Adeon Hawkwood

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  1. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dr_Mechano View Post
    Hush you I'm making a point!

    Besides ONLY engineers could use that AH if I remember correctly and nobody else, it was great for engineering parts and bugger all else IIRC so I would still have to use a major city for the Arctic Leather, which was Leatherworkers only.
    No, the AH was linked between cities, you could get anything there as normal. But yeah, I was mostly being contrary .
  2. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dr_Mechano View Post
    "Right Arctic Leather...oh crap now I need to go buy that from a leatherworker, ech now I've got to go to a major city to use their auction house and I'm in Northrend which doesn't have any!"
    Hang on, if you're making bombs you're an Engineer and Engineers did get a Northrend AH .
  3. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    My only concern is that the reward system should, like it does everywhere else, make some effort to reward merit. Suppose two teams split on a Lambda and one team is far better than the other, not just getting all their assign weapons but also clearing more critters in the process, and *then* having lots of spare time left over to go help the other team. The current system would, I would imagine, reward that team with somewhat more iXP. Shouldn't it?
    I guess it comes down to whether you view leagues as a "team of teams" or a single large team that is broken into sub-groups for organizational purposes.

    Personally I take the latter view and as such believe that they should not receive more than the other team. If one team is substantially faster than the other it means that the league leader failed to balance the power levels of the two teams adequately (which is hard since it's partly a matter of player skill which is hard to access). Additionally the success or failure of the trial as a whole is dependent on everyone. I don't entirely oppose merit based awards but I think they should be based on individual contributions rather than the contribution of your sub-group, especially in situations where the assignment of your subgroup to a particular task has a larger impact on your rewards than actual skill.
  4. Adeon Hawkwood

    Reward

    Sometime after April 18th.
  5. You are correct. Getting the Tier 4 requires you to have 2 tier 3 abilities (they can be any T3 ability, scroll down the lsit to find the appropriate recipe for you) plus a frew other components.

    The general idea is that the T3 is the "standard" ability and the T4 is the stretch ability for those who want a longer term goal. If you do the math the T3 abiltiy provides about 75% of the effectivenss of the T4 ability but for 25% of the cost.
  6. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Nyx View Post
    I want to rephrase. I was talking about the people who get the rewards to unlock these. So far I see more Tanks, Scrappers and Brutes. (Why no Stalkers? I dunno, I see them benefitting from unlocks more than most AT's)
    To be honest, I see more benefit to my non-melee ATs than my melee ATs although I'll admit I'm slightly biased because I prefer non-melee ATs.

    My two melee characters (Inv/Axe Tanker and BS/Sword Scrapper) are already extremely tough running on simple SOs and deal adequate damage. My three "main" characters (an AR/Dev Blaster, a Traps/AR Defender and a Bots/Traps MM) are, through significant IO investment, relatively tough but lack the staying power that my melee characters have. Even my MM, who has one of the most broken combos in the game, can feel squishy if I get hit with significant AoE damage (the best example being enemies with Footstomp).

    I am not, for the most part, feeling the need for more survivability on my melee characters but for my ranged characters the Incarnate system is awesome. For Destiny I am taking Rebirth on all three of them, I have used IOs to build up reasonable defenses on all three and I have significant resistances to some damage types (S/L/E mostly) but when I do take damage I lack any response other than inspirations. Rebirth closes that hole and adds another layer to my defenses improving my survivability substantially.

    Similarly the DoT Reactive Interface helps all three characters a lot when soloing. AR/Dev is a set that has always been slow against single tough targets so adding an extra DoT and resistance debuff helps melt bosses faster which is nice since he lacks the staying power of the other two. For the Traps/AR the damage boost to my AoEs helps a lot with large spawns (the combo of Acid Mortar and blaster damage Ignite means he actually has an easier time with bosses than the AR/Dev). For the MM the reactive Interface improves the value of BG mode. When soloing I tend to keep my Battle Drones and Protector Bots in BG mode (out of laziness mostly) which has the unfortunate side effect of spreading their damage out. With the Reactive interface this works to my advantage, since the Interface stacks are target based, not caster based, and not affected by the purple patch having my lower level bots spread their attacks amongst different targets gets me the most bang for my buck since they can build up DoTs on lots of targets while my Assault Bot focuses on large groups or tough targets.

