The Importance of Solo Play in DCUO

Don't worry I found out the Trinkets are a joke unless you carry maybe a bouncy ball and henchmen lol

But then we're back to one of the problems they tried to solve with unified Marks, in multiple currencies and (most likely) skyrocketing prices.

I just sat down and did the math on what I'd probably run if they reinstated Marks just for solo/duo content. With a character that can run Patrol Catastrophe as the highest level solo missions available, I'd run:

• T1-T3 challenges: 13 Marks
• South Gotham open world: 4 Marks (including Sub Avatar)
• Central City missions: 8 Marks (4 missions at 2 Marks each)
• Home Turf daily missions: 2 Marks
• Iconic Anomalies: 2 Marks
• Open world cultist/Gotham Wasteland daily missions: 4 Marks
• War of the Light 1 weekly missions: 2 Marks
• Amazon Fury 1 Iconics and WOTL 2 Qward mission: 3 Marks
• Amazon Fury 1 Daily missions: 3 Marks
• Metropolis Battlezone daily missions (WOTL 2): 2 Marks
• Patrol Catastrophe: 2 Marks
• Battle For Earth duos via walk-in: 6 Marks
• Gotham Wasteland duos via walk-in: 6 Marks

Total Marks just for running those is 57. That's not including the bonus missions you get after running the Home Turf, Gotham Wasteland, Gotham Under Siege and Metropolis Battlezone missions 5 times, nor does it factor in possible Lockboxes or daily Vault runs. And it goes up even further from there if a person were to queue up for duos that can only be accessed via the On Duty tab.

Even if you don't reset the WOTL 1 missions with replay badges every day, that's still 55 Marks per day, with over half of them coming from content that you could almost sleepwalk through. That's just too much and it'd just about eliminate any need to run alerts or raids for Mark needs.

I do understand the frustration with picking up older styles and everything. It's one of the other reasons why I'm sticking around as long as I can at some of the sweet spots I mentioned. But with the math above, you're looking at 10 days or less to finish out a full set on the Rare Style vendor, and less time than that for vendor gear sets if you don't go after rings, weapons, trinkets, face or neck pieces (it's about the same if you do go after it all and not just the armor).

I just can't see the devs going for that or for creating another possible currency headache.

I disagree here. Solo content is pure DPS content. Doesn't make much sense to run a solo as a Controller or Tank as you have no one to give power to or to aggro baddies away from. Duos are a good spot to hone role skills.

I've always thought of the seasonal instances as a good learning spot, personally. Content intended for everyone, lower pressure (in theory anyway lol) than in regular alerts and it gives a better learning situation for things like positioning and line of sight.

But that's kind of beside the topic.

The fact that you don't need every single mark. It takes 45 marks every 2 months for belt slots and generator rent. Gear comes from content, and in less than a month you have everything one piece of content has to offer, but running it 5 times a week gives 25 marks for alert, and 10 marks for duos, 5 marks for solo and 10 for raid, that's 50 marks, in a week you could have enough marks for rent and then some. And keep in mind this is just from the main content, not including previeus episodes, but in reality if you ran all the 2 solos only for 5 days, that's 20 marks alone in there. So saying you need marks as if they where some rare finding on this game is just not true.

Also, a well done solo could in fact teach you how to support, or are you forgetting we do have iconic characters that half the time need our help more than we need theirs. There could be a solo were you have Superman being weakened by kryptonite and the only way to help him is by changing to healer role, or you have Green Arrow being ambushed and you need to Tank the adds to give arrow time to do whatever he has to do. There are many ways in solo content you could teach a player how to use their support roles. Duo content is meant for teach teamwork, but considering you only have 2 players, if both go support, all they'll learn is how weak support roles are when it comes to dealing damage.

Plus your forgetting if you run ALL T7 Duos you also get the chance to get base items as well as marks as a choice, not marks all the time but enough to make it worth it if you are running them for marks and items

If I trusted AI in general more, I'd go along with that. But the fact remains that I have yet to encounter an AI in ANY game I've played that I'd trust. Escort missions and/or NPC babysitting are pretty low on my list of fun missions to play, namely because NPC AI tends to be about as sharp as a sack of wet mice.

And as I said, it's not just this game. I've lost count of the number of times I've had NPCs in Half-Life 2 get in my way, and one of the first things I'd do in the Rogue Squadron games is dismiss the extra ships flying with me because they were useless. Plus I heard plenty of horror/frustration stories from SWG players about the escort mission in the Force Village, enough that I never even bothered to try running that mission while unlocking Jedi.

Besides, upping damage while in support roles is part of the plan the devs have going for power balance, so that may not be an issue in the (hopefully) near future.

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/dc...roducing-midrange.259915/page-16#post-3626346


Updated to reflect current progress on status on this initiative:

• First, address Celestial, followed by Gadgets
  • These powers have not been touched by Phase 1 or 2 balancing yet
• Second, address ability and combo-based powers one at a time (Fire, Light, Mental, Rage, Munitions, Ice, Quantum)
• Third, address all weapons to account for midrange
  • This must be completed to properly balance the remaining powers that utilize weapons to supplement their damage potential
• Fourth, significantly increase damage capability for all powers when in non-Damage roles
• Fifth, address compound powers one at a time (Earth, Electricity, Nature, and Sorcery)

I've been playing the game off and on since launch, and I'm amazed I managed to get a character to T4 content. I enjoy leveling to 30 with a variety of characters, but I don't do raids. I hate raiding. I don't like to team much at all, and I've only been doing it with Legends missions, which give me no CR advancement.

