Wing_Leader

Acquiring Incarnate power requires farming content. There's simply no getting around it.

Of course the pedants will point out that there are three ways (now) to get your iXP and your iSalvage, and so you can pick which type of content you like best (missions, TFs, or Trials). Unfortunately, all three are in the form of repeatable content that you must run through over and over and over to unlock slots and accumulate salvage, which means that if you hate farming--regardless of the style of content delivery--you are forced to choose between doing something you hate or not progressing your character to a point necessary to participate in The Comng Storm (or, at least, any of the parts that directly involve The Battalion).

Prepare to get your farm on, or miss out on The Big End Game.

I think it is a reasonably good addition, especially for Dual Pistols Blasters. Now all your Kunasagi and Hit Girl fantasies can be realized.

This.

I usually slot SOs at 22, and then replace everything with L30 common IOs at 27 and leave them that way until 47 when everything gets replaced by L50 set IOs. As new enhancement slots are added during levelling, I usually slot them with whatever the highest level common IO is I am allowed to make at the time.

Oh, and I usually drop in the L21 Performance Shifter +End procs as soon as the slots open up for them. And then the various unique proc IOs like Karma, Kismet, Numina's Conv, Steadfast Prot, etc. which are usable at levels ranging from 10 to 30. This, of course, requires farming Hero Merits as often as possible so that I can buy the recipes from Fort Trident as needed.

It also means building up a warchest of influence. I was able to finance all my new character's IO builds from a couple juicy purple recipe drops. YMMV.

More to the point, it prevents Tankmages at level 1. Most of the MMO design community still seems deathly afraid of this. If they designed a better game system to begin with, then they would have nothing to fear from giving players more freedom. Open power selection only results in a broken game when the game as a whole isn't designed properly.

Okay, well I don't think you represent the majority of CoX players who are, by and large, total carebears. I, for one, don't play the CoX end game for a "challenge," I play to see my character kick villain *** (the game is basically just a big interactive superhero cartoon to me). The regular 1-50 missions are so easy that there is no Hero Fails And Must Dust Himself Off And Try Again type drama to be found (except in the few story arcs where certain missions are rigged to fail no matter what you do). The iTrials are not the place, IMO, to suddenly try and insert that sort of narrative motif into the game. If the game is going to introduce challenging play, then it should make it part of the game from the beginning and keep it challenging all the way through. But besides all that, the sharp jump in failure rates in the iTrials are not indicative of well-designed tactical challenges, but are indicative of difficulty-through-obscurity, which is a cheap and intellectually lazy form of game design.

Well, yes, because pointing that out (and nothing more) didn't do anything to further any position in this debate. I mean, finding one or two aspects of the iTrials in a significantly simplified and/or watered-down form in the 1-50 game is hardly worth pointing out, is it?

In the 8 years I've been playing the game I don't think I've done any of those missions, or if I have, I maybe ran into one or two of them once in my entire CoX career, but I don't even remember them. They are so inconsequential in terms of representing the style of gameplay in the 1-50 game, or the manner in which you approach the 1-50 game, that they do little to nothing to make your point, IMO (assuming that your point is meant to be a counter-argument to mine that the standard 1-50 game does not prepare players for the Figure Out How To Beat The Mission By Failing A Dozen Times style of "challenge" presented by the iTrials, with the severe time constraints being a major contributing factor to that).

You are comparing the oranges of the timed iTrials to a few tangerines amidst the mountain of apples that is the regular 1-50 game. If that is meant to stand in refutation of what "I was saying," methinks you need to try again.

The convention organizers are aware of this and see it as a virtue; even the street banners announce it as "Celebrating the Popular Arts". It is, and has been for years now, a general pop culture festival centered around generally nerdy things. But its ties to comic books is largely incidental now.

I knew the SDCC I once loved was dead and gone forever when they had a Glee panel. Easily half of the "content" of the convention has no connection whatsoever to comics or animation. I only go because it doesn't cost me anything to attend (aside from parking fees), and it is an excuse to visit my friend in San Diego.

While this is true in a strictly literal sense, I see the above statement as fairly disingenuous. The timed missions in the regular 1-50 game might as well not be timed at all. 60-90 minutes is about 5-10x more time than is needed by any experienced player, i.e., a player who is experienced with the basic CoX game mechanics but has never done that particular mission before. That is utterly unlike iTrial time restrictions which are extremely severe for leagues doing initial runs because there is no time to regroup and try any other tactics when first ideas inevitably fail. To my mind, timed iTrials and timed regular missions are not even remotely comparable despite both of them involving a countdown timer.

