City of whiffs

With the new patch out, logged into City of Heroes for the first time in a couple of months today. Took my lvl 28 claw/regen scrapper and picked up a timed mission I had refrained from taking the last time I logged in. Go to DA, carve some meat off a few Devouring Earth, recover a couple of artifacts. No problem.

I enter the mission door and I'm faced with yellow minions and orange LTs. Excellent, this will be good xp. Leapt into the fray . . . only to miss repeatedly. Like 15 whiffs in a row. On the orange mobs, I was literally only hitting on crits. Ye gods, every single attack I have is one-slotted with a green Acc SO. Apparently Cryptic made some SERIOUS tweaks to the combat system.

I check the boards -- can't believe people aren't up in arms about this. If this was UO, there'd be 500 people threatening to delete their characters and quit.

OK, so they made PvM a little tougher. Probably a side effect of adding the PvP arenas. And it's not like it didn't need it -- I rarely got KOed back in the day. So I'll do what UO players do -- adapt.

I leave the mission door, run to a contact, and fill up on yellow pez. Back to the mission door (42 minutes remaining). I also notice, on checking my enhancements, I've got a +3 Acc SO just sitting in my inventory wating for me to level (probably from completing a story arc). One of my attacks does -DEF to the target, so I replace one of my damage slots with that. Between changing my tactics to lead with that attack, and judicious use of yellow pez, I manage to take down even the +1 LTs. Yay! I find the 4 mission artifacts, then I figure instead of hitting the exit button, I'll clean up the spawn inside the instance. And what happens? "Disconnected from mapserver". Log back in and it happens again. Which is a bummer, but I'm not a masochist. I call it a night.

Moral of the story? No idea. Maybe "MMOs change, get over it?"