Is early Praetoria (level 1-20) really that difficult?

[Apogee]

I hear this stated a lot around the forums that Praetoria is so difficult, especially for new players.  I don't get it.  Early Praetorian content is way easier than Blue or Red side starting zones.  For one, travel is much easier with fewer zones and most importantly NO CAVE SYSTEMS (I'm looking at you layer cake cave).  Enemy groups are also easier to deal with for the most part.  The only difficult part of Praetoria is trying not to out level the contacts or doing certain contacts out of order resulting in a missing contact.  If you don't care about completing all the missions Praetoria is one of the fastest and easiest means to get to level 20 outside of AE.

[ZemX]

The only really notable differences I've ever seen are in mission design.  Two things stand out:

1. Non-standard placement of enemies can be tricky.  Instead of being in neatly bunched groups, enemies can be scattered and it's easy to aggro multiples.

2. Way heavier use of ambushes can result in fighting one group while getting ambushed by another.  And it's usually a whole string of ambushes one after the other rather than a single ambush.

 

Depending what type of character you are playing this is either no big deal or kind of a pain.  

 

Note that this is not a "Praetoria is more difficult" thing so much as evolution in the way the Live devs did mission design so you can see some of these same elements in content that was later added to both blue and redside as well.  It's just most common in Praetoria.

[Psyonico]

Not sure if trolling

[Go0gleplex]

Not really.  One thing is that there is a high number of enemies with Psychic attacks which a lot of ATs have weak defenses against as opposed to Blue and Red sides.  Some missions have enemies swarm you or teleport in additional attackers which, if you're not ready for, can mess your day up quickly. You also seem to be at a disadvantage to range as well against clocks and resistance so knowing which need to get dropped first and fast helps your survival rate. Other than that...I find Gold side a lot more relaxing to run through and feel more like I'm in an actual city than I do Blue or Red sides. 

[eiynp]

praetoria is harder than a lot of the old lowbie content, e.g. the hollows; it's pretty similar in difficulty to the newer lowbie content (e.g. the skulls arc in KR) because those were designed around the same time

 

also because there aren't many people in praetoria you're mostly soloing, which makes some of the EB or ambush missions a little harder for some ATs to handle

 

nothing in this game is 'hard' but praetoria is certainly harder than doing four or five DFBs to get those early levels

[Apogee]

2 hours ago, Psyonico said:

Not sure if trolling

 

Nope, not trolling.  I run half my 100+ characters through Praetoria (1-20) and I find it a much more enjoyable time than running blue side content.  I love the Praetorian sewers much more than the Primal ones and find the enemy groups generally more fun to deal with in Praetoria.  I solo all the time anyway so the lack of teams in Praetoria is no big deal.  The only actual challenging content I have run across is the last Hunt for Shen mission in Bobcat's arc.  I guess I just don't understand all the issues people have there.  You can jog past mobs if you don't want to fight them and they don't follow (except for scripted ambushes but those are a minor annoyance more than anything).

[cranebump]

3 hours ago, Apogee said:

I hear this stated a lot around the forums that Praetoria is so difficult, especially for new players.  I don't get it.  Early Praetorian content is way easier than Blue or Red side starting zones.  For one, travel is much easier with fewer zones and most importantly NO CAVE SYSTEMS (I'm looking at you layer cake cave).  Enemy groups are also easier to deal with for the most part.  The only difficult part of Praetoria is trying not to out level the contacts or doing certain contacts out of order resulting in a missing contact.  If you don't care about completing all the missions Praetoria is one of the fastest and easiest means to get to level 20 outside of AE.

I always thought the same about the difficulty of Goldside, though I couldn't say if it's harder for new players or not. I've never been a "new" player and played it.:-)

[Oubliette_Red]

Let us not forget that the ambushes ignore stealth.

 

Been running my MA/Nin Stalker through the Resistance Betrayal path and ambushes can be tricky. Being aware of your surroundings,nearby mobs, etc goes a long way in making sure you come out on top. I'd say for someone completely new to the game, Goldside should probably not be your first foray.

 

[Hyperstrike]

My only real...well...OBJECTION...are the frequent and rather unrelenting nature of the ambushes in such missions.

Seriously.  We're in our teens and early 20's, and things like Recovery are VERY hard to come by.  There's even a couple such missions in single-digit ranges!

So here!  Have an ambush or two!  Or three.  HELL!  HAVE FOUR!  STACKED!

Oh!  Stealth!  WUZZAT?

With the way the missions balance out, being able to bump difficulty, which is fairly dependable Red/Blue side goes from "Tough" to "OMGWTFBBQ!!!!!" with almost no notice.

These kinds of shifts are why I normally don't play Gold Side AT ALL.

So I've got a couple of characters I've gotten into the side switching.

But I've got more which are more or less permanently gated Gold Side because trying to advance them is nearly as fun as a do-it-yourself Orchidectomy with a shop vac and a saws-all,

Edited January 29 by Hyperstrike

[Apogee]

Are people generally running Gold-side content at +4/x8?  Is that what I am missing?

[Nuc]

Been a while since I took a new character through but I remember some missions being a pain on some of them. As mentioned, some of the ambushes were way longer than the three waves of blueside (I seem to remember a ghoul one that felt excessively long) and there's a lot more psychic damage but all in all it's not a massive increase in difficulty.

