Add more difficult content, ideas welcome!

[Marbing]

So in the discussion about procs it seems there are a lot of us out there that would like to see more difficult content added to the game. I would like to start this thread to open that discussion here.

Ideas that have been discussed elsewhere:

1) More Incarnate content, and zones (like Dark Astoria). 

2) More missions/story arcs with complex task that require a well coordinated team. (not just HP bags!)

3) More content that requires a fully balanced team (meaning you will NEED control, you will NEED melee, or you will NEED stealth, or whatever etc etc) to complete.

4) More missions that cap the team size below 8 but still maintains an 8 man difficulty. 

5) More mobs that are level shifted themselves!

6) Let us raise our own difficulty past +4!

 

What other things do you think could be done? Which of the above would you like to see? Which of the above would you NOT like to see? 

 

Let's discuss! 😄

 

(politely) 

[Super Atom]

Realisticly, +5/+6 would be ok with +7 being ok (though pushing it) if you're an incarnate. Beyond those, unless something changes it wouldn't be fun.

 

The only thing that does though is increase the need for support.

 

So if you take that into account, the smarter option is likely adding +5 and then enemy types that only show up in +5. Incarnate sappers for example or just enemies with more -tohit -def -res abilities. Theres plenty of things in game that would be difficult to deal with if enemies had access to it, so tougher versions of enemies is likely the best case scenario.

 

Example enemies that increase difficult already-

Awakened

Malta Sappers

CoT ghosts

Force field generators

 

Stuff like that.

Edited July 8, 2021 by Super Atom

[Yomo Kimyata]

There are plenty of ways to put restrictions on yourself.  Try them!  I’d like there to be settings that put Ouro-type conditions on all your content so as to make it externally enforced.  

 

Re: +5, start running +4 content below lvl 49.  Half the mobs should spawn +5. There are bugs to get a little higher, but you can’t currently run +5/x1.  Only +5-6/x8.

[Galaxy Brain]

7 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

There are plenty of ways to put restrictions on yourself.  Try them!  I’d like there to be settings that put Ouro-type conditions on all your content so as to make it externally enforced. 

 

The external part has to be the way to go else nobody (tm) will realistically do it. Yes, you can restrict yourself in a lot of fun ways but it is usually annoying to do so as opposed to testing your mettle vs more challenging tasks that require all the tools you have accrued 🙂

[Super Atom]

1 minute ago, Galaxy Brain said:

 

The external part has to be the way to go else nobody (tm) will realistically do it. Yes, you can restrict yourself in a lot of fun ways but it is usually annoying to do so as opposed to testing your mettle vs more challenging tasks that require all the tools you have accrued 🙂

 

Exactly this, i want to push my character not undo my progression.

[Yomo Kimyata]

Intrinsic motivation comes from within, while extrinsic motivation arises from outside. When you're intrinsically motivated, you engage in an activity solely because you enjoy it and get personal satisfaction from it. When you're extrinsically motivated, you do something in order to gain an external reward.

[Super Atom]

Wanting to push your character has nothing to do with rewards.

[KelvinKole]

Really, when I hear people say they want more challenging content I think what they really mean is they want more engaging content. Steam rolling is not engaging, and so it’s boring. 
 

You can mess with the difficulty settings all you want, but fighting +6 or turning off inspirations doesn’t improve the engagement level. It just makes things take longer and becoming annoying.

 

The only sure fire way to make the game more engaging, by making it more challenging, is to rework the NPCs. Player characters have levels of power creep that enemy mobs never got. They need higher damage scales, higher hit chances, access to better buff and debuff abilities, etc.. Arachnos, as an example, can challenge teams with exotic damage types, debuffs, end drain, critical damage, and nukes. That’s really the model for how to do it. 

[TheZag]

They put out some content recently that was more difficult and players complained that it was too hard so they made it easier.  Next time some difficult stuff is added, the players looking for a challenge need to speak up that they like it.

 

And for something more specific for added difficulty,  having +5 or +6, 7, 8 just makes it take longer.  Maybe leave +1 and +2 alone but give enemies on +3 and +4 access to additional abilities, especially buffs and debuffs and increase their hit chance.

[Olerus]

I had a post on this in the procs thread, so I'm going to badly paraphrase myself a little here.

 

Before adding 'more difficult content', I would ask what makes difficult content fun especially as opposed to 'non-difficult' content, a bucket in which I'd throw in many very frequently ran content: ITFs, radio missions, DFBs, and AE farms.