    Judgement/Lore I don't have much to say about. both give me more damage which is always nice but neither really change the way I play beyond making the occasional tough fight a bit easier.

    At the end of the day I guess my point is that people will play what they want to play. The Incarnate abilities provide strong benefits for all ATs by allowing them to select powers that shore up their existing weaknesses. Melee ATs will continue to be popular because they are easy to play and relatively self-sufficient but the other ATs get just as much bang for their buck if not more.


    [edit]Just coming back in to add something here. Rereading the next section is comes across as somewhat lrn2play. That is not my intent at all. The general point I am trying to show is that the non-melee ATs have always had a different play style from melee ATs. The incarnate system does not change that at all. However, it is less forgiving for them than it is for melee ATs. Melee ATs have always favored a "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" approach to the game and for the most part the incarnate system does not change that (except maybe encouraging them to go in as a group). The other ATs, on the other hand, have always favored a more careful approach to groups, making sure they have sufficient support before leaping in, especially on teams. The problem is that while the "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" approach was not ideal for non-melee ATs it worked well enough that a lot of people (including me) used it anyway (especially on IO'd characters). The incarnate content is much less forgiving and as such non-melee ATs need to take more care than they are generally used to.[/edit]

    More specific responses:

    Quote:
    Controllers- Holds are good, but the enemies are highly resistant, depending on your secondary you may not contribute before death hits you.
    This comes down to timing. If enemies are mez resistant, let someone else go in first. Controllers have always been a relatively tactical AT to play, if you can lock down your foes you are invincible but you need to know when to charge ahead and when you pull back.

    Quote:
    Blasters- Damage! Yay! Aggro! Dead!
    Aggro management is a key skill for any good Blaster. Some Blasters can solo at x8 but the majority cannot. As such on a team it's important to make sure you don't get more aggro than you can handle whether through your powers or inspirations.

    Quote:
    Stalkers- Rarely see em. I think it's because AOE takes em out of stealth minimizing their survivability
    No, the problem with Stalkers is that they are single target specialists in an AoE focused game. As such they aren't particularly popular outside of PvP. The trials actually play to their strengths but they aren't popular enough outside the trials to encourage people to play them.

    Quote:
    Defenders/Corrs One deals less damage and buffs the entire 24, while one does a bit of both, They would be in the mid range for me for as to how well they do in this trial, mainly because of the secondary
    No, both do a bit of both. Both ATs are aimed at doing a mix of buffing/debuffing as well as damage. Shielding an entire 24 man league is generally a waste of time simply because most league members are not taking damage beyond what can be handled with AoE buffs.

    Quote:
    MM - Pets go Boom when the AOE Hits. You are left with a weak blaster with a defender secondary
    The only place I struggle on my MM is the Lambda weapon phase (which does really suck for MMs). Outside of that pet management is key, positioning them (and repositioning them) to avoid AoEs as much as possible helps keep them alive-ish and when it doesn't, well that's what summon powers are for. In general I keep my T2 and T3 pets up close to 100% of the time and have a few T1s up most of the time.

    Quote:
    Doms - might do better because of the single target nature of their powers, however I have never played with one in a trial.
    Doms are basically a cross between Controllers and Blasters so what I said for those ATs applies to them as well. They need to watch their aggro and make decisions about launching a mez versus holding off to avoid aggro.
  7. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Stormfront_NA View Post
    The can't invite cross-faction is merely a flag set by the devs themselves with good purpose, so blue can't invite red by mistake for blue content; same is true for the red side.
    Actually we have no way of knowing if this is true. It's possible that it's true but depending on the actual implementation fixing it could significantly more difficult than you think. Remember that when CoV was originally released it was effectively a separate game. It could feasibly setup so that inviting a cross-faction player is disallowed by default and the co-op zones are making an exception to that. Also you'll recall that it used to be that leaving a co-op zone would kick you off of a cross-faction team which also supports the idea that cross-faction teaming is not allowed by default.