Learn As You Go is fine so long as the cost isn't trial failure the first X times you go through it for The Learning Experience. The problem is that the iTrials are so unforgiving--when you don't yet know the gimmicks and how to defeat them--that applying sound CoX combat tactics are not enough to win the day. I don't like games where I (or, rather, the team/league) can't pull victory from the jaws of defeat by the vigorous application of tried and true tactics. No, when the only way to reach the success state is to master a handful of unique gimmicky activities, the game is basically asking you to learn an entirely new game (in effect, each trial is its own game you have to learn how to play). Just the fact that the iTrial stages are usually timed makes them fundamentally different from established CoH content (from a tactical point of view).

Sure, and that's because "the most number of players" happen to be blueside. But it didn't have to be that way. I get the economics of it, but that's not going to placate the 1%-ers who want to be villains who initiate (their own) evil plans rather than just respond to someone else's (that's what heroes do, not villains).

The co-op content only presents the crises from a heroic perspective, e.g., how to stop Tyrant. It never presents the crisis as an opportunity to achieve greater villainy (e.g., to supplant Tyrant with something "worse"--from a hero's perspective anyway--without it resulting in the End of Days). The writers of the Praetorian storyline created a closed narrative which forced only one possible outcome, which really happens to be the Heroic Imperative, and no amount of spin control changes the fact that villains are given no choice but to play along for no reward besides delayed gratification (a chance to be evil later after the current evil is defeated).

And keep in mind that this isn't just about co-op content. It is just as much about virtually all of the redside content. It is ultimately about the epic failure that is the implementation of "supervillainy" as a whole in CoV/CoX. The fact that the development team could not come up with a way for villain players to concoct their own evil schemes speaks volumes, to me anyway, about their creative blinders (the blame for which will most surely get brushed off onto the engine).

Yeah, and whose fault is that? The reason CoV failed wasn't because the marketplace wasn't into the notion of playing villains; it was because when they got a taste of Paragon's idea of villainy, they turned away and said "No thanks." Perhaps if the Devs had delivered a City of Villains game worthy of the name, the results would have been profoundly different. In this sense I think the developers made their own bed and now we are all having to lay in it.

Does GG even play redside? Does she know what it means to be a villain? Doing the right thing for (morally) wrong reasons is not evil enough to qualify as villainy, but I don't think she gets that. Arguing with her over the nature of redside content (or co-op content that fails to satisfy both hero and villain players) is pretty pointless when there is no common conceptual framework to ground the discussion.

Yes, it is abundantly clear that the Incarnate content was designed very deliberately as a rejection of the design model of the 1-50 game. You simply can not bring any assumptions from the standard game into the Incarnate game. Some of the more advanced trials like Apex and Tin Mage II, which serve as pseudo-introductions to the Incarnate game, give players a taste of what is to come, and by that I mean they give a kind of heads up that most of their understanding of how to "run" (and succeed at) the missions must be left at the door.

Whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing seems to be a personal preference issue. If you come from WoW then you are accustomed to raids in which prior game experience only helps you a little because success relies more on knowing the particular gimmicks of each raid than on your overall grasp of the game's basic mechanics (or your character's abilities). But if you like CoX for all the ways in which it is different from games like WoW, then the Incarnate content is an enormous source of frustration.

At first the frustration comes from the fact that 90% (or more) of leagues will fail a new trial the first time (in fact, the first few times) because they haven't learned the "tricks" to winning it yet. This is the Discover How To Win As You Play model of game design, which is decidedly un-CoX-like. And then, after a trial has been "mastered", frustration comes from the simple knowledge that it took X number of needless failures to reach basic competency and now it is a cakewalk unless your league is full of newbies or uncoordinated soloists thinking they can just get by with their +3 shift and liberal use of Ionic Judgement.

The iTrials have polarized play, IMO. You either get a league full of people who assume everyone knows what to do and everyone goes off doing their own thing, relying on their level shifts and IO set bonuses to keep them alive, or you get a league run by a skilled leader who makes sure everyone knows what to do and when. I can tell you from personal experience that the latter is phenomenally rare (even on Virtue); about the only time I see it is when someone like Crux Enigma takes people on MO runs and leads it like an uncompromising drill instructor. 99% of the time, however, I end up on leagues made up of cats led by someone who knows the futility of herding them.

True. But I try to imagine if my new character would, given his or her personality, actually name themselves that way, and 99% of the time the answer is a resounding No. That strategy is good for obtaining a unique name (sometimes), but not necessarily for obtaining a name that fits the look, concept, and personality of the character.

Not surprising, really. I would not, however, buy a comic with either of those names on the front cover. No offense, but while those may be perfectly adequate names for the characters in question (they actually sound more like throw-away villains to me than franchise heroes, but whatever), they do not ring the bell for me in terms of sounding like classic four-color superhero names like you would see starring in a comic book from Marvel or DC (and yes, that is the sort of superhero world I want to play in). If you are setting out to prove that it is relatively easy to find unique names that aren't very classic sounding, then you have succeeded, but I don't think that is the OP's goal.