 

Obviously, difficult content has broad appeal both to play and to watch.  The success of the entire Dark Souls franchise, and the explosion of content creators that focus on difficult runs of various games shows this.  But difficult content is not created equal.  If we accept that the Magisterium trial is more fun than Khan TF despite both being 'difficult' content, what makes that case?

 

I would argue that 'fun' difficult content has the following attributes:

• it changes up gameplay
• it creates a narrative
• it gives an outlet for a player or team to show skill, knowledge, or planning
• it gives bragging rights / rewards

Some of these are more thorny than others.  Changing up gameplay I believe is a core attribute of difficult content and the one I'll focus on in this post.  In CoH, the primary way this is done currently is through targeting requirements, positioning requirements, and timing requirements.  An example of these would include:

• having to target Sappers first to avoid endurance drain (typically minions can be ignored as they will die to a flurry of AoEs)
• not standing on Carnie or Freakshow corpses to avoid endurance drain
• having to kill both Siege and Nightstar in close proximity during BAF trials

These mechanics are often enforced by the same basic mechanics: damage that isn't mitigated by defense, endurance drain, and making mobs harder to kill.  We see this with how damage patches in Apex, Rularuu and DE getting massive ToHit buffs, Psy/Toxic damage, Nictus defense drops in the ITF, and Nemesis Vengeance buffs all basically do the same thing: hit characters that normally wouldn't be hit.  In general, I'd like to see other other mechanics explored beyond this:

• Extreme -Recharge buffs
• -HP effects
• Suppressing toggles
• More endurance drain effects
• Build interactions: bosses that ignore procs or gain some attribute when debuffed
• Must mez targets

For example, imagine a trial where an enemy cycles between being nigh-immune to melee and ranged attacks and players have a massive -recharge penalty.  They don't have much health, but players would need to carefully plan and time attacks to actually get in for damage.  Or imagine a 'danger run' where players are debuffed to 100 HP regardless of archetype, and must kill 100 minions while avoiding auto-hit traps.

 

I could also see a trial where control effects are a must.  Imagine a boss battle with an invulnerability phase, where 4 players must activate glowies to end the phase.  The challenge?  Weak enemies that deal nagging autohit damage and explode into an even more annoying autohit field on death.  A hold easily stops them and lets the glowies be clicked, but not holding allows the boss to heal. 

 

On control, I'd like to see AVs that are easier to mez but can still do most actions through said control effects.  Like an AV that has a massive auto-hit nuke with a nasty debuff that will make a further event much harder, but can only use it they haven't taken 12 magnitude of Holds.  Or an AV that takes 10s to charge up a powerful effect and is immune to virtually all forms of crowd control, but falters if knocked back with a high magnitude effect.  

 

This gets to the second point.  Not only do these change gameplay, they create a story.  Having watched plenty of difficulty runs, I think I have gained a new appreciation for this.  "We managed to make it through despite the Battalion getting off their nasty debuff by the skin of our teeth" is far more interesting than "we took longer because the Battalion are at +5".  Increasing clear times can be merited developer response, but it doesn't really interact with content in way that makes it more fun; it only really adjusts the reward progression side of content.  Functionally, higher level enemies tend to just be bigger meat sticks: they don't gain new powers or change combat around.  

 

Content with a significant chance of failure does add this narrative factor, but can fail to change up gameplay.  And new effects might fail to change up the basic gameplay patterns if raw destructive power lets the mechanic be bypassed: see how the strategy for Imperious on the ITF has changed with the escalation of damage.  No longer is it necessary to try to separate Imperious from the healing Nictus thanks to damage proliferation outscaling the healing.

 

As far as the others, showcasing players or teams can be good, but it can also be isolating.  If the goal is to make the game more fun, it can't focus on hyper enfranchised teams because those are a minority's minority.  While having options that only a coordinated team can take down, players probably want more engaging content that even a PUG can play and get the same narrative experiences from.  Likewise, a distinct lack of coordinated supergroups means that content can't simply focus on providing an outlet for world records or world firsts.

 

And one challenge of this is that if you change up things to make the average content more difficult, you might piss on the Cheerios of the player that is perfectly happy wiping Council off the face of radio missions.  That players fun is not wrong.  They might even spend just as much time optimizing their character as the player soloing +4 MSTFs, but focusing just on getting a little extra speed and gaining satisfaction from the arcade gameplay (put 'em up, shoot 'em down).  