    Quote:
    To begin with, if you do a search for players at a map zone, you actually get levels and AT types. So essentially the information is already there, but available in a different venue.
    My point isn't that the information is unavailable (because obviously the server knows it). It's that the server does not communicate that information to your client. In theory changing it should be easy but that raises the question of why it was implemented that way in the first place? I cannot come up with any logical reason not to communicate that information to your client ASAP so why, when the team code was first written, was it not done that way? That suggests that either there was a technical reason not to send the information immediately or there is code in place to save bandwidth and processing information by limiting information transfers (not unreasonable in a 7 year old game). If that is the case then removing that code without breaking anything could easily be a very tricky problem.

    Quote:
    Can't arrange the teams, it kinda is a mix of the two above. Obviously if you don't know the AT types, optimizing the team compositions, just can't be done in a practical manner. And the league GUI is flagged not to allow manipulation until players are there or perhaps till all the data of the player is displayed, not sure which or what is the trigger for the flag.
    The optimization thing is a player concern, not a technical one. On the technical side I think this actually ties in with the team invite problem mentioned above. If you track system messages when you move people between league teams they are technically quitting one team and joining another. I suspect the system handles this as the following set of commands:
    1. Stormfront quits current team
    2. Adeon sends team invite to Stormfront
    3. Stormfront accepts team invite

    So unless they can fix the cross-faction team invites so that you can always invite a new member no matter what allowing us to rearrange teams in different zones may well be an insurmountable hurdle.


    At the end of the day the Standard Code Rant applies, none of use really know how easy/hard any of this is. However, in most cases these are features that would be nice quality of life features even disregarding the current trials. The fact that they haven't been implemented suggests that the technical problem is significantly larger than changing a flag in the code somewhere.
  8. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dispari View Post
    It's possible for a Mastermind with an active non-pet secondary to get performance marks. Something like Thermal, Pain, or Dark might get a lot of points. But from what I've seen, people using Forcefield and Traps are getting really awful scores. I have a friend with Bots/FF, and even though he uses attacks, he gets threads and commons quite frequently.
    The problem I have there is that my Traps/AR Defender has been doing exceedingly well in terms of reward table (4 very rares out of 10 runs). Now it could be that the AR portion is shifting things somehow except my AR/Dev Blaster has been doing quite a bit worse (1 rare and 5 uncommons so far).

    My Bots/Traps MM has been getting uncommon tables reasonably consistently, I did get a couple of commons while learning it but haven't seen that in a few runs and I've never gotten the 10 threads table.

    I really wish a dev would clarify how it works.
  9. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Fleeting Whisper View Post
    Clearly, Interface favors MMs - but nothing new really.
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by gameboy1234 View Post
    Yeah I was thinking the same. "You're going to give my MM's pets WHAT? ... oh me... oh my... I'm going to have an evil lie-down for a sec..."
    The important limitation on interface is that it only stacks four time regardless of who is using it. So while MMs will have a somewhat easier time building up Interface stacks on a target they won't actually go any higher than other ATs. However Reactive is still pretty useful for MMs since, from what I've heard, the Interface DoTs are not affected by the purple patch.
  10. Ok, assuming I'm reading you right you are having a hard time on the pickup portion of the tirals. Here's a map you might find helpful (stolen from Tsumiju) showing the layout of the two areas and the position of the items:


    I would suggest having your map window open (positioned soemwhere it won't obstruct your view), then print out the picture and compare it to the ingame map as you go.
  11. Quote:
    Originally Posted by dave_p View Post
    I've been sorta keeping an eye on this the last few days. My completely unscientific observation is that my toons that do more damage get higher random tables. Also, the only ppl I know of that got the 10 thread table were those who DC'ed and came back, so maybe "contributed" less.
    See my observations are the opposite. I've been running 3 characters through the trials and have gotten (gong by memory, the Commons/Uncommons might be +/- 1 or 2):

