Normally don't review things, understand this is mostly opinion, I am going to throw some of the problems I'm seeing with the rampage.
Its repetitive, and many factors lead to a boring experience inevitably.
Well after doing over 30 runs of the fire and ice I can say that, the drop rates suck, way to badly. I've had cases where a character I enter the rampage on just never gets the token to drop, at all. The costume pieces you can earn are likewise, nothing fancy. In fact i'd argue they are very poor in quality. The aura's are decent, but even then they are not necessarily a good reason to do the alert. The fact of the matter is, this is a purely RNG based grind system, and the drop rate can be so low that people report running it 40+ times and still not getting any tokens to drop. There is no guaranteed progress system in place.
It's especially repetitive, more-so than the incarnate trials(which were fun, since you had a variety of people in them and not the same healer/tank/damage), and generally the wait time to setup a team is especially long, I had a couple cases already of the team waiting for 30-40 minutes for someone of a specific role to come. I know the thread hadn't had a post for more then 10 days but I didn't see a reason to start a new one. Every encounters ends up with the same trinity everyone either wrongly loves or correctly despises(however you view it), with little variety. While people speak of a few debuff setups that could reduce the damage of the enemies, you still have to factor in how rarely such builds are going to be made, and how no one in there right mind is going to make a character who is exclusively built to debuff the bosses. So you'd be waiting around even longer unless you got really lucky to get someone who can do that.
The core issue is that the base damage of frosticus is far to high. He can hit for over 14k damage easily, so you have to have either invulnerability of defiance to be able to survive that. Lightning reflexes requires you to min-max to absolute 100% dodge chance in order to survive his attacks. It's not much better dealing with kenina either. The damage is high enough that hybrids and tanks cannot adequetly heal through it, and the lack of variety of debuffs generally means they are doing their max damage. At the same time, they'll still occasionally launch a random attack out, that does up to 14k damage. If you fail to dodge that attack as an LR, it's instant death. This seems to happen even with perfect tanks, to. Regeneration needs to have all constitution to survive, PFF is rendered useless due to it's slow recharge. So that leaves invuln and defiance as the only viable passives in the alert.
The positives, I can say that the ice pillers, and also the living fire/living ice are actually things the team can deal with without any real problems. At 1/3rd health kenina and frosticus will begin fighting back to back, and launch calldown attacks to force people to move. While this isn't a huge problem, in fact it's good, it doesn't actually do as much damage as you'd think for some reason, in fact it's kind of weird, sometimes I get hurt, other times I don't take any damage, inspite being in the areas of effect.
But then there is the last gimmick of the fight, one that, if you played the BAF, you'd be familiar with, but is far less forgiving(in a bad way). You have to kill them at the exact same time, but instead of starting over with the fight, the team will automatically lose. The survivor will begin going berserk, and starts getting exponentially high damage buffs. Eventually, even the highest resistance and dodge/avoidance will see themselves taking 15k+ damage in each shot. While it's easy to keep them close, if the team messes up, it guarantees everyone will have to start over from scratch, as it's an automatic wipe at that point that drags on.
If I was to compare this to an incarnate trial, I'd say, it's short, but you still need a lot of time. The fact that you need very specific team setups to have any chance and there's literally is no way around it, unlike the imperius tf in CoX, you can expect to wait around for 30 minutes to an hour, easily, and get bored especially fast. Even that is not a guarantee of success. It requires very heavy min/maxing as well, something none of the content in CoX does. Fact is, city of heroes had a huge variety of buffs debuffs and crowd control so you were going to have variety even in old content in the overall gameplay, CO does not have that.
It's gameplay is very predictable, more-so than anything in city of heroes, simply because of the lack of variety in builds that are really viable. Combined with the especially low drop rates of the main appealing item, I rate the rampage a D-. It is nice and new and does make you move once in a while, and it's gimmicks can be dealt with, but the rest of the fight isn't fun. When people run this rampage 47 times with no drops, it's a huge alarm bell, and a major red flag against Champions Online's future.
