In all my time paying City of Heroes, both when it was live and since the return of the game last year, I've only once come up against a mission that I couldn't beat. I was on a super strength/invulnerability brute, about level 40, every enemy in the mission was a boss mob with psi attacks, and /Inv offers basically zero defence against psi damage. It didn't take me long to drop that mission, and that was the only time I recall even being tempted to do so.
Until now.
The mission I'm facing now – I'm not quite ready to say stalled on – is a perfect storm of difficulty. It has multiple ambushes, which are not only tough in themselves, but mean that the mobs are still aggro'd on me if I self-rez and will run back into combat with me before I've shaken off the stunned status effect that follows a rez, let alone restored my health and endurance. This doesn't tend to end well.
If I release back to the medical teleporters instead it's a long way through the Underground back to the mission door – so long that I think the mission actually timed out because I'd taken too long to get back there, which I've never seen before in CoH.
I'm also level 19, and since I don't dare level up to 20 for risk of out-levelling the final story arc of Praetoria that's not going to change any time soon. This is probably the biggest problem, because level 19 is easily the most punishing level in all of City of Heroes. The innate accuracy bonus that smooths out the early experience is gone, and half my enhancements are red (i.e. no longer functioning) because the level 15s are obsolete and I can't afford to fully load up on level 20s. This impacts my accuracy, my endurance usage, the duration of my holds and even my damage output. It's a tough mission, and I am quite literally at the weakest I will ever be relative to the content I am doing.
Finally, this is part of the story arc, and given the linearity of Going Rogue, it's not like I can just drop it and go do something else instead. Well, technically I could, but the story is the reason to do Praetoria.
I still have options, though not many. The usual fallback of loading up on +def inspirations won't accomplish much in this situation seeing as it's not one single fight I'm dealing with but several in rapid and unpredictable succession. The long run back upon defeat makes me more inclined to load up on rez this time, though that has its own issues, as mentioned, due to the way ambushes handle aggro.
I could also auto complete the mission, but that's definitely a last resort. That does at least put it ahead of dropping my notoriety to -1/x1/no bosses, which I just won't do, because I never do that.
This mission has beaten me twice so far, so I'll take another couple of runs at it before I consider the auto complete option. It's a challenge, and I always like it when my steady progression through an MMO throws up one of those, although I can't say that 'steady' is a word I'd actually use to describe this particular run.
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