    Traps/AR Defender: 4 Very Rare, 6 uncommon
    AR/Dev Blaster: 1 Rare, 5 uncommon
    Bots/Traps MM: 4 Uncommon, 2 Common

    Admittedly a pretty small sample set but my Traps/AR has been getting very lucky with reward tables (although I can't actually use those very rares yet for obvious reasons).
  12. Quote:
    Originally Posted by White Hot Flash View Post
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't there been instances in the past where players have insisted that something was wrong or bugged, the Devs kept insisting it wasn't, but in their analysis of the code and data they found something related to the "problem" that really was messed up, and wouldn't have found it if the players hadn't been wrong and brought it to their attention?
    Sure that does happen but in the hypothetical scenario Marcian posted the data-mining is essentially considered to be 100% accurate.
  13. Quote:
    Originally Posted by OneWhoBinds View Post
    I ended up DCing during my first real run of a BAF, and I ended up on a solo 4th team in the event. Since I apparently got locked that way (there's supposed to be an icon could be used to unlock my character, but I sure as heck couldn't find one... I don't know how I got 'locked' in the first place.) I ended up with next to nothing to show for the entire trial.
    I've seen that happen to someone on a league I was leading once. The problem is that if you're on a solo team in a league you don't get access to the team management controls and can't unlock the team to allow yourself to be moved to a "real" team.
  14. Quote:
    Originally Posted by JayboH View Post
    You sure the healing buff from spiritual doesn't affect pets that use healing powers?
    It is supposed to, if it doesn't it's a bug.
  15. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marcian Tobay View Post
    I think what's very important that some people may not be realizing is that it seems to me, from the information I've used, that any answer that isn't #2 will result in cries of "The Devs don't care!!1111". Is that a trade-off people are okay with?
    You will always get people who complain that the devs aren't focusing on their pet project which is clearly the most important issue in the game, DOOOOOMMMM!!!!.

    The difference between #1 and #2 (to me at least) is that #1 is a problem you will have to solve eventually anyway whereas #2 is something that will sort itself out sooner or later. Focusing on #2 is basically focusing on trying to appease people while ignoring major problems. Those major problems then tend to build up until you get overwhelmed.

    Consider the hypothetical situation where you decide to spend a month focusing on fixing the perception of Cannon of Justice. However during that month people figure out about the balance issues with Shepard's Crook. End result? No one cares about you "fixing" Cannon of Justice since it's no longer the FotM and everyone is up in arms about Shepard's Crook being overpowered. So now you wasted a month implementing a fix that no one cares about. This could potentially snowball if the players also find the Haddock Exploit for Dual Carp Melee and now you have two major balance issues to fix.

    If you spend time "fixing" Cannon of Justice you are pretty much wasting your time and hoping that while you are fixing it:
    1. No one figures out about Shepard's Crook
    2. No new problems arise

    Players are fickle. Even if they are angry about Cannon of Justice now sooner or later the meta-game will change and people will be complaining about something else. Fixing problems that don't exist just to try and appease players is unlikely to have any more effect than simply making a vague patch note that says "Adjusted Cannon of Justice to bring it inline with Bazooka of Justice" and making some pretty much inconsequential change (such as changing 15% of it's damage to a DoT). If the problem is only in player perception then telling them you changed it will almost certainly result in them coming to the forums to rant about how you "nerfed" it and that it's "useless" now. Although even there I'd wait a few months before resorting to that. Trying to manipulate the meta-game is a risky business.

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Eva Destruction View Post
    Another example: Traps club. You did not talk about Traps club. Most players were under the impression that Traps sucked, and would take a /kin or a /rad over a /traps any day. But a few clever players noticed how Poison Gas Trap worked. Poison Gas Trap takes hold sets. There are three damage procs available in hold sets. Those few clever players slotted Poison Gas Trap with those procs and had a crashless nuke available every 30 seconds.

