Night Ward: numerous missions don't honor "No Bosses" notoriety setting

[Reiska]

I'm going to preface this report by saying that I'm aware some of the missions in the Night Ward arcs give the player a warning about them being higher than normal difficulty and recommending that you form a team for them.  Generally CoH gives that warning when a mission contains one or more Elite Bosses, which sometimes (but not always) downgrade to Bosses (not Lieutenants) when you have solo bosses disabled.

 

That's not what I'm referring to; the missions with that message can be left alone. 

 

However - and I apologize that I can't name specific missions as I ran all the arcs over the course of about a week and didn't take notes - there are a number of missions that don't give that warning and still spawn Bosses, sometimes multiples at once, regardless of your notoriety.  It isn't clear if these would all be EBs when run with bosses enabled or not; I didn't think to reset the missions to check that. 

 

Most of the missions affected by this also give you NPC allies, which I suspect were maybe intended to compensate for the increased enemy difficulty... except the "No Bosses" setting does successfully cap your NPC allies as being lieutenants, and so when you get to the bosses, they pretty much melt.

[lemming]

Without the details, I'm pretty sure all those bosses are Elite Bosses when you have bosses turned on.

 

I do agree the warning isn't consistently applied to those missions that would have EBs.

[Rudra]

Like @lemming said, those are likely normally EBs. Yes, there are some missions with flags warning the player they are going up against an EB or an AV, but those are very few and are late additions to the game. And even for missions during the time period where the missions with EBs were getting warning flags added to them, it was applied inconsistently. Or at least seemingly inconsistently. It may have been applied depending on the perceived difficulty of the specific EB in the mission by the dev. I don't know. What I do know however, is most missions with EBs have no warning saying you are going into a more difficult than normal mission.

[Reiska]

I'd believe it.  The most egregious one anyway is Malaise (who I'm almost positive should be an EB) having four copies of himself, but I think that mission might have carried a warning. 😛