Where the combat has gone?

My best memories in the game, were fighting and struggling to beat some of the old content during leveling, and some of the old raids like khan brainiac subconstruct, FOS, etc, I used to spend quiet some time, beating them, while keep. I had a sense of accomplishment just by finishing them, and then going after feats out of there.

Over the years I have gathered a lot of feats, almost all of those, minus the super grindy.

Now I do feel I spend more time, grinding than fighting to accomplish something, which is not a good thing in a super hero themed game, everything in the game is beatable day 1 with hardly any effort.

Most of the feats are linked to a grindy system that requires you to spend more money on top of the sub, that if you want to finish your stuff in a relevancy window, otherwise you will keep grinding to get some gears or mods that are futile or irrelevant just to get your feats done. And that is not a good sign to keep players like me, who where very invested in the game, playing on a regular basis, sub paid over 6 years, with lot of purchases here and there.

When amazon fury 3 launched, the downward spiral begun for me, as soon as I saw the feats list, I realized that I would never going to be able to finish some of them, because I tend to burn out after playing and replaying the content with ease. the elite lockouts made everything worse at that time. There were no ways to get into elite under geared, and by the time I finished vendor gear most of my still active friends in the game where done with those feats, so bye bye for me. the same happened for the next episode. and my attention for the game was slowly but surely fading, and the feats on the time capsules were one nail on a coffin already in progress, until I stopped subbing, now I only subbed for one month with each new episode. just to see if I can grasp the fun I had with the game at some point. i am not an OC wanna have it all right now, But i disagree with feats based in the replay factor or pay to get those while in relevancy.

Where is the combat devs? the real struggle to beat something (elite is a mess, based on luck most of the times)
Where is the challenge?
Where is the fun? grind is a part of the game, but if that is all left, no point to keep paying

Is it impossible to deliver that kind of content again?, less grind more fun with that fast paced combat, we just to have It is still something there we can strive to get a sense of accomplishment, other than... hey I finished my gearset!!!!! wow really it is that all is left, or yay I spent $100.00 and got my material, well that is silly. And I am sure there are many silent players that thought similar and left the game.

Please devs if you want to keep the grind, fine, but do it with fun challenging content, not the stale pew pew pew done, we have now.
What your thoughts my fellow forumites

So you want hard content, but you don’t like elite because it’s too hard in a way you deem unacceptable? Ok then.

No, because elite content isn't even what it should be. People are beating that the first week with no issues either.

Your request will just fall on deaf ears. They will no longer made hard content. Enough whiney people got their way. The only hard content will be elite.

Today's players think everyone should be able to beat raids day one with zero gear grind to do so. It's ridiculous, but that's DCUO now.

100 Page Nerf DWF thread, that's all I got to say as far as seeing hard content ever again goes.

Not wanting to bang my head against a brick wall all day every day is being whiny?

The game was made "Easier" because DCU does not have a strong following. How can you remedy that? Make it more accessible.

Now, a AAA mmo could pull this off because their following is huge

Yes, when elite content is the only content you allow to be even remotely difficult or even slightly engaging (no, difficult and engaging isn't the same thing), it's being whiny. I understood where people came from when we were stuck in Monthly content where only 2 instances per month was released, but now when we are back to DLC-form there is no reason what so ever to have every single piece of content except one or two Elite-instances be a day-one Rofl-stomp while wearing a blindfold and/or being half-asleep, watching TV or whatever while randomly pushing buttons.

Sad but true. You want a challenge then step foot in elite with artificial difficulty because of limited lives.

Sometimes you die to RNG, like in PanE when you get lassod during the ice phase, it doesn't freeze you and you're stuck so you can't dodge the heat vision, so you just lost a life to something you really had no control over.

That's not true difficulty. That's fake difficulty.

I think you miss at least part of my point, I never said hard, I said engaging content, fun not stale pew pew done, elite was until this episode behind a locked paywall, that needed to be reset (pay) to run or wait for it and see if other people had the PP aswell
You missed my point about the sense of accomplishment, grind system behind paywalls etc. I drew a way bigger picture than what you just focused on.