    My point: if it's overpowered it's only a matter of time before a clever player figures it out and runs with it.
    Good point, that's actually a better example than mine.
  16. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Nyx View Post
    I think the issue of one AT over another is that if a Tank or Scrapper gets the job done, they get a pet, an AOE, heavy debuffs and others neato stuff.

    Now, if you have an Illusion/Rad, you get 2 pets, and debuffs. So if you think about it, if you want more bang for your buck it only makes more sense to take said tank and give them that Ill/Rads benefits. The tank now has the same abilities it always had and the survivability, but now it completely outshines the Ill/Rad in man ways.
    How about taking the Ill/Rad and giving it the Tanker's benefits instead? With Destiny Buffs flying around everyone can be tough and have status protection.

    The new slots do not invalidate any particular characters. They do decrease the differences between them but the powers are quite a bit weaker than true AT powers, especially in a team situation.

    I think the important thing is to consider the benefits that the slots provide to the league as a whole rather than any single character. Let's take a look at the different slots:

    Judgement: The "Blaster" slot. This slot gives everyone an extra damaging attack. It will increase the personal DPS of low damage classes proportionally more than high damage classes but what it does at the end of the day is give the league as a whole a static DPS boost irregardless of AT. However this DPS boost is really only noticeable against groups of enemies (i.e. Trash Mobs), in fights against single tough targets the value of the Judgement slot drops off sharply in order to avoid overshadowing the damage provided by dedicated ATs.

    Lore: The "Mastermind" slot. This one, like Judgement, is primarily a static DPS boost for the league, the main difference being it's more about single target DPS than AoE DPS. As such it is more beneficial against AVs but is balanced by limited up-times, it can decrease the time needed to kill the AV but is not sufficient by itself to kill them. It also provides support pets but what do those actually do? They give their owner a 5% typed defense buff a few other small buffs and a small heal. Those bonuses are nice for soloing but don't make a huge benefit on a large team.

    Interface: The "Debuffer" Slot. Now the important thing to realize here is that, unlike the other slots, this one does not stack between players. A reactive interface, for example, can provide up to a 10% resistance debuff but even if everyone has it you don't go above 10%. The net effect is that this provides a static debuff (again) but the total league-wide value of the debuffs against single targets is actually lower than what a dedicated debuffer can pump out. Compare the 10% resistance debuff from Reactive to the 30% debuff from Rad or the 60% regen debuff from diamagnetic to the 500% regen debuff that rad has.

    Destiny: The "Buffer/Armor" Slot. This one is a little harder to quantify due to the variable nature of the buffs. However, the core purpose seems to be to even out the survivability of the team. Clarion in particular provides decent mez protection to everyone which makes the mez protection on melee characters less important. Barrier and Rebirth provide additional damage mitigation to everyone in the league, which will from a practical point of view benefit squishier characters more than tough characters. Ageless is the odd one out since it's an offensive boost rather than defensive, I suspect the idea of it is to try and narrow the gap between SO'd build and IO'd builds a bit more.

    The net result however is that the basic benefits of the slot to the league as a whole are, essentially, static and AT independent. They also do not overshadow any of the ATs. The damage bonuses from Lore and Judgement help but there is still a need for good damage, especially against bosses. Interface provides some additional debuff but the total of a single debuff type from the entire league is weaker than a lot of single debuff powers. The Destiny provides a lot of extra damage mitigation but it's intermittent which means there is still a need for characters with continuous protection (either for themselves or for others).

    Now, consider a theoretical situation of an incarnate team containing 24 Tankers. Would replacing one of those Tankers with a Radiation Emission character (regardless of AT) increase or decrease the power of the team?

    Now the other side of the argument is that people will opt to play melee characters more out of, basically, a desire for personal glory. That is almost inevitable, if you take a look at any MMO that is designed around the "Tank, Healer, DPS trinity" you always see the same thing, there is a huge oversupply of DPSers, a moderate oversupply of Tanks and a shortage of Healers. I think the devs have recognized that and designed the incarnate system to handle it. A team of all one AT could clear the content but a mixed team will have an easier time.

