I'm interested to hear what players think would be the coolest thing we could (eventually) do in CoT that we could not do in COH.
For me, I'd love to see something like a Rikti raid, but at a much larger scale. Imagine (homage to Tolkien) a location with Morgoth and 1,000 of his closest allies vs 5,000 heroes and villains in a super fight. Can 400 controllers hold Morgoth? Who knows. Every hit from Morgoth is a kill against any player except the strongest tank, and weaker defense players nearby. But he focuses on the tanks. Emps, keep rezzing those tanks! Blasters, keep firing! So what if Morgoth has 50,000,000 hit points, we can take him, and his friends too...
I think the element of planning would be important, but the fight would need to become chaotic in execution. That's why it would be fun. Morgoth's minions are elite bosses with a variety of buffing, debuffing and healing powers of their own.
It would also be very cool if the attack could be recorded and saved for later review by players.
Every player should get rewards even if Morgoth can't be killed, as long as they contribute.
The biggest downside of realm-wide events like that is that, if not shepherded by GMs, they can easily be either too easy or too hard. And by "too hard" I mean "everyone logs off and waits it out because there's no point getting one-shotted on login."
Now if there were zone-spanning things, that didn't force everyone in the game to drop what they were doing and Deal With It Or Leave, and were limited to zones that weren't critical to normal play (e.g. PvP zones), that might be workable. Say, if the big bot in Kings Row acted as a leader for the zone and caused all the clockwork to switch from static spawns to heavy patrols, with more difficult mobs the closer you get to the leader...
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Hindu goddess [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSr4ROLKs0U]Durga[/url] is a superhero. Archetype ... Demon Slayer/ROFLstomper/Incarnate.
Oh and Morgoth? Middle Earth (and LOTRO) is "thataway" ...
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One thing I'm hoping can't be done is solo Giant Monster level threats. I hope we see things like Godzilla! If it's a powerful but not giant foe...let's say Superman level power, then they're always Giant Monster level threat, and we don't see some weakened AV level version.
Keep NPCs threat levels consistent, unless of course, it's something like Darrian Wade, and the storyline is them ascending.
I like these ideas -- and it would be extremely fun to have Devs lead some elements of a big attack. Fortunately, we have devs who are also players, and so this idea works with our strong suit. I also agree about location -- put this in the equivalent of the Rikti War Zone, not in Atlas Park.
But I do think this sort of thing should be hard to succeed at. And along with this, there should be decent rewards for really having a good go at it, even if the Morgoth/Giant robot/ Durqa is not killed.
It might also be interesting if larger units could be led by players -- would that be ten teams of eight, or half of all the controllers, or the tanker team? I don't know, but I think large group leadership would be an interesting add-on for the game.
If this becomes fun enough to do, even the solo players would join in, just for a change. And they would be welcome.
I'll have to disagree here. A reward shouldn't be given for failing.
While there shouldn't be any reward for a complete failure, there should be something for a partial success. You didn't beat the Big Bad, but you did wreck their infrastructure on the way in, so they're worse off compared to where they'd be if you stayed home. So if you look at it as a partial victory, there should be a partial reward. It won't be the Awesome Thing the players wanted, of course.
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This would be easy enough to measure if the encounter had various smaller goals that line up with the primary goal of defeating the Big Bad. If the team does not manage to defeat the Big Bad they can still reap some small reward for popping a few pustules and destroying two tentacles. Perhaps even something as bland as a reward tier per 10% of the Big Bad's health.
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Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
Yes, and that's called all the drops you had along the way.
There is that, but I can see it being a case of a big Zone event being made up of lots of smaller objectives that you have to complete (all with their own rewards), that when completed let you do the big finale (so like a repeatable quest chain)
So whilst *failing* would suck (especially if you got so close to the end), it does give you a check list of stuff that you can do (or attempt to do), and still at least get a partial.
I am not saying that the rewards should be on an equal scale to a "full complete", but they can be an incentive to keep on trying to do it.
CoX kinda missed up on these, because they only ever had a reward for actually *completing* the complete thing, whilst in WoW (counter example) for the raids, although you wouldn't necessarily get stuff that dropped from mobs, you could plug your way through the bosses and they had their own loot tables and the like or you can do a back end stacked reward system for Reward Merits. A total failure in that case would only be if you failed the first mission totally.
If this were the case, I would probably put a time limit onto when you can reattempt that TF/Raid though (20-30 minute lock out upto an hour)
So if you could blitz the first mission in 5 minutes, you wouldn't be elegible for *ANY* rewards for that mission until the timer ran out.
As in, no reward window would pop up for you (if there was one) so you couldn't do the trick in CoX of leaving the window up to wait out the timer....
The most important part is definitely the "everyone versus the seriously bad baddies" part of it. Would be cool to have vilains and heroes fight along each other.
I think a realm-wide event wouldn't be too shabby. At first you have the big boss spawn in a non-hub region and as long as he's not defeated several mini-bosses with their own minions will spawn in various randomly chosen regions in waves with a big cooldown in a way that they can be circumvented but still are serious trouble, not unlike the dynamic events in GW2 which sometimes block waypoints or make you unable to access local merchants and start local quest chains. The mini-bosses could vary in difficulty so everyone can contribute.
Of course it would have to be far more seldom than the dynamic events in GW2, perhaps once or twice a year, no more. It would be seriously fucking awesome though. You could even create some bunker-maps where people can go during the raids, this way you could even have the regular hub regions be attacked without compromising game functionality. And the atmosphere would be first class.
And holy shit, think about it. Instead of classically announcing the event, the GMs would start it at their whim so no one could predict anything, and when it's triggered the news are all about this big ass alien invasion or whatever it is, and the regions that get raided with the mini-bosses as well as their neighbouring regions sound alarm sirens a few minutes before impact.
OMG IT WOULD BE SO FUCKING RAD.
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