Adeon Hawkwood

My understanding is that all of the slots in I20 provide a level shift, but one that will only be effective in incarnate content. I would assume that in the next round of incarnate content we will start seeing enemies with their own level shifts to make it so that a certain amount of incarnate progression is required.

I disagree, [url=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TropesAreTools]Tropes are not Bad[/quote]. There are a lot of character archetypes that get reused in stories and it is perfectly reasonable for people to want to use them to tell their own stories in CoX. In many cases particular archetypes carry with them certain styles of clothing which means that when two people use the same archetype they get similar costumes. For example, I have a DP/Storm Corruptor with a Trenchcoat and Fedora, I have seen several other Dual Pistols characters with a similar costume because it's a standard archetype.

So please remember that while you may prefer to avoid the standard archetypes entirely the same is not true of everyone. Personally I like to make characters who apply a twist to the standard archetypes (he's a hardened trenchcoat wearing bounty hunter... with magic) or combine two archetypes (she's a catgirl... in power armor) but in most cases even that has also been done before (the two examples I gave are influenced by Harry Dresden and the Kzinti respectively).

Oh yeah, my Cab Spider wears black armor with red trim. all hail Lord Recluse.

His clones add to his regen and resistance so kill them off to get him down (send the battle drones after them).

It's not as common as it used to be but it does still happen. Nowadays I see a general "looking for support" a lot more than "looking for healer" but I do see it from time to time and even see the occasional "LF2M, need Tank and Healer then g2g" style comment (which vastly amuses me).

Heck, I when recruiting for an ITF last night I had someone who wanted to know what powersets the tank on my team had before he would join. He didn't respond when I explained that most of the team hadn't zoned in yet so I had no clue whether I even had a Tanker on the team.

I don't think you meant it that way but this is a rather arrogant attitude. You get bad players with every set and I have met plenty of poor Empathy/Pain Domination players. I'm tempted to say that I've met more poor Empaths than any other set but I think that's probably perception bias on my part since it's often easier to spot someone doing a poor job with Empathy than with other sets.

Healing doesn't have a monopoly on making up for the poor play of others it is simply the type of support where doing so is most obvious (giant green numbers) just as it's the type of support that is most obvious overall.

Actually this is already done. Recipes level 10-25 use T1 salvage, 26-40 use Tier 2 and 41-50 use Tier 3 (one caveat, there are a few exceptions for 25 and 40, any recipe where 25 or 40 is the lowest available level will use one tier higher salvage for that particular level).

The reason lower tier salvage is popular with level 50s isn't because level 50 recipes need that salvage it's because:
1. There are advantages to using lower level recipes (keep bonuses when exemping)
2. Field Crafter

I don't think there is a good solution to this. Removing the 3-level restriction on set bonuses would help but you're still going to get level 50s buying lower tier salvage either when working on Field Crafter or to equip their alts.

Sure I've seen it as well. Still at the end of the day that is why the devs gave us player notes.

See in that case the optimal tactic would probably have been to use LR on her (because the potential loss of melee damage is more than made up for by the regen) but not siphon speed (since the extra damage from the kins would probably not out damage the melee characters).

But then as you say, trying to convince people that their powers are hindering the team is an uphill battle. I had a case once on my tank where the Fire controller on the team would cast bonfire directly under me before casting Fire Cages. When I pointed this out to him he insisted that the damage from bonfire was worth it, completely ignoring the fact that bonfire wasn't doing any damage due to enemies being immobilized outside it's radius. Although in his defense he did at least stop when I asked him politely.

The thing is survival in Minecraft is not a useful goal. If all you want to do it survive it's trivial to build yourself a small room with a torch and no windows at which point you can leave the game running forever and "survive".

Survival only becomes an issue in the context of having other goals to accomplish. As such I don't think Survival is a goal, it's an optional challenge to accomplishing some other goal. If you don't want it to be a concern you can turn enemies off.

Similarly (and referencing Samuel's response to my original answer) resource gathering is, again, a possible challenge to put between yourself and a goal (and is indeed the default setting) but you can also use the console to give yourself whatever resources you need rendering the need to gather resources moot.

You defined sandboxes as games that have no explicitly defined goals and I think Minecraft meets that requirement. The end goal of the game is whatever you define it to be (survive a particular length of time, build something, explore somewhere etc.). The other aspects of the game (survival and resource gathering) are simply challenge setting you can use to make your chosen goal harder to accomplish.

For example compare the following possible goals:
1. Build a replica of the Eiffel Tower out of iron blocks
2. Build a replica of the Eiffel Tower out of iron blocks harvested yourself
3. Build a replica of the Eiffel Tower out of iron blocks harvested yourself with enemies turned on

Now each is a possible goal you can set within the game but the later goals are harder. For goal two you need to find a LOT of iron (making an iron block requires you to harvest 9 veins of iron) so in addition to the building itself and the scaffolding required to work on it you need to spend a LOT of time mining. For goal three you need to do everything in goal two while also setting up your mining work in such a way as to avoid zombies.

This is very true. My standard practice against AVs with all 3 of my incarnates is to spam them with web grenades since that allows some of my other powers (specifically ignite and/or poison gas trap depending on which character) to work more effectively. With Battle Maiden I try to avoid that because while it makes things easier for me it it going to cause a lot of problems for the melee characters on the team.

