From Alexa over at the CoH/CoV boards....

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Greetings Heroes and Villains,

We have opened the “Cathedral of Pain” for testing on the Training Room. Many of you have asked when this would be available, so here’s your chance to try it out! We hope you will transfer your characters over and give this a go (for details about how to transfer your characters to the Training Room, please click here ).

Not only will you be helping us uncover potential problems, but it is also an excellent opportunity for supergroups to practice this very challenging trial. The “Cathedral of Pain” is neither for the inexperienced nor the faint of heart, and once it hits the live servers, it will only be available at limited times.

Here are the details:

The “Cathedral of Pain” trial will be available on the Training Room starting Thursday, November 17th. Our hope is to leave it up through Thanksgiving weekend (although availability is subject to change depending upon performance and technical issues). We want to give you time not only to acquire Items of Power, but also to stage base raids against each other in order to defend/steal the items. Good times!

What exactly is the “Cathedral of Pain”?

Rularuu has obtained a number of powerful relics from the infinite worlds into which he peers. These relics rest at the center of his great palace in the Shadow Shard, the Cathedral of Pain.

Every so often, Rularuu’s legions invade Earth and scour it for these relics, or Items of Power. While this is a dangerous time for earth, it also grants heroes and villains an opportunity to travel to the Shadow Shard and take Rularuu’s items for themselves. With these relics, Rularuu will eventually be able to pierce the veil and transfer his full consciousness into our reality, and ravage it utterly. Great heroes must stop this process. Super villains will want to gain the items for their own personal goals.

Note: Items of Power bestow benefits to your entire supergroup for as long as you are able to keep them in your possession.

What will you need in order to attempt the “Cathedral of Pain” trial?

In order to take on this enormous challenge, you will need to belong to a supergroup. The supergroup must also have a base with the following items:

* 8 rooms
* 6 dimensional anchors
* Mission Computer or Oracle
* Raid Teleporter
* A base/mount for the Item of Power

Supergroup affiliations don’t carry over to Training Room when we transfer our characters. How do you expect us to afford such a swanky base?

You will be granted 36 million prestige automatically when you create your supergroup. Additionally, you will have access to all the recipes, but you will still need to get salvage to build the mission computer.

Once we’ve built our base, how do we get to the Cathedral of Pain?

You will be alerted to the trial via the mission computer in your base. After you’ve accepted the mission, you will be teleported, via the Raid Teleporter, to a nearby staging area to carry out the raid.

How many people can participate?

The trial accommodates up to 24 players. This allows a supergroup to easily form three teams of 8. (In other words, you’re going to want to bring a lot of people.)

Anything else we should know?

The “Cathedral of Pain” acts as a Task Force and temporarily “grays out” any other missions, trials, and Task Forces. All players are sidekicked/lackeyed to 50. Players who are defeated in any part of the trial are transported back to their base hospital.

Good luck and don’t forget to leave feedback in the Training Room forum!

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Great.....more supergroup only content. Wonder if they've looked at the CoH supergroups list lately. I know of four or five that's disbanded since I6 alone.

Rob

I honestly hate to say it, but NcSoft has completely buggered the game content for a lot of the older players (older = players who've been playing CoH for at least a few issues).

Did they break the game? No, but they have alienated more than a few of their customers in the process.

They're taking the games (Cov/CoH) in a new direction and that is something that isn't going to change. What remains to be seen is how well it sits with their customer base.

There's quite a bit of yelling going on over in the CoH thread about this. For example...

1. All players are bumped to lvl 50 for the duration. CoV lvl 40 toons are already at a disadvantage from not having a Power Pool or the extra slots.

2. Not many supergroups out there have more than 20 players. One person said that with 20 toons in his SG they can barely afford to have four rooms and a computer.

3. Alexa came back and said that you can enter the trial with one toon, if you wanted, but there was no way that you could solo it. She said it would be hard enough to do it with 24 people.

4. Items of Power can be stolen during base raids. Why suffer through this obviously almost impossible trial to get an IoP only to have it stolen in a base raid later on?

5. Finally, everyone in the raid has to have CoV to participate (because you access the mish from the base).

Some people logged over to test to run it and they said that it's very doable within a 1/2 hour. Only problem is though is trying to find an SG that has that many members, the prestige to build a base, CoV, and a time to accomplish it.

In my own opinion, they really need to cut down the cost of a supergroup base and up the prestige 500% to 1000%. As it stands, I know of only two supergroups on Freedom that have the 8 room supergroup base required for this raid. Unfortunately, poor supergroups like ours and Roo's can never hope to have anything resembling a proper base so we are automatically excluded from that type of content unless we join another SG......which means we'd have no control over how to build the base, too.

I want to quit this game so bad but until I have something proper that will hold my attention (DDO), I doubt I cancel my subscription. One note, though...I've pretty much given up playing CoV for now. It's just a little too boring for me. The only positive aspect of my lvl 21 stalker is the assassination hit coming out of hide. One on one after that and it's a quarter toss as to whether or not I'll live. I can only solo on the lowest setting without incuring too much debt, plus I can barely afford to keep the DO slots in the yellow.

Time to get my tank to level 50 and become PR's first lvl 50 tank. Then maybe I'll try to take a troller or defender to 50.....trying to get one of each. Already got a scrapper and a blaster at lvl 50. My tank is at lvl 28 right now......oh, and he just got the Kraken badge yesterday!

Rob

Ok, this is semi off topic, but i didn't want to start a new thread for it (sue me :p ).

Here's a link to a long and well thought out opinoin on the lifecycle of a MUD (Multi User Dungeon = an MMORPG - Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game), and the do's and don'ts associated with it. It's a bit dated, but still applicable...it's especially poignant in relation to the direction that NcSoft has taken CoH.

WARNING: PROFANE LANGUAGE IS CONTAINED IN THE SITE I'M LINKING TO


Linkaroonie

with the having to own CoV, that's not true. you can enter your base if you don't have CoV, you just can't edit it. don't know why they made that restriction. no one's going to pay $50 just so they can edit their base.

if you do need infamy, just find me when i'm online. i got plenty left over now. it feels to me that the ATs in CoV are a little bit unbalanced. I've been soloing mishes on the highest level since lvl 12 when i realized i could actually do them. Teams of MMs and corruptors tear through all like no other and having any other class on the team except for maybe a dominator just slows us down. i haven't even teamed with a stalker since 20 levels ago (and I think that was you, Rob)

I think that's partly why I quit playing CoV...no one wants to team with a stalker. Hell, why should they? They are good for one assassin hit and even then, you can't take down any villain higher than you so why bother? They are even more squishy than blasters on CoH are.

I'm flowing pretty well with the post I6/ED disaster over at CoH and will probably stick around, even though I'm about the only real active member in the SG now. My tank is to lvl 35 and as soon as I roll him to lvl 50, I'll get to work on my Defender (currently lvl 7), then my controller. I'd like to have one of each at lvl 50. To make sure that I can get a team, both my defender and controller are empaths (able to heal).

Rob

once i get Eresh to level 40, i'll probably go back to CoH a little bit. probably spread out my time over more toons.