It’s the only way i can see AEGIS being used again and it not be frowned upon because there would be no need to grind the gear again.
The fact that we can use those towers already means it is entirely possible that UTA could make a valuable and welcome return to the game in a new elite and NM mode of “The Penthouse”
Frantic hair on fire fun indeed 
I know what Aegis was. I was asking Darxide if he was saying they never should have cut it.
Putting the most op tank build in activity finder instead of nurfing (rebalancing) tanking seems like creating more problems rather than addressing the real one.
I’d be concerned about them rebalancing things. Most of us grumpy vets here have seen their numbers do some really crazy stuff (6 second Ur Draug, while it took aligning the freaking planets to pull off was insane.) Really even before 10.9/11 gear in TSW it was not unusual to spend more time waiting for DABS to come off CD than you did fighting the boss.
Oldschool healing wasn’t immune to this either. Fist healing was leaps and bounds ahead of blood with an input pattern that was 1,2,3,4 over and over.
Penthouse 3’s numbers until MFA/B were so tight, I think it even being do-able was more of an accident than deliberate design. (This does happen, even WoW people beat their heads against the wall that was C’tun until someone started doing the math and pointed out that he was mathematically impossible to beat in his current state.)
Then there is the current dungeons where incoming healing really cannot keep up with incoming damage, threat issues, defensive stats actually being detrimental (Pain Suppression does not trigger on glanced hits).
In the effort to make the game a story driven RPG and more accessible to your average MMO crowd has really killed a lot of the group content options in the game as the design choices don’t really play well together, especially when you take a game that was on the old system and pound it through the square hole of an action oriented combat system.
WoW C’thun’s state you are talking about happened in 2004/2005.
The genre was ages away from where it is now. Unfortunaly, even WoW 2005 game mechanics are superior to some SWL stuff such as tanking and healing.
The most recent of re-balancing techniques they attempted resulted in this:
They changed something to do with stationary enemies that meant ALL stationary bosses were effected by something and they acted in unusual ways they shouldn’t have been. Random one shots to the dps/healer.
You have to be careful what you touch and be careful also what you wish for.
The healer tank issue we have been discussing recently is easily solved and requires no intervention as such from Funcom. Sustain tanking can stay as far as i’m concerned. They may want to look at some elements of the build as it is indeed a tad OP but it is easily countered by more people promoting the use of traditional tanking methods and the use of the very much needed and required healer role.
If only there were some way to test player suggestions and design changes and rebalances before inflicting them on the general playerbase.
IMO, one of the better rebalances they ever did was the final incarnation of Fusang, which went under a lot of player testing and feedback on Testlive. And IMO, one of the worst unilateral changes was MFB 6 NM, whose “fix” was never fixed and had a detrimental impact on the availability pool for NM raids.
Funcom is already running the risk of alienating the players who are invested in the current system (sustain tanks, high IP players, Cruel Delight users) vs alienating the people who would benefit from a change (newbies, healers, ect). And you can only alienate people so many times and for so long before they leave, especially if you throw untested changes at them blindly.
How do you know stuff is untested?
Improveable? Sure. Untested? That’s a long shot in any game.
We all know that most of the changes applied to live and new things (such as Agent Network and SA) doesnt go thru any kind of playtesting from actual players. Ofc there are things that does involve player testing but this is minimal. Let’s say AR and Ele buffs did not go thru any kind of play testing. If there would have been, we would have told that CB will be way too OP x) That was just an example now, bad one maybe but Im sure you got my point.
Funcom’s internal testing means little to me. My MFB 6 example. Players had to prove the fight was extraordinarily difficult if not impossible without 1 healtank + 4 DPS with 2.9 AEGIS and perfect play, well above the bottom threshold for the dungeon.
We don’t have the “Testlive” servers anymore do we? or have i completely missed where they are now?
SWL never had a Testlive server. The only testing players ever got to participate in was beta. 
Yeah i thought as much. I see a Testlive on the conan forum. I’m assuming that’s where ours went to along with servers and staff and the teaboy or girl 
The servers still exist. It’s just not known when and who is able to use it or for what.
I think the story goes that after the Beta they used it as more of a press server but that’s something only funcom themself can give you a straight answer about.
I was wondering if they would implement those towers for instances that required Aegis since they already appeared in swl. It would make for a new mechanic in swl that would add a new challenge.
Correct. Removing it was a huge misstep.
There was a closed test for elite dungeons after launch that a few players got pulled in for.
Point still stands. You can make a fight like that by not simply checking your numbers work even today.
There were quite a number of people who cleared Penthouse 3 before MFA was released. It was incredibly difficult on purpose, but far from impossible. It was the current progression content at the time, I see no problems with it being brutally difficult. Once MFA was released it became much easier even though the fight was not touched. It was just increases in gearing. Once MFB was released, the fight became trivial and easily doable by anyone who was in MFB at the time and then MFB was beating people up. The adjustments made to MFB actually made it harder to complete which I don’t think was right and is a much better example of the point you might have been trying to make. MFB6 went from being easy to being a slog. It wasn’t “hard” exactly, it just required perfection over the course of a 10 minute fight if you wanted to beat the enrage. (I actually think it was 6 minutes, but it felt a lot longer especially with the kite phase taking up nearly two minutes.)
Yes, if one is not checking numbers, that can definitely happen.
Most MMOs do extensive checking nowadays, especially WoW.
A quick question - if one player is fully maxed out - all items are red on max level - is there any benefit to doing new raid content (provided they ever release new one)?
I timed it a few times, the kite phase was 200 seconds and then you had a 30 second dps window. So a total of 8:40 as the slowest possible and ~8:30 as fastest possible intended kill time. Once people found the right bugged talis you could kill it in the first dps window though making it “only” 4 minutes.
Honestly I’d be fine with a 4 minute kill time if it didn’t have so many instawipes. If a medium-experience group can clear it with minor mistakes 100% of the time then fine, 4 minutes. When any mistake by anyone, or plain bad RNG, means a new 8 minute attempt, it just isn’t something most people will want to do more than once.
And just generally, I prefer fights where stronger players clear it faster, instead of scripted events governing the entire thing and you either meet the dps check at the end or don’t. MFA 3 4 5 6 and MFB 2 3 4 5 6 all suffer from excessive scripting. They’re still interesting for the story but like SWL’s dungeons, tuned just plain too long.