Aaah...I remember Brainiac Sub-Construct...

Do you remember the first time you ever ran Brainiac Sub-Construct?

What an amazing instance! Those massive Brainiac-inspired chambers with huge ceilings and massive platforms reaching upward loaded with ads. And the final battle against Brainiac himself!!

Fond memories.

No wonder we all fell in love with this wonderful game so much.

But nowadays, this wonderful raid has been turned into a catalyst run.

Not that I'm complaining about that, but we high level players should sometimes remember that maybe someone in our group is running it for the first time...experiencing that thrill and excitement for the first time.

But if the team does not work together - if the newbies are abandoned to battle ads that high-level players have left behind in their frantic rush to reach the next battle - if they are locked out of boss fights - if they don't even get to battle Brainiac...

Well. maybe they won't fall in love with the game like we did. Maybe they will leave and get their friends to leave.

But if they have a wonderful experience, and they are looked after by the team (in an instance that will probably only take an extra 2 minutes anyway to run properly) - then maybe they will stay and tell their friends to join as well.

And the game we all love so much can flourish and be with us for years to come.

You can thank the Dev's for making this a quickie. Sarc.

i think catylist runs are the worst thing for the game. I dont have a sub so right now i am farming low level stuff for gear i missed and marks to buy other gear i never took the time to buy. If you hit a catylist run level it is packed with players over CR 200. It basically turns into a game of try to keep up. If you actually take long enough to look at your drops (looking for gear i missed) the group is at the far end of the hall and you are lucky to catch them in time before you are locked out of the next boss fight. Oh and speking of boss fights, thanks to the catylist run it exposed the glitch that if you kill Ra's Al Ghoul too fast it glitches you into the chamber. Same with scarecrow in Arkham.

Let the guy like me who cant afford a sub help the noobs (I actually ask if they need feats) dont fill the lower tier stuff with people who will just speed run it because they find it boring. I mean really they just fly past everything and leave the poor noob trying to solo his way down a hallway while they kill the boss and fly over everything in the next hallway before the poor noob has faught his way half way down the first one. Why do they do it? Because it is an easy level they find boring and dont even want to play but they have to because they want the catylist.

If you want new people to come in and enjoy the game then this is a very bad thing.

I definitely agree. I pretty much hate running DPS anymore, and I will very often come into these as a healer for the low levels on the team. The last run I did a few days ago only had 1-2 other 200+ players aside from myself. They still speed-ran and mowed down everything, but I helped keep a lot of other lower levels alive for the ride. What really turned me on DPSing through that stuff is a run I did in Trigon's Prison. A guy on the team was my CR, but he was skipping ads for cutscenes. I watched a team member go down during the Avatar of Sin battle, and this guy just took off towards the next room without even trying to pick him up. Because all of the ads from the previous room poured in after the fight I was unable to get the guy up. He fled and then couldn't make it through those mobs we skipped. Even when the other low level died off as well. I initiated a kick but I don't know if they knew what was going on. Either way it definitely opened my eyes a bit, and it made me think to myself "Don't be that guy".

The sad fact is though that most people really don't care about the game itself. A lot of folks these days are very self-centered, and the only thing they care about is themselves. Sure they're only saving a few minutes by not playing like that, but they will never even for a split second stop and think of how it will impact others.

Another place newer players need to play at their level is Ace Chemical Alert. The henchmen say some pretty hilarious things. Including a little quip about each of the bosses.

"Where did he get a baby head that big?"

Hopefully, over time, matchmaking can help with this. I think it would be fair if matchmaking attempts to group OP with each other and CR-appropriate people with each other. It might help to be able to opt out of OP groups or opt out of CR-appropriate groups so as not to infringe on other people's experience of the instance.

Skipping adds or not Skipping adds; at the end of the day, this thread won't make a difference. I'm sorry, but even if a Higher CR doesn't skip and fights all the adds; they'll just get another Higher CR to rofl-stomp the content.

Sorry, but even if a High CR stops to kill the adds; you as a new player will never experience how great the content was, because not everyone in that group will be new or relevant to the content.

Truth be told: I can understand this thread's purpose, to try and get people to stop skipping adds; but truth be told, if you're talking about new players getting to enjoy the content the way we did; the only way that would happen is if walkins or stat-clamping got implemented. But that'll never happen, because the stats-revamp made the developers introduce the artifact system and which The whole point of the Artifact system was to help the troubling que times and give end-game folks a reason to return to older content.

The golden age truly was the first few months if not the first year of DCUO, minus the PSN hack.
I'm grateful so many of us got to experience this game then, before the major changes began.

I hate that instance so much, wish i could just skip to the last boss or there was no catalyst in there.
If you don't let high cr guys stomp and skip the content many of them won't even queue, and the low level guys will just quit the game because they can't get in a instance.
If the game had a lot of players like in the past not letting the players skip would be fine, but in the majority of the tiers you can't even find a instance unless you wait 2 hours. (Not even talking about operations on the villain side and the EU side)
If what you want with this post is to convince people they should not skip content, this won't work. Sad but true.

I don't want to convince people to skip content.

I just want to remind players that this is an MMO - which means you are expected to play as part of a team most of the time.

If you can't be a good team-player, then you should really go and play a solo game.

I've actually been kicked a few times for "not helping" because burning through ads is considered a positive tactic. We still have a lot of players now, but they're just spread out between worlds, raids, duos, and alerts. We've had 8 different raids released this year (not including elite) and people till can't get through DWF, which was released last year.

