Increased Difficulty without needing tons of +Acc

[SurfD]

8 hours ago, OdinTGE said:

Things should be very dangerous if the tank doesn't pick it all up. That's the point of tanks. The damage characters should be happy to encounter a good tank that is good at collecting everything, and should think twice about wandering into another pack without paying attention or going hard on mobs the tank is still herding.

Problem is that while this works in other MMOs that have fairly hard/strict "rules" regarding things like the Holy-Trinity Tank/DPS/Heal roles baked into their concept of team building, it's basically a non-starter in a game like CoH, where everybody is supposed to feel heroic and almost everything is intended to be soloable without much problem.  Especially where basically ANY team comp is valid for practically everything.   It's also going to be a complete nightmare to thread that line when we exist in an environment where IOs are a thing, and every AT can be built to be able to solo +4x8 on their own.  Any changes you make that make content "hard" for tanks and "challenging" for people who are capable of soloing Taskforces is going to utterly CRUSH people who aren't playing at that level, unless all of those changes to the difficulty sliders are completely optional.

 

Currently there really is only 2 difficulty sliders in the game as far as general groups go:  Increase target level, increase number of targets.

Increasing number of targets really doesn't actually increase Difficulty much, unless your team is entirely comprised of Single Target Damage, as 5 targets with 100 hp each are still going to die exactly as quickly as 15 targets with 100 hp each under any kind of AoE.   Increasing their bulk isn't going to make them significantly more of a threat either, unless you are just making them massive damage sponges, which only really increases how long it takes to kill them.   

 

Increasing Target level DOES add a decent amount of threat, as increasing their level ups their damage slightly, increases their chance to hit YOU, and makes it harder for you to hit them.   Main issue is that the Purple Patch causes a massive ramp up in difficulty in hitting stuff in only a few levels of increase.   Maybe what we really need is instead of a 1-4 level range for the "purple patch" effect, extending it out to 1-10, with the ramp up in enemy Accuracy/damage/hp occurring steadily across the curve, but the ramp up in difficulty to hit being much more pronounced at the end of the range?

 

Also, as mentioned earlier, proliferating the Ouro "Under buff/Debuff" difficulty toggles into all instanced mission content would likely be a very good option as well.

Edited May 14, 2020 by SurfD