You might be right, but still, I hope they reconsider and make all kind of difficulty instances, but not the same raid with 3 levels as Earth 3, but instead something like AF2, that one have 3 raids with all three difficulty levels. same should applied for alerts duos and solos.

Definitely you are right about the players we have now, I can tell there is huge difference in the crowd we have vs the crowd we had in the early years. Sadly it is still shrinking with every new or at least it seems so. based on waiting times for a queue to pop

Except the content isn’t actually like that. Every day I see people get oneshot by the Executioner’s General Grodd powers, or by the Judge’s Lady Sonar powers. Ever done Owlman with 3 dps and a tank? You have to be super cautious. In Pano-n people are constantly being obliterated by Ultraman’s Scatter Shot. I don’t even know what’s killing people in the Killbot 3000 fight, but something sure is.

I could make a case for all of the sacred cow instances in this game having artificial difficulty.

See above, plenty of things can screw you hard in Earth 3 if you just pew pew.

If they would've stuck with the AF2 concept, I'm pretty sure we would have considerably more players still active than what we have now. AF2 was the most balanced DLC that delivered something for everyone, and even when an instance was in fact easy, it was still engaging and pretty much all content had a creative feeling to it. I so wish they would bring back that kind of concept of content-balance again, we really need it.

Yup sure was great not having a clue what was going on storywise because I couldn’t finish Throne.

You take the worst examples you could possibly think of, most of the examples probably gathered by just Q'ing up. Just because some people decide not to play as a team, doesn't mean that the content should be designed in a way where you don't have to play as a team so you can still somehow magically complete it, over and over and over. That's how you lose people's interest.

You won't get people to start paying any more attention to content, until you give them something they need to pay attention to. The "Pew pew, here's ya loot"-concept of the majority of instances have clearly contributed to a lower population, maybe it's time to return to balanced content.

Meanwhile majority of people had overall positive feedback about that DLC in general in terms of balanced content and difficulty. Again, something for everyone. Just because YOU personally got into trouble in the one raid that was designed to be the difficult one in that entire DLC, doesn't mean it was a bad concept. You can't have ALL content personally catered just for you.

Would have loved to have seen some of today's players when PBG was first released. Two lives, heck we only got one shot. Crap ton of players had to glitch the door to even complete this raid. Still my all time favorite. I was a boss sorcery healer at the time, was rare. Loved watching my HL brothers going threw their Ram snaptrap fan combos. That was a hell of a raid.

I never just queue up, except on my one villain. You know what they say about assuming?

Actually, not being able to finish throne was just the tip of the iceberg. Suffice to say I never got many symbols of fury to actually buy more than like two pieces of vendor gear. What’s actually wrong with having different versions of the same raid so everyone can see them?

How long is acceptable to you? Should people pay for content they can’t play until next month? Next quarter? Next year?

But your post is misleading in the first place. By “people”, who do you mean? Was it maybe a dozen people that legit beat ZooE the first week after the buff? Or does “people” include hackers? Glitchers? Exploiters?

Did *you* beat it week one after the buff? Have you beaten it all even now?

It doesn't change the point I was making, which is that bad teammates can't be the reason to keep content the way it is just to make sure that YOU get through it when it suits you. While you of all people seem to have all these horror stories of the the easier content, quite a bunch of other people seem to share the same sentiment that majority of the content we get to this day gets stale and boring a little too fast, without much longevity.

That's what we had. You could que up and see the content, you are not by any stretch entitled to just magically complete it, that is up to you and the group you chose to go in with. Much of your reasoning for wanting content to stay the same ultimately comes down to how you personally prefer content based on what you personally can handle.

I prefer harder pieces of content, but you don't see me whining in every content-thread about how they should make all content Dox-level to suit me and whoever prefer the same as me. A lot of us just want a balanced DLC with interesting content that varies to fit different playstyles. AF2 had that, no matter how much you personally struggled with Throne.