SM Season 3..What a disaster.

i hope they will just go with the 8 man SM from now on any of those you mentioned,that way 2 bosses per round can be feasible i do find fights with a single boss and no adds way too easy having to depend on not 1 Tank but a second Tank is where you really see the Spike in difficulty.

I don't know if you've had a chance to run SM since posting in this thread, but your comments so far sound like you hadn't actually experienced the current state of this SM.

The difficulty of the later rounds is way off. I'd be surprised if you didn't agree with that given some of your past comments.

This has absolutely nothing to do with gatekeeping SM, or the super elite try-hards finding it too easy, or a couple of test server groups figuring everything out. These rounds are providing little to no challenge, not only to top players, but to any half decent LFG group. Yes, I've been pugging Round 30 and it's a cakewalk.

To make some comparisons, it's not as easy as a regular raid, you can still wipe, but in my experience, the late rounds of this SM are easier than the current elite raid - not elite plus, I mean the standard version of TSWE. This SM does not come anywhere close to a single one of the previous 13 SMs in terms of late round difficulty. The difference you feel between rounds 10, 20, and 30 is so slight it just doesn't make sense.

P.S. I don't need a "difficulty is subjective" argument. I know it is, and I know everyone will have different opinions, but this SM is just scaled way too low for what SM is supposed to be and supposed to offer.

Actually I have and I've finished round 30, what I will say is this.

Rounds 5-10 are more difficult than last SM by probably a significant stretch, In the last SM rounds 1-10 were incredibly casual, now you've got a gate at round 6 with Vice and Metallo who are a much greater tanking challenge than most casual tanks would remotely be used to and you've added in the water pool on the floor at that early stage so not only are they dealing with two bosses who can be a handful, they're dealing with that floor effect as well, it's a bit much at those early stages and the water pools should be removed until rounds 11.

Krona at every round (9,19,29) is a mess, he acts as a gate, but isn't particularly difficult if you comply mechanically, which many don't, but because he's just mechanically atrocious the fight feels ******* awful, block, block, run around laser, block, block, in a ball, block, later on, block, block, hope water pool not there, hope robot contained, hope explosion doesn't go off, hope random laser doesn't come out - it's terrible, just an atrocious boss choice when layering the room with other mechanics.

Sixth Dimensional Superman is not super easy to beat at the last round unless you're piling on some FOTM power like rage to take the adds, so let's not even pretend like all difficulty experiences in here are the same, because even your choice power can reflect that. It was clear some of these mechanics are built and continue to be built with certain powers having a disproportionate advantage.

I think what some of you are unhappy about (and I actually like) is that they've toned back the ridiculous over powered one shots coming from the likes of Minotaur, you still have to kite and this includes other bosses as well, but the difference is that not literally everything is 1mm away from a one shot, that is demonstrably better for the tanking experience, some of you might not like that because you seem to get off on wanting the tank to be in a state of constant flight because quite literally everything is going to kill you, but it is better like this and allows for some of the clunkier powers like Earth and Atomic who have to combo and construct things to not be constantly having everything they've just put on be ripped apart while they're also trying to run or just killed before they can do it.

Despite the fact there's a lot of mechanical over lap at times that I do detest on one level, I think creating difficulty through the room mechanics that were added provided for a better challenge than having the ramped up overkill boss damage and I'll take that compromise.

The thing you have to remember as well is, although SM is meant to be a super challenge, it has also been turned in to a pseudo limited time event and that is going to put at least some pressure on balance. You might not want to hear that, given your comment about "difficulty is subjective" but it's true. Everyone gets to enjoy SM, is everyone going to succeed, no. Are a few more people that last time perhaps going to succeed, perhaps, but again, even changing it to 6 man with all difficulty disputes aside that was going to change success rates as well. Some of you would have us believe all the casuals are beating R30, it's that easy, and that's horribly disingenuous and untrue - it's basically you attempting to alter the difficulty through emotion, rather than fact.

Remember survival mode is built for everyone, it is exceptionally less toxic as an event and experience if the 1% aren't constantly trying to use it as a method to gate players and flex and the additional challenge is always still there for you in TSWE+ and it's not going anywhere either.

Have a nice day.

Meh, SM is made for cheaters and speed hackers from the beginning. Work hard if you want as long as you have fun with it.

why TSWE+? if someone wants a real challenge (precisely a challenge and not a unique reward for a favorite style of play in greenhouse conditions honed to the ideal (a league proven over the years, meta power, meta artifacts, tons of bucks invested in characters, all sorts of tricks that the developers haven’t managed to fix and so on...) then let it get to round 30...in a blind queue...there is a challenge to any level of difficulty in the DCUO...but not any level of difficulty offers something more than a challenge as a reward...reach up to 30 rounds in a blind queue is definitely a challenge ... but there is no unique reward that can be boasted on every corner ....

What I'm unhappy about is simply the lack of difficulty. I don't know what the best way to create that difficulty is, but I just want it to be there and it currently isn't. I'm not a fan of the whole grey range, run-for-your-life, don't-get-hit-by-anything style of tanking either, but if I had to choose between that and what we have now, I'd choose the former simply because if the choice is challenge vs no challenge, it's an easy choice.

You say it's meant to be a "super challenge", but the fact that it's nowhere that this time around (even in the late rounds) makes me wonder if that's still what SM is meant to be or if the devs' intentions for it has changed. They certainly haven't told us anything of the sort.

You're right that not everyone is beating SM. I didn't mean to imply that. There are many casuals not interested in it and many who are but just aren't good enough. That will always be the case. I still think it's easy enough that any decent LFG group - meaning they are knowledgeable about the game's mechanics - can beat it with very little difficulty.