I think this game would have retained many more PC players if it had more of a solo friendly approach past level 30. I get the urge to play now and then, but the absurdly repetitive grind in soloable content gets to me after a while. I don't have that problem with other MMOs that I play.

I am one of those who does not like to play with several players ever! Even in my league, I often do myself my stuff ...
much prefer the missions that depend only on me, the things that I depend on others ...

I was thinking about something very similar last night.

I'm still a big proponent of Universal Teleporters that would allow us to enter any content, no matter the number of players. However, the devs have said that creating one would cause a lot of problems at this point, so perhaps they could start slowly - by allowing all Duos to be Soloed.

It might help keep high end players from demolishing Duos alongside new players (leading to new player retention) as well as give players of all Tiers more Soloable Content (again, hopefully leading to yet more new player retention).

You know what's weird about that Shawn Michaels gif? I was actually there to see it, live

I've been posting my support for solo content for a long time, and taken lots of heat for it. This seems like a safe place to post, lol. First, thanks to the OP for being more eloquent than I. I whole heartedly agree with you. I can say that 99% of my player has been solo or duo (with a friend who also prefers this content), and it really wouldn't be all that difficult to improve the experience. There are CR ranges where the solo game bogs down (looking at you, Sons of Trigon), and I think it all boils down to the lousy marks and drops. Someone posted earlier about how you get gear from drops, hence you don't need to spend marks on it. This is simply not true of either solo or duo content. The gear drops, in fact, are often below a player's current CR and the only means of progress is to either tolerate an alert or raid and hope for a drop that actually improves your stats, or grind the solo/duo stuff for 1 or 2 marks at a time until you can buy higher CR gear and claw your way into the next tier. I don't even bother keeping my mods paid up; I save the marks to buy gear.

My present dilemma is with my CR121 celestial, who can only get marks by running the New Genesis dailies (3 marks, zero helpful rewards) because he gets killed trying to run the solo that unlocked but is stacked with CR 35's. I'm not progressing at this point. I joined some alerts and duos and ALL of them failed, one after 2 hours of trying. So, I'm logging in less. I have a boat load of toons stuck in the Gotham Wastelands that I just can't be enthusiastic about anymore. Sadly for DCUO, I'm subscribed and I look forward to buying cool new things that come out (Rainbow aura anyone?). But I'm log jammed with my highest toon stuck and all of the lower ones bunching up in the same bottleneck and feeling way past the point of being left behind as I pay for new content that I'll never reach.

Like I said, the solutions are simple. There just needs to be the will to bring EVERYONE along instead of deliberately undervaluing solo (and duo) content.

Yeah.... characters get stuck in the Gotham Wasteland for a while.
The CR gap from T4 to T6 is about 20CR.
So you will be stuck in the Wasteland for a bit.

The drops don't help you at all after a while.
You need about half of your gear to be 90CR... and the rest 85CR.
So you need to take it slow and steady in the Wasteland.

As for your Celestial toon..... I have a Celestial Black Lantern Batman that is now... 145CR???
And I have recorded most of it's progression. So watching my Black Lantern videos might help you a bit get past 121CR???
Hope this helps.

HELL NO. This is a MMO, Massive MULTIPLAYER Online. Maybe you don't understand what MULTIPLAYER means. Here, let me enlighten you. Multiplayer: Denoting a computer game designed for or involving several players.

If you wanna play solo, more power to you. I don't pay your sub, so I can't tell you how to play. But if you want to play solo in this game and do only solos, only duos, or a combination of both...Thats fine, but don't expect to make it far and don't complain that you can't make it far.

This is a MMO, so if you want to play by yourself and not be affected by other people, go play CoD or some other game that's not a MMO.

I didn't, but with relevant content only is more than enough for rent, in fact 2 weeks worth of runs is enough for 120 days of rent. Raids alone it's 80 marks in 2 weeks, add a duo here and there and you have enough marks for either 2 or 3 pieces of vendor gear depending on what month it is, or as I said 4 months worth of rent.

2 Things:
1- When did Quantum get an update?

2- With roles now getting more damage then a solo is even more viable to teach about roles, and tutorial missions are never fun to begin with, but they are needed. An AI is still more reliable than a player anyway, here we have players from Brazil, Asia, Spain, from kinds to Adults, the language barrier in this game is one of the biggest issues it has (pretty much why PC players never got used to using mics) and making a tutorial for 2 players wouldn't work most of the time unless you find a player that completly understands what's going on, which most times it's hard to do on most content. It doesn't have to be something overly complicated either, look at how well Lois Lane works in Science Spire solo, she doesn't get in your way and actually helps, so it's not impossible to put the NPC or our mentors to work.

Oh and please don't compare this game to others. HL 2 is an FPS from 12 years ago, back then games where released with bugs and it took months to fix, not days as it does now. And if you decided to ditch the ships then it was your descicion, not the NPC being bad. And there is a reason SWG went belly up, devs clearly didn't support it enough, so it's more than just NPC issues there. Someone compared our numbers to that of DOTA 2, but they forgot one thing, we don't gat payed to play this, DOTA players do.

DOTA players get payed?? Is that a metaphor???

Yes..... NPCs can be much better then they were 15 years ago.

But sadly..... even now they can be not so perfect.

Fallout 4 is a pretty recent game....... and my friends get mad at their NPC followers most of the time.

But I agree..... sometimes better a NPC with a flawed AI then certain players who do the opposite of what needs to be done.

you do know there is a championship, same as for HALO and LoL, in fact that is recognized as an esport and there is a college giving it as a class credit. And as I said, a fix can be applied within days, not months or never as it was the case 15 years ago.