    Now there are two ATs that are getting somewhat marginalized: Blasters and Stalkers however I don't think that the Incarnate content is to blame for that, it's been an ongoing trend. Stalkers have always been the red-haired step-child of the ATs, they are supposed to be single target specialists but run into the problem that this is mostly an AoE based game and for the few times it isn't their single target advantage is not that much higher. Blasters are similarly supposed to be the ranged AoE specialists but suffer from the fact that they give up a lot of survivability for relatively little damage compared to the melee damage dealers.
  17. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marcian Tobay View Post
    My own answer changes everytime I think about it. Currently, it's 2, 1, 3. While "working" on #2, I devote one person from the team to talking to the player base. and player base. This will slow the time when #1 is completed, but no one notice's it anyway. The game should be about making people happy, not about being balanced. If people haven't noticed yet, it's a potential problem, not an actual one. I don't want to prioritize a potential problem.

    #3 would simply come last as a matter of profit vs. resources. Cold, but true.
    Yes, making people happy is a goal, but you have to balance long term happiness against short term. While fixing 1 now does not impact player happiness delaying fixing it until after it causes a problem can cause a lot of player unhappiness. #2 on the other hand is something that should resolve itself long term once the meta-game evolves to encompass it.

    To use an example from our game consider the various AE exploits. These generated a lot of unhappiness for players both in terms of complaints about other people playing them, complaints when the devs fixed them and huge flame wars between the two sides. Now suppose that Positron had a time machine and he went back to before the AE was released and gave past-Positron a list of the major exploits. Fixing them before releasing the AE would have prevented a lot of player unhappiness, the only reason the devs didn't was a lack of knowledge.
  18. They will stack and since moth are Mag 2 Terrorizes they should be sufficient to Terrorize a boss.
  19. Quote:
    Originally Posted by GavinRuneblade View Post
    The easy solution is the same one that the big fantasy game implemented to their queue system a while back when premade's in PvP instances were a severe problem:
    Ignore all existing groups, force the queue to be used.
    If it had been that way from the start it would probably have been ok, changing it now is going to upset a LOT of people. The compromise solution would be to allow teams to queue but not leagues.

    However I think if the devs want people to actually queue they need to do three things:
    1. Improve the way leagues form (i.e. don't form at minimum size)
    2. Add a "willing to lead" feature and prioritize leaders based on that
    3. Bribe people to use it (seriously, bribes are the best way to get players to do anything)

    For example if you queue solo or in a single team (as opposed to a league) you get an extra merit on trial completion. First time per day it's an extra Empryean Merit, on repetitions it's an Astral Merit. Oh and give a badge for doing it, everyone loves badges.
  20. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Socorro View Post
    A Queue funtionality for other things in the game besides Trials... Has this been suggested? I searched but no thread titles are obvious and I'm not digging thru all the subject matter.
    Yeah it's been bought up before. However given how... questionably the queue is working for the trials I'm not sure if it's worth the dev effort to implement for anything else.
  21. I'd focus on fixing #1 first (i.e. in the next patch). Nerfing the set before players start to really use it a lot will minimize the sore feelings.

    #3 would be my second priority, I generally feel that if a set is under-performing it should be bought up to speed when possible, but it I consider dealing with over-performing sets to be a higher priority (regardless of relative player numbers). Importantly I would not tell Players I'm rebalancing it until I know I have the time to do it, ideally it would be in the next patch but it could get pushed back by a higher priority such as rebalancing Dual Carp Melee to fix the Haddock exploit.

    #2 I'd pretty much ignore. If the data-mining shows that it is good then waiting for the meta-game to sort it out is probably the best option. Worst case I'd give the meta-game a nudge by making a flashy, but ultimately inconsequential change to the power to encourage players to try doing things without it. Of course I'm assuming here that the data-mining is 100% accurate, something that seems to be implied in your hypothetical but that I would not rely on in real life.
  22. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Nyx View Post
    I have noticed that the Tanks/Brutes/Scrapper section of the game seem to be those who are running the trials more. Literally I was one of 3 controllers on a League with a few defenders, and a Corr.
    I agree that Melee characters are popular on the trials, it's not really that surprising since from what I've seen melee characters are the most popular ATs overall (except for Stalkers).

