Worst TF/SF in the game

[Troo]

Lots of ways to measure Task Forces/Strike Forces

 

Task Forces
The Saga of Faathim - Justin Augustine - 32 missions (42 merits)
Explorers and Exploiters - Dr. Quaterfield - 24 missions (122 merits)
Soul of the Woodsman -  Numina - 23 missions (36 merits)
The Fall of the Clockwork King - Synapse - 15 missions (58 merits)
The Legend of Ruladak - Sara Moore - 15 missions (63 merits)
The Saga of Lanaru - Faathim the Kind - 12 missions (73 merits)

 

Strike Force
The Temple of the Waters - Strike Force Operative Renault - 14 missions (24 merits)

Pirates of the Sky -      Silver Mantis - 6 missions (42 merits)

[Lines]

1 hour ago, Troo said:

 

The Temple of the Waters - Strike Force Operative Renault - 14 missions (24 merits)

I think it's more like 8 missions, including a couple of quick hunts.

 

Redside SFs are definitely less offensive than the TFs that came before it. None of them are particularly outstanding, but at least they're speedy, easy to follow and they make fun use of cutscenes.

Edited February 21, 2020 by Lines

[Troo]

could be, maybe they count each task as a 'mission'.

 

'The Saga of Faathim - Justin Augustine' has more "missions" but not as long to complete as ' Explorers and Exploiters - Dr. Quaterfield'

[MunkiLord]

I love the Hess TF, 3 for me. But it's also easily the most disappointing because we never get to fight the damn giant robot. 

[Sakai]

1 hour ago, MunkiLord said:

I love the Hess TF, 3 for me. But it's also easily the most disappointing because we never get to fight the damn giant robot. 

When I saw the big red robot in Market Crash, I believe, it lessened the pain a little for me .

 

I'm going to echo Citadel, Synapse, and Manti as a little too grindy. That being said I am a sucker for Crey and am ok with fighting lots of robots. 

 

Haven't actually ran a Numina but I imagine the hunts will annoy me a little. 

[Redlynne]

The problem with the Numina TF street sweeping is that you're way overleveled for most of them so they're just time wasters of trying to find the right mobs to hunt.

 

I can imagine a ... fun(?) ... version of this being an Ouroboros type of Task Force where you (and your team) are tasked with street sweeping All The Zones and that the entire team gets auto-Exemplared to zone appropriate Levels for each zone hunt mission and you progress through the zones/levels as you street sweep your way through the Task Force.  The whole thematic of the Task Force is simply street sweeping from start to finish ... as a team ... but you're facing every different NPC Faction and you're touring all of the zones along the way (minus The Hive/The Abyss).

[Call Me Awesome]

My list of the worst TF's in the game:

1. Any of the Shard TF's with shame of place going to Dr. Q.  Badly written, terrible design of zones and constant "go to point x and kill 50 y" without indication of where the hell "point x" might be unless you have the reveal power.  These should die in a fire.

2. Numina thanks to the terrible street sweeping missions.  Desperately in need of a revamp.  Unfortunately it's needed for the TFC accolade.

3. Synapse thanks to the sheer length and endurance sapping clocks at a level you're not equipped to handle such.  Also in desperate need of a revamp.  Also unfortunately needed for the TFC accolade.

 

On the other side of the coin, my favorite TF's would include:

1. Statesman's TF/Miss Liberty's TF.  Fun short TF with decent challenge when it was introduced, still fun even if incarnate powers have reduced the difficulty level.

2. Penny Yin, short, fast and a lot of fun.

3. ITF.  A lot of fun and all the debuffs can make things challenging, particularly on higher difficulty levels.

 

There's several others that I enjoy and a few more I avoid but that's my worst and best list.

[macskull]

1 hour ago, Redlynne said:

The problem with the Numina TF street sweeping is that you're way overleveled for most of them so they're just time wasters of trying to find the right mobs to hunt.

If you know where to go ahead of time though your team can easily divvy it up so with the exception of maybe the first hunt or two you'll have people standing by mobs ready to blow them up.