Now the potential issue here is what if you have both controllers and melee characters on the team? I think at that point the team has to make a decision letting her run free will increase the damage the melee types can do while immobilizing her will increase the controller's damage due to containment. I don't think there's a single good answer here, in either case someone is being forced to perform sub-optimally so it really depends on team composition. The upside is both character types have another use in the fight controlling the ambushes so even if they aren't able to do max damage against BM they aren't useless.

Yep, this is pretty much my take on it. When I'm buying things for the purpose of reselling I'm happy to be patient. When I'm working on my build however I want it NOW!

Except getting Master of Apex requires you to kill BM quickly, it doesn't require you to kill her without dieing. The two are very different problems, for Master you need people who can handle attacking BM while moving more than anything else.

Now assuming you meant "do it without any deaths" rather than master I agree that would be tricky but I think it would depend more on player skill than particular team composition. The thing to remember is that most of the adds have limited or no ranged attacks. So what you need more than anything is for squishy characters to move around a lot and to make good use of AoE slow/immobilize powers to provide clear spaces to move to. A FF or Cold Dom character would also be handy for ranged defense and a few characters with suitable patch powers.

Some of them do although I'm pretty sure Back Alley Brawler trolls the seedy bars waiting for someone to pick a fight with him.

Not to surprising actually. The base regen of Triage Beacon is 150% (for a Corruptor anyway, I think Defender is the same) so ignoring ED the doctored wounds IO would provide 39.75% regen which is 14.75% more than the Regen Proc. If you already had some slotting then a 5% bonus could fit.

I would say yes. There is combat in Minecraft but even in survival mode the primary point of the game is to explore and build. Yes, there is combat and there is 'loot' but neither are really the point of the game they simply serve as the connection between exploring and building.

Fair enough, to me content is crunchy and everything else is filler .

Cross-sever teaming.

Raids and TFs aren't "crunchy"?

Anyway in terms of general thought sit is VERY nice to see new lower level TFs/SFs. I think the devs have done a great job with the newer TFs but except for the Positron revamp they've all be focused on level 50s (yes, the ITF scales down to 35 but it's very rare to see it run as anything other than a level 50 TF). The level range on the new TFs/SFs is interesting as well, 20-40 is a pretty big range and it's also the range that includes the largest increases in power for a lot of characters so it'll be interesting to see how well it's balanced.

Given the comments the devs made it seems likely that the physical NDA stuff was for the trials and the League system. In that case the physical NDA made a lot of sense, it's not about the quantity of stuff to test but the fact that those systems represent a major upgrade to CoX and as such something the devs would want to keep under wraps during the initial testing.

Another alternative is that it's controlled by the Praetorian Resistance and we're being invited on-board to repulse an attack by Cole/Hamidon/Ninja-Pirate-Space-Monkeys.

Well the first question to ask is do you really need purples? Purple sets are nice for some builds but in other cases non-purple sets actually provide more useful bonuses.

That being said if you do want purple sets the purple recipes you are likely to want (Hecatomb and Armageddon) are the most expensive sets so there isn't a cheap way to get them.

The easiest way to get them is to get alignment merits (either through tip missions or running TFs and converting merits). Now don't use the alignment merits to buy purples directly, it's not worth it. Instead use them to buy high value rare recipes (level 25 LotG 7.5%s are often a good choice but check the market) craft those and sell them on the market. You can often get 200 million for 2 A-Merits this way which, given the cost of purples works out to needing about 4-6 alignment merits for every purple recipe.

Now most people only slot 5 pieces of the set and the proc is generally a bit cheaper than the others so you're probably looking at around 50 alignment merits per character to get 10 purples this way.

The other options are:
1. Farm until your eyes bleed
2. Marketeering

Excluding lag the comets all spin at the same speed from what I can tell. However they are often phase shifted relative to each other (caused by the timing of activation) which can make it look like they are moving at different speeds.

I agree that is how it is supposed to work but it isn't necessarily how it does work. The thing to remember is that while the incarnate shards are different from the standard drop system they are not different from all other drop systems in the game. The mechanic of "everyone on the team has a chance for a drop" is used for quite a few other cases in the game, for example:
1. AVs: everyone gets an enhancement
2. Mothership Raid: everyone gets a Vanguard Merit
3. Monster: everyone gets a chance for an inspiration drop

Now there are two basic ways these could be implemented in the code (obviously this is more relevant to the third case than the other two since it's not a guaranteed drop):
1. Roll for each character separately
2. Roll X times and distribute as evenly as possible

Now the advantage of using the second method is that it would mean that the same piece of code is being used for all drops, it is simply told roll X drops with a chance of Y where X is either 1 or "number of team members" depending on the drop.

Now if we assume that the devs did originally implement using the second method above and that they used the same system for Incarnate shards (neither of which I would consider unreasonable assumptions) then it is entirely plausible that there is a bug in the code where for Incarnate shard drops X is being set to "number of characters on team" instead of "number of incarnates on team".

There is some truth in that, but at the same time it's important to consider the relative effectiveness. The critical ones are the T1 (gives access to Apex and Tin Mage) and the T3 (level shift).

Getting the T1 generally takes only 2 TFs (potentially 1 if you're lucky but I more likely 2). Similarly doing a T3 from scratch will probably take 4-6 component granting TFs depending on exactly which ones you run and how much you do kill versus speed (maybe one more if the WST for that week doesn't grant shards). Neither of those numbers seem particularly grindy to me.

Now yes getting the T4 does require quite a bit more effort but from a power point of view it doesn't make a huge difference. The difference between T3 and T4 is definitely less than the difference between SOs and IOs and all of the current content runs fine with just SOs.