Wonderslug

You can convert 10 shards to 10 threads once per day. You can convert 10 shards to 5 threads at any time.

I'm not aware that anyone has firmly nailed down the shard drop rate.

All current content specifically designed for incarnates is team-based. If you are asking if you can earn incarnate powers solo, the answer is yes, but it will be much slower than running trials or even weekly strike targets or standard team play. You would need to spend 156 threads to unlock all four post-Alpha slots without earning any trial XP, and the first-tier powers require a total of 60 threads to create entirely from scratch.

Ageless, aside from giving you a big chunk of blue on activation, will very briefly cap out your recovery (~14 end/sec), then give you approximately 3 targets worth of Drain Psyche recovery (as you have it slotted now), then 2 targets, then 1 target. So probably quite a lot! But as mentioned, Clarion is definitely a strong contender for your Destiny slot.

For reference, base recovery is 1.67 end/sec (although with inherent Stamina that's now effectively more like 2.33 end/sec for anyone over level 1). Your Drain Psyche is adding about 1.57/sec to that per target hit. That's only an average, though: recovery always occurs in units of 6.67% of your maximum endurance. Increasing recovery simply increases the rate at which those units are returned.

If you have a lot of fast-animating powers (which is one of the reasons why fire blast is considered strong, along with the free DoT) and high recharge, it is quite easy to temporarily "outrun" your recovery, especially without endurance reduction, at least until you hit the kinds of ridiculous numbers you get from Ageless, Adrenaline Boost, Recovery Aura, or a saturated Drain Psyche.

The other thing to bear in mind is that, while Mids will show you numbers for end drain and net recovery, that only factors in your toggles. Unless you are Toggle Man, your click powers will always burn far, far more endurance over time (and in much bigger chunks) than toggles, particularly once you have enough of them, or enough recharge, to be constantly activating them.

You're welcome.

It's not like kheldians have never gotten any attention, you know. There are a few small changes coming in 20.5, but go look at the patch notes for Issue 13. Then for added perspective take a gander at the laundry list of handicaps they launched with in Issue 3.

Yes, there are many powers that could use tweaking, but at this point slapping spackle on the holes is not going to do anything to address the systemic issues stemming from fundamentally flawed design decisions made six years ago by an inexperienced dev team and a powers designer whose basic philosophy was "I'll throw numbers at it until I find some that work okay."

The most critical one is this: kheldians were designed as shapeshifters with alternate forms tailored to specific purposes, specifically "shoot things" and "be hard to kill," which together encompass most of the highly nuanced combat system the same inexperienced dev team built into the game. At the same time, human form powers have significant overlap with the powers that come with those alternate forms. Human form, which actually contains the vast majority of available powers, is thus unavoidably consigned to comparative mediocrity, because it cannot--not will not, not should not, cannot--come too close to the performance or capabilities of the alternate forms without making them completely redundant. And if you do that you have just completely eliminated the core concept of the archetype. It's a Catch-22 situation.

You say you're not asking for a complete rework of the AT, but really you should be. Any changes of any significance that don't somehow address that foundational issue are worrying about carpet color while the house is on fire.

I would pay money directly to every member of the powers team to see Jurassik using Shield Charge.

Build him a shield out of old locomotive cowcatchers.

I haven't dusted off my ice/kin in a while--are you saying that he now uses different models for IS and GIS?

If so that is hilarious, in a not-very-funny way: way back when he used the greater model with GIS and it was taken away from him because once he pulled it out he refused to use anything else.

All they have to do now is make a silly decimal error on its accuracy and it will have come full circle. The more things change... :P

It's probably just pohsyb.

I know there was an issue in pre-beta where the changes often would not stick unless you changed something else as well. IIRC you didn't even have to keep the changes--you could change a costume piece and change it right back again before exiting. Try that.

It was actually written in I14 beta, and it was the first DC that Aeon picked, so it's definitely not on the cutting edge. I actually had to cut some stuff *out* to make it fit after I14 went live, due to some backend changes that happened after it was written. There are definitely places I'd touch up if I could, but alas.

Well, I agree there's only one sensible, intuitive and unambiguous definition, which is the mechanical one. My fault for being sloppy with terminology there.

But there's also some metafictional baggage attached to monsters, which is why I don't see the situation as entirely analogous to the rampant misuse of "accuracy." There seems to be a conceptual divide, for the most part well respected, between what constitutes a monster (usually bestial, primal, and/or really big) and an archvillain (usually reasonably human-like), Scrapyard and the the Hydra being the obvious exceptions on each side. In that light, CF Jurassik and Numina Jurassik, for example, are clearly monsters, and are called monsters, even though one of them is mechanically not a monster.

I remember when the "giant monster" concept was introduced, a dev--I want to say it was Positron--actually posted to explain the differences between monsters and giant monsters, and to assure us that monsters in instanced content would be the regular kind: which is to say, the kind that are not technically monsters at all. In that sense the devs created multiple categories of "monster" by fiat.

The problem, of course, is that the conceptual categories of monster/GM/AV the devs presented and the mechanical classifications of same a) do not map neatly to each other and b) are both trying to occupy the same namespace, which is just a recipe for confusion. That's the same basic problem you have with archvillain-class Numina and boss-class Kadabra Kill both being labeled "Hero," which is also a frequent source of confusion and which drives me nuts. I think the conceptual distinctions are important, but not so much so as to justify giving players misleading or apparently contradictory information.

So yeah, I let the flavor text influence my choice of words.

Calling the term "monster" meaningless was perhaps hyperbolic. Would you accept "ambiguously and often inappropriately employed in numerous situations"?

Actually, I'm now wondering if originally all "monsters" really were actual monster-class critters, especially since at the dawn of time they were considerably more fragile than they are now. I do recall both monsters and AVs were tinkered with early on; IIRC, a precursor of the current "levelless" GM system was introduced sometime after the first Halloween event, either as the cause of or in the wake of the infamous "Winter Lord babies" kerfuffle. Presumably at that point most instanced monsters would have become the AVs-wearing-nametags they are today, if they weren't already. If that was the case, continuing to call the instanced versions "monsters" could almost be justified as grandfathering in.

Well now, see, I think it's playing pretty fast and loose with the term to call a lot of World Wide Red "content." Technically newspaper missions are "content." But spending entire missions, of what by current standards are newspaper-level quality, on obtaining single pieces of information that only minutely advance the plot is nothing more than padding for length. If someone went through WWR and gutted all the filler you could probably get it down to half its current size, and it'd be all the better for it.

Not that I don't agree the Faultline stuff was a bit short, but that was I8. They'd just finished banging out ten full levels of content on a skeleton crew. I'm willing to cut some slack there.

(The VEAT "arcs," now, those are pretty inexcusable.)