I don't mind the catalyst runs because they're much better than getting the books from Hands of Fate. Because at least when you complete a raid, you don't become psychotic and leave the extra high leveled enemy around to destroy the low levels.

And for the record, there are STILL high level players that can't get through Blackest Night.

"The Big C"

Am I the only person that caught the innuendo?

^^^ I literally geek out on the Judge in South Gotham Courthouse. The guy who did the voice really should have done Darkseid. (Skip to 11 minutes)

Old content is petty much dead for now.
Nobody runs Kahndaq or FoSes or anything that is not Top tier. There is no ppl grouping for Sub-Avatars or Gotham\Metropolis\Central\Home Turf bounties. Which indicates that there is no new players income. And if a new players come, they stuck after some time, because there is no group to play team stuff.
I come from EUPC-V (which was dead long time ago) to USPC-V - and there is almost the same. I come to CR64 and stop. There is nothing to go and nothing to do. Because nobody here.

And this is very sad. I think, T1-T4 (and maybe part of T5) content is the best in game, it have something, that was lost in the future. Soul, if you wish.

IMO this has always been a serious problem... it got to the point that I do not enter any instance that I don't feel that I can survive without the assistance of others. And that was before catalyst runs came into being lol. Now it has gone from a handful of missions that were risky to a certain few that are almost guaranteed to be Hell if you go in at CR and don't have a strong shield that can help you keep up with the high CR who doesn't give a crap about you.

Since you can't change human nature, my advice is to know what you're getting into. If you are at CR and inexperienced, do not enter LOA. You might or might not die repeatedly is a few others, but that one has always been the worst and these catalyst runs have just made it even more of an ego killer.

Too bad that not all new players read forums in advance, and even if they do they need to go to specific threads in order to know what's what, but who cares about them, right? So long as I get what I want, screw all the newbies... it's a pathetic attitude, but unfortunately that's just the nature of online games.

I'm playing devil's advocate slightly here, but end-game players have their own daily grind to do, often on multiple characters. They also need catalysts for their artifacts. I'm not trying to justify behaviour like not picking up, but there are reasons associated with game progression design why they often enter catalyst content with a "let's get this done" mindset. I really don't know what the solution is.

Yep.

And like someone mentioned, without these catalyst runs sone of the lower level players may not be able to queue into content as often.

The fact is, a leveling players experience now isn’t going to be the same as a leveling players experience when that content was new and it’s not designed to be. It’s just wishful, idealistic thinking to expect a player to experience that content the way you experienced it 5 or so years ago.

That is because Khandaq got replaced by Outer Caverns (same tier). Be honest - which would YOU rather do - the desert or the Batcave? Most DC fans (which are likely most of us - why else are we here) have heard more - FAR more - about the Batcave than Khandaq - so naturally, the Cave has us curious. I've actually done a fanfic centered partially on the Kahndaq raid - a ROMANCE fanfic involving Zatanna - though it is very formulaic (Damsel in Distress - though it's typecasting) - still, what the heck is exciting - in ANY way - about Khandaq - even for Black Adam fans? Now, the Sub-Construct is - especially for tankers - war made personal at the end - a slugfest against the Big B. If you have followed the typical storyline for tanks (including - if not especially - the "Message In A Bottle" mentor mission which got you into the League in the first place) and your first trip to South Gotham (and encounter with he Sub-avatars), this is where all that begins to pay off - and you want to collect - and who better to pay the freight than the Brain himself? I still do BSC - in fact, it's one of those missions I never tire of - and I do it with all my characters. Why? Simple - Brainiac still owes on that bill - and I'm taking it out of him - piece by piece. He'll never - as in ever - be finished paying. I'll take some out in BSC - more in Prime Battleground - still more in Return to the Nexus. Each and every opportunity I get. It's not merely character-based - it's personal. If you truly become your character (which is, in fact, the point), it will become personal to the character you play as well.

Man, we have always skipped adds, even years ago at level. The groups I ran with would always pull everything to the end of each hall way.

Sorry, this game has always been a dps race. Just because high CR players are doing it now, doesn't mean it wouldn't be done with players at level.

Heck, the entire raid was fairly easy at level, until the end. Even back then, getting people to watch their feat or move from the scorpion, etc.

I ran this raid today, cause I was bored. No one complained about the feats they received. No one complained we flew threw it in about 5min.

Today's gearing up isn't anything like it was back then. There are butt loads of TC gear, vault gear, seasonal gear, anniversary gear to be obtained by every one. None of this gear is hidden behind a pay wall.

If players have issue with high levels being in there, I sure have never seen it. No one in Gates today said anything either.

I hated that raid the most when I started this game. Took forever to get to the boss fights and had the worst loot drops. Carrying low levels through it so they can get to the good raids is a blessing. It's great that they took the least played content and made it catalyst runs so players can get into them at all for feats.

So i remember posting in a few of the artifact related threads about how I thought the whole idea of have us go back and run the low level content to get catalyst was a bad idea and now i keep seeing posts about the very thing I was concerned about. I try to be considerate of any low level when one is in the group but if you blind que you get whats there and quite frankly they get left in the dust. Its the same for any of the content. Nobody telling them the mechanics in Artifacts of Blackest Day. Smashing everything in Phantom Zone and so on. We really aren't doing ourselves any favors, Those are the players that will get to end game and not know how things really work. Don't have the answers to fix it but I know i still need the catalyst so i will continue to run the content.

As far as the first run through Sub-Con. 2 1/2 hours just getting to the last boss. Man that was quite the instance to learn. Got turned around and lost just about every wipe. Ah the good old days.