Agent White

Ok so the big day has come. We have an incarnate zone! And darkness control! and a non-DFB, Non-Itrial new trial! And a new iTrial! oh and some flying disc thing.

Anyhow, what do you guys think?

Personally, I'm in love with Dark Astoria. The intro arc is suitably creepy as all hell and gives a pretty cinematic introduction to Mot and the area. The zone looks flat out amazing, I love that it's night all the time, the red war walls are gorgeous and the music just adds so much to the atmosphere. Plus, it's awesome being in a zone and having all my level shifts active.

I ran through heather's arc and mu'vorkan's arc. Is the timer set like the SSAs? I've been reading everything was on a 20 hour timer from the get go, but after finishing both arcs I got to pick a component each time. Is it like the SSAs where each initial completion gets a 'free pick' then they're all linked? Will have to experiment! I really enjoyed the writing on all the arcs so far, though the initial ones seem kind of.. short? I really see why folks on beta were talking about speeding Heather's, there's just not much meat in terms of activity. We'll see how the rest of them go! Also thread drops seemed pretty plentiful, already leagues above shard rates.

I did a number of the repeatables. As expected, they kept the 2 thread reward, with a 20 hour cooldown that drops it to 1 thread in the meantime. The 5 reward merits and super inspiration, on the other hand, seem to have no cooldown of any kind. Looking forward to what tweak they've got planned.

The new mobs are all pretty neat and varied. I was kind of hoping for some updates to everyone, but it seems the Circle have their same behemoths and ice thorn mages carried over from Peregrine. But the new Banished Pantheon, the new Knives of Vengeance, all pretty wicked

I also managed to get an Adamastor ritual drop, so immediately hopped out to go test that out. With a team of 4 50s we took him down in just a few minutes. Not bad, it's just 500 inf for the recipes and you take it to a lil spot just by the old Dark Astoria entrance. The ritual temp is kind of long, think the normal auctionhouse Teleporter. The reward was 10 merits and 5 threads (And the badge, presumably, if you haven't taken him down before) with an hour cooldown on when he could be summoned again. Managed to snag another copy of the ritual before I finished playing, so it seems to drop semi-frequently from any BP critter.

Also ran the new Drowning in Blood trial. It's... okay? It's about as 'complicated' as DFB. You get dumped into a spot, charge forward tearing through mobs to the end. This one actually has folks you can talk to, chiefly certain NPCs to transport you to the next area (which some folks were a little lost since they didn't pay attention to the text prompts) and some of the rescued NPCs have dialogue. The trial felt a little slower than DFB and didn't feel like it was throwing as many mobs at me. It -definitely- doesn't have the same number of archvillains, only the Devstator at the end that splits, so I guess 2? It's a bit hard to compare how it goes XP wise because I ran it on my 50, but we had a non-50 pop up a level while running it.

The badges on it are pretty easy, but slightly obtuse. There's just the completion badge, killing both AVs within 30 seconds of each other, and then 'claiming' all 4 meteors. The AV one is pretty easy, but people need to be aware that the Devastator splits into 2 when he hits 50% hp, the clone spawns right on top of the original so they clip together, it's easy to not see both of them when you're up close with it. As for the meteors, I'm not sure if they were bugged or the trial simply doesn't tell you, but you have to interact with the meteors -before- completing that segments objective. If you try to after the meteors are unresponsive and you can't interact with them in any way. Nothing in the trial tells you this. Still it was easy and it exemps you down to 20 if you're over. It'll be something different to toss in when you get tired of DFB.

We also got together and ran Dilemma Diabolique. If it weren't for the level shifted enemies, I actually would assume this was intended to be a beginner trial. The mechanics are pretty dead simple and stupid easy to accomplish. Of course, it was a whole league of maxed out incarnates, but really, there wasn't a single hiccup in the trial. No one died at any point and we managed to snag the badge for both ignoring Diaboliques helpers at the end and making sure she didn't consume any essences. It's definitely going to be farmed repeatedly, it has no 'easy grief' button like TPN with civvies/cameras and there's no choke point phases like MoM where you might hit problems.

Zwillinger also hopped on to toss flying discs at people in Atlas. Ran down and got someone to toss one at me. It's cute. Completely not worth 250 pts.

Anyway, those're my initial impressions. I still have the rest of DA's arcs to get through, but I'm -really- loving the zone so far. I'll definitely be tempted to take some turns on it once I hit some more characters to 50. I'm quite tempted to try some dark/* */dark characters, and I still want to check out my stalker and my plant dominator for their respective buffs. Still, I'm pretty jazzed by the new issue so far, I think it's an amazing addition the game sorely needed.

The drop rate on threads is -way higher- than shards anyway.

yeah, because those tokens are burning a hole in your pocket to be used on all the -other- Tier 9 repeatable rewards.

hellooooo, what's this? Some buffs to jack Frost and, more importantly to me, the Giant Fly Trap? Sweet! Those look very nice, hopefully up his survivability a fair bit >>

I dunno about you all, but tomorrow I get to start on the road to take down a Dark God that's been a pretty interesting part of the lore for quite a while now and feel like a complete badass while doing it. Maybe it's me, but I call that a pretty big 'win', regardless of States and Psych biting it outside of our control.