 

I still wouldn't recommend it for a new player until they'd reached the mid to late levels on at least one other character. Us old crusties tend to have a lot more latent knowledge about the game than we realise 😉

[Snarky]

I have soloed a lot.  Gold is harder.  This is due ( mostly ) to some tougher foes (moderately) some tighter room writing, and a propensity for ambush waves.   How much harder?  Depends.  But it is harder.  In my opinion 

[ranagrande]

Goldside is definitely harder than red or blue.  It can still be soloed easily enough, but it often requires tactics and strategy where otherwise facerolling would suffice.  This is especially true for stalkers because the ambushes ignore stealth, and masterminds because ambushes ignore pets and focus fire on the character.

[drbuzzard]

Been a while since I did goldside, but it had more enemy debuffs iirc. That could get rough. 

 

Personally I dislike the low levels so I DFB to Posi 1+2 and after those I'm in the 20s where I actually like things. 

[FupDup]

Another thing about lowbie goldside is that there aren't any EBs/AVs at all, whereas blueside a lot of lowbies get stuck on Veles or other similar early EB's. 

[Lunar Ronin]

• Gold side mobs do more debuffs.
• Gold side mobs have more variety of damage type.  Hello there, energy and psionic damage.
• Ambushes galore.
• Those same ambushes completely ignore stealth, and ignore pets and henchmen.  This makes it very difficult for Stalkers and Masterminds.
• The mobs in First Ward and Night Ward are a wee bit overtuned.  (Note that I'm not complaining, I enjoy it as it's refreshing, but it's a fact.)  The Paragon Studios developers said in one of the post-sunset AMAs on Reddit that they were experimenting with new tech while making the Ward mobs, and overdid the difficulty a bit.
• Bugs.  There are quite a few bugs from Issues 18 through 23 that were never fixed prior to sunset, and are still in the game today.  Some of them make it very difficult if not impossible to complete missions without outside assistance.

[Psyonico]

I haven't run gold ina while, but I remember more mez in the early levels

[Lunar Ronin]

I should also point out that there are two instances gold side where you are not meant to win fights.  You can encounter level 40 Anti-Matter at level 15-19, and level 40 Marauder at levels 20-29.  Those will go very badly for you.  You are not expected to win, you are expected to run like heck.  But the rest of CoH trains you to fight, so that generally isn't people's first instinct.

[Apogee]

3 minutes ago, Lunar Ronin said:

I should also point out that there are two instances gold side where you are not meant to win fights.  You can encounter level 40 Anti-Matter at level 15-19, and level 40 Marauder at levels 20-29.  Those will go very badly for you.  You are not expected to win, you are expected to run like heck.  But the rest of CoH trains you to fight, so that generally isn't people's first instinct.

 

I don't think too many people have the patience to wait 5 minutes for Anti-matter to show   You have plenty of time to escape before he arrives.

[Lunar Ronin]

2 minutes ago, Apogee said:

 

I don't think too many people have the patience to wait 5 minutes for Anti-matter to show   You have plenty of time to escape before he arrives.

 

Yep.  But it's quite a bit different compared to other sides.  And there is no waiting five minutes for Marauder.  I've almost gotten one shot by him every time I ran by him, probably only the code that prevents being one shot from doing me in. 😄

[Hyperstrike]

2 hours ago, Apogee said:

Are people generally running Gold-side content at +4/x8?  Is that what I am missing?

No.

As I said, they're demonstrably tougher.

But missions using the whole "ambush wave" mechanic?

Remember, bumping level and enemy size will ADD difficulty.

But ambushes MULTIPLY it.

A standard group is going to be about 4 enemies.

A x2 makes it 8.

An ambush wave  takes it from 8 to 24 -32-+

How many enemies can a Level 14 ANYTHING fight through?

"You're supposed to run away..."

*Wipes bum with this possibly-true but still unacceptable answer.*

[Apogee]

The only ambush I ever worry about is the one in Bobcat's arc when you finally find Shen.  Someday I would love to try that mission with a full AoE group and see how long we can last.  I find the Blast Master ambush annoying but have learned to just ignore them and concentrate on the mission objective.  The molotov cocktails don't hurt too bad. 

[Clave Dark 5]

I've been on high level steamroll teams in today's game still get decimated by Gold-side factions.  I don't know which group it is, but one of them have what appear to be high-powered wide cones that will just chew through a lot of players.

 

Yes, gold side was expressly designed to be tougher for players.

[Apogee]

13 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

I've been on high level steamroll teams in today's game still get decimated by Gold-side factions.  I don't know which group it is, but one of them have what appear to be high-powered wide cones that will just chew through a lot of players.

 

Yes, gold side was expressly designed to be tougher for players.

 

Are you talking First Ward and Night Ward?  I agree those can be a challenge for the unprepared.  Nova Praetoria?  not so much.

[Nemu]

When I do my solo goldside level 1-20 runs I usually run them at -1/1 on damage oriented ATs like blasters, stalkers, MMs. I don't solo with lower damage ATs, it's not a good use of my time. On the damage oriented ATs I never found gold side missions overly difficult. There are a few missions with never ending ambushes that see through stealth that get a little tricky, especially the one in the level 15-20 range where you have to zip to the end of a multi-story map and defeat a Shen? while the ambushes pile on, that one requires burst damage to take the objective out. Speaking of stealth, highly recommend a stealth IO and some other form of stealth so you can stack them and full invis and zip through missions.

 

The way goldside contacts mission are paced is perfectly suited for speeding objectives and leveling via mission completion and story arc completion bonuses even at -1/1, and you have enough cushion to get most of the defeat badges like PPD, ghouls, resistance, etc through that journey. I've never hit a gap going through those contacts where I need to run repeatable missions to get to the next tier.