[Lazarillo]

Here's the thing: I'll do Synapse, because it's a decent low-level romp, even if it's a bit tedious, and the Accolade reward is nice.

I'll even do Dr. Q, because at least the Shard is an intriguing setting.

 

I did Barracuda once, for the badge, and I feel dirty enough just for doing that.  I'm never doing it again.

It's just freaking awful.  I'm not fond of Kahn either; Mary Sue Bison is a terrible villain, and his "return" to the game was awful any way it got sliced (thank goodness for Max, even if it never got followed up on, not to mention being something a lot of players might miss), but Barracuda also has the terrible final mission that throws the whole "play what way you like" premise that every single other mission and TF in the game is founded on, and on top of that, has the horrible "we're going to cave and come up with why you're now an Arbiter even though it makes no sense" plot element added on.

 

Crap mission with a crap story.  Easily the bottom of the barrel.

[Grouchybeast]

Citadel is way the worst for me, not just because it's so repetitive, but because those cave maps give me motion sickness. 🤢

[Clave Dark 5]

14 hours ago, Apparition said:

Five seconds later:  "So and So has defeated Cadaver."

"Oh, whoops, sorry, didn't realize that was a cone power."

[Shred Monkey]

A lot of people say Numina, but I kind of like it.  Originally the level cap was 40 and this TF was a final "replay of your life" task force.  In theory, it tests your knowledge of all the original zones in the game.  That's kind of cool, imho.   

 

It goes fast if you coordinate well with your team and your team knows where to find bad guys in each zone.  The Faultline hunt one is the only hunt that actually takes time because vahz are harder to find after the zone was redone (they're down in the bottom of the Canyons, and unfortunately in small groups.)

 

Granted, it's not a TF I repeat regularly just for fun.  But unlike Synapse, I always look forward to doing it with each alt.  

[Erydanus]

9 hours ago, macskull said:

If you know where to go ahead of time though your team can easily divvy it up so with the exception of maybe the first hunt or two you'll have people standing by mobs ready to blow them up.

No see my problem is we'll split up to the zones and still it will take FOREVER.  I'm not sure what's gone on in the pug ones I've done but at least a couple times things were getting killed so slowly that 2-3 other people went to the assigned person's zone and had the time to get there and do the kills.  Not even like a clear case of someone went AFK like apparently someone either didn't know where to find mobs or was like, a defender with 2 attacks... it just made no sense but it happens over and over.

[Seigmoraig]

I was in a Synapse run last night that ran 3 hours 11 minutes at the end screen. We had 3 people just pack up their shit and leave about 30 minutes in, then 1 guy DCed for 2 or 3 missions, luckily he came back and finished it. We finished with 2 Blasters, 1 MM, 1 Sentinel and 1 Dominator. Once most of the people left I set the missions to -1/x5 and we were able to finish without wiping.
All in all, other than the massive timesink it took to do it, it was pretty fun, we had to use actual tactics to clear, notably corner pulling and CC.

Still would class Synapse as the worst TF though

[MunkiLord]

3 hours ago, Shred Monkey said:

A lot of people say Numina, but I kind of like it.  Originally the level cap was 40 and this TF was a final "replay of your life" task force.  In theory, it tests your knowledge of all the original zones in the game.  That's kind of cool, imho.   

 

It goes fast if you coordinate well with your team and your team knows where to find bad guys in each zone.  The Faultline hunt one is the only hunt that actually takes time because vahz are harder to find after the zone was redone (they're down in the bottom of the Canyons, and unfortunately in small groups.)

 

Granted, it's not a TF I repeat regularly just for fun.  But unlike Synapse, I always look forward to doing it with each alt.  

Last two times I've done Numina for some reason I volunteered for the Vahz hunt and it was terrible. 

[Mister Mass]

4 hours ago, MunkiLord said:

Last two times I've done Numina for some reason I volunteered for the Vahz hunt and it was terrible. 

Fun note about the Vazh hunt in Numina - when the devs revamped Faultline, they didn't include any Vazh in the new version of the zone.  When the change went live, players were unable to complete Numina, since there were no Vazh in Faultline to hunt.  The devs had to roll out a fix & add some Vazh to the zone, just for the TF.