 

But if mechanics are too hidden away, then it isn't worth the developer time to make them.  I'd definitely support reworking the Flashback system to add more restrictions, but that system might be largely ignored outside of a small group of difficultly chasers if it is just the same content, but slower and harder.  But give too much rewards, and the added difficulty becomes the new standard.  You want optional, rewarding, difficulty not optimally rewarding difficult (see: +4/x8).  I would probably use the SBB model for this: unique enhancements for opting into the system.

 

Anyway, that is my rambling.  I think difficulty can be increased beyond just more numbers (ITF computer and Reichsman, I'm looking at you), but we have to really ask ourselves why we are messing with difficulty before we make global nerfs or pump out tons of time for unused content.  Good difficult content isn't easy to make or complete, but there are some things we can draw on when we design it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 8, 2021 by Olerus

[aethereal]

I think that an enemy faction with some lieutenants that spawn with an aura power that gives gigantic AoE defense (like: +50%, say) would be a little change-up of gameplay.  The aura would supress if mezzed.  So when you came against spawns that had those LTs, you have to focus down the lieutenant or mez them before blowing your AoE wad.

 

Obviously not the be-all, end-all of difficulty, but something that could be sprinkled in with other ideas.

[Super Atom]

Grinding to afford IO's and have incarnate isn't difficulty or challenge, it's just grinding and extremely boring. Homecoming removed those mainly because this game is far past its date and most people don't have the time to redo it all like during live, nor the players to support the economy. Honestly the ease of getting to the top is one of the better features of this server. It allows for extended alt-play and no requirement of farm/grind which is a far better experience.

 

Leveling is -still- challenging if you play on the harder difficulties and isn't commonly cited as "too easy" The options in game , +1 to +4 and higher team sizes is often enough to bring difficulty to the player while attempting to reach 50.

 

The complaint of challenge comes from a post-50 post-IO'd area. There is nothing in this game to challenge the player at their best and that's where the complaints begin and it's not a big secret or something people don't understand or just choose not to do. The game died before the developers could get there. This is why the discussion usually involves ideas for new enemies capable of fighting incarnates. There is no reason to beat around the bush or point fingers at the fundamentals of the server that will not change nor should change, since the player base at large seems to prefer the easy alt friendly experience.

Edited July 9, 2021 by Super Atom
Post this replied to removed, gonna leave it anyway.

[Monos King]

14 minutes ago, Super Atom said:

Leveling is -still- challenging if you play on the harder difficulties and isn't commonly cited as "too easy" The options in game , +1 to +4 and higher team sizes is often enough to bring difficulty to the player while attempting to reach 50.

My post is now here.

 

But also, your reply addresses challenge, as I defined it, and not difficulty. It doesn't matter if leveling can be challenging, because it doesn't need to be. Anyone who doesn't want it to be can just skip over what mightve been difficult and become godly, and then sit at the top with few existing challenges. And even if there is a challenge for them, it doesn't matter, because they've already got all the power they would have from overcoming said challenge. It would matter only to someone like a badger whether or not they could complete it.

[Monos King]

23 minutes ago, Super Atom said:

Grinding to afford IO's and have incarnate isn't difficulty or challenge,

As I notes in the post before, grinding is in fact just tedious. But the result of getting those IOs is what removes difficulty. It being quick and easy created a saturation of immensely powerful characters running about, which is the source of the concern to begin with. If everyone is a soloing powerhouse, then most of the game is going to seem easy, roles will be expendable, and activities monotonous. Grinding wasn't a desired option for everyone. So the barrier that maintained the "difficulty" was sort of an illusion for those who were invested, but the mirage maintained the difficulty nonetheless. As for incarnates, you actually had to overcome trials to really level them up (soloing DA arcs was so slow to get the good incarnates it was barely an option and more of an accoutrement) and thus it was somewhat difficult. 

 

Keep in mind I'm not saying the game being so easy is bad necessarily...just to show that it is definitely and objectively easy from a progression stand point, which is how a games difficulty is pretty much always defined. 

