any, back the corner of more grinding. I think that's a very narrow idea of what is meant by challenges.

Conversely yet still, incentive - from active enjoyment to reward - is part of this discussion. If we go by the idea that (let's say - I doubt this is true) because the majority plays AE farms, there should be more AE farms, we just end up playing into an echo chamber. Opportunity lies where there is nothing, not where there is already a satisfied playerbase.

The SG exits into the tower. Ouro spits you out right by the ferry. Both very convenient.

Tanks. I just didn't get them at first. I'm one of nature's scrappers. I want big hits, debt be damned. Now I love my tanks more than my scrappers. Nature versus nurture at work.

What even is this thread?

That Kheld hunter idea is making me think, and it would be a big'un and unrealistic'un. What about a nemesis system where players could create one or more nemeses AE-style. That nemesis and their gang would appear randomly in missions every now and again when you least expect them (perhaps with the exception of missions that already have an AV, so as not to interrupt). They level up with you and are scaled to you, being an incarnate as you become an incarnate. If they win the fight, they gloat and run off and despawn, so they don't become an insurmountable obstacle, but are a looming threat. I think it could have hilarious results.