golstat2003

We'll have to agree to disagree. The game was always silly easy. I don't think anything has changed much. Teams were steam rolling during the SO age also. Saying I like the current base difficulty of the game as is is not a poor argument. It's a fact that the difficulty slider is built to give folks who want a higher challenge just that. The base difficulty is just that, the base. I find saying the game should be made difficult for everyone whether they want it or not to be an inherently selfish argument.

I doubt the balance pass will make it feel like the old days. I think it will just be balanced buffs and nerfs. Nothing to the scale people expect. This team simply doesn't have the manpower. I would advise everyone to temper their expectations.

Yes. You want a it to change from the easy mode it's currently in and the direction it's heading in. I'm saying that's fine, but do it as optional difficulty settings. You are asking for it to change from being easy mode, so you're asking for a change. I'm not sure what's hard to follow.

Expanding these would be a good idea.

As mentioned as a difficulty option to add them back, this would be interesting. I'd prefer they stay out of the base game.

No. Keep the base game AS IS. Give others who want it more difficult higher difficulty options. The ones asking for higher difficulty are the ones asking for a change. Let them be the ones to have the option to select the higher difficulty. As the devs have said in other threads it's completely valid to think that the base game should be left as is. Especially since the HC devs intend to keep SOs the main balance point.

It's just not going to happen. Not unless you are willing to take the hit of no new content for years. I'm not.

Depends on which trial.

Pretty much this.

I don't need the game to be easier or harder. It's fine to me as is.

More specifically if someone is using SOs only I would not expect them to find iTrials easy. At all. And the HC devs have already said in threads before this one that the main balance point of the game isn't changing from SOs. (Hence all the work on easily updating SOs that they have in beta). If that has changed they can let us know . . . but their recent work tells me that hasn't at all changed.

The way paragon worked was that if it was in beta it more than likely was NOT going to change much.

Good to see my memory wasn't that off.

Oh the game is hella easy. I just like it that way. When I want to play a harder mmo or game I play anything else. But nowadays I often DON'T want to play a harder game.

Interesting. Seems Paragon really was dead in the water around the time they announced the shutdown. Could have sworn there was a lot more on test at the time the game when bye bye. (I think crashless nukes were discussed at some point cause folks simply didn't take nukes with the crashes.)

For seven years? Good lord!

At this point I think we're all talked out and just waiting to see what comes out of Closed Beta, and for us to get to public testing. THEN, the REAL arguments will start. 😛

Making IOs more available is sep discussion. Making IOs more available is a good thing. Balance issues like this would have cropped up if IOs were more available on live. The market on live was cancer compared to what we have now. Balance issues exist whether more folks reveal them or not. (Aka more people do the uber builds due to more IOs being available). EDIT: I was referring to things like blaster buffs (historically then have been more than one set over the life of the game), and changes to Doms. Those were on live. Crashless nukes I'm not sure when that happened. Not sure if it was already on the test server when the game shut down. If it were I consider that a Paragon change, not SCORE or later HC. I didn't visit the test server much once the game was announced to be shutting down on live.

I don't evny the devs. There are two spectrums of "the game is too easy" versus " the game is too hard" happening in this thread, and over various threads over the last two years. I wish them luck getting it right. I've seen other COH server NOT getting it right lately.

The thing is a lot of the changes you just mentioned were mainly NOT HC. Alot of that was the devs from live, Paragon Studios. And softcapping was happening during that time. I remember numerous discussions and arguments abut the game being poorly balanced and too easy even back then. This isn't new. EDIT: There used to be posts after posts of people ALSO arguing that Controllers, Defenders, Doms, support needed wholesale buffs. They didn't and they still don't today. There are a few sets or powers that need changes but nothing as radical as some are alluding to about Support in this thread. This is coming from someone who mostly plays support sets. (if I didn't make that clear before about what types of toons I play).

There have been multiple posts over the last two years pointing to the "good ol days". Not just in this thread. Like the game was somehow better balanced at some mystery point in time. It wasn't.

Oh I have no doubt we're talking about months of work. I think some folks in this thread and in the Suggestions forums need to temper their expectations greatly. The team we have isn't Paragon Studios. And this was before COVID was involved. With the expectations that things won't get back to normal worldwide till about 2022, I can't see us getting much released yearly for some time. All this talk by everyone is nice, but people need to keep it real. Now let's figure out how long it's taken us to even get to talking about Page 6 in this climate. HC committed to getting Page 6 out in 2020. I don't expect even that any times soon. Which is why I keep going back to the idea of targeted (and not wholesale) changes. EDIT: Also I would expect disclaimers on the new difficulty options telling folks exactly what they are getting into. Other games do this. The folks asking for those options I think already know what they'd likely be getting into, and expect to bring to the table. If you don't know what an all av, all elite boss missions would be like . . . you need to play the game more. Or try it in AE.

See this is why I find it funny where people long for the old days where they claimed things were better balanced. You exmaple and the large changes it lead to are exactly my point. The game has never been well balanced at any point. Huge changes (both global and targetted nerfs AND BUFFs, see Blasters) have come to try to force it towards that balance pretty much every year of the game being live.

We will need to agree to disagree. I'll leave it there.

I don't think you need a full scale rebalance of the game period. There simply isn't the man power for what folks are saying or asking for. There IS the manpower for smaller harder content and difficulty options, and very targetted buffs and nerfs, released in an agile fashion over many months.