    As to the second part stop and think about it for a second. You had 6 people from the Controller/Defender/Corruptor ATs. That's 25% of the league (assuming you were doing a BAF). There are 14 ATs in the game (if you include the EATs), Controllers, Defenders and Corruptors make up 21.4% of the possible ATs in the game so your point is actually that based on your league the proportions were closely matching the proportions of AT types .

    Overall my experience is that the general proportion of different ATs in the leagues at the moment is reasonably balanced amongst the different AT "types". Some ATs are more heavily represented than others (in particular Hero ATs are more common than Villain ATs and Stalkers are very rare) but overall it seems to work out.
  23. The new lore pets (and MM pets in general) do not inherit buffs on you when you summon them. You can use inspirations on them by dragging and dropping the inspiration on their name plates but using a level shift and then summoning them has no effect. Summoning them and then using the level shift inspiration on them (instead of yourself) should have an effect but I haven't tested it.
  24. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Magentrix View Post
    That's right. There are now exactly 2 good Alpha categories: Cardiac and Musculature. Skip the other two.
    Wow... that is extremely cynical. All of the Alpha categories are useful, even if they provide little or no benefit to the Incarnate abilities you still have 24 other powers that benefit from them.

    Here are my general thoughts on them:

    Musculature: This is probably the best "general purpose" alpha boost. After all a Damage bonus applies to all characters so if you don't need one of the other ones then taking Musculature is a good choice. The secondary and tertiary abilities generally provide at least some benefit to a character but aren't that great.

    Cardiac: This is the one that you take because you need it. Builds that run hot (primarily builds with high recharge and lots of toggles) find endurance management a lot easier with this ability. The secondary bonuses and tertiary bonuses are either excellent or weak depending on the character (for example Range is awesome if you have a lot of cones but that useful otherwise).

    Nerve: This is primarily an ability for SO builds. IO'd builds tend to pick up a lot of accuracy bonuses anyway but for an SO build this makes the trials a lot easier without needing to take Tactics or rely on teammates to provide it. The secondary bonuses are pretty useful but the tertiary bonuses are less generically useful, although for Tanekrs and Brutes the extra taunt duration in all attacks is handy.

    Spiritual: Ah recharge. Extra recharge is very useful to a lot of builds and for an SO build in particular this can go a long way to leveling the playing field compared to IO'd builds. I would say that this also has the most generically useful secondary and tertiary bonuses.
  25. Quote:
    Originally Posted by baron_inferno View Post
    If it's a coding limitation then I could understand but are you certain that all recharge types (Global/Incarnate/Standard IOs) fall under one flag?
    All three bonuses are the same, but the devs can to some degree control independently which work on which powers (there are some limits on this though). In any case, it's not a coding limitation, it's a balance decision. BlackScorpion mentioned it on the open beta forums:
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Black Scorpion View Post
    We're tightly controlling what enhancements and buffs affect the Incarnate powers because their base effects tend to be much higher than standard.

    Here's how the rules break down currently:
    • None of the Incarnate powers are affected by recharge reductions of any type currently available in game - including the Spiritual Alphas.
    • Judgement and Lore are affected by non-recharge "global enhancements" - this currently only includes Alpha slot and Interface slot powers. Regular buffs should not apply.
    • Nothing affects Destiny or Interface. For Interface the tech just isn't equipped to handle that aspect of it. For Destiny the base effects are so strong that if we allowed enhancements to apply we'd probably have to tone down the base effect for balance. And we'd prefer to leave it strong by default.

    Your bud in the Incarnate-powered armor,
    Black Scorpion
    As a side note, if Photonstorm is correct then BS's post is slightly inaccurate since the Destiny powers are at least affected by certain Alphas.