It depends on your server too. Victory has a really nice crew that does trials regularly and we run most of them. TPN and MoM are great trials for doing repeatedly, TPN because it's really pretty easy and nabs you a min. of 60 threads but even then completing it isn't that bad. As well, it's -very- easy to get a MoTPN badge within one or two runs, which is nice for the extra uncommons and random rare. That and TPN and MoM have no cool down from emp -> Astral and it's a lot nicer for building up that emp cache in case you don't get that

Plus we've got Dark Astoria to help folks running solo and small teams to help move things along a little faster.

But being open about being a newbie tends to help too, letting folks know you're not level shifted or even if you have anything crafted. I've seen several times where groups will be deciding on a trial and folks pipping up about "I Need physical" experience helps choose.

The Underground is honestly a lot of fun for me. It's a great dungeon crawl and while a couple points can be a bit irritating, it's not really that bad. It's easily got the best atmosphere of any iTrial except maybe MoM, but that one moves so fast it's hard to appreciate any particular area as you're frantically trying to make sure the phase succeeds. The underground, however, has this wonderful gradual transition as you move from the sharp clean lines of the Praetorian underground sewer/train/etc system into this smooth curvy organic Geiger-esque hive of living plants and corrupted IDF & monsters, ending with the fight against the big bad Avatar.

Really I'm hoping we get some Praetorian Eden style zone that uses some of those art assets.

Hey folks,

starting to get a lot of my alts up there in level and starting to hit that magic 35 where I can start choosing pool powers, if I'm not grabbing the T8/T9 secondaries right away. Which... for some, I'm definitely not.

Anyway I'm not really looking for min/max or anything and not even really looking for build tweaks per se, just kind of fishing about for what generally meshes well with the power sets I've got.

As another note, I'm not really interested in side switching just to grab patron power pools, so my Heroes will stay heroic and my villains will stay villainous. anyhow, here's what I've got:

Necromancy/Dark Miasma Mastermind Hero

Dual Pistols/Traps Corruptor Hero

Storm Summoning/Sonic Defender Hero

Kinetic Melee/Superior Reflexes Scrapper Vigilante

Ninja blade/Ninjitsu Stalker Hero

Super Strength/Willpower Brute Villain

VEAT Fortunata tract Villain

Plant Control/Fire Assault Dominator Villain

Electric Blast/Devices Blaster Rogue

So, ya, thoughts, suggestions?

I have an elec/devices blaster, it's pretty handy for extra damage. Since it can't draw any aggro to itself, my usual plan when taking on a spawn I need to drop it for is to drop it -behind- me, lay a trip mine, then fire my snipe at the hardest target and let them run to me. Has worked pretty well so far, honestly.

You could always just delete the character. As long as nothing about the character is exclusive to the game, like their backstory or look (And.. that's kind of hard given how few pieces are truly 'unique'. But that's sort of the awesome thing about the game's character generator, so many generic pieces to create just about any concept) you should be golden with your concept.

Or use a rename token >>

There'll be the new bloody bay trial for the 15-30 range too.

Just don't do it redside

I'd love to join in, looking forward to the trial

@Tredain, ill/rad controller.

I can honestly say I have never heard any phrase along the lines of "Oh man, X game is coming out, but my MMO is releasing a big update the SAME DAY, HOW WILL I CHOOSE?" Nowhere among any of my friends have ever been swayed one way or the other. They get their new game and download their new update. I don't really think it's an 'either or' choice for too many people.

Congrats! It's a wonderful feeling being an Uncle, mostly because, at any point, you can hand them off to the parents and not feeling guilty or obligated

Well, to be fair, it actually -is- in I22. A lot of the new Tsoo use it.

Yeah I wouldn't be surprised to see Staff hit with I22 as an added surprise, I kind of get the feeling they either thought testing on it would take longer or they'd have I22 out sooner.

Actually it's less the competition they're worried about and more the fact that fans will hold them to their word even when they have to backpedal due to complications.

if Zwill said 'I22 launches Monday, March 5th' and March 5th rolls around and it isn't live because, say, there were unforeseen complications pushing it to live and they had to roll it back to fix it, there would be hell to pay from all the fans that geared up to jump into I22 on Monday. It does not matter there's a good reason, people take any firm dates or direct statements as immutable facts. That's entirely why you see on the coffee streams when they're asked something about an upcoming feature (issue release date, incarnate slots, new zones, etc) they have to give either a nebulous answer or 'no comment'. The moment they say anything that borders on definite, fans take it as word of god. Like if Zwill were to say "I22 will be blue" and it turns out green in the end, there will be people screaming for blue.

Just see all the questions they still get about City Vault even after repeatedly saying the project is dead and never coming into the game.