Edited July 9, 2021 by Monos King

[Super Atom]

@Monos King

 

You're not wrong but it's also too late to consider grinding for IO's/Incarnate as an option, which is why the quest for challenge is a hard one. Homecoming doesn't exactly update to the level needed to fix this issue. On live, Incarnate took a long time to max out and while remembered as difficult, twords the end of the games life it was nearing the same issues we have now (at least on my server Guardian). The trials weren't hard, the difficulty became filling the teams. Most of the people who played had done so for a long time and were either fully IO'd or close to and everything was as trivial as it is on homecoming. So the only true answer was an enemy group like the actual developers planned, The Battalion, to solve the ever growing power of the players.

[Monos King]

2 minutes ago, Super Atom said:

So the only true answer was an enemy group like the actual developers planned, The Battalion, to solve the ever growing power of the players.

Right. And I have the same conclusion.

(That leaves us with the point of this thread, which is why I moved my comment.)

 

Back on topic, -Accuracy (not -to hit) is actually a devastating debuff, and I'd love to see it getting applied somewhere.

[Super Atom]

Actually, it wouldn't be too late to reintroduce extended end-game progression if they introduced the rest of the incarnate system. Could make new trials for those and have it like it was on live. Just would need to use new incarnate salvage you can't get other than the trials and etc

Edited July 9, 2021 by Super Atom

[oedipus_tex]

An interesting Mode that exists in the game is kDisable_Inspiration. If set, it prevents players from using inspirations. There is also kDisable_Inspiration_Small and so on for more specific targetting.

 

It would be interesting to have an enemy group with a death ray power that set this temporarily. It should be doable--there are other powers that set Mode on the target. 

 

There is also kDisable_Epic, which disables Incarnate abilities.

[Myrmidon]

16 minutes ago, oedipus_tex said:

An interesting Mode that exists in the game is kDisable_Inspiration. If set, it prevents players from using inspirations. There is also kDisable_Inspiration_Small and so on for more specific targetting.

 

It would be interesting to have an enemy group with a death ray power that set this temporarily. It should be doable--there are other powers that set Mode on the target. 

 

There is also kDisable_Epic, which disables Incarnate abilities.

Make that a random system for Boss/EB/AVs and that would be very interesting to deal with.

[oedipus_tex]

13 minutes ago, Myrmidon said:

Make that a random system for Boss/EB/AVs and that would be very interesting to deal with.

 

 

I was thinking its actually a rather "fair" way to implement death patches we see in iTrials. Rather that kill you outright, some patches could disable various abilities for a while.

[chi1701]

One idea would be to block hospital, once down, u either stay down or wait for resurect or team to wipe to disengage from combat. Increasing from +4 to +5 should not reward more influence/xp than +4 to stop exploitation from farmers.

Edited July 9, 2021 by chi1701

[Marbing]

I like the ideas represented here!

More troublesome enemies like minions or leuts that have a big impact on the field is a good idea. Sappers are a pain in the rear and can cause team wipe if they are not taken care of quick. I'd also like to see more healer type enemies that can put out big heals and buffs on the mobs, not just single target heals every once in awhile but big aoe heals and big aoe buffs. And then in that same group you could have a tank like enemy with taunt. Just simple things like that would make that encounter much more difficult than your typical smash and burn. 

I would also like to see more enemies with a confuse power. I know it is super potent but think about how much more attention you would have to pay if there is a mob putting out confusion regularly! It would keep you on your toes, gotta take that dude out fast!

 

 

10 hours ago, Super Atom said:

Actually, it wouldn't be too late to reintroduce extended end-game progression if they introduced the rest of the incarnate system. Could make new trials for those and have it like it was on live. Just would need to use new incarnate salvage you can't get other than the trials and etc

Expanding incarnates to the originally planned out ones that never made it into live is a great way to add end-game content and storylines. It would be a huge ask of the devs but would be a great opportunity to add new and more difficult content to the end game! Maybe we keep the current content how it is and the more difficult stuff we are talking about gets added to that effort? That would at least be a good start! Two birds one stone and all.

 

 

Edited July 9, 2021 by th0ughtGun

[oedipus_tex]

I probably should have put this in my last post:

 

 

Another thing you could do is give enemies a chance to possess a random Inspiration, which they can use for themselves.

Edited July 9, 2021 by oedipus_tex

[aethereal]

Throw the endurance drainers a bone.  Make an enemy with a passive power that checks their endurance and gives them a damage bonus (maybe and to-hit) based on their current end level.

[chi1701]

Ive said this before and I will say it again, I am all for increasing difficulty as long as there will be no archytype blacklisting or preferd acytype only etc