Yeah .. funny how people always begged for more challenge, and if they get some, the suddenly cry again
that its all to hard.

And...

/Signed! (again*)

*I already signed it the first time around when Sage brought this up somewhere at the PTS forums.

Many parts of the game clearly needed to be harder than it was.

Ss the notes said master villains and such are harder, and I have noticed that running around back to soloing more characters up - minions are still easy, but the higher tiers of villains are definaltly taking longer to take down.

So that is a good thing - harder - but not insane.

However when you are playing a range of 1-10, deciding to turn up the dial to 30, or 50 is a bit of a jump no? I will leave it to others to decide how far past 10 the dial jumped for some of the Alerts.

The previous 'hardest part of the game' some said was Andrith. A level 41 area with 26k thugs - but that you had no 2 minute time limit to beat them in.

So the hardest level 41 benchmark is being used in a so called level 30 alert - with only 2 minutes to do it in, and one of the bosses say can one shot you if for any reason you didnt block - or have your blocking crippled say.

Yeah thats not a big jump at all.

I doubt it's the same set doing the crying, and yes, some of it is pretty baseless.

However, some in the 'make it harder' group (like myself) appreciate the general adjustment to the world but also note that some parts have gone crazy. I've started leveling a new solo character and a new teamplay character specifically to see what it's like now, and I've definitely noticed that at least the earlier parts of the game aren't completely sleepable anymore.

That said, certain Alerts are definitely out-of-balance with the rest, to the point of being completely unreasonable. A chance of failure is good* when you can reasonably expect to succeed if you're not doin' it wrong. There are a few Smashes that are past that standard. I've only ever been able to complete Trainstopping in a premade, and the 2-minute ones with the highly defensive villains like Draconis (but not with more even-handed ones) are pretty much right out.**

*I would have liked to see more than just the Smashes have some failure condition, actually, because short chunks of action like that are usually the best places to put failure opportunities and reward success accordingly. Not, say, at a single dialogue choice at the end of a mission that just consists of long blah blah blah and running back and forth *glares at STO*

**Why is PFF uber on NPCs when it's useless to PCs? *cry*

I wasn't talking about the other types of Alerts. Stop sidetracking. You seem to have blatantly ignored that I was refering to the 10% of level XP + 1 hour XP boost rewards from completing Smash Alerts.

If it makes you feel better, I'm against Grab Alert rewards and have stated so in another thread.

Except that I said nothing of the sort. That's your interpretation. I said nothing about you learning nothing about the game and just aced through it without any effort or learning the ropes. I quoted your comment with no intention to trivalize your efforts in any way. That's your assumption.

Personally, I've not yet tried Smash Alerts with characters below level 30 yet, so I'll relent and say that perhaps they can be overwhelming, especially for ATs without adequate healing power. Other than that I view them as a significant and worthy challenge for level 30s and above.

And please stop using the victim card. No one's asking you to leave to the other game that does it wayyyyyy better. If you wanted to you'd have already done so. Stop using it as some sort of threat to just to boast your sense of self worth. No one's trivializing your opinion because you're a new player either.

ಠ_ಠ Still not seeing too much difficulty here.

Heavy Haley (L10 Freeform with Decimate, Bludgeon, Cleave, and Invulnerability) partially tanked (because I was in Hybrid and don't have Challenging Strikes, DPS got aggro pretty fast; I did end up tanking him for at least 60% of the whole fight, though, and was almost always #2 on aggro) Jack without dying in a Soul Siphon, got it done before the counter hit 7. And he was one of the ones I was worried about just straight one-shotting her. I had to burn a HoT bot to keep standing, but I had those on me anyway as a matter of course.

I still agree that some of them need to be looked at, but I'm still not sure what else I have to do to make these harder for me.

Still not having issues with any alerts. The only time I lost was a Smash against VIPER-X since the team decided the tank loved getting debuffed by Brickbusters.

Welcome to 50% of my teams since F2P.

Might want to avoid VIPER-related PUGs then :P

I'm seeing modet improvements. Now it seems no one but DPSers pour in on SMASH, so those are going a bit better, now mainly losing on things like Trainstopping where more than once time ran out while trying to finish off overly-buff henchmen, after the boss was down...

Now its just all DPS.

Going better, but that's still not making it any better-balanced, just a playerbase adapting to an imbalance.

Also as said, I strongly suspect the Tryhards clamoring for it to be harder are the ones who are finding the broken difficulty to be objectionable. Masochistic lot, that subset...