[macskull]

5 minutes ago, Mister Mass said:

Fun note about the Vazh hunt in Numina - when the devs revamped Faultline, they didn't include any Vazh in the new version of the zone.  When the change went live, players were unable to complete Numina, since there were no Vazh in Faultline to hunt.  The devs had to roll out a fix & add some Vazh to the zone, just for the TF.

Honestly at that point they should've just deleted that mission. They deleted the hunts in DA and Galaxy City when those zones got revamped, after all.

[MunkiLord]

They should have left the DA hunt, that could have been interesting.

[Jimmy]

Synapse.

[VileTerror]

You heard it here, folks!  Jimmy hates Synapse!

 

 . . . I have a feeling no one is shocked.

[Hedgefund]

My ranking 

 

1) Dr. Q

When it was last wst I was soloing it and quit about 3/4 through because I was SOOOO bored.

 

2) Synapse

I did this early on when it was a WST.  My bet is I never do it again.

 

3) Justin

As mentioned earlier, the hunts are infuriating (like for Q), especially some of them that are short on mobs to hunt on a small island.

 

Q and Justin, oddly enough, are the 2 of the 3 easiest to solo (CoT #1 by far), I'd sacrifice soloability for something interesting.

[srmalloy]

On 2/20/2020 at 5:49 AM, Redlynne said:

Numina TF wins the spot of being the worst for me.  The time waster middle missions of street hunting in EVERY zone of Paragon City is the very definition of being given the runaround.  It's worse now (of course) than when the TF was written because you can have multiple events preventing the street mobs you need to defeat from spawning in a particular zone, making the whole TF take longer than it needs to simply because some event (Rikti Invasion, Zombie Invasion, Pointless Invasion of Invasions, etc.) is happening there.

I wonder what the feel of Numina would be if it were reworked to take all of the street sweep missions and turn them into instanced outdoor "Board Transit" missions that would either a) boost your target to your level, b) exemp you to zone level, or c) use the GM/invasion code to make them equivalent-level, so you wouldn't have nothing but a series of "AoE 1... AoE 2... That's this zone. Next!" missions.

[RCU7115]

On 2/20/2020 at 6:58 AM, Seigmoraig said:

That's nice on paper but in reality you always have people who just want to sit around and not do anything while the rest of the team does the kill tasks. Most of the time when this happens and it's their turn up to bad they are AFK and it needs to get done by the people who actually followed the quest progression and put in their elbow grease. Between Ouro portal and enterbasefrompasscode there is no real reason to station people in different zones, it's faster if everyone helps to finish each mission

The only zone hunt in the Numi TF that sucks is Brickstown

I can find maybe a small group of 3-5 Crey. 

[Mopery]

Worst TF/SF/Trial in the game for me is the one where one or two players feel the need to RUSH! RUSH! RUSH! everything, when it wasn't originally advertised as a "Speed TF".

 

Some of us enjoy a casual pace where we earn XP for our up and coming characters. I have nothing against "Speed TF's" if they were advertised as such, and I do understand why players want a speedy completion, I just don't like it when they think it has to be done every freaking time on every freaking TF.

 

That said, I really enjoy every TF if the company is good. I enjoy playing my characters, especially if I get to play them towards completion of an objective, even if it takes hours. I'm an Altaholic and I've run every TF literally hundreds of times over the years on hundreds of different characters.

 

I love this game.

 

To an almost unhealthy degree, I love this game.

 

I don't have to have the most Inf, most 50's, most badges, or whatever, I just really really really really really enjoy playing the game with others, as often as possible, especially on TF's 😄

 

[RCU7115]

My picks are

1. Posi 1. I only do it once per toon Ever.  45+ minutes for 11 or 15 merits not worth it. It gives me as much enjoyment as the guy from Casino with his head in the vice/clamp.

2. Posi 2. See choice #1.

3. Any tf in the Shadow Shard. Traveling in those zones just puts me to zzzzzzzzzz.