That being said, I really don't care about how many people are beating SM. People often say the elite community wants to gatekeep content and minimize the number of players who can beat something, but this has never made sense to me. What we want is challenging content that we can enjoy. The number of players who are capable of beating something is nothing more than a consequence of the difficulty of the content and the skill distribution of the playerbase. The harder something is, the fewer players will be able to beat it. That is completely self-evident, so I'm not sure why minimizing that number is attributed as an end goal in itself to elite players.

I also agree that SM is for everyone. I don't agree that every round is for everyone. I think that, at the very least, rounds 1-10 should be doable by just about anyone who understands the basics of the game. I also don't think anyone is entitled to beating SM, not even the best player in the game. (Personally, I'd actually prefer if every SM were unbeatable because then there would be no ceiling on the demonstration of teamwork and skill that a group can perform, and it would make for great competition within the competitive PvE scene. (I can already see most of the forum regulars rolling their eyes at the idea of competition in PvE). Anyway, we don't need to go more into this.)

You mention balance but I don't see how this SM is balanced when it offers nothing to the part of the community that most looks forward to it. Having completed this SM in every role in both league runs and PUG runs, I personally feel very little difference between rounds 10, 20, and 30, or x, 1x, and 2x, and that's ridiculous to me.

There are only 10 unique boss fights in SM. The same 10 bosses are repeated because the idea is to have increasing levels of difficulty with each iteration. Why can't the final iteration be challenging enough to the top players so that they can enjoy it? How many iterations do we need before the last one can be very hard? 40? 50? I want SM to be accessible to people as do you, but maybe we don't agree on what accessible means. Accessible, to me, doesn't mean that every last round is at most moderate difficulty. If the first 10 rounds are easy, and the second 10 rounds are easy to moderate, that already makes SM very accessible IMO. I see no reason why SM can't be scaled in such a way that includes everyone.

The only argument I can see against making the last iteration of rounds very hard has to do with rewards. Personally, I don't care one bit about rewards. There could zero rewards in SM and I'd be happy as long as the content was enjoyable. But I know this is an unpopular opinion and the vast majority of players (both casuals and hardcores) do want to see cool rewards in SM. That said, if it were up to me, there would be a bunch of cool rewards, but they would all be obtainable by playing rounds 1-10. There would be no styles, base items, or pets exclusive to any round above 10. The only exclusive thing above 10 would be a title for each multiple of 10 round. No one would miss out on rewards and the hardcore players can have their challenge. Everybody wins.

I enjoyed it, was it easier than i expected? Yes, was it a disaster, absolutely not!

I would have preferred and encourage there to be more frequent and critical mechanics added to the latter rounds. The current desire at endgame (stupidly) is for boss' to 1 tap tanks and have 999999999 hp, it is neither fun or skill based, these types of boss' are just ultimately cheesed when this happens, be it grey tanking, roll dodging etc its quite frankly boring and lazy development imo.

By introducing more frequent fast pace mechs, that encourage communication and faster responses to changing situations you increase difficulty the correct way, you can artificially increase boss hp and damage through debuffs via poor mechanic execution etc this way rather than just doing the easy thing and making them hit harder and last longer.

Some people like it some people dont to be honest there are cosmetic thigs i would change for example you cant block flare attack when you picking up death team members ( hate social justice mechanic / feats ect )
I like this SM 6 ppl was cool idea !

It’s seems that elite plus is now the top end of the difficulty spike on DCUO, rather than SM.

It was much preferable having SM as the hardest thing around and having two elite raids with one more difficult than the other (ie Metal DLCs, Birds of Prey), but the current development route seems to be ever-decreasing amounts of content production and more ways to keep reusing and recycling. One raid in a DLC with four different versions is a joke.

Not quite finished SM yet, but just looking at the Minotaur fight from R24 last time to R26 this time is like chalk and cheese in difficulty terms. This time you can do it with one tank and you don’t even have to do lunges. And of course, he goes down very quickly with there being 3 actual dpses being fully buffed as against a battle troll/healer/tank having to share damage responsibility.

I’m not of the opinion that it’s a bad thing to have one season of SM that’s less difficult than the previous or future seasons, but I am of the view that it should be the ultimate challenge. Whether that requires scrapping or toning down elite plus raids or some other solution, is up for debate I guess.

When you stick rewards behind something you're always, always going to create, access, balance and gating issues, always, that's not an if it's a will. I'm not quite sure why this point is lost on some lol.

If we want to be truly virtuous then the challenge is the reward, heres a novel idea, let's leave R1-30 like it is now with all rewards stopping at 30, SM then continues to scale on forever, getting harder and harder until it actually just becomes impossible, there's your challenge right there

I completely agree and understand this. That's why I wish they'd remove rewards from the high rounds, which would in turn remove any reason for casual players to even care about those rounds.

In dead seriousness, this actually sounds perfect to me.

When they first made SM, that's honestly what I thought it would be, but they made it 10 rounds initially thinking no one would beat it and they did.

The reality is, that ceiling has brought with it this elite perception of toxicity resulting from the inevitable clout chasing involved with it.

Now there's nothing wrong with being elite right, but theres no need for the toxicity that pours from some qaurters, that's by no means you, but we do all know the players I'm talking about

SM was actually fine too when it was just a shirt some pets and a title, but this all changed when they turned it into a full on event with marks and rewards, it put an unmerited level of pressure on the content to be balanced around not gating too many people from the event and the rewards.

If we want a true challenge where it can be truly truly hard then it needs to step further away from the direction it's heading.

Unlimited rounds where you are rewarded marks per round and buy rewards, but no rewards are round locked and at the end perhaps the groups that got the farthest are awarded an SM crown, that crown wouldn't even need to change each season although it obviously could.

This would mean only the truly best of the best get that crown but its not linked to the rest of it and that fuels the challenge and desire for clout if that makes sense.